Translation and its Discontents: Part 2 (some preliminary examples of attitude)

Two of the comments on my recent post stood out from among the others in the tone they struck. They were the ones that generated the dynamic of this particular thread. As obviously as Horace Engdahl was wrong about America and its relation to world literature, the questions that arose seemed to turn upon why he was wrong. One of the two commentators offered to eat his hat, while the other suggested Denmark and Switzerland were irrelevant in terms of the larger picture.

Both seem, unfortunately, to provide adequate justification for Engdahl’s hauteur. The first would do away with literary merit as a viable paradigm; the second – the hat-eater – would do away with the countries in which these books are written, implying that they are “mental fantasies”.
My problem (doubtless self-assigned) is to attend to what kind of generalizations I can make. (But I must say ahead of time that I love generalizations, the architecture of them, and the way they combine the heroic with the fragile. They are both sweeping and utterly provisional. More like the weather above a landmass than the landmass itself.)
This is why I sympathize with the hat-eater and the nation state-denier. They do not back away from making large, cranky statements.
First Boyd Nielson:
“But I think what needs to be questioned even more than whether U.S. poets actually do have any dialogue with x or y country is whether (and why) there should be such a thing in the first place. If country x and y are both rich, prosperous nations, does it really make a difference that their literature is being ignored in mainstream or small press publications of the United States? In fact (if we can do the impossible of suspending for just a moment absolutely endless arguments about literary merit) it seems to me that the only conceivable reason as to why any literature anywhere should be translated and attended to is not to provide a (fair) representative selection of what’s going on around the world but rather to engage in a dialogue with what is happening in (crucial) particular regions. And I care much less about what is happening in Denmark or Switzerland than I do about, say, Bolivia or Chile or Zimbabwe. Let’s even throw Israel in…”
What strikes me first is that Mr. Nielson would substitute “literary merit” for political merit. This seems to be part of a larger shift in the way Americans read and evaluate literature – a shift which I have watched from afar for the last twenty-five years. Harold Bloom has spoken about the flight from the aesthetic. I recall with a certain nostalgia (hardly an appropriate critical tool) my own endless discussions with poet-friends when we were all undergraduates together in the late seventies ranking minor 16th century poets as though they were our contemporaries. Politics never came into it. Bloggers these days seem to studiously avoid any mention of Skelton and Nashe. That hurts. I’ve spent my reading life mostly in previous centuries. It was Wallace Stevens, after all, who wrote in Adagia that “Poetry is the scholar’s art.” And yet translation, for Mr. Nielson, should, like a newspaper, tell us “what is happening in (crucial) particular regions,” a shifting paradigm to which Zimbabwe has obviously just recently been added, and Israel thrown in, for the heck of it. My first instinct is to challenge Mr. Nielson to show me the Zimbabwean poets worth reading, but I think that probably evades the point, and, indeed there must be some good Zimbabwean poets writing in the midst of hyper-inflation, cholera, utterly failed governance and a fetid political atmosphere contrived of a hybrid of tribalism and the worst versions of inherited European nationalism. Some of them, these hypothetical poets, might, for all I know, be students of Kierkegarrd. Finally, if “rich and prosperous nations like Denmark and Switzerland" are of no interest in terms of translation (though I hope we could make an exception for Max Frisch), then we must unfortunately discount American literature as well, which comes from the richest and most prosperous nation of all.
Fortunately Mr. Bloomberg-Reissman solves the problem once and for all. Responding to comments by Henry Gould and James Stotts, he has the following to say:
“I don't understand why noticing that the "US is not a single literary or cultural agglomeration" is silly. That the US is a melting pot or whatever is a fiction that became obvious as a fiction years and years ago. I also think that your notion that nations are "mental fantasies" is truer than you'd like to believe. F'rinstance, think of all those folks from Hegel thru Heidegger and their notions of Germanness; if those weren't mental constructs I'll eat my hat. Which doesn't mean that there was/is not such thing as the state of Germany. Or that French writers can be distinguished from German ones. James notes that whether or not nations are constructs, they are not idle constructs. What more do you want?
…. I do think that translations aren't worthless, however, and help expand one's sense of what writers in other parts of the world are doing, etc.”
Remind you of anything? Frank O’Hara’s litany of ironic banalities in "The Day Lady Died”: “…and buy / an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days…” The problem is there is no ironic lining in Mr. Bloomberg-Reissman’s “what writers in other parts of the world are doing, etc.” As with Mr. Neilson, world poetry here is just part of the news.
Frankly these are exactly the kinds of attitudes that play into Engdahl’s hands: that for many American writers foreign literatures, just as the counties in which they are originally published, exist only as theoretic constructs and excuses for reductive thinking – namely seeing literature (one kind of social construct) as equivalent to politics and sociology (social constructs in their own right, but with entirely different performative expectations).
Neither Mr. Nielson’s failed-state solution, nor the no-state solution of Mr. Bloomberg-Reissman help us to put Engdahl in his place, or really tell us anything at all about literary translation. In both their versions translations are seen as instrumental, to be valued for what they can tell American readers about themselves and their ideas of the world at large. Most of the particularities of difference, which the best of translators fight to preserve, and which for Derrida was the semiotic and ontological basis of reading, or more simply put, the reason why one text is not another text, are, as they say, Lost in Translation. Walter Benjamin noted that real translation is transparent, that it doesn’t block the light of the original.
What Engdahl is actually saying is that Americans are incapable of empathy, that their monumental national identity (which is as powerful on the left as it is on the right) is neatly encapsulated in the individual citizen, preventing him from understanding, and so talking with the world at large. George Bush’s “You’re either with us or against us” is the ur-statement par excellence of this particular form American exceptionalism.
Engdahl’s is not necessarily my own view, but for the purposes of illustration, bear with me while I play the devil.
One of the signal experiences in my own slow enculturation into, at the time, a fairly new setting, occurred in 1992 during the first bi-annual poetry festival at the University of Coimbra (“Encontros Internacionais de Poetas”) where I was employed as a leitor (or lecturer in the English idiom, a kind of highfalutin adjunct in American terms). This was my first exposure to American academics and writers en masse since arriving in Europe seven or so years before. Of course there were many poets from other nationalities as well, but I was most curious about the Americans. I was hungry, so to speak, for the news.
The lighter, and the funnier of the two incidents that frame my memory of this now distant event occurred when, on the first afternoon, Charles Bernstein walked into the Biblioteca Joanina, one of the University of Coimbra's most emblematic edifices, and gazed up at the rows of leather-bound tomes shelved close to the elaborately painted ceiling about ten meters above floor level, and said: “Oh, so this is what they mean by high culture.” His statement, funny at first, seemed to be, upon reflection, an expression of self-consciousness, a natural human response in such a grandiose setting. He certainly had to say something, and because he was Charles Bernstein, he certainly wasn’t going to express any sentiment of awe. Instead, there seemed to be a pressing need to reduce the unfamiliar to a version which he and his courtiers could accommodate. It was a “made in America” joke and stamped “for American consumption only”. For me, it seemed to set the tone. The Americans (that year, represented by a strong contingent from the University of Buffalo) were going to persist in being American until the bitter end.
The second incident, graver in terms of protocol (the power of which should never be underestimated) and seedier in terms of all those human values summed up by that inimitable French term, politesse, involved the late Robert Creeley. A large group had gathered in the city’s most splendid arcade, which shaded the audience from the afternoon heat, to listen to one of those interminable readings by half a dozen poets reciting in a half a dozen languages. Even the multi-lingual Europeans were in the dark. The Americans from Buffalo must have felt like they were trapped in some kind of eternal Latin mass. Afterwards there was the usual question and answer period, which was pretty quickly commandeered by one of Portugal’s last remaining truly world-class poets, Ramos Rosa, a dotty, chain-smoking bard with his resin-stained mustache and seersucker suit. He held forth for much too long in four languages all of them fluently spoken, but all of them severely mumbled. This proved too much for Robert Creeley, Ramos Rosa’s only counterpart in terms of poetic seniority at the Festival. After about twenty minutes of R.R.’s interminable polyglot gabbling (out of which some gems did emerge) our American elder statesman jumped from his perch and in resounding, heart-stoppingly pure American, shouted: “Enough of this shit!”
Robert Creeley – maybe it was the heat – seemed to be exhibiting signs of what computer programmers (perhaps the true poets of our age) refer to as being “export-crippled”. That is, he had been sent abroad suffering from diminished cryptographic strength in order to comply with the United State’s Export Administration Regulations; EAR, for short.