Yudl Rosenberg
Edited and translated by Curt Leviant
Yale University Press ($25)

by Jessica Bennett

Much of Jewish history in the Christian era has been marked by systematic discrimination and punctuated by periodically brutal persecution. In recent history, the Holocaust, or Shoah, has been the most pronounced example, but it is hardly the only instance of murderous treatment of Jews. Among the most common ways that Jews were persecuted throughout the Middle Ages was through the blood libel: a persistent myth that Jews ritually slaughtered non-Jews (usually children) to use thief blood in the making of matzot for Passover (or to fill the hamentaschen at Purim, or for some other ritual purpose). In spite of the rulings of several popes (beginning with Innocent IV in 1247) that the blood libel was a myth constructed for the purpose of persecuting Jews, unknown numbers were falsely executed—some by mobs, some by courts—because of blood libel accusations. The blood libel fueled several sensational cases in the 19th and early 20th century; Hitler himself used the deceit to support his political agenda. The idea of the bloodthirsty Jew endures even to this day among the most virulent anti-Semites, particularly in the Muslim world.

It isn’t difficult to see why the idea of a magical creature capable of saving Jews from harm would be appealing. In his brief introduction, translator Curt Leviant recounts the ancient history of the golem myth: an artificially created man crafted of clay and brought to life by kabalistic magic. Although Leviant seems to assume a certain knowledge of Jewish history, he is nonetheless enlightening in his explanation both of golem legends in general and of the particular one that inspired Warsaw rabbi Yudl Rosenberg to write these stories, and then publish them in 1909 as a found manuscript. Rosenberg’s “Publisher’s Preface” begins, “Dear Readers! I am herewith presenting you with a delightful and hidden treasure that until now had lain hidden for some three hundred years in the great library of Metz.” The preface goes on to explain that the son-in-law of the Maharal (a renowned religious leader of 16th-century Prague) recorded these “wondrous deeds”; Rosenberg claimed to have merely purchased and published them. Rosenberg, Leviant explains, harbored a love of literature “in a community that viewed fiction as frivolous and utterly outside the Jewish tradition of Torah study.” By publishing the book as non-fiction, Rosenberg produced a bestseller that even the most serious of Torah scholars could enjoy without guilt.

Leviant’s thoughtfully crafted edition, the first to collect Rosenberg’s tales in English translation, provides a perspective on Jewish social and literary history that is both entertaining and illuminating. The stories themselves read as a cross between biblical parables and mysteries, with some mildly comic episodes thrown in. Yossele the Golem serves his master well, and the Jews of Prague are saved from many instances of blood libel and other misfortunes due to the Maharal’s wisdom and the Golem’s strength. In these tales, the Jews always overcome and the evildoers are punished, giving the reader hope that with faith in G-d and adherence to his mitvot—and perhaps with the help of a little magic—their own troubles could come to an end.

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Alicia Conroy
Carnegie Mellon University Press ($16.95)

by Katie Harger

Alicia Conroy’s collection Lives of Mapmakers uses a beautifully written ensemble of narrative identities to reach the book’s underlying themes of temporality, uncertainty, and loss. Though the voice Conroy uses is rarely her own, her message is consistent: nothing will last forever. Her characters come to this realization in various ways, learning to chart their lives according to the instability of place and time. In “The Sun Sails Broad Reach,” Conroy writes that as she continues to move through life, she is “learning to pack lightly for the trip.”

The strongest story in the collection is “The Nameless Season,” which envisions an environmental fluke that eliminates spring. Two teenage sisters watch as buds fall from the trees, the grass refuses to green, and the sun grows hotter and hotter. The emotional effects of the change are as great the environmental ones—as the younger of the sisters emptily hopes for a future that is no longer possible, the older changes her name and screams at bushes that refuse to bloom. Conroy’s predictions about life after significant climate change are chilling. If global warming permanently alters conditions on earth, the generation who remembers what it was like before will surely “with gnawings of envy and nostalgia…recognize the way we played favorites, our cult of summer.” Fortunately for Conroy’s characters, spring brings the world to life again six years after it went away. As a result, their longing for the past resurrects itself in gratitude for the options still allowed by the future.

Other highlights include the title story, in which a map collector dreams of acquiring a work by the sixteenth-century mapmaker Gerard Mercator. Mercator’s story interweaves with the collector’s own, connecting a thread of history between the time of explorers who wanted to know the whole world and the time of explorers who just want a piece for themselves. “All This Talking about God” tackles the unshakable sadness of a woman whose eight-month-old baby has died. Her friends and co-workers tell her it’s part of God’s plan, but she can’t see how anyone could plan for grief. “Right now all I’ve got is milk and tears, blood and sweat,” she says. “Animal things washing through me, things that don’t bear reckoning.” She begins to watch Buddhist nuns sandpaint a mandala they will eventually destroy. Their meditation on its temporality helps her realize that her pain, though it will not always be as strong, is inherently a part of her—“that’s what animals do…we cry out, we endure, and we suffer.”

Conroy’s descriptions spiral rhythmically around the images they project so uniformly throughout this collection that the drastic shifts in perspective, time, and place between the stories call undue attention to the fact that they’ve been written by the same person. In many cases, Conroy’s real-world distance from her topics (riparian mermaids, the lives of female migrant workers) seems to push her toward the themes she works with best and away from those she might explore from a truly altered viewpoint. In a passage that could easily describe her writing style, Conroy writes “I am trying to weave the current skein and the broken threads of my past into a plain and useful blanket.” Lives of Mapmakers is hardly plain. Its gorgeous and consistent style calls for a personal, genuine, and much longer story to match.

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Yasmina Reza
Translated by Geoffrey Strachan
Alfred A. Knopf ($19.95)

by Ryan Rase McCray

Nearly all of Yasmina Reza’s creative output examines a short list of pet themes: the nature of art (in her breakthrough play—appropriately titled Art—three friends squabble over a white painting); the division between the internal self and the social self (nearly 80 percent monologue, The Unexpected Man climaxes in the play’s one exchange); and man’s disillusionment with the world (she titled her last novel Desolation, and has also translated a stage adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis). In Adam Haberberg, her third novel, Reza eschews her usual humor for a more solemn and alienating tone.

Adam Haberberg is a struggling writer who, at forty-seven, is “no longer fond of his book.” To add to his melancholy, he suffers from ocular problems—glaucoma and retinal thrombosis among them—and his wife, Irène, despises him. This is the man that Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, Adam’s old friend from school, happens upon in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Though “you couldn’t call her ugly, thinks Adam,” nothing about her, neither her looks nor her personality, is particularly endearing. Marie-Thérèse is a successful entrepreneur, running a number of merchandise outlets that sell “fridge magnets, magnetic words” and other tchotchkes.

Adam and Marie-Thérèse decide to go out for dinner, and the novel charts the remaining daylight hours—a long car ride, dinner, cocktail conversations—through Adam’s meandering consciousness. Marie-Thérèse is hardly a close friend, nor even someone he particularly likes, but the sexual tension between the two propels the narrative nonetheless, providing a much-needed counterpoint to Adam’s weightier internal monologue. Reza’s indebtedness to modernism’s stream-of-consciousness technique is obvious, though she clearly lacks Joyce’s linguistic firepower and Woolf’s unnerving control. The text is pared to essentials, yet the sentences are ultimately mere accumulations of detail devoid of the warmth Reza captured so well in Desolation. The protagonists here are so unlikable, with such obvious (though supposedly hidden) disdain for each other, the reader can’t help but feel distanced.

What’s most lacking here is Reza’s incisive humor. Though everyone in Art is miserable, anxious, and/or angry, none is above self-deprecation; characters maintain their integrity and grace by laughing with the audience. But though the momentum of Adam Haberberg continues to the last page, the pacing—especially for such a short book—feels slow, atmospheric, and self-consciously weighty. Because she doesn’t give us any moments of tenderness capable of provoking sympathy, it’s hard to like anyone. Even Albert, the friend Adam calls repeatedly in the novel’s first quarter, is always “getting on [Adam’s] nerves.”

Reza’s previous characters’ humanity surpassed even their worst self-hatred; here the scorn is projected outward. The bond Adam and Marie-Thérèse used to share (another of Reza’s commonly used devices) is barely enough to sustain their awkward time together. But when his best friend and his wife vilify him, the reader can only share Adam’s own outlook: unpleasant boredom.

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Tao Lin
Melville House ($14.95 each)

by Spencer Dew

“Where were you when the towers happened?” someone is asked in Tao Lin’s debut story collection, Bed. The trick there, of the verb, is precisely what Lin is after—a way to capture the larger cultural moment of post-9/11, a moment defined less by planes, fire, and death as by, say, the free movie screenings in Washington Square Park, the missing person posters, the aimless wandering coupled with an urgent search for some sort of meaning. As Lin approaches it, the wake of 9/11 provides a lens for looking at how people get by with the day-to-day of existence: passively, with neutral expressions, via a sort of emotional somnambulism, crackling at times like a sheet of ice bearing too much weight.

Sick poodles, people who don’t give presents, kids listening to audio tapes on how to overcome social anxiety disorder or kids drinking beers in the movie theater watching Garden State: these are the sorts of ciphers Lin shuffles through his text, offering at times a parable of Patriot Act America, “a time of increased lawmaking” in which “things were generally banned.” Paranoia simmers on the back burner. Exotic sea animals beach themselves. There is a rash of low-profile suicides. Yet Lin’s stories hinge upon a sense of things being more or less ignored, peripheral to the particular subjective moment. The current zeitgeist is identified by Lin as “a general drift towards the arbitrary view, the solipsistic and apolitical.” Thus he populates his stories with slackers who slog through life, staying in bed when they can, aimlessly eating, engaging in rambling discourses, dissatisfied but slightly numbed to their dissatisfaction, their lives reduced to “the padded practice of a thing before the real hurt and triumph of the actual thing."

Bed repeatedly addresses the disconnect between desire and the tar pit of reality. The cultural myth of love is presented via accurately preposterous metaphors: an unattainable commodity; a hoax people invest time and energy in perpetuating, like the Loch Ness monster; a flying skeleton cackling cruelly, always out of reach. But Lin’s interest in disconnectedness leads him, ultimately, to focus not on our fluctuating relations to constructed ideals but on the act of writing and the textual surface. His interest is in the dynamic between writer and reader. He highlights seams between moral longing, analysis, and actual lived moral practice, between the neat frame and symmetry of literature and the mess of lived reality. He pushes these issues to the point of paradox: moral action is contradictory, if not impossible. Likewise, realist writing gives us a world “where tea [is] brewed, earnestly, from paint chips, glass shards, and small change,” but that is not our world, where such a mix boils down to poison. The text is at once resolutely earnest and sarcastic in its dismissal of earnestness, committed to moral ideals and ironic in the invocation of such empty and dated concepts.

In Lin’s novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, released simultaneous with Bed, this double play is heightened by prolonged discussions of politics and ethics, traced back both to banal daily decisions (the ubiquitous moral quandary of what to eat, for instance) and to the reflexive critique of writing and reading (via references to the entertainment industry, both movies and books). This text, in the midst of one of its either earnest or ironic discussions, provides a model for thinking about Lin’s own stylistic play:

“What do you think about the president?” Andrew said.

Mark put noodles into his mouth.

“I think he’s smarter than people think,” Andrew said. “He winked on TV. He winked fast, so only a few people would see. I feel like he’s being ironic all the time.” Andrew stopped talking. Mark did not respond. “I mean everyone on TV is being ironic all the time,” Andrew said, “But the president knows he’s being ironic all the time, so he’s twice ironic. You have to be twice ironic on TV to be regular ironic in real life. So if you’re ironic on TV you’re negative ironic in real life.”

This idea of the twice ironic echoes throughout Lin’s approach. He is twice ironic, twice earnest, but also twice nihilistic, twice moral. Eeeee Eee Eeee’s characters wallow in their depression and/or are cleverly detached from that depression. These discontents find themselves making illegal u-turns or philosophizing in circles, angry at existence itself. One of the funniest bits of the novel (and Lin can be a very funny writer) is the splicing in of fragments from a stock trope of our culture, the “killing rampage,” a collective media-based fantasy popping into characters' heads at odd moments: “killing rampage,” “suitcase full of cash,” “high fives on a diamond boat.” The humans in Eeeee Eee Eeee share space with animals. There are talking dolphins and bears who club movie stars to death, plus, as always in Lin’s work, hamsters. These animals give the work a vandalized edge, as if Lin had finished it and just folded it back, scrawled over his own completed sketch, another double play, either wry or straightforward. Lin’s writing is all surface and/or all depth. The prose is like a hamster wheel, spinning: “Whee,” says some human, and then a bear breaks open his skull. Lin writes like Andy Kaufman wrestled: concealed behind layers of surface image, unreadable in intent.

Later in that conversation about the president, Mark responds with an argument that “irony is so privileged.... It’s what happens when you don’t need to do anything to survive—it’s when the things you do have nothing to do with survival.” Yet irony is a survival mechanism as well, anesthetizing and armoring at the same time, and in these texts, in which we as readers are reminded of horrors both individual and international, of greed and corruption, economic control, and in which we are offered rationalizations for why playing chess or practicing the piano, as expenditures of time and energy, as “politically apathetic” denials of other options, are themselves as deadly as war, as murder, snide withdrawal is the safest, most comfortable option.

Comfort is the ultimate goal for Lin’s characters, not some imaginary release from suffering but the temporary succor of ice cream in bed or the soothing retreat into solipsism, something practiced on a grand scale by the writer valorized in one of the novel’s final discussions, Fernando Pessoa. The Portuguese poet is praised by Lin’s characters for his realistic treatment of the problem of suffering, but as a master of stylistic double play he is certainly high in the lineage of which Lin himself is working. Pessoa pursued a paradoxical egotistical “denial of self” on the level of literary practice, writing under various invented personas, yet on the political level he combined uber-nationalism with ego-centered religious fanaticism for a potent fascist stance. To treat Pessoa purely as a stylist is more than a stylistic choice. Yet “how can you be angry at someone else’s assumption or context that was as arbitrarily chosen or adopted as your own?” another Lin character asks, baffled.

These candy-colored paperbacks are designed to maintain that neutrality, to remain undecided in the face of such questions. They both amuse and accuse their amused readers of bad politics, bad faith. The idea of the moral is dangled in front of us and then collapsed. Exertion is followed by failure, and passivity takes the place of any possible action. “Everyone should be impeached... for being so bad at living,” we are told. Except, of course, that such an act is absurd, and would be pointless, incomprehensible and meaningless as a dolphin’s squeals.

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Jim Crace
Nan A. Talese ($24.95)

by Kelly Everding

Of all the possible futures for America, there are few more chilling than the ruined and devolved country imagined by Jim Crace, one in which Manifest Destiny has reversed eastward in a sad retreat to the mother country. One might think this story a sort of vengeful commentary by a British writer, but our revolution happened over 200 years ago and is old news. The Pesthouse makes no mention of how America dried up and turned into a pre-industrial, plague-ridden, lawless version of itself, with a few people holding on for dear life and relying on the new commodities of fear and escape to survive. What matters is who they become in the face of it.

The story begins in the small enclave of Ferrytown, still thriving because they have a stronghold on the only means to moving east: a boat that will take people, horses, and supplies across a wide river and closer to the great sea. However even this small victory of survival gets squashed rather quickly by Crace; he kills the entire town with one giant poisonous belch—probably a pocket of methane gas—from the lake upstream. Only two people avoid the horrific fate of the villagers. Margaret lives because she was taken to the pesthouse situated above the village when she exhibited signs of the “flux,” a plague passed from traveler to traveler. Franklin Lopez, one of the many migrants heading east, was also on the hill above Ferrytown with an injured knee, waiting for his older brother to return for him. Franklin overcomes his fear of the flux and enters the pesthouse to escape a torrential rain, meeting the shaved and recovering Margaret. And so their adventure and friendship begins—forged by loss, desperation, and finally love. Franklin burns down the village of the dead, and they move on ever eastward:

The fire was in the west and not ahead. Hadn’t that always been the prophecy—that mother would abandon daughter to the ashes, that father and son would depart from one another in flames, that before the doors of paradise could open there would have to be a blackened, hot, and utter silence in America, which could be quenched only by the sea and would be survived only by the people of the boats?

There is no union left in this United States, as people are enslaved, beaten, and raped, and families are torn apart. All knowledge of history and industry is gone—great hulking and rusting machines dot the landscape on the road to salvation. And the people are left to forage what they can, barter for food, and foster their superstitions. Margaret must take refuge with the religious order of the Finger Baptists who spurn all metal wares. Their ruling members, the Helpless Gentleman, refuse to lift their hands to do anything because “hands do Devil’s work.” Crace seems to delight in emphasizing the futility and absurdity that arises in the face of desperate times. “Wingless and with withered arms, they’d earn their places at the side of God.”

Yet, however horrible the situation gets in this imagined wasteland, Crace treats his main characters with the utmost respect and affection. He wants these two people to survive. Margaret and Franklin epitomize the true character and integrity of Americans—the guile, the self-doubt, the determination, the necessary love and compassion needed to rise above the feckless and despicable people around them. The Pesthouse is a novel of gorgeous language and exquisite pacing to be sure, but perhaps the most beautiful thing about the book is how Crace really cares for these embattled Americans.

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Mary Ann Caws titled her latest book Glorious Eccentrics (Palgrave, $35), in honor of the seven women artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries she profiles within its pages. Caws maintains that for her the term eccentric is “an approbation rather than a criticism” and “the very opposite of pejorative.” Eccentricity is a key to survival for these women, a trait that, when combined with particular forms of genius, sustains their ability to live the lives they chose in societies that were not always hospitable to such choices.

The women whose lives and work are portrayed and celebrated in Glorious Eccentrics are not all well known today, though their lives intersected those of more celebrated artists. Judith Gautier was the daughter of Théophile Gautier, a likely mistress of Victor Hugo, and a muse of Richard Wagner; she was also a translator of Chinese, a model for artists, and the author of numerous books. Suzanne Valadon was a painter (and trapeze artist) who is now better known as a model for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and the mother of Maurice Utrillo. Dorothy Bussy was Lytton Strachey's sister, the author of an anonymous novel, Olivia (published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press), and a noted translator, particularly of André Gide, whom she passionately adored. Emily Carr was a Canadian painter and writer who dressed "like a man" and lived more comfortably with animals than people. Paula Modersohn-Becker lived only to the age of 31, but in that time made over 500 paintings, 700 drawings, and 13 etchings—selling only a few of these works, including two to her good friends Clara Westhoff and Rainer Maria Rilke. Dora Carrington is probably the most famous of the seven women, though her popular fame rests as much on her relationship with Lytton Strachey as with her writing and painting, which is what Caws seeks to reclaim and contextualize. Finally, there is Claude Cahun, born Lucie Renée Mathilde Schwob, a writer, actor, and photographer who lived on the island of Jersey, resisted the Nazis, and was sentenced to death with her lover, Suzanne Malherbe (better known as the French illustrator and designer Marcel Moore), though they evaded execution when the island was liberated.

Glorious Eccentrics begins with a preface titled "This is Personal: My Grandmother a Painter" that offers a sensitive meditation on her grandmother's legacy—the legacy of a woman who left the South for Paris, then later Bremen, Germany (where she met Rilke and Otto Modersohn), and finally returned to North Carolina. It is through her grandmother that Caws began to celebrate eccentricity, “a way of life or love or work deliberately chosen instead of given,” and not only vivid eccentricities, but the quiet and interior ones that may go unremarked by history, yet are just as vital to the preservation and propagation of humanity.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, with particular interest in works of 20th-century avant-gardes, Surrealism, and such artists as Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Among the many books she has written or edited are Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind; Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar; The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter; Manifesto: A Century of Isms; and three books in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series: Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Henry James.

by Matthew Cheney

MATTHEW CHENEY: At what point did you settle on this group of women to write about? When did you realize that their eccentricities united them?

MARY ANN CAWS: Originally there were twenty-one eccentric women creators I cared about—from the beginning it was their special, and even bizarre, way of living and working that impassioned me. But I didn't want the famous ones like Frida Kahlo, because there was already so much known about her.

MC: Reading through the book, I wondered if something in particular about the Modernist period required or encouraged these women to live their lives as they did.

MAC: Modernism, it seems to me, gives you both the impulse and the moment to do a great deal of questioning—and is it not the questioning of the world around you and what you specifically can do in relation to and against it, that kind of freewheeling asking of yourself and your surroundings, that sets Modernism, as we know it, apart?

MC: Do you think that the questioning impulse within Modernism was different in any way between women and men?

MAC: Yes, I think women are better questioners, and self-questioners.

MC: Suzanne Valadon was dismissive of critics and even the idea of criticism, as were many of the other women. Do you think this was an attitude they needed so they could survive as (eccentric) artists—or is criticism inherently anti-eccentric?

MAC: Yes, the refusal to consider as vital the judgment of the outside world is essential to one's living as what one wants to live as; I suppose it is the outside world and its relation to the inside world that is always at issue—thus my stress on the “interior eccentric.” I work as a critic of literature and art, and believe criticism to be fundamentally positive in any case. The absorption of it in one's own thinking—with and against—seems to me a positive force for creation.

MC: In discussing the idea of an “interior eccentric,” you say, “A supersensitive strain might be thought to elicit an intensity of emotion and reaction conducive to the intertwining of life and work illustrated here.” How much of the artists’ lives do you think we need to know to understand their work?

MAC: Well, the more the better in general, but on the other hand, some you can get to from the work. I would hate to think that we read Henry James less well from knowing little about his sex life, for example.

MC: Many of the women in Glorious Eccentrics did not limit themselves to one type of art. Even if they are now known for one art in particular, many were both visual artists and writers. Is this a coincidence?

MAC: No, of course not. That is why I picked them, because the interdisciplinarity in which I work as a teacher and lecturer is the point anyway.

MC: Do you feel that interdisciplinarity in art or in academics is inherently eccentric, that is, outside the norm?

MAC: Yes, because most scholars believe that specialization is more serious as the French would say—but I truly like the combination of several things at once. And I believe that each field contributes to the other, in conversation.

MC: Of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington, you write, “That I do not see their lives or art or deaths as tragic, despite the suicides of two of them and the trials all of them suffered, represents a kind of moral choice.” What brought you to make this choice, and how has it influenced your interpretations of these women's lives and work?

MAC: I want to defend a woman creator's intimate choice in all cases. My choice is to defend their choice, since it enabled their work and enhanced their sensitivity to their world. My book is a defense of work as of love.

MC: Again and again these women seemed to have some of their most powerful feelings misunderstood or rejected by men who were important to their lives—Rilke refused to edit the journals and letters of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gide never got what Dorothy Bussy was doing with her novel Olivia, Lytton Strachey doesn't seem to have fully appreciated Carrington's need for him, etc. Yet many of these relationships were the central ones of these people’s lives. What were the obstacles preventing them from more harmonious friendships with each other, and do you think such harmony would have affected their art?

MAC: Yes, I believe their struggle to be understood and the tragic part of their not being understood is the driving force behind what we might think of as their eccentric choices, which then become positive. That is precisely what I defend.

MC: Eccentricity, at least among these women, often involves eccentric gender performances, whether of women crossing the boundaries of what their societies considered “acceptable” behavior, or more broadly (and perhaps boldly), of women questioning assumptions about gender and sexuality that are still prevalent today. What is the relationship between art, gender, and eccentricity?

MAC: I think that women make better eccentrics in the long run, given the extra effort it already takes to non-conform—and personally I take this in a subjective manner, having been brought up in the South, which gives you a certain skew on things. I wrote a memoir called To the Boathouse, about being a Southerner in New York and the special difficulties of a divorced woman having been taught not to ask questions, always to look around to see “what others are wearing” and doing, and conforming to what is and is not done. So I am in over-the-top admiration of the women who have somehow triumphed over what was expected of them, or, I suppose, what they might have been thought to have expected of themselves, given the way they were brought up. As for the art part, I am above all sensitive to creative impulses—which are not always distinguishable from eccentric impulses—and my grandmother's example as a painter and a gracious wife and hostess was meaningful for me.

That the persons we want to be meaningful to in our turn would prefer we be slightly less "eccentric" in this sense puts an added strain on both the art and the life of it.

Of course, my view of a professor's life, especially a literature professor who also writes and gives lectures elsewhere, colors the view I just stated. Doing a lot probably entails not doing so well always in all parts of one’s life. Fine, for that, too, is part of a freedom we care, or should care, so much about.

MC: What is next for you?

MAC: I am preparing a brief biography of Dali for Critical Lives (Reaktion Press), working on a Picasso and Language catalogue for the Yale Art Gallery, a catalogue of the paintings of Jacqueline Lamba (André Breton’s second wife), an edition and translation of Furor and Mystery of René Char and a small 2X2 Henry James and Edith Wharton comparison for the Feminist Press. And hoping to place my memoir of living and cooking in a “cabanon” in Provence.

MC: In your research and life, have you found any particularly fruitful strategies for preserving and benefiting from glorious eccentricity?

MAC: Yes, the absolute determination to do whatever you are doing intensely and forget the outside world while doing that—and also doing as many things as you feel like doing and skipping the others when you can.

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Interview by Francis Raven

Stephen Vincent: This is the constitutional walk every morning.

Francis Raven: Where do you live?

SV: Well my girlfriend, Sandy Phillips, lives over on Guerrero Street above 19th and, then, my place is four blocks away on 21st Street near Dolores. So the walk is a circle. Though we keep separate places, when she's in town I'm mainly there for the night and then use my home as a studio.

FR: You work at home?

SV: Yes, in addition to my writing I have a little company called Book Studio where I develop book projects. Recently, after four years, I completed a book entitled Exploring the Bancroft Library: The Centennial Guide to Its Extraordinary History, Spectacular Special Collections, Research Pleasures, Its Amazing Future, and How It All Works. It was co-publication of the Library with Signature Books. In part it is a history of the different collections within the Library, but equally important, the book pays attention to the way scholars, students, and writers are able to work with archival materials or what some call "primary sources." The poets Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi, for example, are currently developing book projects from Jack Spicer's considerable archive of correspondence and manuscripts, some of which has never been published.

FR: The Bancroft has my ancestor Patrick Breen's diary. Does the library have a fascinating history?

SV: Oh, yes. Bancroft first came to California in about 1859 and then began collecting and publishing. Unlike 19th-century collectors who collected fine bindings and older European works, he had a scorched earth policy with California: ledgers, miner's diaries, he just got everything, which is invaluable now in terms of the history of California. Patrick Breen, as you know, was a member of the Donner Party, and we will use a page from his diary in the project. Using Adobe Photoshop, we are able to give the reader an amplified look at his faltering handwriting—it is a picture of anguish and desperation, and, yet, no matter how harrowing, the desire to keep a faithful record.

FR: When did you start thinking about walking?

SV: I think walking goes way back. I couldn't even say exactly where it started. I'd say consciously in the last 25 years or so. I have a few close friends who walk together. We'll do the Marin Headlands or Mt. Tam and then we'll also do urban walks. Lately I've been doing a lot of just solitary walking.

FR: And then writing the new poems you've been publishing on your blog—the poems you've titled "Walking Theory"—how did those come about?

SV: It started with these essays I was writing about walking around Dolores Park which began when Sandy moved to her new place a couple of years ago. Several of the essays I posted to my then relatively new blog. Then Chris Sullivan at Slight Publications, who has a great eye, really liked them. He has this idea of photographic language; in other words, language you can read as visually tangible, and which has some kind of resonance with what's in front of you. He proposed the idea of a series of poems and commissioned me to do them with the name "Walking Theory." The "commission" part was a joke. Chris is as "low income" as most of us—I never expected anything beyond his interest, and I suspect the given title was a little bit ironic—most everyone has this off-kilter, ironic relationship to Language Poetry and its supposed founding in one theory or another. I don't know if there's anything theoretical about this work, but that sort of got it going.

I think part of it too was that my youngest brother, Chris, died in February of last year. And so I was coping with that. In a curious way his death made me become incredibly alert to both the past and the immediate present—as if, indeed, I was walking an edge between life and death and in the middle of a kind of argument.

FR: You walk and then you go back to your studio?

SV: Often I'll write right here on this ledge overlooking the expanse of the Park. A phrase may come to me as I am walking, and, once I write it down in my journal, the rest of the poem will unravel from that catalyst. I have other sources, as well: found signage; words people chalk on the sidewalk; people's conversations. I'll write all of that down. I assume what I hear or see and then register in my journal will often resonate with something interesting and provoke a reflection and poem. Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.

This whole park here I find very interesting. It was originally a graveyard—actually two Jewish graveyards, each for different Synagogues, were here between 1870 and 1890. Since graveyards are often built over older burial grounds, I assume Dolores Park was probably an Indian, (an Ohlone) graveyard before that. I think the fact that it has so many layers underneath the contemporary one intrigues me. It is, for example, often used as the starting point for progressive political demonstrations, theater performances and coming of age ceremonies—as well as all the other recreational aspects.

It's also a pretty well tended park with these beautiful palm, magnolia, and many other kinds of trees around the grass areas, playground, tennis and basketball courts. I think people have grown quite loyal to it. In the last ten years, it's been relatively safe after a history of ups and downs. Right where we are standing was the nexus of a major drug distribution network. As the Mission became more gentrified and the neighborhood became more active, things changed. If I would have walked through here 10 years ago, people would have been dealing and buying all over the place, and there were some deadly incidents between rival drug gangs. During the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, refugees were also a big part of the Park's population. There's not that edginess here anymore. Now we have intense conflict between dog owners—who want to run their dogs everywhere—and those who do not want the dogs pooping everywhere and tearing up the soccer field, etc. But I like a big public park—it's like a big visible register of life in the City.

FR: When did you come to San Francisco?

SV: I went to graduate school at San Francisco State in 1963 and then I was in the Peace Corps for a couple of years. But I've been primarily here. And when I stopped teaching early on—which included a two year stint as the first Coordinator of California's Poetry-in-the-Schools Program—I got more into small press publishing. I had a small press, Momo's Press, which I started in 1973 and that kept going till about 1986. We published primarily poetry and some fiction. I introduced a number of younger poets who have become known such as Hilton Obenzinger, Jessica Hagedorn, Beverly Dahlen, Victor Cruz and, to be honest, myself! I was interested in the kind of multi-cultural mix that is taken for granted now. But, at the time, it was innovative and it upset the conventional, mostly white applecart for a lot of people—which, though I took a lot of heat, was great. But then I got burnt out on that because I had become a single father; I couldn't keep surviving on NEA grants and small book sales, though Momo's Press was more successful than most such ventures. After that, I lucked into this job being director of an art book company called Bedford Arts that had an enormous amount of money. It was backed by a real-estate company which folded when real-estate began to die in about 1990, but I did that for about five years and we did some extraordinary art books. Some of it focused on California paintings both contemporary and 19th-century. O California: 19th and Early 20th Century Landscapes and Observations, and The Society of Six remain regional classics. We did international stuff as well, including F. Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook and the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase's The Solitude of Ravens. We had every financial advantage imaginable. It was a great opportunity because, unlike so many art books that have to act as catalogs for museum shows, I was able to put my editorial skills to work with great designers and use the whole book as a platform for visuals and text. The press also made it possible for me to travel to Europe and Japan, as well as throughout this country. It was a great learning experience, and it would never have happened if it were not for my experience as a small press editor and publisher and the good luck of meeting a very wealthy backer. For a while, it was very successful. Bedford Arts had a great reputation until the bottom fell out of the California real estate market and they threw us off a plane that was going down. In reality, I'd probably done as much as I could do in that particular venue. It's the first five years of anything that are innovative and exciting—then it becomes an institution and I'm not too good at institutions. Indeed, besides my journal, I wrote very little in the way of poetry, in fact, dropped out of the poetry community, during those years. Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

FR: How do these new "Walking Theory" poems relate to your book Walking?

SV: I think it's just a continuation of the metaphor. I've done a whole series of what I call "Walking Elegies." David Kennedy has published some of them in England, including a little booklet called A Walk Toward Spicer. Formally I don't know if the elegies are considered conventional or not, but I think at the time they were being done in the '90s, when Language writing was still very much in fashion, the elegies—even if serial in format—were probably considered retro. Now, I think they'll reemerge and probably become a book. Most of that work came out of long walks with one or more friends, particularly along the local coast.

In this particular neighborhood—Liberty Heights—on this hill above the park during the day, it's typical to walk and rarely see another person on their feet, except for maybe somebody walking their dog. I don't know if it's the steep hill that is intimidating or if people are just inseparable from their cars. So, up here, it's a kind of solitary walking. Occasionally I encounter people getting into their cars who will say, "Oh, you haven't been walking lately"—like I'm a symbol of the ancient art of walking! But basically when I'm walking I'm not consciously writing or intending anything. In the manner I have learned from meditation practice, I let things unfold.

FR: Do you usually write a whole poem?

SV: No, if I have a quote or fragment I'll write that down. For example, one day I encountered a woman with the Fire Department who was training about twenty recruits. She and her trainees were all running in place at the corner of 19th and Church while she described how another fireman had saved somebody off a third-story balcony in the building just two doors down the street. It was all kind of heroic and concise at the same time, and I remembered and wrote down the sound of her voice talking as soon I found a place to open my journal.

FR: How does the natural world play into these walking poems?

SV: In "Walking Theory," I have a poem about carrying a Dahlia from the top of this hill down to my house. I had found it fallen to the sidewalk. It was interesting to have that direct experience with something, in a sense to liberate it and to see how people would look through their car windows at this guy carrying this big beautiful flower. It made me feel kind of special and different. I also have a poem about a flower thief. I never saw this flower thief, but it was a fun poem to write. But in these poems the urban world clings to the natural world.

FR: When did you start doing your blog?

SV: I've done it for a couple of years now. At first I was blogging every day, but I don't do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I'll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it'll just be new work that I'm doing. I'll get 25 to 50 people who visit every day; I'm coming up on the 35,000 visits mark, which is only a small fraction of what someone like Ron Silliman gets. Sometimes I'll send an announcement about the blog to one of the listservs I'm on, and, depending on the subject, I'll get quite a few people to come visit. For instance, the other week I wrote a piece on a photograph I got at a flea market, and I got about 70 hits. I think a lot of people must be interested in flea markets.

FR: Has the blog changed your other writing?

SV: I am not sure how to answer that. I think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium. When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped. Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.

The blog is also a way to continue to register what I see and hear in a day—no matter what the form. In fact, my blog is a complete mixture of forms. When I was young, I read Joyce's Ulysses, and I don't think I have ever really gotten Leopold Bloom's interior ramblings out of my head! I am sure that voice continues to inspire the walking consciousness in my work—that is, the way I carry on an interior monologue as I walk through this city. It's an open-ended process. I also admire the attention other writers can give to the world we're walking in. Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.

FR: Are there people who are doing this well?

SV: In terms of San Francisco, and in terms of my contemporaries, I particularly like Beverly Dahlen and Ron Silliman. Ron—whose work might sometimes be too caught up in responding to a preset formula—is often full of wonderful particulars and intelligence. Books like Ketjak and Sunset Debris are wonderfully cognizant of the city. Beverly's work, also, is in the city, right down to her bones, particularly in her long on-going poem, "A Reading."

Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such. Jack Spicer, who I very much like, was a bit more spatial and concrete. Rexroth's city work is also limited. Philip Whalen is sometimes right with it. Occasionally, you'll get a Ferlinghetti poem about San Francisco that's kind of fun and lyrical. But there's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff. I don't know if that has something to do with Northern California's tradition of writers who are known for their work along the ocean, in the Valley and in the Sierra. This is actually still a young, frontier city, and its traditions are quite young, as well. As much as I have lived here for forty years, I think the place is still trying to define itself as something besides a figment of a romantic imagination. That is not to say there is not a real life, or real lives and history here. I still find the place ghostly.

FR: Are you working on any other big projects now?

SV: For I have recently finished another project called "Sleeping with Sappho." I took Anne Carson's translations of Sappho and I went through and translated them all from the English. Essentially, I turned words or phrases over into their opposites. So I come up with these poems that I don't really know how to describe, but people seem to like them quite a bit. Faux Press published about forty of them as an e-book. I'm not sure where the voice comes from; it's full of different kinds of emotions. Some people have suggested that the work is evocative of the City—the one of passions and gender issues—a nighttime world that is mostly under the surface during the day.

"Raised by Ghosts" is a picture and text project that I featured on the blog last fall. I took pictures—many also from walking in the neighborhood—and then improvised texts in relationship to the image. I am looking forward to making a book—finally reuniting my art book interest and work with poetry and prose! I really like taking digital photos. I should add that Sandy, my partner, is a well-known museum photography curator, and her practice of looking has been a wonderful compliment to the life of my own eye and writing practice.

FR: Do you have any advice for younger writers?

SV: I'm the last person to give advice, but it's been very exciting in San Francisco; for the last two or three years I've been listening and reading with young writers some of whom once jokingly called themselves The New Brutalists. Much of their work, including some of mine, is collected in Bay Poetics (Faux Press), edited by Stephanie Young. Until recently, house readings were the rage, and I've had a very nice relationships with many of the poets. I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs. But that it's to a younger people's advantage to work with evolving computer technologies that provide so many ways to explore the use and distribution of text, including sound, images and motion. Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.

FR: Are you reading anything good right now?

SV: I'm not actually that big of a reader, but I'm in a couple of reading groups. I was in a Zukofsky reading group and we expanded it to include his peers: Reznikoff, Niedecker, Willams, and Oppen. A couple years before that I was in a Walter Benjamin reading group. But the best was when four or five of us read all of Proust. Currently I am in a Classics group—we are right in the middle of Herodutus. When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A"—particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.

Click here to purchase Walking Theory at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

by Emily Cook and Eric Lorberer

Rain Taxi: So this cover is pretty pornographic…

Irvine Welsh: It’s the best cover I’ve actually had in terms of eroticism—the kind you’re quite happy to have in your hotel room as some kind of stimulus. It’s bourgeoisie porn—erotica rather than pornography.

RT: I thought it was interesting that the American edition seems to have the raciest cover, as compared to the UK or Canadian covers.

IW: It is unusual for America—like with the last book, Porno, they were going to have the blow-up doll cover, the UK cover, and then they bottled down and said it won’t get displayed in shop windows—whereas in Britain there’s nothing more that bookshops like to stack!

RT: It’s especially interesting because of the section in the book about the word “cunt,” in which Danny points out that “it seems to be more offensive to use that word over here than it is to buy a handgun.” I understand that you’ve come up against some criticism about your use of this word in the U.S.—that people have actually walked out on your readings.

IW: It started out that way because people didn’t know what to expect; nowadays they know what to expect. Like anywhere, you can go to the wrong kind of place and get the people who are just on the mailing lists, and they think, “Oh, it’s Scottish, it will be about whiskey and shortbread and tartan”—and then they’re shocked when it’s not like that. The word “cunt” is interesting because it really is a taboo word here in the U.S.; even gangster rappers find it offensive. It’s actually a commonplace word in Britain, and it’s not really seen as offensive.

RT: The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs seems designed to appeal both to the Trainspotting audience and the literati. What’s your sense of your readership these days?

IW: It’s a difficult thing to say. One thing I’ve noticed—I was talking to Chuck Palahniuk about this the other day—is that the readers get younger all the time, and we’re getting older. It’s difficult for me to get a handle on it—it seems to be different in different parts of the country. If I do something at the Edinburgh Book Festival, for example, there’s a solid literary crowd—because it costs so much to get in! Whereas if I go to a campus or an inner-city bookshop it’s a different thing again. There is a kind of coalition in Britain that reads me, a federation of literary types, students, working class regulars, football hooligans… it’s quite a mixed bag, really.

RT: I’m guessing another story of duality by a Scotsman, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, might have been an inspiration for your treatment of Skinner and Kibby in this book. Apparently Stevenson got the idea for that story in a dream. What triggers your writing?

IW: It can be anything, you know, it can be something that I’ve seen or heard or read… and often it’s something someone says. I’ve got this pal who has one of these catch phrases: “it’s nice to be nice.” And I was thinking: well, is it? What if someone actually believes that? That’s one of the things that started me off with this book. Also, I went back to The Picture of Dorian Grey—one of my favorite novels—I was asked to do an introduction to it for the Vintage edition and I started to think about why I liked the book, and it was basically the whole thing with duality—which as you say comes up in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, and there’s another Scottish book I love, James Hogg’s, A Justified Sinner—anyway, it all coalesced in Bedroom Secrets. It was a way of working out what all of this was, and Scotland’s sense of duality, too, this “Scottish or British” debate that keeps raising its head. You’ve also got that kind of thing about Edinburgh being a very run-down city on the outskirts, but at the center it’s got beautiful museums and affluent suburbs. And a whole literary thing comes out of that: you’ve got people like Joanne Rowling, Ian Rankin, and Sandy McCall Smith all living on the same street, which is amazing. (I’m not going to say the name of the street, but they all live on the same street.)

I did this book with Ian and Sandy for a charitable trust called One City, and when you look at the fact that a writer like myself and Sandy are from the same city, but our writing couldn’t be farther apart… we get on well, but we couldn’t be farther apart socially in terms of background and the two sides of the city. But it’s a quite a small city; you can go just a few streets, basically, and you’re in completely different zone, bang. So you get that sense of duality in the book—much more immediately than you do in just about any of my other books’ settings, I think.

RT: That’s true; Edinburgh and Leith represent two distinct poles in the book.

IW: The Edinburgh/Leith thing is very much like the Scotland/Britain thing. Leith, because it was a separate port, kind of got incorporated into Edinburgh against the will of the people. They had a plebiscite and voted against it, but just like Scotland getting incorporated into the UK, it was very unpopular… so you still get people who regard Leith as a separate town even though it’s not been one for ages.

RT: I love books written out of a sense of place.

IW: Absolutely: the books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place. In this book the setting becomes a character in itself—you’re physically traipsing around the city in this book, you actually feel that you’re there. I just reviewed a book for the New York Times by this Polish writer named Andrzej Stasiuk, he’s got a big reputation in Europe. He does this kind of evocation of Warsaw that’s really amazing… You’ve got so many young people walking around building sites in Edinburgh, Dublin, Chicago, Berlin. It’s the whole idea that once you have Capitalism all that stuff will renew Eastern Europe, but it’s actually renewing Western Europe. So you’ve just exported all the young people, and there’s that kind ghost-town feel to it as well, large parts of a city feel spooky and supernatural. Anyway, he really brings Warsaw to life. Getting into the guts of the city—I think it gives a thrill of dimension.

RT: And you have to do it through language—it’s an amazing challenge. Now that you live in Dublin do you find it harder to evoke Scotland?

IW: Not really, no. I’ve been in Dublin for two years now, it’s the longest I’ve been anywhere. Before Dublin I was back in Edinburgh for six months, then I was in San Francisco for six months, then I was in Chicago for a year… so I’ve not been in Edinburgh that much. I get over there a lot: I’ve got season tickets to the football, so I’m there maybe about once or twice a month. But I think in some ways you hear a book, you hear it where you come from, and you see it more closely in exile, you get that reflective thing that you don’t get when you’re right in it.

RT: There’s a passage in which Danny, during his sojourn in San Francisco, calls Scotland “the recipe for disaster. Take a cut of Calvinist repression, sprinkle on some Catholic guilt, add lots of alcohol and cook in a cold, dark, grey oven for three-hundred-odd years. Garnish with gaudy, ludicrous plaid. Serve with chips on the side.” That’s meaty stuff to write about your homeland.

IW: I was consciously parodying that “choose life” thing in Trainspotting. There’s also that “it’s shite being Scottish” thing that they have a discussion about, and I wanted to reprise that because Leith now—some parts of it—have become gentrified. And what that has done has been to make the other parts worse, because what you had was this area down by the docks where nothing happened, it was just old warehouses, and you basically just had junkies hanging out there to score, and prostitutes plying their trade, and then somebody came in and turned all these warehouses into lofts, then they started building all these new places, and what happens is the middle class people then go to the police and say “we don’t want all this scum in the area.” So the police moved them up to Junction street, where’ve you got people who are not in any position to cope with all that drugs and prostitution—single parents, old people… It’s a place that’s already under pressure anyway, economically, and then all of a sudden there are all these social pressures. In some ways it’s better though. I used to come up to Edinburgh for a drink, but now Bernard Street in Leith has got a better vibe than Rose Street in Edinburgh, it’s got a really bustling cosmopolitan vibe down there. Leith now is a center of activity rather than Edinburgh. And I think that’s good.

RT: You’re famous for your use of Scottish dialect—what conscious decisions do you now make in this area?

IW: Well, I have toned it back in this novel. And I’ve got a new book coming out in the fall, a book of stories, and there’s only one set in Scotland. The rest are set here or in Europe.

RT: I imagine your books have been translated widely—how do translators deal with the dialect?

IW: Yeah, well it’s almost better for me because they can’t just give it to anybody—they give it to somebody who has been there, and lived there. There are a couple of translators I’ve become very good friends with because you have to get in touch with me more often. I have these two great Russian translators and they both live in St. Petersburg, and they’re friendly rivals. As soon as one of them went to the toilet, the other would say: “he made a terrible mess of translating the book.” Then they’d be big buddies when they got back together, bigging each other up. I vibed on that because it’s very Scottish. I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots.

RT: Let’s talk about the main characters—how did you come up with these two?

IW: What I wanted to do was get at the whole thing with identity, particularly at that age—when you’re in your twenties, it’s the last time you have the chance to experiment with multiple identities, to decide who you’re going to be in life. In a sense it’s the last chance to live for these guys, particularly Skinner; his quest to find out who he is, how he’s going to be for the rest of his life, is quite desperate. It’s that horrible thing where you’re expected to be one thing or the other. You know, people tend to get stereotyped for about forty percent of their behavior, so if you’re completely crazy forty percent of the time you’ll get stereotyped as crazy, even if you’re totally boring thirty percent of the time and just studious the other thirty percent of the time.

RT: Skinner’s an asshole, but also weirdly cares about Kibby some of the time.

IW: I wanted to get to that point where they cross over on a trajectory. Skinner starts off as a truly bad bastard, but when he’s nice to Kibby, when he’s not bothering him, you see that Skinner probably isn’t that bad a guy after all, he’s not the complete villain that he seems to be. He is trying in his own way; certainly he’s trying to lift the curse and get beyond it. And with Kibby, there is a negative element to his niceness—he’s not engaged in the world, there’s an element of repression that leads to an incipient bitterness, and that is brought out when he receives the curse. In the cross-over, you get to a point where you realize that you’ve got all this genetic inheritance, and you’ve got all this social conditioning, but there is a point where you do have to make a choice, and that’s the optimist in me: you have the freedom to make a choice about how you are going to be, and what you’re going to do. I think that’s what the book is trying to say.

RT: You wrote your MBA thesis on the rights of women in the workplace—which certainly comes out in this book with Shannon’s character—but I’m wondering if you have been criticized for not focusing more on women characters.

IW: I’ve been interested in writing about the basic stupidity of guys together—how when a bunch of guys get together, they dumb down as much as possible, it’s a kind of coping mechanism. All the pressures that are on young men that no one talks about. It has a lot of interesting side effects, in terms of class and culture, and I’ve really been fascinated with this. But yeah, the women characters haven’t had much air time. We just did a film, myself and my pal Dean Cavanagh, “Wedding Belles,” for TV in Britain, and hopefully it’s going to be screened over here soon—it has four female characters, and we were determined to write this as an antithesis to all that Bridget Jones kind of stuff. I think of the women I know, and very few of them are obsessed with shopping, or with getting a guy—they want their own thing, they have their own network going on. It got a really strong reaction in Britain, people either really loved it or really hate it, but everyone agreed that they had never seen women on screen like that before. It’s one of the things that I am really proud of. In terms of the pacing of it, and the movement of it, it stands comparison with Trainspotting because it’s kind of bang bang bang all the time.

I like to get characters who are in a fucked up phase of their life—they’re not like that all the time, but they’re having a bad year or a bad six months, a mental breakdown, or a relationship breakdown. The problem is when guys are like that, any woman who’s got any intelligence isn’t going to be around them. So the women who do tend to be around them tend to be… not victims, but in a bad way themselves, they tend to be completely fucked-up and insane themselves. In some of the books—Trainspotting being part of that—it was more about being an excluded underclass, but with this book the characters—both of them are working-class guys with middle-class aspirations. It’s more of a Tony Blair novel than a Margaret Thatcher novel. It’s not like society’s saying “you’re working class, you’re excluded, you’re scum, keep out,” it’s more like, “yes, you’re poor, you’re working class, but we love you, you must join us, you must come in so we can patronize you.” So I wanted to capture that, and also that middle-class insecurity. Most people with good jobs, middle-class occupations, what have you, are only one pitfall away from social embarrassment and destitution. It’s so precarious. Even salaried people in the West now feel this sense of being trapped, not having the freedom to strike out. You’ve got first-generation Americans here who are going to be poorer than their parents. That’s never happened in the States before, and it’s going to have massive social repercussions here.

RT: The other thing I noticed here is that although it’s a very contemporary novel, set in the shadow of the 2004 American presidential election, 9/11 doesn’t play a major role the way it does in many other books cropping up.

IW: That’s the whole myth about 9/11—that it's changed everything, and that nothing will ever be the same. Most people don’t give a fuck about 9/11. Most people are living in their own communities, or they’re online, and they’re basically looking for someone to shag when they’re online—they’re not reading all these debates about ramifications of 9/11, global terrorism, and Islam. Most people in the West just don’t care about that. They’re not politicized. They’re the most simplistic consumers—they’re animals, basically. I was in Athens for a football match when 9/11 went down, and it was quite spectacular—we went into this bar and tried to find out what happened, and the bartender said “it’s only the American and the Arabs. They’re not big football nations.” So the feeling was, what’s it got to do with us? Why are football games being cancelled in Europe? The intelligentsia in the West feel like they have to figure out the significance of it all, whereas people have other pressing concerns, related to basic needs. They’re worried about how to feed their families, how to get money. Young people are worried about how to meet people, have a meaningful social life. That’s the overwhelming concern that people have.

RT: But technology does play an important role in this book—the character of Dorothy Cominsky, or “Dot Com,” is the very epitome of San Francisco, where Danny rants about people being connected to computers everywhere. Whereas in the end it’s Brian’s father’s handwritten journals that solve the puzzle.

IW: When you look at the whole explosion of the Internet, the decline of print journalism, there are all of these plus-or-minus ramifications, and you have to work it out. The great thing about books is that you have a tactile thing that’s there. You can download this or download that, but how long do you want to be staring at a screen for the rest of your life? You’ve got to have some kind of proper interface for people that’s not about the screen.

RT: Your characters, even if they are only briefly in the book, are always quite layered. Why does Danny like poetry so much, for example?

IW: I think it’s a nice tic to give him. Again, if you make somebody too much of one thing or the other… I think you’ve got to show the different possibilities that exist for people. It’s not out of the bounds of possibility that Danny could be something different, he could be a poet in ten years time. He’s at that stage where he is just wrestling with what he’s going to be. There are options for him, even though he might not be able to see that. You can see different versions of people if you know them really well, you can say so-and-so’s gone down this route, but they were that close to ending up in prison, and the other way around: if someone’s in prison you can see how they were that close to being married with a couple of kids. So you can see the decisions that people make at certain key times affect them.

RT: There is a very crucial text message in the book. Did you struggle with using things like emails and text messages?

IW: You do because they change so much, they are such a big part of life, people even split up by text message, they dump each other by text. Everything seems so disposable, so throwaway, but you have to engage with that if you’re writing about the modern world. You’ve also got all these pop references that you feel obligated to make. They’re just part of the bricolage of the whole thing, whether or not these are actually significant elements themselves. I don’t actually like it that much. There’s a great book by a Scottish writer, a guy named James Meek, called The People’s Act of Love, and you can see why he wanted to write a historical novel set in Siberia, because you don’t have to write about all this crap! I can see myself wanting to write a historical novel—you don’t need to worry about references to reality TV or pop music, you can just get on with the basics of story and character.

RT: I want to go back to The Picture of Dorian Grey for a minute—it seems like literary writers are using these supernatural or fantastic elements a bit more freely lately…

IW: I’ve always been into fantasy—The Acid House has all this fantasy stuff in it—but I think because Trainspotting was my first book, there’s an idea that I am more of a social realist. Also, with people being in cyberspace and using psychoactive drugs, they have much more psychoactive lives than they used to. So I think people are either looking for the literal or they are skeptical about it. Basically everyone’s fucking clueless—there’s no one way of telling a story or looking at reality, so I think any device is up for grabs as long as it fits in with the tone. It’s a weird thing to be writing about a couple of environmental health inspectors to begin with, and when the whole thing takes a supernatural turn it's got to be done in a deft way. And I brought in elements like the witch because there is a Scottish tradition of witchcraft—it goes right back to Robert Burns’s Tam O’Shanter.

RT: The curse you come up with is an alcoholic’s dream…

IW: I’ve actually tried to work out how feasible it would be to put a hex on someone. I still don’t know. This pal of mine and I in Edinburgh, we used to go for a drink on Monday morning at the Central Bar in Leith, and we’d sit there and talk about who we were going to give this fucking hangover to. We’d actually make a list of people. The Central Bar opens at seven o’clock in the morning, by the way, so you can get a few pints in before going to work—so that was another part of the genesis of the book.

RT: You also managed to write one of the most grotesque sex scenes I have ever read. The act of writing something like that must be pretty intense.

IW: Well, you don’t actually get repulsed or aroused—it just becomes a technical thing: “How does this sound?” When I first read that scene it was up in Aberdeen, and it was a very mixed crowd, they didn’t know what to expect, and a lot of people walked out—I guess they were disgusted. And without knowing the story, I guess it is pretty disgusting. Now, when I read it, I set the scene. It’s based on THE Scottish play —Macbeth— because one guy goes to see the witch, then the other guys go to see her. You would expect both Kibby and Skinner to react in that kind of situation.

RT: In a weird way you feel like Skinner is the better man for going through it. We’ve been talking a bit about Scottish writers and here’s one I quite like: Grant Morrison. He writes comics, have you read him?

IW: I’ve read Grant Morrison because I’ve read Batman, I like what he’s done with it… he’s obviously massively talented. I haven’t read comics all that much but I’d like to read more of it. I’ve always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I’m going to stop seeing things.

RT: So what are you reading?

IW: You mean now? I read so many books that I can’t actually remember… it’s also the same with music, I have to look at my iPod and check what I’m listening to. I was on the phone last night, telling someone that I went to see this film last night—it was 28 Weeks Later—and I actually enjoyed it, but I couldn’t remember what it was—and two really good friends of mine produced it!

RT: Trainspotting was written off of journals—do you still keep a journal?

IW: Not so much now, no, I just have a list of projects I want to do, and I’ve got about a dozen things on the list that I want to write, and I’ll be lucky if I get to them—most of them will fall off the radar. I don’t really have time to keep a diary—like a blog, it becomes too much of a narcissistic thing.

RT: You’re often considered something of a bad boy of literature due to subject matter—do you feel the need to negotiate that territory, that kind of reputation?

IW: I’m less conscious of it than I was… when you start off with your first book, people assume that you’re like all the characters in the book—and it does complicate things, when you’re being constantly bombarded with it, but you have to embrace it. You’re never going to get beyond other people’s preconceptions of what you are and what you’re about. I’m quite comfortable now with being misunderstood. I don’t really feel the need either to pander to it or to refute it. Just go on, and do what I’ve got to do.

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Editor's Note: In January 2007, César Vallejo's The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, was released by University of California Press (reviewed in our Spring 2007 Print Issue). In the following talk, originally given at Michael Heim’s translation seminar at UCLA in February 2007, he discusses the psychic struggle and lasting impact of translating Vallejo's uniquely challenging work.

By Clayton Eshleman

By the time I completed a third draft of César Vallejo’s “Human Poems,” in Kyoto, Japan, in 1963, I felt that I was hardly any further ahead with the project than I had been at the beginning. By insisting on trying to get everything right, I kept running up against dead end after dead end. This word was not in any dictionary. This phrase made no sense. Not only did I not understand a lot of what I was working with, but I began to fantasize that Vallejo did not want his words turned into English, and in some bizarre way was resisting my efforts. I realized, however, that being lost in a labyrinth that I had created for myself was significant. I decided that if I could figure out a way to conceive this struggle in a poem of my own, I would have at least something to show for all my work.

I imagined that I was in a life-death struggle with Vallejo, or, in Blakean terms, with the Specter of Vallejo. I was trying to wrest his language away from him as if it were his food while he cannily thwarted my thievery. So I worked on a poem ultimately called “The Book of Yorunomado.” The crucial section of the poem, as far as the struggle with Vallejo was concerned, is this:

I entered Yorunomado and sat
down, translating,
Nightwindow.

The coffee breathed
a tiny
pit—

As a black jeweled butterfly alights
in late summer on a hardening coil of dung,
so I lit on his spine

pages lifting in the breeze in from the patio

We locked. I sank my teeth into
his throat, clenched, his fangs
tore into my balls, locked
in spasms of deadening pain we turned, I
crazed for his breath, to translate
my cry into his gold, howling, he
ripped for food

Locked, a month passed, and as he increased lean
I slackened, drained, and tripling my energy
drew blood, not what I was after, muscles
contracting, expanded he was clenched
in my structure, a dead matter
eating into my cords, and saw deep
in his interior a pit, in spring
I went for it, made myself into a knife
and reached down, drawing
out from the earth cold.
A hideous chill passed—

another month, cunningly
he turned himself into a stone

I dulled on, grinding my own teeth, woke up,
another month, a season. I was wandering
a pebbled compound, the stone in my hand.

I saw I had birthed the dead end, but Japan
was no help—until I also saw
in the feudal rite of seppuku a way.

On the pebbles I lowered stone-like.
Whereupon the Specter of Vallejo raised
before me: cowled in black robes, stern on the roka,

he assumed a formal kneel. With his fan
he drew a bull’s-eye on my gut;
he gave no quarter; I cut.

Eyes of father tubes of mother swam
my system’s acids. As one slices raw tuna
with shooting contortions not

moving a foot I unlocked Yorunomado,
undid his wrists and ankles chained to altars of
the multichambered sun.
Vallejo kept his word:

he was none other that year than himself

Hello all I have ever felt…

for that was the point upon which the knife
twisted loose an ego
strong enough to live.

Seppuku is the more sophisticated term for what is otherwise known as harakiri, or disembowelment. In 1962, I saw, several times, a terrific Samurai film called Seppuku that made a profound impression on me.

Slicing into my own metaphoric guts, an eerie ecstasy ran through me. I was envisioning the destruction of my given life for a creative one, in which Yorunomado, a figure of imagination, replaced my mother and father.

Years later, studying shamanism, I discovered that the novice in his initiation often experiences dismemberment in which his insides are torn out, or boiled. Spirits or ancestral shamans then replace the organs with rock crystals, indicating that the new initiate has an indestructible body enabling him to go on celestial or infernal quests.

Elsewhere I have written: “In early 1964, the fruit of my struggle with Vallejo was not a successful linguistic translation but an imaginative advance in which a third figure had emerged from my intercourse with the text. Yorunomado then became another guide in the ten-year process of developing a “creative life,” recorded in my book-length poem, Coils (1973).”

The temptation in Kyoto at this time was to tinker with Vallejo’s lines in English in such a way that they made sense to me, to, in effect, interpret them rather than to translate them. Probably because of the wall I was up against, I had a lot of fantasies, not only about what a particular line or image might mean, but fantasies that seemed detached from the translation itself. And since Vallejo was one of my key sources for what being a poet meant, I knew that if I was not careful I would skew the translation in directions that would represent my own, at the time, unclear aspirations in poetry. As I pointed out in “A Translation Memoir,” the Afterword to my translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, I have worked hard, over the years, to keep this from happening.

Since I worked on Vallejo at the time I was seeking to lose and to find myself in poetry, his influence on my writing has been considerable. However, there seems to be a crucial difference between being influenced by a master in one’s own language and by one in a language that one is translating. If I am being influenced by Hart Crane, say, you would think of Crane when you read my poetry, and by doing so, one could say that Crane’s presence had marginalized my own. If Vallejo is to make himself felt in my poetry, one way that he could do so would be through what I, as his translator, have turned him into. In this sense, my translations of him act as a kind of half-way house between the original Spanish and my own poetry. If you think of Vallejo when you read one of my poems, you are most probably not thinking of him in Spanish, but of what I have turned him into in English. So to some extent, I have created a text to possibly be influenced by. While I would not go so far as to say that this is the equivalent of being influenced by myself, the translation is so full of “Eshleman decisions” that Vallejo, as direct presence, has been distanced.

Other forms of influence involve psychological strategies. Near the end of “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then…. I contradict myself;
I am large…. I contain multitudes.

Vallejo’s form of contradiction, certainly in Poemas humanos, often involves a subconscious thought entering a line under formation and re-routing it. I became aware of this strategy while in Kyoto, and it taught me that engaging lines of poetry are often those that construct a new image, or, yoke two disparities into a seamless proposal. For example, look at what happens in this stanza from Vallejo’s “There are days, there comes to me an exuberant, political hunger…”:

Ah to desire, this one, mine, this one, the world’s,
interhuman and parochial, mature!
It comes perfectly timed,
from the foundation, from the public groin,
and, coming from afar, makes me hunger to kiss
the singer’s muffler,
whoever suffers, to kiss him on his frying pan,
the deaf man, fearlessly, on his cranial murmur;
whoever gives me what I forgot in my breast,
on his Dante, on his Chaplin, on his shoulders.

Everything the speaker seeks to kiss disrupts literal logic, but does not become nonsense. To kiss whoever suffers on his frying pan, suggesting that the sufferer is hungry, implies that the kiss would be a kind of food. To kiss a deaf man on his cranial murmur is even more dense, but intelligible: is the deaf man unaware that his skull, in effect, “speaks?” And by kissing him on his “cranial murmur,” does not a mystical reciprocal communication not take place? Each of these two prepositional phrases not only re-routes the direction of the sentence but adds elements of human compassion. What is literally contradictory fills cubistically with metaphorical meaning. Via translating Vallejo I came to self-contradiction in the spirit that Whitman had proposed, though not necessarily with his “multitudes” in mind.

After returning to the States in the summer of 1964, I continued to work on my translation of Poemas humanos. Writing “The Book of Yornomado” had given me permission to imagine Vallejo, to regard him not only as a text, but as material to draw upon in my own poetry. I was building up a kind of “Vallejo file” of tangential notions and sensations. My view of apprenticeship expanded, and deepened, from that of the bitter struggle in “The Book of Yorunomado” to passages like this from my 1965 poem, “The Book of Niemonjima”:

he approached
the casket of Vallejo as a book is closed,
toward the heavy box of flesh blowing
by the sea, seeing a man crouched
moving behind, who he feared was himself.
Los stood naked with his hammer behind
the casket of Vallejo smiling at Yorunomado;
he put his hand upon the beaten
lid as the wanderer approached, smiling,
for he alone knew what I must do, & stepped
back as I knelt by the box in dignity, in prayer
to Vallejo. Los stood & watched,
& Yorunomado saw how those who weep in
their work cannot weep, how those who
never weep are the weak, the fake
sufferers. To be a man. That suffering
is truer to man than joy. These were
the lines in the heavy pocked face of Vallejo,
trinities of intersections &
heavy lines, a village of nose & lids;
Vallejo never left home, it was home
he always begged for even in the taking on
of the suffering body of man. I stood for
7 years & looked at him there, observing
the Quechuan rags & shreds of priest cloak,
the immense weight in his mind,
& lifting his rags I saw his female gate,
bloodied & rotten, hopelessly stitched
with crow feathers, azure, threaded with
raw meat, odors of potatoes & the Andes,
& how the priest roaches had gotten into
the gate, yet the edges of his gate were
sewn with noble purple velvet & I pondered
my own course, what was in store for me
given the way I was living, how the female
gate in a man must open, yet the horrible
suffering if it opens & something else does
not open! But there was no cure or cause
for who Vallejo was, perhaps it was the enormity
of what he took on, the weight of his people
to utter, & I shuddered to think of Indiana,
of what it would be to cast Indiana off.
Yorunomado sobbed when he saw the extent
of contradiction in Vallejo’s body, how
could he have lived even one day, he thought;
this was the agony in the lines, the fullness
& the dark beauty of Vallejo’s face horizontal
to sky, long black hair flowing back
into the sand, & Los likewise moved bent
& rested his hammer for one day in tribute
to the fierce & flaming profile contoured
to the horizon…

How long had he been left there? Yornomado
stood & with Los helped the casket off
into the sea of another language.

Los is Blake’s figure of the poet, or the spiritual revolutionary who reveals basic truths. Having freed Yorunomado from my solar plexus (or, to put it another way, having transformed my working place into a figure of instruction), he could occupy dramatic space with Los, in the same spirit that I had engaged Los via Blake.

One point I would like to get across here is how translating Vallejo encouraged me to give priority to imagination over memory and to trust in creative presence. Not only was he instructive regarding contradiction (and “the logic of metaphor”), but his work also enabled me to begin to confront ambivalence. The fact that one is drawn to the world as one is repulsed by it is an aspect of the larger forces of affirmation and negation which I came to see as core values in the making of an art. I think it was Rilke who wrote that “to praise is all,” sensing such as the key mission of the poet. I think he is close to being right: affirmation is wonderful, but it is only real when it is constantly tested against negation. Over the years, I have tried to always hold my affirmation to the fire, as it were, believing that only that which survives the fire counts.

In the mid 1980s, and again last year, I wrote two poems that are hard to describe. Both are based on my translations of two Vallejo poems, and are, in a way, translations of translations, though that is not quite right. Both follow to a considerable extent the formal procedures of the translations in such a way that I would think that a person familiar with either the original or the translation would hear them as ghosts inhabiting my own poems. I am also reminded of the palimpsest, or a text that has been written over earlier texts, so that both show through the third or most recent text.

Here is the first of the Vallejo translations, “The Book of Nature,” from Human Poems:

Professor of sobbing—I said to a tree—
staff of quicksilver, rumorous
linden, at the bank of the Marne, a good student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
between the evident water and the false sun,
his three of hearts, his queen of diamonds.

Rector of the chapters of heaven,
of the burning fly, of the manual calm there is in asses;
rector of deep ignorance, a bad student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
the hunger for reason that maddens him
and the thirst for dementia that drives him mad.

Technician of shouts, conscious tree, strong,
fluvial, double, solar, double, fanatic,
connoisseur of cardinal roses, totally
embedded, until drawing blood, in stingers, a student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
his precocious, telluric, volcanic, king of spades.

Oh professor, from having been so ignorant!
oh rector, from trembling so much in the air!
oh technician, from so much bending over!
Oh linden, oh murmurous staff by the Marne!

Before presenting my “translation” of this translation, since it concerns the fate of the French poet and metaphysician of the theater, Antonin Artaud, I should say a few things about Artaud that are relevant to my poem. Artaud was incarcerated in insane asylums from 1937 to 1946, where he underwent 51 electro-shock sessions. In the last two years of his life—he died in 1948 outside of Paris—he created some of the strangest writing in the 20th century, texts that at once are profoundly disturbed and uniquely coherent. Many facets of his life—his vision quests to northern Mexico and southwestern Ireland, use of a magic dagger and cane, loss of identity, possession by doubles, glossolalia, the projection of magical daughters from his own body, and his imaginative resurrection in Rodez asylum—have more to do with shamanism than with the lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century “men of letters.”

Here is my “translation” of my translation of Vallejo’s “The Book of Nature”:

THE EXCAVATION OF ARTAUD

Shaman of obsession—I said at his tomb—
excavated in electricity, opened between
anus and sex. In the Australian outback of the soul,
3 dead men are fingering your anesthetized root support
shining like a chain of sputtering lights, for the key to creation,
between the bone they’ve drawn out and your bone they so desire.

Priest of lethal phallic rites, of sparkings
in foetid material, of remaining in antithesis
with no hope of synthesis, priest of a genuine melée—
3 dead men are fingering your Muladhara Chakra, your amphimixis,
as if, under the Christian gunk that clogged your focus,
they could plug into your triangle and its twisting tongue of flame.

Pariah in silence, coprophilially
squatting in the corner of your cell for years,
sealed open, who only came when called by your mother’s name—
repressing their way in, to the point of anal cancer,
3 dead men, licking your electroshock-induced Bardo, have found
your atomic glue, the Kundalini compost they must eat to speak.

O shaman, from having been so masterfully plundered!
O priest, from having been fixed in antithesis!
O pariah, from having been so desired by the dead!

Structurally-speaking, Vallejo’s poem is an apostrophe, in which a tree is addressed metaphorically in the first three lines of each of the first three stanzas. In the last three lines of these stanzas, a student attempts to tell his fortune via “the book of nature” present as a deck of cards in the pedagogical tree. In the final stanza, the pedagogical tree is again apostrophized and in a quick series of contradictions defined.

I have no idea if this is a Spanish verse form, or whether it has ever been used by anyone other than Vallejo. I thought it would be a cogent structure to use in apostrophizing Artaud who claimed he had been attacked between anus and sex (the location of the Tantric Muladhara Chakra) by God. I borrow an Australian aboriginal lethal phallic rite from the research of Géza Roheim in an attempt to dramatize Artaud’s plight.

The second of my “translations” of my translations is a poem that concludes a longer work in prose, “One If by Sea, None If by Land,” and it is spoken by a spider, or my vision of the poet as a spider, based on my reading of the labyrinth.

I see the labyrinth as a three-fold image: the model for the Cretan labyrinth, in which Theseus engages and destroys the Minotaur at the center, is the orb-weaving spider web across which a male must make his way to mate at the center with the female builder of the web, and then exit before he is eaten. Writing a poem involves, in my sense of it, the poet symbolically entering this labyrinthian constellation where his activity is transformed into a spider writer (Argiope, the “golden orb-weaver,” is also known as the “writing spider”) devouring his/her material. That is to say that the bitter combat at the center (arachnoid mating, Theseus-Minotaur conflict) is, in the poem’s terms, the poem’s realization of itself where it simultaneously feeds on itself and gives its heart to itself. Another way to put this would be to say that the poet’s task is to translate literal war into mental war (one of Blake’s definitions of poetry).

The Vallejo translation I chose to “translate,” or re-envision, begins “Chances are, I’m another; walking, at dawn…” Such a phrase evokes, of course, Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre,” I is another. In my piece, Vallejo’s “other” becomes a “Minotaur surrogate.”

Here is my translation of “A lo major, soy otro...”:

Chances are, I’m another; walking, at dawn, another who proceeds
around a long disk, an elastic disk:
a mortal, figurative, audacious diaphragm.
Chances are, I remember while waiting, I annotate marble
where scarlet index, and where bronze cot,
an absent, spurious, enraged fox.
Chances are, a man after all,
my shoulders anointed with indigo misericordia,
chances are, I say to myself, beyond there is nothing.

The sea gives me the disk, referring it,
with a certain dry margin, to my throat;
nothing, truly, more acidic, sweeter, more Kantian!
But somebody else’s sweat, but a serum
or tempest of meekness,
decaying or rising—that, never!

Lying down, slender, I exhume myself,
smashing my way into the tumefied mixture,
without legs, without adult clay, nor weapons,
a needle stuck in the great atom…
No! Never! Never yesterday! Never later!

Hence this satanic tuber,
this moral plesiosaurian molar
and these posthumous suspicions,
this index, this bed, these tickets.

And here is my version:

Chances are I’m a Minotaur surrogate,
weaving, at night, an arachnoid adept who jigs about a cordate void,
an anomalous void, orbicular labyrinth.
Chances are, I behead upon being impregnated,
nourishing the just conceived with my brain marrow lunch.
Chances are, I spin-say to myself:
mental war takes place on husk-strewn thread.

The air advertises reality, connecting it,
via respiration, with non-being—
nothing, truly, more noumenal, more depth-resplendent!
But a religious grid, or gradient, an oasis
beyond this work tomb,
verdant, eternal—that, never!

Abdomen-tentacled, I snag
etymological drift, injecting it with literal
breakdown, so as
to turn it, as a threadbaled Thesean,
into drink.

Thus this spider mind,
this forever warp woof-crossed by never,
this spectral Tenochtitlan,
this Jurassic chandelier.

The initial Jacob/angel combat with Vallejo that produced, instead of a realized translation, an imaginary third figure enabled me to understand that the translation process was dual: it involved an imaginal reality as well as a linguistic one. From my point of view, these two realities are not in conflict—in fact, I would argue that acknowledging the imaginal realm, and working with it, has enabled me to support a keen observation made by Eliot Weinberger: “A translation is based on the dissolution of the self. A bad translation is the insistent voice of the translator.”

In “The Book of Yorunomado,” I cast Vallejo as an actor in my drama of self-transformation. In “The Excavation of Artaud,” I generated a vision of Artaud’s terrible and grotesquely stunning condition and drew upon one of Vallejo’s poetic forms to articulate it. And in “Chances are I’m a Minotaur surrogate,” I turned my translation into another poem of my own, making use of my totemic figure, the spider. To some extent, I would argue, I have incorporated Vallejo’s poetry in translation as an element in my own poetry, and thus reversed his influence. Metaphorically speaking, who I served is here serving me.

Author's note: “The Book of Yorunomado” and “The Excavation of Artaud” were published in The Name Encanyoned River: Selected Poems 1960-1985 (Black Sparrow Press, 1986); “The Book of Niemonjima” appeared in Coils (Black Sparrow Press, 1973); “One if by Land, None if by Void” is from An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press, 2006).

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007