NO MONUMENT

Vladimir Ja. Propp, (1928), Morphology of the Folktale, First Edition Translated by Laurence Scott with an Introduction by Svatava Pírková-Jakobson, Second Edition Revised and Edited with a Preface by Louis A. Wagner, New Introduction by Alan Dundes, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 2009, p. 47

Vladimir Ja. Propp, (1928), Morphology of the Folktale, First Edition Translated by Laurence Scott with an Introduction by Svatava Pírková-Jakobson, Second Edition Revised and Edited with a Preface by Louis A. Wagner, New Introduction by Alan Dundes, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 2009, pp. 93-94

"So, he is some sort of phantom."

Émile Delavenay, An Introduction to Machine Translation, Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, New York, NY, 1960 [Between the Covers, Gloucester City, NJ]

“She questioned me endlessly about American life, American politics, American youth – although I was jokingly cautioned against using the word American to mean the U.S. or North America. “Everyone in this car is American,” she said. “You from the North, we from the South.” I explained as best I could about the Eisenhowers, the Nixons, the DuPonts, but she made even my condemnations seem mild. “Everyone in the world,” she said, with her finger, “has to be communist or anti-communist. And if they’re anti-communist, no matter what kind of foul person they are, you people accept them as your allies. Do you really think that hopeless little island in the middle of the sea is China? That is irrational. You people are irrational!”

I tried to defend myself, “Look, why jump on me? I understand what you’re saying. I’m in complete agreement with you. I’m a poet … what can I do? I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics.”

She jumped on me with both feet as did a group of Mexican poets later in Habana. She called me a “cowardly bourgeois individualist.” The poets, or at least one young wild-eyed Mexican poet, Jaime Shelley, almost left me in tears, stomping his foot on the floor, screaming: “You want to cultivate your soul? In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.”