Critical Survey of Poetry

This essay is an attempt to consider whether the poetics of diaspora can provide a point of entry to a critical understanding of globalization. This is not to imply that the terms are necessarily commensurate, much less synonymous: on the contrary, as James Clifford has reminded us, “diasporic practices cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism” (244). The term globalization, slippery and contested as it is, might be considered first and foremost “an attempt to name the present,” whereas the term diaspora would seem to name a relation to a past, as a designation for the aftermath of the scattering of a population (Denning 24). Globalization implies the imposition of a single mode of exchange everywhere—even if that standardization is produced by and entails the proliferation of difference and inequity—whereas diaspora foregrounds divergence, the “friction of distance,” the irreducibility of the specific conditions that produce transnational movement and transnational “sensibilities.” If diaspora can offer a critical lens into the condition of globalization, then it must be taken “not merely as a comparative social or historical phenomenon, not even only as a predicament shared by many people or peoples who otherwise have little else in common, but as a positive resource in the necessary rethinking of models of polity in the current erosion and questioning of the modern nation-state system and ideal” (Boyarin and Boyarin 5). On the one hand, this means that diaspora as a framework of inquiry signals an alternative to the market teleology implicit in economic conceptions of globalization. On the other hand, an invocation of diaspora must also remind us, once again, that globalization is itself a historical phenomenon stretching back in many of its key features at least to the sixteenth century.

Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1281&context=etd_oa

Translating as transculturating :a study of Dai Wangshu's translation of Lorca's poetry from an integrated sociological-cultural perspective

Francis Poulenc’s Sonate pour violon et piano exists as something of a hybrid work. Dedicated to the memory of Spanish resistant poet Federico Garcia Lorca, the sonata’s slow movement, the “Intermezzo”, is prepended with the opening line of Lorca’s “Las Seis Cuerdas”. As a consequence, the movement is imbued with a programmatic quality that causes it to sit somewhere inbetween Poulenc’s instrumental and vocal works. In this essay, I take advantage of this hermeneutic quality to explore the composer’s relation to Lorca and surrealism more generally, and how this manifests in the”“Intermezzo”. Ultimately, I argue that the movement is more than simply a lament over Lorca’s tragic death, and is in fact a broader expression of Poulenc’s despair towards a political and social climate that seeks to marginalize on the basis of sexual identity.

Les songes pleureurs de Poulenc: Lorca, a queer Jondo and le Surréalisme in the “Intermezzo” of Francis Poulenc’s Sonate pour violon et piano

Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York is a Surrealist-in uenced collection which borders on the impenetrable. Despite this, the collection is generally seen as a violent expression of anguish, stemming from Lorca’s sorrow on leaving Spain in 1929, coupled with a New York he found facelessly capitalist, exploitative , meaningless, and dehumanising in the sense of “making impersonal or machine-like” (Allen 1990: 305). Hence, if the poetry is directly related to Lorca’s experiences, it must be free of Ortega y Gasset’s charge that contemporary art is “dehumanised” in the sense of being self-consciously aesthetic to the point of appearing cold, self-obsessed , elitist and unemotional. This assumption that the poetry is closely related to Lorca’s personal situation allows the further assumption that the critic’s task must be to decode the language in order to reveal Lorca’s despairing comments, i.e. to reveal its “humanity”. It is, however, precisely this process of deciphering which has demonstrated the problems inherent in such a stance, and the general consensus regarding the themes of the collection as a whole must be set against considerable divergence of interpretation as far as individua l images or groups of images are concerned. Not only that, literary theory has consistently challenged the assumption that interpretation is a matter of passive decoding of a static text; it has also undermined the idea that literature is primarily referential, i.e. pointing to a reality outside the text. We therefore need to establish how reliable an approach is which decodes Lorca’s personal experiences, before discussing how possible it is to attempt to decode the poems at all, and, if it is at times impenetrable, what the purpose of such impenetrability might be. This will allow us to assess the collection’s “humanity”, i.e. the relative importance of referentiality versus self-re exivity. How reliable is a biographical approach? Decoding Lorca’s personal anguish is problematic, because Lorca made contradictory statements about his time in New York. In a letter to Ángel del Rṍ o, he remarks, “Te escribo desde Eden Mills. Muy divertido” (OC, III: 1131), and, in another to Carlos Morla Lynch, he says that New York “es una ciudad de alegr ṍ a insospechada” (OC, III: 1140). On the other hand, in an interview with Felipe Morales in 1936, he claims that “Nueva York es terrible. Algo monstruoso” (OC, III: 632). Poeta en Nueva York cannot therefore be an unrefracted narration of Lorca’s personal experiences in New York, and interpretation cannot be a straightforward matter of relating poems to biographical events. Before turning to individual poems, it is important to establish what is meant by Surrealism, since it exerted an obvious in uence on Poeta en Nueva York. André Breton de nes Surrealism in terms of the technique of automatic writing,

Luis Fernandez Cifuentes

Papers

Son of Andalusia: The Lyrical Landscapes of Federico Garcia Lorca