Translation and Relation

Poetry’s strangeness to the ear is what pulls me in, and it may be that it’s only possible to hear poetry as itself in a language that isn’t one’s own, where the brain isn’t skating rapidly over all the sonic qualities so that it can digest ‘meaning’ as quickly as possible. There’s an attraction to being on the outside of a language, like the electrifying moment in which I came across Lorca’s line Verde que te quiero verde in the thumbed pages of Penguin Modern Classics, with prose translation, while I was working in a second-hand bookshop in Norwich after university. What I was hearing in my mind’s ear wasn’t necessarily how the line would sound to a Spanish speaker, with its castanet rattle of consonants, but it was foreign and it was poetry and I was hooked.

I’m writing this not long after hearing that the great poet and translator Pierre Joris has died. The first two volumes of Poems for the Millennium, the anthologies he co-edited with Jerome Rothenberg, and which found their way into my hands in 2001, were pivotal in showing me the kind of writer I wanted to be. Voluminous and disruptive, they chart multiple paths into and out from the catalysing shock of early twentieth-century avant-gardes, reading them globally from the vantage point of plural, diverse, multilingual Americas. The translations create a sense of the English language as a mesh through which many others come into view; performance scores and concrete poems expand the limits of the poem on the page, and the anthologies as a whole ...