ADFEMPO

I won't be speaking on translation--instead, I'll be speaking on race and ecopoetics--and there isn't a "translation panel," exactly, but there are lots of inter-language-related events at the upcoming Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism (ADFEMPO) conference next week. There's a panel centered around Hélène Cixous, 33 years later (has it really been so long?), another on multilingual poetics, yet another on hybridity and Asian American Poetics (including some talk on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's video poems and traditional Japanese zuihitsu). In fact, the entire conference opens with a discussion between "orature" and "literature," which I'm sure will provocatively address the varied and various translinguations between speech and writing.

Anyway, yrs truly will be spouting off Friday morning from 10 to 11:45, and the coordinates are the English Department Lounge, CUNY Grad Center, which is located on 5th Ave. between 34th and 35th streets in Manhattan (don't be thrown by the Bergen St., Brooklyn, address at the bottom of the page--it's a trick!). Hope to see you there. Bring questions!

Global Conversations

Series Editor: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Open Humanities Press is pleased to launch a new multilingual series in philosophy and literature published in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office. Each Global Conversations book will be freely available as an electronic book (open access) and as reasonably priced paperbacks. European languages are often seen as the source of original concepts, blissfully unaware or simply ignoring what is evolving in non-European languages and cultures. This series aims at encouraging dialogue among world cultures and languages, big and small, the dominant and the marginalized, by enabling, through open access publishing, the exchange of intellectual products, literary, philosophical and theoretical, among world languages. To avoid a one-way intellectual traffic, it means publishing works in translation in at least two languages: the source and the target. The series should be open to the possibility of many other translations that arise from the initially published. That way the dialogue becomes a multi-logue or conversation. Thus a work originally published in English and Gujarati in the series may end up being translated into Kiswahili and Maori, and these should become part of the conversation. Most importantly, the series aims at making visible original and outstanding works which may not be otherwise readily and commercially available for reasons of language and market. The series will have literary and theoretical/philosophic streams while being open to other works that may not neatly fall intothe streams.

Froid/Cold

At the FACE Festival, I discovered that a poet and an acquaintance of mine, Edouard Levé, had committed suicide. But that’s not all. He had written an entire book toward the act, which he then sent to P.O.L. Editeur just before he hanged himself. I asked the person who told me, but did P.O.L. then publish it? They did. And surrounded the publication with clouds of words that I find so difficult to read—words in which Leve questions the selfishness of his suicide (his wife found him) against the calm that it would bring him. The listing contrasts Suicide with his previous book, Self. Self is an autobiographical survey of sorts, unlinked facts, sentences. And many of these are the negative (or the positive) of what’s in Suicide.

I don’t want to read either book. The excerpts are beautiful, moving, questioning. I still don’t want to read them. I’ve bumped up against the limits of my own definition of “art,” which is apparently life-affirming. I love some conceptualism. I loved Levé’s other projects. He stayed on our couch for a night or two several years ago, during a project for which he was documenting journeys to American cities and towns named after European cities and towns (Rome, Athens, Cairo). We had a few beers and watched a video called “Feathers for Felines,” an incredibly badly filmed how-to for cat owners on how to use toys to relieve the boredom of house cats. We all agreed it was one of the funniest movies we had ever seen. I think he even watched it twice—again after we had gone to bed. He was a nice guy—engaging, intelligent, irreverent. He gave me his book Oeuvres, a list of ideas for projects that he had never carried out. I had been intending to translate it for years (speaking of never carried out). Right now I’m thinking of somewhere to go with this mini-eulogy, this remembrance of Levé. Something that would make some sense to Suicide. Something that makes sense beyond actually reading his last book. Like, was it all the unfulfilled projects, or the idea of art as an unfulfilled project, or the idea of life as an unfulfilled project that got to him? Wanting to complete at least one project? Does this essentially negate the innovative, experimental idea of art/poetry as uncontrollable, unfinishable, uncompletable? Is Suicide an ultimate conservative achievement? Like heaven, where nothing will change once you’re “there”? No transformation beyond the act that was the idea for the book. The book was the endpoint, along with the act. No motion. It was described to me as “froid,” cold.

Suicide is a bit like Rodchenko’s paintings—where they were the end of painting (a statement I make that I firmly don’t believe), it is the end of conceptualism. Maybe. Conceptualism is ephemeral, requires explanation, “clouds of words.” Suicide is definite—does it require explanation? I’ll never get one. Conceptualism is also tired. I’m tired of entering art shows where I’ve got to read the text before looking at the work. Where the artist has to explain everything, like that the rubber bands making up the big ball are rubber bands from Enron’s board rooms and therefore they have some sort of weight that maybe the responsibility for finding is tossed to us, the viewer.

Clever dogs speak in tongues to find food

Apparently, when they smell food on the breath of their fellow dogs, they communicate to each other how to get more. Haven't read the full article--why should I when the headline is so interesting? Clever dogs!

Anyway, my brain has been working furiously at 4:30 a.m. lately (only to quit for the rest of the day) and I had an idea this morning why Oulipo might be more valuable to U.S. poets at the present moment. And that is perhaps because we need to or are interested in identifying the processes/procedures underlying our work, and Oulipo points toward that sort of analysis/recognition. I was very interested in this article on the math underlying city populations, and I wondered if the same sort of analysis could apply to, say, my own poem Traffic & Weather, which I did not consciously write in a mathematical form. I remember Allen Ginsberg identifying close to a 9-syllable count per line in my long poem "Mystery of Public Places III," which I hadn't consciously planned. That identification helped me shape the remainder of the poem, which had been a big mess up to that point.

Michèle Métail certainly made me think a lot about form (although she no longer identifies herself as a member of Oulipo), particularly when she said, "First I find the form, which crystallizes the sense." Each of her poems has a unique form, bound to and arising from the subject of the poem (and thus one fracture in her relationship to Oulipo--in that her forms are not duplicable beyond the specific poem). But back to math and Traffic & Weather--I like the idea of being controlled beyond my own conscious search for form, that instead I'm closer to "nature" or reality (and my idea of nature is very different from most definitions of it) when I write conscious of being close to it, but not conscious of actual equations or numeric counts. It must be inevitably be there, as none of us can really avoid math or physics or nature (although I tried my very best in high school to cut as many math classes as humanely possible).

Here's a wonderful quote on translation I received from Stephanie Gray this morning:

from Wonders of the West by Kate Braverman, a novel from early 90s: "I realize it is possible to be ambushed by revelation. It would be a brutal night of too many stars. Heaven would be filled with tiny metal pins. You would recognize the constellations and where they were going. Their faces would be familiar as photographs on the table next to your bed. You would remember everything. You would know what they were saying. Nothing would require translation."

Persistence of remembering FACE

I’m still thinking, parsing, mediating on and about the FACE festival. It was an extraordinary chance to meet French poets who were, in a way, so purely “French.” It reminded me on many levels how difficult it is on this giant island of the U.S.A. to get the “news” from abroad. Despite all the Internet and e-mail and telephone and texting and whatever, geography remains geography. Anyway, a few gleanings thru the haze of cross-languages:

• Oulipo has a second wind in France, not necessarily a good thing. Apparently, it’s turned into a sort of public game, with the constraints taking on a sort of emptiness, and Oulipean readings/writings overwhelmed by “blagues,” or jokes. I’ve found this in the U.S., too,—in that a jokey reading can take control of the evening. Once one poet makes a funny, the rest of the poets sometimes visibly wilt, as the atmosphere then alters in favor of the continuous laughfest. But since Oulipo is still viewed here as a certain ultimate of deliberately arcane writing, it was initially hard to imagine as a popular radio show program, or taking over the talk channels the way flarf or other group-poetry movements have. But I could see how it has functioned as a sort of access point, perhaps, with only the appearance of inaccessibility, just enough to make it appear different from the American penchant for so-called democratization of the arts (i.e., the more people attending, participating, understanding, the merrier—and the more grants money), which feeds into a penchant for being part of whatever perceived zeitgeist.
• French poets are exploring multimedia readings, using computers, sound, visuals. A persistent point of concern with the FACE festival was that the venue (Eugene O’Neill’s cottage) wasn’t able to support audiovisual. As one result, Michèle wasn’t able to do the full FIVE FEET reading, which involves playing sound samples taken from various locations in Tibet and China, and showing slides of groups of five people shot in random situations. She showed me the slides on my computer and I could see how their absence truncated the experience. However, the poets filled in, unplugged, so to speak. Sabine Macher and Jean-Jacques Poucel did a sort of dance performance as part of their simultaneous reading in French and English, keeping one part of their bodies in continuous contact throughout. I could see how practiced the French poets were in this sort of thing, in that the performance truly followed the content of the poem, which illuminated the points of contact between both words and people (funnily enough it was a flarfish poem, in that Sabine drew from her own work in searching for the words “fish” and “drum,” and then “mischmashing” the results together). Note: Flarf hasn’t crossed the Atlantic yet, judging by the blank looks I received when I compared it to the Oulipo phenomenon. But I’m sure it will soon, given its present rate of exposure.
• Chapbooks are alive and well and flourishing in France. About 10 years ago, someone told me that chapbooks and the letterpress did not exist in France. I’m happy to report this someone was VERY wrong. Somehow I didn’t get to fully interrogate the poets about other chapbook publishers (maybe one of the many instances my language skills failed, or we were distracted by something else), but I look forward to learning more eventually. Also, Pascal Poyet has written me that he didn’t bring 30, but 60 chapbooks. Happy mistake!
• Other things the French noticed: race relations, politeness, fake smiles, race relations, race relations. New London offered up a complexly segregated society, with white poets hanging out at a bar one block from a black club, one minute encouraging us to go read poetry there as a kind of "thrill" (to them I guess) and the next minute warning us away that it would be scary and dangerous. Also, upperclass white society (one whom lectured one of the poets on differences between the North and the South U.S.). I cringed and cringed. Yet there was also a Kente cultural club, a mixed-race art gallery/sneaker/skateboard shop, and a fair-trade store run by a biracial woman. As well as a “north Indian” restaurant run by Tibetans with really terrific food.
• An innocuous wine and cheese shop (don’t remember the street) contained a basement that was an entire house, windows, doors, the lot. The owner’s response to my “Why? How?” was a bit garbled—something like either the street level had sunk or risen. Either way, the basement was an entire house, dating from the revolutionary war.
• Goodies gotten:
  Michèle Métail: Mandibule, Mâchoire; Le route de cinq pieds (so now I can begin to work on the entire piece); and Toponyme: Berlin (with an excerpt of the translation by Holly Dye).
  From Pascal Poyet: Réducton de la revolution la nuit, Opération Lindbergh, Spirit II and Oh un lieu d’épuisement by David Lespiau; LA VILLE, DE LA VILLE by Michèle Métail; and freshly arrived in the mail just today, L’espace Domino and Méthodes pour échapper à l’analogie by Emmanuel Fourneir, Je voudrais entrer dans la légende by Sébastian Smirou, and a translation by Poyet of Rosmarie Waldrop, Dans n’importe quelle langue.

OK, I'm still exhausted, but determined to get the rest of these photos up while waiting for Ismael to fall asleep. It just seems impossible to present photos in blogger! Anyway, if the captions don't seem to immediately match the photo, well. excuuuuuse me!

At left, from left, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Money (never quite got the correct name), Preston Something-White, Elisabeth Hayes, Michèle Métail, Anne Portugal, Sébastien Smirou and Jose.

At left, below, David Lespiau and Sabine Macher admire our host's collection of boats (never did figure out who owned the dingy dinghy, though). At right, Pascal Poyet and Sabine, I think admiring one of the many spiffy digital cameras that I'm sure will be producing much better photos for a different blog.

Macgregor Card and his library and his coat of arms--not! At right, Macgregor, Jean-Jacques and Anne either watch rehearsal or the actual reading. The staircase belongs to the Eugene O'Neill cottage, where the reading took place.

Sébastien sees Eugene O'Neill's ghost. Below, a carload of poets head out for yet more food (I think we singlehandedly saved the restaurant economy of New London).

Après dinner, Sébastien, Macgregor and Pascal exchange poetry notes. Below on left, samples of Pascal Poyet's imprint, contrat maint. I got four books by David Lespiau--Opération Lindbergh, Oh un lieu d'épuisement, Réduction de la révolution la nuit, and Spirit II--and one by Métail, LA VILLE, DE LA VILLE, which is an extract of her larger piece, TOPONYME: BERLIN, a copy of which she gave me. Alas, Holly Dye is already translating it; otherwise, I'd be all over it as it looks absolutely fantastic. Poyet's entire line of approx. 30 books (that's a wild guess though) fit quite nicely into a small bubble sac and won't be pushing him over any weight limits for the flight home. Ah, the many advantages of chapbooks!

Anne Portugal and the proprieter, or manager, or just really nice guy of the Elks Club branch we ended up at. He took us on a tour of the building, which used to be a brothel. Interesting trap doors. The French were impressed by the sign over the bar that said "No drugs or weapons allowed onto the premises." Just one of those things you don't give a second thought until it's pointed out to you. I prefer the "No ID/No Party" sign visible over Anne's head. Anyway, now I've got the photos up, and am heading to bed, but will at some point blog more about specifics of the event, and about my translation plotting for Métail's work, now that she's given me so many books and so much more information about herself and her art.

Firsts at the FACE festival

I'm back from the POEM/FACE festival, an intense and unsettling experience that, like my suitcase, I am still unpacking. It was a festival of firsts: It was the first time many of the French poets had met each other, and the first time any of them had met their translators. It was also the first time for many of them to the United States (luckily, they were able to change their train tickets so as to permit a stopover in NYC, so that their only experience of the U.S. would not be New London (unexpectedly interesting as it was)), or for others, their last visit was so long ago, or so short a visit, as to be null.

It was the first time in a while I've spoken so much French for so many days, but not the first time I've been embarassed by how limited my speaking ability is. And oy, how rusty like an ancient iron door.

It was the first time that Michèle Métail and I met, and read together.

It was the first time I heard Michele Metail read, and don't think I'm hyperbolic when I say it's an incredible experience. The second night of the reading, as she read from the scroll of "The Route of Five Feet," letting it drop to the floor, she began whispering the verses until her lips were moving with no sound at all. I don't think I've ever felt an audience lean more raptly forward in their seats.

It was also the first time I ate dinner in a house that contained a painting by J.M.W. Turner:

The first time I've been to a house with ocean on three sides and with three poets to admire it: from left, Anne Portugal, Jean-Jacques Poucel and Michèle Métail.

The first time, I believe, that David Lespiau, Sébastien Smirou and Anne Portugal have sat together on a couch in a house containing a Turner painting.

The first time Sabine Macher and Jean-Jacques Poucel have 1) done yoga together and 2) danced the "Mischmaschfishdrum" together.

I've got lots more photos and lots more stories to tell, but right now I'm exhausted from going to New London nightclubs last night with the indefatigable Anne Portugal, a long drive today back to NYC, an emotional reunion with Ismael and Rich (and today is simultaneously our wedding anniversary, father's day, and the solstice), and I'm finding it insanely irritating to post photos to Blogger (why does it post all photos automatically to the top?). So, alors, à demain. (But if you're hungry for details now, please visit Smirou's blog).