T. S. Eliot. 2005 (1922): La tierra baldía. Edición bilingüe. Introducción y notas de Viorica Patea. Traducción José Luis Palomares. Madrid: Cátedra, Letras Universales, 2005. 328 pp.
Paul Scott Derrick师德培训体会
Universitat de València
Paul.S.Derrick@uv.es
我是独生子It is practically impossible to overestimate the importance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), not only in the cour of twentieth-century poetry in English, but for Western poetry in general. This single poem has been the object of many hundreds of critical articles and book-length studies. And that interest, that cultural fascination, still shows little sign of diminishing.
Along with Pound’s Cantos (begun in 1915), Joyce’s Ulyss (1922), Williams’ Spring and All (1923) and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), The Waste Land can be clasd as one of a handful of ‘centrepiece texts’ of the first-generation Modernist enterpri. It is a masterwork of constructive destruction, a brilliant application of Cubist collage techniques to language. It is both an expression and a demonstration of the cultural malai and the crisis of belief that resulted from the First World War. It i
s a profound experiment in the compression, or codification, of an encyclopaedic body of knowledge—as if we had nd the need at that point in time to conden our heritage into complex, hermetic forms in order to prerve our cultural memory in the face of some impending disaster. But, in addition, it offers a possible therapy for our illness, an opportunity to put a broken world together again—or at least to practice putting it together again. And in this n, The Waste Land is a powerful record of a yearning for health, wholeness and holiness (words which are all, as Eliot must have been aware, etymologically connected).
The poet himlf, however, claimed that he had no such exalted aims in mind in 1921 when, trying to recuperate in Margate from the stress contingent on his gradually disintegrating marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, he sat down to write what would eventually become part III, “The Fire Sermon”. (He had begun the poem at the end of 1919 as a long ries of stylistic parodies with the title “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. He compod the final ction, “What the Thunder Said”, in late 1921 in Lausanne, under the care of a pre-Freudian analyst named Roger Vittoz.) In his own, undoubtedly dismbling words, The Waste Land was intended to relieve “a personal and wholly insignificant grou against life” (Eliot 1971: 1). All fal modesty aside, the question that immediately aris is: how does an insignificant personal complaint get converted into such an astounding religious, philosophical and literary accomplishment?
Providing a credible account of such a complicated process might be compared to producing a high-resolution, three-dimensional, multi-ctional holographic map of the occult intestines of the Gordian Knot. But that’s what this edition does. The personal aspects of The Waste Land’s genesis, the stages of its development, its roots in Eliot’s previous experience, the warp and woof of its incredible texture and much much more are masterfully illuminated in Viorica Patea’s lengthy and well-written
142Paul Scott Derrick Introduction to this new translation of The Waste Land into Spanish. There em to be very few of tho hundreds of studies the poem has inspired that she is not aware of.
It first appeared in the London journal Criterion, in October 1922. It was published one month later in New York in The Dial. For reasons that Eliot never made clear, he decided to append tho famous notes to each of the poem’s five ctions for its first edition in book form (New York: Boni and Liveright, [December] 1922). Did he do so simply for commercial reasons, to make the book longer? Did he feel the need to protect himlf against possible claims of plagiarism? Was it part of the overall strategy of Modernism to prent its practitioners as connoisurs, a subterfuge by which the Modernist poet distinguished himlf from the ntimentality of many fin-de-siècle versifiers and emphasized his ‘professionalism’?Or was it a sincere attempt at explanation, to make the poem accessible to more than an elite coterie of privileged readers? Whatever the motives may have been,
tho notes have raid more questions for rious students of Eliot’s work than they answer and have notoriously become an integral factor in the poem’s lasting fascination.
But of cour it was not Eliot’s duty, or intention, really to explain his own poem to the public. That is a task for tho of us who follow. In this edition, Dr. Patea, Senior Lecturer in American literature at the University of Salamanca and a specialist in Modernist poetry, elucidates the meaning and significance of The Waste Land just about as thoroughly and effectively as it ems possible to do.
The book consists of three general ctions. The first, the Introduction, provides us with a wealth of background material which is an indispensable aid for an appreciative reading of the text. The cond one is a meticulously annotated bi-lingual edition of the poem itlf, and its notes, with a translation by José Luis Palomares. And the third, an extremely helpful addition, is an Appendix of ten short texts (1-2 pages), also in bi-lingual format, which are among the most important of The Waste Land’s cornucopia of intertextual references.
The Introduction, also structured in three ctions, is a well-balanced mix of biographical information and critical asssment of Eliot’s thought and work. This kind of approach is always enlightening, but especially so in the ca of an author who went to such extremes to obfuscate the many traces of hi
学生学年鉴定表自我鉴定s personal life that inform his work. We learn about Eliot’s New England family background, and the atmosphere surrounding his childhood; the influence of Irving Babbit and George Santayana during his undergraduate years at Harvard and the early but lasting literary influence of Baudelaire, French Symbolism and the work of Dante.
Few readers beyond specialized academic circles are aware that Eliot carried out his graduate studies at Harvard in philosophy. Dr. Patea provides a very informative discussion of this fundamental period in his intellectual development, pointing out the importance for him of teachers such as Josiah Royce, William James, Bertrand Rusll and, above all, the subject of his doctoral disrtation (which he completed but, becau of the First World War, never defended), the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley. Patea is especially effective in signalling the impact of Bradley’s philosophy on Eliot’s poetry and tracing Bradley’s imprint in The Waste Land. This very complex aspect of the poem was first riously considered by Anne C. Bolgan (1973), who rediscovered Eliot’s disrtation in the Puy Library at Harvard. Since then, few commentators have
Reviews 143 failed at least to mention Bradley, although the most satisfying studies in this respect are probably still tho of Schusterman (1988) and Jain (1992).
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We are also given a good overview of Eliot’s earliest critical essays and how they are intimately linked with the content of the papers he wrote for many of his graduate cours in philosophy, as well as a survey of the development of his poetry and criticism over the cour of his life.
The cond part of the Introduction offers a panorama of detailed information concerning The Waste Land itlf and discuss the most important influences contributing to its innovative form and breathtaking scope. We are given a fine description of Ezra Pound’s incisive editorial work. In convincing Eliot to cut out more than 40% of the original text, Pound ensured not only a tighter and stronger organization and a more allusive and esoteric quality, but also a higher degree of Cubist fragmentation. Patea explains how Eliot discovered what he described as ‘the mythical method’—which defines his u of history in the poem—in his own reading of Joyce’s recently-published Ulyss. She also gives a clear account of the u Eliot made of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Becau Eliot directly cited the two works in the introductory paragraph of his notes to the poem, their importance is undeniable (regardless of what his motives for appending that material may have been). Patea’s Introduction, however, places them in a much more balanced perspective than usual, within the framework of the mythical method, among a larger number of literary, religious, anthropological and psychological influences.
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Finally, the third part of the Introduction devotes just over 75 pages to a detailed, insightful and coherent clo reading of the poem. Many ingenious metaphors have been invented to illustrate what happens in The Waste Land. My own personal choice is the archaeological site. The ultimate grace of the Eliot/Pound collage technique is that it confronts us with a field of confusing fragments that we need to reconstruct, fragments that happen to be the remains of earlier cultural continuities:the various traditions of the West, primitivism and the wisdom of the East. This act of reconstruction corresponds with the final pha of the Cubist aesthetics. After the painter has analyzed a scene, taken it apart and placed the pieces into a new design, the viewer must complete the process by recreating the original scene (or stimulus) from the confusing cues the painting provides. In the ca of The Waste Land though, the original scene, or stimulus, is the whole expan of Western culture. The reader, like an archaeologist at a dig, is forced to u every bit of intelligence, imagination and knowledge at his or her command to flesh out tho fragments, reconstitute them and to recover, or maybe better, recreate the historical continuity tho fragments are remnants of. There can be a virtually unlimited number of coherent and valid explications of the poem. But every one of them is, in effect, an individual step toward recovering the health—or the wholeness—of the waste land of Western society. In her particular unfolding of this enigmatic complex of language and cultural memory (and forgetfulness), Dr. Patea applies a fine imagination a
nd a generous intelligence to the large body of knowledge that the first two ctions of her essay display.
The Waste Land ends with an appeal to Buddhist and Hindu scriptures as offering a possible model for a cure to the spiritual aridity that is destroying the West:
144Paul Scott Derrick con estos fragmentos a salvo apuntalé mis ruinas
Sea, pues, que habré de obligaros. Hierónimo esta furioso otra vez.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shanti shanti shanti (285)
The poem itlf, in spite of its apparently chaotic fragmentation and pervasive air of pessimism, constitutes a journey from despair to hope. “La tierra baldía acaba”, writes Patea,
con un atisbo de lo trascendente y la aceptación de lo sagrado. [. . .] La verdad revelada conduce a la conciencia lírica a la realidad de lo inexpresable “donde el significado aún persiste aunque las palabras fallan” [. . .] El poema de Eliot traza el viaje del alma a través del desierto de la ignorancia, del sufrimiento y de la d de las aspiraciones terrenales.
Concluye con la revelación de una realidad que libera su condición fragmentada. En el misterio de la contemplación el r intuye la plenitud de este estado de conciencia no dual y no objetivable. (170-71)
It is probably true that it began as an attempt to relieve “a personal and wholly insignificant grou against life” (Eliot 1971: 1). But Eliot is an artist who individual mind came to accommodate the collective mind of his culture. This is an artist who taught himlf to write, as he describes it in his early essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, “not only with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and compos a simultaneous order” (Eliot 1964: 4).
His ‘insignificant grou’ therefore inevitably transcends to a universal plane. The Waste Land is a prototype of the verbal collage, a ca study of Eliot’s concept of the historical consciousness and the mythical method. It can be thought of as a puzzle to be solved, in which we solve—or resolve—ourlves. Or it might be thought of as a verbal field containing relics of all that we are losing—fragments, mixing memory and desire, forgetfulness and need, pointing us the way toward a new n of wholeness.
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Several worthwhile contributions to the general field of Eliot studies have been published in Spain (Gibert 1983; Abad 1992; Zambrano Carballo 1996; Vericat 2004), each one commendable in its own way. But this edition of The Waste Land ems to me to offer Spanish readers the best opportunity to appreciate and to comprehend all of the manifold dimensions of this towering signpost to the Modern (and post-modern) condition.
Works Cited
Abad, Pilar 1992: Cómo leer a T. S. Eliot. Madrid: Júcar.
Bolgan, Anne C. 1973: What the Thunder Really Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Making of “The Waste Land”. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP.
Eliot, T. S. 1964: Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc.
———— 1971: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Reviews 145 Frar, James George 1922: The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Abridged ed. New York: The MacMillan Co.
Gibert Maceda, María Teresa 1983: Fuentes literarias en la poesía de T. S. Eliot. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Compluten.
Jain, Manju 1992: T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Schusterman, Richard 1988: T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia UP. Vericat, Fabio 2004: From Physics to Metaphysics: Philosophy and Allegory in the Critical Writings of T. S. Eliot. Valencia: Universitat de València, Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans.
Weston, Jes 1983 (1919): From Ritual to Romance. Gloucester MA: Peter Smith.
一天一点口才训练Zambrano Carballo, Pablo 1996: La mística de la noche oscura: San Juan de la Cruz y T. S. Eliot.
Huelva: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Huelva.
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Received 20 May 2006
Revid version received 5 October 2006
