Jack Spicer’sAfter Lorca: translation as decomposition

What is it about?

An analysis of Spicer's "After Lorca" in the context of modernist translation from Pound forward, but also with a special emphasis on pragmatics, insults, invective, and the language of injury in relation to translation theory. How do both poetry and translation relate to words whose basis lies less in semantic denotation than in illocutionary effects? For Spicer, these issues come to the fore with regard to Lorca's list of regional derogatory terms for homosexual men in his "Ode to Walt Whitman." Spicer's approach to this problem is crucial to his own form of queer poetics.

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Why is it important?

A reading of Spicer's "After Lorca" that stresses the importance address, regional idiom, and pragmatics rather than the questions of semantics which tend to dominate study's of this book.