Translation: Better Than Never Kissing At All

Ashbury Hills Christian Camp, is a camp of the Methodist Church of South Carolina, made up of several cottages with modern amenities deep in the northern hills of South Carolina—above Travelers Rest and Marrietta. Keep going and you will hit Table Rock and find yourself in the cool of North Carolina’s southern hill country. You know you are far out in the “sticks” when the usual green blinking light of your cell phone turns orange, and driving alone, along Geer Highway, a meandering climb into narrower and narrower roads, the thick vegetation growing thicker and thicker, and night starting to seep into the sky, you are aware of several things: 1) You cannot see very well at night, 2) there are few houses discernible from the road, 3) you are black and the last people you say at the gas station and convenient store as you entered the town of Cleveland was full, but with only white folks, and every James Dickey Deliverance nightmare, mixed in with a healthy dose of antebellum racial anxiety begins to feed the imagination. It is all unfounded. People are really nice up here and the directions you have are actually quite good, but you worry, and worry until you see the sign to the campsite and you turn off the road onto a dirt road and finally enter the camp.

We are here on a retreat. It is a retreat for poets in our MFA class, a way for me to try and see how much more we can do for the students in the space of an extended weekend. I have done this five times already. It has become a habit. Each time is different. The venue has changed every time. This time I have several things on my mind. I am away from home for yet another weekend, and this Easter weekend, and my children have just started their spring break. A nephew is visiting and I should be there for that. I am thinking of this blog, of the fact that there is no internet access up here in the hills and I know that my inbox will be insanely full when I return to the world of wireless. I am thinking of the verse drama I have asked these students to write, and one that I have decided to write along with them. I am thinking that I have not gotten as far as I would have wanted, and I know that feeling of wanting more time to do this thing that I really want to do, but being unable to find the time to do it.
This morning there was no hot water in the cottage we were housed in. It is very warm in the rooms, and since one of our poets is clearly an olfactory-driven person, the entire cottage smelt of incense. I opened my window to air the place, and the loud gurgling of a stream tumbling over rocks filled the room. I kept the window open all night—a gentle soothing sound while I stayed up late to read Kevin Young’s For the Confederate Dead, enjoying, especially, the sequence of elegies for his friend who died in a car accident in Kenya. Young’s elegies all have titles pulled from song titles by Bob Marley. The poems are raw, honest and flatly direct in their expression of loss and the incapacity to find wholeness of comfort even in the act of writing poems for the dead. They seem to be Young’s most vulnerable poems, and even as I am drawn to them, drawn to the whole collection, I know that a large portion of his supporters will be disappointed by the book because the experimentations are not as self-consciously clever and unallied to clear biographical narrative as some of his earlier work has been. Young’s evocation of reggae is not located in language or even a evoking of the discourse of reggae. He invokes reggae as if it is a foreign language that has symbolic and thematic meaning. The truth is that his fired loved reggae and the reggae in the poems is a reggae that seems to have come through the flawed filter of translation across cultures—across languages.
Perhaps all poetry is translation at some level. The business of writing down what is felt and thought or dreamt represents an act of translating from one language to another. It is why I am always filled with a sense of failure when I have finished a poem. I find satisfaction that the poem has achieved an approximation of the feeling or the idea, but I am actually aware of the failure of language, the failure of form and the failure of my skills as a writer to reproduce what I have imagined. It turns out that the retreat will be about the limitations of translation. We are looking at verse plays that the students are working on. They are struggling with this medium. They want to just write poems. They are struggling with the problems of plot, of conflict, of practical things around drama on the stage, and mostly they are wrestling with the idea of how to make natural talk into poetry—into verse. As it happens, they are talking about voice and they are, I am hoping, going to discover something about their capacity to recover their own voices and translate them into poetry. One of our guest poets has told me she will be talking about translation. I did not plan any of this. But it is all coming together.
Charlene Spearen, my partner in all poetic enterprises in South Carolina, found Valshyna Mort at a reading some months ago and was impressed. She will attend a workshop or a retreat or a conference and arrive with the names and books of a handful of poets—usually women—that she is convinced we should find away to engage here in Columbia. She was high about Mort, and we managed to have her come to Columbia to do a reading and then to spend time with us on the retreat.