Rhetorics as Raw Material: On the Complex Work of Daniel Borzutzky

At Jacket2, Kristin Dykstra writes about both the translation and creative work of Daniel Borzutzky, and how the two modes interrelate as she reads across his oeuvre, focusing on Borzutzky’s 2015 collection Memories of My Overdevelopment, categorized by its publisher, Kenning Editions, as “nonfiction.”

This way depends on their shared grounds of a hemispheric expanse defined around rhetorics of neoliberalism and resistance, which Borzutzky has been conceptualizing in increasingly focused texts. His gradual construction of a specific hemispheric span for his writing – a span where Latin American expression intersects with that of the US, in translation/poetry worlds – uses those rhetorics as raw material.

As a result, it’s increasingly possible to read Borzutzky’s oeuvre as an extended investigation of life under rampant corporatization and the bureaucracies it attempts to consume. His intonations serve up the new inter-American epic — or anti-epic? — in the age of neoliberalism.

Later, Dykstra expands this influence:

As critic Michael Dowdy outlines in a book-length study of US Latino/a literature, different notions of how to define "freedom" accompany the rise of neoliberalism. For its promotors,

neoliberal theory aims to maximize freedom by reducing citizenship to a rational choice model of atomized, possessive individualism. This conception ties all valences of freedom to the market, dismantles collective forms of organization and ownership, converts states into servants to capital, guts social safety nets and the public sphere, and relentlessly commodifies culture, including modes of resistance. (9)

Neoliberalism translates.

And so does resistance to its modalities, though its complications merit time and attention (resources increasingly scarce). Poetic resistance has included writers who "model freedom as a relational concept rooted in diachronic place-based cultural practices and constituted interpersonally rather than held individually" (Dowdy 9).

Borzutzky's explorations, in which the translator exists as fulcrum, a single small-scale point for relations from which larger motions and visions emerge, offer vivid examples of how such cultural work continues to unfurl.

Chile, one of the famous testing sites for neoliberalism after its 1973 coup d’etat, permeates and restructures Borzutzky’s contemporary northern city. Remember and historicize neoliberalism’s storied Chicagoan origins and its initial export to Chile. But Borzutzky's latest writings emphasize a more recent vector of influence. The Chilean boomerang has returned.

Read it all at Jacket2.