The doctor, the Sheriff, the murdered Pregnant woman, the self-critical step-mother – they all had to tell, yet had so much, but had to cede from the stage of life. Inspired by ancient tomb inscriptions, began Edgar Lee Masters in 1914 in St. Louis, so that, fictional, but to publish people of his homeland in the Mid-West inspired epitaphs in a magazine. A little later they were collected as a book for “Spoon River Anthology”, the American history of literature wrote. Master Association therein Sherwood Anderson’s at almost the same time resulting history of the American small town (“Winesburg, Ohio dance”) with a many-voiced Modern and the free verse of Walt Whitman’s and Carl Sandburgs.
Jan Wiele
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
Claudio Maira, in the main professional Swiss President of the court, has now been translated on the basis of the extended Macmillan edition for the first time, all the epitaphs to English, knowledgeable, with references to American (literary)history, annotated, and, thankfully, with a registry mistake, you can quickly find the very last words of Pastor Wiley, of the deceived Mrs. Purkapile, of the Fiedler Jones, the widow McFarlane.
Mairas Translation is decidedly not poetic, it serves the understanding as well as the Transport of Masters’ scarcity, for example, if the pharmacist analyzes why a family experiment went wrong: “Every man for himself good, but bad; he oxygen, she hydrogen, their son, a devastating fire.”
The beauty of free Verse can give so, of course, again: “She drained me like a fevered moon That saps the spinning world. / The days went by like shadows, The minutes wheeled like stars“, barmt, no, sings the well-being of the poor, Fletcher McGee, the woman who has ruined his life. The encompassing Preface with your repeated “All, all are sleeping on the hill” suggests that in death all are equal: “the tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one”. But the resentment of some of the Deceased is lying to this hope.
