is a poet and translator with eighteen books of poetry, a co-authored book of poetry, a volume of essays, a book of articles on translation, a biopoetics, and two memoirs. . She is (co)translator of twenty-one poetry collections and two biopoetics from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian. A forty-year retrospective, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in Citation2017 from Wesleyan University Press. Her latest book is Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (Anansi, 2023). She has translated six books of poetry by Chus Pato: m-Talá, Charenton, Hordes of Writing (Shearsman Books), Secession (Book*hug), Flesh of Leviathan (Omnidawn), The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books) and an essay, At the Limit (Zat-So Productions).
is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her recent collections of poetry include Footnotes to Water (2019), which won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award in 2020, A Revolutionary Calendar (2020) and A Marginal Sea (2022). She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry. Her critical work includes two monographs, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (2013), which includes a chapter on Moure, and Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (2020). This interview was conducted by email from October to December 2020.
Your prolific and innovative practice as a poetry translator, always in dialogue with your own poetry, which in turn comments on translation, has created a distinctive transatlantic space. Through your work, for example, Galician poetry reaches me in Wales not via the Bay of Biscay, as one would expect if poetry travelled as the crow flies (which of course it does not), but from Montreal. I’m particularly interested in how your translation practice inhabits, constructs or critiques relationships in a transatlantic context. What is at stake in the translation of poetry at this time? Has your sense of this changed over the many years you have been translating?
There's so little poetry translated into English in North America and the UK that the stakes are pretty much the same as they were twenty years ago: trying to find spaces and publishers and ways to coax diverse national and world poetries across our borders so that readers in English can enjoy, and writers in English can be influenced by, work in poetry and poetics ongoing in other conversations, other cultures. This is especially the case in Canada, where basically a single government organization, the Canada Council, funds literary publishers and doesn't permit funds to be used to publish non-Canadians, even if translated by Canadians. But we tend in general in English to shut ourselves off, make proclamations about ‘poetry’ as if all of poetry were contained in our experience in English (which makes me laugh). I translate in part to try to mitigate this.
There is a second set of stakes as well, and that involves the challenges of translating from minor or minoritized languages into a hegemonic tongue like English. How not to cause difference (social, political, cultural) to vanish in the process? How not to homogenize a voice, a national conversation, a world conversation? How to create a text that remembers another accent?
When we first met in 2006, you had recently published Little Theatres (Moure, Citation2005), which includes a sequence of poems you wrote first in Galician and then translated into English. It celebrates the elements of borscht, including beetroot, onion and potato, as well as cabbage, a vegetable that later appears as the title of Kapusta (Moure, Citation2015), in reference to your family’s connection with western Ukraine. I’m struck by the contrast between these earthy, rooted images and the uprooting and re-routing of multiple languages in your poetry. What kinds of locatedness or dislocation have been most important in your translation practice?
I think of two things here. One is that I never grew up in English as if it were the Only Language. There was always the ‘haunted’ (or largely unspoken) presence of another language (not English or French) from the first, the language of my maternal grandparents. It was never given a name (my maternal grandparents were multilingual so it was hard to pin down). So perhaps it is the locatedness of a dislocation, or the inverse! The second thing is that because of the Canadian publishing situation, I have had to ‘export’ myself and a lot of my poetry translation work to US and UK publishers, who have been wonderful in their welcomes. Even if it leaves me feeling a bit like I come from nowhere (in kinship with my Mom, born in a western Ukraine that back then was constantly shifted between colonizer empires). I feel most located in the poetry itself, and in the community of translators and readers and publishers who love poetry. I’ve always thought of the various languages in my life just as ‘language’. I sometimes forget they ‘are’ one language or another.
That haunting of language is an important experience for so many Canadian writers whose families have migratory histories. Often, as in your case, the connection with those histories is a gift. However, it seems to me that something different is happening in your translation from Galician, a language you chose to learn, and one which is freighted with political hopes. Language is always full of traces and echoes, but how are these experienced in the act of translation? Does translation bring that haunting to bear on the future, or the forging of new relations?
In a sense, we can only translate traces and echoes, for we translate our reading of a text, not ‘the text itself’ which is always, in some ways, necessarily opaque to us. In a sense, perhaps, the text of origin haunts our translation via our reading. What are these bits of language and who says them and how did they resonate when they were said? How did their resonate for their readers in the first publication?
Which is always a guess! I have spent time in Galician for over 20 years now, listened to Galician, spent time with Galician speakers, spent time having to cope on my own in Galician with no intermediaries, and via some of the answers, some of the questions, I have been able to detect suppositions (about me, about Galician) and productive ambiguities (that exist in the structures of any language) that reveal to me a bit more about receiving Galician-language writing. Context, I guess. Though I am painfully aware that even in listening, it is ‘me’ (this I) interpreting the context. It is the fissures and breaches in these contacts and contexts that I seek out; from them, I can start to apprehend difference. And perhaps, then, be more capable of not effacing difference, what I call Galician difference (for even the Galician ‘accent’ in Spanish is different; Spanish speakers from the centre can often tell you are ‘Galician’ when you speak Castilian), when I translate into English.
You’ve given an intensely physical description of Galician in your essay ‘Emit’ at the end of Planetary Noise, for example its ‘dense and visceral’ verbs. Could you say more about how you navigate that difference in Chus Pato’s work?
Chus Pato is ingenious in her command of the nuances of Galician language structures, of how phrasings affect readerly reception, how they affect rhythms as well, which then affect and effect readerly reception. It’s visceral with her: just as a ballet dancer understands muscular structure, bodily movement, twitch, fibre, gravity, and yet moves fluidly, Pato deploys her Galician language. I have only the English (or French) language and its structures. One example. Because the personal pronoun is needed but rarely in Galician, the speaker’s gender/objectness can remain a ‘productive ambiguity’ ‘held’ or maintained in the poem, and Pato can use this capacity to withhold the identity of the speaker till late in the poem. In English, personal pronouns must precede verbs. By translating accurately and properly into English, then, I can ruin a Pato poem. My tactic is to find ways to ‘tell it slant’, using English at times in a not quite normative way to maintain the tension. For the tension of the poem affects its meaning effects, i.e. its meanings and resonances, in crucial ways; I can’t just drop that tension but have to balance English differently, yet not leave strange effects either. In Pato’s poem ‘Mogador’, for example, in Flesh of Leviathan, the singular imperfect past verb could be either ‘I’, ‘she’, ‘he’, or ‘it’. Tension builds through this ‘productive ambiguity’, which would not be received by a Galician as an ambiguity or problem at all but as an inner tension innate to expression. The poem reveals the ‘I’ only in the fourth and third last lines. It’s a shock, a rhetorical coup, and it viscerally performs the coming into existence of the ‘I’. In Pato’s original, we get to ‘my navigation’ before we have the first person singular clearly as speaker; in the next line, even without a pronoun in Galician, we now know the ‘I’ is speaking. I chose to leave off the personal pronoun until the third last line in order to build and release the tension in a similar way to the Galician original, though I did create a slight ‘reveal’ in the sixth last line as I felt I had to choose between ‘Glimpsed me’ or ‘Glimpsed myself’. The Galician verb is espiar, which is to observe from a hidden place, but I used it in the English way, making out ‘I spied myself’ or ‘he/she/it spied me’, as ‘glimpsed’.
In translating into French, on the other hand, I was reading the Galician poem with my French brain and thus produced the tensions slightly differently in translation. I did manage to create a way of eliding the personal pronoun at the beginning, and avoiding a gender reveal by using the Quebec-dominant way of feminized as well, but I then found myself using the ‘je’ four lines earlier than in the English translation, and eliding it from the third last line. The poem in French to me reflects the resonances of the Galician, as does the English version, but they are different when compared to each other. I find this fascinating. Translation is rhythmic, cadenced, and thus inescapably visceral.
On another front: In Pato’s Galician, as well, being as it is a language under threat, there is the sense that to speak is a struggle against barriers and not necesarily a fluidity. This can come off as abrasive in English, abrasive toward the reader, when in Galician it is Pato that is resisting the abrading of Galician by colonialization, politics, commerce. She is not being abrasive toward her readers, she is supporting them, giving them courage. I keep thinking about this, and about how we can see a similar process at work in society when negatively connoted words are used to describe a woman’s behaviour whereas the same behaviour by a man is described with positively connoted words. I remember being told once at work by a new boss who did not know me and my work record: You are arrogant’, he said. I thought about it for a few seconds, and responded, ‘No, I am competent’. So one of the fronts on which I try to work in the translation is to make resistance present (which is resonant) without abrasiveness (which is flattening).
Coming back to your earlier point, your work has certainly been welcomed in both the US and UK, and I wonder whether you have a sense of these as being different environments regarding translation. Lawrence Venuti, for example, has argued that translations should be reviewed in relation to the literary context of the receiving culture, rather than in terms of any notion of ‘fidelity’ to a source text (Venuti, Citation2019). How have you made decisions about what to publish where? Do you see the English-language context as continuous, or can you think of examples where the intended destination for publication, on either side of the Atlantic, has changed anything in your approach, or in the reception of the work?
I think Venuti is right … why do we want this book in our language, in this place now? It is always a question I ask myself because I translate for the receiving culture. I wish the reviewers in English-speaking areas would address what it means to welcome this work at this time into their culture. How does it move or address our culture/s in English? Our language? Our capacities? How does it throw our poetic/s for a loop?
If I can venture further, I think the question you raise, and your reference to what Venuti says, throw some light on why I often don’t want to publish translations in bilingual editions, which invite reviewers and readers to make their reading a comparative project. Whereas the original writer wrote a book where left and right side of the page reverberate off each other, where turning a page (what other sculptural object makes a viewer so much part of its very being?) is a meaningful gesture, is an in-corporation of the book, of the words. I would prefer in some way or measure to give a reader an experience of the book, of the textual work and physical spacing that is the ‘book’, that might have similiarities to the experience of readers of the book in its first language. More similar, in any case, than creating a bilingual book that effaces most of the material qualities of the work.
To return to your questions, I mostly make decisions on what to translate, and where to publish, based on wanting the work to enter the culture in question and reverberate there, find interlocutors, presences. As well, I am aware that English-language work also finds a public in poetry readers from other languages and cultures, who without English would have no access to the work in question. Postage is expensive, too, so I look at distribution too – the fact, say, that Shearsman Books distributes in the USA through SPD is important (the USA being the most populous country of English speakers).
My publishing collaborations have been randomly successes and failures in terms of sales, though on either side of the Atlantic, a book of poetry in translation has about two thirds of the sales (my guess) that a local book has. Mainly I just try to get the books out, into a public who will be willing to receive them, and where they can affect the ways we talk about poetry (as reading translations of work by others has enriched me).
I do think of what I call ‘accent’ when I translate, and find – luckily – that the Canadian ‘accent’ in English, the Canadian idiom I inherited and learned from the mid 1950s (not the millennial one that is very US-American now) serves as a kind of mid-Atlantic accent and makes the work legible to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. I try to guard against language uses that are distracting in one culture: for example, you in the UK would appreciate that I try not to call trousers or slacks ‘pants’!
This makes me think of Secession/Insecession, from 2014, where Pato is ‘Translated from the Galician into Canadian English in Montreal and Kelowna’, as if it’s your response to a Galician locatedness that makes audible the position of your English – a language so often experienced as placeless. Your own ‘biopoetics’ takes its place alongside Pato’s, in an unravelling of memory and text, and memory of texts, in what is described as an ‘echolation’. How does echoation differ from the other kinds of listening that take place in translation?
I’d used the word echolation as a portmanteau word that holds both ‘echolocation’ and ‘translation’. Something in Chus Pato’s texts in Secession made me think that if she could write a biopoetics and speak of how biography and biology inflect her poetics, I could do it too! And that the two texts beside each other could echo and elucidate something that contributes to thinking on poetics, and to what is at stake in the workings of translation across cultures – using the example of two writers, Canadian and Galician, born in the same year.
I needed her permission of course, as what I intended to do would otherwise be an inappropriate interference in her published work. Pato was generous and enthusiastic. For each of her texts in translation, then, I wrote a text of my own, linking biography and biology with my poetics, both in poetry and in translation (part of the same practice in my case). My texts appear opposite hers in the book, imitating the form of a book of bilingual translation. Yet both texts are in one language, English, just in a different font, and there is no original.
Perhaps my texts, the Erín side, serve as a transcultural translation, or transelucination, a doubled translation beside my ‘literal’ translation of her texts. But also they are a gesture of solidarity and poetic joy. When Pato spies herself on the hide of the ewe (i.e. in the writing, as the hide of a ewe is parchment … we don’t put pictures there but writing), I glimpse myself too, in the writing. Normally in translation, in the writing of a translation, you are supposed to squelch yourself. But you never can, you can only try your best to pretend you are doing it, for the translator, listening, hears her own heart beat at the same time, always, with the words she is translating.
Your point about ewes and parchment reflects an interest in the materiality of writing that often surfaces in your work. You mentioned in a recent conversation that you’re developing an interest in ecopoetry. Could you say more about the project that has led you in this direction? How helpful is it to think about translation in terms of relationships that reach beyond the human?
I’ve long had an interest in land and in life relations with the nonhuman (birch trees, and water, have been key instantiations in my work for years, and the relation with habitation, habitat and breathing) but probably not in the sense that ‘ecopoetry’ has largely been given, according to what I have seen, where human poets applaud ‘nature’ and issue elegies for the ruins caused by industrialization (then these same poets jump in their fossil-fuel powered vehicles to their universities or homes and tap their pensions and salaries funded by the same system that harms ecology and climate). For a long time, I was seeing ‘ecopoetry’ as a smoke-cloud used by white mostly male poets to obscure (themselves to) their own privilege.
I grew up in a culture of values based in Ukrainian peasant and farm lore and relations with the physical world, its plants and trees and the animals, through which we are all connected. An ethos of community in which humans played just one part, and not one of accumulation of value to oneself alone. Later I found those values were in synchrony in many ways with the values of the Cree and Dane-zaa that these Ukrainian peasants met on their remote northern Alberta homestead farm, which was on their traditional lands, and bordered a path to a traditional berry-picking area. This was back in the early part of the twentieth century just before and during the Depression, when immigrants from Eastern Europe could only come to Canada to farm.
As my mother used to say: ‘The grass is writing too, you know’. Translation, yes, can also reach beyond the human. Or it’s going to have to, to keep being relevant into the far future, to keep leading us and prompting us as translation does, to listen and to learn to hear and accommodate difference, even radical difference. I recently did a translation workshop to help people to listen to land and to bring words from it that articulate a relation that is other than a romantic, second-degree distant view. Then they can bring that listening into their poetry in many ways. No matter what I’ve been writing and translating though, I never forget my mother’s words. There has to be a certain humility to the whole human enterprise until we can understand that. I am still working on it, myself, for sure. I think you know that too, Zoë, from listening to the intelligences of plants and creatures in creating the poems in creating your poems in A Revolutionary Calendar! (Citation2020)
I think back to another influence on my thinking: in 2009, I met the Peruvian poet Pedro Favaron in Montreal where he was then studying; he had conducted poetic field work in the Amazon over several years then already, to learn about the poetries of the peoples there. He told me of being in one community early on, and that when he told them he was a poet and wanted to learn of their poetic practices, they brought him to their poet and each was to show their poems to the other. Pedro showed his poems and the local poet was very puzzled, how could these be poems, and unwrapped his own poems, which were herbs and medicines that went with words. Years later, Pedro’s home and life is among the Shipibo-Konibo people and he works with traditional agriculture and medicines as a practice in poetry and ecology; I just reencountered him this summer via Facebook. To him, ecological science must take into account the ‘poetic knowledge’ of Indigenous peoples, and this poetic knowledge includes plants, air, winds. It was disturbed and rejected by eurocentrism and the violence of colonization (Favaron, Citation2015; Citation2017). We need to return to it and open our view of poetry.
I am an urban poet, in part because I’ve never wanted to own a car (I do drive them when necessary), yet this has also meant I use slower means of transport such as bicycle and walking, which make observation easier. There’s a nonhuman world in the city too; the birds know that. And the grasses. Being stuck in town during the pandemic and walking every day here has let me learn a lot more.
I think this attention to the nonhuman world as peer and cohabitant, (plus a shared history of difficulty with breathing), is why the Galician poet Uxío Novoneyra’s work Os Eidos (The Uplands, in my translation, though really it is ‘the-upland-fields-we-know-intimately-for-centuries’) struck such a chord with me (Novoneyra and Moure, Citation2020). He says: ‘Mine is a poetry of the Land rather than of landscape, even though it has moments close to landscape poetry. Those who cohabit with the land never call it landscape’. Those who cohabit with the land where I come from never call it ‘wilderness’ either! That’s a naming (that word and ‘nature’) imposed by people who come from outside the land, as they cannot see it. They can’t see the relationships at work. In Galicia in the 20th century, Novoneyra’s work on the land-human relation, and insistence that popular culture and knowledge are an avant-garde, made me think that relation more thoroughly. With his relationship with land and the people who live on it, with work on that land and community and maintaining a history that lies before him (and to which he is responsible in the present tense: it is not in the past), Novoneyra was also able to understand and convey the importance of maintaining his language, Courelian Galician, and he was able to understand the importance of advocating for the freedom of all peoples subject to colonization (as were/are the Galicians).
I understand Chus Pato’s work better too when I think of Novoneyra as part of her lineage. No wonder she is more able to see through the epistemologies of Capital! And Andrés Ajens’s work too, from Chile. Ajens says we live in a ‘time of technoplanetary literary globalization’ (Ajens, Citation2011, 135) in which colonization, and Conquest, persist. I think it’s key to make sure translation is not used as a tool in that process, but is a shared tool for opening writing and process and habitation to us in other ways.
I’m struck by the way in which the term ‘Europe’ translates between where I am, surrounded by the UK’s isolationism, where ‘Europe’ means a multiplicity of languages and cultures (a shift away from a singular anglophone linguistic dominance and the story of the British Empire), and what it means in Quebec, where it evokes a set of colonial relationships. You’ve mentioned writers from Peru and Chile – could you say more about what the American continent means to you as a translator of poetry?
The American continent is first of all two: South and North America, and we have a tendency in the north to forget the south. And the USA can be such a loud influence (or our listening gear is more attuned to them for some reason) that we forget thinking occurs elsewhere too. As for me, I can’t think ‘Europe’ without thinking of colonization (how else would I have got here? The hunger of Europe and colonizations within European lands were what sent my ancestors here, variously), as you’ve surmised.
On this side of the Atlantic, in the ‘new’ world (new to who?), multiple colonialisms can be traced; they intertwine via slavery, annihilation of Indigenous peoples, religious conversions, racist hiercharchizations, cultural genocides, settlement by peoples worn out by European wars and with no concept that the land they were allotted was accorded them by people who had no right to allot it. In the north of the Americas in particular, colonization was linked to the development of capitalist economic power rooted in slaveholding (another terrifying historical band that links Africa and the Americas and the depths of the oceans). Canada today still hasn’t confronted its own relationship with slavery (pretending by and large that it doesn’t have one), and has its ongoing horrors regarding its treatment of Indigenous nations. There is much talk of ‘reconciliation’ when ‘restitution’ is required. And clean drinking water! All of this can’t help but affect poetry and poetics. For my part, my primary recognition is that I have a lot to learn, and that my view of poetics and literature need to be exploded open. I can’t speak to ‘poetry’; I have to listen to it.
As a translator who can read further afield, as I read in multiple languages and share conversations and food with multiple others, and given my own family history of immigration and settling, I feel it important to work to urge a different thinking, a listening, and an opening that will change us all. Crucial to thinking this ‘new’ world is to think and hear words from Africa, and learn to think alongside Indigenous writers and via their example, which is not to appropriate, but to become aware of thought structures that may help lead us to better futures.
Your mention of Pedro Favaron points to a concept of the poet as the one who orders or reorders connections between words, people and things, a work that depending on context and perspective might be seen as magic, medicine, science, philosophy or all of these. Do you see that continuity in your own work, and if so, how does the translator of poetry fulfil this role? How does it contribute to anti-colonial struggles?
A translator makes spaces that others can occupy, and is attuned to the sounds of languages, even ones we don’t know. Even children readily learn what they cannot comprehend at first; even dogs learn the sounds, birds can imitate human voices and laugh/caw, and yet we supposedly advanced humans ignore what we don’t know and try to see it as irrelevant if we see it at all. A translator at work puts the lie to that kind of attitude. And a translator always has to cultivate humility and listening, for our mistakes and aporias are so visible when we translate.
A writer like Pedro Favaron, like Andrés Ajens, white but cognizant always that they are colonial subjects and thus bear and instigate wounds, act as vital examples and reminders to me. Favaron’s work enacting poetry by his work with plants and peoples is consonant with what my own mother (a person of the earth and old ways) used to say, as I mentioned earlier: ‘The grass is writing too, you know’.
Your translation of French-language poetry, for example Nicole Brossard and Chantal Neveu, responds to the multilingual dynamics of Quebec. What are the challenges of this environment for a translator? Do you think of this work as having a relationship with poetry from France, and if so how? Or is it more helpfully located in relation to your readings of French theory? What are the most interesting directions that are opened up for you by the French language?
I’ve translated or co-translated a number of Quebec poets from French to English over the past twenty years – Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels) above all, but also Louise Dupré, François Turcot, and Chantal Neveu. Quebec is a French-speaking environment and very vibrant in writing culture. It’s also a North American culture. There are fewer challenges for me in Canada in translating Canadian citizens/residents as Canadian small presses are not restricted in using their publishing subsidies to bring out these works. I think the main challenge is not in translating them but in trying to find publishers and in helping to create public space for the works. Nicole Brossard is an exception as an author, as she speaks English and travels a lot and can represent and present the work on her own. Although some of the poets I translate have a sort of footing in French in France (i.e. their works can circulate), for me it does not have a relationship with France or poetry from France. It’s more, again, trying to share this work and these poets that I so appreciate with the English-speaking poetry milieu, in Canada and – to a lesser extent as it’s hard to get work published by Canadian presses to travel across borders – in the USA. The French language has, for sure, made it possible for me to read and engage with (in my own work) French post-structuralist and feminist philosophy without the intermediary of translations (though I do read translations at times as they are easier to obtain, so it can be easier to bring the works into the conversation). As well, knowing French, having learned French, made it easier for me to jump the language barrier and learn Galician, learn to read in Spanish and in Portuguese. I see myself in Montreal as part of what Québec writer, translator, filmmaker, designer Daniel Canty has called, jokingly, ‘the francomixophones’. In my community are people who work in and translate from and speak Romanian, Spanish, German as well as French. And it is a community that includes both anglophones and francophones; that particular societal divide isn’t part of our everyday. We are immersed in the French language; we think, speak, read and write in French at least at some point in every day. All these language-presences do give us a different sense of the writing world, I think, and make it possible for us to relate to what is going on in Europe or in Africa, or in South America, and not just be shut into a north ‘American’ view. For my part, though, it hasn’t led me to the poetry of France (though I have translated or co-translated poems by Sébastien Smirou, Christophe Tarkos and Anne Portugal); my European centre is Galicia, really, and the spaces that other border-crossing poets in the UK, like Caroline Bergvall and yourself, open up for poetic thinking and endeavour.
Your translation of Chantal Neveu, This Radiant Life (Neveu and Moure, Citation2020), seems to exemplify the multilingual vision that you are describing here, as a work that makes radiating connections between the body’s physical presence and an international politics. I see what you mean here about the turning of pages as part of the experience of reading, and why it’s therefore necessary for the work to be only in English. The English is also infused and shadowed by the presence of French in a way that would perhaps be more difficult to achieve in the clear separation of a facing-page bilingual edition. It strikes me, too, that the minimalism of the poetry visibly allows each word to exist in itself and on its own particular journey. Translation is not a mirror image, with its resulting inequality between real and reflected text, but a multiplying of singularities. Is this also a way of thinking about communities, and how they might be formed around and through poetry?
It’s great how your reading of Chantal’s book in my translation brought you to think about communities, about the strengthening of spaces for singularities to multiply in. As Neveu says of us in relation to each other: ‘our mutualities’. We are never not singular, but our singularity can flourish only with mutuality, mutualities. Multiple traversals, on lines not of Deleuzian ‘flight’ but of mutual consideration and care. And though a reader is always singular and their reading of a text is also singular (for they bring to it their own background and history of presence in language), a reading is always a mutuality. To translate, then, and bring a work into another language community, another community of shared endeavour, does indeed multiply singularities – for it multiplies readings. At the same time, the singularity of a reader can persist because of mutualities, because we each cross paths with each other. To me, this process of reading says something about how communities are built, communities of poetry and of other endeavours where spaces and languages are shared. No one of us holds the key to it all, and we all bring something unique to the process of understanding and being with texts, being with articulated language. This is why, to me, poetry is related to citizenship.
To return a moment to Chantal Neveu: her original French, La vie radieuse (Citation2016), is infused by the occasional presence of English lines and words. In finding ways to create those echoes and gentle interpenetrations in the English text, I didn’t always place the interpenetrating words in the same position exactly. I would read out loud and consider sound and beat and flow. Each word or syncopated phrase has its space to resonate with the pale cream of the page. Neveu writes the whole page as surface and fount. She doesn’t just write the words on a support that is a page, without considering that support; she writes the whole texture of the page, and pages, and the turning of the pages. Hers is a minimalism that maximalizes, in a way.
The halt to international travel in 2020–21 has made me aware of the lasting value of in-person encounters in poetry. As I write to you here, it feels like a live conversation because I’m remembering our previous conversations face to face, and I’m aware of all the funding and infrastructure that made them possible. On the other hand, I’ve spent far more time reading your work than talking to you. As we weigh up ecological costs, global inequalities and an uncertain economic future post-Covid, but also the danger of isolationism, is physical travel still a necessary aspect of border-crossing and translation in poetry? What approaches are most useful now?
I think there’s space now for not travelling, for reducing the planetary burden of travel. Yet, it is true what you point at here: I can succeed in doing things on Zoom, doing a remote visit, BECAUSE I have travelled, because I have already been places in person and have met you, have met others. I have to say, my ability to translate from Galician (for example) would be very diminished if I had not spent so much time in Galicia, if I had not endeavoured to put myself in situations there where I was by myself, where I had nobody to rely on, and where my bit of Galician really helped, and also my friends helped! Because there were things about Galician culture I had a hard time to grasp; when I was talking to villagers and had trouble grasping something, I could go to my friends and say: ‘This happened to me in the village, what does this mean?’ I often ended up asking this question of my friends: ‘Who am I in this village?’ and they would explain to me how to describe who I am. Because, again, I am in a community, and my singularity depends on mutualities. I couldn’t have come to realizations about person and community without actually having spent time in Galicia.
The problem with a lot of travel was that people went to conferences or tourist sites simply to present themselves and hang around with people they already knew, by and large, without exposing themselves to the risk of an unknown community, without putting their singularity at risk by listening to what they necessarily fail to understand at first, which is key to forming new mutualities. That kind of travel, to me, can be wasteful.
I’m hoping in the future that there will be travel, though! We need occasions and spaces to confront our different bodies, our cuisines, the way our mouths respond to flavours and syllables, our street understandings and the ways we have of wayfinding that suddenly don’t work, the way our buildings smell, the way politeness and exchange function, the way even one language (like English) operates differently in different terrains. We can lose that innate human urge to xenophobia by exposing it architecturally and spatially, as well as by exposing it in language. There is a lot to be learned from these confrontations, and from the casual parts of such confrontations, as well, the casual exchanges; they very much enable us. When we’ve travelled a lot, met others, we are perhaps more able to inject all that at another point in time as a serum into a Zoom talk, and listen more acutely across spaces.
When we go places in person, the very details of place, the immersion in it, offer us more ways to allow our assumptions to break down and to be replaced with new kinds of knowledges, viewpoints. Of course there are people who travel and never confront their assumptions. But it’s very important to listen, to listen differently, and to be wrong. There’s a necessity for both: travel and digital presence.
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References
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