A Gesture of Togetherness: An Interview with Ian Russell

In my reading of the current Winter 2022 issue, I was drawn to the vivid and imaginative poetry of Spanish artist Pepe Espaliú. The featured excerpt, translated beautifully by Ian Russell, was taken from Espaliú’s only collection of poetry, En estos cinco años (Through These Five Years). The collection was written in the years preceding his death from AIDS, gracefully exploring the topic of mortality. Russell’s translations introduce a new audience of Anglophone readers to a dynamic activist, who fought to call attention to AIDS through his art while many political leaders refused to even acknowledge the disease. Russell was generous enough to agree to speak with me over email, and in the following interview we discuss Espaliú’s legacy as a performance artist, the communal aspect of translation, and some interesting parallels between birding and poetry.

Rose Bialer (RB): Before we start discussing your translations of Espaliú’s work, I’m curious to know how you became interested in translation in the first place. What was your introduction to the craft?

Ian Russell (IR): I can think of two starts. I got offered some freelance work to translate articles from Spanish to English while I was in grad school and took them purely to make a little extra money. I actually felt like I wasn’t very good at it. But right around that same time I had some friends that wrote poetry ask me to help translate their work. I felt totally unqualified since I had only done these academic articles, but after working on them and talking through the poems it became a really gratifying creative outlet for me.

RB: How did you come across Pepe Espaliú’s art? What initially attracted you to his poetry?

IR: I came across Espaliú’s visual work in researching HIV/AIDS in Spain. Later, I discovered he had written quite prolifically, and I found a copy of the first printing of En estos cinco años in the library (this was before Jesús Alcaide’s stunning 2018 La imposible verdad); I really loved the sort of smallness, the roundness, that I encountered in that short edition. I don’t know if that makes sense—the book is comprised of several different sections that seem pretty hermetic at first read, and many poems have an aphoristic quality. Other prose poems sit in their text blocks on the page. I felt a smallness and roundness that was easily digestible, maybe.

RB: In your translator’s note you mention that a challenge you faced in rendering this excerpt of Espaliú’s poetry was understanding that his poems are only a part of his artistic repertoire—he was also a visual and performing artist. How did you go about translating this poetry with consideration of Espaliú’s larger body of work? Did you translate while immersing yourself in it?

IR: I actually started writing about Espaliú’s performance work first. During the pandemic, I found it more difficult to keep up with that sort of critical analysis, and turned to translating Espaliú as a way to think about his performances, as if translating might offer some clue to approach the visual/performance. I think the main piece that came together for me in that process was how the installation, performance, and poetic pieces all read as a reaching out, a convocation of togetherness. So, in that way, I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

RB: You write that you believe that your translation should be read alongside Espaliú’s performance art piece, El nido (The Nest), a project where the artist slowly removes a business suit while walking for seven days around a circular platform suspended in a tree. I feel that in your translation (and in translation more generally) you are doing something similar: circling the source text, stripping it down, attempting to reach a balance between the internal and external.

IR: Yes! That is such a great way to put it, and maybe a better way of stating what I was attempting to say in the previous question. That circling between translator and text and between the text’s inside and outside was somehow congruous with the performance work. There is a repetition, a being inside and outside of time, a being inside and outside of the body, a balancing, a recalling . . . So it felt like a productive approach to the textual work.

RB: To me, Through These Five Years, read like a script to be performed. Especially this section in particular:

I want to create a different death
another death, a death all my own
and offer you all—strange finale—
some suitable lie

AND HE DUCKED BACK IN THE ALLEY.

It feels like Espaliú is putting on a show, addressing an unnamed crowd perhaps. What did you make of moments such as this one in this excerpt?

IR: This is another great reading. It makes me realize that in the poem, there is a movement from a singular (tú) to plural (vosotros) second person, and so there is this sort of transition from a dialogue to a performance—an imagination of a public. In this particular section, what I spent so much time thinking of and focusing on was how to ‘translate’ that last verse, which is capitalized in English in the original. It is such a shock when you read the original poem and I lamented a bit that the surprise is lost when the whole poem is rendered in English. I tried to play with the justification on the page as a way to create some space for shock, but I’m not really sure it was hugely successful. Regardless, to think with your observation, this is part of the show! Who is ducking into the alley? To remember the public of the plural second person, like you say, is to conjure some of the cruising energy in the poem. The alley and the public are in a nice positioning there for whatever is strange finale is going to happen in the alley.

RB: Returning to the text above, I noticed that Espaliú is calling attention to his imminent death from AIDS and creating a performance out of it. I came across another work of his, the Carrying Project, which were two performance art pieces staged in San Sebastian and Madrid in 1993—the last year of his life. In the performances, he was carried in the arms of his friends through the streets of each city. This brought to mind the group ACT UP’s political funerals. How does Espaliú’s art fit into the international activist movement during the AIDS crisis?

IR: There is so much to be said here. Espaliú had already been performing in public and participating in interventions and happenings from the 1970s in Barcelona—and this is the moment of late dictatorship and the transition to democracy. So, he would have definitely had a vocabulary for this disrupting or re-interpreting of the public space, since before the onslaught of the crisis in general. However, as his career continued to grow and the crisis exploded, he spent time in New York City and got involved with ACT UP there; he wrote that he worked with the Latino caucus of ACT UP NY.

“Carrying” was absolutely born of his time spent with ACT UP, and it was one of the first media spectacles about HIV/AIDS in Spain. He also became known to a wider public at this time because he published about his diagnosis in the major newspaper, El país. Additionally, he was leading artist-activist workshops in Spain like ARTELEKU, inviting Jon Greenberg in 1992, and the Sonsebeek exhibition where he performed El nido featured a conversation with French and English gay men about the modes of desire and relationality, which were changing at this time. So, just before he passed away, Espaliú was playing a really interesting role both in Spain and within different international networks of artists and organizers.

RB: You are currently working on other translating poets and artists working at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis such as Manual Ramos Otero, Roberto Valllero, and Victor Fragoso. Can you tell me a bit about this project and what it means to you to translate these voices?

IR: I’m not sure if it’s quite a project yet. I started translating bits and pieces of different voices from those years first, because I liked the poems and, during the last few years, it was also a way to do something creative during lockdown. If somehow this turns into a clearer or more cohesive project, it will be because I think that translation is a way to sort of register and access historical memory of queers, and a rather queer way of doing so. There is something magical in holding my voice with a voice in the past. Translation becomes a mode of doing history magically.

RB: Literary translation is often solitary, but there is also something conversational about the process of bringing voices into a new language. Do you view translation as a communal act?

IR: Yes, absolutely. To me, translation is one way to speak with and through the past. The beauty that Espaliú’s poems and performances brought out of translation to me is that it is always a relational act. He wrote all of these poems that begin with “para aquel . . .” or “para quien . . .,” and there is this giving gesture that I wanted to pick up on in translation.

RB: I gleaned from your Twitter that you are a devoted birder. Along with posting your translations, you also post videos and poems about birds. What is your relationship with birding? Does it inspire your work as a translator?

IR: Birding is such an important part of my life. It’s meditative, contemplative, it’s something I do to relax. I don’t know if I’ve been able to parse out the relation between birding and poetry— but I’m positive it is there. Something about reading the landscape for movements, and for songs and trills—it seems like reading poetry to me. I also follow contemporary poets and writers on Twitter and I see so many of them snapping photos of birds or writing about birds and I feel like there is a significant overlap between a poet’s eye and a birder’s! Maybe we can start a poetry/birding club.

Also I want to mention that there’s been a recent movement called #BirdNamesforBirds, which asks us to re-think how we name birds (and who we name them after), and this strikes me as a conversation poets could add a lot to. When I’m in Latin America, I often wonder how/if bird names translate from one place to another and how birds can tell us so much about place. It is fascinating to me to think about how a bird could migrate from North America across the Caribbean and down the Andes, and be called so many different names along the way.

RB: What do you do when you are feeling stuck or uninspired in your translations?

IR: I started forcing myself to do quick translations. Knowing that I’ll return to it, I just sort of go for the first idea that pops in my head and try to get to the end of a poem in five minutes (or whatever arbitrary limit I set for myself). I feel like this helps to just unlock the process and see where it can go.

Ian Russell (b. 1989, Philadelphia, United States) is a teacher, researcher, and translator. His translations have appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Puerto Rico Review, and elsewhere. He received a Ph.D. in 2019, specializing in Iberian and Caribbean literary and performance cultures of the twentieth century.