A Man Looking at A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, A Review — Part 6
6. My defense of paraphrasing. An example of a poem in my book: Embroidery (Homage to Yehuda Amichai)
Hustvedt says it is “impossible” to paraphrase poems, (Hustvedt, p. 107) about which I disagree. Actually, I kind of agree with her in that the combination of words and punctuation alludes to a specific interpretation. Words and thus sentences, and so forth, have denotations and connotations. Those facts cannot be aborted unless in artistry or so other way legitimized and logical replacements for a time, for example. The poem is birthed and lives in exact language. The throwing together of words, as in a bowl and tossing them to effect a random combination can reveal interesting and tasteful ideas. My initial complaint in that it is possible to “paraphrase” poems relates to her story about the lover “Who would read a poem by Keats and respond by writing another poem in twenty minutes.” While this may not be the same, I do this in effect with a Yehuda Amichai poem entitled “Summer Or Its Ending”:
It was a summer
or its ending.
That afternoon you were
dressed for the first time
in your shroud,
and never noticed,
because of the printed
flowers of its cloth. (http://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/summer-or-its-ending/)
Please look at my poem and consider its paraphrase, where I try to relate the essence of the poem using a different word arrangement, thus as far as I am concerned undermining Hustvedt’s assertion that poems cannot be paraphrased.
Embroidery (Homage to Yehuda Amichai)
You never noticed because it was embroidered.
Because it was embroidered, you never noticed.
How summer fell, lilac soft in the underbrush.
Upon a blanket that was dark sky and
Flowers.
I heard you breathing this time.
You’d already walked toward me.
You had gone from the top
To the faintest light.
You never noticed your shroud.
It was embroidered with flowers,
On the ground between us
Where our handkerchiefs lay.
I think I process and communicate the very essence of the beauty of Amichai’s poem and the variance is so much as to be an entirely different poem. It is like this word salad where one word can spark a fire of newness. Single words often carry a universe of ideas.
Moreover, Hustvedt undermines her theory because her entire work A Woman Looking At Men… is a paraphrase of the art she criticizes. Her entire argument fails if we cannot first understand the art she is criticizing.
Hustvedt senses the poems by her students as accurate reenactments of the poems that inspired them. I have done this kind of writing and often do in response to works of art, for example, and I see no mystery in them. We read a line and the words come because we understand the intention, or we are inspired to produce more words. Words sometimes can be like graphic design, where one application of paint calls for another and another until we have a canvas of line, form, texture, and color that delights our hearts.
