Crow and Vučja so: Locations of Indeterminacy in Ted Hughes and Vasko Popa

Correction:
The author's name was misspelled in the print version. The online article and pdf have been corrected.

Poetic indeterminacy, as understood by theorists such as Marjorie Perloff and Timothy Bahti, has been of great significance in the study of post–World War II English-language poetry. The ramifications of such theories for cross-cultural readings of literature remain, however, largely unexplored. In this article I will consider the role indeterminacy plays in two poetic works: British poet Ted Hughes's Crow poems (initially published as Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow in 1970 and included in an expanded version in his posthumous 2003 Collected Poems) and Serbian poet Vasko Popa's Vučja so [Wolf Salt] (1975). As I will show, the ways these texts have been read in the West demonstrate the pitfalls of applying narrowly deterministic frames of reference to works that straddle and blur cultural boundaries. The cross-cultural generation and reception of texts can cause meaning to slide and shift—such shifts are not, however, the result of flaws in translation or transmission that need to be overcome but point, rather, to the complex nature of the comparative process. Theories of indeterminacy enable this process to be understood in a new way, opening texts such as Crow and Vučja so up to a multiplicity of interpretive frameworks.

Both Crow and Vučja so consist of cycles of short, imagistic poems drawing heavily on myth and folklore combined with highly idiosyncratic modes of surrealism. Both texts have strong narrative themes, presenting the adventures and misadventures of zoomorphic protagonists—in Hughes's texts a crow figure drawn from a variety of mythological sources, in Popa's an extended family of wolf/ancestors/nature deities with a specifically Serbian cultural background. Despite these similarities, however, the critical reception of the two texts has often been markedly different, and these different receptions reveal the degree to which such interpretation is shaped by the perceived cultural positioning of the texts in question. In my examination of these texts I locate indeterminacy at two different sites, utilizing the distinction Charles Altieri makes between "thematic indeterminacy"—indeterminacies located in the text—and "psychological indeterminacy"—what Wolfgang Iser terms the "frames of reference" used in textual interpretation.¹ In the first part of this article I examine the limitations of the specific transnational frame of reference of "universal" or "world" poetry in which both Vučja so and Crow have frequently been positioned in the English-speaking world. In the second part I examine the nature of the texts themselves, using the distinction Perloff makes in The Poetics of Indeterminacy between the deterministic poetics of the symbolist mode of Charles Baudelaire, Robert Lowell, and T. S. Eliot and the anti-symbolist, indeterminate poetics of Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery, Gertrude Stein and others.²

Perloff herself does not address issues of enframement but focuses instead on thematics. Her study of the poetry of John Ashbery does, however, demonstrate how certain texts can be considered intrinsically more indeterminate than others. While Vučja so, consisting of seven subcycles of five to seven poems each, is more tightly organized than Crow, which is made up of many disjointed poems, both texts can be considered fundamentally resistant to closed interpretation. Despite this resistance, however, they have both frequently been placed within deterministic frames of reference, frames of reference that attempt to establish the "true" meaning of the texts. Many English language critics, for example, have located these texts in the idealized space of transnational "world" literature, where borders between culture and language are broken down. In the case of Vučja so, other critics have offered highly culturally specific readings, positioning the book firmly within a Serbian context. Ultimately, however, such attempts at definitive contextualization not only fail to encompass all nuances of these works but also fail to recognize the provisional nature of contextualization itself. Both Crow and Vučja so can be read in a multiplicity of ways, their mythic and cultural specificity rooting them in specific national contexts and...