Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: "My son is a Magyar": Ideas of Firstness and Origin in Charles Olson 's Poems

the Navigator identified various monsters and mermaids on what he called Judas-land, probably around the British Isles. Accounts, John Lloyd's among them, of the legendary island of Brasylle off the coast of Ireland were common in the 15th and 16th centuries. The popular ballad of the Titanic Olson refers to

—"Ladies & / to the bottom of the, / husbands, & wives"

—seems also to belong to mythic knowing. Knowing by word. Attention to words is a legitimate source of knowledge not only for poets, but for sailors and fishermen too. For example, one of the first names given to the American Atlantic coast was the Basque word for cod, bacalhaos; Tierra de bacalaos, the land of codfish, was the Spanish term for Newfoundland used on early maps (such as Verrazano's); Norte, in Mexican Spanish, has the particular meaning of strong north wind; "Pytheus' sludge" refers to that mixture of sea, land, and air surrounding the British Isles, described by Pytheas, which cannot be crossed by sailors. Even misspellings are helpful: although the term Terra nova sive Limo Lue means, in the orthography of the times, "Newfoundland or the Land of Cod-fish," it seems derivable from Latin limus, mud, as well, which, given the mud banks around the area, is also an apt expression. Similar to this replacement of "Mud Bank" for "Cod-Fish" in Limo Lue is the substitution of the name Bertomez for Bretones

: Olson is ready with the conclusion that the Atlantic coast was visited by some Spanish or Portugese explorer of that name, as opposed to what mappemundes indicate: that sailors from Brittany regularly reached its shores. 2. Origin and process; direct experience and experience narrated The poem makes a complex claim about origins, problematizing instances of firstness by asserting and questioning its possibility within one gesture. In this sense it seems to fit into that "project of American poetry" which Joseph Riddel describes as "a myth of origins that puts the myth of origins in question" (358). When firstness is a possibility. Olson is known for his scholarly interest in cultural morphology, which might help explain the origins of certain cultures within certain spaces. Hence his familiarity with the work of Leo Frobenius and Carl Sauer, who taught him that "only certain places had been conducive to the beginnings of culture" and 13