Poetic Constraints of Lyric by Nicholas Andrew Theisen a Dissertation
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Re[a]ding and Ignorance: Poetic Constraints of Lyric by Nicholas Andrew Theisen A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Professor E. Ramirez-Christensen, Chair Professor Marjorie Levinson Associate Professor Johanna H. Prins Associate Professor Joseph D. Reed © Nicholas Andrew Theisen 2009 For no one ii Acknowledgements The work concluded, tentatively, with this dissertation would not have been possible without the continued intellectual engagement with my colleagues within and without the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, especially (in no particular order) Michael Kicey, Meng Liansu, Sylwia Ejmont, Carrie Wood, and Sharon Marquart. I have benefited much from Jay Reed’s friendly antagonism, Marjorie Levinson’s keen insight, Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen’s grounding levity, and Yopie Prins’s magnanimity. But beyond the academic sphere, more or less, I’m am deeply indebted to Kobayashi Yasuko for reminding me that, to some, poetry matters as more than a mere figure of academic discourse and to my wife Colleen for her wholly unexpected insights and seemingly infinite patience. I have likely forgotten to mention numerous people; consider this my I.O.U. on a free drink. iii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Abbreviations vi List of Figures vii Chapters 1. Introduction 1 2. The Edges of Anne Carson’s Sappho 24 The Fragments of [Anne] Carson 27 Mutilation 45 3. Chocolate Bittersweet: Tawara Machi Translating Yosano Akiko 69 Bitter 71 Sweet 97 4. Separate but Equal: [un]Equating Catullus with Sappho 110 Impar 115 Par 128 Silence 140 5. Un]Tangled Hair: Yosano Akiko’s Midaregami Unravels 145 A Tangle of Loose Threads 146 Ukifune 163 iv 6. Conclusion, i 罠 B wiθ U: Shiina Ringo Reding Her Self 177 “Perhaps you would like to know my name…” 181 The Ease of Indifference 197 Bibliography 208 v List of Abbreviations GSS – Goshūiwakashū KKS – Kokinwakashū MG – Midaregami MYS – Man’yōshū vi List of Figures Figure 1 – The first five stanzas of Sappho Fr. 1 in If not, winter 28 Figure 2 – Last two stanzas of fr. 1 in If not, winter 29 Figure 3 – Sappho fr. 2 in If not, winter 31 Figure 4 – Sappho fr. 6 in If not, winter 33 Figure 5 – Sappho fr. 6 in Voigt’s Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta 42 Figure 6 – Sappho fr. 31 in If not, winter 46 Figure 7 – Sappho fr. 31 in Eros the bittersweet 47 Figure 8 – Cover of volume one of Tawara Machi's Chokorēto goyaku Midaregami 80 Figure 9 – Poems 1-3 of Tawara Machi's Midaregami 86 Figure 10 – Midaregami 385 as it appears in Tawara Machi's translation 93 Figure 11 – Midaregami 385 as it appears in Itsumi Kumi's edition 94 Figure 12 – Fujishima Takeji's illustration Gendai no shōsetsu [Modern Novels] in the first edition (1901) of the Midaregami 96 vii Chapter 1 Introduction Once upon a time, not so long ago, if you wanted to study art, you wouldn’t have had many options; just studying art was an expensive endeavor, as expensive as studying literature once was as well, because of the relative cost of books. The study of art was also laborious, if at times it wasn’t as much of a drain on the pocketbook, for, if you were unwilling to purchase plaster casts of statues or hire an artist to etch reproductions of famous paintings and facades, you’d have to make them yourself. You’d have to travel to “where the art is” (generally speaking, “Europe,” but also the “near” and “far” Easts), and should you desire a record of what you’d seen, the easiest and quickest method was simply to sketch it in a notebook. But with the advent of cheap photography and photographic reproduction, the necessity to draw the very objects one sees in order to “preserve” them for later consideration has nearly disappeared. I can imagine that should you quiz a group of fifty contemporary art historians as to whether they possess any skill at drawing or etching that you would happen upon a number surprisingly close to zero. The same question asked even a hundred years ago would have been pointless and absurd. Similarly, if Petrarch wanted a copy of that weird Catullus manuscript that in his time had just recently emerged from obscurity, he would have to copy it himself or send it off to a scriptor (or librarius) to copy it for him; that’s what a writer used to be, as much an auteur as what we might call a mere scribe. Readers were in a similar position: a lector, 1 like a lector in any given church service, was someone who read a given text aloud for the benefit of those who cannot themselves read or for the benefit of a wealthy patron (or master – lectores were often slaves) who wouldn’t trouble with straining his eyes to read a text on his own. In this ancient context (ahistorically understood), a reader only interpreted insofar as he deciphered what he saw on the page (or scroll) and vocalized it. Likewise, a writer, a scriptor, was a conduit between two means of communication, between two complexes of symbols, between two texts (be it letters to letters, or sounds to letters). What we consider skills anyone out of primary school should possess used to constitute genuine professions, due in no small part to reading and writing, taken as a whole, being rather difficult. Prior to standardizations in type and even in handwriting, one needed to spend a great deal of time exposing himself to a large number of hand- written documents that varied wildly even within a given time period—much more so across the centuries—in order to read much of anything. If you find yourself unable to sympathize, take a good look at Emily Dickinson’s manuscript fascicles and see how well you decipher them in real time. A facsimile edition is available, so you don’t even have to haul yourself all the way to Cambridge just to see what I mean. Go ahead, I can wait. A scriptor’s act of interpretation, which above I made to seem straightforward and nearly automatic, is, in fact, anything but. The wild variances we see in the manuscripts of nearly all pre-modern texts is testament to the fact that even this “automatic” mode of interpretation, namely copying, is as fraught with difficulties as “higher order” modes like, say, literary criticism or divination. If a given scribe or copyist should be at a loss as to what a text says, due to the difficulty in simply reading it, he will guess, not arbitrarily, but based on his understanding (limited or not) of what the text should say: the text in 2 that moment becomes what he thinks it says in very real terms, as he is in the process of writing a completely independent copy. Any textual critic or fellow traveler could tell some variation of the tale above, adding or subtracting bits of trivia as suit the circumstances. Often, the scriptor is more willful, he judges his copy text to be deficient in some way, and emends it as he sees fit. He may add his emendation to the copy text at hand, he may write his correction into his new copy, or he may hedge his bets and preserve the reading he finds unacceptable while adding his new, superior reading so that others may judge for themselves. In case my point remains too implicit, let me be clear: these men (let’s be honest, they were generally men) would rewrite the texts as they read them, often much more freely that any contemporary textual critic would. I tell this story to belie the convenient and misleading distinction we often make between reading and writing, between the interpretation and the interpreted. The interpretation literally becomes part of that which it interprets, becomes a text, even becomes the text, and over time the seam between the “original text” and the emendation begin to heal over into a scar that diminishes in visibility. Recognition of the emendation as emendation, and of the act of interpretation that produced it as interpretation, decreases over time, the emendation becomes hard to recognize at all, and the presence of interpretation within a text tends toward invisibility. For lack of a better term, I call this writing as reading mode “reding,” the verb being “to rede.”1 I would like to conceive of reding (my neologism) and reading as interpretive 1 In various conversations with friends and colleagues, I have run across the problem of how this word “rede” and its participle “reding” are to be pronounced. In this text, this dissertation, pronunciation is a non-issue, because the text is, for the most part, silent. German speaking friends tend to attract the word toward Rede, saying something to the effect of rĕ-dĕ or rē-dĕ, while others have tried out something akin to the color red. I have asserted and will continue to assert that it has the same pronunciation as read, considering, after all, rede and read are etymologically identical and where rede has appeared historically it has the same pronunciation as read. However, as I said, it really doesn’t matter here. 3 strategies with relative advantages and disadvantages, and in order to do so I would first reject an overly facile distinction of active and passive, respectively, as if by reding one made texts happen and by reading one let texts happen to her, and prefer to think of them as aggressive and receptive.