Pura López-Colomé & Forrest Gander

talking & reading

on KCRW’s Bookworm

Don Share

discussing

Bunting’s Persia

Mary Jo Bang
&
Jennifer Scappettone
on the intersection
between translation & poetics

Paul Vangelisti on Antonio Porta

[Part 1] [Part 2]

on Cross Cultural Poetics

Reviewing translations
with Arne Bellstorf, Ruth Franklin
Julya Rabinowich & Lorin Stein
(moderated by Eric Banks & Susan Bernofsky)

An international poetry festival is a little like one of those lab experiments that science students are forced to perform. Take a creature that does one thing well – make art with their language – and put them into a container with other creatures who seem similar enough, but lack that one key common element – a mutual language. The possibilities are more or less obvious, and the folks in Rotterdam earlier this month were blessed with the fact that all 19 of their on-site participants¹ were actually nice people. One of the festival officials joked that this was an “innovation” they were trying this year, and that it had not always been the case in prior years.

It’s not an accurate statement that the poets lacked the same language. Eighteen of the 19 spoke at least some version of English, and four of us – Karen Solie of Canada, LK Holt of Australia, Sascha Aurora Akhtar of Pakistan &amp Britain, & I – use variants of it for our writing. With language, of course, history comes encrusted. When Moosejaw-born Karen Solie lists manufacturers of tractors in her work, US companies like John Deere turn up. And I heard Australian Lucy Holt asked on at least one occasion if she was British

This week in the Netherlands

June 12-17, Rotterdam City Theatre

 

43rd Poetry International Festival Rotterdam

Sascha Aurora Akhtar, Vahe Arsen, Najwan Darwish,
Dolores Dorantes, Ulrike Draesner, Olli Heikkonen,
L.K. Holt, Hédi Kaddour, Marije Langelaar,
Jan Lauwereyns , Márcio-André, Chus Pato,
Tomaž Šalamun, K. Satchidanandan, K. Schippers,
Ron Silliman, Karen Solie, Inuo Taguchi,
Umar Timol, B. Zwaal

Amin Khan

What does surrealism tell us now? It’s been nearly 140 years since Rimbaud stopped writing, but I was reading Amin Khan’s Vision of the Return in Dawn-Michelle Baude’s translation when I came across the following piece:

I saw the corpse of the plum tree
of the camel his splattered guts
the soiled tears of the child
the sniffle of orphan light

I abandoned the pursuit of art
to sleep for eternity
under the fevered feet of my children

It’s that second stanza that stopped me cold. It seems like such a puffy, overwritten way to say I chose death over art that it calls to mind Pound’s old dictum that poetry needs to be at least as well written as prose. Now I’ve known Baude’s work for decades and I trust her judgment, as well as that of Post-Apollo Press, well enough to know that Khan cannot be an insignificant figure, and that this is not apt to be a blundering translation.

For the most part, the early sections of Khan’s book are spare, a kind of muted expressiveness that can be quite effective. Nothing before suggests that this comic flight is intentional & knowing that Khan first published this book in 1989, when he was in his early 30s, doesn’t much help. Rather, I think what Khan is doing here is signaling an allegiance to the surreal, as such, something he’s done elsewhere in this volume, perhaps with less pathos.

Which brings me to the question of what does it mean? As an Algerian writing in French, it’s not an insignificant move. Vision was the third of Khan’s books, and the third to be published in French in Algeria, although Khan comes from a revolutionary family in Algiers and has worked as a diplomat for various global agencies (UN, UNESCO, The World Bank). The work’s relationship to the life is obviously complex.

My question has at least two aspects to it. One is what does it mean for someone from a former French colony, writing in French, to adopt the stance of an historic – albeit dated – avant-garde? The other, the one that itches at me still, is the problem of what does it mean to write a stanza whose primary message would seem to be surrealism, as if Khan had simply raised a large banner: SURREALISM HERE.

Obviously the meaning of surrealism in France, where it was principally the poetry of sophisticates between two catastrophic wars, is very different from what it has been in the United States, where it has more often been a code for “Europeanness,” not in the sense of death camps & carpet bombing so much as chardonnay & Gauloises. Khan himself aligns the book with his own sense of doom at the Algerian political situation in the late 1980s as Arab nationalism began to devolve into the civil war of the following decade.

But I’m reminded of what Robert Grenier wrote about speech, himself echoing what William Carlos Williams once had written about the sonnet – that at a certain point in history an established mode of writing simply is the past dragged on as formal habit. That it can only say itself, so that little or nothing can actually be said with it. That might not be true of surrealism in France, Algeria or any of the former French colonies, but it’s very difficult to negotiate stateside.

If you examine that second stanza more closely, you will note that Khan is associating death here with domesticity, suggesting that to look to the family as a respite from the coming slaughter – the first stanza is clear enough – is a coward’s mode of survival. One might associate Khan’s indictment here of the domestic with Milan Kundera’s not dissimilar portrayal of libidinal life in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. There is more going on in that second stanza than my first read-through could see.

But what I get is this unresolvable cognitive dissonance between what this poem – and that second stanza – are and do in Khan’s life & work, and what it means to come upon it in America some 23 years hence. It’s possible to build an intellectual bridge to the context in which Khan’s poem can be read as shattering, but it’s something very different to experience it.

Clayton Eshleman reads Aimé Césaire

Robert Hass reading Czesław Miłosz

Clayton Eshleman
reads
César Vallejo

Contemporary Chinese Poetry

On December 9, a large delegation of poets from Wuhan, the most populous city in central China, visited Kelly Writers House at Penn. For nearly all, this was the first visit to the U.S. These poets – Liang Biwen, Liu Yishan, Chen Ying-Song, Tiang He, Wang Xinmin, Ke Yumin, Hu Xiang & Liu An – read and then had their poetry read in English by one of a team of volunteer translators: Bob Perelman , Sarah Dowling , Michelle Taransky , Charles Bernstein , Greg Djanikian & Yanrong. Yarong is the current scholar-in-residence at the Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics (CAAP). The process was then reversed, with texts by Bernstein, Dowling, Djanikian, Taransky & Perelman (“China”!) translated into Chinese.

Video of the entire event

Downloadable audio here

Complete texts in English & Chinese

In 2009, as part of its Writers Without Borders series, Writers House hosted Zhimin Li, a poet who teaches at Guangzhou University (Guangzhou is the city most Americans my age think of as Canton) & sits on the CAAP board. Li gave a reading & a talk on new Chinese poetry.

Downloadable audio of the full reading here

Downloadable audio of Li’s talk here

Text of Li’s talk – New Chinese Poetry:
The Origin & Development from the Perspective
of Cultural Exchanges between China & the West

Access to segmented poems is available
through Zhimin Li’s page on PennSound

Call for papers
First Convention of
The Chinese/American Association for Poetry & Poetics
Wuhan, China
September 28 – 30, 2011

Char by Man Ray (1933)

I had an “aha moment” reading René Char’s The Brittle Age and Returning Upland,the two volumes of mid-sixties poetry translated by Gustaf Sobin & released this year by Counterpath Press in a design that winks at the New Directions volumes both authors had. Char’s an Objectivist. Well, not an Objectivist really, but he is someone who echoes some of the same concerns that show up in American poetry in the work of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff et al, writers who were in fact his contemporaries. In this sense, Gustav Sobin, Char’s neighbor & protégé, whose own poetry has always struck me – as do the work of John Taggart &, in places at least, the late Ronald Johnson – as shaped heavily by Objectivism, seems the perfect person to have tackled this work.

This is not, I think, an instance of the translator turning his subject into a mirror of his own obsessions – the volume presents not only Char’s French originals, but, as an appendix, a number of variant translations by Sobin himself, apparently done in “an earlier period.” Nor is it out of any conscious parallel on Char’s part – he knew of American poetry, as it knew of him. The book’s rear cover quotes some lines by Williams directed to Char by name: René Char / you are a poet who believes / in the power of beauty / to right all wrongs. / I believe it also. While the poems of The Brittle Age (L’Âge Cassant) may look reminiscent of Stein’s Tender Buttons (& thus, by inference at least, Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations), they’re nothing like them in tone or focus:

In fidelity we learn never to be consoled

*

No man, unless he be dead in living, can feel at anchor in this life.

*

How would the end justify the means? There is no end, only and forever the means, always more machinated.

 

However, these three poems could fit almost seamlessly into Of Being Numerous, George Oppen’s great poem of the same period. How is that possible? In what sense might these brief pieces conceivably capture the essence of Williams’ comment about beauty? If anything, the emotion of the first poem relies entirely on Char’s own obsessive commitment to fidelity in language, which is everywhere manifest in this volume.

It was Char, after all, who was Roland Barthes’ template of zero degree poetry in Writing Degree Zero, even if Barthes’ description sounds for all the world like early period Clark Coolidge. For Char does, like Zukofsky, like the best of Oppen, represent the turn toward language in the poem. Not in the aesthetic sense that one might think of, pointing to Baudelaire or Mallarmé or even Stein, but rather in the ethical one – where Char has a lot in common with Oppen, say, or with Ponge. Francis Ponge is the poet whom I’ve always thought of when I imagined a French equivalent for Objectivism. It is not simply his obsession with objects – “The Object is Poetics” the title of a key statement, intending very much both senses of that first noun – but the degree to which language & voice are intertwined in his thinking.

I don’t think of Ponge particularly when I think of Char, nor vice versa, but perhaps that’s a mistake on my part. Both were born within the same time frame as the Objectivists (dating from Reznikoff in ’94 through Oppen in ’08) – Ponge in ’99, Char in ’07. Both French poets died in 1988, four years after Oppen, a decade after Zukofsky.

All of these poets had their lives & careers disrupted by the Second World War. Char & Ponge were both active in the French Resistance. Oppen saw combat. In the U.S., the anti-communism & anti-semitism that led to the disappearance of most of the Objectivists from print & literary society between 1940 & 1962 prevented them from having the kind of international discovery of one another that one sees much more commonly today. It was, in fact, Cid Corman whose Origin first put both groups of poets together. But I don’t think I ever got the genius of Corman’s editing on this until I read Sobin’s translations.

As translations, they seem serviceable, but the appendix of variant translations – there are ten in all – tend to be more direct, more colloquial & more well constructed. Consider the opening lines of “Septentrion,” a word that is obsolete in English, refering to the North:

—Je me suis promenée au bord de la Folie.—

Aux questions de mon coeur,
S’il ne les posait point,
Ma compagne cédait,
Tant est inventive l’absence.

Here is the main translation from the body of the book:

—I walked along the edge of the Folie. —

To the unmentioned questions of my heart
My companion yielded,
So inventive is absence.

Here is the version from the appendix:

—I walked along the edge of the Folie. —

To the questions of my heart,
If none were forthcoming,
My companion yielded,
So inventive is absence.

I might have prefered “Which it failed to pose,” or even “Which I failed to pose” to “If none were forthcoming,” but there seems to me no way of avoiding the fact that Sobin’s earlier, rejected version is superior to the later “main” one. It better captures the cadence of Char’s logic that get irretrievably lost in inserting “unmentioned” into the first line of the second stanza. “Unmentioned” not only bloats the line, it’s a less exact rendering of Char’s original: unspoken would have been better.

This isn’t particularly a criticism of the book, however. Sobin has complete translations of the two volumes, and that’s what’s rendered here in the main body of the text. But he also has these other variations, some of which are considerably better than their counterparts in the completed project. One could have, I suppose, combined the two & only published the best versions. But this seems the much fuller view, showing Sobin approaching these poems not once, but twice. One wonders what cut short the earlier attempt. Either way, this is a wonderful book. Just be sure you read the appendix – some of the very best work is there.

In my note on Paul Auster’s poetry the other day, I wrote:

Auster’s work looks on its surface a little like New York School verse, especially of the uptown Columbia variant that looked more to Ron Padgett & John Ashbery than, say, to Ted Berrigan (who, so far as I’m aware, never published any translations¹).

The footnote admitted that “This virtually is an invitation to be corrected, and I’d love to be.” Several people wrote in, either via the comments stream or via email, including (among others) Jordan Davis, Tinker Greene, Ron Horning & Anselm Berrigan, pointing to a variety of instances of translation in Ted Berrigan’s work. What follows is a synthesis of these comments.

There is a translation of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre published by Adventures in Poetry with illustrations by Joe Brainard under the title The Drunken Boat that is also the basis for many lines throughout The Sonnets, especially the first I-VI and LXXIV. There are at least eight copies of this side-stapled mimeo volume currently available in used or rare book shops in the U.S., the very least expensive of which is $110.

Life of a Man is collected in the In the Early Morning Rain section of the Collected Poems tho it first appeared in Bean Spasms. The notes to the Collected characterize this sequence as “transliterated from Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Vita di un uomo.” The version in the Collected contains two poems not in Bean Spasms while dropping two others. In Nothing for You is a translation from Rilke called “Autumn’s Day.” Tinker Greene typed the whole thing into the Auster note comments stream.

In Easter Monday is a translation from Leopardi done as a collaboration with George Schneeman & Gordon Brotherston. There is another collaborative translation with Brotherston in the Collected, in a section right near the end entitled A Certain Slant of Sunlight Out-Takes is “Der Asra,” a working of Heinrich Heine’s poem of the same name. A chapbook of eight collaborative translations Berrigan & Brotherston did together is apparently in the works, under the title Water Under the House. In addition to these two poems I am told that there is a work by Neruda in that collection.

Compared with, say, Ron Padgett or Anselm Hollo, this is not a vast quantity and in some ways this is surprising. Translations invariably are a mode of forced collaboration, not just for the translated poet but for the translator as well. And Berrigan was easily the most collaborative poet of his generation – indeed many of our accepted ideas about what collaboration is can be traced directly back to Berrigan’s practice and the huge influence it has had over the last four decades. What we can say about the translations here is that they’re of poets who were already canonic before Berrigan got to them & that he’s very much following the Poundian model of using the process to access different modes of being. This is nowhere more true than in Life of a Man, in which the ex-GI Berrigan writes through the Italian poet of World War I. Further, as a Jew born in Alexandria, Egypt & raised partly in Paris, Ungaretti’s own relationship to his family’s ancestral home of Lucca is at least as complicated as that of the relatively unlettered Berrigan thrown in with all the Ivy-League graduates-turned-art-critics who populated the New York School.

Perhaps Adventures in Poetry should reissue The Drunken Boat. I’ve heard two people in the past week claim it to be second only to The Sonnets among Berrigan’s achievement & tho I’m a “late poem” guy myself, I take that as a serious claim. The other obvious book that should come out – I would be surprised to discover that nobody’s working on this – is a Collected Collaborations. Now that will be a volume to conjure by.

There is a moment in The Iliad when the useless devastation of war suddenly comes into focus, when all its associated bravery & implicit nobility is revealed as pointless & stands for the catastrophe it invariably is. The Iliad, after all, is the song of Ilium, or Troy, and there comes a moment when the destruction of Troy is inevitable, when it is clear to all concerned that Ilium has no future.

That moment is the death of Hector, firstborn son of the king, at the hands of Achilles. Hector understands the futility of his fight going into the match &, at his death, his father, Priam, bemoans the loss of his sons, Hector most of all, & Hector’s widow cries out not only for her dead spouse, but for the future that awaits their son Astyanax, of whom Homer says:

now his life is only filled
with misery and a pathetic path

This moment is the focal point of Iliad XXII, a stunning book & terrific translation by Lisa Jarnot, just published by Atticus Finch books of Buffalo. Of all the political acts against the current debacle in Iraq, this is surely the most elegant. Not simply because of the translation nor the production values (a new level of excellence for Michael Cross, who is rapidly joining the legendary fine press printers of Buffalo, NY, alongside Kristen Gallagher & Kyle Schlesinger), but because of the sly way this particular passage points out that Homer was clear 2800 years ago about some of the basic dynamics of history that so clearly elude W & his neocon brain trust.

Iliad XXII is fascinating not simply as political gesture. Lisa Jarnot has already demonstrated herself to be one of our most resourceful & talented poets. Her translation is doubly sly for the ways in which it calls up yet another bellicose rightwinger, one who in fact had more than a little interest in Homeric verse:

So then the Trojans
poured down through the city
and fled there like deer
that were brightened
with sweat,
and they drank
and they cooled down
their thirst,
and they
rested themselves
in the city’s embankments

and all of the troops of Achaeans
with their shoulders to steady their shields

and then there was Hector
where fate made him stay
in front of the city
and alone at its gate.

The first word of this passage is almost uniformly translated “Thus,” so that Jarnot’s insertion of a word favored by Ezra Pound – the two final words of Canto I are So that – hardly can be an accident.

Iliad XXII is not a Pound imitation. The style Jarnot adopts for the translation, however, falls clearly in a long line extending out from Pound, and which would include Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn’s great translation of The Poem of the Cid – one of the all-time major neglectorino texts – & others whom Jarnot herself thanks in a brief acknowledgements note. It is true, and not that often acknowledged, that right at the front of the Pound- Williams-Zukofsky tradition & that of the Projectivist poets who followed most closely in that same vein, right there in the very first Canto, lies a version of Homer. Which may be why this literary vein, among all others, has stood up so well as a mode for epic translation – contrast Blackburn’s Cid with the bloodless mess put forth by Bill Merwin. Jarnot stays close to this Pound/post-Pound tradition, tho she is capable of sounding positively beat, as when Athena comes to Hector in the guise of his younger brother:

“Sir
my elder brother,
Achilles of the swift foot
is working his bad shit on you,
chasing you around the city of Priam
in that sleek fast way that he has –
but come indeed
let’s stand here
and fend off
his next approaching.”

So this is not a Lisa Jarnot poem, even if it is a Lisa Jarnot work. It is, however, a translation that is turned in more than one direction: at Homer, at Bush & Co., at Pound, at an entire tradition of writing as a mode of literary transcription, at the questions of bravery & fate, and of the consequences of war, that leveler of civilizations, destroyer of families. That’s a lot to get into just two signatures of paper sewn into perfect-bound boards. But hardly anyone sets the bar for their work as high as Lisa Jarnot, and this is no exception.