After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic

After Translation

The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic

Ignacio Infante

Fordham University Press

New York   2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Infante, Ignacio.

After translation : the transfer and circulation of modern poetics across the Atlantic / Ignacio Infante.

page cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5178-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Poetry—Translating. 2. Poetics—History—20th century. 3. European poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 4. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Spanish American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 6. Modernism (Literature). 7. Transnationalism in literature. I. Title.

PN1059.T7I54 2013

418'.041—dc23

2012041913

First edition

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

To Jamie, Isabela, and Nicolas

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Poetry after Translation: Cultural Circulation and the Transferability of Form in Modern Transatlantic Poetry

1. Heteronymies of Lusophone Englishness: Colonial Empire, Fetishism, and Simulacrum in Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I–III

2. The Translatability of Planetary Poiesis: Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionismo in Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel

3. Queering the Poetic Body: Stefan George, Federico García Lorca, and the Translational Poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance

4. Transferring the Luminous Detail: Sousândrade, Pound, and the Imagist Origins of Brazilian Concrete Poetry

5. The Digital Vernacular: Groundation and the Temporality of Translation in the Postcolonial Caribbean Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite

Afterword. The Location of Translation: The Atlantic and the (Relational) Literary History of Modern Transnational Poetics

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

1. Cover of Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I–II (1921)

2. Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I–II (Antinous and Inscriptions) (1921)

3. Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems III (Epithalamium) (1921)

4. Vicente Huidobro’s Matin from Horizon carré (1917)

5. Kamau Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video Style, section from X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces, included in Ancestors (2001)

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a long engagement with modern poetry, the practice and theory of literary translation, and the scholarly field of comparative literature. It is also a work that is intrinsically connected to my own personal transatlantic journey that has taken me from my native Granada, Spain, to Dublin, Ireland, and Irvine, Los Angeles, New Brunswick, New York, and now St. Louis, in the United States. Many wonderful places in one impressive journey. Therefore, there is a very long list of people I need to acknowledge.

I first started seriously reading poetry at Trinity College Dublin in 1997. I was able to work there with arguably the best three Americanists working in the Republic of Ireland today: Philip Coleman, Michael Hinds, and Stephen Matterson. Philip has been my tutor, mentor, and friend since I first met him in 1997. He has been an Irish blessing in more ways than he can imagine. Michael introduced me to the work of John Ashbery—an event that proved to be crucial later in my life—and generously supported my attempts to publish and translate American poetry into Spanish, including an invitation to spend a few days in the South of France. Dublin is also the home of two people who took care of me innumerable times: Adrian Carr and Jean Hoey. Without Adrian and Jean I wouldn’t have finished my degree at Trinity, and without Adrian I simply wouldn’t know a hundredth of the music I love, and two of my dearest friends.

Thanks in part to Tom and Anne-Louise Fisher (family and friends), I was able to work as a literary translator for the publisher Random House Mondadori, in Barcelona. I will always be grateful to Andreu Jaume for trusting in my abilities as a literary translator at a relatively young age and for hiring me on the spot to translate the work of Will Self, as well as for believing in my suggestion to translate Ashbery’s A Wave into Spanish. I wouldn’t know much about the practice of literary translation if Andreu hadn’t given me such a wonderful opportunity in 2001.

During the last ten years I have been extremely fortunate to be able to work in the United States with a group of extraordinary scholars, teachers, mentors, and students, who have not only shaped the way I think about literary and cultural studies but who have ultimately helped me develop as a person. None of this would have been possible without the institutional and financial support of the Fulbright Commission in Spain, the Ministerio of Educación y Ciencia of the Government of Spain, and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Government, which generously granted me a Fulbright Scholarship to complete my doctoral program in comparative literature at Rutgers University. There is no doubt that my life has been marked by my experience as a foreign Fulbright Scholar in the United States.

From the first graduate seminar I took at Rutgers, Billy Galperin has carefully monitored my development as a scholar not only with his characteristic brilliance and enthusiastic energy, but also with the utmost generosity. I am also extremely grateful to Richard Sieburth, who has always welcomed me at his Washington Square quarters throughout the years, and who has been kind enough to share his incredible knowledge and inspiring expertise on modern poetics and translation every time I knocked at his door. Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Nicholas Rennie have helped me enormously along the way too. I also thank Jacques Lezra for generously agreeing to read a previous version of this book. Brent Edwards’s work has been a key source of inspiration, and he is a model for the kind of scholar I wanted to become since I took his Serial Poetics seminar at Rutgers. I am extremely grateful to him too.

The Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers provided the perfect intellectual environment to pursue all my interests and, thankfully, great curricular and funding opportunities to be able to do so, the Transliteratures Fellowship in particular. Most important, however, was the support that I always received from everyone in the program. I particularly thank the different graduate directors during my time at Rutgers for all their time and caring encouragement: Janet Walker, Richard Serrano, Alessandro Vettori, and Elin Diamond. I also acknowledge Susan Martin-Márquez for being the astounding Peninsularist that she is and a superb mentor. Before going to Rutgers I spent a crucial year of my life at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to meeting my wife there, I was also lucky enough to be able to work with four exceptional scholars who have greatly influenced the way I think about my work: John Carlos Rowe, Gabriele Schwab, Martin Schwab, and Jeff Barrett.

Since July 2009, I have had the pleasure to work at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish. The level of institutional support, professional encouragement, and spirit of collegiality I have enjoyed at Washington University has been simply outstanding. In fact, I would not have been able to complete this book in this country without it. I would particularly like to express my gratitude in this regard to Nancy Berg, Jonathan Cohen, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Kathy Steiner-Lang, Harriet Stone, Dean Gary Wihl, as well as Melanie Keeney and her staff, for helping me beyond expectations at a particularly tough period in my life. Without them things wouldn’t have worked out as well as they have, which is a remarkable thing in itself. Also, when I needed help, the most amazing group of people responded: I will be forever grateful to John Ashbery (he should be first, plus his last name starts with A), Carolina Díaz, Representative Maurice Hinchey, Sacra Jaimez, David Kermani, Nicolás Latorre, Michael Leong, Suzanne Jill Levine, Mike McGrath, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Ray Nargizian, Isabel Pérez, Catherine Porter, James Ramey, Fernando de Villena, and Pauline Yu (Philip Coleman, Billy Galperin, Nicholas Rennie, and Richard Sieburth also helped here too).

My two current Chairs, Harriet Stone and Lynne Tatlock, have been extremely supportive in every way imaginable since day one. They both have also read numerous sections of this book and provided extremely relevant feedback along the way. I thank also all my colleagues in the Committee on Comparative Literature and in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University, and particularly those who have directly or indirectly contributed ideas to my project, or who have read sections of the book: Billy Acree, Nancy Berg, Nina Davis, Rob Henke, Emma Kafalenos, Mike Lützeler, Nacho Sánchez Prado, Pepe Schraibman, and Akiko Tsuchiya. Bill Maxwell in English also provided invaluable feedback on the early stages of the publication process. I also thank the Center for the Humanities at Washington University (Gerald Early, Jian Leng, Erin McGlothlin) for their support of the Transatlantic Crossings Reading Group I have been convening with Jessica Hutchins, Nicholas Tamarkin, and Andia Augustin since 2010. This reading group has provided an excellent opportunity to explore some of the ideas developed in this book. Thanks to Jessica, Nick, Andia, Mike, and all other members of the group for their energy and enthusiasm regarding transatlantic studies. Sarah Hennessey, thank you, for helping me with everything, always.

This manuscript made it to Helen Tartar thanks to Jody Greene. The book could not have gone to better hands, and I am extremely grateful to Jody for suggesting Helen. At Fordham University Press I thank Tom Lay, Wil Cerbone, Fredric Nachbaur, and the Editorial Board. Helen and Tom put together an impressive group of readers who have shaped what the book is today. I want to share my enormous gratitude to the two anonymous readers and to Juli Highfill for providing me with numerous brilliant comments and suggestions to considerably improve the book. Tim Roberts at the American Literatures Initiative has been a superb managing editor, and I am very grateful to Teresa Jesionowski for her invaluable patience and wise assistance with the manuscript during the copyediting process.

Finally, I wouldn’t be here without my family. My mother, Teresa Infante, is the bravest woman I know—and one of the smartest—and I owe her an essential part of who I am as a son, a father, and ultimately as a human being. And Mike Harrison is a nice guy, too, a surprisingly great choice for a stepfather, all the way from Leeds via Sharm el-Sheikh. My grandparents, Vicente II Infante del Castillo and Adelaida Fernández Ariza, have always been there for me, and I will always love them for their unconditional love and my beautiful and warm memories growing up with them. All the gratitude and love in the world go to my parents-in-law, John and Veronica Zorigian, for their hospitality, support, and especially for managing to take care so well of Jamie before I showed up that night with a bunch of flowers and an empty stomach. Jason and Christopher, thank you for being the brothers I always wanted to have.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Jamie, our daughter, Isabela, and our son, Nicolas. Jamie is the one and only reason why my heart ticks, my soul keeps getting bigger, my head spins, and my writing flows, plus, at this point, there is no doubt that she is my destiny—a gorgeous destiny if there ever was one. Isabela has been the light of my life since she was born and the drive to go far and beyond where I thought I could ever go, just because she is my baby and a spectacular ballet dancer, volleyball player, singer, and the prettiest big sister ever. Nico is my superhero ball player, a musical genius, and, with Isabela, the sweetest thing in the world. I am blessed with the best family in the cosmos, as Huidobro would say. The three of you are my life, my source of inspiration, and my true original passion, so I don’t need to thank you: I can only love you with my whole heart. Os amo con todo mi corazón.

Introduction. Poetry after Translation: Cultural Circulation and the Transferability of Form in Modern Transatlantic Poetry

This book studies the ways in which the circulation of modern poetry and poetics is articulated by the translation of various poetic traditions and forms across the diverse spatiotemporal realm of mediation constituted by the Atlantic Ocean. By examining how translation, broadly understood as an interlingual, literary, and transcultural practice, is closely related to the transatlantic circulation of modern poetics, I develop a multilingual critical approach to the study of transnational poetry. Another central aim of this book is to analyze how the literary history of modern poetry—traditionally produced within mononational and monolingual frameworks—is altered by a comparative approach that incorporates different languages, poetic traditions, and cultures connected by the heterogeneous geopolitical space of the Atlantic Ocean. My analysis explores various ways in which key modern transatlantic poets attempt through their work to bridge differing but closely interconnected poetic traditions at the temporal juncture between colonialism and the postcolonial era, and how their poetry encourages us to rethink the literary history of modern poetry based on a transatlantic literary field, using Pierre Bourdieu’s term, that is simultaneously multilingual, hemispheric, and transcontinental.

One of the key premises of this book is that the critical category of Anglo-American modernism does not account for the overlapping modern literary traditions that at times coexist within a multilingual and transnational framework across the Atlantic—among them belated forms of romanticism and symbolism, various transnational strands of modernist poetics (Spanish American, Lusophone, Anglo-American), diverse avant-garde movements, and different manifestations of the self-consciously experimental forms from the 1950s and ‘60s traditionally associated with the category of the postmodern. Owing to these overlapping poetic forms and traditions, and the differing experiences of modernity associated with them since the late nineteenth century, I have chosen to use the term modern poetry as opposed to the label modernist poetry for the multilingual analysis of modern transatlantic poetics outside of the monolingual framework of Anglo-American literature. As Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger have recently stated in a different context, "if modernism is simply, as some have argued, the expressive dimension of modernity, and if modernity itself is defined very broadly, the utility of the term modernist, as opposed to, say, modern, would seem to be in question (Dettmar and Wollaeger, xiv). This book therefore questions and rethinks the theoretical paradigm of Anglo-American modernism" based on the transnational, interlingual, and transhistorical features of the work of key modern poets writing on both sides of the Atlantic—namely, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa; the Chilean Vicente Huidobro; the Spaniard Federico García Lorca; the San Francisco–based poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser; the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite; and the Brazilian brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos.

Contemporary scholarship in the areas of modern poetry and poetics emphasizes the need to transcend local and national categories in the analysis of literary and cultural production. A particularly important recent work in the field is Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics, winner of the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association in 2011. Ramazani’s book argues for a reconceptualization of twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry studies, in order to account for what he refers to as the circuits of poetic connection and dialogue across political and geographic borders and even hemispheres, of examining cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges, influences and confluences in poetry (Ramazani, x). Although Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics successfully rearticulates the study of twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone poetry by widening the field of poetry studies beyond a national paradigm, it does so within an essentially monolingual framework. Ramazani’s critical effort to transcend the mononational works well for the study of poetry originally written in English; however, its monolingual methodological framework is more problematic as a potential model for a wider study of cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges that could be applicable to other geopolitical areas where English does not necessarily operate as a vernacular or literary language. Curiously, Ramazani cites the specificities of language and the language specificity of poetry as reasons for excluding from his study both poetry written in other languages and the concept of translation as a form of cross-cultural exchange:

Still a primary reason for drawing a somewhat artificial boundary around poems in English is that, simply put, in poetry, more than perhaps in any other literary genre, the specificities of language matter. . . . The heuristic corollary of this observation is that poems are best taught in the original, and in an English department in a predominantly English-speaking country, the teacher devising a poetry syllabus cannot usually presume student competence in multiple languages. Moreover, although poetic influences continually cross linguistic lines, the language specificity of poetry often grants the inheritances in a poet’s working language(s) special weight. (Ramazani, 19)

Ramazani’s methodological decision to draw an artificial boundary around works originally composed in English within the postcolonial and global framework he uses highlights the long-standing state of affairs within an English department in a predominantly English-speaking country regarding foreign languages and literatures. However, the same linguistic specificity that Ramazani invokes to justify his methodological decision constitutes in itself a problematic concept, particularly from the transnational point of view that articulates A Transnational Poetics as a scholarly project.

Recent scholarship on multilingual literatures, such as Brian Lennon’s In Babel’s Shadow, and Joshua Miller’s Accented America, to cite two relevant examples, exhibits far more awareness of and critical attention to the multilingual specificities that problematize the validity of the notion of a predominantly English-speaking country for the scholarly study of literature in and of the United States. For example, Miller powerfully underscores the implications of a multilingual approach to the study of literatures of the United States in the following terms:

No language (or form of language) has ever been designated an official national speech or standard in the United States, but even a cursory glance at the best-selling anthologies and literary histories seems to imply that only one language has been used to convey Americans’ ambitions and to tell their stories. That this has never been so is an important recognition that has the potential to reconfigure what we understand as the American language or languages—what Americans speak to each other—as well as the texts that constitute U.S. literature—that is, which stories Americans invoke to convey something important about their affiliations. . . . This perspective combats a strategic blindness that discounts multilingualism, presuming it to be irrelevant, marginal, or eccentric in relation to U.S. national culture. (Miller, 18)

By essentializing the specificities of language and the language specificity of poetry within his critical project, Ramazani indirectly marginalizes and discounts multilingualism in his reductive consideration of the United States as a predominantly monolingual nation, in terms similar to the ones just described by Miller. Moreover, Ramazani’s attempt to examine cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges, influences and confluences in poetry (Ramazani, x) from an explicitly monolingual framework does not seriously engage the specificities of translation—either as a linguistic process or concept able to bridge the interstices between different languages, literary traditions, poetries, genres, and forms of media that emerge from the transnational circulation of culture. It is worth noting that Ramazani seldom mentions the concept of translation in his work, and in fact, the word translation does not appear in the index of A Transnational Poetics.

A key claim of this book, therefore, is that if the various historical, economic, and material processes associated with the transnational flow of culture provide the framework for a new critical paradigm to reconceptualize the field of poetry studies, the notion of translation must necessarily enter the picture in a thorough and consistent way. The critical incorporation of translation within the transnational study of modern poetry and poetics entails not only the rejection of what Ramazani refers to as a mononational paradigm but also, and more particularly, the rejection of what constitutes the monolingual framework that has powerfully sustained the institution of English studies in the United States. This book constitutes in part a critical response to the kind of question posed by Susan Stanford Friedman in her recent attempt to problematize that very same institutional paradigm as it applies in particular to the field of modernist studies: "How can modernist studies be planetary if it is monolingual, if it operates within the lingua franca of any given era, if it reproduces the linguistic hegemonies of modernity’s imperial legacies, if, for example, it remains within the confines of global English today?" (Friedman, 489). In the context of Friedman’s important question, approaches such as Ramazani’s represent a symptomatic lack of critical attention to the concepts of interlingual and literary translation in English studies more generally, constituting not only a methodological and theoretical problem for the study of transnational literature but also a historiographic problem. What is at stake here for the purpose of articulating a transnational reconceptualization of modern poetry is to be able to historicize not only how the practice of literary translation has influenced the ways in which English-speaking poets write poetry, but more important, to substantiate critically the ways in which the practice of translation has generated the production and circulation of particular modern poetic forms and traditions.

Even within the discipline of English studies, it is well known that a key aspect of the Anglo-American modernist revolution is the crucial role played by literary translation in the origin, exchange, and transnational circulation of modernist poetics. The case of Ezra Pound, for example, is in this sense clearly paradigmatic. As previous scholars such as Haun Saussy, Richard Sieburth, and Steven Yao have shown, it is mostly through Pound’s idiosyncratic conception and practice of interlingual translation that a movement as central as imagisme within the canon of Anglo-American modernist poetry can historically emerge in the 1910s.¹ However, the case of Ezra Pound as a transatlantic writer whose own poetry and poetics is intrinsically connected to the experience of interlingual translation is not an exception. Many other modern transatlantic poets, among them the ones studied in the following chapters, conceived their own poetic practice in part as a very serious linguistic engagement with various foreign languages and poetic traditions. As Pound himself states bluntly, It must be clear to anybody that will think about the matter for 15 minutes that reading a good author in a foreign tongue will joggle one out of the clichés of ones own and will as it were scratch up the surface of one’s vocabulary (Pound, How to Write, 107). The kind of deep intellectual engagement with a good author in a foreign tongue expressed by Pound, an experience that happens to be at the core of the concept and practice of literary translation, constitutes a crucial component of the circulation of modern poetry and poetics across the Atlantic when understood as a complex transnational process of writing, reading, editing, and publishing.

This book is, therefore, self-consciously located within the academic field of comparative literature, or more precisely, the new comparative literature that Emily Apter defines as the translation zone. Apter delineates the key features of her recent conceptualization of the discipline of comparative literature in the following terms:

A new comparative literature, with the revalued labor of the translator and theories of translation placed center stage, expands centripetally toward a genuinely planetary criticism, extending emphasis on the transference of texts from one language to another, to criticism of the processes of linguistic creolization, the multilingual practices of poets and novelists over a vast range of major and minor literatures, and the development of new languages by marginal groups all over the world. (Apter, 10)

Unlike the various institutional manifestations of the kind of monolingual heuristic corollary described by Ramazani that strictly focuses on the linguistic specifities of a single language or national literature—which