[In the 1990s I composed a series of thirty-three “Lorca Variations,” systematically drawing vocabulary, principally nouns, from my previously published translation of Lorca’s early gathering of poems, The Suites. I later made use of this method of composition for homages to Jackson Mac Low, Octavio Paz, & others as a step beyond translation but with an idea of translation – or what Haroldo de Campos called “transcreation” & I called “othering” – as one of the defining characteristics of poetry as a whole. The obvious difference in t
when all this first started my body broke out into real bad rashes my eyes my face my neck my chest my back my shoulders big giant holes on the back of my legs, holes the size of a #2 pencil looked just like the holes in the fish in the lab on the slab
Four Iroquois chiefs painted from life, circa 1710
[Part One was posted on May 31 and is available here.]
The existence of the content of Cornplanter’s visions is serendipitous. A copy of the manuscript (or the original) was in the collection of the Cornplanter family aand was found and recopied by a young man, Charles Aldrich, in 1849, and sent to Lyman C. Draper who had expressed an interest in collecting memorabilia relevant to a project on the Revolutionary War. Aldrich offered himself as a reliable local scholar who had access to a series of documents in the possession of William O’Beale, one of Cornplanter’s sons. Aldrich apologized to Draper for the legibility of the manuscript he sent because, he explained, he was rushed in producing it, but “it is about as legible from the ms from which it is taken.”
Poems and poetics