Monday, April 03, 2006

damning with faint praise and no space

After two years of research, reading prefaces to anthologies of Latin American poetry and descriptions of women poets in literary histories, I'm a veteran of hateful sexism. You'd think I'd be inured to it.   But this sentence dripped with such venom I thought I'd share it and perhsps that would defuse some of its power:

"She acheived a sort of stark and uncompromising beauty that came very close to justifying the 1945 Nobel Prize she received at a time when Reyes, Neruda, and Borges were all still very active."

Thanks, Rodríguez Monegal... *sarcasm*. Why not just say right out, "Mistral did not deserve the Nobel Prize" and then explain why you think so?

There's another phenomenon I keep seeing. A critic will praise a woman poet's work to the skies, but then won't discuss it; instead, will briefly describe the woman's life, family, and reputation, while giving all the critical attention (and lots of space) to male poets who are not better writers. For example, Anderson-Imbert called María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira "the nucleus of Uruguayan poetry" and of modernismo; he praises her high level of complex thought and her technical perfection; but then he wraps her up in two paragraphs, following up with five pages in detail about Julio Herrera y Reissig, whom he calls "not a great poet..." If he's not a great poet and Vaz Ferreira is, why did she get two paragraphs and he got five pages?

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