For a few days before going to the protest, I gathered images of women and girls and arranged them in a group: ancestors, dolls, figures, goddesses, paintings, the living and the dead, some with whom I had been communing. Some are hidden in veils and masks and voodoo. Some are brides or in braids or shy or bold. Daughters, stepdaughters, daughters-in-law, mother, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, great greats, sisters-in-law, relatives in hiding. C. D.
Exchanging signals
What makes me interested in the question of how poems travel is the very difficulty of capturing the actual experience of reading poems, especially as it varies from culture to culture, language to language. I don’t mean some abstract ‘impact’ or ‘effect’ of poems on individuals or societies. I mean those experiences of reading that can be demonstrated or documented, especially in the form of writing. “Transpositions” is an umbrella term for such material evidence of reception: it comprises different kinds of translation, different kinds of criticism, and more.
Before turning to my first example of transposition, I want to consider two models of poetic circulation that complement the one elucidated by Matt Cohen in Whitman’s Drift, the subject of my last post.