Open Letter to Murat Nemet-Nejat

“I” and “you” are but lattices in the niches of a lamp, through which the One Light shines. “I” and “you” are the veil between heaven and earth; lift this veil and you will see no longer the bonds of sects and creeds. When “I” and “you” do not exist, what is mosque, what is synagogue? what is the Temple of Fire? — Shabistari, The Secret Rose Garden

Quin. Blesse thee Bottom, blesse thee. Thou art trãslated.
Bot. I see their knauery. This is to make an asse of mee, to fright me, if they could: but I wil not stirre from this place, do what they can. I will walke vp and downe heere, and I will sing, that they shall heare I am not afraide. — A Midsummer Night’s Dream

III. 4. To change in form, appearance, or substance; to transmute; to transform, alter (. . .). 6. To transport with the strength of some feeling; to enrapture, entrance. — OED

But even a successful solution of the elementary problems of food, clothing, shelter, and even of literacy, would in no way signify a complete victory of the new historic principle, that is, of Socialism. Only a movement of scientific thought on a national scale and the development of a new art would signify that the historic seed has not only grown into a plant, but has even flowered. In this sense, the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch. — Trotsky, Preface to Literature and Revolution

It could be said that such a manner is extraordinarily subjective. It can indeed become so if the artist focuses his attention on his impressions and not on the people and things which are independent of him. But it will not be subjective if the artist surrenders himself to the world, if, to use philosophical language, he reproduces the thing-in-itself rather than the thing-for-us. By surrendering to the flood of his initial supra-rational perceptions, by re-embodying himself, the artist virtually dissolves his “ego” into these perceptions, not, however, in order to run away from his own being, but to find the world as it is in itself, in its most lively and beautiful forms. This manner, consequently, can be much more objective. Everything depends on the artist’s standpoint, on whether he is focussing his attention on his moods, feelings and thoughts, or if this attention is concentrated on reality itself. — A. K. Voronsky, The Art of Seeing the World

The shadow of my brother
on the wall of the dungeon
moves up and down
up and down. — Nâzim Hіkmet, Lion in an Iron Cage

While language does express social relationships, it is the latter that must be changed. And in the twilight of the 20th century, words are more easily modified than things. — Gilles Dauvé, For a World Without Moral Order

In boxing, the refs say, “Protect yourself at all times”. In writing, it’s the reverse – “Expose yourself, reveal yourself, at all times”.

Go to where the pain is. Talent ain’t nothing. Love is. Suffering means plenty. All serious art is conceived in suffering, born from suffering, grows through suffering, comes to terms with suffering, and transcends suffering. All serious art is suffering couched in beauteous terms. So search yourself. Don’t fear to dive into the depth of your own neurosis, for down deep in the subconscious lies a gold mine of poetic experience, and through your struggle to make manifest your own anxiety in the objective terms of the imagination, to communicate it to another person, any reader, you will come to an understanding of it, realize how your personal suffering has universal value, and discover how to mold its torturous shapes into beautiful forms which capture the life force, the transcendent spirit, enrich the human experience and help create a better world for yourself as well as for others. — Floyd Salas

Dear Murat,

According to data published by the American Booksellers Association, 874 out of the 185,000 titles published in the US in 2004 were translations of literature aimed at adult readers. That’s a pitiful 0.4 percent. Let’s be extremely generous and assume that about 10 percent of all books published in the US are books of poetry. Somebody do the math . . .

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I’ve been reading your wonderful anthology, Eda, in which I’m happy to find beautiful translations of poems by one of my all-time favorites, the great Marxist, Nâzim Hіkmet, and which has introduced me to the fascinating and humorous poetic mind of İlhan Berk, and to the odd and colorful neo-baroque splendors of Lale Müldür, among so many others. I am tremendously grateful to everyone involved. For once, a blurb tells the whole truth. Ammiel is right.

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I’ve been especially struck by selections from the complex, intense and intensely homoerotic souljam by küçük İskender, which I hope you will be able to publish in full very soon.

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Recently, while referring to some translations I’ve done, you wrote, “In my opinion, the irreducible essence of a translator/poet is the lack of a ‘personal’ style.” I’d like to go a step further: The essence of a poet-who-translates is the relative lack of a cathected and immutable personality.

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I’ve asked myself how a heterosexual male (in correspondence, you’ve told me that you are a happily-married family man) can be so unafraid to translate frankly homoerotic poetry, and make it sound so soulfully real in English. I’ve asked myself this question for a long time: I’m also heterosexual, and I’ve translated a great many poems by another gay poet, the Brasilian surrealist mystic with sadomasochistic tendencies, Roberto Piva, and have been very slowly working on poems by a gay foot-fetishist and incredibly prolific sonneteer, Glauco Mattoso. I have also extensively translated the poetry of two very different women from Brasil, Orides Fontela and Josely Vianna Baptista (who is herself a consummate translator); a Catholic mystic surrealist, Murilo Mendes; and an exiled revolutionary, Ferreira Gullar. I’ve been thinking about what this kind of poetic labor might mean to us as artists, and why it is so important to encourage in ourselves our affinities with poets who are so different from us.

All people have homosexual impulses. It is impossible to avoid them, except by repression. I am neither afraid nor ashamed of those impulses, which I feel and have felt for my closest male friends, however fleetingly, at one time or another. As a teenager, I fantasized about making love with my best friends. That I have never acted upon those sexual impulses has in no way hindered my acceptance of them as a perfectly natural and unthreatening part of any close friendship. Rather than experiencing my impulses as irreconcilable contradictions, it is more constructive, more healthy and more humane for me to experience them as shifting points on the circular continuum of my personality. Free access to my own personality is all-important to my sense of fulfillment in the art of translation.

In other words, I’m learning how to keep my big white male mouth shut and fucking listen.

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I love translating. Nothing satisfies me more, in part because creative literary translation carries within itself the deepest political implications of any literary art (more of which very soon). In fact, translating satisfies me so much that I seldom bother to write “my own” poems, and, when I do, I usually keep them to myself: I prefer to save my imagination and whatever poetic skill I possess, so that I can turn them fully toward translating the work of another poet.

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As a poet-who-translates, I am always trying to shed my “identity”, even though I know that this is ultimately impossible. My “identity” is a veil hanging between me and you and reality-as-it-is. I may not be able to see these things clearly, but I know they exist. Instead of searching for a descriptive meaning of who I am, instead of taking the easy way out by insisting to myself and to the world that I am some one particular type of human animal, I must fight, as a citizen of the USA, to see how Masculinity, Heterosexuality, Class and Whiteness — and all the other “subject-positions” that serve to keep us apart from one another — are finely-interlocking segments of the fake monolithic personality shoveled into me from the very first second of my citizenship in this capitalist wasteland in which we Americans — some Brasilian friends have asked me: Don’t your people know that we are all Américans? —, in which we try to live as decent human beings. I don’t know if I will ever clearly understand the positions and ideologies force-fed me, or if I will be able to make any real sense of all the contradictions and complexities. I must fight, all the while knowing that it is mental fight waged in the profound ordinariness of daily life. I suspect that this fight cannot be won by me. All I can do is wage the crucial emancipatory struggle to see as clearly as I can. Ignorance is no excuse. Willful ignorance is, in my opinion, a crime. I know I’m no big deal.

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It is just as impossible without constant struggle to live and work as a decent, ordinary human being in the USA as it is to live and work in any nation ruled by the apparatchiki of capitalism, state capitalism, or any other capitalist perversion of Marxism promulgated by demagogues, for capitalism deals terrible wounds, no matter what it is called by the international caste of propagandists. There is no nation on this planet in which the ruling class is not made up of discompassionate, amoral parasites firmly in control of the thoughts and actions of sycophants who negate and denigrate their own best humane impulses in order to gain for themselves the poor privilege of fighting for the toxic scraps thrown them by their masters.

I cannot be a decent human being unless first I turn radical politics against myself. Irony is death to solidarity. I must be earnest, even in my confusion and blindness. I must struggle for great sincerity. And I must fight to reclaim those words and others like them: they stand for solidarity. I have the responsibility to see how I am like those poets despised by Ray Durem, who “deride the filth they feed upon”, who “criticize the contours and cavities of their nests”, who “flutter, but they never fly”. I have the responsibility to fight to be unlike them.

It is my responsibility as a human being and as an artist to try to be honest in self-appraisal. Therefore, I study and think and try my best to understand the contradictory complexities of human life under capitalism, and when, in my work as a poet-who-translates, I am able to unveil any deep human truth beyond the false reality imposed with great violence by capitalism, I feel that I have accomplished something not only beautiful, but also useful for me and for others.

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Capitalism tortures and deforms our common, ordinary, creaturely humanity by pitting us against each other in unfree competition in a game rigged from above. As above, so below. We have to look at this. We have to try to understand this. We have to struggle against this. It’s not easy, but unless we can see this clearly, there is no hope for humanity.

As above so below: the larger poetry scene in our country is less despicable than the corporate scene only because no one gets murdered during the accumulation of cultural capital. Even though the stakes are negligible, the tiny, impoverished poetry market is controlled according to a set of rules enforced by talentless, unimaginative bureaucrats. Everybody knows what I’m talking about. We all talk about it, in private.

If I continue to play the game in silence, I run the risk of losing my usefulness to my fellow creatures in this world. I cannot afford to run the risk of becoming a wholly mediocre artist who produces nothing worthwhile because I have allowed my poetic labor to become alienated. If it is next to impossible under capitalism to avoid alienation when we are employed so that another can benefit from the work of our hands and minds, then at least in my art I can strive to be engaged with and within the real world of things and creatures beyond the cartoon veil placed before my eyes by the very parasites who extract their unearned, undeserved wealth from the labor I sell them at such a loss.

As a poet-who-translates, I must never succumb to the temptation to participate fully in that nasty little game; even though I know I am in the game to some extent, I must fight tooth and nail against it, always, always, because the art I practice is one of total human solidarity that reacts and acts in childlike wonder — and fierce integrity of form and intent — to the literary art produced by another human being from another human culture. I must learn as much as possible about that culture in order to attack aggressively and without remorse the original poem and my own language so that my language is transformed, enriched and ultimately emancipated, just as I must allow myself to be acted upon in the self-same process unto emancipation, while enacting that process upon the work of the other poet. When this happens (by no means does it always), I am very happy.

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I’m unwilling to translate poets who in my estimation are unable to surrender themselves and their art to the world in all its glorious, terrible materiality of hummingbirds, Komodo dragons, human beings, gentle tropical beaches and storm-wracked deserts of ice in Antarctica — not to mention the fact of the universe!

As a poet-who-translates, I am possessed in an ecstasy of identification with the work (and when I use the word “work” I mean “labor”, not “oeuvre”, god damn it) of another. I strive to dissolve my work and my “ego” into the work and the “ego” of another. This is love. This is respect. This is erotic. This is something like classical Sufism. When this occurs, to whatever extent, as it must, if I am to be a decent human being, I have to allow my poetic labor to stand outside of me, between me and another poet. It is mine and simultaneously another’s. I don’t know how else to describe a decent social relation. How can my poetic labor be alienated, if I and my labor are so profoundly intertwined with and in thrall to the labor of another human being in the world?

Some might say that when I allow myself to become possessed, to become the vessel, the receptacle of another poetic mind, I have lost all objectivity, that it is really a matter of me becoming the slave of the subjectivity of another. But that is far from the truth: When I surrender to the poetic labor of another, I am surrendering to a poet’s expression of his or her own life’s experience in the world of things and people as they are, not as I would wish them to be, nor as I think them to be. In my surrender, I nourish and outwardly expand my own experience of the world. I allow my experience to take in and transform the life experience of another. I am transformed in the process and it is my hope that others, when they read my work, are also transformed in some way that is theirs, not mine. I can see no other use for the great, Keatonesque stumble into the unknown that we call art.

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Theoretical complexity is no defense against philistinism. The purpose of my art is not to represent linguistic surfaces and transmit them to North American readers, but to uncover some human truth and, by transforming it within myself, to give my people a way into the mind of another person from another culture.

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These are some of the things I’ve been thinking about after reading Eda. The complexities and contradictions are very subtle and I’ve never wanted to be a critic, a scholar or a philosopher. Sometimes, I manage to be an artist.

Here’s hoping that this brief, admittedly confused and febrile piece of writing honors and celebrates your poetic labor. Here’s hoping that this thing of mine explains (at least in part) why I believe translation to be the highest literary art, and why I believe that poets who do not translate run the awful risk of blinding themselves to the things and creatures of this world in its endless blazing materiality. Humbleness is not the same as self-abasement; alienation is the death of solidarity.

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We are in peril. Anyone with open eyes can see that there is a mounting swell of something that looks very much like fascism in our country. We are ruled, not represented, by a tiny clique of sociopathic petro-imperialist, racist, sexist, multi-billionaires out to control the world’s natural resources, while at the same time distracting us from their true intent. (“Can you imagine the irresponsibility of those uneducated slum-dwellers in Venezuela who think that petroleum belongs to them!? We need the oil. What’s the problem? Can’t they see that?”) Proud bag men and women for a Christ whose word they have subjugated and perverted and the irreligious worshippers of Capital have the exact same intent: domination of the Earth, all its natural resources, and all the people, all the time, everywhere. They are voracious and insatiable and will stop at nothing.

Some of us are concerned only with the upkeep of self-centered charades of coolness or irony that offer shelter by allowing us the inwardness to ignore the ravenous, power-suited predator smirking on the threshold of our lives.

Many of us are totally unaware. Many of us do not even know that very little has changed. Neither gloves nor mask have come off. The splendid little war that our capitalist rulers are waging in the Middle East is the true and constant, age-old face of pre-eminent wealth and privilege. The social function of our preppy president and his puppeteers is perfectly analogous to the function of a tapeworm in the gut of a dog. George W. Bush, whose intellectual and emotional capacities appear tragically stunted, is the perfect image of the ruling class. Those mendacious bloodsuckers are preparing to fasten yet another maw onto we, the people, who have been deliberately misguided for as long as there have been social classes. When they talk about “our interests”, the millionaires at play in the Senate mean their interests precisely, not ours, not the interests of ordinary people. The ruling elites have always meant to suck us dry and that will always be their most sacred calling. As above, so below.

Like many others, I know it’s not yet too late. The day is coming. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but it is coming. Nothing can stop it but the total destruction of humanity, which I dare to hope will not occur. Many of us dare to foresee a profoundly decent, stateless human society created, nourished and defended by all people, all the time, and we who are poets bound together beyond all hierarchy with our creaturely kin on a respected and cherished planet, gently and fiercely alive together, unalienated co-workers practicing an art become once again indispensable and shining with a light not from above, not from below, but from the labor of our own hearts, minds and hands finally acting together as one to rip the veil to shreds forever.

Yours in friendship and solidarity,
Chris