April is the cruelest month… Few cult poets have managed, among their harsh and hermetic reflections, to camouflage evocative and memorable lines in languages as diverse as Thomas Stearns Eliot (Saint Louis, Missouri, 1888-London, 1965). ), his central work, The Waste Land, is now a hundred years old. In his first collection of poetry, Prufrock and other observations (1917), if he implemented the handy check-in of Nights in cheap hotels for a night, and in his climax Four (1945), he undeniably predicted: «In my principle Between these two extremes -which, by the way, appeared at the end of every World War–in The Waste Land (1922) he blamed the immortal “cruelty” of April, such a bloody spring. like and refreshed, in front of their long-suffering users, the more April they count, the older they get.
In 2017, Visor publishing house compiled the first volume of Complete Poems, 1909-1962, and one hundred unpublished poems, in a flawless bilingual edition, on its full journey of one thousand one hundred and forty-five pages. Keys to the birth and echo of The Waste Land, dated at the mezzo del cammin, where the dancing Dante of the 20th century is deposited. 1922 was a very fruitful year for origin literary sects, as Joyce’s Ulysses, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Vallejo’s Trilce and the closing volume of Tomás Morales’ The Roses of Hercules were also published.
Pound, the best craftsman
As well as certain seemingly unimportant aspects, such as letters in which the author defended a particular article with tooth and nail in the face of the editors’ intentions to call this article the Waste Land, either explicitly or deterring them from putting Yermo in the prince edition in the first edition. In Spanish, the culmination of revelations is the complicit reason for the book’s famous and enigmatic dedication: “For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro” (“best craftsman”). Climbing during his seclusion due to severe depression in a Swiss sanatorium, Eliot entrusts the manuscript to his then-favorite colleague and accepts numerous corrections as is, beginning with the entire book being cut in half. just as the book has always been published, with a notable change in its verses and arrangement.
Now, in separate parts, it can be compared—with Eliot’s absolute comfort—to the original version, filled with more earthly conversation and anecdotal winks than Pound’s scissors would like. Thus, instead of the famous April, the cruelest month in which his poetry collection begins, The Bad Land would thus begin in this drunken tavern style: “First we had two drinks at Tom’s bar and it was old Tom, his eyes crazy and he was so blind” and told April the implication made was to be made later with the cruel hangover…
On the other hand, in the tremendous translation effort undertaken by José Luis Rey in this complete poem (based on the English edition of The Poems of TS Eliot, published by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue in 2015 at the London publishing house Faber). ), most of the new versions replace the classical sound, filling it with a more expressive rhythm and, so to speak, prose. Therefore, the very beginning of the Tomb of the Dead, in which the collection of poems opens, sets aside the quick reminders and successive gerunds of “April, the cruelest month”, to be read more causally and slowly in this way: “April is the cruelest month, because it nourishes the dead earth.” / the lilacs bring out, because they mix with desire / memories, because they shake / the roots are dulled by the spring rain.” In general, a well-known percussion instrument is lost, but in return, lines so precious to Eliot’s obsessions, in which lyric, story and thought are brought together in equal parts, fit into that slot.
The Waste Land, in short, meant the poet’s blessing, the gathering of praise and appreciation far from the dreadful first reception received by Prufrock and Other Observations. Just five years ago, if the literary pages of The Times (with which, ironically, Eliot himself would become an eminent critic during his lifetime) had been removed from the preamble that read: «The fact that these things go on. In Mr. Eliot’s mind, he is absolutely unimportant to anyone, including himself. According to The New York Times Book Review, the publication of a new collection of poems consisting of a single poem, for example: a mental and compact music that practically creates a movement of renewal among young people». Moreover: by the drag effect, henceforth Prufrock himself would cease to be the incoherent premonition attributed to him in his time, but rather the explicit preface to the innovative “stream of consciousness” embodied in Eliot.
Then, transcendent and secularized, his unprecedented ability to combine lyrical and epic with a strangely intimate and choral voice begins to come to the fore, freeing up an igneous colloquialism that Eliot used, even when mixed with cultist elements. it inaugurates a new aesthetic that was so precious to the twentieth century (‘change’, to be exact).
magnetism and deconstruction
His poems, in fact, have the appeal of dialogic monologues (hence associated with the inner division of contemporary man); and at the same time, they show that their creative boils and even their “deconstructors” are mysteriously shortened, as the joints appear to be a dish recently destroyed and reconstructed unnoticed. They also spin without being seen by the hand that moves the circus plates. This is an image of a ventriloquist; A patchwork collage of lyrical, narrative, and philosophical remnants, featuring high culture, biblical exegesis, and quotations from his favorite poets (Divine Comedy, Dante and Hamlet, by Shakespeare as primary source, with English metaphysicians and French symbolists) conditional advertising and mingled with prosaic rhetoric.
Now, Prufrock . . . was the basis for a remarkable “drama of literary anxiety” and a “dramatic interior monologue” about the loneliness, boredom, despair, or longing for unfulfilled love of the new urbanites (“Because I heard the sirens sing”, they sing to each other. / I don’t think they sing for me”). And if in the first pages he told us about a nature convalescing with an assisted breathing sun -»When he lays down in the sky in the afternoon / like an anesthetized person on the operating room table»–, the dead of The Waste Land, Inspired by the recent commemorations for the victims of the Great War in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, Eliot wonders, “Which roots are sticking out, what branches are growing out of this cold trash now? And in the Four Quartets, at the end of the Second War, his clinical picture was completed with this far-sighted overwhelming diagnosis: “The whole world is our hospital…”
intertextuality of poetry
In short, his teaching illuminated it to the point that it would be no exaggeration to argue that no self-respecting poet could do without him, like several other poets so opposed to each other, from the most realistic to the most Orphic. his legacy, even if it’s a small change to face. And among its key teachings, which are preached to exhaustion, is the necessary intertextuality of poetry; the indispensable condition of inhaling the classics in order to be able to fully discharge them later, just as no one can eat what they have not swallowed. The 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, his apparent rejection of Romanticism was even inferior to his anti-academicism; furthermore, having literally had the opportunity to devote himself to teaching at the second institution, having studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, he argued: “The university is beautiful, but I don’t want to be alive. dead…”
In fact, TS Eliot revolutionized lyricism in fashion by starting to shake off an unprecedented cocktail shaker with recycled materials and innovative leftovers presented in the synchronicity of broken mirrors and subjecting any previous icon and abstraction to an emergency landing. His journey against the immigration trend of the time – for a native of the rising Walt Whitman nation, settles in the metropolis of London and becomes a British citizen as well as adopting the Anglican faith – will be decisive for the transoceanic. Indeed, the reconciliation of The Wasteland’s poetry, which the author envisioned and initiated himself, initiating the convalescent modernity in which we still find ourselves.