Suchergebnisse

The poetry of Saint John Perse, although it has fallen into obscurity, is revived in a case study in what is being called world literature. The author maps the vicissitudes of Perse's epic Anabase in order to reconsider the origins of a conceptual framework for world literature based on the "spiritual economy" in which translators are key actors. The great deal of international currency given to Anabase places the poem at the very origins of a growing debate about the nature of internationalism, & provides a lingua franca to evaluate the tensions between irrational forces & rational organization in modern poetics. Analysis of the poem identifies the theme of a spiritual economy to be realized in the material of poetry, & the suggestion of a form a world of poetry that joins diffuse national literatures to the totality of the world's literary production. T.S. Eliot's translation highlights the tension between the uses of myth & the solutions to the "anarchy in contemporary history" that draws on the mythic voice structures as the ordering principle as in Frazers' Golden Bough. Benjamin translation withholds a reading of origins, & rather locates translation itself is an epistemological method for gesturing towards original kinship. If translators are primary actors in the divulgation of world literary texts, Anabase leads to the contrary conclusions of how can a world literary text be brokered by translation and predictable marketplaces and ideas when translations by giants of 20th century literature are fraught by circumstance, or remain under lock and key? References. J. Harwell