David Hadbawnik on Jack Spicer, Experimental Translation, Aliveness . . .

The current issue of Asymptote Journal features an interview with poet, translator, and scholar David Hadbawnik! "Hadbawnik’s translation of books I-VI of Virgil’s Aeneid (Shearsman, 2015) ... pushes the discussion of his interrelated practices of translation, poetics, and scholarship into essential contemporary debates," writes friend and interlocuter Daniel C. Remein. In a conversation that had emails going from Boston to Kuwait--where Hadbawnik currently lives and teaches--these two discussed "how experimental translation, medieval studies, and the poetics of Jack Spicer mutually inform each other in Hadbawnik’s translation practices."

"I feel the poetry I’m working on is alive; Virgil’s alive in the poem," says Hadbawnik. Here's more:

[David Hadbawnik]: ...I want to treat it like it’s a living thing and be in conversation with it, and with lots of other poems too, all the poems it has touched and influenced and which have touched and influenced me.

Part of what I would like to gesture towards is the ease with which Virgil might turn, for example, to the language of mythology, and the shared fluency of his readers in experiencing that—this would be impossible to do if you subscribed to Nabokov’s forensic approach to translation, since his process necessarily involves a conscious act of backtracking, pinning down, measuring, rendering “the whole text and nothing but the text.” I would argue it’s in the spirit of a more easeful—I hesitate to say “natural”— relationship to language and the calling upon of shared cultural references that Spicer turns to baseball (and also to pop music and movies) in his poetry. Which is not to say that it’s “easy,” or that it makes the poetry easy.

This is a roundabout way of getting at Spicer’s idea of the “Martians” using whatever furniture’s in the room (the poet’s mind) to make the poetry out of, and while that furniture might be obscure—including other languages, texts from the deep recesses of literary history, and so on—it’s got to include everything, and a big part of that is the flotsam and jetsam of the immediate culture. That’s what the “real” has to latch onto and emerge into language. The path to that language has to be quick, almost automatic, never deliberate or calculated. Thus, for me, it is the language of sports, which is rich with its own history and metaphors and expressions. In book V, especially—the “Funeral Games”—the sportscaster-style of recounting the action not only seems appropriate, but also hopefully approximates the cultural surround that a Roman would have experienced, reading or hearing it.

Then, to hark back to your earlier question about “canonicity” ...

Remein had asked: "Does the fact that a less mainstream contemporary idiom can tap into the translatability of this text make some implicit argument about either Virgil’s poetics in the past or historical claims to the poem’s canonicity?"

...what sports offer imaginatively to Spicer, perhaps, is a sense of other poets from throughout literary history all playing on the same field (or diamond), which is poetry. You grab the ball and toss it to Keats, the shortstop; he relays it to Spenser at second base, then over to Milton at first (though Milton would make a terrible first baseman). In that figuring, it’s a man’s game, which I don’t want for myself—I want Emily Dickinson in center field, maybe H.D. at third—but I do want the sense of working and playing with other living entities, not this archeological dig as envisioned by Nabokov.

More at Asymptote.