This book studies the ways in which the circulation of modern poetry and poetics is articulated by the translation of various poetic traditions and forms across the diverse spatiotemporal realm of mediation constituted by the Atlantic Ocean. By examining how translation, broadly understood as an interlingual, literary, and transcultural practice, is closely related to the transatlantic circulation of modern poetics, I develop a multilingual critical approach to the study of transnational poetry. Another central aim of this book is to analyze how the literary history of modern poetry—traditionally produced within mononational and monolingual frameworks—is altered by a comparative approach that incorporates different languages, poetic traditions, and cultures connected by the heterogeneous geopolitical space of the Atlantic Ocean. My analysis explores various ways in which key modern transatlantic poets attempt through their work to bridge differing but closely interconnected poetic traditions at the temporal juncture between colonialism and the postcolonial era, and how their poetry encourages us to rethink the literary history of modern poetry based on a transatlantic “literary field,” using Pierre Bourdieu’s term, that is simultaneously multilingual, hemispheric, and transcontinental.
One of the key premises of this book is that the critical category of Anglo-American “modernism” does not account for the overlapping modern literary traditions that at times coexist within a multilingual and transnational framework across the Atlantic—among them belated forms of romanticism and symbolism, various transnational strands of modernist poetics (Spanish American, Lusophone, Anglo-American), diverse avant-garde movements, and different manifestations of the self-consciously experimental forms from the 1950s and ‘60s traditionally associated with the category of the postmodern. Owing to these overlapping poetic forms and traditions, and the differing experiences of modernity associated with them since the late nineteenth century, I have chosen to use the term modern poetry as opposed to the label modernist poetry for the multilingual analysis of modern transatlantic poetics outside of the monolingual framework of Anglo-American literature. As Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger have recently stated in a different context, “if modernism is simply, as some have argued, the expressive dimension of modernity, and if modernity itself is defined very broadly, the utility of the term modernist, as opposed to, say, modern, would seem to be in question” (Dettmar and Wollaeger, xiv). This book therefore questions and rethinks the theoretical paradigm of Anglo-American “modernism” based on the transnational, interlingual, and transhistorical features of the work of key modern poets writing on both sides of the Atlantic—namely, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa; the Chilean Vicente Huidobro; the Spaniard Federico García Lorca; the San Francisco–based poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser; the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite; and the Brazilian brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos.
Contemporary scholarship in the areas of modern poetry and poetics emphasizes the need to transcend local and national categories in the analysis of literary and cultural production. A particularly important recent work in the field is Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics, winner of the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association in 2011. Ramazani’s book “argues for a reconceptualization of twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry studies,” in order to account for what he refers to as the “circuits of poetic connection and dialogue across political and geographic borders and even hemispheres, of examining cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges, influences and confluences in poetry” (Ramazani, x). Although Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics successfully rearticulates the study of twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone poetry by widening the field of poetry studies beyond a national paradigm, it does so within an essentially monolingual framework. Ramazani’s critical effort to transcend the mononational works well for the study of poetry originally written in English; however, its monolingual methodological framework is more problematic as a potential model for a wider study of “cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges” that could be applicable to other geopolitical areas where English does not necessarily operate as a vernacular or literary language. Curiously, Ramazani cites the “specificities of language” and the “language specificity of poetry” as reasons for excluding from his study both poetry written in other languages and the concept of translation as a form of cross-cultural exchange:
Still a primary reason for drawing a somewhat artificial boundary around poems in English is that, simply put, in poetry, more than perhaps in any other literary genre, the specificities of language matter. . . . The heuristic corollary of this observation is that poems are best taught in the original, and in an English department in a predominantly English-speaking country, the teacher devising a poetry syllabus cannot usually presume student competence in multiple languages. Moreover, although poetic influences continually cross linguistic lines, the language specificity of poetry often grants the inheritances in a poet’s working language(s) special weight. (Ramazani, 19)
Ramazani’s methodological decision to draw an “artificial boundary” around works originally composed in English within the postcolonial and global framework he uses highlights the long-standing state of affairs within “an English department in a predominantly English-speaking country” regarding foreign languages and literatures. However, the same linguistic specificity that Ramazani invokes to justify his methodological decision constitutes in itself a problematic concept, particularly from the transnational point of view that articulates A Transnational Poetics as a scholarly project.
Recent scholarship on multilingual literatures, such as Brian Lennon’s In Babel’s Shadow, and Joshua Miller’s Accented America, to cite two relevant examples, exhibits far more awareness of and critical attention to the multilingual specificities that problematize the validity of the notion of a “predominantly English-speaking country” for the scholarly study of literature in and of the United States. For example, Miller powerfully underscores the implications of a multilingual approach to the study of literatures of the United States in the following terms:
No language (or form of language) has ever been designated an official national speech or “standard” in the United States, but even a cursory glance at the best-selling anthologies and literary histories seems to imply that only one language has been used to convey Americans’ ambitions and to tell their stories. That this has never been so is an important recognition that has the potential to reconfigure what we understand as the “American language” or languages—what Americans speak to each other—as well as the texts that constitute “U.S. literature”—that is, which stories Americans invoke to convey something important about their affiliations. . . . This perspective combats a strategic blindness that discounts multilingualism, presuming it to be irrelevant, marginal, or eccentric in relation to U.S. national culture. (Miller, 18)
By essentializing the “specificities of language” and the “language specificity of poetry” within his critical project, Ramazani indirectly marginalizes and discounts multilingualism in his reductive consideration of the United States as a predominantly monolingual nation, in terms similar to the ones just described by Miller. Moreover, Ramazani’s attempt to examine “cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges, influences and confluences in poetry” (Ramazani, x) from an explicitly monolingual framework does not seriously engage the specificities of translation—either as a linguistic process or concept able to bridge the interstices between different languages, literary traditions, poetries, genres, and forms of media that emerge from the transnational circulation of culture. It is worth noting that Ramazani seldom mentions the concept of translation in his work, and in fact, the word “translation” does not appear in the index of A Transnational Poetics.
A key claim of this book, therefore, is that if the various historical, economic, and material processes associated with the transnational flow of culture provide the framework for a new critical paradigm to reconceptualize the field of poetry studies, the notion of translation must necessarily enter the picture in a thorough and consistent way. The critical incorporation of translation within the transnational study of modern poetry and poetics entails not only the rejection of what Ramazani refers to as a “mononational paradigm” but also, and more particularly, the rejection of what constitutes the monolingual framework that has powerfully sustained the institution of English studies in the United States. This book constitutes in part a critical response to the kind of question posed by Susan Stanford Friedman in her recent attempt to problematize that very same institutional paradigm as it applies in particular to the field of modernist studies: “How can modernist studies be planetary if it is monolingual, if it operates within the lingua franca of any given era, if it reproduces the linguistic hegemonies of modernity’s imperial legacies, if, for example, it remains within the confines of global English today?” (Friedman, 489). In the context of Friedman’s important question, approaches such as Ramazani’s represent a symptomatic lack of critical attention to the concepts of interlingual and literary translation in English studies more generally, constituting not only a methodological and theoretical problem for the study of transnational literature but also a historiographic problem. What is at stake here for the purpose of articulating a transnational reconceptualization of modern poetry is to be able to historicize not only how the practice of literary translation has influenced the ways in which English-speaking poets write poetry, but more important, to substantiate critically the ways in which the practice of translation has generated the production and circulation of particular modern poetic forms and traditions.
Even within the discipline of English studies, it is well known that a key aspect of the Anglo-American modernist revolution is the crucial role played by literary translation in the origin, exchange, and transnational circulation of modernist poetics. The case of Ezra Pound, for example, is in this sense clearly paradigmatic. As previous scholars such as Haun Saussy, Richard Sieburth, and Steven Yao have shown, it is mostly through Pound’s idiosyncratic conception and practice of interlingual translation that a movement as central as imagisme within the canon of Anglo-American modernist poetry can historically emerge in the 1910s.1 However, the case of Ezra Pound as a transatlantic writer whose own poetry and poetics is intrinsically connected to the experience of interlingual translation is not an exception. Many other modern transatlantic poets, among them the ones studied in the following chapters, conceived their own poetic practice in part as a very serious linguistic engagement with various foreign languages and poetic traditions. As Pound himself states bluntly, “It must be clear to anybody that will think about the matter for 15 minutes that reading a good author in a foreign tongue will joggle one out of the clichés of ones own and will as it were scratch up the surface of one’s vocabulary” (Pound, “How to Write,” 107). The kind of deep intellectual engagement with “a good author in a foreign tongue” expressed by Pound, an experience that happens to be at the core of the concept and practice of literary translation, constitutes a crucial component of the circulation of modern poetry and poetics across the Atlantic when understood as a complex transnational process of writing, reading, editing, and publishing.
This book is, therefore, self-consciously located within the academic field of comparative literature, or more precisely, the “new” comparative literature that Emily Apter defines as “the translation zone.” Apter delineates the key features of her recent conceptualization of the discipline of comparative literature in the following terms:
A new comparative literature, with the revalued labor of the translator and theories of translation placed center stage, expands centripetally toward a genuinely planetary criticism, extending emphasis on the transference of texts from one language to another, to criticism of the processes of linguistic creolization, the multilingual practices of poets and novelists over a vast range of major and “minor” literatures, and the development of new languages by marginal groups all over the world. (Apter, 10)
Unlike the various institutional manifestations of the kind of monolingual “heuristic corollary” described by Ramazani that strictly focuses on the “linguistic specifities” of a single language or national literature—which still determines most of the syllabi and research produced in departments of modern languages and literatures in the United States—the field of comparative literature constitutes a productive space for the contemporary study of transnational cultures that transcends the monolingual, as suggested by Apter. Though distinct in terms of focus and scope, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also emphasizes the constitutive role of translation within her own recent attempts to reconceptualize the field and practice of comparative literature. As Spivak argues in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, translation constitutes a crucial act of comparative reading since it is endowed with a powerful political dimension: “When we rethink comparativism, we think of translation as an active rather than a prosthetic practice. I have often said that translation is the most intimate act of reading. Thus translation comes to inhabit the new politics of comparativism as reading itself, in the broadest possible sense” (Spivak, 472).
My analysis of modern transatlantic poetry entails a comparative reading of various manifestations of translation as they articulate what Apter describes as “the transference of texts from one language to another.” My approach to the notion of translation aims to open up a critical space for the examination of the interlingual dimensions of modernist, avant-garde, and postmodern poetics that remain insufficiently studied within contemporary literary and cultural studies. Ultimately, my book reveals the limitations of criticism of modernist and avant-garde poetry and poetics that do not take into account what Martin Puchner describes in Poetry of the Revolution as the “dynamic of moving and translating,” in the following terms:
The dynamic of moving and translating, of displacement or replacement points to the limitations of theories of modernism that depend on a more or less deterministic model according to which modernism is a response to the crisis of modernization. . . . The model of modernism as arising from incomplete and contested industrialization thus explains the emergence of a first modernism, but not the projection, refraction and adaptation of this modernism ever since. In particular, it does not work as an explanation of the avant-garde at large, which respects neither origin, nor original language, which does not privilege fixed abodes and cultural frames and thrives on the instable and ephemeral even as it may fantasize about origins and headquarters. What needs to be added to this theory of uneven developments is the dynamic of modernism and the avant-garde itself, the fact that once there existed a radical modernism in Europe’s semiperiphery, this modernism travelled and was distributed to a much wider range of places and locales, disrespecting prevalent modes of production. There formed, in other words, a kind of feedback loop between European and American modernisms. (Puchner, 174)
In order to analyze particular manifestations of the circulating dynamics of translation within modern poetry in the terms suggested by Puchner, I use the concept of “circulation” developed by cultural anthropologists Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma. In “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” an article originally published in Public Culture in 2002, Lee and LiPuma focus on the primary importance of the process of circulation as a “constitutive act” (192) in the generation, dissemination and interpretation of cultural forms. Although most of their article develops a rather prescient analysis of circulation as a key constitutive process for the flow of capital within global capitalism in the early twenty-first century—as Lee and LiPuma argue, “it produces new forms of risk that might destroy it” (211)—their overall approach to the process of circulation succeeds in overcoming the semiotic analysis of the concept of exchange originally developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the field of cultural anthropology. As they argue, their notion of “cultures of circulation” tries to overcome the limitations of Lévi-Strauss’s conceptualization of circulation as merely “transmitting” meaning:
In hindsight, it can be seen that his use of phonology as the model for structural analysis raised fundamental issues about structure, event, and agency that continue to inform poststructuralist discussions of performative identity. One result is that performativity has been considered a quintessentially cultural phenomenon that is tied to the creation of meaning, whereas circulation and exchange have been seen as processes that transmit meanings, rather than as constitutive acts in themselves. Overcoming this bifurcation will involve rethinking circulation as a cultural phenomenon, as what we call cultures of circulation. (Lee and LiPuma, 191)
Unlike Lévi-Strauss, they conceive circulation as a performative and constitutive process that is “created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them” (Lee and LiPuma, 192). Based on their conceptualization of “cultures of circulation,” I analyze the act of translation as an instrumental constitutive process able to generate various forms of transfers that articulate the circulation of modern transatlantic poetry, and to articulate a space of mediation between different national traditions, languages, and cultures.
Closely related to Lee and LiPuma’s groundbreaking definition of “cultural circulation,” Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli offer a relevant model for exploring the process of cultural translation. Their work on transnational circulation originally emerged as a response to the editorial mission of the journal Public Culture, which, since its foundation, has been to seek “a critical understanding of the global cultural flows and the cultural forms of the public sphere which define the late twentieth and early twenty-first century” (Public Culture). In their influential essay “Technologies of Public Forms”: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition”—originally written as the introduction to a collection of essays published in that journal in 2003—Gaonkar and Povinelli develop a new theoretical approach to the study of the transnational movement of cultural forms grounded, in part, on their own reevaluation of the concept of translation. Gaonkar and Povinelli’s approach informs my articulation of a new framework for the study of the transnational transfer and circulation of poetic forms as an intelligible event emerging in a transatlantic space of cultural encounter.
For Gaonkar and Povinelli, the key challenge to transnational cultural studies is to establish a critical framework that engages the actual movement of cultural forms, while avoiding the “traditions of the book,” as they argue here:
The pressing challenge was how to engage these forms as mobile vectors of cultural and social imaginaries without relying necessarily on methods of reading derived from the traditions of the book; or if derived from the traditions of the book, how to readapt those traditions so as to foreground the social life of the form rather than reading social life off of it. (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 387)
The notion of form itself is of paramount importance to their project insofar as it facilitates a new critical focus that shifts from “meaning and translation” to what they refer to as “circulation and transfiguration” within “the contemporary politics of recognition.” As they argue, “A form can be said to move intelligibly (as opposed to merely physically) from one cultural space to another only in a state of translation” (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 392). Their critical project reconsiders within this framework the role played by translation in the transnational movement of cultural forms: “Translation—the (im)possibility of meaningful commensuration—has long been circulation’s double, its enabling twin” (392).
Perhaps the most important contribution of “Technologies of Public Forms” to the fields of transnational cultural studies and translation studies is the new theory of cultural translation Gaonkar and Povinelli offer based on what they refer to as the “dynamic transfiguration of forms across circulatory matrices” (388). Gaonkar and Povinelli’s notion of “transfiguration” thus emphasizes the materiality (rather than the meaning) of cultural forms, and is grounded on a critical stance that acknowledges the flow of transnational culture by “reading form as a moving, transfigurative, and transfigurating element of public life” (“Technologies of Public Forms,” 385). For them “transfiguration” constitutes a notion that displaces the conceptualization of translation within what they refer to as the “straightforward reasoning” of the discipline of translation studies: “But the straightforward reasoning of translation studies obscures a yawning disjunction between translation as a political and economic project and translation as an exemplar of theories of meaning” (394).2 Thus, they locate “transfiguration” at the juncture between a cultural and political approach to translation studies, on the one hand—practiced mainly by historians and cultural anthropologists—and a hermeneutic or critical approach to translation studies embraced by philosophers, literary theorists and linguists, on the other.
The aporia at the intersection of these two projects provides the opening for a revitalized approach to form-sensitive analysis of global public culture. On the one hand, we now have countless socially informed studies of the conditions of possibility for various forms of translation and countless studies of the profoundly political nature of translation. . . . On the other hand, traditional theories of translation as a system of meaning-value arise from and are oriented to the possibility of undistorted movement of linguistic value from one language to another, one genre to another, or one semiotic system to another. These theories of meaning-value continually orient us toward a theory of the sign, mark, or trace and away from a theory of the social embeddedness of the sign, of the very social practices that these histories wish to describe. In other words, no matter the richness of these social studies, theories of translation continually return to the question of how to translate well from one language to another as meaning is born across the chasm of two language codes—or in the Derridean revision, the dilemma of graspability that exists prior to this birth, this voyage. (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 394)
Although there is no doubt that a heuristic gap exists between what can be generalized as the cultural and philosophical approaches to translation in the late twentieth century, as Gaonkar and Povinelli argue, it is a gap that, as will be shown in this book, is as generative of meaning and knowledge as the process of circulation itself. Moreover, if their proposed use of the concept of “transfiguration” constitutes a critique of “theories of translation,” it is a critique that overly simplifies both the field of translation studies and the concept of interlingual and literary translation. At the same time, it overemphasizes the potential for critical “revitalization” entailed in their use of the concept of “transfiguration” as loosely defined in their essay.
Indeed, it is the productive potential of the gap they locate between two different modes of understanding the act and process of translation that precisely demonstrates the importance of contemporary translation studies for the analysis of the transnational movement of cultural forms. The productive potential of this space between different approaches to translation happens to be highlighted in the same essay by Talal Asad to which Gaonkar and Povinelli refer in their article. In his foundational “The Concept of Translation in British Social Anthropology,” Asad develops a theory of cultural translation in which the act of translation is seen as a constitutive process in the production of meaning and not merely a “banal” given of “the task” of social anthropologists (10) in their attempt to interpret foreign cultures.3 In his reformulation of the concept of cultural translation, particularly regarding the phenomenon of “unequal languages,” Asad borrows the notion of intentio from Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” As Asad argues, the main reason for drawing on a component of Benjamin’s theory is to articulate a new form of cultural translation that conveys “the structure of an alien discourse” that “all good translation seeks to reproduce” (21). Asad uses Benjamin’s theory of translation to develop a new form of cultural translation that would allow the “reader to evaluate that intentio” (21) as a structural or formal “coherence” (22) of the foreign culture and which, in his view, could facilitate a more harmonious relation with the language of the “good translator”:
The good translator does not immediately assume that unusual difficulty in conveying the sense of an alien discourse denotes a fault in the latter, but instead critically examines the normal state of his or her own language. The relevant question therefore is not how tolerant an attitude the translator ought to display toward the original author (an abstract ethical dilemma), but how she can test the tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms. (Asad, 22)
Asad’s attempt to conceive a more harmonious practice of cultural translation in order to show literally the good translator’s “tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms” demonstrates how a philosophical approach to literary translation can theoretically articulate a new approach to the concept of translation within the field of social anthropology. It also highlights the productive nature at the core of what Gaonkar and Povinelli view as the gap between what they regard as the two main theoretical strands structuring the discipline of translation studies. Ultimately, their critical need to establish a conceptual space between the notions of “transfiguration” and “translation” generates a limiting disjunction between two deeply interconnected heuristic processes and concepts. Moreover, their analysis of the circulation of cultural forms remains grounded on a notion of “form” as a thing in itself that stands in direct opposition to the notion of “meaning,” two terms opposed but mutually related within their conception of the “sign” as the object of translation. Indeed, one of the key features of the notion of form is that it constitutes an extremely difficult concept to define, as Gaonkar and Povinelli affirm as follows:
We are cognizant of the protean character of the idea of form in play here— and the potential criticism that we seem to be moving blithely through different ontological registers, ranging from textual forms, such as novels and newspapers, to forms of subjectivity adumbrated in citizenship and stranger-sociability, as well as to multiplex cultural formations called the nation and the public sphere. This is deliberate. In a given culture of circulation, it is more important to track the proliferating copresence of varied textual/cultural forms in all their mobility and mutability than to attempt a delineation of their fragile autonomy and specificity. (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 391)
Though they acknowledge the problematic “protean” feature of form, Gaonkar and Povinelli fail to recognize that one of the fundamental tenets of contemporary translation studies is precisely the conceptualization of translation as a form. Citing the work of Benjamin again—perhaps the most crucial contribution to the field of translation studies in the twentieth century—translation constitutes a “form” in the way that it entails a “determination of the medium of reflection,” and is thus necessarily dependent on the translatability of the original: “Translation is a form. To comprehend it as a form, one must go back to the original, for the laws governing the translation lie within the original, contained in the issue of its translatability” (“Task of the Translator,” 254). Benjamin’s seminal conceptualization of translation as a “form” unveils a potential for translatability and transferability that becomes manifest in the particular linguistic and spatiotemporal displacements that emerge when a work is transformed beyond its original manifestation.
Although it is undoubtedly important to provide theoretical models to “track the proliferating copresence of varied textual/cultural forms” for contemporary cultural studies, as Gaonkar and Povinelli argue, it is equally important to analyze the formal and theoretical implications of that same critical tracking so as not to ignore the problematic “autonomy and specificity” that is connected to the translatability of form as a concept. Ultimately, the importance of Gaonkar and Povinelli’s notion of cultural transfiguration resides not so much in their critique of “traditional theories of translation” or “translation studies,” but rather in the theoretical framework they provide for the analysis of transnational cultural forms. Their emphasis on the study of the transformations of form through their concept of “transfiguration” offers a very useful paradigm for the analysis of transnational culture, particularly for the fields of translation studies and comparative literature in the twenty-first century.
To articulate theoretically a transnational and interlingual analysis of modern poetry, the critical framework of this book fuses the “foregrounding of the social life of form” from a transnational perspective, as proposed by Gaonkar and Povinelli, with the critical analysis of the “protean” nature of the idea of form and its potential for translatability inherent in the act of translation. When examined and experienced from a translational framework, the notion of form manifests an explicit potential for mutability and transformation. For Benjamin the translatability of form constitutes in fact a transferential potential for the original to live on in its “afterlife”: “We may call this connection a natural one, or more specifically a vital one. Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife (Überleben)” (“Task of the Translator,” 254). As Benjamin argues, the translation of an original is related to the original in the same way that the determined “manifestations of life” are related to the “phenomenon of life.” For him, this translational relation can be established only through the translatability that articulates the gap between “life” and its “Überleben,” translated into English by Harry Zohn as “afterlife.” Joseph F. Graham, the translator of Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay on Benjamin, “Des Tours de Babel,” chose the term “sur-vival” instead of Zohn’s “afterlife,” a relevant linguistic choice that emphasizes Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Benjamin’s concept of Überleben: “If the structure of the work is ‘sur-vival,’ the debt does not engage in relation to a hypothetical subject-author of the original text . . . but to something else that represents the formal law in the immanence of the original text” (“Des Tours de Babel,” 183).
A concept closely related to Derrida’s “something else that represents the formal law in the immanence of the original text” is precisely Benjamin’s concept of “translatability” unveiled by translation. As Samuel Weber suggests in relation to Benjamin’s theory of translation, translatability constitutes a “potentiality” of the original that can only be experienced after translation:
Translatability is not simply a property of the original work, but rather a potentiality that can be simply realized or achieved, and that therefore has less to do with the enduring life usually attributed to the work than with what Benjamin calls its “afterlife” or its “survival” (Nachleben, Fortleben, Überleben). . . . This is because translatability is never the property of an entity, such as a work, but rather of a relation. (“A Touch of Translation,” 74)
Benjamin’s take on the act of translation allows for an encounter with the “stratum” of what he refers to as “pure language” through a radical transformation facilitated by the translatability of the original, as suggested by Weber, that literally moves it beyond itself after translation, reaching its “afterlife” (Überleben). For Benjamin, this transformation implies a turning of the “symbolizing into the symbolized” through which “all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished” (“Task of the Translator,” 261). Therefore, within Benjamin’s theory, the act of translation implies a “non-pure” linguistic representation of an absolute potential for translatability of the original as “that which seeks to represent” (261). Certainly, “that which seeks to represent” cannot be expressed by a mode of translation concerned with conveying the actual content (i.e., meaning or information) signified by the original since the potential of translatability of the original does not have anything to communicate beyond its own translatability as a form. This aspect of Benjamin’s take on translation leads to a particular “demand for literalness” (260) that radically moves away from any communicative purpose: “From this very same reason translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense” (260). Moreover, Benjamin’s conception of translation can only liberate “pure language” through an exclusively literal perception of the linguistic form of the intention implicit in the original text. In the light of Benjamin’s theory, the “transparent” art of “real” translation (versus meaning-oriented translation) is grounded on a literal perception of the linguistic form of the original that is conveyed by Benjamin in a figurative way, using the visual terminology implicit in the optical perception of form, as he describes here:
A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is a wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. (“Task of the Translator,” 260)
Benjamin’s theory of translation is thus characterized by a conceptual duality that clearly deserves further critical exploration and elaboration within contemporary translation studies. As Apter points out, “In addition to providing the field of translation studies with its most theoretically rich and enigmatic precepts, Benjamin forged an intriguing, yet undertheorized connection between philology and critical theory” (Translation Zone, 7).
Based on the potential for translatability inherent in Benjamin’s conception of translation as a “form”—which he defines both in terms of the linguistic “syntax” of the original (a philological consideration) and as a “determination of the medium of reflection” (a consideration of critical theory)—the notion of poetic transfer is used in this book to analyze the series of linguistic, or philological, and conceptual, or theoretical, correlations that emerge from the circulation across the Atlantic of the work of the various poets I study. In its original Latin form, the term transfere refers to a carrying over, a transport, a displacement, or a transformation of an object or event in relation to another spatiotemporal realm, entity, or medium. As a critical tool, the concept of transfer facilitates the examination of the potential of translatability between the different poetic forms and traditions that articulate the transnational and interlingual circulation of modern transatlantic poetics. My notion of poetic transfer refers in particular to the series of recurring mechanisms of translation, displacement, and substitution determined by the productive difference and spatiotemporal distance that connects the forms, concepts, and traditions involved in the circulation of modern poetry across the Atlantic. I therefore use this notion to study the work of various transatlantic poets located at the interstices of differing literary traditions (romanticism, modernism, the avant-garde), languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish), and media (print, visual, and digital). Within this framework, I examine the various linguistic and poetic forms through which these poets negotiate otherness in linguistic, cultural, sexual, and historical terms, as manifested in the various correlations between notions such as original / translation, real / simulacrum, vernacular / cosmopolitan, latent / manifest, local / universal, queer / normal, history / poetics, colonial / postcolonial, and print media / digital media.
As I develop in this book, a poetic transfer articulates both the linguistic and figural form that mediates the relation between different poetic works, as well as the spatiotemporal realm—both as a historical and cultural dimension—where this correlation actually takes place. David Palumbo-Liu has examined a parallel figural and spatial duality in relation to the concept of literary form within global literary exchange in which he analyzes a poetic “problematic” particularly related to the work of Henry James in the following terms:
The “problematic” that emerges as the product of a “poetic” analytic revolves back with great logic, to precisely the issue that James outlines—how is otherness not only given form, but how can Form itself be both the allegorical articulation of the mediation of self and other, and at the same time be that mediating space that accommodates both. (Palumbo-Liu, “Atlantic to Pacific,” 207)
This particular problematic of how otherness is “given form” described by Palumbo-Liu constitutes a central shared feature of the work of each of the poets analyzed in the following chapters and is central to my study of the transfer and circulation of modern poetry across the Atlantic. This constitutes in fact a key aspect of the notion of poetic transfer as examined in this book that is largely ignored by Gaonkar and Povinelli in their definition of “transfiguration,” that is, its intrinsic relation to the notion of alterity lying at its very core. This aspect of the notion of transfer is connected in my approach to a modern experience of alterity that has been conceptualized by the sociologist Richard Sennett as “being engaged by the unknown.” Following the work on urban sociology by Georg Simmel, Sennett develops a modern notion of cosmopolitanism closely related to an encounter with a “force of alterity” as he argues here:
The distinction between difference and alterity has to do with the possibility of classifying strangers in terms of difference versus the possibility of the unknown other. What Simmel understood about this stranger, understood as a force of alterity, was that it had a profoundly provoking quality to it. As Benjamin would later argue, the notion of the unknown had a kind of force, a kind of power of arousal in crowds. . . . Thus, the quality of cosmopolitanism for these urbanists at the time had to do with the notion of being engaged by the unknown. (Sennett, 43)
One of the main concepts explored throughout this book is that the notion of being engaged by a “stranger, understood as a force of alterity”—taking place rather explicitly in Pound’s conception of reading a “good foreign author,” Benjamin’s conception of “pure language” accessed through translation, as well as in Sennett’s own theorization of cosmopolitanism inspired by the work of Simmel just mentioned—is not only endowed with “a profoundly provoking quality” but also becomes an extremely productive and constitutive event in itself. In other words, the spatiotemporal encounter with an unknown force of alterity embodied in a strange or foreign form—whether this form is linguistic, poetic, semiotic, literary, cultural, or material—constitutes a particular formal correlation that intrinsically leads to the emergence of new intelligible forms. The drive to incorporate the Other as a form of alterity that, according to my analysis, pervades the transfer and circulation of modern transatlantic poetics—as manifested in Fernando Pessoa’s need to incorporate Englishness or Kamau Brathwaite’s drive to articulate Caribbean culture in its specific alterity, for example—precisely embodies one of the “generative matrices” that Gaonkar and Povinelli attempt to unveil through their notion of cultural transfiguration: “What are the generative matrices that demand that things—including ‘meaning’ as a captivating orientation and phantasmatic object—appear in a decisive form in order for them to be recognized as value-bearing as they traverse the gaps of two or more cultures, habitations, imaginaries, and forms of life?” (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 395). Ultimately, it is through form—or rather through its potential of translatability, as I argue—that the self not only figuratively constructs itself but ultimately generates its spatiotemporal relation to the Other, as Palumbo-Liu has suggested:
And yet again, we find that the imaging of self cannot take place formlessly; rather, identity is converted into the coinage of form—it is Form that circulates in the visual, the sensual, the experiential fields of social, intersubjective life in the streets, in the boulevards. The difficulty is finding the Form that is commensurate to this imaging, for it is in the spatial distributions and figurations of Form that the Other is imagined, incarnated and animated. (“Atlantic to Pacific,” 201)
Thus, the varying modes of poetic transfer examined in this book are essentially determined by the productive experience of being engaged by an unknown “stranger,” using Sennet’s term. As I will show, this “stranger” constitutes a form of alterity that happens to be located at the gap between the different conceptions of history, tradition, poetics, and languages that articulate the various manifestations of the transatlantic experience of modernity exemplified in the work of poets examined in this book. Overall, my analysis underscores the ways in which the circulation of poetic forms when seen as a historical and transnational event—whether hemispheric, transcontinental, oceanic or global—dramatically problematizes the notion of form itself, as Palumbo-Liu argues here:
The historical dimension enters into consideration precisely in that the fissures and gaps that trouble the conversion of Form are the products themselves of a tectonic shift in temporality and historicity that brings with it new ways of evaluating social and historical space and temporality. This is a formal problematic situated in an eminently worldly space and time, one that is characterized by migration, displacement, the reinhabiting of the modern world by new forms and ideologies. Under these circumstances, Form becomes freighted with the obligation to encase an as yet unsettled and indeterminate admixture of projected desire and repressed fear. (“Atlantic to Pacific,” 202)
Based on this historical dimension of form in an “eminently worldly space and time” suggested by Palumbo-Liu, one of the main arguments developed in this book is that the different modes of transatlantic poetic transfer under examination operate not only at linguistic, literary, and cultural levels, but ultimately as critiques of modernity—as diverse as the different manifestations and experiences of modernity during the twentieth century occurring on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Chapter 1 of this book I explore the notion of poetic transfer in the work of the modernist Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) by focusing on his relatively unknown English Poems (1921), a collection composed in English after Pessoa had been exposed to the educational system of the British Empire in colonial South Africa. I read Pessoa’s intensely erotic English Poems as a fetishized translation of the English poetic tradition—as mainly figured in the work of John Keats and Edmund Spenser—through which Pessoa carves out not only his own space within the English poetic tradition but also his hybrid postcolonial version of the English language. Using various definitions of the fetish developed by Marx, Freud, and Giorgio Agamben, I examine how Pessoa manages to turn the English language into a surprisingly malleable medium through which he alternately masks and expresses his differing libidinal impulses (hetero- and homosexual) by effectively re-creating his voice into a multiplicity of heteronyms or poetic personae belonging to different colonial empires (classical Greece, Renaissance England, and modern Portugal). At the same time, my analysis of Pessoa’s English Poems is based on Alain Badiou’s groundbreaking philosophical reevaluation of Pessoa’s heteronymic project. Badiou’s analysis of Pessoa’s overall literary project as “a possible condition for philosophy” informs my analysis of the heteronyms that come to define the oeuvre of arguably the most important modern Lusophone writer since Luis de Camões, and which can now be traced to a poetic form of Englishness that Pessoa transforms into a distinctly idiosyncratic modernist idiom.
In Chapter 2, I analyze the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avant-garde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraismo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, I focus on Huidobro’s long prose poem composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem, which has been traditionally overshadowed in its reception by his masterpiece Altazor (1931), narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.” Finally, I demonstrate the way in which in his attempt to articulate an avant-garde transatlantic poetics, Huidobro’s poetry ultimately unveils a planetary potential of the literary event as a “linguistic continuum” that, as has recently been conceptualized by Wai Chee Dimock, “urges on us the entire planet” (“Literature for the Planet,” 175).
Chapter 3 examines a particular transfer of modern poetics that is seminal for the transatlantic circulation of queer and homoerotic poetry during the twentieth century, namely the impact of the work of the German poet Stefan George and the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca on the poetry written by various members of the Berkeley Renaissance during the late 1950s (in particular, the poets Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Jack Spicer). I explore how the experimental poetics embraced by this San Francisco–based community of poets and artists enacts a translational and transnational attempt to connect linguistically with an outside through which they could transcend the oppressive Cold War cultural environment of the American 1950s. Whereas the poetry of Stefan George constitutes a crucial body of work for establishing the queer ethos of Duncan, Blaser, and Spicer’s collective, the importance of Lorca as a fellow homosexual poet was fundamental for the development of their experimental poetry, especially as manifested in the work of Spicer and Duncan. Moreover, I analyze how the queerness of Lorca’s poetry, as rediscovered in particular by Spicer in After Lorca, is closely related to Lorca’s own queer poetic response in Poet in New York to the work of Walt Whitman, perhaps the most influential gay poet within the Anglo-American tradition.
Chapter 4 focuses on the Brazilian movement of Concrete poetics developed by the São Paulo–based brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos that revolutionized both Latin American and world poetry during the 1960s. Mirroring Ezra Pound’s formulation of the notion of the “luminous detail” as a hybrid or complex poetic image constituting a self-sufficient critical fact, the São Paulo–based brothers manage to rewrite the literary history of the Brazilian and Latin American avant-garde. Pound’s overarching influence on the Brazilian collective of Concrete poets is particularly evident in the critical study by the de Campos brothers of the poetry of the romantic Brazilian poet Joaquim de Sousa Andrade (1833–1902) in ReVisão de Sousândrade (1964). In this critical work, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos incorporate the poetry of the Brazilian romantic poet into the theoretical body of concretismo precisely as the Latin American precursor of Pound’s own modernist poetics of imagisme. In examining the parallels between the neo-avant-garde revision of Sousândrade’s romantic poetry, as described by the de Campos brothers, and Pound’s modernist formulation of imagisme, I demonstrate that both display an analogous use of translation as a critical tool in order to constitute or, in this case, reconstitute, an avant-garde poetics that is alternately hybridized, transatlantic, and transhistorical.
In Chapter 5, I trace the progression of the postcolonial poetics developed by the Caribbean historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite as part of his groundbreaking reformulation of the Creole as the basis of Caribbean poetry and culture, from the inception of his project in the early 1960s, to its culmination in digital and virtual form in his “Sycorax Video Style.” In his still ongoing attempt to articulate a vernacular voice for Caribbean culture, Brathwaite’s later poetry involves an intermedial and interlingual transfer between the oral and the digital that aims at bridging the accumulative temporality of history and the performative temporality of poetics. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Simon Gikandi, I analyze the way in which the radically productive tension between the local and the cosmopolitan that Brathwaite finds at the core of Caribbean culture determines his creative and theoretical work toward the development and dissemination of a West Indian voice. I also show how this particular transfer amounts to a futile resistance to a cosmopolitanism and a temporality that subsumes Brathwaite’s radical embrace of the Caribbean vernacular along with the various forms of mediation, both old and new, on which it necessarily depends.
By providing a new critical framework for the analysis of modern transatlantic poetry informed by translation theory, I track some of the paths taken by the “dynamic of modernism and the avant-garde” that, as mentioned by Puchner, are yet to be developed within literary and cultural studies. Although the notion of poetic transfer explored in this book does not constitute a theory of this particular traveling dynamic within a transatlantic context (that is, the “feedback loop” Puchner describes), it does offer a theoretical model to analyze the forms of various transferring dynamics of cultural and linguistic translation, displacement, and replacement as they articulate modern transnational poetry. Perhaps, a fully developed poetics of transfer can eventually alter the way we think about the concept of translation into new critical paths alternative to the traditional dichotomy of letter (imitatio) versus spirit (interpretatio), and to the idea of the untranslatable—and its emphasis on the impossibility of translation—that have historically structured translation studies to date.