Mercedes Roffé Talks Total Art

In the September issue of The Brooklyn Rail, translator Anna Deeny Morales is in conversation with Argentine poet Mercedes Roffé, whose newest book, Ghost Opera (co-im-press), translated by Judith Filc, recalls composer Tan Dun's opera of the same name. Morales and Roffé discuss the poet's "foundations in music and medieval literature, her understanding of art forms and ghostliness, as well as her work in language, symbols, and sound." An excerpt:

[Roffé:] ...Even Ghost Opera, the title of a poem and then of the entire book, was taken from a musical piece by Chinese composer Tan Dun. Tan Dun describes his own Ghost Opera as a particular Chinese musical form where the protagonist gets to face the ghosts of his own ancestors. In our case, our common ancestors were Bach and Shakespeare, to whom I added in my poem a third one—Paul Celan.

But I must say that the expression “ghost opera” refers not only to that homonymous work by Tan Dun, but also to that ideal work of “total art”—that confluence of all art expressions—that Wagner and, after him, most Symbolists poets and composers, wanted to achieve; an ideal so ambitious that it would necessarily end up to be a failure, a kind of ghostly, phantasmatic work.

Deeny: Do you think, then, that each genre or “art expression,” as you say, as it moves toward the other in this yearning for totality, is analogous to such a human desire? That is, the limit of a genre is also the limit of oneself. In this sense, when seek total confluence with the other we inevitably render our own ghostliness.

Roffé: I don’t know. Even if I quote in my poem that well-known Shakespeare’s dictum, “We are such stuff / as dreams are made on,” I don’t think I would state the ghostliness of the human condition as such. It was rather about what I would intuit as a hubris—a human ambition to reach something that would be humanly impossible to reach. In this sense, the ambition to reach such an extreme art form—a form in which all arts converged—would be parallel to other enormous human drives such as the one exemplified by the myth of Babel. I still resent that we, as human beings, were punished for that dream and divided into thousands of languages. I have a similar feeling toward the symbolist’s drive to accomplish a work of total art. I feel some kind of empathy for all those projects that couldn’t be achieved just because they were so radical, so extreme that they surpassed the limits of human nature. I think that the gap between that original desire and the final, predictable failure is what makes them ghostly. As if the memory of that failure had become their own shadow.

Read the full conversation here.