AHB: I suspect that every text in an unknown alphabet is a poem. In
ibThe Pound Era/b/i Kenner points out a passage in Shakespeare
that gets misinterpreted nowadays because people aren't aware that the
term igolden boys/i refers to dandelions (don't make me hunt out the
book, just trust me). I don't know how a foreign Billy Collins would
look to me compared to a foreign Clark Coolidge. Presumably stanzaic
poetry is still stanzaic in Cyrillic.I think the reading of such texts
would free the texts of meaning. Unless the reader was wicked good at
code-breaking, and detect the patterns in this unknown alphabet, the
reader could make whatever out of the written shapes. I don't know if
we're to credit Gaudier-Brzeska's ability to read ideograms with no
prior knowledge. It sound nice. Maybe he was just riffing. Your
questions really just put me back on my heels. Translations very often
leave me dissatisfied. I'd rather read Pound's Chinese translations,
which he wasn't shy abut changing for his own purposes, than the perhaps
more scholarly, but dry, Arthur Waley ones. And I don't like the ones
Amy Lowell was involved with, garnished with flowers. I think my point
is that the translation should be poetic, and likewise the readers
reading of an unknown alphabet. Poetic, that is, rather than 'accurate'.
We have the example of abstract painting whereby the forms on the canvas
are what they are not what they seem. Thus, I suppose, if you give me a
Cyrillic text, I'm going to see isomething/i, influenced by whatever
is present in me at the time (Rorschach test?).are such question as you
posed above ones that you frequently ponder?
