Introduction. Poetry after Translation
1. See Richard Sieburth’s introduction to Ezra Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, Haun Saussy’s “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, and Steven Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism.
2. At the end of this sentence, Gaonkar and Povinelli use author-date citations (“Asad 1986, Povinelli 2001b”) to refer to two essays that tackle the specific problem they are addressing: Talal Asad’s “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” (in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986]); and Povinelli’s “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability” (Annual Review of Anthropology 30 [2001]: 319–34). As I will discuss later, their reference to Asad’s essay is particularly relevant for my analysis of their notion of “transfiguration.”
3. By focusing on the work of influential British cultural ethnographers of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Ernest Gellner and Godfrey Lienhardt, Asad points out the way in which the anthropological act of interpretation tended to “preempt the evaluation” of particular foreign cultures (“Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” 21). For Asad, this is particularly problematic in ethnographic writing characterized by the linguistic phenomenon he refers to as “unequal languages,” in which “the languages concerned are so remote that it is very difficult to rewrite a harmonious intentio” (21).
1 / Heteronymies of Lusophone Englishness
1. Pessoa’s own analysis—written in English—of his transpersonal tendencies is worth quoting in full: “My interest in Francis Bacon’s horoscope is due to several circumstances, of which the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy is only one. The chief interest arises from a desire to see what in Bacon’s horoscope registers his peculiar characteristic of being able to write in different styles (a fact which even non Baconians admit) and his general faculty of transpersonalisation. I possess (in what degree, or with what quality, it is not for me to say) the characteristic to which I am alluding. I am an author: and have always found impossible to write in my own personality; I have always found myself, consciously or unconsciously assuming the character of someone who does not exist, and through his imaginary agency I write.” Fernando Pessoa, Correspondênça Inédita, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva, 92.
2. Some Pessoa scholars have recently emphasized the relevance of the fact that Fernando Pessoa developed as a writer through a bilingual interaction with the canon of Anglo-American literature during the early 1900s—for example, George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature and Maria Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism. But only a few critics have actually emphasized the importance of Pessoa’s own English poetry. Two important exceptions are Jorge de Sena with his groundbreaking introduction and edition of Pessoa’s English Poems in Poemas Ingleses: Obras Completas de Fernando Pessoa—and Georg Rudolf Lind, with his article “Oito poemas ingleses inéditos de Fernando Pessoa,” in Estudos sobre Fernando Pessoa, 385–425.
3. As demonstrated by João Gaspar Simões, Pessoa excelled academically at Durban High School, winning a series of prizes in English composition, among them the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize in 1904 for best English essay at Pessoa’s matriculation examination for admission to the University of the Cape of Good Hope. See João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa. For a more recent study of Fernando Pessoa’s formation at Durban see also Alexandrino E. Severino, Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul.
4. An extremely detailed analysis of Pessoa’s different readings of English literature as well as the actual poetry books by English authors he owned while living at Durban is carried out by João Gaspar Simões in his Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa.
5. See D. J. Palmer’s study of the rise of English literature as an academic discipline during the Victorian era, The Rise of English Studies.
6. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Portuguese and Spanish original texts included in this book are my own.
7. “Sebastianismo” refers to the myth within Portuguese history and literature of the messianic return of the young Portuguese king Dom Sebastião who died in the battle of Alcácer-Quibir in 1578, leaving the Portuguese throne temporarily in Spanish hands until 1640. The establishment of a Portuguese “Quinto Imperio” through the mythic second coming of D. Sebastião constitutes a theme thoroughly explored in Pessoa’s 1934 collection Mensagem. For a thorough study of the theme of Sebastianismo in Portuguese and Brazilian literature see António Quadros, Poesia e filosofia do mito Sebastianista.
8. Pessoa’s full statement goes as follows: “É um imperialismo de gramáticos? O imperialismo dos gramáticos dura mais e vai mais fundo que o dos generais. É um imperialismo de poetas? Seja. A frase não é ridícula senão para quem defende o antiguo imperialismo ridículo. O imperialismo dos poetas dura e domina; os dos políticos passa e esquece, se o não lembrar o poeta que o cante.” (Is it an imperialism of grammarians? The imperialism of grammarians lasts longer and goes further than the general ones. Is it an imperialism of poets? Be it. The phrase is not ridiculous except for those who defend the old ridiculous imperialism. The imperialism of poets lasts and dominates; that of politicians goes away and is forgotten if the poet that may sing it fails to recollect it.) Fernando Pessoa, Sobre Portugal, ed. Joel Serrão, 129.
9. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud defines the fetish as the replacement of the normal sexual object by another object with which it is synecdochally or metonymically related, in the following terms: “There are some cases which are quite specially remarkable—those in which the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but it is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim. . . . What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and pereferable to that person’s sexuality (e.g., a piece of clothing or underlinen)” (249),
10. In his study of Pessoa’s life in South Africa, Alexandrino Severino refers to the complete absence of any reference to Durban in Pessoa’s work in the following terms: “Jamais em seus versos ou nos seus escritos em prosa apareceria qualquer refêrencia direta à cidade que o abrigara durante nove anos.” (Neither in his verse, nor in his prose writings is there ever any kind of direct reference to the city that accommodated him during nine years.) See Alexandrino E. Severino, Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul, 32.
2 / The Translatability of Planetary Poiesis
1. In 1917 Huidobro published in Paris Horizon carré, his first main collection in French. In 1918 and while living in Madrid he published Ecuatorial, Poemas árticos, Tour Eiffel, and Hallali—the last two also written in French.
2. As Huidobro relates during an interview in Chile during the summer of 1919, Pound apparently offered to translate Huidobro’s Horizon carré into English: “Hay además un joven poeta inglés, Ezra Pound, que también ha deseado venir con nosotros y que iba a traducir a su idioma natal mi libro Horizon carré (Cruchaga, 64; There is also a young English poet, Ezra Pound, who also wanted to be with us and who was going to translate Horizon carré into his native tongue). In the same interview Huidobro also mentions Pound’s imagisme as one of the most relevant avant-garde poetics at the time: “La de los ‘imaginistas’, que es una escuela oriunda de Inglaterra, con ramificaciones en Estados Unidos y Canadá” (that of the Imagists, a school which originated in England, and derived groups in the United States and Canada).
3. “Pues la rueda de nuestras evoluciones literarias, después del impulso novecentista, gira muy lentamente y en un silencio de maquinaria gastada. Sus engranajes se oxidan faltos de una vívida lubrificación mental” (Guillermo de Torre, “La poesía creacionista y la pugna entre sus progenitores,” in Costa, Vicente Huidobro y el creacionismo 130; since the wheel of our literary evolution, after the impulse at the turn of the century, spins extremely slowly with a silence of used machinery. Its mechanisms rust lacking a vivid mental lubrication).
4. Bürger incorporates cubism within the different movements that configure his category of “the historical avant-garde” in the following terms: “The concept of the historical avant-garde movements used here applies primarily to Dadaism and early surrealism but also equally to the Russian avant-garde after the October revolution. Partly significant differences between them notwithstanding, a common feature of all these movements is that they do not reject individual artistic techniques and procedures of earlier art, but rejected that art in its entirety, thus bringing about a radical break with tradition. In their most extreme manifestations, their primary target is art as an institution such as it has developed in bourgeois society. . . . Although Cubism does not pursue the same intent, it calls into question the system of representation with its linear perspective that had prevailed since the Renaissance. For this reason, it is part of the historic avant-garde movements, although it does not share their basic tendency (sublation of art in the praxis of life)” (Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 109).
5. In the early 1920s Huidobro started working on his visual novel Cagliostro, subtitled a “Novela-Film,” which was first published in an English translation as Mirror of a Mage in 1930 and which, in 1927, won a $10,000 prize by the New York–based League for Better Motion Pictures as the “book of the year with best possibilities for moving picture adaptation” (De Costa, Vicente Huidobro: The Careers of a Poet, 129).
6. See Trayectoria del caligrama en Huidobro. POESIA I, 3. Madrid, 1978.
7. This idea is also emphasized by Gerardo Diego in one of his articles on creacionismo: “Pero esta conducta, que puede parecer descastamiento aunque en rigor no lo sea, es consecuencia obligada de su concepto de la poesía como idioma universal, en el cual es indiferente usar una lengua u otra, porque en la imagen creada, su invención es válida en todos los organismos linguisiticos y resulta, en lo que tiene de creación, traducible” (Diego, “Poesía y Creacionismo de Vicente Huidobro,” 216; But this behavior, which may seem a form of uprootedness although in fact it is not so, is a necessary consequence of his conception of poetry as universal language, in which it is indifferent to use one language or another since the invention of the created image is valid in all linguistic forms and is translatable as a created thing).
8. See Huidobro, Altazor: Temblor de cielo, 40.
9. “Who has been the assassin? Facing the judge the cadaver of the woman lies like the mummy of the most beautiful female pharaoh. Shout, accusers. . . . Suddenly a deafening cry raised across the air. ‘To the guillotine. The guillotine, the guillotine.’ Moments later, in front of the bloodthirsty crowd, the fatal knife cut the marble head of the accused, and an immense stream of light endlessly emanated from his neck. At that moment, there was a horrifying earthquake in the sky. The stars shattered in a thousand pieces; the planets set on fire; pieces of moons were flying around; burning coals were coming out of volcanoes on other planets and came down at times shrieking into the burst-out eyes of men. . . . In the midst of the catastrophic chaos and general confusion two arms stronger than a hundred oceans grabbed my neck. ‘Isolda, is it you?’ ‘How many years apart from each other.’ ‘There had to be a catastrophe such as this one for us to meet again.’ ‘You, tree of wisdom, with the ripe eyes at the threshold of dreams and that elephant swagger with the feet of an idol.’ ‘Show me your breasts. Let me see your breasts’” (Huidobro, Altazor: Temblor de cielo, 153, my translation).
10. “Ladies and Gentlemen: the snake of shipwrecks bites its tongue and grows bigger, grows bigger into infinity. We are inside its circles absorbed by the abyss of the future putrefaction, spilling pus through our eyes like ocean foam. Meanwhile, the inner landscapes feel the flight of trees; our ears before taking off manage to hear the whirlwind of the spikes that are sinking deeper, falling like leaves. There is no hope for rest. In vain the skeleton behind its glass adopts the posture of the person who is about to sing. The inner doors of the planet cover the ears with violence like the nurse who hears the terrible adventure in the last frontier. Nothing is gained by thinking that perhaps behind the abstract wall extends the voluptuous zone of amazement. . . . That was the discourse that you have called macabre without a reason, the beautiful discourse of the announcer of nothingness.
Go ahead. Follow your journey as I follow mine.
I am too slow for dying.” (Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 172, my translation).
3 / Queering the Poetic Body
1. Daniel Katz and Jonathan Mayhew have written two very different but equally relevant analyses of After Lorca. Katz’s “Jack Spicer’s After Lorca: Translation as Decomposition” is a highly theoretical essay that focuses on the role played by translation as a process of transmission. Mayhew dedicates a section of one of the chapters of his Apocryphal Lorca to Spicer’s work, carrying out a rather useful and detailed comparative reading of After Lorca as an apocryphal version of Lorca’s poetry. Neither of these two critics, however, reads Spicer’s After Lorca as part of the larger translational project of queer poetics that, in my analysis, characterizes the poetry of the Berkeley Renaissance as a collective.
2. Dante’s complete sonnet quoted by Blaser goes as follows:
Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io
fossimo presi per incantamento
e messi in un vasel, ch’ad ogni vento
per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio;
sì che fortunal od altro tempo rio
non ci potesse dare impedimento,
anzi, vivendo sempre in un talento,
di stare insieme crescesse ‘l disio.
E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi
con quella ch’è sul numer de le trenta
con noi ponesse il buono incantatore:
e quivi ragionar sempre d’amore,
e ciascuna di lor fosse contenta,
sì come i’ credo che saremmo noi.
3. Robert Norton, in his groundbreaking biography of Stefan George, describes his relation with Morwitz in the following terms: “A nineteen-year-old admirer named Ernst Morwitz, a native of Danzig, had just been reading George’s works and providentially discovered through one of the newspaper articles about the trial that the poet lived in Bingen. The letter Morwitz wrote to him in August 1905 laid the foundation for a friendship that lasted until George’s death more than a quarter of a century later. . . . Morwitz, who became a successful lawyer in Berlin, was one of George’s chief legal advisers in later years. After 1933, Morwitz, who was a Jew, fled to the United States and there continued his work as a staunch defender of George’s legacy” (Norton, Secret Germany, 346).
4. As anthologized by Francisco García Lorca and Donald Allen in the 1955 New Directions edition of Lorca’s Selected Poems primarily used by Spicer during his composition of After Lorca, Lorca’s poetry displayed a series of poetic features with a strong appeal for Spicer, among them a return to traditional medieval poetic forms in poems belonging to Romancero Gitano or Poema del Cante Jondo, an original take on surrealist imagery at work in compositions posthumously published in Poeta en Nueva York, as well as the radical embrace of popular culture that pervades Lorca’s overall oeuvre. Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian mentioned these details in Poet Be Like God, their biography of Spicer: “Spicer had begun, in Boston, to translate some of Lorca’s work, with a copy of the recent New Directions edition of the Selected Poems kept by his bedside” (81). Also, according to Clayton Eshleman, Spicer also used the 1955 Aguilar edition of Lorca’s Obras Completas.
5. As Clayton Eshleman patiently shows in his relevant “The Lorca Working,” of the thirty-four poems that make up the series, eleven are Spicer’s own poems, clearly written under the spell of Lorca’s ghost. Eshleman describes the “typical” Spicer translation of any of Lorca’s poems in the following rather vague terms: “The greater percentage of the poem is accurately, if uninventively, translated, with matches of mistranslation, some of which appear to be meaningful, some of which appear to be arbitrary” (33). Moreover, Eshleman’s overall effort seems futile mainly because Spicer is clearly not interested in producing faithfully equivalent translations of Lorca’s poems, but rather, as I am arguing here, in leading Lorca’s words across time. Donald Allen also points out in his introduction to Spicer’s One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980) the list of original Lorca poems included in After Lorca.
6. George’s poem “Der Teppich” (The Tapestry) together with Morwitz’s English translation, follows here:
Hier schlingen menschen mit gewächsen tieren
Sich fremd zum bund umrahmt von seidner franze
Und blaue sicheln weisse sterne zieren
Und queren sie in dem erstarrten tanze.
Und kahle linien ziehn in reich-gestickten
Und teil um teil ist wirr und gegenwendig
Und keiner ahnt das rätsel der verstrickten.
Da eines abends wird das werk lebendig.
Da regen schauernd sich die toten äste
Die wesen eng von strich und kreis umspannet
Und treten klar vor die geknüpften quäste
Die lösung bringend über die ihr sannet!
Sic ist nach willen nicht: ist nicht für jede
Gewohne stunde: ist kein schatz der gilde.
Sie wird den vielen nie und nie durch rede.
Sie wird den seltnen selten im gebilde.
Framed by a silken fringe, in strange accord
Here men are intermeshed with beasts and plants,
And sickles blue with stars of white are scored
And traverse them in the arrested dance.
Through lavish broideries run barren lines,
And part for part is tangled and at strife.
And none the riddle of the snared divines . . .
Then, on a night, the fabric comes to life.
The frozen branches tremulously veer,
The beings close in line and circle fused
Emerge before the knotted tassels clear
And bring the answer over which you mused!
Not at your beck it is, and not for each
Accustomed hour, nor guild’s enriching share,
And never for the many and through speech,
It comes incarnate rarely to the rare.
(Stefan George, Poems, 100–101)
4 / Transferring the “Luminous Detail”
1. The Provençal term—whose meaning could never be fully ascertained by modern scholars—was rescued by Pound from the poetry of the French troubadours of the Middle Ages. As generally acknowledged, Pound incorporated the term from the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, using it in Canto XX of his magnum opus The Cantos of Ezra Pound (“Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by noigandres?” [89]).
2. In New York, Sousândrade wrote opinion articles as well as literary essays regularly for the Portuguese-language newspaper O Novo Mundo, owned and edited by another cosmopolitan expatriate from Brazil, the publisher and journalist José Carlos Rodrigues.
3. Sousândrade specifically quotes a passage from Humboldt’s Vue des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810) as an epigraph for O Guesa.
4. The concept of phanopeia is part of the poetic taxonomy developed by Pound famously published in his article “How to Read”:
Melopoeia, wherein the words are charged . . . with some musical property . . .
Phanopoeia, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination.
Logopoeia, “the dance of the intellect among words.” (Pound, “How to Read,” 25)
5. 1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding to rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome. (Pound, “Retrospect,” 3)
6. Pound primarily develops his notion of paideuma in his essay “For a New Paideuma” (included in his Selected Prose). Pound defines paideuma as “the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal, reaching the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time” (Pound, Selected Prose, 284).
7. “In always-moving iris, green-snow / Blue hyacinth and the fulgent roses.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão,28, my translation)
8. “The flat mirror of sand reflects / the golden-diaphanous-ashgrey nimbus.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 28, my translation)
9. “The last fires of the West / cry plates and gold over the mass / of live darkness, liquid, luminous / The Black-River runs whispering.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 28, my translation)
10. “Moving nights of sparkling stars.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 28, my translation)
11. “Assume that, by the translations of ‘The Seafarer’ and of Guido’s lyrics, I have given evidence that fine poetry may consist of elements that are of seem to be almost mutually exclusive.” (Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” 26)
12. Ferenczi’s formulation of introjection as an unconscious identification with an external object had an impact on the work of Freud himself, who picks up the notion to describe hysterical identification in essays such as “Mourning and Melancholia”: “Identifications with the object are by no means rare in the transference neurosis either: indeed they are a well-known mechanism of symptom formation, especially in hysteria” (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 587). At the same time Ferenczi’s notion is crucial for the development of Melanie Klein’s studies of ego formation in children. Ultimately, Ferenczi’s “introjection” becomes extremely relevant for later psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the actual structure of the ego, which is seen in this case by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok as the total sum of introjections, as they argue in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: “We understand Ego as the sum of its introjections and define introjection as the libido’s encounter with a potentially infinite numbers of instruments for its own symbolic expression” (Abraham and Torok, 4).
5 / The Digital Vernacular
1. It is important to point out the fact that Brathwaite’s reevaluation of the notion of the Creole as a conceptual foundation for the development of Caribbean culture predates by roughly ten years the so-called Créolité movement that would later be developed by the Martinican writers Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant.
2. “The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation I want to call the Black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constrains of ethnicity and national particularity” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 19).
3. “His nation language is not the language of a nation, but of an ocean: it is the discourse of the Black Atlantic” (Hitchcock, Imaginary States, 73).
4. Macintosh SE/30: Technical Specifications. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=112170.
5. As stated in the introduction to Brathwaite’s Shar, prior to its destruction by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, his personal library at Irish Town was arguably one of “the most important archives of Caribbean literature and culture, . . . possibly one of the largest collections of Caribbean poetry in the world” (Brathwaite, Shar, n.p.).
Afterword. The Location of Translation
1. The Transatlantic Studies Association was founded in 2002 in the U.K. The following information is available on their website: “The inauguration of the Transatlantic Studies Association took place on 11 July 2002 with the first of its annual conferences. Lord Robertson, Secretary General of NATO, welcomed the delegates with a video message commending the new initiative. The conferences have grown in strength ever since and now attract over 100 delegates each year drawn mainly from North America (35%), from Europe excluding the UK (25%), and UK (35%).” http://www.transatlanticstudies.com/.
2. The term “modernismo” has been the topic of innumerable theoretical disquisitions. As the scholar Max Henríquez Ureña showed in his magisterial Breve historia del modernismo, Rubén Darío originally coined the term in 1888 to refer to a particular “absoluto modernismo en la expresión” (Henríquez Ureña, 156; absolute modernism of expression), used by the Mexican writer Ricardo Contreras. Earlier critics, who generally received Spanish American modernismo as a highly artificial and decadent poetic trend directly borrowed by Latin American poets from contemporary French poetry, used the term with clear negative connotations emphasizing the frivolous excesses of form of their poetry, as well as its corrupting potential for what critics took to constitute the overall purity of the Spanish literary traditin. However, starting with the groundbreaking assessments of the period by figures such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, the above mentioned Henríquez Ureña, Ricardo Gullón, and Iván Schulman, modernismo has been gradually analyzed as a crucial phase in the overall evolution of modern poetics, being parallel in terms of cohesiveness and relevance to other fully fleshed aesthetic responses to modernity such as French modernisme, Brazilian modernismo, and, more importantly, Anglo-American modernism.
3. See Rethinking Literary History—Comparatively, by Mario Valdés and Linda Hutcheon; Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, edited by Mario J. Valdes and Djelal Kadir; A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors; and Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translation, edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors.
4. As Auerbach argues regarding the conceptual implications of the term “figura” in classical antiquity, “Side by side with the original plastic signification and overshadowing it, there appeared a far more general concept of grammatical, rhetorical, logical, mathematical—and later even of musical and choreographic—form” (“Figura,” 15). In his foundational analysis of Dante’s method of representation, Auerbach emphasizes the way Dante’s use of the figurative power of allegory recuperates both its typological and spiritual completeness, by being fully based not in abstract notions or concepts as its ground of representation, but in the figural interrelation of two different real events represented mimetically. It is important to emphasize that, for Auerbach, the intellectual recognition of the figural connection between two events distant from each other within the realm of historical time—the two poles of the figure—constitutes in itself an extratemporal recognition.