Some notes on Seghers, Dylan, and Pound

Some notes on recent reading: First, on finishing reading Anna Seghers's novel Transit, I read the intro (Campbell) and afterword (Boll) to the NYRB edition, and was surprised to learn that, though the copyright info says the novel was published (in German, Seghers's language) in 1951 the novel was actually published in English (and Spanish) translation in 1944, while Seghers was living in Mexico. She had been imprisoned by the Nazis in the 1930s for her leftist views and fled from Marseille just ahead of the German Occupation, so the experiences she recounts in the novel are first-hand, although she is clearly neither the narrator (a young man) nor the love interest, Marie (who - spoiler! - dies when her ship goes down en route to Mexico). Campbell duly notes the Kafkaesque nature of the scene in Marseille as everyone fights the beauracracy; neither writer, however, explains Seghers's strange reluctance to write much about the Nazis in particular, making the novel much more abstract and dreamlike, a novel about the human condition rather than about a particular, heinous period in world history.

Also been reading from time to time parts of Christopher Ricks's study of Dylan's lyrics and other writers, Dylan's Sense of Sin. Ricks's knowledge about and recall of lyrics from across Dylan's entire career is quite amazing, and he makes some surprising and trenchant comparisons of Dylan's work w/ other great lyric poets from across the corpus. And yet ... I come away each time feeling that this study is more about Ricks than and Dylan, or, rather, that he convinces me that he, Ricks, sees the connections but he doesn't add to my sense of Dylan's genius. In a way, he misses the whole point: Dylan's work is about the development of a sensibility across and entire lifetime of writing, recording, and performing; analyzing individual works, detailed study Dylan's rhymes and slant rhymes for ex., makes Dylan seem less, not more or a genius.

Speaking of: What about Ezra Pound? I've been reading some of his pieces in an anthology, including Canto 81, and do these make any sense to any reader who doesn't have access to a compendium or extensive footnotes explaining the allusions - most of them personal and idiosyncratic - and translating from the Greek (I doubt Pound actually knew Greek, let alone Chinese). Kind of the opposite here from what I just wrote about Dylan: Pound was writing for himself and for future critics who could parse and mine and "genius"; Dylan was, is, writing for an audience, for us.