The Fate of Translation

With two essays devoted to Wordsworth, "The Fate of Translation" reframes the discussion of Hesperian aesthetics initiated in Robert Eisenhauer's "Mythic Paradigms, " suggesting how the question of translation poses itself at the crossing of textual high- and low-roads: on the one hand, in the critical and scholarly debate concerning the relevance of Goethe's -Der Wandrer- (in the English version by William Taylor) to the primal/primary scene of autobiography and, on the other, in the reprojection of supernatural agency ("numen") in the context of the Literature of Power. Confrontational deixis and a hermeneutic counterturn energize Wordsworth's self-assertive resensing of antiquity and modernity via satire, pastoral, and the sonnet. The third essay, ranging from Pindarizing texts by Cowley, Goethe, and Holderlin to the films of Matthew Barney, shifts the focus to mimetic enthusiasms among translators and replicators of the -full fan-experience.- John Barth's intriguing analogy between metafiction and fractal geometry serves as the catalyst for a reading of texts by Thomas Browne and Friedrich Schlegel, a major painting by Philipp Otto Runge, and "The Arabian Nights" as malignly received by Poe. The arabesque and grotesque are seen as engaged in a problematics of passion at the utopian end of art, a consensualist paradigm akin to the Dionysian liberation of the subject/player/fan in baseball - one whose field of implication includes Nietzsche and contemporary novelists. Eisenhauer reads Padgett Powell's "Edisto" as a declamatory mini-epic divergent in its "muthos" from the tradition of the -American hieroglyphic-. Edisto's fictive reinvention of the South suggests a revisiting of the Literature of Power as priviledged, emancipative counterfacticity of -other truth- congruent with the fictive worlds of Cable, Faulkner, and Gunther Grass."