Animal friends
Believe me, I
prayed that that
night might be
doubled for us
-Sappho (trans. Mary Barnard)
I remember how the darkness doubled
-Television
Bought Barnard's translation from the 50¢ table at the Sebastopol library today, and read it. Many thoughts about the arrangement, the endnotes on provenance including the fragments' numbering in the 'definitive' Edmonds edition, and the preface and translator's afterword which each disavow the venerable practice among Sappho's translators of constructing possible verses around those fragments, found on ostraka and torn papyri, consisting of single words or a few letters. And these things' (these practices, these textual apparatus') relations to the long piece in Shorter Views about canon formation and paraliterature--
--often when Delany explains something, in sfnally spurious rhetoric as well as in criticism, I feel overwhelmingly certain he deliberately omits the central idea which motivates the explanation or to which the argumentative structure of the explanation leads. In the notes on the modular calculus, it is how the modular calculus would operate in a semiotic system, and he admits as much in an interview in Shorter Views; in the essay on canon formation in the literary and paraliterary, it is that the literary canon is only constructed and maintained through paraliterary practices--
--since Sappho's poetry is known wholly through the quotations of admirers, especially Longinus. Maybe will write it all out later.
prayed that that
night might be
doubled for us
-Sappho (trans. Mary Barnard)
I remember how the darkness doubled
-Television
Bought Barnard's translation from the 50¢ table at the Sebastopol library today, and read it. Many thoughts about the arrangement, the endnotes on provenance including the fragments' numbering in the 'definitive' Edmonds edition, and the preface and translator's afterword which each disavow the venerable practice among Sappho's translators of constructing possible verses around those fragments, found on ostraka and torn papyri, consisting of single words or a few letters. And these things' (these practices, these textual apparatus') relations to the long piece in Shorter Views about canon formation and paraliterature--
--often when Delany explains something, in sfnally spurious rhetoric as well as in criticism, I feel overwhelmingly certain he deliberately omits the central idea which motivates the explanation or to which the argumentative structure of the explanation leads. In the notes on the modular calculus, it is how the modular calculus would operate in a semiotic system, and he admits as much in an interview in Shorter Views; in the essay on canon formation in the literary and paraliterary, it is that the literary canon is only constructed and maintained through paraliterary practices--
--since Sappho's poetry is known wholly through the quotations of admirers, especially Longinus. Maybe will write it all out later.