Mel Kenne
Translation as the Sine Qua Non in Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetics vis-à-vis
Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”
In an often misquoted statement, John Ashbery averred famously in a 1972 Art News interview that “To create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern.” This quote has often been paraphrased by critics to indicate that Ashbery wished only for his own poetry to be immune to critical interpretation, whereas the statement apparently refers to artistic creation in general. As such it may be seen as representing a philosophical stance adopted by the poet toward the function of art, or at least art produced in the latter half of the 20th Century. The statement suggests an artistic ideal of purity that would render a work of art inviolable, in a sense, exempt from anything so banal as critical interpretation.
What makes Ashbery’s statement even more interesting, when viewed in retrospect from forty years on, is that the poet has apparently succeeded, to a large degree at least, in writing a kind of poetry that defies any sort of definitive critical interpretation. His poetry can almost be compared to a sponge that absorbs all the tenets of the movements leading up to it and then turns them inside-out and upside-down in a way that often leaves the reader in a state of confusion, bemusement or a mixture of both in her or his recognition of the poet’s ability to play form against content to the point that any sense of intention created in the poem is continually being undercut by an equal and opposite reaction against an objective or an intention.
This simultaneity of construction and deconstruction of poetic logic in Ashbery’s poetry suggests the kind of lyric purity defined by Walter Benjamin in his discussion of the function of translation in “The Task of the Translator”—an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens—as a movement toward a “pure language that no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages,” so that “all communication, all meaning, and all intention arrive at a level where they are destined to be extinguished” (163). Benjamin claims that this raising of language to a higher level results from the re-writing of an original text so that the translator “breaks through the rotten barriers” (163) of her or his own language to extinguish that which is no longer current in it and at the same time to give it new currency in the re-invented text of the translation.
In Ashbery’s assertion about artistic creation, as it is exemplified by his poetry, and in Benjamin’s ideas relating to translation we might see a corresponding view of creativity that expresses some of the major concerns of American Modernist and Postmodernist poets who have built upon the aesthetics of the French Symbolists and their heirs to create a poetics that translates an “original” text, a text rooted in its particular historical and philosophical milieu, into a mode of expression that more closely approaches a “pure language.” The crucial question that arises in regard to such an analysis, however, is whether the theories that Benjamin applies to literary translation can be expanded across a broader spectrum to account for the vagaries of linguistic evolution in the canonical works of a literary movement. Can the principles discussed by Benjamin in terms of translation be seen as including the “original” works in various movements?
The overarching thesis in Benjamin’s essay, as it relates to the existence of a pure language, does intimate that these principles may apply to all forms of literary pursuit, whether of the writing of original works, the translation of those works, or the criticism of those originals and translations. This thesis is restated several times in different contexts, as when it refers to the issue of fidelity and freedom in translation:
Beyond the communicable, there remains in all language and its constructions something incommunicable which is, depending
on the context in which it is encountered, either symbolizing or symbolized; symbolized however in the development of languages
themselves. And what seeks to be represented and even produced in the development of languages is that kernel of pure language
itself. But if this hidden and fragmentary kernel is nevertheless present in life as something symbolized, it inhabits literary
constructions only as something symbolizing. (162)
The concision of such a statement as a somewhat metaphysical summary of the philosophical and linguistic forces that drove the Symbolist movements in Europe and America—movements leading ultimately to the avant-garde productions of Ashbery’s generation of New York poets—demands that translation be taken not only as an art and practice but as a literary theory in its own right. When we consider how strong a role translation has played in the development of Modernist and Post-modernist poetry in America, Benjamin’s ideas relating translation to the development of a pure language take on another dimension.
A primary question that arises in regard to the exploration of this other dimension is how the 19th Century Symbolist movement is related to Benjamin’s entre-guerre ideas about translation, and how the core idea in Benjamin’s essay may be seen as an a priori definition of what would later become a major characteristic of Ashbery’s post-modernist poetics. An answer to this question would almost certainly have to involve conjuring up the spirits of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in much the way that they conjured up the spirit of Dante and Dante conjured up the spirits of Virgil and Beatrice to resolve similar issues regarding the relationship of language and poetics to cultural changes during their own times.
II.
In fin-de-siècle Europe, a short while before Pound and Eliot chose England as the base for their voluntary exile, the avant-garde was epitomized by the verse of the Symbolists and Decadents in France, whose lead had been taken by many American poets, especially those in New York City. Pound and Eliot were only a part of the latest wave of poets who felt the lure of Europe, more particularly of Paris and the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé. Even in mid-19th Century New York, a bohemian milieu inspired by that of Paris had developed and was centered in Pfaff’s Cellar, a saloon on Broadway habituated by writers then considered controversial, including Walt Whitman (Foster 4). As American poet and critic Ed Foster writes, “If conventional anthologies and histories of American literature are to be believed, fin-de-siecle aesthetics did not reach America until Eliot, Pound, Stevens and other High Modernists began to publish. In fact, these poets came of age in an America where Wilde, Verlaine, and Mallarmé were well known and imitated” (3). We might therefore see Pound and Eliot as the younger members of a generation of poets who saw American provincialism as a hindrance to their work and who chose either to bring Europe to America by establishing a Parisian-style bohemian community in New York City or take the route of voluntary exile, as Pound and Eliot themselves did.
Benjamin infers in his essay that exile itself, as a condition of life and as a metaphysical concept relating to pure language—“the something symbolized” that is separated from the fragmented kernel of purity and which operates in literary constructions as a symbolizing agent—lies at the basis of any new form of poetics, a poetics, that is, which leaves behind the decaying forms that serve as the means by which it is translated into a new style or mode. For Benjamin, this linguistic exile was related to the concept of tzimtzum (contraction), or the movement toward a Messianic age that might be expressed as representing a pure language. According to the 16th Century Kabbalist Isaac Luria, from whom Benjamin took some of his seminal ideas, God’s first act was to withdraw, or to contract his essence, to allow room for the operations of human free will (Fine 66). Benjamin interprets this as meaning that it is in this void left by God that human language finds life in a form of exile from the greater, or purer, language of the Messianic age, and where translation, as a means of interpreting the relationship between languages and of a specific language to the concept of a pure language, necessarily finds its home.
Considering the historic importance of exile, be it imposed or voluntary, as it relates to the alienation of writers and revolutionary works often produced in and from the condition of exile, in tandem with Benjamin’s Lurianic concept of language and linguistics as symbolic of exile in themselves, it may seem a stretch, but perhaps not too much of one, to view the self-imposed exile of writers such as Eliot, Pound, Joyce or Conrad as the means these writers found to attain a greater measure of free will to create and practice a new poetics that perhaps wouldn’t have been possible in their native milieus. In his essay “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said proposes that the condition of self-imposed exile may provide one with a weltanschauung that transcends provincial attitudes and national prejudices, so that one becomes de facto a “citizen of the world” who may gain through his experience of “[s]eeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’” an “originality of vision.” Said goes on to say that “this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal” (186). Pound and Eliot were apparently seeking citizen-of-the-world status through their sojourns in England, France and Italy, in their attempts, as Pound saw it, “to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry” (Personae 185) and provide it with a set of guidelines for entering the 20th Century.
A more thorough understanding of Benjamin’s concept of exile as it relates to a pure language and a Messianic age requires some knowledge of the Lurianic story of the shevirat ha-qelim, or the “shattering of the vessels,” which alludes to a critical occurrence in the story of creation. According to Luria the pure light of God emanating from the eyes of primordial man was stored in vessels, or qelim, some of which were unable to withstand the pressure and shattered, scattering fragments throughout empty space. While most of the light returned to God, other sparks adhered to the shards of the vessels, from which were produced husks or shells called qelipot, wherein the remaining sparks remain trapped, and these qelipot represent evil and the material world. As the story goes, the task of the first man, Adam, was to gather up the sparks that remained in the qelipot and through contemplative exercises to reintegrate them, thereby restoring the lost purity and perfection through repair of the vessels, or tikkun (which means “to repair”). His and Eve’s transgression disrupted this task, causing all that had been gained in tikkun to be lost. Not only did he fall but all the sparks of human souls contained in his own soul fell as well and were admixed in the qelipot. As a result, humans participate in the never-ending process of repair through contemplative action and acts of devotion expressed as a raising up of the fallen sparks (Fine 64-70). It is to this process that Benjamin refers when, speaking of the main task of translation, he says the following:
Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not
resemble each other, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the original, must lovingly, and in detail,
fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original's mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as
fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language. (161)
In terms of this analogy, the task of the translator, in recreating the original not as a facsimile but as a counterpart to its “mode of intention” (161), is to reveal both the original and the translation of it as being made up of fragments of an idea that intimate the existence of something whole that can exist in neither the original nor the translation.
Analyzing the nuances of meaning in this passage, Paul de Man concludes that “the nonadequation of symbol to a shattered symbolized…indicates the unreliability of rhetoric as a system of tropes which would be productive of a meaning. Meaning is always displaced with regard to the meaning it ideally intended—that meaning is never reached” (44). This obviously is a reiteration of the concept that lies at the heart of post-structural criticism, referring to textual indeterminacy and the indefinite deferral of a text’s meaning. It is here where the task of the poet most clearly parallels that of the translator as it is envisioned by Benjamin, and therefore where his text on translation can be seen to function as a form of literary criticism, for this 1923 text clearly defines the problem that resulted in the subjective shift in poetry that spawned Symbolism, Imagism and the school of criticism drawn from Eliot’s ideas and from his poetry and critical writing. It also prefigures by several decades the semiotic theories underlying the strain of postmodern criticism that became prominent in France following the Second World War. To trace this shift in the work of the first American modernist poets requires an exploration of the ideas driving them in their quest for a language that would offer an alternative to the dominant Victorian poetics when they were coming of age in their own right as poets.
III.
Eliot and Pound were directed in their own task largely through the poetry and critical writings of another exile who had been intensely involved in a change in the poetics of his day, and whose life and work illustrate Benjamin’s ideas relating to the quest for a pure language. In their attempts to “modernize” and renovate poetic language, to “make it new,” Pound and Eliot took their cue from the medieval poet Dante Alighieri and his poetic trek toward the empyrean and the culmination of spiritual perfection in the Multifoliate Rose. As did Virgil and Beatrice for Dante, so did Dante take on the role of spirit and spiritual guide for Pound and Eliot, who incorporated his themes and imagery into their work as an authoritative means of defining their own critical and artistic concerns. The literal writing of Paradise as Paradiso by Dante in La Commedia Divina, which portrays a Messianic cosmic unity, as well as his concern for contemporary poetics shown in his essay “De vulgari eloquentia,” bears strongly on Pound’s and Eliot’s own drive to express a coherent vision of life in a world beset by wars, revolts and spiritual crises that was similar in many ways to the world that Dante depicted during his own era. And just as Dante’s essay and his magnum opus had greatly changed literature and criticism leading up to the Renaissance, so would the work of Eliot and Pound herald a Renaissance in literature and criticism in America in the 20th Century. The importance of Dante to the Modernist poetics of Pound and Eliot can be seen in Pound’s own magnum opus The Cantos in which he attempted “to write paradise” (802) and his tribute to Eliot in the memorial issue of the Sewanee Review, saying “His was the true Dantescan voice—not honored enough, and deserving more than I ever gave him” (Selected Prose, 464).
Pound’s development of imagism and Eliot’s attempted employment of “an objective correlative” to keep the personality of the poet out of the poem can be seen as means of creating a new poetics in English modeled on Dante’s attempt to elevate Italian poetics of the time by developing from the “vulgar” language of his time a highly refined system of poetics that could operate as a vehicle to transform the political and religious corruption he viewed from his exile into a vision of cosmic, Messianic purity. Looking at Benjamin’s view of translation, yet taking translation as representing the transformation of one’s native language to a higher level of linguistic purity, we might see the poet working as a translator does, according to Benjamin in his essay, to “set free in his own language the pure language spellbound in the foreign language” (163). That is, from the ecclesiastical Latin of Dante’s era, and from the outworn Victorian poetics of the late 19th Century, a new poetic idiom arises as visionary poets act as translators do to, as Benjamin says, “break[s] through the rotten barriers of [their] own language” (163).
As if anticipating his later work, Pound states in his early book The Spirit of Romance the goal of his study: “to examine certain forces, elements or qualities which were potent in the mediaeval literature of the Latin tongues, and … are still potent in our own” (v). This study prefigures his reconceptualization of an English poetics that was based partly on Dante’s reconceptualization of poetics in Italy in his change to the vernacular language. In “De vulgari eloquentia,” Dante, speaking of Latin and Italian, asserts: “Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular … because it was the language originally used by the human race; … because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; … and … because it is natural to us while the other is, in contrast, artificial” (II).
While the focus of Pound in his attempt to renovate poetry in English did not involve such a radical a change as the move from Latin to vernacular Italian, it did involve a movement away from established verse forms, metrics and figures of speech that he viewed as moribund, and toward a more natural form of speech based not on a regular metrics but on the musical phrase as it arose from the concision of the poem’s linguistic ideation. In Dante’s renewal of Italian poetics in La Commedia Divina, which Pound felt came about as a result of two centuries of development in Provence and one in Tuscany (“Prolegomena” 79), and through his intense work reading, writing, and translating and reading translations of the Troubadour poets as well as the poets in the Romantic and Symbolist movements in France in his own generation and the generation immediately preceding his, Pound had already in his twenties envisioned the future of 20th century poetry, which “will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power …; I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (“Prolegomena” 80).
Much of the work of Pound and Eliot involved translation literally or in a figurative sense in their translating of ideas and even phrases and lines of poetry into a Modernist “mode of intention,” to use Benjamin’s term. To a very large extent, The Waste Land comprises the echoed lines of other texts, and its tone, or “mode of intention,” echoes that of Eliot’s Symbolist mentor Jules Laforgue. We may also remember that Pound’s life work, The Cantos, begins with Pound’s re-translation into English of a Latin translation of a passage from the Odyssey published by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divas in 1537, and that great parts of this monumental work are made up of translations from Greek, Latin and Chinese texts. Eliot’s translations of texts to use in his work or his use of lines or original text from Greek, Latin, French and German, show his deep concern for incorporating ancient and modern poems and musical phrases into his poetry as a means of producing a kind of meta-text that would be instrumental in redefining the world he lived in and redefining English poetics, as did Pound in the creation of the meta-text of The Cantos. Both poets tried to reach Paradise in their writings in different ways, yet the catalysts for their tasks were the same. Similar to Dante’s task, they tried to restore harmony by fitting back into place the shattered pieces of the vessels God created to hold His light after His withdrawal into the empyrean of pure language. Their other great stimulus was the work of the Symbolists, from whose writings the phrase “art for art’s sake” is derived, and whose main innovator, Baudelaire, had spurred Benjamin to write “The Task of the Translator.”
In his essay Benjamin acts as a latter-day spokesman for the Symbolists by articulating the nuances of their creed and their mode of writing. By beginning his essay with the statement that no work of art is created for the observer or reader, and then going on to assert that the intention of the work of art is neither to make a statement nor to communicate a message (151), he is setting up his argument for the existence of a pure language, which justifies the idea that a work of art may exist for no other reason than to intimate an essence that can never be grasped in human language but only sensed through the most abstruse and subtle devices of the poet or artist in creating a work of art. The poet’s poet of the Symbolist movement in 19th Century France, Stephane Mallarmé, defines the artist’s task as a form of translation when he speaks of the modern work of art as a “symphony,” which, “according to the intention or unbeknownst to the musician, approaches thought; which no longer claims descent only from common speech.” For within it, he says, “Some explosion of Mystery to the skies in its impersonal magnificence occurs, where the orchestra couldn't not influence the ancient effort that long claimed to translate it uniquely through the voice of the ancestor” (Johnson, 206). The implication here, which, interestingly, is echoed by Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” is that the focus of modern poetic effort is to subtly translate into modern language or speech the voices of the past that form this symphony, which the poet can only compose if, as Eliot concludes in his essay, “he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (59). It is this idea, in a nutshell, upon which the poetics developed by Eliot and Pound was based and which is expressed by their major works. Translating the past into the present, in the Symbolists’ and Benjamin’s terms involved a focus primarily on the word and the elevating of it into the realm that intimates the unspeakable quality of the “pure language.”
French Symbolism as it was viewed by Benjamin and of Mallarmé lost much of its force in the Modernist poetics of Pound and Eliot when, on the one hand, Pound in 1913 repudiated it as a relevant dynamic in modern poetry, saying of Symbolists in a letter, “They beget imitation and one can learn nothing from them,” and in another letter in 1914, “…there’s nothing to be studied about symbolism” (Hamilton 4), and, on the other hand, when Eliot who, although he continued to be strongly influenced by Mallarmé right up to and throughout his writing of his last major work, Four Quartets, began to enlist his Symbolist aesthetic in the service of his faith in Christianity after he joined the Anglican Church in 1927. Pound and Eliot became as deeply involved in their personal missions in addressing the world’s and their own problems as in writing poetry, with the result that the poetic concerns that arose from their work and influenced later movements in America took on a more dogmatic quality than those more purely linguistic concerns of the Symbolists.
This quality is revealed in the prescriptive dicta of Imagists and Objectivists that the only ideas are in things and that form is an extension of content, both of which belie the Symbolist focus on a pure language, in which no subject in a linguistic construction can find completion in an object or a complement of itself (as in Benjamin’s analogy of the shattered vessels) and, a fortiori, any content, or meaning, that can be elicited from a poem arises out of the formal qualities of the poem, which are inherent in the language of the poem itself. As Benjamin says in regard to translation, which we can relate as well now to the composition of the original: “…the translation’s language can, indeed must free itself from bondage to meaning, in order to allow its own mode of intentio to resound, not as the intention to reproduce, but rather as harmony, as a complement to its language in which language communicates itself [my italics]” (161). According to Benjamin’s literary criticism couched in his definition of the function of translation, the aim of the poet is not to produce meaning but to allow the language to speak for itself through the intrinsic formal and linguistic qualities of the poem. That is, the poem’s form is a corollary to Logos; it is what of Mallarmé describes as the flower that is absent from every bouquet, (of Mallarmé 111), and from it is born the poem’s content. In his essay, Benjamin even uses the Greek beginning sentence of Genesis “En arche hen ho logos,” or “in the beginning was the word” (161), to express the idea that later became the basis for the philosophy of Existentialism: existence precedes essence, from and through which is derived meaning.
European movements spawned by Symbolism, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, had little effect on American poetics during and in the wake of the bombastic political polemic of Pound and the quasi-religious counsels of Eliot on the state of poetry and civilization, although, as Ed Foster notes, “Symbolism as understood by Allen Tate led to various academic poetries, and as understood by Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, and others associated with the San Francisco Renaissance, it helped to shape the ‘New American Poetry’” (13). Other American poets who came in the wake of the Modernists were naturally influenced by the 19th Century Symbolists; however, for the most part the European movements spawned by Symbolism never made a strong impact far inland from the bi-coastal cultural centers of New York and San Francisco.
Of great significance in terms of Benjamin’s thesis in “The Task of the Translator,” Foster goes on to say, “Jack Spicer reformulated Symbolism in ways primary to innovative poetries at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first” (13). It was not until the mid-20th Century and the arrival on the scene of Spicer on the West Coast and a group of New York Poets who saw Modernist American poetics as having reached a dead end, at least for them, that Benjamin’s Symbolist ideas began to come truly into their own. The New York poets, whose most well-known figures included John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, took up where the fin-de-siecle American Symbolist and Decadent poets had left off, turning back toward Europe and European poetry in their search for an alternative both to the academic poetry spawned by Eliot and to its nemesis and antithesis, the poetry of the Beats. Jack Spicer, whose work has stirred new interest today with the publication of his collected poems My Vocabulary Did This to Me: the Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, might be seen as the West Coast counterpart of Ashbery and his friends back East. Like Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer died at forty, leaving behind seven small-press editions of his poems, which only began to be recognized at the time of his death in 1965, brought on by chronic alcoholism.
While Spicer had started writing poetry when he was fourteen, he had spent five years at UC Berkeley preparing for a career in linguistics. He is quoted in the introduction to his collected poetry as declaring that Rimbaud and Dickinson “burst upon me like a bombshell when I was fifteen” (xiv). While Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian point out in their introduction to the book that Spicer’s sensibility clashed with that of the New York poets (xvi), by comparing Ashbery’s “The Old Juristiction” (Ashbery 66) and Spicer’s “Improvisations on a Sentence by Poe” (Spicer 171) we can see very similar underlying philosophies of a Postmodernist American poetics.
IV.
In light of Benjamin’s stress on the mode of intention as a key element in Symbolist poetry, these two poems—while they display very different poetic styles and voices—show the same concerns in terms of their modes of intention: to evade any direct statement that might point toward an essential meaning. In fact, both poems might be seen as expressing this mode of intention as their “themes,” more implicitly in Ashbery’s poem, more explicitly in Spicer’s. While both poems exhibit as practical usage Emily Dickinson’s dictum “Tell all the truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies” (248) taken to an extreme, this linguistic “slanting” underlines a desperate need to escape the banality of “meaning,” as it exists in “the old jurisdiction,” with the stress on “diction” in Ashbery’s case, and indefiniteness as the only possibility for concord, or musical harmony in a poem, in Spicer’s case. Without belaboring the point with line-by-line explications, we can see the gist of the two poems’ intention rise to the surface in lines such as “By anyone’s standards I was an uncertain thing,” “Look, there are live things for each of us,” and in Spicer’s poem the repeated phrase, “The grand concord of what / Does not stoop to definition.” When read “slant-wise” both poems evoke a feeling of the intense loneliness of one who embraces the exile that comes through invocation of the “grand concord,” or the unspeakable, pure language. This language can only be approached through the structuring of words in such a way that the intensity of their refusal to accept being harnessed with conventional meaning is proportionate to the intensity of feeling they evoke in the reader by opening up the poem to a multitude, almost an infinitude, of meanings that cannot be determined through conventional analysis. As Spicer says in one of his letters written to the long-dead poet Federico Garcia Lorca: “Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry…The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead man” (150).
What is most apparent in Spicer’s poem, of course, is the allusion to the statement by Poe upon which it is based. In 1906, Arthur Symons quotes Poe from an essay he wrote in Democratic Review as saying, “I know that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision—imbue it with any very determinate tone—and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character” (Symons Figures-of-Several-Centuries/008). Symons then goes on to remark,
Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine’s “Art Poétique”: “Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance”? And is not
the essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarmé and of the French Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation
of “that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive
one”? (Figures-of-Several-Centuries/008)
Keeping in mind that Benjamin wrote his essay to introduce his translations of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisienes, and that Baudelaire’s development of a Symbolist poetics arose to a great degree from his translations of Poe’s poetry into French, we can see a closing of the circle of influence from America to France and then to America again after a long period during which the Modernist poets were involved in such movements as Imagism, Objectivism, and Projective Verse while the group of poets under Eliot’s sway were writing what was thought of as “academic poetry.” In Europe during this same period, Dadaist and Surrealist poets in France and Germany were carrying on the Symbolist and Decadent traditions that grew out of the response by poets of the mid-nineteenth century to the Romantics. The circle was being closed as well by Ashbery, Koch and O’Hara in New York City under the influence of the French poets they were reading, while on the West Coast Spicer was being drawn to Poe’s ideas and those of the Symbolists and post-Symbolists involved in a poetic flowering in Spain, that led him to write one of his most important books in terms of his thoughts regarding a Postmodernist poetics, After Lorca.
The principal focus in After Lorca is on translation itself as a corollary to the Romantic, and later Symbolist, notions of “correspondence.” The book itself is a series of letters and poems that attempt to correspond to Lorca and his work as a spirit-agent that has possessed the poet while he is entranced, his normal, waking consciousness deactivated most probably by a heavy dose of alcohol. The borders of correspondence are intentionally blurred, so that an apparent interchange of spirits takes place in the poems / translations. Spicer was an advocate of automatic writing, and he attributed much of his poetry to alien beings that he termed “Martians.” This “alien” force that took over his writing is related to Spicer’s idea of correspondence, as when in one of his letters to Lorca he says,
Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across
language as easily as he can bring them across time…every place and every time has a real object to correspond with your real
object…Even these letters. They correspond with something…and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds
to them. That is how we dead men write to each other. (Spicer 134)
Furthermore, every poem in After Lorca is denoted by Spicer as a translation that is dedicated to one of his friends, and the poet admits that there is no clear line demarking what is a “true” translation of a poem by Lorca from what is Spicer’s own poetry. Spicer apparently felt that the role of translation in the writing of poetry was vital. It functioned as the means by which the poet could connect, from his exiled state, to another spirit in its own state of alienation and exile. As with Dante, Spicer used translation, both in the linguistic and the more abstract sense of the word, to raise his language to a level that broke through the barriers containing it within the older, no longer useful forms, just as Ashbery is “too wrapped in wind” even to take notice of the stone defining “the old jurisdiction” as he calls upon “the stranger with his suitcase” for help in translating himself past the boundaries of the known and familiar.
Reading the work of both of these Postmodernist poets we may feel, on the one hand, the assimilation and further development of Pound’s dictum on creating a kind of poetry that is, “austere, direct, free from emotional slither,” while, on the other hand, we may feel the force of Eliot’s definition of the serious poet as one who while writing is translating into a modern mode of intention the symphonic voices of long-dead poets into her or his own composition, a work that can only be composed by one who “lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past…conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” An echo of Eliot’s pronouncement can be heard in one of Spicer’s letters to Lorca, when he says,
Tradition…means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem,
gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do
with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry. (110-111)
V.
While Ashbery stresses in his interviews, as in the one in The Paris Review in 1983 (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews), that the poetry written by him, O’Hara and Koch is too dissimilar to be considered a “school” of poetry, all three poets had attended Harvard University after World War II, and were, or soon became, proficient in French and avid readers of French poets whose work had evolved out of the Symbolist, Dadaist and Surrealist modes of writing, and all were influenced as well by Marxism and the Existentialist philosophy in vogue at that time.
Very significantly, all three poets were also deeply involved in the New York art scene, ruled by abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. For years Ashbery worked as an art critic and reviewer, while O’Hara held a curator position at the Museum of Modern Art, focusing more on art than on the poetry he wrote, which he considered a sideline avocation. Whereas poetry had, in a sense, stagnated or else reached a stage where the most important Modernist works had been written, abstract expressionism, which focused on the formal elements of a painting as opposed to a representational content, was at its height, and its influence on the poets in the New York area was enormous. Thus these young poets were primed by cutting-edge art work to lead the way to a new poetics that would to some degree assimilate into their work the formal concerns of abstract expressionism, just as Gertrude Stein had tried to assimilate into hers the aesthetics of cubism.
Before Ashbery went to Paris on a Fulbright grant in 1955, Kenneth Koch had introduced him to the work of Raymond Roussel, who was known to a small circle of admirers and writers for the experimental poems and novels he left behind when he died in 1933 from an overdose of barbiturates. Rather than go into great detail to explain Roussel’s experimental techniques, an explanation by poet from Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, from his book about American expatriates in Paris, is sufficient for present purposes: “In Roussel, associations between one idea or event and another are based not on external similarity but on a highly permutated verbal construct, in which two words, nearly identical homophonically, are combined with other like phrases to yield phonetically similar sentences with entirely different meanings” (243). The strongest influence from Roussel in Ashbery’s early books can be seen in The Tennis Court Oath, in which the poet relied heavily on a collage technique that, as Sawyer-Laucanno says, “is linked to a notion, derived largely from Roussel, that words themselves can be the subject of a poem” (248). He goes on to say:
Where the surrealists were concerned with wonder, with the marvelous, with stretching perception, Ashbery is concerned
mainly with calling attention to the words themselves rather than what they evoke…for here Ashbery’s work turns on puns and
associative linguistic properties…to create unusual combinations…But ultimately these new conjunctions are not about anything
other than themselves. (249)
However, Sawyer-Laucanno later quotes Ashbery as saying that what he found most appealing in Roussel was Roussel’s ability to manipulate language to “raise the word to a new power…to yield true meaning at last; that is the lead which alchemy is on the verge of translating something far more interesting than gold” (244). This implies that the “far more interesting” thing that Ashbery learned from Roussel was not only that “words themselves can be the subject of a poem” or that poems are about “the words themselves rather than what they evoke,” but that by starting not with content but with form, or linguistic formations, the language of the poem could be raised to a level more closely approximating the “pure language.”
On the other hand, Spicer returned from his trip to the East with a similar impression of Ashbery and his friends as that imparted by Sawyer-Laucanno, or that “Ashbery’s work turns on puns and associative linguistic properties…But ultimately these new conjunctions are not about anything other than themselves.” Gizzi and Killian quote from Spicer’s letter to his friend Allen Joyce: “Like most primitive cultures, New York has no feelings for nonsense. Wit is as far as they go…No one speaks Martian, no one insults people arbitrarily, there is, to put it simply and leave it, no violence of the mind and of the heart, no one screams in the elevator” (xvi). It’s evident here how Spicer’s poetry differed from that of the New York poets. Spicer was a proponent of the serial poem and, more importantly to his poetry’s relationship to Symbolism, his attitude toward words themselves differed from theirs. In a letter to Lorca he noted,
Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible
connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection…
Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold with, nothing
else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to…
…—the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary. (123)
To delve with any depth into the distinction between Spicer’s ideas toward lexical usage and those of the New York poets would require a wholly different treatise that focused on the stylistic differences between the associative poetry of the group of Spanish poets of the 1920s and 1930s, of which Lorca was a key figure, and the poets of the Surrealist and post-Surrealist movement in France during the 1930s and 1940s, such as Pierre Reverdy and Pierre Martory, whose works were read, and some translated, by Ashbery, O’Hara and Koch.
While a greater and more refined vocabulary was perhaps more directly important to the New York poets than to Spicer because of stylistic differences, the previous discussion has shown that for both Ashbery and Spicer words function principally as vehicles to translate the poetry to a higher level of meaning. Therefore, the apparent contradiction seems to turn more on a vast difference in sensibility and style between Spicer and Ashbery, Koch and O’Hara rather than an essential difference in the underlying poetics evident in these writers’ work.
What we may finally be seeing in Spicer’s poetry and that of Ashbery and others of his group in New York is a coming of age in America of a poetics based largely on Symbolism, as well as a new way of viewing the relationship between poetry and translation, vis-a-vis Walter Benjamin’s critical concepts in “The Task of the Translator.” American poetics, as it has developed via Ashbery, O’Hara and Koch in the East and principally Spicer in the West, is characterized, as was presaged in Benjamin’s essay, by a poetry that has drawn so near to translation that the original language and the language of translation are virtually one and the same language that is elevated, or translated, to a higher level. As Benjamin says near the end of his essay,
True translation is transparent, it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if
strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible above all by conveying the syntax
word-for-word, and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is the original element of translation. For the sentence is the
wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering is the arcade. (162)
As Postmodernist poetic theory as well as a theory of translation, Benjamin’s focus on the word as “the original element of translation” harks back to his Lurianic idea of Tikkun, where words function as the most basic element used by the poet to refashion the “old,” or “original,” language by creating a new mode of intention that functions as its counterpart for the new time. The poet has to literally create a new language for poetry that functions as the old, or original one, did by translating the original language into the new language. To do this effectively requires the poet to have an equal knowledge of past as well as present poetic usages along with a concept of how this equivalence can operate as a catalyst for constructing the new language. The standard of proof of this knowledge is how well the poet uses the most basic building block of the poem, the word, in structuring her or his sentences. This intense focus on linguistic structuring requires a near total immersion in one’s state of artistic exile, the proof of which appears in the phrasing of the poem and the evocation of a “pure language” that it yields.
Because this new poetry reaches so ardently toward an elevated level of expression—a higher form of truth, if you will—and could not have been written in a conventional way, it can’t be read in a conventional way. It has to be read in a way similar to that we might use in reading a translation: asquint, or in Dickinson’s term “aslant.” Yet, because it is a freshly rendered translation of the reader’s native tongue into an idiom that is as yet unfamiliar to her or him, it may at first appear strange; as strange as one’s first encounter with any alien form of being; or as strange and yet familiar as an encounter with an “other” in oneself through the artificial medium of words. Appreciating this new poetics involves adjusting one’s perception away from its former mode of associating words together in a sentence and toward viewing a poem through a new lens of Logos so that—using Benjamin’s analogy—one is able to discern through the sentences, or walls of associated words making up the poem, gleams emanating from the glittering yet forever ungraspable gems displayed in the arcade.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. “Opera Omnia, De vulgari eloquentia,” Tr. Steven Botterill. http://alighieri.scarian.net/translate_english/ (May 1, 2013).
Ashbery, John. Art News. New York, May 1972.
—. Planisphere: New Poems. New York: Ecco, 2009.
—. Interview. The Paris Review, Winter 1983 No. 90. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3014/the-art-of-poetry-no-33-john-ashbery
(May 1, 2013).
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Tr. Steven Rendell. erudit. http//id.erudit.org/iderudit/037302ar. August 2012.
De Man, Paul. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator.’” Messenger Lecture, Cornell University, March 4, 1983.
Yale French Studies, No. 69. The Lesson of Paul de Man (1985), pp. 25-46.
Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: University Paperbacks, 1964.
Fine, Lawrence. “The Contemplative Practices of Yihudim in Lurianic Kabbalah.” Jewish Spirituality 2, ed. A. Green, Arthur. 64-70.
New York: Crossroad, 1987.
Foster, Edward, Ed. Decadents, Symbolists, & Aesthetes in America—Fin-de Siecle American Poetry: an Anthology. Jersey City:
Talisman House, Publishers, 2000.
Hamilton, Scott. Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Mallarme, Stephane. “Crisis of Verse.” Tr. Barbara Johnson. Divagations. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University, 2007.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Marginalia [part II],” Democratic Review, December 1844, 15:580-594.
Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. New York: New Direction Publishing Corporation, 1986.
—. Personae: the Shorter Poems. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1990.
—. “Prolegomena,” Poetry Review I, 2, (February 1912), 78-80.
—. Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1973.
—. The Spirit of Romance. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1910.
Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960. San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1998.
Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Symons, Arthur. Figures of Several Centuries. http://www.readcentral.com/chapters/Arthur-Symons/Figures-of-Several-Centuries/008,
(May 1, 2013).
Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”
In an often misquoted statement, John Ashbery averred famously in a 1972 Art News interview that “To create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern.” This quote has often been paraphrased by critics to indicate that Ashbery wished only for his own poetry to be immune to critical interpretation, whereas the statement apparently refers to artistic creation in general. As such it may be seen as representing a philosophical stance adopted by the poet toward the function of art, or at least art produced in the latter half of the 20th Century. The statement suggests an artistic ideal of purity that would render a work of art inviolable, in a sense, exempt from anything so banal as critical interpretation.
What makes Ashbery’s statement even more interesting, when viewed in retrospect from forty years on, is that the poet has apparently succeeded, to a large degree at least, in writing a kind of poetry that defies any sort of definitive critical interpretation. His poetry can almost be compared to a sponge that absorbs all the tenets of the movements leading up to it and then turns them inside-out and upside-down in a way that often leaves the reader in a state of confusion, bemusement or a mixture of both in her or his recognition of the poet’s ability to play form against content to the point that any sense of intention created in the poem is continually being undercut by an equal and opposite reaction against an objective or an intention.
This simultaneity of construction and deconstruction of poetic logic in Ashbery’s poetry suggests the kind of lyric purity defined by Walter Benjamin in his discussion of the function of translation in “The Task of the Translator”—an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens—as a movement toward a “pure language that no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages,” so that “all communication, all meaning, and all intention arrive at a level where they are destined to be extinguished” (163). Benjamin claims that this raising of language to a higher level results from the re-writing of an original text so that the translator “breaks through the rotten barriers” (163) of her or his own language to extinguish that which is no longer current in it and at the same time to give it new currency in the re-invented text of the translation.
In Ashbery’s assertion about artistic creation, as it is exemplified by his poetry, and in Benjamin’s ideas relating to translation we might see a corresponding view of creativity that expresses some of the major concerns of American Modernist and Postmodernist poets who have built upon the aesthetics of the French Symbolists and their heirs to create a poetics that translates an “original” text, a text rooted in its particular historical and philosophical milieu, into a mode of expression that more closely approaches a “pure language.” The crucial question that arises in regard to such an analysis, however, is whether the theories that Benjamin applies to literary translation can be expanded across a broader spectrum to account for the vagaries of linguistic evolution in the canonical works of a literary movement. Can the principles discussed by Benjamin in terms of translation be seen as including the “original” works in various movements?
The overarching thesis in Benjamin’s essay, as it relates to the existence of a pure language, does intimate that these principles may apply to all forms of literary pursuit, whether of the writing of original works, the translation of those works, or the criticism of those originals and translations. This thesis is restated several times in different contexts, as when it refers to the issue of fidelity and freedom in translation:
Beyond the communicable, there remains in all language and its constructions something incommunicable which is, depending
on the context in which it is encountered, either symbolizing or symbolized; symbolized however in the development of languages
themselves. And what seeks to be represented and even produced in the development of languages is that kernel of pure language
itself. But if this hidden and fragmentary kernel is nevertheless present in life as something symbolized, it inhabits literary
constructions only as something symbolizing. (162)
The concision of such a statement as a somewhat metaphysical summary of the philosophical and linguistic forces that drove the Symbolist movements in Europe and America—movements leading ultimately to the avant-garde productions of Ashbery’s generation of New York poets—demands that translation be taken not only as an art and practice but as a literary theory in its own right. When we consider how strong a role translation has played in the development of Modernist and Post-modernist poetry in America, Benjamin’s ideas relating translation to the development of a pure language take on another dimension.
A primary question that arises in regard to the exploration of this other dimension is how the 19th Century Symbolist movement is related to Benjamin’s entre-guerre ideas about translation, and how the core idea in Benjamin’s essay may be seen as an a priori definition of what would later become a major characteristic of Ashbery’s post-modernist poetics. An answer to this question would almost certainly have to involve conjuring up the spirits of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in much the way that they conjured up the spirit of Dante and Dante conjured up the spirits of Virgil and Beatrice to resolve similar issues regarding the relationship of language and poetics to cultural changes during their own times.
II.
In fin-de-siècle Europe, a short while before Pound and Eliot chose England as the base for their voluntary exile, the avant-garde was epitomized by the verse of the Symbolists and Decadents in France, whose lead had been taken by many American poets, especially those in New York City. Pound and Eliot were only a part of the latest wave of poets who felt the lure of Europe, more particularly of Paris and the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé. Even in mid-19th Century New York, a bohemian milieu inspired by that of Paris had developed and was centered in Pfaff’s Cellar, a saloon on Broadway habituated by writers then considered controversial, including Walt Whitman (Foster 4). As American poet and critic Ed Foster writes, “If conventional anthologies and histories of American literature are to be believed, fin-de-siecle aesthetics did not reach America until Eliot, Pound, Stevens and other High Modernists began to publish. In fact, these poets came of age in an America where Wilde, Verlaine, and Mallarmé were well known and imitated” (3). We might therefore see Pound and Eliot as the younger members of a generation of poets who saw American provincialism as a hindrance to their work and who chose either to bring Europe to America by establishing a Parisian-style bohemian community in New York City or take the route of voluntary exile, as Pound and Eliot themselves did.
Benjamin infers in his essay that exile itself, as a condition of life and as a metaphysical concept relating to pure language—“the something symbolized” that is separated from the fragmented kernel of purity and which operates in literary constructions as a symbolizing agent—lies at the basis of any new form of poetics, a poetics, that is, which leaves behind the decaying forms that serve as the means by which it is translated into a new style or mode. For Benjamin, this linguistic exile was related to the concept of tzimtzum (contraction), or the movement toward a Messianic age that might be expressed as representing a pure language. According to the 16th Century Kabbalist Isaac Luria, from whom Benjamin took some of his seminal ideas, God’s first act was to withdraw, or to contract his essence, to allow room for the operations of human free will (Fine 66). Benjamin interprets this as meaning that it is in this void left by God that human language finds life in a form of exile from the greater, or purer, language of the Messianic age, and where translation, as a means of interpreting the relationship between languages and of a specific language to the concept of a pure language, necessarily finds its home.
Considering the historic importance of exile, be it imposed or voluntary, as it relates to the alienation of writers and revolutionary works often produced in and from the condition of exile, in tandem with Benjamin’s Lurianic concept of language and linguistics as symbolic of exile in themselves, it may seem a stretch, but perhaps not too much of one, to view the self-imposed exile of writers such as Eliot, Pound, Joyce or Conrad as the means these writers found to attain a greater measure of free will to create and practice a new poetics that perhaps wouldn’t have been possible in their native milieus. In his essay “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said proposes that the condition of self-imposed exile may provide one with a weltanschauung that transcends provincial attitudes and national prejudices, so that one becomes de facto a “citizen of the world” who may gain through his experience of “[s]eeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’” an “originality of vision.” Said goes on to say that “this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal” (186). Pound and Eliot were apparently seeking citizen-of-the-world status through their sojourns in England, France and Italy, in their attempts, as Pound saw it, “to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry” (Personae 185) and provide it with a set of guidelines for entering the 20th Century.
A more thorough understanding of Benjamin’s concept of exile as it relates to a pure language and a Messianic age requires some knowledge of the Lurianic story of the shevirat ha-qelim, or the “shattering of the vessels,” which alludes to a critical occurrence in the story of creation. According to Luria the pure light of God emanating from the eyes of primordial man was stored in vessels, or qelim, some of which were unable to withstand the pressure and shattered, scattering fragments throughout empty space. While most of the light returned to God, other sparks adhered to the shards of the vessels, from which were produced husks or shells called qelipot, wherein the remaining sparks remain trapped, and these qelipot represent evil and the material world. As the story goes, the task of the first man, Adam, was to gather up the sparks that remained in the qelipot and through contemplative exercises to reintegrate them, thereby restoring the lost purity and perfection through repair of the vessels, or tikkun (which means “to repair”). His and Eve’s transgression disrupted this task, causing all that had been gained in tikkun to be lost. Not only did he fall but all the sparks of human souls contained in his own soul fell as well and were admixed in the qelipot. As a result, humans participate in the never-ending process of repair through contemplative action and acts of devotion expressed as a raising up of the fallen sparks (Fine 64-70). It is to this process that Benjamin refers when, speaking of the main task of translation, he says the following:
Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not
resemble each other, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the original, must lovingly, and in detail,
fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original's mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as
fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language. (161)
In terms of this analogy, the task of the translator, in recreating the original not as a facsimile but as a counterpart to its “mode of intention” (161), is to reveal both the original and the translation of it as being made up of fragments of an idea that intimate the existence of something whole that can exist in neither the original nor the translation.
Analyzing the nuances of meaning in this passage, Paul de Man concludes that “the nonadequation of symbol to a shattered symbolized…indicates the unreliability of rhetoric as a system of tropes which would be productive of a meaning. Meaning is always displaced with regard to the meaning it ideally intended—that meaning is never reached” (44). This obviously is a reiteration of the concept that lies at the heart of post-structural criticism, referring to textual indeterminacy and the indefinite deferral of a text’s meaning. It is here where the task of the poet most clearly parallels that of the translator as it is envisioned by Benjamin, and therefore where his text on translation can be seen to function as a form of literary criticism, for this 1923 text clearly defines the problem that resulted in the subjective shift in poetry that spawned Symbolism, Imagism and the school of criticism drawn from Eliot’s ideas and from his poetry and critical writing. It also prefigures by several decades the semiotic theories underlying the strain of postmodern criticism that became prominent in France following the Second World War. To trace this shift in the work of the first American modernist poets requires an exploration of the ideas driving them in their quest for a language that would offer an alternative to the dominant Victorian poetics when they were coming of age in their own right as poets.
III.
Eliot and Pound were directed in their own task largely through the poetry and critical writings of another exile who had been intensely involved in a change in the poetics of his day, and whose life and work illustrate Benjamin’s ideas relating to the quest for a pure language. In their attempts to “modernize” and renovate poetic language, to “make it new,” Pound and Eliot took their cue from the medieval poet Dante Alighieri and his poetic trek toward the empyrean and the culmination of spiritual perfection in the Multifoliate Rose. As did Virgil and Beatrice for Dante, so did Dante take on the role of spirit and spiritual guide for Pound and Eliot, who incorporated his themes and imagery into their work as an authoritative means of defining their own critical and artistic concerns. The literal writing of Paradise as Paradiso by Dante in La Commedia Divina, which portrays a Messianic cosmic unity, as well as his concern for contemporary poetics shown in his essay “De vulgari eloquentia,” bears strongly on Pound’s and Eliot’s own drive to express a coherent vision of life in a world beset by wars, revolts and spiritual crises that was similar in many ways to the world that Dante depicted during his own era. And just as Dante’s essay and his magnum opus had greatly changed literature and criticism leading up to the Renaissance, so would the work of Eliot and Pound herald a Renaissance in literature and criticism in America in the 20th Century. The importance of Dante to the Modernist poetics of Pound and Eliot can be seen in Pound’s own magnum opus The Cantos in which he attempted “to write paradise” (802) and his tribute to Eliot in the memorial issue of the Sewanee Review, saying “His was the true Dantescan voice—not honored enough, and deserving more than I ever gave him” (Selected Prose, 464).
Pound’s development of imagism and Eliot’s attempted employment of “an objective correlative” to keep the personality of the poet out of the poem can be seen as means of creating a new poetics in English modeled on Dante’s attempt to elevate Italian poetics of the time by developing from the “vulgar” language of his time a highly refined system of poetics that could operate as a vehicle to transform the political and religious corruption he viewed from his exile into a vision of cosmic, Messianic purity. Looking at Benjamin’s view of translation, yet taking translation as representing the transformation of one’s native language to a higher level of linguistic purity, we might see the poet working as a translator does, according to Benjamin in his essay, to “set free in his own language the pure language spellbound in the foreign language” (163). That is, from the ecclesiastical Latin of Dante’s era, and from the outworn Victorian poetics of the late 19th Century, a new poetic idiom arises as visionary poets act as translators do to, as Benjamin says, “break[s] through the rotten barriers of [their] own language” (163).
As if anticipating his later work, Pound states in his early book The Spirit of Romance the goal of his study: “to examine certain forces, elements or qualities which were potent in the mediaeval literature of the Latin tongues, and … are still potent in our own” (v). This study prefigures his reconceptualization of an English poetics that was based partly on Dante’s reconceptualization of poetics in Italy in his change to the vernacular language. In “De vulgari eloquentia,” Dante, speaking of Latin and Italian, asserts: “Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular … because it was the language originally used by the human race; … because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; … and … because it is natural to us while the other is, in contrast, artificial” (II).
While the focus of Pound in his attempt to renovate poetry in English did not involve such a radical a change as the move from Latin to vernacular Italian, it did involve a movement away from established verse forms, metrics and figures of speech that he viewed as moribund, and toward a more natural form of speech based not on a regular metrics but on the musical phrase as it arose from the concision of the poem’s linguistic ideation. In Dante’s renewal of Italian poetics in La Commedia Divina, which Pound felt came about as a result of two centuries of development in Provence and one in Tuscany (“Prolegomena” 79), and through his intense work reading, writing, and translating and reading translations of the Troubadour poets as well as the poets in the Romantic and Symbolist movements in France in his own generation and the generation immediately preceding his, Pound had already in his twenties envisioned the future of 20th century poetry, which “will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power …; I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (“Prolegomena” 80).
Much of the work of Pound and Eliot involved translation literally or in a figurative sense in their translating of ideas and even phrases and lines of poetry into a Modernist “mode of intention,” to use Benjamin’s term. To a very large extent, The Waste Land comprises the echoed lines of other texts, and its tone, or “mode of intention,” echoes that of Eliot’s Symbolist mentor Jules Laforgue. We may also remember that Pound’s life work, The Cantos, begins with Pound’s re-translation into English of a Latin translation of a passage from the Odyssey published by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divas in 1537, and that great parts of this monumental work are made up of translations from Greek, Latin and Chinese texts. Eliot’s translations of texts to use in his work or his use of lines or original text from Greek, Latin, French and German, show his deep concern for incorporating ancient and modern poems and musical phrases into his poetry as a means of producing a kind of meta-text that would be instrumental in redefining the world he lived in and redefining English poetics, as did Pound in the creation of the meta-text of The Cantos. Both poets tried to reach Paradise in their writings in different ways, yet the catalysts for their tasks were the same. Similar to Dante’s task, they tried to restore harmony by fitting back into place the shattered pieces of the vessels God created to hold His light after His withdrawal into the empyrean of pure language. Their other great stimulus was the work of the Symbolists, from whose writings the phrase “art for art’s sake” is derived, and whose main innovator, Baudelaire, had spurred Benjamin to write “The Task of the Translator.”
In his essay Benjamin acts as a latter-day spokesman for the Symbolists by articulating the nuances of their creed and their mode of writing. By beginning his essay with the statement that no work of art is created for the observer or reader, and then going on to assert that the intention of the work of art is neither to make a statement nor to communicate a message (151), he is setting up his argument for the existence of a pure language, which justifies the idea that a work of art may exist for no other reason than to intimate an essence that can never be grasped in human language but only sensed through the most abstruse and subtle devices of the poet or artist in creating a work of art. The poet’s poet of the Symbolist movement in 19th Century France, Stephane Mallarmé, defines the artist’s task as a form of translation when he speaks of the modern work of art as a “symphony,” which, “according to the intention or unbeknownst to the musician, approaches thought; which no longer claims descent only from common speech.” For within it, he says, “Some explosion of Mystery to the skies in its impersonal magnificence occurs, where the orchestra couldn't not influence the ancient effort that long claimed to translate it uniquely through the voice of the ancestor” (Johnson, 206). The implication here, which, interestingly, is echoed by Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” is that the focus of modern poetic effort is to subtly translate into modern language or speech the voices of the past that form this symphony, which the poet can only compose if, as Eliot concludes in his essay, “he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (59). It is this idea, in a nutshell, upon which the poetics developed by Eliot and Pound was based and which is expressed by their major works. Translating the past into the present, in the Symbolists’ and Benjamin’s terms involved a focus primarily on the word and the elevating of it into the realm that intimates the unspeakable quality of the “pure language.”
French Symbolism as it was viewed by Benjamin and of Mallarmé lost much of its force in the Modernist poetics of Pound and Eliot when, on the one hand, Pound in 1913 repudiated it as a relevant dynamic in modern poetry, saying of Symbolists in a letter, “They beget imitation and one can learn nothing from them,” and in another letter in 1914, “…there’s nothing to be studied about symbolism” (Hamilton 4), and, on the other hand, when Eliot who, although he continued to be strongly influenced by Mallarmé right up to and throughout his writing of his last major work, Four Quartets, began to enlist his Symbolist aesthetic in the service of his faith in Christianity after he joined the Anglican Church in 1927. Pound and Eliot became as deeply involved in their personal missions in addressing the world’s and their own problems as in writing poetry, with the result that the poetic concerns that arose from their work and influenced later movements in America took on a more dogmatic quality than those more purely linguistic concerns of the Symbolists.
This quality is revealed in the prescriptive dicta of Imagists and Objectivists that the only ideas are in things and that form is an extension of content, both of which belie the Symbolist focus on a pure language, in which no subject in a linguistic construction can find completion in an object or a complement of itself (as in Benjamin’s analogy of the shattered vessels) and, a fortiori, any content, or meaning, that can be elicited from a poem arises out of the formal qualities of the poem, which are inherent in the language of the poem itself. As Benjamin says in regard to translation, which we can relate as well now to the composition of the original: “…the translation’s language can, indeed must free itself from bondage to meaning, in order to allow its own mode of intentio to resound, not as the intention to reproduce, but rather as harmony, as a complement to its language in which language communicates itself [my italics]” (161). According to Benjamin’s literary criticism couched in his definition of the function of translation, the aim of the poet is not to produce meaning but to allow the language to speak for itself through the intrinsic formal and linguistic qualities of the poem. That is, the poem’s form is a corollary to Logos; it is what of Mallarmé describes as the flower that is absent from every bouquet, (of Mallarmé 111), and from it is born the poem’s content. In his essay, Benjamin even uses the Greek beginning sentence of Genesis “En arche hen ho logos,” or “in the beginning was the word” (161), to express the idea that later became the basis for the philosophy of Existentialism: existence precedes essence, from and through which is derived meaning.
European movements spawned by Symbolism, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, had little effect on American poetics during and in the wake of the bombastic political polemic of Pound and the quasi-religious counsels of Eliot on the state of poetry and civilization, although, as Ed Foster notes, “Symbolism as understood by Allen Tate led to various academic poetries, and as understood by Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, and others associated with the San Francisco Renaissance, it helped to shape the ‘New American Poetry’” (13). Other American poets who came in the wake of the Modernists were naturally influenced by the 19th Century Symbolists; however, for the most part the European movements spawned by Symbolism never made a strong impact far inland from the bi-coastal cultural centers of New York and San Francisco.
Of great significance in terms of Benjamin’s thesis in “The Task of the Translator,” Foster goes on to say, “Jack Spicer reformulated Symbolism in ways primary to innovative poetries at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first” (13). It was not until the mid-20th Century and the arrival on the scene of Spicer on the West Coast and a group of New York Poets who saw Modernist American poetics as having reached a dead end, at least for them, that Benjamin’s Symbolist ideas began to come truly into their own. The New York poets, whose most well-known figures included John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, took up where the fin-de-siecle American Symbolist and Decadent poets had left off, turning back toward Europe and European poetry in their search for an alternative both to the academic poetry spawned by Eliot and to its nemesis and antithesis, the poetry of the Beats. Jack Spicer, whose work has stirred new interest today with the publication of his collected poems My Vocabulary Did This to Me: the Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, might be seen as the West Coast counterpart of Ashbery and his friends back East. Like Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer died at forty, leaving behind seven small-press editions of his poems, which only began to be recognized at the time of his death in 1965, brought on by chronic alcoholism.
While Spicer had started writing poetry when he was fourteen, he had spent five years at UC Berkeley preparing for a career in linguistics. He is quoted in the introduction to his collected poetry as declaring that Rimbaud and Dickinson “burst upon me like a bombshell when I was fifteen” (xiv). While Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian point out in their introduction to the book that Spicer’s sensibility clashed with that of the New York poets (xvi), by comparing Ashbery’s “The Old Juristiction” (Ashbery 66) and Spicer’s “Improvisations on a Sentence by Poe” (Spicer 171) we can see very similar underlying philosophies of a Postmodernist American poetics.
IV.
In light of Benjamin’s stress on the mode of intention as a key element in Symbolist poetry, these two poems—while they display very different poetic styles and voices—show the same concerns in terms of their modes of intention: to evade any direct statement that might point toward an essential meaning. In fact, both poems might be seen as expressing this mode of intention as their “themes,” more implicitly in Ashbery’s poem, more explicitly in Spicer’s. While both poems exhibit as practical usage Emily Dickinson’s dictum “Tell all the truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies” (248) taken to an extreme, this linguistic “slanting” underlines a desperate need to escape the banality of “meaning,” as it exists in “the old jurisdiction,” with the stress on “diction” in Ashbery’s case, and indefiniteness as the only possibility for concord, or musical harmony in a poem, in Spicer’s case. Without belaboring the point with line-by-line explications, we can see the gist of the two poems’ intention rise to the surface in lines such as “By anyone’s standards I was an uncertain thing,” “Look, there are live things for each of us,” and in Spicer’s poem the repeated phrase, “The grand concord of what / Does not stoop to definition.” When read “slant-wise” both poems evoke a feeling of the intense loneliness of one who embraces the exile that comes through invocation of the “grand concord,” or the unspeakable, pure language. This language can only be approached through the structuring of words in such a way that the intensity of their refusal to accept being harnessed with conventional meaning is proportionate to the intensity of feeling they evoke in the reader by opening up the poem to a multitude, almost an infinitude, of meanings that cannot be determined through conventional analysis. As Spicer says in one of his letters written to the long-dead poet Federico Garcia Lorca: “Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry…The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead man” (150).
What is most apparent in Spicer’s poem, of course, is the allusion to the statement by Poe upon which it is based. In 1906, Arthur Symons quotes Poe from an essay he wrote in Democratic Review as saying, “I know that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision—imbue it with any very determinate tone—and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character” (Symons Figures-of-Several-Centuries/008). Symons then goes on to remark,
Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine’s “Art Poétique”: “Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance”? And is not
the essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarmé and of the French Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation
of “that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive
one”? (Figures-of-Several-Centuries/008)
Keeping in mind that Benjamin wrote his essay to introduce his translations of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisienes, and that Baudelaire’s development of a Symbolist poetics arose to a great degree from his translations of Poe’s poetry into French, we can see a closing of the circle of influence from America to France and then to America again after a long period during which the Modernist poets were involved in such movements as Imagism, Objectivism, and Projective Verse while the group of poets under Eliot’s sway were writing what was thought of as “academic poetry.” In Europe during this same period, Dadaist and Surrealist poets in France and Germany were carrying on the Symbolist and Decadent traditions that grew out of the response by poets of the mid-nineteenth century to the Romantics. The circle was being closed as well by Ashbery, Koch and O’Hara in New York City under the influence of the French poets they were reading, while on the West Coast Spicer was being drawn to Poe’s ideas and those of the Symbolists and post-Symbolists involved in a poetic flowering in Spain, that led him to write one of his most important books in terms of his thoughts regarding a Postmodernist poetics, After Lorca.
The principal focus in After Lorca is on translation itself as a corollary to the Romantic, and later Symbolist, notions of “correspondence.” The book itself is a series of letters and poems that attempt to correspond to Lorca and his work as a spirit-agent that has possessed the poet while he is entranced, his normal, waking consciousness deactivated most probably by a heavy dose of alcohol. The borders of correspondence are intentionally blurred, so that an apparent interchange of spirits takes place in the poems / translations. Spicer was an advocate of automatic writing, and he attributed much of his poetry to alien beings that he termed “Martians.” This “alien” force that took over his writing is related to Spicer’s idea of correspondence, as when in one of his letters to Lorca he says,
Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across
language as easily as he can bring them across time…every place and every time has a real object to correspond with your real
object…Even these letters. They correspond with something…and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds
to them. That is how we dead men write to each other. (Spicer 134)
Furthermore, every poem in After Lorca is denoted by Spicer as a translation that is dedicated to one of his friends, and the poet admits that there is no clear line demarking what is a “true” translation of a poem by Lorca from what is Spicer’s own poetry. Spicer apparently felt that the role of translation in the writing of poetry was vital. It functioned as the means by which the poet could connect, from his exiled state, to another spirit in its own state of alienation and exile. As with Dante, Spicer used translation, both in the linguistic and the more abstract sense of the word, to raise his language to a level that broke through the barriers containing it within the older, no longer useful forms, just as Ashbery is “too wrapped in wind” even to take notice of the stone defining “the old jurisdiction” as he calls upon “the stranger with his suitcase” for help in translating himself past the boundaries of the known and familiar.
Reading the work of both of these Postmodernist poets we may feel, on the one hand, the assimilation and further development of Pound’s dictum on creating a kind of poetry that is, “austere, direct, free from emotional slither,” while, on the other hand, we may feel the force of Eliot’s definition of the serious poet as one who while writing is translating into a modern mode of intention the symphonic voices of long-dead poets into her or his own composition, a work that can only be composed by one who “lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past…conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” An echo of Eliot’s pronouncement can be heard in one of Spicer’s letters to Lorca, when he says,
Tradition…means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem,
gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do
with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry. (110-111)
V.
While Ashbery stresses in his interviews, as in the one in The Paris Review in 1983 (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews), that the poetry written by him, O’Hara and Koch is too dissimilar to be considered a “school” of poetry, all three poets had attended Harvard University after World War II, and were, or soon became, proficient in French and avid readers of French poets whose work had evolved out of the Symbolist, Dadaist and Surrealist modes of writing, and all were influenced as well by Marxism and the Existentialist philosophy in vogue at that time.
Very significantly, all three poets were also deeply involved in the New York art scene, ruled by abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. For years Ashbery worked as an art critic and reviewer, while O’Hara held a curator position at the Museum of Modern Art, focusing more on art than on the poetry he wrote, which he considered a sideline avocation. Whereas poetry had, in a sense, stagnated or else reached a stage where the most important Modernist works had been written, abstract expressionism, which focused on the formal elements of a painting as opposed to a representational content, was at its height, and its influence on the poets in the New York area was enormous. Thus these young poets were primed by cutting-edge art work to lead the way to a new poetics that would to some degree assimilate into their work the formal concerns of abstract expressionism, just as Gertrude Stein had tried to assimilate into hers the aesthetics of cubism.
Before Ashbery went to Paris on a Fulbright grant in 1955, Kenneth Koch had introduced him to the work of Raymond Roussel, who was known to a small circle of admirers and writers for the experimental poems and novels he left behind when he died in 1933 from an overdose of barbiturates. Rather than go into great detail to explain Roussel’s experimental techniques, an explanation by poet from Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, from his book about American expatriates in Paris, is sufficient for present purposes: “In Roussel, associations between one idea or event and another are based not on external similarity but on a highly permutated verbal construct, in which two words, nearly identical homophonically, are combined with other like phrases to yield phonetically similar sentences with entirely different meanings” (243). The strongest influence from Roussel in Ashbery’s early books can be seen in The Tennis Court Oath, in which the poet relied heavily on a collage technique that, as Sawyer-Laucanno says, “is linked to a notion, derived largely from Roussel, that words themselves can be the subject of a poem” (248). He goes on to say:
Where the surrealists were concerned with wonder, with the marvelous, with stretching perception, Ashbery is concerned
mainly with calling attention to the words themselves rather than what they evoke…for here Ashbery’s work turns on puns and
associative linguistic properties…to create unusual combinations…But ultimately these new conjunctions are not about anything
other than themselves. (249)
However, Sawyer-Laucanno later quotes Ashbery as saying that what he found most appealing in Roussel was Roussel’s ability to manipulate language to “raise the word to a new power…to yield true meaning at last; that is the lead which alchemy is on the verge of translating something far more interesting than gold” (244). This implies that the “far more interesting” thing that Ashbery learned from Roussel was not only that “words themselves can be the subject of a poem” or that poems are about “the words themselves rather than what they evoke,” but that by starting not with content but with form, or linguistic formations, the language of the poem could be raised to a level more closely approximating the “pure language.”
On the other hand, Spicer returned from his trip to the East with a similar impression of Ashbery and his friends as that imparted by Sawyer-Laucanno, or that “Ashbery’s work turns on puns and associative linguistic properties…But ultimately these new conjunctions are not about anything other than themselves.” Gizzi and Killian quote from Spicer’s letter to his friend Allen Joyce: “Like most primitive cultures, New York has no feelings for nonsense. Wit is as far as they go…No one speaks Martian, no one insults people arbitrarily, there is, to put it simply and leave it, no violence of the mind and of the heart, no one screams in the elevator” (xvi). It’s evident here how Spicer’s poetry differed from that of the New York poets. Spicer was a proponent of the serial poem and, more importantly to his poetry’s relationship to Symbolism, his attitude toward words themselves differed from theirs. In a letter to Lorca he noted,
Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible
connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection…
Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold with, nothing
else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to…
…—the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary. (123)
To delve with any depth into the distinction between Spicer’s ideas toward lexical usage and those of the New York poets would require a wholly different treatise that focused on the stylistic differences between the associative poetry of the group of Spanish poets of the 1920s and 1930s, of which Lorca was a key figure, and the poets of the Surrealist and post-Surrealist movement in France during the 1930s and 1940s, such as Pierre Reverdy and Pierre Martory, whose works were read, and some translated, by Ashbery, O’Hara and Koch.
While a greater and more refined vocabulary was perhaps more directly important to the New York poets than to Spicer because of stylistic differences, the previous discussion has shown that for both Ashbery and Spicer words function principally as vehicles to translate the poetry to a higher level of meaning. Therefore, the apparent contradiction seems to turn more on a vast difference in sensibility and style between Spicer and Ashbery, Koch and O’Hara rather than an essential difference in the underlying poetics evident in these writers’ work.
What we may finally be seeing in Spicer’s poetry and that of Ashbery and others of his group in New York is a coming of age in America of a poetics based largely on Symbolism, as well as a new way of viewing the relationship between poetry and translation, vis-a-vis Walter Benjamin’s critical concepts in “The Task of the Translator.” American poetics, as it has developed via Ashbery, O’Hara and Koch in the East and principally Spicer in the West, is characterized, as was presaged in Benjamin’s essay, by a poetry that has drawn so near to translation that the original language and the language of translation are virtually one and the same language that is elevated, or translated, to a higher level. As Benjamin says near the end of his essay,
True translation is transparent, it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if
strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible above all by conveying the syntax
word-for-word, and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is the original element of translation. For the sentence is the
wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering is the arcade. (162)
As Postmodernist poetic theory as well as a theory of translation, Benjamin’s focus on the word as “the original element of translation” harks back to his Lurianic idea of Tikkun, where words function as the most basic element used by the poet to refashion the “old,” or “original,” language by creating a new mode of intention that functions as its counterpart for the new time. The poet has to literally create a new language for poetry that functions as the old, or original one, did by translating the original language into the new language. To do this effectively requires the poet to have an equal knowledge of past as well as present poetic usages along with a concept of how this equivalence can operate as a catalyst for constructing the new language. The standard of proof of this knowledge is how well the poet uses the most basic building block of the poem, the word, in structuring her or his sentences. This intense focus on linguistic structuring requires a near total immersion in one’s state of artistic exile, the proof of which appears in the phrasing of the poem and the evocation of a “pure language” that it yields.
Because this new poetry reaches so ardently toward an elevated level of expression—a higher form of truth, if you will—and could not have been written in a conventional way, it can’t be read in a conventional way. It has to be read in a way similar to that we might use in reading a translation: asquint, or in Dickinson’s term “aslant.” Yet, because it is a freshly rendered translation of the reader’s native tongue into an idiom that is as yet unfamiliar to her or him, it may at first appear strange; as strange as one’s first encounter with any alien form of being; or as strange and yet familiar as an encounter with an “other” in oneself through the artificial medium of words. Appreciating this new poetics involves adjusting one’s perception away from its former mode of associating words together in a sentence and toward viewing a poem through a new lens of Logos so that—using Benjamin’s analogy—one is able to discern through the sentences, or walls of associated words making up the poem, gleams emanating from the glittering yet forever ungraspable gems displayed in the arcade.
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