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After

Douglas Messerli

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Beginning in the late 1970s poet, dramatist, and fiction writer Douglas Messerli began casually "translating" poems that he had difficulty comprehending in other translations. Describing these sometimes loosely translated works as poems "after" the originals, he began experimenting in his own poetry with some of the poetic techniques and themes he had worked with in the poems of other languages.

In 1993 he began pairing the poems he had written with the poems "after" other writers. In the process, the writing of After called into question the whole endeavor of translations and the interrelationships of differing cultures. What would Milton sound like as a so-called "Language" poet; what would the result be if an American poem, translated into another language by others, were to be retranslated back into English? Taking some of Jack Spicer's poems from After Lorca, Messerli experimented with poems after Spicer, after Lorca. In "The Acquaintance," he writes a poem based on the first few words of each line of Robert Frist's "Acquainted with the Night." These experiments, in turn, reappear almost as leitmotivs in Messerli's own works.

Purchase using our online PayPal shopping cart, or by phone 323.857.1115, fax 323.857.0143, email douglasmesserli@gmail.com, or send a check or money order to Green Integer, 6022 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 202C, Los Angeles, CA 90036. We charge the list price plus $2.00 for handling & postage.