A Mirror on Which to Dwell

A Mirror on Which to Dwell is a 1944 small-press collection by Canadian poet and translator John Glassco that presented itself as a compilation of translated poems by a fictional Spanish poet, Maria de Guadalupe "Mariposa" de las Flores, purportedly collected and translated by Glassco. The volume combined pastiche, parody, and literary hoax to engage with traditions of Spanish literature, French literature, and Anglo-Canadian modernist poetry, prompting debates among contemporaries including E. J. Pratt, F. R. Scott, A. J. M. Smith, Leonard Cohen, and later critics such as Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom.

Background and Composition

Glassco composed the book amid the milieu of 1940s Canadian small-press activity centered around figures such as F. R. Scott, A. J. M. Smith, Patrick Anderson, Irving Layton, and institutions like McGill University and the little magazines Preview and First Statement. Influences acknowledged or implicit in the text include the canon of Federico García Lorca, Luis de Góngora, Pablo Neruda, and the Spanish Golden Age dramatists Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega, as well as translations and adaptations by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Jorge Luis Borges. Glassco drew on his experience translating Adrien Plauchu and his familiarity with Parisian salons frequented by émigrés associated with Montparnasse, evoking stylistic registers from Baroque decorum to modern surrealist diction. The collection’s mise-en-page and paratextual gestures—faux biographical notes, fabricated bibliographies, and invented manuscript histories—mirror rogue anthologies and hoax traditions exemplified by episodes surrounding figures like James Macpherson and his Ossian poems, and the controversy over Thomas Chatterton.

Publication and Editions

Originally issued by Contact Press, a hub for avant-garde Canadian writing allied with numberless émigré and domestic contributors such as Earle Birney and F. R. Scott, the first edition of the book was printed in a limited run in 1944. Subsequent reprints and collected editions appeared in anthologies and scholarly studies of Glassco’s work, often bundled with his translations and memoirs alongside contemporaneous volumes from small houses like Ryerson Press and McClelland & Stewart. Overseas interest prompted editions in the United States and the United Kingdom, where presses associated with expatriate networks—publishing houses linked to figures like T. S. Eliot’s Faber and Faber milieu—occasionally examined the text in comparative studies with Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. Later critical editions incorporated explanatory notes cross-referencing manuscripts in archival collections such as the Library and Archives Canada and private papers housed at McGill University Library. Special commemorative printings appeared in retrospectives alongside Glassco’s translations of Pierre de Ronsard and his memoirs about Parisian literary circles.

Themes and Content Analysis

The collection interrogates authorship, authenticity, and the politics of translation by staging a bogus corpus attributed to a female Spanish voice; it thus engages debates surrounding writers like Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and gendered literary personae in the 20th century. Poetic strategies in the book evoke the imagery of García Lorca’s rural Andalusia, the metaphysical density of Góngora, and the surreal registers associated with André Breton and Paul Éluard, while its ironic stance recalls parodic works by W. H. Auden and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thematically, poems foreground exile, erotic melancholy, Catholic iconography tied to Seville and Toledo, and modern urban dislocations suggestive of Paris and Montreal. Formal experiments range from sonnet sequences indebted to John Donne and William Shakespeare to free-verse lyrics that echo Walt Whitman’s expansiveness and Ezra Pound’s imagistic compression. The book’s hoax mechanism functions as literary critique, interrogating canonical gatekeepers such as The New York Times Book Review-era critics, salons patronized by figures like Gertrude Stein, and institutional legitimators including national academies and prize juries (for example, those associated historically with Governor General's Awards).

Reception and Criticism

Contemporary reception was mixed: some reviewers celebrated Glassco’s erudition and playful virtuosity—responding in publications allied to Preview and First Statement—while others condemned the deception, invoking earlier controversies surrounding literary forgeries like Macpherson’s Ossian and legal disputes epitomized by cases involving misattributed texts. Critics such as Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom later considered the work within broader canons of parody and intertextuality, situating Glassco alongside translators and imitators like Constance Garnett and Gregory Rabassa for questions of fidelity and voice. Feminist and postcolonial scholars—drawing on frameworks influenced by Simone de Beauvoir and Edward Said—have re-evaluated the ethics of ventriloquizing a colonized or silenced persona. Book historians and bibliographers cited micropress practices of Contact Press and contemporaneous printers, connecting the work to the small-press revival documented alongside figures like Earle Birney.

Influence and Legacy

The collection’s hoax-model influenced later experiments in pseudonymous authorship and found-text aesthetics by poets and novelists such as Robert Graves, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Auster, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino. Within Canadian letters, Glassco’s approach reverberated in the practices of translators and pasticheurs including George Bowering, Mordecai Richler, and Leonard Cohen’s early lyric borrowings; institutions like McGill University and archives such as Library and Archives Canada preserve correspondence illuminating its afterlives. Scholarly inquiry into the text continues in dissertations and journal articles housed at universities like University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, and Queen’s University, where debates over authenticity, gender, and translation theory persist alongside comparative studies linking Glassco’s hoax to modernist and postmodernist experiments by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Ashbery.

Category:Canadian poetry collections Category:Literary hoaxes Category:1944 books