Toward the Radical

In this special cluster on translational poetics, we have brought together a collection of critical writing that features the figure of the poet-translator. The poet-translator, it turns out, puts their finger in the wound of many of the paradigms that have long held together thinking on translation. Equivalence, originality, fidelity all crumble in the hands of the working poet who also works as a translator. These, as well as other stalwart ideals, cease to function as viable measures by which to think through and evaluate translation. The poet-translator returns us to the root of craft—to the radical, to what is radical about translation—as they build a new work from the internal workings of another poem. Here the dynamic movement of meaning, syntax, and form—what is fluid, alive, mutable in poetry—is harnessed in new combination and reshaped by new material until it comes to settle in some new structure that will, at least for some time, be its lyric shelter and home. "Lyric ruins everything," writes Patrick Pritchett. "A thing becomes a noun though it longs to be a verb. / A circle breaks with a whisper and / everything becomes a face. / All the matter before you / pleading its raw song" (31). Lyric, even before the translator gets their hands on it, is a shapeshifter. Action turns to thing, things speak themselves into existence. This is the raw song of lyric that even in its purest precision pleads to be elsewhere, to be something other, to take some new shape in the hands and in the mouth of the reader. The poet-translator—listener, interpreter, craftworker—is that singular reader who can answer the call of lyric and rehome it over again in some new form where it gets to be something other, mean something else, mean in different ways.That so often this generosity—for a translator's task is always a generosity—is measured in terms of accuracy, equivalence, and fidelity both misses the mark and vacates the purpose of the liberation movement that the act of translation performs. Translation unleashes the constitutive dynamism of language. This is what Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about in his pedagogy of the proverb, what Michael Emmerich gives us in snow that haunts, what Anne Carson lays at our feet as she gropes for the light switch in a dark, but not unfamiliar room. What Walter Benjamin proposes in his flowering and his fruit. Language is already—in any combination, but particularly literary language—in flux. Language is movement. The poet-translator does not do more than re-move language so that it might take on other meanings that make it accessible to new ears, new audiences. There is no crime here, no treason. Only generosity and love and the risks these entail. This reaching out, forward, toward—this primary stretching out toward the other—is what is radical and necessary in translation.The poet-translator is already accustomed to this gesture, their hand is already practiced. The poet, too, reaches out, toward, to bring language forth to activate the world-at-hand. But even here language struggles, Martin Heidegger's intimacy and pain met on the threshold that language speaks and marks. The matter before us "pleading its raw song" as we work it into shape. The best poems—the convincing poems, to work backward and invoke Jorge Luis Borges's well-known measure of an effective translation—settle into their shape. They convince us of their shape, whose stuff is soundwork and syntax and the complex network of meaning and music that by dint of echo, relation, and deferred realization manifests into some immediate, whole, cohesive object that can be handed over to another to say look, listen, here the world, mine and yours, do you hear it, too? Do you see it, too? The poet here is the fulcrum, the bridge, the interpreter between a larger world and a reader. The poet is already a translator. To name the poet-translator is then already a redundancy, to name someone twice over. No poem is not a translation of the known world or the hoped-for world, the world as it might have been or a world to come. So when the poet translates, they take on a task they are already accustomed to performing."Poetry, as an art of metaphor, made of thoughts via the materiality of the human artifact of language," Susan Stewart tells us, "thus helps to keep the language alive; the more the language is used, the more it is renewed" (138). Here figurative language keeps language writ large alive, in circulation, makes it new. The poet's freedom is also the responsibility to renovate, reinvigorate, renew. But she goes on: "Above all, language is free of its dependence on finite meaning, or what we might call indexicality. All art resists such resolution into determined meaning in favor of a meaning effect, a capacity for meaning, and openness to it" (138). Stewart reminds us that what poetry means is never as important as how it means or the very fact that it means, and that this capacity to mean, and to mean otherwise is the openness not to which it strives but that defines it as one of the principal forms of human art. Metaphor, simile, metonymy, and prosopopoeia give us a world as we have not before seen it, radical combinations of sense and object, transformation. But these transformations are not fixed. Built from movement, they are alive with an internal dynamism that propels them toward future movement. We may call this interior movement translatability. But before we get there, it is the engine that allows meaning to manifest in multiple and unfixed ways. This is the stuff of poetry.So the poet comes to the translation of poetry honestly. Already practiced at dealing in transformation, the production of movement on the page, the poet applies their hand to remaking an extant poem out of the material of another language instead of out of the material that populates—here again Borges—the invisible draft of a work that's taken shape in their head, or eye, or ear (see Borges 69). The process is a similar one, requiring all the dexterity and acumen of craft to build something where before something has not been. The making of a translation does not occur in the shadow of work already produced any more than any poet already writes in the shadow of all the works that have previously been written. Every poem happens anew, must necessarily clear the way for itself, even when it might borrow or import or nod to works and authors that have come before. Every poem is a clearing in the forest, a flash of light, a source of semantic energy that fuels and refuels itself. The working conditions and horizon of expectations of the poet who translates are no different. The poet-translator clears the scene, makes space, in order that a new poem may take place.Here questions of fidelity and accuracy are vacated, illusions of debt and obligation are emptied, expectations of originality rendered naive and superfluous. The translated poem is always a new poem. Crafted from already new material whose purpose is to again mean in new and mutable ways, the poem in translation is always an original work whose first responsibility is to manifest as a single, cohesive object with its own rhythms, soundwork, logic, and radiating network of meaning. The translated poem has to account, as much as any new poem and any new work of art, for that matter, for itself and to itself. That is, it responds first to its own internal structure, form, and purpose. Without the fulfillment of this singular obligation, it will not survive on the page or on the lips of readers. When we consider, then, the work of the poet-translator—their means, mode, mechanisms, and ethics—we do well to attend to, to learn to read, the vicissitudes and responsibilities of craft, of technê, here knowledge, application, imperfection, and persuasion. Neither art nor science, literary translation is a matter of learned craft and takes place at its intersection of skill, beauty, and persuasiveness. A convincing series of questions before a poem in translation, then, might be: What shape does this work take? To what internal demands of sound and sense does it respond? What constellation of meaning does it create and how? What new movement does it report on the page and in the ear? What new space does it clear for itself? Here the usual—by now certainly clichéd—questions as to accuracy, equivalence, fidelity, and debt are revealed as superfluous, retrograde, and atrophied. These are tired questions that do not teach us how poetry works in any of its multiple and multiplying material forms, one of which may be the new shape a poem takes when constructed in a new language.The thinkers and writers gathered in this special cluster on translational poetics trouble these stalwarts of Western translation thought. But more importantly, they look to the contours and complications of material poetic craft as a source for thinking through how literary translation works formally on the page and less formally in the wider publishing world. In her introduction, Villa-Ignacio identifies translation as a driver of contemporary creativity writ large, a stunning possibility that imagines deep connections between previously diverse aesthetic and political projects. But she also erases the distinction, in her vision of translational poetics, between critical world-revealing and creative world-making, which is to say, between translation and poiesis. Poetic production—for Agamben's poetry in dialect, for Clarke's Rukeyser, for Smith's Ashbery—is coeval with translation. Likewise, translation returns Tengour and Rodríguez's Moro to an inhabitable space where poetry is possible, new, generative. And for Turner's Bouquet, the two meet as inextricable forces that act on one another to create a textual and cultural placeholder for a wider poethical community. Throughout this issue—and in new, exciting work from around the globe that intersects with its theme—translational poetics asks that we understand poetry as already an act of translation taken up once over in new, dynamic, again shapeshifting ways as it participates in a wider bilingual, multilingual, and international poetics.Here the task at hand, Benjamin tells us, "consists in finding that intended effect Intention upon the language into which the translator is translating which produces in it the echo of the original" (76). This effort is, for Benjamin, the feature that distinguishes the work of the translator from the work of the poet wherein "the intention of the poet is spontaneous, primary, graphic; that of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational" (76–77). This last gets the philosopher to a "true language," his "pure language" an ongoing motion or event in which all the languages of the world supplement one another, reconciled and harmonized in how they mean. But if the poet is also already a translator of the sounds, things, and world around them, their work is also already ultimate and ideational. That is, poetry is a striving and active participant in the work toward a "language of truth" that "all thought strives for" (77). The work of the poet is derivative insomuch as it derives both its material and its mode from the lived world, be this world external or internal to the life of the poet. The poet-translator then operates on multiple fronts: their work is spontaneous, derivative, primary, ultimate, graphic, and ideational. And the work that they produce, the task they undertake, is not limited to reproducing "the echo of the original"; it also requires constructing new echoes proper to and constitutive of the work rebuilt of new material and new modes of meaning. A poem built from the ground up in a new language does not deal only in reverberations; if done convincingly, it repeats the call from "the center of the language forest." It calls anew.This is not a question of splitting hairs, or seconds, or personalities. A single figure does not here become two. Rather the poet-translator is their own whole speaking animal who knows that the ideational and the graphic are the same operation, that alpha and omega kingdom come, and that spontaneous is another word for derivative of participation in a larger human language that always already strives toward its own perfect undoing, tensionless and silent. When the poet-translator acts, then, on and in language, theirs is an intervention that lays bare the inner workings of invention and craft such that thought, syntax, and the transformative potential of figurative language erases our distinctions between first and last, faithful and adulterous, recorded and irrecoverable. The poet-translator throws a new pot on the wheel every time. And in order to function, this vessel has to respond to its own internal logic, structure, and striving. Every poem is made anew, makes the world anew, and we with it. A translational poetics charts how this happens, makes space for the event, and returns us to the root, the radical, and the radiating: the language that doesn't speak again, but speaks.