Do you know khlebnikov?
This is from Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch
Incantation by Laughter by Vladimir Khlebnikov
Trans. Paul Schmidt
Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Who lawghen with lafe, who hlaehen lewchly,
Hlahla! Hloufish lauflings lafe uf beloght lauchalorum!
Hlahla! Loufenish lauflings lafe, hlohan utlaufly!
lawfen, lawfen
Hloh, Hlouh, hlou! luifekin, luefikin,
Hlofeningum, hlofeningum.
Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!
This is some stuff Hirsch says about Khlebnikov:
Khlebnikov loved puns and palindromes, the roots of words, neologisms of all sorts. He loved obsessive wordplay and the magical language of shamans. He found eerie wisdom in separate linguistic sounds, such as sh, m, and v. There was something both very old and startingly new in his poetic practice. He believed that universal truths are secreted in the sheer materiality of language, and he sought to access them through spells and incantaions, magic words, folk etymologies, archaic sounds. He especially loved the Futurist term Zaum, a coined word thta means something like "transrational " or "beyondsense". HE employed it to suggest the ways that poetic thinking transcends so-called common sense and the restrictive strictures of rational intellect. "if we think of the soul as split between the government of intellect and a stormy population of feelings," Khlebnikov wrote in his essay "On Poetry" , "then incantaions and beyondsense language are appeals over the head of the government straight to the population of feelings, a direct cry to the predawn of the soul..."
This book is so good. He has so many anecdotes about the lives of the poets and what they were like and all the poems he chooses are incredible.
Khlebnikov--cool name
"be me. be Khlebnikov. "
