Poetry
translation has been an essential element of your work. In Writing Through: Translations & Variations you speak of the difference between
translation and composition. Has your approach to translation changed over the
years? Do you view translation as a different mode of composition?
I view translation as a particular kind of composition (not always but certainly)
where the intention is to match a poem in one language with a fully present
poem in another. To do that I have to employ my full resources as a poet, while
remaining faithful to my sense of the other’s meanings and, as far as feasible,
their rhythms and my equivalents to those. Since, however, there are two
languages and poetic cultures involved here, there are certain changes that
inevitably come into play, sometimes quite minor but in other instances moving
us from simple translation into what Haroldo de Campos called “transcreation.”
To push this still further and to lend it some legitimacy, I tried in Writing Through to show the many ways in
which the words and voices of others could enter into my own poetry and form
the basis for new compositions at a nearer or further remove from theirs. At an
extreme I played with the idea that all
poetic composition was a form of translation, embedding the works and words of
the many poets who came before or side by side with us. I felt, as I was
compiling that collection, that our originality –my originality, to be more
precise– was not threatened by such broad-based influence from others but was
truly enhanced by it.
You
say that you came to think that "all poetic composition was a form of
translation" ... could you develop the idea.
The point of reference, which I wouldn’t want to
belabor too much, is where we feel ourselves to be working within a tradition or
lineage or as a singular part of a larger company of poets, past and present. That
calls already for a great deal of transference and absorption, naturalizing the writings of predecessor
poets and significant contemporaries, both foreign & domestic, into my own
tongue, as an act, to my thinking, of translation and closely related forms of appropriation,
what I’ve tried to cover elsewhere with a word like “othering.” Alongside more autonomous procedures of observation
and imagination, this has been crucial to me and puts me in conflict with
Harold Bloom’s well-known thesis of an “anxiety of influence” common to all poets
of any stature or status. For myself I
incline more toward Robert Duncan’s self-identification as a “derivative poet”,
welcoming and encouraging influences from every and all directions. Interacting
with Duncan, who became a close friend after our initial meeting in 1959, I
found his critique of “originality” a liberating force that would welcome other
voices into my own poetry and those assemblages like Technicians of the Sacred that were my clearest equivalents to what
Duncan spoke of elsewhere as a “grand collage.”
Along with that I attempted, at first with The Lorca Variations in 1990, to create a more specific linkage to
the works and words of others, and I realized that this was also an aspect of
translation and realized too that there was an undercurrent of translation in almost
everything we do as poets – the translation of all actions & things & thoughts
& feelings into language, along with the turning of one language into
another or moving from idiolect to idiolect within the same language..
Do
you think, like William Carlos Williams, that poetry should employ the same
speech patterns used in daily life? And should the poet also appropriate modes
of speech from other times and traditions?
All of the above, Javier, with the proviso
that the default language for today’s poetry –at least where I come from– is
that drawn from ordinary speech, and
yet, if you listen closely, you’ll realize that, as it’s fine-tuned by the
poet, it comes to the ear and mind as something extra-ordinary. Further, from my own experience, there are times
when I deliberately turn to something other than the speech patterns of
everyday life. The most obvious occasions involve the use of the obsolete
second-person pronoun (thou-thee-thine) in English, as in this mock-address to
the female aspect of God (Shekhina) in Jewish mystical tradition:
O Esther K. thou my semitic
beauty thou easter excellence
thou poor forsaken witness yet plyest thy
trade in peace!
Thou warmest a towel for the Governor.
Thou wearest a rose gown.
(A man, once come on business, learneth to
stay & bathe with thee.)
Thou eatest tripe & poppy seeds.
Thou sharest half thy bounty with the
rich.
But at other times I feel a need for that usage, as a proper form
of address to a forgotten Jewish Poland and to my role as what I jokingly
called “the last Yiddish poet,” writing only in English:
o poland thy
beer is ever made of rotting bread
thy silks are
linens merely thy tradesmen
dance at
weddings where fanatic grooms
still dream of
bridesmaids still are screaming
past their red
moustaches poland
When another poet later translated this into normative Yiddish, it
restored the second-person form of address (as it would also in Spanish), as an
example of a kind of counter-translation.
You have said
that you recall hearing songs at your local synagogue as a child, and listening
to African-American preachers on the radio. Did you sense, back then, that
there was something unique about that experience? Do you feel that these were defining
experiences in your future as a poet?
I can’t truly recall what I felt back then, but I know that what I heard
helped to shape my sense that there were vehicles for poetry beyond what I was
already reading on the printed page. Growing up when and where I did, it was
also possible to come on other forms of sung and chanted language, and my
predisposition was to attend to whatever I came across from a range of recorded
and live performances that were then becoming available. Years later David
Antin and I would play around with Rudyard Kipling’s equally playful lines, “There are nine and sixty ways of
constructing tribal lays, / And
every single one of them is right.” This was bringing us into a concern for
both “high” and “low” forms of expression, with a desire to break down the
barriers between them and to let each emerge as singular and unique. Only much
later did I realize that my own sense of originality came not from exclusion,
as I thought at first, but from the inclusion in any new poetics of as much of
the poetic past and present as was open and meaningful to me.
This bringing together of both “high”
and “low” forms of expression is a central aspect of your anthologies. 50 years
after the work you started in Technicians…, do you see a new
poetic dialogue happening between the wide-range poetries/poetics and the
mainstream? How can we build upon this foundation?
There are a number of intersections between different channels of
poetry, and I’ve thought increasingly of bringing more and more of these
together. That would of course include the mainstream or canonical as well, though
careful not to lose or weaken our sense of the transformative and transgressive
in the process. Where this came into full play for me was in yet another
gathering, the third volume of Poems for
the Millennium, where Jeffrey Robinson and I looked back at the nineteenth
century, to construct a new picture of Romanticism and post-romanticism on an
international scale. Here of course we included, or even foregrounded, the works
of canonical and easily recognized figures but attempted to see them anew as experimental
and disruptive, qualities that had been obscured in the passage from their time
to ours. What emerged for us was a continuum of poetry and poetics (Romanticism
linked to Modernism, and “inside” to “outside”) replete with changes and new
discoveries, where we were free to explore the fuller range of each poet’s
works (the “classics” included): Hoelderlin’s palimpsests along with his
finished poems, Coleridge’s fragments from the Gutch notebooks, Goethe’s
“theory of color” as vision and science, Poe’s book-length “prose poem” Eureka on the thin borderline between
poetry and physics. And alongside these and others we placed works by outsided
and non-literary figures, and we constructed additional sections such as “A
Book of Origins,” “Some Outsider Poets” and “Some Orientalisms.” Also, with an
ultimate omnipoetics in mind, I moved the work forward in a later addition to
the Millennium series: Barbaric Vast
& Wild: A Gathering of Outside and Subterranean Poetry from Origins to
Present. Having taken it this far, my hope is that other instalments will
develop what we’ve started here.
It's
interesting, for example, what happened (among others) with Dante, don't you
think? Once banished from his homeland, now he is seen as a part of the
"canon"...
Banishment of course is one extreme that many “canonical”
writers have faced somewhere along their journey, and many canonized writers
pass through a time of rejection or neglect before belated recognition. This is one of the themes in Barbaric Vast & Wild, my gathering
of “outside and subterranean poetry,” and it brings me back also to Gertrude
Stein’s account of the passage from “outlaw” to “classic” in typical Stein
fashion: "The creator of the new composition
in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in
between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator
but also very much too bad for the enjoyer, they all really would enjoy the created
so much better just after it has been made than when it is already a classic.” Here Stein, being Stein, is likely not
thinking of political extremes like banishment or imprisonment or assassination,
but the history of poetry is replete with those as well: a danger and terror
that continues into the present.
Your
anthologies have tried to preserve and present voices that, generally, are not
considered within the canon. I would like to address
Barbaric Vast and Wild. There, you gather
Coptic incantations, Greek sacred choirs, an epic of the American Sign
Language, twitter poems, visual and hallucinatory poetry, glossolalia, a sermon
of an African-American preacher-poet, microscripts, private and semi-private
correspondence, Krazy Kat cartoons, etc., which reveal poetry as (to put it in
your words) “the outside/outsider art par excellence”. Do you think poetry
should keep on pushing every boundary –artistic, human– to reach what Blake
called “The Palace of Wisdom”?
I don’t know that we ever reach
there nor that we should expect to, even if we think of our lives as a striving
in that direction. So, I’ve thought of poetry as a way always to move ahead and
always without an end in sight, “palace of wisdom” or otherwise. And I’ve been
possessed by an ambition to open poetry up to any and all of its possibilities,
but in particular to those language acts that have been ignored, occulted, or
suppressed. It’s in this way that I’ve come to speak of what some of us were
doing or exploring as an omnipoetics.
For me that began with Technicians of the
Sacred and with the launching through Technicians
of what I began to speak of then as an ethnopoetics. Here the immediate opening was to
language works or poetry from places and times that had been too easily spoken
of as “primitive” or “simplistic” or otherwise unformed and lacking.
By
contrast, then, the key terms for me were “complex” and “universal/global,” and
along with that I began approaching poetry not so much as a question of form or
technique but as what Tristan Tzara –our great Dada predecessor– spoke of as “a way of being, a state-of-mind, of spirit.” Or not to get too far away from the work itself –an act
of language over all– I began to use the Greek word poesis rather than poetry as such, to
name an active, open process, since poetry
seemed to suggest –qua literature– a
sense of closure that left too much out of the total picture or scheme.
So,
to get it said: I would take poesis
and assert it as perhaps the oldest way we have for exploring mind, usually with
ourselves as the experimental subject, related to objective/scientific
explorations of psyche but without the need for closure or generalization,
rather delighting in its particulars, one after the other, from poem to poem
and poet to poet. For which the essential tool of course is language, from dialect
to idiolect and back again.
Would
it be fair to say that this was the original source for the development of your
notion of “othering.” Could you tell us more about the importance of letting other
voices resonate in your own poems?
“Othering” is the word I use for
something quite similar to De Campos’s “transcreation,” but I’ve tried also to
let it represent a range of other moves I’ve made in the course of my life as a
poet. For me, anyway, the voices in the poem are not only those of poets I admire
but of those also who have no public voices of their own and for whom what I
write can sometimes serve as a conduit. In writing about this before, I’ve
often used as a point of departure the following lines from Whitman’s Song of Myself, in which he lets that
singular “self” include an entire world of voices:
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of
prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
This has clearly been important for
me in the series of big books –anthologies or assemblages– that I’ve composed,
beginning with Technicians of the Sacred and
concluding with Barbaric Vast & Wild
(“outside and subterranean poetry”). But maybe I feel it most sharply in Khurbn, the book-length series of poems
memorializing the Jewish holocaust of the last century, as a follow-up to my
earlier book, Poland/1931. Here it
was important to me to let the dead speak, either through voices that I
imagined or created, or, more importantly, through the testimonies of survivors
or in the words that many of the murdered scrawled on gas-chamber walls or left
behind on scraps of paper buried in the mud. If much of my poetry moves toward
a kind of experimental formalism, this sense of witnessing and testimony is
what those formalist procedures allow me to make happen. (At least I hope they
do.)
Can you speak of the transition from
your first exposure to poetry to your discovery of the experimental
breakthroughs of Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists, Jackson Mac Low, Fluxus, John
Cage and other defining modern figures?
My first inklings of Dada were in my mid-teens, when I began to read about
it as an art movement of the previous generation and was particularly struck, I
remember, by the references to the poetry-without-words that the artists had
been producing. The poets themselves, much less the poems, were near impossible
for me to come by –whether with words or without– until Robert Motherwell’s
book, The Dada Painters and Poets,
was published in 1951. This came, you must remember, at a time when “official
verse culture” in the United States had turned against the experimental
modernists and avant-gardists of the generation before, which made Motherwell’s
book even more of an eye-opener (a mind-opener to be exact) for many of us. The
relation of Dada to Surrealism was also of interest, but a grittier and less
oppressive version as it came to us. It was enough anyway to bring Tzara into
our line of site, along with Picabia and Schwitters and Duchamp, among a cast
of hundreds. Still, it would take nearly a decade for me to get a true grip on
all of that, going as far as to plan, in 1960, a volume that would bring a full
range of Dada poets into a single book –something that we didn’t have in
English, and maybe not even now. I was, anyway, going to call it That Dada Strain (after a jazz standard
of that name) and publish it through my own small press, Hawk’s Well; but sadly
it didn’t happen and I saved the title for still another decade and a book of
my own poems, addressed in part to those I called “the Dada fathers.” By then
things had changed for me. I met and became close with Jackson Mac Low –I hope
to our mutual advantage– and found the New York Fluxus people in easy range, largely
I thought in the orbit of John Cage. So, by the mid-60s there was a neo-Dada
feeling in the air, along with the surviving modernisms and the postmodernisms
that coalesced with thoughts and yearnings of my own. With all of these I felt
something in common that I still find hard to define, but I came to realize
that what I had done on my own in Technicians
linked me to a range of poets and artists, at home and abroad, and that what I
finally aimed to do was to treat each one as unique and simultaneously, within
my own limits, to bring them all together.
[And I would add here,
as an afterthought, that in the first volume of Poems for the Millennium, Pierre Joris and I were able to bring
Dada and its major participants into the picture we were projecting – for me
the fulfillment of what I had attempted thirty years before.]
You have spoken before about the way
in which singing/song opened new possibilities for you. Can you tell us
something about that moment of “discovery” and the work that emerged for you in
its wake?
In some languages (Hebrew and Japanese, for example) the same word is
used for both song and poetry, and while English, like Spanish, favors two
distinct words, the use of “song” to mean “poem” (as in Whitman’s Song of Myself) is certainly common
enough. So that is something we inherit from our literature as such, even if it
causes us to forget still other sources for poetry, like speaking and talking
and writing. For myself, as I began to explore the possibilities of poetry as
language art, with an eye and ear in search of origins, I found the range of
oral poetries –of poetries in particular in cultures without writing – to be an
area that needed further exploration. I pursued this through some of what had
already been transcribed by others, but I also turned to transcriptions and
translations of my own. What followed and
took me by surprise was that I was able to push what I began calling “total
translation” to include not only non-semantic sounds (mislabelled “non-sense”)
but, as a final step, to translate the indigenous music of the original songs
into a music of my own. The key work for me came in the early 1970s with the
translation of a series of Navajo Indian horse-blessing songs, where I translated
and thereby transformed or “transcreated” (to use Haroldo de Campos’s word) all
sounds I was aware of in the Navajo versions. But the greater surprise –for me
at least– was when I began to perform and re-oralize those translations and several
others: an experience of poetry at a level I had never known before.
What
about performance? That original energy that unlocks the corporal, sonic,
visionary suppressed by tradition or other intermediaries… how do you conceive
this process?
The “search for the primitive,” as
Stanley Diamond had it, brought us back to the oral and performative aspects of
poetry, which had been developing independently. And in our practice as well –
though Kelly, say, spoke of it more then than I did– rhythm and sound were absolutely
essential, and lineation in its various forms was clearly an issue. Still, some
of that remains mysterious to me, particularly how what you seem to be talking
about emerges for me in the act of performing, when something arises, with or without
premeditation, and leaves me with a sense of wonder, even more so than deep
image, I suppose. This anyway was the other great power of poetry to which I
called attention, certainly in Technicians
of the Sacred but in theoretical writings and in my own performance
practice as well. I would stress, though, that this wasn’t only a matter of
spontaneity but of a degree of premeditation and planning, in particular when I
was working with others –musicians and actors foremost –which called for
considerable work and attention “to get it right.” Like much else in my life as
a poet, performance was largely self-taught, learning from a lineage of poets
and artists who had come before me but also from the practice of those who were
my contemporaries and compadres for the work at hand: musicians like Charlie
Morrow and Bertram Turetzky; theatrical artists like The Living Theater and its
offshoots; Klaus Schoening who commissioned and produced two radio sound-plays
of mine for WestdeutscherRundfunk in Cologne. For that matter composition
–poem-making– can also be premeditated, and in later years in particular I’ve
often been involved with procedural operations alongside more spontaneous and
improvisational forms of writing and performing. In the end our fullness as sentient
beings is dependent on both.
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