Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Jack Sweeney's basic English translation of Donne's 'Loves Deity' from 1943
John L. (Jack) Sweeney fist published his Basic English translation of Donne’s “Love Deity” in Reed Whittemore and James Jesus Angleton’s Furioso 2:1 (p. 34) in 1943. Sweeney's note on the experiment included these comments: "It should be noted that in terms of the system of Basic English its use in verse form is unorthodox. It is not a literary language . … In a certain sense the extension printed here is a sport [but] it may suggest to educationists an auxiliary device for the analysis and discussion of language in poetry. As I. A. Richards said in a different connection, 'Most people find that having versions of a passage before them opens up the task of explaining immensely. This is true even when one version of it is clearly very inferior; its presence still throws the implications on the other into relief." The poem was reprinted in Delos 1:4 (1988-89), pp. 138-40.