Pohřební hudba
Vykřičené domy se hemží zákazníky
pastucha který navštívil město je hledá
ptá se mě na cestu jako v Jiráskově lucerně
právo světlonoše
you must scrub the floor of the lavatory all naked
on your hands and knees
even melody.
This is a poem from Pomocná škola Bixley, or the Bixley Remedial School, by twentieth-century Czech writer Ivan Blatný. But on second thought I don’t know whether calling him a “Czech” writer is accurate: the poem above begins in Czech and ends in English. Paralleling his personal history, Blatný was born in Czechoslovakia, but fled to England after the communist coup of 1948. Czechoslovakia itself became systematically occupied by Nazi Germany starting in 1938 until 1945, after which it “enjoyed” three years of some measure of autonomy before its concomitant absorption into the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union through the above-mentioned coup. Finally, in 1993, after all these invasions and transnational translations, what we knew as Czechoslovakia disintegrated and re-formed into what we now call the Czech Republic. Blatný’s Pomocná škola Bixley is itself a textscape permeated by translation, where one finds oneself before poems “speaking” Czech, English, French, German, and Spanish, sometimes all at once. Who is at home in such a text? How could such a text be considered foreign, when there is no domestic reader? By 1954 Blatný was permanently institutionalized—a psycho-social exile—and Bixley was published in 1982. As a reader I “enjoy” an exilic relation to the text; I do not know the context of the English because I do not know Czech, and so I bring to bear on, I infect, I inflect the text with the context of Blatný’s personal and historical circumstances, which are inextricable for any state subject, but especially so for the political exile. Is Blatný transcribing the experience of being told by an English nurse he must scrub the floor thus? Am I being ordered to do as much by Blatný? Must I be all stripped, all naked, even of language? What is the difference between scrubbing legible melody and illegible melody, and is the latter inchoate? “Must” I learn Czech to cross this border? What if I translate it wrong; is “scrubbing” translation: will I scrub the swill of language to encounter the innards of true meaning? Why is true meaning in the lavatory? Is a public restroom still public in a private institution? Won’t I be infected and inflected in doing this? Am I not in the shithouse already? Why must I confront in mirrors, and be confronted by, my own body? How will I know the difference between melody and the sound of sanitation’s circulation? Finally, the “even” of even melody implies that melody is not itself pristine; it is not laminated against soiling and grime; it is not transcendent. Melody, lyric, poetry—all susceptible to contamination. How can I access this poem? Am I accessing the poet’s experience of inaccessibility by being unable to access this poem? Is this what mimesis is, the lie of art: to mimic the inimitable? Is this the most beautiful song I’ve never heard? These are the same insolvent questions I carry with me as I read poet, translator, and essayist Johannes Göransson’s multilingual suite of poems, Summer, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2022. It begins:
I can’t hear you
the lilacs are in bloom and the underworld
is slow I’m slowly listening to girls
sing about the rabble in syrenerna
they’re at my door pöbeln
the girls are in the lilacs syrenerna
I can’t hear them
Summer opens its mouth to express inaudibility: “I,” the “speaker,” cannot hear the speech of “you,” perhaps the most protean of English pronouns. Does “you” refer to the reader, or is it an evocation of a particular person or even season, summer? We have in the second line the description of the state of the lilacs and, due to enjambment, it would appear that not only are the lilacs in bloom but the underworld is, too. But the third line clarifies that the “underworld / is slow,” so the third line is the underworld of the second line, slowing the poem by modifying the second line’s “underworld” in retrospect; we are moving back now looking back like Orpheus looked back before exiting the underworld alone. We wonder, too, whether the “I can’t hear you” refers to the girls the speaker is “listening to.”
And then another weird thing happens: we end the fourth line at syrenerna, a Swedish word. To the monoglot anglophone eye, it looks like nonsense, like babble, a couple of words away from “rabble.” And then the fourth line ends in pöbeln, another Swedish word, and the penultimate in “syrenerna” again, and finally ending in “I can’t hear them,” which we likely cannot either. The poem continues:
I have a telephone number
tattooed on my shoulder and the lyrics
of the song on the radio
seems to be they’re at the door pöbeln
they’re at the door drömmen it’s not
a dream summer never ends
the currency has lost the language
inside language treacherous lilac
In the Western tradition, the ancient Greek male poet is inspired by the female muse; this inspiration is literal, it is an an-erotic (which is to say, erotic) exchange of breath, the muse penetrates the throat of the poet, it is an-urgent CPR. This doesn’t happen, however, by happenstance; the poet calls upon the muse to make him able to call, the poet evokes the muse so he can become evocative, and then the poet will feel and hear the breath of the muse become his own. It becomes clear, here, that we have some really nuanced substitutions and inversions. Again, the poem begins “I can’t hear you,” as if the breath has been totally cut off and the room vacuum-sealed. Instead of the ethereal goddess that is the muse singing in the gods’ ancient Greek, or the lord’s Latin, to the male poet, we have an unknown quantity of girls in lilacs in the underworld likely singing in the vulgate languages of Swedish and English to the speaker, who sometimes self-identifies as a mother. The muse’s heavenly melody has been scrubbed in a lavatory, and instead, we have the static silence of death. This also segues into a class inversion, whereby the courtly poet’s royal milieu is replaced with the lumpen rabble and the radio, a broadcast medium that reaches millions of pairs of ears, not just the poet’s unique and privileged set of AirPods. Finally, the aural “call to the muse” is punningly replaced by a textual telephone number, rendered all the more visual by its being a tattoo on the speaker’s shoulder that the speaker cannot even see. The lyrics—the privileged position of the Lyric I—are not the poet’s but the song’s on the radio, which immediately gives way to the “pöbeln,” or rabble. It would seem this poem is a dream space that is seasonal and cyclical, with Swedish terms cropping up like flowers or, specifically, plural lilacs that replace the singular lyric. Instead of “the language has lost the currency”—perhaps that poetry has lost its value, or because the poet has lost a wallet—it is the currency that has lost the language, i.e. the poem has gone out of control and been swept up in the current, and “the language” has been replaced with languages, or with treacherous language, profligate, riotous as summer. Here is how the inaugural poem ends:
inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom
like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar
What is this treacherous lilac inside language? We could argue that the source of treachery is the source of the language itself, i.e. the author, and there is precedent for such an argument, which was made explicitly by Göransson himself in his previous book Poetry Against All. Framed as a diary he kept in order to plan out the writing of an earlier book of poems, The Sugar Book, Göransson writes:
I have to make this book into a riddle.
I have to throw away the key.
So that squares. Nevertheless, the passage is a “key” to The Sugar Book, and not necessarily to Summer. Another possible answer to the question would be a re-positioning of the question itself, i.e. “What is this treacherous lilac inside language?” begs the question “What is outside language?” This brings us to false cognates, words that seem like they are etymologically rooted in two distinct languages, but which aren’t; they are outside (the) language. The very next line, “language syrener made for girls,” embeds “syrener” inside the language, like a “syringe,” an off-homonym supported by the twice-appearing blood in neighboring lines. Similarly, we might hear “siren,” the treacherous singing women that lure heroes to their deaths in ancient myth, against whom one can do nothing but listen. Despite being false cognates, they don’t seem wrong: this is what poetry is. And yet, the translation of “syrener” is “lilacs.” So “inside language treacherous lilac” is literal, self-referential, deadpan, and the treachery here is that the foreign terms are sheep in wolves’ clothing: “pöbeln” translates to its line-adjacent “rabble,” “drommen” to its line-adjacent “dream,” and “det är sommar,” which ends the poem, translates to the penultimate line’s “it’s summer.” As readers we find ourselves in a linguistic field rabbled with lilacs at the height of fertility, which plays “pöbeln” on translational expectations; by the time you translate the terms, they become superfluous, “copies” or “versions” of the surrounding English; they become familiar. Before translating them, however, they appear treacherous, foreign. If the treachery is translation, and translation is the key, then the key is being thrown, yes, but in our faces.
So, let’s face where this treacherousness comes from: From what ideology do we view translation, and language itself, as treacherous? Why wild wolves rather than domesticated sheep? I think many of us are familiar with terms like “a faithful translation” or “a loose translation”—terms themselves curiously resonant with the misogynistic language of fidelity in the twinned contexts of patriarchal monogamy and patrilineal monotheism—and I think many of us are familiar as well with the biblically foundational Story of Babel. Essentially, a kingdom sets to build a tower that will reach God, and God, who is insecure about his height, shatters the tower and also fragments the unifying language into several different languages; comprehension becomes babble, and a unified community becomes a loose rabble. God punishes us with languages for our infidelity, and translation is the memento of our treachery.
In keeping with this theme, we have the Italian maxim “traduttore, traditore”—“translator, traitor” which, as if to prove the maxim’s veracity, doesn’t look as good in translation—and we have the idea of what is “lost in translation.” Translations are seen often as inferior, impoverished copies of the original text, especially in the case of poetry, which tends to maximize meaning by way of precise use of language, and any “loss” threatens the pristinely functioning economy of the poem. It is like exporting too much of a staple crop, thereby rendering unstable the domestic market system.
Göransson himself speaks of the economy of poetry in his book of essays Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation. Describing the legacy of I.A. Richards, a key player in New Criticism, which transformed the American practice of teaching and reading poetry and paved the way for what we know today as the MFA workshop, Göransson writes:
What assures communication depends on readers having learned to read properly (“close reading”), which allows them to access the meaning of the poem, and to be “discriminating,” thus able to determine the poem’s “worth.” In the end, the New Critical paradigm—like the communication ideal—functions according to an economic principle: meaning is the gold standard ensuring the value of language, while language is a currency otherwise susceptible to nonsense, inflation, chaos.
It follows then that the threat of translational loss is as grave as that of translational gain, which results in “inflation” that lowers the poem’s “worth.” While we much more frequently speak of translational loss, I think our primary fear around translation is what “foreign” elements are added to the poem; if a poem is untranslatable, e.g. if the experience of a poem in Swedish cannot be fully replicated in English, then new elements are added, and compromises are made, in the attempt to create the English product. Thus, within the translated poem, words “foreign” to the source poem are added; and then on a macro level we have several competing translated versions of the poem, a fragmented Babel of poems. Subsequently, the questions become: Is this an adequate/faithful translation? Is it too “free,” or loose? Does it betray the original by being “essentially” a new poem? Can I trust it? Or, as Göransson might say, which translation sets the gold standard?
These translational anxieties are already interesting insofar as they often betray widely held Western anxieties regarding economic values, which further translate into xenophobic ideologies. Analogously, the pedagogical approach championed by Richards and then codified in the MFA world, Göransson argues, creates a sort of Poetics of Domestication, whereby the soul is its own country.
We can see the results of that influence in the pedagogic and aesthetic mottos made famous by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: “write what you know” and “find your voice.” Behind the phrase “write what you know” is a profoundly regionalist model urging writers not to stray into the strange world beyond their home, not to subject themselves to “foreign influence.”
We find this Poetics of Domestication amplified even further in contemporary discourse around poetry-in-translation; such speech often belies a desire for nationalistic purity, which is as offensive as it is hypocritical:
. . . critics often try to denigrate poets who are too much under the influence of foreign poets and movements. For example, “soft surrealists” is a common insult of American poets who are influenced by foreign Surrealists, but who are supposedly “light”, i.e. lightweight, because they are writing in the US, away from the politically urgent contexts in which these foreign Surrealists wrote. Critical anxiety over and denigration of such “soft surrealists” parallels the anxiety over inflationary poetry that circulates without the gold standard of meaning to secure its valuation. Not only is this critique reactionary, it neglects the acute domestic political crises that have typified America since before its inception as a nation—its foundation on slavery and genocide, and the perpetuation of racism, oppression, economic exploitation, and forever wars that lumber on in its domestic and foreign policy.
It strikes me suddenly that, while writing this essay, I’ve oftentimes been unsure whether to modify certain nouns with the adjective “poetic” or “translational.” The two terms seem synonymous, or like translations of one another, or one seems like a metaphor for another, and I don’t think this is simply me tripping myself up. I think, rather, it’s because I find the concerns of poetry and those of translation are nearly the same. In a poem/translation, what is the ideal relationship between word and meaning? In a poem/translation, how does the writer show mastery over the text? If a translation of a poem is too faithful, it fails the poem it translates, becoming only a slavish imitation that sacrifices poetic effect or “quality” for the re-rendering of literal meaning in a different language; if a translation of a poem is too free, it fails the poem it translates by becoming a different poem with new meaning(s). Similarly, if a poem is too slavish to its sources, it becomes derivative, fool’s gold, whereas if it is too free of those sources, it is often seen by the literary establishment to be incomprehensible: it cannot be evaluated, it has no value. Finally, the Latin term “translation” etymologically derives from translatio, “carried across,” and the term “metaphor” etymologically derives from the Greek metaphora, “a carrying across.” It is very apparent that these two terms are not the same; but if we translate them, they are apparently the same. This is itself a metaphor.
The primary engines of poetry and of translation are also what drive them insane, to self-schism; a translation takes a text and attempts to become another text. A metaphor takes a term and attempts to become another term. In the act of each carrying across, what is meant to make the trip unmodified is meaning. However, the text/term is not carried across, but obviously changed. The Swedish becomes English. The heart becomes stone. And yet the anxious aim of the translator/poet is to see the meaning itself cross over unchanged, and in a fixed manner. If the meaning is less obviously changed, what sort of unexpected and treacherous changes does the translated text harbor? How does the reader/writer of a translation/poem manage meaning? The translator dreams of producing the perfect copy; the poet dreams of a word “tree” that will grow actual branches. In both cases, the writer produces difference instead of sameness, and the corporeal and contingent triumph over the allegorical and intentional.
And so we return to the treacherous lilac inside language: on the one hand, the translations in Summer threaten the meaning of the poem because they seem to keep a secret from the reader, and this secret acts like a poison that could infect the meaning, or inflect the meaning, beyond accessibility; on the other hand, if the syringe is simply filled with water—if the Swedish “syreners” refer to the same referents as the English “lilacs” surrounding them—then the Swedish words’ use-value is called into question, as are the English words, and the precise economy of word-per-meaning is threatened, resulting in a sort of riotous inflorescence, or inflation. Or as Göransson states in Transgressive Circulation:
The danger of translation is not just that it makes the original yet another version, but that it infects the entire literary culture with a proliferation of versions. The economy of taste breaks down.
And what happens then? When taste is based on the Renaissance values of spirit and soul, of the authorized author of the body of work, then the “gold” of gold standard becomes just another mineral, as valuable as pyrite; the meek lilacs overtake the mighty “Lyric I.” What I’m referring to here is the soul of the sole body of work. The proliferation of translations of one body of work results in several bodies which, even if one were to argue that these bodies are “mere” copies or even prostheses of the original body of work, nonetheless threaten the primacy and almost mystical inaccessibility of the original, because the original is reproducible. As Walter Benjamin argues in “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction,” the reproducibility of the original work of art allows for the reproduction of illimitable bodies of the original work, which threaten the aura of the original; the original is no longer sacrosanct. In fact, it is not just the product, the copy itself, which threatens the original work but the process, the very fact or revelation that the original is reproducible—once it has been copied, it is revealed that it can be copied, it has no patent on monadism—and thereby the original holds no claims to primacy. The soul, it turns out, can also procreate; it can also catch Covid. Translation, as Göransson again argues in Transgressive Circulation, operates similarly:
There’s a necrotic dimension to our anxieties about both communication and translation. This is because Western emphases on voice, interiority, and meaning repeat Western preferment of the ‘spirit’ over the ‘body’. Translation is the persistence of the body, but it also enfigures the potential of the body to change, to rot or release emanations. Translation scandalizes the self-sameness of human presence: it is the corpse or the ghost that follows too late or too soon on human presence.
Here is what I think: Johannes Göransson wrote a book called Poetry Against All, but I think it very well could have been called “Translation Against All.” I think it very well could have been called Summer.
As a poetic embodiment of an injunction to embrace a more inclusive, more inflationary art, Summer is a book whose multilingual form and (non)translative dynamic haunt “the Western preferment of the ‘spirit’ over the ‘body,’” and thereby the nationalistic and xenophobic ideologies undergirding traditional Western poetry. The reasons for such a call and such an incarnation are aesthetic, and are thereby political, too—what a society or an institution authorizes as beautiful is always political—but they are in no way theoretical. Summer is an embodied book, which means it is a book that is itself haunted:
what do I call my daughter
she’s a hole in the middle
of this poem there can be no hole inside an allegory
it needs gold at its center
like the body needs a soul at its center
Summer appears to be one long poem—there are no titles—divided into four sections, and in the middle of the poem there is a hole, and that hole is the speaker’s daughter. Here “hole” and “soul” form an antimony; an allegory needs gold—the gold standard of meaning—and analogously a body needs a soul. Summer, then, has no sole transcendent meaning, and therefore is not an allegory, or extended metaphor. Summer is possessed by a hole or a ghost, an anti-meaning, a life, or something that threatens life’s meaning. Again, the end of the first page of Summer:
inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar
I know an allegory with a hole in it; it’s the ancient Greek cosmogony story, the abduction of the goddess Demeter’s daughter Persephone. Hades, the god of the underworld, abducts Persephone through a hole he opens in the upperworld. Her daughter gone, Demeter is inconsolable; her grief causes winter on earth and everything begins to die. To reverse this climatic catastrophe Zeus intervenes and demands that Hades return Persephone, but Hades, treacherously, offers Persephone pomegranate seeds that she eats and, since it’s a food of the underworld, Persephone now partially belongs to it. Summer establishes its setting as the underworld, and here we have pomegranate seeds the speaker is being fed by his wife, and are her “bloody fingers” actually stained by pomegranate, or is this blood, and if this is blood why is it blood as well that marks the “bloody little finger prints I can’t hear”? When Persephone stays with Demeter on earth, Demeter’s happiness is expressed seasonally in the form of spring and summer. When Persephone must return to the underworld, Demeter’s grief is expressed in the form of fall and winter. This is the story’s allegory: allegory offers no escape from the world. Grief marks the world and makes the world, which in response makes the seasons. The hole is the site of grief, and grief and the seasons share the same etiological movement. Summer is the hinge between joy and grief; its solar intensity casts the longest shadows:
We have shadows
in summer I can read
letters I won’t tell you
what they say it’s a private
message from my private
mother to my private
daughter the daughter
goes clap clap
med hennes näktergalna
händer I invented war
I can’t turn it off.
We have letters, denoting a correspondence between two people physically absent from one another, and letters after all are private—envelopes are public—and these letters are enveloped in an even higher level of privacy insofar as they are messages between the speaker’s “private mother” and “private daughter.” We’re not privy to the meaning of “private,” but we do know that the speaker “can read” the letters and presumably has, which denotes an invasion of privacy on the speaker’s part. The speaker nonetheless “won’t tell you” what they say. And then there is a sound we are privileged to hear, the onomatopoeic “clap clap” of the daughter, which has a strange effect on the English speaker reading the Swedish letters, as if they are an envelope, or as if a foreign language is itself a clap clap, something that means nothing beyond the sound of the letters themselves, unless you open them, unless you invade their privacy.
I did open them. The phrase “med hennes näktergalna” roughly translates to “with her nightingales,” as if the daughter is clapping/flapping with her nightingales. The moment, and all of Summer, eerily reminds us of John Keats’s elegiac and hallucinatory “Ode to a Nightingale.” The poem begins with the speaker describing his heartache, an emotional state which actually numbs his senses as if he’d drunk fatal hemlock, causing him to sink Lethe-ward—to the river in ancient Greek hell that causes forgetfulness—and then:
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
Compare the dreamlike, shadowy above with the following from Summer:
There were lilacs my body
was juned I was reckless
with my breathing
I was handsome
even for June even with
the peculiar dew dripping
down my forehead I could tell
what I was looking for
a sound ett ljud nej
ett oljud for min oskuld
eller the sound of debt
the virgin sound of nightingales
when they are poisoned
I was poisoned
*
I should never have
taken these seeds in
my mouth now I can’t leave
sommaren pours through
my throat my throat was made
for summer it’s horrifying
Both Keats’s and Göransson’s passages are concerned with nature, with melody, with shadow, and with the nightingale, but where the nightingale in Keats is directly addressed as a “light-winged Dryad”—a virgin nymph that flies—singing with “full-throated ease,” Göransson’s is described as both virgin and poisoned, and his descriptions of his breathing as “reckless” make it seem once again as if poetic melody is economical, and he has spent it thriftlessly. Rather than the regulated caesuras in the comma-rich lyric of Keats—the signals to pause and take a breath—Göransson uses no punctuation whatsoever and his enjambment is radical. Where Keats shows poetic control through prosody, Göransson acts as if “sommaren pours through” his throat—to the extent that sommaren produces a new verb, “to june”—resulting in an almost literal breathlessness, and even belabors his throat with another language. Perhaps this is what it is to june, to create Summer, to make it so the currency loses the language, to poison the well and to drink from it. Consider for example “what I was looking for / a sound ett ljud nej / ett oljud for min oskuld /eller the sound of debt.” “a sound” is immediately followed by the Swedish, then by “the sound of debt,” and then the nightingale/Keats to whom the poet is “indebted,” but now the nightingale has been “poisoned” by another language.
This antagonism between the languages brings us back to the question of the relationship between English and Swedish in Summer. While earlier in the poem there seemed to be a superfluous or inflationary relationship between the English and the Swedish, a lilac field of copies, here we see emerging skirmishes between the two, comprising invasions of privacy and secret messages embedded from each other. Again:
my private
daughter the daughter
goes clap clap
med hennes näktergalna
händer I invented war
I can’t turn it off.
“med hennes näktergalna” indeed translates to “with her nightingales,” but only due to enjambment: händer on the next line then results in the syntax “med hennes näktergalna händer,” where “näktergalna” functions as an adjective for “händer,” or “hands,” forming now the expression “nightmarish hands.” Thus, the private daughter goes clap clap “with her nightmarish hands,” which due to enjambment nightmarishly began as nightingales, but now nightmarishly morph into hands because of the underhandedness of “händer.” Or the sleight of hand of it. I could pun on this all day, and this is my point: the level of linguistic play in the Swedish indicates we have a simultaneous poem happening here, a dream/nightmarish realm or underworld translating, metaphorizing, and running concurrent to the English. Instead of inflation of one currency, we have a transgressive circulation whereby two competing currencies are threatening to devalue one another, a sort of currency war the speaker “can’t turn off.” And then this metaphorical currency becomes literalized:
Can you give me some money
so I can buy my daughter back
because poetry is not
enough
We have a similar moment in the epigraph of Chilean poet Raúl Zurita’s Canto a su amor desaparecido—or Song for his disappeared love—translated by Daniel Borzutzky and published in 2010 by Action Books, an extremely translation-forward and daring poetry press co-run by Göransson himself and poet and playwright Joyelle McSweeney. The vast majority of Zurita’s oeuvre has centered around the decades of brutal, systematic “disappearances” of Chileans carried out by the military regime led by dictator General Augusto Pinochet, after ousting socialist president Salvador Allende via a military coup on September 11, 1973. The US-backed coup resulted in Chile becoming a sort of neoliberalist laboratory, whereby the free circulation of capital was contingent upon violent political repression. Zurita himself was detained and tortured, and the decades-long continuation of this, let’s say, “currency war,” resulted in a range of exilic conditions, political, psychosocial, artistic, and, in the case of these “disappearances,” mortal. The epitaph personally responds to this historical trauma:
Now Zurita—he said—now that you got in here
into our nightmares, through pure verse
and guts: can you tell me where my son is?
The epigraph is unattributed; we know “he” is a father who lost his son, his disappeared love, to political violence. In a way, the very fact of this anonymity universalizes the statement: you, poet, who can move through nightmares and the underworld of loss and death, what have you actually done? Baudelaire says the poet is the “custodian of the intangible,” an Orpheus whose song grants him passage to borderlands and engagement with shadows, but Orpheus is unable to bring his disappeared love back to life. So what is meaningful about this intangible communion? Allegory is about direction; the story or metaphor is carried to a higher place, a place called Meaning, or The Point. It is the “where” of the epigraph, then, that really crushes me. Where is the meaning? Where is my child?
For Johannes Göransson it is the underworld, and for his wife, Joyelle McSweeney, it is the same. In her most recent book of poetry, Toxicon & Arachne, which is one of the most incredible books I have ever read in my life, we see the same set of concerns shroud over the same loss:
My living daughters and I want to cross into the Underworld and find their sister. Can you imagine a baby in the Underworld. No. For that you need an overworld. But we don’t believe in that. So down we go. Or across. I’m an academic so I’ll do some research. I know already that a trip to the Underworld requires accessories: mirrors, rivers, a golden branch. Which portal to the Underworld is right for you? People also ask. I run my tongue over my teeth. People also search for. Pomegranate seeds. That’s for staying in the Underworld. Pop them between your teeth. To be with my baby again, I’d gladly set my credit card down. Open a tab. I’d gladly stay forever.
The plethora of prepositions—into, under, over, down, across—highlights a preoccupation with and satirical reliance on positionality. I say satirical because there can be no position nor movement when setting and passage are impossible: for an underworld you need an overworld, but the speaker and her daughters don’t believe in an overworld even. Or even melody . . . the passage is in prose, after all. And then, the journey itself is virtual: the portal to the underworld is a tab—both an internet window, and an open bill—where one can open a window onto myth, onto product, onto Paypal.
In László Krasznahorkai’s War & War (translated by George Szirtes)—a bitterly moving play on Tolstoy’s War and Peace—the narrator observes: “There is an intense relationship between proximate objects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as for the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God.” The nature of God is synonymous with the nature of loss—“Why have you abandoned me?” we say to God; “Why have you abandoned me?” even God said to God—we lose physical proximity to our love objects, but the relationship’s intensity remains. In this way the field of relationality itself is out of relation, so there is no movement. Where movement actually “occurs” in the passage, virtually, or metaphorically, however, is through currency, through the online market. “Accessories” is a commodity term, rather than a term defined by its use-value such as “tools” or even “talismans.” Through metaphor, the portal to the commodity masquerades as the portal to the underworld. We have the quest replaced with the tourism parlance of which portal is “right for you?” Pomegranate seeds become both a currency for “staying” in the underworld, as well as a party drug to “pop” between the teeth. I’d gladly set my credit card down if I could buy my daughter back.
If loss, or the soul, or allegory, or God is the really distant site where our relationship is weakest—if our beloved relation has been whisked away through a hole—then it is capital that rushes in to fill that lack, and transforms every object into a unit of the same value. Loss itself becomes commodified, an accessory to loss. Hades or the underworld in this passage becomes an internet site fantasmagorium, where you can search for meaning via an algorithm that filters your search toward products to buy. And not only that, but you are not alone; others have searched for meaning before you, and you see their ghostly traces in the form of autosuggested ghost writing:
we’re entering a more economic
phase because of inflation
something is taking my place
it’s called an exchange
metaphor means a carrying
across a dead child is what
I picture metaforen är död
I’ve been told like poetry
or the corpses of translation
We are returned, suddenly, to the link between translation and metaphor; again, both terms mean “a carrying across,” and also both denote “transference,” and here we have the synonymous “exchange,” where the language of economics translates to the language of metaphor and then ends at “the corpses of translation.” At first the “of” here is unclear; are the translations dead? Do the translations kill? I think these readings are possible, but if you enact translation on “metaforen är död,” then translation uncovers corpses: “metaphors are dead.” What I uncover ultimately in Summer is that it’s not so much that the metaphors are dead nor that the extended metaphor, or allegory, is dead, but rather that the operation of metaphorical movement is no longer unilateral nor transcendent. The metaphors do not move us from text to meaning—from body to spirit, from underworld to overworld—rather, they are the seasons that recur cyclically, marks borne from grief that themselves remake the world. Rather than seek allegorical escape to a place of redemption, Summer exposes the holes in capitalist and nationalist circulations that attempt to vampirize and exploit our griefs and our arts. Like snow and under the cover of snow, these systemic circulations offer to deaden and muffle this pain; Summer burns it off and uncovers how these systems—through desire via capitalism, through individualism via nationalism, through redemption via poetry, even melody—only widen the scope and magnify the violence of these wounds, and attempt to remove us from engagement with the world. And why would we want to escape this world when we belong to it? And who has the right to convince anyone that there is a price to this belonging, that it must be bought? “I massacre language / my wife calls me anti-orpheus,” Göransson writes. Summer’s linguistic violences and translational surpluses re-route the circulation of allegory, so the allegory has no heaven to escape to, and the meaning returns to the metaphor itself as the material site of meaning-making. That site is the world, and the World is as metaphorical as Meaning is material. This means we can remake the world, we can transgress against its coercive circulations. And if the world is too expensive to destroy, then at least the poem can be killed, or absconded from:
Poesin är död
so I write a poem
in a foreign language
en giftig dikt
till min döda dotter
or
Poems are dead
so I write a poem
in a foreign language
a poisonous poem
to my dead daughter
In translating these words, I experience a new feeling of unfaithfulness, as if by translating the message I am betraying the speaker, and perhaps the private mother and perhaps the private daughter. It feels as if I don’t belong here. In fact, I think this feeling itself helps me better understand the title of Göransson’s previous book, Poetry Against All. Before reading Summer, I interpreted it in the sense of poetry as a refuge against the disastrous world, or poetry as a weapon against everything, against cops against inflation against white supremacy against misogyny against homophobia against transphobia against contagion against the Supreme Court. You may have lost everything, but at least you have poetry.
But then there’s the problem of “all,” which encompasses poetry, too. If there’s a hole in allegory, if there’s a hole in metaphor, then poetry is against even poetry. In reverence, in supplication, in subjection, in abjection, you must scrub the floor of the lavatory all clean. Even melody. Even poetry.
I think Baudelaire was wrong in saying poets are the custodians of the intangible, and I think Summer is right: poetry is against all in the same way one leans “against” a wall. What I mean is where poetry is prepositional, it touches on and touches everything; it is held against all. If there is an allegory of this book, I think it is that everything and everyone belongs in poetry. Even if the poet doesn’t belong in the world, or in a nation in hell, or in an asylum in heaven, there will still be the poem against those walls and borders and this is true precisely because the poem does not offer refuge from the world. There isn’t even an overworld. It is, in some sense, a translation of the world. And in regard to the world—in regard to global warming, the unprecedented scale of refugee crises, a terminal and evolving pandemic, and the violently infringing enforcement of the “free” circulation of global capital—the world as we know it has effectively, tangibly, already ended. But we are still living in it, and I think we can reread it differently, and I think Summer teaches us a new way to know it, a way that has less to do with familiarity and propriety, and more to do with strangeness and, I think, a welcome displacement:
I’m talking ruins
with the devil you have to be
a foreigner to make art
out of other people’s ruins
he tells me you can’t belong
to ruins because you’re bleeding
from your forehead amazingly
he’s right but I say I belong
to anywhere
