Robert Lowell's Imitations and the Cold War - by Simon Van Schalkwyk (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first book-length study focusing on Robert Lowell's career-long preoccupation with the liberal mode of translational adaptation known as imitation.

Robert Lowell's Imitations and the Cold War argues that Lowell's imitations are simultaneously symptomatic of and critically responsive to familiar nodes of Cold War ideology such as containment and contamination, secrecy and security, post-imperial U.S. expansion and Empire. It departs from studies focused solely on Imitations (1961), Lowell's book-length collection of translational adaptations, by demonstrating how imitation shadows Lowell's work from his earliest collections, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), through his celebrated mid-career collections, Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964), and to later works such as Near the Ocean (1969) and his contributions of adaptations from the Russian of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam collected in Olga Carlisle's anthology, Poets on Street Corners (1967).

Simon van Schalkwyk excavates the imitational substrate undergirding and informing Lowell's compositional method and poetic imagination throughout the course of his career. In so doing, he shows how imitation enacts, at the level of form, Lowell's restless investment in Cold War geopolitics and literary networks in ways that inform, develop, and complicate his more conventional canonization as an unquestionably 'American' poet preoccupied solely and simplistically with personal or autobiographical modes of poetic 'confession'.

As literary sites at which containment's dualities, porosities, leakages, and contaminants are most clearly displayed, Lowell's imitations simultaneously challenge and develop our understanding of confession's presumably strict preoccupation with the personal, regional and national frameworks through which Lowell has commonly been understood.

Review Quotes

"Simon van Schalkwyk shows convincingly that Lowell, in his entire oeuvre from the 1940s to the 1960s, was propelled by his translations and imitations considerably beyond the measure we have accepted to date. Lowell is not just a supremely intertextual poet, but one who is peculiarly responsive to the voices and verses of those he has read. Van Schalkwyk's deeply-researched and innovative approach will re-direct how we think of Lowell and how we situate post-WWII American poetry within the political posture of the United States across three decades." --Thomas Austenfeld, Professor of American Literature, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

"This highly original and even revolutionary reconception of Lowell's art of imitation overturns several generations of conventional wisdom. It is the first advance in providing insight into the poet's 'imitational adaptions' since Donald Carne Ross's critique of 1968. Sweeping away the literalist obsession with apparent mistranslations (irrelevant in a genre that calls itself 'imitation'), van Schalkwyk recasts 'the area of greatest divergence' as precisely the domain of 'compelling uniqueness.' He also refigures imitational adaption as Lowell's go-to device and analyzes it with great sophistication, while convincingly embedding his reframing within a new theorization of containment culture. Van Schalkwyk uncovers Lowell's 'covert redeployment of the foreign at the heart of the American home.' This is the Lowell book we have long needed without quite realizing it. It changes everything." --Steven Gould Axelrod, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside, USA

"This is a revelatory study of the central and multilayered role translation plays in Lowell's work in the context of Cold War politics and poetics. Apart from offering fresh insight into one of the most important American poets of the second half of the 20th century, the book is also an important contribution to the more general questions of the complex relationship between translation and original creation, and between translation and the world we live in." --Mariana Machová, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic

About the Author

Simon van Schalkwyk is Senior Lecturer of English Studies at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and formerly Visiting Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER). He is co-editor for Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies and academic editor for the Johannesburg Review of Books, and he has published a collection of poetry, Transcontinental Delay (2021).