An Exercise in Autonomy: Hugo García Manríquez on Translation

I first met Hugo García Manríquez in 2019 at Casa Tomada, an independent bookstore and cultural space located in the la Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. Hugo, who is originally from Camargo, Chihuahua, and currently lives in Oakland, California, was in town to give a reading in celebration of two recent publications: his translation of George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, as well as a chapbook, Lo común. As a doctoral student writing my dissertation on documentary poetry, I’d been a longtime fan of García Manríquez’s ANTI-HUMBOLDT: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a bilingual erasure of the North American Free Trade Agreement published binationally by Litmus Press and Matadero Ediciones. I’d recently returned to ANTI-HUMBOLDT as a participant in one of Casa Tomada’s excellent short courses, “Herramientas de escritura ante la catástrofe” [Tools for Writing in the Face of Catastrophe], taught by Guillermo Espinosa Estrada. The night of Hugo’s reading, a pre-pandemic affair, Casa Tomada’s small foyer was packed to capacity. The book table was crowded and the copies of Lo común were limited. Before the reading had even begun, several people had purchased their copies of the small blue pamphlet, placing them on seats as placeholders. After securing my own copy, I managed to snag one of the few remaining folding chairs, where I found myself surrounded by the phrase “LA POESÍA ES PARTE DOCUMENTAL PARTE INFERNO” [POETRY IS PART DOCUMENTARY PART INFERNO]. Printed on the back cover of Lo común, the line had me flipping back and forth through the thin little volume, trying to find the page on which it appeared. I was fascinated by the association of “documentary” with “inferno,” the implied critique of the type of poetry I had been immersed in writing about for several years. Sitting there, skimming the slim pamphlet for the first time, I knew that I wanted to translate Lo común. After the reading—which was, of course, fantastic—I got up the nerve to ask Hugo if he was interested. In many ways this moment marked the beginning of the conversation below.

Over the past two years, I’ve been in regular dialogue with Hugo as part of the process of co-translating Lo común alongside my colleagues and dear friends Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz. Together, Zane, Gero, and I make up the translation collective “NAFTA” (North American Free Translation Agreement/North American Fraught Translation Argument). The name, itself a joke, is in part a reflection of our national affiliations (one of each a citizen of Canada, Mexico, and the United States), and of the neoliberal geopolitical circuits we find ourselves enmeshed within: none of us currently resides in our nation of origin; none of us is naturalized within our nation of residence. But the acronym is also, in part, an homage to Hugo’s first book published in the United States, which each of us admire and have been engaged with, in different and at times overlapping ways, as part of our shared research interests in hemispheric poetry of the Americas. Taking on Lo común as our first project seemed natural; when Hugo gave us the go-ahead to start translating, our translation collective effectively came into being.

One of the most interesting aspects of the process has been translating someone who is a prolific translator. Along with Oppen, Hugo has translated a number of Anglophone writers into Spanish, including Williams Carlos Williams, Clayton Eshleman, Charles Bernstein, and, most recently, Sean Bonney. In translating my portions of Lo común, I found that it became difficult at times for me to differentiate Hugo’s voice from Hugo’s Oppen: De ser numerosos and Lo común entered into my life simultaneously that night, so long ago it now seems, at Casa Tomada. My tendency to collapse the two voices was the genesis of one particularly “fraught translation argument” among my co-translators, and it incited me to begin a longer, ongoing dialogue with Hugo about his work. The following exchange, about poetry and translation and poetry in translation, emerges out of and ends in Lo común, with all that’s in-between representing a kind of abridged version of interrelated discussions Hugo and I have had over the past two years over WhatsApp, email, Zoom, Google Drive documents, and, inevitably, Twitter. One thread in particular, in fact, served as the impetus of this particular dialogue. In July 2021, following the publication of his selection and translation of Bonney’s poetry and essays, Hugo shared “a few notes about translation.” The series of tweets, originally posted in Spanish, struck me then, as it does now, as an impressively brief and, moreover, compelling theory of translation as praxis. My goal in initiating a follow-up conversation with Hugo was two-fold: to give form to ideas originally articulated in 280 characters or less and to bring them into English.
—Whitney DeVos

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Translated from the Spanish by Whitney DeVos

Whitney DeVos: You recently tweeted that “Translating is, above all else, an exercise in autonomy.” Could you explain a bit about what you mean by autonomy in this context?

Hugo García Manríquez: What I had in mind when I wrote that were young translators in Mexico, which is where I grew up and “became” a writer. It seems to me that, even today, in Latin America, there’s still a situation of almost neocolonial dependency when it comes to editing and publishing. This is a well-known aspect of the global market: certain countries can publish a great volume of work, including translations, while other countries consume these publications. Taking a more historical perspective, despite the fact that there was a great epoch of translation in Mexico (I’m thinking around the middle of the twentieth century), the pendulum has swung so that we find ourselves in a moment of being largely dependent on what is published elsewhere, mainly in Spain. But there are more and more independent outlets in Mexico and other countries, which is a great sign. To a large extent, though, Mexico continues to be dependent on which books and authors are translated first in other countries. It’s great that books make it to us from other places, but it’s also key to break the cultural and intellectual dependency, which seems to me a very basic requirement for a thriving literary scene anywhere.

Translation requires autonomy from the moment you begin, even (or even especially) without the promise of publication. Actually, I wholeheartedly recommend translating without thinking about publication up front. This might not make sense to a lot of people, but it’s how I’ve worked in the past. To do the opposite, to find funding and only then begin, makes little sense to me; it allows exterior forces to get in the way of the unique relationship that you, as a translator, need to establish with the work.

I’m also talking about autonomy within a greater collective readership by translating to get a particular author’s material to circulate more widely. Said differently, if you read something and get the urge to translate it to share the work with other readers, do it. Don’t expect that someone else will. Of course, there are any number of translators at work in the world, and they publish lots of books each year. But don’t expect them to feel moved to translate that particular text which interests you. Start translating it yourself now.

WD: And what would you say to people who are concerned about their limited abilities as a translator, that is, their level of proficiency in the “target language”?

HGM: I learned English, in part, by translating the poetry of William Carlos Williams, working slowly for several years through his book—perhaps his most radical book, in terms of form—Paterson. I never formally studied English, apart from the basics in middle school, and then, years later, a course or two as an undergraduate. In any case, limitations are real. But then again we have someone like Jack Spicer, who wrote After Lorca precisely by working out an enigmatic poetics of translation—turning all limitations inside out. I should say right away, however, that translating a massive book like Paterson would have never been possible without the support of my partner, who would always read my drafts, answer my endless questions, and make invaluable suggestions. Having this collaboration was crucial for me: it meant a double welcome, a welcome into Williams’s poetry, and also, in a way, into this language.

The questions never go away when you’re working with a different language. The moment at which the translator is “completely ready” doesn’t exist. I’ll always remember this moment during an appointment with a doctor (who, like me, was an immigrant) when he asked me what I was studying. “A master’s degree in English,” I said, and he immediately pointed toward a pile of all kinds of dictionaries: US slang, thesauri, etc., in frustration, saying, “But you will never know everything!” But what I hear now in his disappointment is that impossible task that often, as immigrants, we make our own, and also the anxiety that comes with it—not knowing if you actually know every word and every expression. Although I understand, and still experience that anxiety, it can turn into an obstacle when translating poetry. We can’t ignore our limitations, of course, but they shouldn’t be a reason not to translate in the first place. Perhaps one has to admit, like the doctor but with less frustration, that one never will be completely “ready.”

WD: It’s refreshing to hear someone say all of this, particularly that it’s okay to learn a language as you’re translating it. I have had some formal training in Spanish, however sporadic. At this point, though, much of my language learning takes place by means of translation projects. And this ongoing learning process would likewise be impossible without similar collaborations I have with other Spanish-speaking poet-translators with whom I regularly exchange work. Living in Mexico City has certainly improved my Spanish, but I am by no means an expert translator. I have no formal training in translation.

HGM: We assume “expert” people are out there and are well prepared as translators. But these “experts” may not be interested in translating, say, poets like Oppen. This is especially true if one works with “non-canonical” authors, as has always been the case with me. I had assumed that translators would one day translate authors that interested me. But I kept waiting, and eventually I decided I’d better do it myself. And I was lucky enough to translate some of my favorite books of poetry, some of them for the first time in Latin America: Paterson, Of Being Numerous, and now a selection of Jack Spicer’s work, forthcoming this summer in Mexico City.

An “experienced” translator should be experienced in the sense of having experienced the exercise of translation, not necessarily in the sense of being an expert who wields absolute command over a language. All that matters, it seems to me, is the moment in which you are immersed. There comes a moment when the text demands this immersion to such an extent that there is no other alternative.

WD: On Twitter, you summed all this up along the lines of: “There is no ideal or expert translator. Say goodbye to the idea of being an ‘expert.’ It’s false and a source of blockage. … Not all of us were lucky enough to study languages from a young age. But that doesn’t matter: knowing other languages doesn’t necessarily mean having a passion for translation. Let poetry, for instance, be your guide, your teacher in that new language. It is the text that ‘constructs’ its translator.” Could you say a little bit more about that last part? In what ways does the text “construct” its translator?

HGM: Prior to this relationship with the text, that particular translator did not exist. The text forces the person who translates it to do “research,” to make decisions among various options. Contemporary theory and philosophy have tried to present themselves as “spokespeople” for translation. But translation is a poesis, a doing that shouldn’t require asking permission from such disciplines before doling out what their work has to offer. Translation is an exercise in joy. That’s why you should never think about who will publish that translation you just started or where it might appear. Instead, try to see beyond the individual text: look toward the author. Try to cultivate a relationship with the author. I don’t mean a “personal” relationship, but rather a commitment to their overall body of work.

WD: And how did you decide to cultivate your own relationships with particular authors? Williams’s Paterson was the first text: how did you choose it?

HGM: In the case of Paterson, it was thanks to a poet I consider my mentor, the Argentinian poet and editor Hugo Gola, who lived in Mexico for many years. I should mention that Hugo himself had as his mentor a major poet, Juan L. Ortiz. To Hugo I owe gratitude for an introduction into what would become this dual, bilingual nature of my work as poet and translator—my ongoing engagement with Latin American and US poetry is due to him, particularly the work of those poets regarded as “experimental” or “innovative,” from Haroldo de Campos to Rodolfo Hinostroza, to Louis Zukofsky and Williams himself.

Reading Paterson was one of those totally out of the ordinary, unrepeatable experiences I was lucky to have happen to me even once. All I can say is that from the moment I opened Paterson, I started translating it nonstop; at night, until dawn, whenever I could. The variety of materials Williams introduces into Paterson, its registers, the sculpting of its verse, the questions about language itself as part of the poem, the array of documents included, its expansiveness, all of this set Williams apart from everything I had read before, especially when it came to Mexican literature.

WD: It strikes me that perhaps the only thing more ambitious than conceiving of/writing/realizing/assembling an epic work like Paterson is the years-long task of translating it into another language, especially without the promise of publication or grant money to support the project while in process, as was the case with this project.

HGM: I’m all about connecting with the work and figuring out the rest later. This “connecting” is what used to be called “initiation” in poetry, the learning process from poet to poet that is essential to poetry and is completely erased when the only calculation is on the funding, because that derails everything. But then again, I am not a “professional” writer who makes a living translating poetry.

My notion of translation is like talking with the dead (I have published primarily dead authors)— everything else comes later. I call this autonomy, but for others, it may be an utterly obsessive tendency or just sheer impracticality. Not long ago, someone complained on Twitter about the poets they were translating (a paid assignment, I guess), and I thought, What is the point of translating authors you don’t care about? Yes, “it’s a job,” but, quite frankly, that’s the worst situation both for poets and translators.

My work as a translator is centered on doing it for the poetry that I admire. If we get some funding, great; if not, we are still doing it. We should remember that translating is, etymologically, a kind of “carrying across.”

WD: There’s been a lot of pushback recently, in the translation world, about approaching translation as a “labor of love” rather than a form of grossly undercompensated labor that has led to any number of structural inequalities within the field more broadly. If I understand you correctly here, for you, there’s something in the process of translation that exceeds the marketplace. That, if we approach texts from this place of autonomy, translation becomes a process that has inherent value outside of capitalist exchange; that when we refuse to approach the text as a potential commodity, there’s a kind of use-value that for the translator comes into being by means of the process, regardless of the publication of the final product or the eventual arrival of grant funding that often helps usher the translation into its life as a commodity (however unlucrative).

HGM: I completely agree. Of course, we have to push back against the recurrent marginalization imposed on translators by the market (particularly when it comes to the remuneration of labor), whenever there exists a market and/or a “field” for translators, which in Mexico hasn’t always been the case. There is usually no money for translations, yet one cannot sit idly by. We have significant authors like the English poet Sean Bonney (whose work I finally translated last year) and many, many others who are either under-translated or still haven’t been translated at all. In my experience, working from the margins (and in my case, from another country), the solution is to work autonomously, using small amounts for funding, finding solidarity from other poets, sometimes having to pay for part of the process, and giving your own time. All of this went into my selection of Bonney’s work, El lenguaje de las barricadas, thanks to the solidarity of poets and comrades at Commune Editions and at my publisher, Matadero Editorial.

For me, those poets that translate poetry play no small part in keeping poetry alive, whether the working conditions are good, bad, or nonexistent.

For me, translating is, above all, a means of learning the craft of poetry, with the added benefit of becoming part of a precarious and yet very much thriving material culture. I think working without guarantees comes with freedom—the most important thing—even as it implies certain limits. I guess I kept at Paterson because, personally, that poem continued offering a new vision of poetry. And translating it was a kind of apprenticeship. One translates not only to publish but also, at least as a poet, to learn something from the work you translate. That’s why I mentioned the importance of having a “relationship” with the author’s overall body of work, not just with poems alone.

WD: I assume it’s safe to say that for you, even if the Spanish Paterson hadn’t ultimately been published, you’d have done it all the same. But, as fate would have it, your translation eventually came out with Aldus Editorial in 2009, after a long search for a press.

HGM: Translating Paterson took years, and, despite being a very important book of modern poetry, in the end it was difficult to publish. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I was young and unknown. And because the Williams of Paterson is much more demanding than the Williams who wrote the short poems, that is, the Williams most people are familiar with. For a long time in Mexico, to read Williams was to read a selection of short poems Octavio Paz had translated in the eighties. After completing my translation of Paterson, I approached editor after editor, and no one seemed interested. Only years later, in 2019, did it become possible to publish the book, thanks to the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Espina, who recommended my work to an independent publisher. To this day, Eduardo and I have never met, but he knew Williams’s work and knew it had to be published. I mention this because I think it speaks volumes about the sort of solidarity so often missing in top-down, hierarchical literary scenes.

In countries like Mexico, where material culture is strong, i.e. where books are “still” the main vehicles of literature (and I don’t necessarily see why this should change), translators should remember how crucial the book is as an object. What I am trying to say is that, if the internet is not necessarily accessible to everyone, making the book part of a circuit or a readership offline is key, even politically.

Without being technophobic, I believe printed materials have another way of moving around, of being found, discarded and recovered, of surviving.

WD: I think that’s exactly right. Particularly inspiring to me—and to my co-translators—is how your work in translation has sought to break predictable literary circuits within Mexico, still dominated by Octavio Paz and the conventional lyric, by bringing into Spanish a series of book-length experimental Anglophone works, many of them written by communists or fellow travelers. How would you characterize the various texts you’ve chosen to translate, in general?

HGM: In general, I’ve always translated what interests me, and such an approach has its challenges: not having institutional support, working from the margins (and this is by no means ideal or easy, it’s just how it’s been for me), translating poets unknown in Mexico, etc. In large part, I’ve continued focusing on bringing the modernist-objectivist tradition into Spanish: after Williams came Oppen, who lived in exile in Mexico for ten years during the “Red Scare” in the fifties. The CIA was after him because of his political views and affiliations with the Communist Party. But despite his connections to Mexico, his work, and even his most important poem, Of Being Numerous, had never been translated, as far as I know, in its entirety into Spanish.

Autonomy again was key here, too. After several failed attempts at securing some kind of funding, the translation came out in 2017, thanks to a small amount of funding we received from a small state university to pay for the rights; the rest we did “por amor al arte.” For us, the alternative was doing nothing. My guess is that this is the main reason a text like Of Being Numerous had never been translated in full: because no one would get paid to do it. That is nonsense.  

Besides the incredible opportunity of spending time slowly, carefully reading Of Being Numerous, for me, translating Oppen was a way of remediating or completing, if you will, this missing part in the strange puzzle that is the literary history between the United States and Mexico.

WD: That makes perfect sense to me. One of our collective’s ongoing projects is a translation into Spanish of Dionne Brand’s Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia. Bringing Brand’s feminist response to Cardenal’s early, Pound-inflected work to Hispanophone readers feels like closing a circuit in hemispheric poetics. What are you working on now?

HGM: The Spicer anthology I mentioned will appear later this year; again, the first in Spanish, I think. This project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of my friend, the poet Kevin Killian, who passed away in 2019, and another poet, Peter Gizzi. My most recently published translation was a selection of Bonney’s work.

In one of his essays, Eliot Weinberger says one shouldn’t translate too much; half the time I think he’s right and half the time not. (Today, for example, I think he’s absolutely right.) And yet it’s impossible to stop oneself.

I think this obstinance is a core attribute of any translator.

WD: As someone who not long ago swore off taking on new translation projects–and has since completed several nevertheless—I can’t help but agree, somewhat sheepishly, about the obstinance. Once you begin translating, you start to get a sense of all that’s missing within a particular literary landscape: there’s always another text that urgently needs to be translated. I imagine Sean Bonney’s death only underscored this sense of urgency. What has the reception of El lenguaje de las barricadas been like? What kind of intervention does his work make in the Mexican/Hispanophone context?

HGM: What’s crucial to me about Sean Bonney’s work is that it rejects a certain tendency in contemporary poetry, in both the US and in Mexico, whose politics one could call “pietistic”—that is, having at its core the representation of grievance and suffering, aimed primarily at eliciting empathy from readers. My point here is that “empathy”—the limits of which have been extensively theorized—can easily lend itself to or be assimilated within (maybe it always was) a malleable multiculturalist critique: a call for inclusion while everything else remains the same, a call for reforms, or for “better” laws, instead of deploying a ruthless criticism of the terms in which social reality is reproduced, a critique that may include those spaces and institutions some want to preserve by merely diversifying the gatekeepers. Bonney demands a revenge that is incommensurate with the Law, and would appear to be somehow cosmic. It is astonishing, actually. His poetry is an important reminder that, while necessary, poetry alone will not save us. But of course, in order to make this point, he writes great poetry; the kind of poetry that makes you want to write, which is a great rule of thumb for good poetry.

The reception of the translation has been very good. I’m happy. In addition to Mexico, the book has been well received in other countries with long poetic traditions, such as Chile and Peru, where there always seems to be a whole lot of interest in translations.

Along with Bonney, I think Heriberto Yépez’s latest book, Transnational Battle Field, also proposes other ways of thinking about the future of political poetry not confined within what Bonney rightly calls “police realism.” In his “Letter on Poetics: After Rimbaud,” Bonney states: “I’d like to write a poetry that could speed up a dialectical continuity in discontinuity & thus make visible whatever is forced into invisibility by police realism, where the lyric I—yeh, that thing—can be (1) an interrupter and (2) a collective, where direct speech and incomprehensibility are only possible as a synthesis that can bend ideas into and out of the limits of insurrectionism and illegalism.”

WD: Your own forthcoming collection COMMONPLACE / Lo común, out this fall with Cardboard House Press, continues Bonney’s legacy through its own “prosody of riot,” that is, through a poetics of collective interruption. COMMONPLACE / Lo común reveals and collapses the layered forms of colonial and geopolitical violence which underlie contemporary landscapes of Mexico’s state capital: literally, in the case of the European construction of Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes over chinampas, floating platforms used by the Mexica in agricultural cultivation. Could you tell us a bit about the genesis of the book?

HGM: Exactly, the book has to do with those historical layers that have given form to the architecture of the present. Lo común is about the “commonplace” link between the production of “culture” and the production of death. The book moves in several directions, taking, on one hand, language as “what’s commonplace.” I think Alain Badiou also talks about how whoever writes poetry works with the most commonplace material of all: language. But, on the other hand, my book also insists on a continuity between the production of “culture” and the production of death, which has historically been the role of the State. Lo común imagines a delirious ecosystem, more a nightmare than a dream, one that tends toward collapse: animals turn into one another; weapons are indistinguishable from the statues outside the Palacio de Bellas Artes. I thought of Bellas Artes as the crystallization of various transhistorical knots that recur across the sections of the book.

Lo común is moved by the desire to conceive of a culturally charged site, in this case Bellas Artes, as an embodied poetics of militarization: the building as a physical accumulation of lifeforms, which are absorbed or negated, accordingly. Such a “poetics of militarization” is, of course, an architectonics of meaning that has historically dictated what constitutes “proper speech,” what doesn’t, what’s “ours,” what’s “national,” “rational,” “woman,” “Mexican,” “human,” etc. In short, all those things that constitute “culture.”

But this architectonics of meaning also implies everything it negates: other forms of life, be it life in language or as language, other forms of social organization or antagonistic struggles that emerge periodically as “alboroto y motín” [“riot and revolt”] (as in Sigüenza y Gongora’s famous essay on the riots in Mexico City on June 7th, 1692, which I refer to in Lo común), and which are actively negated by the same official poetics of national “culture.” And of course, Lo común is also an attempt at thinking architectonically: how “poetry” is positioned, if at all, with respect to all this.

WD: In delving into the relationship between culture and nationalism, you pose the question of whether other forms of poetic and artistic production are possible, given the conditions of ambient violence under which they must inevitably occur. What does politically committed poetry look like for you in early 2022?  

HGM: As I see it, by and large, the poetry identified as political today is often marked by a tendency toward a return to certain political essentialism; that is, politics is more or less narrowly understood as the politics of representation. Naturally, looking at what is being written today, the risk is to believe that representational inclusion is, somehow, enough to change existing systems of power.

Now, as for what politically committed poetry looks like, that we can only dream of, and maybe write it down afterward, if we’re lucky.