Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io Fossimo presi per incantamento . . .
—Purg. XI. 97
In Shelley’s beautiful sonnet, which translates it:
Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I,
Led by some strange enchantment, might ascend
A magic boat . . .
—Sonnet VI
In Robert Duncan’s version from among the sodomites:
Robin, it would be great if you, me and Jack Spicer
Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal heads so turned
That life dimmed the light of that fairy ship . . .
—Robin Blaser, “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere”
In 1957, the San Francisco–based poet Jack Spicer (1925–1965) published After Lorca, Spicer’s first published poetic work that, as the title suggests, was inspired by the poetry of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). After Lorca was published in San Francisco by White Rabbit Press, an independent publishing venture run by Joe Dunn, one of Spicer’s close friends at the time. After a series of attempts to find his own poetic voice, as well as his vocation as a poet—he refers to his early poems as meaningless “one night stands” (Collected Books, 61)—Spicer produced in After Lorca one of the most influential poetry collections produced by the poets and artists in the group generally referred to as the Berkeley or San Francisco Renaissance within the literary history of the United States. As I will demonstrate, the publication of After Lorca constitutes a particularly important event in the transatlantic circulation of modern poetry during the twentieth century, especially within postmodernist American poetry.
Spicer’s poetry book of 1957 not only displays a crucial transfer of poetics between different queer traditions across the Atlantic but also entails a radically experimental transformation of the practice of poetry that originally emerged as a response to both the heteronormative and homophobic environment in American culture, as well as the hegemonic power of New Criticism in literary and scholarly circles during the 1940s. More important, I argue in this chapter that the conceptual transformation of the practice of poetry clearly manifest in Spicer’s After Lorca is closely connected to the circulation across the Atlantic of the postsymbolist poetics of the influential German writer Stefan George (1868–1933). As I show, the impact of George’s poetic project, as well as its deeply queer ethos, was particularly important for theoretically grounding the overall response to the oppressive heteronormative context of postwar American culture as it was collectively experienced by the San Francisco group of poets and artists to which Spicer, together with the poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, originally belonged. I analyze in particular the impact on these three poets of the teachings of a key George disciple, the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz, while he was a professor at Berkeley. The influence of Kantorowicz’s scholarship on medieval history and political theology on the experimental poetics of these three key members of the Berkeley Renaissance has not been sufficiently studied to date, and it provides a crucial theoretical framework for understanding both the queer ethic of this group of poets and the translational dimension of the poetics they developed during the 1940s and 1950s.
In what follows, I am particularly interested in examining the ways in which the concept and practice of translation play a role in this specific series of poetic transfers originating from two foreign queer literary traditions—embodied respectively in the work of George and García Lorca—as collectively explored by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser within the context of American poetry of the historical period. Although there has recently been some excellent scholarship particularly focusing on Spicer’s After Lorca, my main objective is to show how Spicer’s idiosyncratic conception and practice of translation are connected to a larger reconceptualization of a queer poetics closely related to the reception in the United States of the poetic and ethical project developed by George and his circle in Germany.1 At the same time, I will demonstrate how Spicer’s translational handling of the linguistic body of Lorca’s poetry is intimately connected to the notion of “human community” as it emerges in the field of medieval political theology theorized by Kantorowicz, and previously explored by George in his poetry. Ultimately, the publication and circulation of Lorca’s poetry through various experimental literary circles in the United States, as well as the impact of the work of George and Kantorowicz on the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance, provide two foreign poetic and ethical models that helped shape a queer poetic tradition able to emphasize the universal dimension of the poetry produced by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser in the Bay Area during the 1940s and 1950s.
As thoroughly documented by Michael Davidson in The San Francisco Renaissance, Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser became the most prominent figures of a group of poets and artists that originally formed in Berkeley during the late 1940s around the figure of Kenneth Rexroth. In what constitutes a key characterization, Davidson defines their poetic group in terms of a peculiar combination of aestheticism and insularity partly connected to the homosexuality of some of its members: “Not all members of the Spicer-Duncan circle were gay, but an important component of their self-conscious aestheticism was a defense against a hostile outside for which the creation of an insular fraternity was necessary” (59). Davidson’s description of Spicer and Duncan’s group in his groundbreaking literary history of the San Francisco literary scene of the 1950s contextualizes their poetics by emphasizing their aestheticism as a strategic defense against what, according to Davidson, was perceived as a “hostile outside.” Among the outside historical circumstances that could literally be regarded as “hostile” for the San Francisco–based poets studied here, it is worth mentioning the pressing and reactionary sociopolitical environment of the 1950s pervaded by Cold War paranoia and homophobia. These socially repressive conditions were particularly difficult for gay men living in the Bay Area, as the writer Michael Rumaker in his personal history of the period, Robert Duncan in San Francisco, describes here concerning his own experience in the Bay Area during 1955:
I was to learn in my year and a half stay in San Francisco that it was indeed a police city. There was, in spite of the extraordinary quality of light over the city, a heavy climate of fear, not so much from the violence which occurred, but rather from the activities and presence of the police themselves. This was particularly true for gay men. There was also the burgeoning narcotics squad with the beginnings of the wider use of drugs. But the Morals squad was everywhere, and the entrapment of gay males in the street, the parks and in numerous public places was a constant fear and common occurrence. (Rumaker, 13)
Apart from these extremely difficult social circumstances, the 1950s saw the sudden emergence of other influential groups of poets within the American literary scene that gained critical and social recognition and that, as a whole, revolutionized the field of American poetry, partially impeding the potential impact of the work of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser within literary and scholarly circles. The most important groups that rivaled the Berkeley group and which quickly became popular and critically respected by the American literary establishment included the Beat generation—which gravitated around the figure of Allen Ginsberg on the very same San Francisco terrain; the alternative postmodernist poetics represented by the work associated with Black Mountain College—especially the work of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, to whom Duncan would later be connected; and finally the formation of the New York School of poets, centered on Ivy League–educated writers such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, themselves closely related to the emergence of abstract expressionism in the visual arts and who soon became extremely respected and influential poets.
Departing from the notion of “insular fraternity” that, according to Davidson, characterized the Berkeley collective of poets, I analyze their work as constituting an original attempt to articulate a new mode of poetic experience that ultimately led to the development of what I describe as an idiosyncratic form of queer poetics. My use of the term “queer” refers to their conceptualization of the practice of poetry as a model for a queer ethic, and its consequent transformation of poetic form that, in my view, lies at the core of their overall aesthetic project as a collective movement. In Guys Like Us, Davidson uses the notion of “male homosocial desire” as developed by Eve Sedgwick in Between Men to analyze the gay North Beach scene surrounding the figure of Spicer, and the way in which his poetry essentially aimed at the formation of a local community within what Davidson refers to as the “compulsory homosocial” cultural context of the United States in the 1950s. According to Davidson, “the function of poetry during this period was often to perform and engage social alliances, not represent them separate from the poem” (Guys Like Us, 17), constituting a poetry that addresses “specific constituencies without consideration of a larger reading public” (18). Davidson touches here on a key aspect of the Spicer-Duncan group of poets, especially in relation to what he sees as their unwillingness to reach a “larger reading public.” However, as opposed to Davidson’s argument, I claim that the work of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser addresses that same “specific constituency” by articulating a poetics that aimed at transcending the particular homosocial framework that determined locally their work by connecting to various foreign queer literary traditions and poetic practices that could legitimize the universality of their own creative and ethical plight. One of the main characteristics of the poetics developed by these three poets was their need to establish a form of transmission that could connect to a larger outside beyond their local context and so constitute, in that very process, a form of a shared history and tradition across time and space.
It is precisely this need to transcend the specificity of the local through their poetry that constitutes in my analysis the key translational aspect of the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance. The translational form adopted by their collective need to transmit and connect their poetics to a broader queer tradition is explicitly and symptomatically evident in the epigraph from Blaser’s “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere” heading this chapter. The quoted section of the poem arranges in sequence the original passage of Dante’s sonnet dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti—which Blaser misattributes as a section of Dante’s Purgatorio—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s translation of that passage, and finally the fragment referring to Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser within the same series as a collective of male poets. Translation operates within this sequence of three poetic fragments as a necessary transmitting process that relates and connects the first and third group of male poets in two main ways. On the one hand, the series of three poetic passages establishes a tradition or poetic genealogy in which Shelley’s English translation of Dante’s original sonnet establishes the necessary poetic relation between the depiction of community of male poets configured by Dante, Cavalcanti, and Lapo Gianni in Dante’s poem and the parallel community of male poets constituted after Shelley’s translation by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser.2 On the other hand, this translational sequencing entails a radical queerification of the same poetic tradition it creates, in which the “sodomites” of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser ultimately channel the poetic force that originates in the three medieval poets of the dolce stil novo into an openly queer version of themselves via Shelley’s English translation. Therefore, it is precisely after the kind of poetic translation showcased in this passage from “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere”—both as an interlingual process of poetic equivalence and as the generation of a particular poetic genealogy—that Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser located themselves within the very literary tradition that they incorporate in their own queer terms.
As otherwise explored in this book, translation—in its various interlingual, literary, and cultural modalities—is closely connected to a mode of cultural circulation that generates a tradition by particularly articulating a history for an “interpretive community,” using Lee and LiPuma’s definition, which in the case of the Berkeley poets ultimately serves the purposes of legitimizing their own poetics. Thus, if the following lines of the poem, “Robin, it would be great if you, me and Jack Spicer / Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal heads so turned / That life dimmed the light of that fairy ship . . . ,” have a local value in the way they address a “specific constituency” as previously suggested by Davidson, it is of paramount importance to analyze the ways in which their poetics is at the same time connected to a translational queer “outside”—both temporally and spatially—embodied and immanent in their poetic and ethical project.
This chapter therefore addresses the crucial role played by translation and cultural circulation in the generation of the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser in the 1940s and ‘50s. I focus on the ways in which the characteristic aestheticism and insularity of their collective “for developing gay community” (Guys Like Us, 41), as Davidson describes, is carried out from its inception under the foreign influence of two queer European poets from the first half of the twentieth century, the German Stefan George and the Spaniard Federico García Lorca. My argument focuses on the ways in which the transatlantic circulation of the poetic work of both George and Lorca in the 1940s and its appearance in various forms and manifestations within the literary scene in the United States, in general, and Berkeley, in particular, facilitated a productive poetic “community” for Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser that extended beyond the historical and sociopolitical circumstances determining their internal dynamics in the face of the “hostile outside” they experienced. Owing in part to the poetic contact with the respective foreignness and queerness of the work of George and Lorca—and the necessary linguistic transformation of their respective poetics through the act of translation required to articulate this form of circulation—the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance were able to establish some of the main theoretical bases for their conceptualization of poetry as a communal practice with important ethical implications intrinsically connected to their own queerness.
In order to ground my use of the notion of “queer” theoretically in the context of the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser beyond the paradigm of “male homosocial desire,” I rely on the work of Michael Warner. Warner’s groundbreaking scholarship on queer studies proves particularly fruitful for the purpose of analyzing the need of these three poets to articulate a poetics for a “specific constituency” via an “outside” beyond the historical particularity of their local homosocial context. According to Warner, one of the challenges at the core of queer and gay culture—in his analysis, pertaining to the 1990s in the United States—is its problematic relation to its own history, especially in comparison with the public and institutional dimension of the historicity of normative straight culture: “One reason why we have not learned more from this history is that queers do not have the institutions for common memory and generational transmission around which straight culture is built” (Trouble with Normal, 51). Warner points out a crucial factor that is equally applicable to the situation of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser as queer poets writing in the 1950s. Lacking local models for the generational and historical transmission for the practice of their own queerness, the three San Francisco–based poets creatively embraced the foreign poetics offered by the work of Lorca and George to turn their local and private experience into a poetry that aimed to express a public and universal need.
One of the main objectives of this translational effort was to stress the universal aspects of their own condition as queer writers in an intrinsically hostile local environment that was oppressively ruled by heteronormative cultural practices and institutions. Warner analyzes a related aspect of the queer condition, pointing at a universal ethical problem within heteronormative culture when he discusses the particular way queerness emphasizes a “truer” form of human dignity, in the following terms:
Queer scenes are the true salons des refuses, where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world that they now recognize as false morality. For this reason, paradoxically, the ethic of queer life is actually truer to the core of the modern notion of dignity than the usual use of the word is. (Warner, Trouble with Normal, 35)
This issue of unveiling a higher form of human dignity based on “the ethic of queer life” that points out the indignity of a false morality is at the core of the translational dimension of the poetics developed by Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser. In fact, an idea parallel to Warner’s is conveyed by Duncan in his essay “The Homosexual in Society,” originally published in 1944, when he was just twenty-five years old. In this early essay, Duncan powerfully asserts how the social and institutional punishment of queer life highlights a universal ethical problem lying at the heart of modern heteronormative societies, with the following words:
My own conviction is that no public issue is more pressing than the one that would make a man guilty and endanger his livelihood for the open knowledge of his sexual nature; for the good of humanity lies in a common quest through shared experience toward the possibility of sexual love. Where we attend as best we can the volitions and fulfillments of the beloved in sexual acts we depend upon those who in arts have portrayed openly the nature of love; and as we return ourselves through our writing to that commune of spirit we come close to the sharing in desire that underlies the dream of universal brotherhood. (Duncan, “Homosexual in Society,” 43)
Hence, a central tenet within the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser is precisely this notion of “sharing in desire that underlies the dream of universal brotherhood.” In contrast to the oppressive and “hostile” historical outside that surrounded Spicer and Duncan’s San Francisco group, the figures of George and Lorca provided an “outside” that could be powerfully and openly incorporated into their “insular fraternity.” Both Lorca and George offered these three San Francisco–based poets foreign models of queer poetics that grounded their desire for a universal brotherhood in their poetry and provided a distant “outside” both in linguistic and spatiotemporal terms for the development of their own poetics. In this sense, the notion of “human community” that lies at the core of Spicer’s After Lorca is intrinsically connected to the notion of the sovereign artist which the San Francisco–based poets derived from the work of George and Kantorowicz. As I will show, while George offered a solidly defined queer ethic and aesthetic ideology, Lorca provided an idiosyncratic poetic language while constituting an artist tragically assassinated in 1936 in the city of Granada by a group of fascist locals during the Spanish Civil War precisely because he was an openly gay writer and intellectual.
“Poetry Yet to Be”: Stefan George, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Queer Ethic of the Sovereign Artist
The poetry of Stefan George was first introduced in the United States in 1943 by Ernst Morwitz, who edited and translated with Olga Marx a collection of George’s poems for Pantheon Books in New York City. Morwitz had been one of George’s main disciples for more than thirty years and played a crucial role in the publication and dissemination of his work, first in Germany and later in the United States.3 After being forced to leave Nazi Germany, Morwitz eventually settled in North America and taught German at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In his introduction to George’s Poems, Morwitz boldly describes George as one of the most influential poets in the history of Western literature, comparing his literary standing with that of poets such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. At the same time, and more importantly, Morwitz refers in fact to George as a writer who “rings in a new era” for the German people as a nation:
When Germany had reached the peak of external power and her inner strength began to lessen, another true poet at the turn of her destiny, comprised the present and the future: Stefan George. . . . He was the last of a series of relentless thinkers and of those great poets who blended profundity with enchantment. He not only produced poems of enduring beauty and altered the tone and the structure of his language, he became the judge and the prophet of his people. And so he rings in a new era. (Morwitz, Introduction to Poems, by Stefan George, 9)
Morwitz’s hyperbolic analysis of George’s work, in particular his assertion of George’s importance as “the judge and the prophet” of the German nation, deserves further analysis in the context of this book. A key feature of George’s poetry is that its practice soon became the model for an ethic, not only for him, but more importantly for the carefully selected group of male artists and writers who actively served as his disciples and who configured his so-called “Circle” (Kreis). As described by Norton in his biography of the German poet, George “had devised not just a way of writing poetry but also, as time went on, a way of living” (Secret Germany, x). Essentially, George’s poetry embodied the aesthetic and ethical principles followed by his closest followers. George’s firm grip on his aesthetic project and poetic vision was not only exerted through his own poetic production and the careful selection of his circle of acolytes but also through Blätter für die Kunst, an influential literary journal he founded in 1892 and which he oversaw for more than twenty years. As Morwitz’s effusive appraisal in his introduction to his English translation demonstrates, George’s aesthetic and ethical ideals were firmly believed by his numerous followers who maintained a nearly blind faith in the “magic” or divine nature of his poetry, including Morwitz and Olga Marx themselves, as evident in the postscript to their translation: “The chief concern of the translators was to give an English equivalent of the original in its magic” (254).
The ethical aspect of George’s poetic project struck the young Berkeley-based poets when they first encountered his work soon after Morwitz’s translation appeared in the United States. Duncan characterizes the early impact of George and his poetics on both Spicer and himself in his preface to Spicer’s One Night Stand and Other Poems, as follows:
When I first met him [Spicer] in the summer of 1946, he wanted to know first of all what I might know about the German poet Stefan George and his circle. The volume Poems with its introductory essay by Ernst Morwitz had been published in 1943, where—Spicer was right—I too had read the legend of the cult of Maximin, where a young boy in his death is enshrined in poetry that is also the heart of the poet. . . . What is striking in Spicer’s searching for what lay back of George’s legend is not that George would ever be, as Rilke was, a model of the poet for Spicer, but that he was searching for his own self in poetry yet to be. (Duncan, Preface to One Night Stand and Other Poems, by Jack Spicer, x)
As Duncan suggests here, the figure of George provided both Spicer and himself not so much with a model as a poet, but rather a model for their quest for an ethic inherent in the practice of poetry as a creative process. Therefore, in my analysis, the importance of George’s poetry for the work of the members of the Berkeley Renaissance examined here resides not so much in the way in which it linguistically and aesthetically “coined a language of its own,” as Morwitz and Marx describe it in their postscript to their translation (254), but rather in the way his work managed to articulate a space for the emergence and expression of a desire to overcome a heteronormative outside that prohibited and oppressed that same creative drive in its full and open manifestation. In fact, the harsh treatment of homosexuals in George’s lifetime recalled the Americans’ situation. As described by Norton here, male homosexuality was heavily punished under German law at the time:
In Germany, as opposed to the relatively more liberal and tolerant France, the legal penalties for same-sex liaisons, quite apart from the inevitable social stigma they incurred, were severe and potentially ruinous. In 1871, under the watchful guidance and tacit encouragement of Bismarck, the existing Prussian edict outlawing homosexuality had been adopted into the new German penal code as Paragraph 175, which metallically stated: “Unnatural lewdness committed between persons of the male sex or by persons with animals is to be punished by prison. Loss of civil rights may also be imposed. (Norton, 122)
Therefore, the practice of poetry, as well as the practice of all the other activities of his circle became for George the only place where his sexual orientation and desires could be displayed truthfully and publicly outside the punitive heteronormative constraints imposed by German law and society. In this sense, the cult of Maximin mentioned by Duncan is thus particularly relevant, since it became the most influential poetic manifestation of sexual love at the core of George’s overall project. As documented by Norton, the cult of Maximin originated in the figure of Maximilian Kronberger, a fourteen-year-old boy from Munich, whom George had met by chance and of whom he quickly grew seriously fond. Soon after their first meeting, the young Maximilian became an active participant in some of the activities of the George Circle during 1903, until he died suddenly from meningitis in 1904. His death led to George’s conception of Maximin, a poetic figure closely based on the young Maximilian, who embodied the creative form of sexual love George had always craved. As described by Morwitz in the introduction to his English edition of George’s poems, the figure of Maximin “plays the same role as the child Beatrice for Dante. Maximin broke the spell of loneliness and the poet was convinced of the reality of his world by the fact that another being shared it with him” (Morwitz, 26). Morwitz also includes in his introduction a prose passage written by George himself in which the German writer openly discusses the cult of the young boy in the following terms:
When we first met Maximin in our city, he was still in his boyhood. . . . In him we recognized the representative of sovereign youth, such as we dreamed of, youth in that unbroken fullness and purity that can still move mountains and walk on dry land through the midst of the sea, youth fitted to receive our heritage and to conquer new domains. We had heard too much of the wisdom that thinks to solve the final enigma, had savored too much of the motley in the rush of impressions. The overwhelming freight of external possibilities had added nothing to the content, but the shimmering play of light had dulled the senses and slackened tensions. What we had need of, was One who was moved by plain and simple things and could show them to us, as they are beheld by the eyes of the gods. (George, quoted in Morwitz’s introduction to Poems, 26)
As described by George, Maximin represented for his circle the poetic embodiment of a particular notion of sovereignty able to “receive our heritage and to conquer new domains.” Maximin thus embodied a poetic figure that, although based on the real Maximilian Kronberger, ultimately functioned as a poetic medium through which George was able to channel his own ethical project and create a new realm of poetic experience that was not bound and determined by either the merely rational (“the wisdom that thinks to solve the final enigma”) or the merely empirical (“the motley in the rush of impressions”). The key aspect of this “divine” mode of experience—shared with and ultimately accessed through the figure and cult of Maximin—is precisely the completely unbound form of sovereignty that it ideally articulates as originally conceived by George. In his poem “On the Life and Death of Maximin,” George presents this boy figure as a unifying force able in death to illuminate and breathe new life into the experience of the poetic voice through his natural access to a divine realm, as translated into English by Morwitz here:
Your eyes were dim with distant dreams, you tended
No more with care the holy fief and knew
In every space the breath of living ended—
Now lift your head for joy has come to you.
The cold and dragging year that was your share,
A vernal tide of dawning wonders bore,
With bloomy hand, with shimmers in his hair
A god appeared and stepped within your door.
Unite in gladness, now no longer darkened
And flushing for an age whose gold is flown:
The calling of a god you too have hearkened,
It was a god whose mouth has kissed your own.
You also were elect—no longer mourn
For all your days is unfulfillment sheathed . . .
Praise to your city where a god was born!
Praise to your age in which a god has breathed!
(George, Poems, 149)
The figure of Maximin articulates a crucial double role for George by allowing him to create, first, an aesthetic experience through which the poet could achieve a shared sense of connection and fulfillment and, second, a model for the manifestation of creative sovereignty that is able to transcend the boundaries and limits of heteronormative culture. It is precisely this double feature of George’s work embodied in the cult of Maximin as introduced and translated by Morwitz that generated the interest of both Spicer and Duncan as they sought their own queer ethic in a “poetry yet to be,” as previously mentioned by Duncan.
A similar form of creative sovereignty also inspired by George’s poetic vision and queer ethic was explored and theorized by Ernst Kantorowicz. Kantorowicz was another key disciple of George who became an influential and respected historian of the Middle Ages at such prestigious academic institutions as the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. George met Kantorowicz in 1919 while he was studying at Heidelberg and, as detailed by Norton, the young historian soon became a member of George’s closest group of friends (Secret Germany, 625). There is no doubt about the tremendous influence George had on the young Kantorowicz both personally and intellectually in his early work as a historian of the Middle Ages. In fact, as Martin Ruehl has argued in his study of the politics of Kantorowicz’s Frederick the Second, George, always the sole master of his circle of disciples, played a fundamental role in Kantorowicz’s key decision to write his first scholarly book. Ruehl describes the key role played by George in Kantorowicz’s choice as follows:
Kantorowicz’s decision to write about Frederick II was in itself a “national” choice of sorts. His Heidelberg teacher Domaszewski had advised him to tackle universal themes such as the history of Judaism or Byzantium; but the young recruit to the Circle, under the influence of the Master, chose a thirteenth-century German emperor. (Ruehl, 196)
Whether under the spell of George or not, there is no doubt that Kantorowicz’s influential scholarship on medieval political theology and law is crucial for understanding some of the key theoretical ideas at the core of the queer poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser. The impact of Kantorowicz’s work, in particular the influence of his studies on the political implications of medieval legal and aesthetic theories, has not been sufficiently analyzed to date in relation to the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance. As Blaser repeatedly mentions in many of his critical essays in The Fire, Kantorowicz was one of the most influential teachers the three poets encountered while they were studying at Berkeley. According to Blaser, Hannah Arendt was their other influential teacher.
Duncan’s notion that “the good of humanity lies in a common quest through shared experience toward the possibility of sexual love” expressed in “The Homosexual in Society” takes on new theoretical, aesthetic, and historical dimensions when considered in the context of the work of Kantorowicz. In their overall attempt to arrive at a new conception of “sexual love” not bound and determined by their oppressive heteronormative context, the San Francisco–based poets place the notion of a creative and communal “shared experience” at the core of the ideal of humanity that could be articulated through their poetry. The idea of arriving at the notion of “human community” through their poetics can be directly traced back to Kantorowicz’s own work on medieval political theory, more precisely to his reevaluation of the notion of Dignitas that, as developed in The King’s Two Bodies. As Blaser suggests in his essay “The Recovery of the Public World,” Kantorowicz found the concept of a “human Dignitas” to be at the core of Dante’s work:
Here, the exemplary significance for us . . . is to be found in those relations and in the discourses that properly and publicly arrange them to create a human community, not a transmogrified humanity. Kantorowicz also draws attention to Dante’s concept “of a purely human Dignitas which without Dante would be lacking, and would have been lacking most certainly in that age” (453). Dante’s is a primary document in our effort to imagine and measure a human community worthy of our words—and in which we hold only a “middle place.”
Dante:
Two ends have been set by Providence, that ineffable, before man to be contemplated by him: the blessedness, to wit, of this life, which consists in the exercise of man’s proper power and is figured by the terrestrial paradise; and the blessedness of eternal life, which consists in the fruition of the divine aspect, to which his power may not ascend unless assisted by the divine light. And this blessedness is given to be understood by the celestial paradise (quoted in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 457–58). (Blaser, “Recovery of the Public World,” 74)
Blaser here acknowledges Kantorowicz for locating at the core of Dante’s poetry a model of “human community” beyond the legal and social constraints of heteronormativity that could ideally constitute a shared humanity “worthy of our words.” As Michael Warner argues, the ethic of queer life uncovers the indignity inherent in a heteronormative cultural paradigm, necessarily pointing toward a higher ethic: “The ethic of queer life is actually truer to the core of the modern notion of dignity than the usual use of the word is” (Warner, Trouble with Normal, 35). Warner’s observation happens to constitute an essential concept within queer theory that is not only applicable to the poetics of the San Francisco–based poets analyzed in this chapter but also to the medieval notion of Dignitas that Kantorowicz—the George disciple—recovered from Dante’s work. As Blaser fleshes out, it is important to emphasize the fact that Dante’s notion of humanity is defined by a series of particular human relations beyond set rules and norms that could articulate, through a process of poetic creation, a sense of a human community beyond religious, social, or historical differences: “I like to remember that Dante’s human community—humanitas exists only in these relations which become community—enfolded all the ‘mortal human beings’ of the world, not just Christians” (Blaser, “Recovery of the Public World,” 75).
At the same time, the notion of artistic sovereignty that pervades the work of George, and to which it constantly aspired, seems ultimately to aim at opening up a public space for the ethic of queer life, and consequently, for the generation of a universal form of dignity, or using Kantorowicz’s words, “a purely human Dignitas” that could articulate a new sense of “community.” The role of the poet is of paramount importance here since it represents the sovereign artist who, through an act of poetic creation, is able to rise above the indignity of heteronormativity in an attempt to reach a higher realm of human dignity otherwise unavailable. In this context, Duncan also seems to follow Kantorowicz’s main claim regarding the importance of Dante’s work as a model for the sovereign artist when he points out the “higher ethic” unveiled in Dante’s own treatment of homosexuality in the Inferno, as he describes here:
In Hell, the homosexuals go, as Dante rightly saw them, as they still go often in the streets of our cities, looking “as in the evening men are wont to look at one another under a new moon,” running beneath the hail of a sharp torment, having wounds, recent and old, where the flames of experience have burned their bodies. It is just here, when he sees his beloved teacher, Brunetto Latini, among the sodomites, that Dante has an inspired intuition that goes beyond the law of his church and reaches toward a higher ethic: “Were my desire all fulfilled,” he says to Brunetto, “you had not yet been banished from human nature: for in my memory is fixed . . . the dear and kind, paternal image of you, when in the world, hour by hour, you taught me how man makes himself eternal. (Duncan, “Homosexual in Society,” 49)
Within the framework of a queer ethic analyzed here in relation to the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance, the sovereign artist is able to open up an aesthetic space for the emergence of a form of human dignity that must be created in order to overcome the heteronormative enforcement of various forms of banishment “from human nature,” in Dante’s words. Dante’s portrayal of the figure of Brunetto Latini in the Inferno referred to by Duncan in his “Reflections,” added in 1959 to the original version of “The Homosexual in Society,” constitutes a powerful model in the way in which it establishes the sovereignty of the artist through the creation of a new aesthetic space with ethical implications that overcome the potential inhumanity and indignity of preexisting heteronormative laws or social norms. Therefore, Duncan’s meditation on Dante seems clearly connected to a key aspect of Kantorowicz’s notion of “a purely human Dignitas,” which he also ascribed to Dante, in particular, the importance of a creative act that goes “beyond the law” in order to reach that necessary “higher ethic” to overcome the indignity at the heart of heteronormative structures. This need to reach a higher ethic necessarily touches on “the blessedness of eternal life, which consists in the fruition of the divine aspect” previously mentioned by Dante and which is also embodied in the “god whose mouth has kissed your own,” as George expresses in the Maximin poem quoted above. Kantorowicz himself offers in his essay “The Sovereignty of the Artist” a relevant analysis of the way medieval legal theory provided a model for the “divine” creation of new laws that could respond to real historical changes:
The ideal legislator as visualized by the jurists not only became an imitator of nature by applying the law of nature to the particular circumstances of his realm, but he was also the only person who could make new laws according to the necessities of a changing time and thereby “make something out of nothing.” . . . Moreover, the legislator, when handling his art, the ars aequi et boni, was able to produce something new because he was divinely inspired ex officio. (Kantorowicz, “Sovereignty of the Artist,” 361)
As suggested by Kantorowicz, the medieval legislator was able to make something new beyond the established laws of nature precisely because of his divine inspiration. While imitating nature was a key part of the legislative art, for medieval jurists, the “ideal legislator” was able divinely to create a law for a new historical or social need. One of the legal methods used by medieval legislators to create new laws consisted in the process of what Kantorowicz refers to as aequiparatio, in which a legal equivalence is created between two different entities originally belonging to separate realms. More important, for Kantorowicz, medieval aequiparatio entailed a legal process of transfer that became a crucial mechanism for the emergence of the artist as a figure capable of embodying a form of creative sovereignty parallel to that inherent in the figures of an emperor or a king, as he describes here:
In fact, that procedure of transferring something from one orbit to another formed, we may say, the essence of the art of the jurists, who themselves called this technique aequiparatio, the action of placing on equal terms two or more subjects which at first appeared to have nothing to do with each other. . . . This method of “equiparation,” however, which was not restricted to jurisprudence, can help us to understand in what respects the theories of the jurists might appear to have been relevant to the later artistic theories. The legislator takes his impulses from divine inspiration, and he creates certain judgments and technicalities out of nothing, but he does all that ex officio, just as he imitates nature likewise by virtue of his office and not as an individual poetic or artistic genius. The equiparation, however, of poet and emperor or king—that is, of the poet and the highest office representing sovereignty—began as early as Dante. (“Sovereignty of the Artist,” 362)
Medieval aequiparatio therefore constitutes a process of transfer from two different realms that ultimately allows an artist to adopt “the highest office representing sovereignty.” As analyzed here, the notion of creative sovereignty is crucial, since it is absolutely required in order to create a space—poetic or otherwise—in which the queer artist is able to generate the sense of dignity inherent in a new notion of human community, while overcoming a series of oppressive heteronormative constraints and limits.
In the remainder of this chapter, I analyze the ways in which translation provides Spicer a process to generate a particular mode of aequiparatio for establishing his own sovereignty as a gay poet in his own poetic terms. While my analysis of the ethic of queer life in relation to the work of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser as a group developed so far provides a relevant context for understanding their collective poetics, I focus in what follows on the way in which Spicer’s own sense of a “human community” is grounded on a particular conception of poetic language that allows him to create his own poetic sovereignty by poetically transferring through an act of translation the linguistic body of the poetry of Lorca.
Spicer’s After Lorca: Translation and the Poetic Aequiparatio of Lorca’s “Unanswerable Need”
Parallel to the discovery of the work of George in 1946, Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser found in the poetry of Lorca another influential gay poet across the Atlantic whom they could add to their San Francisco “insular fraternity.” The poetry of Lorca constituted a relevant component for the ideal of a “human community” beyond the constraints of heteronormativity that could be articulated through the practice of poetry. Spicer’s After Lorca is central to this queer paradigm since it constitutes a collection that emerges in the attempt to establish a transhistorical and interlingual bond with the poetry of Lorca. This close affinity and the communal aspect of the appeal the San Francisco collective felt for the figure of Lorca is emphasized by Duncan in the following passage from his preface to Caesar’s Gate: “It seemed to us, to Jack Spicer as to me, in our conversations of 1946 and 1947 as young poets seeking the language and the lore of our homosexual longings as the matter of a poetry, that Lorca was one of us, that he spoke here from his own unanswered and—as he saw it—unanswerable need” (xxii). In keeping with Duncan’s remarks, it is important to emphasize the way in which Spicer and Duncan felt that Lorca’s work was personally relevant to them, particularly regarding what they saw as Lorca’s own homosexual longings emerging as an “unanswered and . . . unanswerable need” that pervaded his poetry. This “unanswerable need” ultimately enables the recognition of a form of desire—through its linguistic manifestation in his poetry—that plays a crucial role in the complex relation that Spicer established with Lorca in After Lorca, and that ended up being a fundamental component of the collective struggle of the San Francisco–based poets to seek a “language and a lore” for expressing and making public their own queerness. Obviously, this specific take on the figure of Lorca as “one of us” is based on Duncan and Spicer’s own conceptualization of Lorca’s “need,” a bonding form of desire connecting the three poets.
Spicer’s After Lorca constitutes in fact an attempt to establish through an act of translation a complex poetic correspondence with the body of Lorca’s work, one able both to reach beyond the constraints of historical time and to expand dramatically the local boundaries of the “insular fraternity” inherent in the conception of poetry and poetics collectively shared by Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser. As Duncan himself acknowledges in his preface to Spicer’s One Night Stand and Other Poems, the attempt to establish a form of creative sovereignty through their poetry to generate a space for their queer ethic was part of a project grounded on the “Orphic” power of poetry to create a mysterious connection with an afterlife located beyond their local San Francisco scene: “In the Berkeley period 1946–1950 we dreamed—Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and I—on the seashores of Bohemia of a Berkeley Renaissance and projected Orphic mysteries and magics in poetry” (Duncan, Preface, xiii).
Spicer’s own poetic take on Lorca’s “unanswered and . . . unanswerable need” was ultimately incorporated into After Lorca through a complex process of translation that modified the basic conceptual structure of the transferring principle connected to Kantarowicz’s concept of aequiparatio in relation to the emergence of the sovereign artist and its corresponding notion of human dignity during the medieval period. Spicer’s particular translational strategy in After Lorca was partly determined by the fact that if Lorca’s poetry embodied for Spicer an “unanswered and . . . unanswerable need,” it could only do so as a form of desire that had not been answered and that could not be answered, fulfilled, or satisfied in itself. Therefore, Spicer’s attempt to correspond to this form of desire through a process of translation cannot merely imply the production of semantic equivalents able to reproduce the original form of this “unanswerable need” in another language, but ultimately implies a poetic struggle to expand the original poetic form of this need into a hybrid version of itself that eventually spans a multiplicity of bodies and languages.
Thus, in After Lorca, Spicer slightly modifies Kantorowicz’s notion of aequiparatio as “transferring something from one orbit to another” into a translational process in which the aim of the overall transfer is to expand an original form of creative sovereignty not so much into a particular equivalent manifestation of itself, as into a potentially infinite dissemination and multiplication of this sovereignty into other languages and historical contexts. As Blaser suggests regarding After Lorca, if Spicer’s work is trying to generate a sense of “human community” through its composition, it is a form of community that transcends the relational principle that was at the heart of Dante’s notion of Dignitas: “The details of it propose a special relationship with García Lorca, and then move without warning beyond the strictly relational” (Blaser, The Fire, 144). Blaser particularly refers to this conception of translation, in fact, as a “task and a reparation” (149) that aims at a reenactment of an incomplete work that is “dictated” through language, in the following terms:
The principle of translation in After Lorca proposes that one must reenact life again, that it is the same that it was, but with a difference. Lorca’s poetry corresponds to and with Jack’s. . . . A friend has noted that the book ends with a Postscript, rather than a translation, a radar which signals appearance and disappearance. I note that the death in these poems is an imageless point at which the acted visibility meets and enters the other which articulated it. . . . This dimension is an aspect of the where of this work, which I have tried to follow—where the body will not and cannot stop, even in its desires—where the false manhood of the old discourse does not hold the conversation. There is here an experience of dictation, now opening to all of us, beginning where the manhood leaves off—at the open end of what we are. (Blaser, The Fire, 148)
While Kantorowicz’s analysis of the principle of aequiparatio emphasizes the emergence of a form of creative sovereignty in order for the artist to articulate a new form of human dignity through poetry, Spicer’s take on translation generates a sovereign process of transpersonal creation that departs from “the open end of what we are” as mentioned by Blaser in relation to the notion of “dictation” (Blaser, The Fire, 148). Therefore, I take Spicer’s After Lorca to constitute not just a particularly significant moment in the transatlantic circulation of queer poetics during the twentieth century, but more important, a key event in the poetic quest toward a queer sovereignty as collectively conceived by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser during the 1940s and 1950s.
Moreover, through his own idiosyncratic conceptualization and practice of translation in After Lorca, Spicer was ultimately trying to formalize theoretically what seems to be an alternative to the poetics of the self that dominate English and American romanticism—manifested more clearly in Wordsworth’s notion of the “egotistical sublime”—a poetics that Spicer saw as “a perpetual motion machine of emotion” (Gizzi, 5) that in its futile effort eventually ends up breaking apart or burning out. At the same time, as suggested here by Duncan, Spicer was reacting to the poetics championed by New Criticism: “The Spicer of these early poems was at war with the doctrines of the New Criticism that would see the poem as a thing in itself” (Duncan, A Selected Prose, 164). As opposed to the formal and self-contained poetics of New Criticism, Spicer saw the poem as a transferring mechanism that could channel and recast an otherness immanent in and embodied in the language of poetry, and that, through this translational transformation, could also avoid the intrinsic time-bound decay implicit in the pathetically finite “beautiful machine” of the subjective poetics of romanticism. Although Spicer’s poetic strategy of becoming a “conveyor of messages” may sound playfully metaphoric, it ended up constituting for Spicer a true ethical struggle, as suggested here by Duncan: “There is no facility, nothing facile, about Spicer’s amazing and cunning wit, about his feints and strategies—for they are struggles in earnest” (Duncan, Preface, xxxvii). Ultimately, Spicer’s personal, ethical, and poetic plight—a deadly struggle strained by alcoholism that ended his life prematurely in 1965—has to do with the process of transferring the body of the language of poetry that he first started transmitting through his encounter with Lorca’s poetry in After Lorca. In this sense, Jerome McGann has already acknowledged how Spicer’s poetic project thus constitutes a problematic “impossible quest,” more particularly, an “immersion into the material resistance of language [that] is a literal descent into hell” (McGann, 114).
Based on Spicer’s particular take on the process of translation and poetic composition in After Lorca, the different poetic “pieces” that configure the book can be analyzed as a series of ambiguous poetic hybrids endowed with a poetic body composed of elements belonging to both Lorca and Spicer. As acknowledged by the figure of Lorca—as channeled here by Spicer’s poetic voice—in the introduction to After Lorca, Spicer generally tended to substitute randomly the original form of Lorca’s poems into his own versions in English:
In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had it written. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to it half of his own, giving rather the affect of an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) (Spicer, Collected Books, 11)
Thus, by deriving “pleasure” in carrying out a series of transformations that alter the mood and meaning of Lorca’s original poems, Spicer is ultimately—whether willingly or unwillingly—turning the body of Lorca’s poetry into his own, as centaur-like hybrids through which Spicer manages effectively to incorporate Lorca into the “insular fraternity” of poems that ambiguously coexist within the book-bound structure of After Lorca.4 More important, Spicer’s particular characterization of the pieces that configure After Lorca as “centaurs” here not only refers to the hybrid nature of the translational compositions in linguistic and poetic terms but also has a sexual connotation that playfully asserts the homosexual bond between both poets. These sexual implications of the bonding and hybrid nature inherent in the pieces that configure After Lorca play a crucial role in generating that transferential poetic process of aequiparatio that lies at the core of the queer poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance.
For Spicer, this “transportation” as a leading across time of the language of Lorca’s poetry can take place only within the process of poetic composition itself—a process that must necessarily imply a movement onward from a previous configuration not only in terms of the inevitable transformation of Lorca’s original poetry but also in relation to the actual progression of the poems themselves in Spicer’s After Lorca. As Joseph Conte has already suggested in relation to Spicer’s poetics, the book operates as “a closed structure within which one poem asserts its position in resonance with the others; its place cannot be assigned by any external thematic progression” (Conte, 107). Thus, my use of the adjective “translational” to refer to the actual “pieces”—i.e., the poems and letters—that compose After Lorca is in no way gratuitous. The translational aspect of the particular poetic pieces composing the book, however, has nothing to do with whether the series of poems and letters in the collection are “actual” translations of poems by Lorca or not, or whether the letters between Spicer and what he conceives as Lorca’s “ghost” are just part of a mere epistolary game, or a more serious attempt to theorize dialogically the translating and resonating process taking place in some of the poems.5 Rather, the translational aspect of the pieces that configure After Lorca lies in the onward motion implicit in the transferring of words over time being carried out by Spicer through the process of poetic composition and the queer “community” his translations of Lorca’s work open up. Hence, it can only be through a process of translatio as opposed to merely a process of aequiparatio—i.e., as “carrying or removing from one place to another, a transporting, a transferring” (Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary)—that Spicer’s leading of words across time can actually take place within the poetic realm of After Lorca. In his 1965 Vancouver lectures transcribed by Peter Gizzi in The House That Jack Built, Spicer describes this translational mechanism unfolding in After Lorca as eventually becoming an autonomous mode of poetic composition that manifested itself through Spicer’s own Lorca-inspired poetry, in the following terms:
At what point did you allow these messages to take over or start happening in your poetry?
JS: [Jack Spicer] It happened about halfway when I was writing After Lorca, when the letters to Lorca started coming and being dictated and the poems, instead of being translations, were dictated. Then I sort of knew what was happening. And when the final thing happened, in the poem, the business of the last letter, I really knew there was something moving it. (Spicer, House That Jack Built, 135–36)
This “something moving it” cannot be in itself but intrinsically transferential, more specifically, a translatable event that leads to a particular transfer over time from one manifestation of itself into another. Spicer’s take on translation constitutes as a whole a system of poetic correspondences that transcend the realm of interlingual translation and ultimately facilitate the emergence of a transpersonal and hybrid textual realm beyond the control of a single poetic voice. In this sense, Spicer’s own notion developed in After Lorca of the poet as a “machine” or a “time mechanic” implies the processing, transformation and distribution of certain poetic “currents” that, as suggested here, can be conceptualized ultimately as a transferential process that radically alters the conceptualization of both Lorca’s and Spicer’s poetry as constituting “originals” in themselves, while generating a queer communal sense of their mutual poetic being. Spicer’s poems included in After Lorca are structured around the central presence of the “Ode for Walt Whitman,” a literal translation of Lorca’s own “Oda a Walt Whitman.”
Whereas the pieces before the Whitman poem seem to be merely experimental translational attempts to correspond with Lorca’s poetry, Spicer’s “Ode for Walt Whitman” is perhaps the most relevant poem for the purpose of analyzing the way in which “the language and the lore of our homosexual longings as the matter of a poetry” emerges not only in Lorca’s own poetry, but also in Spicer’s. Although the reasons generally given for the centrality of this poem in Spicer’s 1957 book are clear (namely, the paramount position of Whitman within American literature, the revolutionary nature of Lorca’s overtly gay poem, especially in relation to its ambiguous homoerotic content, the surrealist imagery used by Lorca, etc.), they are completely external to the actual progression of the translational poetics that Spicer develops in After Lorca.
Apart from a few key substitutions like “pricks” for “sexo” (sex) and “cocksuckers” for “maricas” (which can be literally translated as “sissy” or “pansy”), Spicer’s version of Lorca’s poem is a an extremely literal translation of the original, as the following passages from Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman” and Spicer’s “Ode for Walt Whitman” show.
Contra vosotros siempre, que dais a los muchachos
Gotas de sucia muerte con amargo veneno.
Contra vosotros siempre,
Faeries de Norteamérica
Pájaros de La Habana,
Jotos de Méjico.
Sarasas de Cádiz,
Apios de Sevilla,
Cancos de Madrid,
Floras de Alicante,
Adelaidas de Portugal.
¡Maricas de todo el mundo, asesinos de palomas!
Esclavos de la mujer. Perras de sus tocadores.
Abiertos en las plazas con fiebre de abanico
O emboscados en yertos paisajes de cicuta.
(García Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York, 223)
Against the rest of you always, who give the kids
Drippings of sucked-off death with sour poison.
Against the rest of you always
Fairies of North America,
Pajaros of Havana,
Jotos de Mexico
Sarasas of Cadiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Adelaidas of Portugal,
Cocksukers of all the world, assassins of doves,
Slaves of women, lapdogs of their dressing tables
Opening their flys in parks with a fever of fans
Or ambushed in the rigid landscapes of poison.
(Spicer, Collected Books, 31)
The greater sexual intensity in various moments of Spicer’s translation of Lorca’s poem resulting from these apparently minor linguistic transformations—as in Spicer’s decision to translate Lorca’s “maricas” as “cocksuckers”—is symptomatic of a crucial aspect of Spicer’s strategy of translation in After Lorca, as well as of Spicer’s overall relation to the linguistic body of Lorca’s poetry. A key factor regarding the increased sexual intensity of Spicer’s translation is the homosexual bond between the two poets and the particular way Spicer aims to turn the linguistic body of Lorca’s overtly gay poem into a key component of his own poetry collection. As Eric Keenaghan has suggested in relation to this passage of Spicer’s Ode for Walt Whitman, Spicer’s approach to the lingusitc body of Lorca’s original poem entails a linguistic shift into a “crass” and “sexualized street vernacular” that makes the “gay body lexically visible” (Keenaghan, 278).
In this sense, the first aspect worth examining within the translational relation and tension between both poems is the fact that in his “Oda a Walt Whitman,” Lorca himself is looking for “the language and the lore” for his own “homosexual longings” while embracing the queer ethic embodied in the work of Walt Whitman. It is important to note that Lorca’s own ode, composed in 1930, is a central poem in his seminal collection Poeta en Nueva York. In this work, Lorca experiments with a new surrealist poetics while confronting his own transatlantic experience and the radical modernity of the city of New York in its various forms and facets, particularly the various manifestations of social marginalization, inequality, and human indignity that he encounters and which he generally depicts using a collage of poetic images of brutality, violence, and death. Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York constitutes a key moment of rupture between his early and more traditional period and a more avant-garde stage in which his own queerness openly takes a central role in his work, as displayed not only in Poeta en Nueva York but also in his experimental play El público (1930). Enrique Álvarez, in his study of queer poetics in modern Spain, has importantly noted that one of the key features of Lorca’s poetry connected to his encounter with life in New York is “la tensión entre lo estético y lo personal característica de los poemas neoyorkinos” (the tension between the aesthetic and the personal characteristic of the New York poems). Álvarez describes this key tension at the core of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York as follows:
El resultado es una noción de género fragmentada en la subjetividad poética que cuestiona el monopolio ideológico de la masculinidad heterosexual como fuente de visibilidad y fundamento del discurso. Por medio de la inversión del signo, la figuración poética de la muerte se transforma en táctica de inscripción de la disidencia sexual e introduce el reto lorquino al orden heteronormativo. (Álvarez, 46)
The result is a fragmented notion of gender in which the poetic subjectivity questions the ideological monopoly of heterosexual masculinity as the source of visibility and sole foundation of discourse. Through the inversion of the sign, the poetic figuration of death transforms itself in a strategy of inscription of sexual dissidence and introduces the Lorquian challenge to the heteronormative order.
As Álvarez’s analysis of Lorca’s New York poems makes clear, there is a crucial connection between his work and that of the work of the San Francisco poets, especially regarding the notion of the ethic of queer life. The main shared feature of their respective work is in this sense a conception of poetics that challenges heteronormative culture through a newly created space in which queerness is able to subvert a preestablished notion of what is normal. This particular aspect of queerness that, I argue, is shared by the poetry of both Lorca and Spicer can be seen as a “thorough” response to what Warner defines as “regimes of the normal”: “The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvi). Lorca’s own form of queer resistance emerges in his New York poems as a surrealist “inversion of the sign,” as suggested by Álvarez, through which the poetic voice questions the normalcy of heteronormativity and the particular homosocial structures he encounters in New York.
As examined here, Spicer seems radically to question the subjectivity behind the poetic voice as an act of resistance to those same “regimes of the normal” mentioned by Warner in his translational approach to Lorca’s poetry. Spicer’s own poetic act of resistance against heteronormativity essentially takes place in After Lorca through the gradual transition—and transmission—from translation as aequiparatio into translation as “an experience of dictation” as suggested above by Blaser, precisely “beginning where the manhood leaves off—at the open end of what we are” (Blaser, The Fire, 148). In this sense, his poem “Aquatic Park” marks a pivotal point in Spicer’s process of becoming a “time mechanic” as this translational transition from translation into “an experience of dictation” in the sense suggested by Blaser unfolds within the structure of the book. Apart from providing the title to one of Spicer’s original poems in After Lorca—in fact the only one dedicated to himself—Aquatic Park was an extremely important San Francisco location for Spicer, as Ellingham and Killian describe in detail here:
On San Francisco Bay at the foot of Van Ness Avenue, Aquatic Park was backed by the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory, The Eastman Kodak Co. (demolished in 1987), Fort Mason, and the buildings of Fisherman’s Wharf. One major feature of the park is an art deco concrete structure (housing dressing rooms, a maritime museum, and—on the roof—banks of open benches). The Westernmost benches were favored by gay sunbathers. Another favorite sunning spot was the small green area between the bocce ball courts, the Sea Scouts pavilion and the water. Spicer repaired to the park every afternoon with his portable radio, his books, and his newspaper, and his friends and students joined him. This became a ritual for the rest of his life. (Ellingham and Killian, 101)
However, the importance of “Aquatic Park” in After Lorca does not reside in the potential biographical implications of the San Francisco Bay location for Spicer. Rather, its main relevance for the translational poetics of After Lorca lies primarily in the fact that the poem appears in a book that up until that point had been a rather consistent series of Spicer’s “centaur-like” versions of Lorca’s original poetry. It is important to emphasize here that for Spicer the book as a poetic unit has a strong chronological structure, as he argues in one of his Vancouver lectures: “The book, which is a unit as the poem is, has to be absolutely chronological. It has to be chronological in the writing of the poems” (Spicer, The House That Jack Built, 53). The emergence of the poem “Aquatic Park” must therefore “absolutely” follow the internal chronology of After Lorca as a book-bound composition. It thus constitutes a crucial event in its own internal textual history as a departure from literal translation into a new realm opened up by the previous series of translations, that clearly moves into a different form of poetic practice. Thus the fact that Aquatic Park in the San Francisco Bay, the place where Spicer ritualistically socialized during a key period of his life, ends up appearing as the title of one of the poems written “after” Lorca deserves further critical consideration.
Aquatic Park
A Translation for Jack Spicer
A green boat
Fishing in blue water
The gulls circle the pier
Calling their hunger
A wind rises from the west
Like the passing of desire
Two boys play on the beach
Laughing
Their gangling legs cast shadows
On the wet sand
Then,
Sprawling in the boat
A beautiful black fish.
(Spicer, Collected Books, 32)
It is precisely in Spicer’s self-dedicated “Aquatic Park,” where both the poetic “current” that drives its temporal structure, as well as the different elements that compose the poem seem to have been not literally translated but figuratively transferred from Lorca’s work. Thus, what Spicer took to be Lorca’s “unanswerable need” seems to drive the scene of “Aquatic Park,” while the seaside landscape of the poem is populated by boys equivalent to those who were singing and showing their bodies in Spicer’s nearby “Ode for Walt Whitman,” now with “their gangling legs” casting “shadows on the wet sand.” Thus, the poem unfolds as a temporal sequence established by the conjunction “then” in which the rising of a wind from the west, “like the passing of desire,” not only answers the “hunger” of the “Gulls circling the Pier,” but eventually, and more importantly, leads to the appearance of the indeterminate “beautiful black fish” at the end of the poem. The temporal mechanics of “Aquatic Park” turn this poem not so much into a hybrid “unwilling centaur,” but rather into a literal “time mechanism” established through a series of striking poetic correspondences produced by Spicer in his quest and struggle to transmit the “unanswered and unanswerable need” embodied in Lorca’s poetry.
Therefore, Spicer’s “Aquatic Park” marks a transition between the form of desire that he and Duncan originally associated with Lorca’s poetry in 1946 and the emergence of a new mode of corresponding with the body of Lorca’s work that clearly moves beyond the principle of sovereign equivalence inherent in the notion of aequiparatio. While the mechanism in the first half of the book is articulated through relatively literal and equivalent versions of Lorca’s original poems, the actual progression of Spicer’s overall effort of corresponding to Lorca’s poetry within the structure of his book eventually leads to the appearance of completely new poetic objects—such as the “beautiful black fish” of “Aquatic Park”— that are drifting away from Lorca’s work. Thus, at this point in After Lorca, Spicer seems to have gone beyond the relational process of interlingual translation and starts moving his poetry much closer to the transferential “mechanics of time” at the core of his own conception of the process of dictation identified by Blaser. In a way, these newfound objects at the heart of “Aquatic Park” are the first sovereign elements that appear in After Lorca, articulating a form of creative sovereignty that is transpersonal and transhistorical and whose own limit is not sublimated in a particular poetic image (as in the case of the figure of Maximin in George’s work), but rather by the temporal progression of the language of poetry itself.
The Afterlives of Translation: Spicer, Benjamin, George, and the “Real Thing”
By eventually unfolding a series of striking poetic correspondences with the body of Lorca’s poetry in the second half of After Lorca—“Aquatic Park” being probably the most relevant example—Spicer not only develops a transferring mechanism able to lead words across time but also, ultimately able to lead what he refers to as “real things” across language, as he argues in After Lorca:
But things decay, reason argues. Real things become garbage. . . . Yes, but the garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world making its objects, in turn, visible—lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to newspaper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalents into being. Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time. (Spicer, Collected Books, 34)
For Spicer, the intrinsic time-bound decay of things as the “garbage of the real” constitutes a process of material transformation that can be made visible if transferred across language through the act of translation. Such a creative and transformative process is articulated upon the potential for transferability that Spicer saw at the very core of the language of poetry, as a medium that can be experienced only through different—but equally sovereign—manifestations of itself. Moreover, Spicer’s own attempt to reconstitute the linguistic body of Lorca’s poetry through translation also implies an attempt to reconstitute what Spicer refers to as “the real” that manifests itself in Lorca’s poetry. As Spicer discusses in his first Vancouver lecture, the “real thing” that manifests itself in language constitutes in fact an immanent “want” that is endowed with the potential of translatability. More specifically, Spicer’s “real thing” is a form of desire which he describes as the “business of wanting coming from Outside” as he argues here:
But what you want to say—the business of wanting coming from Outside, like it wants five dollars being ten dollars, that kind of want—is the real thing, the thing that you didn’t want to say in terms of your own ego, in terms of your image, in terms of your life, in terms of everything. (Spicer, House That Jack Built, 6)
The main reason for Spicer’s interest in developing a poetics grounded on the rejection of the poet’s individual subjectivity as the actual source for poetic composition is precisely his attempt to convey the “real thing” as “the business of wanting coming from Outside” in his own poetry. Thus, the translational leading of “real things” across time and language in After Lorca constitutes a poetics that by adding more to the original without “losing anything” ends up facilitating the linguistic manifestation of the afterlife of those “things” connected to the “business of wanting coming from Outside.” Ultimately, Spicer’s translational poetics aims to release what Benjamin defines as the “afterlife” of the particular linguistic embodiment of that “business of wanting.” In this sense, Spicer’s poetics of translation has key points in common with Benjamin’s, as Lori Chamberlain has already described in the following terms:
As a receiver of messages from Lorca’s duende, Spicer’s task as a poet and translator is not to “represent” these messages but to “present” them, a point he makes repeatedly in the letters to Lorca. In Spicer’s own terms, he does not want to give us rotten lemons but fresh ones; in this sense, Spicer’s theory is strikingly similar to Walter Benjamin’s, as articulated in his “The Task of the Translator.” Benjamin also argues against a representational model for translation, proposing instead an organic model: the translation does not reproduce the original, but completes it, providing for the continued life of the work. (Chamberlain, 435)
According to Chamberlain, what Spicer is trying to do in After Lorca is to present organically the messages he receives from the work of Lorca’s “ghost” in a fresh and actualized form that “completes” those original messages, thus facilitating their poetic afterlife. Benjamin’s conception of a linguistic afterlife opened up by translation—as a “stage of continued life”—has “organic” implications similar to the ones Chamberlain ascribes to Spicer’s translational poetics. Departing from Chamberlain’s analysis, I argue that inherent in Spicer’s use of translation in After Lorca is an attempt to unveil, transmit, and reenact the linguistic impulse or “want” embodied in the original Lorca poems—an immanent impulse that can be deemed parallel to the notion of intentio referred to by Benjamin in his foundational essay “The Task of the Translator” (1921):
On the other hand, as regards the meaning, the language of a translation can—in fact, must—let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original, not as reproduction, but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio. (260)
Benjamin’s notion of intentio characterizes a linguistic tendency for completeness immanent in the original that is voiced whenever the language of a translation manages to “let itself go.” By letting go of the semantic dimension of the original, the language of the translation voices its own intentio not as a meaning objectively equivalent to the original, but rather as a linguistic form that harmoniously supplements the original intentio. As Samuel Weber argues, translatability constitutes for Benjamin “the never realizable potential of a meaning and as such constitutes a way—way of signifying—rather than a what” (Weber, 75). Benjamin’s task of the translator consists therefore in the linguistic liberation of the immanent intention of the original by producing a way of signifying that supplements the intention of the original, as he argues here:
The task of the translator is to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks decayed barriers in his own language. (Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 261)
In clear contrast to Benjamin’s take on translation, Spicer does not seem to consider the particular original form of the source itself, that is, the actual linguistic body of Lorca’s work in After Lorca, for example, to constitute a determining factor for the actual process of poetic transformation facilitated by the act of translation. Accordingly, in the first of his Vancouver lectures of 1965, Spicer overtly dismisses the importance of the original form of his “messages” with the following succinct statement: “The source is unimportant” (Spicer, House That Jack Built, 5). As I have discussed, Spicer’s main focus on translatability then lies on the poetic reconstitution of a linguistic body as the decayed but haunting message coming from an Outside, which in the case of After Lorca, happens to be embodied in Lorca’s poetry. Spicer clarifies this aspect of his conception of translation in After Lorca by stating that his main objective was to “get in contact” with Lorca, regardless of his knowledge of the Spanish language: “The fact that I didn’t know Spanish really well enough to translate Lorca was the reason I could get in contact with Lorca” (Spicer, Collected Books, 138).
In the context of this chapter, however, we must take Spicer’s notion of getting “in contact with Lorca” here not just as a manner of speaking, but rather, as a serious strategy that pervades Spicer’s overall poetic production and that carries with it important ethical implications. This relational “getting in contact” constitutes a crucial strategy within the ethic of queer life at the core of the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser, in which the creation of a “human community” through the practice of poetry was a foundational collective objective. In this sense, to “get in contact with Lorca” within the context of After Lorca clearly transcends the merely semantic aspect of linguistic translation and entails a deeper ethical relation to the body of Lorca’s work that aims to liberate its original intentio—as an “answerable need” in this case—into a higher level of poetic and linguistic completeness and ethical purposiveness by being part of a new poetic community (“one of us”) now able to generate in itself a new sense of human dignity.
Therefore, what Spicer was mainly interested in “presenting” through the pieces of After Lorca was not so much the reconstitution of the body of certain original poems as the “language of poetry,” as Chamberlain argues, but rather the reconstitution of the particular “business of wanting coming from Outside” that Spicer originally found at the heart of the queer poetics of Lorca’s work. It can be argued that Benjamin’s conception of “pure language” accessed through the “breaking of decayed barriers” embodied in the act of translation partly corresponds to Spicer’s notion of the “real thing” as an ultimate “want” that transpires through his conception of translation as a bearing across time and language. As in the case of Benjamin’s conception of a “real” translation able to release “pure language” in its harmonic relation with the original as its supplemental afterlife, translation facilitates for Spicer the unfolding of the immanent linguistic impulse of the original. Thus, within the framework of poetic reconstitution implied in Spicer’s conception of translation in After Lorca, the actual words adopted by this “business of wanting” in its different poetic manifestations—whether belonging to Lorca or Spicer is after all meaningless—are only relevant as they constitute the building blocks, or “furniture” as Spicer often liked to say, that facilitate the surfacing of “the business of wanting coming from Outside” as a determined linguistic form. This is perhaps what Spicer means with the following statement in one of his letters to Lorca included in After Lorca: “Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to” (Spicer, Collected Books, 25).
Thus, the potential inherent in the act of translation to propel the original beyond itself, establishing the “continuance” of the original through a linguistic “other” to which it might not be semantically or formally related, can only be fully realized after translation. As practiced by Spicer, the after of “after translation” in this sense entails, first, a temporal expansion of the original into a potentially infinite series of actualizations of itself; second, a serial or sequential continuation of its linguistic form through different languages; and finally, a complex transpersonal amalgamation of the different voices involved in the articulation of the potential for translatability of the original into a transferential tradition that lies beyond the sole authorial control of the author or translator. Therefore, the crucial point of contact in my analysis between Spicer’s translational poetics and Benjamin’s theory of translation lies specifically in a conception of the original as being part of an organic medium that keeps on materially living once it has been transferred into a different linguistic form through the act of translation. Ultimately, the afterlife of the original is conceptualized by both writers as the linguistic materialization of an immanent need or tendency facilitated by its translatability—that is, the translatability of the language of poetry as a medium in the case of Spicer, and the specific translatability of the intentio of the original in the case of Benjamin.
Therefore, the relation between original and translation is conceived in both cases as a living relation that unfolds across time and language, producing its own history and tradition. This basic conception of the original as an organic form is described similarly by Theodor Adorno as a reflective transformation of the aesthetic dimension of artwork into a “living experience” produced by a “contemplative immersion” in the work. This transformation, which for Adorno happens to be epitomized in none other than the work of Stefan George—also an important influence for Benjamin himself, as well as for Spicer, Blaser, and Duncan—eventually unleashes “the immanent processual quality” of the work itself, as he argues here:
Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. This is George’s symbolist teaching in the poem “The Tapestry,” an art poétique that furnishes the title of a volume. Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of a work is set free. By speaking, it becomes something that moves in itself. Whatever in the artefact may be called the unity of its meaning is not static but processual, the enactment of antagonisms that each work necessarily has in itself. . . . It is as a result of their own constitution that they go over into their other, find continuance in it, want to be extinguished in it, and in their demise determine what follows them. This immanent dynamic is, in a sense, a higher-order element of what artworks are. If anywhere, then it is here that aesthetic experience resembles sexual experience, indeed its culmination. (Adorno, 176)
For Adorno, the contemplative immersion in the aesthetic object—of which the act of translation is an excellent example—unveils what he describes as a “processual” dimension at the very core of the work. In this sense, Adorno’s conception of the unity of the work as an overall process due to the intrinsic incompleteness of the particular artwork is clearly applicable to Benjamin’s theory of translation. At the same time, Adorno’s take on the “immanent dynamic” through which a work finds “continuance” into its afterlife by taking part in a “higher-order element” to which it ultimately belongs can be applied to both Benjamin’s “pure language” and Spicer’s own version of the “real thing” that transpires through language.
As analyzed previously, it is precisely this access to a “higher-order element” that grants sovereignty to an artistic creation, an idea that is equally important for the queer poetics respectively developed by George and Lorca, as well as Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser, as examined in this chapter. Adorno’s actual description of the immanent dynamic that leads to an experience in which artworks “go over into their other, find continuance in it, want to be extinguished in it, and in their demise determine what follows them” unveils a crucial libidinal aspect of that same process that is particularly important for the analysis of the translational poetics connected to the queer ethic at the core of Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser’s collective work. This relation also constitutes a shared and equally important libidinal aspect of George’s own relation to the figure of Maximin, as well as of Lorca’s own poetic embrace of the figure of Whitman—relations of paramount importance for the development of their respective queer poetic projects as examined in this chapter.
Referring to After Lorca, and following Adorno, Spicer’s own “contemplative immersion” in the body of Lorca’s poetry facilitated by the act of translation transforms an aesthetic experience into a “living experience” that ends up resembling “sexual experience, indeed its culmination,” as suggested by Adorno with regard to George’s poem “The Tapestry.”6 By letting Lorca’s poetry communicate its own “business of wanting” through the translational mechanics examined in this chapter, Spicer manages not only to correspond figuratively with Lorca but also to transform an aesthetic experience of his poetry into a living or “higher-order” experience that incorporates the body of Lorca’s work as the afterlife culmination of its own immanent libidinal need into a sovereign poetic and linguistic form. As argued in this chapter, the potential of the act of translation to propel the original beyond itself, establishing its “continuance” through an “other” in which, as Adorno states, it wants “to be extinguished,” lies at the core not only of Spicer’s translational poetics at work in After Lorca but also George’s cult of Maximin and Lorca’s poetic version and translation of Whitman’s own queer ethic in his “Oda a Walt Whitman.”
Finally, Spicer’s role as a “time mechanic” within his own poetic project ultimately facilitates and channels the liberation of immanent libidinal impulses of the “business of wanting” that, as in the case of Benjamin’s “pure language,” are “tied” to the “heavy, alien meaning” of the original. Thus, as in Benjamin’s conception of the task of the translator, the translational transfer channeled by Spicer in his Lorca poems exposes and reconstitutes the immanent drive of the original by pushing it rather literally beyond itself. In this sense, Rainer Nägele’s description of this drive of translation beyond itself offers a very useful perspective on the libidinal implications of the immanent dynamic that lies at the heart of the task of the translator as conceptualized by Benjamin, in the following terms:
Benjamin’s insistence on a position über (over, above) the abyss designates, as a position over the abyss, not a panoptic overview but rather the über of Übersetzung and Übertragung (translation, transport, transfer), which, as the translations of Eros will show, is also the position of Eros. Eros is the one who, in Hölderlin’s translation, above all übernachtet; he spans the night as the quintessential time-space of a “between” without limits. All delimitations emerge from it. (Nägele, 13)
In accordance with Nägele’s remarks, Spicer’s poetry can be analyzed as primarily aiming to occupy this haunting spatiotemporal “between” that Spicer found at the core of language and that is unveiled by the act of translation. Within the queer poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance, translation therefore constitutes a mode of contemplative immersion that not only transforms an original work, but that, at the same time and based on this interlingual transformation, is able to create the space for the emergence of a “human community” that could freely accommodate its own power of aequiparatio and creative sovereignty. This dimension of language and poetry constitutes in fact an ethical and erotic “between” at the heart of language that for Spicer emerges literally as a form of dictation once the act of translation reaches its afterlife after translation.
Ultimately, as conceived by Spicer, translation not only transforms the original work but at the same time, by pushing the immanent impulse of the original into its translated afterlife, ends up pushing the very act of translation beyond itself. Spicer’s theory and practice of translation can help us find ways to rethink the act of translation in the twenty-first century not only as a linguistic act that can carry the original across time in its translated afterlife—resulting in compositions tangentially related to the original—but also as a powerful ethical act that, as suggested by the work of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser, can radically alter the way we experience the sovereign desires and needs of others as they are embodied in language, and the new higher forms of human dignity this transferring process can ultimately generate.