A wound gives off its own light
surgeons says.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.

Anne Carson, “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”

ontology, translation, and REM

I stayed up with the owls last night, reading Jane Hirschfield’s essays and thinking about the ontological question in translation, namely, where does the essence or being of the poem reside? Is it in the form, the syntax, the grammar, the lexicon, the theme, the architectonics, the implied meaning….?

As I understand her essay, the issue of what exactly the translator “translates” often determines the what the translator adapts or alters. There are countless schools and theories on this, and some are fascinating—some theories become poems—though, for the most part, writers don’t translate for fear of “getting the writer wrong.”

Similar ontological questions can be mapped onto the poetry review process. We err towards certain review forms for fear of being seen inside the review—as if wearing a uniform isn’t a costume, an attempt to guise what exists. As if the presumption of non-visibility isn’t a certain privilege, a status in itself.

Like translation, reading and reviewing must be subjective; our ideas of greatness and good writing are socialized by education, socialization, and exposure to various canons. Guising the guidance of these canons only solidifies their influence. It is 2 amish and I cannot helping thinking, in this lateness, how an imagined third-person affects our reading, interpreting, understanding, and participating in the encounter itself.

The poem, above all, wants us to enter. And when we enter the poem, we do so as ourselves—with all the experience and privilege and bias of that self in time. Adam Zagajewski mused about the poem’s seduction, the work of invitation, the challenge involved in making this invitation irresistible:

But the writing of the poem, the work of it, also asks permission to enter—asks, oddly enough, permission to trespass. Sometimes I can feel that every poem I’ve ever read is linked to every other poem. Curious thresholds demand offerings before they will open. To write a poem may be to make just such an offering. The poem as sacrificial in nature. The brazen act does not cry out Look at me! It calls out, Let me in.

Zagajewski is not referring to the the saddest REM song ever recorded. He is talking about poetry, and what it asks of us as writers and readers and “sharers” in communion with life and text. It is intense. It is inflected by what we know of longing, loneliness, and hope.

someone’s Virgil

Circling. Leaving the gate open for ellipses. Perhaps the question of what one wants from a translation feels similar to the question of what one expects from the book review. Disappointment, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. It relies on subconscious expectation (i.e. this book review will illuminate Ashbery’s formal concerns), and the book review is felt to either deliver on this expectation, to disappoint it, or to do something else well enough that the initial expectation is modified and adapted.

Faced with my Virgil, I had the sensation (well known to me) of a poet at work. From time to time I argued absently with myself about this famous book, set in its millennial frame, with as much freedom as if it had been a poem of my own on the table before me.

- Paul Valery, “Variations on the ‘Eclogues"‘“

When translating Virgil, Paul Valery felt so close, so tangled up in the text, that he referenced this possessiveness, calling him “My Virgil”—and I think, to some degree, this can be true of translation. It gives you “my Virgil.” But there is another Virgil that Valery describes:

So I again opened my school Virgil, where, as is usual, there was no lack of notes revealing the erudition of some professor but revealing it to him alone, for on the whole they are wonderfully calculated to entangle the innocent pupil in philology and doubts—if, that is, he should consult them, which he is careful not to do. O classroom Virgil, who would have thought that I should have occasion to flounder about in you once more?

Here, Valery refers to the “classroom Virgil,” the public monumental Virgil, the hard stone that one cannot touch or be touched by. I think the contract between “my Virgil” and “my school Virgil” is compelling when considering translation. But I want to extend this into the art of the book review, or the specific charged encounter that a good review should enact.

Classrooms are important. I have no argument involving classrooms. But in a review which is not a classroom, which does not purport to be a classroom, which extends itself towards encountering, perhaps the best I can give you is my Virgil. Or my Virgil as understood through Valery’s translation. Or my Virgil as he speaks to other writers or translations I have read. I cannot give you Virgil or Valery.

My claim is larger. I wish to suggest that no poem can give you Virgil or Valery. A poem can only give you the world as it held the poet for a particular timespan. No translation can give you Virgil or Valery. A translation can give you the translator’s Virgil or Valery. And what this says of translation theories as related to the act of reading, itself, is not axiomatic.

and maybe the eros of the book review

Like sex, light is not a question until you are in the dark.

Anne Carson, “The Brainsex Paintings”

“Knowledge is erotic,” Hirschfield writers. And translation engages this eros, this hunger to be known closer, more deeply, in a transformative manner.

If translation is erotic—and it is—the book review is also erotic. The word eros comes to us from late 14th century Greek, where it designated the god of love. See eros (plural erotes), "god or personification of love," literally "love," from eran "to love," erasthai "to love, desire," which is of uncertain origin.

I cannot imagine taking the time from my family and life to write a review about a book that meant less than love for me. Which is to say: erasthai "to love, desire," which is of uncertain origin. Which is to foreground the uncertain origin of a word that turns a god into a verb.

Love is the mystery inside this walking. It runs ahead of us on the road like a dog, out of the photograph.

Anne Carson, "Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Differences Between Men and Women”

For some of us, writing about books is like writing about love—and the book review maps the shape of this intense encounter. If the “I” is absent, the review cannot speak towards Us.

with an aside on attraction + white chocolate

Attraction, itself, is complicated. For example, I always feel more “at home” in the work of Eastern European poets than I do in Southern ones. Despite having lived 9/10 of my life in Alabama, my relationship to this place and space remains burdened by rejection, by fear, by the sense of never quite belonging enough, or never being able to like the things that would evidence this belonging.

Confession: I don’t like white chocolate. Because I’m not drawn to white chocolate, I have little to say about it that isn’t a variation of my dislike. Someone who doesn’t like white chocolate is not an expert on white chocolate so much as an expert on justifying and explaining their own preference. Of course preferences can be interesting, but I have teenagers who are very adept at consistently marketing their own dislikes in long monologues and so I feel very fulfilled on the why-I-hate-this front.

Ultimately, perhaps, I have more to say about my preferences-for rather than my preferences-against. For it is this attraction that is fascinating. The love letter, always more illuminating than the hate mail.

praxis, or fidelity to the encounter

While poems can make sense of the world, they cannot be the final story about the words with which they shape this particular sense. The blackbird exists outside Wallace Steven’s vision.

Maybe the review is a letter between one mind (this one) and the mind that touched it with poetry. I worry more (I worry a lot) about what the writer will make of review than I do the reader.

Is this an apologia for the I’s intimacy, it’s private ardor? Yes—if by apologia one means the Greek speech of defense. Or what Corey Van Landingham described in “Apologia,” where the genre of apologia doesn’t admit regret or guilt but “desires, instead, to make one’s position clear, to offer an explanation in the face of accusation, to justify one’s belief.”

Because I have more to say about what I like than I do about white chocolate, I am willing to sit with the book and do the work of finding words to explain it. If I misread or misunderstand the poems, I am sorry—but no so sorry that I would erase the review, or that conversation between the reader and the text. I know what I know and nothing more. I cannot speak for the world or the universe or the market which permits the existence of white chocolate. I am still amazed daily by how two humans can speak with familiar words and yet misunderstand one another completely, or leave the conversation with different expectations. Like Ann Lauterbach, I try to remember the smallness of my place in all this, namely:

..that what I know is always a fragment of what there is to be known....that what I know is sometimes a defense against what there is to be known. This defense can realize itself as fear, as contempt, as doubt, as ideology, as polemics--the desire to fasten one's partial knowledge and conviction onto universal value.

My classroom Virgil is less relevant to my encountered Virgil when speaking about a personal relationship to a text. I trust the classroom to speak for itself in its inerrant articulations. I trust my Virgil to be wrong and yet, engaged and invested enough in the text to re-view it, to write from that re-viewing, to want to know and meet the poet in the mind’s least lit corners.

And so the praxis enacts itself in these stolen hours; the event takes place in varying lightscapes, each rooted, somehow, in this hunger and desire to meet. I expands. You meet you, naked with the knowledge of this book, this thing which fascinates and absorbs—this source of disquiet keeping you awake—and you cannot be present for the nature of this encounter, or what it asks of the mind, without also revealing the others that came before it. The books that inform it. The theories you admire. The ghosts, both public and private, in the body. The parts where you want to be touched or are open to feeling, to being felt, to knowing further. You cannot be invisible in this regarding. You cannot hide behind the hierarchies which perpetuate notions of objectivity in the encountering.

Why we write at all remains a mystery. But it’s not a mystery that writing enacts a relationship wherein we write towards others—towards strangers in a room who are willing to meet in slight rapture. It is late and I will probably regret all of this.

Ontology and intimacy in reviews and translation

ontology, translation, and REM

someone’s Virgil

and maybe the eros of the book review

with an aside on attraction + white chocolate

praxis, or fidelity to the encounter

see also etc.