Translation Interview

Here's a interview with me about translation from the U of Iowa Translation Program journal Exchanges (the publication of which was the occasion for my reading last night).

Reading in Iowa City Tomorrow - correction

if you live in Iowa City, please come to my reading tomorrow:

Thursday - 5:00 pm Reading, Shambaugh House, 430 N. Clinton

I'll be reading translations of various contemporary Swedish poets.

Correction:

It's at 7 pm.

New Cathy Wagner book

[I got this from Fence:]

In this third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Her slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation slides from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. “Things mean,” she writes, “and I can’t tell them not to.” In each of the four series that make up this book we find a female body watching itself and marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.


The Argument


This book is called Hypneratomachia Fuckphila.
Fuckfila on her journey her new spelling
reminiscent of Chick-Fil-A. Fill the
chick and filler well of ding ding dong.
Fuckin’ A. Behold a useful and
profitable book. If you think otherwise,
do not lay the blame on the book, but on
yourself. If you sourly refuse
the new erotic guest, do not despise
the well-ordered sequence nor the fine
well-ordered style. Then in this volume
she falls in love. It is a worthy book, and full
of many ornaments: he who will not read it
is dull of mind. Various things are treated in it
which it would tire me to relate, but accept
the work which offers a cornucopia
emending it should it be incorrect. The End.



“Catherine Wagner’s New Job might be the last great book of the aughts . . . One picks up some Sylvia Plath but what I really felt was Frankenstein. My New Job is tinkering with life.” –Eileen Myles



“Wagner delivers the unanticipated beauty of acknowledgment—reduplications, pain ratios, contradictions, corrections, consumables, “and the things in people’s eyes.” This is work worth returning to.” –C. S. Giscombe



Catherine Wagner was born in Burma and grew up in Baltimore. She is the author of Macular Hole (2004) and Miss America (2001), both from Fence Books. With Rebecca Wolff, she edited Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (Fence Books, 2007). She teaches at Miami University in Oxford, OH.

de Sade in Sweden/Vertigo

The inimitable Swedish publisher Vertigo has just published Marquis de Sade's "Juliette." Here's a funny little review that talks about how the Swedish cultural ministry denied the press subsidies because they felt the book lacked artistic merit. Chalk one up to government arts funding.

Vertigo by the way is a really fantastic press. They've published Delaney's Hogg, Robert Coover, Apollinaire, HP Lovecraft, Nikanor Teratologen (soon to be published in English translation via Dalkey, his books are about... well, old people), Zizek, Louis Aragon's erotica and a lot of erotic/subversive classics, and of course the continuing saga of Klitty (lesbian detective). It's run by Carl Michael Edenborg who was a member of the Surrealist Group of Stockholm back in the day.

Frances Hwang

[Got this reminder, for those of you who live in South Bend:]

Greetings,

Just a reminder that Frances Hwang is reading at IUSB tonight at 7:30. Location and information below.

I "could not be more thrilled" about this event, and here's the article in the IUSB Preface to prove it: http://www.iusbpreface.com/news/author-of-transparency-to-speak-at-iusb-1.933853

Hope to see you tonight!

Kelcey Parker

Reviewing Books in Translation

[Here's my response to Barbra Jane Reyes blog entry on the Harriet Blog (it gets me every time!) about reviewing books in translation:]

Hi Barbra Jane and Co,

Here's my advice: You review books of poetry in translation in a similar way you review other books of poetry: You try to figure out what's going on, what makes the poems tick, what they are concerned with, how they operate.

You want to acknowledge its status as translation, but that doesn't invalidate it as poetry in English.

Of course, you want to consider that it might not have the same context and goals as an American Poem, but then there is no One American Poem either, so that's useful to keep in mind when you review American poetry too.

It often helps to know something about the literary context of the work (which is often included in intros etc), but that is true of reviewing American poetry too.

Besides, I've seen reviews by people who know something about the context and it getting in the way of actually engaging with the text.

If you want to make a study of the translation, you obviously have to know the other language to some extent. These kinds of review are also useful, but that's only one kind of review.

The idea that this is the only useful review of a work in translation is very problematic for me: as if foreign works had no interest beyond scholarly knowledge and curiosity. We need the correct text in order to achieve Mastery!

The obsession with the "correct translation" is a really reactionary notion - based on the really reactionary idea of there being *one* original, presumably as interpreted by that highly problematic reader, the Ideal Reader. The Ideal Reader is never a foreigner, just as his Ideal Text is never a foreign text.

This makes me think of a really great piece Haryette Mullen read about reading as the non-intended reader. It's on the web somewhere.

I also want to note that the Action Books book of Finland-Swedish avant-garde poet Gunnar Björling ("the Gertrude Stein of Scandinavian Literature") was reviewed incredibly well in the fine journal Pleiades by someone (I'm sorry I can't remember his name) who did not know Swedish as far as I could tell. But it was really one of the best articles I've ever read about Björling's prosody/syntax, including all the scholarly articles written over some 80 years (and I've read pretty much everything ever written about him). Likewise, Lara Glenum's article about Aase Berg that we published on www.actionyes.org is one of the most perceptive articles about that Swedish poet. So it can definitely be done.

Jonathan Mayhew recently wrote a highly enjoyable, informative book about the translation of Lorca into English, but in it he argues that translation is "kitsch," that it's a second-hand experience, "apocryphal." As Lawrence Venuti pointed out in a recent review of that book, this is a profound misunderstanding of not just the way translation works, but the way literature works - that only the true scholar has access to the real text and all else is kitsch, a lie, "second hand." Well, I certainly don't feel that way, not about works in translation, or about works of American poetry. And I hope we haven't come to that as a literature - when only the certified scholar has access to the true text.

But then I've been living my entire adult life as a foreigner, a second-hand reader and writer of American poetry.

Best,
Johannes

"... lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art"

I'm giving a reading and talk on Friday:

"... lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art": poetry/translation/kitsch/cinema/grotesque"
Friday, November 20, 2009
116 Debartolo Hall
1:30 pm

I'm going to build off Daniel Tiffany's article to talk about translation as kitsch. I'm also criticizing Jed Rasula's model of "American Poetry Wax Museum" as essential a kitsch-based framework. I'll also talk about Breton, Plath and Aase Berg as kitsch/translation. I'll post my findings on this blog when I'm done.

Clark/Hume

The Creative Writing Program will be hosting a reading/multimedia event featuring poets Christine Hume and Jeff Clark on Nov 18 at 7pm at the Hammes Bookstore.

Christine Hume was born in 1968 and has lived in sixteen different States and countries. She is the author of three books and a chapbook: _Musca Domestica_ (Beacon Press 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize; _Alaskaphrenia_ (New Issues 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic's 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; _Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense_, a chapbook and CD (Ugly Duckling Presse 2007); and most recently _Shot_ (Counterpath Press 2009). Lux Books in Berlin will issue a bilingual Selected Poems in 2010. Her work has been translated into German, Dutch, and Slovenian. She currently teaches in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

Jeff Clark was born in southern California in 1971. He went to Iowa for poetry, then moved to San Francisco, where he lived from 1995 to 2000. From 2000 to early 2004 he lived in Oakland, and now lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with his partner, the poet Christine Hume, and their daughter, Juna Hume Clark. After eleven years with Oakland design studio Wilsted & Taylor, Clark does book design as Quemadura (www.quemadura.net). His own books are _The Little Door Slides Back_ (Sun and Moon, 1997; reprint FSG, 2004), _Music and Suicide_ (FSG, 2004), and _2A_ (Quemadura, 2006), a book written with Geoffrey G. O'Brien. A limited edition book entitled _Ruins_ just appeared this fall, coinciding with a show in NYC of Clark's design work.

Book signing to follow. Author books will be available for sale at the bookstore. The event is free and open to the public.