Two of the comments on my recent post stood out from among the others in the tone they struck. They were the ones that generated the dynamic of this particular thread. As obviously as Horace Engdahl was wrong about America and its relation to world literature, the questions that arose seemed to turn upon why he was wrong. One of the two commentators offered to eat his hat, while the other suggested Denmark and Switzerland were irrelevant in terms of the larger picture.
Both seem, unfortunately, to provide adequate justification for Engdahl’s hauteur. The first would do away with literary merit as a viable paradigm; the second – the hat-eater – would do away with the countries in which these books are written, implying that they are “mental fantasies”.
My problem (doubtless self-assigned) is to attend to what kind of generalizations I can make. (But I must say ahead of time that I love generalizations, the architecture of them, and the way they combine the heroic with the fragile. They are both sweeping and utterly provisional. More like the weather above a landmass than the landmass itself.)
This is why I sympathize with the hat-eater and the nation state-denier. They do not back away from making large, cranky statements.
First Boyd Nielson:
“But I think what needs to be questioned even more than whether U.S. poets actually do have any dialogue with x or y country is whether (and why) there should be such a thing in the first place. If country x and y are both rich, prosperous nations, does it really make a difference that their literature is being ignored in mainstream or small press publications of the United States? In fact (if we can do the impossible of suspending for just a moment absolutely endless arguments about literary merit) it seems to me that the only conceivable reason as to why any literature anywhere should be translated and attended to is not to provide a (fair) representative selection of what’s going on around the world but rather to engage in a dialogue with what is happening in (crucial) particular regions. And I care much less about what is happening in Denmark or Switzerland than I do about, say, Bolivia or Chile or Zimbabwe. Let’s even throw Israel in…”
What strikes me first is that Mr. Nielson would substitute “literary merit” for political merit. This seems to be part of a larger shift in the way Americans read and evaluate literature – a shift which I have watched from afar for the last twenty-five years. Harold Bloom has spoken about the flight from the aesthetic. I recall with a certain nostalgia (hardly an appropriate critical tool) my own endless discussions with poet-friends when we were all undergraduates together in the late seventies ranking minor 16th century poets as though they were our contemporaries. Politics never came into it. Bloggers these days seem to studiously avoid any mention of Skelton and Nashe. That hurts. I’ve spent my reading life mostly in previous centuries. It was Wallace Stevens, after all, who wrote in Adagia that “Poetry is the scholar’s art.” And yet translation, for Mr. Nielson, should, like a newspaper, tell us “what is happening in (crucial) particular regions,” a shifting paradigm to which Zimbabwe has obviously just recently been added, and Israel thrown in, for the heck of it. My first instinct is to challenge Mr. Nielson to show me the Zimbabwean poets worth reading, but I think that probably evades the point, and, indeed there must be some good Zimbabwean poets writing in the midst of hyper-inflation, cholera, utterly failed governance and a fetid political atmosphere contrived of a hybrid of tribalism and the worst versions of inherited European nationalism. Some of them, these hypothetical poets, might, for all I know, be students of Kierkegarrd. Finally, if “rich and prosperous nations like Denmark and Switzerland” are of no interest in terms of translation (though I hope we could make an exception for Max Frisch), then we must unfortunately discount American literature as well, which comes from the richest and most prosperous nation of all.
Fortunately Mr. Bloomberg-Reissman solves the problem once and for all. Responding to comments by Henry Gould and James Stotts, he has the following to say:
“I don’t understand why noticing that the “US is not a single literary or cultural agglomeration” is silly. That the US is a melting pot or whatever is a fiction that became obvious as a fiction years and years ago. I also think that your notion that nations are “mental fantasies” is truer than you’d like to believe. F’rinstance, think of all those folks from Hegel thru Heidegger and their notions of Germanness; if those weren’t mental constructs I’ll eat my hat. Which doesn’t mean that there was/is not such thing as the state of Germany. Or that French writers can be distinguished from German ones. James notes that whether or not nations are constructs, they are not idle constructs. What more do you want?
…. I do think that translations aren’t worthless, however, and help expand one’s sense of what writers in other parts of the world are doing, etc.”
Remind you of anything? Frank O’Hara’s litany of ironic banalities in “The Day Lady Died”: “…and buy / an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days…” The problem is there is no ironic lining in Mr. Bloomberg-Reissman’s “what writers in other parts of the world are doing, etc.” As with Mr. Neilson, world poetry here is just part of the news.
Frankly these are exactly the kinds of attitudes that play into Engdahl’s hands: that for many American writers foreign literatures, just as the counties in which they are originally published, exist only as theoretic constructs and excuses for reductive thinking – namely seeing literature (one kind of social construct) as equivalent to politics and sociology (social constructs in their own right, but with entirely different performative expectations).
Neither Mr. Nielson’s failed-state solution, nor the no-state solution of Mr. Bloomberg-Reissman help us to put Engdahl in his place, or really tell us anything at all about literary translation. In both their versions translations are seen as instrumental, to be valued for what they can tell American readers about themselves and their ideas of the world at large. Most of the particularities of difference, which the best of translators fight to preserve, and which for Derrida was the semiotic and ontological basis of reading, or more simply put, the reason why one text is not another text, are, as they say, Lost in Translation. Walter Benjamin noted that real translation is transparent, that it doesn’t block the light of the original.
What Engdahl is actually saying is that Americans are incapable of empathy, that their monumental national identity (which is as powerful on the left as it is on the right) is neatly encapsulated in the individual citizen, preventing him from understanding, and so talking with the world at large. George Bush’s “You’re either with us or against us” is the ur-statement par excellence of this particular form American exceptionalism.
Engdahl’s is not necessarily my own view, but for the purposes of illustration, bear with me while I play the devil.
One of the signal experiences in my own slow enculturation into, at the time, a fairly new setting, occurred in 1992 during the first bi-annual poetry festival at the University of Coimbra (“Encontros Internacionais de Poetas”) where I was employed as a leitor (or lecturer in the English idiom, a kind of highfalutin adjunct in American terms). This was my first exposure to American academics and writers en masse since arriving in Europe seven or so years before. Of course there were many poets from other nationalities as well, but I was most curious about the Americans. I was hungry, so to speak, for the news.
The lighter, and the funnier of the two incidents that frame my memory of this now distant event occurred when, on the first afternoon, Charles Bernstein walked into the Biblioteca Joanina, one of the University of Coimbra’s most emblematic edifices, and gazed up at the rows of leather-bound tomes shelved close to the elaborately painted ceiling about ten meters above floor level, and said: “Oh, so this is what they mean by high culture.” His statement, funny at first, seemed to be, upon reflection, an expression of self-consciousness, a natural human response in such a grandiose setting. He certainly had to say something, and because he was Charles Bernstein, he certainly wasn’t going to express any sentiment of awe. Instead, there seemed to be a pressing need to reduce the unfamiliar to a version which he and his courtiers could accommodate. It was a “made in America” joke and stamped “for American consumption only”. For me, it seemed to set the tone. The Americans (that year, represented by a strong contingent from the University of Buffalo) were going to persist in being American until the bitter end.
The second incident, graver in terms of protocol (the power of which should never be underestimated) and seedier in terms of all those human values summed up by that inimitable French term, politesse, involved the late Robert Creeley. A large group had gathered in the city’s most splendid arcade, which shaded the audience from the afternoon heat, to listen to one of those interminable readings by half a dozen poets reciting in a half a dozen languages. Even the multi-lingual Europeans were in the dark. The Americans from Buffalo must have felt like they were trapped in some kind of eternal Latin mass. Afterwards there was the usual question and answer period, which was pretty quickly commandeered by one of Portugal’s last remaining truly world-class poets, Ramos Rosa, a dotty, chain-smoking bard with his resin-stained mustache and seersucker suit. He held forth for much too long in four languages all of them fluently spoken, but all of them severely mumbled. This proved too much for Robert Creeley, Ramos Rosa’s only counterpart in terms of poetic seniority at the Festival. After about twenty minutes of R.R.’s interminable polyglot gabbling (out of which some gems did emerge) our American elder statesman jumped from his perch and in resounding, heart-stoppingly pure American, shouted: “Enough of this shit!”
Robert Creeley – maybe it was the heat – seemed to be exhibiting signs of what computer programmers (perhaps the true poets of our age) refer to as being “export-crippled”. That is, he had been sent abroad suffering from diminished cryptographic strength in order to comply with the United State’s Export Administration Regulations; EAR, for short.
As a supplement to your post, I think it is interesting to consider whether the European influence on American letters in the latter half of the 20th Century might not seem deficient in our fiction and poetry only because it appears so pronounced elsewhere, in a domain that, in terms of institutional prestige if not general cultural recognition, is the more salient and powerful, and–who knows–perhaps the more enduring. I am speaking, of course, of criticism. Your own nod to Derrida and Benjamin, which in a “serious” discussion of translation feels de rigeur, lends traction to my point. We don’t read Baudelaire; we read “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” We don’t dally with Mallarme; instead, we wade through the tortuous currents of Dissemination (or, at least, we dip into it enough to say that we have). Of course, this is just an idle generalization. All the same, I am repeatedly led, particularly in my encounters with the literary avant-garde, to wonder where our contemporary literature would be without the gravitas lent it by habits of a critical vocabulary, habits that remain, for the most part, exterior to the works themselves.
Posted By: Benjamin on February 10, 2009 at 3:29 pmMr Earl–
Posted By: John Bloomberg-Rissman on February 10, 2009 at 3:52 pmI don’t see why an interest in translations of comtemporary poetry, in wanting to see what poets in the other part of the world are doing, needs to be ironized. Poets in other parts of the world, though I can’t read their work, are, y’know, real people, worth reading as well as knowing. The dead aren’t worth more than the living, believe it or not, though their work is no doubt not worth less either. (Yes I’ve read Skelton, etc … good stuff) Why should I be ironic?
Oh, I see, because, like “many Americans” (you should have said USAmericans, but perhaps you’ve never heard of Canada or Mexico …), I’m reducing other literatures and creators to “theoretic constructs and excuses for reductive thinking”. That you can deduce this from what I wrote is simply … amazing. Because I am interested in the people who live in those countries, their art, their lives, I have reduced them somehow? But then again, you don’t live in the US so you are de facto Amazing, just as I am de facto “incapable of empathy”??
Do you make this stuff up just to be … dear god, what would be the word?
What on earth leads you to say that I somehow think that “translations are seen as instrumental, to be valued for what they can tell American readers about themselves and their ideas of the world at large”??
Do you think I actually read to look in the mirror? Fer cryin’ out loud, I don’t even find Am Lit much of a mirror. And if I want to masturbate I don’t bother with literature.
I read to learn what other people are like. Y’know, that “difference” thing.
But then again, well, who am I to say anything, I’m from the good ol’ USA, you betcha.
In the aftermath of the 1992 Creeley incident, a friend of mine at the conference, one of the youngest poets among the Buffalo contingent, and whose name I won’t mention unless he himself cares to bring it up, was called upon a number of times to justify Creeley’s behavior and to “explain what you Americans are up to.”
Posted By: Mark Wallace on February 10, 2009 at 6:06 pmNever mind the obvious power dynamic at work in asking a young, unknown poet to justify the behavior of an old famous one. More importantly, generalizing about the writers of other countries and their work, and neglecting distinctions between individuals in an attempt to defend one’s own country, turn out not to be behaviors that only Americans engage in.
I suppose, though, that it’s possible to talk about degrees of ignorance. Maybe. But even so, the comments of any two individuals, whether analyzed accurately or not, don’t really add up to an analysis about a whole nation. In fact I wonder what evidence would be sufficient to defend such a broad claim.
“enculturation”?
Posted By: Paul on February 10, 2009 at 7:06 pmI read this piece three times and the earlier one and I have no idea what it is trying to say or what the point of the anecdotes might be (except perhaps as name dropping exercises). Are conciseness and clarity no longer used as measures of good writing?
the belief that translation, and cosmopolitan ambitions, lead to a more conducive atmosphere for great literature (the essential point of engdahl’s claim) is itself reductive and shows engdahl to be of the showhorse-and-blinders mentality.
Posted By: james stotts on February 10, 2009 at 9:40 pmit’s important for me to keep in mind what the true cultural consequences of translation are to the culture-at-large that they are being translated for (or ‘into’). having all of world literature at one’s beck and call, and in contemporary translations, has an incredible flattening effect; not only is all the diverse babel reduced to a single tongue, but the time signatures of what’s translated are erased as well (e.g., who would tolerate a bunch of e’ers, and ofts, and ablutions in a modern translation?–our dante and homer and cervantes are all contemporary composites, which is accepted, i guess, because we consider them timeless, but just last year there were popular english-to-english translations of chaucer and milton, just like the bible, which has to be symptomatic of an inability to empathize). our inability to contend with the infinite languages and variations that pass before us doesn’t jive with this lofty missive from the nobel committee to have america found insufficient on the grounds that it hasn’t made all of world literature into american literature.
to implicitly claim that america lacks diversity is a wild claim, too–it’s maddeningly diverse, and even though i don’t know how i would qualify this, i think it is probably more diverse than almost all other nations, hence the reason i’m generally uncomfortable when i hear anyone try to tell me something about there being one america, or even two america’s or a black america and white america. and i turn to one of my heroes, howard zinn, to back me up on this–it’s one of the great democratic fantasies.
another one of my heroes is benjamin, and though his own ideas about translation are tangled up in a great delusion of some magical ur-language, he still deserves a central spot in any big discussion of the task of the translator. the utility of a translation is much more modest and powerful than poetry as a kind of news rag. translations are especially conspicuous ghosts, mile markers, of the afterlife of a work of art. we don’t always have a record of a poem’s reading, unless there is an essay, an imitation, or a translation.
the bernstein anecdote is fascinating to me personally, because he has done the dirty deed of translation, and is comfortable translating the russian of mandelstam, which is a language he doesn’t know. unfortunately, this is typical. when i justify translation to myself, it isn’t an easy case to make. i don’t know why it’s needed, and as a rule don’t feel it is very successful in communicating much of what i would want it to, but as a practice, translation can be seen as a media, a way, of slow reading (reading in lento). in the jargon of anxious influence this makes a lot of sense–one poet rigorously rehabilitating and changing his predecessors. in paying his respects, he renders the original obsolete, consummates the erotic compensation that translation is. ironic. violent.
why someone would want to translate a poem they don’t know in the original, and love and struggle with in the original, is beyond me. maybe bernstein can answer that.
Dear Martin Earl,
Posted By: Boyd Nielson on February 11, 2009 at 8:53 amI appreciate that you’re interested in what I said, but this is a pretty blatant misrepresentation of my main points in the previous thread. (You even wholly ignore the two follow-up posts.) I am usually a willing participant in conversations on poetry at Harriet. Even so, if your paraphrases of my contributions here are going to slip so easily and quickly into parody, I hasten to ask that you stop mentioning me by name, especially since you are the only one, after all, getting paid for these posts. My argument, which I have already qualified, is obviously not that we should turn just to “hypothetical” poets like, say, Dambudzo Marechera and Juan Luis Martínez (besides, the first often wrote in English and the second—well, let’s just say it’s complicated). Nor is my argument that “Denmark and Switzerland [are] irrelevant in terms of the larger picture.” Nor is it that “translation […] should, like a newspaper, tell us ‘what is happening […].’” Not even close.
B
I’m actually about to give a little talk at the AWP that will deal with the issue of Engdahl and the hysteria of the American response. But I thought I should add something that is of some note: the US is a very powerful nation, US culture has spread on the wings of that eagle so to speak. People in large parts of the world feel that the US is central as a consequence and that they should pay attention to us. The same dynamic has led us to feel like we are so important and central that we don’t need to pay attention to other literatures; we may like the idea of some exotic trinketry, but we don’t feel the need to engage with foreign literature.
Posted By: johannes goransson on February 12, 2009 at 8:53 amI’ve written a lot about this on my blog. I will now talk about it to the AWP.
On the wings of the eagle,
Johannes
Benjamin,
Posted By: mearl on February 12, 2009 at 5:57 pmIn your comment you point out an interesting schism: the seeming stature of European influence on American criticism and the lack thereof on American literature. Indeed, to a certain extent European criticism has, in the last thirty years, swept aside the Anglo-American tradition (Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, the Frankfurt School, and more independent thinkers like Benjamin, Arendt, Canetti, etc., not to mention the gamut of ismists, have replaced the models and methodologies of first the New Critics and then likes of Edmund Wilson, Paul Blackburn – also an excellent translator – Northrop Frye, or later still someone like the under-read Frank Lentricchia. Even Frank Kermode, still active and amazing is hardly talked about. I wonder if the wholesale adoption by American academe of the continental tradition (already, and for a while now, surpassed on the Continent) will stick in the end.
One of the seeds of this series of posts was the fact that I just wasn’t seeing that much discussion of European, South American, Russian or African poetry and fiction between contemporary bloggers. Probably I’m not looking in the right places. But the overriding activity in the poetry blogosphere seems to be for contemporary American poets to talk about other contemporary American poets. As well, very few seem to be reading older poetry; very few seem to be reading British poetry (absolutely fantastic poets like W.S. Graham, Stevie Smith, J.H. Prynne, John Ash, Justin Quinn, Geoffrey Hill; or Australians like John Tranter, John Kinsella or Less Murray.) There are exceptions of course. Brian Henry, the editor of Verse, being one of them, and those poets, who are translators as well (and who are also active bloggers): Forrest Gander, of course. Marcella Durrand maintains the only blog I’ve ever come across completely devoted to literary translation called Translate This. I’m not against the continental tradition. But it would be refreshing to invite some of the Anglo-Americans back to the table. Journals which are labeled conservative, like The New Criterion and the online journal Contemporary Poetry Review, are beginning this work and do not shy away from serious evaluative criticism. But they are, one feels, largely snubbed by the majority of MFA-produced poets.
I would like to hear more of your thoughts on why, as you state in the last sentence of your comment, the “habits of a critical vocabulary” seem to remain “exterior to the works themselves.”
Martin
James,
Posted By: mearl on February 12, 2009 at 6:09 pmI second your invitation to Charles Bernstein.
And I also share your suspicion of what is a curiously American practice, that of translating poetry with the help of natives speakers. This issue (of interpretive vs. literal translation –neither of them being viable categories) dates back, at least in recent memory, to the Wilson-Nabokov debacle and the fashion Lowell did so much to foster with his Imitations, his worst book.
And this new mania for passages translated from Virgil by rusty Latinists, or of Dante by poets who are obviously cribbing from Sinclair’s prose version is also highly suspect. But, on the other hand I can think of many books that rise above what your refer to as “contemporary composites”. Arrowsmith’s translation of Pavese, Hamburger’s translations of Celan, Keeley and Sherrard’s Cavafy, Graves Apuleius, Peter Cole’s stunning work with both medieval Hebrew and contemporary Arabic poetry, Richard Zenith’s singular reinstatement of Pessoa onto the modernist map. Forrest Gander’s work with Latin American poets we might never have heard of otherwise. Not to mention the great surprise of Allisa Valles’s collected Herbert. In light of these books, Horace Engdahl’s comments seem short-sited.
Martin
I wonder if the reason Continental criticism met such a welcoming embrace in US academia was precisely to displace the reigning Anglo-American schools (a sort of professional turf war). Just a guess - I don’t know enough about it.
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 12, 2009 at 7:32 pmWhich would partially explain the (strictly academic) cachet provided to the “avant-garde” poetics of American postmodernism. The poets had a ready-made explanatory discourse, a justification of their “seriousness”. (As Benjamin suggests.) It’s an in-house thing.
In a sense, it was all based on mistranslation… the Continentals were far enough out of the loop of Anglo-American literary & poetic traditions that their theories acted as a sort of jazzy foreign language… displacing the mid-century, home-school syntheses of theory & practice. (In this regard I think the Chicago School has more to offer than the New Critics. But the Chicago Critics slipped into oblivion just as the Continentals came along. I guess.)
Helen Vendler represents a midpoint, maybe. She’s an old-school New Critic who loves Stevens, Ashbery & Jorie Graham. These are the American poets who traveled a lot in Europe & who take only what they need from foreign languages - all in fun. They bring home sophistication without translation. Jorie Graham is an ambodied Theory unto herself. So is Stevens. (Ashbery is an embodied Theory of that guy with the hobbyhorse in Tristram Shandy.) These are the real Americans, by golly.
& I’m right in there with ‘em.
The difference between Europe & America is medieval Christendom vs. “E Pluribus Unum”. We have to be careful not to tip the balance too far in either direction. They’re both miraculous & terrible.
martin,
Posted By: james stotts on February 12, 2009 at 9:25 pmlowell even tried to do mandelstam, which nabokov corrected with scouring criticism and his own translation (there’s a new book of nabokov’s gathered translations and comments on translation–VERSES AND VERSIONS). and when wilson attacked the technical aspects of nabokov’s 4 vol. EUGENE ONEGIN, wilson was even more flammable than any straw man nabokov might have made up to attack (wilson knew better–nabokov’s true genius was almost certainly lexical/linguistic). and nabokov wasn’t really in any literalist camp of translation, only set himself the task of an exhaustive literal translation. he had a lot of metrical, rhyming, translations into english as well, which while a little mechanical are better than his actual english poetry.
brodsky’s translations of himself are awful.
i’m thinking, though, of akhmatova, who translated from literal drafts provided to her from various languages. and ezra pound’s translations, which he needed cribs for and were still not very accurate (this is according to the criticism i’ve read; i don’t know chinese). for akhmatova, translating was the only work she could get published and paid for during the most censorious years of soviet-socialist lit., and was a necessary but undesirable position for not only her but many writers (mandelstam and pasternak, for example). i think why it’s become such a popular method here is that publishers simply want to put a famous name on the cover. why poets consent, though…$$$
i’m not opposed to inaccurate translations, by any means–as far as i’m concerned whatever makes for good poetry, i am opposed to the double standards we set, where translations are given the benefit of the doubt, as far as quality is concerned, when making critical judgments. i have favorites, too (check out the anthology of OBERIU poets from a few years ago by eugene ostashevsky and company), but i think a lot of it is junk that would never get published if it weren’t for ulterior motives. translations are at least as likely to fail as any poems, but are more often commissioned and scheduled by publishers.
one of borges’ norton lectures at harvard, on translation, sums it up for me–that we should not be concerned which version is the ‘original,’ any more than we should make excuses for ‘authors’ (his ‘pierre menard, writer of the quixote’ is a great satire of forgetting the text for the maker–menard rewrites DON QUIXOTE from scratch in the 20th c., and it is agreed that it is an infinitely better book because of his genius for facilitating all the modern theory, criticism, psychology, etc. that is, for all that can be read into it with modern/postmodern eyes).
translation is ultimately impossible, since languages are not the same. if some of us strive for faithfulness, it is because we are demanding the best reading from ourselves on the one hand, and the best poetry from ourselves on the other hand, and hoping that what we’ve read has made us demonstrably better writers in doing so. there isn’t so much correspondence between texts, as the dependence on the translation of the constituent parts of the original–strong forces.
i’ll be taking as many of your recommendations as i can afford (these are lean times) for my personal library, and making a trip to the public library for the rest.
james
Hello Martin,
Posted By: Benjamin on February 12, 2009 at 9:37 pmThanks for your attention to my comment, especially since it had so little to do with the speculations your post was meant to provoke. I hesitate to pursue my line of thought, since I suspect that the chief critical purchase it can provide is merely to point the way to self-criticism: I haven’t read enough to make the claims I feel inclined to make. But I do feel, when reading certain blogs that seem to be organs for the literary avant-garde, such as Ron Silliman’s, or even many of the threads on this blog, that the avant-garde gets constructed as such through a rather enormous effort at critical justification by the poets themselves—some of it aimed at establishing canons of the avant-garde, some of it aimed at defending the latter’s relevance, in political and cultural terms—by which these poets define their practice in opposition to a dominant, hostile, and evidently silent majority. Yes, of course, you will say, but so what? I suppose I wonder what would happen to literature if the critical apparatus were removed. I’m not talking exclusively about the “evaluative criticism” you mention, and I don’t see my question as relevant only to the avant-garde, or even only to literature—the world of visual art leans if anything more heavily on its critical apparatus. But it seems to me a contradiction particularly vivid in avant-garde theorizing, that so much critically prescriptive energy goes into connecting poetic language to ideological positions, etc., without its ever being said that the discourse, or the practice, or the institution, with which modern poetry maintains the strongest ties is none other than criticism itself. Without the silent presence of The Well-Wrought Urn in the background of the undergraduate English class, would we, as a culture, bother to read Keats at all, much less Williams, much less Creeley? Criticism, from Arnold to Barthes, from Brooks to Greenblatt, is the jacket around the literary arts; it is the repository of their beauty and their truth; it is the very medium of tradition. This fact raises interesting questions about the survival of the tradition—if not about the survival of tradition itself.
I leave off therefore, since I run into danger of being full of wind. But I will mention two sources that have spurred my thinking in this regard. The first is John Guillory’s Cultural Capital. The other, specifically about the avant garde, is an article by William Lavender, “Disappearance of Theory, Appearance of Praxis” (Poetics Today 17, 2, 1996: 181-202).
Martin, thanks for another very interesting post. I should avoid commenting on translation, since I don’t know a lot about it, but I appreciate the honesty of this: “My problem (doubtless self-assigned) is to attend to what kind of generalizations I can make. (But I must say ahead of time that I love generalizations, the architecture of them, and the way they combine the heroic with the fragile. They are both sweeping and utterly provisional. More like the weather above a landmass than the landmass itself.)” My own problems are usually self-assigned, and I love generalizations, too.
Posted By: Jason Guriel on February 13, 2009 at 8:23 amJohannes is certainly right about the feelings abroad about hegemonic US cultural influence. The problem is how to alter that situation. If the idea is that it’d help if Americans read and absorbed more translations, that’s fine, but in its generalized form this proposal easily comes across as exactly the kind of high-handed imperialism it’s supposedly battling.
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on February 13, 2009 at 3:53 pmExcept that his specific political commitments get rather entangled in it, I suspect Boyd Nielson was partly saying the same thing. Any command to read translations *so that* Americans can prove they’re not xenophobic skips merrily over the root causes of American xenophobia. As I took it, Boyd was not arguing that it’s better, politically or otherwise, to read Zimbabwean poets. He was questioning the logic of holding abstract value for translations in-and-of themselves. And that’s something some of Martin’s arguments have certainly lent themselves to.
So, can we talk specifically about what exactly Americans are blind to, and what these other writers from other cultures can help them/us/me to see? In his earlier post, Martin asked whether American readers were “returning the favor” of reading the writers of other countries. But reading isn’t a politeness contest. At some point you do have to articulate what those other works envision or offer.
yrs,
Brent Cunningham
Brent,
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 14, 2009 at 8:00 pmAmericans are blind the way Russians & Chinese & Indians & Indonesians are blind. They’re big, & caught up with their own problems. Whereas most of the world is small (small countries), & caught up with their own problems. Which, often as not, include the problems imposed by big countries (& their respective ego-trips).
Europe, & the Middle East, & Southeast Asia, & Polynesia, & the Catholic Church, & Islam, & Buddhism (gradually becoming one big conglomerate - call it Esperanta) are slightly different. They are not “big” in the same way (they are not nation-states).
We’re all pretty blind, actually. It’s not a bad idea to read poems from other countries.
p.s. & let’s not forget Africa, Brent. Africa is… a continent. One of my favorite translators is Peter S. Thompson, an expert in the francophone poetry of Africa. He knows the languages, the history, he’s met & befriended the poets (the ones who are alive). He’s a pro. His books are on Amazon, if you’re interested. (Nabile Fares is one, from Algeria. The poems were originally written in French, then translated into Spanish, by the author. Peter provides the English.)
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 14, 2009 at 8:15 pmI know, it sounds awfully post-colonialist-imperialist, doesn’t it? & we wouldn’t want to worry the lamb-like soft little brains of young politically-correct Americans with anything that smacks of COLONIALISM, would we? Heaven forfend! Better not to translate, period. Who’s ever heard of Peter S. Thomson, anyway? Does he go to AWP? I doubt it. Who is he? Is he a Flarfist? Has he been to California?
Brent,
Posted By: johannes goransson on February 15, 2009 at 4:50 pmI did not say: we should read a little translated text to become better people. I merely very briefly pointed out a dynamic of the situation. I’ve always opposed such a quick easy fix. I don’t understand how you could have gotten that from my post.
Johannes
My apologies to Brent for irascible tone.
Posted By: Henry Gould on February 16, 2009 at 9:50 amJohannes,
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on February 16, 2009 at 11:44 amSince I led with agreeing with you, maybe structurally you felt implicated in the caveats that followed, but I was pointing to a general moralistic aura that can adhere to imperatives to read translation. Really wasn’t saying you’ve exhibited that aura, sorry you got that impression. Knowing your critical work, I’d expect your talk would be very careful about avoiding suchlike…
yrs,
Brent
Not sure if this’s been brought up - but I think Engdahl’s critique is much most a numbers game - from %40 of Germany’s books being to translations to less than a percent of America’s.
Posted By: -w on February 17, 2009 at 4:06 pmI agree with you re:politics - politicizing aesthetic is CRUCIAL, yet everyone’s doing it wrong here. The same way Cold War Russian translations - the ones that popped up in time with each new development in that drama - were wrong.
Benjamin is my key in this - I want to clarify the light you refer to: a translation is an intimate, problematic, usually violent overcoming of text’s language, EXACTLY as a good essay is an intimate, problematic, usually violent overcoming of text’s meaning.
(I think Bernstein’s polemical courses against translation are the dumbest embrace of post-structuralism. Tho I do understand his critique of the pretenses involved in translation - the Language poets were masters of overcoming forms of language in their own works, I don’t think they needed the pretense of worldliness, and that certain older poets were holding their inability to translate from one author from one language was closing poetry.)
My point being that a culture that lacks translations is missing something the same way that a culture lacking criticism is missing something - an ecology of DEDICATED forms of reading.
There’s a hell of a lot of material in this thread that I haven’t had time yet to address. Let me take up what I think is most salient, working from the bottom up. In the last comment, W. says some rather remarkable things and highlighting them will certainly contribute to a furthering of what we’ve all been talking about. First, what he says about Engdahl and the “numbers game”. He’s right there; Engdahl’s comments are based partly upon a statistical realty: we don’t translate as much as the Europeans. But the real situation is more complicated. Individual European countries make money by importing American (and obviously not only American) products, including cultural products. There is a demand for them, and these countries cannot answer that demand by supplying their citizens with just one kind of a car (the Trabant syndrome). Sweden (the most Americanized country in Europe) would be a boring place with only Swedish movies, Swedish novels and clogs. Translation is part of this market dynamic. It’s natural that American’s do not need the Swedish influence, as much as the Swedes need the American influence. This is as much an economic issue as it is a cultural one.
Posted By: mearl on February 19, 2009 at 7:20 amW. then goes on to say that “translation is an intimate, problematic, usually violent overcoming of text’s language, EXACTLY as a good essay is an intimate, problematic, usually violent overcoming of text’s meaning.” This would imply stable language and stable meaning. Violence needs a stable target, or at least an unflappable trigger finger. I’d be curious to know what others think about this idea.
Finally he speaks of “DEDICATED forms of reading.” I find this notion fascinating.
Johannes comment of February 12 which begins “I’m actually about to give a little talk at the AWP…” addresses precisely this issue of how the economic realities of the literary translation industry create a kind of hubris on our part when it comes to other national literature. I would love to see a link to the talk he gave at the AWP. Maybe he could post it on his blog - just click on his name at the bottom of his post and you’ll get to Exoskeleton.
Brent Cunningham engages in what has become somewhat typical of these threads: a “clarification battle”. He starts by agreeing with Johannes but then disagrees with the implications of his own agreement: “If the idea is that it’d help if Americans read and absorbed more translations, that’s fine, but in its generalized form this proposal easily comes across as exactly the kind of high-handed imperialism it’s supposedly battling.” I’d encourage Brent to expand on this, on why the generalized from of J’s proposal somehow morphs into exactly that which it is trying to counter.
I’m glad Mark Wallace has chimed in with some background to the Creeley affair. I’d be very happy to learn more about his take on the event. But, about the question of generalization. If we can’t make generalizations about America, based on the behavior of individuals (especially public individuals, who know they are public individuals and therefore must deal with that mantle of being representative that public individuals can’t help but wear, and deal as well with the responsibilities that accrue) then how are we to generalize at all? Or should we avoid generalizations altogether? Over the last twenty-five years I have, by default, become a kind of observer of American behavior abroad. One’s natural tendency is to study the particularities of individuals, and then make one’s conclusions. These conclusions or generalizations should be starting points for further discussion, especially because they are always provisional, despite the confidence with which they are often made.
Martin
the violence of translation is partly in trying to strap a poem down, and make it a stable target–this is what all the slow, painstaking reading is for.
Posted By: james stotts on February 19, 2009 at 8:24 amthe second aspect comes in when we put the author’s name of the original on the cover–so that it’s pretty hard to argue that the translation is not being passed off as a representation of the original, then you have to account to all the damage that’s been done, one language forcing itself on the other.
a lot of violence occurs in the mind of the translator as well, as the poem is memorized (inspired) and then the mental work of turning it into english begins–a lot of people might have noticed this, but once you know and internalize a poem in a second language, the brain refuses to let it stay as it was and will start the process of translation all on its own, subconsciously, finding ways to conceptualize, paraphrase, rhyme, etc. in the translator’s mother tongue. that is, it is snuffing out the original language, making the original obsolete, which is the ultimate aim of a translation anyway: to have the poem without needing its language, to extract it from the foreign culture. this is what i call erotic compensation (erotic in the sense of an operation of making whole), where we take the severed existence of a russian poem in an englishman’s head, and turn it into an intentional english poem.
it’s rape, necromancy–necrophilia, vivisection, and cetera.
and to assume that the original poem never changes after a translation–i don’t believe that either. that’s the same as saying it doesn’t change after it’s been read. maybe virgin eyes can go back to that original poem someday, but i never can.
I don’t mind some generalizations, Martin, especially in casual conversation. I like them less when they are made as authoritative statements in authoritative forums. I suppose the Harriet blog lies rather uncomfortably between those two poles.
Posted By: Mark Wallace on February 19, 2009 at 12:59 pmBut to assume that the character of the people of a given country can be generalized on the basis of statements made by public figures or leaders of that country contains the assumption that those leaders achieved their positions by reflecting the character of the people. Most leaders do not come into power that way, although perhaps rarely they might–and of course even winning an election is hardly the same as proof that one as a leader is reflecting the character of the people. Certainly most poets who become famous do not become famous because they express the attitudes of most other poets.
Mark,
Posted By: mearl on February 20, 2009 at 7:18 pmThis conversation has probably outstripped the parameters of my original post, especially since we are talking about an event that very few, if any, of the other commentators, or readers witnessed. I’d wondered if you could give us your version, but maybe we should save that for another day. American literature, and those writers who have observed America as outsiders (De Tocqueville, Dickens, Henry James and many others) have always extrapolated from individuals to create types, which in turn create the basis for generalizations. I simply don’t see the point of removing that tendency from the discourse. Especially since the examination of individual’s differences, particularities, eccentricities and the like are at the base of the process. But you do have a point, albeit a kind of something-rotten-in-the-state of Denmark point – but you’re absolutely right. We need to take care about how we reach our generalizations. I just hope you’re not suggesting that we do away with the fun of finding our way towards large conclusions. Some of them do, in the end, stick.
Henry Gould makes a fabulous point at the end of one of his comments, about balance: “The difference between Europe & America is medieval Christendom vs. “E Pluribus Unum”. We have to be careful not to tip the balance too far in either direction. They’re both miraculous & terrible.”
We’ll talk,
Martin