Ezra Pound
Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

by Steven Moore

An unsympathetic critic might grumble that Pound threw everything but the kitchen sink into his 824-page Cantos, especially since the book ends with a section of "Drafts and Fragments." But in fact Pound did leave a lot out, the best of which has now been gathered by Italian Pound scholar Massimo Bacigalupo for this edition of "Posthumous Cantos." The introduction and notes are in Italian, but the poetry is of course in English, and since there are no plans for an American edition, Canti postumi deserves notice.

The book is divided into eight chronological sections: it begins with the 1917 version of "Three Cantos" published in Poetry, different enough from those eventually published in The Cantos to be preserved. Then we travel from Paris (1920-22) to Rapallo and Venice (1928-37), then sections called "Voices of War" (1940-45) and "Italian Drafts" (1944-45), then outtakes from the great Pisan Cantos (1948), followed by what Pound himself called "Prosaic Verses" (written during his confinement at St. Elizabeths in the 1950s), and finally "Lines for Olga" (1962-72).

Some drafts offer longer versions of incidents that were compressed for the final book version, like a discussion between Pound and Eliot at Verona in 1922 that is merely alluded to in the published version. The couplet "Her name was courage / & is written Olga" from the final page of The Cantos is taken from a lovely 13-line poem published here in tribute to his longtime companion Olga Rudge, the embodiment of Venus invoked at the beginning of his epic. Other verses occur in contexts quite different from those in the final book and will aid Pound scholars in seeing those historical "rhymes" Pound made by yoking various eras together.

And throughout there are beautiful, medallion-bright images that take one's breath away: "Brows cut smoothe as if with a jade-wheel / Cool water of hill-lakes, water calm as the eyes"; "her red head a flask of perfume"; "The air is solid sunlight, apricus, / Sun-fed we dwell there." For all his obfuscation and hare-brained theories, Pound commanded poetic powers that continue to astonish, even in these drafts and outtakes.

There are images in Canti postumi of ruined castles, of "Empires end[ing] in the marsh." The Cantos itself is like a cathedral falling into ruins, attended today only by specialists, ignored by most readers of poetry. Canti postumi may only be fragments shored against those ruins, but these drafts remind us of the greatness of Pound's achievement, and the book even works as a teaser for those uncertain whether they want to take the grand tour. It is well worth seeking out.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Taha Muhammad Ali
Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin
Ibis Editions ($11.95)

by Kim Jensen

Ibis Editions, based in Jerusalem, is a small literary press which offers work related to the Levant, mainly translations from Hebrew and Arabic. Ibis has published a number of interesting little books in the past few years, including Michael Sells's translation of Ibn 'Arabi's Stations of Desire and The Little Bookseller, Oustaz Ali by Egyptian poet Ahmed Rassim. In 2000, they put out a small but exceptional translation of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali; the volume, entitled Never Mind, includes an introduction by Gabriel Levin, a nice selection of poetry, and a gripping short story called "So What," about an impoverished village boy who longs desperately for a pair of shoes.

Something of a local legend, Taha Muhammad Ali's poetry is well known in the Arab communities of the Galilee and beyond. Born in the village of Saffuriyeh in 1931, Ali was already a young man by the time his village was razed by the Israelis in 1948. Ali became a refugee, settled a year later in nearby Nazareth, and eventually opened a souvenir shop in the souk.

Ali's poetry arises from the fertile yet relentlessly bitter grounds of personal and collective experience. His poems are suffused with imagery from everyday Palestinian life, both before and after "al-Nakbah" (the catastrophe). Combining a literary and colloquial Arabic, his work has taken on a folkloric status in the Galilee. A few of his poems, especially those about his fictional character, Abd al-Hadi, have become popular enough that they have variant verses and lines, as happens when poetry evolves in the oral sphere.

Ali uses a direct language in his poetry, which translates into English quite well. The poems have the story-telling quality reminiscent of such committed poets as Nâzim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, and early Darwish. But their simplicity of language and structure belies a depth and swift lateral movement that make for a powerful undertow, as in exceptional poems such as "Abd El-Hadi Fights a Superpower," "Thrombosis in the Veins of Petroleum," "Fooling the Killers," "Crack in the Skull," and the heartbreaking "Warning":

Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don't aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn't worth
the price of the bullet
(you'd waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn't happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.

Oscillating between tender nostalgia and its wounding laconic edge, the poetry's particular Palestinian sorrow finds its echo in the wider registers of the universal.

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Dorothy Barresi
University of Pittsburgh Press ($12.95)

by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Rouge Pulp is Dorothy Barresi's third book of poems, and it is by far her best yet. Eschewing the clumsy and often prosaic narrative structures that fill her previous book (The Post Rapture Diner) and dot her first (All of the Above), Rouge Pulp marries Barresi's ear for witty, fiery language with a series of compact, concise, and fairly lyrical poems that showcase the alternately serious and sardonic voice at the center of the book's universe.

Barresi's first two books were notable for her reliance on personal narrative—one rarely doubted that the person behind the voice was anybody other than Dorothy Barresi, the events anything other than what had actually taken place on the family vacation in 1969. In Rouge Pulp, Barresi also tells stories from her life (the death of her mother provides the book's central focus, and there are a handful to her infant son, Dante), but they're less constricted by the narrative mode. For example, "At the Posh Salon Called Ultra" could have easily turned into a heavy-handed indictment of cultural standards demanding women remain beautiful at any cost, but instead it is just as infectious, guilty, and pleasurable as a trip to "the Posh Salon" really might be, even as the stylist informs you that

... you are worth saving; I assure you,
we have seen worse.

And though it is far from cheap
dreaming yourself into our fashion,

cheer up—it is very becoming.
Girgio, Reynald, Coco—a sweep of curls in the dustpan, clank,

and the past is your natural color.
Pucker up. Bring me the big rollers.

When the sham world blows you kisses,
the real world knows you at last.

The poems in Rouge Pulp are more formally ambitious than anything in Barresi's first two books, as well as more allusive. These are crowded poems: Duke Ellington shows up in a poem about Sylvia Plath's father, "The Heaven of Otto Plath" (and Plath shows up herself on two separate occasions); Hart Crane is mentioned, as are Theodore Roethke, Lenny Bruce, Jackie Kennedy, Richard Speck, Bobby Kennedy, the New Critics, and, in one of the best poems in the book, the stripper Lily St. Cyr. That poem, "Glass Dress," is a good example of the new sort of poetic techniques influencing Barresi's most recent work. The declaration that opens the poem—"Lily St. Cyr is dead"—gets repeated throughout the poem and not always where you'd expect it, creating a dirge-like refrain whose flatness works perfectly with the glittery, gaudy images Barresi swirls around it:

Her generating curves,
her spirals,
her vector rotation of planes and onstage bubble baths
are the swellest immorality for those
wrecked and crippled boys
in the front row.
Lily St. Cyr is dead.
Knock back a whisky. Dim the spot.

The poem's also about the end of innocence, about GIs returning from the war and an America full of "vast warehouses of exhausted capital," and it falls flat only when Barresi overexplains herself, giving us the meaning of "ecdysiast" ("'ecdysis' meaning 'shedding,' / or 'nothing.'") when the simple rejoinder that follows, "It's true," would have been enough.

There are other such moments in Rouge Pulp when Barresi's wish to make sure we get it interrupts the flow of the poem. These mostly occur near the end of the book when the poems begin to sound more and more like the Post Rapture Barresi who hasn't quite loosed herself from the sentence and syntax, from relying on prose sense to do the work that the Barresi of the first half of Rouge Pulp has discovered can be accomplished via aural effects, line breaks, and, at times, inference. Take, for example, "Fifties Song (or, We Are All Born under Eisenhower)," a poem notable in Barresi's corpus for its utter lack of narrative and reliance on anaphora:

Unto the altar of argyle,
Unto the Lenny Bruce of nod,

Unto the spondee of babies,
Unto the lawn mower of fear,

The poem ends: "Unto the bowling alley of family love, / which is none-of-your-goddamned-business. // Unto red meat and milk." And it works—as Barresi's poems often do—as a look back on a baby-boomer childhood through the shattered lens of the present. What Barresi's poems don't often do is use the line as a unit upon which the poem is built. Other poems in Rouge Pulp do similar list-like work less effectively, partly because they don't rely on readily available cultural markers—tweaking, refuting, or aggrandizing them as in "Fifties Song"—and instead depend upon conventional notions of mother-daughter, mother-infant relationships, which often slip into sentimentality.

Still, much of Rouge Pulp is great: innovative, exciting, and most importantly fun (e.g., "Sock Hop with the New Critics"). In her best poems Barresi manages to be as accessible as she is verbally and aurally interesting. The poems want to say things, to make points and spin social commentary, and a handful of them do so with flash and wit and even daring. The best parts of Rouge Pulp significantly complicate Barresi's interest in personal narrative and the cultural framework that influences and orders an individual life. The book is a formal grab-bag: there are four poems that use anaphora, two dramatic monologues, a prose poem, an elegy, and a surreal collage poem ("Little Dreams of War," probably the least Barresi-like poem Barresi has ever written). There's much to be admired in a poet who, two books and two major prizes into her career, displays such a willingness to play with a proven formula, to take risks with her verse and experiment with form and structure. Dorothy Barresi isn't a "new" poet, and Rouge Pulp doesn't herald a new talent, but the book should stand as a model to other poets who find themselves stuck in the rut of their own first or second successes. For all its unevenness, it's an energetic, highly enjoyable collection of poems from a poet sure to go somewhere different next time as well.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

 Translated by Mark Spitzer
Creative Arts Book Company ($14.95)

by Karl Krause

Mark Spitzer's From Absinthe to Abyssinia, a collection of obscure and never before translated works by one of France's most intoxicating poets, sheds a harsh light on a much-admired heroic figure. Along with some essential fragments and poems of Rimbaud's finest period comes a stiff helping of bawdy parodies and letters of the poet's post-literary years. Uncompromisingly comprehensive, this collection offers a few sips of nectar and an adequate sample of the morning after.

One of the highlights of the book is Spitzer's translation of the startlingly inventive "Drunken Boat." Previously translated by the likes of Ted Berrigan, this poem wields the impact of enormous influence, implausibly written around 1875: "I've slammed myself / into Florida's incredible / mixing petals / with panther / eyes and human skin / while under oceanic skies / rainbows reined / the sea-green herds." Rimbaud's arrival at these poetics, in light of his contemporaries, is phenomenal.

Unraveling this mystery, Spitzer presents a number of selected parodies. As his letters have long suggested, Rimbaud inspired his poetic development with a mix of alcohol and rebellion; these poems clearly indicate that he did not simply arrive as a genius poet, but instead developed both confidence and subject from dissatisfaction and ambition. Though enlightening historical documents, however, these works will have limited appeal for sober humors. "He takes a poop then disappears / but beneath the holy / empty moon / his damned poop appears / in a little cesspool / filthy with blood!" The collection concludes with a thorough sample of Rimbaud's letters as an African explorer and slave trader, a body of work largely unknown to the poet's Anglophone audience.

While the original French drafts of these writings are not provided in this volume, Spitzer—who has also translated works by Celine and Georges Bataille, among others—makes his intentions clear from his introduction. Citing comical examples, he intends to set right the errors of previous translations, abandoning rhyme to compensate for the complexity of meaning in Rimbaud. The technique works well for Rimbaud's more telling works, although some of the most illuminating poems in this collection come from Rimbaud's early, melodic, formal studies. Spitzer's tendency to make up for the inadequacies of other translations leads him to some bold presentations, as he opts for the blatant side of double entendres—for example, he transforms "siege" (which has a number of meanings, commonly "seat") to "potty."

From Absinthe to Abyssinia is unlikely to inspire a new generation of Rimbaud enthusiasts, but it will at least set the record straight. And perhaps there is something inspiring here: the knowledge that even boy-genius Rimbaud wrote a few stinkers.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Yang Lian
Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee
Green Integer ($14.95)

by Lucas Klein

Over a decade ago Harvard Sinologist Stephen Owen took on contemporary Chinese literature with his article "The Anxiety of Global Influence—What is World Poetry?," wherein he succeeded, through astonishingly sensible and even-tempered writing, in laying out a pretty bullet-headed point. Now required reading for Chinese poetry courses in English-speaking universities, the article faults Bei Dao and his fellow Misty Poets—poets who were raised on clandestine translations of experimentalist writing from outside China—for not being Chinese enough. The main point of Owen's review is simple: "Poems are made only for audiences," and the audience Misty Poetry is written for is international, not Chinese. He asks, "is this Chinese literature, or literature that began in the Chinese language? For what imaginary audience has this poetry been written?"

Professor Owen's comments were aimed at Bei Dao, certainly the best known of the Misty Poets, but they struck the other Chinese poets affiliated with the underground journal Jintian (Today) as well. Shu Ting, Gu Cheng, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian, to name only the most renowned, have all in various ways been castigated for doing what for any other tradition would be a bold, futuristic move: casting away the bonds of the past and moving forward into a new literature.

Yang Lian, however, has not simply thrown away his Chineseness. In the late 1980s, Yang Lian wrote Yi, which may be China's first epic poem, incorporating elements of Western Modernism without jettisoning any of the Chinese cultural heritage. Yang Lian takes the Yijing (familiarly known in English as the I Ching or The Book of Changes) as his starting point, and in exacting, difficult, and sometimes hermetic poetry, demands that we re-examine the nature of man's relationship with his surroundings. In its dependence on Chinese traditions—ancient and modern—in thought, motif, and specific reference, Yi is a work that even Professor Owen would find worthy of Chinese literature.

Like the best of classical Chinese literature, the architecture of Yi is impressively tight, though on a much grander scale. Sixty-four poems subdivide into four sections, each with a specific structural purpose. The Yijing, an ancient text of cosmology and divination, outlines sixty-four hexagrams—six-line units—to correspond to human interaction with nature; the hexagrams are each formed out of a pairing from the eight trigrams, in turn representing Heaven, Earth, Mountain, Marsh, Water, Fire, Thunder, and Wind, each of which is composed of the various combinations of three lines of yin or of yang. In following this structure, Yang Lian's poem is necessarily just as complex. As described in his very helpful endnote, "The abstract signs of the Changes are not used but certain images and numbers are indicated in order to preserve the primitive free symbolization of the Changes, like the forms in nature. In internal structure, Heaven and Wind, Earth and Mountain, Water and Marsh, Fire and Thunder, are used to construct four books corresponding to the Four Elements of classical philosophy."

He is here referring to the four books of Yi, each with its own set of hexagrams and an element as thematic coagulant. The sections outline as follows: "The Untrammeled Man Speaks," the Heaven and Wind hexagrams, is based on qi, as much air as the mystic breath of vitality; "In Symmetry with Death," with the Earth and Mountain hexagrams, uses earth as its central imagery; the poems of "Living in Seclusion," running through the Water and Marsh hexagrams, base their poetics on water; and finally there is the redemption of "The Descent," which through the Fire and Thunder hexagrams takes fire as its central element. Each section also illustrates an essential conflict, in the order of Man confronts nature, Man confronts history, Man confronts the self, and Man reaches transcendence.

Yet the overarching structure does not suffocate. While it is meticulously outlined, each individual poem, when taken line-by-line, is refreshingly free-form and organic. Take, for example, Yi's first lines, from "Heaven 1":

Supreme like this: Nameless black rock, ecstatically crashing through
vertical time
The myriad things tranquil like dusk, more free more vast
Sunset's ritual each step a lotus, slowly moves west to death

And indeed, this is what poetry aims for: a crash, though tranquil, through time; the frame gives shape to the expression and the rigidity is softened by the verse. Yang Lian has married freedom to form, achieving what all poets aspire to do.

In Yi, Yang Lian as poet presides over a marriage of Eastern and Western. While the general structure of the poem follows traditional Chinese culture, its roots also reach into the Modernist tradition of Europe and America. The length alone dictates that Yi belongs to the tradition of personal epic extending from Pound's Cantos. Translator Mabel Lee, professor of Chinese at University of Sydney, has published an article illustrating the debt Yi owes to Sunstone, the long poem that defines the poetic maturation of Octavio Paz. Indeed, the two works share a thoroughly modern use of language to investigate the lingering significance of an ancient cosmological text, as well as a cyclical structure to evoke wholeness; the repeated strophe that begins and ends Sunstone—"a course of a river that turns, moves on, / doubles back, and comes full circle, / forever arriving: " (Eliot Weinberger, trans.)—is analogous to the first and last phrase of Yi: "Supreme like this." As Lee writes, "Paz's Sunstone and Yang Lian's Yi have both been inspired by ancient calendars which provided in both cases symbolic and concrete confirmation for their thinking about cyclical time in human history."

Another evident precursor for Yang Lian's Yi is Eliot's Four Quartets. Structurally, both are poems built from four sections, each inspired by the four elements. Likewise, the poems are meditations on time and eternity, the nature of poetry, and the duty of the poet. Similarities even appear in individual lines: "Forever the first," "Where time does not exist life and death do not exist. Each person is a word, in each word there is no distance between hell and heaven," and "I am not on the mountain, I am the mountain" could all have been written into The Four Quartets. The complexity of structure and the darkness of The Waste Land combine in Yi with the high philosophy and meditative essence of Eliot's later work.

While The Four Quartets represents Eliot's Paradiso, Yang Lian does not have a similar Judeo-Christian model to follow; the symbolic order of the China written into Yi is at times so foreign to the Western reader that the section of redemption and transcendence, which we would normally expect to be an upward motion, is titled "The Descent." Although the Euro-American forebears to Yi are important, they are not the whole story. To be sure, this is a modern epic in the Pound tradition, following as it does his definition that an epic is "a long poem containing history." That history now is a foreign history, one which Ezra Pound, even in writing the China Cantos, would have been unable to create.

The Chinese word for epic is in fact a compound word meaning "history poem," so the poem defines its epic nature on its own terms, without needing help from Pound's famous designation. History is indeed at the root of Yi, perhaps nowhere so visibly as in the eight Earth poems of "In Symmetry with Death." The eight poems are written in something approximating the voice of eight figures from ancient Chinese history, with classical quotations throughout. Yang Lian explains these eight figures as personae, or masks, that each human wears at times in his life. But they also have echoes with more recent history, as the poem “Earth 7” illustrates:

History crammed into reverberating walls
Language of the dead
Buzzing circles

The poem's accompanying hexagram is Earth over Thunder, or what the Yijing calls "The image of the Turning Point." If this is the turning point, then, it turns from historical success to failure. The poem's header points to Chen Sheng, described in the notes as

Leader of a peasant rebellion in the Qin dynasty [221-206 BC]. Driven to extremes by the oppressive government of the time, he led an uprising in the marshes. . . . Afterwards when his military might gradually increased he became obsessively suspicious and began to kill off his comrades; he was eventually murdered by his intimate ministers.

For Yang Lian, Chen Sheng is the historical precedent for Chairman Mao Zedong, the walls of today crammed with historical reverberations. Chairman Mao, another peasant who came to power by rebelling against an oppressive government and who killed his comrades in the Cultural Revolution, could just as easily be the subject of this poem. To link two historical figures may be little more than a parlor game, but literature actualizes the unity of past and present:

In fish bellies cut open in the shrieking of foxes is his name
No one guesses his secret fear of ghosts
He stakes all on the handsome face of his head:
King, marquis, general and minister
Would you prefer progeny

For the audience, especially the audience of Chinese readers brought up and brought down in the Cultural Revolution, the secret fear of ghosts not only links Chen Sheng with Chairman Mao, but is also one of the trends against which Yi is a forceful rebellion. Not only did the Cultural Revolution preach forgetting as a means of eradicating ghosts, but China since the 1970s has also treated the ten years of chaos as a mistake best left undiscussed. Yang Lian understands the psychological impossibility of 'ignore it and it will go away', and his Yi is in many ways a fight, if futile, for remembering.

Bending down a huqin is being played
Mottled snakeskin
Eyelids of the dead split
Echoes on walls     Reverberate
Each person forgotten in
The language of the living

Though the Cultural Revolution is never distinctly mentioned anywhere in Yi, no work of consequence from 1980s' China can fully avoid digesting the significance of cataclysmic horror only a decade removed. But while Yi explores many revolutions—psychic, social, natural among them—the topic of political revolution remains on the submerged part of this iceberg. Yi can still be read as an individualist (or even just an individual) response to the Cultural Revolution, confronting the natural world intellectuals were "sent down" to, revisiting the past that both produced and entailed these events, questioning both one's terror and one's guilt, and finally emerging triumphant, as a poet, as a creator. "I created the setting sun in the midst of the vast human river. The flood of the vast setting sun spills into a perfect circle to rest in the sky."

If any redemption can be found in the Cultural Revolution for Yang Lian, it is that Yi embodies the poet's own counter-revolution. Both the foreign and the ancient were made illegal in the Cultural Revolution—"The more ancient, the more counter-revolutionary" was one of the more inane slogans of the day—and yet the foreign and the ancient are the seeds of Yang Lian's oeuvre. That such elements can combine to create what will no doubt come to be seen as one of China's most powerful and important poems is no surprise (just as it is no surprise that it took nearly ten years for such a poem to find publication in English). After all, Yang Lian has turned the personal into the universal, and the universal must now find its audience.

As for whether the intended audience is Chinese or international, the question is hardly relevant anymore. For poetry of this level, the audience needs to find the poem; Yi is not simply a great Chinese poem, but it may just be one of the grandest poetic masterworks to be found in any language's literature. Like the Yijing, Yang Lian's Yi represents a closed circuit, wherein a change in one line, in one hexagram, in one poem, has repercussions and responses in each of the other interdependent elements. The poem is a grandly conceived web where only the architecture and the words maintain superiority. Yi compels a vision of the world in inter-connected change, where a Chinese or international audience is only a matter of the temporary manifestation of the cultural flux. In the end, and at the beginning, it is Yi itself which, while never breaking free of the need for an audience, is still above, transcendent, superior, "Supreme like this."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Donald Revell
Alice James Books ($13.95)

by Hank Lazer

George Oppen, a poet much admired by Donald Revell, concludes in "Route": "I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity." In My Mojave as well as in his previous books, Revell has idiosyncratically pursued a moving and beautiful mode of clarity. As a reader, Revell has been drawn to two seemingly disparate types of clarity: that found in spiritual journals and that found in the nature writing (journals, letters, notes) of Henry David Thoreau. Thus informed, Revell's search for clarity begins to reveal itself as a phenomenology of spirit—a reporting on the movements, lurches, vicissitudes, pain, grief, and sudden blessings of a soulmaking-in-progress.

Oppen's remarks on his motive of poetry are preceded by these two lines: "Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity." For Revell, that search for beautiful construction and for the marvel of the specific involves precision of historical and physical detail: "A stone's throw west of Melville's tomb, my father's / Headstone tilts under one spruce kept alive / By sprinklerheads and a Puerto Rican gardener." Likewise, it involves the kind of historical detail and juxtaposition that in the present becomes exactingly ironic: "And as Charles Darwin good man / Born the very same day as Abraham Lincoln / Wrote 'three species of tyrant-flycatchers / (Are) a form strictly American'."

In "Arcady Again," the opening poem of My Mojave and an explicit link to Revell's previous book Arcady, Revell writes,

God help the man who breathes
With nothing leading him
Here or someplace like it
Inside him which he opens
Wide enough to walk through
And walks through

Note the perfection, paradox, and beauty of Revell's line breaks—how they open up multiple syntaxes and productively different paths of reading/thinking—as well as Revell's determination throughout My Mojave to find such places, such openings in breathing and thinking, as described in "Arcady Again." These places turn out to be sites of wonder, but also often sites of memory and grief—the place to exercise what Charles Darwin, in an odd phrase I recently came across in Rosmarie Waldrop's marvelous writing on what Edmond Jabes calls "grief-muscles."

Though Revell is definitely one of those poets representative of and crucial to the development of a new (or renewed) poetry of spirit, the core writer for his recent work--Henry David Thoreau—points toward an equally strong attachment to glorious specifics of the world of nature and fact. In My Mojave, a book divided into two sections, "Here" and "There," the epigraphs for both sections come from Thoreau: "Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid" and "The knife which slices the bread of Jove ceases to be a knife when this service is rendered." Revell orients us to the "casual" writings of Thoreau, his Journal and his correspondence, more than to the "finished" writing (such as Walden). It is the epiphanic sentence that most attracts Revell, the Thoreau-sentence that becomes like the renewing and mystifying "someplace" in "Arcady Again," the sentence-as-site that reorients and renews our thinking and that educates the making of our (in-progress) souls. Revell's Thoreau at once intensifies our moments of perception and also places us in proximity to a self-annihilating or apocalyptic quality of awareness, the kind of enlightened ending that Thoreau points toward at the end of the second chapter of Walden: "If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career."

With his generous cross references and attachment to other writers, Revell practices the kind of original unoriginality that Robert Duncan insisted upon: an acknowledgement of the communal nature of poetry, and a giving thanks for the words of others that inspire and enable present writing. Revell's poems, particularly extended poems such as "Given Days," demonstrate an admirable stitching together of "his" words and the words of others—a process that makes Revell's poems a verbal quilt composed of treasured scraps reassembled into a new design. As John Cage would have it, Revell's submission to the writing of others—his writing through their words—gives proper priority to self-alteration (rather than the more common emphasis of mainstream poets on self-expression).

While Revell's poems often do point toward his dialogues with other writers, the poem is just as likely to be initiated by an accidental or fortuitous encounter with an odd object or an unusual set of details. In this respect, "My Trip" is an archetypal Revell poem. The key moment of the poem occurs at the midway point:

Next day is no way of knowing,
And the day after is my favorite,
A small museum really perfect
And a good meal in the middle of it.
As I'm leaving,
I notice a donkey on a vase
Biting the arm of a young girl,
And outside on the steps
A silver fish head glistens beside a bottlecap.
Plenty remains.

In sentences that flirt with a deliberate flatness, Revell focuses on the moment when wonder and renewed (and renewing) attentiveness are activated. In this persistent and accurate recording of such moments of transformed attention, he reminds me a bit of David Wilson, the creator of The Museum of Jurassic Technology—a museum designed, as Wilson puts it, "to reintegrate people to wonder" and to celebrate the moments of "delicious confusion ... that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human." As well as their conviction of the fundamental importance of wonder, Revell and Wilson share a Socratic sense of the subversive and pedagogical nature of the experience of wonder. Again in "My Trip," Revell writes,

The work of poetry is trust,
And under the aegis of trust
Nothing could be more effortless.
Hotels show movies.
Walking around even tired
I find my eyes find
Numberless good things
And my ears hear plenty of words
Offered for nothing over the traffic noise
As sharp as sparrows.

It is toward what Revell calls "catching a glimpse of eternity" or perhaps hearing a word or two of renewing mystery "over the traffic noise" that the poems direct our attention. And it is a poetry fully aware that "every blessed thing is elusive." To his credit, Revell resists a formulaic version of spiritual accounting, particularly the all too common contemporary poem dead set on achieving a "wow" ending that, repetitively and compulsively, puts the reader in a preordained hammock of dumb wonder.

Revell's poetry is an oblique and not so oblique struggle with the divine, in one moment "urging God to be God-like / Earth to be worthy a grown man's living there"; in another, in lines that recall the tone and substance of James Wright's best poems, "We're not home yet. / And I'm still new / To my callings: / Teacher, drunkard, absent minister. / I was in Carcassonne once. / I saw two horses there / And God who invented them." But as the concluding lines of the book's title poem indicate, Revell's interactions with the divine are apt to be self-annihilating: "At midday, / My soul wants only to go / The black road which is the white road. / I'm not needed / Like wings in a storm, / And God is the storm." Revell's poetry—part journal, part spiritual autobiography, part day-book—increasingly lays bare the poet's spiritual desires:

Heavenly man
I am scarce to go
And well to stand
In a disused place.

Miserable cardinals comfort
The broken seesaws
And me who wants no comfort
Only to believe.

In Keats's sense, it is a poetry of soul-making, a writing intent on tracking the process of that schooling and that formation:

God eat our suffering
Out of which we churn butter
See
How troubles twin us
The white doe
Afraid
The National Bank
Afraid
Although the soul we have
Is love's doing.

The latter half of My Mojave, "There," features two gorgeous extended poems: "Prolegomena" and "Given Days," as well as the beautifully displayed "Heat Like Murder" (from the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth), a poem that suggests the lyrical erasure and display of Ronald Johnson's RADI OS.

Revell's poetry embodies moments of wonder, reports in an honest phenomenology tenuous and erratic relations to the divine, and weds and welds such moments to the odd specificity of historical fact and suddenly appropriate (and appropriated) writings of predecessors, just as Revell seeks the precise names and descriptions for these moments in their exact present circumstance. He wants to find a music—a lyricism, a beauty of sound—that matches these moments. Increasingly, though, there is an ethical dimension to Revell's spiritual accounting, a desire to live up to his own observation that "in truth there can be no greater reward / For doing well than to be enabled to do well," an ethics tempered by the contingent observation that "all days take instruction from accident."

As in "Given Days," which begins with a poem on September 11, 2001, Revell tries to establish a set of coordinates and signposts—readings and beliefs that might sustain us in times of plagues and lamentation. Revell turns to essential reading: Whitman, the Psalms, the creature poems of D.H. Lawrence. He creates a poetry that sounds like a jazz fugue, as key phrases recur, are recognized, reshaped, improvised upon, moderately transformed, all while they continue to echo with a pleasing familiarity. As Revell acknowledges earlier in My Mojave, "The plot is the stutter / Is why / The wild is why," and this latest book, beautiful as it is, may leave us and perhaps Revell too listening for a more stuttered music, a lyricism less driven by the sentence and more guided by the multiple music of poems such as "Arcady Again," which strains a bit more at the limits of an already known syntax and music.

With My Mojave, Revell demonstrates the great art of when to write and when not to, of what to read and when. He writes a spiritual poetry that feels utterly truthful, giving us a phenomenology of spirit remarkably free of institutions and mostly free of habit. My Mojave will leave both those who have long followed Revell's work and those new to the fold eager to read what's next.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

by Brian Evenson

Anybody familiar with literary history realizes that the writers praised by their contemporaries are not always the writers that last the longest. Look at a 20-year-old copy of the New York Times and see how many of the Books of the Year are still available, how many of the names still hold respect today. Indeed, very often what strikes reviewers, critics and readers as necessary to the moment is not what lasts over the long haul. Herman Melville, for instance, was all but forgotten until the discovery of Billy Budd, but since has been defined as one of the giants of his period. Aphra Behn was largely ignored for 200 years, but now is seen as one of the most significant voices of the 18th century.

There are many different methods used to sort out literary history, each of them with their own flaws. At one end of the spectrum is the traditional method, the so-called Test of Time. It goes something like this: if a book is genuinely good, it will last while lesser works fall by the wayside. Such a view has tended to generate a canon that's quite conservative, that doesn't readily admit new additions, and that remains somewhat musty in the way it reads the work it includes. It relies on notions of taste rooted in the 18th and 19th century, is hostile to "otherness," generally considers literature a mimetic enterprise, and isn't always kind to innovative work. At the other end is the notion that individual experience is primary, and that the works that are valuable are those that represent a diversity of experience. Such a view validates works of literature that the Test of Time excludes and is kind to minority viewpoints. The difficulty, however, is that at its worst, such a method ends up validating work that quickly feels dated, quickly resembles local color. And like the Test of Time it validates certain kinds of works and certain kinds of readings, looking at writers in terms of race class and gender and perhaps excluding those writers who don't quite fit into those boxes.

One side emphasizes the timelessness of literature, the other its timeliness. Either method, as I've said—and all the methods in between—are flawed; too much slips through the cracks. Thus, readers tend to negotiate several different aesthetics as they read contemporary writers, hoping that one writer will lead to another, that one can wade through the books being published to find work that strikes one as genuinely good. To do so one needs, however, a little bit of distance, some way to gain a perspective on the work of 20th- and 21st-century writers.

One way of doing that is to go abroad, for to be outside of American culture can create a distance analogous to the distance that time can provide. Oddly enough, some of the best writing on American writers is being published not in America but in France, in Éditions Belin's "Voix Américaines" [American Voices] collection. The series is directed by critic Marc Chénetier, who has translated into French writers such as Alexander Theroux, Jerome Charyn, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, Russell Banks, Denis Johnson, Willa Cather, Mary Caponego, and Robert Coover, among others. Chénetier himself has also published, in both English and French, work on writers ranging from Vachel Lindsey to Richard Brautigan, from Paul Auster to William H. Gass, from Stanley Elkin to William S. Wilson. His book Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960 (U Penn Press), is one of the best studies of American writing of the '60s, '70s and '80s available.

Indeed, it is no surprise that a series directed by a rigorous foreign critic and scholar, who remains quite aware of contemporary trends in American literary criticism but who has maintained a careful commitment to the text and to language, would be itself rigorous and first rate. While many similar American series, including Twayne's American author series, are written for the lowest common denominator (beginning college students), and as a result often oversimplify the work of some genuinely interesting writers, Belin's "Voix Américaines" demands more of its readers. It refuses to dumb down the writer.

Each of the more than 40 volumes of the series is 128 pages long, and each tries to offer a fairly precise overview of the author along with careful analyses of the major works and acknowledgment of the criticism. Writing my own book on Robert Coover this year, I found Jean-François Chassay's opinions in his Belin book on Coover invaluable as something to play my own ideas off; indeed, published in 1996 it is the most recent book on Coover and the only book to discuss works such as Pinnocchio in Venice and (very briefly) John's Wife.

The Belin series contains books on well-known American writers who have often been written on in America, such as Willa Cather, Arthur Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Edith Wharton, and Sherwood Anderson. It contains as well more contemporary acknowledged masters such as Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and John Edgar Wideman. It also includes writers such as John Barth, John Hawkes, James Purdy and Robert Coover who were highly regarded in America in the 1960s and '70s but who since have been less visible in our country. Belin's books make a good case for the strength of these writers, suggesting that they might have fallen out of favor for the wrong reasons. It is astounding, for instance, that James Purdy hasn't had a book written on him for several decades, despite the fact that some of his stylistic gestures were at the heart of the development of the minimalist aesthetic in the '70s and '80s. Figures who have been written about in America as popular icons but seldom with any depth considered as literary writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan, are included as well. Intriguing are the inclusion of writers such as John Ashbery, William Gaddis, and William Gass. Finally, most intriguing of all are the inclusion of a few writers who have never had much written on them in America and certainly not a book: for instance, Guy Davenport and Robert Steiner. Davenport in particular, though he is respected, puzzles Americans. Well-read and quite original, as proficient as an essayist and translator as in fiction, he doesn't fit easily into any American box and thus has been unjustly ignored. Indeed, while Belin's series reaffirms the greatness of American cannon writers and commemorates once-popular, now-forgotten ones, it more importantly culls writers we've neglected, though they are world class.

In all cases, these short books offer views of American writing that focus on the stylistic qualities; they suggest that current American writing has a relevance that moves beyond the confines of our own nation. While we may not share the French opinion of, for instance, Jerry Lewis, we have quite a bit to learn from the seriousness and insight with which Belin's "Voix Américaines" approaches American literature.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

Promethean Risk: The Poet as Translator
Risking It: Scandals, Teaching, Translation.

by Kristin Prevallet

Editor's note: the following paper was presented at the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Conference as part of a panel moderated by Tom Radko of Wesleyan University Press. Radko asked panelists Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Donald Revell, and Kristin Prevallet—all poets who are regularly engaged in the taxing labor of translation—to comment on the dangers and advantages working poets face when translating the great masters of another tongue. The papers by Eshleman, Joris, and Revell can be found in the Summer 2003 Print Edition of Rain Taxi.

In reviewing a new translation of The Histories by Herodotus and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, the poet Charles Olson makes an analogy to a Bulldog Drummond mystery in which a man, exhausted from a day of exploring the streets of a foreign country, returns to his hotel room only to find that any trace of his existence has disappeared—the concierge doesn't recognize him, the room he was staying in has a new number on the door, and his luggage is not to be found anywhere. He begs the concierge to hear his story, but without tangible evidence of his existence, he is no one—and the concierge refuses to help him. To Olson, this scenario sums up two opposing but magnetic approaches to history—on the one hand there is the concierge who, like the early Greek historian Thucydides, is determined that in order for any event to be legitimate, there must be facts, tangible evidence, proof that it happened. On the other side is Herodotus who, according to Olson, would have taken the man's oral word for it, and represented his story as fact. He would have, in other words, respected the man's humanity. Confused as he may have been, certainly he knew where he left his luggage and therefore was an authority on his own whereabouts. Herodotus relied heavily on oral accounts and rumors, ritualistic traditions and folklore and took plenty of imaginative leaps when evidence was lacking. It was his humanity that Olson appreciated, the fact that to Herodotus, "the voice is greater than the eye (343)."

With interpretation as their nexus, certainly history and translation have a lot in common—dealing on the ground level with how language itself works, both must consider the authenticity, the truth-value, and the inevitable subjectivity of source texts. Like the historian, the translator is faced with a decision: to be Thucydides saying, "stick close to what the original text is doing. Try and rearrange the furniture in the room to look exactly as it looked before you began muddling with it." Or, the translator can choose to think like Herodotus who might say, "every translation is like being in a room that is constantly in the process of being rearranged. It is impossible to get the room to look exactly like it did originally. The furniture always has to be in a new place because any trace of the original room is itself subject to perspective."

Given either model, the original text is going to be changed. No matter what, it will be put through a kind of time/space warp and come out altered, disfigured, marred; (or, in some cases made over, new-and-improved, fixed.) Translation, reliant as it is on interpretation, essentially engages language's limitations to reveal either absolute authenticity or unbiased truth. Therefore, as the post-structuralists would say, the task of the translator is to reveal the play, the language games, at work in the act of translation itself. And yet, there are risks involved in straying too far from the text, from taking too many liberties, from imposing too much of our own human will—poetic imposition and play—on the remodeling of the text.

As the title of this panel (Promethean Risk: The Poet as Translator) suggests, perhaps these risks are related to the fate of the good-hearted but ultimately failed translator Prometheus, who thought that fire stolen from the Gods could work to further human knowledge. Tragically, (at least according to Shelley) instead of using it to develop science and culture, humans used it strategically in war to gain power over each other. Something was certainly lost in the translation, and for his faith in humanity, the translator had to pay with his liver.

How this mythological parable of tricked gods and selfish humans is being played out in current political events is yet another story of the risks of translation. After all, we're living right now under the rule of arrogant God-impostors, an administration of war-hawks who took enormous liberties in the manipulation and distortion of texts in order to justify an attack on Iraq, for which there was no solid evidence and certainly no immediate urgency. Many documentary distortions were presented as Truth. There were pages of manufactured reports and twisted interpretations of texts and evidence: Although the actual document submitted by Iraq to the UN in December 2002 was 12,000 pages long, the Security Council's 10 elected council members only received 3,500 pages of it—and of those pages, crucial information regarding the sale of weapons by US and European countries had been "blacked out," according to the Washington Post. Then, On March 7, 2003, Colin Powell gave a speech to the U.N. in which he attempted to prove that Iraq was duplicitous, using forged documents fabricating some arms shopping spree in Africa and a graduate student's paper from ten years (complete with spelling errors and inaccuracies) outlining Iraq's movement of weapons. A week before Powell's speech, there was a tape alleged to be the voice of Bin Laden which was broadcast throughout the Middle East (with the notable exception of Iraq). The tape was instantly translated and summarized by a variety of internet and cable news sources. MSNBC online reported that "the message also called on Iraqis to rise up and oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who is a secular leader." (The story I read on Yahoo had the headline, "bin Laden Calls Hussein an Infidel.") But an hour later, Powell comes up with a different spin: that in spite of bin Laden's disdain for Hussein, in fact this tape solidly proves the connection between bin Laden and Hussein. All Powell had to do was say the word, and the news agencies instantly re-wrote the story, altering their original interpretation and ultimately deleting the "Infidel" sentence entirely. Amazing. When there are no documents, create them; and as for the documents that do exist but don't reflect the official version of history, destroy them. This is a post-structural joke of textual reflection in which the mirrors themselves can't figure out which one holds the original image.

But these are just a few of many examples of the textual risks that are still being taken by this supposedly God-fearing administration. Promethean risks (in which the assumption of high power is democratically distributed to the people) have been subtly transfigured into Satanic ones (Milton's Satan, Prometheus's alter-ego, who stole powers from the gods not to benefit humanity but to benefit himself). I keep waiting for the good—gods, the ones we pray to for hope, not power, to descend and chain the real infidels to the Washington Monument, sending their battalions of eagles to slowly pick at the vile-infested hearts of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz. Or maybe Prometheus can come down from the mountain and return our fire to Zeus. Now that we're using it to build weapons and wage war over the existence or non-existence of weapons that may or may not be used to wage war, it is as if the weapons themselves are in charge. How is this logical?

To return to the immediate topic of this panel: a text undergoing translation is always in danger of being scandalized—meaning, in danger of being used to prove or disprove allegiances to nation, identity, boundaries, or larger structures of power. (This use of the term "scandal" comes from Susan Stewart's book, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For example, in the ballad tradition there are several players involved in the creation of scandals—one example is the English ballad collectors who came along in the 19th century, and the Scottish "folk" who, since the 12th century, had been singing ballads without writing them down. The ballad collectors, instead of transcribing the songs directly from the folk who sang them, re-wrote the songs as embellished English verse—an undertaking that ultimately served nationalist and certainly colonial endeavors. Not only did these collectors establish another class of readers for ballads (stealing their soul away from the largely illiterate people of the hills who sang them and publishing them in chapbooks for drawing room entertainment), but since many ballads originated in Scotland, this tearing at the root of tradition allowed England to achieve a certain cultural as well as political and economic dominance. What these scandals of poetic translation bring into question is the problem of authenticity—in the case of Scottish ballads, there is no definitive author, no "Homer of the hills" who composed the ballads and then set about spreading them orally among the people. What there is, over the course of over 500 years, is a constantly evolving genre as each singer of each generation in each town took license to change the ballad at her or his will, passing down a song that held a trace of some original, authentic ur-ballad, but in reality was a hybrid composition—a constantly evolving translation. However, although the songs were constantly being reinvented, they ultimately served the purpose of renewing and rejuvenating an oral tradition in order to preserve cultural memory from generation to generation. And this is very different from the motives of the ballad collectors, who translated the oral tradition into English verse with the intention of wiping away the identity of the people who originally sang them.

In his essay "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights," Borges writes about the scandalous translations of The Thousand and One Nights, a text which was thoroughly abused by English translators who projected every sort of insecurity onto it, removing any iota of tone and logic from the original Arabic and embellishing it with their own moral dilemmas—one generation of translators taking out scenes that were deemed too offensive, and another generation embellishing erotic scenes beyond belief in order to titillate English social codes. This is a text that suffered extreme impositions of poetic license—every translator defaced and maimed the text a little differently than the last, depending on the agenda (either his own, or England's) to which he was complicit. Like the ballads, Orientalism itself is another scandal, aided by overly poetic translators, who would take such liberties with Asian and Middle Eastern texts as to render the rhetoric and logic of the original language into nothing more than placid parlor reading. Again, there is always an imposition of a larger social and political context onto the original text as it is being translated. There is no translation without a motive—and although in these so called progressive modern times our gestures towards the original text are more self-conscious and sensitive, still we play out larger contexts in how we approach texts.

In her essay "The Politics of Translation," Gayatri Spivak writes about the responsibilities that we have as Western readers and writers to question our position and privileged identity over, in particular, third-world translated texts. "Translation is the most intimate act of reading," she writes. "I surrender to the text when I translate." Surrendering to the text means careful attention and awareness of both the logic and the rhetoric of the original language—an attention that would be difficult to master without doing the hard work of actually immersing oneself in the culture and language of the text being translated. Ammiel Alcalay, in an interview with Benjamin Hollander, writes that learning another language is crucial in the agenda to "stretch the American context to engage with experiences that are not made to fit existing models"(184). To Alcalay it is crucial to resist mono-lingualism and to "give permission to other languages, literatures, and cultures to come into the space of the language you happen to be writing in."

There are numerous ways that, in creative writing classrooms, teachers and students get around this issue of intimacy, and set about translating texts from languages they know nothing about. For example, homophonic translations, or exercises in which students are asked to mix and match four or five different translations of a text in order to come up with their own, English compromise. In a way, these kinds of translations (when they are done as a first, and last step) are another kind of scandal—they reduce the original text to a linguistic experiment and teach nothing new about language. What they ultimately teach is that anything can sound good in English. The dangers that poet-translators are capable of inflicting onto texts when our own poetics expand to overtake an original is a question, once again, of authenticity and ownership. Who has the right, the permission granted, to rewrite...and for what purpose? What kind of colonization is being taught when texts are handled in this way, and what nation, empire, or ideology, does it mimic?

This issue of translation in the classroom brings Spivak to call for students to do the work of learning both the rhetoric and logic of a foreign language—most specifically a third-world foreign language—before translating it or even before reading translations from it. To apply this to creative writing programs, I will simply question how many creative writing programs have any language requirement attached to them at all. This question is one that I ask myself in reference to the BFA writing students I used to teach at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They all wanted to be writers—they all wanted the assurance from me that they had what it takes to be published. And yet, how to "have what it takes" is the last thing I wanted to be teaching them. My goal was that they began to question their motives in wanting to be writers, and from there, begin to critically examine how language works in the larger world around them. Translation offers multiple ways for young writers to be estranged from their language, to put their cockiness aside and actually feel what it is like to struggle with a text, to contextualize their own writing projects within an understanding of language as a complex system of meaning-making.

And yet, I know that most of these students will never learn a foreign language. So what does that mean? That I avoid teaching translation all together, or do it in an "experimental" way that teaches them good lessons about textuality, but nothing about larger cultural and political ways that culture and language work to create meaning? I am torn about how to handle translation in the classroom—Herodotus and Thucydides both taunt and challenge me to come up with a solution to this dilemma.

Before relaying my personal solutions, I'd like to introduce myself and talk briefly about my own first encounter with translation—since certainly it shapes my thinking about these issues. I can say with some confidence that translation changed my logical framework, and thereby changed the entire direction of my work as a writer. I had three years of high-school French, and spent two semesters of my sophomore year in France. While I was in France, I was taking language courses but ironically ended up failing them—literally. I did learn how to read and speak French with some proficiency, but probably due to the difficulties I had with learning the logic of French grammar, have never been able to write in French. My failing of French was probably due to the fact that at that time, although I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had not yet encountered any teachers who stressed the idea that poets could do more than write poems.

I returned from Paris to the University of Colorado, where in my desire to hang out with the bohemian-cool students, I encountered Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and Naropa, and saw my first glimpses of the kind of poetry and intellectual pursuits that I still follow to this day. Reading Rothenberg's ethnopoetic anthologies, hearing Brakhage talk about Duncan's poetry as akin to the kinds of explorations he was making in film, working on Ed Dorn's magazine Rolling Stock and from there learning about Clayton Eshleman's Sulfur magazine—I picked up on the amazing revelation that the poems I was writing (mostly about love affairs gone awry, or Proust-imitations on lofty things I knew nothing about) were terrible. Dorn stressed the necessity of young writers to embark on what Olson calls a "saturation job" of one particular author or subject. I chose surrealism, and from there developed my first poetic project, of translating Ernst's collages into prose poems.

I went to SUNY Buffalo for my M.A., and it was there that, quite accidentally, I re-encountered French as poetic tool, as something that would enable me to hear my own language, my own poetry, in new ways. The poet Peter Gizzi, who was at that time working on editing Jack Spicer's letters, went to Paris and found a poem by Jean Cocteau called "L'ange Heurtebise." (Heurtebise is the angel-guide in Cocteau's film Orphee who helps him navigate the underworld. Heurtebise also plays an important part in Spicer's poetic cosmology.) Peter asked me to translate this text, although I had never translated anything before. This text was basically written by Cocteau when he was on an opium high to soothe his grief over the death of his lover in WWI. It is a text that abounds in word play, puns, and illogical leaps that end up exposing language as suspicious, alien, and not to be trusted. It took me months to translate it, a total immersion into the rhetoric and logic of French that I had never before conceptualized. I said earlier that translating this text changed my writing forever—and it did. More than anything else, it developed my ear, the way I heard English and the way I then explored tone, measure, and line in my writing—and made me want to pursue poetry as a means of investigating the way language is used to shape my relationship to the world, as an artist and as a thinker.

I'd now like to give some practical suggestions for ways in which translation can be handled in the space of the creative writing workshop. Assuming that creative writing programs will likely never adapt a foreign language requirement, and assuming that most MFA writing programs are comprised of primarily English speaking writers (who, if you ask them, maybe took a few years of French or Spanish or German in high-school), the question is how to engage students to open up their field of knowledge and expand their assumptions about what poetry is and can do. Also, translation exercises can challenge students to question English-only, question their identities as writers, and ask them to consider what "responsibilities" writers have in their textual dealings.

These ideas are centered around a classroom designed after what Charles Bernstein calls "Creative Reading Lab" as opposed to "Creative Writing Workshop." In all my poetry workshops I hand out a heavy dosage of texts, many of which are statements on poetics, manifestos, articulations of what the writer is doing and why. So it is always through close reading and intimacy with other texts that creative writing happens in my particular classroom. What I have done in my creative writing workshops is to make translation and issues around translation the "hub." Which means that I include a wide representation of international texts and movements (Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg's anthology Poems from the Millennium is good to teach for this reason, as is Carolyn Forché's anthology, Against Forgetting. However, finding poems printed with both the original language and the translation is more of a challenge.)

I begin with what I have been calling the "experimental" translation exercises, which again I have adapted from Bernstein's curriculum. (See Translation Phase One of my handouts, located at: http://www.kayvallet.com/Syllabi/translation.html) I think of these experimental exercise as a means and not a ends to the translation workshop. I have seen these exercises taught in a few different writing workshops, usually in order to get students to appreciate the English language and to connect some basic post-structural dots such as: (1) that translation is impossible; (2) that texts are always open to interpretation; (3) that writing is an active practice of reading. These are all valuable lessons, but again, they are only the beginning. There is still the pervading questions of logic and rhetoric, politics and culture. To deal with this, after having students do a translation experiment, I have them collaboratively work on an actual translation. (See Translation Phase Two of link, above.) After they have worked together to produce this translation and have written a response about what can be learned navigating between two languages, they then have to do a close reading of the poem and research the poet and the country he/she is from. A close reading means looking up all of the references, exploring the cultural history of the poet's country, as well as figuring out what was going on in the world during the year or decade in which the poet was writing (even if the poet is not herself writing about politics). After doing this, the class is ready to talk about the larger cultural and political issues that many of the poets face: issues of war, exile, homeland, censorship, and how their use of language may be situated within these larger concerns.

This is just one example, and I hope to develop more as I continue teaching writing courses. My ambition is that these exercises work in some way to encourage students to pursue foreign language study on their own, and to make translation central to their own lives as writers. In other words, I would personally like students to see the contextual links between history, politics, poetry, and translation. When poets are trying to figure all this out, poetry is understood as a means of working through knowledge to arrive at a understanding of, as Benjamin Hollander formulates in a question to Ammiel Alcalay, "the boundaries we've drawn around what we left in or exclude from our understanding of poetic practice, and from how we think and act in relation to the world in a time of emergency." Alcalay, in responding to Hollander, makes a very practical analysis that provides a conclusion for the larger point I'm attempting to make in this essay: "The turning away from a grounded poetics and the backlash against its concerns in much of what is now in vogue seem to me a great loss of breadth and scope, a willingness to not only settle for less but to become domesticated and so willingly participate in, and accept, structures of power...we have pretty much come to the point of removing poetry from knowledge, and sticking it in the creative writing department." The creative writing department is not just a factory for producing poems and stories that are then published and consumed, but is a site where minds converge and think through writing about language, self, boundaries and the larger concerns of the world.

Bibliography:

Alcalay, Ammiel. from the warring factions. Venice, CA: Beyond Baroque, 2002.

Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights," translated by Esther Allen. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 34-47. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Cocteau, Jean. "L'Ange Heurtebise," translated by Kristin Prevallet. Chicago Review, (Winter 2001/Spring 2002): 181-186.

Olson, Charles. "It was. But it Ain't" in Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. University of California Press, 1997.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "The Politics of Translation." In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 397-416. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Newsclips:

"Some Call Iraq Declaration Pile of Disjointed Data," Washington Post, December 18, 2002.

"Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake: U.N. Nuclear Inspector Says Documents on Purchases were Forged." Washington Post, March 8, 2003.

Pitt, William."Osama Rallies Muslims, Condemns Hussein." Truthout, February 12, 2003.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

by Jessica Bennett

Anthony Bourdain has come a long way since the release of his first two mystery novels, Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. His curriculum vitae now contains two hit nonfiction books (Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour) and the television show A Cook's Tour, which, with the possible exception of Iron Chef, is the best show on the Food Network. Bourdain's following includes fellow chefs and restaurant workers, as well as those of us outside the industry who admire their outlaw lifestyle and love good food.

Bourdain's latest book, The Bobby Gold Stories, is a short collection of self-contained stories about a New York mafia tough-guy, and Nikki, the sexy sous-chef he falls in love with. The disparate stories add up to a crime novel that's a comedic page-turner. I talked with Bourdain in Minneapolis about fiction, food, and a few other sizzling topics during his recent book tour.

Jessica Bennett: Do you consider The Bobby Gold Stories to be, at heart, a love story?

Anthony Bourdain: Well, it is kind of a love story, a dysfunctional love story. I didn't know that I was writing one at the time. I'd been writing about myself for two books, talking about myself on television, and frankly I'm bored with the subject. Maybe I'm working through some personal issues here. I was also very much under the influence of the Pat Hobby stories by Fitzgerald. Not that I write anything like Fitzgerald, but he wrote these stories when he was at his abject lowest point in his career, all about a failed screenwriter named Pat Hobby. He wrote them to put his daughter through Vassar and sold them to magazines. And when they were published in a collection it was this lovely sequence of long short stories, all with the same character, and all of them, at least putatively, in order. And I thought, wow, that's a really fun thing to do, they can both stand alone and have some sense of continuity. I just wanted to enjoy myself, and I didn't want to have to chase my characters up a tree, the denouement—I don't care who done it in crime books or why they done it, I care what they're wearing, what the room smells like, what's cooking, that sort of thing. I think those things speak volumes about people.

JB: And what they're listening to as well.

AB: What they're listening to. The record collection, always very important.

JB: I notice that you mention the Modern Lovers in at least a couple of places, which thrills me to no end, because I think Jonathan Richman is a genius.

AB: You know his greatest album, he hates—the first record, The Modern Lovers. He won't perform it. I love "Someone I Care About." There's this great line, "There's a certain kind of girl / That you care about so much / I don't care what you guys do to me / but her, don't touch." It's just a guilelessly wonderful song. I'm a huge fan of that album, that mixture of naiveté and earnestness and cynicism and everything else.

JB: There's also this concern there for the people around him, for people who are destroying their lives, in a similar way to how the people in your books are sometimes destroying their lives—especially with the biggie, drugs.

AB: Yeah, well, it's very autobiographical. I deliberately set out to make my hero and heroine as unsympathetic as I could possibly make them and yet still make you want to keep reading. I don't know whether I pulled that off, but to me, it's not will they get the bad guy, or will they get away with it; what interests me when I'm reading is whether I'm still going to like this guy next chapter. That issue is seriously in doubt in The Bobby Gold Stories. And I always try to find a way to like the bad guy a little bit.

Bobby is a little guy in a big body. He's bulked up to this monster size, but he's basically a pussycat. He's shy, he's socially inept. I guess it's kind of a parable for what you become when you become a chef. Also, this book is very much a reflection of... you know, I got health insurance for the first time a couple of years ago, after I wrote Kitchen Confidential, and I had my walls painted for the first time, and I bought a little furniture. And I was just so giddy to be doing something normal. I'd lived on the fringes, paycheck to paycheck, for 28 years, and I'd always been curious about the massive, abstract entity out there in the dining room. What was it like to own a home, have a lawn, own a car, have kids, any of those things. So it's about two people who have their nose pressed against the glass, but who in their own weird dysfunctional way are trying to emulate Beaver Cleaver.

JB: It's a natural fit for Bobby and Nikki to end up together, Bobby the gangster and Nikki the cook.

AB: I think so. She made herself into this rough, tough, heavily armored character and so did he. They both want something, and in their own, inept way, they're looking to play house.

JB: There are places in your fiction where you write voraciously about food, and the other place where I see that kind of passion is in the sex in the books. There seems to be this really strong connection between food and sex in both your fiction and non-fiction.

AB: Taking pleasure in food has always been associated with sin. Food and sex have been closely aligned in the Judeo-Christian ethic going right back to the very beginning and the apple. If you don't like sex, if you don't like music or movies, chances are you're not eating well, either. Yes, I think there's a close connection personality-wise, but also physiologically, you undergo many of the same physiological changes in anticipation of a good meal as you do with sex. I think they're closely aligned. I read a lot of food writers, and I'm always thinking, this person writes about food like they've never had good sex in their life. I think they're interchangeable in that if you can't take pleasure in one, you probably can't take pleasure in the other.

JB: So what food writers do you like?

AB: (pauses) Um...

JB: Do you like Jeffrey Steingarten at all?

AB: Yeah, now there's a guy, the authoritative crank done well. Really, really well. I kind of like Ruth Reichel's stuff. Not my style, but she makes it interesting because she's so kooky and writes about her own dysfunctional life. I also like the Nigella Lawson stuff. It's all about eating, she doesn't set herself up as an expert.

JB: Do you like any of the classics, like M. F. K. Fisher?

AB: Great writer. I've been accused of being more interested in chefs and in the lifestyle, than in the food, and that's true. Ludwig Bemelmans, George Orwell, Nicolas Freling, they all write about chefs, and about the life. But, you know, if you're in the life, chances are you love food. I guess I'm more interested in the tribe of cooks, and their customs, attitudes, and argot, than I am in ... well, you know, when you write about food it's like writing pornography. I mean, how many adjectives can you use to describe a salad? After "crunchy," "garden fresh," and "redolent of unkilled fields," what are you gonna do? It's like writing for Penthouse Letters.

JB: One of your other apparent passions in fiction is writing about the mob. Does writing about the Mafia offer you a way to explore the characters, or do you think it's just fun to write and read about?

AB: All of the above. I worked with a bunch of those guys back in the seventies and eighties. I'm a crime buff. I watch a lot of trials, I listen to wiretap recordings, read transcripts of surreptitious recordings of mobsters. First of all, I like the sound. To me, it's poetry, the sound of mobsters talking—especially when they think they might be being taped, but they're not sure, and they're speaking in that loopy, elliptical way. To me, Joe Pesci is like Charlie Parker: beautiful to listen to. So that's number one. Two, it's a pressure-cooker situation, with moral gray areas, personal loyalties... it's a more extreme version of life. What is the great American family television show? It's The Sopranos. There's no more accurate representation of the average American family. You have to go to an organized crime family to see what Americans really live like and how they talk at home. So, in a sense, it's just a comfortable way to explore the kind of social relationships I'm familiar with. Organized crime, much like real life, is not The Godfather. Somebody makes a mistake, they screw up, they don't get whacked, it's not the end of the world. People betray each other in small ways all the time. You make a decision, and you move on, you try to do the best you can. So it's a comfortable world, it's a familiar world, and it sounds good to me. I like the way they talk. They're funny guys. Almost all of them. And they eat, and eat well.

JB: Although you do make fun of the way the mobsters eat in Bone in the Throat.

AB: That was very much based on this kid I knew, a chef. There was a lot of me, a lot of chefs I worked with, but I was very much thinking of this hood-y character from Arthur Avenue who had become a French chef in New York. I thought it was very interesting that he was half in and half out. I was a kid who grew up with pirates and cowboys. The gangsters are simply a continuation of that tradition of A Boy's Own Adventure.

JB: I like the conversational tone of both your fiction and non-fiction, and I've read in other interviews that you feel you developed your capacity for bullshitting in the restaurant world, in the kitchen. When you write, are you taking things from your own life and then "bullshitting" them out?

AB: You're never going to find me writing about Irish potato farmers. I avoid any characters whose voices I can't do. If I don't know them and how they talk, I'm not doing them. On the one hand, it's limiting, on the other, no, I don't see it as limiting. I've been in the business 28 years, I've met a lot of people, I know how they talk. It's comfortable for me. Catchy, realistic dialogue is intensely important to me. More important than anything else. To hell with plot. If I'm reading a crime book for instance, like the Spenser books, and Spenser and the girlfriend start engaging in quippy repartee, catching up on the plot, it stops dead for me. Who talks like this in their private moments, in perfect sentences? I hate that. And also, when I'm imagining the reader, I'm always gearing it towards the kind of people who are like my characters. I'm writing for cooks, because I don't know who anyone else is. I haven't had that much exposure to the general public, I don't really know what they want, I wouldn't even know how to begin to try and please them. What I don't want is a salad man in some restaurant to read one of my books and say, "This is shit. Who talks like that?" If no one else, at least I talk like that.

JB: So what mystery novelists do you like?

AB: Crumley is great at his best. Daniel Woodrell. George Higgins. I think The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the absolute benchmark of pitch-perfect dialogue and atmosphere. You can smell the beer on these characters. I like my characters. I want to hang out with them. And I guess that's what I'm doing when I write fiction, is I'm creating a little world that I can escape into for a while, a more dramatic version of the world I've lived in. I can disappear in to their problems and move them around as I like. For me, George V. Higgins is the benchmark of absolutely perfect, unreliable dialogue. Everybody's kinda bullshitting. He owns that territory.

JB: Do you like Ian Rankin?

AB: He's a good friend. Perfect example of a guy who owns his territory. Don't be writing any crime books set in Edinburgh, because Rankin owns it. Higgins owns Boston, as far as I'm concerned. Woodrell owns the Ozarks. Rankin's got Edinburgh. Ellroy, at least in the past, he owned '40s-'50s L.A. I don't know what he owns now. I like that. Nobody's ever going to accuse those guys of getting the voice and the characters and the clothes wrong.

JB: How much "bullshitting" creeps into your nonfiction?

AB: I think when you use hyperbole as much as I do, a constant mea culpa is required. I think the most boring thing about my life is that I was a junkie. We've all read that book, that's why I didn't talk about it much. But I thought it was necessary in Kitchen Confidential to mention it: If I'm going to say all of these obnoxious, sweeping, bold statements about "the business" and the people in it, people should be reminded that, hey, this is a utility level ex-junkie talking to you here. So every word is true. Not that I'm not wrong about stuff. But as far as my own life, what I've seen, what people have said, for better or worse, it's all true.

JB: It seems like the mafia world and the restaurant business as you write about them are these very male-dominated places where women can become tough and make it, but you don't see many "typical" women.

AB: I guess they don't interest me. Some of the greatest moments in my professional career are when I've had the privilege of working with women who identified, absolutely correctly, the kitchen as a meritocracy, and said, "OK, boys, I'll play by these rules." And they kicked everybody's ass, as well they should and could. I greatly admire them. So, yeah, there is an archetypal woman in a lot of my books and she's largely constructed from pieces of my wife and women that I've worked with in the kitchen. I'm always a little dismayed when I go into a kitchen and it's a boys club except for the pastry section. It breaks my heart, because I want to see—not that it's my place to want or not want—but I would like to see women sauciers and women sous-chefs, women bossing around a bunch of Neanderthals who got an education real quick.

JB: You must have an incredibly busy life, with book tours, TV—

AB: Just filming the show is, like, six months out of my year.

JB: When do you find time to write?

AB: In the morning. And I take three months off in the Caribbean every year, or I try to. So I'll be taking notes or a diary or whatever while I'm on the road or whatever I'm working on, then I'll take two solid months in the Caribbean where I do nothing but pad around barefooted, wake up first thing in the morning and write for a few hours. You know, it's a carrot and stick. I can't leave the house, have a beer, or go to the beach until I put in the writing. The first three books I wrote, the reason I could write them is because I had no time to write them. I was working seventeen hours a day. I woke up, I started writing, got through as much as I could, then went to work. I didn't have any time to think about all those metaphysical aspects of writing: is it good, is it worthwhile, is it important—I didn't have time. Just wake up, do the job.

JB: But why did you do that job?

AB: Because I had the opportunity. I've never toiled away in a garret writing unpublished manuscripts. Absolutely everything I've ever written has been published. In almost every case, it started with either a short writing sample, a lucky break, or I wrote something short to entertain a limited audience, and an opportunity opened up where I could tell a story for money. Or love. And I could. I'm a hustler. I make the most of opportunities. Give me a crack at the bigs and I'll do my best.

JB: In that sense, do you feel that the way you got into writing was similar to the way you came to be a chef?

AB: I have exactly the same work ethic. I don't see writing as anything more important than cooking. In fact, I'm a little queasier on the writing. There's an element of shame, because it's so easy. I can't believe that people give me money for this shit. The TV, too. It's not work. At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It's a gift. A few months ago, I was sitting cross-legged in the mountains of Vietnam with a bunch of Thai tribesman as a guest of honor drinking rice whiskey. Three years ago I never, ever in a million years thought that I would ever live to see any of that. So I know that I'm a lucky man.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003