At an absorbing informal meeting of a dozen people at a faculty/graduate-student reading group on poetry yesterday, we talked about a half dozen different topics that came up from our reading of two poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and different translations of those poems by Langston Hughes and Achy Obejas, and also about an essay by English poet Dick Davis about how English poetry can be seen as a sequence of changes brought about by translation into English of poetry from outside England, from Chaucer to Ezra Pound (Davis does not specifically address American poetry in his essay). Our poet colleague Mary Kinzie wondered if the loss of pronounced word-endings in English after Chaucer’s time was an important reason why rhyme declined; I said that I thought that the decline of rhyme in English was a result of poets (in different periods) having narrowly defined rhyme as full rhyme rather than, as in some other languages and literary histories, regarding it as a broader range of kinds of phonetic repetitions, including many that are not full rhyme.

In other words, even though poets like to say that English is rhyme-poor compared to inflected languages with lots of frequently repeated word-endings, I was arguing that the abandonment of rhyme (several times, and most widespread during the twentieth century) was based on literary choice rather than on any linguistic limitations of the sounds of English. (And in fact, the poets of ancient Greek and Latin, which are very inflected languages, chose not to use rhyme, while later, medieval, poets writing in Latin did so.)

This may sound like an arcane discussion that is of little interest to readers of poetry, and yet it points to how our understanding of poetry itself is not “natural” but rather the result of historical choices, of the influence of poets and critics whose dominant opinions may have less to do with the truth value of what they say than with the particular advantage in their own historical moment of looking at poetry one way instead of another. So most readers of poetry and most American poets, might feel that rhyming is not “natural,” but the truth it that it is no less natural than not rhyming. Meanwhile readers who are less in touch with what twentieth-century poets have done–like listeners who have heard few works by twentieth-century composers–may yearn for poetry with rhyme simply because much the poetry they learned as schoolchildren was from the nineteenth century, when a lot of poetry rhymed, and when classical music conformed to a paradigm of harmony that was superseded by twentieth-century music (to various degrees, agreeable or not to one listener or another, depending on the composer).

It’s not hard to demonstrate that any particular poetic quality or element is not “natural” in the sense that it is inherent in poetry itself. Just as we all begin to learn from birth how to sort out which phonemes of our mother-tongue(s) we need to pay attention to, and begin to stop paying attention to the others and in fact eventually lose the ability to hear those others, so poets learn to pay attention to which elements and resources of poetry they need to pay attention to in order to write what is regarded in their historical moment and their culture as poetry (several sorts of poetry, usually), and stop paying attention to other elements and resources, and in fact may eventually lose the ability even to notice how those other ones work. Or at least may convince themselves that those other ones are of no great importance. And thus we gets “schools,” movements, exclusions, dominance, and so on. All of which in fact makes poetry richer overall as a practice of meaning-making, because the multiplicity of poetry frees poets of different persuasions to extend the capacities of poetry in different directions.

But no one should think that learning how to write a poem or read one is as “natural” as learning one’s mother tongue(s). This is so, even though there are poetic practices still in use that are amazingly old—as old as the earliest traces we can find of what poetry was, even long before there was writing. Any poetic practice that old, even if it is not “natural,” must be a response to an appetite in the human mind for certain things that language did then, and still does now. Language as a vehicle, a capacity, an appetite, for thought and feeling, I should say.

Ed Roberson’s new book of poems, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), opens with these lines:

I entered as a man enters

a labyrinth,      seeing

from hairline fracture to abyss

the magnified whisper

of memory      not finish its sentence

whole [...]

Roberson is the master of a hauntingly meditative rhythm of thought and perception, precisely scored (musically) by means of the poetic line. How can thought and perception be anything but meditative? you ask. What I am trying to articulate is my sense of an utterance that unwinds syntactically not in the order of the expected narrative structuring of a personal anecdote or of reference to a personal circumstance, but rather, in the form of the poet telling what he (or I should say his poetic alter ego, his poetic self, the self created in and by the poem) is thinking while simultaneous questioning and responding to his own thought.

Roberson’s interiority makes it possible for him to write “Somewhere I’m the disappointment in myself,” when he is in “A Bout Of” (the title) “One of those malarias of memory” (the first line). “Somewhere” seems somewhere else, still within him. “You’ve gained the language used for not speaking” (“A Small Residue”), he writes to himself–ruefully yet not without a hint of the achievement of this. He does not say that it is a language not used for thinking.

He has a gift of startling and just metaphors. To characterize the sudden access of an unexpected thought, he writes of a “Manic Tack” (which in the poem eventuates in manic talk):

When you flip the side of the sail

the wind is in     –I’ve heard you use

the word–     but the pop      that whack sound

it makes and the boat jumps forward

what is that?       –that’s how it feels

when      what one opinion says is a chemical

change in my brain and next thing

I know my clothes are all over

the room like angry whitecaps

my face near being a wave off

my head [...]

And he writes:

The shadow barcode of the tiger–

scanned through

the grasses

we are just now understanding

that we too register in

the deeper darkness–

turns up a receipt

statement of experience

somehow we know

has some due.

This poem makes several turns, bringing into articulation additional metaphors for what is finally a sense of existential, even if not political, freedom.

Roberson has produced acrobatic leaps and counter-leaps of thought, including a somewhat startling arrival, in some poems, at a bluntness about race in America. “The Depths of an Old Wrong” and “A Small Residue,” which I quoted above, are mostly about “what white folks will say” and what, in response, Roberson will … “sing.”

In other poems his compressed, sometimes halting, sometimes rushing syntax and thought reach inward from episode and image to the very edge of being, and of being alive; I’m thinking of the five short poems that follow the overall title of “Rush,” and also of the autobiographical sequence “’There are many stops along the way ‘.” Roberson’s sense of the ultimate justification for and of a life is at once a kind of doubt and an exhilarating doubleness of thought; he says one thing and his very own lines may both fulfill it and oppose it, in the way they move.

And all of that is in part one of this two-part book. Read into part two and you will find much more—a way of writing that seems to have gone around a corner from part one. Graceful, and no less a close study of the edge between life and death, but different in tone.

Looking up from the work on my desk—the pleasing, illuminating but demanding scrutiny of draft translations by Spanish poet and translator Jordi Doce of some of my poems for a small bilingual edition to be published in Spain by Littera Libros—I see in the books around me so many extraneous attractions, distractions.  Projects as yet unfinished–that’s the connotation of the particular books nearest at hand, many from the university library. One in particular that I happen to find myself looking at (I would like to figure out what unconscious train of thought led me to look at it unaware, and then come to awareness that I was looking at it) makes me feel that it is an enormous privilege to be able to hold it in my own hands and make use of it.  It comes from very far away and long ago.

I hesitate even to name it, but really I shouldn’t worry that anyone who might read these words of mine would ever covet it, although surely it is rare. To me it seems far more precious than the money that would be required to replace it, if that were possible: Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1918, Volume XIV: Eskimo Songs, subtitled Songs of the Copper Eskimos, by Helen H. Roberts and D. Jenness, Southern Party—1913-16. Published in Ottawa by F. A. Acland, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1925. Yes, of course, already one thinks of it as the fruit of colonization within a country’s own borders–no matter how much one might be grateful for traces of the amazingly intrepid Copper Eskimos and, for that matter, the Euro-Canadians who trekked long and hard to get to Canadian Arctic in 1913!

And one knows that the collection of the songs must have been flawed, that at least some songs would never have been sung to them, and that others would only have been sung in a way that did not violate their special qualities, perhaps sacred or shamanistic, and that the relations between anthropologists and indigenous people must have been fraught with manipulation on both sides, power on one side, lack of it on the other. How accurate are the transcriptions and translations of the songs? And what particular preparations, circumstances, distractions, difficulties, of the Southern Party (on “the Arctic mainland and the adjacent islands”) might have made their findings more useful or less, to those who want, nearly a hundred years later, to ponder their document?  Producing this songbook, bigger in trim size than a hymnal and fully as thick, was a terribly complex project and must have required the most extraordinary meticulousness, patience, keenness, stamina, and seriousness, with its musical scores, charts presenting musical analysis, a beautiful hand-written transcription (in an alphabet evidently invented for a language with phonemes beyond those of English), of the verse running beneath the musical notes in each song.  And at the back, for each, there is an italicized transliteration of the verse and a translation into English.

I tracked this book down by following a lead in the work of Brian Swann, poet and long-time student and champion of Native American poetry.  Severed from the singers, from the time and world and life experience and cultural practices and thought of those singers, the songs are cryptic—and perhaps some of their mystery is the result of imperfect translation.   But I rather think that it comes from the prior fact that the anthropologists had little in their own lives that corresponded to that far northern world, experience, culture, thought, singing and perhaps–to use a phrase from classics–”song culture.”  Even what seems cryptic to us might have been well translated in some terms, but it came into a language and a culture that had no way to understand fully what it was encountering.  And I would think that the anthropologists themselves acknowledged that.

Sung by a girl from Prince Albert Sound, here is a song that begins with many repetitions of syllables that perhaps express at the least the presence and the emphatic effort of the singer: ye ye yai ye ya i ya ye yai ya and more. Such are the “prelude” and “refrain.” The verses are these:

1.1 Seeing that I was longing for it,

I gave it a name, this spirit.

1.2 Much blood pours from me [my nose] unexpectedly.

I gave it a name, seeing that I recognized it.

2.1 I have not finished it [my song] however.

Whither my little sister, my little Kaniraq [has she gone].

2.2 Much blood pours from me unexpectedly.

Whither my little sister–I have not finished it however.

There are ways of thinking about this, especially with the ways of reading poetry, that make it begin to signify obliquely and powerfully.  And Freud to one side, Jung to another, are looking on as we think.  As are scholars of oral culture and of ancient poetry in the west.

The collectors of the songs write in a footnote: “This is one of the songs that was taught by the Prince Albert sound Eskimos to the ******* [I cannot reproduce this word, which uses characters of a non-Roman alphabet invented to represent the indigenous] Eskimos during the summer of 1915. The words are said to have been taken from three separate songs.”

What, you may wonder, is my interest in this book? I admit that this celebration of it is for its own sake. But there is yet another project awaiting me in which I take up the search for a particular metaphor through a few disparate cultures, trying to think with that metaphor about writing.  Perhaps at some point I will report on what I was beginning to find when other duties intervened, many months ago, and other duties intervened upon those, and so on, preventing me from finishing my song.  Or rather, I seem to have invited my own self-preventing.  I think I felt it would take longer to think through this problem that I would be able to sustain my thinking.

Anyway, now I go back to translations that press me more urgently…

Olivia Judson, who writes about science for the New York Times, mentions in her column today the possibility that some facial expressions can cause certain emotions (in addition to being expressions of those emotions):

A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

She goes on to write:

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

(Sources of the studies she reports can be found below her blog post, at http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/a-language-of-smiles/

Years ago when I was thinking of the person on whom I modeled the subject of my poem “Desterrado, late 1960s” (in Sparrow: New and Selected Poems), I wrote this phrase:  “the language-shaped curve of his mouth.”  I was thinking about how something seems different in the configuration of the face in persons who speak Spanish vs. French vs. German.   And I was wondering if this had to do with lifelong use of the facial muscles to produce certain phonemes (especially vowels) and not others.

The empirical data that Judson points to may be the beginning of another rethinking of the idea, so popular in literary studies for decades, that language is a perfectly arbitrary system of signs that contain no inherent meaning in themselves.  The linguist Roman Jakobson wrote in one of his essays that in the early 20th century there were empirical studies that established that certain consonantal phonemes were associated with two opposed ideas–specifically, the idea of what is hard, sharp, pointed, etc., vs. the idea of what is rounded, soft.  Every speaker of English probably has a sense of which consonants those are, and the experiments that Jakobson cited were conducted in several different European languages, so there was little question of the ideas being associated with existing words.

And in fact other recent studies have shown that a word that is gendered in opposite ways in two languages (say, German and French) produces opposite associations that are indeed related to whether it is grammatically gendered masculine or feminine.  Of course this would not be true of all nouns, but it does contradict persuasively what our language teachers told us when we learned that the language we were studying gendered nouns–which was that the grammatical gender had nothing to do with the thing itself.  Fair enough; but it can have something to do with the associations and connotations.

This is one of the ways the mind receives, decodes, and plays with language.  If it weren’t true that language were so complex, then it would not have occurred to Victorian people of very proper upbringing and manners to put skirts around the bottom of a grand piano so that no one would see the legs, because to see the legs would then connote seeing human legs, and those would turn into female legs, very lovely ones, and the audience would be morally corrupted by the design of the piano. (!)  The thing (that which is signified) can change the signifier just as much as the signifier controls our idea of the thing.

Poetry brings such associations and connotations into play, at least in “the back of the mind.”  (And in the front of the mind, too, in those who, like musicians, have not only trained the back but are also restlessly, inventively thinking with the front.)  I have long been annoyed by the argumentative tendency to want such matters to be decisively one way or another–words are perfectly arbitrary signs (dog, perro, cane, chien)?; words are all mystically related to what they mean?.  Nope.  Neither.  (Some) words have some relation to what they signify (mama, maman, mami, mom, mater, mae, mutter, moder; or point, punto, punkt, ikkaku, pontertek; or words for spike… and others).  That’s one of the things we work with when we write and keep our ears open for the sounds our words make.

So much has taken my attention away from maintaining my rhythm of thinking in public, in these little essays, that I have fallen behind what I thought would be my regular schedule.  Even if I limit myself to events and demands and interests that have to do with poetry, I am amazed at how much there is to distract one–happily at best–from self-imposed disciplines of writing.  So I will cheat–what else is there for me to do?–and offer my happy excuses.

My colleague in the English Department at Northwestern, Ivy Wilson, and I have been forming a study group in Poetry and Poetics, which has immersed us and a number of colleagues–scholars (in several departments) and poets–in the exciting prospect of being able to spend time, every so often, talking together about so many interesting texts, problems of writing, problems of reading, enthusiasms for all of that.  (See humanities.northwestern.edu/news/workshoppage3.html)

The poet and now novelist Angela Jackson gave a superb reading from her just-published Where I Must Go at Northwestern on Oct. 6, and on the following night gave another, with poet Carolyn Rodgers, at the South Side Community Arts Center.  (See this New York Times feature on Jackson–nytimes.com/2009/10/13/books/13jackson.html.  And for information about the novel, see nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/0-8101-5185-5/Default.aspx

Three writers from Eastern Europe visited the Northwestern campus on Oct. 15–Petra Hulova (Czech Republic), Ferenc Barnas (Hungary), and Drago Jancar (Slovenia).

Janet Burroway gave a commanding reading for the MA/MFA in Creative Writing (see http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/grad/cw/), along with a student, Adin Bookbinder, on Oct. 16.

At lunch on Monday Oct. 19 I met with Steve Young, the program director of the Poetry Foundation, and Steve Burns, the artistic director of the Chicago new music group, Fulcrumpoint (see www.fulcrumpoint.org).  The latter Steve is putting together the musicians (and rehearsals) for a performance of  the telling of the story of Oedipus and my reading of my translations of the five odes from the play, on Dec. 3 at the National Hellenic Museum (see “events” at poetryfoundation.org).

And yesterday (October 26) Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa were at Northwestern all day to give readings and to discuss, in a very animated panel together, aspects of being an English-language poet in America, identified with Arabic-speaking and Muslim cultures (the idea of cultural identity was of course at the center of much of the discussion, which was about both self-chosen identities and those that others impose on one); and…

and all of this was immensely rich in artistic accomplishment, in sometimes heroic dedication to the art of writing, and in a dazzling variety of the situation of writers and writing.  So much to think about, to think with, to think.

And so many of us live at a pace that can bring us more experience in a day, and certainly in a week, than we could think through in a month or a year.

I can never catch up to all that, nor to what is coming in the next weeks and months.  I will try to catch up with my half-drafted posts to this site of my thinking in public, especially about poetry. 

I was out for a morning walk this past Saturday. The air was chilly, the lake was moving only slightly with very low swells blown in by light winds from the east, there were twenty or so sails moving across the water, far out and south, and also to the south, a dozen miles away, the Chicago skyline was standing dark and sharp-edged against the pale sky. Clouds were coming in from the west, and as I walked through the lakeside park at Northwestern University in Evanston, I realized I was getting the last of the brilliant but mild sunshine of the day. And I also realized that the tune in my head was from a high-school musical in which I had led a tiny band in a makeshift pit between the front row of seats and the high stage, banging away at a large, old upright piano (tuned for the performances), with only drums, a bass and a tenor sax. The show was Sandy Wilson’s “The Boy Friend,” a 1950s satire of 1920s musical shows–energetic, superficial, and fun to stage. And I asked myself—where in the world did that tune come from, as I am walking briskly along on this crisp, beautiful morning?

*

I tried retracing thoughts I had had already on this walk, working backward through the associations. And I saw that they made a kind of sideways sense.

*

I became aware of this possible process when years ago I read Christopher Bollas’s wonderful Cracking Up (1995). A fellow poet, Steve Berg, told me enthusiastically about this book. The subtitle is “The work of unconscious experience.” Bollas, a psychoanalyist who also has a PhD in American literature, and who has written many books, is keen to understand the freedom of the unconscious, and how in our unconscious, whether we are awake or asleep, many trains of thought are continuously being generated, developing, and then breaking apart and disappearing. This particular book has always seemed to me one of the most fruitful I have ever read in thinking about how the process of writing draws willy-nilly (and fortunately) on our unconscious trains of thought, unconscious feelings, unconscious memories of experience.

*

I mean the writing of fiction and poetry, drama and even the personal essay, although it is no doubt true that in even the most impersonal writing tasks there are flickers of unconscious choice to use this word and not that, to extend syntax this way and not that. What makes this interesting is the idea of freedom. We all know how deadening it can be when our choices, word by word, are made in a state of linguistic and cultural unfreedom—that is, when routine wording is what we put down, simply because that wording is easily available to us, is familiar to us, and in almost all the other writing we do, whatever it might be, we want readers to come with us without their having to work too hard. (A whole subject awaits us there, but I won’t go into it today.)

*

Bollas shows how and why a train of thought can be retraced, when we are lucky, from a thought or a decision which we feel to be unforeseen and spontaneous back through a whole train of ideas and feelings of which we have been only very slightly aware as we were thinking them. A kind of associational “logic” is revealed.

*

So all of a sudden I realize I am humming to myself the song, “Won’t You Charleston With Me?” (When I got back home I looked up that show online to find a list of song titles, and recognized–for I could never have remembered–which title went with the tune I was hearing from memories of forty-five years ago.)  And I began to try to go backward, to try to remember what else I had been thinking of. It went like this:

**

I remembered having been thinking, at an earlier point on the walking trail, of having performed at the piano very happily when I was sixteen, and so enthusiastically, I now remembered also, that my fingers had bled a little from how hard and for how long I had to keep hitting those keys in order to be heard in that auditorium, which was very big.

*

And I thought how I never enjoyed performing again, and I wondered if this was because my experience in competitions and in a concerto performance two years later had been simply awful. But why had I been thinking about that?

*

I then remembered having watched the first twenty minutes of a “Nova” program on Darwin earlier in the week. I couldn’t stay with it—it was a poor production, the acting was strained, the dialogue was hopelessly unconvincing as real talk between people, and… the flashback to Darwin’s romance with his wife, the devout Emma Wedgwood, was set in her family living room, where she was playing Chopin on the piano.   Beautifully, of course, because the playing had been dubbed into the soundtrack by a professional pianist.   And I, in a petty mood, had been annoyed that the young Victorian ladies portrayed in the movies always play the piano perfectly. But why on my walk had I thought of the Darwin movie?

*

And then I recalled the first moments after I got beyond the town street and onto the path leading into the Northwestern University park land, and how I started heading birdsong from a beach-side copse to the right (while on the left is a massive two-level concrete parking lot, but mostly empty on Saturday morning), and I thought about how often I advert, in my own mind although not in conversation, to evolution in general, as one of the great beauties of the universe (at least, when it is not nurturing new strains of virus and bacteria or wiping out “native” flora and fauna, and so on).

*

And why was I thinking about that? I had been completely unaware of these thoughts as a train of thought; I had not, after all, been thinking about what I was thinking—I had simply been thinking it, in the form of an occasional thought that surfaced for an instant and then was gone again while my conscious thinking was pretty much focused on the path, the lake horizon, the skyline downtown, the breeze, the sun, a women’s lacross scrimmage on the lakeside field, and so on.

*

Now I could see the under-sequence of thoughts as a very private version of what I try to do when I am at work on a poem—looking deeper into how the thought/feeling moves…   This is how I teach, sometimes, too– looking for the wobbly spots in a draft, the gaps or seemingly overly emphatic passages that, to me at least, imply that something important in the train of thought/feeling that the poet is trying to shape remains ungrasped, unexpressed, unrealized.  Flagging those moments, I make no attempt to guess what’s under the surface of the draft, since whatever it is that’s missing, if it is missing, only the poet herself/himself could find by using the draft as a trail of clues leading back…

*

Sometimes—the best times—this exercise opens up a space into which a new thought/feeling rises.

*

I don’t think I have any special talent for working back through a train of thought of which I was not aware. I manage to do it sometimes, and at most times not, and on most days I don’t even try.   But the surprising thing that comes to mind—that has already come to mind—fascinates me and seems to me intimately related not only to the ways in which dreams move (which was Freud’s interest) but also to the ways in which a poem gradually finds its shape as a sequence of ideas and feelings. One can’t move one’s whole creative process into the unconscious; one has to make artistic decisions that are more deliberate and more pondered than that; but one can’t escape—and one shouldn’t try to escape it, whether by distracting oneself from it, or by denying its existence—the unconscious dimensions of one’s writing.  One should use them, as I think all successful artists do.

From the obituary of Yehuda Amichai (b. 5/3/24, d. 9/22/00) that was published in the New York Times:

Metaphor “is the great human revolution, at least on a par with the invention of the wheel.”

“There’s an old Jewish saying, ‘If you meet the devil, take him with you into the synagogue.’  Try to take the evil of politics into yourself, to influence it imaginatively, to give it human shape.  This is my attitude toward politics.”

For him, all poetry was political.  “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making.  Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

*   *   *   *   *  *

Marina Tsvetaeva in 1926 in “The Poet on the Critic”:

“Who am I writing for?  Not for the millions, not for one person alive, and not for myself.  I write for the sake of the thing itself.  The thing writes itself through me.”

*   *   *   *   *

Thomas Mann to Erich Kahler, 3/18/31:

“Give the times their due and publish what you have written.  I understand your inhibitions, but we believe until almost at the end that the decisive word remains to be written, and yet we have always set down far more of the decisive words than we ourselves can possibly appreciate.”

*   *   *   *   *

Franz Kafka (as quoted, who knows how reliably, by Gustav Janouch in his Conversations with Kafka):
Wealth is “material insecurity.”

Kafka’s works are, in his own words, “evidence of solitude.”  Hence his sincere desire to destroy them.

On Georg Trakl: ” ‘He had too much imagination,’ said Kafka.  ‘So he could not endure the war [WW I], which arose above all from a monstrous lack of imagination.’ ”

“My complaints about the disorder in the office, and especially around myself, are only a trick, by which I try to hide the insecurity of my existence from the accusing and inquisitive gaze of the outside world.  In reality, I only manage to live because of the disorder, from which I steal the last remnant of personal freedom.”

The Germans “do not wish to comprehend, understand, read.  They only wish to possess and rule; for that, understanding is usually a hindrance.”

” ‘Are they dancers?’ I stupidly inquired, with a glance at a well-disciplined chair of chorus girls.  ‘No, they’re soldiers,’ replied Kafka.  ‘A [musical] revue is a military parade in disguise.’ “

There are a number of interesting collections of essays on translation–theoretical and practical.  In my course I use the two edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation and The Craft of Translation (both published by the University of Chicago Press).  I supplement these with some individual essays by Kwame Anthony Appiah, George Steiner, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Yves Bonnefoy (who is marvelous on the subject in his volume, translated from French, Shakespeare and the French Poet (also published by Chicago), and Dick Davis’s marvelous essay on the effect of translation on the whole history of English poetry, “All My Soul Is There: Verse Translatioin and the Rhetoric of English Poetry” (published in the Yale Review some years ago).  Essays in Theories of Translation that I find particularly engaging–as a poet who translates–include those by John Dryden, Roman Jakobson, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Octavio Paz, and inevitably, Walter Benjamin (although a German graduate student told me long ago that having read Benjamin’s famous essay in both English and German, she could not say that the German was any clearer).

More of my introductory groundwork for the translation seminar I am teaching:

The acts of writing and translating are textual and contextual (and also intertextual, in that a translation exists only because of the existence of a prior text elsewhere.) Different approaches to translation arise because of the gaps–linguistic, literary, cultural and historical–between poet and translator.

Linguistic—not only because languages differ in what they can say, can’t say, and may or may not say (we’ll read an essay by Roman Jakobson on this subject), but also because idioms and idiomatic syntax in two different languages can be so different. Imagine a Chicago social club that includes “artist members”; how is this phrase different from “member artists”? What if in a particular phrase one language must specify the gender of a pronoun, and another cannot or need not use pronouns at all? Some languages specify or imply dimensions of time, experience, and action and agency that others do not communicate.

Literary—because any given literary work is composed in a context of artistic assumptions, constraints, permissions, and expectations that has been created by earlier works over time—or by particular audiences or even by dominant critics. And while in its language of origin a work might be very fresh in manner or statement, that same manner or statement might already be familiar in the target language, which makes it difficult for the translator to convey the original freshness. There is an opposite problem, too: what if a particular manner, familiar and even clichéd in the source language, is unfamiliar or even unprecedented in the target language? Should the translator bring this element into the target language as something very fresh? Or rather find an analogous cliché in the target language? (Does everything depend on figuring out the intentions of the source writer—even though artistic intentions are often nearly impossible to judge?) Should a translator make the translation seem completely idiomatic in the target language, as it it had been composed in the target language originally? Or rather translate so that the unfamiliar aspects of the source language and text will sound unidiomatic? (This might enlarge the possibilities of poetry in the target language.) (We will read essays by Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Walter Benjamin that take up this question.)

Or what if an impressive quality of the source text (which could have to do with style, with sound, with the movement of thought, etc.) is already known in the target language but is considered inappropriate or uninteresting or puerile or antiquated in the literary culture of that language? What if an earlier literary strategy or stance—such as High Modernist poetic devices like those of T. S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy–is considered antiquated, outmoded, in the source language, but would have the effect of a literary revolution in the target language in the present day?

I remember vividly arriving at a literary party in Mexico City and seeing Octavio Paz speaking with a small group of young men (literary culture is more patriarchal in Mexico than in the U. S.). I approached and Paz—whom I knew a little and regarded as a very great writer—welcomed me to his circle of admirers. “I was just telling them,” he explained to me (in Spanish, of course), “that three of the most influential American poets in all of Latin America were from Illinois. Isn’t this true?” I was taken aback by the idea that the influence in Latin America of three poets from Illinois could have rivaled Walt Whitman’s. “Sandburg,” I said. “Yes,” he answered, smiling and waiting. “Masters,” I said. And Paz turned to his group and said to them, “There are poets all over Latin America who are rewriting in their own locales the Spoon River Anthology without even knowing that that is what they are doing.” Then, to me: “And the third?” I made a gesture of not knowing—because I didn’t know, and because I wanted to see his enjoyment when he triumphantly announced the missing name. “Vachel Lindsay!” he said. So—three poets no longer at all in vogue in American literary culture can still be revelatory innovators to poets elsewhere. Another very well-known case is that of Edgar Allen Poe—whom Baudelaire, Mallarmé,Valéry, and other French poets considered one of the greatest of poets, and who, to their great annoyance, has never been regarded as such by poets and critics of America.

On the other hand—what if the target language and literature make possible certain effects that are partly limited by the source language itself and its literary traditions? Can translation liberate meanings as often as it loses them? Samuel Beckett, who late in his life wrote a few poems in French and also made English translations of them, allowed or spurred himself in effect to rewrite them in English; in English he did some things that French cannot do (for both linguistic and literary reasons). In English, Beckett sounds very English-language, not only because the two languages are different but also because modern literature in English has its own permissions and constraints. Almost any two languages offer the writer (and translator) different linguistic openings and opportunities, as well as different literary-historical contexts that sometimes can be liberating rather than constraining.

Cultural and historical—because literary culture is a part of a larger culture shaped and infused by historical events and epochs; attitudes toward those events and textures of those epochs may be understandable elsewhere, but probably can never be mapped clearly across cultures, and may even be scarcely apprehended in the target language and culture. In the target culture and language, other, quite different historical events and textures of historical experience may dominate, along with other associations, connotations, ideas, and what I suppose we could call feeling-sets of particular groups within cultures—missing in the source culture and language—may dominate. (For example, American narcissism; the cultural centralism of Mexico City; patriarchal attitudes of varying intensity in different cultures; Native American spiritualism of nature; “face” in East Asia; “la bella figura” in Italy; and so on.) Hence this kind of gap between source text and possible translation. In China, poets were persecuted, decades ago, for writing poems about flowers; their gesture was considered by those who ruled as a coded and criminal criticism of the communist regime, which insisted that all writers depict idealized lives of workers—which insisted, that is, that poems make certain political gestures and not others. Even a literarily excellent translation of such poems into English cannot bring with it their political gesture, which is entirely implicit. For many decades, similar constraints oppressed writers in the Soviet Union, who were all too often silenced or murdered. (To say nothing of Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and many other regimes on this planet.)

And of course there is highly effective “soft” political pressure, too, on art. In the U.S.A., one of the most volatile and contradictory subjects in literature (and even more so in the media) is the political dimension of social class. Two great American poets who can now be found in anthologies but who were long excluded, and who remain excluded from many classrooms, are Thomas McGrath and Muriel Rukeyser. They must present interesting problems of context to translators abroad. We may not be disturbed, but we are not surprised, that contemporary media, seems constantly to encompass more and more lurid and sensational material the political implications of which can be suppressed in favor of gossip; yet those political implications exist. Meanwhile, certain subjects are excluded from broadcasts—subjects that evidently not only to not interest the desired market segments but which also offend moralistic and demagogic groups aligned with corporate interests and existing social privilege based on religion, race, and so on. A prominent recent example is the exclusion of photos, video, or print reporting or commentary on brutal events involving the actions of American soldiers actively at war; in this case, the exclusion is from the media with largest audiences, but fortunately our culture permits such events to be described in print venues utilized by small audiences (above all, books). Books are not so dangerous in a social context of electronic media. What, amidst all this, might be the translator’s goal in translating a work of the ancient world, or a work from an oral culture?

Preparing for classes that started this past week at Northwestern (this university’s academic year is organized by quarters rather than semesters), I have been sorting out some preliminary thoughts about literary translation.  The course is both a seminar and a workshop in poetry translation.  Students will translate several short poems from different languages–each student making his or her own versions, but discussing the versions collaboratively.  We begin with a briefing on each poem by an informant–a scholar or a literary native speaker or even the author (in the past I brought the Russian poet Ilya Kutik into the classroom to tell us about a short poem of his own; this year I will have another author present for one of the poems).  Among the poems we work on, I always choose one that is from either an ancient or a non-European language (or both).  This year, because Chris Abani is teaching at Northwestern during the fall quarter, we are using a poem of his written in Igbo (one of the languages spoken in Nigeria).  We spend two weeks on each poem–one class for the briefing, and three more for discussing our versions.  Meanwhile the students read a number of essays in two books edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation and The Craft of Translation, plus some other essays from one text or another, including pieces by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Yves Bonnefoy, Dick Davis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, George Steiner, and others.  Students respond to these essays and to each other on the course Blackboard site, and at the end of the course students create individual portfolios that include a research paper on translation and  revised versions of the four poems.

Here’s the paragraph with which I begin my own brief essay on literary translation:

A common word in one language may signify or connote an idea or feeling that is differently conceived or felt or not so often encountered in another language—for example, the Brazilian Portuguese word “saudade” (a kind of nostalgic longing), or the frequent everyday metaphors of “illumination” or “light” in French, a semantic usage that seems to derive from the intellectual history of France in particular. There can be grammatical instances of this problem, too, such as the present perfect tense in English, which as a construction signifies something like “an action begun in the past and continued into the present moment” (“I have gone to that club many times,” “I have never eaten sushi”); this tense may be difficult to comprehend for someone whose native language does not make use of it (Spanish has the tense and the concept; Italian does not have the concept and it uses a similar conjugation—auxiliary verb plus past participle—to signify an action completed in the past (“I went there many times,” implying that “I do not go there any more,” or “I did not eat sushi” on a specific occasion). But are these the kinds of problems that literary translators spend most of their time on?

From this, I go on to the larger questions, the ones that really do engage the translator more deeply–about language, of course, but also about literature, culture, history.  I will post more from this little essay later.

September 21, 2009 | Announcements

Northwestern Reaffirms Commitment to University Press; TriQuarterly Magazine Goes Electronic

Northwestern University Press is renowned for its strength and commitment to publishing scholarly works in the humanities.

By Alan K. Cubbage

/**/ /**/ EVANSTON, Ill. — After an extensive review of Northwestern University Press, its academic publishing house, Northwestern has reaffirmed its commitment to publishing and disseminating scholarly writing. A nationwide search for a new director of the Press will be launched soon, said Sarah Pritchard, the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian.

Northwestern University Press is renowned for its strength and commitment to publishing scholarly works in the humanities and the role it plays in supporting many of Northwestern’s academic areas. Last fall, the Press received a grant of more than $800,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support innovative efforts with the Program of African Studies and the Performance Studies and Theatre departments. One of the first major outcomes will be the launch next year of a new electronic journal, Islamic Africa, which will be produced in collaboration with the Program of African Studies and will draw on Northwestern’s established research strength in African studies.

The move to digital publishing will continue with the transition of TriQuarterly, the Press’s literary journal, to an online format next year. TriQuarterly already has an online blog, TriQuarterly To-Day.

TriQuarterly will be integrated into the Creative Writing program of the School of Continuing Studies. Such distinguished writers as Stuart Dybek, Aleksander Hemon, Alex Kotlowitz, Mary Kinzie and Ed Roberson teach in the program, which has gained increasing recognition in recent years. The acquisitions, editorial and design aspects of the journal will be carried out as part of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program with technical support provided by Northwestern University Information Technology staff. The journal will continue to solicit and publish offerings from external writers, and will be made freely available on the web.

“This move will align publishing efforts more closely with the University’s academic enterprise while at the same time expanding electronic dissemination and public access to the wonderful literature and essays that are published in TriQuarterly,” Pritchard said. “Scholarly publishing is increasingly moving to open access, allowing greater distribution of academic work. This reflects that trend and allows the journal editors to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities offered through online publishing.”

The search for a new director for Northwestern University Press will be launched this fall, Pritchard said. “We will be seeking an energetic leader from the academic publishing community with strong vision to guide us as we focus on the traditional strengths of the Press, implement new business models and expand digital strategies,” she said.

TriQuarterly Books will continue as an imprint of Northwestern University Press and the Press also will continue to distribute books from other academic and small presses.

“After a year of significant economic setbacks, the Press has undergone a careful review. The University has reaffirmed its commitment to the dissemination of scholarship as part of its academic mission,” Pritchard said. “The Press will be a more efficient operation and we will deepen our alliances with the University’s academic programs while moving forward with the delivery of content in a digital format. There undoubtedly will be challenges, but it also should be a time of exciting opportunities.”

Alan Cubbage is vice president for University Relations. Contact him at a-cubbage@northwestern.edu