Anthony Madrid
Twenty-six items from Special Collections

Anthony Madrid

Twenty-six items from Special Collections (Table of Contents)

Exhibits ‘A’–‘Z’: Complete list.

From January 4, 2016 - March 31, 2016, Anthony Madrid posted items from a personal "golden treasury": twenty-six exhibits labeled ‘A’ through ‘Z’ that represent a tour through his reading life. Every post (linked in this index page) begins  with a bibliography, for, as Madrid explains, "the benefit of the bookhounds out there, who might like to order the original, beautiful, first-edition, smoke-smelling, water-damaged hardcovers, online."

March 31, 2016

Twenty-six items from Special Collections (y)

Exhibit ‘Y’: Hausa (Nigeria). (Anonymous, dan tauri performance, 20th century)

Poetry, Prose and Popular Culture in Hausa, Graham Furniss (Smithsonian, 1996), pages 76–7. The piece below has a frenzied, zigzag quality I find exhilarating. Does anybody remember that Warner Bros. cartoon character who would literally become a tornado? (Also cf. Stephen Leacock's Lord Ronald, who flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.)  I have always speculated this might make a nice class exercise: "Say anything at all, no rhythm/no nothing, just lay about freely with an Indiana Jones bullwhip, making sure the sense jumps around nimbly and quickly. Throw down a bunch of commands." The question arises: "Yeah but how much of that kind of thing can a reader actually tolerate?"

March 26, 2016

Twenty-six items from Special Collections (x)

Exhibit ‘X’: Ancient Greek. (Theocritus, 'Idyll #2,' third century BCE)

Bibliography: Theocritus: The Idylls, translated with an introduction and notes by Robert Wells (Penguin, 1988). Comment: My original plan for this series excluded any poetry in Latin or Greek, on the grounds that such works are so much more likely to be familiar to readers of Jacket2. I make an exception today only because I have the sense that whenever one finally locates an effective translation of a {famous piece that had always seemed hopeless}, one has a strong duty to report the fact. For example, Wang Wei had always seemed to me the Great Tang Poet Whom I Don't Get,—until I found the 1991 translation by Tony Barnstone and Xu Haixin. Having thoroughly enjoyed and digested Wang Wei for the first time, I spent the next few months running from place to place saying "Barnstone and Xu! Barnstone and Xu!"

March 16, 2016

Twenty-six items from Special Collections (s)

Exhibit ‘S’: Koryak. (Two folktales, both told by Pa’qa, a girl of Kamenskoye Village on the Penzhinskaya Bay, collected 1901)

The photo above is so you can see what the page layout looks like in my copy-text. The lower half of each page is a (quite enjoyable) word-for-word rendition of the tale translated more smoothly in the upper half. The book was intended, after all, for specialists interested in the Koryak language, an sich. My sense from the introduction is that the linguists and ethnographers involved in the research expedition cared nothing for the actual content of the stories they collected. They just wanted to set native speakers talking, so that the Koryaks’ homemade, inconsistent, Martian grammar and diction could be recorded and analyzed. The introduction, meanwhile, does not explain why all but one of the expedition's informants were female.

March 8, 2016