[NOTE. The following
commentary was written to accompany a series of poems commisioned &
prepared for "Trans-Poetic Exchange: A Colloquium on Haroldo de Campos and
Octavio Paz's poem 'Blanco'" at Stanford
University
The crux of the matter here was Haroldo de Campos’s theory and practice of transcreation, something that was very much on my mind since our first meetings in
My strategy here was to turn, as Haroldo had before me, to the original “Blanco,” so as to further the earlier act of transcreation with a transcreative work of my own. I looked in doing so to a form of othering that I had begun to practice two decades before – in a series of poems, “The Lorca Variations,” derived from the vocabulary of my own translations of García Lorca’s early Suites. In those I systematically used all of Lorca’s nouns (in my English translation) as nuclei from which to compose new poems. Moving from poem to poem I arranged the translated nouns in four or five columns and proceeded to link the words in something like reverse order, with results like the following, both Lorca and not-Lorca, both mine and not-mine:
The Lorca Variations XV
“Water Jets”
1
If
death once had a face
the
water from this water jet
has
wiped it out,
the August air has left
no trace of it,
like
other fountains
or
other faces from your home town
that
the sunlight & the water jet
drive
from your room.
Things
leave our eyes no boundaries here
other
than dreams, no dreams
still
precious to your heart,
its
carved interior shot through with corners,
into
which a grapevine grows,
fed
by the water jet your fingers
once
turned on, made it a place of clouds,
the
perfect death’s head still inside it,
&
that a water jet wipes out.
2
It’s
night.
In
the garden our hearts have turned blue.
A
maid opens the water jet, lets water & roses spill out.
A
century passes.
Pianos
circle the earth, dark swords slice arteries.
No
dust on your windows, just blood.
In
the garden four gay caballeros trade swords.
A
cloud breaks apart & starts quaking.
It’s
night.
And for Paz’s “Blanco”
the following:
BLANCO
2: A VARIATION IN FIVE SEGMENTS FOR OCTAVIO PAZ
1. A clarity | of all the senses | lingers |
leaving on the mouth & face | a white precipitation | sculptures
crystal-thin | blank space | translucid whirlpools
2.
Is it a pilgrimage | that brings us | dancing in a ring | into a forest | where
our thoughts | are white | the only signs | our steps | that break the silence
3. Green would be better | a slim defile |
through which we pass | an archipelago | the shadow of a syllable | a white
reflection
4. Is it red | or is it blue | this dazzlement | that blinds us | numbers |
dancing in the void | like things | a
final clarity | no longer white
5. Thoughts fade | winds cease| forgetfulness
erases truth | there is a deeper music in the words we speak | yellow isn’t
white | & amethyst | is just a color
2/
If the Blanco
variations published here and written for the occasion of the Stanford
conference were my homage to Paz, in the case of Haroldo de Campos I brought
forward a series of poems composed several years before and displaying a quite
different form of othering. That series,
which I called “Antiphonals” for obvious reasons, was part of a commission from
Francesco Conz, a great collector and publisher of Fluxus and other avant-garde
art and poetry, for poems to be written by hand on a series of large colored
photo portraits of Haroldo. As my contribution to what was conceived as a group
tribute, I took phrases & lines from English translations of Haroldo’s
poetry & responded to them with loosely rhymed soundings of my own. I then
handwrote the poems pair by pair onto a black left margin on each of the
photographs. In the typographical version, Haroldo’s words appear in italics,
while mine are shown in roman type. For me at least, the resultant work has the
feel of translation/transcreation – as still another instance of othering.
Two such instances follow:
the malice
of the
mastery
the chalice
of her
chastity
.
weary
weary
weary
and a fury
dreary
dreary
dreary
in missouri
All of this of course is not
unfamiliar to other poets and is part of what we mean when we speak not only of
translation as such but of related procedures such as collage and
appropriation. I am willing enough to
extend all of these techniques so as to consider the consequences of viewing
all our works (even the most “original” and “self-expressive” ones) as aspects
of such a deeply human procedure.
Language is and always has been an aspect of our work in common, and
there is a sense here, as I’ve stated often before, in which all translation
and all of its related acts involve a kind of implicit collaboration – at least
in the mind of the translator. I am very
much aware of this, however one-sided it may often seem, and I have sometimes
let myself believe that all our writing, all our poetry, is an activity shared
by all who are the users and makers of our common language. This idea of a communally driven poetry – of
the poem, however individual or unique, as simultaneously what Pound called “a
tale of the tribe” – has held my attention even when I felt it to be
false. In a world in which that kind of
unity is again under fire, I would continue thinking in those terms, wherever
it may take me.
No comments:
Post a Comment