William Shakespeare on the attack on the
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
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Blogger was down for several hours last night.
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At least one Russian blog took note of my Mayakovsky entry the other day, as well, I take it, as the comments string that grew up barnacle-like alongside it. But when I ran the Russian through Babel Fish (my Russian is worse than my German is worse than my Spanish & I’m literate in none of these other languages) what I got was:
(
As near as I can tell, the author’s name is “the system of the mechanical transfer.” I suspect a Benjamin fan would call that Mechanical Reproduction.
This, on the other hand, is considerably more intelligible than Henry Gould’s remark that
the thing is, I don't think anyone has demonstrated that Brodsky ever "returned" to a "pre-soviet" aesthetics; that Brodsky ever was strongly influenced by the New Critics; that Brodsky ever was strongly influenced by the Russian Formalists.
I never argued that Brodsky even read the New Critics, only that his American friends had. And it should be clear enough from reading my post that Brodsky never showed any interest in the Russian Formalists, but instead sought a neo-classical, pre-modern poetics. You could argue that Brodsky represents a particular kind of deformed modernism, I suppose, but if that’s the argument you want to make, Henry, you should make it and stop chasing straw men.
