Asymptote’s poetry editor Aditi Machado has curated across the gutter and five continents. In light of Asymptote’s July issue, I interviewed Aditi, and her responses run the gamut: what follows is an in-depth interview with insight into arranging an issue, poetry in translation, and embracing vulnerability when reading.
Many think that reading poetry requires a specific literacy—is the same true for reading translation, or poetry in translation?
Reading anything requires specific forms of literacy, even reading a newspaper. With poetry, I think we’re less aware of skills we may already have or of those that may be gained. Additionally, we’re extremely sensitive about our lack in these skills—or, if we feel we do have them, we might be able to articulate how we learned them and how much further we have to go. It’s a special privilege, being literate about one’s literacy.
I’m sure that this could be said of various other types of texts, but it’s fascinating to me how swaths of people learn to talk about movies or novels or YouTube videos with such an arsenal of criteria and not necessarily know or care to examine how they arrived at those particular paradigms. As an aside to an aside, I should mention I’ve been watching a lot of krump videos online. It’s strange to me that this very complex and politically charged dance form is explained away in certain televised programs as X or Y—explanations I once cheerfully swallowed—as if to include the viewer, inviting her assimilate into it (or it into her) without questioning the assimilation. On the other hand, many of the less-mainstream krump recordings actively shut me out. I have to work my way in from outside to glimpse even a page of its vocabulary. The process of taping a live krump battle renders it into a very obvious translated text: I become conscious to a heightened degree of how I’m concerting all my faculties toward understanding something that wasn’t given to me, to which I don’t belong and possibly never will, but which offers me this frame of a lavishly participatory audience—the people who “get” it, who are part of it, whose bodies and minds move into the performance and shape it—while I sit placidly at a distance gathering the clues, attempting not to say that thing one so haplessly says when reading a translation, “I wish I was there!”/“I wish I could read the original!”
Reading translated poetry can be a little like that: what do I really know about Japanese poetry when I’m not its most immediate audience? But I love the imaginative reading practice involved in recognizing a literary tradition that hasn’t fully washed over me. Also: feeling the presence of those bodies and minds surrounding the dancer/poet as it were. It’s a way in. A shape that I can see that’s blurry and dense, but it’s always moving and inviting.
I don’t think reading poetry in translation is necessarily of a higher order than reading poetry in one’s native language. Even if there are skills to add to one’s repertoire, much of it has to do with unlearning certain assumptions: the first would be any explicit or implicit belief that the canon of one language is superior to any other; the second, that there’s no point reading a translated poem because “it can’t be as good as the original.”
I’ve been wondering whether, at the very depths of an otherwise assiduous reader’s distaste for translation lies fear about confronting one’s inadequacies. But those inadequacies are useful contours: what you don’t know shapes what you know and you never stop negotiating those boundaries. It’s a dangerous, unsettling world—that’s why it’s fun.
Asymptote currently has a poetry call for its upcoming October issue. In the call, you specify you are looking for English-language poems that engage with “myth and mythology.” What inspired you to choose this theme?
On perhaps the most obvious level, the fact that all (most?) cultures have their myths, many of which are less than familiar to readers in English. And then the fact that these myths offer abundant resources to poets in the way of persona, narrative, trope, and so on. Myths are translated, adapted, abused, theorized all the time and Asymptote is very much keen on those processes.
But, more specifically, I like for our English poetry calls to investigate something about contemporary poetry. I’m curious, for example, about the prevailing mannerisms, the ways in which the ancient is brought to the contemporary as allegory or analogy—or, more specifically, the strategies by which certain strands of contemporary English writing absorb distant structures without any sort of meaningful exchange. I’m hoping for some fresh approaches to what has been in the quiver a long while. By approach, I mean the formal stakes. How deeply vulnerable can you be on the highways of inherited routes?
Here’s a quote from our prompt which says the theme is really a non-theme: “Rather than approaching mythology as a ‘theme,’ we ask that you to enter it as a field of investigation in which the principal terms, rubrics, figures, and narratives may be redefined, recreated, and even newly invented.” We’re completely fine with myth being desecrated, or used in the context of something like Barthes’s Mythologies, or written about prior to a conceptualization of what mythology is.
When curating the poetry section, how do you arc the section? What sorts of things do you look to find in common among the poems in a given issue?
Randomness and play! I try not to look for common threads as I place poets in forthcoming issues. I worry that doing so would lead to superficial connections on the level of content. So I usually work with a number of practical concerns, like not having too many poets from one part of the world versus another, ensuring contributors don’t have to wait too long between getting an acceptance and seeing their work in our (web)pages, publishing work before it appears in book form, and so on. The strange and wonderful thing is that once I have a lineup and I start uploading articles to our website, I notice all sorts of connections between apparently very disparate texts. The human mind likes to recognize pattern. It’s how we deal with chaos: we tame it into something harmonic. But we also like when there’s stuff around the pattern that’s unaccountable.
As for the arc, I have a little playground almost—a dashboard on which I can move the poetry articles around to see what happens. For the July 2014 issue I began and ended the poetry section with the two Latin American poets (who complement Megan McDowell’s Latin American fiction feature). It was important to me that Salomão and Zurita’s work enact different models of time. In “Jet Lagged Poem” time gets overlapped to such an extent that it feels multilingual—everything is in the now and terrifyingly dimensional. Zurita’s Country of Ice poems, on the other hand, read to me like a work of memoir: the time lapse across which the speaker performs his acts of memory is an ice age. I love the intensity of scale in both these works, and of the scale between them as well. And then I felt that Theis Ørntoft needed to be somewhere in the middle with his enmeshment in apocalyptic time, his sense of the future as a condition of the present world. And so on: the different poets got arranged.
I’d love to know if anyone has read into such things as the order of poetry articles. Often the reasons I come up for doing something are important more for my own sense of editorial purpose than toward laying bare how something should be read. I imagine most readers read in whatever order they like, as I do when I read other journals.
Does poetry in translation engage with language in a way that non-translated poetry does not? Is there something to be learned from translation, specifically, that could inform a monolingual poet’s sense of words?
It can be hard to neatly distinguish between the two kinds of writing, assuming one does both. I owe Jennifer Kronovet so much for being the first teacher to bring me so actively to translation and to thinking about how it relates to my work as a poet. In her translation workshop, she often had us look at both translations and original work by a given writer and we’d start to see how they informed each other. But you also begin see it in your own work. I was translating Marguerite Duras for that class. She has a very distinct manner of constructing sentences: sparse, often brusque, with a relatively simple diction. I’d thought that would make things easier for me, but I found myself struggling to recreate the effects of her French sentences in English. I began to realize that English and French have very different spatial dynamics. You see it in the pronouns and reflexive verbs, and also the prepositions (which, it turns out, are often the hardest to translate between any two languages). The experience changed my poetry markedly. It was like a new intelligence about what the target language is incapable of—at the level of word or syntax or form—but you try to do it anyway, as you translate but also as you write your own poems. More taste buds, I call it.
I’m not so sure how it works for monolingual poets. I can imagine someone who lives in a monolingual culture and whose work is enriched by the closed-off aspects of that lived experience. I can’t offhand name such a culture, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else could. But a monolingual poet who chooses to remain so when there’s opportunity not to—that’s harder to make sense of. Aren’t there theories arguing that we think differently in different languages? I’d want to exploit that as much as possible.
On the other hand, to play devil’s advocate: is it even possible to be monolingual in today’s world? If we broaden our definition of “language” to include dialects, field-specific discourses and jargons, slang, pidgin forms, then there are far more polylinguists in the world that we previously assumed.
What are some of your favorite poems from this issue (and issues past)?
I won’t be able to pick from recent issues—issues I’ve edited. Of late, I’ve been going back quite often to Freke Räihä’s “Swedish Trees – a conceptual floræ. / Extracts of fruit:” which appeared in Asymptote’s second issue, back when Brandon Holmquest was poetry editor. Maybe I go back because I’ve been thinking about how to write about nature in a new way. I also love the quality of language: this is a rare case of a poet translating his own work. The last paragraph is stunning: “The evolutionization. The privatization of industry. We inherit nothing. The absence of vaginas, that the trees grow out of, is palpable, like the marginalization of women. I do not deny that I am inadequate. It is a call-out. A renewable source. Meanwhile the world is burning, language.”
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