The
Miseries of The Miseries
The
Miseries of Poetry
Traductions from the Greek
By Alexandra Papaditsas and Kent Johnson
Reviewed
by Michael Atkinson
Read the Text Online www.blazevox.org/miseries.pdf
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Not
satisfied with violating the sacred atomic bomb poetry of
Hiroshima victims, Kent Johnson, yes, that Kent Johnson
of the Araki Yasusada Doubled Flowering hoax, has struck
again. Now he's placing an egg-shaped turd in the nest of
Greek lyric poetry.
The
careful reader will immediately catch a whiff of artificial
goat cheese in the opening pages entitled "Praise and
Confusion for The Miseries of Poetry" (how wonderfully
appropriate the word "miseries"). I could see
a few endorsements by significant figures like John Ashbery
and David Lehman, but forty-two? That's more than double
the number of poems in the book! And blurbs from nobodies
like Mikhail Epstein, George Kalamaras, John Bradley? Does
anyone really care what these hodcarriers think? Doesn't
all of this indicate that the "praise and confusion"
is a hoax? I mean who would ever come up with this endorsement:
"The result is 'classics' fit for inscription in your
local Olive Garden vomitorium"? Let's spew it out--Ben
Lerner is Araki Yasusada is Kent Johnson.
Alexandra
Papaditsas, co-translator of these Miseries, suffered from
a "large keratinous horn" that sprouted from her
forehead, Johnson relates in his preface. Do you not a smell
keratinous untruth? My research tells me that Alexandra
Papaditsas, Johnson's supposed co-translator, is a hairdresser
in Athens, Georgia, known for her bizarre hairstyling. She's
considered the originator of The Horn, a style where the
hair is sculpted forward over the forehead into a large
horn. The only Greek she knows is "Oooopa." Why
she would lend her name to Johnson's "traductions"
(from "traduce," meaning "to speak falsely
or maliciously of," as in, "to trounce upon yet
another sacred literary tradition") is beyond me. Perhaps
she receives a monthly stipend from Johnson (royalties from
Doubled Flowering), or he absconded with her horn for his
own perverse purposes.
And the "traductions from the Greek"? Willis Barnstone,
Dudley Fitts, Kenneth Rexroth, who all tried their hand
and gloriously failed at translating the Greek lyrics, must
be racing for the afterworld Olive Garden vomitorium. Here
is a small sample (all that you will need) of a Johnson/Papaditsas
"traduction": "All opposition is seamlessly
interconnected by atomic joints." This was written
by the fifth century B.C. Greek figure Herakleitos? No doubt
he was intuiting not only Buddhism, as the footnote proclaims,
but also Einstein, ducts, Madonna, cell phones, spam, and
eating sushi off a reclining naked woman, while he was at
it.
The
bizarre ravings of Ms. Papaditsas, placed in italics in
the poems, remind me of the worst automatic writing of the
French surrealists: egotistical, petty, pretentious, and
horny, such as this Freudian line that opens and closes
(as if once was not enough)
"Death Mask": "[Moths eating, their thorax's
growing purplish and huge.]" If Ms. Papaditsas is indeed
amongst the living, Johnson should get her immediately to
a good clinic for an extended tour.
Why
anyone would want to spend their time with these miserable
scraps of lust, feces, copulation, and sodomy when they
could be reading a proper literary translation of the Greek
poems is beyond me. The one poem in the entire collection
that possesses any merit is the one entitled "Poetry,"
which consists of these three lines:
[Rotted
away.]
What
[does] poetry do for the world?
[Rotted
away.]
This
poem inspires me with hope that these "traductions"
will indeed rot away, and none too soon. I think Kent Johnson
owes an apology not only to the wandering souls of the pagan
Greeks that he so cheerfully violates in these poems, but
once again to the reader, who might wander into a bookstore,
pick up a copy of The Miseries of Poetry, and think, "The
Greeks wrote this? Why, they were way messed up. Worse than
the French, even."
I leave
Kent Johnson these words of Anakreon (translated by Kenneth
Rexroth and myself) to meditate upon:
Dead
and dust, yet some poet
digs me out of my grave.
Little does he know one day
a poet will hump his dust.
Michael
Atkinson is
the author of "Hyperauthor! Hyperauthor!," which
appears in the Dec.'03/Jan. '04 issue of The Believer. He
is presently at work translating the poetry of Gen. George
S. Patton into Aramaic.
