Looking closely at Jorge Carrera Andrade's Micrograms

Oh you must read this: BOMBLOG has Elizabeth Clark Wessel interviewing Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman, the translators of Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms, another book almost out. Quickly, about the author:

Jorge Carrera Andrade was born in 1902 in Quito, Ecuador, and died there in 1978, after spending the bulk of his adult life abroad. His distinguished literary career spanned a wide range of work, from editing and translation to criticism and poetry, much of which was published internationally and engaged international themes. It is from this "worldly" perspective and influence that his work grew, and maybe the most fascinating of these works is his MICROGRAMS.

The short form was also prevalent in the work of Robert Walser, so it's interesting to think about in light of translation:

ECW I enjoyed Andrade’s engagement with form immensely, but I was unclear about the relationship he thought these forms (haiku, saeta, microgram) have to each other. For example, he describes and analyzes the haiku beautifully (“ . . . an original concept of existence. A poetic thought. A philosophical meditation.”), but in connecting it historically with the microgram he leaves the work to a future scholar (“How did the haiku arrive in our America? It is a matter for patient research.”). I understand that within the confines of a lyric essay there isn’t really room for that kind of work, but do you have some ideas about the role Andrade thought that translation and cross-pollination played in literary development? Or, in other words, could you say more about what Micrograms told you about translation?

ADA & JB Well, we actually think that to some extent he wants to leave it open. “Patient research” can be understood as thought and writing as well as study. While selecting and introducing haiku, Andrade was aware of haiku writing in the Americas, but chose neither to fully research its history, nor (more importantly) to participate in it as a writer. Micrograms are clearly something else. They are, among other things, the inspired fusion of the objectivity and attention of haiku with the sentimentality and wit of short forms in Spanish and other European languages. Though Andrade defines the form with some precision, his own contributions (which presumably have the status of exemplars) are only one possible version of micrograms, and his movement through other Spanish works, finding (at times retroactively) short forms is a way of pointing to a kind of unresearchable simultaneity, a connection of interests born out of the parallel lives of poets in different traditions.

For us, much of what Andrade is doing is watching the trajectory of forms and processes and trying to imagine them in new contexts (which could be a description of translating, writing poems, or even being an artist interested in anything beyond the local). It is interesting to remember that this book only addresses some of Andrade’s concerns at the time, and that he was (while in Japan) focusing some of his energies on the European surrealists and translating from French. You asked about what Micrograms told us (and it told us plenty as both a book and as a translation project), but one of the more interesting things it told us concerns the different values that can be had by moving fluidly between macro and micro views of literature and culture. While doing this might neglect certain traditional responsibilities of literary criticism, it can allow the mind to better appreciate the complexity of the artist and artistic work, even, and maybe especially, in the case of work that presents so simply.

Beckman is certainly known for his own interest in short forms as well, but here he focuses on Andrade:

ECW Andrade sees possibilities in the short form that I would suspect the majority of contemporary American poets do not. Outside of the context of Micrograms as a project with its special kind of attention and thought, how do the two of you as poets relate to the short poem? And has translating these poems, both Andrade’s and the other poets, pushed you towards or away from short forms in your own work?

ADA & JB Our experiences over the years of working on this book are so varied it is probably best to answer by keeping one foot in the context of Micrograms. In the essay, Andrade combines an uncontroversial point (that short forms have been minor in Spanish literature, and by extension in all traditions of Western poetry) with a highly exotic gesture: the location of the short form as a hidden aspect of long forms (witness how he plucks his first microgram out of a poem by Quevedo, one quatrain out of twenty-four!). This gives us a guiding hint: we may not know what the short form is, how poems assume it or silently rely on it, and consequently we might want to think differently about where and when to look for it. In this sense the push might be both towards and away from short forms.

Read the entire interview here.