Matt Reeck’s rich, sonically layered translation of Olivier Domerg’s psychogeographic writing, from Portrait of the Puy de Manse, was published in Asymptote’s January 2025 issue as part of its special feature on new forms. In the piece, we leap from prose to verse, stepping with each new utterance from alignment to alignment, just as the puy becomes a stream becomes another mountain. “Collapse: debris,” writes Domerg in Reeck’s precise, pensive hand. Does translation depend on a similar, geological rhythm of change? In this interview, Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor of Fiction Michelle Chan Schmidt speaks with Reeck about his translative art, the sonic aura of language and space, and the process of decolonising knowledge.
Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): In an interview with Asymptote from 2014—eleven years ago!—you state that your translation philosophy is ‘best left unexpressed’. Yet in a brilliant 2019 essay for Public Books, ‘Translation’s Burden’, you highlight what you call the ‘Hermeneutic Truth’, deconstructing the cliché of ‘semantic invariance’, or the so-called untranslatable element—apparently intrinsic to each text—that causes their translations to wither. How would you express your translation philosophy today? What role might ‘unnecessary original language words’ play in translated texts?
Matt Reeck (MR): First, I have to say that while I know people use the word ‘philosophy’ in this context, I tend to avoid it; why does everything have to have a philosophy when ‘practice’ would do, when intelligence and sensitivity would do? That word also tends to make ‘practice’ appear uniform and to regularise what is naturally variable. Even if there are guidelines, choices are always particular and individual. I think that means translation is an art and not a philosophy (and is not governed by a philosophy).
These days, I think about the role editors take. (Patrick Hersant has a great essay forthcoming called ‘The Third Hand’, translated by me (!), that talks about the role editors play in the publication of translations.) I think about any book’s birth as a collaboration. So many people are involved, and the relationship with editors can be good or bad.
I graciously accept that copy editors have helped me improve my translations in untold ways! But when an editor has strong preferences, it’s best to know those from the jump. Literary translators tend to be competent, so they are flexible and can institute protocols for making particular sorts of choices, but when editorial preferences are only retroactively made clear through ‘error correction,’ it tends to grate, and this sort of editorial action devalues translators as professionals.
As for this phrase, ‘unnecessary original language words’—is that mine? I might have been thinking about some Urdu writing, which has formal features that don’t necessarily translate well to English; there, some pruning of excessive nouns is useful. But I would also say words aren’t the only thing you’re translating. I got to teach translation to beginners for the first time this fall, and what I found was that no matter how hard I argued for this approach—to see beyond the words—the students returned to words. It was their comfort zone. In my view, to fixate on words misses much of what translation is. Which is to say, if we’re talking about one translation, one sentence, then who can say which word is absolutely necessary?
MCS: Could you tell us about your approaches to translating from French, Hindi, Urdu, and Korean? Does your method differ from language to language, and how?
MR: I would like to say I have a method, but I think that the way I translate is half intuitive, half grammar brain, and half cultural learning. (Yes, translation is an excessive art.) I first think of translation within the general context of my language learning and use. I wanted to learn new languages to talk to new people, so for me, the oral/ aural part is a primary element.
Each language has its oral/ aural system. When I’m around a language, my ears and brain get set up differently. There’s a subtle physical reconstruction that takes place. What’s interesting to me is that users of each language find their grammar, syntax, and vocabulary ‘natural’. I mean, all grammars are natural, all syntax is natural: no matter how different they are, they are all already in the human brain. Sometimes, with long sentences, or weird syntax, grammar, vocabulary, etc., you have to pause and decode even in a ‘native’ language, but I would say that when you hear a language you know, you’re not translating it; it goes inside your mind, hits something neural, and makes sense. So when you’re translating, you’re not translating. But holding two languages ‘open’ at once is imperfect. I mean, you can get lost in between these two natures.
When I look back on a draft, sometimes I see that I haven’t fully switched the grammar, the codes. Or, you could say, the naturalness of the first grammar has lingered; it has temporarily convinced me of its absolute naturalness, not its specific naturalness within the first language’s confines. So, ideally, I need time after drafting to forget the oral/ aural stimulus of the first language and its grammar.
As for method, my other method is looking up words in dictionaries and enjoying it! I used to be mad at myself that I couldn’t remember every single word I read, but now I’m practicing self-compassion. One translator I know once said that translators don’t look up words because they don’t know them, but because they’re checking. For me, that is true—authors use words in different ways and sometimes it’s so unexpected that you learn something new about the words—but then there are words I don’t know. What I also find is that sometimes, because I work fast, looking up words can provide that moment or two for the brain to find what it’s looking for on its own.
MCS: Your translation of Olivier Domerg’s writing, from Portrait of the Puy de Manse, raises fascinating questions—or thought puzzles—about the matter and effect of language. For instance: ‘What, then, would it mean to “say something implicitly?”’ Or: ‘What does the movement of language do face-to-face with the inertia of something?’ As a poet and translator, how do you relate to these questions? Do you have any answers?
MR: Words are the first or last things we use to speak—but which one? When I lived at the Kansas Zen Center, the Zen masters encouraged us to think of sitting meditation as communication: there were energy belts beneath the floor, a rhizome, connecting all the people seated in meditation. Communicating our basic humanity.
These days, I play a game with my daughters. We call it ‘communicating.’ One person says: ‘I’m thinking of a fruit.’ And we try to channel our intuitive powers to see which fruit it is. (So far it doesn’t work well, but I don’t think it’s because the idea is wrong, just our skills aren’t that good yet.)
Things speak all the time. We speak in gestures, in touch, in silence. All the time. I’m looking at a photo taken of a hill I know and love in Kansas. Whenever I return to the computer, I see it. We’re communicating. It speaks to me about all the histories it holds: my histories, and the histories of the land, which I can intuit, or the social histories, which I can learn, if words are put to them. I think I relate to Olivier’s writing because he uses words to try to capture what is already there and being communicated without words—and that process can sometimes seem messy, imprecise, and fleeting. Superficial.
The natural world can seem inert because its time-frame is different. My experience is that I have to slow down to hear it. In college, when I was feeling out of sorts, I would find a patch of lawn to sit on, and I would push back the grass and dig into the soil to see what animals I might find: ants, worms, bugs whose names I don’t know. And then the scale and time-frame of nature stopped feeling so different from mine. Then the words don’t seem so vain. In vain.
MCS: Reading Domerg’s original text, Portrait de Manse en Sainte-Victoire Molle, closely, I encounter such delicious sonic chiasmi. I’m thinking especially of ‘Au ventre de la forme pansue. À la pensée de la forme venture,’ which you translate as ‘The center of its paunch. The thinking invested in its stomach-like form.’ Your translator’s note already touches on the ‘displacement of language’ that makes Domerg’s ‘wordplay moments’ impossible to directly reproduce, but could you speak a little more about how you came to your final translation decision for this quotation? More broadly, how do you attempt to undo the stale ideas of semantic, formal, and effect ‘invariance’ in your translation of Domerg’s Portrait de Manse?
MR: I hope you mean I succeeded here! French and English are in no way comparable in terms of their oral/ aural powers; rhyme and homophones in French are so much greater that they allow so much more wordplay, which can be a great effect when playfulness is part of the goal, and which can also be, in a more neutral way, simply part of the poetic effect of French in general. (Sometimes it can also make things overly punctilious and vapid. . .) I don’t know when I thought of ‘paunch,’ but in ‘paunch’ and ‘stomach’ (panse/ ventre) you have two words with similar meanings, of different registers. And you get the visual ‘ch’ in paunch and the ‘ch’ in stomach; you get the [k] sound in thinking, stomach, like. . .; you get the [p/f] pair, which are related sonically, aurally.
In poetry or poetic prose, when I have to make a choice to prioritise meaning or sound, especially when the oral/ aural dimension seems so integral in the original text, I prioritise sound. But a lot of the denotative, semantic meaning is carried across here too. The ‘failing’ that I see is the way that the word panse must have come into Olivier’s mind because it rhymes with Manse. That’s not a moment you can recreate in English.
MCS: Both your poetic and translative practices grapple with the construct of the city. I’m thinking of your chapbooks, The Pastoral City and The Necessary City, as well as your co-translation with Aftab Ahmad of Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto; your forthcoming translation of 89 Words Followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem by Milan Kundera; and others. Urban and psychogeographic writing is also an interest of mine. How do you perceive the city as a literary form? Within its form, how do your poetry and your translations mould each other?
MR: Cities make geography appreciable in an easy way. I don’t think of them as being different from the countryside. I would say I’m equally city and country, or that my emotions toggle between the two; I’m always happy to leave the city, and I’m always happy to return! Each city’s history builds through its geography. For me, it would be impossible to think of a city without a clear geographical (or psychogeographic) map on top or underneath, and I have a very good sense of direction; my memories imprint quickly on places, or vice versa. I can find myself around in places I haven’t been in decades. But my wife is the opposite. What does the city look like to her? How does she occupy space-as-place, when that place hasn’t been fit into a grid of all the other places-as-spaces around it?
So I wouldn’t say exactly that it’s a literary form. One way to answer your last question is that when I’m translating a new geography—when what I’m translating is about somewhere I haven’t been—there’s a moment of pause. Or on the flip side: I get so excited to translate things about places I know and love! In my poetry, these days, I’m writing mostly chronicles, with photos attached, like what Olivier does (Brigitte Palaggi is the photographer, in his case). These chronicles have a psychogeographic element. They aren’t meant to overwrite the landscape but to place me in it, or it against me.
MCS: Your most recent and current translation projects lean towards the de-/postcolonial; these include One-World by Édouard Glissant, for which you were awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in translation, and the nonfiction Anthropocene Communism: Land and Capital in the Age of Disaster by philosopher Paul Guillibert. You also received a New India Foundation Translation Fellowship to translate A Portrait of the West, a decolonial 1924 travelogue by the Urdu writer Qazi Abdul Ghaffar.
Little public attention seems to have been paid to the intersection of translation and (academic) theory, but I’m curious: how do you engage with translating theory-dense texts, and how does the process differ from translating poetry or fiction? How do you imagine the shift in the dominant intellectual landscape that bringing as-yet untranslated de-/anticolonial texts into English would engender?
MR: I have to say that I’m also leery of using the word ’theory,’ like philosophy—what do we mean by that today? Paul’s book is much more like the sort of close reading that you see in literary studies, yet its agenda is engagement: political activism, while being also a rereading of Marx. I had thought for his book to hew close to the text, allowing the syntax of the French to come through a little, to foreignise ‘philosophy,’ and yet the editor just came back with criticism of that ‘method,’ which, he says, results in episodes of ‘clunky’ prose! So perhaps that choice was in error! Non-fiction, by and large, is such a vast category that it can’t really be a category where one approach is always useful. Cultural studies. Philosophy. Theory. To me, it’s like pointing to something in the dark.
Another book that’s forthcoming, The Wound of a Name by Abdelkébir Khatibi (which won the Global Humanities Translation Prize in 2021), is also, by these categories, non-fiction, theory, cultural studies, and philosophy. But it reads nothing like Paul’s book. And in that case, a blurb on the cover will commend my ‘ambitious and sensitive’ translation, and I believe I used the same ’method’ that I used for Paul’s book! So it feels like swimming in a murky sea where the landmarks are hard to make out, where the winds change every couple of hours. . . where you’re not sure if the people in the boat on the horizon are coming to save you or drown you!
Then, I have to point out that Glissant’s One-World is a novel, but a novel unlike any other novel you’ve read—excluding, perhaps, another of his novels, if you’ve read one. I translated a portion of his manifestos (edited by Patrick Chamoiseau) for Manifestos (Betsy Wing and I each translated half of this collection), and there is a difference between even these casually critical-social texts and his novels, but his novels have theory in them. Implicit theory. My goal in translating this novel is to show in one (big) work how great his novel writing is, and also to argue for critical-creative intellectual agency, in which there is not a great (false) differentiation between the two.
As for my interest in the postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial, and what I think might happen by bringing more texts like these into English circulation. . . I’m almost positive that I have no power to influence anything. Mostly, these days, it seems like everyone’s preaching to their own choirs. I do it because I find these texts interesting and important; I like reading them, and they bring me to places and languages and cultures where I wish to go. My basic observation is that every new hire in the humanities states that their goal is decolonising knowledge, and yet no one is going off the grid. It’s not that knowledge can or should just now be decolonised, it’s that there have always been two tracks of knowledge, and that the dominant (visible, historical) track is premised upon exclusions that it cannot countenance or accommodate without losing its raison d’être.
I’m reading a Hindi novel by Ranendra, The Disappearing Country, that is aware of these things—but it’s aware of these things because it’s telling the story of the Munda people in Jharkand, who are one historically excluded group in India in a historically marginalised area. It’s only by telling these stories and putting them in new spaces—translating them—that people can realise that there have always been two tracks of knowledge, and that each person has to commit to finding things out for themselves. To say you’re decolonising knowledge from within the Western university (or Western publishing industry—whichever institution you would like to name) is, to me, absurd. It’s a rhetorical gambit forced on people today, whereas it would be clear to most that you would first have to change the colonial-modern apparatuses (dispositifs) of knowledge that continue to shape Western thinking. I mean, you’d have to renegotiate the meaning of social-scientific objectivity and open the boundaries of reality to go beyond the merely material, and you’d have to seriously deconstruct European humanist universalism, and then reconstitute departments so they don’t implicitly reproduce colonial-modern biases. Then you might talk about decolonising knowledge.
But, in my view, translators share an interest with the oppressed. They might be able to help decolonise knowledge, if their work isn’t entirely co-opted by the institutions that broadcast it (I’m an adjunct, so not implicated in the power structure of the university—but rather the opposite). Since we’re among the surveilled, the forgotten, and our work is diminished by the organs of capital, who better than translators to extend their natural sympathy to others who are surveilled, overwritten, and diminished by those in power?
Matt Reeck translates from French, Hindi, Urdu, and Korean. What of the Earth Was Saved, his translation of the Hindi poet Leeladhar Jagoori, was published in 2024 by World Poetry Books. He is currently a New India Foundation Translation Fellow for A Portrait of the West, the 1924 Urdu travelogue by Qazi Abdul Ghaffar. Recent French poetry publications can be found on remue.net, and current French poetry translations include work by Patrick Beurard-Valdoye, Stéphane Bouquet, and Olivier Domerg.
Michelle Chan Schmidt (she/her) is Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor for fiction and a 2023 Editorial Fellow at Full Stop, where she curated the Winter 2024 special issue on ‘Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities.’ She has contributed reviews, interviews, translations, and creative writing to The Cleveland Review of Books, Interpret Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, Public Books, and others. As the 2025 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentee for Poetry from Hong Kong, she is the English translator of Hongkongese poet Tang Siu-Wa’s《眾音的反面》The Opposite of Sounds.
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