Fictitious Poets for Unreal Times

Visit Words Without Borders to learn about Ezequiel Zaidenwerg's project to translate 13 "invented poets." Interviewed by Susannah Greenblatt, Zaidenwerg speaks about the volume that he "compiled and translated" 50 Estados: 13 poetas contemporáneos de los Estados Unidos (50 States: 13 Contemporary Poets from the United States, Bajo la Luna, 2018). As Greenblatt explains, the fictive element is that "the thirteen contemporary US poets anthologized in the Argentine collection never existed. Every poet, and each of the one hundred poems in the book, were invented by Zaidenwerg himself." From there: 

The author interviews that follow the poems are “real” in the sense that they actually transpired, but between Zaidenwerg and thirteen real US poets—friends of Zaidenwerg—who have nothing to do with the author-characters they play. Perhaps the greatest of Zaidenwerg’s wiles is that he isn’t the book’s primary translator. With a few exceptions, he wrote the poems in his native Spanish and they were then translated into English by Robin Myers.

Zaidenwerg’s range of poetic voice is almost eerie—each poet seems real, made even more so by the candid (even awkward at times) accompanying interviews. These metafictive machinations piqued my sense of wonder to the point where I found myself Googling each poet, half expecting to discover some other trap door in the book’s architecture. (Joe Urbach, the anthology’s first poet, turned out to be a writer, but of gardening books; pure coincidence.)

Zaidenwerg writes in the prologue (as his compiler-translator character) that “Perhaps translation is a way of showing what was always there, in spite of its never having been.” If there’s betrayal here, then perhaps it’s in the spirit of the word’s roots—be, from the Middle English “thoroughly,” and trair from the Old French, meaning “to hand over.” Zaidenwerg has thoroughly handed us something to marvel at: a Nabokovian experiment, a commentary on translation and authoriality, thirteen protagonists, and a new collection of bilingual poetry.  

I spoke with Ezequiel Zaidenwerg at a small café in Tribeca following the release of 50 Estados in Argentina and the publication of his first book in English translation, Lyric Poetry Is Dead (tr. by Robin Myers, Cardboard House Press, 2018).

Susannah Greenblatt (SG): After reading 50 Estados, I began to wonder whether I’d been introduced to thirteen registers of your poetic voice, or if I hadn’t really encountered your voice at all—if I only knew it in the way I “know” Daniel Day Lewis, as a vessel for his roles. This gets to the question of what this book isexactly. Your Argentine publisher, Bajo La Luna, listed the book as fiction. Can you talk a little about what went into that categorization?

Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (EZ): I originally wanted to present the book as an anthology. But then we had a meeting that took place in a very tiny office. The editors were bullying me like, “You need to come to terms with the fact that you’ve written fiction. This is fiction.” When I left the room I said, “Yes, of course, I wrote a novel.” So it was pretty automatic for me to start seeing the book as a novel. And I never thought of it exclusively as a novel, but what is a “novel of poetry”? That’s one of the myths that the book is about.

Read more at Words Without Borders.