Laying it on the line: Mark Rudman's Sundays on the Phone

Few contemporary poets can be said to “contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman did. Mark Rudman is one of them, as evidenced by his Rider quintet, which culminates in Sundays on the Phone. The winner of numerous prizes (The National Book Critics Circle Award, the Max Hayward Award for a translation of Boris Pasternak, and numerous fellowships), Rudman has been widely praised for his work, which manages to be ambitious and intimate, harrowing and funny. When his last book, The Couple, was published, Harold Pinter commented that Rudman had “woven an extraordinarily rich and highly original tapestry. It’s an impressive achievement.” Thom Gunn wrote of Rider (1994), the quintet’s first volume, that it was “The most believable book I have ever read about love.” An exceptionally well-read writer, and as much a cultural commentator as a writer of poems, Rudman has won some of the highest awards. His work, written in a seamless blend of verse and prose, the traditional and colloquial, documentary and personal, combines elements of biography, lyric, conversation, essay, and asides. Yet he remains, in the best sense, a poet’s poet, and it may well be the wide-ranging, discursive element of his poetic – which requires more than the brief investment of time allotted by so many readers – that has so far precluded his work from gaining the wider audience that it so richly deserves. This seems particularly true now, since Rudman’s control of the demotic and of the multiple themes of class, race, poverty, and privilege, has reinvigorated an art that often appears remote from public concerns and the polis. Here is a poet who confronts suffering, and is himself engaged in a poetic salvage operation through which he is able to transform anger (that which embittered his mother and caused his father to commit suicide) into energy. Rudman has evolved an autobiographical epic of surprising emotional and intellectual power. Surveying his output over the last decade, one gets the feeling that his achievement will soon garner wider recognition.

Rudman’s method has diverse antecedents. Denis Diderot and Edmond Jabès have been mentioned by reviewers before (and there is a short piece on Jabès in Diverse Voices, Rudman’s 1993 book of essays). Rudman’s mercurial, colloquial verse dialogue that crosses metaphysical boundaries recalls James Merrill; and the cinematic touches – voice over, concise director’s notes, asides, digressions – bring to mind the Pasolini of “A Desperate Vitality.” Dialogic verse that ranges from high diction to low dates from Dante, Shakespeare, and Whitman, but Rudman has also translated Euripides, and written adaptations (‘palimpsests’) of Horace and Ovid. He is acutely aware that to work in language is to work with freighted material, and has remarked that “the American poet is often deluded by the fantasy of not being weighed down with antiquity, of having an opportunity to encounter history anew without an overlay.” The classics are the model par excellence for reimagining the family and individual as the striated site of civic morality, and Rudman shares a talent for translation – and for the transposition of classical examples – with Frank Bidart and C.K. Williams, two elder contemporaries. The classics have also been formally rejuvenating for Rudman: “I found that modernism was implicit in Horace, with his sudden leaps, allusions, reversals, turnings, and complex use of form and sound based on Greek models [...] Horace’s sudden leaps to another plane were prophetic of catastrophe theory.” In an essay entitled “Catastrophe Practice” in his 1995 book of essays, Realm of Unknowing, Rudman appraises Nicholas Mosley’s writing as a strategy of fragments, intuitively sequential and capable of acknowledging the simultaneity and transhistoricity of subjective time. Rudman’s point is that Mosley’s style allows for a closer representation of how the mind works – sometimes stimulated to move ahead by the sudden shocks of catastrophe, other times immobilized by known limits, half-measures, the conditioning past. “Stammerers stammer because they can’t render what is in the mind – the larger picture, lost unity – in sequential speech. The stammerer has not repressed the awareness of how little of what comes out ‘for all its lovely cadences (perhaps because of them?)’ has to do with ‘what is going on in one’s head.’” Rudman’s writing similarly implodes chronological narrative; it is the record of an obsessive recapitulation of the past alongside attempts to live in the present. In “The Night,” an essay on Antonioni in Realm of Unknowing, Rudman defines the concept of duration as “moments of perception which take consciousness a long time to detail, to populate. Consciousness can never unravel all that it perceives happening in an instant.” The Rider quintet responds to such moments of limitless duration, which rise to consciousness in the poetry through fragmentary and elliptical narratives.

In Sundays on the Phone, the voices of the poems range from Anita O’Day to the local dentist to the members of Rudman’s immediate family; the voices of the departed mix with those still among us, to comic and harrowing effect. The speakers we hear most often are the poet’s stepfather, the poet himself, and the poet’s mother – whose complexity, and complexes, dominate the volume. Poems refer to one another, threads of conversation are taken up again, and dialogues don’t seem closed at book’s end – which is fitting, since Rudman’s project is to lay bare the subject’s self-fashioning. One could say that his subjects are the testing-ground for the health of the American body politic. And Rudman’s is a body politic saturated in the language of jazz and film. An epigraph to “Fragile Craft” in the quintet’s previous book, The Couple, quotes Michael Powell: “Cinema is the mythology of the twentieth century.” Rudman is an avowed ‘burrower’ – an obsessive collector of popular culture – and he has a knack for juxtaposing the armature of daily life with the mythological stories that typically pass for the ephemera of our imagination. For example, when Rudman leaves a notebook behind on a plane, it is salvaged from the deep by Aesacus the Diver (from Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XI, and reworked in the trio of Aesacus poems in the quintet’s second book, The Millennium Hotel), who then passes it on to Andromeda (Metamorphoses, Book IV, and “Perseus and Andromeda” in The Couple) – who in turn restores something of its contents to the author. The voices of this poem, “Sons and Lovers Recovered!,” which report what is retrieved from the notebook, belong to the notebook itself; to the ‘rider’ of the quintet’s first book – alternately prickly, empathetic, and discursive; and to Andromeda, who concludes the discussion by apprising Rudman of the multiple delusions attending his youthful obsession with Mary Ure. The notebook spoke of the poet’s mother taking him, at age 11, to see 'Sons and Lovers' – “a real / adult film, no one else’s mother in town like that would have taken their child to see...” – and, having completed the transmission of the notebook’s meditation with these lines:

I know it saddens you Mark to think how companionable
your mother had been and could be in light of
how she became and even though I am only
antimatter now—not even graph
paper—

it saddens me too!

You—who wrote on me in such a way that I felt wanted… …

Yours Truly,

Lost (Moleskin) Graph Paper Notebook

Andromeda writes:

PS

Dear Mark,

Let me clarify a few points. It was Ure’s strength you liked; it was only her blond hair and pale complexion that made you remember her as ethereal. It is not she who is fragile but the actor’s craft. It’s the same subliminal mistake Perseus made when he saw me chained to the rock and he watched the wind lash my hair across my face. But he was just a boy, like Paul Morel.

Do you know that the parts you like best in the film weren’t even in Lawrence’s novel?

Yours truly,

Andromeda

The finer memories the poet has of his childhood are just as suspect – and indelible – as his experience, as an eleven-year-old in 1960, of the film rendition of Sons and Lovers. As in the example above, Rudman’s poems often juxtapose the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’; voices and time frames recur over the course of the quintet, creating a vortex through which the reader follows the poet toward an eventual understanding, if not reconciliation. And despite the inclusive method of the quintet, Sundays on the Phone is akin to Rider, its bookend partner, in that it is paradoxically a work of remarkable focus and economy – the battle lines are sharply drawn, the speakers are precise, lines are brief and sentences pointed, and even poems of several pages’ length are works of concision.

Rudman’s probing of the relationship between mother and son is at the center of the book. Marjorie Louise Levy Leeds Harris Rudman Strome – one person – died in 1999. By the end of Sundays on the Phone, the reader can almost construct her biography, particularly as it is lived under the oppressive influence of male figures: her father, who scorned Marjorie’s artistic ambitions while cultivating those of her brother (the filmmaker Herbert Leeds); and her husbands, both alcoholics. Some of Rudman’s most powerful work has addressed his father – “rebarbative, even in death” (“Dreams of Cities,” in Realm of Unknowing) – and his stepfather, interlocutor from beyond, uncommon voice of sanity amidst family chaos, and the ‘rider’ of Rider. In Sundays on the Phone, we learn about Marjorie’s life in her own words or through overheard dialogues between mother and son. Rudman’s own son, Samuel, figures in these poems from the beginning; as Samuel matures into his teenage years, the poet’s empathy grows for his late father, mother, and stepfather, though his anguish does not diminish. On closing the book, we understand why “Back Stairwell” describes the poet, “the last of the parents / who don’t send a stand-in […] propelled by a kind of demon” as he runs up the synagogue stairs to pick up his son from day care; shortly thereafter, Samuel responds with “a look of sheer defiance” when his father tries to get him to hold onto the banister:

the same boy who, the other night
I watched shuffle and backpedal and nearly fall,

down the escalator, over
the rapids of the raw-toothed

edges of the blades;
his hands, his attention, occupied

by a rabbit samurai Ninja turtle
and Krang, the bodiless brain.

I gauged the dive I would need
to catch him if he fell:

a flat out floating horizontal grab
I couldn’t even have managed in my youth.

The daily terror of being a parent – of endlessly striving to give one’s own child the best of oneself – is all the more poignant for this poem’s position at the volume’s outset, as a deceptively casual sign of what follows.

At times – as announced in the frontispiece, “The Nowhere Water,” originally published in The Nowhere Steps (1990) – the relationship between mother and son is blissful and effortless; at others it is painful for everybody involved – mother, son, and then grandson. At the time of Sundays on the Phone, fifteen years after The Nowhere Steps, all of Rudman’s parent-figures are deceased. The struggle of living with (or on the phone with) his mother has ended, and it is as though he can see “Marjy, Left to Her Own Devices,” the title of one of the book’s prose pieces. An abruptly direct passage from that poem glosses the entire volume:

My point: she was younger than her years and, as every word written in this book attests, she was born too early (as well as in the wrong family) to have the choice to live a life in which she would have flourished, even if her temperament and sense of unwantedness was the same as it was. There are a lot of functioning, successful people who are not happy in their personal lives but they take satisfaction from their work. My mother “could have been” (for instance), to use a modest example, an art historian, transforming her encyclopedic knowledge into a vocation. She could have spent her days in a wish-come-true factory, surrounded by and immersed in images and objects from another time.

Following his mother’s death, there is clarity: Rudman is witness to the fall of a family, his mother’s brother dead by his own hand, and his mother consumed, eaten alive by anger because trapped in an unrewarding existence light years from how she envisioned life with a ‘Rabbi.’ Yet this clarity delivers the poet into an impasse, dark as those he has observed in others who have written of spiritual conversion; the volume’s final poem, “Conversion in Scafa,” finds him stuck deep in a wordless melancholy, unable to express himself without pain and collapse. But Rudman is heir to the skeptical pragmatism of the American diaspora; what redemption might be on offer, the poem implies, is here and within us, if we have the courage to observe carefully:

But this July in the rugged Abruzzo something stole my sleep.

In exhaustion, it all comes clear.


The stars so close to the ground.

The way, the way they appear, one by one.

No vasty, vertiginous blur.



The dry, ravaged air that molds
every rock and shrub and crevice and grotto,
every white house chiseled into the Apennine range.

Not that there is no secret to the universe,
but that the secret may not be one
we want to hear.

At the conclusion of Rider, the poet was “set free” by the empathy of a preacher and hospice worker, who came to love Rudman’s stepfather Sidney, ‘the little Rabbi,’ during their time together. At the end of Sundays on the Phone, equilibrium is restored in a renewed quest for metaphysical knowledge. The poems resist closure – and the quintet likewise – because they are the embodiment of a life lived according to the dictates of a persistently dialectical mind. For years, mother and son had spoken by phone on Sunday morning. Sunday no longer threatens with phone calls – but it wouldn’t be correct to say there’s no one on the other end of the line.

Review of Mark Rudman, Sundays on the Phone (Wesleyan UP, 2005), by Nick Benson, in Prairie Schooner 82:1 (Spring 2008).

Interview with Photographer David H. Wells

The photographer David Wells visited us (he travelled from Providence on his Suzuki) and gave a presentation & visited classes on April 15th. Ian has now finished viewing All The President's Men and transcribed the bulk of his discussion with David, which follows.

David Wells came to The Gunnery on April 15th and gave a presentation of his photographs. Mr. Wells was born in Albany, New York in 1956, and has a Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts from Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. He is a commercial photographer, photo-essayist, and photo-educator based in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has been published and shown in exhibitions around the world and he has received two Fullbright fellowships among several other prestigious grants.

Last things first: what advice would you give young aspiring photographers?

The answer is always the same. When I started out if you could expose film well and use a camera well you could get work, because not many people could do it. So as time went on people learned how to do black and white, so I started doing color and more and more sophisticated stuff because people couldn’t do it. The problem is digital has vaporized the whole craft question – anyone can do it. Then it becomes what is it that you can bring to it that no one else can. Is it style? For example, a lot of wedding photography is about relationships and portraits, and about customer service people liking you. If you’re doing food photography you have to be a great cook. If you’re doing nature photography you have to know your subject as well as you know photography. The photography part is completely sort of presumed. So the question is what do you do that somebody else doesn’t do that makes you different. And that is true of anything. Fashion, portraits, food, anything. So that’s the advice I’d give anybody: figure out what makes you different. If I was doing it again, I would study languages, simply because if there’s a hundred of us lined up and you speak Spanish or Chinese, you’ll get the job. I’d also maybe study anthropology or economics. Anything but photography really. The craft part isn’t want you should spend your four years in college on. Maybe spend it on language, anthropology, psychology, economics, political science, history, economics, maybe business so you know how to market yourself, but not on photography.

How’d you get involved with newspapers?

Well I was at a college, I had worked briefly in an art gallery and I abhorred it, I wanted to do something more stimulating. So I started rooting around to get a newspaper job. Back then – and I think this might still be true – newspapers were continually testing you to see if you’d screw up. I think the first newspaper job I ever got paid money for was to go down to the animal shelter to photograph a dog they were trying to adopt away. And if you could photograph a dog without screwing up, they give you another assignment and another assignment, continually testing you, and if you got to a certain point without screwing up they gave you a real job. That’s exactly how I started. Now it’s a bit more formal, you can get a degree in it.

What did you go to college to study?

History of photography. My mother wasn’t convinced; parents don’t generally look at photography as a career. So I studied history of photography and I learned a lot and a lot of what I talk about in all my classes – about how you look at a photograph and how your eye travels through a photograph and what makes a photograph work – all that came from studying history of photography. I apply that when I’m out taking photographs. I couldn’t have made a career out of it though, being a historian of photography, without going to graduate school, and I didn’t have the money at the time, so I became a photojournalist.

When did you first start taking pictures?

1972 in High school. I was failing French class in high school and I needed a class to transfer into. It was then called Industrial Arts; it’s Shop now. We did some photography in that and I didn’t really like the drilling holes, but when you put the paper in the chemical and the image pops up, I liked that. I had a very good teacher for it. I wasn’t very good at academic subjects so I did everything I could to hang out in the darkroom. He gave me a lot of leeway and I didn’t screw up, and one thing led to another and he ended up teaching me ninety percent of what I know. For me that was very pivotal.

Where do you think you’ll go next in your work?

I have no idea. The problem is it’s completely dependent on someone paying me. There’s no money coming in right now on future work, so I don’t know if it will go on hiatus or I’ll do it on my own. I’ve just started talking with a writer and I think we’re going to start focusing on Bangalore, where my wife’s family is from, and where most of the change you saw taking place in my photographs is happening.

I think we’ll do something on the changing urban landscape, the way Bangalore is being built and rebuilt is what we’ll focus on. If I can get funded I want to keep going on it. I’m also very interested in pursuing multimedia projects like the rickshaw piece that was shown during the slideshow.

[Thanks to David Wells for permission to reprint the photo above.]

Interview with Valzhyna Mort

The fantastic young Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, now a U.S. resident, came to The Gunnery this week and wowed an audience of writers, teachers, and students at a reading on the evening of Monday the 7th. Valzhyna Mort's new book, Factory of Tears, has just been published in a bilingual edition by Copper Canyon.

Ms. Mort had met Dylan Crittenden earlier in the day, and arranged for him to introduce her reading with a song.

Dylan Crittenden singing Im wunderschönen Monat Mai (Robert Schumann's setting of a poem by Heinrich Heine) at the reading (below).



















Ms. Mort embarked on her busy schedule leading writing workshops and visiting classes with the following interview with Ian Engelberger.

Ian: What’s your main inspiration when writing?

Mort: Everything. I cannot have one source of inspiration - if I had one source of inspiration it would be very easy for me to write, because I would just use and reuse such a wonderful source. But there’s no source. A wonderful Polish poet and Nobel laureate in poetry, Czeslaw Milosz, said that poets are the secretaries of the invisible. This is how I’d like to describe myself. I really sort of feel the same way.

I: How do you begin to write your poems?

M: I started when I was eighteen. I came to literature from a music background. I was studying to be a professional musician but then I quit because I was sixteen and stupid. I was looking for the music in my life because I really liked it and in school we began studying the Belarusian language, because I came from a Russian speaking family. The language was very musical, and that was sort of my way of writing music in a language. This is how I started writing poetry. I would have a melody and then put a language to that melody and write.

I: How do you edit the things you write?

M: When I started I didn’t do any editing. I won’t write the poem down till I have it complete in my head, so I carry it in my head and edit it. It’s very convenient for this musical purpose because what you do is you repeat many times; it becomes like chanting, and when the poem is complete I write it down. Right now it’s different because I live in the States and I live in a English speaking community, I don’t feed off the language that I write in anymore – now it’s more of a paper process, but I still try and do as much in my head as possible. When I write things down it looks finished it’s claimed by paper already it’s hard for me to go back and edit anything because it looks finished.

I: Do you think that your poems ever lose anything in translation?

M: I think that people are divided into those who believe in translations and those who don’t, and I am a big believer in translation. I started translating other people’s poetry before I had to translate my own. When I lived in Warsaw I was on a scholarship in translation I was translating a Polish poet into Belarusian. I do think that poems lose in translation but at the same time they gain a lot, things that might not have been in the original but come out in a foreign language, because this is how the language of poetry is different than everyday language. In the poetic language, behind every word there is the whole mythology of the culture, so when you translate it only the word goes through – the mythology stays, but then there’s the mythology of another culture that comes in and it breathes something new into the poems. I know that my translations are different from the original poems in many ways but in many ways it’s not about better or worse; they gain things that they didn’t have. I have poems for example that were written as very straight forward, non-metaphorical poems that when translated into English become full of metaphors just because of the change in language.

I: Who are some of your favorite poets?

M: I generally prefer to say that I don’t like poetry because there’s so much bad poetry. And I’m not a person who reads it and likes it just because it’s a poem. I have my demands too. So I don’t like poetry in general, but I like certain poems; and for me I don’t really distinguish between poetry and prose – you know I come from a culture growing up on Russian poetry, like Pushkin, and Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva. Those poets were read the way people here read short stories and novels. So for me it’s not about if it’s a poem or if it’s a novel or a piece of prose – it’s about the quality. I don’t know if it would be worth naming any names. I got into Polish poetry and I think this is my favorite poetry – the generation of the sixties and seventies in Poland – and they’re very popular here. They’re very well translated, I would say: Szymborska, Milosz, Zagajewski, Baranczak – he’s hard to translate because he plays with the language a lot. But still, he’s interesting.

I: So you mentioned that you were going to be a musician; what instrument did you play?

M: I started to be an accordionist. I think for over eight years.

I: So is there anything you could say to young aspiring poets?

M: Yes, I always say the same thing, what I was told many times: read, read, and read. The more you read the better it is for you. And read a lot of very good literature – don’t be afraid of big thick serious books. This will help you to raise your own demand of yourself. When you have doubts about a poem don’t think ‘I’m just seventeen years old’ – just ask yourself if Robert Frost wrote it, would he be okay with it? This is my approach.

Varanasi by Austin Ryer

“You know, you very much look like Elvis,” the old man said to me. I couldn’t hold back my surprise; being compared to Elvis was new to me. I was wearing aviator sunglasses and had long hair covering most of my face. I doubted this man could even tell what I looked like. But several times before Indians had called me Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks. Once I was even compared to Mel Gibson.

“Why, thank you very much,” I slurred, weakly attempting an Elvis impersonation. Of course he laughed, and went so far as to say I sounded like Elvis as well.
But I wasn’t fooled at this man’s Elvis banter; he was an intelligent observer. Sitting outside of my hotel in the city of Varanasi smoking a cigarette, he sat because he had nothing better to do. Roughly in his sixties, he was a large man with the stubble of a graying beard and dyed blond hair. His stained yellow teeth were interrupted by a gap where his two front teeth should be, and his nose was large enough to be almost swollen. He remained nameless to me, but I knew from our talk of theology that he was an aspiring Christian, who liked Jesus and thought he was a good man. From our talk of politics I knew he disagreed strongly with George Bush’s policies, and would be glad when a new president is elected in America. He claimed to have lived in Varanasi his whole life, and so had his father and grandfather, generation after generation. It was this last fact that led me to ask him what I and some friends should do while in Varanasi. In response he wrote down the name of a particular Ghat, and told us that was where we had to go.

It was not often that I found myself wandering into an unknown city looking for some location based solely on a stranger’s recommendation. However, earlier we had learned that “Ghats” were holy places on the Ganges where a tributary joined the river, and so we followed the old man’s advice. After lunch at a nearby Pizzahut, I and three others caught an auto-rickshaw and showed the driver the name of the Ghat; its pronunciation was way beyond any of our simple knowledge of Hindi. The driver gave us a price, but told us he couldn’t go the whole way because it was closed to vehicles; we would have to walk some of the way. More hesitant now, we still agreed, and entered the rickshaw.

The auto-rickshaw was three-wheeled and about the size of most refrigerators turned on end, shaped into a rounded V. In front was a t-shaped handlebar used on motorcycles, and a small bench seat for the driver. In back, as the vehicle widened, there was a larger bench seat meant for three passengers though I’ve seen many more than that in rickshaws. It had a roof and windshield, which offered some protection, though it had no doors or sides. I sat in front alongside the driver, though half of me stuck outside, narrowly missing passing traffic. Behind me, on the bench, were my three friends, Julia, Dan, and Will, each lost in their own thoughts. After riding through thick traffic for about fifteen minutes, the driver finally pulled to the side, and let us out.

We found ourselves on a main road, with a solid division between incoming and ongoing traffic. Periodically, a side road or alley broke the endless line of buildings on either side. Accompanied by hand gestures to augment his weak English, our driver had told us that to get to the Ghat we had to walk straight for a while and, after three somethings, turn left onto another road until we saw something tall, and then to maybe take a right.

Almost immediately lost, we stopped to ask a man sitting on a cart for directions.
“Excuse me sir, do you know how to get here?” we showed him the paper with the name of the Ghat on it.
“Uhh… no angles?...“ We assumed he meant that he didn’t speak English. Turning to leave, we heard him say something in Hindi to a man passing by. The man stopped, looked at us, and quickly introduced himself.
“Hello,” he said in barely accented English, “can I help you get somewhere?”
He was young, maybe in his early twenties, and wore a white long sleeved shirt with a purple sweater tied around his neck. Though he looked flamboyant, he also looked well off, dressed in western clothing. To us, this meant that he didn’t need our money, and therefore would probably not try to steal from us. That, as well as the fact that we were already far within the city and had no idea where we were, lead us to trust him; we were probably safer with him than on our own.

Raz lead us into what we later learned was old Varanasi. This section of the city is comprised of thin alleyways crowded with people, cows, and debris, overshadowed by high buildings on either side. This deep into the city, even shopkeepers were indifferent, and didn’t chase after us to sell their goods. In this area, everything was built for purpose. Beside countless silk and spice shops there were small restaurants serving chai to passing customers. Religious buildings lacked the grand archways and gates of other holy buildings. Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist temples blended into the city, with nothing other than occasional statues of deities separating them from the cafes and homes next to them. I do not know if we ever reached the Ghat the old man recommended, but we saw more. We saw an Indian city thousands of years old that still operated under the same principles as those of its founders and builders. We saw a life not prepared or watered down or expectant of foreign eyes. We saw life in this city as it simply was, with nothing to distract from the work that had to be done to survive.

Raz, like the old man at the hotel, had lived in Varanasi his whole life. However, Raz was different than most strangers we had met before. He was a perfect example of western culture intruding upon Indian traditions. As we walked, he asked us if we had seen a show aired on the BBC network a while back, because he had been in it. He knew perfect English and dressed in the western style, but as we learned later, Raz worked in a silk shop with his family, a small family owned business passed on for several generations, located in old Varanasi.
We asked him, “But why are you helping us? There must be somewhere else you could be besides showing us around the city?”
“Karma. This is good Karma, helping strangers, and it will help me in my next life. Besides, it’s my day off at work, why not show you around? It gives me something to do, yeah?”

We were not far into the city, however, when we were stopped. As we passed a police checkpoint, an officer called us over. He wore the standard tan uniform of the Indian police, and had a long brown rifle slung over his right shoulder. He was slightly overweight and wore a constant smirk, as if he enjoyed harassing foreigners like us, and did it often. He pulled Raz aside, but told us to go on. However, we were now in the city, and would be even more lost than when we were on the main road. Eventually we convinced the officer to let us go on our way, with Raz leading us. As we walked away, Raz thanked us.
“If you hadn’t helped, they would have kept me there for hours. They see sometimes Indians leading foreigners around the city, pretending to be tour guides and then charging very high prices later. The police are corrupt though, and would’ve demanded that I admit to being a guide or until I bribe them. Why should I say I’m something that I’m not? It’s not right, I will not lie. I have the right to go where I want, and help who I want.”

After the encounter with the police, we eventually reached the river, and came to a place none of us had expected Raz to bring us. We had reached a Crematorium. About 5000 years old, it was the oldest one in the city. We were introduced to a man known as the “Dhoon Raj,” or King of the Dhoons, the untouchables who worked at the crematoriums to break the bones of the burning deceased. Though an untouchable, part of the lowest caste in Indian culture, he was the richest man in the city, and well-educated. He explained how only men were allowed down by the pyres to watch the deceased be cremated, because women were too emotional.

He explained that, rather than the more economic electric crematoriums in the area, people preferred the wooden pyres because it was more traditional, more spiritual. He explained all of this, as well as much more, before Raz lead us away, back into the city.

Char Dukhan by Austin Ryer

We walked along a long road, winding through the hillside. On both sides massive pine trees, as well as other species, rose above the path, blocking out any light that broke through the clouds of the monsoon. The road itself was well maintained, and work was being done as we walked by, passing two-man shovel teams and trucks moving earth and gravel to fix the side of the road that had been washed away by the recent rains. Through the trees the opposing hillside was clearly visible, as well as the hillside beyond and the mountains beyond that. Even further were the snow peaks, mountains so high that even then, during the height of the monsoon season in August, snow was evenly spread along their crests. However, our view was quickly blocked by a passing fog, thick enough to hide everything beyond five meters. Nonetheless, we continued down the road.

After many minutes, the road, which before had wound through the hillside, straightened out. It led out onto a bridge, though we couldn’t see past it because of the fog. But as we crossed it lifted, giving us a clear view of the small town known as Char Dukhan.

Translated from Hindi, Char Dukhan means Four Stores, and it is just that. Spread in the shape of a triangle, it serves as an intersection between the road we walked and the road that goes to the Mussourie Bazaar. As it split and then met again, the road formed the arms of a triangle, with buildings on the outside. The inside was a small park, with several benches scattered around the gravel and a large tree in the middle, surrounded by a raised concrete circle to provide earth and serve as another seating place. The whole park was surrounded by a wrought iron fence with small gates to allow access. The purpose of this was to prevent vehicles from driving through the park and to prevent cows and other animals from entering and bothering the people within.

The road we walked was the main arm of the triangle, with the village alongside. Four stores, all small family-owned restaurants, stood along the road with tables and signs displaying the dishes that each one made. Though essentially they were all the same, we preferred the one at the farthest end, called the Tip Top Tea Shop. Bracketing the open space that served as an entrance were a plexiglass showcase and a small cook range. The former displayed goods such as candy, cigarettes, and hundreds of other unidentifiable Indian foods. The latter was a cooking surface, with only about four burners and as many pots and pans as were available. Despite the appearance, the meals served here could compete with the best of restaurants in both quality and price; a full order at Char Dukhan was usually about four American dollars. Further into the shop, the restaurant appeared to be a small food market. Local goods coexisted with Cheese-itz and Tropicana juices, because as small as the shop was, the owner imported from America. Outside were three tables next to the road, but often the food was eaten in the park under the trees, or even further inside the shop, where there were several more tables to escape the cold.

With nowhere to go, we took the long road leading back to a place known as the “Sister’s Bazaar.” On the ridge of the hill lay two roads that connect and later split, roughly forming an elongated “X”. The section where they connect is surrounded by low buildings painted a red-brown, which extend down the ridge for about the distance of a New York City block. The street is always quiet, but is often the place of a quick Cricket match. At random points the buildings separate, offering stairs down to small herb gardens or stone walls overlooking the hillside below and across the valley. The stillness and simple beauty of the Sister’s Bazaar always brought to mind some small town market street on the Mediterranean. On one side there is an antiques and clothing shop, and farther down is a food market, with a much greater selection of goods, both imported and not, then the Tip Top Tea Shop.

In one corner of the Sister’s Market lay several computers, though the internet was never working. After purchasing some Red Bull, Godiva chocolate, and Ritz crackers, we went out onto the street and sat on a stone wall, to watch the snow peaks disappear as the fog moved in once more.

Out on the street

Thanks for asking about us.
We're on leave until 3/24 or thereabouts.

The Boy Who Grew Up Too Fast, by Joe Mashburn, with illustrations by Jung Min Park

This is the account of a boy who thought that everything got easier as a person grew up. The unfortunate thing is that he lost sight of what really mattered: things that most people miss.

Lee was six years old. His daily routine consisted mainly of 1st grade and coming home to study his vocabulary words and then going outside to play in his backyard. His bedtime was eight, and on weekends it was nine.

However, life was not perfect. He didn’t have many friends at school because he was very shy. His best friend was his dog, whose name was Spike. Spike had lived with Lee since Lee was 2 years old. Spike was not a large dog and he was very timid. Spike liked Lee, but he liked anyone who gave him the occasional bite of food. Lee usually talked to Spike about life and school and his parents and things like that. Spike, being a dog, was a very good listener.

Lee also liked to take notice of small things, some of which the other kids took for granted. The grass appeared greener to Lee than it did to most kids. Colors in general were much brighter and clearer to Lee. What Lee felt was also greater than what the other kids felt.


One time, Lee jumped off a swing and when he reached the height of his jump, it felt like he would never fall. Everything melted away. When he looked down, all he could see were little ants, and the bright colors of trees and the red covered slide and the blue swing that he had just leapt from. It was the best feeling in the world to Lee, and he kept jumping off that same swing and getting the same feeling.

One day, the kids at school made fun of Lee. They picked on him because he did not want to go down the red slide. Lee was scared that he would get trapped inside and not be able to get out. When Lee got back home, his mother was teaching her students, as she was a piano teacher, and his dad was off in New York, but Lee had no idea what he did. His babysitter picked him up from school and took him home. She plopped him in front of the TV and started to read her magazine. All Lee wanted to do was talk to Spike. Slowly, Lee crept off into the other room where Spike was asleep on the couch. Lucky for Spike, it was Lee and not his mother, since she would have kicked him off the couch.


“The kids at school are not nice to me Spike. If I didn’t want to go down the slide, would you have made me?”
Spike’s response was to roll onto his back and sneeze.
“Of course you wouldn’t have. You’re much nicer than those kids at school. That slide was scary and dark, and you know how I don’t like the dark. See, if I were older, none of this would be a problem. Grown-ups have no problems with anything. You never hear them talk about how their friends pick on them, or how they can’t go down a covered slide because they’re scared. That’s because they aren’t scared, Spike. For some reason, they don’t think that the dark is scary. They can fix everything. It would be so much easier if I was older…”

At dinnertime, his mom took him out to eat a restaurant. She asked him how his day went at school and Lee avoided the question because he did not feel like explaining it to someone who would think it was an easy problem to fix. “Only Spike understands,” thought Lee. “Mom wouldn’t know what it is like.” This all took place on Friday, which meant that Lee’s bedtime was nine o’clock. Lee did not do anything between dinner and bedtime.


When bedtime came, Lee climbed into his bright orange dinosaur bedsheets quietly and listened to his mom read him a story. Before the story was done, Lee was asleep.

That night, something strange happened. Lee’s legs seemed to stretch, and his arms seemed to grow, and his stomach seemed to stretch. Everything changed on Lee while he was sleeping. His hair got longer, and he now had hair on his face. He woke up on Saturday to his mom telling him to get out of bed and go shave before he went to work. Lee was very confused by this, and got out of bed. As he turned around to make up his bed, he realized that his sheets were no longer the brilliant orange that they had been when he went to bed. They were very normal and very dry colors. In fact, his whole room had changed colors. Nothing struck Lee as being magnificent anymore. He was not surprised at how much color there was in his room. He looked outside, and the same thing had happened. The trees were now a boring color of green, as was the grass. Everything looked as though it was covered in a light smoke or something that was blocking the true color. The buildings that he saw out his window had even changed. They were not bright shades of white with the deepest of black shutters anymore. They were all copies of the same type. Even the birds that he used to hear every morning seemed to be further away. However, his mother was not, and she burst into his room screaming about how he needed to shave and go to work right away.

Lee, after a few mishaps with his razor, walked into what he used to know as a town. The birds still sounded far away, even though one was in the tree above him, and the colors still had a film of smoke over them. Lee was very confused. There was a chocolate shop up the street from where Lee lived and he had always said that he would like to work there. Lee guessed that this is where is mom meant, and he walked into the shop. The usual smell that came to his nose was gone. It was not fantastic anymore, or surprising. It just smelled… like a regular chocolate shop. They asked him if he needed anything, and Lee was so surprised that they did not tell him to get to work that he walked out of the store. He walked to the next drab building and walked in. This was the library. Lee always told himself never to get a job here, because he did not like that there were no interesting smells or colors or sounds in there. He walked in, and one of the ladies who worked there bustled over and asked him to fill the shelves in section C-2. Lee stared blankly at her and nodded. As she moved on to help a person looking for a book, Lee saw himself in a windowpane. He was very tall and very skinny. The blue eyes he had yesterday were now covered with the same smoky film that covered all the other colors in the world. They were now more of a grey, which made Lee very nervous. He liked his eyes, and colors in general, and wished that everything would go back to normal.

Before he could leave, however, he turned around and saw the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Now, he didn’t actually know she was beautiful. He couldn’t tell that for some reason, and the more he thought about it the more he fell away from the idea that she was beautiful.


But there was something about her, something magical almost. He went to talk to her, and realized that her eyes were completely green. There was no shade over them, and immediately he knew he was in love. Then he turned around and saw the blandness in the world.

Lee left the library and ran home. He thought since he had fallen asleep young and woken up older, that if he fell asleep again it might set him back to being young again. As he entered the house, his mom started to say something, but he held up his hand and ran into his room. He jumped in bed without even taking his clothes off and shut his eyes. He relaxed, and in fifteen minutes was asleep.

During his sleep, Lee changed locations completely. He woke up with a start and looked around him. He stood up out of bed and looked at his covers. “Oh-no” thought Lee, as he saw that his old dinosaur covers had been replaced by boring grey ones. He looked in the mirror and saw that he now had short black hair, and actual grey eyes, and grey everything. In fact, Lee looked around, and realized that everything was grey. He ran to the window, and all he could see was another window, which had grey curtains. He ran outside his room and ran to what he believed was the front door of his house. The girl with the green eyes was in his house with a ring around her finger. Her eyes were dull. Lee didn’t know what to do, since this was the girl who appeared to shrug all the effects of this horrible world off, and her eyes were grey. The door he found brought him to what looked like an alleyway, and he took a right and headed down the grey hallway. He found stairs at the end and ran down them, taking two at a time. He ran past two people who were walking their dog, which was grey, just like the people and the walls they were near. By now, Lee was getting nervous. He found a door that had a grey street behind it. He ran outside and was surrounded by the noise of nothing. All this time, Lee had not realized that he could not hear anything. There was a consistent buzz in his head that was fairly loud, but there were no birds, and there was nothing that reminded him of home.

When Lee went on the street, he saw something that terrified him. Surrounding him were giant buildings, so tall that planes would have to fly around them. The people who were near him were talking, but he could not hear them. They were all the same shade of grey as the buildings. They were talking very fast, and seemed to be in a rush to get somewhere. However, none of them seemed to be moving. They stood where they were, in a rush to get somewhere, but not actually going anywhere. Their outlines became blurry, and Lee could not tell where one started and the other ended. The world started to spin, and then there was nothing. Lee was floating in a huge amount of nothing. There was no noise, no color, and no smell.

Lee awoke with a start. He looked around him and was surprised to see vivid color. He looked at his bedsheets and realized they were his brilliant orange dinosaur bed sheets. He looked in the mirror on his door, and smiled when he saw his brilliant blue eyes. He jumped out of bed and ran to look outside. Overnight it had snowed, and the snow lay over everything equally. On the pine tree that covered his driveway, the occasional patch of brilliant green caught his eye, and then was gone, taken up by the brightest white Lee had ever seen. He went downstairs where he was sure he could smell pancakes being made. He was right! When he opened the door, his mom was standing in front of the griddle yelling at Spike to get off the couch. Spike was ignoring her. She turned and looked at Lee, and he realized that she had brilliant blue eyes also. Her robe was an astonished shade of red, and her hair reflected the light into millions of different patterns on the wall. Lee ran to find his favorite thing in the house: the crystal, which hung in one of the windows. When he found it, he stopped in his tracks. The blue and red and green and yellow that fell on the floor in patterns were the most astonishing things that he had ever seen. And they were all so alive and vibrant, he could hardly think of what to do next. He stared for a couple more seconds, then left to go tell Spike about his dream.

Now, some people say that there are different endings to this story. Some people will tell you that he talked with Spike for over three hours about his dream and how he thought that he never was supposed to grow up in the first place. Others will say that when he saw Spike, he realized for the first time that Spike actually was many different colors which combined to make him a beautiful peachy white, which Lee thought was the most gorgeous thing that he had ever seen. But I know what really happened. When Lee sat down to tell Spike about his dream, Spike leapt up and gave Lee a giant lick right on his face. Lee laughed and said to Spike: “You don’t really even need to know about my dream, do you? I bet you already know what happened!” and then laughed some more. Lee hugged Spike, and for a split second, Spike’s eyes changed from the deepest black to the bluest blue and in a flash, were black again.

Talking to Strangers by Jon Hartmann

Having spent less than a week in India, I began what would become a dangerous habit: riding trains hanging out of the open boarding gate door. When you blow your nose after riding in this way for a while, you find it is coated with the dust of spent coal belched out by the engine-car, and dirt off the train tracks. This is how I saw most of the Indian countryside, wind-in-hair and occasional pebble-kicked-up-in-face, with dusty shirts and blackened nostrils.

I think I first realized the unspoken consciousness of class that all people have at a train stop outside of Delhi. It was one of my first train rides in India, and I remember, as the train slowed down, being interested in the way people of this particular town had taken to growing pumpkins on top of their tarpaulin shacks. They let the vines curl around their tin walls, blackened by railway soot. And soon, at a total halt, the boarding platform appeared. It was an area of packed earth with a Hindi station sign and a tree. The tree itself was one of the sacred-fig trees planted at the stations across the Indian plains to provide shade. Sacred figs, the same variety as the Bodhi-tree that Buddha attained enlightenment under, are actually sacred to Hindus. They’re often the resting places of Hindu holy men, or Sadhus, who occasionally erect shrines around them. This tree’s keeper, orange-robed and turbaned, shot me a startling glance. It was piercing and unwavering. I knew it was because I was not Indian, and I appeared to be wealthy, yet I was riding in the manner of the poorest of India. Whether this was puzzling to him, or aggravating, I clearly saw the division in his eyes that would haunt my seven months in India.

There’s an unheralded class in Delhi that doesn’t appear to live anywhere in particular; they’re seen on highway service projects, sweeping streets, and selling chickens. When you stop your car in traffic, they’re there with a baby in arms and shattered teeth, asking for loose rupees. Sometimes the baby is dead. I was rummaging through a lower residential bazaar, and had finally come upon the source of its foul smell: a poultry slaughterhouse. I noticed its gutter in the ground at the entrance, the stream that bled avian fluid onto the sidewalks and alleyways of the bazaar. Clouds of flies reassured me that it was the foulest smell I had ever detected in my life. Near vomiting, I stumbled past several bazaar children, who were amused I had wandered so far into the slaughterhouse. Finding some fresher air, I watched them, matted hair and torn green cardigans, begin to kick an improvised cricket ball back home.

Their home was the square kilometer of packed clay earth between the railroad tracks and the slaughterhouse. It was dusted with chewing tobacco packets, and spent beedi cigarette stumps. At the height of the afternoon, the greater part of the community was languishing in the heat, seeking shade in their hodge-podge of shacks, made mostly of tin siding, tarp, mud, and the more salvageable parts of Delhi’s waste. Some families had a tire full of drinking water, or an outdoor bed, raised off the trash-covered and infestation-prone ground. The government had put up a stick fence around the entire lot to hide it. I sat for a while, and no one seemed to mind; it was as if they knew what I was thinking. They could exit the enclosure, but they could never leave. The children smiled.

Earlier that day, when I rode the train into Delhi, I sat in the open boarding gate with one of the train’s conductors. We were discussing railroad life and his home, when the train began to slow down as we pulled nearer to the station. We stopped in the thick of a slum. I at first was inapprehensive. Just beyond the tangle of power lines, I saw the tin roofs and blue tarps, bonfires, smelled the air of unrefrigerated meat and dairy. A group of children came skipping up the railroad tracks, matted hair and dusty clothing, homemade toys of electrical wire wheels and soup-can chassis. Immediately the leader of this group ran up to us and began shooting pictures with his small yellow camera. The situation quickly escalated as the conductor demanded they leave “Jao!” – but they didn’t leave. “Go f--- your sisters,” the conductor said in Hindi. The camera boy spat as the conductor closed the boarding gate door. The children skipped quickly back down into the sea of tin, as the conductor threatened to throw a piece of fruit from behind the tinted window.

I asked him “why did you do that?” He said “because they are salas, they are bastards and rascals.” I only hoped that the reason he had done that was because I was present, and that normally he would have even let them on the train. “May I have a tip?” he said. “I have no money with me,” I replied. It was true. I even showed him my empty wallet; he laughed.


* * *

The cicadas had just begun their evening chorus when a certain farmer discovered the reason I had been resting atop one of his trees for the past half hour or so. The time of course made no difference to him, as he did not have, and had potentially never seen a watch. His guard dog, mastiff-like and wearing a nail-studded collar to deter leopards, had pursued me and several other backpackers until we scaled the nearest trees. Laughing to himself slightly, he persuaded the dog to return to his yurt. I descended the tree, slipping on monsoon ferns and fungal growth. Half apologizing, he beckoned me and my two fellow hikers to follow him and the dog back to the yurt.

At that moment, I felt resistant, resistant to accompanying a total stranger, whose ferocious and completely obedient dog had just chased me up a tree. Ignoring my screaming western “practicality” or “common sense,” I followed him. We were soon sitting in the evening shade of his walnut tree, audience to the chorus of the cicadas and jungle crows. He shot me a searching look, and adjusting his wool hat, thought to give me a bag of walnuts. I smiled, and we both ate walnuts looking down into the Himalayan valley, sharing something unspoken or intangible, a knowing collision of two cultures in the wilderness. Realizing that walnuts are prized produce in the Himalayas, I made an effort to give him a small amount of money. Ten rupees, enough to buy his family a few kilograms of rice; he declined. I continued to insist and he said in Hindi “Because you give out of love, I cannot refuse.” His crumpled brow loosened, and he stuffed his hands into his grey kurta-pockets.

At the Baha’i Lotus-Temple in Delhi, out of respect, all visitors are expected to take off their shoes and tread barefoot on the woven mats that lead up to the temple’s entrance. I remember first seeing the temple, somewhat masked by the haze generated in Delhi’s own greenhouse-like atmosphere. It sits on a parched grass lawn, and is shaped like the traditional flower of Hindu and Buddhist iconography, twenty-seven interlocked petals emerging from a pool. I accompanied several Buddhist monks to the doorway, and stood back for a few moments watching them enter the base of the marble lotus. Looking out over the walkway, Asian tourists, Hindu holy-men, all backgrounds of Indians, and the occasional Westerner slowly pushed their way through the humidity to the temple entrance. Unaware that I was blocking the door, I was urged by a French backpacker, currently a Baha’i door-holder, to enter the temple.

I expected there to be some sort of ceremony or activity inside; however, there was nothing, nothing but the stone silence of several hundred people breathing. Never before had I encountered a congregation of people simply sitting, listening to silence, simply thinking. I sat on one of the few hundred wooden benches and stared three stories upward at the ceiling. The temple itself is surprisingly light for having so few windows. It seems to collect the sighs and soft murmurs of its occupants, bottling them into a collective and primal drone.

I was at first puzzled by the meaning of the temple, and my posture must have displayed this clearly as I walked back to the parking lot. Kicking a bit of trash up the road and trying to spit the dust out of my mouth, I passed a strip of bazaar that sells various religious goods such as marigold garlands and strings of peppers to ward off evil spirits. I spotted a Hindu holy-man sitting underneath one of the open air stalls, the dusty air just agitating his beard and dreadlocks out of their resting position. He was bare-chested, with eyes ablaze; our eyes met.

Several months later, I again found myself entering the home of a complete stranger. He was a Rajasthani folk artist, one of the precious few painters still using ground minerals and oil as watercolors. We sat for a while on his rooftop, looking out over the desert city Jaipur, drinking tea out of shot glasses. He said “I hope I’m not boring you.” I immediately responded “not at all,” looking out at the paper kites flying above the city. Every telephone wire in the city is wrapped in twine and kite skeletons. I was silent for a moment, looking at the swarms of people below us, flowing through the bazaar, the heavy traffic of rickshaws and greasy diesel trucks, the occasional cow demanding to cross the road. Moving to his studio, we discussed art for a while. The walls of his studio were covered in parchment, each bearing a famous scene from Hindu legend. The incarnations of Vishnu, the birth of Ganesh. He smiled, said “artists need to help other artists out,” and handed me a small package of water colors.

I came to rest by one of the small shrines interspersed throughout the twisting bazaar pathways. This particular one had been built up around a withered tree that was now coated with religious calendars, hundreds of spent incense stubs, and layers of sweet oils. The shrine bore the presently sooty and oiled image of Ganesh, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles. I sat for a moment looking up at the parched growth on the surrounding mountains, and back to the shrine, interested that no one had stolen the coins from the oil-filled offering bowl. I thought, “because you give out of love, I cannot refuse.”

[photos courtesy of Austin Ryer and Jon Hartmann]

Sasha Geerken, Arizona (2007)

The politics of translating

[The following is the text of Nick Benson’s presentation at ‘The Power and Politics of Translation,’ a panel discussion at the recent AWP (2/2/08); also on the panel were Natasha Sajé (Chair), Forrest Gander, Khaled Mattawa, James Kates, and Lisa Katz. Scroll down for text of the presentations by Lisa Katz and Forrest Gander in previous posts.]

As I was reading around lately with my mind on this panel, I came across this bit of text by Lawrence Venuti: “Translations position readers in domestic intelligibilities that are also ideological positions, ensembles of values, beliefs, and representations that further the interests of certain social groups over others.” As this quotation from Venuti’s The Scandals of Translation (NY: Routledge, 1998: 78) indicates, translation would seem to offer yet another rich site for polarizing debates. In this scenario, literary translators are just as good as anyone else at pushing the envelope, creating and toppling Babel, infringing upon and appropriating; they’re foreignisers or domesticators, academics or poeticizers, activists or originalists, and, just like everyone else, they give politics a bad name. Maybe this habit is somehow reassuringly familiar in its hard-wired, involuntary compulsiveness. Or maybe things aren’t quite as bad as all that, not ten years after Venuti wrote those remarks. One of the co-editors of Calque, the new literary journal that offers new translations each issue, closes the preface to the latest issue (Number 3, Nov. 2007) with these words: “This journal juxtaposes writers from distinct, even disparate literatures. Most are appearing for the first time in English. Others are being rewritten by translators with a critical vision different from that of their predecessors. The only aesthetic connecting them is one of multiplicity – in our case, a literature that loves adaptation, refraction, transgression. In translation, literature is always becoming something new. Calque hopes to illustrate this process.” I mention this editorial statement by Steve Dolph because it’s one of the latest signs that ‘the politics of translation’ − with its suggestion of competing camps, tribal boundaries, binary oppositions – looks in fact like a healthy body politic: that out there, among the publishers, the binaries or poles of literary translation are deliberately being given space to coexist, rather than being thought of as mutually exclusive.

Translators are well aware – maybe all too aware − of the fraught nature of their endeavor, and their prose (intro, afterword) is often marked by a startling and even embarrassingly frank discussion of merits, and a disavowal of grand ambition that is singular in the world of letters. Translators strike me as similar to anthropologists in their deep knowledge of their own hubris, with a sometimes paralyzing recognition of how context dictates worth and credibility. I like this statement by Ronald Knox, English translator of the classics, writing fifty-plus years ago: “The translator must do his best by using the speech that comes natural to him, fortified a little by those good old English words which are out of favour, but not obsolete. His style must be his own, his rhetoric and his emphasis must be that of his original. And always, at the back of his mind, he must imagine that he is the original. Can he hope, in any case, that his version will live? At least, if he does his work well, he will have the comfort of being pirated by his successors” (“On English Translation,” New England Review 25:1-2 [2004]: 112-25; 124). So, translators realize that their endeavor lives – for now. They know that it is in fact a wonder that their effort appears in your hands at all (more about this later).

When it comes to politics, though at times it would seem that translators are uniquely empowered, in fact there aren’t many with less power than translators, and (surprise) I’m disposed to think well of them. My mother was a translator in the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow when I was a kid. Maybe my next-generational move toward literary translation is a logical evolutionary step: in a way, it’s an appropriation of agency, since I decide what I’ll translate, and whether it will be read at all.
So much for the political power of the literary translator.

Staying with this admittedly reductive point of view for the time being, one might ask whether the literary translator in fact gains some advantage from his marginal status. A review in the pages of the New York Times Book Review recently opened with some comments on the marginality of poetry in the States being to its poets’ advantage, since this marginality has ostensibly helped poets listen to themselves and to preserve their independence and originality. You could easily make the argument that such a statement in the New York Times constitutes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a case of the market dictating certain parameters. Maybe the point the reviewer was making about poets is better made about literary translators, all the more poignant since they weren’t even mentioned; let’s assume that their marginality is to their advantage, since their independence allows them to choose projects without concern for the marketplace. It sounds good, but anyone who has tried to publish work in translation knows that this unfettered independence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Although I don’t want anyone else to decide what to translate for me, I invite influence as a matter of course; Attilio Bertolucci was a suggestion by my Master’s advisor, and Palazzeschi was suggested to me by a publisher in the States. Even with these prompts or leads, my story of having gone through a dozen or so publishers before finding Parlor Press and their new poetry series, Free Verse, is not at all unusual. Along the way I received some very nice rejection letters – really! Looking back, it seems to me now that I needed the encouragement contained in a couple of those letters to keep on going. Still, I doubt I would have sent the manuscript to another press, if Parlor Press hadn’t taken it. I had resolved to move onto a new project and to spend that sort of psychic energy elsewhere. The translator needs patience, pragmatism, persistence − and computer skills, or the help of a magnanimous friend. The whole process, though, constitutes a kind of training wherein the translator refines his concept of what he’s doing. It forces one to create a kind of mission statement for the work of translation and the specific project. So right now I’m translating Aldo Palazzeschi’s book from 1910, L’incendiario (The Arsonist), a work originally published by F.T. Marinetti and the volume in which Palazzeschi uses onomatopoeia, slang, dialogue, and an apparently reckless free verse style to deflate the exaggerated self-regard of Italian poetry. I owe the NEA profound thanks for helping to support this work; it may not be easy to find an interested publisher, as a writer of the avant-garde a hundred years ago is more than likely still a writer of the avant-garde today.

My goal in this translation of Palazzeschi that I’m doing isn’t that unusual. In spite of the wide array of rhetoric used to describe and defend translations, it seems to me that all literary translations are attempts to come as close as possible, in the target language, to the same rapture/rupture that the original effected in its own time in its own language. It’s not entirely possible, there’s something curatorial in it, but there it is. I’d hypothesize that it is the rare literary translation these days that ‘gets in the way of’ or radically departs from the original − and those that do announce and explain their strategy in an introduction to their translation. And only in the rare case does the reader have to guess what the translator’s intention was, because there’s a sort of textual confession-box otherwise known as the ‘translator’s introduction,’ or sometimes an afterword, in which the translator recounts any exceptional translation problems and (provisional) solutions. (Of course, sometimes the problems win; only in rare cases does one hear why, but a happy exception is Dick Davis’s essay “On Not Translating Hafez” in NER 25:1-2 [2004]: 310-18. To read on this subject: the new book by Emily Apter, The Translation Zone).

It must have been the perfection of the device of translator’s intro, or perhaps its easy availability, that shamed or intimidated me into failing to construct much of a defense of my own translation of Bertolucci (Winter Journey, Parlor Press, 2005). I thought that some readers would be knowledgeable in both languages and would let me know where I strayed from the right road, if my effort was decent enough to warrant comment when I had erred. In fact there have been a few insightful and instructive pieces of advice to put to use in a revision, if it happens. Anyway, I thought it was more important at the time to emphasize Bertolucci’s connections to Italian and world literature than to justify my translation choices, and I think such an effort by a translator is always appreciated by readers (a book of poetry in translation with a skimpy introduction always seems a bit disappointing).

I like a fairly commodious idea of translation as a scrolling work in progress, in which the scroll is the space of the mejdan, the piazza, or maybe the Corso in which one feels free to go forth and back continuously refining and revising, enjoying the paradoxically public confidences of the streets. In his essay “Spacey Rooms: A Note on Translating ‘Lamentation on Ur,’” Tom Sleigh remarks that “If we think of ourselves as language islands in an archipelago that is all the languages of the world, and of the sea surrounding us as the universal drive toward language – what certain linguists call ‘deep structure’ – then translation is the attempt to experience that structure through the alienating medium, the at first incomprehensible strangeness, of another tongue” (Interview with a Ghost. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2006: 64). So the notion of translation as an open society is an appealing one, and it works across time as well as space; later in the essay just cited, Sleigh explains that translation is a sort of triple threat: it is an alienation machine, time machine, and projection machine (72). As I was thinking about this, Borges reminded me – I was listening to a CD of one of his Norton Lectures – that the word ‘threat’ originally meant ‘an angry mob’ (Borges cites the example of its use in the first lines of Beowulf). So now, behind each individual translation project, I see an impatient mob of translation projects. But I also see the December ’07 issue of Harper’s, in which there are excerpts from an essay by Auden, translated from the French by Richard Howard (“The Mental Kitchen” in 'Readings,' pp. 19-22; since published by Princeton UP in The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume III, 1949-1955). We only have this essay by Auden due to the fact that it was translated into French and published by a journal in France, since there’s no trace left of its English original. This is just one recent instance of translation matter-of-factly yet magically transcending the limits of language and time, if not politics, lent greater poignancy by the essay’s title: “De Droit et de Gauche” – ‘Of The Right and The Left.’

I’ll close with some words of incitement from Eliot Weinberger, from his essay “Mislaid in Translation”; he was making the point that translation allows new voices to be heard and allows new writing to happen. “Translation is not a means for allowing the foreign to speak. The foreign has already spoken, they don’t need us. But we need them, if we are not to end up repeating the same things to ourselves. Translation is one of the ways that lets us listen. It expands the range of possibilities of what we, right now, can hear. From listening, we learn to speak. Translation expands what we can write. Which in turn expands what we can hear. Translation is a necessity, not an accessory” (‘Mislaid in Translation’ (1993), Written Reaction, 160-167; 167). Have these words been heeded? Have publishers recognized this necessity? Judging by the exhibits in the Book Fair at the AWP, the answer would appear to be a resounding ‘Yes.’ And yet consider that it is only a generous estimate that 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation (as reported by the University of Rochester’s journal 3%, among other sources).

Survey
A quick & partial survey of necessary (re)discoveries in twentieth-century Italian poetry: Giorgio Orelli is an Italian poet from the Canton Ticino, Switzerland, born in 1921, whose work I’ve only seen in old anthologies in the States. Valerio Magrelli is widely considered one of the most important Italian poets writing now; worth seeking out is the outstanding Anthony Molino translation, The Contagion of Matter (Holmes & Meier, 2000). Molino is also the translator of the poet Lucio Mariani, whose work is very well represented in the selected poems, Echoes of Memory (Wesleyan UP, 2003). As far as I know, still to have volumes translated are the intriguing writers Cesare Vivaldi (b. 1925; wrote mostly in Ligurian dialect) and Giancarlo Marmori (b. 1926, also Ligurian). Recommended reading: recent translations of Vittorio Sereni by Peter Robinson and Marcus Perryman; of Luciano Erba by Peter Robinson; of Andrea Zanzotto, edited by Patrick Barron; and of Antonia Pozzi by Lawrence Venuti. I'm hunting for a copy of Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti’s translation of War Variations, a 1964 volume of poetry by Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996), published by Sun & Moon in 1995, as well as her volume Sleep: Poems in English (1953-1966). Silvia Bre won last year’s Viareggio Prize for her third volume of poetry, entitled Marmo (Marble), a volume of superbly controlled intensity. In the ‘90s, Sun & Moon Press turned out two bilingual anthologies of twentieth-century Italian poetry, I novissimi: Poetry for the Sixties and The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975, both of which should be sought out. And Geoffrey Brock, the translator of Disaffections, an essential collection of Cesare Pavese’s poetry, is currently assembling an anthology of twentieth-century Italian poetry.

Ian Engelberger, 'We the children'
(2007)

Falling by Josh Johnston

I am falling. There is nothing below me. My stomach, formerly in knots, is now completely… gone. There is nothing inside me. Yet I feel okay. Will I ever be fine? Nevermore. Will I ever laugh or joke, or see those eyes again? Yes. And I will be thankful. I will learn to be propitious. To be the best I can be. Why? Here is my story:

I see a face. I cannot make out any features of it. All I know from the knowledge of a face is that there should be a nose, two eyes, and a smile, the feeling of absolute loveliness. But there are no eyes. Just tears. Tears falling from two empty holes. I see right through them. Behind the holes is no brain, but thoughts. Thoughts of memories, of fantasies, of one's deepest darkest most undisclosed secrets. Quite possibly the moral dilemma, or the ethical choices. And for certain, the thought of me. The smile is replaced, not with a mouth, but just a throat. From that throat emerges sound, but not of regular voice. A wailing, a whining cry that seems to resonate all around me. I slowly crouch to the ground, and curl up into a ball. I hear nothing but wailing, and sobbing. The tears pour around me, engulfing me in a salty water pond. The nose is expelling sniffles and snorts of stifled crying. My own ears pound with this sonic boom. I suddenly hear I’m sorry. I’M SORRY! And I suddenly realize it is not this face that should be sorry. It is I. I left myself open. I opened my heart – and I never closed it. I am still falling.

Still looking up at blackness, looking down at that floor that never seems to be drawing nearer. I try to feel my stomach again, and I place my hand around my stomach – or where I thought my hand should be. Placed on my non-existent entrails, I don’t even see my own hand. I see the black and white outline of where a hand should be. Without being resolved, I am disappearing. Scared, I start to cry out, slowly I begin to panic. What has happened? And then the face in full appears. And my epiphany: that face will always be there, whether I see it or not. Will the cause of my loss always be? Never. For never in the world can it happen that a force stronger than mine would present itself. I am too good. I am the one. I believe it, but I drew myself in a little too much. My weakness. I will never have it again. But I will have something greater – the face. Just the face, always there – and now, it is a face, not a figure with holes. The holes have been filled up, and the eyes present a greenish glint that reflects my own eyes. I am clean-shaven, and the face smiles. Perfect teeth, and a beauteous smile, the nose is center, and non-expelling now. I begin to slow my fall, because for some reason, I can still see past the eyes. I can still see into the space where a brain should be. I see the thoughts, the joy, the secrets, and the shame. It is here that I stop falling – stop right in midair, and look around. There is the face again, and again, all around me. Not just a face, but a body and clothes to accompany it. And a personality, unlike any other I know. Things are okay, I say to myself… Things are going to be okay.

Will I ever forget the fall? Never. For as I fall, the most vulnerable I’ve ever been, and as I think, harder than I ever have, I realize that the fall was the first changing point in my life. I realize that I must step past obstacles, and hold my head up high. I know at this point – and it is at this point that the ground appears below me – that if I ever need that face, if I ever feel down, or in despondency, I can just ask for that face, for that smile, and the rest of her. I will be okay, and as I take my first step, again, I feel brand new. Nothing is forgotten, but everything is much clearer. I have learned that nothing is forever, and that what I had, before my fall, which is another story, is something so powerful, that the consequences must have impacted me beyond my wildest and most naïve thoughts.

I start off at a brisk walk, into the darkness, with my most loyal, my best friend, this face, behind me: my guardian angel, watching over me, forever.