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   Feature: The Poetry of Response Contents List

Tony Barnstone

The Cannibal at Work: Five Discourses on Translation, Transformation, Imitation, and Transmutation

This piece is about 13 printed pages long.

Discourse One: The Author Is Dead: Long Live the Translator!

In his The Poetics of Translation, Willis Barnstone notes that translators have to wear the ‘Scarlet T of translation,’ to wear the ‘shame of translation’ (9), a shame so intense that the translator and the reader need to ask the basic question ‘Is literary translation literature?’ (10) Can we ‘judge the translated text on its own, as an autonomous aesthetic object’ (11), or will it always be a secondary reflection of the true source of authority, the source text that lends it its name and raison d’etre. If the translator is to be respected as a writer, the question then becomes, how can ‘the matter of translation ... be forgotten so that the poem before us can be read as an original act’ (Barnstone 5)?

Though Vladimir Nabokov irately declares, ‘A schoolboy’s boner is less of a mockery in regard to ancient masterpiece than its commercial interpretation or poetization....The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase,’ for Octavio Paz, ‘language itself, in its essence, is already a translation,’ and so ‘all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such constitutes a text’ (Nabokov 127; Paz, in Barnstone, 5). Barnstone asserts that in fact ‘reading is translation and translation is reading’ and that ‘writing is translation and translation is writing,’ because all literary meaning-making is a translation of a graphic sign to a mental act (7). Translation is a form of extreme reading, as reading is a form of transformative interpretation, and ‘So one sign breeds another, there is an unending process of rewording, retelling, translation, transmutation, and wherever we turn, where meaning is sought, where mental activity takes place, we are living inescapably in the eternal condition of translation’ (19).

Furthermore, because the source text itself is not equal to itself (that is, because the act of reading itself is contextual its meaning changes with each reader and with each successive reading by each reader), and because translation can never achieve the equation of A=A, in some sense both the source text and the translation of the source text thrive on difference. Certainly, the now-venerable notion of Barthes and Foucault that the author is ‘dead,’ and that the meaning of the text lies not in the transcendental signified of the author’s life and mind but in the relationship of text to reader and text to language and culture, could lead one to a Derridean notion of textual play in translation.

For the creative writer, such literary theorizing opens the potential for some interesting practical applications.

Discourse Two: In the Sausage Factory of Translation

Twenty-four years ago I flew to China on a lark, because with my degree in English and Spanish literature the only work I could find in Santa Cruz, California, was day-work on an assembly line in a granola factory and a window-washing gig in which I washed the windows of office buildings in San Jose and stared through the soapy glass like the Little Match Girl at the men and women in power suits. On my voyage to the other end of the planet, I brought with me every book I could find of Chinese poetry, and also packed in my suitcase the notion that perhaps, if things went right, I might devote myself to being an amateur translator of Chinese poetry. Though I brought with me the Chinese translations of Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, Pauline Yu, and David Young, I took as my model Kenneth Rexroth, whose Chinese translations ravaged me during my undergraduate years with their beauty, their concision, their evocation of an elegiac poetics, their combination of objectivity and confessional intimacy, their precise images unfolding in the reader’s mind like a small internal movie. I wanted to learn to translate like Rexroth, because I wanted to learn to write such poems myself. I found them immensely moving.

After I began to translate Chinese poetry, however, and began to see what Rexroth and the others were doing from the inside, I found that as with sausages and laws, it’s better not to know the techniques though which translations are made. Rexroth, like virtually every other translator of Chinese poetry into English, approached the Chinese tradition with a kind of cultural imperialism. The esthetic of the Chinese poem changes significantly over its 3,000 year tradition, but typically is accentually metered, strictly rhymed, has end-stopped lines in which the meaning and phrasing pauses at line’s end, is constructed according to principles of parallelism within and between lines, has a caesura partway through the line that divides it into balanced and slightly asymmetrical elements, and celebrates its own tradition through imitation of and allusion to past poems and historical, religious and philosophical texts. In Rexroth’s English translation, the Chinese poem becomes unmetered, unrhymed, enjambed, the parallelism and caesuras are typically elided or hidden, and troublesome allusions are either ignored or excised completely from the poem. That is, the translations of Kenneth Rexroth, with all their devastating beauty, are an American invention. The traditional Chinese house of the poem has been razed to its foundations and built up again to conform to American housing codes, with modern electricity, appliances and furniture.

With some sadness, I realized that my translations could never be as beautiful as Rexroth’s, because I wasn’t willing to go as far as he was in pursuit of the spectacular object in English. I still think of myself as the midwife to the poem, not its adopted parent. To translate like that is to go the path of Robert Lowell in his Imitations. Lowell states baldly in the introduction, ‘I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone,’ to write ‘alive English’ instead of translating like ‘taxidermists’ whose ‘poems are likely to be stuffed birds’ (xi). So, as he says, ‘My licenses have been many. My first two Sappho poems are really new poems based on hers. Villon has been somewhat stripped; Hebel is taken out of dialect; Hugo’s +Gautier+ is cut in half....About a third of +The Drunken Boat+ has been left out. Two stanzas have been added to Rilke’s +Roman Sarcophagus,+ and one to his +Pigeons+’ (xii). And so on. However, Lowell is straightforward about his technique, and thus it seems to me his work is valuable as poetry in English. When he writes ‘All my originals are important poems’ (xiii) we know that he is referring to the original poems that he is imitating, but it is hard not to read the sentence are referring to the new originals Lowell is creating in English. To say that the imitated object is an important poem is a radical thing indeed, given the Scarlet T that translators must wear.

This poetic practice is a modern attempt at an ancient practice. It is that which Abraham Cowley used to translate Pindar and Horace, which John Dryden called the ‘way...of imitation, where the translator (if he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion...taking only some general hints from the original...’ (17). It is also the imperial translation practice that the Romans used in appropriating the literature of the Greeks. For the early Romans, ‘translation meant transformation in order to mold the foreign into the linguistic structures of one’s own culture’ (Freidrich 12). As Saint Jerome writes about his Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint bible, ‘The translator considers thought content a prisoner ... which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror’ (Freidrich 12-13). Hugo Freidrich observes that ‘This approach is based on the premise that the purpose of translation is to go beyond the appropriation of content to a releasing of those linguistic and aesthetic energies that heretofore had existed only as pure possibility in one’s own language and had never been materialized before,’ and so Nietzsche ‘wrote, in The Gay Science, +Indeed, at that time translation meant to conquer+’ (13, 14).

Paradoxically, the farther away from the original the translator travels, the more authority the poem gathers into itself. When Yeats transforms Ronsard’s sonnet ‘Quand vous serez bien vieille’ into his own poem, ‘When you are very old,’ he moves progressively further away from the original, and creates a new ending for the poem. No longer a standard carpe diem poem in which the poet tells the woman to love him before she grows old, it becomes a poem in which love itself has fled the planet, like the God leaving Antony, and has ‘paced upon the mountain overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.’ As the translation mutates and transforms, as it grows feet and crawls for the first time onto the land, it takes on a life different from its old one, breathes a different air, swims in a different element, wonders at a different sky. It is a new creature on the face of the earth.

In this sense, when Rexroth moves from translation to imitation then it seems to me that the process is more honest and valuable for literature. Rexroth’s Love Poems of Marichiko, for example, imitate the concision of tanka, drawing particularly from the images of Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), the great modern erotic poet of Japan, but they are original poems in English. Here Rexroth is using translation with an Emersonian self-reliance. As Emerson reads the great wisdom texts of the Middle East and of Asia in an attempt to come up with a particularly American form of transcendent individualism, so Rexroth finds in his Japanese translations a confessional voice, an erotic spirit, and a concise, imagistic technique that he wished to replicate in original poems. Emerson writes in ‘Self-Reliance’ that ‘In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty’ (145); Rexroth recognized his own genius in the poems he translated and saw no reason why he should not continue ‘translating’ directly out of his imagination instead of from Japanese source texts. Here’s Rexroth in one of his Marichiko poems:

Your tongue thrums and moves
Into me, and I become
Hollow and blaze with
Whirling light, like the inside
Of a vast expanding pearl.

Perhaps Rexroth is seeking to spur the schoolboy’s boner that Nabokov disdains. At least that is a step up from Auden’s assertion in ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’! Perhaps it’s possible for such transformative techniques to give rise to both schoolboy boners and important original poems in English?

Like Rexroth, I have been deeply affected by my decades of immersion in Asian poetry and poetics, and I have tried my hand at poetic Chinoiserie and at Japanese imitations. Here, for example, is a poem from a novella in verse that I set in Japan and titled ‘The Love Suicides’:

I bury my love for you,
a seed I hope is dead,
but it sprouts in the soft earth
and sends tendrils
through my coffined brain.
It tries to escape from my mouth
but I bite it off,
fingers through the dark delta below
but I cross my legs,
peers out of my eyes
but I drop the lids,
and when at last I think it’s gone
I see your face
shining at the temple
and blind, mute, crossing my legs,
my whole body betrays me.
Swaying toward your light
I burst into blossom.

The problem, for me, is that the poetry I was able to write in this mode seems to me to be precious, and somewhat derivative. In the end, I abandoned the series and simply mined the poems for images and rhetorical structures, and transformed them into some of the sonnets that appeared in my last book, Sad Jazz. Strangely enough, this impersonal technique allowed me to express intensely personal emotions and situations:

What He Tries Not to Say

He knows he has to hide his love for her.
She has withdrawn from him but still will see
him if he doesn’t ask too much. The seed
is waiting underneath his words, interred,
internal, sending tendrils through his brain;
though they still meet as ghosts of who they were,
have sex, a movie maybe, there’s a war
within him not to yowl and mewl in pain.
It tries escaping from his mouth but he
bites it off. When it trickles from his eyes,
he drops the lids. It burrows through his thighs;
he crosses legs. And then, when thankfully
it seems to stop, it tricks him: crossing legs,
and blind and mute, he can’t stop it. He begs.

There is a strong undercurrent of India, China, Japan and the Middle East in my poetry, but it can be hard to recognize because when I don’t feel poems are working I put them through transformative processes so radical that, like Humphrey Bogart after plastic surgery in Escape from Alcatraz, they can no longer be recognized. It reminds me of an interview with Jorge Luis Borges in which Borges was asked, ‘Mr. Borges, was there ever a woman who was for you a muse, the great love of your life?’ To which Borges replied, ‘Yes, in fact there was. The strange thing is, though, that she kept changing her face.’

Discourse Three: From Readymade to Response Poems

My own thinking about self-reliant imitation, transformation, and transmutation, goes back to a certain modernist move in the sculpture of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. In a well-known sculpture of a bull’s head by Picasso, for example, the piece was constructed from parts of a bicycle. Picasso describes his technique as follows:

One day I took the seat and the handlebars. I put one on top of the other and I made a bull’s head. Well and good. But what I should have done was to throw away the bull’s head. Throw it in the street, in the stream, anyway, but throw it away. Then a worker would have passed by. He’d have picked it up. And he’d have found that, perhaps, he could make a bicycle seat and handlebars with that bull’s head. And he’d have done it... That would have been magnificent. That’s the gift of metamorphosis. (Picasso 273-4)

I took Picasso’s sculpture, together with his statement about his technique, as inspiration to make my own poem, to create my own metamorphosis. For the seat and handlebars that became the sculpture and might one day become again a bicycle still have inside them the magic to transform themselves into further objects, into a poem perhaps, and from the poem to transform themselves yet again into something unknown. Here is my riff off of Picasso:

Discourse on Found Objects (Pablo Picasso, 1945)

Do you remember the bull’s head I made
from objects found discarded, handle bars,
a bicycle’s old leather seat, spare parts
I welded into one and then displayed
at an exhibit? Then the critics said,
‘Look how cleverly he formed it, how
he made the horns, look at the leather snout.
It’s beautifully rendered, this bull’s head.’
I made those objects new. But now I say
the metamorphosis will be complete
when the sculpture is cast on a trash heap
with other fallen objects, and some day
someone takes them home because they’re just right
as handle bars and seat to fix his bike.

Picasso’s technique is similar to that used by Marcel Duchamp in his readymade sculptures, most notably the urinal which he submitted in 1917 to the New York Society of Independent Artists. These found art sculptures, for Duchamp, were to be called ‘aided’ or ‘assisted’ readymades if they were modified from their original state, rotated, or titled, or attached to other objects. Duchamp’s urinal was not entirely ‘readymade.’ It had been adjusted somewhat: he titled it ‘Fountain’ and signed it ‘R. Mutt,’ and turned it on its side, causing it to be denormalized, removed from its practical use, and put into the frame of art. Thus it is, in Duchamp’s term, a ‘readymade aided.’ As Duchamp said at another time about the famous urinal, ‘Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object’ (Ramirez 64).

For Duchamp, ‘the replica of the ‘Readymade’ deliver[s] the same message, in fact nearly every one of the ‘Readymades’ existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.’ Unlike Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ who fears the artwork’s loss of its essential ‘aura’ of originality, Duchamp celebrates the readymade’s ‘lack of uniqueness’ instead of bemoaning its quality of being reproduced. In fact, Duchamp loves the idea of converting the original work of art into an ordinary object: ‘At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and +Readymades,+ I imagined a +Reciprocal Readymade+: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!’ In fact, ‘Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are +Readymades aided+ and also works of assemblage.’ Thus, Picasso’s bull head would be a ‘reciprocal readymade’ if converted back into a bicycle again.

Here is the poem I wrote, drawing from this inspiration:

The Urinal (Marcel Duchamp, 1917)

Marcel Duchamp painted the name R. Mutt
on a white urinal and sent it in
to the New York Society of In-
dependent Artists new exhibit, but
in nineteen-seventeen the joke fell flat,
the urinal was sent back, even though
its molded conch shell form did seem to glow
like a lamp turned to low, and though Duchamp
claimed that its biomorphic curves and holes
were art because he chose it. It’s his taste.
Though it was disconnected from the pipes,
the board could only think of its old role;
Duchamp went to the bathroom and saw life
was beautiful, but they just thought of waste.

Though the original Duchamp urinal is supposed to be lost or broken, replicas exist (one might almost say ‘translations’ exist). When I saw one of these replicas in the New York Museum of Modern Art Dada exhibition in 2006, I have to say that I was tempted to pull out my penis and pee into it. I’m sure Picasso would have approved. However, the security guard was eyeing me suspiciously, and so I moved on. I think it is a great loss for art.

Discourse Four: The Frankenstein Poem

From these beginnings, I began to spin wilder and wilder spells. From the poetics of response, I have moved towards a different method: using translation techniques to create readymade poems. One method I use to do this is to create (in my pet term) the ‘Frankenstein Poem,’ pieced together with wire and bolts from the dead limbs of the original poem. The idea is to take chainsaw to the source poem and chop out articles, pronouns, prepositions, leaving only the ‘power words’ on the metal table: nouns, verbs, adjectives. So, for example, consider Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’:

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Cut up on the surgeon’s table, with the skin and tendons and fat removed, the flayed and detached remnants of muscle and bone look like this:

world is charged grandeur God
Will flame out shining shook foil
gathers greatness ooze of oil
Crushed men reck rod
Generations trod trod trod
all is seared trade bleared smeared toil
wears man's smudge shares man's smell soil
is bare foot feel being shod

this nature is spent
there lives dearest freshness deep things
last lights black West went
morning brown brink eastward springs
Holy Ghost bent
world broods warm breast bright wings

From these bloody parts I made my own monster:

God, Dead

Who knows what the world is? I charged
my Nietzsche textbook at the bookstore,
hoping that some grandeur after the death of God
would flame out shining from the pages,
but I was shaken, crushed like foil, the shopboy
sneered at me, damn him and his nose ring,
the cumulonimbus clouds gathered greatness,
dark, like the ooze of oil, and I ran among crushed men
reckoning how far to my car as the fat drops fell like rods,
generating splashes as I trod, trod, trod,
and all the neons seared my eyes, trading words with me,
Vacancy, Tattoos, Hot Croissants, as through the bleared
smeared window of the French Bakery the female baker
toiled wearing a man's smudged shirt and shared
with this man the smells if not the flesh, if not the soil
or soul, no bare foot feel of being in the shoddy world,
no croissant for me.

Nature is somewhere, spent but there, and still,
one guesses, living, since that’s what nature does,
living with the dear freshness of deep things,
but I lived then in Los Angeles, and, home,
looking out the window as the last lights
blackened to the West, I went traveling towards morning,
riding my soggy bed, until from the brown smoggy brink
of the world eastward came springing what
we have instead of the Holy Ghost, bent sunlight
over the world brooding, warm, comforting
as breasts, flying on one bright wing.

You know if your Frankenstein poem is ‘alive English’ in Lowell’s term if the electric charge takes hold and the monster stands up and walks out into the literary village. And if the critics storm your castle, torches in hand, you will have only yourself to blame. It’s dangerous to steal fire from the gods.

Discourse Five: The Cannibal Poem

Many of my readymade poems cannibalize the work of the masters, though the technique used differs from project to project. The ‘power word’ technique is fun, but increasingly I have been moving towards a kind of poetic journalism in which I transform nonpoetic texts into poetry. For example, I found inspiration in the log of that great explorer, conquistador of spice and gold and slavery, and servant of the Inquisition, Christopher Columbus. In two log entries (translated by Robert H. Fuson) he writes:

I also understand that, a long distance from here, there are men with one eye and others with dogs’ snouts who eat men. On taking a man they behead him and drink his blood and cut off his genitals. (Columbus 1617)

The Indians aboard ....[speak of] people ... with one eye in the forehead, as well as others they call cannibals, of whom they show great fear. When they saw I was taking that course, they were too afraid to talk. They say that the cannibals eat people and are well armed....Perhaps these people may have captured some of the other Indians; when the captives did not return to their own country, it was said that they were eaten. The Indians we have encountered believed the same thing at first about us Christians. (Columbus 1619)

In coming up with my own version of this text, I was thinking about the source of syphilis, which some historians speculate came back to Europe from the Americas with Columbus’ crew. Thus, the crew, perhaps Columbus himself, must have had sex with the Arawak Indians whom they encountered on their voyages. I tried to tie the cannibalism to the sexuality, thinking at some level of the carnivorous sexuality of George Herbert’s erotic religious poem ‘Love III’:

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
          Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
          From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
          If I lack'd anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer'd, ‘worthy to be here’;
          Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
          I cannot look on thee.’
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
          ‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
          Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love,‘who bore the blame?’
          ‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
          So I did sit and eat.

Here is the poem I came up with, drawing from these various texts:

The Cannibals

The natives say there are some places
where canibales live who feast
on men, behead them, drink like beasts
at the bloody spout, their wild faces
with just one eye and snouts of dogs.
They slice your genitals off clean-
a raw delicacy — and steam
them, serve them rare, or feed like hogs
at your red corpse. Some natives fled
from us at first. We looked like wild men.
But now they welcome us like children.
Sunset spills like the wine Christ bled
while one girl lets me taste her meat.
I kneel before her flesh and eat.

And why not work from other poems in English and use readymade magic to deform, reform and transform the form, to re-image the images, to unword and reword the words, as Yeats did with Ronsard? Here is William Butler Yeats’ ‘No Second Troy’:

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

And here is my translation, or transformation, of that poem:

Another Troy

Why should he blame her that she fills his days
with misery, like a curved hook inside
his belly he can’t wriggle off, or why
should she blame him because he loves her face?
What made her simple as a flame that eats
the heart like kindling, eating it to live?
Why did he walk into the fire, give
his chest to the barbed shaft, and ask for peace?
Because embracing flame is still embrace,
because she needs another Troy to burn,
because she needs to crack his innocence
which keeps her chained to him and to this place.
From her small smile like a taut bow he learns
how much he needs even her violence.

Yeats had his Maud Gonne, and I had my ex. She was a sweet and wonderful woman, but becoming an ‘ex’ is a violent act, after all, and this poem is what I found when picking through the ruins of the burned city.

There is a violence as well to this act of transformation and reproduction. The poet translator is like a mirror that faces another mirror and mirrors itself again, and again, and again. It reminds me of a sonnet I translated by the great, blind, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, titled ‘To the Mirror:

Why is it you persist, incessant mirror?
Why copy me, down to the smallest ges-
ture of my hand? Why suddenly reflect
there in the shadows? You, uncanny brother,
you are the other me that ancient Greek
spoke of. You’ve watched forever. From a glaze
of old and watery crystal do you gaze
at me? It’s useless to be blind. You seek
me and it’s worse that I can’t see, can’t tell;
that really is your horror, magic thing
who multiplies the cipher of our being
then sucks our blessings into your strange well.
And when I’m dead, you’ll duplicate another,
another, then another, and another . . .

‘The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror — going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing,’ says Zhuangzi, the great founder of Daoism. But when I think of Emily Dickinson’s lines, ‘The brain is wider than the sky, / For, put them side by side, / The one the other will include / With ease, and you beside,’ I realize the mirror-brain of the poet-transformer is no innocent Daoist, sitting in meditation and giving up selfish concerns. No, like the cannibal of Columbus’ log, it will drag you into its well and feed on your flesh, leaving you just an image of an image, afterimage receding down a hallway of thought, and with your life force it will step from the glass and walk into the world, full of power and magic.