Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation

Front Cover
The Porcupine's Quill, 2001 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 252 pages

Eric Ormsby is a poet who writes prose that is both graceful and hard-headed. With an outspoken contempt for cant and literary persiflage, Ormsby ranges over a surprising array of writers and literatures. Each essay involves a new and sometimes startling viewpoint, whether on Hart Crane's homosexuality and its effect on his poems or the strange and twisted, yet redeeming, place which Shakespeare held in his own family history. From American and Canadian poetry to Classical Arabic literature Ormsby brings a fresh slant and incisive expression to his prose.

What was Franz Kafka doing at a ski resort in the last years of his life and what did he do there besides tobogganing? Everyone knows that Jorge Luis Borges was bookish, but did you know he was bloodthirsty as well? How is Pat Lowther's posthumous reputation as a poet connected with the brutal circumstances of her murder? These and other mysteries are explored in the 17 elegant essays that make up Eric Ormby's new book.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Preface
7
The Hidden Life of Words
13
Hart Crane at 100
31
Hart and Fangs on Marianne Moores and Hart Cranes Letters
81
Posthumous Impresario William Butler Yeats
89
The Dark Regime of Paradise David Solway
103
The Magic of Happenstance Roo Borson
123
Franz Kafka and the Trip to Spindelmühle
133
Flypaper for Ghosts Robert Musil
145
Jackals in Parentheses Eugenio Montale
167
A Sideshow of One Umberto Saba
187
ESSAYS ON CLASSICAL ARABIC LITERATURE
201
On Classical Arabic Poetry
211
The Place of Shakespeare in a House of Pain
235
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Abū Nuwās al-Mutanabbi Amorgos appear Arabic literature Arabic poetry Aunt Dee beauty Bedrock begins Ben Bulben biography Borges Borges's Borson Bridge cadence Classical Arabic collection correspondence Cuttlefish Cuttlefish Bones Dante dark David Solway death Diaries dream early echoes edition effect Eliot Elizabeth Bishop English especially essays example eyes fact famous feel final Galassi German Grandmother Harman Hart Crane Hill Hill's imagination Irwin Islamic Italian Jorge Luis Borges Kafka Keats Keats's language later lines Lowther Mariani Marianne Moore mean metaphor Montale Montale's Moore's mother Motion Muirs Musil night notes once perhaps phrase poem poet poet's poetic prose Qur'an reader reality remains Review rhyme Roo Borson Saba Saba's Sartarelli seems sense Shakespeare Solway sometimes sound Spindelmühle stanza superb T.S. Eliot things tion tone tradition translation verbal verse voice volume Water Memory words writing wrote Yeats

About the author (2001)

Eric Ormsby's poetry has appeared in most of the major journals in Canada, England and the U.S., including The New Yorker, Parnassus and The Oxford American. His first collection of poems, Bavarian Shrine and other poems (ECW Press, 1990), won the QSpell Award of 1991. In the following year he received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for `outstanding work as a poet'. His collection, Coastlines (ECW Press, 1992), was a finalist for the QSpell Award of that year.

Bibliographic information

TitleFacsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation
Canadian criticism
AuthorEric Linn Ormsby
PublisherThe Porcupine's Quill, 2001
ISBN0889842264, 9780889842267
Length252 pages
Subjects › 

Language Arts & Disciplines / Translating & Interpreting
Literary Criticism / Canadian
Literary Criticism / Poetry
  
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