Beware of the Critic

Sign outside the art studio.

Three Coins from Guy Davenport

I love Guy Davenport's fine collection of critical essays: The Geography of the Imagination.  He had such a breadth and depth of knowledge, literary and humane, that he was able to bring to bear at a moment's notice, or so it feels, time and again.  Many of the essays began as lectures, composed while Davenport walked from his house to the university.  I wish I'd been in more than a few of those classes.

Here, I just want to share three quotations plucked almost at random from that fine book.

"Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed."

--from "Another Odyssey"


"Plutarch in the first structuralist study of myth, Isis and Osiris, demonstrates that there is no one way of telling the tales of the tribe. A myth is a pattern, not a script."

-- from "That Faire Field of Enna"



"Sir Walter Scott, out hunting and with some good lines suddenly in his head, brought down a crow, whittled a pen from a feather, and wrote the poem on his jacket in crow's blood."

--from "Finding"