Dear Poetry Editor Aditi Machado

Ruben Quesada presents some choice thinking from Asymptote Journal's poetry editor, Aditi Machado, for Chicago Review of Books's ongoing "Dear Poetry Editor" series. "Machado is the author of Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017) and the translator of Farid Tali’s hybrid novella Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016). She is from Bangalore, India and currently lives in Denver, Colorado." Let's start with a look at the misconceptions of translation:

On Perspectives of Poetry

Poetry is untranslatable. It’s a notion that persists despite a long-desired increase in the visibility of translators, much astonishing advocacy work, and the multitude of journals and presses today that invest in translation. There’s always someone, inside or out, who thinks that a translated work isn’t “as good” as the original. Plenty of scholars who translate still struggle to convince tenure committees that their published translations are valuable. But translation isn’t simply some post-Babelian necessity. It isn’t simply sociological or anthropological work seeking to make other cultures “intelligible” to us—it’s a full and necessary literary activity in which politics and aesthetics can’t be disentangled. I rather love the provocation of Asymptote founder and editor-in-chief Lee Yew Leong’s thought that sometimes “translation can be more effective than the original if we set aside the question of primacy.”

There are misconceptions about who or how to translate. I’ve been thinking about the prevalent notion that poetry ought to be translated into idioms/forms/aesthetic paradigms already available or au courant in the target language. It’s not wrong necessarily but that method is simply one possibility — and then there are other possibilities.

On Poetry

I don’t think there is a poem for me, but I do tend to value poetries for which language is never transparent. It’s a kind of thickness people are moving through, paring it down, drying it out, or making it even denser. Translators know this intuitively—there is nothing clean about rewriting something in a different language. In what we commonly call original compositions, I tend to value proximities to other languages—classical, contemporary, rare, invented. Multilingualism, embodied prosodies, or negative capability, not just as metaphysics but actual physics, the way thought moves through and against sound, image, and matter. I tend to gravitate toward work by poets who also translate or whose work can’t be located in one linguistic space.

Read it all right here.