WANTING TO RUN

I didn't start this blog to piss people off, but somehow or other I've managed to alienate a few people at various times because of things I've said, or not said, in my posts.

After my entry yesterday, David wrote to me & said that regardless of my changed tastes, saying that I read what he's written & want to run is a shitty thing to say to a friend.

I'm not sure why that's the case, but even so, I recognize that I didn't explain myself--my wanting to run--very well. I certainly didn't mean for it to bring anything to bear on our friendship, and neither did I mean for it to have anything to do with David either as a writer or as a person.

Instead, I think it comes down to my own insecurities & discomforts about my changing--not changed--ideas about poetry, along with my insecurities and discomforts about the fact that I haven't been writing for the past four years.

I came back to the US from Paris and admitted that I was bored with the poetry I’d been writing. I hadn’t been putting much energy into it, and so I thought I’d take a break for a month. That month has lasted for four years, with only a handful of scraps to the contrary (I began this blog half a year ago with a promise to write every day, a promise I have definitively not kept). I’m certainly not comfortable with this fact, and what I think back on is not my boredom with my writing, but my realization the year after graduation from college that I could write a certain kind of poem very easily and very well, but that I wanted to push myself further. And yet in the next three years, I failed to. Failed to even try. So no wonder I got bored with what I was writing, to say nothing of bored with what I was reading (or more appropriately, bored with what I wasn’t reading).

Add to all that all the questions about what academics and institutionalization adds to poetry, and where I am, and about all the clichés and truisms about academics and translators as poètes manqués, and the source of my insecurities comes out. If that isn’t enough, I also have to worry about the kind of poetry I research & write about: is it edgy enough? is it radical enough? is it engaged enough? As if engaged or radical or edgy meant anything in medieval China! And yet, here I am wondering if my own presentation of self as poet and translator and academic and reader all adds up.

Why exactly does this make me want to run from David's poetry? Well, I should probably say first that it doesn’t, completely. I've read four of David's recent poems: two I liked, and two I didn’t. But what I did want to run from, especially in the latter two, was the comfort, the ease that I found there. I’m obviously a pretty anxious and agitated person—features of myself that produce more agitation and anxiety—and I seem to be wanting agitated and anxious poetry. And at the same time, the intimacy, the sincerity, the seductiveness of David's writing is also something I think writing should be. And so there is an anxiety in there after all (a tension, we could call it, that is in the end unresolved), and at the same time I look into that anxiety and that tension and see calmness and comfort, and I know that that isn’t what I want my poetry to be. But insofar as my poetry isn’t anything, what can I do? I could face all this, or I could say I want to run.

So in the end, I'm afraid of David's poetry. I'm afraid of the poetry of any friend of mine whose writing is both better than I could do and yet not what I want poetry to be. I'm not sure if that's a shitty thing to say to a friend; I do think it's a shitty way to be as a person. But in the end, the truth of it says a lot about me and very little about anyone or anything else.

THE NEW YEAR

We've just returned to New Haven from three weeks of family time in northern California & Chicago. Some new books, too, that I'm looking through or about to, by W. Somerset Maugham, Tony Fitzpatrick, Robert Creeley, & others.

We also had lunch with my college friends, Jen (née Heinlein) & David Keeling, who have been living in Chicago for the past few years. After a MSW from the University of, Jen staid in Chicago to do social work and fight the good fight, while David has been the midwest office for an organization setup to accredit career-switchers into public school systems, such as the Chicago Public Schools, also fighting the good fight. And as of January 2nd, David has reduced his work-week to a supereuropean thirty hours so he can spend his mornings writing. He's chronicling some of his experiences & more of his thoughts on his blog, A Writing Year, which I'm including to my list of links, to the right.

David was one of the best writers I knew at college, and while his practice has probably decreased--compelling him towards his MFA-of-one in the mornings of '07--from what I've seen of his writing, his talent has not. And yet, for reasons of my own, I was much more willing to respond to David's writing seven years ago than I am today. Simply, my tastes have changed, have been pushed beyond where I could even conceive of them being while I was at Middlebury. For instance, I would have considered myself & my reading habits to be some variation of modernist, postmodernist, and / or avant-garde while in college, but at the time I only had access (that is, mental access) to Ezra Pound as the avatar of that kind of writing. After graduation, I came across (from the essays of Eliot Weinberger, primarily) names like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and so on (to say nothing of Rachel Blau du Plessis, Clayton Eshleman, and Jerome Rothenberg, to say nothing of the non-Americans), and all of a sudden my own stable standing as an avant-gardiste who knew little beyond Pound & Williams seemed pretty feeble. So now when I come back to David's poetry, which is a fine example of School of Quietude craft and focus, I sense a distance that I didn't sense before. In college, David & I would let each other read our poems and I might feel envious; today, I read what he's written, and I want to run.

I wonder what he would think about that. I'll have to ask him.

UPDATES

I have a few publications to boast about.

First, the current issue of Twentieth Century Literature includes my review of Eric Hayot's Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. I think this might be my first official academic publication, at least judged chronologically from the time of printing.

Another review of mine was printed on the Zoland Poetry site, a review of two versions of the Laozi 老子, Thomas Meyer's translation titled daode jing, and David B. Axelrod's poetic re-configuration, Another Way: Poems derived fromthe Tao Te Ching. Both of these reviews give a bit of autobiographical detail from when my interest in learning Chinese first developed.

The most recent publication is in the new Rain Taxi, of Keith Waldrop's The Flowers of Evil, a verset translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. My favorite thing about review is the serendipity about the fact that in the review I wrote for the previous Rain Taxi, of Jacques Roubaud's The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart, translated by Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop, I wrote “Roubaud can lead to Baudelaire, for instance, just as Baudelaire leads to Roubaud.” And the next review I write is of a Waldrop translation of Baudelaire. If I were in a Pynchon novel, I’d come across Waldrop's translation of “the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal heart” in Flowers of Evil and think it was more than a coincidence.

Also in the new issue of Rain Taxi is an interview with Steve Bradbury done by Shin Yu Pai. They even mention CipherJournal, and me by name! Steve was the one who introduced the Taipei Poetry Festival to me, giving me a chance for extra pay and more translation publications. The translations were published in the festival volume, Images of the World, Songs from the Soul: Selections from the Taipei International Poetry Festival, edited by Hung Hung 鴻鴻.

I'm also adding two new blogs to my links list, to the right. The first is an academic blog I enjoy, Culture Industry (or Kulturindustrie). The second is one I think will turn out to be very important, the International Exchange for Poetic Invention.

CLICHED IN TRANSLATION

I came across a review in the LA Times of Robert Fagles's new translation of The Aeneid, linked from Ron Silliman's blog. I've written before about clichés in translation, but perhaps a larger problem--at least insofar as increasing the readership of translations in general is concerned--is the use of clichés in book reviews of translations. Consider this, how Thomas Cahill opens his review:

Now here's an unrewarding subject: translation. The Italians have it right when they insist "traduttore traditore," for every translator is, of necessity, a traitor to the original text. Robert Frost hit the nail on the head: When asked what poetry is, he said it's what's lost in translation.

Cahill, the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, has strung up three clichés in a row. As always, the problem with clichés is not their veracity--each of these sentences presents an undeniable, and undeniably boring, truth--but rather their lame attitude towards truth. Rather than digging further into what makes these phrases true--or more interestingly, what makes them false--the author of a cliché asserts the most mundane and limited fact imaginable, all the while thinking that he's really clever for his observations and his phrasing.

I don't expect that a book reviewer would have read scholarship on literary theory or translation studies. I don't think that only someone familiar with, say, Lawrence Venuti's books can write an effective review of literature in translation. But when the highest praise that Cahill can give to Fagles is, "This work, this miraculous beast of a text, is so enjoyable that you will hardly know you are reading an ancient masterpiece," he's coming very close to the kind of ethic that Venuti argues against in The Translator's Invisibility: if we forget that we are reading an ancient masterpiece, if we forget that we are reading a translation, then we are pretending that all the world throughout time acts and thinks and feels and speaks the way that we do now. And if that's the case, then what do we need translation for, anyway?

Sure, I understand that Cahill means only to praise Fagles for producing a translation that is lively rather than staid, relevant rather than dusty, and these are all qualities I look for in literature--especially translation--too. But by relying on so many clichés, Cahill's own writing is staid and dusty. By praising Fagles's translation by saying it seems like something it is not, then anyone who reads the Aeneid after reading Cahill's review is reading it in spite, not because, it is a translation. Is this how the publishing world plans to introduce more translations and push past the myopia of the American book consumer?

I have no idea if Fagles's Aeneid is any good (with my tastes, I have a hard time imagining anybody's Aeneid is any good). Based on what Cahill and other reviewers have written, it appears to contain passages of great strength. But if that strength is not also matched by strong reviewers and strong readers, then we have the impotence of someone who fled the Trojan war and languished at sea, never reaching another peninsula to found another empire, let alone descend into the underworld to emerge through the Gates of Horn.

TRANSLATIONS ON THE PICKET LINE

Last week we went to a rally to protest working conditions at a laundry facility nearby. Our chants went back and forth between English and Spanish, further testament to how much I need to learn that language. A write-up in the paper described the bilingual chanting like this:

Chanting catchphrases like "No contract, no peace" and "The people united will never be conquered" alternately in Spanish and English, 110 protesters - including a trio of New England Linen Supply workers - marched up and down Derby Avenue.

As should be obvious to anyone who's ever witnessed a left-wing rally, the phrase in English would be "The People / United / Will never be defeated." It rhymes--or comes close to rhyming--better that way, though in Spanish the exact linguistic equivalents are going to have to be fudged for the purposes of chantability. Of course, the unwitting writer of the above-quoted article has stumbled onto an interesting question of translation theory: what is the relationship between absolute accuracy and pre-established conventions, in this case the convention of chanting?

As I wrote in a comment to the What in the Hell blog recently, Spanish is a much more chantable language than English. My favorite chant at the rally went like this:

New England Linen / Escucha / Estamos en la lucha

The first three words were pronounced with a Spanish accent, so before I asked my Bolivian-American union organizer friend what we were saying, I had to keep my mouth shut ("estamos en la lucha" I could figure out from what French I know, and eventually I picked up on "escucha," but I couldn't guess at what sounded like nu inlanli nen might mean). Here, of course, we have a different example of translation theory in praxis: how do foreign words get nativized so as to match conventions, in this case the convention of pronunciation?

In fact, "The people united will never be conquered" and "New England Linen" represent opposite ends of the same continuum. The strange is made familiar, while the familiar is made strange. And if the management of New England Linen could listen to the voices of its employees and offer liveable wages and benefits, then perhaps what is strange and what is all too familiar could be left behind.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN

Someone pointed out that, in my write-up of Venepoetics, where I mentioned my enthusiasm for Spanish poetry & translators from Spanish, I missed Clayton Eshleman. Particularly egregious because of his Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, newly out from University of California Press, I was set to wondering why I might have overlooked Clayton when coming up with my list.

The easy answer is that it was a sin of omission, rather than commission: I didn't exclude him, I just left him out. I was writing quickly, I think, and picked a few of my favorites. But certainly Clayton should have been close to the front of my mind: I've published a number of pieces of his--both prose and poetry--on CipherJournal, and we've long been in corespondence.

But as a translator of Spanish, while Clayton is certainly a master, and no one has done as much to fill the Vallejo gap in English, for some reason he doesn't register in my mind. This is odd, because the first Eshleman book translation I read was Tricle, but for a number of reasons, I think I see Clayton more as a translator of French than of Spanish, as a writer more associated with French rather than Spanish culture. This is emphatically not to downplay the significance or quality of his Spanish translations, but rather to up-play the significance of French culture to Clayton, and also to raise a question about national definitions and connotations.

The first book of Clayton's that I read was From Scratch, but I didn't then have the New American wherewithal to understand his post-projectivist poetics. After returning from France, where I learned about the lasting importance of Surrealism and its later developments, and where I had also tried my hand at translating a few of Aimé Césaire's poems, I bought Clayton's big book of Césaire's poetry, and set to reading it. I had that book in my bag, coincidentally, when I met Clayton for the frist time.

But is that enough for me to associate Clayton with French, or with France? (what would Césaire think about such a prospect?) Is Surrealism a French phenomenon, or is it a universal phenomenon with French characteristics? Or, especially in its Négritude moments, is it an anti-French phenomenon, with French hearing being read as controlled, rational, and refined? I'm not sure that I can answer these questions, except to say that from Baudelaire to Derrida so much of French literature seems to be aimed at dismantling the limits of the French identity; that these have since become the hallmarks of that very French identity seems to me to be a very large irony indeed.

In addition, or perhaps supporting, Clayton's Surrealism is Clayton's investment and investigation in cave paintings, most of which are physically locating in France. That the physical location isn't as important as the psychic location in Clayton's poetry is obvious, nonetheless, even if it's nothing more than that I know Clayton and Caryl lead cave tours in southern France, I think this may also contribute to my linking of Clayton to French culture.

And yet, how far can this go, really? Not only is Surrealism beyond mainstream French culture, so is Upper Paleolithic cave art, only accidentally within the borders of what we now call France. Or, to look at it the other way, if we expand the parameters of what can be meant by "French," then perhaps all Latin-American poetry since Breton went to Mexico is French, too. Césaire is French and Paz is French and Cortázar is French and Vallejo is certainly French. But if French culture extends this far, is it reduced to nothingness?

All that matters, in the end, is Clayton's poetry:

Now that you are showering, cables of water convert, ghost-loaded suds, Rabelais's mane furls from Aphrodite's thigh...

THE TECHNOLOGY OF WRITING

When Nathaniel Mackey came, he talked about the relationship between how he writes and how he reads aloud. He pointed to a passage in Paracritical Hinge, in the chapter called "Sight-Specific, Sound Specific...":

This is the poem performing on the stage the page amounts to (and on the stage the reader's mind amounts to by way of the page). I don't, however, feel obligated to read the poem aloud in the manner such placement might suggest--obligated or even able. What, after all, do varied margins sound like? (What, for that matter, does an unvaried margin sound like?) To avail oneself of graphic amenities peculiar to the page is not to disallow the poem behaving differently when read aloud but to recognize that it does. The ultimate untransmissibility of vocal dynamics timbre, accent, pace, volume, inflection, and so forth) by print--and vice versa--makes variance inevitable. The poem's articulation is as various as its locations.

From there, he went on to how writing the way he writes has gotten more difficult over time. That sentence is not meant in a metaphyisical way, but in a material way: with an electric typewriter, he could drop a word to the next line and hang an indent at the push of a literal button. Now he has to use tabs and spaces and eyeball it to get the same effect. A step forward for technology, but backward for the technology of experimental poetry.

We may be used to thinking about the effect of technological and material developments on poetry. We may understand how the declining price of paper allowed for formal poetic practices now considered second-nature, such as line-breaks. When Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 prefaces a batch of twenty poems with "紙墨遂多。辭無詮次。聊命故人書之。以為歡笑爾。 The paper and ink have multiplied, words without order or sequence. I've asked for an old friend to rewrite them, so we can laugh and delight in them," we might remember how much a hermit in fifth century China must have paid for such pleasure.

But we may not be used to thinking about how technology affects our own writing habits. Now that paper is so cheap and available that we don't even need to use it for poetry, we face other constrictions in word-processors and html. I told Mackey that when I typed up his poem in my last post on this blog, I couldn't get the right justification based on spaces alone. Instead, I had to fill in the spaces with periods, and then color them the same as the background. In other words, I had to write this:

.....................................Flesh beginning
to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,
.....................................................breath
an abiding chime, chimeless,
...........................................bells
had we been................................
rung ......................................................

so I wouldn't have this:

Flesh beginning
to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,
breath
an abiding chime, chimeless,
bells
had we been
rung

If technology is debilitating, rather than facilitating, advancements in poetry, it may be because the owners of technological advancement are not interested in poetry, let alone poetic advancement. We could, of course, compose our poems in programs like Quark rather than Word, laying-out our writing more than typing, or even writing (though perhaps better than processing). The page/stage freedom there, of course, comes with a certain technical savoir-faire (or, as my dad sez, subway fare), which is not exactly the kind of democratizing trend that we imagine both technology and poetry to have prepared us for. And if the owners of technological advancement are de-democratizing poetry, then what will happen (and what has happened) to the other areas of cultural production under the ownership of similar technocrats and businesspeople?