Writing a Book I Was Not Writing: Translateral Poetics

Contemporary poets have leveraged lateral approaches to the poetics of translation in response to certain formal and conceptual constraints that became codified during the archival turn. These approaches position their work outside of the discursive and methodological categories of poetics of the archive that were codified in the 1990s and 2000s (such as Michael Dowdy’s “shakeout poetics” and Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”) and suggest a radical departure. In particular, I track the nearly metabolic conversions that occur when source materials are embodied and carried across from one textual condition to another, first derived, then revisioned, revoiced, retouched. These conversions can involve shifts from one language to another but also shifts from one subjective scope or residency to another—one that is not, so to speak, one’s own—and demonstrate what translations through dreamwork and erasure can make possible for appropriative poetics after the archival turn. I argue that the translateral poetics of Heriberto Yépez, Don Mee Choi, Edgar Garcia, and Myung Mi Kim constitute emergent experiences and articulations of intersubjectivity and invent nonreducible and unassimilable forms of opposition.