瓦伦西亚大学教授如何解读艾略特的长诗《荒原》(全英文)

大学教授Derrick对于《荒原》的详细解读

T. S. Eliot. 2005 (1922): La tierra baldía. Edición bilingüe. Introducción y notas de Viorica Patea. Traducción José Luis Palomares. Madrid: Cátedra, Letras Universales, 2005. 328 pp.

Paul Scott Derrick

Universitat de València

Paul.S.Derrick@uv.es

It is practically impossible to overestimate the importance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), not only in the course of twentieth-century poetry in English, but for Western poetry in general. This single poem has been the object of many hundreds of critical articles and book-length studies. And that interest, that cultural fascination, still shows little sign of diminishing.

Along with Pound’s Cantos (begun in 1915), Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Williams’ Spring and All (1923) and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), The Waste Land can be classed as one of a handful of ‘centrepiece texts’ of the first-generation Modernist enterprise. It is a masterwork of constructive destruction, a brilliant application of Cubist collage techniques to language. It is both an expression and a demonstration of the cultural malaise and the crisis of belief that resulted from the First World War. It is a profound experiment in the compression, or codification, of an encyclopaedic body of knowledge—as if we had sensed the need at that point in time to condense our heritage into complex, hermetic forms in order to preserve our cultural memory in the face of some impending disaster. But, in addition, it offers a possible therapy for our illness, an opportunity to put a broken world together again—or at least to practice putting it together again. And in this sense, The Waste Land is a powerful record of a yearning for health, wholeness and holiness (words which are all, as Eliot must have been aware, etymologically connected).

The poet himself, however, claimed that he had no such exalted aims in mind in 1921 when, trying to recuperate in Margate from the stress contingent on his gradually disintegrating marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, he sat down to write what would eventually become part III, “The Fire Sermon”. (He had begun the poem at the end of 1919 as a long series of stylistic parodies with the title “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. He composed the final section, “What the Thunder Said”, in late 1921 in Lausanne, under the care of a pre-Freudian analyst named Roger Vittoz.) In his own, undoubtedly dissembling words, The Waste Land was intended to relieve “a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” (Eliot 1971: 1). All false modesty aside, the question that immediately arises is: how does an insignificant personal complaint get converted into such an astounding religious, philosophical and literary accomplishment?

Providing a credible account of such a complicated process might be compared to producing a high-resolution, three-dimensional, multi-sectional holographic map of the occult intestines of the Gordian Knot. But that’s what this edition does. The personal aspects of The Waste Land’s genesis, the stages of its development, its roots in Eliot’s previous experience, the warp and woof of its incredible texture and much much more are masterfully illuminated in Viorica Patea’s lengthy and well-written

大学教授Derrick对于《荒原》的详细解读

142 Paul Scott Derrick Introduction to this new translation of The Waste Land into Spanish. There seem to be very few of those hundreds of studies the poem has inspired that she is not aware of. It first appeared in the London journal Criterion, in October 1922. It was published one month later in New York in The Dial. For reasons that Eliot never made clear, he decided to append those famous notes to each of the poem’s five sections for its first edition in book form (New York: Boni and Liveright, [December] 1922). Did he do so simply for commercial reasons, to make the book longer? Did he feel the need to protect himself against possible claims of plagiarism? Was it part of the overall strategy of Modernism to present its practitioners as connoisseurs, a subterfuge by which the Modernist poet distinguished himself from the sentimentality of many fin-de-siècle versifiers and emphasized his ‘professionalism’? Or was it a sincere attempt at explanation, to make the poem accessible to more than an elite coterie of privileged readers? Whatever the motives may have been, those notes have raised more questions for serious students of Eliot’s work than they answer and have notoriously become an integral factor in the poem’s lasting fascination.

But of course it was not Eliot’s duty, or intention, really to explain his own poem to the public. That is a task for those of us who follow. In this edition, Dr. Patea, Senior Lecturer in American literature at the University of Salamanca and a specialist in Modernist poetry, elucidates the meaning and significance of The Waste Land just about as thoroughly and effectively as it seems possible to do.

The book consists of three general sections. The first, the Introduction, provides us with a wealth of background material which is an indispensable aid for an appreciative reading of the text. The second one is a meticulously annotated bi-lingual edition of the poem itself, and its notes, with a translation by José Luis Palomares. And the third, an extremely helpful addition, is an Appendix of ten short texts (1-2 pages), also in bi-lingual format, which are among the most important of The Waste Land’s cornucopia of intertextual references.

The Introduction, also structured in three sections, is a well-balanced mix of biographical information and critical assessment of Eliot’s thought and work. This kind of approach is always enlightening, but especially so in the case of an author who went to such extremes to obfuscate the many traces of his personal life t …… 此处隐藏：6704字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……