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Wednesday, February 16, 2005
For those wondering about the Wolcott poem... Wolcott won the Nobel Prize for lit back in the early '90s for his Omeros, a recasting of the Homeric epics for Caribbean fishing villages. Helluva book. As for today's poem, I first encountered it in France in '93. In a supplementary lecture for an English-French translation class I was taking, the instructor brought in a Time magazine article about Wolcott including the poem. Most of the article was standard fare and easily translated. But the poem... that presented challenges, starting with the instructor's inability to understand that "nigger" had a lot more implications than her dictionary indicated. I don't remember much about how our group effort came out except that I don't think any of us were really satisfied with the result. At any rate, here you have a short but interesting snippet from an unusual poet.
posted by gbarto at 10:39 PM
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