New England Review

Behind the Byline

Michael Martin Shea

NER poetry reader David Francis speaks with translator Michael Martin Shea about “from The Somber Station,” a sequence of poems by Liliana Ponce published in NER 42.4.

David Francis: Liliana Ponce, a contemporary Argentine poet, has gained notable acclaim in the Spanish-speaking world, but less has been written about her in English. What do you want us to know about the author, and what draws you to the work you have published here?

Michael Martin Shea: I was initially directed towards Liliana’s work by the poet and editor Reynaldo Jiménez, himself also relatively unknown in English, as is the case for so many wonderful and thrilling poets from the Southern Cone (even while coming from a region and a language that are comparatively overrepresented in US publishing). I met Reynaldo while living in Argentina on a Fulbright fellowship, and he invited me over to his house, which doubles as a repository for tsé-tsé—the small but storied poetry press he runs, and which published two of Liliana’s five collections. I left with a list of names and an enormous stack of books, including Liliana’s Fudekara, which would become the first work I ever attempted to translate.

Initially what drew me to Liliana’s poetry was how different it was from my own. At the time, I was writing poems that were garrulous and irreverent, buzzing around images drawn from postmodern popular culture. Liliana’s are almost the opposite: they’re so careful and methodical in their approach. I’m tempted to say restrained, but that’s not quite true: her poems are quiet only in the way that a simmering pot is quiet. The most important thing to know about Liliana is that she almost never writes stand-alone poems. Beginning with her very first book, Trama Continua, everything she’s published takes the form of these multi-poem sequences. Sometimes they’re only five poems long; sometimes they have as many as twenty parts. I see this as the formal extension of her sense of the poem as a mode of meditation, a vehicle for thought in its purest form. The goal of her writing isn’t to convey an idea—the poem itself is the pursuit, one that she follows with an almost surgical precision.  

One thing that’s neither here nor there as far as the poems are concerned, but which I find interesting, is that Liliana’s long-time husband is the novelist César Aira, author of something like a hundred books (and counting). So in one respect they’re very different: César publishes at a maniacal pace, while Liliana is much more selective. César’s novels are whimsical, talky, and digressive; Liliana’s poems can be very stark, her images almost fleeting. But on a formal level, they’re two artists who use literary form as a philosophical apparatus, a way of asking certain questions. César is compared to Borges all the time, and not unfairly, but I see Liliana’s poems as similarly experimental, in the sense that the work itself is an experiment, an investigation.

Liliana Ponce

DF: The poem you have translated—from “The Somber Station” [“La estación sombría” in Spanish]—provides a profound meditation on the act of writing. The poem claims that “to write today is an emptiness.” What do you think that statement means? Would you make the same argument for translating poetry or, at least, for translating this poem?

MMS: The act of writing is something Liliana comes back to throughout her oeuvre. Perhaps her most famous sequence, Fudekara, was composed during a fourteen-day calligraphy course, and its jumping-off point is the physical act of tracing these Chinese characters. There’s a meta or recursive quality to her work: her poems think about thinking, she writes about writing. And I think at the heart of both of those processes is a blankness, not necessarily in the sense of lack, but in the sense of possibility. As the poem goes on to say, this emptiness at the heart of the form or the passage is also a kind of “maximum intensity.”

In my capacity as a scholar, I’m currently studying what I term “visionary poetics,” a kind of umbrella category for various religious, mystical, or New Age-y tropes and compositional strategies. I don’t know that I’d count Liliana as a visionary poet herself, not in the sense of a writer like Kamau Brathwaite and his explicit invocations of Afro-diasporic religious practices. But Liliana has studied Buddhism and other eastern religions for a long time, she’s a translator and scholar of Noh theater (among other things), and it’s certainly true that this influence makes its way into her poems. There’s a preoccupation with the denial of the self, the self’s erasure: some of the other words that crop up frequently in her work are “abyss, ” “nothingness,” “forgetting.” But I don’t think of her as a dark or brooding poet. So when she writes that “escribir hoy es un vacío,” I think there’s a complicated texture to that word “vacío,” “emptiness.” It doesn’t necessarily have that same negative charge that we might be tempted to put on it. Again, it’s that sense of exploration—what would it really mean to be empty?

DF: In the title, the Spanish word “estación” can mean both “season” and “station,” both words in English relating to time. What do you make of the speaker’s sense of time as it relates to the lyrical composition of self? Why did you choose to translate the poem’s title the way you did?

MMS: This was a big debate for me, and I’m still not entirely convinced that this poem shouldn’t be called “The Somber Season.” But I think having “season” and “station” as two possible translations bifurcates a certain flexibility that the Spanish word “estación” maintains, a word which as you point out can equally refer to a time period or a place. When I hear “station,” I really hear the word’s spatial connotation taking precedence over the temporal, and vice versa with “season.” So this was a moment in the translation process where I felt I was being asked to elevate one connotation over another. Ultimately, I chose place over time, in part because the subsequent sequence in Teoría de la voz y el sueño is entitled “Más allá de la estación sombría,” and I hear that “más allá” [beyond] as privileging the spatial rather than the temporal association.

But as theorists like Doreen Massey have pointed out, space is always-already linked with time—there’s no such thing as pure space. And I think Liliana’s sense of space and time is very complex. Often her poems seem as if they want to alter time, to pause it or, as she writes here, to draw it out, to “feed the creation” of it with words. And then at other moments she adopts a diaristic model where there’s a real time outside the poems that’s being tracked, not only in Fudekara but in another long sequence, Diario, which appeared as a chapbook from Ugly Duckling Presse a few years ago. So I think in some respects her lyric self is always creating itself against these limitations—space and time, but also body—which are at the same time absolutely constitutive of its existence.

DF:

Here is the thirst of the impulses,
beach without memory where the likenesses speak
and even so, sisters, they dissolve in mirages,
like your eyes, like my gaze.

The poem conveys a sense of solitude and, yet, it is also often conversational. Parts 1 and 2, for instance, speak primarily of the first person “I” as it relates to writing and the landscape surrounding the speaker. Part 3 then shifts its gaze to a “you,” and, in the stanza above, the speaker turns to address her “sisters.” For you, how do voice and language come to define the speaker’s relationship with those who hear her?

MMS: It’s funny that you put your finger on this line—it’s one that really threw me off when I first started reading, and then translating, Liliana’s work. As you note, her poems create these moments of heightened lyrical intimacy—as in the second poem of the sequence, where it feels like you’re really inside the void of the speaker’s mind—and then suddenly there are sisters there with you, or there’s a teacher, or you’re given a clear directive which shifts the poem from monological to dialogical. For a long time I didn’t know what to make of this, or how to render some of these asides into a readable English without breaking that lyric spell. And then at a certain point it dawned on me—oh, that’s the point. I think it relates to what I was saying above about space and time: there’s a similar give-and-take between self and other, between speaker and world or even speaker and reader. There’s a lyric self that wants to retreat from the world to that “dream unfamiliar,” and then there’s the intransigent fact of the world.

DF: Your stanzas contain compelling rhythm and musicality, based often on repetition. They reflect—to follow the poem’s words—a sense of “doubling” of the self through musical incantation. How did you come to convey this music? Balancing form and content in your translation, how does music inform your process as translator? 

MMS: It’s almost a cliché to say this, but of course one of the most difficult aspects of translating into English from a romance language is moving from a vocabulary with a lot of shared word endings to one with significantly fewer. In a certain respect, Liliana’s work makes this easier: she rarely (if ever) follows an end-rhyme scheme or a metrical pattern, so the kind of brute force labor required to maintain something like an ABAB pattern isn’t necessary here. But her poems do have a lot of subtle music in them, often created through the repetition of key nouns and phrases (which I read as an outgrowth of her meditative poetics manifested at a formal level, a sort of conceptual deepening by way of redigestion). The extent to which I can maintain that music depends a lot on the individual line. In the third poem, the phrase “like your eyes, like my gaze [como tus ojos, como mi mirada]” is something that repeats verbatim in the original, making it easy to convey in the English (though of course even there you can hear some sonic patterning—“como,” “ojos,” “mi mirada”—that doesn’t make the leap). But then there are lines like this one from the second poem: “With words I feed the creation of time [Con palabras alimento la creación del tiempo].” Ultimately, I couldn’t find a way to maintain that internal alimento/tiempo rhyme. When that happens, I try to take the same principle from that line and see if I can reinsert it elsewhere in the poem: for instance, in the subsequent line, I chose “speak” rather than “talk” for “hablar” to give back some of that music. It’s like I’m extracting a sonic blueprint from the original and trying to recreate it elsewhere with slightly different materials. It’s the balance that’s very difficult to achieve, and while I think that a lot of my own training as a poet and a reader of poetry has helped develop my ear for these patterns, the choices I make in an individual line ultimately comes down to a degree of intuition (though perhaps an intuition schooled through immersion in someone else’s language). In one of her other poems, there’s a final line that reads, “abandonar la idea como se abandona el tiempo.” Abandonar is a cognate, whereas abandonarse means something more like “surrender” or “give in.” But my felt sense was that the sonic pattern here was more important than that conceptual difference—this is the final line of the poem, after all—so I landed on “to abandon the notion as time abandons.” Maybe in a month or so I’ll feel differently—I’m not sure a translation ever achieves a balance that isn’t, in some way, provisional.

DF: If you were to anthologize this poem, what other authors would you include in the anthology?

MMS: I suppose that really depends on what kind of anthology I’m putting together. I think Liliana’s work is particularly interesting in a national or regional context, especially for Anglophone readers. She published her first book in 1976, so she’s writing contemporaneously with figures like Juan Gelman and Raúl Zurita—some of the so-to-speak giants of Latin American poetry in translation. But her work is less overtly indexed to the dictatorships that ruled the Southern Cone during those early years of neoliberalism, and so complicates the often-simplistic picture American readers get where Latin American poetry is all about capital-R Resistance. Similarly, she’s associated with many of the writers of the neobarroco period—her publisher, Jiménez, was included in the canonical Medusario anthology and she traveled in a lot of those circles in the 1990s throughout the ríoplatense region. But she doesn’t really display the kind of linguistic maximalism for which neobaroque writers like Néstor Perlongher or Haroldo de Campos are known. Her work is certainly influenced by that of the great Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik: I see Pizarnik’s touch in the way that Liliana’s images will carry you into these unfamiliar spaces and then simply drop away (perhaps a form of what Robert Bly called “leaping poetry”). But where Pizarnik is so focused on the body, in Liliana’s work the body tends to retreat, almost disappearing as thought takes center-stage. Thematically, the way her poems are influenced by religious thought resonates with the work of writers like Héctor Viel Temperlay or Miguel Ángel Bustos (both of whom have been wonderfully, recently translated), though each of those poets moves in a slightly different direction. And then of course if we abandon the regional-linguistic framework, there are all sorts of fun associations to make. Sometimes I hear something like an echo of C. D. Wright in her poems, or Cole Swensen—sometimes even Georg Trakl. This last option is the most interesting to me. I’m trained as a comparativist, and though I take a very historicist approach in my own scholarship, as a reader I’m charmed by the prospect of discarding these traditional frameworks in favor of a different organizing principle.

DF: What was the greatest moment of revelation for you in reading the poem during the translation process?

MMS: I’m not sure there was a distinct moment. I completed a first draft of these poems in December of 2016, so these have been kicking around in my head for over five years. My process for translating Liliana’s work involves doing a very, very quick first draft of the entire sequence, just to establish the basic architecture. And then I go back over the poems more carefully, sitting with the language, trying out various constructions. I make extensive use of dictionaries—both that of the Real Academia Española and various Spanish-to-English ones—to check almost every word or phrase, looking for gradations of meaning and generating a pool of options. And then I assemble a new draft, or various new drafts. In the case of “The Somber Station,” there were few major epiphanies along the way, but many minor ones, born from coming back to the poems with fresh eyes after some time away. I specifically remember the way things clicked into place for me in the first stanza of the fourth poem when I shifted from translating the word “raíz” literally (as “root”) to something more figurative (“cause”).

This was the second sequence of Liliana’s that I translated—Fudekara being the first—so those early drafts bear witness to the process of figuring out how to conjure her voice in English, how to speak this personal, singular language of hers. I just completed a book-length manuscript which was about six years in the making, and while I wouldn’t say it’s become easy to translate her work, it’s certainly become a bit more fluid. The more time I spend immersed in her writing, the more comfortable I am making certain choices which would have stumped me in the early days—not necessarily because I’m a better translator now (though I suspect I am, simply through practice), but because I have a more intimate relationship with her voice. If I were to start on a project by a different author, even one writing in Spanish, I suspect I’d have to internalize a different sense of language and sound. So I guess I think of translation more as a process of sinking deeper and deeper into someone else’s consciousness. A translator is of course actively creating the new text—I don’t want to erase that aspect of the work—but at the same time there’s a certain suspension of the self. For me, that’s part of the appeal.

DF: Section Five refers to “the first dream.” Is this publication part of a series of dreams? Are there other “station” poems we can look forward to reading in your future translations? If so, how will they differ from what we see here?

MMS: That’s a great question, and one that’s hard to answer. Liliana’s poems deal with dreams a lot. As she says here, “what one wants from the air is a dream unfamiliar / with the cloth of shadows;” in a later poem, she writes, “I am the dreaming woman / I want to be the dream.” And even though she plays with diaristic forms which suggest a kind of real outside that the poems are indexed to, there are other moments when it feels like the poem itself exists as a kind of alternate real, like a dream. “A beach without memory where the likenesses speak.” Maybe the best way to think about this is that dreams are a kind of emptiness, like writing is.

As I mention above, the sequence that immediately follows this one is called “Beyond the Somber Station,” which in some ways expands on the ideas here, and in other ways goes beyond: both Shinto and ancient Rome make an appearance in that suite. That’s part of the full-length manuscript that will hopefully soon find a home. And Fudekara, which is also obsessed with writing and what it means to write, is going to be released as a chapbook by Cardboard House Press later this year, which is really exciting—I’ve loved that sequence since I first read it, and I can’t wait for an English version to be in the world.

David Francis, a reader of poetry manuscripts for NER, serves as dean of Grace Hopper College at Yale University, where he teaches in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. He has received a Fulbright fellowship to translate poems by the Colombian writer José Asunción Silva into English. His translations or poems have appeared in Inventory, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Latin American Poetry, Guernica, Exchanges, The Brooklyn Rail, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. He is the translator of Footwork (Circumference Books, 2021), the selected poems of the acclaimed Cuban author Severo Sarduy.

"Translate me"

A conversation with Jennifer Grotz and Simone Kraus

Jennnifer Grotz (left) on the Bread Loaf inn porch, photo by Brett Simison; Simone Kraus (right) in the Bread Loaf inn

“…seeing, reading, writing, translating are to me inextricable modes of being and thinking.”
—Jennifer Grotz

Simone Kraus: In one of the co-interviews during the Bread Loaf Writers’ Reunion in October 2017, Patrick Phillips asked you, “When did you know you wanted to be a poet?” And you said, “I can’t remember not writing poems. I can’t remember not doing it.” I was in the audience at the time, and I still remember this part vividly. To become a poet, to become a writer wasn’t a choice you made. I’ve brought up this aspect, because Patrick’s question made me think about a writer’s decision to be a translator. While it’s definitely hard to find an answer to the “when” from a writer’s perspective, it may be easier to answer the question “When did you know you wanted to translate?” How did you enter the world of translation, Jennifer?

Jennifer Grotz: That’s true, what you say, that I don’t think I ever made a conscious choice to be a writer, but I always knew inside somehow that I was one. When Patrick asked me that question, I started thinking about the Illustrated Bible my grandmother gave me when I first started to read, around the age of five. That Bible, and the Yellow Pages we had in the kitchen by the telephone, and the Avon booklets advertising makeup and jewelry that I would help my mom distribute (she was an “Avon Lady,” as they used to call their sales staff), were these texts I’d pore over and sort of gloss in the margins with pencil or crayons, adding my own endings to stories in the Bible, drawing in lipsticks or perfume bottles sometimes, making lists like the lists in the phone book. What I was saying earlier about how reading, writing, and translating all seem like modes of the same central human activity was certainly true for me back then, back from the very beginning.

But the world of translation you’re really asking me about came much later, in my twenties. I had studied French in junior high and high school; it had been one of my majors in college, and I’d studied my junior year abroad at the Sorbonne. But after that deep immersion and connection with French, I found it hard to preserve once back in the United States, especially when I was out of school. I started translating just to try to keep French close to me, to have it be a part of my weekly if not daily life. Languages are like relationships; they have to be given a great deal of attention, ongoing and preferably frequent, in order to be maintained. At the time, I was trying to be very disciplined as a young writer, also learning to write outside of school and away from external deadlines. I think trying my hand at translation was a way to be disciplined but also practical about keeping my French. Plus I had a poet in mind, Patrice de La Tour du Pin, that I’d wanted to read more carefully, particularly his updated psalms.

To be honest I should say that I don’t think I would have started translating if I hadn’t believed that it would somehow help me as a poet. Otherwise I probably just would have made a practice of reading novels in French, for instance. Poetry is a jealous god, and most of the major decisions in my life have come down to how to let poetry be a central focus. La Tour du Pin taught me a great deal about psalms, couplets, devotional poetry, forging poetic authority, and the intimate address of prayer. But poets throughout history have turned to translation; it’s actually hard to think of a really major poet who hasn’t. I like to tell students—and I truly believe this to be the case—that translation is how poets acquired their craft before the very recent (and American) invention of the writing workshop.

That said, I’ve also undertaken less selfish forms of translation—accepting invitations to translate a given work, as I did with Hubert Haddad’s Rochester Knockings, or finding deserving and significant unread-because-untranslated poets and taking on the task of correcting that by translating them, as I’ve most recently done (with a cotranslator, Piotr Sommer) with the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski.

SK: No matter how good you are as a translator, no matter how much experience you have, every time you sit down with a text in order to translate it, a new journey begins. An adventure from the first to the last sentence. Recently, I watched an interview with John Irving—who was at Bread Loaf for nine years beginning in 1975—in which he shared his thoughts on the writing process. He doesn’t write a story until he sees the ending or the last sentence. From his perspective, to write a story implies writing towards this sentence. To a certain extent, there is a similarity between Irving’s method and a translator’s approach to a text. As translators we have to know the whole story, i.e., to see the ending, before the real work can begin. On the other hand, we are given the opportunity to live two lives. While we recreate a text in another language, we let someone else’s voice speak through us; we are allowed to write while we don’t have to be ourselves. At the same time, we are in the position to play with different versions of a sentence until we think we have found the best possible version. How do you feel about the last sentences of poems you have translated? How hard is it to write the last sentences of your own poems?

JG: This is surely one of the most significant ways in which translating and writing are the same—that humbling if not helpless confrontation of the blank page at the start of a new project, a new day of sitting down at the desk, how it is always the blank page, no matter what experience and success one has had on other pages in the past! I’ve heard many writers say something similar to what John Irving suggests in this description of his own writing process, but I have to say that for me, it’s never worked that way. I mean, I’ve thought I’ve come up with the last line of a poem—some place where I had the sense a poem I might write would want to arrive, but just as often as not, that line, if it remained, could end up being the first line in the poem! Or anywhere else in between. What’s truer to my own experience as a writer is that getting a line like that is enough to lure me into trying to write toward it, as Irving says, that is, to start a poem. But once the poem is begun, then it’s all about the mystery of process.

A friend and colleague of mine, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg, has this amazingly astute observation about process and revision. She says: “For reasons unknown, some pieces of work will require much more from us than others.” Oh, have I found this true in my own poems! But I certainly have found it true in every work of translation I’ve undertaken as well. When I was working on Rochester Knockings, my first time translating a novel, I was always trying to stay on a schedule, i.e., to translate so many paragraphs or words a day. But what I experienced was that one day I could translate five paragraphs easily, then the next day one single complicated sentence or confusing paragraph would take up my entire writing time. It was never for a single reason or even a clearly parsable set of reasons—it was always unpredictable and essentially for “reasons unknown.” I found it bewildering, and frustrating, but there were so any other pleasures that commingled with the process that made up for it. One was what you also mention here—the translator’s “opportunity to live two lives.” For me, a poet who can’t really imagine being able to sit down and write a novel, I had this amazing experience of getting to write a novel! I suddenly understood so much of what other novelist friends had described. I longed as soon as I woke up in the morning to grab my coffee and go upstairs and be with the characters and in that world. I laughed and felt alongside them, I literally wept as I translated the death of certain characters. And when the translation was finished, I missed them. It was an unforgettable vicarious experience translating that novel brought me. I also longed, just as significantly, to be in the mind, as it were, or in the company, of the author, Hubert Haddad. His sensibility, his way with descriptions, his patterns of sentence-making, were also what I was communing with. Andres Neuman describes this pleasure wonderfully; he says translating is the closest you can come to reading and writing a text at the same time.

So, when you ask about how hard it is to write the last sentence of my own poems or translations, I have to say they are just as hard to write probably than any other part—or rather, the difficulty will or won’t be so difficult for “reasons unknown.” But I haven’t said much about the other interesting part of your question—which is about the significance of endings themselves, either in writing and translation, which also deserves our meditation. Endings, it seems to me, whether they be the endings of lines, sentences, paragraphs, poems, or any other literary unit, are what signal the shape, the made-ness of something. All writers know from working with words that content is more something formed than expressed. Louise Glück put this succinctly in her poem “Celestial Music” (in fact it’s the ending of that poem!): “The love of form is a love of endings.” I think you’re right therefore that any translator as well as writer will struggle and take great care about how endings of various kinds work in any given poem, story, novel.

SK: You once told me that your poem “Window Left Open” explores your idea of translation as an analog to the sensual and spiritual life. Jennifer, could you describe your take on translation in this poem in more detail? Is your poem an ode to translation?

JG: You and I have spoken before about the opening chapter of George Steiner’s After Babel, in which he performs an exhausting and spellbinding close reading of a passage from Act II of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Steiner’s thesis is that translation is, among other things, perhaps the most sophisticated form of reading there is. This is a wonderful text to introduce to young translators because it reminds us of how much learning and meaning are in a given text and thereby how much learning and meaning must be undertaken and generated in a successful translation.

Reading After Babel is probably the first time it occurred to me that translation is a mode of living in that regard, but it’s something I’d already been thinking about and exploring a lot in poems in a more inchoate and intuitive way. No matter how long I looked at either the world or any work of art, I found that the meaning in it was unfixed and inexhaustible, and this has always fascinated me. Everything in my experience and life with words and languages has made me believe that writing and translation and also reading are really all modes of some central activity that humans are constantly immersed in. On some days I find them all to be essentially the same thing; on other days when I think they’re otherwise, I still find them so deeply interconnected that it feels unprofitable to separate them. It’s one of the reasons it felt so urgent to me that we start the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. As you’ve heard me say before, inherent in the conference is the belief that translators are writers and deserve to be treated, trained, and supported as such. So maybe the poem isn’t exactly an ode to translation so much as it is an ode—or maybe an ars poetica—to how seeing, reading, writing, translating are to me inextricable modes of being and thinking.

SK: The first sentence and the last sentence—speaking of last sentences again!—of your poem “Window Left Open” resonated powerfully with me: “All you have to do is open the window” and “translate me.” Who is speaking? The translator? Could it be a text that needs to be translated? Or both? 

JG: I love this question because it helps me see and think about my own poem in a new (but not at all unrelated) way—that’s a gift. I want to answer “all of the above,” and maybe also suggest that the poem is spoken by a lyrical speaker (pretty much, I’ll admit, myself). I wrote the poem, as most of the ones in that book, at a former Franciscan monastery in the French Alps. It was a place that lent itself to the fusing of the spiritual and sensual world. It was also a place where I was the only English speaker, so I was spending my days with others in French and then writing in English in my head when I was back in the room. So a natural and kind of constant translation was happening in that setting. I remember going back to my room after every walk or meal to add to my list of new vocabulary for various plants or moths or whatnot.

You point to the first line, “All you have to do is open the window,” and that’s significant because the poem (for me) is really about trying to keep some channel open between and interior and exterior, which is maybe more of a metaphysical or lyrical analogy, yes, to the cultural work that literary translation does. I didn’t intend anything so ambitious or idea-driven as that exactly when I wrote it, but the poem does its thinking through images. The moths that fly in first “effervesce in a stream / toward the lamp,” but then later in the poem I start to think of them as something the air “borrows” from the night so it can be seen. Some of the images of the moths come from direct observation: “I see / what they are: perched tightly together like carnations, / a fidgeting corsage of little engines.” But the associating mind also leads that to a larger analogy, comparing the moths suddenly to “words / the lamp knows how to translate / from the teeming night.” This is really all poetic thinking, but I remember feeling some kind of solace or pleasure when suddenly I was able to envision the moths that way, which is what led to the final utterance of the poem, asking God to “translate me.” It seemed like the best prayer one could ask for.

SK: In my final school year in Germany, our French teacher put Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot [Waiting for Godot] on the reading list—a play that he wrote in French. It was the first time I had realized that writers sometimes choose to write in a language other than their native language or mother tongue. Beckett once wrote: “More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it.” Another writer who adopted French as his literary medium is Milan Kundera. His decision to abandon Czech was due to the political situation in Czechoslovakia and the necessity to emigrate and find a new audience in a new language.

I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s book In Other Words, a very personal meditation on how she fell in love with the Italian language and what the total immersion in another language—”a language that has nothing to do with my life” —meant for her identity as a writer. Lahiri’s voluntary exile in the Italian language changed her life in profound ways. She began to write in Italian as well as translate from Italian.

Jennifer, you have translated works of literature from French into English, including poetry by Patrice de La Tour du Pin, collected in Psalms of All My Days (2013), and Hubert Haddad’s novel Rochester Knockings (2015). I would love to hear more about your relationship with the French language. Why and how did you learn it? Would you like to write poems in French? Maybe you want to add information about your relationship with Polish as well.

JG: I love to hear stories of how people choose and fall in love with different languages, but my own stories are not so dramatic or political or significant as the Beckett, Kundera, or Lahiri examples you cite. I treasure each of those authors and their translingual commitments and experiments with writing. I have found that when I’m in France, and speaking French, I write a great deal of French in my notebook that I scribble in daily. If I’m trying to write poems, then I have to translate that into English, but usually it’s just phrases or occasional lines. I have never made a substantial attempt to write poems in French, though after reading Rilke’s French poems while I was studying in Paris, I did try my hand a couple of times. It’s hard! I found it handicapping, because my French is not anywhere as strong or expressive as my command of English. I miss the variety of register and diction and trust my ear, in terms of music, with English best. But as Lahiri explores in In Other Words, there can still be worthwhile reasons for such an undertaking.

I grew up in Texas, and the predictable thing to do would have been to study Spanish. In fact, kindergarten when I was growing up was bilingual state-wide, so I had in fact dabbled in Spanish and encountered it a lot—I suspect it felt therefore too quotidian for me to study, though I regret that I felt that way and wish I’d acquired Spanish while growing up. I also was half-German, so the other predictable thing to do would have been to study my familial language, one I’d heard spoken by my grandparents. But—maybe as Lahiri was explaining—I wanted to study a language that had nothing to do with my life, that felt not utilitarian but artistic, if that makes sense, though I don’t mean to over-intellectualize it—I was twelve or so when I made this decision!—so I chose to study French.

Learning French in small-town West Texas is a curious thing. Our accents were just awful. I remember being taught that “l’amour” and “la mort” were pronounced identically (but then, I also grew up believing that “pen” and “pin” were pronounced identically). My first French teacher explained to the class that “vous” was French for “y’all.”

I had a rude but wonderful awakening when I eventually made it to Paris. I was extremely poor when I was there, so I didn’t eat out in a restaurant ever (and even now I still feel my vocabulary for food, for example, is relatively impoverished), but felt actually very rich that whole year, surrounded by so much culture and art and history. I studied literature and paintings intently and went to classes and museums and learned some of their art of philosophical debate and conversation. So in a certain sense, I really did end up thinking of and using the language more intellectually and artistically than practically. 

My decision to learn Polish was even more eccentric and impractical. (I’m often asked if I’m Polish but the answer is no.) I simply fell in love with contemporary Polish poetry. The truth is, a good deal of twentieth-century Polish poetry is marvelously translated into English (Miłosz, Szymborska, Herbert, Różewicz, Zagajewski), so my love affair started via literary translation. But then I studied under Adam Zagajewski and, along with him and Edward Hirsch, organized a poetry seminar that took place every summer in Krakow from 2002 to 2006. It was loosely centered around the poet Czesław Miłosz and was occasioned by his retirement from a long career of teaching at Berkeley and his return home to Poland. A lot of Polish poets—like Miłosz and Zagajewski—had come to the United States and had a great influence on American poetry. The idea behind our poetry seminar was to reverse the flow, to bring some American poets to Krakow and let them interact with Polish literary culture. Those were marvelous summers, and they allowed me to meet younger Polish poets who weren’t translated into English. My desire to study Polish was related entirely to poetry. To really become expert at thinking about it, I was going to have to read it eventually in the original. Plus, there were lots of poets I would otherwise have no other way to read!

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­SK: In a conversation with Matt Jennings, editorial director of Middlebury Magazine, you described Bread Loaf as a kind of ecosystem—a place that includes writers at every stage of the writing life or career. With two additional programs dedicated to environmental writing and literary translation we see this ecosystem expanding. The fact that the Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Translators’ Conference take place at the same time is particularly interesting. I have participated in two Translators’ Conferences; the presence of environmental writers had quite an impact on my idea of translation. Attending their readings and hearing their voices made me realize how many different definitions of the term “translation” exist; how the concept of translation is woven into the fabric of the world(s) we live in. To me, the two conferences complement each other perfectly. Jennifer, could you comment on the two conferences and how they “correspond” with each other?

JG: Thank you for that description—you’re not alone in observing and thinking about the palpable and inspiring synergy the two conferences increasingly generate each year. It’s something I kind of shake my head and marvel at every summer without being able to take any credit for it whatsoever! The truth is, it’s sort of an accident. Or maybe more accurately, the decision came out of purely practical reasons rather than philosophical or pedagogical ones. The former director, Michael Collier, and I decided to run the two conferences simultaneously as a way to reduce costs. Both, we knew, would at least initially be much smaller conferences than the flagship August writers’ conference. We wanted to protect them from each having to shoulder the entire cost of providing kitchen staff and maintenance for the whole mountain campus, essentially.

But as you aptly describe, the conferences have ended up complementing and corresponding with each other to a surprising degree. It started with small things, like the translators discovering the morning bird walks held by the environmental writers and suddenly discussing language and communication in a different context. One faculty member from the environmental writers conference recently confessed to me that she felt translators were maybe even more serious writers than writers! She said she loved hearing them discuss at astonishing length the repercussions of a certain word choice, for instance. One Bread Loafer put it to me this way: both conferences bring together writers who love literature and believe in things in the world that are larger than themselves, than their own work. In that sense, both conferences are bringing people together who are in service to something in addition to or beyond their imagination and creativity. Or perhaps another way to say it is that they’re wanting to harness their own art to work toward some greater good. There is also often an undeniable sense of urgency—a political engagement—that wants to “translate” or explain how the world is much smaller and interconnected than Americans may conventionally see it. It is also much more intricate, various, and complex than any single one story or culture or tradition can fully contain.

One final thing: there have also been now on several occasions writers who have attended one conference and then come back in subsequent years to attend the other! You yourself, actually, are an example of someone who first attended Bread Loaf as a translator and have come back to a different conference as a writer. I love that! That there are these gifted and versatile writers, who are seeking ways to nurture their gifts and develop their skills and also to share them with others in a community like Bread Loaf. And it points to how Bread Loaf might help writers of the present moment and with its present challenges in ways that are different than regular degree or MFA programs, for instance.

SK: Thank you, Jennifer. I’m looking forward to your forthcoming book Everything I Don’t know.

JG: Thank you, Simone!

Jennifer Grotz’s most recent book of poems is Window Left Open (Graywolf, 2016). Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski cotranslated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer, is forthcoming from World Poetry Books. Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, she teaches at the University of Rochester.

Simone Kraus, a NER nonfiction reader, is an experienced translator living in Germany and the Czech Republic. In 2016, she received a Katharine Bakeless Nason grant for emerging writers from the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. She holds a doctoral degree in American Studies from the Translation School of Mainz University, Germany, where she taught courses in the translation studies program for nine years. She is the author of Prag in der amerikanischen Literatur: Cynthia Ozick und Philip Roth (Peter Lang, 2016), a book focusing on the literary representation of Prague in the works of Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth.

Translating a text by May-lee Chai

Intro to Translation Studies

H

ave you ever wondered what it would be like learn to translate? This winter term at Middlebury, NER got a first-hand look at the challenges and pleasures of translation by teaming up with Professor Karin Hanta for her “Intro to Translation Studies” class.

NER author May-lee Chai agreed to have a portion of her essay “Women of Nanjing” translated by the students, who had the chance to ask her questions as they created translations into Bulgarian, French, German, Italian, isiXhosa, and Spanish.

The class also translated memes, as pictured below. The chart on the right recreates a semantic field, showing all the different shades of meaning that the word “design” can have.

  • illustration of a semantic field centered around the word "design"

According to Professor Hanta, the class “is geared towards beginning translators with advanced language skills/bilinguals. In this translation exercise, we simulated a situation involving a real-life client, the New England Review. When ‘our client,’ editor Carolyn Kuebler, visited the class, students tried to determine what kind of translation she would expect from them. To many of them, it seemed that the client was looking for a ‘faithful translation.’ Students reflected on how they could or could not meet this expectation. What helped them immensely in their work was an encounter with author May-lee Chai, in which the writer further explained her text. This was their first exposure to translating a nonfiction text type with historical underpinnings. Students zigzagged from the word to the sentence level, critically examining their choices and assuring the smooth flow of the translated text. They experienced what it means to be the closest readers of a text and how background knowledge [in this case about what Nanjing means in history] always serves a translator well.”

Here we share those translations, along with the students’ intriguing and insightful comments about the challenges of translating ino their particular language. Click on any one of them to see the opening passages of the essay translated into another language, followed by their comments.

Avalena Baird (French)
Grace Carroll (Spanish)
Lex Clay (German)
Zoe Garcia (Spanish)
Michael Koutelos (Italian)
Damaris Neaves (Spanish)
Vera Rousseff (Bulgarian)
Maeve Shea (Spanish)
Lila Steinberg-Sher (Spanish)
Khanya Sarrkos Thunyiswa (isiXhosa)
Maren Walsh (Spanish)

Behind the Byline

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros talks with Megan Howell about her short story “Patriotic Sex” from her collection Una casa en los Catskills. Erin Goodman’s English translation of the story is available in NER 42.1.

Megan Howell: In “Patriotic Sex,” an Afro-Cuban woman reflects on her tumultuous relationship with Humbercito, a white Cuban American. Her allusions to slave barracks, sexual violence, and intergenerational trauma are more reminiscent of James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” or Gayle Jones’s Corregidora than, say, the euphemistic depictions of interracial sex in shows like Always a Witch and Escrava Isaura. At the same time, she’s not a complete victim; she has agency, going out of her way to seek out Humbertico.

I’m wondering how you were able to make the protagonist free-willed while also showing that a violent, terrible history is influencing her actions. How do you write about the intersections between sexual liberation and anti-Blackness in a meaningful way that doesn’t feel fetishistic?

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros: The answer is in the flesh. The flesh does not lie.

I am always suspicious of grandiloquence, of all attempts to explain a phenomenon, a feeling, especially our emotions, with only words. I know, it seems paradoxical, since, as a writer and a scholar, words are my tools. And, perhaps, this extreme familiarity with words is what prevents me from trusting them.

Aware of the impossibility of words—and the discourses woven with them—to properly express our experience, I seek to convey the unspeakable, which silently lies in the flesh. That’s why I called these “stories written from the flesh and for the flesh.” That was the leading thread when I was writing the stories included in my first book, Una casa en los Catskills [A House in the Catskills], in which the Spanish version of “Patriotic Sex” was first published, in San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Havana (Cuba).

Everything I have been writing since the publication of this book continues to explore the Black experience, particularly the Black female experience in the Americas.

Thus, under the title “Con tinta negra” [With Black Ink], goes one of my current projects, a biweekly column I write for OnCuba News, in which I gather my intimate reactions—trying to keep the writing as close to the flesh as possible—through my daily experiences. There, I teach, I walk, I love, I read, I hate, I suffer, I cry, I laugh, I am attacked and loved and misunderstood and forgotten as a human being with black flesh, which, everywhere in the Americas, means that my experience today is linked to the enslavement of my ancestors and subsequent anti-Black racism.

When I am teaching, I have to use facts, dates, well-constructed arguments. In my stories, I find the freedom to allow my flesh to talk. And I believe this is what keeps the stories from falling into that fetishism you are talking about.

MH: In many ways, your story is one of contrasts. It juxtaposes New York with Cuba; Cuban Americans with cubiches; black with white; violence with pleasure; Soviet boarding schools with a commodified, Americanized replica of a Cuban ghetto; femininity with machismo, etc. The protagonist reflects on these conflicts without explicitly saying which ones are preferable. Do you think she’s resigned? Or is she still searching for what she wants?

OCC: She is not resigned. She is not searching either. She just goes beyond the excluding polarities, the juxtapositions.

The protagonist of “Patriotic Sex” is not in the either/or dichotomy, discarded, for instance, by the Black feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. Instead, and like O’Grady, my character follows the infinite possibilities offered in the “both/and” logic, which actually gives title to her latest show, at the Brooklyn Museum. (Don’t dare to miss it if you are around, it’s exquisite.)

Why should she express her preference between concepts, institutions, and ways of thinking that, ultimately, have not been conceived to make her thrive but, rather, to systemically exclude her, as a Black Latina of Cuban origins? She does not fit in any of these structures: she is constantly shifting between them, ungraspable and slippery like a snake, maybe a little bit venomous as well. And she likes that. She prefers to be a monster rather than feel victimized.

MH: The protagonist describes herself as being “not a political animal” even though her thoughts and mere existence are deeply political. Do you think she’s wrong? Or does being political require actively participating in political revolutions and reading up on geopolitics?

OCC: Everything is political, even the unspoken expression of the flesh. But I believe there is a way of being political that doesn’t involve getting immersed in a simplistic scheme, in which everyone repeats, without thinking, the same ideas, taken from social media, dictated by obscure gurus and old politicians. This is the political plot she is trying to avoid: the superficial repetition of slogans and old mantras that unfortunately shape the leading conversations about Cuba today, in which there are, again, only two mutually exclusive sides. Two ways of being Cuban and thinking about Cuba, in favor or against the island’s regime, in favor or against the US embargo, without the possibility of introducing nuances. Each of them determined to win over the other, without concessions. Withdrawing herself from this never-ending game becomes her way of adopting another political stance—a nonconventional one, in which possibilities multiply and a real conversation would be possible. But Humbertico/Andy is too embedded in these binaries, and the conversation is precluded by a Fidel Castro–like speech that convinces our protagonist to seek pleasure, listening to her lover’s naked flesh, rather than his Manichean monologue.

MH: Rather than forming her political opinions after telling readers so much about herself, the protagonist leaves both Andy and the entire narrative for Starbucks. Do you think her passivity is sustainable for a Black woman living in America? Is the story’s ending a coda? Or a small break in her life before the next racial upheaval?

OCC: I don’t think she is passive. Passive would be to fall into Humbertico/Andy’s narrative. Instead, she acts. She knows what she wants, which is to have good sex. She gets it, avoids supporting his monologue or confronting him, and then she leaves. All that matters is her satisfaction, and this is an extremely radical position for a Black woman in the Americas. Our bodies have, since enslavement, been used, objectified, raped, discarded, exterminated. The protagonist takes agency and ownership over her body and her desire. She is her own master, and her actions do not satisfy the expectations of her white lover or most readers. Just her own.

MH: There’s been a recent resurgence of interest in socialism, especially among young Americans online. I’ve noticed that many of them do a poor job of reckoning with race when discussing a subject as nuanced as Third World socialism. On the one hand are neoliberals who continue to demonize countries like Cuba for eliminating very exploitative, corrupt, extractive economic systems that benefited only an elite (i.e., white) few. And on the other are leftists who believe that socialism is postracial. As someone who writes extensively on the myth of Cuba’s postraciality, do you believe that this new wave of socialist thinkers is less or more open to Black voices?

OCC: This is subject to their position in regards to racialization here in the United States. There is a lot of arrogance in both ranks; imperial views prevail among all of them. Again, we have these two poles that present themselves as radically divergent, although they might not be so different after all. If leftists and neoliberals allowed themselves to listen to voices coming from other contexts, particularly the voices from the Global South, the systemically silenced voices, maybe they would be able to more effectively tackle the problems they supposedly want to address. Concerning their openness to Black voices, it would require them to reflect on the White privilege that most have enjoyed and continue to enjoy. Only if they are genuinely acquiescent to doing that, and to reckoning with the fact that this is not so much a Black problem as a problem created and globally reproduced by the Eurocentric hegemony, a real talk on racialization might be possible.

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is a Cuban-born writer, scholar, and Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of the short story collection Una Casa en Los Catskills [A House in the Catskills], published by La Secta de los Perros in 2011, she has also published a book of literary essays Utopía, distopía e ingravidez: Reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa post-soviética cubana [Utopia, Dystopia and Ethical Weightlessness: Cosmological Reconfigurations in post-Soviet Cuban Fiction] from Vervuert Verlagsgesellschaft in 2013. Focusing on the Afro-Latinx experience, she is currently completing several fiction and nonfiction book projects.

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review and The Establishment  among other publications.

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