Speaking with Marie Buck, Jennifer Scappettone, Guillermo Parra, Daniel Borzutzky
and Johannes Göransson
There’s a sense that I get that American poets seem to only like to read other American poets? Am I wrong about this, right? Why is it important to read poetry in translation, or is it?
Guillermo Parra: When I think back on my own education as a poet, from approximately 1988 onwards, translation was there from the very beginning, with Stephen Mitchell’s translations of Rilke, Louise Varese’s Rimbaud (a particularly important event in my life, her translations still resonate with me today on a very personal level) and Eliot Weinberger’s Paz (though I was reading Paz in both English and Spanish, it was Weinberger’s amazing translations that probably made me think translation was something normal and everyday, since jumping back & forth between the two on facing pages I thought of them, at the time, as a young undergraduate, as equivalents, equals).
It’s extremely important to read poetry in translation, especially for North American poets because it helps us open our eyes to the world. I do notice that quite a few North American poets are woefully unaware of large swaths of poetry throughout the world. Of course, that’s a privilege that North American poets alone have, the luxury of not having to think about the rest of the world. Because I’m Venezuelan-American, and I grew up both in the U.S. and Venezuela, I’m particularly interested in Latin American poetry, and we all know Latin American poetry remains quite invisible or non-existent for most North American poets. Aside from several big names, such as Neruda or Paz. But this invisibility, while it does frustrate me, tends to just motivate me more, it pushes me to work harder at my translations of Venezuelan (and a handful of Peruvian) poets at my blog and in magazines & books.
Marie Buck: I do feel like the conversation is more U.S.-centric than it ought to be. It makes sense to read literature in translation—why limit yourself? It also seems like we can ask very different questions if we’re reading across cultural contexts. How do writers across the world respond to a specific series of events like the financial crisis or Occupy? What are the different ways that enunciation and subjectivity can work in poetry? How does self-reference work in poems? For instance, Ben Fama’s “June Emotional Poem” (http://thefanzine.com/june-emotional-poem-cum-patiri/), which I read the other day, ends with “this sounds like / a poor man’s ‘Ben Fama’ poem / but I am a poor man”. The ending self-reference reminded me of the ghazal form, and of Ghalib’s poems, and of Agha Shahid Ali’s use of the form (though I don’t know much of Ali’s work, actually). I’m a total sucker for this gesture—I love the ending self-reference. So now I am wondering where else similar gestures occur, how they work differently or similarly in poems across time and language and culture. I have to admit that I am pretty American-centric in my reading, more than I would like to be. But, in general, I wish the poetry conversation were a bit broader. I haven’t actually done this yet, but I’ve been wanting to organize a reading group to read older work and maybe non-American work and definitely work that is not as much a part of the M.F.A. canon. For the most part, the poetry community is organized around readings, and the reading scene will generally skew toward contemporary work in English. It’d be good to find ways to have poetry events that bring people together to think about a broader range of work.
Johannes Göransson: I actually think Americans can be quite interested in foreign poets, but that tends to happen on a grassroots level - I get more requests for translations than I can keep up with, books by Aase Berg, Kim Hyesoon, Hiromi Ito are very frequently reviewed. But they are reviewed on websites and small magazine and not as often in the more prestigious journals. The gatekeepers and defenders of “the field” of contemporary poetry (ie professors, critics etc) are opposed to foreign poetry because it almost always goes against the orthodoxies that hierarchies and “fields” necessarily depend on. Translation is volatile; it makes too many poets, too many versions, too many lineage to put into nice structures. But this is partly what makes translation interesting and important. I tend to think Art does better if those hierarchies are unsettled. And, since this is the US, still something like an imperial culture, I think there’s a strong political element to this unsettling, even if I don’t think the rest of the world exists to teach Americans lessons, and poetry doesn’t exist to teach Americans that not all poetry looks the same.
Daniel Borzutzky: What do UnitedStatesian poets like to read? Beats me.
I just looked at the SPD monthly top-selling poetry books and here’s what the numbers tell us.
May 2015: One book in translation made the list out of 20
April 2015: 0/20
March 2015: 2/20
Feb 2015: 1/20
Jan 2015: 1/20
Dec 2014: 0/20
Nov 2014: 0/20
Oct 2014: 0/20
So, US poets don’t like to read books in translation - apparently that’s true. I think it also means that US publishers, even small presses, don’t like to publish books in translation.
I don’t know what such a list would look like in the rest of the world. My guess is that there probably wouldn’t be that many books in translation in most other countries either. Though I don’t have the numbers: just the suspicion that xenophobia is not unique to UnitedStatesian letters. On the one hand.
On the other hand. We are an immigrant culture. Certain gatekeeping circles spout the need for diversity and for inclusion, but there’s nothing in the history of US poetry, or US experimental or quote-un-quote avant-garde poetry that leads us to believe that this is much more than spouting. The avant-garde gatekeepers are racists. They don’t like foreigners either. And there’s not much of a desire to think about ourselves in relation to the rest of the world, to think about how the rest of the world has shaped us (and not just how we have shaped it), and to think about the nationalist implications of shutting out foreign voices. There’s not much of a desire to think about how that SPD bestseller list, with just 1 work in translation, is symptomatic of a nationalistic impulse that defines what even small press poetry in the US looks like. No one can afford to be surprised by this: the poetry small presses are nationalists!
Is it important to read books in translation? There’s lots of ways to answer this question. I’ll start with a simple answer: The small press poetry books in translation are BETTER than the ones that are not in translation. This is pure subjectivity. But just to keep things local: take a look at the translated titles that Action Books has published: Hiromi Ito, Kim Hyesoon, Raứl Zurita, Oliviero Girondo, Maria Negroni, Valerie Mejer, Tytti Heikkinen, Jorge Santiago Perednik. Books of poetry don’t get much better than these. And these are amazing, prolific, well known writers in their native countries and there aren’t a lot of other publishers who would touch these books.
Look at Ugly Duckling's recent Latin American translations alone: Alejandra Pizarnik, Cecilia Vicuňa, Cesar Vallejo, Luis Felipe Fabre, Marosa di Giorgio, etc…
So the books in translation are better!
And by better I mean: they hit you harder, they care more about their words, they are scarier, fiercer, wilder, stranger, more beautiful, etc….
This is not to say that all the books in the countries these writers come from are that good. But it’s just to say that if you’re a contemporary translator and you’re taking on a translation project there’s nothing to be gained from it other than an occasional PEN grant and some miniscule cultural capital. So if you have good taste you are more likely than the rest of the world to create a good project. Scientific reasoning!
If you’re a translator, people will ask you to talk about translation. Though they will rarely ask you {read: me} to publish translations. I at least get more invitations to talk and write about translation than I do to publish it. US poets and academics like to talk about translation. They like to talk about translation more than they like to read work in translation or to publish it. That’s silly. But it’s worth thinking about for a minute: why are people more interested in talking about translation than they are in actually publishing and reading translation? I’m going to ungenerously suggest that it’s connected to a self-congratulatory liberalism that is proud of itself for gesturing towards the foreign, pointing towards the foreign, highlighting how interesting and relevant is the foreign without actually reading or publishing it. But maybe this also has to do with a very narrow conceived sense of the country we live in. Translation, through the gringpo lens, is something that happens elsewhere, outside of our normal practice. Foreigners fall outside our normal practice. It’s a denial perhaps of the ways in which millions among us are constantly translating and living their lives in translation. For the small press poetry world foreign language writing is a thing that happens over there, on that side of the border, and not among us. The toxic stance against identity politics articulated in US avant-garde writing has is racist; it promotes nationalism as well in its desire to ignore and mistrust the foreign.
We here in the US are shitty. Also the rest of the world is shitty. Reading books in translation reminds us of this. The rest of the world is as shitty as we are, only it’s a different kind of shit, and the poets have different approaches to documenting and responding to the shit. And we understand through translation that all the countries are shit. And the neoliberalism we shit gets shat back upon us through translation. When a Latin American poet writes poetry critical of her nation-state this should not be read outside of a larger transnational framework that implicates US-style neoliberalism as a global strategy intended to level, intend to disappear cultural and local particularities. And we have a lot to learn about how other nations made us into ourselves by the ways in which the shit we flung at them has come back across the border to soil us, to nurture us, to influence us, to accuse us and hate us and condemn us and interrogate and shape us and love us.
Also, writers from other countries predict what is going to happen in the US. Roberto Bolaño and Horacio Castellanos Moya understood that Kenneth Goldsmith was ignorantly going to exploit the body of a state-murdered African American man before Goldsmith even did it. Moya’s Senselessness showed us, before the KG VP shit show, how privileged white people, quote-un-quote leftists, love to look for art in the pain and murder of minorities killed by the dominant society.
Also, books in translation open up a space for what the larger culture doesn’t want: multilingualism. The work that translators, writers, activists, amazing humans Jen Hofer and John Pluecker are doing around creating multilingual spaces and advocating for language justice is amazing in its vision and activism. Multilingual books in translation provide a model for how we might consider making the rest of our art and community spaces more multilingual, more open to welcoming and acknowledging the foreign.
In short, read books in translation because: they are better; the translators are publishing more interesting writing than the non-translators; so that you can understand that our own neoliberal inferno is swimming around in the bucket of shit with all the other neoliberal infernos.
Jennifer Scappettone: Daniel is generous in wondering whether the US is alone in reading so few books in translation. I’m going to go out on a limb and say (without taking the time to excavate statistics—since we are pulling this together quickly and off-the-cuff) that US poets are a special kind of provincial. As Guillermo puts it (& we likely all agree), they enjoy a distinctive privilege: the luxury of not having to think about other cultures, given the lingering US economic and cultural dominance over the rest of the world. That luxury makes them—makes us—lazy. Beyond that, it seems clear that US poets can plow their way to fame more efficiently via a distinctive brand of innocence, which we might call ignorance—through self-referentiality, by which I mean less reference to oneself in a poem than a social-media hall of mirrors based on self-promotion, and on citing and propping up one’s immediate peers. I blame this partly on the education system, given that many aspiring writers are introduced to poetry in school, and on the workshop tactic of the traditional MFA, which allows many creative writing students to get away with reading their peers’ writing without too many interruptions from other cultures. I blame it on specialization, given that many in our generation who lack independent wealth have sought shelter in the academy, and the academy measures success through mastery of specialized fields. Even in an academic context that gives lip service to diversity and interdisciplinarity, there is little to no reward—and perhaps even demerit—for learning a language one has not already “mastered” by age 22 in order to become a slightly more attuned citizen of the world. There is little to no reward for bringing under discussion, let alone translating, books hailing from cultures that are not already broadly thought to possess copious amounts of cultural capital. There is suspicion of work in translation, as if the very basis of Western culture had not come down to us at third (or fourth, etc.) hand. A slowly mutating shortlist of foreign authors that one ought to know circulates through polite conversation (sometimes without acknowledgment that they have been translated), but one can pass as culturally literate more fluidly if one doesn’t make interlocutors uncomfortable by invoking foreign authors with unpronounceable names. This provincialism is as much historical as it is cultural.
I’m exaggerating, of course, to make a point. And there are notable cherished exceptions in the small press and university publishing spheres: Action, Ugly Duckling, yes, and Litmus, Archipelago, Burning Deck, Nightboat, to name a handful; historically, Green Integer; the University of California Press, which publishes the Poets for the Millennium Series, and other university presses that keep translations in print.... Now Commune Editions is taking an interest in leftist writing from around the world. Journals such as Asymptote, Aufgabe, and Gulf Coast have promoted translation tirelessly. Many journals do seek out translation in theory, but leave all the work of obtaining permissions to the translator in practice. Journals really need to make more of an effort on that front if they want to broaden their scope.
I learned about modernism, and most of the poetry that I came to care about, largely through translation, because I went to an undergraduate school with a conservative literary curriculum: through Ezra Pound’s translations, and Charles Wright’s translations of Eugenio Montale and Dino Campana, which I read on my own. These works offered models outside the immediate workshop world that dominated at that time, of poems about back porches and ploughs, and led me to go to Japan and Italy to work and learn languages immersively instead of getting an MFA. I think it’s important to learn other languages, as many as feasible, because it stretches your outlook—cognitive, linguistic, cultural, political and otherwise. It’s important to read in translation partly because it forces you to appreciate that you don’t, you can’t possibly, apprehend everything—but the reaching anyway is what it takes to make a commons.
Johannes Göransson: Daniel, I think you make an essential point about the academic study of poetry. Scholars love to say that they are interested in the “transnational” or some such - and they would certainly never say they were opposed to translation - but when it comes to actually reading and writing about foreign works, they tend to get shy. Translation as a theoretical topic is good, but to engage with foreign literary works in translation is something else; such an activity would not only have to forego illusions of mastery, it would also inevitably lead to challenges of the academic status quo. Academic discussions of translated texts tend to fall back on facile notions of “context” - as if all foreign texts had one stable, reductive “cultural context” which would explain (in best academic, new historicist way) the work of art. I wrote about this issue here: http://www.thevolta.org/ewc51-jgoransson-p1.htmlOne of the scandals of translation is that it shows that way works of literature are too volatile for reductive contextual readings; rather poems forge all kinds of contexts, and these are often cross national.
And I don’t think the “MFA cannon” is worse in this regard than the experimental/PhD cannon. In some ways I think the PhD cannon is worse - the MFA degree allows for a fluidity that the PhD canon with its rhetoric of mastery and field does not. I teach in an MFA program and I teach works in translation all the time but that’s of course not the common practice. But that’s of course an exception.
Jennifer Scappettone: All academic programs are limited in approaching poetic questions insofar as they prescribe requirements according to pre-established categories (disciplines, national languages, etc.) about which poetry normally couldn’t care less. Those of us who teach have to transgress those categories and work at eroding them while empowering students to think critically and ecstatically about work in translation. Increasing numbers of students in this country are, in fact, bilingual and have already by their university years absorbed some dogma that they need to think exclusively in English. My students (undergraduates especially) are really galvanized by discussions of work in translation and love to think about how they were brought into English.
Do you see yourself as a more traditional or more experimental translator, meaning do you feel a certain loyalty to the original text, or do you allow the poet in you to come out and take over? Along those lines, is there a right or wrong way to translate a text? Do you feel a loyalty to the intent of the poet in the original language? Is translation a more artistic or scholarly exercise for you?
Guillermo Parra: I am neither a traditional nor an experimental translator. Although I do tend to place a great deal of value on the original source text. I feel a certain reverence for the source text that prohibits me from distorting it too much. There’s definitely no right way to translate. All methods are valid if you come up with a poem at the end. While I’m very loyal to the intent of the poet in the original language, I do take liberties with the language. This is something I learned from hearing the poet & translator Michael Hofmann speak when I was at BU in the late 1990s, but also in interviews where Hofmann talks about one of his translation methods: he works very quickly on his first drafts, moving fast and not thinking too much about mistakes or style. I’ve adopted this method and that speed allows me to forget the poet I’m translating, to a degree, and to recreate the poem, or traces of it, with my own language.
Translation is mainly a creative exercise for me. I see it as an extension of my own writing as a poet. Even when I’m translating a short story, novel or essay, I’m writing/translating as a poet, as someone who’s constantly looking beyond the surface of the text, finding resonances within myself that pick up vibrations from the text. Lastly, I feel a particularly strong loyalty to many of the writers I translate. Some of them are actually friends of mine, so the connection is personal. But because Venezuelan literature is unknown in the U.S. I feel it’s my duty to help some of these poets be read by a wider audience. This is especially the case for my work with José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930), who was also ignored for decades in Venezuela. I believe there’s an aspect of translation in which I’m channeling not just the poetry but also the poet I’m translating.
Marie Buck: I’m not actually a translator in any traditional sense. A lot of my work, though, has been experimental translations or rewritings of already-existing poems, always from English to English. In my first book, Life & Style, which came out in 2009, I translated Emily Dickinson poems and, working from already-existing English translations, some poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and other Symbolist writers. The book also contains text from an issue of a celebrity magazine, too. I entered the text into MySpace searches to find text to collage. I was really intrigued by the sort of tonal rhyming that seemed to occur between the Symbolist texts and all the angsty teen writing that proliferated on MySpace. I picked source texts that allowed me to work through some themes I was interested in: publicity and privacy, especially in relation to gender, the public performance of affect or emotion, public expressions of wanting to be wanted.
For most of my projects, it’s felt important to have some source texts that I’m writing through. I’m invested in the frame of translation in that it forces me to think about my work in a larger, less individual context. I suppose what I’m most interested in in poetry, generally, is the relationship between individual affectsand larger social-historical moods, especially with regard to political resistance. I don’t really want to write about moods, though; I want to invoke them, and working through multiple pre-existing texts, with their distinct tones and registers of language, is how I like to do that. The poems I’ve been working on more recently aren’t translations, but I am using sources from the 1980s (when the full defeat of the 1960s and early 70s was really sinking in culturally), as a way to write about political disappointment, repression, fear, and hope in Occupy and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.
Johannes Göransson: I don’t agree with the common American insistence on autonomy: the experimental translator as maintaining some kind of sovereignty. That this is experimental, progressive, avant-garde. I am fascinated by the translator’s role precisely because we are not in control, not in power. I don’t want my translations to be their own, new artworks. That feels actually like a conservative stance - conservative in that it wants to maintain the idea of the poem (and the translation) as autonomous artwork, wellwrought urn - when that is what translations challenges - and conservative in the sense that these experimental methods often ends up turning the foreign work into something closer to contemporary American experimental poetry. (At the same time I think something like James Wagner’s Trilce or Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl are profound possessions and meditations on the sounds of foreign poetry.) I think translating is mostly an inherently radical act.
I’m an immigrant. I was always translating. A lot of my favorite writers - many of the writers that have influenced me - are Swedes, so I’ve translated them. There’s an obsession with the nature of the original/copy - are they faithful? Are they even the same? - in discussions about translations. This never bothered me. Of course I have always known it’s not the same text, but that has never stopped me from translating, from reading texts in translation. Joyelle and I wrote a booklet called Deformation Zone (we took the title from an Aase Berg poem in translation) and that’s more the way I see poetry and translation: as these zones where texts are always changing and morphing. It is important to note that foreign texts are often in fact very experimental. So that Aase’s work is radically non-fluent - deforming the Swedish language in all kinds of ways - so that to produce a “good” English version would in fact be deeply treasonous. I think this shows the lie of the standard binary of faithful vs loose, traditional vs experimental.
Daniel Borzutzky: Hmmmm….I’m not sure that for me this is the right binary...between traditional and experimental if what experimental means is inserting yourself into the text in order to take it over. And I think it would be important to put works like James Wagner’s Trilce and Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl in a separate category from the work that I’m doing as a translator.
And I think to say that you are an experimental or traditional translator puts the focus on the translator and not on the work being translated. In other words, if the work in the original language is aesthetically unconventional/experimental, etc… - then the translation should mirror that sense of experimentation. But I personally would be reluctant to say that the translator’s aesthetics should be what determines the approach to the work being translated. For me it’s the other way around.
I’d agree with Johannes that rather than being an experimental move, in a UnitedStatesian context especially, such overt ego insertions can be reflective of imperialist domination tactics (and we may sound kinda old fashioned here). And these moves certainly date back to the 1950s in the US when early translations of Neruda and Vallejo were starting to circulate, and to the US modernists as well. And often the tactics involved trying to fit the work into translation to match the translator’s aesthetic agendas and not the translator trying to make the work in translation match the aesthetic of the author.
Of course, translators will inevitably have their own aesthetic agendas and they will mold translations in certain individualistic ways. No big problems there. But I think when we’re talking about bringing work into the US, with its tradition of subsuming and exploiting other cultures and countries, then there are political implications in thinking that the work to be translated is so easily mutable to fit into an aesthetic ideology.This tendency, has colonialist implications that create a hierarchical relationship that overly empowers the translator and makes the foreign language its subject to be dominated.
I’m sure there’s no one “right” way to translate a text and there’s probably 8000 “wrong” ways. But as Johannes has noted elsewhere, there’s also a culture of suspicion surrounding translation that mirrors the suspect treatment applied to immigrants.There is an exaggerated focus on the ways that the translation might be “wrong”. And this continual focus on the ways that the translation might be wrong has the effect of keeping publishers from publishing work in translation. Because the publishers are excluded from knowing the original language, the rest of us are excluded from having access to the work in translation. The immigrant becomes suspect for what she might infect the culture with, and the translated text becomes a site of constant suspicion about the accuracy of the translation, its authenticity, and the value of the original text in the original language. As the SPD top 20 listings show us, the choice the publishers and readers make is to stay away from the languages they don’t understand.
So yes, I feel a loyalty to the original text in the original language. The text in Spanish has a particular relationship to standard Spanish. I try to recreate that relationship linguistically; and I address my loyalty by contextualizing the politics and the histories that the original text is responding to. In Zurita’s case, he is didactically responding to the murderous policies of the Pinochet regime and situating those policies within a global continuum of mass violence and neoliberal exploitation. For me it’s important to expose this.
Translation is part of my artistic practice. I translate the work of writers that I love, writers who are important to me, and who have influenced my writing and thinking. I don’t hide the ways in which I am influenced by the work I translate, and my work as a translator has shaped the way I think about and approach my own writing.
Jennifer Scapettonne: I wholly agree with what Johannes and Daniel have said about the imposition of the translator into the body of a text. While there is no authorless translation, the whole process ought to lure us outside of ourselves—even further than when composing our “own” work. One’s tactic of translation should be in continual metamorphosis depending on the forms and methods of the work at hand (and that can and will change even if the author of the original is the same). The concept of experimental translation was useful insofar as it meant to counteract the faux polish of literary translation of the sort bent on smoothing out disjunctions in an original text and eliding the distance between languages. However, it seems to me that the term as currently bandied about in US poetry circles has become degraded; it has come to license superficial engagement with the original text, subjection of the other to gimmicks and whims, whereas the commitment obliged by translation (including innovative transmutations like Zukofsky’s Catullus or Carson’s Sappho, or Rothenberg’s Navajo Horse Songs) can, in sincerity, take years or even decades to build toward. Facile acts of “translation” can come to mirror the vampiric and, yes, colonial aspects of certain “avant-garde” acts of appropriation. It seems to me that only a culture as narcissistic as this one can collapse categories of engagement to such a degree and call so many sorts of appropriation by the name of translation. Translation is a deeply empathic act: ideally, it’s a two-way channel.
Translation is an inextricable part of my poetic practice and part of my research. These vocations are in a harmonic relation to one another, and the tendency to separate one practice from the other, to divide translators as technicians from poets and scholars, is another species of historical amnesia and cultural blindedness. Research is necessary to create a context of reception for the work and try to conjure its aspirations, particularly when the author being translated is no longer present as interlocutor. As a poet one can attempt an echo of those aspirations and their form. I am wary of teams of translators that include a scholar or native-language “informant” and a poet working in the “target” language—a strategy that dominates the translation market, perhaps because it seems more authoritative, less prone to “error”—precisely because this strategy reinforces a division of labor and of linguistic facility at odds with the original impulse.
I wanted to ask a question about the recent political activism in the poetry world in the US--particularly the political activism which has led to what might be called the fall of conceptual poetry via the calling out of racism in avant-garde poetry practices. I know that that Heriberto Yépez has responded (GP has translated his response) and I’m wondering what this activity looks like or what sense it makes on a more international level, removed a bit from the claustrophobia of American poetry social media. Thoughts? Does this fall of conceptualism matter, say in Sweden, Venezuela?
Johannes Göransson: It’s a complicated question. Sweden has a long tradition (going back to the 1960s concretists, such as Öyvind Fahlström and Åke Hodell) of what might be loosely termed conceptual poetry. But it was always much more overtly political and activist than the current US incarnation. And also way more humorous as well as defiantly populist (in difference to Goldsmith’s overt elitism, these poets read Warhol as a populist, and thus left-wing, artist). Though in the late 90s, several young Swedish scholars (most prominently Jesper Olsson) were educated in langpo/conceptualism american style and came back, started a journal (OEI), got academic positions, wrote books, invited American poets over etc. This way the Swedish conceptualism got an american spin. Nevertheless, OEI and others associated with them did bring attention to a lot of contemporary Swedish poets that may be considered loosely “conceptual,” such as Johan Jönson and Jörgen Gassilewski. But we might compare two controversies: Johan Jönson stirred up a huge controversy for supposedly “advocating class hatred” with his book about being working class and wanting to kill the right-wing prime minister. Not only is Jönson far more unruly in his method than the more “puristic” (we allow for a little “massage”) decorum of US conceptualists (it’s seldom clear when he’s sampling and when he’s just writing about his own experiences), but in imagining killing the prime minister, his “controversialness” seems the opposite of Kenny Goldsmith’s reading of the Mike Brown coroner’s report. But OEI and the Modern Museum in Stockholm are currently organizing a conceptual poetry reading which features mainly US poets like Goldsmith, so apparently not everyone has heard of the demise of conceptualism. But Swedish poetry is extremely engaged in matters of race and I have heard from a few poets who are concerned about this.
On the whole, the most exciting Swedish poets would hardly be considered "conceptual" from a U.S. perspective. Poets like Leif Holmstrand, Aase Berg, Sara Tuss Efrik, Maria Margareta Österholm, Athena Farrokhzad, Elisabeth Berchtold, Helena Boberg, Aylin Bloch Boynukisa, Lidija Praizovic are maximalist, gurlesque, gothic, queer, unwieldy, tastelessly political, tastelessly about the body. I prefer to see Johan Jönson with his excessive, messy, often hateful, poetry as part of this group of writers. Also, I love some of the influential neo-Romantic poets who started publishing in the 1980s, such as Ann Jäderlund and Eva Kristina Olsson, who are writing some of their best, strangest work these days. You can see sampling practices in many current poets - Aase Berg, Johan Jönson, Leif Holmstrand, Helena Osterlund, Athena Farrokhzad, Elisabeth Berchtold, Helena Boberg, Aylin Bloch Boynukisa, Lidija Praizovic - but the result is not decorous high art, it’s often maximalist, gurlesque, queer, unwieldy, overtly political, overtly about the body.
Jennifer Scappettone: Some internationally-oriented authors in Italy have taken to the most visible impersonations of today’s conceptualism—i.e. Kenny Goldsmith, probably due as much to his work with ubuweb (which does offer the public free access to the work of international avant-gardes—though Heriberto Yepez has lately critiqued this curatorial strategy as “The Ubu Degree of Poetry Inc.”) as to the international hijinks and headlines. The Italian literary scene is still highly masculinist, and I don’t even think Vanessa Place or the authors contained in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women have received any attention. But postwar modernists and the neo-avant-garde in Italy were intimately related to first-wave conceptualism, and far more politically committed—in the form of action as opposed to artists’ statements. (I recently wrote an essay for Moderna about Amelia Rosselli’s conceptualism, and the relation of constraint to imprisonment in politically committed postwar writing, music, and art.) I would ask US readers to look outside for alternative models of engagement. There is reinvigorated interest—perhaps more in Oakland than in Italy—in Italian feminism at the moment; there is an upswelling of interest in operaismo, or workerism. I would point interested people to literary and political journals like Alfabeta2, the second instantiation of the provocative 1970s-80s publication directed by Nanni Balestrini.
That said, it would be healthy if the current “Body of Michael Brown”/ “Mammy” debacle led to a reinvigorated debate surrounding race in European literature (though I doubt it will, because the sensationalism of the Goldsmith/Place pieces wouldn’t hold up; it’d be the work that arises in response to sustain an international discussion). In a nutshell, race in Italian culture has traditionally been framed in terms of “the Southern question,” with the impoverished South racialized and despised to a degree hard to imagine from here, given that the signature differences in skin color are relatively slight. Now that Italy is seeing so many waves of immigration, leading to Roma families’ banishment to unlivable conditions in peripheral encampments, and thousands of refugees from North Africa being left to drown in the Mediterranean, alarming and categorically different forms of racism are an undeniable part of the cultural scene. None of this will be solved by conceptualism.
Marie Buck: Well, as Jen said, this seems like a good moment to look elsewhere. I was really glad to see Vanessa Place removed from the AWP subcommittee she was on, since I think that a lot of her work creates a hostile environment for writers of color. However, I don’t take her or Kenneth Goldsmith to be representative of conceptualism, the experimental tradition, or the avant-garde (though I’m very skeptical of the contemporary application of the term ‘avant-garde’ myself). I see people making a lot of claims about the experimental tradition as a whole, which seems to imply that more traditional poetry in the U.S. somehow generally has good politics around race (definitely not true). And if we take Goldsmith and Place as representative, we also elide the many writers and artists of color who have made non-racist and/or anti-racist work using conceptual or more generally experimental strategies.
At the same time, a lot of conversation about the ‘experimental tradition,’ for lack of a better term, within experimental writing communities is so short-sighted. For instance, I don’t feel like there is a lot of conversation about or knowledge of the Black Arts Movement in the poetry circles that I travel in, and the BAM is clearly an avant-garde by most definitions.
Generally, it seems unfortunate that the conversation has focused so heavily on Goldsmith/Place/MCAG. The Goldsmith/Place/MCAG conversation at this point feels a bit like the Rachel Dilazel conversation: click bait that’s masquerading as a conversation about racism. We really need actual anti-racist activism that operates outside of the (relatively tiny) poetry community, that builds political power through organization. (I.e., we should certainly try to make the poetry community less racist, but I don’t think we can ‘fix’ poetry without changing the whole society. And the poetry community isn’t a particularly strategic space to organize from, so it is probably better to be involved in Black Lives Matter, or Fight for 15, or adjunct organizing, or etc. than to remain focused on the poetry community.) And we need thinking about aesthetics and race. I don’t know. Last week I went to the new Whitney and saw the really phenomenal exhibit America Is Hard to See, which includes a wall of anti-lynching art, a lot of work about the AIDS epidemic, a section on industry and the rust belt, a section of feminist performance work, and a lot of other stuff. Yesterday I went to a launch for the new edition of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and heard the author, Michele Wallace, speak, and it was great. I guess I feel like the Goldsmith/Place/MCAG conversation does not go very far, and it really just makes me want to read more widely and attend events that are not poetry readings, and I want the poetry community in general to be able to think with a wider range of writing and art related to race, aesthetics, oppression, political organizing, and so on. (And this conversation is definitely making me want to focus outside the U.S. a bit, too.)
Johannes Göransson: I don’t agree with all the ideas proposed by the MCAG, but I think it is doing really necessary work. On some level, this is very much like the Black Arts Movement: the statements have the kind of harsh manifesto-energy of the historical avant-garde and the BAM but I don’t think that means that it’s shallow or limited. It is focused like manifestos, I would say. It does tie in with a lot of the statements we have made in this discussion about the implicit nationalism of a lot of US academic poetry discussions. But other than that I agree with a lot of what you are saying here.
Daniel Borzutzsky: I can speak a bit about Chile, but without much confidence that I am accurately representing the ins and outs of the Chilean poetry scene. I can speak anecdotally, about conversations I have had with friends, and I can give some impressions.
I’d start by saying that I don’t think Goldsmith and Place, and their ugly appropriations of African-American bodies, are something that is talked about in Chile. The number of Chilean poets who really care about what is happening in contemporary US poetry is equivalent to the number of US poets who really care about what is happening in contemporary Chilean poetry: not many. From what I can tell, a handful of people read Heriberto Yepez’s essays, but I think the general impression is that this is a gringo debate and context. I don’t know to what degree people know or care about this very particular and ugly form of racism.
Jen was discussing racism in Italy. In a Chilean context, for a Chilean reader of Goldsmith/Place, the discussion of race won’t have the same resonance as it would in the US. As in Italy, those from the Southern part of the country, the indigenous, and specifically the Mapuche, have been abused, discriminated against, killed and violated for centuries. And there is perhaps also an analogous discussion (to the US) about the appropriation of Mapuche traditions by artists in Chile who are outside of their community. But from what I understand the question of who is inside and outside is complicated by a far reaching mestizaje. On the other hand, and as I’ve written about elsewhere, the unfair expectation that indigenous artists only work in their traditions is also one which is prevalent and which is illustrative of a backwards form of racism.
So, I’m not sure what that what you’re calling the fall of conceptualism matters much in Chile.
But Chileans would also argue that there is a Chilean tradition of conceptualism and the avant-garde which doesn’t need to look to the US as a model. There’s lots of places to start, but if you’re looking at uses of found text Juan Luis Martinez’s La Nueva Novela (http://juanluismartinez.cl/obras/nueva_novela/nueva_n.html) from 1971 is an amazing book that's way ahead of its time. And Cecilia Vicuña,, especially in her visual art starting in the1970s, was working in conceptual modes that long pre-dated what we in the US are currently calling conceptualism.. US readers will be familiar with some of the other giants of the Chilean avant-garde, like Huidobro and Parra. But there are plenty of other models as well, who were well outside of the reach of the US, and so I’d end here by emphasizing that Chileans don’t need to turn to the US to find models of conceptual art, and that US models like Goldsmith would have little resonance there.
(Question directed to Jennifer): You talk about a kind of superficial or “vampiric” translation mode that is more cultural appropriation rather than translation whereby the translator uses the original text as a way to assert more strongly or more powerfully a “lyric I.” Am I understanding this correctly? I’m wondering about this because I think I explicitly do that in my own translations of Baudelaire--like it’s intentional but I feel that I have to defend myself because he is also the privileged “master”--so I’m wondering if this type of vampiric translation, as you call it, is acceptable in some way if the original is in itself, the master--in some sense, I am his other. Can’t these things work both ways? Which bridges to something Johannes was saying in the idea that there is a sense in which translation practice can be volatile and disruptive of hierarchies, something Marie and Daniel also allude to. At the same time everyone seems to be saying that there is a suspicion around translation, because it’s inherently pluralistic in the same way that people are suspicious of writing collaborations and I think that there is a sense in which that suspicion also speaks to the political power of translation because it’s threatening and makes us re-examine our own writing practices and assumptions about what a poem is. Concluding thoughts?
Jennifer Scappettone: I was referring to a collapsing of the categories of appropriation and translation that seems typical of US literary scenes at this moment, and might be read as another sign of the privilege of an English-centric culture that does not need to work to learn and communicate in another language. I find this blurring of categories distracting because appropriation and translation, while related, are not the same. Working glacially on comprehension and expression across multiple languages, and attempting to approximate the semantic and/or formal properties of a poem in another language, are qualitatively different from the kind of translation game or exercise now possible with tools like Google Translate. Don’t get me wrong: I think these exercises can produce interesting results and potentially provocative meditations on globalization, algorithms and artificial intelligence, etc. But such exercises seem to be more fashionable and fun to engage these days than “normal” translation, which is more deferential to the cultural difference of the original text, perhaps more abject—and which, as noted earlier, attracts relatively few US publishers, readers, and reviewers. Brandon Brown’s work is an interesting example of experimental translation in which the text is apparently wildly divergent from, say, Catullus, but based on years of commitment and study. Ventrakl was an extreme example of devoted deformation, but didn’t call itself a translation; perhaps only an “umdichtung,” “woven around” the original, could make us think so hard about translation as a problem.
Eunsong Kim gave a powerful talk at the &NOW festival’s “m0ngreL PoeTiKs” panel about appropriation and the archive, with Carrie Mae Weems’s appropriation of daguerreotypes of enslaved people vs. Kenny Goldsmith’s appropriation of the Michael Brown autopsy report at the center (Harvard’s Peabody Museum asked Weems to pay permissions fees for the daguerreotypes’ reuse; she refused, but a deal was made wherein Harvard purchased her final pieces). Kim’s central point was that conceptualism has licensed various acts of freewheeling appropriation that don’t think or feel hard enough about their relation to the archive. Translation really needs to think and feel through its relation to the archive—word by word, phoneme by phoneme.
The example of your translations from the French, and of other sorts of subversive translation, is to me a different issue. I like the point above (expressed most pointedly by Daniel) that translation, rather than showing that other cultures are ethically superior to the one in which we are living, can also remind us of the horrible consistencies in a, for example, current neoliberal universe: exposing forms of white supremacy, exploitation of the poor, sexism, planetary decimation, totalitarianism that are inextricably linked to the ones we are living and witnessing in the immediate moment, yet approached from different perspectives, which are threatened with obliteration under global capitalism. The choice of who one translates is of course paramount; one of the tasks of the translator is to pull marginalized voices within those systems into a different kind of legibility, and (like most of us here) I’ve focused my efforts on poets who implode the fraught ideology and expression of “mother tongue” and “fatherland” from within. But translators can also rewrite history by forging strategies of confrontation with “master” texts. This is something I’m grappling with at the moment in translating a sort of nemesis, FT Marinetti, after having devoted over a decade (and counting) to translating Amelia Rosselli, a committed Communist who lived the Cold War years in fear of the CIA—whose father, the Jewish Italian Resistance leader Carlo Rosselli, was assassinated through the global Fascist network, leading to a protracted exile. While sickening and often enraging, it has felt perversely crucial for me to think through the poetics of figures like Marinetti and Ezra Pound, whose revolutionary aesthetics are hailed while their reactionary politics are rejected or, too often, elided—to grapple with the relation between art and ideology. Translating a work Marinetti composed in 1943-44 from Venice, a city he once rejected for being too feminine, “Oriental,” foreign-loving, and passéist, while Fascism was going up in flames—and trying to expose the war of desire and violence at the heart of Futurism’s attitudes toward women and the global South—has become a vengeful occupation. I don’t feel the need to distort the text to the degree you might have in translating Baudelaire, because the publication records are different—translating Baudelaire becomes a conversation not just with the now canonized master text, but with innumerable other translators. When the historical record has so many gaps, it’s perhaps enough just to make the brawls and blindnesses within a text itself visible.
Marie Buck: I really appreciate what Jen is saying here. I think at the time I wrote my book that includes what we’ve been calling ‘translations,’ I was referring to them as translations. The book doesn’t actually include that term, though; the way you’d know the poems I was working from is that I always kept the titles. I’ve had people read the book without noticing that I’m appropriating or riffing on, or really, I’d actually say the right term would be writing through, other poems. And I think I’m glad I didn’t include the word ‘translation’ within the book because I agree that the word ‘translation’ might not make a lot of sense there. I did major in German in undergrad and so I have actually translated things, in a totally amateur way, in the past. I really like that process and it definitely feels like an entirely different endeavor, one that should have a specific word that doesn’t get used for other things. (I do have a pretty intense relationship with some of the poems I was writing through, but translating in the sense that the rest of you here translate is not what I was doing, for sure.) That said, I am definitely interested in thinking about translation and these other types of engagements with texts in the same conversation.
Daniel Borzutzky: Again, I don’t know if the suspicion around translation is because it’s pluralistic. I think it’s simpler than that. People are nervous about what they don’t understand. And we live in an English-centric, anti-immigrant environment where language use and border crossing are perniciously legislated, where language use and border-crossing are sites of actual violence done to actual people. I don’t really need to moralize about what kind of translation and translation-based activities poets are involved in. And I am not particularly interested in talking about the nuts and bolts of translation. I am deeply interested, on the other hand, in translation and its relationship to dissidence and the political realities the translated text is exposing. And I am also interested in thinking about translation and multilingualism as a form of critique and activism.
I’ve written elsewhere about Don Mee Choi’s work with Kim Hyesoon, and in particular her statement that her “translation intent has nothing to do with personal growth, intellectual exercise, or cultural exchange, which implies an equal standing of some sort. South Korea and the U.S are not equal. I am not transnationally equal. My intent is to expose what a neocolony is, what it does to its own, what it eats and shits. Kim Hyesoon’s poetry reveals all this, and this is why I translate her work” (Freely Frayed,ᄏ=q, & Race=Nation. Wave Books, 2014).
I really appreciate what Don Mee is opening up here. It blows up the notion that translation exists in order to further the goals of diversity and multiculturalism. And instead, by my reading, she rightly politicizes the translator by positioning herself as a communicator of dissidence. It replaces a well-intentioned though bogus and unrealized intent (multilingual/national diversity) with a pointedly political one (to critique, to be a mouthpiece of criticism, to interrogate and expose). And as with Zurita and Chile (and political Latin American writers in general), Hyesoon’s poetics begins as a critique of Korea but is inseparable from a critique of US imperialism. I find the clarity of Don Mee’s focus here refreshing and inspiring. And the suggestion I see in it, and this goes back to the question of how translation fits into my artistic practice: I’d say that there is a political stance and commitment in my poetry that is hopefully paralleled by a political commitment to translate….
And then I’d again point to the work that Jen Hofer and John Pluecker do with the Antena collective (http://antenaantena.org/). The way that they have articulated the importance of translation as it relates to language-justice, and the creation of multilingual community spaces, is for me another inspiring example of some serious thought and action about how the translator moves beyond language transmission and into practical modes of grassroots community activism.
On the homepage of their website we are told that “Antena views aesthetic practice as part and parcel of language justice work.”
The work they are doing, and the articulation of these positions, has helped me grapple with some of these larger questions we have been talking about in regards to the way that the suspicion of translation mirrors the suspicion of immigrants.
There are plenty of instances outside of poetry, with journalistic or didactic writing, where translation can actually be a dangerous act. And we talked plenty about the imperialism involved in appropriative translations in the US. But I point to Don Mee and Jen and John as examples of poets who are troubling the boundaries of the translator and the material to be translated in very different ways, in ways that at once expose imperialism while offering methods of critique, and of improving people’s daily lives in meaningful, serious ways.
And on a different note, and thinking about poetry as political action, I’d cite Kristin Dykstra’s incredible commitment to bringing Cuban poets into translation and circulation in the US. This is not easy work because of the continuous practical and bureaucratic hurdles that are tied to US-Cuban relations (just emailing alone with Cuban poets can be difficult). But Kris has navigated them with great care and compass and skill, and has given us an incredible array of Cuban poetry, writing we would not otherwise have access to. Kris’s work, through its action and vision and dedication to making sure we hear voices we are not supposed to hear, demonstrates the ways that translation can serve as meaningful, political and literary activism.
Jennifer Scappettone: I just want to echo Daniel’s praise for Antena (and also Don Mee/Hyesoon!). I’ve been really floored and moved by Antena’s creation of spaces aimed at thinking through and enacting language justice in various cities, most recently Los Angeles. Their work is empowering people who constantly have to negotiate English-language dominance in a very concrete way. Antena’s conceptual platform also asks us to rethink the commonly held notion that “transparency” between languages is the answer. In my introduction to PennSound Italiana, which is aimed at “liberating” Italian-language texts as sound, I quoted Antena’s “Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” which also calls for “untranslation, undertranslation, overtranslation, an excess, extranslation, a lack, a limit, an excrescence, an impropriety, distranslation, retranslation, multitranslation, a mistake, a conflict, dystranslation. An understanding of the potential in not understanding.” Antena is a unique example of experimental translation in action. It asks us to find ways to put our skills to work in quotidian contexts dominated by an increasingly hysterical fear of outsiders while stressing that assimilation is not the answer.
Contributors
Marie Buck is the author of the poetry collections Life & Style (Patrick Lovelace Editions, 2009) and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015), and she teaches literature and writing in Brooklyn. Some of her recent poems appear in Poems By Sunday, a Perimeter, and Fanzine.
Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her books of poetry include From Dame Quickly and the bilingual Thing Ode / Ode oggettuale, translated in dialogue with Marco Giovenale; she edited Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, featuring new writing by Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, and her prose and visual poems. Exit 43, an archaeology of landfill and opera of pop-up pastorals, is in progress for Atelos, with a letterpress palimpsest, A Chorus Fosse, coming soon from Compline. She edited and translatedLocomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, which won the Academy of American Poets’ biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize, and is at work on new translations of Carla Lonzi and F.T. Marinetti. In 2009 she guest-edited a special feature devoted to contemporary Italian poetry of research for Aufgabe 7, and she recently launched PennSound Italiana, a new, ongoing sector of the audiovisual archive devoted to Italian poetry, with a focus on experimental and underrepresented voices in the field. Recent prose appears inBoston Review and Jacket2. Collaborative work has included performances of Exit 43 with the Difforme Ensemble in Rome; digital archaeologies with Judd Morrissey; libretti, scores, and vocal concepts for PARK, directed and choreographed by Kathy Westwater; and sonic documentaries for X Locus, a site-specific installation conceived with AGENCY architecture and composer Paul Rudy for the courtyard and Trajan’s aqueduct tract at the American Academy in Rome. Her critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice was published in 2014.
Translation links:
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of the poetry collections The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011), The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007); the chapbooks Bedtime Stories for the End of the World (Bloof Books, 2014), Data Bodies (The Green Lantern, 2013), One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad Press, 2009), and Failure of the Imagination (Bronze Skull Press 2007); and a collection of short stories, Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2005). He has translated Raúl Zurita’sThe Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) and Song for His Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010); and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008). His writing has been translated into Spanish, French, Bulgarian, and Turkish, and has been anthologized in, among other publications, Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing; La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA; A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years; and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. Borzutzky’s work has been recognized by grants from the PEN American Center and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Daniel’s translations : http://www.kenningeditions.com/kenning-editions/ordinance-1-memories-of-my-overdevelopment-by-daniel-borzutzky/
http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Poetry&id=189
http://circumferencemag.org/?p=2873
Poet and translator Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970 and lives in Pittsburgh. His most recent translation book is the novelThe Conspiracy (Pittsburgh: Sampsonia Way, 2014) by the Venezuelan writer Israel Centeno. In 2013, he edited a special issue of Typomagazine dedicated to Venezuelan poetry (http://www.typomag.com/issue18/). This month, his translation of a 1964 manifesto by the Venezuelan collective El Techo de la Ballena was published in The Brooklyn Rail (http://brooklynrail.org/2015/06/poetry/why-the-whale).
Poet and translator Johannes Göransson emigrated with his family from Skåne, Sweden to the United States at age 13. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Georgia. He is the author of several books, includingHaute Surveillance (2013),Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), and Dear Ra (A Story in Flinches)(2008). He has translated Aase Berg’s Dark Matter (2012), Transfer Fat (2012), andRemainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg (2005) as well as Henry Parland’s Ideals Clearance (2007).
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Posted by: Christi71343894 | November 18, 2015 at 03:11 AM