If a single through line can be said to anchor a body of work as varied and prolific as Gander’s poetry and translations, it is this: the ethos of una-saka, of going beyond the vanishing point, taking his readership with him across the boundary, down the slope, and into the ambiguity of the space beyond, to the other shore, to parts and voices unknown.
He does so with a deeply felt ethical impulse, a syncretic mind, a sense of formal irreverence, and a geologist’s dexterity shifting scales from the granular to the panoramic.
I suspect Gander would agree with the physicist Brian Greene’s notion that “the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.” Core Samples from the World, for which Gander was a 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist, maps “other shores” as diffuse as Xinjiang and Sarajevo, San Luis Potosí and Isla Negra, with blistering depth for a volume slimmer than a hundred pages. Still, his poetry and translation practice resides not on the physical shores his books have taken him to, but in the in-between spaces, the una-saka between languages and people, the more nebulous una-saka of and between words and within the poet-translator’s own emotional topography.
“I write . . . in all directions at once,” Gander says in the essay collection A Faithful Existence, “emphasizing not the stability of single words but the transition that emanates between them, or between a word and its rings of association, rings of silence. My idea of meaning is derived from the continuity of the transition. . . I follow those poems whose rhythms and syntax draw me away from what is already familiar, secure, agreed upon.”
No surprise, then, that Gander is drawn to the otherworldly poetry and performance of Gozo Yoshimasu, whose ineffable compositions have been called untranslatable. In Alice Iris Red Horse Gander has assembled a team of both emerging and well-known translators to bring them into English “by any means necessary.” Gozo’s poems mock the conventions of print, typography, and orthography; they are poly-(vocal), inter-(subjective, textual), and multi-(lingual), una-sakal to the core. Gozo cannot be read on any terms but his own. Descriptions such as this one can only gesture at a fraction of his work’s intricacy and originality. “It might be observed,” Gander writes in his introductory essay “The Beyond of Gozo Yoshimasu,” “that this poetry has not been translated from the Japanese so much as it has been translated from Gozo Yoshimasu.”
New Directions aptly calls Alice Iris Red Horse “as much a book on translation as it is a book in translation.” By even attempting to compile a career-spanning anthology of Gozo’s poetry in English—which in its “Talmudic density” of voices, languages, and inter-texts is inherently subversive to the logic of a translation mirroring its original—Gander has broken new ground within the realm of translation. “I wonder if the goal of ‘representing’ the original is the goal of translation at all, given that the work is necessarily subjected to alteration, transformation, dislocation, and displacement,” he elaborates in the introduction. “And given that transformation and displacement are major concerns in Gozo’s work, maybe there are times when NOT ‘representing’ the original is precisely what permits the creation of something less definitive but more ongoing, a form of translation that amplifies and renews the suppleness of the original poetry’s meanings.”
Forrest Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, among them Core Samples from the World, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Be With, a collection of elegies for his late wife, widely beloved poet C. D. Wright, which received this year’s Pulitzer Prize in poetry. For many years he was the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University, where his ecopoetics and translation seminars were in high demand. We have Gander to thank for bringing many important writers into English, notably Coral Bracho, Alfonso D’Aquino, Jaime Saenz, and Kiwao Nomura. His co-translation, with Kyoko Yoshida, of Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems, was the recipient of the 2012 Best Translated Book Award. Gander is best known as a translator for The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda, a bilingual collection of twenty previously unreleased Neruda poems published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press.
Forrest was kind enough to meet me for a drink in New York over the summer before giving a reading in Bryant Park. The ensuing conversation, conducted by email, touches on Alice Iris Red Horse, the international poetry landscape, ecopoetics, lichen, filmic poetry, and more.
—Henry Ace Knight
Alice Iris Red Horse is a translator’s book of translations, truly not for the faint of heart. In both your introduction to the volume and the translator’s note for your contribution to it (co-translated with Kyoko Yoshida), you use this jazz phrase, “stacked chords,” to describe the effect of Gozo’s poetry, e.g. “we end up processing two simultaneous meanings as though we are hearing stacked chords in music.” The phrase stuck with me throughout the book as a really apt metaphor for the level on which I was experiencing it as a reader with no knowledge of Japanese, quasi-fluency in Chinese, and some marginal understanding of the Korean writing system. Even as I often struggled to make sense of what Gozo was trying to get at, I was still getting a sense of what he was up to. The book worked on me in many cool and revelatory ways beyond the narrow purview of semantic meaning. You get a feel for the pliability of Japanese and its sonic possibilities from these translations. But it’s more experiential than that: you gather from Gozo’s homophonographic play and orthographic strangeness that this is a poet who cannot be read on anyone’s terms but his own, whatever language(s) the text may be in. At first you fight the discomfort of that reading experience, but when you yield to it, and just read the thing rather than trying to read into it, you feel an expanding awareness of how stacked language becomes when you pay as much attention to it as Gozo does and are as generous with it as Gozo is. The more you acclimate to this way of reading, the more absurd it seems to entertain the idea of “representing the original” in the classical translation sense. It occurs to me that maybe the reason why some call Gozo untranslatable is simply that the conventional paradigm for translation is about “representing the original,” and attempting to do that in this case would be so obviously in vain. In the introduction you call for “something less definitive but more ongoing, a form of translation that amplifies and renews the suppleness of the original poetry’s meanings.” How has editing this anthology influenced your thinking on translation, and how have other translators responded to the book?
Because it’s such an unusual book, straining the expectation for an “ordinary” reading experience, the response from others has been all the more gratifying. It gets discussed at many translation symposiums in various countries, and its sales figures have surprised the editors at New Directions. The rights were acquired and a UK edition came out. It received notable reviews in Japan, although it isn’t in Japanese. But for all the splash, I certainly don’t think it’s the model for every future translation of poetry into English. On the other hand, it’s not simply an inventive conceptual translatorly response to a text akin to Christian Hawkey’s wonderful VenTrakl or Janet Hendrickson’s recent Treasures of the Castilian or Spanish Language.
What Alice Iris Red Horse shows is that translation can be something with which to think. The focus on different translation processes instead of a dominant “representative” one, on the commentaries of individual translators, and on imaginative puzzle-solving proposals in English for, to take an example, visual and sonic rhymes made possible by the nature of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese characters, give us access to Gozo’s profoundly complex and influential poetics, an access that primarily semantic translations deny us. Gozo’s other-honoring poetry is ethical at the core and so, I would say, is the thoughtful, creative plurality of the translations of his work in this book.
One of the hallmarks of Gozo’s work, for you, seems to be his poetic ethics. Could you tell us a bit about the particular ethical stance of his poetry and performance, and what draws you to it?
Most recently, deeply affected by the tragedy of the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima, Gozo has been going to sites of trauma to write and to conduct “open sessions” with whatever or whomever happens upon him in those settings. He characteristically rolls out a large copper scroll on which he formalizes the beginning of a session with a hammered stamp into the copper. He uses the tools of a dead friend to do this. And then he attentively waits, sometimes chanting, sometimes taking photos, sometimes playing music from a tinny tape recorder. He doesn’t just listen, but as Miles Davis advises, he “listens into.”
As I mention in my introduction to the book, “As part of an ethical inclusiveness, he scrupulously cites the names of others with whom he shares conversations. Characteristically, he ceremonializes those references by citing dates and place names: ‘IN Kasumi, WITH Sato Masayoshi-san, last Year of the Rat—December 2009—31st, at three o’clock, just at year end. . . .'. He refers to friends and strangers and long dead writers with tender reverence. Adonis is ‘that great poet of Dimashq (Damascus).’ The Japanese filmmaker is ‘that Dear Ozu Yasujiro.’ Even a puppy is honored as ‘His Dogship.’ Gozo goes so far in his honorifics as to curiously dedicate someone else’s poem, Hoshi Saigyo’s twelfth-century ‘Furrowed Road of Embers,’ to a contemporary poet that he admires. It is critical for him to credit the words of others. Partly, he says, he does this out of shyness. He readily yields his own voice in order to allow for other voices.”
While I was in Japan this summer, Gozo was conducting a monthlong “residency" near a town that had been evacuated due to radiation contamination. He was holding all-day, all-night sessions for anyone who came to see him in poetic encounters that shared, perhaps, some qualities with the sorts of engagements that Marina Abramović famously initiates.
There is such obvious kinship between your ways of being and poetry-making and Gozo’s. Aesthetically and formally your work is quite different, but the underlying spirit of it seems totally of a piece. Nomadic but radically present, intersubjective, syncretic, animated by the “cosmic wind” as Gozo puts it, “cultivating a constant vulnerability, an ongoing receptiveness,” as you have it in the introduction to Alice Iris Red Horse—your visions of what it means to “live as a poet” seem to be in remarkable alignment. In the poem, “, , , , Stones Single, or in Handfuls,” Gozo alludes to an experience you shared together, the nature of which is left mysterious, involving (I believe?) a white raincoat and a cocoon and Walden Pond. After Alice Iris Red Horse came out, you did a series of performances together. What is it like for you to hang out with Gozo, and to share the stage with him?
It’s miserable to share a stage with him. I’d much rather watch with the audience or accompany him on a walk at Walden. I’m more self-conscious and also reverential to the point of being inhibited by him onstage. Sawako Nakayasu, who has a background in dance and performance, is a much better on-stage collaborator with him. Gozo doesn’t like to repeat himself in his performances, even if he pulls out similar props. He often, for example, uses a bell that dangles from his teeth on a string. It hurts him a little and forces him to speak words differently. Curiously, John Coltrane, who had bad teeth from years of sucking butternut lifesavers, did a similar thing with his embouchure. The gorgeous sound came with a price. Cultivating vulnerability as an ethical and aesthetic stance often involves the experience of pain.
From the interviews included in Alice Iris Red Horse, a sense of the vibrant sixties and seventies Tokyo arts scene that supported Gozo’s early poetry comes into focus: transdisciplinary, decentralized, exploratory, unpretentious, eccentric, populated by all of these super permissive venues for performance and noncommercial zines that published emerging writers. What little time I’ve spent in Tokyo totally squares with Gozo’s description of the city as an incubator for culture. Upon discovering Tsutaya and Tower Records, I thought to myself, Here is a city where not only are writers and musicians decently compensated for their work, but the average person still seems to really value there being a physical hub through which to experience it. Ten-story brick-and-mortar record stores are just obsolete in much of the West, if they ever existed in the first place. Of the many, many scenes you’ve experienced in your travels, I’m wondering which ones seem to be the most supportive and permissive of work that, like Gozo’s, is really far out there and challenging and radical.
I was talking about the sixties in Tokyo last night with the Japanese dancer/movement artist Eiko Yamada, who was saying that the surge of creativity at that time was partly a response to political and personal oppression, much like the uprisings in Hong Kong recently. The Chilean poet Raúl Zurita said much the same thing about the wildly inventive art and writing that arose in response to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. I think that oftentimes, something has to be really at risk for artists and writers to take the kinds of risks that Zurita, Yoshimasu, and others took in their work. And probably no zone sustains such fluidity for very long. At the beginning of the Cambrian, animal life shared enough DNA that any creatures could breed and produce entirely new forms. But eventually, that openness closes down. Berlin seemed to be an innovational place twenty years ago; I see a lot of inspired writing and performance work in Mexico City these days. The underground electronic music scene in Shanghai is outrageous.
In Core Samples from the World, you’re wrestling with the desire for communion with faraway people and places (“Want to move / in a way that’s more connected”) but also the anxiety of creating a false, reductive image of the unfamiliar (“To welcome the / strangeness of / strangers / not versions / simply of / my own / thought”). This seems to have been a time in your life when you were stuck in your own head and trying to find a way out: “Let’s get this process right. / Want to find my bearings in what’s real.” What was it that first moved you to begin traveling so widely?
I didn’t want to be, as Robert Creeley has it, “locked in this / final uneasiness.”
You always seem to have your ears pricked while you’re on the road for new poetic forms to incorporate into your work. With Core Samples from the World, it was the Japanese essay-poem tradition of haibun. Lately you’ve been making these really cool “interior landscape” poetry films inspired by a classical Tamil poetry lineage. Can you tell us a bit about the sangam tradition you’ve been working with, and what you’ve been up to with poetry films more broadly?
I have a book, Twice Alive, that New Directions will bring out in early 2021. Like much of my writing, it’s concerned with intimacy, not just human intimacy but our intimacy with our environs. I don’t want to talk out my passions far in advance of their articulation in the book, so that when the book comes out, I’m already sick of speaking to its concerns. But I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last two years in India, which is the most fascinating locus I’ve encountered, a cultural and linguistic palimpsest that flourishes in constant translation, where any conversation, even in small villages, will include words and phrases from at least three languages. In Tamil Nadu, a literary blossoming occurred between 300 B.C. and 300 A.D. that came to be called Sangam literature, the literature of confluence. One current of that literature shares a great deal with the concerns of contemporary eco-criticism; in particular, the merging of subjectivity (human emotion) with local landscapes. I’ve written a series of poems influenced by that tradition and I continue to make little films that extend the scope of my poetry.
Can you tell us a bit about the lichen project you have in the works?
Again, I don’t want to talk myself out far ahead of the book, but drawing on a two-year-long collaboration with mycologist Anne Pringle, artist Emily Arthur, and literary critic Lynn Keller, and inspired by the writing of Julio de Vega, Matts Soderlund, and Brenda Hillman, I’ve come to connect my own thinking on intimacy with lichen which, it turns out, muddles many of our categories for thinking about distinctions between plants and animals, between species, and between the individual and the mutualistic.
Do you agree with John Shoptaw that for a poem to be ecopoetic it must be thematically and rhetorically environmentalist, “urgent” and “aim[ing] to unsettle”? You published Redstart: An Ecological Poetics in 2012; has your sense of what it means to be ecopoetic at a time of ecological crisis changed since?
I’m a fan of Shoptaw’s own poetry and his criticism, but I wouldn’t ever presume a “must.” People who rely on definitions, as Shoptaw generally doesn’t, tend to have little sense of history. In Redstart, I’m skeptical of some of the claims made for ecopoetics. But I’m more than ever supportive of its aim to reorient our habitual faith in a logocentric, human-centered, hierarchical relation to everything in the world that is not human. As you know, we ourselves aren’t only human. Our DNA contains the DNA of nonhuman species ranging from Neanderthals to parasites, long ago incorporated into our systems. (Trigger warning for racists: that fact frizzles your arguments about “blood purity”).
Almost fifteen years ago now, in a conversation you had with Eliot Weinberger published in BOMB, Eliot said, “American poets are mainly preoccupied with autobiographical anecdotes, or pomo ironic skating on the ‘surface’ of language.” To which you replied, “It’s Oppen’s proposal of inquiry into ‘what we stand on,’ in the combined mineral and ethical sense, that matters. Sure, there’s a level of gratification in reading a story-poem that draws a moral lesson. Everything’s familiar, the form, the voice, the humor or irony, but no significant art celebrates presumed values or situates its morality outside the work’s structure. That’s why translations send tremors through the ground we stand on and why, especially during times controlled by conservative discourses, work from other languages can be so revelatory. A good part of my own new book of essays, A Faithful Existence, has to do with translation. What happens when translations inject new images, rhythms, perceptions, etc. into the muscular arm of the language of power.”
At the time, with Eliot’s “What I Heard about Iraq” newly published, you would have been hard-pressed to believe that an even more rabidly conservative, rhetorically enfeebled politics was imminent. And yet, here we are, 2019. In light of the present moment, do you think the preoccupations of American poets have shifted, and are you more optimistic about the general direction of American poetry?
Don’t you figure that the majority of writing and art in any period is pretty mediocre? Including those zesty sixties which we sometimes moon over. (Do you remember Zager and Evans?) We take a step forward and slip two steps back. But I don’t have any trouble finding hotspots in the United States or abroad. Many American writers— like C. D. Wright, Fred Moten, Don Mee Choi, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joyelle McSweeney, and Eliot Weinberger— are disconfirming habits of genre and aesthetics while broadening the conventions of “the political poem.” North American poets are reading more translations than ever, and there are more U.S. poets who are translating. I think the trajectories of our major writers lead across the borders. We are bound to meet the foreigners in ourselves.
