Waste Land Research Articles

Modernism and Non-translation

“An arresting, recurrent feature of modernist literature, especially that written in English,” declare the editors in their introduction, is “its incorporation of untranslated words and phrases.” True enough, and it is astonishing that more has not been written on the phenomenon of foreign-language citation in the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and many others. The Waste Land, for example, as Harding points out in his own contribution to this essay collection, is a veritable tissue of allusions, inserted in the original Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Provençal and even Sanskrit forms. It is as if the Cumaean sybil's prophecy, in the poem's epigraph, could not be rendered in English.How and why writers felt compelled to insert foreign phrases—Henry James, Daniel Karlin notes, included numerous French locutions like à contre coeur (“reluctantly”) even in his own personal notebooks—makes for a fascinating study, but unfortunately Harding and Nash refer to the process as non-translation, a term implying that the word or phrase in question could have been translated but was not. Non-translation, however, is misleading. If I write a letter to friends who, like me, have a special love for things Italian, and address them as Carrissimi, it is not because I could not say “Dearest ones.” It is because the Italian phrase feels more intimate, more authentic. James, who had lived abroad for many years and regarded French culture as much more sophisticated than our own, loved to use their phraseology, which often seemed to him more succinct, more to the point. Or again, Pound could have translated the repeated words “Dove sta memoria” (from his beloved Cavalcanti's Donna mi prega) as “Where memory lives,” but then he would have lost the entire tone and affect of the phrase.Citing Christopher Ricks, Harding, discussing the opening of The Waste Land, notes that the “non-translation” of line 12—“Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch”—allows Eliot to emphasize the “tonal recesses of foreignness,” the “strangeness of the voices of the displaced.” But the citation has, I think, a much more obvious function. The nameless woman in the Hofgarten is meant to epitomize the rootlessness and mongrelization of culture of the postwar years: her casual, colloquial sentence is, of course, absurd: she is not echt anything. The German phrase guarantees authenticity and irony. Similarly, in Joyce's Ulysses, we meet a Stephen Dedalus whose mind is full of Church Latin, even as Bloom comically mistranslates snatches of Italian opera. The modernists were responding to an age of increasing linguistic alterity.Equally interesting, as Stephen Romer shows in his excellent essay, is to speculate why certain poets then discontinued the practice, as did Eliot by 1930, when he evidently longed to assert his new status as a “royalist” and “Anglican” Englishman. Romer finds that Ash Wednesday contains a single foreign reference—Dante's Sovegna vos.

“Burning Burning Burning Burning”: The Fire of The Waste Land in Anna Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero

"In 1940, when the flames of WWII were already devastating Europe and approaching the USSR, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) started what was to become her last major work, Poem Without a Hero (1940-1960). Thanks to the poet and writer Boris Pasternak, Akhmatova was able to read T.S. Eliot’s work. Although she and Eliot never met nor communicated directly, Akhmatova considered him her soulmate. Having witnessed WWI, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the communist purges, Stalinism, and foreseeing the upcoming Nazi invasion, Akhmatova turns to Eliot as one of her main inspirations. The present paper explores one of the leitmotivs of The Waste Land, the multifaceted fire, seeing it as, first, a symbol of the horrors depicted in Poem Without a Hero, and second, a hope of a purifying power. Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero originated in The Waste Land´s despair and longing for salvation, and the fire in her poem is as merciless as it is redeeming, “like a pure flame in a dish of clay” (Poem Without a Hero)."

Recital “Then Spoke The Waste Land: Songs and Fragments” (Congreso “Wastelands” 2022, UNED, Madrid)

"“Then Spoke the Waste Land; Songs and Fragments” is a recital performed by the UNED English Faculty Group; it premiered in Madrid, April 6, 2022, at the 34th European Association for American Studies Conference (EAAS). The recital is a combination of music and verse. Passages from The Waste Land are read, interspersed with comments from Eliot’s friends, such as Ezra Pound and Virgina Woolf, or his wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood. These voices emerge from different texts, letters, novels, even autobiographies, and all reflect on the poem. We can even hear William Carlos Williams’s reaction to the poem when it was published, as he annotated it in his Autobiography. They perform against a musical backdrop which ranges from Wagner to popular song. The poem is recited thematically, rather than in an orderly fashion from beginning to end. Passages are grouped around seven main motifs. Beginning with a Prologue / Overture, it continues with: “Spring and Love,” “The City,” “Here is Belladonna,” “Dry Desolation,” “Death By Water,” “Distant Spirituality.” The recital is available at: https://canal.uned.es/video/624ea08db6092302 c6288f02. What follows are brief introductions of each section, as well as the fragments and music included in each of them."

The Waste Land and the Release of Social Energy: An Eliotean Reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Fiction

"This essay discusses the striking influence of The Waste Land on Thomas Pynchon’s oeuvre and evaluates the stylistic and thematic links connecting them. More specifically, the article centers on twin aspects of Pynchon’s intertextual reframing of Eliot’s representation of the waste land. The first refers to the use of certain motifs and symbols of the poem, such as the narrator’s bouncy character, the living-dead condition of some personages, and the evocation of the violet hour. The second aspect concerns Pynchon’s versions of the figure of Belladonna as a “lady of situations” and her relationship with the notion of waste associated with mythic thinking, ethics, and the complexity of life. These themes are developed intensely in Pynchon’s oeuvre and are reflected in his complex experimental style."

The Waste Land and The Road to Emmaus

"The game-changing status afforded to The Waste Land complicates any evaluation of the poem’s quality, since it broke most of the old formal rules. To equate the poem with “Modernism” does not help. Some difficulties with reception can be removed (e.g. calling it The Wasteland makes readers think it is about the 1914-18 war, which it is not). The Notes can be demystified. This article spells out the Christian focus of Part V, which is often overlooked."

“With Inviolable Voice”: Eliot’s Redeeming Word in The Waste Land

"This paper analyzes the notions of despair and selfhood in The Waste Land through the prism of Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death (1849). It contends that despite the sense of loss and meaninglessness of existence, The Waste Land traces the journey of the self from ignorance and suffering, from being bound to temporality and sensual thirst, through “the dark night of the soul” to a vantage point from where it can see into “the heart of light.” Furthermore, it claims that Eliot is a twentieth century Dante who goes beyond European frontiers and attempts to reconcile Christianity, Buddhism and the Vedanta with an existentialist discourse."

Écfrasis líricas y relaciones intertextuales alrededor de la Melancolía I de Alberto Durero

Melencolia I (1514), an engraving made by the german painter Albrecht Dürer, is certainly one of the most widespread and analyzed engravings in the history of art until today. However, the pictorial field is not the only one in which this work has left its fertile seeds, also producing significant repercussions in the literary field, especially in poetry. In between the several lyrical ekphrasis that refer to this prolific renaissance engraving, we can find a trail of intertextual connections which begins with the sonnet “El desdichado” from Gérard de Nerval, followed by “The Waste Land” from T.S. Eliot, and then Jaime Gil de Biedma writes his poem “Príncipe de Aquitania, en su torre abolida”, influenced by the former; apart from other poetic references which also lead to this engraving, such as “Ciudades” by Enrique Lihn, and more recently the poem “Tres”, published by Rafael Ávila Domínguez in the sixteenth issue of the journal Apostasía, in indirect dialogue with the first two poems mentioned above. From these references, all interconnected around this picture, the materiality of Melencolia I has acomplished to expand from image to language, strunging on the pearls of an intertextual lineage that broadens the significance of the concept of melancholia around artistic creation, transmotivating the lyrical connotations from renaissance to the romantic and the modernist imagination, and from them to our present idea of melancholia.

“A current under sea,” “Then spoke the Thunder” (2022). “The Waste Land (2022)

"This issue also includes a selection of artwoks by the German artist Wolfgang Hunecke and a digital collage by the Spanish artist and designer, professor at the University of Salamanca and curator of many exhibits, Carlos Fortes."

The Waste Land: Meaning and Multiplicity

"T.S. Eliot’s “stony rubbish ... / A heap of broken images” is often characterised as both The Waste Land’s theme, and the technique it employs to “connect” aspects of modernity. To read the poem from within the British twenty first century lyric tradition is to admire the way that such tessellation creates a literary whole. What lessons can be learnt for contemporary poetics, in an era characterised arguably less by a breakdown in meaning than by a multiplication of meanings: in the multiplying sources of authority offered by identity politics, or citizen journalism; in competing public discourses; in the ramifying identities one individual may acquire as they occupy a number of social or emotional roles? If the impulse of lyric poetry is to “sing” these into a kind of coherence, a unifying voice too often creates unifying perspective, is it possible that The Waste Land offers a counterexample?"

The Waste Land in Spanish Translation (1930-2022)

"Between 1930 and 2022, no fewer than 35 people (including professional translators, scholars and amateurs) met the formidable challenge of translating into Spanish either The Waste Land in full or only some of its sections. With varying degrees of success, these translations found their way into the pages of single books, anthologies, literary magazines or journals both in Spain and in Hispanic-American countries such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Santo Domingo. Undertaking a close analysis of all these versions not only provides an excellent opportunity to revisit T.S. Eliot’s best-known poem on the centenary of its publication, but may also contribute to the study of the complex process of its retranslation over more than nine decades."

“De Pound a Eliot, en el más allá”. “Herida de sol”. “Waste”. “En esta Isla de cetros”.

"The centennial commemoration of The Waste Land includes not only literary studies but also creations in the domain of visual arts and music. In the artwork section two well-established poets, multi-prized Spanish Antonio Colinas, and Mexican Jeannette Lozano Clariond, pay their homage to Eliot. They are accompanied by startling poetic voices of those who are more known as scholars and who reveal now their less known facet as poetic craftsmen, such as, Paul Scott Derrick, an eminent Americanist at the Universitat de València, and Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, a promising writer and professor at the Universidad de Granada."

The Marketing Mix of Desert Tourism Applied in Islamic Economy

Tourism is the concept of movement in order to change the place and the environment for knowledge and understanding and to improve the standard of life, while the marketing mix is the concept of the appropriate mixture for the exchange and transfer of goods and services between multiple parties. What was required in order to study the marketing mix was to identify the market and its environment and then study the limits of possible interactions between the elements as they are in the concept of the marketing mix when studying general marketing and marketing for services. The beginning will be the preoccupation with desert tourism, then engage in the exploitation of the resources of the desert as an environment that produces wealth and finally the development of desert tourism in whole, by pushing the desert to move from the waste land to an environment suitable for growth, and perhaps the most important area that can be adopted for this research is the Sahara region, which occupies an area of 9,200,00 km, Which is preparing to turn from sand dunes to an active market by transforming into an African transit area with the activity of cross-desert roads and linking with the Mediterranean Sea in a short crossing for goods towards Europe. After the completion of the 400-long trans-Saharan road, moreover Algeria will turn into the best destinations for travel and adventures, and the desert will be a field for trade, travel and investment in a marketing mix of the type of service mix, in the physical distribution of transportation, storage and handling It will be the start of an effective contribution to the second Silk Road that connects the continents. This is what prompted us to first pay attention to desert tourism in the Algerian desert in various regions Biskra state, Ghardaia state, Tamanrasset state, to be the nucleus for research in the exploitation of deserts, and for research to manage desert resources and then valuing them we were going to answer the question: What is the fate of developing desert tourism to turn the desert into an active environment instead of keeping the desert as it is? and search of the appropriate marketing mix for this.

INTERTEKSTUALNO ČITANjE DRAME „ŽUDNjA“ SARE KEJN

According to Aleks Sierz (2001: 118), Sarah Kane’s Crave needs four different reading strat- egies to fully uncover its meanings. This paper takes one of those strategies – an intertextual reading – to examine the play’s echoes of R. W. Fassbinder, Martin Crimp, and T. S. Eliot. Fassbinder’s play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life, and Eliot’s poem The Waste Land enable Sarah Kane to combine materials – forms, sources, messages, sounds, dialogues and solos – into a complex dramatic structure that unsettles the plot-and-character conventions of realism. De-individualized characters, marked only by the letters A, B, C, and M, reveal the presence of Pre-Paradise Sorry Now and Attempts on Her Life – they allow Kane to use fragmentary lines of action to explore how power is organized and shared within a social group. The analysis shows that Eliot’s narrative poem The Waste Land is the principal influence that ‘guides Crave in both form and content’ (Saunders 2002: 102). In addition to the wasteland motif, Kane employs Eliot’s rhapsodic impulse to combine disparate patches of text and dramatic, epic and lyrical elements into a never-ending flow of voices.

The Waste Land in Spanish a Hundred Years Later: The Case of Claudio Rodríguez

"This article explores Claudio Rodríguez’s approach to Eliot’s poetry through his unpublished translation of The Waste Land. It also considers Rodríguez’s translation work within the wider context of Eliot’s influence on Spanish poets during the twentieth century, an influence deriving largely from the repeated translations of The Waste Land. Unlike other renowned Spanish poets from the 1950s, my study tackles the significance of Rodríguez’s contribution to the translations of Eliot into Spanish by focusing on his initial reluctance to undertake the task and on the conceptual divergence he felt vis a vis the Anglo-American poet’s poetic principles."

Reading the More-Than-Human World in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

"This article offers an ecocritical reading of The Waste Land, arguing that Eliot’s magnum opus can be read as an ecopoem that anticipates the woes of the Anthropocene, finding evidence for this in the many references to the human-induced environmental degradation and anthropogenic detritus that are scattered throughout the poem. In the aftermath of the Great War, amidst the disintegration of the mind of Europe in an increasingly secularised world, Eliot strives to find solace not only in the spirit, but also in the more-than-human world as represented by mountains, water and birdsong that emulates the sound of dripping water. Yet in Eliot’s conceptualisation, the more-than-human world is tinged with the transcendent and the divine, as his ecologism is deeply ethical and spiritual."

Миф и мелос в «Четырех квартетах» Т.С. Элиота

The paper is dedicated to the poem by T.S. Eliot Four Quartets (1943), it examines its artistic specificity, its poetic and musical peculiarities with their complex symbolic subtext and a whole layer of meanings. The organizing principle of the Four Quartets is the synthesis of myth and melos. The poem contains features “borrowed” from music so that the “musical energy” (melos) that is not yet a melody finds a specific poetic embodiment. Built on the principles of musical poetics, Eliot's poem contains various artistic images that alternate and combine according to the principle of the development of musical themes (like Wagner's leitmotifs) and their meaning does not remain the same, but is changing. Another similarity between the poem and a musical work is its timeless character: a full perception of the musical integrity of Four Quartets is achieved after repeated reading of the text, simultaneous experience of what has already been read and what has yet to be read — and this is like listening to a symphony, the desire to perceive it in its entirety, beyond time. The myth, in contrast to the quite specific mythologems of The Waste Land, in Four Quartets and its melodiousness, does not have any subject or plot even in its infancy and is rather represented by abstract, general ideas and archetypes. The article analyzes the archetypes and elementary symbols of Four Quartets (circle, square, quaternity, intersecting lines, etc.) and reveals their significance. The paper demonstrates that the imagery of Four Quartets is also based on Eliot's personal impressions, which merge with many “intellectual” associations and, refracting in the mythopoetic structure of the poem, turn into general, universal symbols.

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life Craig Howes (bio) Others contributors to this collection will movingly and accurately capture what Miriam was like as a coeditor, coauthor, crew member, and dear friend. Except for the paddling, I knew her in all of these roles, but I will begin this Biography tribute with some words about her as a researcher and scholar. Her biography on the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa English Department website listed her principal interests as modernism and modern American literature, twentieth century women’s literature, autobiography theory and criticism, and “all modes of life writing.” Her academic journey explains how her interests became her recognized expertise. She received her BA in 1970 from SUNY Buffalo, a major center for the study of modern and contemporary literature. The title of her 1979 NYU doctoral dissertation was “‘Persistent Pattern and Significant Form’: The Conceptual and Formal Impact of The Waste Land on Selected Anti-Realistic American Novels,” and she would go on to publish essays on T. S. Eliot, William Gaddis, Nathanael West, and Hart Crane. What she soon became best known for, however, was her work on women and modernism. She published extensively on Djuna Barnes and H.D. She edited and included her own work in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays. And in 1989 she coedited with Ellen G. Friedman the collection Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Their introduction has been called “practically a monograph” in itself, and the volume played an important role in “the continuing feminist project of the recovery and foregrounding of women writers.” This landmark collection was reprinted in 2014 by Princeton University Press as part of its Legacy Library series. In the mid-1980s, Miriam’s interest in modernism brought her to Hawaiʻi for a seminar conducted by the noted William Butler Yeats and Hart Crane scholar John Unterecker. Shortly afterwards, she resigned her associate professorship at Elizabeth Seton College and settled permanently here. For Miriam, moving to a world center for modernism studies like Honolulu after years of toiling in the literary and cultural backwater of New York City was an easy decision to make—after all, Jack Unterecker and Leon Edel had already done the same thing. But I suspect that someone named Alan Holzman probably had something to do with it as well. She [End Page 135] spent her first years as a visiting assistant professor in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa—she always remembered who was collegial, and who was . . . otherwise. She came on the tenure track in 1989, in 1993 she was tenured and promoted early, and she became a full professor in 2003. As a lifewriting scholar, Miriam’s status is indisputable. Part of the University of Wisconsin Press’s renowned Studies in Autobiography series, her 2004 book, The Text Is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe, fulfilled Susanna Egan’s prophetic assessment: “Miriam Fuchs is breaking new ground. Her remarkable exploration of catastrophe writing will be important in autobiography studies and fascinating to all who care about self-representation as a mode of survival.” This book brought Miriam’s many interests together—modernism, women’s literature, autobiographical fiction, art, and Hawaiʻi and the Pacific—in her outstanding opening chapter on the diaries of Queen Liliʻuokalani, but also in the book’s dedication: “To the women paddlers—Lanikai, Kumulau, Bora Bora.” I’ll let other contributors to this tribute address the autobiographical dimensions of a book entitled The Text Is Myself, mentioning only its major theme: “however much the past may be shaped into a discernable storyline, it is the uncertain present that preoccupies these writers.” And of course, Miriam had a long and profoundly influential impact upon Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and the Center for Biographical Research. Cynthia G. Franklin offers some personal and detailed remarks on their collaborations as coeditors and friends; let me set the stage with an origin story, and a few personal notes. When I took over as editor of Biography in 1994, I asked Miriam to replace me as one of the literary editors; a year later, she was listed as “literary editor in chief...

“Tarot Card Reading in The Waste Land and Its Korean Translation.”

“Tarot Card Reading in The Waste Land and Its Korean Translation.”

“On the Intertextuality and Gender Sensitivity of The Waste Land and Orlando”.

“On the Intertextuality and Gender Sensitivity of The Waste Land and Orlando”.

“The Peripatetic Philosopher”: Unlocking the Trauma of Richard Jefferies

This article considered the juvenilia of Richard Jefferies in light of the traumatic experiences of his early childhood, which included the sudden loss of his elder sister and a move from the country to the city to live with his aunt and uncle. Using a psychobiographical approach the article considers the impact of the prejudice directed towards him from the local Swindon community during his mid-to-late teens, which spurred him forward in honing his skill as an observational writer. Consonant with this process was the discovery and expression of his authentic voice, which was tempered by the financial need to write for the local newspapers. The article illustrates how his treatment of an area of waste land near his boyhood home affords insight into his emotional wellbeing and his maturation as an author and thinker. Through the close reading of passages written between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, alongside excerpts from his mature works, the article identifies a new unexplored dimension to the author and his works at a formative time in his career.