A Voice Full of Breathturns: Remembering Pierre Joris

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

A former teacher (Robert Kelly) and a colleague (Charlotte Mandell) in conversation about the poet and translator Pierre Joris, who died earlier this year. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

CHARLOTTE MANDELL: You first introduced Pierre to me over 30 years ago now. He had been a student of yours at Bard. I actually met him not long after I met you. It was thanks to him that I was able to translate Blanchot’s La part du feu, The Work of Fire. He had been asked to translate it by Helen Tartar at Stanford University Press, and he didn’t have time, so he recommended me, even though I was very young. I was in my 20s, and I’d only published poems in magazines. The Work of Fire was my first book-length translation. I feel like it’s to Pierre that I owe my career, and I'm so grateful to him and also to you for introducing him to me. Pierre also introduced me to a lot of other authors like Abdelwahab Meddeb. I went on to translate a book of opems by Meddeb, Tombeau of Ibn Arabi, as well as his memoir, White Traverses, and Pierre and I co-translated his condemnation of fundamentalism, The Malady of Islam. Pierre also introduced me to the contemporary poet Jean-Paul Auxeméry, whom I translated for my senior project at Bard.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about what it was like having him as a student and being his teacher, and how you introduced him to Paul Celan.

ROBERT KELLY: Well, the main thing to say is that at Bard we have a senior project, which is to say a BA thesis, usually a book length manuscript of some sort. Pierre had come to Bard eager to connect with the revolutionary poetry of the 1960s, the beatniks, all of that. But I urged him to translate Paul Celan, which he did as a senior project, translating one of Celan’s books. That became an introduction to a very important part of his life's work—translating the whole of Celan.

Pierre in those days needed to learn American English, and I guided him as best I could to the best source I knew of quick vernacular, namely baseball on the radio. So, he became a baseball fan. He listened faithfully to the baseball broadcasters and he picked up the slang, the idiom, but above all, the rhythm of American speech, which was immensely helpful for him in translation, since he didn't want to translate Celan or anybody else into pseudo German or pseudo French. He was translating into American English and that was very important.

As a student, he was devoted, fierce, crazed the way students are, very industrious. The friendships he made at Bard in those days lasted him for years. He was quite a remarkable student, especially in that he represented Luxembourg, which was both French and not French. A Luxembourg child, he told me, grows up speaking Luxembourgish, which is a Central German dialect. In grammar school, it shifts slowly to German. In high school they switch to French and in college they switch to English. So a young Luxembourger already has four languages. When Pierre came to Bard College he was at home in French, German, English, and poetry. So giving him Celan was in a way tapping on his door and saying Later on, you will give this writer to many others. And he has given us an amazing number of publications, in a relatively short time. The number of books Pierre published in his lifetime is astonishing.

CM: When you taught Pierre, did you also teach him Duncan and Olson?

RK: Certainly, I tried to guide him to those strongest voices in the 50s and 60s in America: Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley. And I think from reading them, he acquired the deft, relaxed sort of English that he was able to use so effectively in his translations not simply from the German, but from the French of the diaspora, the Middle Eastern French, the French of Syria, Lebanon, the French of North Africa, where he spent a lot of time. But all of that comes into an English which is refined but also casual. It avoids the pomposity of much translation. No names mentioned.

CM: You said that he also spent some time in North Africa, and I know that Arabic was important to him. That's how we met Meddeb, a Tunisian author very involved in Sufism and in the work of Ibn Arabi. You knew Pierre when he was in North Africa, or was that after?

RK: I visited Pierre in Germany, France, England, all over the place in Paris, in London, in California, but never in North Africa. He lived in North Africa for several years and he had important companions who were North Africans.

His African connections are striking because his father—a renowned physician and surgeon in Luxembourg, and the physician to the Grand Duke of Luxembourg—after he retired, went down to one of the French francophone colonies in Africa, and set up a hospital for treatment of people. That same generosity extends to the son. You won't find anybody who knows Pierre, who doesn't think too well of him. He was very generous, very giving.

CM: That's true. I think that's one of his chief characteristics—his generosity and also his complete lack of jealousy. He was never jealous of anybody. He was always happy for other people's success, which is not very common among poets. A lot of poets can be very jealous. And he was never jealous.

Did you introduce him to Jerry Rothenberg?

RK: I think so. I'm not sure, because connections in those days were so fluid. Pierre went on to develop a very lasting relationship with Jerry. And he was deeply, deeply hurt by Jerry's recent death.

They were great people, great men.

CM: I remember when Pierre and Nicole [Peyrafitte] were living in Albany, we used to visit them there a lot. Pierre was teaching at SUNY-Albany. And I remember we were there when Miles was born, their son Miles, I remember you holding him in your arms.

Pierre also worked with Nicole, they worked together on a lot of projects.

RK: Occasionally doing—up here in Kingston, as well as in New York, in Paris and Luxembourg and a few other places—performances together, where his poetry would accompany certain declamations by Nicole, who would perform in all manner of fresh ways.

CM: She also performed for your 40th teaching anniversary at Bard. Pierre was there for that too, and gave a very moving talk. He was also at the Anthology Film Archives when they celebrated your 50th anniversary. And he was responsible for the two big books about your work that came out from Contra Mundum Press: A Voice Full of Cities and A City Full of Voices. It was amazing what he did. I mean, how he gathered so many poets together to contribute to both of those books.

RK: He worked closely with Charles Bernstein in recent years, and he finally gave up those silly places like France and London and California and came to the real place, Brooklyn, my homeland, and lived on the nose of the fish right there on Bay Ridge, in a house overlooking the Narrows, so he could look out the window and see not just the Norwegian trawlers, but he could see cormorants.

Nicole is a great birder and every day, in recent years, they would walk out along the water, sometimes miles down into Sheepshead Bay, Plum Beach, birding—watching the birds, taking pictures of the birds. One of his last books was about cormorants. He lived in the midst of a thousand writers, artists, musicians, composers, many of them close friends, but what he spoke of in his poems were the birds, the water, the flowers, the animals.

CM: I thought maybe I could read a poem of his where he talks about what he sees from his view in Brooklyn. It was a poem that he wrote to you for your birthday, just a few years ago:

DEAR ROBERT, I

wake up in pre-
dawn Brooklyn,
make water, heat water, squeeze
lemon, crush home-grown (at Joseph’s
on 68th between 3rd & Ridge) peppers
(cayenne), make first pot of coffee
(Peruvian organic medium roast) in
orange French press thermos, look out,
windy, rain while we slept, heavy
colored dreams we tell us
we had but don’t remember
more of, take her hot lemon
& coffee to Nicole finishing
this past Sunday’s New York Times in bed,
take my cups to my study
remembering last night’s sweet
Mets win in Washington but really
listening as I have since I got up
to France Cul where Olivier Cadiot speaking
of his new Shakespeare translation playing right
now in a mise-en-scène by Thomas Ostermeier
at the Comédie française, says
“Il n’y a pas de vers français pour accueillir
le vers shakespearien aujourd’hui,” which I
think is totally accurate as I put cups on
desk, pour first coffee, turn
to look out at white-
capped waves — nothing
melvillian, just normal fall
adjustment — can’t yet see the anchored ships,
the leaves still all on the trees
in the Narrows Botanical Garden
across Shore Road,
wind tires or tortures them or tries to,
at least shakes them without spearing them so
a big white incongruous light shines through every
so often all the way from Staten Island
while all the way from
wherever I was in my sleep
to this moment of opening the red notebook
& unscrewing the black “Sailor” fountain pen
I have really thought of nothing else than
that this day
is your birthday, Robert —
many happy returns, joyeux anniversaire, Alles
Gute! before I’ll turn (in a minute,
right after sending this off to you)
to the last three poems
from Celan’s Niemandsrose
that remain to be translated so that on
this your birthday I may finish what I started
in Annandale 51 years ago under your guidance.
I raise my (by now second) cup (of Peruvian)
to you, dear friend.

(Bay Ridge, 9/25/18)

RK: A cup of coffee is what we remember, as well as the whitecaps and Staten Island.

CM: He was very happy when they moved to Bay Ridge, and he wanted you to come visit because he knew that was your home. We never made it, but he and Nicole both wanted us to come down and see what it was like there.

RK: That's not from any lack of love on my part, but I'm not a traveler. I visited him in Paris, in Luxembourg, in London, Albany, California…

CM: So, that's probably where he met Jerry—in California, when he was there.

RK: That's possible. Yes, they were there at the same time. Jerry moved there early on, and they worked together on that massive anthology. I haven't heard it mentioned lately, but the vast Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerry and Pierre, and marvelously put together, is one of the most important anthologies ever, comparable in, many ways, to the one that got us all started back then, the old Untermeyer Modern American Poetry.

CM: Have you noticed any changes in Pierre’s Celan translations over the years?

RK: No, no, I can't say that at all. He grew to know the whole body of work intimately.

For Celan himself, a man I never met alas, American poetry was becoming important. I think that Pierre somehow intuited a movement toward American verse of that era—Celan had translated Marianne Moore, people like that—toward the kind of free line, the importance of the line, long or short. I think Pierre felt that movement in Celan’s later work, and I won’t say stressed it, but made it evident in his translations, rather than trying to box him into a sort of Rilkean quatrain or something like that.

CM: Pierre was also amazingly prolific. And I think some of that he might have gotten from you because you encouraged him. Every time we saw him, there would be at least one book, usually two or three. And they would be in different languages and in different countries. There was recently an exhibit of Pierre's work or Nicole's work in Luxembourg. I think it was a joint exhibit. They gave Pierre the 2020 Prix Batty Weber, Luxembourg's national prize for literature, sort of the equivalent of poet laureate award. He said he always wanted to run away from Luxembourg because it was so small. But I think it meant a lot to him.

RK: Fascinating country, it is. The one country in Europe where Americans feel at home. Americans are well-regarded because the only contact they had with Americans was the American army coming and liberating them from the Nazis in 1944. They speak all languages. You can make yourself understood everywhere easily. And that's part of Pierre’s energy.

CM: And also just being at home everywhere, I think that was part of his sort of nomad existence. Pierre was at home wherever he lived. He was a true cosmopolitan. He was always at home. I mean, I don't think he ever felt like he was a foreigner anywhere.

RK: No. He always spoke with a faint, discernible accent. It was clear that he wasn't a native English speaker, but his work was so intently American.

He spent a lot of time in London working with many important English poets like Eric Mottram, Allen Fisher, Tom Raworth, with whom he became close. They were important influences on him. He lived near Eric Mottram on the north side of the Thames.

CM: And he got you to come to London to give readings.

RK: He did, he got everybody to come everywhere. And even in a relatively culturally quiet city like Albany, he managed to bring many, many, many poets and other writers there and arranged for poetry festivals to occur there, some of which were quite memorable.

It’s so hard for us, I think, you and me, to see Pierre just as a public figure—though he was clearly such an important one—because he seemed so close to being just an intimate friend. A very important friend.

In the various memorials that we have witnessed or heard about there has been a natural tendency to stress his translations and his anthologies and his editorial work, and not much is said about his poems, which is what happens to generous people, I think—his generosity giving the world Celan. But it’ll work out. He’ll get to be known. I’m sure that whenever this conversation of ours comes to light it may help that attempt to turn toward Pierre’s own writing.