Covers alike
I like simile. In Stephen Burt’s new piece he considers
the fact that to say something is like something is to say it is mostly not
like it (otherwise the comparsion would be ineffective, or near-identical). It’s
something I’ve noted, possibly lies behind the lines he quotes (from A
Translated Man, with all its managed unlikely unlikenesses, as it were). Here’s
a fragment.
You can find negated similes elsewhere, too. Consider
Prince’s love song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which most of us know only in its
second version, a cover by Sinead O’Connor, both like and unlike the original
song.
The English poet Robert Sheppard writes “we like the
likeness of things but/ even if we saw them we would never know them”: we know
only appearances, likeness itself, full-color projections on walls of a
Platonic cave, or a “passage” (his word), that we can never leave.
Sheppard wrote these lines not in propria persona
but in the voice of a fictional Belgian poet called René van Valckenborch, who
wrote in both Flemish and French (really, in Sheppard’s English): his poems
exist only in translations, versions that are only so much like the nonexistent
originals they replicate.
The “like” in poetry may resemble the “like” in
translation, where work in the target language is like (but never the same as)
the source, or the like in sacrificial ritual—in Greek and Roman sacrifice, for
example—whereby the gods demand the smoke of entrails, something like but
nonidentical with real human beings’ real food.
Here’s the rest of the online excerpt. It's from American Poetry Review.
