Reading Forrest Gander's Be With Through Lens of Translation

At The Quietus, Lotte Lewis opens a review of Forrest Gander's new collection, Be With, with a look at his time translating Bolivian writer Jaime Sáenz, during which Gander "learned of the influence of the South American Aymara language on Saenz’s writing . . . . Aymara is the only studied culture for which the past is linguistically and conceptually in front of its speakers, while the future lies behind them. The word for future is also the word for behind, as is the word past the same as front. When people talk in Aymara about the future they gesture backwards; when they mention the past they gesture forward." Later:

The obsessions that have always haunted Gander’s work – ecology, the language of translation, the scientific – aren’t sequestered, but wielded anew to provide an intimate, particular portrait of living with loss within a world that, as Gander recognises, does not stop its “spins / nightly toward its brightness” as [C.D.] Wright wrote in Tremble. In is in this particularity that Be With is able to move beyond any sense of excess, grandeur or genericness. After all, Gander knows how restrictive aspiring to generalised trade routes of language can be. In In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means he writes, “one form of totalitarianism is the stuffing of expression into a single, standardized language that marches the reader toward some presumptively shared goal.” In refusing to submit to a shared universality of feeling, Gander treats us, the reader, as equals. Gander may tell us, “It means just / what it feels like / it means,” but he never claims to know what “it” means for us.

In doing so, the presence of C.D. Wright strikes with the fluency of light throughout the collection. Gander’s invitation to be present in his seeing and being is evocative of Wright’s own generosity; “Come up on the porch with me,” she wrote in String Light, “I’ve got good peaches; I don’t mind if you smoke.” On Between the Covers, Gander states that he perceives the self as a constant collaboration, formed primarily in relation to others; “Who was ever only themselves?”

Find the full review at The Quietus.