Literal

When Susan Sontag visited Hanoi in 1968 to show her opposition to the Vietnam War, she noted the literal-mindedness of her hosts’ language, of everyone speaking “in simple declarative sentences. All discourse either expository or interrogative.” She recorded in her journal what a life without metaphor was like—“It’s monochromatic here”—and despaired that the revolution was “betrayed by its language.” The opacity of the Vietnamese led her to this observation, sympathetic yet little different from the usual reductiveness that amounts to racist othering:

I felt my consciousness included theirs, or could—but theirs could never include mine. And I thought with despair that I was lost to what I most admired. My consciousness is too complex, it has known too great a variety of pleasures.

If finding someone literal-minded is an occasion to celebrate the complexity of one’s own mind, it is also an accusation that can summon the most extreme aspects of consciousness. Fred Moten speaks of Kant’s “fantastical generation of blackness,” which is deployed as “inoculation,” leading to “critical neglect,” because this “is how generation comes to seem the same—little literalist objects who, having chosen not to object, sign on as privileged beholders […]” The contempt in the phrase “little literalist objects” indicates that literal-mindedness is one of the few intellectual deficiencies that can muster a metaphorical power commensurate with our worst beliefs, like racism.

Because the notion of the literal is fundamental in our aesthetic and cultural understandings, we often perceive consciousness itself—its complexity, its privileges—as saturated in the dichotomy of literal and figurative. We tend to conflate the figurative with thoughtfulness and variegation, and the literal with obtuseness and monochrome dullness, like the “literal-minded” suitors in Louise Glück’s “Ithaca,” who cannot see that Penelope is living in a figurative world created by imagining Odysseus’ return.

The paradox of judging someone literal-minded is that it can become a form of literal-mindedness itself. A “too literal realist of the imagination,” as Yeats called Blake, may bring to mind a Blakean watercolor of some winged creature illustrating—too literally—the contents of the crowded Blakean calligraphy surrounding it, and yet, as each generation discovers, Blake conveys an array of figurative meanings—“the myths represent psychological or subjective states of mind” (Northrop Frye)—well beyond his easily caricatured mythopoeic literalism. Even Marianne Moore’s slightly altered quotation of the phrase in her poem “Poetry”—“literalist of the imagination”—may remind the reader that she relegated the full version of her poem to a footnote in Complete Poems, perhaps because a whiff of the “pedantic literalist,” the title of the next poem in her book, adheres to “Poetry” itself. And when Erich Auerbach praises Dante for being more literal than his contemporaries because “in almost every case [in Dante’s work] the literal meaning yields a poetic idea,” he may be suggesting something inescapable about the literal. By articulating origins and thus literalizing originality, Dante’s incomparable erudition may, in fact, return his work to the literalism with which all poetry begins. As Matthew Zapruder notes, “[t]o be a literalist (as a poet but also as a reader) with the words in a poem, not to treat them as symbols or codes but to take them for what they are, is what draws us into true strangeness.” If strangeness—the astonishment of creativity, the cognitive change that an original interpretation of the world bestows—is what we desire from poetry, it may be a matter of learning to distinguish creative uses of the literal from dullness and pedantry.

To try to know

some ( soursharp ) something about something.
                                           ~Atsuro Riley, “Thicket”

While reading two extraordinary books of poetry recently, Atsuro Riley’s Heard-Hoard and Valzhyna Mort’s translation of Polina Barskova’s Air Raid, I was fascinated by the ways in which both works grappled with notions of the literal. Heard-Hoard, which I reviewed here, finds inspiration in evasions of literal formulations of biographical narrative and personal memory. Riley’s book reads at first like a South Carolina lowcountry version of Spoon River Anthology fractured in a kaleidoscope. Who is speaking (“[t]he story-man encircling us”)? Whose perspective is being shown (“[t]he old ever-voice (with the tear through it)”)? Why are these stories important to the author (“I guttle the rudimental stories”)? These questions swirl uncertainly, as if they were too literal-minded to clarify, even as the poet implicitly answers with a lyrical originality that is its own reason for being. At times the speaker sounds omniscient (“No body not them knows”), at other times, as if the poet were viewing the events of his life from an elaborate distance of his own making (“our lodged our / locked unsaids”). The omission of direct biographical reference in Riley’s work—the use of “Romey” in his first book as a stand-in for the self, various characters in the second, especially the Japanese immigrant Tetsu, apparently remaking figures from the poet’s life, like his mother—only serves to heighten the impression of a self willfully evaded.

Not knowing the details of Riley’s personal life and coming to his poetry only as a reader of his books, I interpreted these evasions as an aesthetic choice born of suffering (“We come gnawed by need on hands and knees”), a fleeing from the literal as a way of uncovering meaning from a childhood spent in lowcountry deprivation. If I felt a natural tendency to turn Riley’s work into “little literalist objects,” fictions particularized from wayfaring hints and cool obviations, I also knew that his characters and settings only make sense—why the references to Japanese mothers? why the South Carolina lowcountry in the first place?—as variations on a world actually experienced. As with John Ashbery’s myriad lyrical voicings, Riley’s poetry reformulates an individual artist’s “soursharp” vision of consciousness. His “characters” are less people with bodies and names than suggestive agglomerations of lyrical phrases with a South Carolina lilt: “My born name keeps but I don’t say.” To be overly literal about either the biography or the fictionalized deviations is to fail to see the art.

Translation of poetry is that pigheaded effort to convey in words of another language not only the literal meaning of a poem but an alien way of seeing things. 
            ~ Charles Simic

[A] very far cry from the original text.
            ~ Nadezhda Mandelstam,
               (on Paul Celan’s translations of Osip Mandelstam)

In Valzhyna Mort’s high-energy version of the Russian poet Polina Barskova’s Air Raid, which I reviewed here, I found an approach to translation that gainfully complicates the notion of literalism. If the question in literary translation is how and to what extent one must remain “literal”—true to the original—Mort offers an answer through the primacy she places on creativity as a vehicle for conveying a poet’s essence: “an arsenal of possibilities, yet no real equivalence; simultaneous lack and abundance,” as she says in her delicious conversation with Barskova appended to the book. To translate Barskova, she uses American-sounding phrases (“tossing your guts,” “come here, little fella,” “tough luck”) alongside Russian-sounding locutions (“Sweetpoochkins,” “I do have a little bit of sons after all!”) because her goal is not the transmission of literal meaning but the conveyance of Barskova’s particular excellence qua language. “My faithfulness is to the pitch that turns a human voice into the voice of a siren,” as Mort says—not only an Odyssean siren but Barskova’s air-raid siren from Siege-era Leningrad.

This kind of flexible creativity, this “literal” rendering not of each word but of literary excellence itself, is an ideal to which my own work aspires.  When I translated “Apologia pro Vita Sua” by the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) for my collection Divine Fire, I did so literally at first, looking up each word in the version from Cernuda’s La realidad y el deseo and rehearsing English equivalents. Over time the translation became less and less literal as I found articulations that worked for what I, not Cernuda, was trying to convey.

What interested me most about the poem was Cernuda’s conflation of love with divinity, his belief that the beauty of the world “was, as in a certain way occurs with sexual desire, an urge, painful in its intensity, to abandon myself and to be immersed in that immense body of creation” (tr. Stephen Kessler). I wanted to bring to the fore—make more literal—an image that reappears in poems like “Apologia pro Vita Sua” and “To the Statues of the Gods,” of the men in his past becoming God, whom the speaker, in turn, calls his “lost love” in “The Visitation of God.” When I imagine Cernuda as a single “literal” image, I see a desperately lonely Spanish hill town where a line of men—lovers from the poet’s past—recede from view up a winding cobblestone street towards a flickering distance that may, in fact, be heaven.

Over the years that I lived with the poem, I adjusted Cernuda’s language to meet the exigencies of my own book. I heightened what I consider to be one of two stylistic approaches that gay-male writers have been drawn to in the face of our otherness, a high-style eloquence that one also sees in writers like Proust and Henry James (camp is the other approach). While Cernuda was courageously open about his homosexuality, he was still circumspect. My own version is more direct:

Those final shadows surge up in pain:
Shadows of the people in my blood
Demanding recognition from a soul that doesn’t know them.
(tr. Stephen Kessler)

the last shades mournfully ascend,
shades of the men in my blood,
pleading for a sanction the soul disavows.
(from “Divine Fire” by David Woo)

I sometimes used the term “Lord,” which I associate with translations of Rilke’s “Herr,” because it lent a certain tonality, aristocratically distanced yet worldly, to Cernuda’s references to God. Reared in the Sonoran desert, I invoke a “desert sun” that doesn’t occur in the original. Where Cernuda speaks of “faithful prayer” (“[l]a oració de la fe”), I speak of “faithless prayer,” not having grown up in the Catholic church, although I kept Cernuda’s vocabulary of sacramental ritual. And when I changed a line to include the phrase “divine fire,” it became clear what the title of my book would be:

                       Temper my soul
with divine fire until one day it is rendered
unto the light you make.

By this point I realized that the poem was now a commentary on the melancholy divinity my own memory ascribed to the lovers I have lost, like the aspiring artist, senselessly murdered at age 32, who only last year painted my face as an enormous image (about 5ߴ x 4ߴ) poised in some tender realm between the abstract and the literal. (The literal truth of the cliché “senselessly murdered” somehow consoles me, whereas the desire to find a figurative mot juste to replace it tormented me until I had to give up.) While my poem remains close in meaning and structure to Cernuda’s, it was somehow no longer a “literal” translation but a commentary on my own love life. When my book Divine Fire appeared this year, the poem was a central part of it, now titled “Divine Fire (After Luis Cernuda’s ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’),” establishing its distance from direct translation and therefore from what was both problematic and ineluctable, the literal.