I will come out and say it. I’ve been thinking about you constantly. Please don’t tell anyone about this. This is just between me and you, OK? I’ve been meaning to say this for a very long time, for an eternity, actually. I want you. I mean, I want you to want me. Please don’t laugh at my insolence and desperation. I can see you giggling already. Even across time zones, I can hear you howling. Is my nudity so ridiculous? I cannot keep this terse and cute, sweetie. I must go on babbling because “Orders are always short and brief, and every master is monosyllabic to his slaves, whereas supplications and lamentations are lengthy,” so wrote Demetrius.

As haughty slaves, poets are no strangers to supplications and lamentations, since they must bow, defer, accede and give in constantly, they must 1) Refer for judgment or consideration 2) Put before 3) Yield to the control of another 4) Hand over formally 5) Refer to another person for decision or judgment 6) Yield to another's wish or opinion 7) Accept or undergo, often unwillingly 8) Make an application as for a job or funding 9) Make over as a return 10) Accept as inevitable. It sucks to submit, I know, and I've been on both ends of these undignified transactions. More than a decade ago, I received a letter from one miffed submitter [click on image to enlarge]:

The best way to criticize an imperfect translator is not to shoot, then bury him in a picturesque forest, but to do a better translation. Doing this, you'll make the flawed, offensive translation, which you've sucked on and tweaked only slightly, disappear forever from the face of this earth.

The many resistances in the source poem force the translator to compensate and invent, enriching the language he is translating into.

Vietnamese poet/critic Trịnh Thanh Thủy: “Influenced by the peculiarities of foreign languages and cultures, Vietnamese texts written overseas do not lose their strengths but gain new dimensions through awakened, previously latent capabilities.”

In both cases, you have one culture or language trying to accommodate another. This meeting point, this border, this collision of avant-gardes, is where the new, improvised and unexpected can happen.

I’m not a translator so much as a tightrope walker between two unreliable dictionaries.

It's not entirely true that translation is just thin jism on a moonless night, eggdrop soup minus the egg, or a thin man chasing a fat man's shadow.

My apartment in Philadelphia is three blocks from Geno's Steaks, famous for the sign, "This is America, when ordering speak English." The owner of Geno's, Joey Vento, is a little guy with a big attitude. (Vento is Italian for "wind," by the way.) Joey has a Hummer and several Harleys, which he displays in a store front with his confederate flag, Elvis figurine and a Frankenstein manakin wearing a T-shirt that says, "I'm an American, so I order in English." Geno's is a tourist magnet, so it attracts plenty of foreigners, but the sign makes little sense, since what language would anyone order in but English? Of the roughly 6,900 languages in the world, hundreds are endangered, with one disappearing every two weeks. Approximately 600 became extinct in the last century. English is not threatened, obviously. It is the most dominant and ubiquitous language ever, more than Latin, French or Spanish, so there's no need to harass anyone into learning it. People worldwide are already hounded and seduced into memorizing, at the very least, "Yes. No. Thank you. Sexy. Excuse me. I'm sorry." Conversely, Americans overseas seldom bother to order their foods and drinks in anything but English. Just across the street from Geno's is Pat's, the original Philly cheesesteak joint and Geno's rival. Its slogan: "Don't order a misteak." Unlike Vento, Pat Francona is lowkey, a Democrat, like most folks in Philadelphia, and even a multiculturalist, "We serve everyone here. It doesn't matter if you speak English or any language. If you need help getting through a cheesesteak order, we'll help you. This is a multicultural neighborhood now. We have a range of different people now. We have to teach them. We can teach them to say cheesesteak."

"Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his soul's salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native village, and perhaps do both."--Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book 3, Chapter 6, as translated by Constance Garnett

Poets are also hoarders of impressions, of course. Most are nothing but. Speaking of peasants, I want to point out that the Vietnamese language, especially the truly native words not borrowed from the Chinese, somewhat equivalent to pre-Norman English, is very much grounded in the body with its pleasures and horrors, as I try to explain in this flash assay:

The word mình, body, has wide application in Vietnamese. It is sometimes used as a first person pronoun, as in “body has lived here for a long time,” or “body does not know him.” Body is I. It is also we or us. As in: “Body eat rice; they eat bread.” Body is also used to address one’s spouse. As in: “Body, what would you like to eat today?”

A motorist is pulled over by a policeman, “You ignored that stop sign.” “But I slowed down!”, the driver protests. Hearing this, the cop starts whacking the driver with a night stick while intoning, “Do you want me to stop, or do you want me to slow down?”

Poems are like musical scores, their notations to be read the same way each time by each reader, with each linebreak acknowledged with a pause. Is that too much to ask?

William Carlos Williams read his “Between Walls” three different ways on Pennsound, here, here and here (MP3s). Yusef Komunyakaa is another habitual offender of the linebreak injunction. Enjamb, yes, but don’t slur, OK?

A few years ago, I found myself strolling down a narrow, car-free street in Bury Saint Edmunds, a gorgeous little town in Suffolk, England. Admiring its houses’ irregular roof line, I realized that although the human mind needs patterns to orient itself, it’s also thrilled by the sabotage of these patterns, that the coexistence of order and chaos lies at the heart of the aesthetic experience.

Ironically enough, given the topic of my last post, I have been sidelined from this blog for a while because I've been painfully sick wth what my oncologist thinks (but doesn't know) are new chemotherapy side effects. But I am better now, and I am back. Happy reading.

Politics, history, biography all inform and sometimes even deform art (style can be seen in one sense as the scar history leaves on art, what Adorno calls a hardening against the pressure of suffering), but they enter into art as artistic materials, and are transformed within it. And art speaks back to these things; it is not merely subject to them. To treat art as a social or economic or historical epiphenomenon is to strip it of its identity as art, and of its liberatory potential. This is why I am an adherent of what Adorno calls immanent critique.

In a recent post, Daisy Fried discussed the deflational aspect of standard journalese, how it flattens all horrors big and small into an efficient monotone. Newspaper lingo as tranquilizer. But there’s also yellow journalism, which is sensationalism for the lower class. (This term originates from the Yellow Kid, the first comics character.)