A human pyramid crashes, on a riverbank in Mirpur, 1994.
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“The twenty-first century (ceinture, F., belt, see cinch) will be poetickal, or not be at all.”
“A century of anxiety and handwringing . . . over words!”
“Henceforth, thin clad, in rain.
In Johnson’s Dictionary: “Buggery, penis, and shit were excluded, though all were common.”
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Michael Hofmann, thinking aloud through reasons he translates (German, mostly Joseph Roth, also the terrific Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, written by Hofmann’s father, Gert):
I don’t really know what it is. An expression of my fealty to German? Or to prose? Something Macchiavellian, a practical identification of a type of work that’s always there to do, and that’s endlessly portable? Or something altogether more sinister: a kind of driven self-obliteration? . . . Perhaps poetry, at my rate of output, just doesn’t seem enough to show for a life. “A slim bundle of dead writs,” Ian Hamilton puts it . . .
Hofmann points out a droll (Pelham Grenville) Wodehousian warning: “. . . what P. G. Wodehouse called ‘the series habit’—which, along with the growing of side whiskers, he claimed to find the besetting danger to the writer . . . If you’ve done five, you do a sixth.” (Or, if you’ve done A, you do B . . .)
Hofmann’s identification with James Schuyler.
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Typo: “poutput” for “output”
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The negative as human invention, and the predominance of irony. Kenneth Burke: “To use [words] properly, we must know that they are not the things they stand for . . . since language is extended by metaphor which gradually becomes the kind of dead metaphor we call abstraction, we must know that metaphor is not literal . . . we cannot use language maturely until we are spontaneously at home in irony.”
