Translation: Jesús Cos Causse (on Poets.org's Poem-a-Day)

Today, thanks to poet, translator and critic Rosa Alcalá, who curated the poems appearing on The Academy of American Poets' September "Poem-a-Day" roster, you can read my translation of the late and truly great Afro-Cuban poet Jesús Cos Causse's poem "Mirando Fotos," or "Looking at Photos." 

I will say as little as possible here, beyond thanking Rosa, as well as Kristin Dykstra, Herbert Rogers and Prof. Jerome Branche, who were invaluable in helping me get in touch with Cos Causse's son Camilo, who provided permission to run the translation, and to MR Daniel, who sent me the poem many years ago (2007), and which I posted on this blog.

It took me 14 years but finally, here is the translation, with short notes about the poem itself and about Cos Causse, as well as me reading it in both English and Spanish (forgive me, Spanish speakers).  

You can find all of this at the link above or here.

Enjoy!

*Essays On Hilda Hilst* Now Available

Thanks to the dedication of editors Adam Morris and Bruno Carvalho, Essays on Hilda Hilst: Between Brazil and World Literature, the first English-language scholarly volume dedicated to the work of one of Brazil's most singular and path-blazing authors, is now available for purchase. Published by Springer this month, the book opens with an insightful introduction about Hilst (1930-2004) and her relation to the category of "World Literature," by Morris, a gifted translator and scholar who produced an exceptional rendering of Hilst's 1986 novella Com os meus olhos de cão (With My Dog Eyes, Melville House, 2014), as well as works by Jõao Gilberto Noll, Beatriz Bracher, and other major contemporary Portuguese-language writers, and Carvalho, a Princeton professor of Spanish and Portuguese, whose scholarly interests span an array of topics and whose study Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (2013), received the Brazilian Studies Association Robert Reis Book Award in 2014. Other essays in the volume explore different aspects of the late author's oeuvre, ranging from her plays (Tatiana Franca Rodrigues Zanirato), fiction (David William Foster), poetry (Alva Martinez Teixeiro), and broader theoretical, political and ideological readings (Deneval Siqueira Azevedo Filho, Eliane Robert Morães, Morris, and Nathanaël).

For my part, I contributed a revision of a talk I delivered in at the New York Public Library back in 2014, "Translating Brazil's Marquis de Sade," which explores the complexities of Hilst's Cartas de um Sedutor (Letters from a Seducer), for which Carvalho wrote the introduction, and the challenges I--and anyone--might face bringing it and her work in general into English. (In "Derelict of Duty, "Nathanaël also discusses some challenges faced co-translating Hilst's A obscena Madame D (The Obscene Madame D, Nightboat and A Bolha Editora, 2013). It is especially exciting to see this essay in print and in this volume, which I hope will serve as an enticing overview and introduction that I hope sparks more studies in English about Hilst, and spurs more translations of Hilst's work. I believe a translation of Hilst's Fluxo-Floema is on its way soon, and this year, Hilst's Of Death: Minimal Odes, translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin, will be published by co•im•press.

Please consider getting a copy of this volume, or at least suggesting your nearest library do so. And please, read Hilda Hilst!

The Hillmans' New Translation of Ana Cristina Cesar's At Your Feet + Poems: Ana Cristina Cesar

At Your Feet, by Ana Cristina Cesar
translated by Brenda Hillman
and Helen Hillman, with Sebastião
Edson Macedo, edited by
Katrina Dodson (Anderson, SC:
Parlor Press, 2018)

A few years ago at the Associated Writing Program's annual conference, I was on a panel that focused on translating Brazilian women writers, and one of the figures I had translated and shared with my co-panelists and the audience was the late Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983). Although she committed suicide at age 31 and left only a small oeuvre, it has proved to be among the most significant and durable of her generation. She now stands as one of the important Brazilian poets of the last quarter of the 20th century, as well as one who continues to influence poetry in her native country as well as outside it.

What I did not learn until after that panel had concluded was that the distinguished American poet and professor Brenda Hillman and her mother, Helen Hillman, who was born in Brazil, had been translating Cesar's poetry as well. Specifically, they were bringing the poems in her acclaimed 1982 Brasiliense collection A teus pés (At Your Feet) into English, and had run into the challenge I faced, which was trying to get permission to publish the English translations in the US. (I had only sought journal publication, but they had the entire collection in mind.)

Unlike them, however, I never heard back from Cesar's estate, which I knew did permit some translations, as I had found a copy online of British publisher Boulevard's (now Boulevard Books The Babel Guides) 1997 edition of Cesar's Intimate Diary, translated by Patricia E. Paige, Celia McCullough and David Treece and edited by Treece roughly a decade ago. As far I know, other than individual poems published in journals and anthologies, that was the only book-length edition of Cesar's books of poetry in English. Interestingly enough, it contains poems not only from the titular volume, but also from At Your Feet (which itself gathered together the three chapbooks Cesar had published from 1970 through 1980, Luvas de pelica (Kid Gloves: Fragments of a Journey), Correspondência Complete (Complete Correspondence), and Cenas de abril (April Scenes), at times in versions whose original source remains somewhat unclear (more about this below).

Given Hillman's gifts and stature in the poetry world, and her mother's familiarity with Brazilian Portuguese, I was eager to see how they would capture and carry over into English Cesar's ironic, often casual and erotic tone, the often laser-sharp shifts and textual collaging her poetic speakers engage, and the often very subtle tissue of allusions she weaves into her work, sometimes from Brazilian and global literary traditions (especially Anglophone literature, which she was quite familiar with, having lived in the UK for a short period), sometimes from popular culture.

A few weeks back, I received the fruit of the Hillmans' labor, At Your Feet, a bilingual collection completed in conjunction with Sebastião Edson Macedo and edited by Katrina Dodson, published by Parlor Press, an indie publisher based in South Carolina. Their book and translations are certain to become n excellent entry point into Cesar's poetry, and the standard for future English translations of the author's work. Readers now have some of her best known poems, like "[Soundtrack in the background," "[The story is complete: wide sargasso sea]," and "Samba Song," along with others that have not previously appeared in English before. (I hope that this translation spurs a re-translation of  Intimate Diaries, as well as much more of her unpublished prose and poems like "Gramas," which I translated a few years ago.)

In her introduction, Hillman rightly describes Cesar as an "avant-garde" poet, which she was, both for her time and today. She also was a key figure in the Poesia marginal (Marginal Poetry) movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and a pioneer in Brazilian LGBTQ writing. As I noted above, Cesar's mediation between high and popular culture is crucial to how her poems look and sound, and the Hillmans and Macedo negotiate the shifts quite well. Same-sexual desire, and a queering of discourse suffuse her poems, making her love poems in particular feel very contemporary, as if they were written just yesterday, i.e., earlier in 2018 or last year. No wonder that this poetry continues to appeal to young writers and readers of all ages.

Hillman also notes in her introduction that she received help from Cesar's current publishers, Companhia das Letras, in establishing the correct lineation of the poems. What she does not say, and what a comparison between her and mother's collection and the Paige-McCullough-Treece collection demonstrates, are variant versions of the poems, in some cases considerably so, perhaps arguing for a fuller introduction in a future edition of this or another translated Cesar collection. I do not have the Companhia das Letras edition of Cesar's collected poems, Poética (2013), or A teus pés (2016), but I assume that these were the versions that the Hillmans worked from. A few years ago I translated some of Cesar's poems that appeared not just in A teus pés, but also in Antigos e soltos: poemas e prosas da pasta rosa (Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Moreira Salles, 2008), and Álbum de retazos: antología crítica bilingüe : poemas, cartas, imágenes, inéditos (Buenos Aires: Corregidor), a collection of her poems, letters, photos, and unpublished work translated into Spanish and edited by Luciana Di Leone, Florencia Garramuño, and Ana Carolina Puente.

I assumed the versions of Cesar's poems in A teus pés were the authoritative one, but with the ones in other volumes, like Antigos e soltos, I took them as drafts that she--or editors--very well might have refined, she if she had lived to do so, or editors based on drafts they had carefully studied. So I now am quite curious about what versions Paige-McCullough-Treece might have chosen in translating Cesar's poems. Given that the earlier anthology was published in conjunction with the Center for the Study of  Brazilian Culture and Society, now King's Brazil Institute at King's College London, and given that David Treece, now the Camões Professor of Portuguese, is still there, I probably should write him to inquire about this.

Here is one example, the Portuguese taken directly from the Hillmans' book, followed by their translation, and, just for comparison, the P-M-T version (which, as you'll see, contains what are freestanding poems in the Hillmans' version.)

SUMÁRIO


Polly Kellog e o motorista Osmar.
Dramas rápidas mas intensos.
Fotogramas d meu coração conceital.
De tomara-que-caia azul-marinho.
Engulo desaforos mas com sinceridade.
Sonsa com bom-senso.
Antena de praça.
Artista da poupança.
Absolute blind.
Tesão do talvez.
Salta-pocinhas.
Água na boca.
Anjo que registra.

SUMMARY


Polly Kellog and Osmar the driver.
Fast but intense dramas.
Freeze-frame of my conceptual heart.
In a navy blue strapless dress.
I take insults but with sincerity.
Sly with common sense.
Village gossip.
Savings artist.
Absolutely blind.
Lust for the maybe.
Limp wrist.
Mouth-watering.
Recording angel.


tr. Brenda Hillman and Helen Hillman,
with Sebastião Edson Macedo

SUMMARY


Polly Kellog and the driver Osmar.
Rapid but intense dramas.
Still frames of my conceptual heart.
In a navy blue strapless dress.
I swallow insults but with sincerity.
Artful with good sense.
Antenna in the square.
Artist of thrift.
Absolutely blind.
The hots for perhaps.
Puddle-jumping.
Mouth watering.
An angel who leaves his mark.


The story is complete: wide Sargasso sea,
     blue blue that does not
frighten me, and sings like a paper siren.
Without you I am a lake, a mountain.
I think of a man named Herberto.
I lie down beneath the window to smoke.
I breathe dizzily. Roll on the mattress.
And fearfully, heartlessly, I raise the price.


tr. Patricia E. Paige and David Treece

Portuguese original and first translation, as well as the two translations below, Copyright © Ana Cristina Cesar, At Your Feet, translated by Brenda Hillman and Helen Hillman, with Sebastião Edson Macedo, edited by Katrina Dodson. Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2018. All rights reserved.

Second translation above, Copyright © Ana Cristina Cesar, Intimate Diary, translated by Patricia E. Paige, Celia McCullough, and David Treece. London: Boulevard, 1997. All rights reserved.

The final section in the P-M-T version is two free-standing, untitled poems in the Hillman's version: "[The story is complete: wide sargasso sea]" and "[Without you I'm really a lake, a mountain.]" Each includes slight variations, capturing a truer sense of the Brazilian original:

A historia está completa: wide sargasso sea, azul azul que não
me espanta, e canta como uma sereia de papel.

The story is complete: wide sargasso sea, blue blue that doesn't
amaze me, and sings like a paper mermaid.

And:

Sem você bem que sou lago, montanha.
Penso num homem chamado Herberto.
Me deita a fumar debaixa da janela.
Respiro com vertigem. Rolo no colchão.
E sem bravata, coração, 
     aumento o preço

Without you I'm really a lake, a mountain.
I think of a man named Herberto.
I lie down and smoke under the window.
I breathe dizzily. Roll around on the mattress.
And without bravado, sweetheart, <
     I raise the price

In the Hillmans' version of the first now free-standing poem, "[A historia...]",  the English words become italicized; "espantar" is translated as "amaze" rather than "frighten," changing the meaning; and in conjunction with that change, the original "sereia," which Paige and Treece translate as "siren," becomes a "mermaid," a more benign figure. In the second poem, which is extremely simple yet wry, as Cesar's poems often are, just on the edge of heartbreak, we get a more mellifluous English translation--"smoke under" and "roll around"--as well as a crucial change, "heartlessly" to "sweetheart." I actually think both slightly miss the sly complexity of Cesar's original, since "sem," meaning without, both does and does not modify "coração" ("heart"), so the original poem is saying both "without bravado [and] heartlessly" and "without bravado, [my] heart"; perhaps "my heart" might have worked the best.

But either way, as she says, she raises the price. At any rate, please do check out the Hillmans' translation when you can.

Poems + Translations: Arnaldo Antunes

Last year I had the pleasure of translating a small cache of poems by Arnaldo Antunes (1960-), a Brazilian musician, composer and writer, who is very famous in his home country, but not as well known on these shores. A former member of the rock & roll  band the Titãs (Titans) and an extensive collaborator with the Brazilian singer Marisa Monte (1967-), Antunes has been publishing his poetry since the early 1980s, and, like his music, it has the capacity for being both seemingly straightforward and accessible, while also proving quite playfully complex. One of my favorite of his musical works is Os Tribalistas (EMI/Phonomotor), a 2002 project with Monte and Bahian musician Carlinhos Brown (1962-).

One challenge with Antunes's poetry is the magic he wields with apparently simple elements combines into challenging verbal artifacts. I am thinking for example of a poem I translated entitled "Pedro de pedro," whose title may seem easy enough, but which is actually quite difficult to render into English. Why? Because "pedro" means "stone" or "rock" and that "de," meaning "of," adds layers of nuance, creating in English the following possibilities: "Stone's stone," "Rocky stone," "Stony stone," "Stone made out of stone," etc.

Of course I can't write all of these into the English translation, which demands that I pick one (I did), but I nevertheless want and need to to give a sense of what a native Portuguese speaker would pick up and puzzle over, yet understand, seeing the title alone. The polysemous nature of such poetry, which abounds in Antunes's work, deeply fascinates me, leading me to attempt to translate the untranslatable, but then, isn't that what all translators at some level are up to? Na impossibilidade fica possibilidade, não?

Antunes also has played with concrete and digital poetics over the years. You can find a variety of examples if you search online. You also can view an array of his musical and visual artistry at his personal site. In 1993, shortly after leaving Titãs, he released a collaborative LP, Nome (Name) guest-starring Monte, João Donato and Arto Lindsay, which was a multimedia music-and-poetic project with a computer-animated video that later traveled to various art museums and galleries. He has continued exploring poetry's materiality, and its nexus with visual art and the digital, and after a bit of scrounging about online, I found three examples of his poems, on Brazil Escola and  that merge the poetic and visual, emphasizing language's materiality and multiplicity.

 The first poem feels very appropriate to the political and social situations in Brazilian and US society today:

    PER

    DER

    BER

LI       TA




    LOS

    ING

    BER

LI        TY

The second involves a little visual play, with the flying upside down once the wing(s) come(s) out (or off, in which case the upside flying also signifies falling!)--and, I should note, the pronoun-less verb is both (2nd person informal in Brazil) imperative and (3rd person) indicative, so "spread" or "s/he/they spread/open):

TIRA
A ASA


E VOA



SPREAD
YOUR WINGS



AND FLY

or

S/HE/THEY SPREAD/S
OUT HIS/HER/THEIR WINGS



AND FLIES/FLY

This third piece is a quartet (or, thinking of visual art, a tetrych) of poems, one partly in English, one the same in the both languages, the other two in Portuguese, and all together forming a kind of crossword puzzle when viewed from afar:

IMAG
IGAB
YBTES

IMAG
IGAB
YTES

(Or "Imagigabytes," a neologism, but really what we produce with every creative thought)

***

IN-
VENTO
VENTO
DENTRO

I IN-
VENT
WIND
WITHIN

This one needs no explication; even if you speak no Portuguese, if you say it aloud it you can here the rhyme, and the inward sound of "dentro" (within, inside) vs. "vento" (wind); is it that "r" that does the trick?

***

MIRA
NA ESTRELA
E ASSOPRA

AIM
AT THE STAR
AND BLOW

This is quite simple too; my translation misses the visual design of the poem, in which the "blowing" is clearly attenuated; stars are far away, as we know.

***

YOU CAN THINK EVERYTHING
TUDO PODE SER PENSADO

VOCE PODE PENSAR TUDO
EVERYTHING CAN BE THOUGHT

With this one I reversed the translations, so that his English becomes Portuguese and vice versa. As we human beings steadily learn, almost anything can be thought, though that does not mean we need to act on it.

All translations and commentary © Copyright John Keene, 2018.

Poem: Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer
(World Literature Today)

In 2011, Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015), a highly regarded but perhaps not widely known Swedish poet, translator and psychologist, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. I wrote a short blog post about him and featured some of his poems. I did not, however, delve into a discussion of his biography, since it was up at the Nobel site, and I was somewhat indifferent to his selection. Given some of the bizarre Nobel literature choices (save Alice Munro) since Tranströmer, and the ongoing scandals linked to the Swedish Academy, which awards the literature Nobel, Tranströmer's honor looks like a recent high-water point for that organization.

His poetry certainly holds up; a lyric poet to the core, he has a gift for creating mystery and drama out of observations of everyday life, and a skill for utilizing metaphor to suggest great depths below and beyond the surface of the visible world. There is something charged and spiritual in so many of his poems that while I think it might be wrong to call him either a metaphysical or a religious poet, he is, I think it fair to say, a poet of the spirit and, conversely, of immanence. In the three poems of his I quoted back in 2011, you can see this most directly in "Strophe and Antistrophe" (I love that title), when he is describing both reality and something within and beneath--beyond--it: "Sudden change: beneath the float of heavenly hulls / glide the tethered ones. / Stern high, at an impossible angle, / leans the carcass of a dream, black / against a pale red strip of coast."

The sensory and sensuous apprehension of the world pulses dialectically in these lines, which paint a picture, but not a verisimilitudinous one. Instead, it is painterly in the stricter sense, of capturing what lies in in the mind, before the eyes and fingertips, while being interpreted and transformed by them. As it turns out, Tranströmer was alert to how other artists might be engaging with the world around them, and in "Vermeer," his short poem about Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), the Dutch Golden Age painter, whose exquisite intimate portraits had to wait several centuries before they received widespread acclaim. Careful, slow, deliberate, with an exceptional eye and gift for depicting light, he is now praised as an Old Master.

In "Vermeer," beautifully translated by Samuel Charters and which I am borrowing from the Painters and Poets blog, Tranströmer is chattier than usual, and appears to have devised a formal game for himself, which entails repeating "wall," one pictorial element that appears in the first of the images below, in nearly all of the stanzas. One way to read this repetition apart from being a result of observation and description of the paintings is by noting some of its possible metaphorical meanings; a wall of time separates us from the lifeworld and vision of Vermeer, and no amount of research can make him, his process or his perception of the world fully knowable. (David Hockney created a stir when, a few years ago, he argued and demonstrated the several of the Old Master painters like Vermeer, may have used optical devices, including special lenses and camerae obscurae, to produce works of such pinpoint precision.) That has stopped writers and even Hollywood from trying, though; Vermeer's iconic "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (one of its many names) spurred an eponymous 1999 historical novel, by Tracy Chevalier, which then became a belauded 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson--as well as an allegedly dreadful 2008 play, which I've never seen.

Yet what does a work of art--a poem, a short story or novel, a play--about someone from the past do but allow us another means to "know" that gone world, to access, imaginatively, its vistas, its landscapes, including of feelings? Like a filmmaker with magic powers, Tranströmer is taking us into Vermeer's scenes, his world--"straight through the wall into the bright studio / into the second that goes on living for hundreds of years"--captured and preserved for posterity in these paintings, aware of course that in so doing, it can disorient us--"it hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick / but it is necessary"--but, as so many of these poems have shown, that defamiliarization is salutary in the end. A new sense of language, of time, of space, of ourselves and others, however brief and temporary, is important, so that, like the "emptiness" and against the nihilism, we can say as the paintings--and something within them--say, "'I am open."

VERMEER

by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Samuel Charters

No sheltered world . . . on the other side of the wall 
        the noise begins
the tavern begins
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, 
        the din of bells
and the mentally disordered brother-in-law, the bearer
        of death that everyone must tremble for.

The great explosion and the delayed tramp of rescuers
the boats that strut at anchor, the money that creeps
        into the pocket of the wrong person
demands piled on demands
Cusps of gaping red flowers that sweat premonitions 
        of war.

Away from there and straight through the wall 
        into the bright studio
into the second that goes on living for hundreds 
        of years.
Paintings titled The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking 
        inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of 
       Terra Incognita.

Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed
       to the chair.
The gold upholstery tacks flew in with unheard-of speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been anything but stillness.

The ears ring with either depth or height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall
that leaves every fact suspended
and holds the brush steady.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick
but it's necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself --
Whether you know it or not it's the same for everyone,
everyone except little children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has set itself on a slant against the wall.
It's like a prayer to emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
"I am not empty, I am open."

Tomas Tranströmer,"Vermeer," from Painters and Poets, originally in Art and Artists: Poems, an anthology of ekphrastic poems by Emily Fragos, Knopf, 2012. Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer, Emily Fragos, 2012. All rights reserved.

Here are a few Vermeer paintings that Culture Trip's Lani Seelinger recommends you see if you are unfamiliar with his work. Tranströmer's poem explicitly references the first two, I believe.

The Little Street (1657–58), oil on canvas,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Music Lesson or A Lady at the Virginals
with a Gentleman, c. 1662-65, oil on canvas,
Royal Collection, Buckingham Palace

View of Delft, 1659-60, oil on canvas,
Mauritshuis, the Hague

Poem: Shuzo Takiguchi

Shuzo Takiguchi
(Mirador. Blog de Joan Miró,
Cultural y Arte, por
Antonio Boix.)

Keeping with the theme of ekphrasis and with the principle that an ekphrastic poem or poem about art need not describe a specific artwork, as Monica Youn's poem yesterday demonstrated, today I'm sharing yet another approach: you could write a poem about a specific artist, an homage/femmage/themage, with references however overt or subtle, to their oeuvre. Such is the case with Shuzo Takiguchi (1903-1973), the Japanese Modernist poet, painter and critic, who was associated with various movements in Japan, including Surrealism and Dada. I happened upon Takiguchi's tribute below, and two others--to fellow Surrealist artists Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró--on the Poetry site (the three translated poems appeared in the October 2014 print issue of Poetry Magazine), and was intrigued.

"René Magritte," once you read it, is an open tribute to the great, popular Belgian Surrealist, who lived from 1898 to 1967, and who produced some of the most iconic art work of the Surrealist movement--though he broke with André Breton over his decision to stay in Brussels instead of returning to Paris before the war. Allusions to various recurring Magrittean images, such as silhouettes, water, mountains, and hats appear, but it is not just the imagery, but the incantatory repetition of phrases, privileging sound and juxtaposition over clarity and immediacy of meaning, the unmooring of realist logic, that also underpins Takiguchi's own Surrealist poetic practice, and the way he translates his understanding of Magritte into poetry. His translation is not literal, but imaginative and contextual.  Additionally, the end words, when read aloud, almost make the two stanzas feel like the opening or ending to a sestina, though it clearly isn't one.

So was there a particular Magritte painting or were there paintings that Takiguchi had in mind? He mentions "silhouettes / flow incessantly like water," as well as "a mirror trick, / like a human echo / burns a silk hat endlessly." Given these references, two Magritte paintings, "La Belle Société" (1962) and "Décalcomania" (1966) come to mind.  In both there are human silhouettes that open up, like windows, onto beach landscapes with water flowing in the distance. As it turns out, Takiguchi created his own set of decalcomanic artworks, keeping the media as the title. The final stanza seems to refer to the two paintings above as well as to another famous Magritte image, "The Masterpiece Or the Mysteries of the Horizon," featuring three men, angled in various ways away from the viewer, and three crescent moons that could also be eclipses. (The poem could also be titled "Giorgio de Chirico" given the landscapes Takiguchi describes and paints.)

Yet what I want to argue is that even if Takiguchi had these two paintings, or just the latter one, in mind, his poem's language and imagery capture the spirit of Magritte such that any painting could stand in. His approach stands against literalness in favor of something more elusive and strange, not unlike Magritte's often very beautiful and bizarre paintings. Here I quote from Mary Jo Bang's and Yuki Tanaka's "Translators' Note," which shares a bit more information about what Takiguchi was after:

With Takiguchi, the surrealist estrangement has to be maintained in today’s poetic world where defamiliarization is not as surprising as it once was. To that end, we have had to be careful not to normalize the poems or alter their dialogic relationship to French surrealism. Takiguchi was actively involved in that literary movement. He corresponded with André Breton and translated his 1928 Surrealism and Painting into Japanese two years after it was published in France. An Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, compiled by Breton and Paul Éluard for the International Surrealism Exhibition in 1938, recognized Takiguchi as a “poète et écrivain surréaliste.” The present poems were first published in 1936 in L’échange surréaliste, a collection of writings and drawings by European Surrealists in Japanese translation, designed to foster international exchange. Takiguchi also helped revive the avant-garde scene in postwar Japan by spearheading an interdisciplinary art group called Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), which was active from 1951 to 1957. The experimental fervor of French surrealism can be felt in the radical texture of Takiguchi’s poems and his decision to call them “poetic experiments.”

You can find more about Takiguchi here. There's also his archives, where you can view some of his drawings.

And now, the poem.

***

RENÉ MAGRITTE



by Shuzo Takiguchi



Translated by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka

Released silhouettes
flow incessantly like water,
flow between mountains
swiftly like a kaleidoscope.
The solitude of  the North Pole
bustles with human silhouettes.
Endless transmission of  ABC.

On the shredded shore
a silk hat burns
like a mirror trick,
like a human echo
burns a silk hat endlessly.
Then the flames
were received like ABC.

On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse
the silhouettes smiled.

                     
                 Translated from the Japanese

Translators’ Note: Three Poems by Shuzo Takiguchi

Here are the three paintings by René Magritte, followed by one of Takiguchi's "Decalcomania" series:

René Magritte, The Beautiful Society,
oil on canvas, 1962.

René Magritte, Decalcomania, oil
on canvas, 1966.

René Magritte, The Masterpiece or Mysteries of the Horizon,
oil on canvas, 1955, private collection.

Shuzo Takiguchi, Spirit of Matthias
Grunewald, decalcomanic painting on paper,
1962.

Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke & Francisco Aragón

Francisco Aragón (YouTube.com)

Several days ago in my post featuring a poem by Valerie Martínez I mentioned poet Francisco Aragón, who had organized the "PINTURA: POETA, a project in Ekphrasis program" that Martínez, Carmen Giménez Smith, Blas Falconer, and a number of other leading contemporary Latinx poets had participated in back in 2013. I do plan to feature more of those poets and poems, but you J's Theater readers did not think that I would mention Francisco without sharing one of his poems, did you? In fact, a while ago I thought about posting his poem below, and then, in the swirl of...well, you know the drill. A day, a week, a month, years pass. So, how fitting that this month has provided a reminder to do so.

One of the most famous ekphrastic poems ever written is German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's (1875-1926) "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," a sonnet that initially appeared in his Neue Gedichte (New Poems) of 1907. These poems, and those in the second volume of 1908, were landmarks in European Modernist literature; while many appear in fixed forms like the sonnet, their combination of objective description, incantatory lyricism, and metaphysical heft appeared to mark a new stage in German and European poetry. At times, Rilke's poetic speaker engages in dialogue with himself--or his selves--and the poem's subject and themes, incorporating the reader in the dialogue, in a way that feels distinct from the dialogic approach one finds at times in Romanticism, or the abstractions of Symbolist poetry.

Rilke's "Archaic Torso" is fairly straightforward compared to some of the other poems in the two volumes, but it is less for the description than for its final line that its fame accrues. Many people who  perhaps have never read the German, let alone the English version of the poem know that famous dictum that concludes the sonnet: "You must change your life." As I have pointed out a number of times over the years, this translation is correct, and yet it loses one key component of the German, which is the verb "ändern," meaning to change or alter. "Ändern," and its cognates "ander/e," meaning "other," are directly related etymologically to English's "other." We lost the "n" and in the consonant shifting that occurred, and we got the "th" where German has a "d." Think "thorn" and "Dorn," or "thistle" and "Distel," or, well, "to think" and "denken." The languages, at least in their root words, are close. 

German does have other words for change too; "wechseln," meaning to "change" as in "exchange" money, sheets, etc.; "umziehen," to change one's clothes; "umtauschen," to exchange (something in a store); "verwandeln," to transform. (In the latter word, of course, "ande[r]" makes an appearance. Those "ändern" literally means "to make another" or "to make other." Or "to other." In this one word then, Rilke, as canny as they come, reminds us of the power of what not just the encounter with the work art does to the speaker, to us and any viewer, but what the artist herself must do--make oneself another, an other, other.

I have not forgotten Francisco, though. So below I am posting the German original of Rilke's poem, and Stephen Mitchell's famous translation. And then, I am posting Francisco's riff, which could be thought of also as a creative translation that manages to transform--verwandeln--the poem into something else, wittily but also with a serious little wallop. I think there are several different ways to interpret Francisco's version, but I'll leave that for J's Theater readers to pursue. I've already said quite a bit, though in case you are interested, Francisco is the author of two books of poetry, Puerta del Sol (2005) and Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and among his many activities (some of which I've mentioned on this blog before), he directs Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

ARCHAISCHER TORSO APOLLOS

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Shultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

From Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995). All rights reserved.

TORSO

by Francisco Aragón

    after Rilke

Despite the absent head (whose eyes

were the green of apples)
the supple flesh hums
with the afterglow

of those eyes
which is why the curve
of chest shimmers which is why

the twist of loin turns
that look into a smile, snaring
your eyes, leading

them slowly to regions
below the waist...That block
of stone more than a figure

disfigured and short; cascade
of shoulder glints
like a sinewy beast

of prey, whose edges blink
like stars—that torso:
gazing on its own. Step closer:

go blind

Copyright © 2014 by Francisco Aragón. From Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.

And, lastly, what might that headless torso of Apollo have looked like to Rilke, or how might it appear today?

Torso of Apollo, Roman copy
after a statue of the school of
Polykleitos, ca. 430–420 BC
Villa Ridolfi in Rome, acquired
in 1812 by Wagner for the
 Glyptothek, Munich
(courtesy of The Rapidian)

Annotations, Soon In Portuguese

Annotations, my first book, appeared 23 years ago, when New Directions published it in the fall of 1995. In the intervening years, the brief, dense, lyrical novel--or poetic memoir, if you like--has, I'm thankful to say, attracted a steady readership and remains in print. Until recently, however, neither the book nor any portion of it has ever been translated into another language, as my other work has. An attempt shortly after the book was published in the US failed because the foreign publisher felt Annotations was perhaps too culturally specific. For my part, based on my own experience as a reader and translator, I have long wondered if the dense web of allusions, and the intricate, often lilting quality of the prose was the barrier. But unless you hear from the publisher and potential translators, you may never know what is or was going on.

A few years ago, however, I learned that a planned publication of Annotations in Portuguese, or Anotações, was going to go forward. The publisher is A Bolha Editora, who co-published my translation into English of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer in 2014 with Nightboat Books. Guided by writer, editor and genius Rachel Gontijo Araújo, A Bolha Editora is one of Brazil's exciting small presses, publishing both domestic and international authors, and have been based in the downtown Botafogo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro since their founding (though I believe they may have recently moved to Brasília, the federal capital). Among the other authors and artists on A Bolha's roster are a number of prose and poetic experimentalists, including Claude Cahun, Kammal João, Bhanu Kapil, Tove Jansson, Douglas A. Martin, Adriano Motta, Jesse Moynihan, Nathanaël, Virgílio Neto, Gail Scott, and Studs Turkel.

Anotações' translator is Daniel Lühmann, originally from Poço de Caldas, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and now living in Lisbon. Daniel has previously translated the noted graphic novel, Snowpiercer (A Perfura de Neve) by Jacques Lob, Benjamin LeGrand and Jean-Marc Rochette, and Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly (Um Reflexão na Escuridão), into Portuguese, and also makes intriguing performance videos, under the title "Pasarela" (Catwalk), which you can view on YouTube. If you read Portuguese, you can enjoy Mayra Azzi's short, informative profile of him on Revista Trip (the same site that featured the Thiago Borba images) going about his morning routine, with accompanying photos. Or if you are feeling especially tl;dr, you can see Azzi's photo series "Despertando com Daniel Lühmann" (Waking Up with Daniel Lühmann) at Cargo Collective.

Anotações, from A Bolha
Editora (image © A Bolha Editora
and Rodrigo Martins)

In terms of the translation process, he was a pleasure to work with, possessing not just a fine ear but a subtle eye, and we resolved some thorny issues involving vernacular terms and syntax, assonant, consonant and rhyming prose, and obscure references that American readers might be able to guess but Brazilians probably could not. (As was the case with the original version, it will have a glossary, though much expanded from the one I provided at the request of James Laughlin.)

Daniel even devised a solution to "Scaredy cat, scaredy cat, too scared to know where your shadow's at" that mirrors but is hardly an echo of the original. In the process, he even reminded me that I'd invented a few words in that text. His version will be of incalculable help to anyone translating Annotations into any other language, and, like the best translations, he creates a music akin to the original, but distinctively (Brazilian) Portuguese. To him, publisher, author and visionary Rachel Gontijo Araújo, and everyone at A Bolha Editora, I offer my deepest abraços e obrigadões.

The volume is slated to be out later this year, I think, and I think it's OK to show part of one of the covers (there may be two), which uses a original painting by Rio native Rodrigo Martins (cf. above).

Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day + Poems: Nicolás Guillén & Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes in Harlem,
1959. (The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images)

Happy Black History Month! February ushers in the month on the US calendar when the history, culture, and experiences of people of African descent, African Americans and all other Black peoples, in America and across the globe, occupy the foreground. As readers of J's Theater know well, every day, every month, every year here offers an opportunity to highlight the artistry, past and present experiences, and rich cultures of Black people, and to the extent that I can do so this month as every month, I intend to.

February 1 is also the birthday of arguably the greatest and most prolific African American poet, (James) Langston (Mercer) Hughes (1902-1967), a Joplin, Missouri native whose poetry transformed Black American and American literature, and who was one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance and a link to many of the Black American and non-US literary traditions that followed. One of the many aspects of Hughes' career that has deeply influenced me is his work as a translator; he brought into the English the drama of Spain's Federico García Lorca, the poetry of the Afrocuban luminary Nicolas Guillén, and the prose of Haitian writer Jacques Roumain.

I've previously posted one of his translations of Guillén's poems from Motivos de Son (1938), the collection that made the Cuban poet's reputation. I shared it in conjunction with my trip to Cuba,  which though 9 years ago feels like it was just yesterday. Hughes visited Cuba three times, in 1927, 1930 and 1931, before the Revolution, and as Ervin Dyer discussed in a CBS News piece, the American poet played a role in helping the country connect to its African roots, engaging in conversations with and championing the work of Afrocuban artists and writers at a time when racial discrimination there, as in the US, was rife. One of the poets he met and whom he encouraged was Guillén, who interviewed him for Diário de Marina, according to Dyer. Many stars aligned: Hughes was already famous and being translated in Cuba, Guillén's career was ascendant, and the newspaper had a page dedicated to fighting racism. Hughes would go on to translate Guillén's poetry and cultivated their friendship to the end of his life. At the same time, his presence in Cuba and his art continued to galvanize an array of Afrocuban artists working across genres.

Here is Hughes' translation of Guillén's "Little Song for the Children of the Antilles," which I screenshot from The Translations: Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and Jacques Roumain, by Langston Hughes, edited and with an introduction by Dellita Martin-Ogunsola, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

And here is a poem Dyer mentions in his article, one of Hughes' tributes to Cuba, "To the Little Fort of San Lázaro on the Ocean Front, Havana." It is also a humorous and sarcastic critique of capitalism, especially of the predatory US kind, which had reached its tentacles deep into Cuba before Fidel Castro and the Revolution hacked it away.  We also might think of it as a fitting epigraph for a good deal of what gentrification and global capital are laying waste to today.

TO THE LITTLE FORT OF SAN LÁZARO

ON THE OCEAN FRONT, HAVANA

by Langston Hughes


Watch tower once for pirates
That sailed the sun-bright seas —
Red pirates, great romantics.

  DRAKE
  DE PLAN,
  EL GRILLO

Against such as these
Years and years ago
You served quite well —
When time and ships were slow.
  But now,
Against a pirate called
THE NATIONAL CITY BANK
What can you do alone?
Would it not be
Just as well you tumbled down,
Stone by helpless stone?

From The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Poems, 1921-1940, edited and with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. All rights reserved.

Remembering Ursula Le Guin, Visionary Fiction Writer & Nicanor Parra, Anti-Poet

Photograph by Dana Gluckstein / MPTV Images
via New Yorker

Let me start my note about Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) by pointing out that I always write her name as "Ursula LeGuin," closing that Breton gap between "Le" and "Guin." As it turns out, that was the original spelling of her husband Charles' name, but when they married in France, when both were in graduate school, a clerk urged Mr. Le Guin to use the linguistically correct form. This is neither here nor there, really, except that Ursula Le Guin was very attentive to naming, and more specifically, to language and its power, using and probing it to explore alternatives to the oppressive structures that defined our real world in her visionary fiction career, which spanned half a century, and which left a deep and lasting mark on literature.

Bibliomane and bibliophile though I am, I first learned about Le Guin's work when I saw the first film version--now hard to find--of her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven on PBS, when I was a high schooler in 1980, and recall being transfixed by it. The novel, a dystopia set in 2002 Portland, Oregon, turns on the powers of the protagonist, Charles Orr, who can willfully dream new realities, past or present, into being. A psychologist, William Haber, figures out a way to manipulate Orr, for nefarious purposes, but one of the most enlightening aspects of Le Guin's novel is how she explores the potentially devastating consequences of what may, without extensive consideration and extrapolation into the future, seem to be positive or even neutral changes to our reality. To give one example, when Haber utilizes his machine to have Orr eliminate racism, the result is that all people end up turning the same, dull color of light "gray," which addresses the issue of color prejudice but also eliminates a major component of human difference, beauty and identity. (Of course one could also argue with the idea that racism hinges solely on skin color and does not also entail physiognomy and other distinguishing traits, let alone structural and system components, but in the sense that "color prejudice, "as the classicist George Snowden famous put it, lies at the heart of the European project of racial categorization and scientific racism, Le Guin made a justifiable choice.)

The Lathe of Heaven is a powerful example of how her work was less interested in technology, and more engaged with profound philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and, like much realist fiction, psychological questions. I think it once saw it called "soft science fiction," though there is nothing lesser about how she and others explored alternate ways of imagining our world, or alternative and parallel ones they had created from their imaginations. The Lathe of Heaven was a standalone work, though, and not part of her well known Earthsea and Hainish cycle series, for which she is best known. The five Earthsea books, commencing with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), depict an archipelagic world in which magic plays a key role, and whose characters tend, as I learned with surprise upon reading A Wizard, brown-skinned. The Hainish novels, exemplified by The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), tackle social, political and cultural questions head on; in this novel, a visitor from one planet ventures to another, where he encounters a very different cultural context, including ambisexual characters, which unsettles his initial attempts to understand and connect with them. Social, political and cultural questions run throughout all her work, but Le Guin highlights them in these novel such that it would be hard to walk away from them not somewhat transformed by the questions she raises and allows the texts, and her readers, to mull over. If there were ever a set of works ripe for serialization on TV, and a more opportune time than our current moment of social and political crisis, I could hardly name them. So perhaps some director and production companies will take a hint, negotiate with heirs, and, once greenlighted, start filming.

In addition to her speculative fictional novels for adults, Le Guin also published collections of short stories, one of which, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," I have taught a number of times over the years. Her work also includes works for children, and works of nonfiction, including essays and a guide for better writing, Steering the Craft (1998), which I am proud to admit is sitting on work table right now. (I'd fished it out in preparation for rereading, as my sabbatical got underway.) She remained a powerful feminist, anti-racist, progressive voice till the very end, delivering a knockout speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, where she overtly critiqued capitalism and the hyper-commercialization of books.  She concluded her brief, powerful oration with the following words:

We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Though Le Guin is no longer among the writing, the conceptual power, assured craft and vivid world-making of Le Guin's art, in the fullest senses of that term, should ensure readers return to it. I know I plan to, beginning with the Earthsea books. May she rest in peace.

‡‡‡

Regular J's Theater readers know that I am a fan of Nicanor Parra's (1914-2018), and have featured his work and posts about him several times over the years. Back in 2012, I posted his anti-poem "Young Poets," and one year prior, I wrote about his receipt, tardy though it was, of the Cervantes Prize, one of the highest honors for a Spanish-language writer. The very idea of the anti-poem, which is to say, a literary work that in many ways eschews what are thought to be the fundamentals of poetry while nevertheless employing poetry's unique resources, especially drawn from everyday speech and the vernacular, have long fascinated me, as has Parra's wittiness and humor, and his willingness to incorporate non-lyric elements in poetry, including images, drawings and charts.

I also have regularly lamented that he was not awarded the Nobel Prize (see the first link above), a prospect extremely unlikely at this point, now that he has passed at the age of 103, but then any number of major authors have been and will be passed over, including John Ashbery, who died late last year, and Ursula Le Guin, who I plan to memorialize below. Neither inventiveness nor longevity was enough to move Parra onto the laureate plane, but not winning the Nobel Prize is not the end of the world (and winning it, as a certain musician did a few years ago, is no guarantee of great poetry), and Parra will remain a vital poet for anyone who is interested in poems--or anti-poems--that make the most out of the simplest means.

Here are a few Parra poems I posted on Twitter that I wanted to share here. Note the first, partiularly cheeky if you ask me. (The first two poems are from, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, antitranslation by Liz Werner (@NewDirections, 2004), and the second from After Dinner Declarations, translated & w/ an intro by Dave Oliphant (Host Publications, 2009). Consider drafting an anti-poem, and enjoy.

Chatting with Mark Sussman at the Creative Independent

Recently I chatted with writer Mark Sussman for a short feature that has now posted at The Creative Independent, under the title "Writing from the Inside Out." It was such an honor to be invited to participate on the site, which aims to be "a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people," and features short interviews with an impressive array of creative people across the artistic spectrum, including Hilton Als, Björk, Taja Cheek, Scott Esposito, Shepard Fairey, Diamanda Galás, Roxane Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Jonathan Gonzalez, Rickie Lee Jones, Isaac Julien, Joseph Legaspi, Carmen Maria Machado, Aparna Nancherla, Morgan Parker, Brontez Parnell, Paul Sepuya, Prageeta Sharma, Danez Smith, Michael Stipe, and many others.

The site's first conversation, after its launch note, was with the incomparable Eileen Miles, and the one that posted right before mine engaged Mrs. Smith, a "philanthropist, tone poet, and the world's most unlikely guitar hero." My conversation with Mark, which took place via Skype, even spilled over the alotted time limit, I think, so he could include only a few key portions of it appear on the site. As always I tried not to cover ground that I had in other public conversations, though some of that is unavoidable. One other aspect of the exchange was the light editing; the transcript is very casual, and close to how it was recorded, so what we said is what the readers get. Mark also shared a few of the excerpts that didn't make to the TCI website on his personal blog.

Here are some thoughts about translation, why new translators for extensively or well-translated texts are needed from time to time, and more specifically, some thoughts about translators of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. The bolded statement is Mark's, the response is mine:

One of my teachers once said the text in the original language stays the same, but we always need updated translations. And we’re always getting new translations of old texts. Why is that?
Because I think, with each new translation, you bring a different perspective to it. Often, of course, what happens with new translations is they re-situate the work for a new context. I think of a writer that’s so beloved and has been translated by different people in so many different ways, like Rainer Rilke. Two people whose translations of Rilke I think are really great are William Gass and Steven Mitchell. I believe Gass’s precedes Mitchell’s. You know, William Gass was an extraordinary writer in English. But he was also a profoundly philosophical writer. And he, of course, spoke German. He had training in German. So his translations have a certain kind of philosophical sensibility, like he’s capturing something in Rilke, I think, that most translators probably wouldn’t.

With Steven Mitchell, you have a translator who has an extraordinary ear [and] an extraordinary eye and his desire is to give you a Rilke that, on the one hand is as approximate as possible, but also doesn’t lose any of Rilke’s strangeness. If you go back and forth between those two translations, and of course, many lesser translations, you really start to get a sense, if you don’t speak German, of what Rilke might be like. And that, I think, can be really great.

But at times updated translations can just be terrible. If you’re translating the work of a poet, particularly a poet who is also an extraordinary prose writer, you want to retain that poetry, so you want to err on the side of the lyrical that might not be as exact, as opposed to the exact that is not so lyrical, because [otherwise] you lose what is essential to that writer.

Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben
Mohammed Anoun, Moorish
Ambassador to Queen
Elizabeth I (1600), Anonymous
painter.

And here's one snippet from the excerpt, where we discuss William Shakespeare's Othello, which we both love and have taught:

There’s this amazing portrait of an ambassador, I guess, from one of the North African countries that would have existed then, it wasn’t Morocco. There’s this amazing portrait of this ambassador, and it’s unclear whether Shakespeare would have ever seen that particular picture, but imagery of that kind circulated about Northern Africa and the Middle East, and of course Africa itself. There was also a moment where, in his transposition of the story from Britain to Venice, he’s picking a very similar society. A maritime society, but also a society that you could say gives him a little bit more leeway, but, like Britain, [one that] is very much engaged in mercantilism. So there are all of these parallels between the Britain of his day and the fictional Venice.

But the fascinating thing that most people usually don’t talk about is that, in Shakespeare’s time, he would see Black people walking through the streets of London. They may have been working in the theater, or they may have been working on the docks. This is also the moment where slavery is getting going. So you have all of these things happening in the background, and as you pointed out, they all feed into the play.

I think it’s very interesting that in the play, you have these moments of slippage. One of the things the students always ask is, “What is a Moor?” This is what the dictionary says a Moor is. And then, when you read through it and you see how, in fact, it’s not even so much about Moorishness Africanness. It really is about Blackness. When you think about all of those insults that come out of Iago’s mouth or the horror that Desdemona’s father feels about this. He’s a warrior, he’s just like this big “black ram.” So you see that. Shakespeare was kind of working through multiple things at once, which makes the tragedy that much more powerful. So when Joyce Carol Oates makes the statement, I was just sort of like, “What are you doing? You’re smart enough to know, you’re not making any sense.” You know? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Do read the rest of both interviews if you can.

Master Class on the Novella in Translation

Bolaño's Una novelita lumpen

At the beginning of September, the fall semester always looks endless to me, like a river whose mouth or delta lies beyond the horizon of the looming holidays. Once class begin, however, the weeks and months always race by more swiftly than I envision. By December, I find myself remarking how the term has slimmed down to final papers and exams, with the restorative winter break--that terminus--only weeks away. Even still, I always worry about overloading and wearing myself out, which I have come to realize is unavoidable. Beyond classes these days, there is everything else, which was always there, but even more so with each passing year.

I nevertheless had the idea that a mere month's worth of--four--classes on a free Wednesday alongside my usual teaching and advising load would not be unreasonable and a pleasant change of pace, and it turns out that it was. For four weeks from mid-October through the beginning of November, I taught a masterclass on the novella in translation to a small cadre of MFA students at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and once I properly figured out the commute, which required heading in the opposite direction from Newark, things ran quite smoothly.

Having not headed into Manhattan regularly during morning rush hour in 17 years, I was reminded that the PATH trains are usually reliable, if stuffed like a coffee vacuum pack, at that hour, and that the trip into the city is especially quick because it only requires a few stops to Christopher Street station, which once was my destination when I was a student at NYU (except when I taught in the East Village and in the winter, when I would take it further, to 9th Street) and again when I worked in SoHo in the late 1990s. From the Christopher St. PATH stop, I walked down the famous street, still mostly shuttered at 9 am, to the 1 Train at 7th Avenue, and then changed to the 2 to speed uptown, then back to the 1 to end up right outside Columbia's main gate on Broadway. Trips back to New Jersey (and usually the Rutgers campus for afternoon meetings) ran more leisurely in reverse.

Since we had only four weeks, so I assigned four novellas in translation:

• Roberto Bolaño's 2005 mini-masterpiece A Little Lumpen Novelita, the last work of fiction he published in his lifetime, which was translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by New Directions in 2016;
• Amélie Nothomb's 1993 novella Loving Sabotage, translated by Andrew Wilson and published by New Directions in 2003;
• Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool: Three Novellas, originally published as three separate works, in 1990 and 1991, and translated by Stephen Snyder and published by Picador in 2008;
• and Abdourahman A. Waberi's 2009 Passage of Tears, translated by David and Nicole Ball, and published by Seagull Books, 2011.

I had read all of these books before, the Waberi and Bolaño texts most recently, and the Nothomb not long after it appeared a little over a decade ago. I chose these texts with the aim of linguistic, aesthetic, and thematic diversity, among other goals, yet still ended up with two Francophone authors, writing from rather different perspectives, and three works in European languages. (Since I can read French and Spanish, though, I had a clearer sense of the translators' skills.) Of the four works, Bolaño's and Ogawa's were clearly labeled novelas (or "novelita"), while Nothomb's and Waberi's were issued as novels. All four are authors I admire, Bolaño especially so, and though I had taught his work before, I had never included fiction by any of the other authors, nor these four works, on my syllabi.

I'd chosen Waberi's text, I realized after the course had begun, in part as a provocation, because its length suggests that it might not fit the criteria. And what are they? I won't reprise the essay, based on a talk I gave last spring at Northwestern's annual spring Festival of Writing, that I revised and shared with my students to start the class, but some of the key characteristics I asked the students to think about were the novella's usually limited scope (more than a story, perhaps, but less than most novels) and concentrated effects, its unity of voice and plot, and its concision in narration. One of my students metaphorized, specifically apropos of Ogawa's work, the novella's narrative focus to a "tunnel." I thought this a brilliant insight, and thought it applied, in varying ways, to all four works. The students' assignments included in-class discussion and writing, response papers, and, as their final submission, a set of novella starters. Each student produced several that I hope they pursue, if not as novellas then, plumped out as novels.

They were to a person smart, engaged, and original in their thinking. I did not see any of their creative work, but nearly all were fiction writers, and I got a sense of what each of them was working on. It was a pleasure to experience thinking through the texts with them. Each novella offers different challenges in terms of how it works, and the class as a whole was more than up to the case, puzzling out as well other aspects of the texts. One of the students who read French was able to point out how much more ironic Nothomb's original was compared to the English (and how it riffed off a variety of works that Francophone readers would know, though Anglophones might not), while Waberi's French was a bit more formal in places, and less so in others.

Will they write a novella or novellas? I hope my proselytization was effective, though I did discuss, in the essay and the class, the US publishing industry's reluctance about the shorter long form. I also hope I might have sparked an interest in translation among some of them. I did leave the very brief course--like an "eyeblink," as one student put it--as encouraged as I always am when I finish a semester with my MFA (and other graduate, and undergraduate) students at Rutgers-Newark, about the future of American literature and writing. The hurdle, of course, is to get inventive, talented writers (of all ages and backgrounds) like these students and my Rutgers students and mentees, into print, and their work to readers. The sharp, gifted novella class cohort, I sincerely hope and trust, will be doing so before long.