Going back and forth between versions creates a pleasurably vertiginous kind of rhyme. I feel it must be a little like what Emily Dickinson felt reading between her versions, the sway of meaning.
Not having to pick one, enjoying the different angles. The reader can circle the statue as in a museum. In Stutt's two versions, I love her more faithful "incredible head / where the eyes ripened like apples," both because of the way she splits apart the German of Augenäpfel and because her "incredible" doesn't seem colloquial to me at all, it feels like the older sense of difficult to take in, to come to grips with being in the presence of, but I also love her nearly invented "a lump of rock with no vision" because of the way it taps into, not just the formless state of the original stone as flagged by Carol Rumens, but the literal decapitation of the statue which in the ordinary course of things should not make the visitor feel so sleeted through with vision like radiation.
His title might be a bit archaic itself, but I will say I think he nails the last line.
Yes. Also the short, factual run-up of "for here there is no place / that does not see you." It's just the way things are.
Predator's pelt, lion's mane, wild beast's fur; all three glisten. I think I like the stress in Mitchell the best, but "pelt" is the most luminous word.
Agreed. And because it's a word for the fur when it's off the animal as well as on, it sets up the star-bursting of the next line, as if Apollo at any second might shrug off his marble and be something even wilder underneath.
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Going back and forth between versions creates a pleasurably vertiginous kind of rhyme. I feel it must be a little like what Emily Dickinson felt reading between her versions, the sway of meaning.
Not having to pick one, enjoying the different angles. The reader can circle the statue as in a museum. In Stutt's two versions, I love her more faithful "incredible head / where the eyes ripened like apples," both because of the way she splits apart the German of Augenäpfel and because her "incredible" doesn't seem colloquial to me at all, it feels like the older sense of difficult to take in, to come to grips with being in the presence of, but I also love her nearly invented "a lump of rock with no vision" because of the way it taps into, not just the formless state of the original stone as flagged by Carol Rumens, but the literal decapitation of the statue which in the ordinary course of things should not make the visitor feel so sleeted through with vision like radiation.
His title might be a bit archaic itself, but I will say I think he nails the last line.
Yes. Also the short, factual run-up of "for here there is no place / that does not see you." It's just the way things are.
Predator's pelt, lion's mane, wild beast's fur; all three glisten. I think I like the stress in Mitchell the best, but "pelt" is the most luminous word.
Agreed. And because it's a word for the fur when it's off the animal as well as on, it sets up the star-bursting of the next line, as if Apollo at any second might shrug off his marble and be something even wilder underneath.