This last century has been one of the world's most decisive eras. Progress in all fields has been lightning fast and spectacular - another Renaissance, whose technologically "upgraded" alchemy has changed the face of the earth radically and irrevocably. And of course, art and poetry had to reflect all the unavoidable vicissitudes, while also keeping an eye on its equally inescapable archetypal foundations.
Folk or formal, classical or modern, rhymed or in free verse, idyllic or melancholy, from any country and in any language, poetry is the most reliable vehicle for a dream trip through time and space, in the known and unknown universe.
The Sonnets to His Dark Love (Sonetos del Amor Oscuro - written in 1936 and published posthumously, in 1983) are Lorca's last poetic work, inspired by the style and themes of San Juan de la Cruz, Shakespeare and Gongora. They are his personal statement about love and poetic art, made even more poignant by the fact that he was arrested and executed by his country's dictatorial government the very same year the poems were written. The Sonnets are therefore not a complete work, cut horifically short by the poet's unjust and untimely death at the age of 37.
Translation is more than the mere issue of a mental process. It is both an intellectual enterprise and a physical task. Things become even more difficult when having to deal with a literary text: literature has its own determining features, and language, the instrument of its expression, is a self-sufficient living system in which every presupposition of perfection has been fulfilled. The risks a translator is obliged to take in this case are much similar to those taken by a surgeon who performs a delicate operation: although the result may perfectly be accomplished under conditions of utmost conscientiousness and knowledge, nothing can guarantee that the patient will eventually survive. In fact, a literary text rarely manages to survive without any more or less serious damages when transferred from one language into another. The task is excessively hazardous; skill in manipulating written speech is as essential as profound linguistic intuition and instruction; a wide spectrum of academic information is as indispensable as personal sensitivity to the subject one is occupied with.
The poetic universe of George MacBeth is determined and defined, in a large number of his poems, by plain, common, everyday things, personal objects and sometimes plants or animals which are obsessionally used in a variety of poetic images. But the poetic image is not created for its own sake; it carries along with it a great number of connotations which sometimes elevate it to the point of becoming a universal symbol and a key for the poet's philosophical anxiety.
Phuong's character in The Quiet American is one of the most difficult to define, as she holds no real leading part in the novel and her particular characteristics are shown to the reader through the eyes of Fowler, the narrator, that is through the deforming prism of both a male vision and a European spirit. Attempting thus an approach to Phuong's character, one should beware of a number of traps liable to mislead one's judgement - if it is ever possible to fully analyse a character whose only known aspects are those revealed to us by the author himself through the character mostly acting as his mouthpiece.
"Popular fiction" is by definition meant to appeal to a large, if not the largest, part of the reading public in literate societies. From the Bible (or even Homer) to Walter Scott and from Goethe to Raymond Chandler, the nature of this literary phenomenon presents a considerable range of variations according to the historical background of each era. What in particular seems to correspond to the term in question the last two or three centuries, and especially during and ever since the Industrial Revolution, consists mainly of a secondary, "unofficial" kind of literature with less, or, sometimes, no literary value (to the extent, of course, that such an attribute can be objectively assessed), easy to read and highly digestible, usually doomed to oblivion after a meteoric success. From this rule must, of course, be exempted the works which, due to their own exceptional merits, managed to resist time and establish themselves as classics, like those of Balzac, Dickens or Zola.
Written in the mid-'50s, in other words shortly after the end of World War II, Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot offers a most perceptive, bitter and yet quite sympathetic vision of the human condition in the trying times Europe was then going through. Vladimir and Estragon, the two principal characters, spend their lives "waiting for Godot" in an almost desert scenery. The characters of the play are very few, five only, plus Godot, the invisible sixth, who is all the same omnipresent due to the continual reference to him by Estragon and Vladimir. In a dramatic environment where the animate element, as well as the non-animate, appear reduced to the absolutely functional, an entire existential reasoning is amply presented to the audience.
The two poems in question present, first of all, a similarity in subject: they both deal with the cinema. The first one refers to an unexpected incident during the projection of a film, while the second one describes the personal feelings of the poet while watching a love story οn the screen. In the first poem the event is narrated in the third person singular, which actually represents the "projectionist" mentioned in the first line, while in the second poem the "Ι" of the poet-narrator is very obviously present.
In his article on Black Box (in a superb English translation by Nicholas de Lange), published in New Statesman on the 1st of July 1988, Sean French expresses his surprise for the epistulary form of this novel; he also locates the inevitable problem of doubtful verisimilarity presented to a novelist by the application of this writing technique. In any case, the epistulary novel, especially when consisting of a letter exchange among individuals of different characters, mentality and origins, could always constitute a temptation to the writing skill of an author, as the heterogeneousness it entails makes it a first class exercise of style.
