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Suppose that the abstract notion of
poetic wonder could be a thing in the same way light or water are things. Imagine it
running through a prism: and that what comes out shimmering are words. In terms of
fascination with language, maybe that begins to say what translation does, or is capable
of--how radical a process translation can be. It is an act whereby one must ask, continually,
what do words contain?--what do they release? The following lines of poetry from Orides Fontela,
translated by Chris Daniels, capture something of the paradox of what poetic wonder is:
All
will be difficult to say:
the real world
is never easy. ...
There is no
pity in signs...
--Orides Fontela, "Speech,"
translated by Chris Daniels
In literary work, poets are charged with saying what is most difficult,
the critical and the emotional. But in saying such also comes the realization that the
means of saying--language--will hold no "pity" for the sayer. How much more complicated
must this paradox of wonder and pitiless word be for the artful, willing translator? In
this interview, Chris Daniels shares some of his thinking about such challenges and more.
I have few concrete details for you: a literary interview today
would ordinarily begin with what can be thought of as some evocative scaffolding,
concrete information meant to situate the literary figure in time and space, to normalize
the situation. It would offer a detailed, synesthesiac description of the place where the
interview occurred, panning camera-like to the subject, the literary person. There might
be a detailed description of this person, of his or her apparel, and of the countenance,
as the Victorians would have said, thereby making both memorable and mysterious what
inevitably turns out through the scaffolding to be mostly one person's face alone rather
than in dialogue, even while the interview attempts to focus on and represent some sense
of an entire person thinking aloud--sharing--with another person. Although the medium of
communication was email, a strong sense of what Chris Daniels thinks has come through.
In turn this made me rethink many things, not least of which were the conventions of
interviewing.
Chris Daniels is evocative and provocative enough on his own without the
imposition of such scaffolding and normative situating. Here, instead of details of
physical realities, we have details of thought. Granted it arrives as combinations of letters
on a screen, but as Orides might point out, words will be "difficult" no matter what it is
one wants from them. The interview was done entirely online. I have, then, arranged this
piece out of Chris's well-wrought writing in email. He kindly thought over and responded
in writing to some provocative quotes culled from Walter Benjamin's classic essay,
"The Task of the Translator" (Illuminations. transl. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken,
1968).
There is one physical detail: Chris Daniels wrote to me on Monday,
April 21, 2003, saying that there was a "nice rain outside in san francisco"--"nice"
actually saying enough in terms of what that city is in rain. Especially while in the midst of
Benjamin's driest convolutions about textuality it was a welcome relief to hear. Such
inlay of concrete reality can be said to resonate with the limit of what's possible (or not)
for writing as it exists apart or dissociated from the everyday real of life. If pieces
of writing were characters--as they sometimes seem, especially in electronic communications--
and if they could talk (um... do they?!), then I suppose they would say something about
realities like that rain, though always incompletely. Or so all the elaborate twinings of
theory about textuality remind us. But theory has its limits when it moves far from
everyday realities, especially for practical-minded literary folk. For Chris, who likes to
stay pragmatic about it, translation is a form of work. Chris explains:
I love that essay of Benjamin's. Not as a theoretical frame I use to guide me
in my work, but as a state to which I can aspire in my work as a translator: a state of
absolute care for the Portuguese language, the poem I'm translating, the poet who wrote the
poem, my own language, and the mystery of it all. I love our English language and I love its
poetry, and I'm willing to wreak havoc, to allow the Portuguese language as used by a poet I
admire to conquer, to colonize English in the hope that I will be giving English-language
poetry something surprising and beautiful and mysterious. ... I'm not much for talking
about theory: I like to work, to do the work. When I translate, the farthest thing from my
mind is theory. ... I never learned about literary theory in a classroom. Whatever
critical acumen I possess goes into the work.
Because translation deals fundamentally with language, it is intimately
performative. It is an act that takes languages apart, bit by bit, reassembling through
an act that also refurbishes them. So, translation would necessarily "wreak havoc" at some
very basic levels of language. Benjamin says translation is a "mode" (69-70), thus it
performs work at various levels: consciousness, cultural knowledge, means of transmission.
Although the act of translation may appear solitary, its effects are far from it. All
involved undergo "transformation": the text does, of course, but in other ways, not only the
perception of the original author, but the perceivers,
the audience --the translator, certainly, and the readers--are transformed, too.
But it is language as lived that benefits from translation, Chris notes:
"When I allow Portuguese to permeate and influence English, then English is transformed,
sometimes very subtly. ...I try to think like [the] poet. I let the poet's work inhabit
my mind and change the way I think." In translation, then, language shows its inherent
humanity and fluidity in many ways--its shimmering flow becomes more apparent. Perhaps some
powerful, sometimes unlovely--though just as often, lovely--and candid things go quietly
bumping around looking for new places to call home, as it were. In terms of powerful things
he translates, when asked about Brazilian feminists, Chris offered these lines, short but
candid, and telling, which he has translated from Alice Ruiz, who is generally known,
Chris notes, as "the first feminist poet in Brazil:"
nada na barriga
navalha na liga
valha
[her lines translate to]:
nothing in my guts
razor in my garter
you got it
In only three lines we get the sting of a woman's life as lived, as
then compressed to utility in languge by a smart, wry, yet apparently underestimated, woman.
In Ruiz, life is street-wise, sharp--thus met with the most honest and necessary,
sharpened words. Chris is able to capture that economy absolutely in the English.
So, what does it take, then, to put oneself in the middle of two
languages and be transformed?--so to create something as artful as poetry across differing
cultures? How is it, how does it occur--being a "point of contact between two [or more]
cultures"? Chris says it is basically to "allow [the self] to be possessed" by the author
(specifically, in regard to his work on Pessoa's multiple, first-person speakers from the
Heteronyms). Walter Benjamin notes that "[l]anguages are not strangers to one another."
They are "interrelated." (72) Responding to this Chris adds the dimension of personal
interaction insofar as "[l]anguage can open another mind for us, can make us very much aware of
another person's perception." So, translation allows the sense of self to be "possessed"
by another to the point of dispelling potential barriers of estrangement between people.
Performing the work of translation--dispelling potential barriers of
estrangement--for Chris Daniels, yields an important idea and action: "precise,
radical caring." Chris's thought on this is in part a "refusal of post-modern irony."
He explains:
Nathaniel Tarn [contemporary American scholar and poet, see
http://jacketmagazine.com/o6/index.html]
says that the usual
post-modern response is to not respond. I lament with him: that
statement is more true than most of us are willing to admit. Like Tarn,
I can't indulge in non-response because I care, in every sense of the
word. The philosopher Levinas [Emmanuel
Levinas, French philosopher, d. 1995; see http://columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/0231079117.htm] talks
about attending to the other--caring about and for the other--and I take that pretty damn
seriously. ...Irony can all too often degenerate into a kind of seal against the world,
against the other--a kind of mental membrane against human emotion, human warmth: this is what
it means to be cool. It's sad, because so often all we're doing is covering our
all-too-human insecurity with a veneer of adamantine invulnerability. When I'm at my best
I could care less about being cool or hip or knowing something someone else doesn't
know--or even being right. Only geeks worry about that stuff."
In stating additionally that "[t]ranslation as I try to practice it is
precise, radical caring," Chris emphasizes and calls into question the kinds of violence
inherent in various language uses, here, literary, cross cultural, and always gendered. In
other words, merely more ways to stay "cool" rather than to embrace being warm: human.
Elaborating, he says:
the kind of literature I care about is... bent on furthering the techniques of
literature, furthering what can be said by a writer, what is allowed to be said, what can be
dared to be said, and at the same time takes delight in language... and is [also] in dialogue
with literature. ... Language can help us learn compassion, and compassion is one intangible
that humans need more than anything else. That is the supreme beauty of language.
Given such foundational awareness and commitment to caring, how is
translation, including the politics of translation, difficult? Chris admirably responds to
this thorny question by pointing to some of the particular problems of translating as an
American right now:
It's been said that translation is a kind of appropriation, a kind of
colonization. There's been a lot of theorizing about translation [from this line of inquiry].
It's interesting, and I understand the arguments, and I agree with them to a certain extent.
But translation in our country at this time is moribund because we are as a whole a very
narcissistic and ignorant society of poets, and I worry because if we don't wake up pretty
soon and start looking beyond our little scenes and coteries and pet theories, then the
poets in the rest of the world will start ignoring us in earnest because we're so clueless
about poetry all over the world. I'm willing to run the risk of committing appropriation
or colonization, because to translate is to be a point of contact between two cultures, and
I think that's a very necessary thing. ANYTHING is better than cultural narcissism. In the
end, it's a matter of caring. And of proceeding in such a way that you can maintain a good
conscience.
When understood from a perspective of the history of western rhetoric,
what Chris advocates and employs with "precise, radical caring," also suggests a refurbishing of
the traditional take on ethos in textuality. Ethos in textuality is a combination that
contains effects both ethical and immanent (per Aristotelian thought in the tradition) via
the ways language is used and received. Here we have a refurbishing if the translator is
the "point of contact" between text, author, and audience, and the translator demonstrates
an ethos that cares in "precise," "radical" ways, from all these perspectives. In effect,
ethos becomes a matter of shared responsibility and fusion, then, rather than a superficial
mode of appeal or even inherently the responsibility of author/speaker and/or translator alone.
Here, audience is radically involved, invoked, drawn in, made conscious of involvement with
ethos. In this sense, since the translator performs work as both audience and author/speaker,
responsibilities for ethos must be shared outward rather than originating and remaining in or
contained by the author function alone.
What's up next for Chris Daniels? His latest project is the translation of
an essay written by the Brazilian artist, Francisco Faria, for inclusion in a book of the
artist's reproduced drawings. This comes after recently translating the poetry of Josely
Vianna Baptista, who is married to Faria. Because the two share many ideas, Chris explains
that this opportunity, too, offers yet another fusion of perspectives inhabiting his thought
about translation. This opportunity offers additional perspectives to be shared rather than
contained, perspectives availed by the action of translating: "for me to translate [Franciso's]
essay... is a natural consequence of translating his wife's poetry. It illuminates her work
as well as his." This is a manifestation of what Benjamin calls the reciprocal nature of
translating, the posing of multifaceted problems, and the ludic energy that seeks resolve.
For Chris all this 'translates' to a situation that, when you come right down to it, is
just "a hell of a lot of fun," just the kind of work that makes him, simply, "very happy."
When you come right down to it, it's also the kind of "fun" that significantly contributes and
shares literary life as most worthwhile in terms of human understanding.
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