Orwell/Lorca
George Orwell: 1984: Not a plausible future but a cartoon of the status quo in Orwell’s time. The plot and characters aren’t entirely worthless, though mundanely dysfunctional Winston is more revealing than heroically-fucking Winston. Most of the value is in the systematisation, best realised in the Goldstein excerpts and the fascinated Newspeak primer. It could never be a lingua franca, yet the war on language rages on.
Federico Garcia Lorca: Songs (tr. Alan S. Trueblood) and The Gypsy Ballads (tr. Will Kirkland & Christopher Maurer), in Collected Poems (2002 edition): I don’t know Spanish, so while I find the specificities in these translations useful, I can’t tell how they correspond to the originals. But the English versions flow while preserving length, and Babelfishing doesn’t reveal anything criminal. In “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard” (Kirkland’s translation of the first stanza is below), the revelatory power of the imagined appearances goes beyond any American Deep Image poetry I know.
Black are the horses,
the horseshoes are black.
Glistening on their capes
are stains of ink and of wax.
Their skulls—and this is why
they do not cry—are cast in lead.
They ride the roads
with souls of patent leather.
Hunchbacked and nocturnal,
they command, where they appear,
the silence of dark rubber
and fears of fine sand.
They go as they will,
and hidden in their heads
is a vague astronomy
of phantasmagoric pistols.
