承前*1
先日他界したジョン・アシュベリーを巡って。
Mark Ford “John Ashbery obituary” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/john-ashbery-obituary
Mark Ford氏はかつてジョン・アシュベリーで博士論文を書いたのだという。
少し抜書き；
One of his most radical innovations was the fluidity with which he allowed pronouns to operate, a rhetorical habit best illustrated by his friend Kenneth Koch*2 ’s parody of a typical Ashbery line: “It wants to go to bed with us.” When asked to comment on this aspect of his work, Ashbery compared his pronouns to “variables in an equation”: “‘You’ can be myself or it can be another person, someone whom I’m addressing, and so can ‘he’ and ‘she’ and for that matter ‘we’.”The indeterminacy that resulted allowed Ashbery’s poetry to capture the interactions of the many dictions that surround us with a new fullness and complexity; a poem such as Daffy Duck in Hollywood*3 mixes up references to Disney cartoons, Paradise Lost, newspaper comic strips, the symbolist drama of Maeterlinck, new brutalism and Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula, in a dizzying, exhilarating melange.
Tania Ketenjian*4 “Brilliant, irreverent, indefinable: my poetry class with John Ashbery” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/remembering-john-ashbery-poet-professor-bard-college
2015年に紐育チェルシーのアパートメントにジョン・アシュベリーを訪ねたこと；
アシュベリーはバード・カレッジで教えていた。Tania Ketenjianさんもバード・カレッジ出身で、テクストの前半では、アシュベリー教授の詩のワークショップを受講したことが書かれている。偶然ではあるけれど、スティーリー・ダンのウォルター・ベッカーとドナルド・フェイゲン*5もバード・カレッジ出身者。
Two years ago, I went to John’s apartment in Chelsea, New York, where he has lived for decades. I was going to interview him for the Brooklyn Academy of Music about translations he had done of poetry by Rimbaud. David Kermani, his husband, warmly greeted me at the door as if we had been friends, although he had never met me before.And there was John, reclined in a chair, surrounded by stacks of books, the light flooding in on this gorgeous NY winter day. Now a radio journalist, I was keenly aware of the banging of construction somewhere nearby in the building and Ashbery commented on how the building and the neighborhood was changing. He wasn’t upset about the change but was steadfast in the fact that he was there to stay.
And magically, when the recording started, the banging stopped. I took it as a sign.
We spoke of how he discovered poetry and what had drawn him to translate Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
He said, “You have to see the poetry as well as hear it; even the shapes of the letters have something to do with it.” And after reading aloud some of his own translations, he modestly commented: “I wish I could be as sure of my own poetry as I am of these translations.”
*1:http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20170904/1504545310
*2:See eg. “Kenneth Koch” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kenneth-koch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Koch
*3:https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/daffy-duck-hollywood
*4:http://www.radiotania.org/index.html
*5:See eg. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20170904/1504492287
