Graphically Prufrock
February 8, 2017 7:30 AM   Subscribe

 
'and in short, I was afraid.'
posted by mrdaneri at 7:43 AM on February 8, 2017


OP: Please tag the artist. I've started browsing through herhis(?) other illustrated poems and other works and they're all fantastic.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:05 AM on February 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


Tagged. I was rather surprised after browsing his site that it had not appeared before on the Blue.
posted by Death and Gravity at 8:11 AM on February 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


That was great.
posted by oddman at 8:15 AM on February 8, 2017


Absolutely lovely. Prufrock is one of my favorite poems, but I don't have a very visual imagination, so I really enjoyed all the little details that this artist folded into his interpretation.
posted by merriment at 8:15 AM on February 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


This is good but I'm not sure how much I like it that J. Alfred looks so much like T.S. Eliot (crossed with Denholm Elliott). What about 'not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,' dammit? (Although I admit that TSE was more about his own weird personality than he liked to make out.)
posted by Mocata at 8:41 AM on February 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is so very, very good.
posted by corb at 8:42 AM on February 8, 2017


The illustration is talented, and I don't know if it is possible to do better, but I found it to be disappointingly literal in its interpretation. This is problematic for poetry in general, described by Frost as "what gets lost in translation", but specifically for Prufrock, the poem wallows in the narrator's awareness that he is talking in metaphors. To limit the illustration to just that described by the poem, and not everything that isn't described but weighs it down, gives just a... two-dimensional image of what Eliot was going for.
posted by cardboard at 9:04 AM on February 8, 2017 [7 favorites]


Very Nice! A favorite poem I have not read in a long time, and the illustrations fit well.
posted by mermayd at 9:25 AM on February 8, 2017


cardboard, I simultaneously agree and demur.

Seeing the whole thing laid out so plainly did help me get a better feel for the overall flow of the poem than I've had before--I think this is a poem I've encountered so often in little chunks it's been like trying to appreciate a living animal by starting from a dissected one--but every time some new twist of wording was literalized I felt like the whole thing was rendered flatter than it needed to be.
posted by Four Ds at 9:29 AM on February 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Really expected to dislike it but it's lovely. It's fun to see such a literal interpretation of the poem.
posted by not_the_water at 9:34 AM on February 8, 2017


I was going to do a photo-journal documentation of a poem about plums, but someone ate them already. They seem to have liked them, though, according to the note they left.
posted by hippybear at 9:36 AM on February 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


It had been far too long since I had read the poem - and it so thoroughly matches my current mood that I couldn't help but love this rendering. I think that I acquired the illustrator's taste as he depicted the fog and understood then then nature of his illustration of the metaphor in literal terms. I like it. It does not (could not!) show every depth, but it shines lights into new places as well.
posted by meinvt at 9:56 AM on February 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Came in to agree with cardboard. The yellow fog doesn't need a literal tongue to lick into the corners of the evening. The evening isn't smoothed by human fingers. Just the fog, or the evening, would have been enough.

That said, it shines in moments like the narrator looking at a doorknob, or looking at unnamed others. That is, where it's highlighting implied expressions instead of making metaphors literal.

Or maybe the whole point is to invite over-analysis? It would be appropriate for the subject matter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by supercres at 11:00 AM on February 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


One of the themes of the poem is that the speaker can't put his feelings into words, but the words are spoken anyway. I think the illustrations are consistent with that theme and at times an improvement.

The illustrations accompanying:

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.


were perfect.

The tacit disapproval of the woman in the third panel leaning back ever so slightly, the speaker slowly realizing what he's done, and then smash cut to the crab. It highlights the humor in what's otherwise a pretty dark line.
posted by Hume at 11:32 AM on February 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


Fantastic, made me enjoy this poem even more so.
posted by e1c at 11:38 AM on February 8, 2017


...disappointingly literal in its interpretation.

I think this is a fantastic way to start a poem analysis. Showed it to my freshman college granddaughter, and she was blown away by how much grounding it gave her to build a deeper metaphorical understanding. She did poetry last semester, and she's going to show her prof the comic. They did Prufrock, but even though there was discussion in her class, this resonated with her. Kids today are so visual, go figure.


The tacit disapproval of the woman in the third panel leaning back ever so slightly...


Hume, exactly!

I enjoyed this much more than I expected I would, and I'm sixty(mumble mumble)
posted by BlueHorse at 1:43 PM on February 8, 2017


eponysterical!

am I doing this right?
posted by prufrock at 2:47 PM on February 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think the artist missed an opportunity right up front, to make the evening clouds, look like a patient, etherised upon a table.
posted by Oyéah at 3:58 PM on February 8, 2017


Is...is this poem about being friendzoned?
posted by divabat at 4:04 PM on February 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


I was prepared to hate this, yet really enjoyed it. Thanks for posting.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:42 PM on February 8, 2017


I'm astonished that nobody has commented on the natural companion piece to this work: Martin Rowson's amazing adaptation of The Wasteland into a hardboiled private-eye graphic novel. It was published by Harper Collins and Penguin in 1990 and widely ignored, despite being blisteringly clever and funny, and a remarkably insightful reading of the poem too. It appears to be back in print and also available as some kind of iOS app as well. I recommend it with every shred of my being.
posted by Hogshead at 3:02 PM on February 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


« Older Actually just a monkey with a Slap Chop   |   Introducing Open Access at The Met Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments