Thus Khlebnikov, the most acclaimed of Cubo-Futurists among linguists and poets, is largely unknown beyond their circles. In addition, the Cubo-Futurist displacements of language, their attempts to find meaning in the word and the letter as objects and in sound divorced from its conventional linguistic context, did not find widespread favor among readers. By 1928 in the Soviet Union politics had intervened in the shaping of art's future, while translation of the Cubo-Futurists' language play was and remains a formidable task. While Cubism entered the mainstream of art appreciation with relative ease, becoming a phenomenon of commercial reproduction, the Cubo-Futurism of the language arts did not. He thought of language as a game played with dolls: ''Thus,'' he wrote of the ''trans-rational'' language favored by the Cubo-Futurists, ''a word is a doll of sound, and a dictionary a bunch of toys.'' In Khlebnikov's poetry and prose the analogy with the visual arts was especially strong. THE Russian Cubo-Futurist writers of the 1910's and 1920's, in particular Velimir Khlebnikov, sought to break down and rearrange language as the early French Cubists did pictorial elements, lending dynamism to what had become commonplace, staid. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. THE KING OF TIME Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |