Thomas Fink
Cultural (Un)translatability: Gander, Javier, Miller
“Cultural translatability” seems a broad topic. My aim in the following paragraphs is to analyze current poetry that treats visual experience in relation to conventions and counter-conventions of picture-taking (Forrest Gander), immigrants’ geographical and linguistic displacements (Paolo Javier), and the longstanding divide in U.S. political life (Stephen Paul Miller). The “(un)” in my title announces that the poets under consideration strive to assess what can be translated and what cannot.
Gander transcribing/accompanying Sally Mann’s landscape photos
In his 2005 series, “Late Summer Entry: the Landscapes of Sally Mann,” Forrest Gander’s poems are paired with reproductions of Mann’s photographs. Sometimes in prose and sometimes in verse, his texts test various forms of translation and resistance to translation, often playing against expectations of an unproblematic, literal rendering of a three-dimensional natural scene through a flat surface, as well as anticipated developments of a conventional figurative association, such as the pristine beauty of untamed wilderness. One aspect of Mann’s photos that especially engages Gander is her use of techniques that disrupt and/or complicate translation: “… our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish/ on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble,/ it sabotages the scene’s transparence/ and siphons off its easy appeal” (“Bridge & Swimmer,” 55). In an exchange with Eliot Weinberger, Gander states: “She’s using warped lenses and chemical dribbles and developing techniques that animate the landscapes so they’re haunted with traces of movement and suggestions of presence. A carbonized sun, a listing horizon. It’s like seeing into a place, through the flicker of everything that ever happened there.” In an interview that is primarily about her appropriation of the nineteenth century photographic process of collodion, Mann says that “none of [her] equipment has ever been any good” and that this is intentional:
I spend an awful lot of time at that antique mall looking around for these lenses with just the right amount
of decrepitude. The glue has to be peeling off of the lens elements, it’s great if it’s mildewed and out of whack
—a lens is made up of several different pieces of glass which are supposed to stay glued in the right relationship
with each other—but my most prized lens has one of the pieces of glass askew, so when the light comes in it
it's refulgent. It just bounces all around and does this great sort of luminescent thing on the glass.
Uses of “warping” and “dribbling” effects enable the photographer to depart from the usual goal of realistic translation. And this departure from expected “presence” provides the opportunity for a translation of something that is not necessarily entirely or even primarily visual into visual terms, a “flickering” presence, as in the opening paragraph of the prose-poem “Ivy Brick Wall”: “It never aims to create an illusion of reality. Instead, the warped lens allows for a new set of relationships behind swirling frets. The wall confronts a flotsam of vortical energy and tree limbs transparentize in the blast” (51). Whereas the speaker associates the customary quest for “reality” as stasis with “illusion,” he suggests that the evocation of an aura of movement is a more authentic strategy for stimulating sight (“like seeing into a place”). In this way, the adjective “vortical” and the noun “blast” pay tribute to the early twentieth century poetic movement of Vorticism, championed by Ezra Pound as an improvement on and complication of Imagism, and to Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine, Blast. Perhaps Mann, within her own temporal and geographical context (the southern U.S., Gander’s own), has concretely realized the theoretical tenets of Vorticism in her art in ways distinct from those of Pound and Lewis’ contemporaries (like the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska).
The actual “brick wall” as object “depicted” in the photo does not become a trope of solid reality, of certainty; “the spectator,” instead, is “enmeshed in a field of concentric force” and “drawn toward a wormhole of brightness.” The prose-poem’s speaker implies that the “wormhole” is comparable to a black hole in its dazzling transgression of limits: “this originary force that transforms the ordinary into the exultant” (51). As the last paragraph indicates, the kind of translation celebrated here involves motion that undoes conceptual stability and thwarts any faith in permanent translatability: “The nucleus of the image is all verb, the seen availing itself to our seeing. When there are no stable terms, there are no faithful things.” Process (“seeing”) supplants the security of “the seen” and its fidelity to a particular organization of “reality.”
While Gander and Mann can both be labeled U.S. Southerners whose work is informed by their native geography, Mann’s photos and Gander’s translation of them do not bespeak a faith in the stable re-presentation of a particular locale; the materials of translation disrupt such “terms” of unity or unification, as in two lines from the visually bifurcated “Argosy for Rock and Grass”: “Although place is depicted, no sign in the world/ corresponds to this image. There is no source/ outside itself for such radiance” (53). The poet reverses the expectation that the “image” is a signifier and the scene in the world is a signified. “Radiant” immanence cannot be “outsourced,” and the “source” of the photo’s impact is inextricable from processes of enactment and production. Another such bifurcated poem, “Road and Tree,” ends with an assertion about the endlessness of translation and highly mediated interpretation: “And the place itself was neither fully read nor erased since it never/ ceased being written. Only a word was pronounced, only/ the instrument clicked” (45). “Writing,” the use of both scriptive and photographic “instruments,” continually engenders the re-presencing of “place.”
At the beginning of the prose-poem “River and Trees,” Gander raises the possibility that the viewer’s receptivity to unaccustomed and unsettling visual clues may be necessary for the photographer’s translation of whatever objects or processes are more salient than what “Ivy Brick Wall” calls “an illusion of reality” to have an effect: “The passage may be so swollen, limpid, and inviting that it requires considerable effort, a convulsion in seeing’s habit, to encounter the drama” (39). But the sentence does not tell us who is making the “effort” and causing the “convulsion.” To allow “seeing’s habit” to be shaken can signify either visual labor on the part of the viewer, not passive reception of the picture’s “invitation,” or the photographer’s strenuous application of defamiliarizing strategies. The noun “passage” can itself be a signifier of translation from event to text to reader or from event to picture to viewer, whereas “composition,” the first noun in the second sentence, situates actions in the art object’s restricted, atemporal field: “In this composition, to wit, the river lavishes-out soft tones, rich detail, and gentle, contrasting textures, but only at first glance.”
The “wit” of poetic convention (personification) tells us that this represented “object” (actually a flow or “vortical” motion) is the main actor in the drama; it “lavishes-out” appealing visual information, but “habit” is broken at second glance: “The calm is contradictory. For when we find the river holding still—in imitation of itself—it barely impresses a likeness” (39) In this re-vision, the viewers—the poet consistently uses “we”—are capable of seeing that the river’s action of “holding still,” making its flow into the appearance of stasis, is self-mimicry constituting an “impression,” (im)printing or manipulation of the audience’s perception, that “barely” accords with the viewers’ previously stored experience of this kind of landscape element. “Drama” can be found in the “contradictory” aspect of the first and second glances: the “calm” of the scene playing against the agitation that troubles comfortable representation.
The second paragraph of “River and Trees” is broken up in a way that seems to create a caesura structure, as in verse, and this split is comparable to the kind of rupture that lightning could have effected in the actual scene. The paragraph begins with an attempt at scientific contextualization that is followed by the inclusion of an element of translation left out of the first paragraph, Sally Mann herself, then further reading of the scene:
The depicted instant: a galvanic pre-storm eclipse.
On a bridge, the photographer bends, shrouded behind her tripod.
As she guesses the exposure time, lightning hisses and rips so close
that the air, for seconds, isn’t breathable. At once, the river
quicksilvers. Its surface bulks and brightens. The heft of the
scene, though, and the dynamic tension flee to the margins.
There,
in the rumpled quiet of the trees, we catch the most
animate qualities. In the riffle of leafy detail, we sense the
respiration of the forest. (39)
Not only “on a bridge,” Mann stands as the figurative “bridge” between her solitary experience of a remarkable moment and the photographic translation that, to some extent, might reproduce it for Gander and other viewers. But as she is “shrouded,” not discernible in the picture, Mann is brought into the drama through the poet’s translation. Evidently, the photographer has put herself in danger for the sake of her temporal and spatial development of “this composition.” The notion of “the air” not being “breathable” seems to be part of the speaker’s imagining of the photographer’s experience, but it can also reflect his own translation of the scene, as though he can imagine himself (and us) in it, not peering into a “window.” The verb “quicksilvers” evokes a mercurial speed, but Gander’s descriptive gestures establish a contrast between the river’s “bulk” or “heft” and its dispersive liquidity. Countering the earlier mention of breathlessness, “respiration” is said to occur at “the margins,” where “the riffle of leafy detail” seems more “animate” than the “denatured” river.
In the prose-poem’s final paragraph, Gander concentrates on the effect on the viewer of what he had termed “a convulsion in seeing’s habit” in the first sentence:
And while we absorb this disturbance in a merely apparent
repose, our stomach rolls—as when an elevator begins to descend.
We detect in the blurred trees a peristaltic contraction. We feel
the landscape giving birth to our vision. (39)
In the struggle between “apparent repose” and “disturbance,” the effects that the photographer has created might be considered representations of natural processes or tropes that displace those processes by gesturing toward a mystical event—or what the closure of the haunting “Ghost Sonata” characterizes as “the border between a tangible and an intangible world” (43). In either case, the effects are assumed to induce a visceral reaction in the viewers while “we” interpret (“detect”), and yet it is said to be “our vision” to which “the landscape,” the translation and transformation of the landscape seen by Mann, is “giving birth.” Just as a mother gives birth to a child but does not own (even if she strongly influences) the latter’s subsequent experience, the photographer’s translation is the “mother” of and primary influence on a visionary experience that “we” can claim as our possession. Another way to put this is that the translation influences its audience, which then has the opportunity to translate the translation—in Gander’s case, through ekphrasis that is replete with figurative language, a medium that diverges from the parent “text.” And doesn’t every translation differ from its “original” (and thus entail its own “vision”) because the translator’s work is inevitably colored by his/her experiences that differ from those of the one whose art is translated?
“Science & Steepleflower,” another prose-poem in the series, also utilizes the term “vision” in relation to the photo’s audience. Science & Steepleflower, a 1999 collection of poems by Gander, features the apposite landscape photo by Mann on the cover. Here is the first of two paragraphs:
The temperate, velvet sheen on the water is not applied, but
constitutive. Just the stream utters light. The woods are hushed.
The vagueness of a near shoreline endows the water with a
transfigured, opalescent lour. We see the reflection of trees, partly
erased in splotches, as through a delicate mist. Our eyes following
the stream until shadows pinch off the flow of our gaze. (47)
Perhaps the opening sentence differentiates what a painter does from the fact that a photographer, despite her ability to use techniques to undo “seeing’s habit,” must work with a given scene and does not create it ex nihilo. And yet the adjective “constitutive” modifying “velvet sheen” may instead signify an assertion that the quality of this representation of light is fundamental to the picture; it is not merely a choice of “application” by some viewers as a component of their interpretations that others can ignore. Of course, the assertion is itself a rhetorical gesture presenting an interpretation that cannot be proven. That “the stream” is the lightest part of the composition would receive intersubjective assent from most viewers, but the poet’s use of the personification of “utterance,” in contrast with the silenced “woods,” implicitly places value in that detail. Speech is aligned conceptually with light, and silence with darkness. Since these four terms have longstanding spiritual connotations, the description of the scene can be read as investing it with the power of revelation, transcendence of the ordinary, as the adjective “transfigured” in the next sentence suggests. “Vagueness” calls the customary boundaries that organize “reality” into question, and “water” seems to overwhelm solidity. While utterance could be beatific, the noun “lour” indicate the threatening aspect of potentially sublime speech, and “shadows” are not airy and insubstantial but are capable of psychologically “pinching” the audience’s effort to achieve coherent vision. On one hand, the impression of “mist” is “delicate,” and on the other, the terms of simile (“as through”) cast doubt on the comparison while it is being drawn. “Splotches” perform “erasure” that does violence to “the flow” of perception that may also involve a search for psychological or spiritual illumination.
As a translator of the photo which itself is both a translation and impediment to translatability, Gander’s speaker in “Science & Steepleflower” keeps opposite states and qualities in play, and, as the second paragraph begins, he identifies uncertainty as a lure for the viewers: “Because the realm is uncertain, it prompts us” (47). However, uncertainty is posited as a temporary stage in translation that is encompassed by what the speaker starts to put forth as a definitive interpretation: “The shaggy forest is dim, private, oneiric. And the circular frame of the image closes inward.” The sylvan and aquatic scene is read as an emblem of individual interiority, the “oneiric” realm of the unconscious where dark encircles and perhaps restricts light. Gander goes so far in underscoring the applicability of a particular double interpretation as to have his speaker declare its tropological foundation and to identify what it signifies: “Called vignetting, this girdling dark is a metaphor, and it has two meanings.” For some photographers, “vignetting” is a technical problem to be eliminated by technical means, but in the photo in question, the “girdle” fits the poet’s sense of Mann’s deployment of polarities. The prose-poem concludes with an articulation of the “two meanings” in relation to the audience’s reception:
It signals the onset of our blink, and as such, can be
read as the sign of the evanescence of the image that, even in the act
of preservation, must be relinquished. However, it is equally
indicative of the incipient vision opening to us from the other side
of consciousness, the muscular curtain drawing back from the
beginning of dream. (47)
Just as the camera blinks, we viewers do. Typically regarded as a means to make a moment in time eternal, the photo here is regarded as a demystification of such an eternalizing gesture. What the image “permanently” represents is the moment’s coming and going, the movement from emergence—for example, the appearance of “opalescent” light on water—to disappearance. The interpretation of the other “metaphor,” which traces a motion from absence to presence without (necessarily) returning to absence, cannot provide a translation into literalness but is itself supplemented by another metaphor, the exposure of illuminating “vision” gained from the “drawing back” of a formidable barrier, the “curtain” which separates “consciousness” from the spiritual or psychological riches of the unconscious. Whereas the first meaning teaches a general lesson of transience with acute immediacy, the second one indicates that the viewers—addressed collectively, with the speaker included, as earlier in the text—can utilize their reaction to an image external to themselves to gain contact with what is most interior to them, fundamental, “visionary” elements of their dream-states. This makes sense because the unconscious must make transformative use of materials that the subject encounters in the world to “weave” its “text.” Gander wishes “us” to see how “we” may attempt to translate the most hidden parts of ourselves to ourselves. But the “realm” referred to earlier—like the connection between the juxtaposition in the prose-poem’s title and the play of oppositions in the paragraphs that follow it—remains “uncertain,” because the poet’s layered translation of Mann’s image ends by pointing to “the other side of consciousness” without supposing that he can supply a “line-by-line” translation of even his own text.
Javier: language travel’s thrills and perils
In a review of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005), Paolo Javier’s second book, Yago Cura calls Javier “a brazen polyglot” who “solders English to Tagalog, and Tagalog to Spanish with a manic acetylene torch” in the creation of “an American, mongrel, poetry” that manifests “a dialect-identity” (24). According to Cura, this “identity” is that of “a Filipino poet educated and acculturated in America”—I note, too, that Javier has lived and studied in Canada, Egypt, and the U.S.— “but supremely wary of America’s track-record with Colonialism….” In the middle of “Crescendo Subic Destitute Sonnet,” Javier places a string of sixteen Filipino words between “Porgy & Bess,” that “cute” caricature of African-Americans, and “McKinley” (26), the U.S. President who authorized the annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Unable to piece together a decent translation of “patikman yung puti ng kaunting ugaling kayumanggi/ at paparoom siya ng madali, pati na rin si” from an online Tagalog/English dictionary, due to my ignorance about Tagalog syntax and idioms, I fortunately obtained a translation from the author himself: “Let the white taste a little bit of the brown and he/she will frequent that place immediately, and also” McKinley. Thus, the usual paternalistic justifications for colonial rule are unmasked as morally “destitute,” stereotypical mistranslations of erotic and other sensual fantasies, but only for those readers who either know Tagalog or have access to the assistance of someone who does.
“English Is an Occupation,” the title of a poem in 60 lv bo(e)mbs, embodies a metaphor performing a metonymic linkage between the imposition of the English language on Filipinos during the nearly half-century U.S. occupation ( resulting in the devaluation of Tagalog and other local languages) and the occupation itself. However, confirming Cura’s notion of “mongrel identity,” it also reflects the job of an English teacher or professor and of the “polyglot” poet writing in English: “persevere counter ardor mystic parables/ today Paolo occupies you, today Paolo occupies you” (7). In this poem and in the book as a whole, density of allusions and the syntactically unpredictable juxtaposition of fragmentary utterances make the critic’s “occupation” of “translation” challenging, as a brief passage indicates:
you lasso Miro’s loneliness parabolas
mask chimera’s own toys
venture capital enemy Villa dollar economy lusty Hydras
English trippin’ on acid poor lipreads hummed
Erase tula culpable due East judged the Angry Oriental . (6)
The poet’s language said to “lasso” (translate) the “loneliness” of modernist master Joan Miro, long exiled from his native Spain due to the repressive Franco regime, and this calls attention to the fact that Miro himself created a great many “lasso” lines (“parabolas”) on the brooding fields of his quasi-abstract canvases. But the second line is more elusive: what are the fiction-generating constructs (“toys”) of an already insubstantial fiction (“chimera”), and is the chimera a “mask” or does the “you” perform the action of “masking” this fiction? Repeated references in the book, which can be conceived as a single long poem of 60 sections, to “Villa” suggest the Filipino-American poet José Garcia Villa, who was championed by modernists like William Carlos Williams, later largely ignored, and finally, “re-discovered” by Filipino poets in recent decades, and also the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and the celebrated Filipino world flyweight boxing champion who assumed the name “Pancho Villa.”
Surely, the Mexican Pancho Villa was an avowed “enemy” to “venture capital” and the “lusty Hydra” monsters of early twentieth century “dollar economy,” but how the other two Villas are interpreted as fitting such an “enemy” status is open to much speculation. Perhaps the pride of Filipinos in their boxing champion, whose name was associated with rebellion against oppressors, was countered by the kind of racist response to alien “primitives” that American fans heaped on African-American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. The poet Villa had an “outsider” (not “enemy”) status in the Philippines, since his experimental sensibility did not make him seem to represent Filipino culture, and the U.S. In that sense, he is excluded from the “dollar economy’s” ordinary commerce. Not confirming ordinary forms of communication, he is a model for Filipino poets like Javier who seek to “occupy” their “borrowed tongue” in ways that subvert normative colonial and postcolonial uses. Innovative poets deploy such techniques as homophonic translation, Oulipian methods, and their own procedures to confect “English” that some may deride as “trippin’ on acid” but whose defamiliarizing gestures combat such damning, damnable, oppression-justifying stereotypes as “the Angry Oriental,” as well as recent tendencies of “the East” to accede to manipulation to “accommodate mass [Western] culture” (6).
Yago Cura asserts that “if you speak more than one language you understand that each language in your head has a different brain”; he regards the work in 60 lv bo(e)mbs as “acts of translation that are successful failures—a ping-pong-mediation between the brain of the source language and the brain of the projected language. It is only natural that some of these lingual algorithms of English, Tagalog, and Spanish get lost in the translation.” I believe that the realization of areas of untranslatability in a work of art can be a “successful failure” that foregrounds perception of important differences that should not be subsumed, but respected. Conversely, such “failure” shows how false translation, a practice that homogenizes indiscriminately, tends to promote colonization or neo-colonization. In the last line of the passage from “English Is an Occupation” cited above, “tula” is the Tagalog word for poetry, and the phrase “erase tula culpable due East” implies both a critique of imperialist (“Orientalist”) poetry that travels “East” to indict Asian culture and a valorization of “tula” that “erases” false culpability.
When Javier’s third book, The Feeling Is Actual (2011), appeared, he was in an early stage of serving a three-year stint as Poet Laureate of his current home borough, Queens, New York, one of the U.S.’s most ethnically and racially diverse areas. Much of The Feeling Is Actual articulates diverse aspects of cultural translation. The prose-poem/pseudo-TV special segment “Pinoy Signs” is a “a ‘reading tour’” of “word play” in English and, to some degree, in Filipino languages, especially “with retailers and various businesses favoring a play on names of Western establishments and celebrities (Americans, in particular; movie stars and entertainment personalities, especially)” (27). Javier’s humorous and serious presentation of Pinoy translation of the most recent colonial power’s cultural idioms into local contexts spotlights Filipinos’ linguistic resourcefulness and flexibility, akin to poetry, whether in the interest of commerce or emotional survival through “a good sense of humor” (31), and the extent to which the U.S. continues to practice cultural colonialism far too successfully.
The intricate, thoroughly allusive collage-field of “Heart as Arena” demonstrates how Haitian-American graffiti/ fine artist Jean-Michel Basquiat not only engages with the history of anti-black racism in the U.S. but with the polyglot community in New York City’s lower East side in the seventies and eighties, a scene in which the possibilities and failures of translation can become acutely evident. Further, the poem critiques mainstream (mis)translations of Basquiat’s deployment of cultural signifiers. Also, the poetic play “Wolfgang Amadeus Bigfoot” allows its audience to see how conservative conspiracy theorists who are believers in the existence of Bigfoot translate both the “otherness” of Bigfoot and of their liberal “opponents” to themselves and permits Javier to translate the psychological and ideological traits of these characters to those who might find them unfathomable or absurdly “alien.”
The most direct analysis of cultural translation in The Feeling Is Actual appears in a poem bearing a title that repeats ([mis]translates?) the book’s title—with a difference. The lack of apostrophe in the second word of “Feeling Its Actual” could be an error of omission indicating “feeling that it is actual,” with the pronoun “it” suggesting a host of referents, or it might also signify omission of punctuation between the first two words: “feeling—it’s actual,” a valorization of emotion as authentic. But “its” might take a possessive form rather than being a contraction of a subject and copular verb; thus, the omission is at the end, the sentence lacking an object that should be attached to the adjective “actual,” or else the adjective may be intended to have a noun’s power: the process of feeling a situation’s actuality. Though people often believe that a translation should deliver the “actual” “feeling” possessed by or within a speaking subject, differences between languages pose obstacles to such an aim, as the unnamed female speaker of “Feeling Its Actual” informs us in an English that is not, apparently, native to her:
why did i always
use the wrong words
should be other words
that are more suitable
language is quite strange
and make me so confused
i often cannot understand
what they say. (136)
While the immigrant speaker expresses the difficulty that she faces in negotiating with a new environment via a new tongue in a way that seems to reflect both frustration and some self-reproach for her “errors,” she also suggests in the third line (lacking “there”) that the new language has lamentable limitations. The adjective “suitable” frames English as a wardrobe that could be more versatile. But she muses that perhaps all languages have built-in limitations that can make them incommensurable with one another and engender mistranslation and confusion for the bilingual subject. On the other hand, if the speaker has the advantage of living in a polyglot area like Javier’s Queens, she might hear numerous languages on the street on any given day and, thus, appreciate such polyphony: “i can also listen to the/ tone of the foreign language/ knowing that only this kind of language express such/ unique images and life” (136). Untranslatability can be a chance to celebrate multiplicity.
Major aspects of the speaker’s expression of emotion and cognition in “Feeling Its Actual” are easily understandable—for example, the desire to experience comfort and to withdraw from the consistent stress and frustration of translating from her own language to communicate in the new one and the reverse to receive others’ communications. Education is seen as numbing repetition, not as an opportunity for advancement: “i don’t want to go to school/ going to school feels like carding/ but mother wont help me” (137). However, moments of salient complexity occur when Javier uses the speaker’s alleged lack of control over idiomatic English to point out possibilities for the enrichment of signification. For example, the subject/verb disagreement involving “language” and “make” in the passage above suggests an area in which English grammar behaves arbitrarily; perhaps the parent language, unknown to us, might not. This arbitrary quality is intensified by the coordinating conjunction “and,” which often reflects a plural subject, but in this case, a plural verb. “Language” is actually the co-presence of two (or more) languages in the speaker’s mind; conceptually, it is both a singular and plural subject at once, making for a “strangeness” that produces “confusion” about the verb ending. Coming directly after a correct usage of the same verb, another example of a third-person singular subject/verb disagreement is equally illuminating:
i want to hide in a place
that makes me comfortable
this sofa feels like
the peafowls feathers
very comfortable
make me feel ecstatic. (136)
On the one hand, the alleged error of “make” in the last line might instead be a command indicating the speaker’s demand for comfort (that is not separated by a semi-colon, dash, or period). On the other hand, if we judge the verb error as operative, “ecstatic” emotion is the result of the speaker’s strong association between the sensation of her current sofa and a cherished memory from her native land (“peafowls feathers”) that permits her imagination to engineer a return home, at least momentarily. In the last part of the next strophe, a verb form error, followed by the problematic construal of a preposition, rings changes on the uses of the binaries imagination/reality and past/present:
in fact i just need to imagine
what i want or fancy what
will be happened
if i don’t want something
to happen, i go away
i miss my home too
time can stop in anytime
for the weather is cold
all day long (136)
Although the non-standard verb combination, “will be happened,” indicates that the desired future—at least in “fancy”—is a repetition of the past, it is balanced by the speaker’s expression of her homesickness and mention of the emotionally and physically “cold” “weather” of her new environment. “Going away” signifies ignoring an unpleasant current reality or departing from a situation (to the extent that she can); ironically, it reiterates her family’s act of leaving their homeland. Next, the placement of the little preposition “in” has a significant impact: “time can” enter (“stop in”) to disrupt the eternal present/presence of nostalgic reverie “anytime” (doubling the reference to temporality in a single line), or it can cease (“stop”) at any point to be itself—that is, sudden death ends life, even if the implication of death is itself a figure for exile as the cessation of a life in which happiness is possible. Therefore, depending on how the preposition is read or judged to be irrelevant, “time” is either a helpful or a threatening entity in desire’s struggle against whatever would negate it. In the next strophe, the line is repeated; it follows the statement, “time wont stop just for you” (137), which tends to support the idea that one cannot live in a marvelous eternal present.
In this monologue, the reader can find an alternation between moments of resignation about difficult reality—“I can be this way concedingly” (137)—and determination to fulfill wishes or aims. Having the makeshift adverb “concedingly” modify the verb “can be” is not saying, “I can concede” that my reality is disappointing; it suggests that the speaker chooses to behave provisionally in response to a particular context rather than to succumb permanently to a limiting pessimism. Often figured as a resource, nostalgic return (via sensory imagination) to the “missed” “home” is also precariously situated, as in a passage that evokes the repetitions of one of Javier’s major influences, Gertrude Stein:
memories—thats what i forget
i remember happy things
if the happy things
are what i remember
is that means i am sad
when i forget?
its not that i don’t remember
i love to remember happy things
besides that I don’t know
i cant remember a lot of things
id like to remember more
id like to know . (139)
The first line above seems contradictory unless one assumes that the speaker is worried about having forgotten what she previously remembered. Because of the absence of periods, the third and fourth lines can be read as a dependent clause attached to either the independent clause in the second line or the linked interrogative clauses in the fifth and sixth. If the former linkage is operative, the conjunction “if” in the third line suggests that she forgets whether what she thinks are “happy” memories actually happened—or are “happy” fantasies, illusions about the past that serve her psychological needs and mask humdrum or negative aspects of past experiences. However, if the latter connection applies, then the speaker is wondering whether forgetting memories—in addition to not being conscious of sad things—is proof of her sadness, due to her inability to access positive nostalgia. In other words, she asks whether the present’s harshness is sometimes strong enough to blunt precious memories’ power. It is important, though, to ask whether the replacement of the standard “does” by “is” in the interrogative verb combination produces other possibilities of signification that further complicate the string of utterances. In the standard form, forgetting is performed as an action with effects involving meaning, such as “sadness” as a process, whereas the use of the copular verb in the “error” makes forgetting into a state of being fully associated with sadness as a state of being. (It might be going too far to claim that “means” is a noun, and therefore, the line is a truncation of “Is that a means to show that I am sad?”)
In general, the tussle of interpretations of this passage marks the speaker’s difficulty in translating her own experience of what can be called exile to herself—let alone others. She is unsure whether to view her identity (including happiness and sadness) in essentialist terms (being) or in terms of an interplay of influences, emotions, motivations, and actions (be-ing) without an a priori origin or telos. “Id like to know,” she asserts, but knowing might entail the uncomfortable discovery that she has repressed unhappy components of her pre-exilic life. If positive nostalgia (“so i was a house princess/ and especially my dad was a king/ to me and my mom was a queen” [140]) and outright fantasy (“egg is an old lady/ their children is her stick/ and this blue lamp/ thats my auntie” [139]) strengthen such repression, the immigrant subject may be vulnerable to a damaging return of the repressed in other forms, and lack of accurate, balanced knowledge of the complexity of her early history will not serve her well in efforts to improve her current circumstances.
While many poets are intent on combating xenophobia in the U.S. by clearly representing immigrants’ dignity, integrity, persistence, resourcefulness, and intelligence in the face of egregious discrimination, Javier in “Feeling Its Actual,” though also investing his speaker with positive qualities, battles such ethnocentrism by foregrounding the obstacles of translation for all concerned. He elicits empathy (not pity) for the immigrant subject’s need to engage in intricate and constant internal and external negotiation, as well as respect for an other’s subjectivity that can only be gradually, partially, and imperfectly known (just as one can never finish the process of knowing oneself), and he gives readers cause to celebrate the polysemy and sonic intricacies of language. When Javier calls attention to how small changes in syntax engender confusion that can only be resolved by appeal to arbitrary idiomatic conventions, there can be pleasure and humor in an understanding of the mischief created: “i always cant be clear/ about all these things” (139). For a native English speaker, the fact that the adverb comes before the verb makes the immigrant speaker say that she never achieves clarity, even as common sense tells us that she is admitting that clarity is possible but does not happen every time (“can’t always”). But what logic justifies the native speaker’s feeling that “always can’t” sounds wrong, whereas “I can never be clear” is appropriate?
Neither positive stereotypes nor pietisms about common humanity are presented as useful alternatives to negative stereotyping. Late in the poem, the speaker flirts with the concept, “We’re all the same,” then disrupts the authority of a homogenizing “mirror” as translation becomes an issue: “if we face the mirror/ would become the same person/ its something about the light/ but i don’t know what hes saying/ hes only got one eye” (139). In the second line, the deletion of the independent clause’s subject (the “we” that does not get reiterated but disappears) felicitously enacts the kind of non-differentiation of which the clause speaks.
The closing lines of “Feeling Its Actual” simultaneously represent the immigrant’s admirable striving and continue to serve Javier’s defamiliarizing aims. The speaker has just been describing her indebtedness to her mother:
i was following her footsteps
and i am too determined
to make my way alone
i was not a great cook but
i have a great eyes for details. (140)
‘Your pillow is outside itself.’ (141)
Noteworthy for its arbitrariness, omission or inclusion of the preposition “in” makes little difference to the idea of the speaker acknowledging her mother’s influence. The substitution of “too” for the expected “very” in the expression of intense determination can be understood as a positive thing that, in some contexts, may be viewed negatively: xenophobes will find her overly determined to take work that they believe “belongs” to native citizens, while others might say that the barriers to opportunity make her willpower futile—hence excessive—and lastly, her call for self-reliance in the next line may be deemed flawed in ignoring the necessity of interdependence in a difficult environment.
The misuse of the indefinite article in the strophe’s last line follows a particular logic: “eyes” are plural but work together as a single entity; “an eye for detail,” except in cases like that of the monocular man who had stared at the speaker, is an idiom that implies the plural within the singular. The speaker here preserves both components, just as she represent individual and collective impulses in the strophe as a whole. The poem’s final line, a terse coda, is placed on a new page to underscore the speaker’s double consciousness. A source of comfort in tough circumstances, the “pillow” of nostalgia is “inside out,” exposed to effects of present challenges and the difficulties of accessing memory. Among other things, the translator seeks comfort but “always can’t” or “can’t always” get comfortable, and her effort at translation is sometimes unhappily or happily unsuccessful.
Miller: dialogue, translatability, and critique
In several long, meandering, conversational, but intellectual dense poems published between 1992 and the present, Stephen Paul Miller has consistently done three things. First, as in his 1999 book of cultural criticism, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, he has developed analogies—one might call them points of translation—among various realms such as visual art, cinema, literature, philosophy, science, computer science, and politics. “Row” (2002), for example, weaves together Bob Dylan’s music, Edwin Black’s linkage of IBM and the Shoah, Alan Turing’s use of computer logic to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code and enable the Allies to win World War II, Turing’s sexuality in relation to his epistemological stance, the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, the findings of Logical Positivists, including “Gottlob Frege’s great mathematical achievement” (The Bee Flies in May 29) and, oddly, his musings on Jewish identity, the significance of the term “concentration camp,” and the social meanings of American suburbs. Several of these motifs are reworked in “’The Hustle’ and Its Liquid Totems of Holocaust, Suburb, and Computer” (2005), which includes an elaborate analysis of a popular disco song: “’The Hustle’ reverses/ the post-World War II era totemic order, starting/ with a suburban synthesis being undone” (Skinny Eighth Avenue 71)
Secondly, often comparing and contrasting events in different historical periods, Miller has launched vigorous, sometimes quasi-scholarly and sometimes sarcastic critiques of right-wing Republican attitudes and praxis regarding war, economics, and other features of political life, as well as Democratic tendencies to drift rightward. In the middle of “I’m Trying to Get My Phony Baloney Ideas about Metamodernism into a Poem” (2005), the poet speculates on how and why the salubrious emphasis on social welfare in the New Deal is challenged and eventually dislodged by “the Reagan/ Revolution,” which “begins when so few/ support/ New Deal-style/ employment programs/ during economic slumps/ of the mid- and late seventies” (Skinny Eighth Avenue 7-8). Through an allusion, he compares the gutting of FDR’s vision of equality—as well as that of the counterculture during the sixties—to Hitler’s way of dealing with his “Jewish problem”: “… after Nixon, the final/ budget and economic/ solution/ is cutting social/ spending,/ that mind-set prevailing under Ford/ and Carter”(8). The specificity of Miller’s criticism of the New Deal’s opponents is sharpened and extended in “Fort Dad” (2009), to which I will turn at the end of this analysis of Miller’s work.
Thirdly, Miller in his long poems explicitly or implicitly calls for thoroughly democratic inclusiveness, unlimited dialogue among all stakeholders, and a sense of community which differences cannot splinter. This imperative is most directly and frequently articulated in Miller’s first full-length collection, which comprises a long, skinny, stanzaless poem entitled Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (1992): “Whitman/ said that/ since we’d/ taken/ democracy/ this far/ we might/ as well/ let it go/ all the/ way” (23), and by “all the/ way,” the poet means an “open/ forum/ structure—/ something/ like/ classical/ democracy” (36) in which “power” is “exercised/ in such a/ way that/ excludes/ no one” (38). Miller affirms the use of “power” by individuals and groups that manifests empathy and openness in the service of understanding a perspective that is very different from one’s own, and he goes farther by suggesting that, not only relinquishing the authority to impose a particular program on others but coming closer to their perspective after scrutinizing it can be a truly powerful, generative gesture:
I
think that
seeing the
point of
view of
all manner
of enemy--
artistic,
political,
or
whatever--
and even
qualifying
oneself in
an
opponent’s
light is a
political
action
because it
stresses a
different
sense of
power. (42-3)
In “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century Poetry (2001), which takes the first part of its title from the passage above, I perform a lengthy close reading of this poem that addresses its literary and historical contexts, yet I do not manage to consider the possible role of translation and translatability in Miller’s statements about dialogue. Does what he regards as worthwhile not require a deliberate act of translation? If one can “see” the other’s “point of/ view” in an unmediated way, then translation is not necessary, but aren’t different conceptual and psychological “languages” often at work in such exchanges? Without efforts at translation, isn’t the co-presence of two monologues more likely than a dialogue? Can self-qualification occur without the submission of aspects of one’s own ideas to the possibility of undergoing translation that may entail some degree of transformation, or the translation of one’s concepts into a “language” that shows respect for and understanding of one’s opponent?
As noted at the beginning of this discussion, three features can be found in most of Miller’s long poems of the last two decades, and the middle one, critique, might well stand in the way of the realization of open dialogue and translatability. It is important to ponder whether the poet sufficiently presents opportunities for effective mutual translation or whether a fundamental untranslatability (and hence, barrier to dialogue) presides over his discourse and its implications for political transactions. There are various aspects of political critique in Art Is Boring, all of which I cover fully in “A Different Sense of Power” and will not rehash in detail here, but the most significant is the negative evaluation of President George Bush, Sr.’s buildup to the first Iraq War (the Gulf War), his handling of the conflict, his response to criticism, before and after the conflict, of the U.S.’s waging of the war, and his placing of restrictions on media coverage, especially in light of what dissenting journalists later discovered about what actually happened.
Miller himself presents some doubt in Art Is Boring about whether he is translating the Bush administration’s justification for the Gulf War into language to which the poet and others who share his critical attitude can be open. He asks: “how can I/ deny it,… the/ adversarial/ stance and/ position/ of this/ poem?/ Isn’t my/ rhetoric a/ little/ rigid?” (67). In fact, while it includes a letter from a friend, the poet Sparrow, that criticizes the Miller’s position on another topic and presents a thorough response, the poem offers no direct quotation or substantial paraphrase from the arguments of President Bush other members of his administration, or other supporters. The closest Miller comes to a presentation of the Bush viewpoint is in rhetorical questions implicitly denouncing the administration’s refusal to engage in prolonged negotiation with Saddam Hussein because it would signify “appeasement.” His ideas are eerily similar to what could be said of Bush’s son’s dealings with Saddam Hussein at the outset of the second Iraq War, a decade after Art Is Boring appeared: “… why should/ instituting/ a more/ effectively/ open mode/ of/ communication/ be/ tantamount/ to/ appeasing/ anyone, no/ matter/ what that/ person’s/ crimes or/ supposedly/ imminent/ threats?” (45). Miller does not explore Bush’s specific notions of what the “threats” are, why they are considered “imminent,” and why the President believes that dialogue would not only fail but would lead to more destruction. Instead, he throws in additional rhetorical questions to show that the refusal of dialogue on Bush’s part creates the opportunity for Hussein to react more emotionally and recklessly and, thus, to pose greater danger to the U.S., his own people, and the world: “Who ever/ tried/ bullying/ anyone/ into/ getting/ off a/ ledge or/ putting/ down a/ loaded/ gun? When/ shouldn’t/ there be a/ peace/ conference?” (45-6). A few pages later, anticipating Barack Obama’s analysis of foreign policy during the 2008 Presidential campaign, Miller asks, “With a/ more open/ and/ ‘human-rights’-/ oriented/ pre-Reagan-/ post-Nixon/ attitude,/ how could/ our/ national/ security/ have been/ threatened/ to the perhaps/ considerable/ extent/ that/ Hussein/ may have/ indeed/ threatened/ it?” (49-50).
I believe that results of the last two decades of U.S./Iraq entanglement fully confirm the implications in Miller’s critique. However, even if he proves to be astute at prophecy, his concepts about open dialogue lose some rhetorical force because he is not putting them into play in his encounter with the Bush administration in Art Is Boring. Whether he translates his own perspective into a language that Gulf War supporters can understand is difficult for me to assess, but his translations of the opposing views are too limited—if not quite as limited at his opponents’ caricatures of the anti-war faction’s views. Therefore, the poem succeeds as a powerful critique of particular instances of the refusal of open dialogue and consequences of that refusal, but it does not serve as an example of such openness. (This is a point that I did not recognize in the interpretation of the text that I wrote more than ten years ago.) If the poet sees his work as part of a “peace conference,” then he does not motivate the opposite party in the conference to “qualify [themselves] in [his] light” by initiating such a gesture.
To chide Miller for this “failure” seems pointless. First, it is extremely difficult for someone to practice a great deal of openness to a perspective that seems so wrong to her/him. At least he represents his opponents’ views with reasonable accurately, if briefly, and he seldom “shouts” at them. Secondly, though I have been doing so throughout this analysis, we cannot assume that Miller is the “I” in the poem who advocates empathic translation of the other’s view in a dialogic process without awareness of attendant ironies. He may intend to stage a situation that demonstrates the immense difficulty or impossibility of the realization of this stated ideal, which is nevertheless desirable to attempt to actualize, and he sheds light on the difficulties of translation. Indeed, when Miller/the speaker declares, “Not that/ simply/ talking is/ magical/ but the/ context in/ which we/ talk can/ be because/ all/ contexts/ are bound/ to be/ unguarded/ and/ somewhat/ fertile” (54), the reader can see how both translation effecting open dialogue and the impasse of untranslatability may work. Regarding this passage, in “A Different Sense of Power,” I note that the “wordplay with ‘bound’ (in relation to ‘unguarded’) wittily identifies the absence of binding or constraining features on contexts as a barrier to the fixing of determinate meaning,” and this marks a situation of “plural signification” in which conversation can either reveal “interesting productive differences” that “serve to weaken the unfortunate grip of a fixed ideology on an individual” and increase his/her receptivity to “divergent perspectives, or it can merely feed “a quest for dominance” (178).
Miller’s “Fort Dad,” which appeared in a book of the same name during the autumn of Barack Obama’s first year in the White House, goes slightly farther than Art Is Boring in the direction of an open dialogue with conservative Republicans. The poem weaves in and out of such topics as parenthood, the Oedipal Complex, the Civil War, the TV sit-com Mr. Ed, Nazism and Alan Turing’s computer innovations and their historical implications (as in two aforementioned earlier long poems), the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, and Polish mathematician Jan Lukasiewicz’s challenge to Aristotle. For the purposes of this discussion, I will concentrate on his re-interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that reflects not only on subsequent history but on the polarization—immediately evident to Miller in the first half of 2009—between the aims of President Obama, inheritor of the Great Recession, and those of the Congressional Republicans.
Beginning the poem with a harsh critique of conservative Republican ideology, Miller quotes his young son: “‘Republicans don’t evolve,’ Noah observes…” (Fort Dad 35), then proceeds in the poem to give examples of what he perceives as GOP politicians’ lack of adaptability to economic crises from the Great Depression to the present. Within a few pages, he directly supports his son’s thesis: “The right tends to// hold onto everything. No matter what./ They don’t evolve./ It’s part of being the privileged right, or,// as FDR put it, “economic royalists,”/ knee deep in the/ always already and pushing us on” (40). The reference to the well-known pair of adverbs in the last line is not a deflation of the concepts of various philosophers like Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida who used the phrase; it is a jibe at the idea that the primacy of untrammeled capitalism, along with the entitlement of the privileged class, is beyond question, an inevitability established in advance by history. Born to such privilege, FDR was subject to physical adversity that made him able to translate the sufferings of most Americans during the Depression into his own idiom in a way that others of his class could not. But, more importantly, Miller asserts that, unlike them, he believed that an economic plan involving unprecedented state-sponsored social welfare programs did not entail “communism” but the only way to preserve the capitalist way of life during this time of crisis:
FDR’s disability cuts
him off from what’s at stake for his class,
pushing him to aspire to being an Oprah nudging all parties
to discuss
codified economic solutions
and he expects a Groton medal for upholding the status quo ‘n
saving the rich
‘n their ways--his ways too after all.
But the right’s wrath amazes him.
As soon as he saved
them, they went back to their
addiction. (41)
In an article published during the 2008 primary season that notes Democratic candidates’ failure to invoke the New Deal, Marxist historian Howard Zinn reiterates the point in his earlier work that “the innovations of the New Deal were fueled by the militant demands for change that swept the country as FDR began his presidency: the tenants' groups; the Unemployed Councils; the millions on strike on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the South; the disruptive actions of desperate people seeking food, housing, jobs--the turmoil threatening the foundations of American capitalism.” Implying that Miller’s use of the phrase “upholding the status quo” above is justified, Zinn calls “the New Deal… tentative, cautious, bold enough to shake the pillars of the system but not to replace them.”
Miller represents wealthy conservatives of the thirties as “addicts,” compulsively clinging to their “always already,” ridiculously linking Roosevelt with the “Nazis,” who also “back social safety nets,” and basing their views on extremely irrational fears—“The right, like the fisherman’s wife,/ is insecure and nothing’s enough” (41)—at the same time as they underestimate the intensity and broad spectrum of social unrest in the early days of the Depression to which Zinn refers: “Our rich don’t thank Roosevelt—/ they don’t fear the revolution he averts” (45). Today’s “Oprah,” whose rise to economic success has not branded her a class traitor, has greater success in “nudging all parties” than FDR did, though his class’s fierce opposition to him in the 1936 election and “major polls predict[ing] Republican victory” (44) were unable to avert his landslide triumph over GOP standard-bearer Alf Landon.
None of these characterizations by Miller (or, if my last paragraph on Art Is Boring seems to dictate, his representative Democratic “I”) of how “‘Republicans don’t evolve’” seem likely to show sufficient empathy or respect needed to encourage descendants of thirties Republicans to enter into a sincere dialogue with Democrats and thus have a chance of realizing the potential for accord in the Obama era. However, in the development of his advocacy for New Deal policies in “Fort Dad,” it is evident that Miller is not demanding that rich right-wingers accept an ethical imperative for the transformation of economic relations; he is performing some translation of the basis for his advocacy into terms of self-interest that wealthy Republicans can recognize. At different points in the poem, Miller’s unjustified left margins alternately slant rightward, then leftward—very gradually:
The beauty part’s
the most feared totem--
dreaded welfare,
what trickles thru
driving the economy. We prosper
3 post-Frankie D
decades by upping the poor’s
purchasing power thru
fair taxes, union protections, utility
and financial regulation,
social security and other nets,
some institutionalized shame
and hesitance to take way-super profits,
good faith crazy gluing into place
FDR’s even handed
WW II wage/price controls, prototypes
until the 70s and 80s. Purchasing power impels investment ‘n
production, N-O-T
the other way around. (47)
Whereas in the eighties Reagan supports the “trickle down theory” of supply side economics and slashes social programs, ending the long run of New Deal “prototypes,” Miller attaches “dreaded welfare” to a “trickle thru” theory, a lateral flow in which various factors cited above all synergistically contribute to economic health in the post-Depression U.S. (He compares the New Deal’s intricate array of programs with the use of “input and output/ creating feedback/ with other operations” [58] in Turing and others’ computer science advances at the time.) Miller’s translation for the benefit of right-wingers does not praise the New Deal result of “upping the poor’s// purchasing power” as a “redistribution of wealth” or equalizing measure and instead stresses its healthful impact on the economy—and therefore, on the long-term portfolios of the privileged. Miller would wish to persuade conservatives that “greed”—short-term “way-super” profitability for a small cadre of elites that ignores the overall social impact—eventually causes the elites’ loss of wealth and power: “Why is avoiding greed by sharing/ with the poor NOT the answer?.... Franklin knows the/ rich investing and over-investing/ without matching consumption// equals depression—same as now/ though now people can’t spend/ cuz they can’t borrow” (48).
“Fort Dad,” however, is not the record of a speaker seeking dialogue with a single audience, but two or more. This impedes the poet’s ability to perform consistently efficacious “translations” for his opponents. Frequently, in his strong critique of the anti-New Dealers, “rich right crybabies” who “won’t negotiate a thing” and to whom Roosevelt declares, “’I welcome your hatred’” (60), he tries to goad centrist Democrats (and perhaps moderate Republicans) to challenge their sense that they must adapt to the nation’s rightward turn and, instead, muster the guts to embrace a more liberal agenda. Therefore, he sometimes does not stress what Zinn considers the New Deal’s preservation of capitalism but its progressive character. Since the New Deal dislodges laissez faire economics, management of “the economy/ to keep the status quo” is only the first of Roosevelt’s three stages, as Miller points out late in the poem: “Second, he/ goes/ after the status quo.// Third, he goes/ after the status quo BY/ managing the economy thru// progressive taxation/ and wage-price control and regulation during/ the war” (61).
It would be nearly impossible for the poet to maintain a lyrical and colloquial flow if he were to examine FDR’s “progressive taxation” in the detail that “Paul Krugman’s 2006 The Conscience of a Liberal” (Fort Dad 59) supplies, and if so, the “rich right” and Tea Partiers would be even more resistant to Miller’s perspective. According to Krugman, “the top income tax rate” in the 1920s “was only 24 percent,” compared to “63 percent during the first Roosevelt administration, and 79 percent in the second,” and “by the mid-fifties, as the United States faced the expenses of the Cold War,… 91 percent” (47). Further, “the average federal tax on corporate profits rose from less than 14 percent in 1929 to more than 45 percent in 1955,” and “the top estate tax” grew “from 20 percent” in the twenties to”77 percent” in the fifties (48). (I am not sure how Krugman factors in the ability of the rich to hire creative, loophole-seeking accountants.) Given these numbers and overwhelming GOP resistance to rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in the last four years, if the “rich right” were to acknowledge what Krugman calls “the great compression,” the equalization of “incomes for… more than thirty years” and “a time of unprecedented prosperity” (54), they would do so without attributing those successes to New Deal policies and sustained applications of their principles but to World War II, the Cold War, and other factors. What marks an area of untranslatability that dogs Miller as he asserts that “raising the poor’s/ consumption powers” enables the New Deal’s “programs” to “work” (58-9)—to end the Depression and create “the Great Compression”—is the distinction between what he calls “greed” and what his foes would label their logical rejection of unfair sacrifice (of dubious social utility) and insistence upon their right to fruits of their labor and ingenuity. Further, they would perceive social welfare as philanthropy’s domain. Reframing their idea of sacrifice as an excellent long-term investment in the economic system as a whole, and reframing extreme market volatility, not as a chance to make a “killing,” but as a gigantic risk in the long run, even for those in the “1 percent,” is probably the best translation strategy, and the poet implies all of this when he is not chiding the “rich right crybabies,” but much too subtly. Nevertheless, how many other U.S. political poets strive as assiduously as Miller does in “Fort Dad” to develop effective translations of their convictions in hope of realizing the potential for open dialogue with their adversaries that Miller articulates in Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam?
*****
In the early stages of developing this essay, I believed that the poems of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge would be especially suitable for it. My impression, it turned out, was based on a handful of fragmentary utterances in different poems, and each time I tried to read Berssenbrugge’s powerfully abstract yet imagistic, disjunctive yet meditative poetry in relation to (un)translatability, I found that the work’s particular flux disabled whatever generalizations I hoped to cull from it. In other words, my own interpretive “translations” knocked up against a certain untranslatability, whereas other strategies devised by critics like Charles Altieri, Linda Voris, and even myself had proven more useful for reading the poetry.
Therefore, the lens of translation/untranslatability is not necessarily applicable to the writing of all contemporary poets, but Gander, Javier, and Miller, I think, are a small sampling of vital poets who can be cogently discussed through this meta-thematic approach. My subjects are three men, the first of whom engages in ekphrastic conversation with the art of a woman and the second of whom deploys the persona of a woman. That fact reminds me that one possibility for future criticism in this vein is the area that psychologist Deborah Tannen has so compellingly investigated: cross-gender communication. How do men and women foreground their efforts to translate what they wish to communicate to the opposite gender? How do they think about translating the “language” of the opposite gender to themselves? And also, for transgendered poets, how are the complexities of translation enacted and absorbed? The last sentence of my analysis of Miller’s poems is a kind of “dare” to find poets sufficiently committed to genuine dialogue that they would assiduously engage in ideological translation in their work, but if such writers could not be located, critics could consider areas of untranslatability or openings for translation within particular ideological debates waged in poetry. Of course, Javier’s emphasis—deliberately presented without many specific cultural markers in “Feeling Its Actual”—on the encounter between different racial or ethnic groups is another strong possibility. And Gander’s recent Core Samples from the World (2011), which comprises a dialogic alternation of prose and verse representing the poet’s travels in China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, would be especially amenable to such a contextualization, as evidenced by the poet’s note at the beginning of the book:
This book comes about as unprecedented human movement leads,… to conflicts, suspicions, and opportunities to
reconsider what is meant by “the foreign,” by “the foreigner.” It is also a very personal account of negotiations across
borders (between languages and cultures, between one species and all the rest, between health and sickness,
between poetic forms, and between self and others).
The “negotiations” that Gander refers to depend on sustained attention to translation, an attempt to appreciate difference but reduce the barrier implied by “‘the foreign’” and the distance needed to travel “across [cultural and ideological] borders.”
WORKS CITED
Cura, Yago. “Paolo Javier: 60 lv bo(e)mbs.” The Poetry Project Newsletter 208. Oct./Nov. 2006: 24. Print. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.
Fink, Thomas. “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century Poetry. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2001. Print.
Gander, Forrest. Eye Against Eye. New York: New Directions, 2005. Print.
_______. Core Samples from the World. New York: New Directions, 2011. Print.
Javier, Paolo. The Feeling Is Actual. East Rockaway: Marsh Hawk P, 2011. Print.
_______. 60 lv bo(e)mbs. Oakland, CA: O Books, 2005. Print.
Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.
Mann, Sally. “Collodion Interview.” East Coast/West Coast Art Educators. 15 Nov. 2009. Web. 23 Dec. 2012.
Miller, Stephen Paul. Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam. New York: Domestic, 1992. Print.
_______. The Bee Flies in May. New York: Marsh Hawk P, 2002. Print.
_______. Fort Dad. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk P, 2009. Print.
_______. Skinny Eighth Avenue. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk P, 2005. Print.
Weinberger, Eliot and Forrest Gander. “Eliot Weinberger and Forrest Gander.” Bomb 93 (Fall 2005). Web. 22 Dec. 2012.
Zinn, Howard. “Beyond the New Deal.” The Nation 7 April 2008. Web. 22 Jan. 2013.
Cultural (Un)translatability: Gander, Javier, Miller
“Cultural translatability” seems a broad topic. My aim in the following paragraphs is to analyze current poetry that treats visual experience in relation to conventions and counter-conventions of picture-taking (Forrest Gander), immigrants’ geographical and linguistic displacements (Paolo Javier), and the longstanding divide in U.S. political life (Stephen Paul Miller). The “(un)” in my title announces that the poets under consideration strive to assess what can be translated and what cannot.
Gander transcribing/accompanying Sally Mann’s landscape photos
In his 2005 series, “Late Summer Entry: the Landscapes of Sally Mann,” Forrest Gander’s poems are paired with reproductions of Mann’s photographs. Sometimes in prose and sometimes in verse, his texts test various forms of translation and resistance to translation, often playing against expectations of an unproblematic, literal rendering of a three-dimensional natural scene through a flat surface, as well as anticipated developments of a conventional figurative association, such as the pristine beauty of untamed wilderness. One aspect of Mann’s photos that especially engages Gander is her use of techniques that disrupt and/or complicate translation: “… our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish/ on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble,/ it sabotages the scene’s transparence/ and siphons off its easy appeal” (“Bridge & Swimmer,” 55). In an exchange with Eliot Weinberger, Gander states: “She’s using warped lenses and chemical dribbles and developing techniques that animate the landscapes so they’re haunted with traces of movement and suggestions of presence. A carbonized sun, a listing horizon. It’s like seeing into a place, through the flicker of everything that ever happened there.” In an interview that is primarily about her appropriation of the nineteenth century photographic process of collodion, Mann says that “none of [her] equipment has ever been any good” and that this is intentional:
I spend an awful lot of time at that antique mall looking around for these lenses with just the right amount
of decrepitude. The glue has to be peeling off of the lens elements, it’s great if it’s mildewed and out of whack
—a lens is made up of several different pieces of glass which are supposed to stay glued in the right relationship
with each other—but my most prized lens has one of the pieces of glass askew, so when the light comes in it
it's refulgent. It just bounces all around and does this great sort of luminescent thing on the glass.
Uses of “warping” and “dribbling” effects enable the photographer to depart from the usual goal of realistic translation. And this departure from expected “presence” provides the opportunity for a translation of something that is not necessarily entirely or even primarily visual into visual terms, a “flickering” presence, as in the opening paragraph of the prose-poem “Ivy Brick Wall”: “It never aims to create an illusion of reality. Instead, the warped lens allows for a new set of relationships behind swirling frets. The wall confronts a flotsam of vortical energy and tree limbs transparentize in the blast” (51). Whereas the speaker associates the customary quest for “reality” as stasis with “illusion,” he suggests that the evocation of an aura of movement is a more authentic strategy for stimulating sight (“like seeing into a place”). In this way, the adjective “vortical” and the noun “blast” pay tribute to the early twentieth century poetic movement of Vorticism, championed by Ezra Pound as an improvement on and complication of Imagism, and to Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine, Blast. Perhaps Mann, within her own temporal and geographical context (the southern U.S., Gander’s own), has concretely realized the theoretical tenets of Vorticism in her art in ways distinct from those of Pound and Lewis’ contemporaries (like the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska).
The actual “brick wall” as object “depicted” in the photo does not become a trope of solid reality, of certainty; “the spectator,” instead, is “enmeshed in a field of concentric force” and “drawn toward a wormhole of brightness.” The prose-poem’s speaker implies that the “wormhole” is comparable to a black hole in its dazzling transgression of limits: “this originary force that transforms the ordinary into the exultant” (51). As the last paragraph indicates, the kind of translation celebrated here involves motion that undoes conceptual stability and thwarts any faith in permanent translatability: “The nucleus of the image is all verb, the seen availing itself to our seeing. When there are no stable terms, there are no faithful things.” Process (“seeing”) supplants the security of “the seen” and its fidelity to a particular organization of “reality.”
While Gander and Mann can both be labeled U.S. Southerners whose work is informed by their native geography, Mann’s photos and Gander’s translation of them do not bespeak a faith in the stable re-presentation of a particular locale; the materials of translation disrupt such “terms” of unity or unification, as in two lines from the visually bifurcated “Argosy for Rock and Grass”: “Although place is depicted, no sign in the world/ corresponds to this image. There is no source/ outside itself for such radiance” (53). The poet reverses the expectation that the “image” is a signifier and the scene in the world is a signified. “Radiant” immanence cannot be “outsourced,” and the “source” of the photo’s impact is inextricable from processes of enactment and production. Another such bifurcated poem, “Road and Tree,” ends with an assertion about the endlessness of translation and highly mediated interpretation: “And the place itself was neither fully read nor erased since it never/ ceased being written. Only a word was pronounced, only/ the instrument clicked” (45). “Writing,” the use of both scriptive and photographic “instruments,” continually engenders the re-presencing of “place.”
At the beginning of the prose-poem “River and Trees,” Gander raises the possibility that the viewer’s receptivity to unaccustomed and unsettling visual clues may be necessary for the photographer’s translation of whatever objects or processes are more salient than what “Ivy Brick Wall” calls “an illusion of reality” to have an effect: “The passage may be so swollen, limpid, and inviting that it requires considerable effort, a convulsion in seeing’s habit, to encounter the drama” (39). But the sentence does not tell us who is making the “effort” and causing the “convulsion.” To allow “seeing’s habit” to be shaken can signify either visual labor on the part of the viewer, not passive reception of the picture’s “invitation,” or the photographer’s strenuous application of defamiliarizing strategies. The noun “passage” can itself be a signifier of translation from event to text to reader or from event to picture to viewer, whereas “composition,” the first noun in the second sentence, situates actions in the art object’s restricted, atemporal field: “In this composition, to wit, the river lavishes-out soft tones, rich detail, and gentle, contrasting textures, but only at first glance.”
The “wit” of poetic convention (personification) tells us that this represented “object” (actually a flow or “vortical” motion) is the main actor in the drama; it “lavishes-out” appealing visual information, but “habit” is broken at second glance: “The calm is contradictory. For when we find the river holding still—in imitation of itself—it barely impresses a likeness” (39) In this re-vision, the viewers—the poet consistently uses “we”—are capable of seeing that the river’s action of “holding still,” making its flow into the appearance of stasis, is self-mimicry constituting an “impression,” (im)printing or manipulation of the audience’s perception, that “barely” accords with the viewers’ previously stored experience of this kind of landscape element. “Drama” can be found in the “contradictory” aspect of the first and second glances: the “calm” of the scene playing against the agitation that troubles comfortable representation.
The second paragraph of “River and Trees” is broken up in a way that seems to create a caesura structure, as in verse, and this split is comparable to the kind of rupture that lightning could have effected in the actual scene. The paragraph begins with an attempt at scientific contextualization that is followed by the inclusion of an element of translation left out of the first paragraph, Sally Mann herself, then further reading of the scene:
The depicted instant: a galvanic pre-storm eclipse.
On a bridge, the photographer bends, shrouded behind her tripod.
As she guesses the exposure time, lightning hisses and rips so close
that the air, for seconds, isn’t breathable. At once, the river
quicksilvers. Its surface bulks and brightens. The heft of the
scene, though, and the dynamic tension flee to the margins.
There,
in the rumpled quiet of the trees, we catch the most
animate qualities. In the riffle of leafy detail, we sense the
respiration of the forest. (39)
Not only “on a bridge,” Mann stands as the figurative “bridge” between her solitary experience of a remarkable moment and the photographic translation that, to some extent, might reproduce it for Gander and other viewers. But as she is “shrouded,” not discernible in the picture, Mann is brought into the drama through the poet’s translation. Evidently, the photographer has put herself in danger for the sake of her temporal and spatial development of “this composition.” The notion of “the air” not being “breathable” seems to be part of the speaker’s imagining of the photographer’s experience, but it can also reflect his own translation of the scene, as though he can imagine himself (and us) in it, not peering into a “window.” The verb “quicksilvers” evokes a mercurial speed, but Gander’s descriptive gestures establish a contrast between the river’s “bulk” or “heft” and its dispersive liquidity. Countering the earlier mention of breathlessness, “respiration” is said to occur at “the margins,” where “the riffle of leafy detail” seems more “animate” than the “denatured” river.
In the prose-poem’s final paragraph, Gander concentrates on the effect on the viewer of what he had termed “a convulsion in seeing’s habit” in the first sentence:
And while we absorb this disturbance in a merely apparent
repose, our stomach rolls—as when an elevator begins to descend.
We detect in the blurred trees a peristaltic contraction. We feel
the landscape giving birth to our vision. (39)
In the struggle between “apparent repose” and “disturbance,” the effects that the photographer has created might be considered representations of natural processes or tropes that displace those processes by gesturing toward a mystical event—or what the closure of the haunting “Ghost Sonata” characterizes as “the border between a tangible and an intangible world” (43). In either case, the effects are assumed to induce a visceral reaction in the viewers while “we” interpret (“detect”), and yet it is said to be “our vision” to which “the landscape,” the translation and transformation of the landscape seen by Mann, is “giving birth.” Just as a mother gives birth to a child but does not own (even if she strongly influences) the latter’s subsequent experience, the photographer’s translation is the “mother” of and primary influence on a visionary experience that “we” can claim as our possession. Another way to put this is that the translation influences its audience, which then has the opportunity to translate the translation—in Gander’s case, through ekphrasis that is replete with figurative language, a medium that diverges from the parent “text.” And doesn’t every translation differ from its “original” (and thus entail its own “vision”) because the translator’s work is inevitably colored by his/her experiences that differ from those of the one whose art is translated?
“Science & Steepleflower,” another prose-poem in the series, also utilizes the term “vision” in relation to the photo’s audience. Science & Steepleflower, a 1999 collection of poems by Gander, features the apposite landscape photo by Mann on the cover. Here is the first of two paragraphs:
The temperate, velvet sheen on the water is not applied, but
constitutive. Just the stream utters light. The woods are hushed.
The vagueness of a near shoreline endows the water with a
transfigured, opalescent lour. We see the reflection of trees, partly
erased in splotches, as through a delicate mist. Our eyes following
the stream until shadows pinch off the flow of our gaze. (47)
Perhaps the opening sentence differentiates what a painter does from the fact that a photographer, despite her ability to use techniques to undo “seeing’s habit,” must work with a given scene and does not create it ex nihilo. And yet the adjective “constitutive” modifying “velvet sheen” may instead signify an assertion that the quality of this representation of light is fundamental to the picture; it is not merely a choice of “application” by some viewers as a component of their interpretations that others can ignore. Of course, the assertion is itself a rhetorical gesture presenting an interpretation that cannot be proven. That “the stream” is the lightest part of the composition would receive intersubjective assent from most viewers, but the poet’s use of the personification of “utterance,” in contrast with the silenced “woods,” implicitly places value in that detail. Speech is aligned conceptually with light, and silence with darkness. Since these four terms have longstanding spiritual connotations, the description of the scene can be read as investing it with the power of revelation, transcendence of the ordinary, as the adjective “transfigured” in the next sentence suggests. “Vagueness” calls the customary boundaries that organize “reality” into question, and “water” seems to overwhelm solidity. While utterance could be beatific, the noun “lour” indicate the threatening aspect of potentially sublime speech, and “shadows” are not airy and insubstantial but are capable of psychologically “pinching” the audience’s effort to achieve coherent vision. On one hand, the impression of “mist” is “delicate,” and on the other, the terms of simile (“as through”) cast doubt on the comparison while it is being drawn. “Splotches” perform “erasure” that does violence to “the flow” of perception that may also involve a search for psychological or spiritual illumination.
As a translator of the photo which itself is both a translation and impediment to translatability, Gander’s speaker in “Science & Steepleflower” keeps opposite states and qualities in play, and, as the second paragraph begins, he identifies uncertainty as a lure for the viewers: “Because the realm is uncertain, it prompts us” (47). However, uncertainty is posited as a temporary stage in translation that is encompassed by what the speaker starts to put forth as a definitive interpretation: “The shaggy forest is dim, private, oneiric. And the circular frame of the image closes inward.” The sylvan and aquatic scene is read as an emblem of individual interiority, the “oneiric” realm of the unconscious where dark encircles and perhaps restricts light. Gander goes so far in underscoring the applicability of a particular double interpretation as to have his speaker declare its tropological foundation and to identify what it signifies: “Called vignetting, this girdling dark is a metaphor, and it has two meanings.” For some photographers, “vignetting” is a technical problem to be eliminated by technical means, but in the photo in question, the “girdle” fits the poet’s sense of Mann’s deployment of polarities. The prose-poem concludes with an articulation of the “two meanings” in relation to the audience’s reception:
It signals the onset of our blink, and as such, can be
read as the sign of the evanescence of the image that, even in the act
of preservation, must be relinquished. However, it is equally
indicative of the incipient vision opening to us from the other side
of consciousness, the muscular curtain drawing back from the
beginning of dream. (47)
Just as the camera blinks, we viewers do. Typically regarded as a means to make a moment in time eternal, the photo here is regarded as a demystification of such an eternalizing gesture. What the image “permanently” represents is the moment’s coming and going, the movement from emergence—for example, the appearance of “opalescent” light on water—to disappearance. The interpretation of the other “metaphor,” which traces a motion from absence to presence without (necessarily) returning to absence, cannot provide a translation into literalness but is itself supplemented by another metaphor, the exposure of illuminating “vision” gained from the “drawing back” of a formidable barrier, the “curtain” which separates “consciousness” from the spiritual or psychological riches of the unconscious. Whereas the first meaning teaches a general lesson of transience with acute immediacy, the second one indicates that the viewers—addressed collectively, with the speaker included, as earlier in the text—can utilize their reaction to an image external to themselves to gain contact with what is most interior to them, fundamental, “visionary” elements of their dream-states. This makes sense because the unconscious must make transformative use of materials that the subject encounters in the world to “weave” its “text.” Gander wishes “us” to see how “we” may attempt to translate the most hidden parts of ourselves to ourselves. But the “realm” referred to earlier—like the connection between the juxtaposition in the prose-poem’s title and the play of oppositions in the paragraphs that follow it—remains “uncertain,” because the poet’s layered translation of Mann’s image ends by pointing to “the other side of consciousness” without supposing that he can supply a “line-by-line” translation of even his own text.
Javier: language travel’s thrills and perils
In a review of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005), Paolo Javier’s second book, Yago Cura calls Javier “a brazen polyglot” who “solders English to Tagalog, and Tagalog to Spanish with a manic acetylene torch” in the creation of “an American, mongrel, poetry” that manifests “a dialect-identity” (24). According to Cura, this “identity” is that of “a Filipino poet educated and acculturated in America”—I note, too, that Javier has lived and studied in Canada, Egypt, and the U.S.— “but supremely wary of America’s track-record with Colonialism….” In the middle of “Crescendo Subic Destitute Sonnet,” Javier places a string of sixteen Filipino words between “Porgy & Bess,” that “cute” caricature of African-Americans, and “McKinley” (26), the U.S. President who authorized the annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Unable to piece together a decent translation of “patikman yung puti ng kaunting ugaling kayumanggi/ at paparoom siya ng madali, pati na rin si” from an online Tagalog/English dictionary, due to my ignorance about Tagalog syntax and idioms, I fortunately obtained a translation from the author himself: “Let the white taste a little bit of the brown and he/she will frequent that place immediately, and also” McKinley. Thus, the usual paternalistic justifications for colonial rule are unmasked as morally “destitute,” stereotypical mistranslations of erotic and other sensual fantasies, but only for those readers who either know Tagalog or have access to the assistance of someone who does.
“English Is an Occupation,” the title of a poem in 60 lv bo(e)mbs, embodies a metaphor performing a metonymic linkage between the imposition of the English language on Filipinos during the nearly half-century U.S. occupation ( resulting in the devaluation of Tagalog and other local languages) and the occupation itself. However, confirming Cura’s notion of “mongrel identity,” it also reflects the job of an English teacher or professor and of the “polyglot” poet writing in English: “persevere counter ardor mystic parables/ today Paolo occupies you, today Paolo occupies you” (7). In this poem and in the book as a whole, density of allusions and the syntactically unpredictable juxtaposition of fragmentary utterances make the critic’s “occupation” of “translation” challenging, as a brief passage indicates:
you lasso Miro’s loneliness parabolas
mask chimera’s own toys
venture capital enemy Villa dollar economy lusty Hydras
English trippin’ on acid poor lipreads hummed
Erase tula culpable due East judged the Angry Oriental . (6)
The poet’s language said to “lasso” (translate) the “loneliness” of modernist master Joan Miro, long exiled from his native Spain due to the repressive Franco regime, and this calls attention to the fact that Miro himself created a great many “lasso” lines (“parabolas”) on the brooding fields of his quasi-abstract canvases. But the second line is more elusive: what are the fiction-generating constructs (“toys”) of an already insubstantial fiction (“chimera”), and is the chimera a “mask” or does the “you” perform the action of “masking” this fiction? Repeated references in the book, which can be conceived as a single long poem of 60 sections, to “Villa” suggest the Filipino-American poet José Garcia Villa, who was championed by modernists like William Carlos Williams, later largely ignored, and finally, “re-discovered” by Filipino poets in recent decades, and also the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and the celebrated Filipino world flyweight boxing champion who assumed the name “Pancho Villa.”
Surely, the Mexican Pancho Villa was an avowed “enemy” to “venture capital” and the “lusty Hydra” monsters of early twentieth century “dollar economy,” but how the other two Villas are interpreted as fitting such an “enemy” status is open to much speculation. Perhaps the pride of Filipinos in their boxing champion, whose name was associated with rebellion against oppressors, was countered by the kind of racist response to alien “primitives” that American fans heaped on African-American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. The poet Villa had an “outsider” (not “enemy”) status in the Philippines, since his experimental sensibility did not make him seem to represent Filipino culture, and the U.S. In that sense, he is excluded from the “dollar economy’s” ordinary commerce. Not confirming ordinary forms of communication, he is a model for Filipino poets like Javier who seek to “occupy” their “borrowed tongue” in ways that subvert normative colonial and postcolonial uses. Innovative poets deploy such techniques as homophonic translation, Oulipian methods, and their own procedures to confect “English” that some may deride as “trippin’ on acid” but whose defamiliarizing gestures combat such damning, damnable, oppression-justifying stereotypes as “the Angry Oriental,” as well as recent tendencies of “the East” to accede to manipulation to “accommodate mass [Western] culture” (6).
Yago Cura asserts that “if you speak more than one language you understand that each language in your head has a different brain”; he regards the work in 60 lv bo(e)mbs as “acts of translation that are successful failures—a ping-pong-mediation between the brain of the source language and the brain of the projected language. It is only natural that some of these lingual algorithms of English, Tagalog, and Spanish get lost in the translation.” I believe that the realization of areas of untranslatability in a work of art can be a “successful failure” that foregrounds perception of important differences that should not be subsumed, but respected. Conversely, such “failure” shows how false translation, a practice that homogenizes indiscriminately, tends to promote colonization or neo-colonization. In the last line of the passage from “English Is an Occupation” cited above, “tula” is the Tagalog word for poetry, and the phrase “erase tula culpable due East” implies both a critique of imperialist (“Orientalist”) poetry that travels “East” to indict Asian culture and a valorization of “tula” that “erases” false culpability.
When Javier’s third book, The Feeling Is Actual (2011), appeared, he was in an early stage of serving a three-year stint as Poet Laureate of his current home borough, Queens, New York, one of the U.S.’s most ethnically and racially diverse areas. Much of The Feeling Is Actual articulates diverse aspects of cultural translation. The prose-poem/pseudo-TV special segment “Pinoy Signs” is a “a ‘reading tour’” of “word play” in English and, to some degree, in Filipino languages, especially “with retailers and various businesses favoring a play on names of Western establishments and celebrities (Americans, in particular; movie stars and entertainment personalities, especially)” (27). Javier’s humorous and serious presentation of Pinoy translation of the most recent colonial power’s cultural idioms into local contexts spotlights Filipinos’ linguistic resourcefulness and flexibility, akin to poetry, whether in the interest of commerce or emotional survival through “a good sense of humor” (31), and the extent to which the U.S. continues to practice cultural colonialism far too successfully.
The intricate, thoroughly allusive collage-field of “Heart as Arena” demonstrates how Haitian-American graffiti/ fine artist Jean-Michel Basquiat not only engages with the history of anti-black racism in the U.S. but with the polyglot community in New York City’s lower East side in the seventies and eighties, a scene in which the possibilities and failures of translation can become acutely evident. Further, the poem critiques mainstream (mis)translations of Basquiat’s deployment of cultural signifiers. Also, the poetic play “Wolfgang Amadeus Bigfoot” allows its audience to see how conservative conspiracy theorists who are believers in the existence of Bigfoot translate both the “otherness” of Bigfoot and of their liberal “opponents” to themselves and permits Javier to translate the psychological and ideological traits of these characters to those who might find them unfathomable or absurdly “alien.”
The most direct analysis of cultural translation in The Feeling Is Actual appears in a poem bearing a title that repeats ([mis]translates?) the book’s title—with a difference. The lack of apostrophe in the second word of “Feeling Its Actual” could be an error of omission indicating “feeling that it is actual,” with the pronoun “it” suggesting a host of referents, or it might also signify omission of punctuation between the first two words: “feeling—it’s actual,” a valorization of emotion as authentic. But “its” might take a possessive form rather than being a contraction of a subject and copular verb; thus, the omission is at the end, the sentence lacking an object that should be attached to the adjective “actual,” or else the adjective may be intended to have a noun’s power: the process of feeling a situation’s actuality. Though people often believe that a translation should deliver the “actual” “feeling” possessed by or within a speaking subject, differences between languages pose obstacles to such an aim, as the unnamed female speaker of “Feeling Its Actual” informs us in an English that is not, apparently, native to her:
why did i always
use the wrong words
should be other words
that are more suitable
language is quite strange
and make me so confused
i often cannot understand
what they say. (136)
While the immigrant speaker expresses the difficulty that she faces in negotiating with a new environment via a new tongue in a way that seems to reflect both frustration and some self-reproach for her “errors,” she also suggests in the third line (lacking “there”) that the new language has lamentable limitations. The adjective “suitable” frames English as a wardrobe that could be more versatile. But she muses that perhaps all languages have built-in limitations that can make them incommensurable with one another and engender mistranslation and confusion for the bilingual subject. On the other hand, if the speaker has the advantage of living in a polyglot area like Javier’s Queens, she might hear numerous languages on the street on any given day and, thus, appreciate such polyphony: “i can also listen to the/ tone of the foreign language/ knowing that only this kind of language express such/ unique images and life” (136). Untranslatability can be a chance to celebrate multiplicity.
Major aspects of the speaker’s expression of emotion and cognition in “Feeling Its Actual” are easily understandable—for example, the desire to experience comfort and to withdraw from the consistent stress and frustration of translating from her own language to communicate in the new one and the reverse to receive others’ communications. Education is seen as numbing repetition, not as an opportunity for advancement: “i don’t want to go to school/ going to school feels like carding/ but mother wont help me” (137). However, moments of salient complexity occur when Javier uses the speaker’s alleged lack of control over idiomatic English to point out possibilities for the enrichment of signification. For example, the subject/verb disagreement involving “language” and “make” in the passage above suggests an area in which English grammar behaves arbitrarily; perhaps the parent language, unknown to us, might not. This arbitrary quality is intensified by the coordinating conjunction “and,” which often reflects a plural subject, but in this case, a plural verb. “Language” is actually the co-presence of two (or more) languages in the speaker’s mind; conceptually, it is both a singular and plural subject at once, making for a “strangeness” that produces “confusion” about the verb ending. Coming directly after a correct usage of the same verb, another example of a third-person singular subject/verb disagreement is equally illuminating:
i want to hide in a place
that makes me comfortable
this sofa feels like
the peafowls feathers
very comfortable
make me feel ecstatic. (136)
On the one hand, the alleged error of “make” in the last line might instead be a command indicating the speaker’s demand for comfort (that is not separated by a semi-colon, dash, or period). On the other hand, if we judge the verb error as operative, “ecstatic” emotion is the result of the speaker’s strong association between the sensation of her current sofa and a cherished memory from her native land (“peafowls feathers”) that permits her imagination to engineer a return home, at least momentarily. In the last part of the next strophe, a verb form error, followed by the problematic construal of a preposition, rings changes on the uses of the binaries imagination/reality and past/present:
in fact i just need to imagine
what i want or fancy what
will be happened
if i don’t want something
to happen, i go away
i miss my home too
time can stop in anytime
for the weather is cold
all day long (136)
Although the non-standard verb combination, “will be happened,” indicates that the desired future—at least in “fancy”—is a repetition of the past, it is balanced by the speaker’s expression of her homesickness and mention of the emotionally and physically “cold” “weather” of her new environment. “Going away” signifies ignoring an unpleasant current reality or departing from a situation (to the extent that she can); ironically, it reiterates her family’s act of leaving their homeland. Next, the placement of the little preposition “in” has a significant impact: “time can” enter (“stop in”) to disrupt the eternal present/presence of nostalgic reverie “anytime” (doubling the reference to temporality in a single line), or it can cease (“stop”) at any point to be itself—that is, sudden death ends life, even if the implication of death is itself a figure for exile as the cessation of a life in which happiness is possible. Therefore, depending on how the preposition is read or judged to be irrelevant, “time” is either a helpful or a threatening entity in desire’s struggle against whatever would negate it. In the next strophe, the line is repeated; it follows the statement, “time wont stop just for you” (137), which tends to support the idea that one cannot live in a marvelous eternal present.
In this monologue, the reader can find an alternation between moments of resignation about difficult reality—“I can be this way concedingly” (137)—and determination to fulfill wishes or aims. Having the makeshift adverb “concedingly” modify the verb “can be” is not saying, “I can concede” that my reality is disappointing; it suggests that the speaker chooses to behave provisionally in response to a particular context rather than to succumb permanently to a limiting pessimism. Often figured as a resource, nostalgic return (via sensory imagination) to the “missed” “home” is also precariously situated, as in a passage that evokes the repetitions of one of Javier’s major influences, Gertrude Stein:
memories—thats what i forget
i remember happy things
if the happy things
are what i remember
is that means i am sad
when i forget?
its not that i don’t remember
i love to remember happy things
besides that I don’t know
i cant remember a lot of things
id like to remember more
id like to know . (139)
The first line above seems contradictory unless one assumes that the speaker is worried about having forgotten what she previously remembered. Because of the absence of periods, the third and fourth lines can be read as a dependent clause attached to either the independent clause in the second line or the linked interrogative clauses in the fifth and sixth. If the former linkage is operative, the conjunction “if” in the third line suggests that she forgets whether what she thinks are “happy” memories actually happened—or are “happy” fantasies, illusions about the past that serve her psychological needs and mask humdrum or negative aspects of past experiences. However, if the latter connection applies, then the speaker is wondering whether forgetting memories—in addition to not being conscious of sad things—is proof of her sadness, due to her inability to access positive nostalgia. In other words, she asks whether the present’s harshness is sometimes strong enough to blunt precious memories’ power. It is important, though, to ask whether the replacement of the standard “does” by “is” in the interrogative verb combination produces other possibilities of signification that further complicate the string of utterances. In the standard form, forgetting is performed as an action with effects involving meaning, such as “sadness” as a process, whereas the use of the copular verb in the “error” makes forgetting into a state of being fully associated with sadness as a state of being. (It might be going too far to claim that “means” is a noun, and therefore, the line is a truncation of “Is that a means to show that I am sad?”)
In general, the tussle of interpretations of this passage marks the speaker’s difficulty in translating her own experience of what can be called exile to herself—let alone others. She is unsure whether to view her identity (including happiness and sadness) in essentialist terms (being) or in terms of an interplay of influences, emotions, motivations, and actions (be-ing) without an a priori origin or telos. “Id like to know,” she asserts, but knowing might entail the uncomfortable discovery that she has repressed unhappy components of her pre-exilic life. If positive nostalgia (“so i was a house princess/ and especially my dad was a king/ to me and my mom was a queen” [140]) and outright fantasy (“egg is an old lady/ their children is her stick/ and this blue lamp/ thats my auntie” [139]) strengthen such repression, the immigrant subject may be vulnerable to a damaging return of the repressed in other forms, and lack of accurate, balanced knowledge of the complexity of her early history will not serve her well in efforts to improve her current circumstances.
While many poets are intent on combating xenophobia in the U.S. by clearly representing immigrants’ dignity, integrity, persistence, resourcefulness, and intelligence in the face of egregious discrimination, Javier in “Feeling Its Actual,” though also investing his speaker with positive qualities, battles such ethnocentrism by foregrounding the obstacles of translation for all concerned. He elicits empathy (not pity) for the immigrant subject’s need to engage in intricate and constant internal and external negotiation, as well as respect for an other’s subjectivity that can only be gradually, partially, and imperfectly known (just as one can never finish the process of knowing oneself), and he gives readers cause to celebrate the polysemy and sonic intricacies of language. When Javier calls attention to how small changes in syntax engender confusion that can only be resolved by appeal to arbitrary idiomatic conventions, there can be pleasure and humor in an understanding of the mischief created: “i always cant be clear/ about all these things” (139). For a native English speaker, the fact that the adverb comes before the verb makes the immigrant speaker say that she never achieves clarity, even as common sense tells us that she is admitting that clarity is possible but does not happen every time (“can’t always”). But what logic justifies the native speaker’s feeling that “always can’t” sounds wrong, whereas “I can never be clear” is appropriate?
Neither positive stereotypes nor pietisms about common humanity are presented as useful alternatives to negative stereotyping. Late in the poem, the speaker flirts with the concept, “We’re all the same,” then disrupts the authority of a homogenizing “mirror” as translation becomes an issue: “if we face the mirror/ would become the same person/ its something about the light/ but i don’t know what hes saying/ hes only got one eye” (139). In the second line, the deletion of the independent clause’s subject (the “we” that does not get reiterated but disappears) felicitously enacts the kind of non-differentiation of which the clause speaks.
The closing lines of “Feeling Its Actual” simultaneously represent the immigrant’s admirable striving and continue to serve Javier’s defamiliarizing aims. The speaker has just been describing her indebtedness to her mother:
i was following her footsteps
and i am too determined
to make my way alone
i was not a great cook but
i have a great eyes for details. (140)
‘Your pillow is outside itself.’ (141)
Noteworthy for its arbitrariness, omission or inclusion of the preposition “in” makes little difference to the idea of the speaker acknowledging her mother’s influence. The substitution of “too” for the expected “very” in the expression of intense determination can be understood as a positive thing that, in some contexts, may be viewed negatively: xenophobes will find her overly determined to take work that they believe “belongs” to native citizens, while others might say that the barriers to opportunity make her willpower futile—hence excessive—and lastly, her call for self-reliance in the next line may be deemed flawed in ignoring the necessity of interdependence in a difficult environment.
The misuse of the indefinite article in the strophe’s last line follows a particular logic: “eyes” are plural but work together as a single entity; “an eye for detail,” except in cases like that of the monocular man who had stared at the speaker, is an idiom that implies the plural within the singular. The speaker here preserves both components, just as she represent individual and collective impulses in the strophe as a whole. The poem’s final line, a terse coda, is placed on a new page to underscore the speaker’s double consciousness. A source of comfort in tough circumstances, the “pillow” of nostalgia is “inside out,” exposed to effects of present challenges and the difficulties of accessing memory. Among other things, the translator seeks comfort but “always can’t” or “can’t always” get comfortable, and her effort at translation is sometimes unhappily or happily unsuccessful.
Miller: dialogue, translatability, and critique
In several long, meandering, conversational, but intellectual dense poems published between 1992 and the present, Stephen Paul Miller has consistently done three things. First, as in his 1999 book of cultural criticism, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, he has developed analogies—one might call them points of translation—among various realms such as visual art, cinema, literature, philosophy, science, computer science, and politics. “Row” (2002), for example, weaves together Bob Dylan’s music, Edwin Black’s linkage of IBM and the Shoah, Alan Turing’s use of computer logic to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code and enable the Allies to win World War II, Turing’s sexuality in relation to his epistemological stance, the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, the findings of Logical Positivists, including “Gottlob Frege’s great mathematical achievement” (The Bee Flies in May 29) and, oddly, his musings on Jewish identity, the significance of the term “concentration camp,” and the social meanings of American suburbs. Several of these motifs are reworked in “’The Hustle’ and Its Liquid Totems of Holocaust, Suburb, and Computer” (2005), which includes an elaborate analysis of a popular disco song: “’The Hustle’ reverses/ the post-World War II era totemic order, starting/ with a suburban synthesis being undone” (Skinny Eighth Avenue 71)
Secondly, often comparing and contrasting events in different historical periods, Miller has launched vigorous, sometimes quasi-scholarly and sometimes sarcastic critiques of right-wing Republican attitudes and praxis regarding war, economics, and other features of political life, as well as Democratic tendencies to drift rightward. In the middle of “I’m Trying to Get My Phony Baloney Ideas about Metamodernism into a Poem” (2005), the poet speculates on how and why the salubrious emphasis on social welfare in the New Deal is challenged and eventually dislodged by “the Reagan/ Revolution,” which “begins when so few/ support/ New Deal-style/ employment programs/ during economic slumps/ of the mid- and late seventies” (Skinny Eighth Avenue 7-8). Through an allusion, he compares the gutting of FDR’s vision of equality—as well as that of the counterculture during the sixties—to Hitler’s way of dealing with his “Jewish problem”: “… after Nixon, the final/ budget and economic/ solution/ is cutting social/ spending,/ that mind-set prevailing under Ford/ and Carter”(8). The specificity of Miller’s criticism of the New Deal’s opponents is sharpened and extended in “Fort Dad” (2009), to which I will turn at the end of this analysis of Miller’s work.
Thirdly, Miller in his long poems explicitly or implicitly calls for thoroughly democratic inclusiveness, unlimited dialogue among all stakeholders, and a sense of community which differences cannot splinter. This imperative is most directly and frequently articulated in Miller’s first full-length collection, which comprises a long, skinny, stanzaless poem entitled Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (1992): “Whitman/ said that/ since we’d/ taken/ democracy/ this far/ we might/ as well/ let it go/ all the/ way” (23), and by “all the/ way,” the poet means an “open/ forum/ structure—/ something/ like/ classical/ democracy” (36) in which “power” is “exercised/ in such a/ way that/ excludes/ no one” (38). Miller affirms the use of “power” by individuals and groups that manifests empathy and openness in the service of understanding a perspective that is very different from one’s own, and he goes farther by suggesting that, not only relinquishing the authority to impose a particular program on others but coming closer to their perspective after scrutinizing it can be a truly powerful, generative gesture:
I
think that
seeing the
point of
view of
all manner
of enemy--
artistic,
political,
or
whatever--
and even
qualifying
oneself in
an
opponent’s
light is a
political
action
because it
stresses a
different
sense of
power. (42-3)
In “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century Poetry (2001), which takes the first part of its title from the passage above, I perform a lengthy close reading of this poem that addresses its literary and historical contexts, yet I do not manage to consider the possible role of translation and translatability in Miller’s statements about dialogue. Does what he regards as worthwhile not require a deliberate act of translation? If one can “see” the other’s “point of/ view” in an unmediated way, then translation is not necessary, but aren’t different conceptual and psychological “languages” often at work in such exchanges? Without efforts at translation, isn’t the co-presence of two monologues more likely than a dialogue? Can self-qualification occur without the submission of aspects of one’s own ideas to the possibility of undergoing translation that may entail some degree of transformation, or the translation of one’s concepts into a “language” that shows respect for and understanding of one’s opponent?
As noted at the beginning of this discussion, three features can be found in most of Miller’s long poems of the last two decades, and the middle one, critique, might well stand in the way of the realization of open dialogue and translatability. It is important to ponder whether the poet sufficiently presents opportunities for effective mutual translation or whether a fundamental untranslatability (and hence, barrier to dialogue) presides over his discourse and its implications for political transactions. There are various aspects of political critique in Art Is Boring, all of which I cover fully in “A Different Sense of Power” and will not rehash in detail here, but the most significant is the negative evaluation of President George Bush, Sr.’s buildup to the first Iraq War (the Gulf War), his handling of the conflict, his response to criticism, before and after the conflict, of the U.S.’s waging of the war, and his placing of restrictions on media coverage, especially in light of what dissenting journalists later discovered about what actually happened.
Miller himself presents some doubt in Art Is Boring about whether he is translating the Bush administration’s justification for the Gulf War into language to which the poet and others who share his critical attitude can be open. He asks: “how can I/ deny it,… the/ adversarial/ stance and/ position/ of this/ poem?/ Isn’t my/ rhetoric a/ little/ rigid?” (67). In fact, while it includes a letter from a friend, the poet Sparrow, that criticizes the Miller’s position on another topic and presents a thorough response, the poem offers no direct quotation or substantial paraphrase from the arguments of President Bush other members of his administration, or other supporters. The closest Miller comes to a presentation of the Bush viewpoint is in rhetorical questions implicitly denouncing the administration’s refusal to engage in prolonged negotiation with Saddam Hussein because it would signify “appeasement.” His ideas are eerily similar to what could be said of Bush’s son’s dealings with Saddam Hussein at the outset of the second Iraq War, a decade after Art Is Boring appeared: “… why should/ instituting/ a more/ effectively/ open mode/ of/ communication/ be/ tantamount/ to/ appeasing/ anyone, no/ matter/ what that/ person’s/ crimes or/ supposedly/ imminent/ threats?” (45). Miller does not explore Bush’s specific notions of what the “threats” are, why they are considered “imminent,” and why the President believes that dialogue would not only fail but would lead to more destruction. Instead, he throws in additional rhetorical questions to show that the refusal of dialogue on Bush’s part creates the opportunity for Hussein to react more emotionally and recklessly and, thus, to pose greater danger to the U.S., his own people, and the world: “Who ever/ tried/ bullying/ anyone/ into/ getting/ off a/ ledge or/ putting/ down a/ loaded/ gun? When/ shouldn’t/ there be a/ peace/ conference?” (45-6). A few pages later, anticipating Barack Obama’s analysis of foreign policy during the 2008 Presidential campaign, Miller asks, “With a/ more open/ and/ ‘human-rights’-/ oriented/ pre-Reagan-/ post-Nixon/ attitude,/ how could/ our/ national/ security/ have been/ threatened/ to the perhaps/ considerable/ extent/ that/ Hussein/ may have/ indeed/ threatened/ it?” (49-50).
I believe that results of the last two decades of U.S./Iraq entanglement fully confirm the implications in Miller’s critique. However, even if he proves to be astute at prophecy, his concepts about open dialogue lose some rhetorical force because he is not putting them into play in his encounter with the Bush administration in Art Is Boring. Whether he translates his own perspective into a language that Gulf War supporters can understand is difficult for me to assess, but his translations of the opposing views are too limited—if not quite as limited at his opponents’ caricatures of the anti-war faction’s views. Therefore, the poem succeeds as a powerful critique of particular instances of the refusal of open dialogue and consequences of that refusal, but it does not serve as an example of such openness. (This is a point that I did not recognize in the interpretation of the text that I wrote more than ten years ago.) If the poet sees his work as part of a “peace conference,” then he does not motivate the opposite party in the conference to “qualify [themselves] in [his] light” by initiating such a gesture.
To chide Miller for this “failure” seems pointless. First, it is extremely difficult for someone to practice a great deal of openness to a perspective that seems so wrong to her/him. At least he represents his opponents’ views with reasonable accurately, if briefly, and he seldom “shouts” at them. Secondly, though I have been doing so throughout this analysis, we cannot assume that Miller is the “I” in the poem who advocates empathic translation of the other’s view in a dialogic process without awareness of attendant ironies. He may intend to stage a situation that demonstrates the immense difficulty or impossibility of the realization of this stated ideal, which is nevertheless desirable to attempt to actualize, and he sheds light on the difficulties of translation. Indeed, when Miller/the speaker declares, “Not that/ simply/ talking is/ magical/ but the/ context in/ which we/ talk can/ be because/ all/ contexts/ are bound/ to be/ unguarded/ and/ somewhat/ fertile” (54), the reader can see how both translation effecting open dialogue and the impasse of untranslatability may work. Regarding this passage, in “A Different Sense of Power,” I note that the “wordplay with ‘bound’ (in relation to ‘unguarded’) wittily identifies the absence of binding or constraining features on contexts as a barrier to the fixing of determinate meaning,” and this marks a situation of “plural signification” in which conversation can either reveal “interesting productive differences” that “serve to weaken the unfortunate grip of a fixed ideology on an individual” and increase his/her receptivity to “divergent perspectives, or it can merely feed “a quest for dominance” (178).
Miller’s “Fort Dad,” which appeared in a book of the same name during the autumn of Barack Obama’s first year in the White House, goes slightly farther than Art Is Boring in the direction of an open dialogue with conservative Republicans. The poem weaves in and out of such topics as parenthood, the Oedipal Complex, the Civil War, the TV sit-com Mr. Ed, Nazism and Alan Turing’s computer innovations and their historical implications (as in two aforementioned earlier long poems), the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, and Polish mathematician Jan Lukasiewicz’s challenge to Aristotle. For the purposes of this discussion, I will concentrate on his re-interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that reflects not only on subsequent history but on the polarization—immediately evident to Miller in the first half of 2009—between the aims of President Obama, inheritor of the Great Recession, and those of the Congressional Republicans.
Beginning the poem with a harsh critique of conservative Republican ideology, Miller quotes his young son: “‘Republicans don’t evolve,’ Noah observes…” (Fort Dad 35), then proceeds in the poem to give examples of what he perceives as GOP politicians’ lack of adaptability to economic crises from the Great Depression to the present. Within a few pages, he directly supports his son’s thesis: “The right tends to// hold onto everything. No matter what./ They don’t evolve./ It’s part of being the privileged right, or,// as FDR put it, “economic royalists,”/ knee deep in the/ always already and pushing us on” (40). The reference to the well-known pair of adverbs in the last line is not a deflation of the concepts of various philosophers like Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida who used the phrase; it is a jibe at the idea that the primacy of untrammeled capitalism, along with the entitlement of the privileged class, is beyond question, an inevitability established in advance by history. Born to such privilege, FDR was subject to physical adversity that made him able to translate the sufferings of most Americans during the Depression into his own idiom in a way that others of his class could not. But, more importantly, Miller asserts that, unlike them, he believed that an economic plan involving unprecedented state-sponsored social welfare programs did not entail “communism” but the only way to preserve the capitalist way of life during this time of crisis:
FDR’s disability cuts
him off from what’s at stake for his class,
pushing him to aspire to being an Oprah nudging all parties
to discuss
codified economic solutions
and he expects a Groton medal for upholding the status quo ‘n
saving the rich
‘n their ways--his ways too after all.
But the right’s wrath amazes him.
As soon as he saved
them, they went back to their
addiction. (41)
In an article published during the 2008 primary season that notes Democratic candidates’ failure to invoke the New Deal, Marxist historian Howard Zinn reiterates the point in his earlier work that “the innovations of the New Deal were fueled by the militant demands for change that swept the country as FDR began his presidency: the tenants' groups; the Unemployed Councils; the millions on strike on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the South; the disruptive actions of desperate people seeking food, housing, jobs--the turmoil threatening the foundations of American capitalism.” Implying that Miller’s use of the phrase “upholding the status quo” above is justified, Zinn calls “the New Deal… tentative, cautious, bold enough to shake the pillars of the system but not to replace them.”
Miller represents wealthy conservatives of the thirties as “addicts,” compulsively clinging to their “always already,” ridiculously linking Roosevelt with the “Nazis,” who also “back social safety nets,” and basing their views on extremely irrational fears—“The right, like the fisherman’s wife,/ is insecure and nothing’s enough” (41)—at the same time as they underestimate the intensity and broad spectrum of social unrest in the early days of the Depression to which Zinn refers: “Our rich don’t thank Roosevelt—/ they don’t fear the revolution he averts” (45). Today’s “Oprah,” whose rise to economic success has not branded her a class traitor, has greater success in “nudging all parties” than FDR did, though his class’s fierce opposition to him in the 1936 election and “major polls predict[ing] Republican victory” (44) were unable to avert his landslide triumph over GOP standard-bearer Alf Landon.
None of these characterizations by Miller (or, if my last paragraph on Art Is Boring seems to dictate, his representative Democratic “I”) of how “‘Republicans don’t evolve’” seem likely to show sufficient empathy or respect needed to encourage descendants of thirties Republicans to enter into a sincere dialogue with Democrats and thus have a chance of realizing the potential for accord in the Obama era. However, in the development of his advocacy for New Deal policies in “Fort Dad,” it is evident that Miller is not demanding that rich right-wingers accept an ethical imperative for the transformation of economic relations; he is performing some translation of the basis for his advocacy into terms of self-interest that wealthy Republicans can recognize. At different points in the poem, Miller’s unjustified left margins alternately slant rightward, then leftward—very gradually:
The beauty part’s
the most feared totem--
dreaded welfare,
what trickles thru
driving the economy. We prosper
3 post-Frankie D
decades by upping the poor’s
purchasing power thru
fair taxes, union protections, utility
and financial regulation,
social security and other nets,
some institutionalized shame
and hesitance to take way-super profits,
good faith crazy gluing into place
FDR’s even handed
WW II wage/price controls, prototypes
until the 70s and 80s. Purchasing power impels investment ‘n
production, N-O-T
the other way around. (47)
Whereas in the eighties Reagan supports the “trickle down theory” of supply side economics and slashes social programs, ending the long run of New Deal “prototypes,” Miller attaches “dreaded welfare” to a “trickle thru” theory, a lateral flow in which various factors cited above all synergistically contribute to economic health in the post-Depression U.S. (He compares the New Deal’s intricate array of programs with the use of “input and output/ creating feedback/ with other operations” [58] in Turing and others’ computer science advances at the time.) Miller’s translation for the benefit of right-wingers does not praise the New Deal result of “upping the poor’s// purchasing power” as a “redistribution of wealth” or equalizing measure and instead stresses its healthful impact on the economy—and therefore, on the long-term portfolios of the privileged. Miller would wish to persuade conservatives that “greed”—short-term “way-super” profitability for a small cadre of elites that ignores the overall social impact—eventually causes the elites’ loss of wealth and power: “Why is avoiding greed by sharing/ with the poor NOT the answer?.... Franklin knows the/ rich investing and over-investing/ without matching consumption// equals depression—same as now/ though now people can’t spend/ cuz they can’t borrow” (48).
“Fort Dad,” however, is not the record of a speaker seeking dialogue with a single audience, but two or more. This impedes the poet’s ability to perform consistently efficacious “translations” for his opponents. Frequently, in his strong critique of the anti-New Dealers, “rich right crybabies” who “won’t negotiate a thing” and to whom Roosevelt declares, “’I welcome your hatred’” (60), he tries to goad centrist Democrats (and perhaps moderate Republicans) to challenge their sense that they must adapt to the nation’s rightward turn and, instead, muster the guts to embrace a more liberal agenda. Therefore, he sometimes does not stress what Zinn considers the New Deal’s preservation of capitalism but its progressive character. Since the New Deal dislodges laissez faire economics, management of “the economy/ to keep the status quo” is only the first of Roosevelt’s three stages, as Miller points out late in the poem: “Second, he/ goes/ after the status quo.// Third, he goes/ after the status quo BY/ managing the economy thru// progressive taxation/ and wage-price control and regulation during/ the war” (61).
It would be nearly impossible for the poet to maintain a lyrical and colloquial flow if he were to examine FDR’s “progressive taxation” in the detail that “Paul Krugman’s 2006 The Conscience of a Liberal” (Fort Dad 59) supplies, and if so, the “rich right” and Tea Partiers would be even more resistant to Miller’s perspective. According to Krugman, “the top income tax rate” in the 1920s “was only 24 percent,” compared to “63 percent during the first Roosevelt administration, and 79 percent in the second,” and “by the mid-fifties, as the United States faced the expenses of the Cold War,… 91 percent” (47). Further, “the average federal tax on corporate profits rose from less than 14 percent in 1929 to more than 45 percent in 1955,” and “the top estate tax” grew “from 20 percent” in the twenties to”77 percent” in the fifties (48). (I am not sure how Krugman factors in the ability of the rich to hire creative, loophole-seeking accountants.) Given these numbers and overwhelming GOP resistance to rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in the last four years, if the “rich right” were to acknowledge what Krugman calls “the great compression,” the equalization of “incomes for… more than thirty years” and “a time of unprecedented prosperity” (54), they would do so without attributing those successes to New Deal policies and sustained applications of their principles but to World War II, the Cold War, and other factors. What marks an area of untranslatability that dogs Miller as he asserts that “raising the poor’s/ consumption powers” enables the New Deal’s “programs” to “work” (58-9)—to end the Depression and create “the Great Compression”—is the distinction between what he calls “greed” and what his foes would label their logical rejection of unfair sacrifice (of dubious social utility) and insistence upon their right to fruits of their labor and ingenuity. Further, they would perceive social welfare as philanthropy’s domain. Reframing their idea of sacrifice as an excellent long-term investment in the economic system as a whole, and reframing extreme market volatility, not as a chance to make a “killing,” but as a gigantic risk in the long run, even for those in the “1 percent,” is probably the best translation strategy, and the poet implies all of this when he is not chiding the “rich right crybabies,” but much too subtly. Nevertheless, how many other U.S. political poets strive as assiduously as Miller does in “Fort Dad” to develop effective translations of their convictions in hope of realizing the potential for open dialogue with their adversaries that Miller articulates in Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam?
*****
In the early stages of developing this essay, I believed that the poems of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge would be especially suitable for it. My impression, it turned out, was based on a handful of fragmentary utterances in different poems, and each time I tried to read Berssenbrugge’s powerfully abstract yet imagistic, disjunctive yet meditative poetry in relation to (un)translatability, I found that the work’s particular flux disabled whatever generalizations I hoped to cull from it. In other words, my own interpretive “translations” knocked up against a certain untranslatability, whereas other strategies devised by critics like Charles Altieri, Linda Voris, and even myself had proven more useful for reading the poetry.
Therefore, the lens of translation/untranslatability is not necessarily applicable to the writing of all contemporary poets, but Gander, Javier, and Miller, I think, are a small sampling of vital poets who can be cogently discussed through this meta-thematic approach. My subjects are three men, the first of whom engages in ekphrastic conversation with the art of a woman and the second of whom deploys the persona of a woman. That fact reminds me that one possibility for future criticism in this vein is the area that psychologist Deborah Tannen has so compellingly investigated: cross-gender communication. How do men and women foreground their efforts to translate what they wish to communicate to the opposite gender? How do they think about translating the “language” of the opposite gender to themselves? And also, for transgendered poets, how are the complexities of translation enacted and absorbed? The last sentence of my analysis of Miller’s poems is a kind of “dare” to find poets sufficiently committed to genuine dialogue that they would assiduously engage in ideological translation in their work, but if such writers could not be located, critics could consider areas of untranslatability or openings for translation within particular ideological debates waged in poetry. Of course, Javier’s emphasis—deliberately presented without many specific cultural markers in “Feeling Its Actual”—on the encounter between different racial or ethnic groups is another strong possibility. And Gander’s recent Core Samples from the World (2011), which comprises a dialogic alternation of prose and verse representing the poet’s travels in China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, would be especially amenable to such a contextualization, as evidenced by the poet’s note at the beginning of the book:
This book comes about as unprecedented human movement leads,… to conflicts, suspicions, and opportunities to
reconsider what is meant by “the foreign,” by “the foreigner.” It is also a very personal account of negotiations across
borders (between languages and cultures, between one species and all the rest, between health and sickness,
between poetic forms, and between self and others).
The “negotiations” that Gander refers to depend on sustained attention to translation, an attempt to appreciate difference but reduce the barrier implied by “‘the foreign’” and the distance needed to travel “across [cultural and ideological] borders.”
WORKS CITED
Cura, Yago. “Paolo Javier: 60 lv bo(e)mbs.” The Poetry Project Newsletter 208. Oct./Nov. 2006: 24. Print. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.
Fink, Thomas. “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century Poetry. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2001. Print.
Gander, Forrest. Eye Against Eye. New York: New Directions, 2005. Print.
_______. Core Samples from the World. New York: New Directions, 2011. Print.
Javier, Paolo. The Feeling Is Actual. East Rockaway: Marsh Hawk P, 2011. Print.
_______. 60 lv bo(e)mbs. Oakland, CA: O Books, 2005. Print.
Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.
Mann, Sally. “Collodion Interview.” East Coast/West Coast Art Educators. 15 Nov. 2009. Web. 23 Dec. 2012.
Miller, Stephen Paul. Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam. New York: Domestic, 1992. Print.
_______. The Bee Flies in May. New York: Marsh Hawk P, 2002. Print.
_______. Fort Dad. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk P, 2009. Print.
_______. Skinny Eighth Avenue. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk P, 2005. Print.
Weinberger, Eliot and Forrest Gander. “Eliot Weinberger and Forrest Gander.” Bomb 93 (Fall 2005). Web. 22 Dec. 2012.
Zinn, Howard. “Beyond the New Deal.” The Nation 7 April 2008. Web. 22 Jan. 2013.