After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic 9780823252145

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After Translation

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After Translation The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic

ignacio infante

Fordham University Press new york

2013

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Infante, Ignacio. After translation : the transfer and circulation of modern poetics across the Atlantic / Ignacio Infante. page cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-5178-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Poetry—Translating. 2. Poetics—History—20th century. 3. European poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 4. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Spanish American poetry—20th century— History and criticism. 6. Modernism (Literature). 7. Transnationalism in literature. I. Title. PN1059.T7I54 2013 418'.041—dc23 2012041913 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13

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First edition A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

To Jamie, Isabela, and Nicolas

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Contents

1

2 3

4 5

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction. Poetry after Translation: Cultural Circulation and the Transferability of Form in Modern Transatlantic Poetry

1

Heteronymies of Lusophone Englishness: Colonial Empire, Fetishism, and Simulacrum in Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I–III

22

The Translatability of Planetary Poiesis: Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionismo in Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel

51

Queering the Poetic Body: Stefan George, Federico García Lorca, and the Translational Poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance

81

Transferring the “Luminous Detail”: Sousândrade, Pound, and the Imagist Origins of Brazilian Concrete Poetry

117

The Digital Vernacular: “Groundation” and the Temporality of Translation in the Postcolonial Caribbean Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite

146

Afterword. The Location of Translation: The Atlantic and the (Relational) Literary History of Modern Transnational Poetics

177

Notes

189

Bibliography

199

Index

211

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Illustrations

1. Cover of Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I–II (1921)

27

2. Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I–II (Antinous and Inscriptions) (1921)

29

3. Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems III (Epithalamium) (1921)

39

4. Vicente Huidobro’s “Matin” from Horizon carré (1917)

63

5. Kamau Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video Style, section from “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces,” included in Ancestors (2001)

165

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Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a long engagement with modern poetry, the practice and theory of literary translation, and the scholarly field of comparative literature. It is also a work that is intrinsically connected to my own personal transatlantic journey that has taken me from my native Granada, Spain, to Dublin, Ireland, and Irvine, Los Angeles, New Brunswick, New York, and now St. Louis, in the United States. Many wonderful places in one impressive journey. Therefore, there is a very long list of people I need to acknowledge. I first started seriously reading poetry at Trinity College Dublin in 1997. I was able to work there with arguably the best three Americanists working in the Republic of Ireland today: Philip Coleman, Michael Hinds, and Stephen Matterson. Philip has been my tutor, mentor, and friend since I first met him in 1997. He has been an Irish blessing in more ways than he can imagine. Michael introduced me to the work of John Ashbery—an event that proved to be crucial later in my life—and generously supported my attempts to publish and translate American poetry into Spanish, including an invitation to spend a few days in the South of France. Dublin is also the home of two people who took care of me innumerable times: Adrian Carr and Jean Hoey. Without Adrian and Jean I wouldn’t have finished my degree at Trinity, and without Adrian I simply wouldn’t know a hundredth of the music I love, and two of my dearest friends. Thanks in part to Tom and Anne-Louise Fisher (family and friends), I was able to work as a literary translator for the publisher Random House

xii / acknowledgments

Mondadori, in Barcelona. I will always be grateful to Andreu Jaume for trusting in my abilities as a literary translator at a relatively young age and for hiring me on the spot to translate the work of Will Self, as well as for believing in my suggestion to translate Ashbery’s A Wave into Spanish. I wouldn’t know much about the practice of literary translation if Andreu hadn’t given me such a wonderful opportunity in 2001. During the last ten years I have been extremely fortunate to be able to work in the United States with a group of extraordinary scholars, teachers, mentors, and students, who have not only shaped the way I think about literary and cultural studies but who have ultimately helped me develop as a person. None of this would have been possible without the institutional and financial support of the Fulbright Commission in Spain, the Ministerio of Educación y Ciencia of the Government of Spain, and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Government, which generously granted me a Fulbright Scholarship to complete my doctoral program in comparative literature at Rutgers University. There is no doubt that my life has been marked by my experience as a foreign Fulbright Scholar in the United States. From the first graduate seminar I took at Rutgers, Billy Galperin has carefully monitored my development as a scholar not only with his characteristic brilliance and enthusiastic energy, but also with the utmost generosity. I am also extremely grateful to Richard Sieburth, who has always welcomed me at his Washington Square quarters throughout the years, and who has been kind enough to share his incredible knowledge and inspiring expertise on modern poetics and translation every time I knocked at his door. Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Nicholas Rennie have helped me enormously along the way too. I also thank Jacques Lezra for generously agreeing to read a previous version of this book. Brent Edwards’s work has been a key source of inspiration, and he is a model for the kind of scholar I wanted to become since I took his Serial Poetics seminar at Rutgers. I am extremely grateful to him too. The Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers provided the perfect intellectual environment to pursue all my interests and, thankfully, great curricular and funding opportunities to be able to do so, the Transliteratures Fellowship in particular. Most important, however, was the support that I always received from everyone in the program. I particularly thank the different graduate directors during my time at Rutgers for all their time and caring encouragement: Janet Walker, Richard Serrano, Alessandro Vettori, and Elin Diamond. I also acknowledge Susan Martin-Márquez for being the astounding Peninsularist that she is and a superb mentor. Before going to Rutgers I spent a crucial year of my life

acknowledgments / xiii

at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to meeting my wife there, I was also lucky enough to be able to work with four exceptional scholars who have greatly influenced the way I think about my work: John Carlos Rowe, Gabriele Schwab, Martin Schwab, and Jeff Barrett. Since July 2009, I have had the pleasure to work at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish. The level of institutional support, professional encouragement, and spirit of collegiality I have enjoyed at Washington University has been simply outstanding. In fact, I would not have been able to complete this book in this country without it. I would particularly like to express my gratitude in this regard to Nancy Berg, Jonathan Cohen, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Kathy Steiner-Lang, Harriet Stone, Dean Gary Wihl, as well as Melanie Keeney and her staff, for helping me beyond expectations at a particularly tough period in my life. Without them things wouldn’t have worked out as well as they have, which is a remarkable thing in itself. Also, when I needed help, the most amazing group of people responded: I will be forever grateful to John Ashbery (he should be first, plus his last name starts with A), Carolina Díaz, Representative Maurice Hinchey, Sacra Jaimez, David Kermani, Nicolás Latorre, Michael Leong, Suzanne Jill Levine, Mike McGrath, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Ray Nargizian, Isabel Pérez, Catherine Porter, James Ramey, Fernando de Villena, and Pauline Yu (Philip Coleman, Billy Galperin, Nicholas Rennie, and Richard Sieburth also helped here too). My two current Chairs, Harriet Stone and Lynne Tatlock, have been extremely supportive in every way imaginable since day one. They both have also read numerous sections of this book and provided extremely relevant feedback along the way. I thank also all my colleagues in the Committee on Comparative Literature and in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University, and particularly those who have directly or indirectly contributed ideas to my project, or who have read sections of the book: Billy Acree, Nancy Berg, Nina Davis, Rob Henke, Emma Kafalenos, Mike Lützeler, Nacho Sánchez Prado, Pepe Schraibman, and Akiko Tsuchiya. Bill Maxwell in English also provided invaluable feedback on the early stages of the publication process. I also thank the Center for the Humanities at Washington University (Gerald Early, Jian Leng, Erin McGlothlin) for their support of the Transatlantic Crossings Reading Group I have been convening with Jessica Hutchins, Nicholas Tamarkin, and Andia Augustin since 2010. This reading group has provided an excellent opportunity to explore some of the ideas developed in this book. Thanks to Jessica, Nick, Andia, Mike, and all other members of the group for their energy

xiv / acknowledgments

and enthusiasm regarding transatlantic studies. Sarah Hennessey, thank you, for helping me with everything, always. This manuscript made it to Helen Tartar thanks to Jody Greene. The book could not have gone to better hands, and I am extremely grateful to Jody for suggesting Helen. At Fordham University Press I thank Tom Lay, Wil Cerbone, Fredric Nachbaur, and the Editorial Board. Helen and Tom put together an impressive group of readers who have shaped what the book is today. I want to share my enormous gratitude to the two anonymous readers and to Juli Highfill for providing me with numerous brilliant comments and suggestions to considerably improve the book. Tim Roberts at the American Literatures Initiative has been a superb managing editor, and I am very grateful to Teresa Jesionowski for her invaluable patience and wise assistance with the manuscript during the copyediting process. Finally, I wouldn’t be here without my family. My mother, Teresa Infante, is the bravest woman I know—and one of the smartest—and I owe her an essential part of who I am as a son, a father, and ultimately as a human being. And Mike Harrison is a nice guy, too, a surprisingly great choice for a stepfather, all the way from Leeds via Sharm elSheikh. My grandparents, Vicente II Infante del Castillo and Adelaida Fernández Ariza, have always been there for me, and I will always love them for their unconditional love and my beautiful and warm memories growing up with them. All the gratitude and love in the world go to my parents-in-law, John and Veronica Zorigian, for their hospitality, support, and especially for managing to take care so well of Jamie before I showed up that night with a bunch of flowers and an empty stomach. Jason and Christopher, thank you for being the brothers I always wanted to have. This book is dedicated to my wife, Jamie, our daughter, Isabela, and our son, Nicolas. Jamie is the one and only reason why my heart ticks, my soul keeps getting bigger, my head spins, and my writing flows, plus, at this point, there is no doubt that she is my destiny—a gorgeous destiny if there ever was one. Isabela has been the light of my life since she was born and the drive to go far and beyond where I thought I could ever go, just because she is my baby and a spectacular ballet dancer, volleyball player, singer, and the prettiest big sister ever. Nico is my superhero ball player, a musical genius, and, with Isabela, the sweetest thing in the world. I am blessed with the best family in the cosmos, as Huidobro would say. The three of you are my life, my source of inspiration, and my true original passion, so I don’t need to thank you: I can only love you with my whole heart. Os amo con todo mi corazón.

Introduction. Poetry after Translation: Cultural Circulation and the Transferability of Form in Modern Transatlantic Poetry

This book studies the ways in which the circulation of modern poetry and poetics is articulated by the translation of various poetic traditions and forms across the diverse spatiotemporal realm of mediation constituted by the Atlantic Ocean. By examining how translation, broadly understood as an interlingual, literary, and transcultural practice, is closely related to the transatlantic circulation of modern poetics, I develop a multilingual critical approach to the study of transnational poetry. Another central aim of this book is to analyze how the literary history of modern poetry—traditionally produced within mononational and monolingual frameworks—is altered by a comparative approach that incorporates different languages, poetic traditions, and cultures connected by the heterogeneous geopolitical space of the Atlantic Ocean. My analysis explores various ways in which key modern transatlantic poets attempt through their work to bridge differing but closely interconnected poetic traditions at the temporal juncture between colonialism and the postcolonial era, and how their poetry encourages us to rethink the literary history of modern poetry based on a transatlantic “literary field,” using Pierre Bourdieu’s term, that is simultaneously multilingual, hemispheric, and transcontinental. One of the key premises of this book is that the critical category of Anglo-American “modernism” does not account for the overlapping modern literary traditions that at times coexist within a multilingual and transnational framework across the Atlantic—among them belated forms of romanticism and symbolism, various transnational strands of

2 / introduction

modernist poetics (Spanish American, Lusophone, Anglo-American), diverse avant-garde movements, and different manifestations of the selfconsciously experimental forms from the 1950s and ‘60s traditionally associated with the category of the postmodern. Owing to these overlapping poetic forms and traditions, and the differing experiences of modernity associated with them since the late nineteenth century, I have chosen to use the term modern poetry as opposed to the label modernist poetry for the multilingual analysis of modern transatlantic poetics outside of the monolingual framework of Anglo-American literature. As Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger have recently stated in a different context, “if modernism is simply, as some have argued, the expressive dimension of modernity, and if modernity itself is defined very broadly, the utility of the term modernist, as opposed to, say, modern, would seem to be in question” (Dettmar and Wollaeger, xiv). This book therefore questions and rethinks the theoretical paradigm of Anglo-American “modernism” based on the transnational, interlingual, and transhistorical features of the work of key modern poets writing on both sides of the Atlantic—namely, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa; the Chilean Vicente Huidobro; the Spaniard Federico García Lorca; the San Francisco–based poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser; the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite; and the Brazilian brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Contemporary scholarship in the areas of modern poetry and poetics emphasizes the need to transcend local and national categories in the analysis of literary and cultural production. A particularly important recent work in the field is Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics, winner of the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association in 2011. Ramazani’s book “argues for a reconceptualization of twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry studies,” in order to account for what he refers to as the “circuits of poetic connection and dialogue across political and geographic borders and even hemispheres, of examining cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges, influences and confluences in poetry” (Ramazani, x). Although Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics successfully rearticulates the study of twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone poetry by widening the field of poetry studies beyond a national paradigm, it does so within an essentially monolingual framework. Ramazani’s critical effort to transcend the mononational works well for the study of poetry originally written in English; however, its monolingual methodological framework is more problematic as a potential model for a wider study of “cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges” that could be applicable to

introduction / 3

other geopolitical areas where English does not necessarily operate as a vernacular or literary language. Curiously, Ramazani cites the “specificities of language” and the “language specificity of poetry” as reasons for excluding from his study both poetry written in other languages and the concept of translation as a form of cross-cultural exchange: Still a primary reason for drawing a somewhat artificial boundary around poems in English is that, simply put, in poetry, more than perhaps in any other literary genre, the specificities of language matter. . . . The heuristic corollary of this observation is that poems are best taught in the original, and in an English department in a predominantly English-speaking country, the teacher devising a poetry syllabus cannot usually presume student competence in multiple languages. Moreover, although poetic influences continually cross linguistic lines, the language specificity of poetry often grants the inheritances in a poet’s working language(s) special weight. (Ramazani, 19) Ramazani’s methodological decision to draw an “artificial boundary” around works originally composed in English within the postcolonial and global framework he uses highlights the long-standing state of affairs within “an English department in a predominantly English-speaking country” regarding foreign languages and literatures. However, the same linguistic specificity that Ramazani invokes to justify his methodological decision constitutes in itself a problematic concept, particularly from the transnational point of view that articulates A Transnational Poetics as a scholarly project. Recent scholarship on multilingual literatures, such as Brian Lennon’s In Babel’s Shadow, and Joshua Miller’s Accented America, to cite two relevant examples, exhibits far more awareness of and critical attention to the multilingual specificities that problematize the validity of the notion of a “predominantly English-speaking country” for the scholarly study of literature in and of the United States. For example, Miller powerfully underscores the implications of a multilingual approach to the study of literatures of the United States in the following terms: No language (or form of language) has ever been designated an official national speech or “standard” in the United States, but even a cursory glance at the best-selling anthologies and literary histories seems to imply that only one language has been used to convey Americans’ ambitions and to tell their stories. That this has never been so is an important recognition that has the potential

4 / introduction

to reconfigure what we understand as the “American language” or languages—what Americans speak to each other—as well as the texts that constitute “U.S. literature”—that is, which stories Americans invoke to convey something important about their affiliations. . . . This perspective combats a strategic blindness that discounts multilingualism, presuming it to be irrelevant, marginal, or eccentric in relation to U.S. national culture. (Miller, 18) By essentializing the “specificities of language” and the “language specificity of poetry” within his critical project, Ramazani indirectly marginalizes and discounts multilingualism in his reductive consideration of the United States as a predominantly monolingual nation, in terms similar to the ones just described by Miller. Moreover, Ramazani’s attempt to examine “cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges, influences and confluences in poetry” (Ramazani, x) from an explicitly monolingual framework does not seriously engage the specificities of translation— either as a linguistic process or concept able to bridge the interstices between different languages, literary traditions, poetries, genres, and forms of media that emerge from the transnational circulation of culture. It is worth noting that Ramazani seldom mentions the concept of translation in his work, and in fact, the word “translation” does not appear in the index of A Transnational Poetics. A key claim of this book, therefore, is that if the various historical, economic, and material processes associated with the transnational flow of culture provide the framework for a new critical paradigm to reconceptualize the field of poetry studies, the notion of translation must necessarily enter the picture in a thorough and consistent way. The critical incorporation of translation within the transnational study of modern poetry and poetics entails not only the rejection of what Ramazani refers to as a “mononational paradigm” but also, and more particularly, the rejection of what constitutes the monolingual framework that has powerfully sustained the institution of English studies in the United States. This book constitutes in part a critical response to the kind of question posed by Susan Stanford Friedman in her recent attempt to problematize that very same institutional paradigm as it applies in particular to the field of modernist studies: “How can modernist studies be planetary if it is monolingual, if it operates within the lingua franca of any given era, if it reproduces the linguistic hegemonies of modernity’s imperial legacies, if, for example, it remains within the confines of global English today?” (Friedman, 489). In the context of Friedman’s important question, approaches such as Ramazani’s

introduction / 5

represent a symptomatic lack of critical attention to the concepts of interlingual and literary translation in English studies more generally, constituting not only a methodological and theoretical problem for the study of transnational literature but also a historiographic problem. What is at stake here for the purpose of articulating a transnational reconceptualization of modern poetry is to be able to historicize not only how the practice of literary translation has influenced the ways in which English-speaking poets write poetry, but more important, to substantiate critically the ways in which the practice of translation has generated the production and circulation of particular modern poetic forms and traditions. Even within the discipline of English studies, it is well known that a key aspect of the Anglo-American modernist revolution is the crucial role played by literary translation in the origin, exchange, and transnational circulation of modernist poetics. The case of Ezra Pound, for example, is in this sense clearly paradigmatic. As previous scholars such as Haun Saussy, Richard Sieburth, and Steven Yao have shown, it is mostly through Pound’s idiosyncratic conception and practice of interlingual translation that a movement as central as imagisme within the canon of Anglo-American modernist poetry can historically emerge in the 1910s.1 However, the case of Ezra Pound as a transatlantic writer whose own poetry and poetics is intrinsically connected to the experience of interlingual translation is not an exception. Many other modern transatlantic poets, among them the ones studied in the following chapters, conceived their own poetic practice in part as a very serious linguistic engagement with various foreign languages and poetic traditions. As Pound himself states bluntly, “It must be clear to anybody that will think about the matter for 15 minutes that reading a good author in a foreign tongue will joggle one out of the clichés of ones own and will as it were scratch up the surface of one’s vocabulary” (Pound, “How to Write,” 107). The kind of deep intellectual engagement with “a good author in a foreign tongue” expressed by Pound, an experience that happens to be at the core of the concept and practice of literary translation, constitutes a crucial component of the circulation of modern poetry and poetics across the Atlantic when understood as a complex transnational process of writing, reading, editing, and publishing. This book is, therefore, self-consciously located within the academic field of comparative literature, or more precisely, the “new” comparative literature that Emily Apter defines as “the translation zone.” Apter delineates the key features of her recent conceptualization of the discipline of comparative literature in the following terms:

6 / introduction

A new comparative literature, with the revalued labor of the translator and theories of translation placed center stage, expands centripetally toward a genuinely planetary criticism, extending emphasis on the transference of texts from one language to another, to criticism of the processes of linguistic creolization, the multilingual practices of poets and novelists over a vast range of major and “minor” literatures, and the development of new languages by marginal groups all over the world. (Apter, 10) Unlike the various institutional manifestations of the kind of monolingual “heuristic corollary” described by Ramazani that strictly focuses on the “linguistic specifities” of a single language or national literature—which still determines most of the syllabi and research produced in departments of modern languages and literatures in the United States—the field of comparative literature constitutes a productive space for the contemporary study of transnational cultures that transcends the monolingual, as suggested by Apter. Though distinct in terms of focus and scope, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also emphasizes the constitutive role of translation within her own recent attempts to reconceptualize the field and practice of comparative literature. As Spivak argues in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, translation constitutes a crucial act of comparative reading since it is endowed with a powerful political dimension: “When we rethink comparativism, we think of translation as an active rather than a prosthetic practice. I have often said that translation is the most intimate act of reading. Thus translation comes to inhabit the new politics of comparativism as reading itself, in the broadest possible sense” (Spivak, 472). My analysis of modern transatlantic poetry entails a comparative reading of various manifestations of translation as they articulate what Apter describes as “the transference of texts from one language to another.” My approach to the notion of translation aims to open up a critical space for the examination of the interlingual dimensions of modernist, avantgarde, and postmodern poetics that remain insufficiently studied within contemporary literary and cultural studies. Ultimately, my book reveals the limitations of criticism of modernist and avant-garde poetry and poetics that do not take into account what Martin Puchner describes in Poetry of the Revolution as the “dynamic of moving and translating,” in the following terms: The dynamic of moving and translating, of displacement or replacement points to the limitations of theories of modernism that depend on a more or less deterministic model according to which

introduction / 7

modernism is a response to the crisis of modernization. . . . The model of modernism as arising from incomplete and contested industrialization thus explains the emergence of a first modernism, but not the projection, refraction and adaptation of this modernism ever since. In particular, it does not work as an explanation of the avant-garde at large, which respects neither origin, nor original language, which does not privilege fixed abodes and cultural frames and thrives on the instable and ephemeral even as it may fantasize about origins and headquarters. What needs to be added to this theory of uneven developments is the dynamic of modernism and the avant-garde itself, the fact that once there existed a radical modernism in Europe’s semiperiphery, this modernism travelled and was distributed to a much wider range of places and locales, disrespecting prevalent modes of production. There formed, in other words, a kind of feedback loop between European and American modernisms. (Puchner, 174) In order to analyze particular manifestations of the circulating dynamics of translation within modern poetry in the terms suggested by Puchner, I use the concept of “circulation” developed by cultural anthropologists Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma. In “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” an article originally published in Public Culture in 2002, Lee and LiPuma focus on the primary importance of the process of circulation as a “constitutive act” (192) in the generation, dissemination and interpretation of cultural forms. Although most of their article develops a rather prescient analysis of circulation as a key constitutive process for the flow of capital within global capitalism in the early twenty-first century—as Lee and LiPuma argue, “it produces new forms of risk that might destroy it” (211)—their overall approach to the process of circulation succeeds in overcoming the semiotic analysis of the concept of exchange originally developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the field of cultural anthropology. As they argue, their notion of “cultures of circulation” tries to overcome the limitations of Lévi-Strauss’s conceptualization of circulation as merely “transmitting” meaning: In hindsight, it can be seen that his use of phonology as the model for structural analysis raised fundamental issues about structure, event, and agency that continue to inform poststructuralist discussions of performative identity. One result is that performativity has been considered a quintessentially cultural phenomenon that is tied to the creation of meaning, whereas circulation and exchange have been seen as processes that transmit meanings, rather than as

8 / introduction

constitutive acts in themselves. Overcoming this bifurcation will involve rethinking circulation as a cultural phenomenon, as what we call cultures of circulation. (Lee and LiPuma, 191) Unlike Lévi-Strauss, they conceive circulation as a performative and constitutive process that is “created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them” (Lee and LiPuma, 192). Based on their conceptualization of “cultures of circulation,” I analyze the act of translation as an instrumental constitutive process able to generate various forms of transfers that articulate the circulation of modern transatlantic poetry, and to articulate a space of mediation between different national traditions, languages, and cultures. Closely related to Lee and LiPuma’s groundbreaking definition of “cultural circulation,” Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli offer a relevant model for exploring the process of cultural translation. Their work on transnational circulation originally emerged as a response to the editorial mission of the journal Public Culture, which, since its foundation, has been to seek “a critical understanding of the global cultural flows and the cultural forms of the public sphere which define the late twentieth and early twenty-first century” (Public Culture). In their influential essay “Technologies of Public Forms”: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition”—originally written as the introduction to a collection of essays published in that journal in 2003— Gaonkar and Povinelli develop a new theoretical approach to the study of the transnational movement of cultural forms grounded, in part, on their own reevaluation of the concept of translation. Gaonkar and Povinelli’s approach informs my articulation of a new framework for the study of the transnational transfer and circulation of poetic forms as an intelligible event emerging in a transatlantic space of cultural encounter. For Gaonkar and Povinelli, the key challenge to transnational cultural studies is to establish a critical framework that engages the actual movement of cultural forms, while avoiding the “traditions of the book,” as they argue here: The pressing challenge was how to engage these forms as mobile vectors of cultural and social imaginaries without relying necessarily on methods of reading derived from the traditions of the book; or if derived from the traditions of the book, how to readapt those traditions so as to foreground the social life of the form rather than reading social life off of it. (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 387)

introduction / 9

The notion of form itself is of paramount importance to their project insofar as it facilitates a new critical focus that shifts from “meaning and translation” to what they refer to as “circulation and transfiguration” within “the contemporary politics of recognition.” As they argue, “A form can be said to move intelligibly (as opposed to merely physically) from one cultural space to another only in a state of translation” (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 392). Their critical project reconsiders within this framework the role played by translation in the transnational movement of cultural forms: “Translation—the (im)possibility of meaningful commensuration—has long been circulation’s double, its enabling twin” (392). Perhaps the most important contribution of “Technologies of Public Forms” to the fields of transnational cultural studies and translation studies is the new theory of cultural translation Gaonkar and Povinelli offer based on what they refer to as the “dynamic transfiguration of forms across circulatory matrices” (388). Gaonkar and Povinelli’s notion of “transfiguration” thus emphasizes the materiality (rather than the meaning) of cultural forms, and is grounded on a critical stance that acknowledges the flow of transnational culture by “reading form as a moving, transfigurative, and transfigurating element of public life” (“Technologies of Public Forms,” 385). For them “transfiguration” constitutes a notion that displaces the conceptualization of translation within what they refer to as the “straightforward reasoning” of the discipline of translation studies: “But the straightforward reasoning of translation studies obscures a yawning disjunction between translation as a political and economic project and translation as an exemplar of theories of meaning” (394).2 Thus, they locate “transfiguration” at the juncture between a cultural and political approach to translation studies, on the one hand—practiced mainly by historians and cultural anthropologists—and a hermeneutic or critical approach to translation studies embraced by philosophers, literary theorists and linguists, on the other. The aporia at the intersection of these two projects provides the opening for a revitalized approach to form-sensitive analysis of global public culture. On the one hand, we now have countless socially informed studies of the conditions of possibility for various forms of translation and countless studies of the profoundly political nature of translation. . . . On the other hand, traditional theories of translation as a system of meaning-value arise from and are oriented to the possibility of undistorted movement of linguistic value from one language to another, one genre to another, or one

10 / introduction

semiotic system to another. These theories of meaning-value continually orient us toward a theory of the sign, mark, or trace and away from a theory of the social embeddedness of the sign, of the very social practices that these histories wish to describe. In other words, no matter the richness of these social studies, theories of translation continually return to the question of how to translate well from one language to another as meaning is born across the chasm of two language codes—or in the Derridean revision, the dilemma of graspability that exists prior to this birth, this voyage. (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 394) Although there is no doubt that a heuristic gap exists between what can be generalized as the cultural and philosophical approaches to translation in the late twentieth century, as Gaonkar and Povinelli argue, it is a gap that, as will be shown in this book, is as generative of meaning and knowledge as the process of circulation itself. Moreover, if their proposed use of the concept of “transfiguration” constitutes a critique of “theories of translation,” it is a critique that overly simplifies both the field of translation studies and the concept of interlingual and literary translation. At the same time, it overemphasizes the potential for critical “revitalization” entailed in their use of the concept of “transfiguration” as loosely defined in their essay. Indeed, it is the productive potential of the gap they locate between two different modes of understanding the act and process of translation that precisely demonstrates the importance of contemporary translation studies for the analysis of the transnational movement of cultural forms. The productive potential of this space between different approaches to translation happens to be highlighted in the same essay by Talal Asad to which Gaonkar and Povinelli refer in their article. In his foundational “The Concept of Translation in British Social Anthropology,” Asad develops a theory of cultural translation in which the act of translation is seen as a constitutive process in the production of meaning and not merely a “banal” given of “the task” of social anthropologists (10) in their attempt to interpret foreign cultures.3 In his reformulation of the concept of cultural translation, particularly regarding the phenomenon of “unequal languages,” Asad borrows the notion of intentio from Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” As Asad argues, the main reason for drawing on a component of Benjamin’s theory is to articulate a new form of cultural translation that conveys “the structure of an alien discourse” that “all good translation seeks to reproduce” (21). Asad uses Benjamin’s theory of translation to develop a new form of cultural

introduction / 11

translation that would allow the “reader to evaluate that intentio” (21) as a structural or formal “coherence” (22) of the foreign culture and which, in his view, could facilitate a more harmonious relation with the language of the “good translator”: The good translator does not immediately assume that unusual difficulty in conveying the sense of an alien discourse denotes a fault in the latter, but instead critically examines the normal state of his or her own language. The relevant question therefore is not how tolerant an attitude the translator ought to display toward the original author (an abstract ethical dilemma), but how she can test the tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms. (Asad, 22) Asad’s attempt to conceive a more harmonious practice of cultural translation in order to show literally the good translator’s “tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms” demonstrates how a philosophical approach to literary translation can theoretically articulate a new approach to the concept of translation within the field of social anthropology. It also highlights the productive nature at the core of what Gaonkar and Povinelli view as the gap between what they regard as the two main theoretical strands structuring the discipline of translation studies. Ultimately, their critical need to establish a conceptual space between the notions of “transfiguration” and “translation” generates a limiting disjunction between two deeply interconnected heuristic processes and concepts. Moreover, their analysis of the circulation of cultural forms remains grounded on a notion of “form” as a thing in itself that stands in direct opposition to the notion of “meaning,” two terms opposed but mutually related within their conception of the “sign” as the object of translation. Indeed, one of the key features of the notion of form is that it constitutes an extremely difficult concept to define, as Gaonkar and Povinelli affirm as follows: We are cognizant of the protean character of the idea of form in play here— and the potential criticism that we seem to be moving blithely through different ontological registers, ranging from textual forms, such as novels and newspapers, to forms of subjectivity adumbrated in citizenship and stranger-sociability, as well as to multiplex cultural formations called the nation and the public sphere. This is deliberate. In a given culture of circulation, it is more important to track the proliferating copresence of varied textual/ cultural forms in all their mobility and mutability than to attempt

12 / introduction

a delineation of their fragile autonomy and specificity. (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 391)

Though they acknowledge the problematic “protean” feature of form, Gaonkar and Povinelli fail to recognize that one of the fundamental tenets of contemporary translation studies is precisely the conceptualization of translation as a form. Citing the work of Benjamin again—perhaps the most crucial contribution to the field of translation studies in the twentieth century—translation constitutes a “form” in the way that it entails a “determination of the medium of reflection,” and is thus necessarily dependent on the translatability of the original: “Translation is a form. To comprehend it as a form, one must go back to the original, for the laws governing the translation lie within the original, contained in the issue of its translatability” (“Task of the Translator,” 254). Benjamin’s seminal conceptualization of translation as a “form” unveils a potential for translatability and transferability that becomes manifest in the particular linguistic and spatiotemporal displacements that emerge when a work is transformed beyond its original manifestation. Although it is undoubtedly important to provide theoretical models to “track the proliferating copresence of varied textual/cultural forms” for contemporary cultural studies, as Gaonkar and Povinelli argue, it is equally important to analyze the formal and theoretical implications of that same critical tracking so as not to ignore the problematic “autonomy and specificity” that is connected to the translatability of form as a concept. Ultimately, the importance of Gaonkar and Povinelli’s notion of cultural transfiguration resides not so much in their critique of “traditional theories of translation” or “translation studies,” but rather in the theoretical framework they provide for the analysis of transnational cultural forms. Their emphasis on the study of the transformations of form through their concept of “transfiguration” offers a very useful paradigm for the analysis of transnational culture, particularly for the fields of translation studies and comparative literature in the twenty-first century. To articulate theoretically a transnational and interlingual analysis of modern poetry, the critical framework of this book fuses the “foregrounding of the social life of form” from a transnational perspective, as proposed by Gaonkar and Povinelli, with the critical analysis of the “protean” nature of the idea of form and its potential for translatability inherent in the act of translation. When examined and experienced from a translational framework, the notion of form manifests an explicit potential for mutability and transformation. For Benjamin the

introduction / 13

translatability of form constitutes in fact a transferential potential for the original to live on in its “afterlife”: “We may call this connection a natural one, or more specifically a vital one. Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife (Überleben)” (“Task of the Translator,” 254). As Benjamin argues, the translation of an original is related to the original in the same way that the determined “manifestations of life” are related to the “phenomenon of life.” For him, this translational relation can be established only through the translatability that articulates the gap between “life” and its “Überleben,” translated into English by Harry Zohn as “afterlife.” Joseph F. Graham, the translator of Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay on Benjamin, “Des Tours de Babel,” chose the term “sur-vival” instead of Zohn’s “afterlife,” a relevant linguistic choice that emphasizes Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Benjamin’s concept of Überleben: “If the structure of the work is ‘sur-vival,’ the debt does not engage in relation to a hypothetical subject-author of the original text . . . but to something else that represents the formal law in the immanence of the original text” (“Des Tours de Babel,” 183). A concept closely related to Derrida’s “something else that represents the formal law in the immanence of the original text” is precisely Benjamin’s concept of “translatability” unveiled by translation. As Samuel Weber suggests in relation to Benjamin’s theory of translation, translatability constitutes a “potentiality” of the original that can only be experienced after translation: Translatability is not simply a property of the original work, but rather a potentiality that can be simply realized or achieved, and that therefore has less to do with the enduring life usually attributed to the work than with what Benjamin calls its “afterlife” or its “survival” (Nachleben, Fortleben, Überleben). . . . This is because translatability is never the property of an entity, such as a work, but rather of a relation. (“A Touch of Translation,” 74) Benjamin’s take on the act of translation allows for an encounter with the “stratum” of what he refers to as “pure language” through a radical transformation facilitated by the translatability of the original, as suggested by Weber, that literally moves it beyond itself after translation, reaching its “afterlife” (Überleben). For Benjamin, this transformation implies a turning of the “symbolizing into the symbolized” through which “all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished” (“Task of the

14 / introduction

Translator,” 261). Therefore, within Benjamin’s theory, the act of translation implies a “non-pure” linguistic representation of an absolute potential for translatability of the original as “that which seeks to represent” (261). Certainly, “that which seeks to represent” cannot be expressed by a mode of translation concerned with conveying the actual content (i.e., meaning or information) signified by the original since the potential of translatability of the original does not have anything to communicate beyond its own translatability as a form. This aspect of Benjamin’s take on translation leads to a particular “demand for literalness” (260) that radically moves away from any communicative purpose: “From this very same reason translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense” (260). Moreover, Benjamin’s conception of translation can only liberate “pure language” through an exclusively literal perception of the linguistic form of the intention implicit in the original text. In the light of Benjamin’s theory, the “transparent” art of “real” translation (versus meaning-oriented translation) is grounded on a literal perception of the linguistic form of the original that is conveyed by Benjamin in a figurative way, using the visual terminology implicit in the optical perception of form, as he describes here: A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is a wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. (“Task of the Translator,” 260) Benjamin’s theory of translation is thus characterized by a conceptual duality that clearly deserves further critical exploration and elaboration within contemporary translation studies. As Apter points out, “In addition to providing the field of translation studies with its most theoretically rich and enigmatic precepts, Benjamin forged an intriguing, yet undertheorized connection between philology and critical theory” (Translation Zone, 7). Based on the potential for translatability inherent in Benjamin’s conception of translation as a “form”—which he defines both in terms of the linguistic “syntax” of the original (a philological consideration) and as a “determination of the medium of reflection” (a consideration of critical theory)—the notion of poetic transfer is used in this book to analyze the

introduction / 15

series of linguistic, or philological, and conceptual, or theoretical, correlations that emerge from the circulation across the Atlantic of the work of the various poets I study. In its original Latin form, the term transfere refers to a carrying over, a transport, a displacement, or a transformation of an object or event in relation to another spatiotemporal realm, entity, or medium. As a critical tool, the concept of transfer facilitates the examination of the potential of translatability between the different poetic forms and traditions that articulate the transnational and interlingual circulation of modern transatlantic poetics. My notion of poetic transfer refers in particular to the series of recurring mechanisms of translation, displacement, and substitution determined by the productive difference and spatiotemporal distance that connects the forms, concepts, and traditions involved in the circulation of modern poetry across the Atlantic. I therefore use this notion to study the work of various transatlantic poets located at the interstices of differing literary traditions (romanticism, modernism, the avant-garde), languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish), and media (print, visual, and digital). Within this framework, I examine the various linguistic and poetic forms through which these poets negotiate otherness in linguistic, cultural, sexual, and historical terms, as manifested in the various correlations between notions such as original / translation, real / simulacrum, vernacular / cosmopolitan, latent / manifest, local / universal, queer / normal, history / poetics, colonial / postcolonial, and print media / digital media. As I develop in this book, a poetic transfer articulates both the linguistic and figural form that mediates the relation between different poetic works, as well as the spatiotemporal realm—both as a historical and cultural dimension—where this correlation actually takes place. David Palumbo-Liu has examined a parallel figural and spatial duality in relation to the concept of literary form within global literary exchange in which he analyzes a poetic “problematic” particularly related to the work of Henry James in the following terms: The “problematic” that emerges as the product of a “poetic” analytic revolves back with great logic, to precisely the issue that James outlines—how is otherness not only given form, but how can Form itself be both the allegorical articulation of the mediation of self and other, and at the same time be that mediating space that accommodates both. (Palumbo-Liu, “Atlantic to Pacific,” 207) This particular problematic of how otherness is “given form” described by Palumbo-Liu constitutes a central shared feature of the work of each of the poets analyzed in the following chapters and is central to my study

16 / introduction

of the transfer and circulation of modern poetry across the Atlantic. This constitutes in fact a key aspect of the notion of poetic transfer as examined in this book that is largely ignored by Gaonkar and Povinelli in their definition of “transfiguration,” that is, its intrinsic relation to the notion of alterity lying at its very core. This aspect of the notion of transfer is connected in my approach to a modern experience of alterity that has been conceptualized by the sociologist Richard Sennett as “being engaged by the unknown.” Following the work on urban sociology by Georg Simmel, Sennett develops a modern notion of cosmopolitanism closely related to an encounter with a “force of alterity” as he argues here: The distinction between difference and alterity has to do with the possibility of classifying strangers in terms of difference versus the possibility of the unknown other. What Simmel understood about this stranger, understood as a force of alterity, was that it had a profoundly provoking quality to it. As Benjamin would later argue, the notion of the unknown had a kind of force, a kind of power of arousal in crowds. . . . Thus, the quality of cosmopolitanism for these urbanists at the time had to do with the notion of being engaged by the unknown. (Sennett, 43) One of the main concepts explored throughout this book is that the notion of being engaged by a “stranger, understood as a force of alterity”—taking place rather explicitly in Pound’s conception of reading a “good foreign author,” Benjamin’s conception of “pure language” accessed through translation, as well as in Sennett’s own theorization of cosmopolitanism inspired by the work of Simmel just mentioned—is not only endowed with “a profoundly provoking quality” but also becomes an extremely productive and constitutive event in itself. In other words, the spatiotemporal encounter with an unknown force of alterity embodied in a strange or foreign form—whether this form is linguistic, poetic, semiotic, literary, cultural, or material—constitutes a particular formal correlation that intrinsically leads to the emergence of new intelligible forms. The drive to incorporate the Other as a form of alterity that, according to my analysis, pervades the transfer and circulation of modern transatlantic poetics—as manifested in Fernando Pessoa’s need to incorporate Englishness or Kamau Brathwaite’s drive to articulate Caribbean culture in its specific alterity, for example—precisely embodies one of the “generative matrices” that Gaonkar and Povinelli attempt to unveil through their notion of cultural transfiguration: “What are the generative matrices that demand that things—including ‘meaning’ as a captivating orientation and phantasmatic object—appear in a decisive

introduction / 17

form in order for them to be recognized as value-bearing as they traverse the gaps of two or more cultures, habitations, imaginaries, and forms of life?” (Gaonkar and Povinelli, 395). Ultimately, it is through form—or rather through its potential of translatability, as I argue—that the self not only figuratively constructs itself but ultimately generates its spatiotemporal relation to the Other, as Palumbo-Liu has suggested: And yet again, we find that the imaging of self cannot take place formlessly; rather, identity is converted into the coinage of form— it is Form that circulates in the visual, the sensual, the experiential fields of social, intersubjective life in the streets, in the boulevards. The difficulty is finding the Form that is commensurate to this imaging, for it is in the spatial distributions and figurations of Form that the Other is imagined, incarnated and animated. (“Atlantic to Pacific,” 201) Thus, the varying modes of poetic transfer examined in this book are essentially determined by the productive experience of being engaged by an unknown “stranger,” using Sennet’s term. As I will show, this “stranger” constitutes a form of alterity that happens to be located at the gap between the different conceptions of history, tradition, poetics, and languages that articulate the various manifestations of the transatlantic experience of modernity exemplified in the work of poets examined in this book. Overall, my analysis underscores the ways in which the circulation of poetic forms when seen as a historical and transnational event—whether hemispheric, transcontinental, oceanic or global—dramatically problematizes the notion of form itself, as Palumbo-Liu argues here: The historical dimension enters into consideration precisely in that the fissures and gaps that trouble the conversion of Form are the products themselves of a tectonic shift in temporality and historicity that brings with it new ways of evaluating social and historical space and temporality. This is a formal problematic situated in an eminently worldly space and time, one that is characterized by migration, displacement, the reinhabiting of the modern world by new forms and ideologies. Under these circumstances, Form becomes freighted with the obligation to encase an as yet unsettled and indeterminate admixture of projected desire and repressed fear. (“Atlantic to Pacific,” 202) Based on this historical dimension of form in an “eminently worldly space and time” suggested by Palumbo-Liu, one of the main arguments

18 / introduction

developed in this book is that the different modes of transatlantic poetic transfer under examination operate not only at linguistic, literary, and cultural levels, but ultimately as critiques of modernity—as diverse as the different manifestations and experiences of modernity during the twentieth century occurring on both sides of the Atlantic. In Chapter 1 of this book I explore the notion of poetic transfer in the work of the modernist Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) by focusing on his relatively unknown English Poems (1921), a collection composed in English after Pessoa had been exposed to the educational system of the British Empire in colonial South Africa. I read Pessoa’s intensely erotic English Poems as a fetishized translation of the English poetic tradition—as mainly figured in the work of John Keats and Edmund Spenser—through which Pessoa carves out not only his own space within the English poetic tradition but also his hybrid postcolonial version of the English language. Using various definitions of the fetish developed by Marx, Freud, and Giorgio Agamben, I examine how Pessoa manages to turn the English language into a surprisingly malleable medium through which he alternately masks and expresses his differing libidinal impulses (hetero- and homosexual) by effectively re-creating his voice into a multiplicity of heteronyms or poetic personae belonging to different colonial empires (classical Greece, Renaissance England, and modern Portugal). At the same time, my analysis of Pessoa’s English Poems is based on Alain Badiou’s groundbreaking philosophical reevaluation of Pessoa’s heteronymic project. Badiou’s analysis of Pessoa’s overall literary project as “a possible condition for philosophy” informs my analysis of the heteronyms that come to define the oeuvre of arguably the most important modern Lusophone writer since Luis de Camões, and which can now be traced to a poetic form of Englishness that Pessoa transforms into a distinctly idiosyncratic modernist idiom. In Chapter 2, I analyze the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avantgarde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraismo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, I focus on Huidobro’s long prose poem

introduction / 19

composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem, which has been traditionally overshadowed in its reception by his masterpiece Altazor (1931), narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.” Finally, I demonstrate the way in which in his attempt to articulate an avant-garde transatlantic poetics, Huidobro’s poetry ultimately unveils a planetary potential of the literary event as a “linguistic continuum” that, as has recently been conceptualized by Wai Chee Dimock, “urges on us the entire planet” (“Literature for the Planet,” 175). Chapter 3 examines a particular transfer of modern poetics that is seminal for the transatlantic circulation of queer and homoerotic poetry during the twentieth century, namely the impact of the work of the German poet Stefan George and the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca on the poetry written by various members of the Berkeley Renaissance during the late 1950s (in particular, the poets Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Jack Spicer). I explore how the experimental poetics embraced by this San Francisco–based community of poets and artists enacts a translational and transnational attempt to connect linguistically with an outside through which they could transcend the oppressive Cold War cultural environment of the American 1950s. Whereas the poetry of Stefan George constitutes a crucial body of work for establishing the queer ethos of Duncan, Blaser, and Spicer’s collective, the importance of Lorca as a fellow homosexual poet was fundamental for the development of their experimental poetry, especially as manifested in the work of Spicer and Duncan. Moreover, I analyze how the queerness of Lorca’s poetry, as rediscovered in particular by Spicer in After Lorca, is closely related to Lorca’s own queer poetic response in Poet in New York to the work of Walt Whitman, perhaps the most influential gay poet within the AngloAmerican tradition. Chapter 4 focuses on the Brazilian movement of Concrete poetics developed by the São Paulo–based brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos that revolutionized both Latin American and world poetry during the 1960s. Mirroring Ezra Pound’s formulation of the notion of the “luminous detail” as a hybrid or complex poetic image constituting a self-sufficient critical fact, the São Paulo–based brothers manage to rewrite the literary history of the Brazilian and Latin American avant-garde. Pound’s overarching influence on the Brazilian collective of Concrete poets is particularly evident in the critical study by the de

20 / introduction

Campos brothers of the poetry of the romantic Brazilian poet Joaquim de Sousa Andrade (1833–1902) in ReVisão de Sousândrade (1964). In this critical work, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos incorporate the poetry of the Brazilian romantic poet into the theoretical body of concretismo precisely as the Latin American precursor of Pound’s own modernist poetics of imagisme. In examining the parallels between the neo-avantgarde revision of Sousândrade’s romantic poetry, as described by the de Campos brothers, and Pound’s modernist formulation of imagisme, I demonstrate that both display an analogous use of translation as a critical tool in order to constitute or, in this case, reconstitute, an avant-garde poetics that is alternately hybridized, transatlantic, and transhistorical. In Chapter 5, I trace the progression of the postcolonial poetics developed by the Caribbean historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite as part of his groundbreaking reformulation of the Creole as the basis of Caribbean poetry and culture, from the inception of his project in the early 1960s, to its culmination in digital and virtual form in his “Sycorax Video Style.” In his still ongoing attempt to articulate a vernacular voice for Caribbean culture, Brathwaite’s later poetry involves an intermedial and interlingual transfer between the oral and the digital that aims at bridging the accumulative temporality of history and the performative temporality of poetics. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Simon Gikandi, I analyze the way in which the radically productive tension between the local and the cosmopolitan that Brathwaite finds at the core of Caribbean culture determines his creative and theoretical work toward the development and dissemination of a West Indian voice. I also show how this particular transfer amounts to a futile resistance to a cosmopolitanism and a temporality that subsumes Brathwaite’s radical embrace of the Caribbean vernacular along with the various forms of mediation, both old and new, on which it necessarily depends. By providing a new critical framework for the analysis of modern transatlantic poetry informed by translation theory, I track some of the paths taken by the “dynamic of modernism and the avant-garde” that, as mentioned by Puchner, are yet to be developed within literary and cultural studies. Although the notion of poetic transfer explored in this book does not constitute a theory of this particular traveling dynamic within a transatlantic context (that is, the “feedback loop” Puchner describes), it does offer a theoretical model to analyze the forms of various transferring dynamics of cultural and linguistic translation, displacement, and replacement as they articulate modern transnational poetry. Perhaps, a fully developed poetics of transfer can eventually alter the way we think

introduction / 21

about the concept of translation into new critical paths alternative to the traditional dichotomy of letter (imitatio) versus spirit (interpretatio), and to the idea of the untranslatable—and its emphasis on the impossibility of translation—that have historically structured translation studies to date.

1 /

Heteronymies of Lusophone Englishness: Colonial Empire, Fetishism, and Simulacrum in Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I–III

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) started writing poetry in English at roughly thirteen years of age with a poem titled “Separated from thee . . .” (1901) while he was living in the colonial town of Durban, South Africa. At about the same time, Pessoa had already adopted one of his first transpersonal identities as Alexander Search, an early English entry in his long series of fictional personalities (personalidades fictícias) (Obras em prosa, 92) that Pessoa referred to as “heteronyms,” which would gradually generate Pessoa’s extremely diverse oeuvre. This chapter examines the way in which the origin of Pessoa’s transpersonal tendencies, connected to his decried impossibility to write in “my own personality,” is intrinsically connected to his critically overlooked poetry written in English during the second decade of the twentieth century.1 More specifically, I analyze the way in which the tradition of English literature that Pessoa gradually absorbed during the early years of his life in South Africa functioned as a direct precursor to the heteronymic project that configures his radically idiosyncratic modernist poetics. Ultimately, I will show how the publication of Pessoa’s English Poems in 1921 should be critically reconsidered a crucial event in the evolution of the work of perhaps the most seminal Lusophone author since Luis de Camões (1525–1580)—both in terms of Pessoa’s impressive bilingual ability to produce poetry in English and in his attempt to incorporate his own poetic work into the canon of English literature.2 Pessoa referred to his literary alter egos as “figuras de meu sonho” (dream figures), “gente” (people), and “subpersonalidades de Fernando

heteron ymies of lusophone englishness / 23

Pessoa ele-mesmo” (subpersonalities of Fernando Pessoa himself) among other related appellatives (Obras en prosa, 92–93). As opposed to the term pseudonym that has an implication of a false or spurious personality, Pessoa’s use of the term heteronym (heterônimo) to categorize this series of literary personae not only emphasizes the heterogeneity of the names it refers to but also their relational form with the other linguistic terms to which they are intrinsically linked. This crucial term refers to Pessoa’s fictional personalities as concrete entities in the way they are related to him, in fact as translational terms intimately linked to, but ultimately independent from, the orthonymic term Fernando Pessoa ele-mesmo (Fernando Pessoa himself). As the French philosopher Alain Badiou argues in his reassessment of Pessoa’s work within contemporary philosophy and literary theory in Handbook of Inaesthetics, Pessoa’s invention of a “non-classical logic” is precisely grounded on the “language games” and “borrowed codes” that ultimately articulate what Badiou refers to as “the heteronymic game”: Pessoa proposes the most radical possible form of the equation of thought with language games. What is heteronymy, then? We must never forget that the materiality of the heteronym is not of the order of the project or of the Idea. It is delivered [livrée] in the writing, in the effective diversity of the poems. . . .When it is all said and done, what is really at stake is the production of disparate poetic games, with their own rules and their own irreducible internal coherence. It could even be argued that these rules are themselves borrowed codes, so that the heteronymic game would enjoy a kind of postmodern composition. (Badiou, 40) Based on Badiou’s reconceptualization of Pessoa’s heteronyms as emerging in the act of writing, I argue that the publication in Lisbon of Pessoa’s English Poems —a three-volume poetry collection that he authored as himself and that has been generally ignored by Pessoa scholars until very recently—constitutes a decisive event in the critical reexamination of Pessoa’s work. It is precisely in the complex linguistic nature of Pessoa’s English Poems and, in particular, the paradoxical relation that the Portuguese author establishes with the English language and literary tradition, that we explicitly encounter what Badiou defines as “the materiality of the heteronym” (40). In the light of Badiou’s comments above, I will demonstrate how Pessoa’s English Poems enacts the very heteronymic logic that articulates his overall work in Portuguese. Specifically, I focus on how these poems function as part of a linguistic game that is “delivered”—livrée, as Badiou

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states in the original—through a poetry that plays with and translates “borrowed codes,” in particular the foreign “codes” configured by the English language and literature that Pessoa absorbed while living in colonial South Africa under the educational system imposed by British colonial rule. In other words, the extreme importance of Pessoa’s English Poems resides in the way it allows us to see more clearly how his development in Portuguese of a system of heteronyms is rooted in an idiosyncratic poetic and linguistic response to the English literary tradition that literally emerged heteronymously into a new version of itself—in fact, as a translation of English poetry. As his English Poems shows, Pessoa was able to translate the linguistic and poetic codes inherent in his English colonial identity into a powerful heteronymic matrix that would ultimately lead him to develop his extremely original and influential mode of literary modernism.

Pessoa in South Africa: The Colonial Encounter with Englishness The young Pessoa spent about nine years of his life in Durban, which is now the largest city of the KwaZulu-Natal province of the Republic of South Africa. Pessoa arrived in South Africa in 1896, following a long Atlantic voyage in which he left Lisbon together with his then recently remarried mother to settle in Natal with his stepfather João Miguel Rosa, commander of the Portuguese army and consul of Portugal in Durban. At the time of Pessoa’s arrival, Durban was the economic and political center of a colonial state established and run by the British on Zulu territory since 1843, after Great Britain had taken over the Boer occupation of the Zulu kingdom approximately ten years earlier. Durban was then a small and highly segregated colonial town run by a community of white European settlers who governed a society that included indentured Indian laborers, as well as a very large majority of Zulu natives. One of the most relevant aspects of the historical circumstances that determined Pessoa’s life in Durban is the fact that his education was shaped by the schooling system established by the British colonial government. As Robert Morrell argues in his sociohistorical study of the colonial period in Natal, the establishment of a British education system aimed primarily at forging a unified cultural identity for a diverse European population of white settlers: The identity was forged around British cultural symbols and the English language. The schools, for example, were modeled on

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British public and grammar schools. The sports that were played were taken from Britain (cricket, soccer and rugby) or the empire (polo). German, Norwegian, Scottish and Irish settlers all gradually adopted the English language and became assimilated into the settler community. An important feature of settler identity was whiteness and its presumed association with civilisation and racial superiority. (Morrell, 53) As a member of the European settler community in Durban, the young Pessoa had to adapt culturally and linguistically to an imperial form of Englishness—the only identity available to him apart from his relatively small Portuguese familial circle. Pessoa’s British education in Durban not only enabled him to have an impressive command of the English language at an early age but also provided the means for him to articulate a new cultural identity parallel to his native Portuguese self that I will refer to here as a “Lusophone Englishness.”3 This particular aspect of his life in Durban is essential for understanding the way in which Pessoa’s Lusophone Englishness became a catalyst for the heteronymic poetic system that informs his entire literary production in Portuguese. In short, Pessoa was able to develop an English identity through the discipline of English studies, the main source of Englishness to which he had actual access in Durban. Pessoa’s early assimilation of a colonial Englishness was primarily determined by his readings of the work of canonical English poets, among them Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and, as I shall discuss below, Keats and Spenser.4 As a crucial part of British colonial ideology, the main corpus of English poetry at the core of English studies formed a fundamental basis for the education Pessoa received at Durban. Although originally established at different cities in England through Mechanics’ Institutes and Working Men’s Colleges during the first half of the nineteenth century, English studies soon became a vital ideological tool for incorporating individuals into the socio-economic project of the British Empire.5 It is worth noting that English literature was in fact part of the examination for the entrance to the Civil Service of the East Indian Company during the late 1850s, becoming instrumental for the ideological training of the government workforce, the settler communities, and the colonial subjects of the British Empire. Terry Eagleton has already suggested how the rise of English studies during the second half of the nineteenth century was essential in order to incorporate new recruits to what he refers to as an English “‘organic’ national tradition and identity.” As Eagleton describes, “What was at

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stake in English studies was less English literature than English literature: our great ‘national’ poets Shakespeare and Milton, the sense of an ‘organic’ national tradition and identity to which new recruits could be admitted by the study of the humane letters” (Literary Theory, 28). It may thus seem that the literary works belonging to the canon of English studies that Pessoa originally experienced in South Africa succeeded in recruiting him to that very same “organic” English national tradition mentioned by Eagleton in a rather straightforward way. However, Pessoa’s peculiar position within colonial Durban as both a member of the white European settler community and as a subject of a British imperial ideology ultimately foreign to his native Portuguese identity led him to develop an extremely paradoxical heteronymic relationship with the specific form of Englishness he assimilated while living in South Africa. Although English language and literature constituted a heteronomous structure that was imposed on the young Pessoa by his particular historical circumstances living in a British colony, his heteronymic logic produced an idiosyncratic modernist idiom that managed to translate both the a priori originality of English literature and the inherent “organic” national identity at the very core of English studies described by Eagleton into a multiple series of heteronymic versions. In what follows, I will demonstrate how Pessoa’s poetic writing constitutes a heteronymic translation of “Englishness” as an imperial identity into a paradoxical poetic project with extremely important theoretical implications for the study and critical reassessment of his work in general, as well as its impact within Lusophone, European, and Anglo-American modernisms.

Pessoa’s English Poems: An Imperial Cycle of Erotic Love Pessoa’s most impressive literary response to the specific cultural, linguistic, and intellectual challenge brought forth by his assimilation of an imperial Englishness was embodied in the two collections of English poems he published in Lisbon in 1921, respectively titled English Poems I–II and English Poems III. The first volume contains Antinous, a long poem that was composed around 1915 and published as an independent volume in 1918, as well as a series of classically oriented epitaphs titled Inscriptions. In English Poems III, Pessoa published Epithalamium, an earlier long poem composed around 1913, eight years after his permanent return to Lisbon from South Africa in 1905. A prominent aspect of the publication of Pessoa’s two editions of his English Poems is perhaps that, except for Mensagem, his 1934 nationalistic collection of Portuguese poems, these three poems together with an English collection

figure 1. Cover of Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I-II (1921).

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of Shakespearean sonnets, titled 35 Sonnets (1918), constitute the only poetry collections that Pessoa published during his lifetime under his own name. Pessoa composed the poems included in English Poems between 1913 and 1921, precisely the period in which his main heteronyms emerged in his writings. In fact, the poetic production of his different heteronyms follows a serial progression of different poetic eras that emanates from the source of pagan poetics developed by the heteronym Alberto Caerio in his O Guardador de Rebanhos, and that culminates in the neopagan systems developed by his various heteronymic followers, as Pessoa describes here: Este Alberto Caerio teve dois discípulos e um continuador filosófico. Os dois discípulos, Ricardo Reis e Álvaro de Campos, seguiram caminhos diferentes; tendo o primeiro intensificado e tornado artisticamente ortodoxo o paganismo descoberto por Caerio, e o segundo, baseando-se em outra parte da obra de Caeiro, desenvolvido um sistema inteiramente diferente, e baseado inteiramente nas sensações. O continuador filosófico, Antônio Mora (os nomes são inevitáveis, tão impostos de fora como as personalidades), tem um ou dois livros a escrever, onde provará completamente a verdade, metafísica e prática, do paganismo. (Obras em prosa, 82) Alberto Caeiro had two disciples and a philosophical follower. The two disciples, named Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, took different paths. Whereas the former intensified Caeiro’s paganism, turning it into an orthodox aesthetic system, the latter—based on another aspect of the Caeiro’s work—developed a completely different system founded entirely on sensations. The philosophical follower, named António Mora (their names are as unavoidable and externally imposed as their personalities), still has one or two books to write in which he will prove the absolute truth of paganism from a metaphysical and practical level.6 According to this passage, the heteronyms Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos soon emerged as the two necessary disciples required for the poetic development of Alberto Caeiro’s primitive paganism. The series of poems that configure Caeiro’s O Guardador de Rebanhos appeared in March 8, 1914, as related by Pessoa, in what constituted for him an ecstatic kind of impulse, “numa espécie de êxtase cuja natureza não conseguirei definir” (Obras em prosa, 96; in a kind of ecstasy of a nature that I will not be able to define). Some of Álvaro de Campos’s key poetic

figure 2. Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems I-II (Antinous and Inscriptions) (1921).

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compositions such as “Opiário,” “Ode Triunfal,” and “Ode Marítima” appeared at about the same time, published in the first two issues of the journal Orpheu in 1915. Álvaro de Campos was by far the most prolific heteronym of Pessoa’s “coterie,” perhaps due to his more contemporary avant-garde aesthetic; he published his poetry profusely until Pessoa’s death in 1935. As for the other two key heteronyms, some selections of the work of Alberto Caerio were published in 1925 in the journal Athena, while some of the work of Ricardo Reis was first published in 1928 in the journal Presença. Following the serial emergence of his heteronyms, Pessoa considered the composition of his English Poems as part of a series, more specifically a five-part opus of which only the first two sections were ultimately published. According to a letter written to his friend and biographer João Gaspar Simões, in which he discusses the writing of his English Poems, Pessoa was in fact planning to add three additional long poems to what was supposed to amount to an “imperial” cycle, as he argues here: Os dois poemas citados formam, con mais três, um pequeno livro que percorre o círculo do fenômeno amoroso. E percorre-o num ciclo, a que poderei chamar imperial. Asssim temos: (1) Grécia, Antinous; (2) Roma, Epithalamium; (3) Cristianidade, Prayer to a Woman’s Body; (4) Império Moderno, Pan-Eros; (5) Quinto Império, Anteros. Estes três últimos poemas estão inéditos. (Pessoa, Obras em prosa, 464) The two poems mentioned constitute, together with three others, a small collection that covers the cycle of the phenomenon of love. And it covers it in a cycle that I would call imperial. Thus we have: (1) Greece, Antinous; (2) Rome, Epithalamium; (3) Christianity, “Prayer to a Woman’s Body”; (4) Modern Empire, “Pan-Eros”; (5) Fifth Empire, “Anteros.” The three last poems remain unpublished. Pessoa’s English poetic cycle was therefore projected to follow a series of five different manifestations of what he refers to as the “ fenômeno amoroso” (phenomenon of love). Beginning with the homoeroticism of Antinous, the cycle would expand into the heterosexual intensity of Epithalamium, followed by the Christian sublimation of Eros seemingly implied in “Prayer to a Woman’s Body,” in order to reach its erotic climax through its modern manifestation as “Pan-Eros” and conclude in “Anteros,” the Fifth Empire of “reciprocal love.” The various stages of Pessoa’s English poetic cycle were supposed to represent not so much historical periods, but rather different modalities of an aesthetic whole, as Pessoa

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relates to Gaspar Simões: “None of them has a precise location in time, but rather in feeling” (nenhum deles tem colocação precisa no tempo, mas só no sentimento) (Correspondênça Inédita, 464). This aesthetization of poetic empires intrinsic to Pessoa’s projected cycle of English poems articulates different aesthetic modes or poetic masks through which Pessoa could begin to translate various manifestations of his own heteronymic poetic project. As originally conceived by Pessoa, the cycle, following the progressive structure of the heteronyms, clearly builds toward the neopagan aesthetic of the “Quinto Imperio” or “Fifth Empire” represented by the poem “Anteros,” a concept that is also thoroughly explored in Pessoa’s nationalistic collection of epic poems entitled Mensagem (1934). The clear esoteric aspect of Pessoa’s erotic cycle, especially of its two final stages, is analyzed by Jorge de Sena in the following terms: Pan-Eros, como o nome indica, e referido ao “Império Moderno” (i.e. o mondo contemporáneo), é a dissolução e coexistência de todas essas fases, que precederá, no Quinto Império, o triunfo de Anteros. Este não é, [ . . . ], o “antiamor”, mas a divindade grega, que era irmã de Eros, e seu complemento não antagónico: ao amor em si correspondia o amor além de si (como explica Cícero em De Natura Deorum). Assim, da pansexualidade, se transitaria ao amor sublime de tudo e todos por tudo e todos. (Sena, 33) “Pan-Eros,” as the title indicates, and used in reference to the “Modern Empire” (i.e., the contemporary world), is the dissolution and coexistence of all those stages that will lead, in the Fifth Empire, to the triumph of Anteros. This figure is not . . . the “anti-love,” but the Greek divinity, brother to Eros and constituting his complementary and nonantagonistic side: to love itself would correspond love beyond itself (as explained by Cicero in De Natura Deorum). Therefore, from pansexuality, we would move to the sublime love of everything and everyone by everything and everyone. Within Pessoa’s original project for English Poems, the final imperial triumph of “Anteros” would not only imply the messianic arrival of the mythic “Quinto Imperio”—a recurrent theme within Portuguese history and literature since the sixteenth century—but also would take place in a time contemporary to Pessoa’s life. It is characteristically paradoxical of Pessoa to conceive a cycle of English poems configured by a series of “imperial” stages pervaded not so much by the imperial anxieties that

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lie at the core of the very notion of Englishness he assimilated in South Africa, but rather by the imperial anxieties at the core of Portuguese and Brazilian history related to the phenomenon generally referred to as “Sebastianismo” within Lusophone culture.7 In what constitutes a conflation of both transpersonal tendencies and a modernist manifestation of Portuguese nationalism, Pessoa believed that the second coming of the Portuguese king Dom Sebastião—in the figure of a Portuguese poet born, like Pessoa, in 1888—would lead to the establishment of a new imperial epoch, more precisely the “imperialismo de poetas” (imperialism of poets) that would ultimately emerge victorious from his cycle of poems written in the English language.8 Hence, Pessoa’s characteristic systematicity of thought that structures his projected cycle for English Poems—as well as his genealogy of literary heteronyms—culminates in the poem “Anteros,” both in an idealized version of Portugal and of Pessoa himself as the ultimate manifestation of the imperial cycle of love, which, as de Sena suggests, represented a transpersonal and reciprocal form of love “beyond itself.” Paradoxically, the projected cycle of Pessoa’s English Poems embodies a Lusophone imperial anxiety that is expressed as a heteronym of the forms of English poetry disseminating the Englishness at the core of the British Empire as a colonial project.

Antinous: The Masking Fetishization of the English Language Although the complete cycle of Pessoa’s English Poems sounds fascinating, all that has been published to date are the first two stages, in the long poems Antinous and Epithalamium. Perhaps the most relevant feature of both English poems, Pessoa writes to Gaspar Simões, is their overt sexual content—what Pessoa calls the “violência inteiramente inesperada de obscenidade” (entirely unexpected violence of obscenity): Antinous e Epithalamium são os únicos poemas (ou, até, composições) que eu tenho escrito que são nitidamente o que se pode chamar obscenos. Há em cada um de nós, por pouco que especialize instintivamente na obscenidade, um certo elemento desta ordem, cuja quantidade, evidentemente, varia de homem para homem. Como esses elementos, . . . são um certo estorvo para alguns processos mentais superiores, decidi, por duas vezes, eliminá-los pelo processo simples de os exprimir intensamente. (Obras em prosa, 464) Antinous and Epithalamium are the only poems (or even compositions) I have written that are clearly what can be called obscene.

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There is in each of us, the least instinctively familiar with obscenity one may be, a certain element of this order, in a quantity that evidently varies from man to man. Since these elements . . . are somewhat of a hindrance for certain superior mental processes, I decided twice to eradicate them by the simple process of expressing them intensely. However, the “violence of obscenity” characteristic of Antinous and Epithalamium should not have appeared “entirely unexpected,” since, as de Sena points out, the rest of the work published under Pessoa’s name and that of his different heteronyms overtly lacks explicit forms of sexual eroticism: “A obra poética de Fernando Pessoa, excepto nestes dois poemas em inglês, é como a noche oscura do sexo, o deserto da privação absoluta, ‘normal’ ou ‘anormal, da afectividade erotica’ (Poemas Ingleses, 31; The poetic oeuvre of Fernando Pessoa, except for these two English poems, is like the noche oscura of sex, a desert of an absolute privation— “normal” or “abnormal”—of eroticism). Pessoa’s own justification in the same letter for the overt eroticism of these poems points toward a Freudian attempt to avoid the repression of obscene thoughts through their poetic expression in a foreign language, in order to enable the exertion of what Pessoa refers to as “superior mental processes” (Correspondênça Inédita, 464; processos mentais superiores). De Sena also argues that the eroticism of Antinous and Epithalamium articulates, through a poetic “exorcism” of obscenity, the objective universality that Pessoa was trying to achieve through his heteronymic system of poetic production, in the following terms: Era, ao mesmo tempo, exorcismar o “femenino” e o “masculino”, para justificar a castidade e a disponibilidade heteronímica do ortónimo e dos heterónimos, dando a estes uma “universalidade” acima das circunstancialidades eróticas. (Sena, 31) It implied, at the same time, the exorcising of the “feminine” and the “masculine,” to justify the chastity and heteronymic availability of both the orthonym and the heteronyms, giving them a universality that rises above erotic incidents. Although de Sena rightly emphasizes the crucial role of Pessoa’s poetic exploration of erotic obscenity in Antinous and Epithalamium, it is clear that behind Pessoa’s obscenity in his English Poems there is much more than a mere “exorcising” of erotic incidents, as de Sena suggests. At the core of de Sena’s argument is the notion of “chaste” or pure universality beyond a particular sexual orientation which construes the

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“heteronymic availability” of Pessoa’s poetic project as an ideal disposition that transcends the various particularities and conflicts of the self. Yet in English Poems, Pessoa’s heteronymic project is not configured ideally or on a purely abstract level; rather, it is configured materially through the complex series of English poetic “codes” that are incorporated and displaced in the linguistic materialization of his writings. In other words, the “heteronymic availability” at the core of Pessoa’s poetic project does not constitute an ideal universality beyond the erotic and cultural contradictions of the self that could be adapted by different ideal alter egos as suggested by De Sena. Instead, this “heteronymic availability” constitutes a multiple totality in constant flux of self-generation of a linguistic process of writing that keeps masking and altering its previous heteronymic manifestations—including heteroerotic and homoerotic obscenity—as different configurations of an ultimately fluid and deeply interconnected transferential aesthetic totality. The use of different masks appears thus for Pessoa as one of the most basic methods, or poetic modes, through which he translates his own fragmented and hybrid poetic voice into a heteronymic aesthetic totality. As suggested in his English sonnet VIII of 35 Sonnets, the question of the self for Pessoa soon translates into a complex overlapping of different masks that precisely acquire significance in their playful interaction and material relation with each other. How many masks wear we, and undermasks, Upon our countenance of soul, and when, If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks, Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? The true mask feels no inside to the mask But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes. (Poemas Ingleses, 164) Pessoa’s development of a poetic system grounded on the conception of an infinitely recurrent and overlapping series of poetic masks takes us directly to the romantic poetry of John Keats and his poetics of negative capability. As Thomas McFarland argues in The Masks of Keats, the English romantic poet turned the use of the poetic mask into a method of literary creation that could operate as a translation of the poetic voice. This conception of the poetic mask allowed Keats to articulate a powerful alternative to the romantic poetics of the self developed by William Wordsworth. As McFarland argues, “Unlike Wordsworth, Keats achieves his own greatness not through the truthtelling of a primary self, but through masks of a presented self speaking

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from the worlds of Camelot and Hellas” (Masks of Keats, 18). Pessoa’s work can be seen in part as an heir apparent to Keats’s poetics of negative capability in what constitutes, on behalf of Pessoa, a modernist reconfiguration of the self-less or objective poetic character grounding the work of the English romantic poet as the capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats, Letters of John Keats, 43). Pessoa’s own mask of Hellas channels the first stage in the phenomenon of love that he planned to cover in his English poetic cycle. In Antinous, Pessoa explores the form adopted by the manifestation of Eros within the homoerotic paradigm implicit in the love relationship between the Roman emperor Hadrian and his young Bithynian eromenos. “Love,” Pessoa writes, “is the presence and the mover” (Poemas Ingleses, 96), and both the figures of Antinous and Hadrian are constituted as mere bodies whose different forms dialectically enable the particular configuration of Eros that emerges in the poem. Pessoa locates the action of the poem right after the mythic death of Antinous—the naked body of the dead youth lying wet and cold on Hadrian’s couch. A terrible sense of irretrievable loss permeates an opening scene that is dominated by Hadrian’s deep sorrow. The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’s soul. The boy lay dead On the low couch, on whose denuded whole, To Hadrian’s eyes, whose sorrow was a dread, The shadowy light of Death’s eclipse was shed. (Poemas Ingleses, 90) The poem itself represents a virtual opportunity for both Hadrian and Antinous to redeem in part the condition of alienation and sorrow at the core of their homoerotic relation. As Fernando Arenas has recently pointed out, the entire poem is pervaded by “a constant tension between the said and the unsaid, the sensual and the chaste, the macabre and the erotic; in the end between life and death” (Arenas, 116). This sense of alienation connected to this uncanny tension “between life and death” is associated in the poem with a sensation of coldness that takes a powerful shape in the poem’s striking first line. Pessoa’s use of coldness to set the mood of the poem disrupts the outside/inside dichotomy that separates Antinous’s dead body and Hadrian’s soul, managing to redeem poetically the alienating condition of their separation. The poetic evocation of coldness as a redeeming power also happens to be a crucial feature of John Keats’s poetry, as Paul de Man argues here:

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This state of frozen immobility, of paralysis under the life-destroying impact of eternal powers, becomes the obsessive image of human predicament that poetry is to redeem. . . . There hardly exists a single one of Keats’ important poems in which a version of this recurrent theme fails to appear, though the outward form may vary. It is most frequently associated with the sensation of cold, as if the cooling breeze of I stood tip-toe heralding the benevolent arrival of the gods had suddenly turned icy and destructive. (de Man, “Negative Road,” 34) Both the redeeming “frozen immobility” that de Man associates with Keats’s poetry and the Keatsian use of the poetic mask discussed by McFarland constitute two of the main features of Pessoa’s Antinous. Pessoa’s adoption of his particular “mask of Greece” in this poem is not only Hellenic—due to the Greek roots of the form of love that turned Antinous into a cult homoerotic figure—but, as suggested here, it is also extremely Keatsian, most particularly in the way it manages to rearticulate and translate Keats’s poetics of negative capability into a new linguistic and highly sexualized poetic register. Thus, Pessoa’s modernist translation of Keatsian negative capability constitutes an attempt to inhabit not so much the space of negation conceptualized by Keats as a highly idiosyncratic space of uncertainty and ambiguity, which is consistent with Badiou’s notion of the heteronym as a “floating negation,” as described here: There is in Pessoa a floating negation destined to infect the poem with a constant equivocation between affirmation and negation, or rather, that there is a very recognizable species of affirmative reticence that ultimately vouchsafes that the most explosive manifestations of the power of being come to be corroded by the more insistent renegotiations of the subject. (Badiou, 39) Pessoa’s version of a poetics of negative capability that emerges in Antinous is clearly connected to the “renegotiations of the subject” that lie at the core of Pessoa’s heteronymic project, as Badiou suggests. Therefore, in Antinous Pessoa translates a modernist version of Keatsian poetics that is produced at the interstices of conflicting linguistic, poetic, and cultural identities. In this sense, Pessoa’s English versification in Antinous emerges as a complex and inflected poetic amalgamation of the current of English poetry he originally experienced during his school years at Durban. A crucial characteristic of Pessoa’s peculiar English poetic diction is the increase of its formal complexity in key moments of Antinous, as the following lines demonstrate:

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He was a kitten playing with lust, playing With his own and with Hadrian’s, sometimes one And some times two, now linking, now undone; Now leaving lust, now lust’s high lusts delaying; Now eyeing lust not wide, but from askance Jumping round on lust’s half-unexpectance; Now softly gripping; then with fury holding, Now playfully playing; now seriously, now lying By th’ side of lust looking at it, now spying Which way to take lust in his lust’s withholding. (Poemas Ingleses, 98) Here, Pessoa’s English syntax becomes much more repetitive than in less obscene passages, gravitating around specific words, such as the term “lust” in the sentence that culminates in the clause “which way to take lust in his lust’s withholding.” Pessoa’s poetic alteration of English syntax and grammar in key erotic moments is usually emphasized by complex and highly irregular compound words that ultimately lead to bizarre syntactical structures and clause formations, as in “lust’s half-unexpectance” or “now lust’s high lusts delaying.” More important, through this particular poetic process of syntactical and grammatical alteration of standard English, Pessoa bestows a heteronymous value to key words such as “lust” in the case above, altering its semantic, grammatical, and syntactic value and thus turning the word into a “translated” version of itself. Ultimately, one of the main consequences of this heteronymic transformation of the word “lust” in his process of poetic reconfiguration is that Pessoa manages to expand the boundaries of the standard form of English in his English Poems. Therefore, it is by no means coincidental that Pessoa’s main attempt to incorporate eroticism into his poetry emerges from his conscious effort to expel obscenity from the rest of his work and that this process of obscene erotic elimination happens to be articulated in his “second” language rather than in his native Portuguese tongue. That the formal complexity of Pessoa’s peculiar English poetic diction is intrinsically connected to the overt eroticism displayed in the passage above provides one of the main critical keys for analyzing the complex mechanics of displacement and translation at work in his English Poems. Based on what I am referring to as Pessoa’s poetic logic of obscenity in the composition of both Antinous and Epithalamium, the process of linguistic and erotic displacement that pervades the passage from Antinous quoted above constitutes a very peculiar form of linguistic fetishization. This fetishization primarily implies what Sigmund Freud refers to as “the replacement

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of the object by a fetish” (250) in his study of the unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object included in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. From a Freudian perspective on fetishism, Pessoa’s use of the word “lust” in Antinous can thus be read as a replacement or substitute for the word “penis.” This particular linguistic substitution does not operate merely at a metaphoric level, but rather transfers the word “lust” beyond its standard or organic linguistic configuration, that is, it moves the particular term heteronymously beyond itself into what Karl Marx defines in Kapital as “a very queer thing” (Capital, 440; ein sehr vertracktes Ding, Das Kapital, 37) that ends up altering its original and organic linguistic status as “ein ordinäres sinnliches Ding” (37; a common every-day thing, 445). Similar to Marx’s conception of “the fetishism inherent in commodities” (459), the linguistic fetishization carried out by Pessoa in his own heteronymous version of English diction affects the ordinary status of the linguistic term itself. Consequently, this mode of poetic fetishization articulated in Pessoa’s English poetry causes a transformation of what, following Marx, can be referred to as the familiar or “every-day” condition of the English language that Pessoa ultimately translates into his own modernist version.

Pessoa’s Epithalamium: Translating a (Partly) Absent Englishness Pessoa’s second published part of his imperial cycle of English erotic poems is Epithalamium, a work pervaded by a rather carnal form of heterosexual love. Pessoa explores here, now with his “mask” of Rome, the realm of a nuptial fescennine. Pessoa’s Epithalamium is an extremely idiosyncratic version of Edmund Spenser’s own Epithalamium (1595) and is characterized by a mode of poetic displacement parallel to the fetishizing mechanism at work in Antinous. Although Pessoa closely followed Spenser’s poem in his own heteronymous version, he did carry out a rather thorough erotic expansion of the marriage ritual portrayed by the English Renaissance poet. As a comparison of four similar passages reveals, Spenser’s Epithalamium becomes a very powerful vehicle for Pessoa’s “Roman” treatment of the theme of heterosexual love. Spenser’s Epithalamium And let them also with them bring in hand, Another gay girland For my fayre loue of lillyes and of roses,

figure 3. Fernando Pessoa’s English Poems III (Epithalamium) (1921).

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Bound trueloue wize with a blew silke riband. (41–44) Her brest like to a bowle of creame vncrudded Her paps lyke lyllies budded, Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre And all her body like a pallace fayre Ascending vppe with many a stately stayre To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre. (175–80) Open the temple gates vnto my loue Open then wide that she may enter in . . . Bring her vp to th’ high altar, that she may The sacred ceremonies there partake. (204–16) Let no lamenting cryes, no dolefull teares, Be heard all night within nor yet without: Ne let false whispers, breeding hidden fears, Breake gentle sleepe with misconceiued dout. (Spenser, Poetical Works, 334–38) Pessoa’s Epithalamium Garlanded round with roses and those leaves That love for its love weaves! Between her and the ceiling this day’s ending A man’s weight will be bending. (5) The bridegroom aches for the end of this and lusts To know those paps in sucking gusts, To put his first hand on that belly’s hair And feel for the lipped lair, The fortress made but to be taken, for which He feels the battering ram grow large and itch. (10) Open the windows and the doors all wide . . . That she would be a bride in bed with a man The parts where she is a woman do insist And send up messages that shame doth ban (5) And let the night, coming, teach them that use For youth is in abuse! Let them repeat the link, and pour and pour Their pleasure till they can no more! (English Poems III, 15)

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As illustrated in these passages, Pessoa displaces and dislocates certain individual “pieces” that originally appeared in Spenser’s poem— both individual words such as “girland,” “love,” “paps,” and “roses,” as well as parallel syntactical structures—as if the text of the English poet constituted a lexical mosaic that Pessoa reconfigures though his heteronymous poetic logic. Pessoa’s process of poetic reconfiguration clearly affects the status of the main epithalamic elements that structure the temporal sequence of Spenser’s poem within the traditional fescennine form, among them the bucolic pastoral setting, the exploration of the natural beauty of the female body and the ritualistic journey in and out of the religious temple. Whereas the central part of Spenser’s poem focuses on the “sacred ceremonies” of marriage, Pessoa’s poem bypasses the crucial religious and social implications of Spenser’s own take on the nuptial ceremony (“No more, no more of church or feast, for these / are outward to the day”), and quickly moves toward the climax of sexual intercourse that constitutes for Pessoa “the great day’s true ceremonial” (Poemas Ingleses, 140). Thus in the hands of Pessoa, the constituent parts of Spenser’s Epithalamium lose their Protestant ethos of purity and virtuosity, acquiring instead the linguistic peculiarity of Pessoa’s English diction and, at the same time, the sexual explicitness of the “intense” obscenity characteristic of his English Poems. Although it is evident that Spenser’s Epithalamium thoroughly saturates Pessoa’s poem, the linguistic variations and increased eroticism of Pessoa’s version somehow revert to Spenser’s, enhancing sexual elements that were partly latent, or at least not manifest in the poem by the English poet. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Pessoa’s poetic and lexical reconfiguration is the way in which it effectively becomes a “translated” version of Spenser’s poem that reaches beyond the status of mere copy, ultimately constituting a simulacrum of Spenser’s Epithalamium. The notion of simulacrum, as theoretically developed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Différence et répétition, represents a valuable concept for the analysis of the peculiar intertextual and linguistic relation between Pessoa’s and Spenser’s epithalamia. Although there is no doubt that Spenser’s Epithalamium is engraved in Pessoa’s poem, Pessoa’s simulacrum enacts a radical transformation of the very poetic parameters that grounded the originality and canonical stability of Spenser’s poem within the English literary tradition. A key implication of the simulacrum lies in the differential element at its very core through which it is able to abolish the possibility of establishing a distinction between original and copy, as Deleuze argues here:

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Car, par simulacre, nous ne devons pas entendre une simple imitation, mais bien plutôt l’acte par lequel l’idée même d’un modèle ou d’une position privilégiée se trouve contesteé, renversée. Le simulacre est l’instance qui comprend une différence en soi, comme (au moins) deux séries divergentes sur lesquelles il joue, toute ressemblance abolie, sans qu’on puisse dès lors indiquer l’existence d’un original et d’une copie. (Différence et répétition, 95) By simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned. The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself, such (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy. (Difference and Repetition, 69) Based on Deleuze’s groundbreaking conception of the simulacrum, the simulating act intrinsic to Pessoa’s Epithalamium challenges the a priori privileged and “organic” position of Spenser’s poem as a canonical instance of English poetry. Hence, the difference in diction and sexual explicitness between the poems disrupts the possibility of conceiving them as either original or copy, opening up the kind of heteronymic relation that abolishes both the realm of resemblance in the intertextual relation between both poems and the original heteronomous subjection of Pessoa’s poem in relation to Spenser’s as a poetic precedent central to English studies as part of the British colonial project. If we take into account Deleuze’s remarks, the actual manifestation of the “differential element” inherent in Pessoa’s simulacrum thus constitutes an act that affects at least two different series that, while intrinsically related, never fully coincide. John Johnston analyzes Deleuze’s conception of the simulacrum as precisely the kind of mutual interiorization of two different series that “resonate” within each other, and that we see at work in Pessoa’s Epithalamium, in the following terms: The simulacrum can no longer be regarded as a “bad” or degraded image, since the model or “original” that founds this distinction is no longer distinct from the copy or imitation; within the simulacrum, at least two divergent series are interiorized, with neither being assignable as the original or the copy. These series never converge, but resonate through the agency of what Deleuze calls a “dark precursor,” a force that moves through them without ever

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allowing any re-centering or realignment that would imply an essence. (Johnston, 49) Pessoa’s diction, characteristic of his English Poems, can be conceptually related to this “interiorization” of “two divergent series” that Johnson discusses concerning Deleuze’s conception of the simulacrum. Moreover, this heteronymic resonance between two series at the core of Pessoa’s English poetry recalls Marx’s description of the fetishism of commodities, particularly in the way in which Pessoa’s poetry is characterized by its “queer” fetishizing tendencies illustrated previously in my reading of Antinous. Similar to Deleuze’s conception of the simulacrum, the fetish happens to be characterized by a paradoxical internalization of divergent series since, as Giorgio Agamben theorizes, it constitutes the “presence of an absence,” in the following terms: In quanto presenza, l’oggeto-feticcio è sí, infatti, qualcosa di concreto e perfino di tangibile; ma in quanto presenza di un’assenza, esso è, nello stesso tempo, immateriale e intangibile, perché rimanda continuamente al di là di se stesso verso qualcosa che non può mai realmente essere posseduto. (Agamben, Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale, 41) Insofar as it is a presence, the fetish object is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed. (Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, 33) Both Deleuze’s conception of the differential element of the simulacrum and Agamben’s take on the fetish as referring “continuously beyond itself” provide crucial theoretical insights into the mechanics of Pessoa’s heteronymic poetics that would arguably be lost in any critical study of his work that ignores the English Poems. As I have argued, by simulating key features of Keats’s poetics of negative capability in Antinous, as well as Spenser’s poetic celebration of heterosexual marriage in Epithalamium, Pessoa’s English poetry emerges as an attempt to substitute and replace the work of these two canonical English poets with heteronymous modernist versions of their respective poetics. Therefore, we witness in both Epithalamium and Antinous the process through which Pessoa translates his poetic voice into different versions or alter egos of himself, as generally analyzed in relation to his series of Portuguese heteronyms. More important, however, we are able to see that the heteronymic form

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of his work and consequently, its heteronymic availability mentioned previously, emerges in the very act of poetic writing through which Pessoa is in fact translating canonical instances of the corpus of English literature into modernist simulacra of themselves. Pessoa’s attempt to incorporate his own poetry within the English literary tradition also implies an attempt to reestablish and assert the peculiar cultural and linguistic identity at the core of his own Lusophone Englishness. Owing both to his paradoxical position within Durban described earlier and his permanent return to Lisbon in 1905, Pessoa’s own Englishness partly lacked a sense of belonging to the “organic national identity” that, Eagleton argues, originally lay at the core of English studies. I use the adverb “partly” here to qualify Pessoa’s paradoxical Englishness because, as shown in this chapter, Pessoa’s poetics of displacement and simulation in his English Poems is as synecdochal and metonymic as Freud’s conception of the fetish.9 Thus, the paradoxical incorporation of divergent series that structure both the fetish and the simulacrum happens to enact the very tension that articulates Pessoa’s own Englishness, since it was an identity that ultimately constituted the presence of an absence. As such, one of the crucial aspects of Pessoa’s process of fetishization that pervades his English Poems is that, referring again to Agamben’s work on fetishism, it can be extended exponentially into an infinite series of manifestations of itself: Proprio in quanto esso è negazione e segno di un’assenza, il feticcio non è infatti un unicum irripetibile, ma è, al contrario, qualcosa di surrogabile all’infinito, senza che nessuna delle sue successive incarnazioni possa mai esaurire completamente il nulla di cui è la cifra. (Agamben, Stanze, 42) Precisely because the fetish is a negation and the sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any of its successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol. (Agamben, Stanzas, 33) Agamben’s formulation of the infinite potential of the fetish for its own replacement and substitution allows us to analyze the sexual, imperial, and linguistic series that configure Pessoa’s heteronymic work as a complex process of poetic fetishization through which Pessoa could poetically simulate—precisely as attributes of himself—what he partly lacked, that is, the kind of “organic national identity” at the core of English studies. Pessoa’s own Lusophone Englishness, his idiosyncratic and

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fetishistic English diction, and the different poetic empires that structure his projected cycle for English Poems represent, therefore, some of the attributes with which Pessoa himself—the orthonymic “ele mesmo” (himself) mentioned previously—was paradoxically also endowed. As Agamben suggests, the potentially infinite incarnations of a fetishizing imagination can never succeed in exhausting the productive absence these series replace and signify. Hence, Pessoa’s different heteronymic empires constitute various poetic manifestations of the extremely productive absence that Pessoa’s process of poetic fetishization was never able to exhaust fully.

Pessoa’s Heteronymous Tradition and Anglo-American Modernism A relevant absence in Pessoa’s oeuvre associated with the composition of his English Poems is the lack of any specific reference to the circumstances regarding his own experiences in colonial Durban throughout his writings.10 It is striking that in both his English and Portuguese work Pessoa never directly mentions the actual details of the historical events that, among other things, determined his own personal and literary identity. Paradoxically, this manifest absence from his work of his own relation to British colonialism in South Africa constitutes a “symptom” that links Pessoa to the corpus of Anglo-American modernist literature in what Simon Gikandi defines as a modernist “failure in the colonial space,” in the following terms: The truth is, we have become so accustomed to reading the modernist text as an attempt to keep out the contaminants of the world outside the aesthetic sphere that we have forgotten how often modernist art forms derive their energy from their diagnosis of the failure of the imperial enterprise, and how modernism produces its narrative authority by becoming enmeshed—against its own intentions, perhaps—in the politics of empire and in the conflict between colonial culture and a changing global economic and cultural system. . . . There is, therefore, no better place to read this failure than in that unstable cognitary zone in which modernism seeks aesthetic solutions to historical problems and ends up displaying its style as the most blatant symptom of the very problems—the crisis in capitalism, fragmented subjectivity and imperial atrophy—that its aesthetizing strategy sought to keep out of the text. (Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, 161)

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As shown here, Pessoa’s English Poems powerfully stages parallel symptoms of what Gikandi ascribes to the colonial “failure” inherent in Anglo-American modernist literature. Similar to the cases of Anglo-American modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, to mention two central examples, Pessoa’s poetic system of heteronyms, masks, and empires constitutes as a whole a complex and compulsive aesthetizing attempt to arrive at a Great Work, or a Great Tradition, that could potentially mask a historically rooted crisis linked to the colonial failure described by Gikandi. In this sense, the fact that Pessoa never wrote about his nine-year colonial experience in Durban highlights the overarching aesthetizing strategy that pervades his poetic and literary project. However, the main problem with Pessoa’s English Poems in relation to this colonial “failure” is that, as opposed to the work of Eliot or Pound, Pessoa’s English poetry has never belonged to the corpus of English studies that Gikandi analyzes from a postcolonial perspective. Although Pessoa’s English Poems clearly shares some of the symptoms of the “crisis of belief in the efficacy of colonialism” (Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, 161) that Gikandi ascribes to Anglo-American modernism—in particular the notion of a “fragmented subjectivity”— Pessoa’s English poetry has never been regarded as “English” enough to enter the discipline of English studies, regardless of the shifting institutional use of the term during the last two centuries. One of the main reasons for the exclusion of Pessoa’s English Poems from an academic discipline and literary tradition where the poems were originally meant to belong is primarily because of their destabilizing potential to abolish what Deleuze refers to as “the very idea of a model or privileged position” that still lies at the core of the institution of English studies. In this regard, the work of Eliot is particularly relevant, owing both to the symptomatic “failure in the colonial space” that it shares with the poetry of Pessoa and to the privileged position that Eliot’s modernist poetics acquired with the rise of New Criticism within English studies after World War II and throughout the first few decades of the second half of the twentieth century. Similar to Pessoa’s attempt to incorporate an imperial form of Englishness in English Poems, Eliot also tried to assimilate a notion of Englishness that was originally foreign to him as a native of St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot’s theoretical and ideological effort to articulate a new tradition for modernist Anglo-American poetry emerged in part as a way to fashion a form of Englishness that, as in the case of Pessoa, he could inhabit as a writer who was partly foreign to Englishness as an “organic” tradition and national identity. As an American émigré living in England at the intellectual heart of what was then left of

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the British Empire—originally as a graduate student at Oxford University working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation—Eliot soon managed to produce a groundbreaking series of poems that changed the course of English studies in the twentieth century and rapidly turned him into an extremely powerful and influential figure in academic, cultural, and publishing circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, Eliot’s own take on the concept of tradition as a cornerstone of his literary project emerges from the evident strength of and critical acclaim achieved by his first two collections of poetry contemporaneous to Pessoa’s own English Poems, namely Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land and Other Poems (1922). Eliot’s own modernist tradition constitutes a genealogy of sorts within English and European literature that places his own poetics at the very core of that tradition, while bypassing most of the canonical works within English studies dominant at the time. In brief, Eliot’s tradition as articulated in his early critical work entails a return to the English Metaphysical Poets (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw), through whom he aims to connect with the work of Dante and other Italian poets of the Trecento, such as Cavalcanti, clearly following the command of Ezra Pound on the matter of romance poetics. Hence, in the process of critically building a new tradition around his own modernist poetry—one that will eventually become the new poetic gravitational center of English studies, at least in American academia—Eliot tries to avoid the work of Tennyson, Browning, the British romantics, as well as Milton and Spenser—poets who paradoxically configure most of the authors within the canon of English literature precisely assimilated by Pessoa during his education in South Africa. In the process of establishing a tradition for his poetics, Eliot not only abandons the romantic poetics of the imagination, but perhaps more importantly in epistemological and ideological terms, avoids a big part of the history of the development of the concepts of critical reflection and self-consciousness as they emerged during the European romantic period. In contrast to the negligible impact of Pessoa’s English Poems and his heteronymic project within English studies, Eliot’s concept of tradition provided a powerfully dominant position for his own modernist poetry—and consequently for himself as poet and critic. Through the aesthetization of a particularly reactionary ideological position, Eliot was able to ground historically a tradition within English literary history, while ultimately mocking a previously dominant poetic tradition as essentially “childish” and “naïve.” He argues in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

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Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. . . . Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (Eliot, 43) Thus, based on his own reconceptualization of the notion of tradition, Eliot tries not so much to overturn the structural and conceptual cohesion of the “organic national identity” connected to the notion of “Englishness” that Pessoa experienced in South Africa but rather to adapt and rewrite the literary and ideological forms inherent in the idea of “Englishness,” to make them into his own modernist poetics. However, and as examined in this chapter, Pessoa’s own relation to “Englishness” generated a tradition that, although contemporaneous with Eliot’s modernist poetry, articulates a radically different conception of poetic tradition. The impressive power of Pessoa’s fetishizing poetic imagination resides in the process of constructing his own poetic empire through which he was able to produce a heteronymous tradition of many parallel and interconnected manifestations of a process of poetic writing that kept constantly moving beyond itself, and ultimately beyond Pessoa as its own authorial voice. K. David Jackson describes precisely this aspect of Pessoa’s conception of literary tradition as follows: Pessoa stands out among the writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century who use imagined, multiple authorship to structure a comprehensive literary project because his selection of authors challenges and replaces the centrality of a single creative and responsible self, while focusing the entire literary tradition on the present moment of writing. (Jackson, 6) Pessoa’s overall heteronymic project—articulated not so much by different poetic personae or alter egos of Pessoa himself but rather by the creation of parallel and interconnected heteronymic series—configures as a whole a poetic tradition that originally emerges not as an idea (such as in Eliot’s ideological approach to the generation of a tradition) but rather as a material process of writing that paradoxically exists beyond the certainty of its very idea. As Badiou writes, the heteronym constantly leads to “this ‘neither-nor’” and the suggestion that “at its core there lies yet something else that every opposition of the type ‘yes/no’ fails to capture” (Badiou, 40). Jackson similarly describes the characteristic ontological

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instability of Pessoa’s heteronymous tradition: “Pessoa’s system, or nonsystem, oscillates between dialectical extremes of being and non-being in a dynamically unstable and self-referential flux” (Jackson, 15). As Deleuze affirms in The Logic of Sense, the overall inclusion of divergent series into a unified and total Great Work that keeps moving beyond itself is a key characteristic not only of the simulacrum but also of the phantasmatic nature of the repressed power ultimately lying at its very core: There is indeed a unity of divergent series insofar as they are divergent, but it is always a chaos perpetually thrown off center which becomes one only in the Great Work. . . . Between these basic series, a sort of internal resonance is produced; and this resonance induces a forced movement, which goes beyond the series themselves. These are the characteristics of the simulacrum, when it breaks its chains and rises to the surface: it then affirms its phantasmatic power, that is its repressed power. (Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 261) Because of its linguistic, conceptual, and sexual idiosyncrasies, Pessoa’s English Poems shows us that whatever this heteronymic “yet something else” ends up poetically becoming, it always emerges as a translation of the heteronomous relationship originally established with the “organic” linguistic and literary codes of a colonial Englishness that keeps transforming itself into new heteronymous configurations generated by the very process of poetic writing. Thus part of the reason why Pessoa’s English Poems remains rarely studied despite the unquestionable importance of Pessoa within European modernism is because of its complex heteronymic form, that is, the fact that, as mentioned previously, for Badiou the heteronym is “delivered [livrée] in the writing.” As shown here, what is precisely “delivered” in the peculiar linguistic materiality of his English Poems is the fetishizing process of translation that produces a simulacrum of both the English language and literary tradition he assimilated during his time under British colonial rule. Pessoa’s heteronyms are not only “delivered” in their own linguistic materiality within the particular poems but, referring to Badiou, are also handed over, yielded, and abandoned to a material process of poetic writing that keeps producing an Other beyond itself. One of the important poetic consequences of this process is the destabilization not only of the English language, but also, as Jackson suggests, of the various literary genres Pessoa keeps incorporating and playing with: “Pessoa aims in his literary project to undermine genre and its stylistic formulas by changing, subverting, or altering their conventions

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until they can be understood differently” (Jackson, 16). Ultimately, Pessoa’s overall work in English attempts to mask aesthetically a failure and an absence intrinsically connected to his paradoxical cultural experience in colonial Durban. This is perhaps the reason why Pessoa’s assimilation and translation of different linguistic, cultural, sexual, and literary forms displayed in English Poems results in a “phantasmatic” aesthetic project through which he tries to create a “Great Work” or tradition as imperial as the Lusophone Englishness the Portuguese writer always embraced.

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The Translatability of Planetary Poiesis: Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionismo in Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel

The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) briefly settled in Madrid during the fall of 1918 after having spent almost two years in Paris. During his time in France, Huidobro became fluent in French, composed five collections of poetry, founded the avant-garde journal Nord-Sud with the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, and more important, established the main theoretical foundations of his very own avantgarde movement, a poetics he called creacionismo (creationism).1 Soon after his arrival in Paris in 1916, Huidobro befriended key members of the Parisian avant-garde; he became an important member of a group of poets and artists that included Juan Gris, Max Jacob, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Blaise Cendrars, and even a young Ezra Pound.2 The arrival of Huidobro in Madrid in 1918 had a major impact on its literary and cultural scene, since he essentially served as an invaluable cultural bridge between Paris, the thriving and cosmopolitan cultural capital of Europe during the first two decades of the century, and Madrid, the capital of Spain, a city then culturally more dormant and provincial when compared to Paris.3 Huidobro brought with him to Madrid a firsthand knowledge of the main currents of avant-garde art, poetry, and poetics mostly absent from Spain prior to his arrival, as well as a wide array of relevant avant-garde figures escaping from the aftermath of World War I, such as Sonia and Robert Delaunay and the Polish painters Wladyslaw Jald and Marjan Paskiewic. In Madrid, Huidobro quickly became the most influential figure of a group of poets and writers that included the Spanish authors Rafael Cansinos-Assens and Guillermo de Torre, and which eventually led to the creation of ultraísmo, arguably the main

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literary group originating in Spain that belonged to the historical avantgarde. However, the great impact of Huidobro in Madrid upon his arrival stemmed not only from his important connections in Paris and his own considerable impact on the Parisian Avant-garde scene per se, but also, and perhaps more importantly, from what the Basque poet Juan Larrea refers to as a new Entusiasmo del Nuevo Mundo (enthusiasm of the New World) that sparked an unprecedented avant-garde artistic reaction in Europe, and particularly in Spain: Vicente Huidobro importó a Europa un entusiasmo juvenil, de cepa americana, que la literatura europea desconocía por completo. De ahí la brillantez incomparable de sus metáforas. . . . Por medio del ultraísmo, nacido a su calor, ese su entusiasmo del Nuevo Mundo prendió en España y se propagó a toda la poesía nueva que directa o indirectamente le debe no poco. (Larrea, quoted in Bary, 359) Vicente Huidobro imported to Europe a juvenile enthusiasm of an American root that was completely unknown to European literature. Thus the incomparable brilliance of his metaphors. . . . By means of ultraísmo, born around his spark, his New World enthusiasm caught fire in Spain, and it expanded to the new poetry that directly or indirectly owes him a considerable amount. Larrea clearly places considerable importance on how Huidobro’s position as a Latin American writer ignited a creative spark that was particularly alien to European and Spanish literature and culture at the time. Although his “New World” origins clearly played a role in the development, circulation, and dissemination of Huidobro’s own strand of avantgarde poetics in Paris and Madrid, his own transatlantic condition is slightly more problematic than what the idealized and exoticizing “brilliance” Larrea describes regarding creacionismo might seem to suggest. In contrast to Larrea, the Chilean literary scholar Jaime Concha points to the actual tension and compulsion at the core of Huidobro’s transatlantic condition that clearly problematizes Larrea’s conception of Huidobro’s characteristic “juvenile enthusiasm” and its implications of a regenerative but exoticized creative impulse. As Concha succinctly states, Huidobro’s constant transatlantic journeying reveals the problematic condition at the heart of his avant-garde poetic project, which has been generally overlooked in the critical assessment of creacionismo as an avant-garde poetics: “En Huidobro, el nomadismo es pulsión; sus transhumancias marinas proceden del fondo del deseo” (Concha, 63; In Huidobro, his nomadism is a form of pulsion; his sea migrations originate from

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the depths of desire). More important, for Concha, Huidobro’s nomadic cosmopolitanism not only articulates the actual transatlantic crossings for the historical Vicente Huidobro—for whom “el viaje fue siempre desgarramiento, tensión, encruzijada” (journeying was always rupture, tension and a dilemma)—but also the planetary and utopic dimension of creacionismo as an avant-garde poetics in which, as Concha, in clear reference to Huidobro’s Altazor, suggests: El símbolo armonioso de las golondrinas es más bien un ansia y un anhelo, y no la proyección de su íntima verdad transatlántica. Es el vaivén, ése de las golondrinas purificado de todo; sin mar ni tierra, sístole y diástole de una circulación planetaria. (Concha, 63) The harmonious symbol of the swallow is more a desire and a wish, and not the projection of its inner transatlantic truth. It is the comings and goings of the swallow, purified of everything; without sea or land, systole and diastole of a planetary circulation. Although there is no doubt that the revolutionary and inspiring spark associated with Huidobro’s creacionismo in Paris and Madrid is partly connected to his Latin American roots, as Larrea argues, Concha’s analysis allows us to see Huidobro’s role within the transatlantic circulation of avant-garde poetics in a different light. Following Concha’s remarks, the remarkable impact of Huidobro’s creacionista poetic compositions resides in the creative force inherent in the tension at the core of his complex transatlantic position—i.e., between a “real” Huidobro constantly circulating the two worlds separated by the Atlantic and an authorial Huidobro attempting to overcome this transatlantic tension through the development of an avant-garde poetics that could create the image of a unified and utopic planetary experience, such as the example of the image of the “golondrina” (swallow)—that famously appears in Huidobro’s masterpiece Altazor, translated into English by Eliot Weinberger: Como las gaviotas vomitan el horizonte Y las golondrinas el verano No hay tiempo que perder Ya viene la golondrina monotémpora Trae un acento antípoda de lejanías que se acercan Viene gondoleando la golondrina. (Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 88) As seagulls vomit the horizon And swallows the summer

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There’s no time to lose Look here swoops the monochronic swallow With an antipodal tone of approaching distance Here swoops the swallowing swallow. (Huidobro, Altazor, or a Voyage in a Parachute, 89) As I will show in what follows, the revolutionary newness of Huidobro’s creacionismo as a poetics emerges as an avant-garde response to a personal and geopolitical transatlantic tension between conflicting forms of literature, tradition, and history. Ultimately, creacionismo constitutes an overall planetary quest toward a poietic absolute that takes the “real” Huidobro across different and divergent histories, languages, parts of the world, and literary traditions, through the very series of formal “displacements” and substitutions that articulate his poetics. In this sense, Martin Puchner has precisely emphasized in his study of manifestos and the avant-garde how the mechanisms of “displacements and replacements” that characterize Huidobro’s creacionista poetics also happen to articulate the form of his transatlantic journeys in the following terms: One might describe these travels as a combination of displacement and replacement, displacement from putative origins and their replacement by travels and transient places. This effect of displacement and replacement is in fact intimately connected to the foundational force of the manifesto. . . . These manifestos respond to the experience of displacement by trying to create places, by replacing the lost with the new. (Puchner, 174)

The Transatlantic Circulation of Huidobro’s Creacionismo Perhaps the most important characteristic of Huidobro’s influential creacionismo as a poetic project belonging to what Peter Bürger refers to as the “historical Avant-garde” is that it became an idiosyncratic historical event that aimed at carrying out a fundamental critique of poetry as an artistic medium. In fact, soon after he had first landed in Europe from Chile, Huidobro quickly turned his poetics into a fully developed set of theoretical principles, poetry collections, various manifestos, journals and art exhibitions connected with each other through his particular use of creacionismo as the key concept sustaining his overall artistic project. Hence, what Huidobro imported from the New World was not so much a different kind of “enthusiasm,” as Larrea argues, but more precisely an idiosyncratic form of making history, literary or otherwise, that is

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inherently connected to the complex dynamics of displacement and circulation of Huidobro’s transatlantic condition. A rather symptomatic sample of the tremendous impact—verging on religious fervor—that the arrival of Huidobro’s creacionista poetics had in the literary circles of Madrid is explicitly stated by the poet and critic Guillermo de Torre in a personal letter to Huidobro after one of his early visits to the Spanish capital: Sin embargo para su íntima consolación en los repliegues psíquicos intersticiales de nuestros corazones flotantes quedaba pulsátil una cordial estela de perceptiva irradiación lírica, dinámicamente creadora. Así al glisar de las horas las fragantes semillas que usted arrojó magnánimo, los módulos inéditos que usted descubrió ante nuestros trémulos espíritus atónitos han ido arraigando purificados en su devenir de evolutiva gestación triunfal. (Bajarlía, La polémica Reverdy-Huidobro, 52) However, for your intimate consolation, a cordial trail of a lyrical perceptual irradiation remained pulsating in the psychic interstitial folds of our floating hearts, dynamically creative. Thus, after the passing of the hours, the fragrant seeds you magnanimously spread among us, the new modules you discovered in front of our astonished, tremulous spirits have been taking purified root in their evolutionary becoming of a triumphal gestation. De Torre’s generously hyperbolic tone of astonishment when describing Huidobro’s “dynamic creativity” is extremely suggestive of the kind of reaction and response surrounding Huidobro’s presence in Madrid during 1918 and 1919. The newness of creacionismo as a historical and literary event soon inspired the creation of ultraísmo as an avant-garde collective movement essentially developed by two of Huidobro’s friends in Madrid, the aforementioned Cansinos-Assens and de Torre himself, who would later become the brother-in-law of Jorge Luis Borges through his marriage with Norah Borges in 1928. Although of relatively brief life, ultraísmo had a major impact on the evolution of twentieth-century poetry produced in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic; it influenced the work of major Spain-based poets as diverse as Larrea and Gerardo Diego, as well as the work of the young Borges, who after a brief period in Madrid imported his rather Borgesian version of ultraísmo to Latin America in general, and Argentina in particular. While Huidobro’s work originally triggered an enthusiastic outburst of avant-garde cultural production in Madrid, the reception of

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his work was less enthusiastic in the literary circles of his native Chile. Particularly relevant are the following comments by the Chilean literary critic Hernán Díaz Arrieta, who in 1919 expressed the intrinsic difficulty of Huidobro’s creacionismo as follows: El Creacionismo es una cosa rara y difícil, algo como una nueva lengua literaria, . . . Esto ya no es quitar los altares ni sustituir un culto por otro; es remover las columnas del templo, echar abajo los muros, arrasar la tierra y mirar—o querer mirar—desde un mundo nuevo, astros y planetas diferentes.” (Díaz Arrieta, “El creacionismo,” as quoted in Costa, En Pos de Huidobro, 51) Creacionismo is a weird and difficult thing, something like a new literary language, . . . It is not just about dismantling the altars, nor substituting one cult for another; it is about removing the very pillars of the temple, tearing the walls down, destroying the earth and looking—or desiring to look—from a new world at different stars and planets. The aura of revolutionary change with which Díaz Arrieta describes creacionismo as a radical new way of looking at the universe is intrinsically connected to what Bürger refers to as a “change in the means of artistic representation” that characterizes for him the historical avant-garde. Bürger rejects Theodor Adorno’s conception of the category of the new as a category of modern art, particularly as developed in his Aesthetic Theory. Bürger characterizes Adorno’s own analysis of the category of the modern as “a necessary duplication of what dominates the commodity society” (Bürger, 61), a definition that for Bürger entails a “failure to precisely historicize the category of the new.” Since the avant-garde did not aim at a “change in the means of artistic representation,” Bürger argues, but rather a “change in the representational system,” the category of the new as used by Adorno in his critique of modern art does not necessarily apply to the historical avant-garde: If we sought to understand a change in the means of artistic representation, the category of the new would be applicable. But since the historical avant-garde movements cause a break with tradition and a subsequent change in the representational system, the category is not suitable for a description of how things are. And this all the less when one considers that the historical avant-garde movements not only intend to break with the traditional representational system, but the total abolition of the institution that is art. This is undoubtedly something “new,” but the newness is qualitatively

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different from both a change in artistic techniques, and a change in the representational system. (Bürger, 62) Based on Bürger’s argument, we can analyze the original critical response to creacionismo on both sides of the Atlantic—whether with passionate enthusiasm in Spain or with a rather ironic sense of puzzlement in Chile—as constituting in each instance a different reaction to Huidobro’s particular break with “the traditional representative system” characteristic of the historical avant-garde. Throughout Huidobro’s career, creacionismo emerged and developed as a highly idiosyncratic and personal attempt to reconstitute poetry as a traditional system of representation through what Huidobro thought to be the next logical stage of poiesis as the universal principle of creation. Most of the scholarship on Huidobro since the 1970s has traditionally analyzed creacionismo in relation to the changes in the representational system generated by cubism. Influential Huidobro scholars such as René de Costa and Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo have essentially conceptualized Huidobro’s avant-garde poetics as a form of literary cubism. As Caracciolo-Trejo suggests, due to Huidobro’s contact and friendship with key cubist painters—especially with Juan Gris—Huidobro was exposed to and greatly influenced by the main tenets of cubism: Una vecinidad temporal y de amistad con algunos de sus exponentes más notables, pone a Huidobro muy cerca del Cubismo. En efecto, aunque el Cubismo nace como tendencia exclusivamente plástica, propone también una liberación de las leyes naturales. En su plano específico, niega la representabilidad fotográfica de la realidad, busca la unicidad de sujeto-objeto, elude el artificio de la perspectiva, presenta, simultáneamente, perfiles que se establecen desde puntos de observación móviles. . . . El Cubismo propone entonces una “relectura” del mundo que los sentidos perciben y un nuevo lenguaje capaz de expresar esa experiencia. (CaraccioloTrejo, 44) A temporal proximity and friendship with some of its most notable exponents places Huidobro extremely close to cubism. In fact, although cubism is born as an exclusively plastic tendency, it also purports a liberation from the laws of nature. On a specific level, it negates the photographic representability of reality, looks for the univocity of subject and object, eludes the artifice of perspective, and simultaneously presents outlines from moving viewpoints. . . . Cubism thus proposes a “re-reading” of the sensorial world and a new language able to express this experience.

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There is no doubt that creacionismo entails a critique of the traditional system of representation parallel to the one Bürger ascribes to cubism—i.e., “it calls into question the system of representation with its linear perspective that had prevailed since the Renaissance” (Bürger, 109). However, the critical use of the label of “literary cubism” to analyze Huidobro’s project based on his personal proximity to certain cubist artists or a parallel problematization of the “representability of reality” fails to account for the transatlantic tension at the very core of his avant-garde poetics, in what amounts to a characteristically Eurocentric conception of both the avant-garde in general, and the place and role of Huidobro’s creacionismo within it in particular.4 In fact, Huidobro’s conception of creacionismo clearly transcends the particular impact and influence of Parisian-based cubism on his project, from his early work published in Chile in the early 1910s, to his later and more influential work published in the early 1930s—roughly ten years after synthetic cubism had ceased being practiced by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. At the same time, and perhaps most importantly, the label of “literary cubism” to refer to creacionismo fails to account for Huidobro’s idiosyncratic reconceptualization of the creative act, as well as his reformulation of the notion of poiesis as the principle for poetic creation. In what follows, I examine the ways in which Huidobro’s early poetic ambitions proved to be not only fruitful for the creation of an original and influential avant-garde poetics that aimed at the reconceptualization of poetry as a system of representation but also led to the production of a series of astonishing avant-garde poems that still deserve their full critical recognition within studies of modern poetry, modernist poetics, and the avant-garde. Through my analysis of the theoretical tenets of Huidobro’s creacionismo and their materialization in the bilingual poem Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel, I will show how Huidobro’s work is crucial for the study of avant-garde poetry and poetics in its transatlantic and transnational dimensions. Ultimately, I argue that Huidobro’s creacionismo unveils the very dynamics of translation, displacement, and replacement that, as analyzed by Puchner, lie at the core of the avant-garde as a form of “radical modernism” (Poetry of the Revolution, 174).

Huidobro’s Creacionismo: Intermediality and the Transferability of Poiesis As Huidobro states as early as 1912, one of the main purposes of his career as a poet was to reformulate literature as a means of representation by recovering the creative potential of poiesis at the core of poetry: “El

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reinado de la literatura terminó. El siglo veinte verá el reinado de la poesía en el verdadero sentido de la palabra, es decir, en el de creación, como la llamaron los griegos, aunque jamás lograron realizar su definición” (“El creacionismo,” Obras Completas, 672; The realm of literature has ended. The twentieth century will see the realm of poetry in the true sense of the word, that is, that of creation, as the Greeks called it, although they never accomplished the realization of its definition). From the beginning of his career as a poet, creacionismo essentially emerged as a poetic search for an absolute form of the “true sense” of poetry itself. Huidobro’s poetic project represents an avant-garde critique of literature as a traditional system of linguistic representation whose aim it was to replace a hegemonic artistic tradition by exploring the poietic creative potential at the core of modern poetry. Creacionismo as the “true sense” of poetry would constitute poetry as not merely a generic literary form but rather as a new stage of its historical, formal, and ultimately logical development as a medium, according to Huidobro, “como continuación de la evolución lógica de la poesía” (as quoted in Costa, En pos de Huidobro, 54; as the continuation of the logical evolution of poetry). Huidobro’s creacionismo thus aims to re-create poetry based on the logic of its own creative purpose, that is, the creative evolution of the formal manifestation of poetry itself as its own logical end, as the Chilean poet argues here: En mi modo de ver el “Creacionismo” es la poesía misma: algo que no tiene por finalidad, ni narrar, ni describir las cosas de la vida, sino hacer una totalidad lírica independiente en absoluto. Es decir, ella misma es su propia finalidad. (Cruchaca, “Conversando con Vicente Huidobro,” 63) From my own perspective, I see creacionismo as poetry itself: something which does not have as its purpose to narrate, nor describe the things of life, but rather to create an absolutely independent lyrical totality. That is, poetry itself is its own purpose. By conceiving the creative or poietic potential at the core of poetry as its very essence, Huidobro reformulates the institutionalization of the literary as conceptualized during European romanticism—a seminal event within Western literature and intellectual history. As Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have argued in The Literary Absolute, it is precisely during romanticism—as particularly conceptualized by early German romantics such as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel—when the notion of literature emerges as a radically new “genre” of writing: “They, in any case, will approach it [literature] explicitly as a new genre, beyond

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the divisions of classical (or modern) poetics capable of resolving the inherent ‘generic’ divisions of the written thing” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 10). More important, it is the very productive principle that the Jena romantics see at the core of literature as an intrinsically new (and modern) genre that precisely constitutes the same creative principle used by Huidobro to declare the death of literature as an institution, that is, the concept of poiesis. The groundbreaking critical analysis of early German romanticism carried out by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy helps clarify Huidobro’s own reformulation of poetry as medium, especially in relation to their critical reconsideration of the notion of “poiesy” as developed here: The absolute in literature is not so much poetry (whose modern concept is also invented in Athenaeum fragment 116) as it is poiesy, according to an etymological appeal the romantics do not fail to make. Poiesy, or in other words production. The thought of the “literary genre” is thus less concerned with the production of the literary thing than with production, absolutely speaking. Romantic poetry sets out to penetrate the essence of poiesy, in which the literary thing produces the truth of production in itself, and thus, as will be evident in all that follows, the truth of the production of itself, of autopoiesy. . . . Romanticism is the inauguration of the literary absolute. (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 12) If according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, romanticism inaugurates the “generativity of literature” as an “infinitely new Work,” Huidobro’s creacionismo is evidently meant to represent powerfully its closing ceremony, while positioning his own creacionista poetics as a new manifestation and logical continuation of the same generative principle of poiesis that the early German romantics found at the core of the literary. Early German romanticism originally conceived the literary as a productive realm where particular works are related to an absolute Work of self-production due to the “infinite versability” of literature as a medium. The essential creative purpose of creacionismo, in contrast, is to articulate an absolute form of poiesis aiming at the production of a complete, harmonious, and unified poetic totality in itself by transferring radically diverse elements into the creacionista poem. As Cansinos-Assens writes, creacionismo formally operates as a poetics by creating a series of images in which differing elements are simultaneously fused together into the medium provided by the new creacionista “created” image:

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La imagen creada es algo que no existe en la realidad, que se logra no amalgamando reminiscencias, sino uniendo en intuición vivaz atributos diversos e individuales que sólo pueden coexistir en la imaginación del poeta. De esta suerte, se obtiene una doble imagen que se presenta fundida en una sola, simultaneamente a la evocación del lector. (Cansinos-Assens, 270) The created image is something that does not exist in reality and which is obtained not by amalgamating memories, but rather by uniting in vivid intuition diverse individual attributes that can only coexist in the poet’s imagination. In this manner, a double image is obtained which simultaneously presents itself to the evocation of the reader as being fused in one image. Cansinos-Assens makes clear that Huidobro’s creacionismo manifests a dynamic in which individual words suffer a displacement and a reconfiguration of their original or standard linguistic forms that are translated into newly created poetic images “that do not exist in reality.” This transfer of different “individual attributes” provides the main rhetorical form for the figural correlation that leads to the creative generation of a new poetic image that can be experienced by the reader as a simultaneous complex. Therefore, a key feature of creacionismo that still requires further analysis is what I will refer to as its intermedial dimension. I take intermediality in the context of Huidobro’s creacionismo to constitute both the incorporation of traditional linguistic and artistic media into the texture of the newly created work, as well as the creation of a new medium located between the particular material forms of traditional media. My use of the notion of the intermedial in this chapter is indebted to the critic who originally defined the concept, the New York–based artist and member of the Fluxus avant-garde collective Dick Higgins. Higgins defines the intermedial recurring to the tradition of English romanticism, in particular the work of Coleridge, in the following terms: “The vehicle I chose, the word ‘intermedia’ appears in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1812 in exactly its contemporary sense—to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known” (Higgins, 27). Although Higgins uses the term borrowed from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria to describe various artistic forms belonging to different historical periods—from opera to visual or sound poetry, and from happenings to ready-mades—Higgins’s conception of the intermedial essentially constitutes a key component of his own theory of avant-garde art. Similar to Bürger’s conception of the avant-garde as a critique of art

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as an institution, the intermedial constitutes for Higgins a critique of traditional media that generally emerges in avant-garde artworks: “But when one is thinking of the avant-garde of forms and media, one is often thinking of artists who, for whatever reason, question those media” (29). Huidobro thus developed a series of parallel and interconnected intermedial strategies that underscore the limitations of the literary as a medium of artistic expression and representation, while creating a new medium that tries to overcome the very traditional forms of literature he questions. This series of creacionista intermedial strategies as manifested in his work consist of both the incorporation of visual elements in Huidobro’s poetry—which includes his famous attempt to incorporate the medium of film in his avant-garde poetics—as well as his bilingual use of French and Spanish in the composition and publication of some of his major poems.5 As René de Costa recounts, from Huidobro’s compositions of the early 1910s, to his work produced in Paris at the end of the same decade, Huidobro’s creacionista poetics essentially incorporates the visual through different forms of calligrammatic poetry.6 While some of Huidobro’s early visual poems follow a pattern similar to that of the English metaphysical poet George Herbert—in which the typographic form of the poem becomes a crucial component for its meaning, such as Huidobro’s Triángulo armónico (1912) and La capilla aldeana (1913)—during his first stay in Paris, Huidobro moves to more complex and innovative forms of visual poetry. The evolution of Huidobro’s creacionista experimentation with visual elements reaches a greater level of complexity in 1922, when in a gallery exhibit of his artwork, Huidobro introduces his “poèmes-peints,” a series of complex visual poems or poetic paintings such as Kaleidoscope, in which the visual and textual elements of the composition produce a dynamic and hybrid whole functioning as autonomous intermedial pieces. A good example of this new creacionista form is Huidobro’s “Matin”— included in his seminal collection Horizon carré (1917)—in which the lines of the poem unfold as a series of different visual objects, constituting what de Costa refers to as a “poema-dibujo” (poem-drawing). What is particularly interesting about “Matin”—a poem originally dedicated to Jean Cocteau—is the way Huidobro articulates a morning Parisian scene by framing the poem with the word “soleil,” in fact suggesting the perimeter of the sun as a square within which the action of the poem unfolds as a “scene.” Moreover, side by side with the main “French” images of the poems (the “tour Eiffel,” the “coq à trois couleurs,” and “La Seine,”) framed by these four “soleil” as suggesting an image of the sun, Huidobro inserts the foreign figure of the “Obélisque” that has forgotten its

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figure 4. Vicente Huidobro’s “Matin” from Horizon Carré (1917). Courtesy of Fundación Vicente Huidobro, Santiago de Chile.

“Egyptian words” when transplanted into the French capital (“it hasn’t bloomed this year”): “Et l’Obélisque / Qui a oublié les mots égyptiens / Na pas fleuri cette année.” As evident here, a key aspect of the intermedial nature of Huidobro’s creacionismo from his arrival in Paris in 1916, also evident in “Matin,” is the use of French in his poetic compositions. As Gerardo Diego points out, apart from being somewhat of an offense to his “native” or “putative” literary tradition in Spanish, Huidobro’s use of the French language crucially marks his overall attempt to arrive not so much at a merely bilingual poetics as at a universal form of creative expression: Huidobro sentía tan hondo la atracción de Paris y el arte moderno, que pasa en Montmartre y Montparnasse lo mejor de su juventud y

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que durante algunos años abandona su idioma natal, para adoptar el francés como lengua más bien esencial, universal o telegráfica, de sus poemas creacionistas. Este que a tantos se le antoja pecado imperdonable, no lo es dentro de una estética, de una poética como la suya, en que el idioma sólo cuenta en lo que tiene de interior o creador, y no en lo fónico, castizo o sintáctico. (Diego, “Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948),” 20) Huidobro felt so deeply the attraction of Paris and of modern art that he spent the prime of his youth in Montmartre and Montparnasse. During a few years he abandoned his native tongue in order to adopt French almost as an essential language—universal or telegraphic—for his creacionista poems. This linguistic adoption, deemed by many people an unforgivable sin, does not constitute such within his own aesthetics and poetics, in which language plays a role only in its inner or creative dimension, and not in its phonic, characteristically local, or syntactical features. A crucial feature of Huidobro’s use of French as a linguistic medium related to these creacionista implications of universal creation is that creacionismo never ceased to constitute an intermedial and interlingual poetic practice. However, contrary to Diego’s characterization of Huidobro’s use of French as “abandoning” his native tongue, Huidobro embraced his own linguistic and cultural distance from the French language as a foreign space—productive but also problematic—where creacionismo could potentially take root, similar to his Egyptian “Obélisque” in “Matin,” by allowing him to detach and separate his own poetic practice and creations from their “putative origins,” that is, the Spanish language and the Latin American literary tradition that preceded him. It is precisely through his own translational and displaced position in relation to French as an intermedial and nonnative medium for his poetics that its actual “foreignness” to Huidobro and his particular Latin American origins could add a significant planetary dimension to his poetry. My own use of the notion of the “planetary” in the context of Huidobro’s creacionismo is indebted to the groundbreaking use of the term by Wai Chee Dimock in her essay “Literature for the Planet,” in which she conceives literature in planetary terms as “an artificial form of ‘life’—not biological like an organism or territorial like a nation but vital all the same, and durable for that reason. Its receding and unfolding extensions make it a political force in the world” (175). The great importance of Dimock’s work for my analysis of Huidobro’s creacionismo as an

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intermedial and interlingual poetics resides in the fact that literature, for Dimock, when comprehended on a planetary scale constitutes a “linguistic continuum” that “urges on us the entire planet” (175). When we apply Dimock’s conception of planetary literature to Huidobro’s reconceptualization of poetry as a medium, the French language emerges as a foreign tongue able in itself to incorporate poiesis on a planetary scale beyond the spatiotemporal and geopolitical constraints imposed by Huidobro’s specific origins, that is, his language (Spanish), nation (Chile), and even continent (the Americas). Dimock similarly acknowledges the importance of the “presence of a foreign tongue” in her planetary approach to literature, pointing to what she refers to as a “not fully rationalized” space and time beyond the nation, as she argues here: For the presence of a foreign tongue—the meaningfulness of that tongue—already suggests a counterpoint to the entity called the nation, showing up its limits, its failure to dictate an exact match between the linguistic and the territorial. . . . It points to dimensions of space and time not fully nationalized because not fully rationalized, space and time not conforming to an official number, not integrated by a unified metric. (Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 177) Therefore, at the core of Huidobro’s poetic use of French lies a conception of the creacionista event as being in itself a translatable phenomenon that could achieve its intended planetary universality precisely as it is expressed and conveyed in different languages. In this sense, Huidobro’s creacionismo aimed at the poetic manifestation of an autonomous creative force that by being partly independent of its linguistic medium could potentially be universally transferable to any language and culture of the entire planet, as described by Saúl Yurkievich in the following terms: Practica una poesía de viajeros poliglotas, de trotamundos a escala planetaria. Insiste además en la naturaleza mental del fenómeno poético, creación autónoma que tiene una vida independiente del medio lingusitico que la transmite. La poesía es, según Huidobro, completamente transferible de una a otra lengua. (Yurkievich, 75) He practices a poetry of polyglot travelers, of planetary globetrotters. He insists, moreover, on the mental nature of the poetic event, as an autonomous creation endowed with a life independent of its linguistic medium. According to Huidobro, poetry is completely transferable from one language to another.

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One of the key and previously unacknowledged aspects of the transferability of poiesis as a creative principle at the core of Huidobro’s conception of creacionismo is that it leads to a particularly problematic theory of translation. Referring again to Bürger’s theory of the historical avantgarde, the creacionista image entails a change not in the means of representation but rather in the system of representation; that is, it constitutes a systematic reconfiguration of the created event as a new translatable medium. Therefore, as a created “thing,” the creacionista event is as concrete and complete in itself as any other created object available in nature, according to Huidobro. Hence, within Huidobro’s avant-garde theory of translation, the created poetic image as a new event is essentially deemed universal regardless of the particular language used to express it. This idea at the core of creacionismo is emphasized by Huidobro in the short manifesto included as a prologue to Horizon carré (1917): “Faire un poeme comme la nature fait un arbre” (To make a poem as nature makes a tree). Moreover, the transferability of the creacionista event is precisely expressed by Huidobro in what constitutes perhaps his most important theoretical analysis of the act of interlingual translation included in one of his key creacionista manifestos. Si para los poetas creacionistas lo que importa es presentar un hecho nuevo, la poesía creacionista se hace traducible y universal, pues los hechos nuevos permanencen idénticos en todas las lenguas. Es difícil y hasta imposible traducir una poesía en la que domina la importancia de otros elementos. No podeís traducir la música de las palabras, los ritmos de los versos que varían de una lengua a otra; pero cuando la importancia del poema reside ante todo en el objeto creado, aquél no pierde en la traducción nada de su valor esencial. De este modo, si digo en francés: La nuit vient des yeux d’autrui o si digo en español: La noche viene de los ojos ajenos o en inglés: Night comes from others eyes el efecto es siempre el mismo y los detalles lingüísticos secundarios. La poesía creacionista adquiere proporciones internacionales, pasa a ser la Poesía, y se hace accesible a todos los pueblos y razas, como la pintura, la música o la esculptura. (Huidobro, “El creacionismo,” 674)

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If what is important to creacionista poets is to present a new event, creacionista poetry becomes translatable and universal, since any new event remains identical in all languages. It is difficult and nearly impossible to translate a poetry dominated by the importance of other elements. One cannot translate the music of words, the rhythms of the verses which vary from one language to another; but when the relevance of the poem resides overall in the created object, this object does not lose any of its essential value in its translation. Thus, if I say in French: La nuit vient des yeux d’autrui or if I say in Spanish: La noche viene de los ojos ajenos, or in English: Night comes from others eyes the effect is always the same and the linguistic details are secondary. Creacionista poetry acquires international dimensions, it becomes Poetry, and it is accessible to all nations and races, as is painting, music, and sculpture. As described here, Huidobro’s theory of translation is articulated by the same logic that pervades his avant-garde poetics. It is thus a theory grounded on a creative force that aims to produce a new form of poiesis that by “becoming Poetry” through the intermedial and interlingual medium of Creacionsimo could acquire planetary “international dimensions” and be “accessible to all nations and races” beyond the spatiotemporal and historical constraints of specific origins. Related to this planetary dimension to creacionismo, Huidobro considers particular linguistic elements, such as the tone or rhythm of the original, not only secondary, but more important, extraneous to the creacionista event. What is important for Huidobro regarding translation is that it constitutes a linguistic process that unveils what he considers to be the transnational and translingual dimensions of the created image, itself a direct product of creation and not exclusively dependent on the actual linguistic form this image may have in a particular language. The act of interlingual translation is in this sense extremely relevant, since for Huidobro it reveals how the same creacionista image can be produced in different languages and experienced by different peoples, regardless of the fact that as a poetic image it must necessarily be different in each particular language. In a way, the interlingual and intermedial space

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of creation opened by the act of translation corroborates the planetary aspect of Huidobro’s project in its inherent drive to move beyond its putative linguistic origins. As Dimock mentions regarding her planetary conception of literature, translation “unsettles the native tongue” and “alienates it, puts it into perspective, throws it into a linguistic continuum more turbulent and more alive than the inert lines of a geopolitical map” (Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 176). Creacionismo as a poetics enacts, then, a transformation of the literary medium (in any language) by transferring particular words into new created images that are reconstituted as a new series of translatable created objects.7 In the hands of Huidobro, poetry as a medium previously determined by the linguistic features of a particular language (Spanish or French in his case) transforms into a planetary realm of higher purposiveness available to all languages, peoples, and races. This transformation recalls Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the linguistic transformation experienced by the original in the act of translation, as “the unfolding of a special and high form of life,” as he argues here: The relationship between life and purposiveness, seemingly obvious yet almost beyond the grasp of the intellect, reveals itself only if the ultimate purpose toward which all the individual purposivenesses of life tends is sought not in its own sphere but in a higher one. All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of their significance. Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another. (Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 255) Benjamin’s conception of a higher purposiveness made available through the act of translation—as representing the significance of languages to each other—is parallel to the higher purposiveness that Huidobro sees at the heart of the creacionista poetic image. Huidobro develops his most sophisticated theoretical articulation of this notion in a lecture titled “La poesía,” given in Madrid in 1921 and published as the foreword to Temblor de cielo ten years later. In “La poesía,” Huidobro argues that there is a deeper or “magical” mode of signification that is able to break up, displace, and transform the merely communicative function of language. The main objective of Huidobro’s quest toward a universal and planetary form of poetry is to elevate the reader into a realm of aesthetic experience that transcends the merely communicative purpose of the grammatical and linguistic features of a particular language:

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Aparte de la significación gramatical del lenguaje, hay otra, una significación mágica, que es la única que nos interesa. Uno es el lenguaje objetivo que sirve para nombrar las cosas del mundo sin sacarlas fuera de su calidad de inventario; el otro rompe esa norma convencional y en él las palabras pierden su representación estricta para adquirir otra más profunda y como rodeada de un aura luminosa que debe elevar al lector del plano habitual y envolverlo en una atmósfera encantada. (Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 7) Apart from the grammatical signification of language, there is another, a magical signification which is the only one that interests us. One is the objective language that is used to name things in the world without displacing them beyond their status as inventory. The other one breaks this conventional norm and, within it, words lose their strict representational value in order to obtain a deeper one, surrounded by a luminous aura that must elevate the reader beyond the realm of the habitual in order to enfold him or her in an enchanted atmosphere. Just as Benjamin critiques the communicative dimension of language in “The Task of the Translator” through his notion of “pure language” to reveal the higher “purposiveness” of translation, so, too, does Huidobro endow creacionismo as a creative process with a higher linguistic purposiveness. Thus, the language of creacionsita poetry emerges as a creative mechanism for encountering a realm of linguistic experience that is immanent in objective reality by essentially transforming the way the poietic, as the embodiment of creation, is named and takes shape within the poem. This process constitutes not so much a transformation of words themselves as their relocation through a transferential association with other words into a medium where the poet, as in Benjamin’s conception of the task of the translator, can establish anew a form of correspondence between poetic images. More particularly, Huidobro conceives the higher purposiveness immanent in language as an infinite potential of “certeza” (certainty) facilitated by the created word once it is located within the new intermedial space between “lo que vemos” (what we see) and “lo que imaginamos” (what we imagine), as he describes here: En todas las cosas hay una palabra interna, una palabra latente y que está debajo de la palabra que las designa. Esa es la palabra que debe descubrir el poeta. . . . Su vocabulario es infinito porque ella no cree en la certeza de todas sus posibles combinaciones. Y su rol

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es convertir la probabilidad en certeza. Su valor está marcado por la distancia que va de lo que vemos a lo que imaginamos. (Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 7) Everything contains an inner word, a latent word that lies underneath the word designating it. That is the word which the poet must discover. . . . Its vocabulary is infinite because it does not believe in the certainty of all its possible combinations. And its role is to turn probability into certainty. Its value is marked by the distance that goes from what we see to what we imagine. The creacionista poetic practice, therefore, aims at unveiling the “latent word” underneath words that can only be found when relocated into the creative space of poiesis lying at the interstices that separate the realms of objective reality and the creative imagination. This space, revealed by the poet through the discovery and establishment of previously unknown correspondences between words into a particular formal correlation, enables a series of complex poetic images to emerge within the poem. It is through a process of poetic transfer that Huidobro’s new form of poiesis is unveiled, moving poetry closer to a state that for Huidobro can resemble in its purest form the language of absolute creation. Ultimately, the role of the poet in triggering this process of creation by relating through the language of poetry “two distant realities” is discussed by Huidobro in his avant-garde manifesto titled “Manifiesto de manifiestos” as follows: Yo agregaba entonces, y lo repito ahora, que el poeta es aquél que sorprende la relación oculta que existe entre las cosas más lejanas, los ocultos hilos que las unen. Hay que pulsar aquellos hilos como las cuerdas de un arpa, y producir una resonancia que ponga en movimiento las dos realidades lejanas. La imagen es el broche que las une, el broche de luz. (Huidobro, Obras Completas, 667) I insisted then, and I repeat it now, that the poet is the person who finds out the occult relation that exists among things most distant, the hidden threads that unite them. Those threads must be played as the strings of a harp, and produce a resonance that puts in motion two distant realities. The image is the broche that joins them, the broche of light.

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Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel: The Planetary Poiesis of Huidobro’s Creacionismo Huibodro’s overall quest toward a planetary form of poiesis through creacionismo developed and circulated through new poetic manifestations as he continued traveling between Paris, Madrid, and Santiago de Chile during the 1920s. Although the basic premise of creacionismo remained the same—the rearticulation of poetry as a medium based on the creative principle of poiesis— Huidobro’s poetic practice gradually evolved into more complex versions of creacionismo that eventually led to the composition of the two seminal long poems published in Madrid during 1931, arguably the poetic culmination of his avant-garde project. These two poems are Altazor, which is generally regarded by critics to be Huidobro’s masterpiece, and the lesser-known prose poem titled Temblor de cielo, which was published in French in 1932 as Tremblement de ciel. As Huidobro’s constant travels across the Atlantic during the second decade of the twentieth century continued, creacionismo experienced a gradual process of aesthetic transfiguration and transformation, as Diego suggests here: Juan Larrea, siempre clarividente, me decía en una carta muy de principios de nuestra fe creacionista, que el Creacionismo era para él, y suponía que para Huidobro un sentido total y distinto de la poesía (el mismo Vicente confiesa que acaso ya no es poesía sino otra cosa diferente de lo que con esa palabra se ha entendido siempre), un arte distinto que tendrá tras de su primitivismo y clasicismo, su romanticismo directamente deducido. Esto justamente es lo que sucede en la segunda etapa, entre 1925 y 1931, cuando Huidobro trabaja y concluye su Altazor, iniciado en 1919, y su Temblor de cielo, título tan chileno, en 1931. (Diego, “Poesía y Creacionismo de Vicente Huidobro,” 215) Juan Larrea, always a clairvoyant, mentioned in a letter early in our creacionista faith that creacionismo constituted for himself, and he supposed for Huidobro too, a different sense of poetry in its totality, (Vicente himself confessed that it was not even poetry but something different from what has always been understood by that word), a different kind of art that after its primitive and classical periods, would have a romantic stage directly derived from them. This is precisely what happens in its second stage, between 1925 and 1931, when Huidobro works on and completes his Altazor, started in 1919, and Temblor de cielo—such a Chilean title—in 1931.

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Diego’s brief but important characterization of Huidobro’s “second period” as the romantic stage of his earlier work clearly emphasizes the evolution of creacionismo as a poetics. At the same time, Diego points toward the series of formal and conceptual features that distance both Altazor and Temblor de cielo from Huidobro’s earlier creacionista poetry, which Diego defines as purer and more classical stages in the overall progression of Huidobro’s poetics. Although the most recent critical work on Huidobro’s poetry of the 1920s and 1930s focuses nearly exclusively on Altazor, Temblor de cielo has been generally ignored by literary scholars on both sides of the Atlantic since its publication in 1931. In what follows, I argue that Temblor de cielo culminates in what Diego defines as the “romantic” period of Huidobro’s creacionismo by narrativizing the epic quest for a poetic universality that lies at the core of his avantgarde project. Some of the poetic features of Temblor de cielo connected to Diego’s conceptualization of creacionismo’s later period as a romantic stage of his poetics emerge in the introduction to the 1957 anthology of Huidobro’s work edited by the critic Antonio de Undurraga. Undurraga refers to Temblor de cielo in the following terms: No es Altazor el único poema largo de Huidobro. Temblor de cielo es el otro. En este texto, escrito en prosa, el hilo conductor es el amor, e Isolda, la mujer amada, una hermosísima creación huidobriana. Sin embargo, este hilo conductor no parece muy visiblemente, pues todo el poema está bañado de una luz negra y por un incontenible presentimiento de la muerte. Los objetos no permanecen estables, sino que tienden a monstruosas transformaciones. (Undurraga, “Teoría del creacionismo,” 201) Altazor is not the only long poem by Huidobro. Temblor de cielo is the other one. In this text, written in prose, the main thread is love, and Isolde, the loved woman, an extremely beautiful Huidobrian creation. However, this thread does not appear fully visible, since the complete poem is bathed in a dark light and an irrepressible premonition of death. Objects don’t remain stable, but rather tend toward monstrous transformations. As Undurraga mentions, Temblor de cielo has a basic narrative thread established by the relation of a male poetic voice and the character “Isolda” (“Isolde” in the French version), which was partially inspired by Wagner’s own Tristan und Isolde, as has been suggested by René de Costa.8 Whereas Isolda embodies the female principle of absolute beauty in the poem, the unnamed poetic voice constitutes an avant-garde

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version of the prototypical hero of medieval romance, who happens to be on an epic quest—literally here spanning across the entire cosmos—to encounter his female object of desire. Although the basic narrative structure of the poem appears relatively straightforward, the cosmic quest of the poetic voice is problematized by the “luz negra” (dark light) and the premonition of death that, as Undurraga describes, pervade Temblor de cielo. Moreover, the “transformación monstruosa” (monstrous transformation) that Undurraga discusses constitutes a pervading feature of the poem that continuously affects the logical stability of its poetic images. In fact, in Temblor de cielo, Huidobro carries out a “monstrous transformation” not only of the myth of Tristan and Isolde, the main thread of the epic poem, but ultimately of creacionismo itself as an avant-garde poetics. This “monstrous transformation” is the result of Huidobro’s overall attempt to push the creative principle of poiesis at the core of creacionismo to its own logical and poetic extreme, that is, the notion of creation as a form of annihilation and death. Throughout Temblor de cielo, the relation between the poetic voice and Isolda is one of constant displacement and replacement, an impossible quest for an aesthetic ideal that keeps shifting and transforming itself, unexpectedly appearing as the narrative of the prose poem unfolds. This “monstrous” relation between both protagonists articulates the form of sexual love that embodies the productive principle of poiesis driving the narrative thread, which is intrinsically related to various destructive manifestations of death and annihilation. This paradoxical interrelation and interaction between sexual love and death is compellingly relevant in the following passage from Temblor de cielo, excerpted here both in its Spanish and French versions. ¿Quién ha sido el asesino? Ante el juez está el cadáver de la mujer como la momia de la más bella faraona. Gritad, acusadores. ... De pronto un alarido ensordecedor se eleva en los aires. —A la guillotina. La guillotina, la guillotina. Momentos más tarde, cuando ante la muchedumbre sedienta de sangre, el cuchillo fatal cortaba la cabeza de mármol del acusado, un inmenso chorro de luz manaba de su cuello interminablemente. Al mismo instante hubo en el cielo un espantoso terremoto. Se rompían las estrellas en mil pedazos, se incendiaban los planetas, volaban trozos de lunas, saltaban carbones

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encendidos de los volcanes de otros astros y venían a veces a clavarse chirriando en los ojos desorbitados de los hombres. . . .

* * * En medio de la catástrofe y de la confusión general unos brazos más poderosos que cien mares se apretaron en mi cuello. —Isolda, ¿eres tú? —Cuántos años lejanos el uno del otro. —Se ha necesitado una hecatombe semejante para volver a encontrarnos. —Tú, árbol de la sabiduría, con los ojos maduros en la puerta del sueño y ese andar de elefante con pies de ídolo. —A ver tus senos. Muéstrame tus senos. (Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 153)9 Qui a été l’assassin? Devant le juge est placé le cadavre de la femme, comme la momie de la plus belle pharaonne. Criez, accusateurs. ... Soudain, une clameur assourdissante s’éleva dans les airs —A la guillotine! La guillotine, la guillotine! Quelques moments plus tarde, quand devant la foule assoiffeé de sang le cocteau fatal trancha la têtê de marbre de l’acussé, un immense jet de lumiére jaillit de son cou interminablement. Au même instant il y eût dans le ciel un épouvantable tremblement. Les étoiles se brisèrent en mille morceaux, les planètes prirent feu, des fragments de lunes volèrent, des charbons rouges sauterènt des volcans des autres astres et vinrent parfois se clouer pétillants dans le yeux désorbités des hommes. . . .

* * * Au milieu de la catastrofe et de la confusion générale deux bras plus puissants que cent mers étreignirent ma gorge. — Iseult, Iseult, c’est toi? Combien d’années nous avons été loin l’un de l’autre. Il a fallu une hécatombe semblable pour se rencontre de

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nouveau. Toi, arbre de la sagesse, avec les yeux mûrs à la porte du rêve, et cette démarche d’eléphant aux pieds d’idole. — Montre-mois tes seins. (Huidobro, Tremblement de ciel, 29) These two passages in Spanish and French highlight the “monstrous” dimension—literally here as meaning “deviating from the natural” (OED)—of both Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel. On one hand, the creative tension between sexual love and death—as well as between the poetic voice and Isolda—that pervades the entire poem opens up a creative space between the manifest and the latent, the imaginary and the real that is based on the conception of the principle of poiesis as a translatable force. In this sense, differing manifestations of death and chaos such as the beautiful cadaver of a woman, a maddening crowd, or the brutal execution of the assassin becoming a marble figure, give way to the appearance of Isolda as the object of sexual and erotic desire obsessively sought out by the poetic voice throughout the poem: “A ver tus senos. Muéstrame tus senos.” On the other hand, this “monstrous transformation” ultimately affects the stability of the principle of poiesis at the core of Huidobro’s creacionismo since it embodies the extremes of both creative love and deadly annihilation in the very form of the poem. What is particularly relevant about this “monstrous transformation” of the principle of poiesis into its next logical stage—i.e., now as both a principle of production and annihiliation—is that it is intrinsically connected to the planetary dimensions of Huidobro’s poetic project in Temblor de cielo. Thus, in the poem, the entire cosmos constitutes the spatiotemporal realm able to contain the poietic relation between opposite creative forces, representing the absolute limit for the expansion of the principle of poiesis at the core of creacionismo. As Huidobro argues in “La poesía,” a manifesto from 1921 that was included in the first edition of Temblor de cielo, any poetry that he deemed valid for his creacionista purposes must move precisely toward this absolute horizon beyond contradiction “where extremes touch.” Toda poesía válida tiende al último límite de la imaginación. Y no sólo de la imaginación, sino del espíritu mismo, porque la poesía no es otra cosa que el último horizonte, que es, a su vez, la arista en donde los extremos se tocan, en donde no hay contradicción ni duda. (Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 10)

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All valid poetry moves toward the ultimate limit of the imagination. And not only of the imagination, but of spirit itself, because poetry is nothing but the last horizon, that is, at the same time, the edge where extremes touch and where there is neither doubt nor contradiction. As shown in the bilingual fragment from Temblor de cielo quoted previously, the dynamic between love and death articulates an extremely relevant poetic manifestation of Huidobro’s notion of poetry as moving toward the “ultimate limit of the imagination.” In this sense, the key trope facilitating the unity and relation between the two extremes of poiesis throughout the poem is the planetary creacionista image that gives the title to the poem, i.e., the concept of “temblor de cielo” in Spanish or “treblement de ciel” in French: “Al mismo instante hubo en el cielo un espantoso terremoto” / “Au même instant il y eût dans le ciel un épouvantable tremblement” (At the same time there was a horrifying earthquake in the sky). This bilingual creacionista image tries to embody the complex tension of opposite forces at the very heart of Huidobro’s creacionismo, which reaches in this prose poem its own absolute poietic limit and last cosmic horizon “where extremes touch.” Specifically, the planetary tension between the heavens and the earth embodied in Huidobro’s figure of “temblor de cielo” opens up a space of translatability in which extreme and opposite manifestations of poiesis are transferred into each other. However, the poetic image of “temblor de cielo” or “tremblement de ciel” brings us directly to the problematic question of the translatability of the creacionista image that sustains the claims of universality of Huidobro’s avant-garde poetics. The problematic nature of Huidobro’s notion of the translatability of creacionismo, as well as with his theory of translation, resides in whether his creacionista poetics is ultimately translatable in different languages, since, as poetry, the creacionista image ultimately exists as determined by its particular linguistic expression. In other words, if according to Huidobro’s theory of translation the poetic images articulated by the words “temblor de cielo,” “tremblement de ciel” or “sky quake”—my own infelicitous English translation of Huidobro’s bilingual creacionista image—constitute the same universal created object, they can only do so as poetic images that are intrinsically bound to and determined by the linguistic particularities (syntactical, grammatical, or semantic) of the particular languages that articulate them. This is perhaps part of the reason why Huidobro may have chosen the Spanish word “temblor” instead of the word terremoto to produce a

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creacionista translation of the French “tremblement de ciel” in some of the passages of the poem—including its title—while not in others, such as the line from the passage quoted previously (“Al mismo tiempo hubo en el cielo un espantoso terremoto” [At that same time, there was a horrifying earthquake in the sky]). Although Huidobro manages to provide a new and original form of poetry based on his creacionista rearticulation of poiesis in Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel, the problematic aspect of his notion of the translatability of the creacionista image shows that despite its claims of universality, creacionismo as a new medium is still bound to and determined by some of the essential features of the traditional medium he is trying to replace, precisely the medium that the Jena romantics originally referred to as “literature.” Huidobro’s theoretical articulation of creacionismo fails to recognize that the creacionista image can only constitute a created object through the literary medium, and more importantly, by the notion of “absolute poiesis” that, as suggested by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, lies at the very core of the literary. However, by tapping into the poietic potential at the core of poetry, Huidobro indeed manages to open a space for a new manifestation of the infinite force of creation to emerge—a force that for the German romantics precisely lies at the core of literature as medium. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, the autopoietic dynamic of poiesis exceeds any attempt to confine it within a particular work, ultimately unveiling an immanent productive force of becoming that keeps transforming its own medium of expression by problematizing its distance from its very form, or, as they put it, by revealing its infinite potential of autoformation: The process of absolutization or infinitization, the Process as such, exceeds—in every way—the general theoretical (or philosophical) power of which it is nonetheless the completion. The “auto” movement, so to speak—auto-formation, auto-organization, auto-dissolution, and so on—is perpetually in excess in relation to itself. And this, too, in a certain sense, was noted in Athenaeum fragment 116: “the romantic kind of poetry is still becoming; that is real essence, that it should forever be becoming and never perfected. No theory can exhaust it, and only a divinatory criticism would dare characterize its ideal.” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 92) My final argument regarding Huidobro’s creacionismo is that it offers a radically avant-garde response to an essentially romantic (and modern) problem, that is, the drama precisely enacted in the poem of a poetic subjectivity struggling to articulate the relation between mind and nature,

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reality and representation through the power of the creative imagination. Part of the complex romantic nature of Huidobro’s Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel is that, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, poiesis as the principle of the literary absolute ultimately aggravates the drama of the subject due to the fact that it “infinitizes” the “thinking of totality” (Literary Absolute, 15). Ultimately, due to its very inexhaustability, the main power of poiesis lying at the core of the literary is, as they suggest, the annihilation of “all individualities”: “The Work must be nothing other than the absolutely necessary auto-production in which all individualities and all works are annihilated” (56). This seems precisely what is announced (with a difference) at the very end of Huidobro’s Temblor de cielo and Tremblement de ciel—the annihilation of subjectivities lost in the abyss of autoproduction that lies at the core of the poietic. However, as the last passage of the poem suggests, the main difference between Huidobro’s notion of poiesis and that developed during early German romanticism as conceptualized by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy is the concept of the planet, which ultimately encapsulates and embodies for Huidobro what they define as the “process of absolutization or infinitization, the Process as such” of the creative poeisis of creacionismo. Señoras y señores: la culebra de los naufragios se muerde la cola y se agranda, se agranda, hasta el infinito. Adentro de sus círculos estamos nosotros sorbidos por el abismo de la futura podredumbre, arrojando pus por nuestros ojos como espumas de playas. En tanto, los paisajes internos, sienten el vuelo de los árboles, nuestros oídos antes de despegarse y caer como hojas, alcanzan a oír el torbellino de las espigas que se ahondan. No hay esperanza de reposo. En vano el esqueleto detrás de su vidrio toma la actitud hierática del que va a cantar. Las puertas internas del planeta se cubren los oídos con violencia como el enfermero que oye los alaridos de la terrible aventura en la última frontera. Nada se gana con pensar que acaso detrás de la muralla abstracta se extiende la zona voluptuosa del asombro. [ . . . ] Así fue el discurso que habéis llamado macabro si razón alguna, el bello discurso de presentador de la nada. Pasad. Seguid vuestro camino como yo sigo ahora. Soy demasiado lento para morir. (Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 172)10 Mesdames et Messieurs, la couleuvre des naufrages se mord la queue et s’agrandit, s’agrandit jusqu’à l’infinit. Nous sommes là

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en dedans de ses cercles, aspirés par la abime de la future pourriture, rendant nous pus par nos yeux, comme écume des plagues. En même tempes les paysages internes sentent l’envolve des arbres, nos oreilles avant de se decoller et tomber comme des feuilles, parviennet à entendre le tourbillon des épis qui s’approfondissent. Il n’y a pas d’espoir de repos. En vain le squelette derrière sa vitre prend l’attitude hiératique de celui qui va chanter. Les portes internes de la planète se couvrent les oreilles avec violence comme l’infirmier qui entend les clameurs de la terrible aventure à l’ultime frontière. On ne gagne rien à penser que peut-être derrièrre la muraille abstraite s’éntend la zone voluptueuse de l’étonnement. [ . . . ] Tel fut le discourse que vous avez appelé macabre sans aucune raison, le beau discours du présenteur du néant. Passez. Suivez votre chemin comme je suis le mien. Je suis trop lent à mourir. (Huidobro, Tremblement de ciel, 59) A tragic conclusion to the drama of the modern subject indeed, but one that, as powerfully envisioned and acknowledged by Huidobro at the end of Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel, constitutes perhaps the key inescapable moment of planetary poiesis in the poem. As shown in this chapter, although his avant-garde poetic project manages to tap into the same poietic principle of the literary event originally explored and theorized during early German romanticism, a crucial aspect of Huidobro’s avant-garde poetics is the way in which it unveils the poietic as a new principle of creation aimed at reaching all nations and races on a planetary scale. Huidobro’s avant-garde rearticulation of the romantic drama between mind and nature ultimately aims at bridging through the created poem the minds of readers separated by “distancias inconmensurables” (insurmountable distances). The poietic bridging of these insurmountable distances is intrinsically connected to the “foreign” intermedial space of creation and translation at the heart of the dynamic of displacements and replacements inherent in Huidobro’s own transatlantic experience, as the following words suggest: El poeta representa el drama angustioso que se realiza entre el mundo y el cerebro humano, entre el mundo y su representación. El que no haya sentido el drama que se juega entre la cosa y la palabra, no podrá comprenderme. El poeta conoce el eco de los llamados de las cosas a las palabras, ve los lazos sutiles que se tienden las cosas entre sí, oye las voces secretas que se lanzan unas a otras palabras separadas por distancias inconmensurables. [ . . . ] Allí coge ese temblor ardiente de la palabra

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interna que abre el cerebro del lector y le da alas y lo transporta a un plano superior, lo eleva de rango. (Huidobro, Temblor de cielo, 9) The poet represents the anguished drama that takes place between the world and the human brain, between the world and its representation. Whoever has not felt the drama played by the thing and the word will not be able to understand me. The poet knows the echo between the callings of things to words, sees the subtle links established between things themselves, hears the secret voices that communicate words separated by insurmountable distances. . . . The poet obtains there the ardent tremor of the inner word that opens the mind of the reader and gives it wings, transporting the reader to a higher plane, raising its rank. Through creacionismo, Huidobro unveils the power of poetry as a medium able to connect readers at a planetary scale, beyond the spatiotemporal and linguistic limitations that have traditionally constrained literature. By placing the principle of poiesis at the interstices between different nations and continents, languages and media, the visible and the invisible, Huidobro articulates a radical avant-garde challenge to geopolitical boundaries and conceptual limits through what essentially amounts to an act of planetary reading. Throughout his work, and as examined in this chapter, Huidobro ultimately offers the readers of his creacionista poetic compositions a glimpse of what Dimock has suggestively defined as the “collective life of the planet,” as described here: To yield to this centrifugal force is to yield to an onslaught of space and time, an onslaught unavoidably brutal, centered on no one nation and tendered to no one nation. . . . For if writing must end up being a form of translation (not always voluntary) from the here and now, it is reading that initiates that process. Reading ushers in a continuum that mocks the form of any finite entity. It mocks the borders of the nation, just as it mocks the life span of the individual. As a global process of extension, elaboration and randomization, reading thus turns literature into the collective life of the planet. Coextensive neither with the territorial regime of the nation nor with the biological regime of a single human being, this life derives its morphology instead from the motion of words: motion effected when borders are crossed, when a new frame of reference is mixed with an old, when foreign languages turn a native tongue into a hybrid. (Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 178)

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Queering the Poetic Body: Stefan George, Federico García Lorca, and the Translational Poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance

Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io Fossimo presi per incantamento . . . —Purg. XI. 97 In Shelley’s beautiful sonnet, which translates it: Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I, Led by some strange enchantment, might ascend A magic boat . . . —Sonnet VI In Robert Duncan’s version from among the sodomites: Robin, it would be great if you, me and Jack Spicer Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal heads so turned That life dimmed the light of that fairy ship . . . —robin blaser, “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere”

In 1957, the San Francisco–based poet Jack Spicer (1925–1965) published After Lorca, Spicer’s first published poetic work that, as the title suggests, was inspired by the poetry of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). After Lorca was published in San Francisco by White Rabbit Press, an independent publishing venture run by Joe Dunn, one of Spicer’s close friends at the time. After a series of attempts to find his own poetic voice, as well as his vocation as a poet—he refers to his early poems as meaningless “one night stands” (Collected Books, 61)—Spicer produced in After Lorca one of the most influential poetry collections produced by the poets and artists in the group generally referred to as the Berkeley or San Francisco Renaissance within the literary history of the United States. As I will demonstrate, the publication of After Lorca constitutes a particularly important event in the transatlantic

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circulation of modern poetry during the twentieth century, especially within postmodernist American poetry. Spicer’s poetry book of 1957 not only displays a crucial transfer of poetics between different queer traditions across the Atlantic but also entails a radically experimental transformation of the practice of poetry that originally emerged as a response to both the heteronormative and homophobic environment in American culture, as well as the hegemonic power of New Criticism in literary and scholarly circles during the 1940s. More important, I argue in this chapter that the conceptual transformation of the practice of poetry clearly manifest in Spicer’s After Lorca is closely connected to the circulation across the Atlantic of the postsymbolist poetics of the influential German writer Stefan George (1868–1933). As I show, the impact of George’s poetic project, as well as its deeply queer ethos, was particularly important for theoretically grounding the overall response to the oppressive heteronormative context of postwar American culture as it was collectively experienced by the San Francisco group of poets and artists to which Spicer, together with the poets Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, originally belonged. I analyze in particular the impact on these three poets of the teachings of a key George disciple, the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz, while he was a professor at Berkeley. The influence of Kantorowicz’s scholarship on medieval history and political theology on the experimental poetics of these three key members of the Berkeley Renaissance has not been sufficiently studied to date, and it provides a crucial theoretical framework for understanding both the queer ethic of this group of poets and the translational dimension of the poetics they developed during the 1940s and 1950s. In what follows, I am particularly interested in examining the ways in which the concept and practice of translation play a role in this specific series of poetic transfers originating from two foreign queer literary traditions—embodied respectively in the work of George and García Lorca—as collectively explored by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser within the context of American poetry of the historical period. Although there has recently been some excellent scholarship particularly focusing on Spicer’s After Lorca, my main objective is to show how Spicer’s idiosyncratic conception and practice of translation are connected to a larger reconceptualization of a queer poetics closely related to the reception in the United States of the poetic and ethical project developed by George and his circle in Germany.1 At the same time, I will demonstrate how Spicer’s translational handling of the linguistic body of Lorca’s poetry is intimately connected to the notion of “human community” as it emerges

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in the field of medieval political theology theorized by Kantorowicz, and previously explored by George in his poetry. Ultimately, the publication and circulation of Lorca’s poetry through various experimental literary circles in the United States, as well as the impact of the work of George and Kantorowicz on the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance, provide two foreign poetic and ethical models that helped shape a queer poetic tradition able to emphasize the universal dimension of the poetry produced by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser in the Bay Area during the 1940s and 1950s. As thoroughly documented by Michael Davidson in The San Francisco Renaissance, Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser became the most prominent figures of a group of poets and artists that originally formed in Berkeley during the late 1940s around the figure of Kenneth Rexroth. In what constitutes a key characterization, Davidson defines their poetic group in terms of a peculiar combination of aestheticism and insularity partly connected to the homosexuality of some of its members: “Not all members of the Spicer-Duncan circle were gay, but an important component of their self-conscious aestheticism was a defense against a hostile outside for which the creation of an insular fraternity was necessary” (59). Davidson’s description of Spicer and Duncan’s group in his groundbreaking literary history of the San Francisco literary scene of the 1950s contextualizes their poetics by emphasizing their aestheticism as a strategic defense against what, according to Davidson, was perceived as a “hostile outside.” Among the outside historical circumstances that could literally be regarded as “hostile” for the San Francisco–based poets studied here, it is worth mentioning the pressing and reactionary sociopolitical environment of the 1950s pervaded by Cold War paranoia and homophobia. These socially repressive conditions were particularly difficult for gay men living in the Bay Area, as the writer Michael Rumaker in his personal history of the period, Robert Duncan in San Francisco, describes here concerning his own experience in the Bay Area during 1955: I was to learn in my year and a half stay in San Francisco that it was indeed a police city. There was, in spite of the extraordinary quality of light over the city, a heavy climate of fear, not so much from the violence which occurred, but rather from the activities and presence of the police themselves. This was particularly true for gay men. There was also the burgeoning narcotics squad with the beginnings of the wider use of drugs. But the Morals squad was everywhere, and the entrapment of gay males in the street, the

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parks and in numerous public places was a constant fear and common occurrence. (Rumaker, 13) Apart from these extremely difficult social circumstances, the 1950s saw the sudden emergence of other influential groups of poets within the American literary scene that gained critical and social recognition and that, as a whole, revolutionized the field of American poetry, partially impeding the potential impact of the work of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser within literary and scholarly circles. The most important groups that rivaled the Berkeley group and which quickly became popular and critically respected by the American literary establishment included the Beat generation—which gravitated around the figure of Allen Ginsberg on the very same San Francisco terrain; the alternative postmodernist poetics represented by the work associated with Black Mountain College—especially the work of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, to whom Duncan would later be connected; and finally the formation of the New York School of poets, centered on Ivy League–educated writers such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, themselves closely related to the emergence of abstract expressionism in the visual arts and who soon became extremely respected and influential poets. Departing from the notion of “insular fraternity” that, according to Davidson, characterized the Berkeley collective of poets, I analyze their work as constituting an original attempt to articulate a new mode of poetic experience that ultimately led to the development of what I describe as an idiosyncratic form of queer poetics. My use of the term “queer” refers to their conceptualization of the practice of poetry as a model for a queer ethic, and its consequent transformation of poetic form that, in my view, lies at the core of their overall aesthetic project as a collective movement. In Guys Like Us, Davidson uses the notion of “male homosocial desire” as developed by Eve Sedgwick in Between Men to analyze the gay North Beach scene surrounding the figure of Spicer, and the way in which his poetry essentially aimed at the formation of a local community within what Davidson refers to as the “compulsory homosocial” cultural context of the United States in the 1950s. According to Davidson, “the function of poetry during this period was often to perform and engage social alliances, not represent them separate from the poem” (Guys Like Us, 17), constituting a poetry that addresses “specific constituencies without consideration of a larger reading public” (18). Davidson touches here on a key aspect of the Spicer-Duncan group of poets, especially in relation to what he sees as their unwillingness to reach a “larger reading public.” However, as opposed to Davidson’s argument, I claim that the work of Duncan, Spicer,

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and Blaser addresses that same “specific constituency” by articulating a poetics that aimed at transcending the particular homosocial framework that determined locally their work by connecting to various foreign queer literary traditions and poetic practices that could legitimize the universality of their own creative and ethical plight. One of the main characteristics of the poetics developed by these three poets was their need to establish a form of transmission that could connect to a larger outside beyond their local context and so constitute, in that very process, a form of a shared history and tradition across time and space. It is precisely this need to transcend the specificity of the local through their poetry that constitutes in my analysis the key translational aspect of the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance. The translational form adopted by their collective need to transmit and connect their poetics to a broader queer tradition is explicitly and symptomatically evident in the epigraph from Blaser’s “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere” heading this chapter. The quoted section of the poem arranges in sequence the original passage of Dante’s sonnet dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti—which Blaser misattributes as a section of Dante’s Purgatorio—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s translation of that passage, and finally the fragment referring to Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser within the same series as a collective of male poets. Translation operates within this sequence of three poetic fragments as a necessary transmitting process that relates and connects the first and third group of male poets in two main ways. On the one hand, the series of three poetic passages establishes a tradition or poetic genealogy in which Shelley’s English translation of Dante’s original sonnet establishes the necessary poetic relation between the depiction of community of male poets configured by Dante, Cavalcanti, and Lapo Gianni in Dante’s poem and the parallel community of male poets constituted after Shelley’s translation by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser.2 On the other hand, this translational sequencing entails a radical queerification of the same poetic tradition it creates, in which the “sodomites” of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser ultimately channel the poetic force that originates in the three medieval poets of the dolce stil novo into an openly queer version of themselves via Shelley’s English translation. Therefore, it is precisely after the kind of poetic translation showcased in this passage from “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere”—both as an interlingual process of poetic equivalence and as the generation of a particular poetic genealogy—that Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser located themselves within the very literary tradition that they incorporate in their own queer terms. As otherwise explored in this book, translation—in its various interlingual, literary, and cultural modalities—is closely connected to a mode

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of cultural circulation that generates a tradition by particularly articulating a history for an “interpretive community,” using Lee and LiPuma’s definition, which in the case of the Berkeley poets ultimately serves the purposes of legitimizing their own poetics. Thus, if the following lines of the poem, “Robin, it would be great if you, me and Jack Spicer / Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal heads so turned / That life dimmed the light of that fairy ship . . . ,” have a local value in the way they address a “specific constituency” as previously suggested by Davidson, it is of paramount importance to analyze the ways in which their poetics is at the same time connected to a translational queer “outside”—both temporally and spatially—embodied and immanent in their poetic and ethical project. This chapter therefore addresses the crucial role played by translation and cultural circulation in the generation of the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser in the 1940s and ‘50s. I focus on the ways in which the characteristic aestheticism and insularity of their collective “for developing gay community” (Guys Like Us, 41), as Davidson describes, is carried out from its inception under the foreign influence of two queer European poets from the first half of the twentieth century, the German Stefan George and the Spaniard Federico García Lorca. My argument focuses on the ways in which the transatlantic circulation of the poetic work of both George and Lorca in the 1940s and its appearance in various forms and manifestations within the literary scene in the United States, in general, and Berkeley, in particular, facilitated a productive poetic “community” for Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser that extended beyond the historical and sociopolitical circumstances determining their internal dynamics in the face of the “hostile outside” they experienced. Owing in part to the poetic contact with the respective foreignness and queerness of the work of George and Lorca—and the necessary linguistic transformation of their respective poetics through the act of translation required to articulate this form of circulation—the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance were able to establish some of the main theoretical bases for their conceptualization of poetry as a communal practice with important ethical implications intrinsically connected to their own queerness. In order to ground my use of the notion of “queer” theoretically in the context of the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser beyond the paradigm of “male homosocial desire,” I rely on the work of Michael Warner. Warner’s groundbreaking scholarship on queer studies proves particularly fruitful for the purpose of analyzing the need of these three poets to articulate a poetics for a “specific constituency” via an “outside”

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beyond the historical particularity of their local homosocial context. According to Warner, one of the challenges at the core of queer and gay culture—in his analysis, pertaining to the 1990s in the United States—is its problematic relation to its own history, especially in comparison with the public and institutional dimension of the historicity of normative straight culture: “One reason why we have not learned more from this history is that queers do not have the institutions for common memory and generational transmission around which straight culture is built” (Trouble with Normal, 51). Warner points out a crucial factor that is equally applicable to the situation of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser as queer poets writing in the 1950s. Lacking local models for the generational and historical transmission for the practice of their own queerness, the three San Francisco–based poets creatively embraced the foreign poetics offered by the work of Lorca and George to turn their local and private experience into a poetry that aimed to express a public and universal need. One of the main objectives of this translational effort was to stress the universal aspects of their own condition as queer writers in an intrinsically hostile local environment that was oppressively ruled by heteronormative cultural practices and institutions. Warner analyzes a related aspect of the queer condition, pointing at a universal ethical problem within heteronormative culture when he discusses the particular way queerness emphasizes a “truer” form of human dignity, in the following terms: Queer scenes are the true salons des refuses, where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world that they now recognize as false morality. For this reason, paradoxically, the ethic of queer life is actually truer to the core of the modern notion of dignity than the usual use of the word is. (Warner, Trouble with Normal, 35) This issue of unveiling a higher form of human dignity based on “the ethic of queer life” that points out the indignity of a false morality is at the core of the translational dimension of the poetics developed by Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser. In fact, an idea parallel to Warner’s is conveyed by Duncan in his essay “The Homosexual in Society,” originally published in 1944, when he was just twenty-five years old. In this early essay, Duncan powerfully asserts how the social and institutional punishment of queer life highlights a universal ethical problem lying at the heart of modern heteronormative societies, with the following words:

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My own conviction is that no public issue is more pressing than the one that would make a man guilty and endanger his livelihood for the open knowledge of his sexual nature; for the good of humanity lies in a common quest through shared experience toward the possibility of sexual love. Where we attend as best we can the volitions and fulfillments of the beloved in sexual acts we depend upon those who in arts have portrayed openly the nature of love; and as we return ourselves through our writing to that commune of spirit we come close to the sharing in desire that underlies the dream of universal brotherhood. (Duncan, “Homosexual in Society,” 43) Hence, a central tenet within the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser is precisely this notion of “sharing in desire that underlies the dream of universal brotherhood.” In contrast to the oppressive and “hostile” historical outside that surrounded Spicer and Duncan’s San Francisco group, the figures of George and Lorca provided an “outside” that could be powerfully and openly incorporated into their “insular fraternity.” Both Lorca and George offered these three San Francisco– based poets foreign models of queer poetics that grounded their desire for a universal brotherhood in their poetry and provided a distant “outside” both in linguistic and spatiotemporal terms for the development of their own poetics. In this sense, the notion of “human community” that lies at the core of Spicer’s After Lorca is intrinsically connected to the notion of the sovereign artist which the San Francisco–based poets derived from the work of George and Kantorowicz. As I will show, while George offered a solidly defined queer ethic and aesthetic ideology, Lorca provided an idiosyncratic poetic language while constituting an artist tragically assassinated in 1936 in the city of Granada by a group of fascist locals during the Spanish Civil War precisely because he was an openly gay writer and intellectual.

“Poetry Yet to Be”: Stefan George, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Queer Ethic of the Sovereign Artist The poetry of Stefan George was first introduced in the United States in 1943 by Ernst Morwitz, who edited and translated with Olga Marx a collection of George’s poems for Pantheon Books in New York City. Morwitz had been one of George’s main disciples for more than thirty years and played a crucial role in the publication and dissemination of his work, first in Germany and later in the United States.3 After being forced to leave Nazi Germany, Morwitz eventually settled in North America

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and taught German at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In his introduction to George’s Poems, Morwitz boldly describes George as one of the most influential poets in the history of Western literature, comparing his literary standing with that of poets such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. At the same time, and more importantly, Morwitz refers in fact to George as a writer who “rings in a new era” for the German people as a nation: When Germany had reached the peak of external power and her inner strength began to lessen, another true poet at the turn of her destiny, comprised the present and the future: Stefan George. . . . He was the last of a series of relentless thinkers and of those great poets who blended profundity with enchantment. He not only produced poems of enduring beauty and altered the tone and the structure of his language, he became the judge and the prophet of his people. And so he rings in a new era. (Morwitz, Introduction to Poems, by Stefan George, 9) Morwitz’s hyperbolic analysis of George’s work, in particular his assertion of George’s importance as “the judge and the prophet” of the German nation, deserves further analysis in the context of this book. A key feature of George’s poetry is that its practice soon became the model for an ethic, not only for him, but more importantly for the carefully selected group of male artists and writers who actively served as his disciples and who configured his so-called “Circle” (Kreis). As described by Norton in his biography of the German poet, George “had devised not just a way of writing poetry but also, as time went on, a way of living” (Secret Germany, x). Essentially, George’s poetry embodied the aesthetic and ethical principles followed by his closest followers. George’s firm grip on his aesthetic project and poetic vision was not only exerted through his own poetic production and the careful selection of his circle of acolytes but also through Blätter für die Kunst, an influential literary journal he founded in 1892 and which he oversaw for more than twenty years. As Morwitz’s effusive appraisal in his introduction to his English translation demonstrates, George’s aesthetic and ethical ideals were firmly believed by his numerous followers who maintained a nearly blind faith in the “magic” or divine nature of his poetry, including Morwitz and Olga Marx themselves, as evident in the postscript to their translation: “The chief concern of the translators was to give an English equivalent of the original in its magic” (254). The ethical aspect of George’s poetic project struck the young Berkeley-based poets when they first encountered his work soon after

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Morwitz’s translation appeared in the United States. Duncan characterizes the early impact of George and his poetics on both Spicer and himself in his preface to Spicer’s One Night Stand and Other Poems, as follows: When I first met him [Spicer] in the summer of 1946, he wanted to know first of all what I might know about the German poet Stefan George and his circle. The volume Poems with its introductory essay by Ernst Morwitz had been published in 1943, where—Spicer was right—I too had read the legend of the cult of Maximin, where a young boy in his death is enshrined in poetry that is also the heart of the poet. . . . What is striking in Spicer’s searching for what lay back of George’s legend is not that George would ever be, as Rilke was, a model of the poet for Spicer, but that he was searching for his own self in poetry yet to be. (Duncan, Preface to One Night Stand and Other Poems, by Jack Spicer, x) As Duncan suggests here, the figure of George provided both Spicer and himself not so much with a model as a poet, but rather a model for their quest for an ethic inherent in the practice of poetry as a creative process. Therefore, in my analysis, the importance of George’s poetry for the work of the members of the Berkeley Renaissance examined here resides not so much in the way in which it linguistically and aesthetically “coined a language of its own,” as Morwitz and Marx describe it in their postscript to their translation (254), but rather in the way his work managed to articulate a space for the emergence and expression of a desire to overcome a heteronormative outside that prohibited and oppressed that same creative drive in its full and open manifestation. In fact, the harsh treatment of homosexuals in George’s lifetime recalled the Americans’ situation. As described by Norton here, male homosexuality was heavily punished under German law at the time: In Germany, as opposed to the relatively more liberal and tolerant France, the legal penalties for same-sex liaisons, quite apart from the inevitable social stigma they incurred, were severe and potentially ruinous. In 1871, under the watchful guidance and tacit encouragement of Bismarck, the existing Prussian edict outlawing homosexuality had been adopted into the new German penal code as Paragraph 175, which metallically stated: “Unnatural lewdness committed between persons of the male sex or by persons with animals is to be punished by prison. Loss of civil rights may also be imposed. (Norton, 122)

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Therefore, the practice of poetry, as well as the practice of all the other activities of his circle became for George the only place where his sexual orientation and desires could be displayed truthfully and publicly outside the punitive heteronormative constraints imposed by German law and society. In this sense, the cult of Maximin mentioned by Duncan is thus particularly relevant, since it became the most influential poetic manifestation of sexual love at the core of George’s overall project. As documented by Norton, the cult of Maximin originated in the figure of Maximilian Kronberger, a fourteen-year-old boy from Munich, whom George had met by chance and of whom he quickly grew seriously fond. Soon after their first meeting, the young Maximilian became an active participant in some of the activities of the George Circle during 1903, until he died suddenly from meningitis in 1904. His death led to George’s conception of Maximin, a poetic figure closely based on the young Maximilian, who embodied the creative form of sexual love George had always craved. As described by Morwitz in the introduction to his English edition of George’s poems, the figure of Maximin “plays the same role as the child Beatrice for Dante. Maximin broke the spell of loneliness and the poet was convinced of the reality of his world by the fact that another being shared it with him” (Morwitz, 26). Morwitz also includes in his introduction a prose passage written by George himself in which the German writer openly discusses the cult of the young boy in the following terms: When we first met Maximin in our city, he was still in his boyhood. . . . In him we recognized the representative of sovereign youth, such as we dreamed of, youth in that unbroken fullness and purity that can still move mountains and walk on dry land through the midst of the sea, youth fitted to receive our heritage and to conquer new domains. We had heard too much of the wisdom that thinks to solve the final enigma, had savored too much of the motley in the rush of impressions. The overwhelming freight of external possibilities had added nothing to the content, but the shimmering play of light had dulled the senses and slackened tensions. What we had need of, was One who was moved by plain and simple things and could show them to us, as they are beheld by the eyes of the gods. (George, quoted in Morwitz’s introduction to Poems, 26) As described by George, Maximin represented for his circle the poetic embodiment of a particular notion of sovereignty able to “receive our heritage and to conquer new domains.” Maximin thus embodied a poetic figure that, although based on the real Maximilian Kronberger, ultimately

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functioned as a poetic medium through which George was able to channel his own ethical project and create a new realm of poetic experience that was not bound and determined by either the merely rational (“the wisdom that thinks to solve the final enigma”) or the merely empirical (“the motley in the rush of impressions”). The key aspect of this “divine” mode of experience—shared with and ultimately accessed through the figure and cult of Maximin—is precisely the completely unbound form of sovereignty that it ideally articulates as originally conceived by George. In his poem “On the Life and Death of Maximin,” George presents this boy figure as a unifying force able in death to illuminate and breathe new life into the experience of the poetic voice through his natural access to a divine realm, as translated into English by Morwitz here: Your eyes were dim with distant dreams, you tended No more with care the holy fief and knew In every space the breath of living ended— Now lift your head for joy has come to you. The cold and dragging year that was your share, A vernal tide of dawning wonders bore, With bloomy hand, with shimmers in his hair A god appeared and stepped within your door. Unite in gladness, now no longer darkened And flushing for an age whose gold is flown: The calling of a god you too have hearkened, It was a god whose mouth has kissed your own. You also were elect—no longer mourn For all your days is unfulfillment sheathed . . . Praise to your city where a god was born! Praise to your age in which a god has breathed! (George, Poems, 149) The figure of Maximin articulates a crucial double role for George by allowing him to create, first, an aesthetic experience through which the poet could achieve a shared sense of connection and fulfillment and, second, a model for the manifestation of creative sovereignty that is able to transcend the boundaries and limits of heteronormative culture. It is precisely this double feature of George’s work embodied in the cult of Maximin as introduced and translated by Morwitz that generated the interest of both Spicer and Duncan as they sought their own queer ethic in a “poetry yet to be,” as previously mentioned by Duncan.

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A similar form of creative sovereignty also inspired by George’s poetic vision and queer ethic was explored and theorized by Ernst Kantorowicz. Kantorowicz was another key disciple of George who became an influential and respected historian of the Middle Ages at such prestigious academic institutions as the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. George met Kantorowicz in 1919 while he was studying at Heidelberg and, as detailed by Norton, the young historian soon became a member of George’s closest group of friends (Secret Germany, 625). There is no doubt about the tremendous influence George had on the young Kantorowicz both personally and intellectually in his early work as a historian of the Middle Ages. In fact, as Martin Ruehl has argued in his study of the politics of Kantorowicz’s Frederick the Second, George, always the sole master of his circle of disciples, played a fundamental role in Kantorowicz’s key decision to write his first scholarly book. Ruehl describes the key role played by George in Kantorowicz’s choice as follows: Kantorowicz’s decision to write about Frederick II was in itself a “national” choice of sorts. His Heidelberg teacher Domaszewski had advised him to tackle universal themes such as the history of Judaism or Byzantium; but the young recruit to the Circle, under the influence of the Master, chose a thirteenth-century German emperor. (Ruehl, 196) Whether under the spell of George or not, there is no doubt that Kantorowicz’s influential scholarship on medieval political theology and law is crucial for understanding some of the key theoretical ideas at the core of the queer poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser. The impact of Kantorowicz’s work, in particular the influence of his studies on the political implications of medieval legal and aesthetic theories, has not been sufficiently analyzed to date in relation to the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance. As Blaser repeatedly mentions in many of his critical essays in The Fire, Kantorowicz was one of the most influential teachers the three poets encountered while they were studying at Berkeley. According to Blaser, Hannah Arendt was their other influential teacher. Duncan’s notion that “the good of humanity lies in a common quest through shared experience toward the possibility of sexual love” expressed in “The Homosexual in Society” takes on new theoretical, aesthetic, and historical dimensions when considered in the context of the work of Kantorowicz. In their overall attempt to arrive at a new conception of “sexual love” not bound and determined by their oppressive heteronormative context, the San Francisco–based poets place the notion

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of a creative and communal “shared experience” at the core of the ideal of humanity that could be articulated through their poetry. The idea of arriving at the notion of “human community” through their poetics can be directly traced back to Kantorowicz’s own work on medieval political theory, more precisely to his reevaluation of the notion of Dignitas that, as developed in The King’s Two Bodies. As Blaser suggests in his essay “The Recovery of the Public World,” Kantorowicz found the concept of a “human Dignitas” to be at the core of Dante’s work: Here, the exemplary significance for us . . . is to be found in those relations and in the discourses that properly and publicly arrange them to create a human community, not a transmogrified humanity. Kantorowicz also draws attention to Dante’s concept “of a purely human Dignitas which without Dante would be lacking, and would have been lacking most certainly in that age” (453). Dante’s is a primary document in our effort to imagine and measure a human community worthy of our words—and in which we hold only a “middle place.” Dante: Two ends have been set by Providence, that ineffable, before man to be contemplated by him: the blessedness, to wit, of this life, which consists in the exercise of man’s proper power and is figured by the terrestrial paradise; and the blessedness of eternal life, which consists in the fruition of the divine aspect, to which his power may not ascend unless assisted by the divine light. And this blessedness is given to be understood by the celestial paradise (quoted in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 457–58). (Blaser, “Recovery of the Public World,” 74) Blaser here acknowledges Kantorowicz for locating at the core of Dante’s poetry a model of “human community” beyond the legal and social constraints of heteronormativity that could ideally constitute a shared humanity “worthy of our words.” As Michael Warner argues, the ethic of queer life uncovers the indignity inherent in a heteronormative cultural paradigm, necessarily pointing toward a higher ethic: “The ethic of queer life is actually truer to the core of the modern notion of dignity than the usual use of the word is” (Warner, Trouble with Normal, 35). Warner’s observation happens to constitute an essential concept within queer theory that is not only applicable to the poetics of the San Francisco–based poets analyzed in this chapter but also to the medieval notion of Dignitas

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that Kantorowicz—the George disciple—recovered from Dante’s work. As Blaser fleshes out, it is important to emphasize the fact that Dante’s notion of humanity is defined by a series of particular human relations beyond set rules and norms that could articulate, through a process of poetic creation, a sense of a human community beyond religious, social, or historical differences: “I like to remember that Dante’s human community—humanitas exists only in these relations which become community—enfolded all the ‘mortal human beings’ of the world, not just Christians” (Blaser, “Recovery of the Public World,” 75). At the same time, the notion of artistic sovereignty that pervades the work of George, and to which it constantly aspired, seems ultimately to aim at opening up a public space for the ethic of queer life, and consequently, for the generation of a universal form of dignity, or using Kantorowicz’s words, “a purely human Dignitas” that could articulate a new sense of “community.” The role of the poet is of paramount importance here since it represents the sovereign artist who, through an act of poetic creation, is able to rise above the indignity of heteronormativity in an attempt to reach a higher realm of human dignity otherwise unavailable. In this context, Duncan also seems to follow Kantorowicz’s main claim regarding the importance of Dante’s work as a model for the sovereign artist when he points out the “higher ethic” unveiled in Dante’s own treatment of homosexuality in the Inferno, as he describes here: In Hell, the homosexuals go, as Dante rightly saw them, as they still go often in the streets of our cities, looking “as in the evening men are wont to look at one another under a new moon,” running beneath the hail of a sharp torment, having wounds, recent and old, where the flames of experience have burned their bodies. It is just here, when he sees his beloved teacher, Brunetto Latini, among the sodomites, that Dante has an inspired intuition that goes beyond the law of his church and reaches toward a higher ethic: “Were my desire all fulfilled,” he says to Brunetto, “you had not yet been banished from human nature: for in my memory is fixed . . . the dear and kind, paternal image of you, when in the world, hour by hour, you taught me how man makes himself eternal. (Duncan, “Homosexual in Society,” 49) Within the framework of a queer ethic analyzed here in relation to the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance, the sovereign artist is able to open up an aesthetic space for the emergence of a form of human dignity that must be created in order to overcome the heteronormative enforcement of various forms of banishment “from human nature,” in Dante’s words.

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Dante’s portrayal of the figure of Brunetto Latini in the Inferno referred to by Duncan in his “Reflections,” added in 1959 to the original version of “The Homosexual in Society,” constitutes a powerful model in the way in which it establishes the sovereignty of the artist through the creation of a new aesthetic space with ethical implications that overcome the potential inhumanity and indignity of preexisting heteronormative laws or social norms. Therefore, Duncan’s meditation on Dante seems clearly connected to a key aspect of Kantorowicz’s notion of “a purely human Dignitas,” which he also ascribed to Dante, in particular, the importance of a creative act that goes “beyond the law” in order to reach that necessary “higher ethic” to overcome the indignity at the heart of heteronormative structures. This need to reach a higher ethic necessarily touches on “the blessedness of eternal life, which consists in the fruition of the divine aspect” previously mentioned by Dante and which is also embodied in the “god whose mouth has kissed your own,” as George expresses in the Maximin poem quoted above. Kantorowicz himself offers in his essay “The Sovereignty of the Artist” a relevant analysis of the way medieval legal theory provided a model for the “divine” creation of new laws that could respond to real historical changes: The ideal legislator as visualized by the jurists not only became an imitator of nature by applying the law of nature to the particular circumstances of his realm, but he was also the only person who could make new laws according to the necessities of a changing time and thereby “make something out of nothing.” . . . Moreover, the legislator, when handling his art, the ars aequi et boni, was able to produce something new because he was divinely inspired ex officio. (Kantorowicz, “Sovereignty of the Artist,” 361) As suggested by Kantorowicz, the medieval legislator was able to make something new beyond the established laws of nature precisely because of his divine inspiration. While imitating nature was a key part of the legislative art, for medieval jurists, the “ideal legislator” was able divinely to create a law for a new historical or social need. One of the legal methods used by medieval legislators to create new laws consisted in the process of what Kantorowicz refers to as aequiparatio, in which a legal equivalence is created between two different entities originally belonging to separate realms. More important, for Kantorowicz, medieval aequiparatio entailed a legal process of transfer that became a crucial mechanism for the emergence of the artist as a figure capable of embodying a form of creative sovereignty parallel to that inherent in the figures of an emperor or a king, as he describes here:

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In fact, that procedure of transferring something from one orbit to another formed, we may say, the essence of the art of the jurists, who themselves called this technique aequiparatio, the action of placing on equal terms two or more subjects which at first appeared to have nothing to do with each other. . . . This method of “equiparation,” however, which was not restricted to jurisprudence, can help us to understand in what respects the theories of the jurists might appear to have been relevant to the later artistic theories. The legislator takes his impulses from divine inspiration, and he creates certain judgments and technicalities out of nothing, but he does all that ex officio, just as he imitates nature likewise by virtue of his office and not as an individual poetic or artistic genius. The equiparation, however, of poet and emperor or king—that is, of the poet and the highest office representing sovereignty—began as early as Dante. (“Sovereignty of the Artist,” 362) Medieval aequiparatio therefore constitutes a process of transfer from two different realms that ultimately allows an artist to adopt “the highest office representing sovereignty.” As analyzed here, the notion of creative sovereignty is crucial, since it is absolutely required in order to create a space—poetic or otherwise—in which the queer artist is able to generate the sense of dignity inherent in a new notion of human community, while overcoming a series of oppressive heteronormative constraints and limits. In the remainder of this chapter, I analyze the ways in which translation provides Spicer a process to generate a particular mode of aequiparatio for establishing his own sovereignty as a gay poet in his own poetic terms. While my analysis of the ethic of queer life in relation to the work of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser as a group developed so far provides a relevant context for understanding their collective poetics, I focus in what follows on the way in which Spicer’s own sense of a “human community” is grounded on a particular conception of poetic language that allows him to create his own poetic sovereignty by poetically transferring through an act of translation the linguistic body of the poetry of Lorca.

Spicer’s After Lorca: Translation and the Poetic Aequiparatio of Lorca’s “Unanswerable Need” Parallel to the discovery of the work of George in 1946, Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser found in the poetry of Lorca another influential gay poet across the Atlantic whom they could add to their San Francisco “insular

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fraternity.” The poetry of Lorca constituted a relevant component for the ideal of a “human community” beyond the constraints of heteronormativity that could be articulated through the practice of poetry. Spicer’s After Lorca is central to this queer paradigm since it constitutes a collection that emerges in the attempt to establish a transhistorical and interlingual bond with the poetry of Lorca. This close affinity and the communal aspect of the appeal the San Francisco collective felt for the figure of Lorca is emphasized by Duncan in the following passage from his preface to Caesar’s Gate: “It seemed to us, to Jack Spicer as to me, in our conversations of 1946 and 1947 as young poets seeking the language and the lore of our homosexual longings as the matter of a poetry, that Lorca was one of us, that he spoke here from his own unanswered and—as he saw it—unanswerable need” (xxii). In keeping with Duncan’s remarks, it is important to emphasize the way in which Spicer and Duncan felt that Lorca’s work was personally relevant to them, particularly regarding what they saw as Lorca’s own homosexual longings emerging as an “unanswered and . . . unanswerable need” that pervaded his poetry. This “unanswerable need” ultimately enables the recognition of a form of desire—through its linguistic manifestation in his poetry—that plays a crucial role in the complex relation that Spicer established with Lorca in After Lorca, and that ended up being a fundamental component of the collective struggle of the San Francisco–based poets to seek a “language and a lore” for expressing and making public their own queerness. Obviously, this specific take on the figure of Lorca as “one of us” is based on Duncan and Spicer’s own conceptualization of Lorca’s “need,” a bonding form of desire connecting the three poets. Spicer’s After Lorca constitutes in fact an attempt to establish through an act of translation a complex poetic correspondence with the body of Lorca’s work, one able both to reach beyond the constraints of historical time and to expand dramatically the local boundaries of the “insular fraternity” inherent in the conception of poetry and poetics collectively shared by Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser. As Duncan himself acknowledges in his preface to Spicer’s One Night Stand and Other Poems, the attempt to establish a form of creative sovereignty through their poetry to generate a space for their queer ethic was part of a project grounded on the “Orphic” power of poetry to create a mysterious connection with an afterlife located beyond their local San Francisco scene: “In the Berkeley period 1946–1950 we dreamed—Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and I—on the seashores of Bohemia of a Berkeley Renaissance and projected Orphic mysteries and magics in poetry” (Duncan, Preface, xiii). Spicer’s own poetic take on Lorca’s “unanswered and . . . unanswerable need” was ultimately incorporated into After Lorca through a complex

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process of translation that modified the basic conceptual structure of the transferring principle connected to Kantarowicz’s concept of aequiparatio in relation to the emergence of the sovereign artist and its corresponding notion of human dignity during the medieval period. Spicer’s particular translational strategy in After Lorca was partly determined by the fact that if Lorca’s poetry embodied for Spicer an “unanswered and . . . unanswerable need,” it could only do so as a form of desire that had not been answered and that could not be answered, fulfilled, or satisfied in itself. Therefore, Spicer’s attempt to correspond to this form of desire through a process of translation cannot merely imply the production of semantic equivalents able to reproduce the original form of this “unanswerable need” in another language, but ultimately implies a poetic struggle to expand the original poetic form of this need into a hybrid version of itself that eventually spans a multiplicity of bodies and languages. Thus, in After Lorca, Spicer slightly modifies Kantorowicz’s notion of aequiparatio as “transferring something from one orbit to another” into a translational process in which the aim of the overall transfer is to expand an original form of creative sovereignty not so much into a particular equivalent manifestation of itself, as into a potentially infinite dissemination and multiplication of this sovereignty into other languages and historical contexts. As Blaser suggests regarding After Lorca, if Spicer’s work is trying to generate a sense of “human community” through its composition, it is a form of community that transcends the relational principle that was at the heart of Dante’s notion of Dignitas: “The details of it propose a special relationship with García Lorca, and then move without warning beyond the strictly relational” (Blaser, The Fire, 144). Blaser particularly refers to this conception of translation, in fact, as a “task and a reparation” (149) that aims at a reenactment of an incomplete work that is “dictated” through language, in the following terms: The principle of translation in After Lorca proposes that one must reenact life again, that it is the same that it was, but with a difference. Lorca’s poetry corresponds to and with Jack’s. . . . A friend has noted that the book ends with a Postscript, rather than a translation, a radar which signals appearance and disappearance. I note that the death in these poems is an imageless point at which the acted visibility meets and enters the other which articulated it. . . . This dimension is an aspect of the where of this work, which I have tried to follow—where the body will not and cannot stop, even in its desires—where the false manhood of the old discourse

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does not hold the conversation. There is here an experience of dictation, now opening to all of us, beginning where the manhood leaves off—at the open end of what we are. (Blaser, The Fire, 148) While Kantorowicz’s analysis of the principle of aequiparatio emphasizes the emergence of a form of creative sovereignty in order for the artist to articulate a new form of human dignity through poetry, Spicer’s take on translation generates a sovereign process of transpersonal creation that departs from “the open end of what we are” as mentioned by Blaser in relation to the notion of “dictation” (Blaser, The Fire, 148). Therefore, I take Spicer’s After Lorca to constitute not just a particularly significant moment in the transatlantic circulation of queer poetics during the twentieth century, but more important, a key event in the poetic quest toward a queer sovereignty as collectively conceived by Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser during the 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, through his own idiosyncratic conceptualization and practice of translation in After Lorca, Spicer was ultimately trying to formalize theoretically what seems to be an alternative to the poetics of the self that dominate English and American romanticism—manifested more clearly in Wordsworth’s notion of the “egotistical sublime”—a poetics that Spicer saw as “a perpetual motion machine of emotion” (Gizzi, 5) that in its futile effort eventually ends up breaking apart or burning out. At the same time, as suggested here by Duncan, Spicer was reacting to the poetics championed by New Criticism: “The Spicer of these early poems was at war with the doctrines of the New Criticism that would see the poem as a thing in itself” (Duncan, A Selected Prose, 164). As opposed to the formal and self-contained poetics of New Criticism, Spicer saw the poem as a transferring mechanism that could channel and recast an otherness immanent in and embodied in the language of poetry, and that, through this translational transformation, could also avoid the intrinsic time-bound decay implicit in the pathetically finite “beautiful machine” of the subjective poetics of romanticism. Although Spicer’s poetic strategy of becoming a “conveyor of messages” may sound playfully metaphoric, it ended up constituting for Spicer a true ethical struggle, as suggested here by Duncan: “There is no facility, nothing facile, about Spicer’s amazing and cunning wit, about his feints and strategies—for they are struggles in earnest” (Duncan, Preface, xxxvii). Ultimately, Spicer’s personal, ethical, and poetic plight—a deadly struggle strained by alcoholism that ended his life prematurely in 1965—has to do with the process of transferring the body of the language of poetry that he first started transmitting through his encounter with Lorca’s poetry

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in After Lorca. In this sense, Jerome McGann has already acknowledged how Spicer’s poetic project thus constitutes a problematic “impossible quest,” more particularly, an “immersion into the material resistance of language [that] is a literal descent into hell” (McGann, 114). Based on Spicer’s particular take on the process of translation and poetic composition in After Lorca, the different poetic “pieces” that configure the book can be analyzed as a series of ambiguous poetic hybrids endowed with a poetic body composed of elements belonging to both Lorca and Spicer. As acknowledged by the figure of Lorca—as channeled here by Spicer’s poetic voice—in the introduction to After Lorca, Spicer generally tended to substitute randomly the original form of Lorca’s poems into his own versions in English: In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had it written. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to it half of his own, giving rather the affect of an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) (Spicer, Collected Books, 11) Thus, by deriving “pleasure” in carrying out a series of transformations that alter the mood and meaning of Lorca’s original poems, Spicer is ultimately—whether willingly or unwillingly—turning the body of Lorca’s poetry into his own, as centaur-like hybrids through which Spicer manages effectively to incorporate Lorca into the “insular fraternity” of poems that ambiguously coexist within the book-bound structure of After Lorca.4 More important, Spicer’s particular characterization of the pieces that configure After Lorca as “centaurs” here not only refers to the hybrid nature of the translational compositions in linguistic and poetic terms but also has a sexual connotation that playfully asserts the homosexual bond between both poets. These sexual implications of the bonding and hybrid nature inherent in the pieces that configure After Lorca play a crucial role in generating that transferential poetic process of aequiparatio that lies at the core of the queer poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance. For Spicer, this “transportation” as a leading across time of the language of Lorca’s poetry can take place only within the process of poetic composition itself—a process that must necessarily imply a movement onward from a previous configuration not only in terms of the inevitable transformation of Lorca’s original poetry but also in relation to the actual progression of the poems themselves in Spicer’s After Lorca. As

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Joseph Conte has already suggested in relation to Spicer’s poetics, the book operates as “a closed structure within which one poem asserts its position in resonance with the others; its place cannot be assigned by any external thematic progression” (Conte, 107). Thus, my use of the adjective “translational” to refer to the actual “pieces”—i.e., the poems and letters—that compose After Lorca is in no way gratuitous. The translational aspect of the particular poetic pieces composing the book, however, has nothing to do with whether the series of poems and letters in the collection are “actual” translations of poems by Lorca or not, or whether the letters between Spicer and what he conceives as Lorca’s “ghost” are just part of a mere epistolary game, or a more serious attempt to theorize dialogically the translating and resonating process taking place in some of the poems.5 Rather, the translational aspect of the pieces that configure After Lorca lies in the onward motion implicit in the transferring of words over time being carried out by Spicer through the process of poetic composition and the queer “community” his translations of Lorca’s work open up. Hence, it can only be through a process of translatio as opposed to merely a process of aequiparatio—i.e., as “carrying or removing from one place to another, a transporting, a transferring” (Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary)—that Spicer’s leading of words across time can actually take place within the poetic realm of After Lorca. In his 1965 Vancouver lectures transcribed by Peter Gizzi in The House That Jack Built, Spicer describes this translational mechanism unfolding in After Lorca as eventually becoming an autonomous mode of poetic composition that manifested itself through Spicer’s own Lorca-inspired poetry, in the following terms: At what point did you allow these messages to take over or start happening in your poetry? JS: [Jack Spicer] It happened about halfway when I was writing After Lorca, when the letters to Lorca started coming and being dictated and the poems, instead of being translations, were dictated. Then I sort of knew what was happening. And when the final thing happened, in the poem, the business of the last letter, I really knew there was something moving it. (Spicer, House That Jack Built, 135–36) This “something moving it” cannot be in itself but intrinsically transferential, more specifically, a translatable event that leads to a particular transfer over time from one manifestation of itself into another. Spicer’s take on translation constitutes as a whole a system of poetic correspondences that transcend the realm of interlingual translation and

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ultimately facilitate the emergence of a transpersonal and hybrid textual realm beyond the control of a single poetic voice. In this sense, Spicer’s own notion developed in After Lorca of the poet as a “machine” or a “time mechanic” implies the processing, transformation and distribution of certain poetic “currents” that, as suggested here, can be conceptualized ultimately as a transferential process that radically alters the conceptualization of both Lorca’s and Spicer’s poetry as constituting “originals” in themselves, while generating a queer communal sense of their mutual poetic being. Spicer’s poems included in After Lorca are structured around the central presence of the “Ode for Walt Whitman,” a literal translation of Lorca’s own “Oda a Walt Whitman.” Whereas the pieces before the Whitman poem seem to be merely experimental translational attempts to correspond with Lorca’s poetry, Spicer’s “Ode for Walt Whitman” is perhaps the most relevant poem for the purpose of analyzing the way in which “the language and the lore of our homosexual longings as the matter of a poetry” emerges not only in Lorca’s own poetry, but also in Spicer’s. Although the reasons generally given for the centrality of this poem in Spicer’s 1957 book are clear (namely, the paramount position of Whitman within American literature, the revolutionary nature of Lorca’s overtly gay poem, especially in relation to its ambiguous homoerotic content, the surrealist imagery used by Lorca, etc.), they are completely external to the actual progression of the translational poetics that Spicer develops in After Lorca. Apart from a few key substitutions like “pricks” for “sexo” (sex) and “cocksuckers” for “maricas” (which can be literally translated as “sissy” or “pansy”), Spicer’s version of Lorca’s poem is a an extremely literal translation of the original, as the following passages from Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman” and Spicer’s “Ode for Walt Whitman” show. Contra vosotros siempre, que dais a los muchachos Gotas de sucia muerte con amargo veneno. Contra vosotros siempre, Faeries de Norteamérica Pájaros de La Habana, Jotos de Méjico. Sarasas de Cádiz, Apios de Sevilla, Cancos de Madrid, Floras de Alicante, Adelaidas de Portugal.

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¡Maricas de todo el mundo, asesinos de palomas! Esclavos de la mujer. Perras de sus tocadores. Abiertos en las plazas con fiebre de abanico O emboscados en yertos paisajes de cicuta. (García Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York, 223) Against the rest of you always, who give the kids Drippings of sucked-off death with sour poison. Against the rest of you always Fairies of North America, Pajaros of Havana, Jotos de Mexico Sarasas of Cadiz, Apios of Seville, Cancos of Madrid, Adelaidas of Portugal, Cocksukers of all the world, assassins of doves, Slaves of women, lapdogs of their dressing tables Opening their flys in parks with a fever of fans Or ambushed in the rigid landscapes of poison. (Spicer, Collected Books, 31) The greater sexual intensity in various moments of Spicer’s translation of Lorca’s poem resulting from these apparently minor linguistic transformations—as in Spicer’s decision to translate Lorca’s “maricas” as “cocksuckers”—is symptomatic of a crucial aspect of Spicer’s strategy of translation in After Lorca, as well as of Spicer’s overall relation to the linguistic body of Lorca’s poetry. A key factor regarding the increased sexual intensity of Spicer’s translation is the homosexual bond between the two poets and the particular way Spicer aims to turn the linguistic body of Lorca’s overtly gay poem into a key component of his own poetry collection. As Eric Keenaghan has suggested in relation to this passage of Spicer’s Ode for Walt Whitman, Spicer’s approach to the lingusitc body of Lorca’s original poem entails a linguistic shift into a “crass” and “sexualized street vernacular” that makes the “gay body lexically visible” (Keenaghan, 278). In this sense, the first aspect worth examining within the translational relation and tension between both poems is the fact that in his “Oda a Walt Whitman,” Lorca himself is looking for “the language and the lore” for his own “homosexual longings” while embracing the queer ethic embodied in the work of Walt Whitman. It is important to note that Lorca’s own ode, composed in 1930, is a central poem in his seminal

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collection Poeta en Nueva York. In this work, Lorca experiments with a new surrealist poetics while confronting his own transatlantic experience and the radical modernity of the city of New York in its various forms and facets, particularly the various manifestations of social marginalization, inequality, and human indignity that he encounters and which he generally depicts using a collage of poetic images of brutality, violence, and death. Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York constitutes a key moment of rupture between his early and more traditional period and a more avant-garde stage in which his own queerness openly takes a central role in his work, as displayed not only in Poeta en Nueva York but also in his experimental play El público (1930). Enrique Álvarez, in his study of queer poetics in modern Spain, has importantly noted that one of the key features of Lorca’s poetry connected to his encounter with life in New York is “la tensión entre lo estético y lo personal característica de los poemas neoyorkinos” (the tension between the aesthetic and the personal characteristic of the New York poems). Álvarez describes this key tension at the core of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York as follows: El resultado es una noción de género fragmentada en la subjetividad poética que cuestiona el monopolio ideológico de la masculinidad heterosexual como fuente de visibilidad y fundamento del discurso. Por medio de la inversión del signo, la figuración poética de la muerte se transforma en táctica de inscripción de la disidencia sexual e introduce el reto lorquino al orden heteronormativo. (Álvarez, 46) The result is a fragmented notion of gender in which the poetic subjectivity questions the ideological monopoly of heterosexual masculinity as the source of visibility and sole foundation of discourse. Through the inversion of the sign, the poetic figuration of death transforms itself in a strategy of inscription of sexual dissidence and introduces the Lorquian challenge to the heteronormative order. As Álvarez’s analysis of Lorca’s New York poems makes clear, there is a crucial connection between his work and that of the work of the San Francisco poets, especially regarding the notion of the ethic of queer life. The main shared feature of their respective work is in this sense a conception of poetics that challenges heteronormative culture through a newly created space in which queerness is able to subvert a preestablished notion of what is normal. This particular aspect of queerness that, I argue, is shared by the poetry of both Lorca and Spicer can be seen as a

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“thorough” response to what Warner defines as “regimes of the normal”: “The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvi). Lorca’s own form of queer resistance emerges in his New York poems as a surrealist “inversion of the sign,” as suggested by Álvarez, through which the poetic voice questions the normalcy of heteronormativity and the particular homosocial structures he encounters in New York. As examined here, Spicer seems radically to question the subjectivity behind the poetic voice as an act of resistance to those same “regimes of the normal” mentioned by Warner in his translational approach to Lorca’s poetry. Spicer’s own poetic act of resistance against heteronormativity essentially takes place in After Lorca through the gradual transition— and transmission—from translation as aequiparatio into translation as “an experience of dictation” as suggested above by Blaser, precisely “beginning where the manhood leaves off—at the open end of what we are” (Blaser, The Fire, 148). In this sense, his poem “Aquatic Park” marks a pivotal point in Spicer’s process of becoming a “time mechanic” as this translational transition from translation into “an experience of dictation” in the sense suggested by Blaser unfolds within the structure of the book. Apart from providing the title to one of Spicer’s original poems in After Lorca—in fact the only one dedicated to himself—Aquatic Park was an extremely important San Francisco location for Spicer, as Ellingham and Killian describe in detail here: On San Francisco Bay at the foot of Van Ness Avenue, Aquatic Park was backed by the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory, The Eastman Kodak Co. (demolished in 1987), Fort Mason, and the buildings of Fisherman’s Wharf. One major feature of the park is an art deco concrete structure (housing dressing rooms, a maritime museum, and—on the roof—banks of open benches). The Westernmost benches were favored by gay sunbathers. Another favorite sunning spot was the small green area between the bocce ball courts, the Sea Scouts pavilion and the water. Spicer repaired to the park every afternoon with his portable radio, his books, and his newspaper, and his friends and students joined him. This became a ritual for the rest of his life. (Ellingham and Killian, 101) However, the importance of “Aquatic Park” in After Lorca does not reside in the potential biographical implications of the San Francisco Bay location for Spicer. Rather, its main relevance for the translational

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poetics of After Lorca lies primarily in the fact that the poem appears in a book that up until that point had been a rather consistent series of Spicer’s “centaur-like” versions of Lorca’s original poetry. It is important to emphasize here that for Spicer the book as a poetic unit has a strong chronological structure, as he argues in one of his Vancouver lectures: “The book, which is a unit as the poem is, has to be absolutely chronological. It has to be chronological in the writing of the poems” (Spicer, The House That Jack Built, 53). The emergence of the poem “Aquatic Park” must therefore “absolutely” follow the internal chronology of After Lorca as a book-bound composition. It thus constitutes a crucial event in its own internal textual history as a departure from literal translation into a new realm opened up by the previous series of translations, that clearly moves into a different form of poetic practice. Thus the fact that Aquatic Park in the San Francisco Bay, the place where Spicer ritualistically socialized during a key period of his life, ends up appearing as the title of one of the poems written “after” Lorca deserves further critical consideration. Aquatic Park A Translation for Jack Spicer

A green boat Fishing in blue water The gulls circle the pier Calling their hunger A wind rises from the west Like the passing of desire Two boys play on the beach Laughing Their gangling legs cast shadows On the wet sand Then, Sprawling in the boat A beautiful black fish. (Spicer, Collected Books, 32) It is precisely in Spicer’s self-dedicated “Aquatic Park,” where both the poetic “current” that drives its temporal structure, as well as the different elements that compose the poem seem to have been not literally translated but figuratively transferred from Lorca’s work. Thus, what

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Spicer took to be Lorca’s “unanswerable need” seems to drive the scene of “Aquatic Park,” while the seaside landscape of the poem is populated by boys equivalent to those who were singing and showing their bodies in Spicer’s nearby “Ode for Walt Whitman,” now with “their gangling legs” casting “shadows on the wet sand.” Thus, the poem unfolds as a temporal sequence established by the conjunction “then” in which the rising of a wind from the west, “like the passing of desire,” not only answers the “hunger” of the “Gulls circling the Pier,” but eventually, and more importantly, leads to the appearance of the indeterminate “beautiful black fish” at the end of the poem. The temporal mechanics of “Aquatic Park” turn this poem not so much into a hybrid “unwilling centaur,” but rather into a literal “time mechanism” established through a series of striking poetic correspondences produced by Spicer in his quest and struggle to transmit the “unanswered and unanswerable need” embodied in Lorca’s poetry. Therefore, Spicer’s “Aquatic Park” marks a transition between the form of desire that he and Duncan originally associated with Lorca’s poetry in 1946 and the emergence of a new mode of corresponding with the body of Lorca’s work that clearly moves beyond the principle of sovereign equivalence inherent in the notion of aequiparatio. While the mechanism in the first half of the book is articulated through relatively literal and equivalent versions of Lorca’s original poems, the actual progression of Spicer’s overall effort of corresponding to Lorca’s poetry within the structure of his book eventually leads to the appearance of completely new poetic objects—such as the “beautiful black fish” of “Aquatic Park”— that are drifting away from Lorca’s work. Thus, at this point in After Lorca, Spicer seems to have gone beyond the relational process of interlingual translation and starts moving his poetry much closer to the transferential “mechanics of time” at the core of his own conception of the process of dictation identified by Blaser. In a way, these newfound objects at the heart of “Aquatic Park” are the first sovereign elements that appear in After Lorca, articulating a form of creative sovereignty that is transpersonal and transhistorical and whose own limit is not sublimated in a particular poetic image (as in the case of the figure of Maximin in George’s work), but rather by the temporal progression of the language of poetry itself.

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The Afterlives of Translation: Spicer, Benjamin, George, and the “Real Thing” By eventually unfolding a series of striking poetic correspondences with the body of Lorca’s poetry in the second half of After Lorca— “Aquatic Park” being probably the most relevant example—Spicer not only develops a transferring mechanism able to lead words across time but also, ultimately able to lead what he refers to as “real things” across language, as he argues in After Lorca: But things decay, reason argues. Real things become garbage. . . . Yes, but the garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world making its objects, in turn, visible—lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to newspaper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalents into being. 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. (Spicer, Collected Books, 34) For Spicer, the intrinsic time-bound decay of things as the “garbage of the real” constitutes a process of material transformation that can be made visible if transferred across language through the act of translation. Such a creative and transformative process is articulated upon the potential for transferability that Spicer saw at the very core of the language of poetry, as a medium that can be experienced only through different—but equally sovereign—manifestations of itself. Moreover, Spicer’s own attempt to reconstitute the linguistic body of Lorca’s poetry through translation also implies an attempt to reconstitute what Spicer refers to as “the real” that manifests itself in Lorca’s poetry. As Spicer discusses in his first Vancouver lecture, the “real thing” that manifests itself in language constitutes in fact an immanent “want” that is endowed with the potential of translatability. More specifically, Spicer’s “real thing” is a form of desire which he describes as the “business of wanting coming from Outside” as he argues here: But what you want to say—the business of wanting coming from Outside, like it wants five dollars being ten dollars, that kind of want—is the real thing, the thing that you didn’t want to say in terms of your own ego, in terms of your image, in terms of your life, in terms of everything. (Spicer, House That Jack Built, 6) The main reason for Spicer’s interest in developing a poetics grounded on the rejection of the poet’s individual subjectivity as the actual

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source for poetic composition is precisely his attempt to convey the “real thing” as “the business of wanting coming from Outside” in his own poetry. Thus, the translational leading of “real things” across time and language in After Lorca constitutes a poetics that by adding more to the original without “losing anything” ends up facilitating the linguistic manifestation of the afterlife of those “things” connected to the “business of wanting coming from Outside.” Ultimately, Spicer’s translational poetics aims to release what Benjamin defines as the “afterlife” of the particular linguistic embodiment of that “business of wanting.” In this sense, Spicer’s poetics of translation has key points in common with Benjamin’s, as Lori Chamberlain has already described in the following terms: As a receiver of messages from Lorca’s duende, Spicer’s task as a poet and translator is not to “represent” these messages but to “present” them, a point he makes repeatedly in the letters to Lorca. In Spicer’s own terms, he does not want to give us rotten lemons but fresh ones; in this sense, Spicer’s theory is strikingly similar to Walter Benjamin’s, as articulated in his “The Task of the Translator.” Benjamin also argues against a representational model for translation, proposing instead an organic model: the translation does not reproduce the original, but completes it, providing for the continued life of the work. (Chamberlain, 435) According to Chamberlain, what Spicer is trying to do in After Lorca is to present organically the messages he receives from the work of Lorca’s “ghost” in a fresh and actualized form that “completes” those original messages, thus facilitating their poetic afterlife. Benjamin’s conception of a linguistic afterlife opened up by translation—as a “stage of continued life”—has “organic” implications similar to the ones Chamberlain ascribes to Spicer’s translational poetics. Departing from Chamberlain’s analysis, I argue that inherent in Spicer’s use of translation in After Lorca is an attempt to unveil, transmit, and reenact the linguistic impulse or “want” embodied in the original Lorca poems—an immanent impulse that can be deemed parallel to the notion of intentio referred to by Benjamin in his foundational essay “The Task of the Translator” (1921): On the other hand, as regards the meaning, the language of a translation can—in fact, must—let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original, not as reproduction, but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio. (260)

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Benjamin’s notion of intentio characterizes a linguistic tendency for completeness immanent in the original that is voiced whenever the language of a translation manages to “let itself go.” By letting go of the semantic dimension of the original, the language of the translation voices its own intentio not as a meaning objectively equivalent to the original, but rather as a linguistic form that harmoniously supplements the original intentio. As Samuel Weber argues, translatability constitutes for Benjamin “the never realizable potential of a meaning and as such constitutes a way—way of signifying—rather than a what” (Weber, 75). Benjamin’s task of the translator consists therefore in the linguistic liberation of the immanent intention of the original by producing a way of signifying that supplements the intention of the original, as he argues here: The task of the translator is to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks decayed barriers in his own language. (Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 261) In clear contrast to Benjamin’s take on translation, Spicer does not seem to consider the particular original form of the source itself, that is, the actual linguistic body of Lorca’s work in After Lorca, for example, to constitute a determining factor for the actual process of poetic transformation facilitated by the act of translation. Accordingly, in the first of his Vancouver lectures of 1965, Spicer overtly dismisses the importance of the original form of his “messages” with the following succinct statement: “The source is unimportant” (Spicer, House That Jack Built, 5). As I have discussed, Spicer’s main focus on translatability then lies on the poetic reconstitution of a linguistic body as the decayed but haunting message coming from an Outside, which in the case of After Lorca, happens to be embodied in Lorca’s poetry. Spicer clarifies this aspect of his conception of translation in After Lorca by stating that his main objective was to “get in contact” with Lorca, regardless of his knowledge of the Spanish language: “The fact that I didn’t know Spanish really well enough to translate Lorca was the reason I could get in contact with Lorca” (Spicer, Collected Books, 138). In the context of this chapter, however, we must take Spicer’s notion of getting “in contact with Lorca” here not just as a manner of speaking, but rather, as a serious strategy that pervades Spicer’s overall poetic production and that carries with it important ethical implications. This relational “getting in contact” constitutes a crucial strategy within the ethic of queer life at the core of the poetics developed by Duncan, Spicer,

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and Blaser, in which the creation of a “human community” through the practice of poetry was a foundational collective objective. In this sense, to “get in contact with Lorca” within the context of After Lorca clearly transcends the merely semantic aspect of linguistic translation and entails a deeper ethical relation to the body of Lorca’s work that aims to liberate its original intentio—as an “answerable need” in this case—into a higher level of poetic and linguistic completeness and ethical purposiveness by being part of a new poetic community (“one of us”) now able to generate in itself a new sense of human dignity. Therefore, what Spicer was mainly interested in “presenting” through the pieces of After Lorca was not so much the reconstitution of the body of certain original poems as the “language of poetry,” as Chamberlain argues, but rather the reconstitution of the particular “business of wanting coming from Outside” that Spicer originally found at the heart of the queer poetics of Lorca’s work. It can be argued that Benjamin’s conception of “pure language” accessed through the “breaking of decayed barriers” embodied in the act of translation partly corresponds to Spicer’s notion of the “real thing” as an ultimate “want” that transpires through his conception of translation as a bearing across time and language. As in the case of Benjamin’s conception of a “real” translation able to release “pure language” in its harmonic relation with the original as its supplemental afterlife, translation facilitates for Spicer the unfolding of the immanent linguistic impulse of the original. Thus, within the framework of poetic reconstitution implied in Spicer’s conception of translation in After Lorca, the actual words adopted by this “business of wanting” in its different poetic manifestations—whether belonging to Lorca or Spicer is after all meaningless—are only relevant as they constitute the building blocks, or “furniture” as Spicer often liked to say, that facilitate the surfacing of “the business of wanting coming from Outside” as a determined linguistic form. This is perhaps what Spicer means with the following statement in one of his letters to Lorca included in After Lorca: “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 on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to” (Spicer, Collected Books, 25). Thus, the potential inherent in the act of translation to propel the original beyond itself, establishing the “continuance” of the original through a linguistic “other” to which it might not be semantically or formally related, can only be fully realized after translation. As practiced by Spicer, the after of “after translation” in this sense entails, first, a temporal expansion of the original into a potentially infinite series of actualizations of itself; second,

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a serial or sequential continuation of its linguistic form through different languages; and finally, a complex transpersonal amalgamation of the different voices involved in the articulation of the potential for translatability of the original into a transferential tradition that lies beyond the sole authorial control of the author or translator. Therefore, the crucial point of contact in my analysis between Spicer’s translational poetics and Benjamin’s theory of translation lies specifically in a conception of the original as being part of an organic medium that keeps on materially living once it has been transferred into a different linguistic form through the act of translation. Ultimately, the afterlife of the original is conceptualized by both writers as the linguistic materialization of an immanent need or tendency facilitated by its translatability—that is, the translatability of the language of poetry as a medium in the case of Spicer, and the specific translatability of the intentio of the original in the case of Benjamin. Therefore, the relation between original and translation is conceived in both cases as a living relation that unfolds across time and language, producing its own history and tradition. This basic conception of the original as an organic form is described similarly by Theodor Adorno as a reflective transformation of the aesthetic dimension of artwork into a “living experience” produced by a “contemplative immersion” in the work. This transformation, which for Adorno happens to be epitomized in none other than the work of Stefan George—also an important influence for Benjamin himself, as well as for Spicer, Blaser, and Duncan— eventually unleashes “the immanent processual quality” of the work itself, as he argues here: Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. This is George’s symbolist teaching in the poem “The Tapestry,” an art poétique that furnishes the title of a volume. Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of a work is set free. By speaking, it becomes something that moves in itself. Whatever in the artefact may be called the unity of its meaning is not static but processual, the enactment of antagonisms that each work necessarily has in itself. . . . It is as a result of their own constitution that they go over into their other, find continuance in it, want to be extinguished in it, and in their demise determine what follows them. This immanent dynamic is, in a sense, a higher-order element of what artworks are. If anywhere, then it is here that aesthetic experience resembles sexual experience, indeed its culmination. (Adorno, 176)

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For Adorno, the contemplative immersion in the aesthetic object—of which the act of translation is an excellent example—unveils what he describes as a “processual” dimension at the very core of the work. In this sense, Adorno’s conception of the unity of the work as an overall process due to the intrinsic incompleteness of the particular artwork is clearly applicable to Benjamin’s theory of translation. At the same time, Adorno’s take on the “immanent dynamic” through which a work finds “continuance” into its afterlife by taking part in a “higher-order element” to which it ultimately belongs can be applied to both Benjamin’s “pure language” and Spicer’s own version of the “real thing” that transpires through language. As analyzed previously, it is precisely this access to a “higher-order element” that grants sovereignty to an artistic creation, an idea that is equally important for the queer poetics respectively developed by George and Lorca, as well as Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser, as examined in this chapter. Adorno’s actual description of the immanent dynamic that leads to an experience in which artworks “go over into their other, find continuance in it, want to be extinguished in it, and in their demise determine what follows them” unveils a crucial libidinal aspect of that same process that is particularly important for the analysis of the translational poetics connected to the queer ethic at the core of Spicer, Duncan, and Blaser’s collective work. This relation also constitutes a shared and equally important libidinal aspect of George’s own relation to the figure of Maximin, as well as of Lorca’s own poetic embrace of the figure of Whitman—relations of paramount importance for the development of their respective queer poetic projects as examined in this chapter. Referring to After Lorca, and following Adorno, Spicer’s own “contemplative immersion” in the body of Lorca’s poetry facilitated by the act of translation transforms an aesthetic experience into a “living experience” that ends up resembling “sexual experience, indeed its culmination,” as suggested by Adorno with regard to George’s poem “The Tapestry.”6 By letting Lorca’s poetry communicate its own “business of wanting” through the translational mechanics examined in this chapter, Spicer manages not only to correspond figuratively with Lorca but also to transform an aesthetic experience of his poetry into a living or “higher-order” experience that incorporates the body of Lorca’s work as the afterlife culmination of its own immanent libidinal need into a sovereign poetic and linguistic form. As argued in this chapter, the potential of the act of translation to propel the original beyond itself, establishing its “continuance” through an “other” in which, as Adorno states, it wants “to be extinguished,” lies at the core not only of Spicer’s translational

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poetics at work in After Lorca but also George’s cult of Maximin and Lorca’s poetic version and translation of Whitman’s own queer ethic in his “Oda a Walt Whitman.” Finally, Spicer’s role as a “time mechanic” within his own poetic project ultimately facilitates and channels the liberation of immanent libidinal impulses of the “business of wanting” that, as in the case of Benjamin’s “pure language,” are “tied” to the “heavy, alien meaning” of the original. Thus, as in Benjamin’s conception of the task of the translator, the translational transfer channeled by Spicer in his Lorca poems exposes and reconstitutes the immanent drive of the original by pushing it rather literally beyond itself. In this sense, Rainer Nägele’s description of this drive of translation beyond itself offers a very useful perspective on the libidinal implications of the immanent dynamic that lies at the heart of the task of the translator as conceptualized by Benjamin, in the following terms: Benjamin’s insistence on a position über (over, above) the abyss designates, as a position over the abyss, not a panoptic overview but rather the über of Übersetzung and Übertragung (translation, transport, transfer), which, as the translations of Eros will show, is also the position of Eros. Eros is the one who, in Hölderlin’s translation, above all übernachtet; he spans the night as the quintessential timespace of a “between” without limits. All delimitations emerge from it. (Nägele, 13) In accordance with Nägele’s remarks, Spicer’s poetry can be analyzed as primarily aiming to occupy this haunting spatiotemporal “between” that Spicer found at the core of language and that is unveiled by the act of translation. Within the queer poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance, translation therefore constitutes a mode of contemplative immersion that not only transforms an original work, but that, at the same time and based on this interlingual transformation, is able to create the space for the emergence of a “human community” that could freely accommodate its own power of aequiparatio and creative sovereignty. This dimension of language and poetry constitutes in fact an ethical and erotic “between” at the heart of language that for Spicer emerges literally as a form of dictation once the act of translation reaches its afterlife after translation. Ultimately, as conceived by Spicer, translation not only transforms the original work but at the same time, by pushing the immanent impulse of the original into its translated afterlife, ends up pushing the very act of translation beyond itself. Spicer’s theory and practice of translation can help us find ways to rethink the act of translation in the twenty-first

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century not only as a linguistic act that can carry the original across time in its translated afterlife—resulting in compositions tangentially related to the original—but also as a powerful ethical act that, as suggested by the work of Duncan, Spicer, and Blaser, can radically alter the way we experience the sovereign desires and needs of others as they are embodied in language, and the new higher forms of human dignity this transferring process can ultimately generate.

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Transferring the “Luminous Detail”: Sousândrade, Pound, and the Imagist Origins of Brazilian Concrete Poetry

In 1964, the Concrete poets Augusto and Haroldo de Campos published ReVisão de Sousândrade, an anthology and critical study of the Brazilian romantic poet from Maranhão, Joaquim de Sousa Andrade (1832–1902), generally known within Brazilian literature simply as “Sousândrade.” Despite the fact that ReVisão de Sousândrade was originally published in a small edition of five hundred copies, it constitutes an extremely relevant work within Brazilian and Latin American literary history, as well as within the global history of the avant-garde. In ReVisão de Sousândrade the de Campos brothers not only manage to recover a seminal romantic writer almost completely forgotten by literary scholars on both sides of the Atlantic during a period spanning more than sixty years, but they also successfully established a Brazilian precursor for the avant-garde Concrete poetics they developed during the 1950s and 1960s. Chronologically, the reevaluation of the work of Sousândrade carried out by the brothers de Campos constitutes a relatively late event within Brazilian concretismo, taking place when the three main poets associated with the group —namely Augusto de Campos (born in 1931), Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003) and Décio Pignatari (born in 1927)—were reconsidering their own historical relevance as an avant-garde collective both in terms of the global impact of their Concrete poetics, as well as specifically within the local realm of Brazilian literature and culture. ReVisão de Sousândrade was published twelve years after the initial burst of the concretista revolution inaugurated by the de Campos brothers and Pignatari in 1952 with the publication in São Paulo of the first issue of the journal Noigandres, which quickly became the main artistic and

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literary venue for the different activities of the Brazilian Concrete movement. According to the members of the São Paulo-based group, the term “Noigandres”—a word they borrowed from the poetry of Ezra Pound1— epitomized the innovative and experimental ethos of their avant-garde collective, “[a palavra] foi tomada como sinônimo de poesia em progresso, como lema de experimentação e pesquisa poética em equipe” (Teoría da poesia concreta, 177; the word was adopted as a synonym for poetry in progress, as a motto for team experimentation and research in poetics). The work of Ezra Pound not only provided an inspiration for the experimental ethos of the Brazilian avant-garde collective, but as ReVisão de Sousândrade shows, it more importantly offered a seminal theoretical corpus through which the de Campos brothers could articulate some of the key aspects of their own avant-garde poetic project. As I demonstrate in this chapter, the de Campos brothers carry out a critical reevaluation of the work of Sousândrade through a theoretical incorporation of both the Imagist poetics originally developed by Ezra Pound around 1912, as well as Pound’s particular conception of translation as a form of criticism. Their critical revision represents a key intervention within the realm of Brazilian literary history since it facilitates the genealogical constitution of a genuinely Brazilian source for their avant-garde poetics. ReVisão de Sousândrade unveils the complex dynamics that articulate the theoretical project of Brazilian concretismo, as well as the complex relation of the Brazilian avant-garde movement with European and Anglo-American modernist poetry in general, and with the work of Ezra Pound in particular. Ultimately, I analyze how ReVisão de Sousândrade demonstrates a strategic attempt to rewrite Brazilian and Latin American literary history in a way that would guarantee a central position to the de Campos brothers’ own poetic movement within the global avant-garde, which had been historically dominated by the hegemonic forms of European and Anglo-American literary traditions. Prior to the critical revision of the work of the nineteenth-century poet by the de Campos brothers, Sousândrade was generally considered a marginal member of the second generation of Brazilian romanticism (a period roughly spanning from 1853 to 1870), and was critically received as a rather obscure author of minor relevance by contemporary literary scholars. In the second edition of the seminal História da literatura brasileira (1903), the scholar Silvio Romero, acknowledging that Sousândrade remained a practically unknown figure, deemed his work to be worthy of some critical attention, citing the originality of Sousândrade’s Pan-American scope, as well as the formal complexity of his poetic diction as follows:

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Joaquim de Sousa Andrade é quase inteiramente desconhecido, o que facilmente se explica pela índole de seu poetar. É merecedor, porém, de atenção. Descubro-lhe alguns sinais característicos; primeiramente, de nossos poetas é, creio, o único a ocupar-se de assunto americano estranho ao Brasil, um assunto colhido nas repúblicas espanholas; depois, é um poeta de forte elevação de idéias; mas de forma muitas vezes áspera e rude e quase ininteligível. (Romero, 79) Joaquim de Sousa Andrade is almost completely unknown, something that can be easily explained by the nature of his poetry. He is worthy, nevertheless, of attention. Certain characteristic features can be found; primarily, I believe he is the only one of our poets who has dedicated himself to the exploration of American themes foreign to Brazil, an aspect borrowed from the Spanish republics; then, he is a poet of a lofty elevation of ideas, but in a manner that most of the times is rough, unpolished, and nearly unintelligible. Based on Sousândrade’s prior marginal position within Brazilian literary history, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos aimed at unearthing a figure that had been ostracized by previous Brazilian literary scholars such as Fausto Cunha and Antonio Cândido in terms similar to the ones expressed by Silvio Romero. As the de Campos brothers acknowledge in ReVisão de Sousândrade, their critical revision constitutes a complex and provocative effort to write, or rather rewrite, literary history, in particular arguing for the centrality of Sousândrade’s work within the Brazilian literary canon, as they argue here: Pode-se dizer que este livro criou um “caso” na crítica literária brasileira, propondo en termos deliveradamente provocativos, sem a tibieza cautelar do escolasticismo acadêmico, a reavaliação do olvidado autor do Guesa, e répondo em circulação parte expressiva de seus textos de maior impacto estético, em especial a seção por nós batizada (a partir de versos do própio poeta) “O Inferno de Wall Street.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão de Sousândrade, 11) It can be argued that this book created a “case” within Brazilian literary criticism, proposing in deliberately provocative terms, and without the cautionary coolness of academic scholarship, the reevaluation of the forgotten author of O Guesa by bringing back into circulation a significant amount of his texts with a bigger aesthetic impact, especially the section baptized by us (based on verses from the author himself) “The Wall Street Inferno.”

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As a scholarly exercise with the strategic premise to shake the landscape of Brazilian literary criticism, ReVisão de Sousândrade includes a comprehensive anthology of the work of the Brazilian romantic poet through which the de Campos brothers substantiate the previously unacknowledged relevance of both the content and the style of Sousândrade’s poetry. Their critical work aims to reintroduce and put into circulation the work of the romantic poet within the Brazilian literary scene of the 1960s, while trying to produce significant evidence to provocatively present a new controversial case within Brazilian literary history. The particular mode of poetic transfer the de Campos brothers carry out in ReVisão de Sousândrade is best understood in terms of the groundbreaking definition of cultural circulation developed by Lee and LiPuma mentioned in the Introduction. One of the main ideas Lee and LiPuma articulate in “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity” is that cultural circulation not only “transmits meanings” from one cultural context to another, but more importantly is a performative and constitutive act in itself able to create meaning, particular modes of cultural analysis, and ultimately specific “interpretive communities,” in the following terms: If circulation is to serve as a useful analytic construct for cultural analysis, it must be conceived as more than simply the movement of people, ideas, and commodities from one culture to another. Instead, recent work indicates that circulation is a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them. (Lee and LiPuma, 192) In this chapter, I analyze the ways in which the publication of ReVisão de Sousândrade configures a performative and constitutive event that aims to rewrite Brazilian cultural and literary history by unveiling and circulating the previously unacknowledged relevance of the work of Sousândrade. As the de Campos brothers argue, the main purpose of their work is not just to disseminate the forgotten poetry of the Brazilian romantic writer but, more importantly, to “create a case” that could reconfigure “Brazilian literary criticism” as an interpretive community. My main focus in this chapter is on the productive function of translation within the overall dynamics of cultural circulation of Sousândrade’s work as conceived and performed by the de Campos brothers in their attempt to rewrite the history of the avant-garde within the realms of Brazilian, Latin American, and ultimately world literature.

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Sousândrade’s Epic Vision of the Americas: O Guesa Most of the poetic texts by Sousândrade that were put back into circulation in 1964 by the de Campos brothers in ReVisão de Sousândrade belong to Sousândrade’s main opus, O Guesa, a Pan-American epic poem of thirteen cantos that he began composing around 1852, and on which the romantic poet worked for the rest of his life. In particular, eight of the final thirteen cantos were composed while he was living in New York between 1871 and 1885. O Guesa has thus a rather complex publishing history that mirrors Sousândrade’s cosmopolitan and peripatetic life on both sides of the Atlantic and across the Americas. As described in Sousândrade, vida e obra, the groundbreaking bibliography of Sousândrade written by Frederick Williams, a first edition of the first four cantos of the poem was included in the publication of the poet’s Obras poéticas (New York, 1874) under the title of O Guesa errante, which was expanded to include cantos V to VIII in two additions published in 1876 and 1877. Sousândrade moved to New York in 1871, after having traveled extensively around South and Central America and Europe, including a long stay in Paris, where he allegedly took courses in Letters and Engineering at the Sorbonne.2 The final edition of his epic poem, now with the title O Guesa, was registered in the British Museum in 1888 and published by the Moorfields Press in London at about the same time. Just a few years before, in 1885, Sousândrade had left the United States, and after a journey through Central America, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, returned to Brazil where he lived completely immersed in the political milieu of the state of Maranhão, according to Sousândrade scholar Jomar Morães, as a “patriota abolicionista e republicano fervoroso” (16; abolitionist patriot and a passionate republican) until his death in São Luis in 1902. The thirteen-canto O Guesa describes the epic journey through the Americas, Africa, and Europe of the Guesa, a sacrificial figure belonging to the culture of the Muyscas Indians of the great plain of Bogotá, Colombia. Sousândrade recovered the mythic figure of the errant Guesa from the work of the nineteenth-century German explorer and naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt, incorporating his groundbreaking ethnographic studies in Central America as one of the main sources for his own re-creation of the Muyscan wandering protagonist of his epic poem.3 At the same time, Sousândrade also drew some key elements for his composition of O Guesa from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). The key influence of Byron’s Harold is acknowledged in different moments of O Guesa by Sousândrade himself, since the narrative structure of the epic describes the progress of a wandering hero who,

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like Harold, explores different regions of the modern world. Similar to the role of Harold in Byron’s romantic epic poem, the mythic figure of the Guesa occupies a key liminal position within the various cultural and geographic realms he encounters in his Pan-American and transatlantic journey. The intrinsic errancy of the Guesa—that takes him to the Andes, the Amazon, Brazil, West Africa, Europe, New York, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—together with the complex conflation of American mythological and historical events in the poem construct a rather unique poetic point of view through which Sousândrade was able to explore certain pressure points of the American experience during the nineteenth century that transcended ethnic, national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Perhaps the most relevant passage of O Guesa is Canto X, which contains the section of Sousândrade’s poem that the brothers de Campos famously refer to as “O Inferno de Wall Street.” In this passage—formally parallel to a previous section in Canto II in which the Guesa, still in the Amazon, takes part in the indigenous ritual dance of the Tatuturema— Sousândrade critiques the rampant capitalism of the Gilded Age orchestrated from the financial capital of the United States, which was becoming the dominant force in the world economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. The hellish experience that the Guesa faces in New York, specifically depicted by the brothers de Campos in reference to Goethe’s Faust as “a segunda Walpurgisnacht sousandradina” (Sousândrade’s second Walpurgisnacht)—the first of which appears in Canto II of O Guesa—includes a series of grotesque encounters with figures from different historical eras of the Americas that are collapsed into the fragmented textual realm of the epic poem. A brief passage of Canto X of O Guesa shows the formal complexity of Sousândrade’s style, as well as the wide range of political and historical references. (Freeloves meditando nas free-burglars bellas artes:) – Roma, começou pelo roubo; New York, rouba a nunca acabar, O Rio, anthropophago; = Ophiophago Newark . . . tudo pernas p’ra o ar . . . (w. childs, a.m. elegiando sobre o filho de sarah-stevens:) – Por sobre o fraco a morte asvoaça . . . Chicago em chamma, em chamma Boston, De amor Hell-Gate é esta frol . . . Que John Caracol,

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Chuva e sol, Gil-engendra em gil rouxinol . . . Civilisação . . . ão! . . . Court-hall! [ . . . ] (columbus perdendo e vespucci ganhando, pelas formas:) –Em Cundin-Amarca, El Dorado, O Zak em pó de oiro a brilhar . . . = Amarca é América, Am-eri-ca : Bom piloto assim sonda o mar ! (O Guesa, 243) (Freeloves meditating on the free-burglars Beaux Arts) – Rome began by stealing; New York steals without end The River, anthropophago; = Ophiophago Newark . . . legs all up in the air (w. childs, a.m. in elegiac mode on sarah-stevens’ son:) – Death hovers over the feeble Chicago in flames, in flames Boston, This flower from Love’s Hell-Gate . . . That John the Snail, Rain and sun, Gil-Engenders in gil nightingale . . . Civilization . . . to the . . . Court-hall! (columbus losing and vespucci winning, in their ways:) –In Cundin-Amarca, El Dorado, The Zak in shining gold-dust . . . = Amarca is America, Am-eri-ca: Thus a good pilot explores the sea! This brief excerpt displays the varied set of registers and American themes incorporated by Sousândrade in his poem, including New York as the brutal and imperialistic capital of the United States that abuses the weaker city of Newark; the hellish aura of burning fire surrounding main U.S. cities; or the self-profiting colonial exploitation of America by European conquistadors, to name a few. At the same time, this set of historical, geopolitical, and economic references emerges through Sousândrade’s innovative poetic juxtaposition of characters and events

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that intentionally disrupts formal literary conventions, as well as the narrative flow of the poem, favoring a multidimensional collage of various scenes driven by the constant movement of baffling poetic images throughout the epic. Interestingly, though, the de Campos brothers emphasize the groundbreaking nature of Sousândrade’s O Guesa not in terms of its clear relation with the European romantic tradition—due in part to its evident connections to the work of Byron, Von Humboldt, and Goethe—but rather in terms of what they define as Sousândrade’s modernist tendencies, “em premonição mais uma vez á linha Pound-Eliot da poesia atual” (38; in premonition once again of the Pound-Eliot line of contemporary poetry). The key aspect of their critical characterization of O Guesa is that Sousândrade’s revolutionary style essentially predates for them the formal innovations that characterize Anglo-American modernism, mostly bypassing the clear relation of Sousândrade’s work with European romanticism. In this sense, the critical revision and circulation of Sousândrade’s poetry entailed by the publication of ReVisão de Sousândrade is an invaluable event for Augusto and Haroldo de Campos since it provides a poetics of an unparalleled modernity and originality within Brazilian and Latin American literature, as well as a historical opportunity to articulate a new critical framework for Brazilian literary history and, consequently, their own avant-garde poetics of concretismo.

The Concretista Revision of Sousândrade: A Poundian Invention of Literary History Despite the unquestionable originality of Sousândrade’s O Guesa as a revolutionary and formally innovative Pan-American epic poem originally belonging to Brazilian and Latin American romanticism, it is surprising that a poet practically forgotten for more than a half century would be deemed by Haroldo de Campos in his work Ruptura dos gêneros na literatura latino-americana (1977) as the “insulado patriarca latinoamericano da poesía de vanguarda” (24; isolated Latin American patriarch of avant-garde poetry), and the “precursor dos rumos da vanguarda na poesía universal” (20; precursor of the avant-garde currents of universal poetry). As de Campos’s words suggest, the overall revision of the work of Sousândrade by the de Campos brothers involves a twofold intervention within the realm of literary history. First, it establishes the figure of Sousândrade as the lost origin—now turned patriarch—of the

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Latin American avant-garde, providing at the same time a solid genealogical foundation for the concretista movement in Brazil. Second, the articulation of their own avant-garde genealogy based on Sousândrade as their direct poetic origin legitimizes the universal impact of the poetics of Brazilian concretismo as an avant-garde movement extending beyond the specific historical boundaries of Brazilian and Latin America culture of the 1950s and 1960s. The incorporation of Sousândrade to the theoretical corpus of Brazilian concretismo is primarily carried out through a sophisticated analysis and selection of Sousândrade’s work that continuously gravitates around toward modernist poetic concepts originally developed by Ezra Pound during the first three decades of the twentieth century. From a formal, thematic, and theoretical standpoint—ReVisão de Sousândrade essentially constitutes a reading of Sousândrade’s work based on the main precepts of Pound’s own modernist poetics, as the de Campos brothers argue here: Mas não é só na ideação de um inferno financeiro que se assemelham Sousândrade e Pound. Aproximam-se, como ja fizemos notar em outros pontos deste trabalho, por diversas características estilísticas:—como a técnica imagista, atrás examinada, e a dicção sintetico-ideogrâmica, que ora abordamos, e que por sua vez envolve vários procedimentos: compressão da historia, montagens de citações coloquiais ou literarias ou de faits divers da época, pot-pourri idiomático, enumerações críticas e fusões de personae. (Campos and Campos, ReVisão de Sousândrade, 55) But it is not only in their conception of a financial hell that Sousândrade and Pound are alike. They resemble each other, as we have noted at other points in this work, in various stylistic features: like the imagist technique previously examined, and the synthetic-ideogrammatic diction being discussed now, which involves various practices: the compression of history, the montage of citations from faits diverse of the time, colloquial and literary quotes, idiomatic potpourri, critical enumerations and the fusion of personae. As a stylistic feature (“técnica imagista”) shared by both Sousândrade and Pound according to the de Campos brothers, imagism is of special relevance here since it was a poetic concept originally invented by Ezra Pound roughly twenty-five years after Sousândrade published his final edition of O Guesa. The notion of imagism initially emerges in Revisão de Sousândrade as one of the two key formal features that, together with

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its “barroquismo” (baroque form), characterizes Sousândrade’s poetry for Augusto and Haroldo de Campos. Apart from its baroque element— which they analyze as an intrinsically Latin American characteristic conceived in purely aesthetic terms as an “estilo abstrato” (27; abstract style) expressed in the use of conceits, pure metaphors, and foreignizing terms—Sousândrade’s poetry is characterized by what they refer to as its “imagist” dimension, or “linha imagista” (95). In their attempt to define the imagery characteristic of the poetry of the Brazilian romantic poet, the brothers de Campos use two key concepts that are intrinsically connected to Pound’s formulation of the notion of the poetic image, i.e., imagism and phanopoeia, in the following terms: Ao lado do barroquismo, há a considerar na poética de Sousândrade uma componente por assim dizer imagista, voltada para um tipo de imagem visual menos eriçada de intelectualismo e de wit e toda feita de impactos olho-coisa, luz-movimento. É um Sousândrade que lembra a fanopéia poundiana (“the throwing of an image on the mind’s retina,” “the moving image”) de poemas de Personae e de muitos Cantares. (Campos and Campos, ReVisão de Sousândrade, 28) Next to its baroque element, there has to be considered a component in Sousândrade’s poetics that may be called “imagist,” which moves toward a kind of visual image less charged with intellectualism and wit, and fully composed of eye-thing and light-movement impacts. It is a Sousândrade that reminds one of the Poundian phanopoeia (“the throwing of an image on the mind’s retina,” “the moving image”) of poems from Personae and of many Cantos. While Pound’s conception of imagism emerges around 1912, his notion of “phanopoeia” comes as a later addition to the critical body of terms he used to refer to his complex—and at times fragmentary—theoretical conception of the poetic image.4 That Augusto and Haroldo de Campos describe one of the main “macroesthetic” or stylistic features of Sousândrade’s poetry as “imagista,” and, moreover, that this concept is exclusively defined in Poundian terms is extremely symptomatic of the overarching influence of Pound’s modernist poetics on Brazilian concretismo, as well as within the theoretical articulation of their own avant-garde poetics. In other words, the manner in which Augusto and Haroldo de Campos invoke the Poundian concept of imagism emphasizes the kind of critical integration that very same invocation tries to establish in relation both to Sousândrade’s and Pound’s poetry as two of the main pillars

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that sustain the avant-garde project of Brazilian concretismo as a literary movement with global significance. Moreover, in their attempt to rewrite literary history, the de Campos brothers invoke imagism in ways parallel to Pound’s original formulation of his own avant-garde poetics. Pound originally fabricated the word “imagist,” or rather in its French spelling “Imagiste,” in 1912 as a term he applied to five poems by T. E. Hulme that Pound included in his collection Ripostes. He later used the term to describe some classically oriented poems produced by the American poet Hilda Doolittle and the English poet Richard Aldington that were edited by Pound and published by Harriet Monroe—per Pound’s request—in the journal Poetry in 1913. Based on the rapid success of his foundational concept of imagisme for a modernist poetics, Pound subsequently produced an anthology of imagist poems titled Des Imagistes (1914) containing work by poets— including himself—which he felt belonged to his newly developed movement. More important, a year before the publication of Pound’s Imagiste anthology, he issued the seminal series of poetic precepts under the title “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” originally published in Poetry in March of 1913, in which he establish the three inaugural imagist precepts written in relation to H.D. and Aldington’s first imagiste poems into a fully fleshed poetics.5 The main aspect of Pound’s imagiste project that must be emphasized in relation to the concretista revision of Sousândrade, is that it primarily functions as a powerful tool for the production of literary history. As Martin Kayman argues, Pound’s influential conception of imagisme both as a literary movement and an avant-garde poetics ultimately constituted a “quasi-mythic” invention of literary history: “what Pound produced in Imagisme was a literary history—or rather, a fiction of literary history, and hence a history of quasi-mythic character” (Kayman, 63). At stake in Kayman’s crucial analysis of Pound’s invention of imagisme is the need of avant-garde movements to produce, contextualize, and rewrite their own place within literary history, and to locate themselves as crucial components within this reconceptualized and rewritten literary tradition. In the light of Kayman’s argument, Pound’s modernist credo of “Make it new” comes specifically to mind not so much as a call for a brand-new modern poetics, but rather as a call for a radical modernist remaking of literary history. Pound’s own definition of criticism developed in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” provides crucial insight into the kind of critical work that theoretically sustains the notion of imagism, both as originally conceived by Pound and in the brothers de Campos’ use of the term regarding Sousândrade:

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Criticism is not a circumscription or a set of prohibitions. It provides fixed points of departure. It may startle a dull reader into alertness. That little of it which is good is mostly in stray phrases; or if it be an older artist helping a younger it is in great measure but rules of thumb, cautions gained by experience. (Pound, “Retrospect,” 4) For Pound, criticism implies the fleshing out of a very particular form of reading experience based on the intellectual search for those “stray phrases” that “startle a dull reader into alertness” and that can be determined and captured into a specific frame of reference as “points of departure,” very likely toward more textual criticism. Pound’s own conception of criticism essentially constitutes an autotelic textual experience that keeps generating new manifestations of itself as it searches for “stray” objects as points of departure for the very kind of critical and aesthetic judgment that generated them in the first place. Thus, Pound’s formulation of criticism implies the searching, collection, and production of textual moments that startle the reader into the kind of experience precisely defined by Pound as criticism. This particular method of assimilation in which a specific moment of experiential and readerly alertness can be fixed and incorporated as a poetic image into the overall body of criticism is otherwise referred to by Pound as the “method of the Luminous Detail” in his early essay “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1912). Pound’s self-labeled “New Method in scholarship” (Selected Prose, 21) develops a modernist literary history through a series of formal principles that are extracted via what Pound defines at different times as “the luminous detail,” “sources—of light, heat, motion,” “virtù,” and, in a slightly more specific manner, as “particular works or the works of particular authors” (24). For Pound, a “luminous detail” constitutes in essence a critical fact able to justify in itself a wide range of literary activities, ranging from his literary criticism, to his editions of the works of various modernist poets, his controversial translations of Italian, Provençal, and Chinese poetry, or his conception of imagism as a modernist poetics. Carol T. Christ argues that Pound’s modernist poetics is grounded on a rather problematic positivist theory of history—literary or otherwise—that pervades his work, in which, “significant facts are sufficient carriers of their own meaning,” as she describes here: He [Pound] can extend the ideal of the self-sufficient image that had motivated his early poetry and provide nothing else than an objectively based theory of civilization and culture in a poetry that is decisively modern. A collage of appropriately selected images will

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carry their own significance, imply general laws. . . . Through this historical collage, Pound constitutes a universal cultural memory which knows itself by its difference from the very elements which compose it. (Christ, 126) The critical apparatus surrounding the concretista revision of Sousândrade’s work as embodying an “imagista” poetics effectively functions as a “luminous” “collage of appropriately selected images” carefully searched for, compared, and edited by the de Campos brothers. In a way, the cultural memory they articulate around the figure of Sousândrade follows a parallel positivist logic to the cultural memory Pound constitutes through his “New method of scholarship,” as Carol Christ suggests. As a scholarly and critical project, ReVisão de Sousândrade aims at providing a “self-sufficient image” of the work of Sousândrade that could turn it into a historical fact and rewrite in itself the critical parameters of Brazilian literary history. Similar to the seminal role of the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel within Pound’s modernist poetics—also one of the main topics of Pound’s “Osiris” essay—the figure of Sousândrade becomes in the hands of the brothers de Campos the kind of “luminous detail” able to provide an original Brazilian source for their own avantgarde poetics. Similar to Pound’s strategy in his creation of imagisme briefly outlined previously, the de Campos brothers carry out a parallel invention of literary history around the figure of Sousândrade. The overall result of the critical revision of Sousândrade by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos is thus to present an image of Sousândrade as “o terremoto clandestino que ainda estremece a poesia brasileira e reclama um lugar de pionero na poesia universal” (back flap of the book; the clandestine earthquake that still stirs Brazilian poetry and that demands a pioneering place in universal poetry.). Their ReVisão constitutes thus a crucial component of a larger process within literary history which fulfills a foundational role for their own avant-garde poetics, as well as for their aspiration to be part of the global avant-garde extending beyond the borders of Brazilian and Latin American literature.

Translation, Circulation, and Anthropophagic Introjection: The Concretista Conversion of Sousândrade into Pound’s Precursor A main incorporative aspect of the de Campos brothers’ Poundian revision of Sousândrade is their recuperation of the anthropophagic aesthetic theory developed by the Brazilian modernist writer Oswald de

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Andrade (1890–1954). As de Andrade argues in his “Manifesto Antropófago,” originally published in the first issue of Revista de Antropofagía in 1928, his concept of “antropofagía” emerged as a Brazilian reaction against any manifestation of the colonizing import of bourgeois ideology (“contra todos os importadores de consciência enlatada” (Andrade, 14; against all importers of canned consciousness). “Antropofagía” implies for de Andrade the annihilation of bourgeois consciousness through its bodily incorporation by what he refers to as the indigenous “instinto Caraíba” (15): “Antropofagía. Absorção do inimigo sacro. Para transfomâlo em tótem” (18; Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. In order to transform it into totem). The Brazilian scholar Benedito Nunes, in his introduction to the Obras Completas of Oswald de Andrade, suggests that the incorporative aspect of de Andrade’s anthropophagic theory ultimately seeks to create an autonomous intellectual identity, “englobando tudo quanto deveríamos repudiar, assimilar e superar para a conquista da nossa autonomía intelectual” (Nunes, xxvi; incorporating everything we should repudiate, assimilate and overcome in order to attain our intellectual autonomy). The influence of the modernist work of de Andrade is therefore fundamental for the materialization of the critical reevaluation of Sousândrade carried out by the de Campos brothers. As Gonzalo Aguilar suggests in his study of the Brazilian Concrete movement, Poesía concreta brasileña (2003), the incorporative aspect of their avant-garde poetics is precisely related to the recuperation of the modernist poetics of de Andrade: El concepto clave en esta incorporación fue el de antropofagia, pero no en el sentido amplio y cultural en el que se lo ha entendido posteriormente (y en el que los poetas paulistas también han tomado parte) sino en un aspecto muy específico: la capacidad de incorporar los materiales más diversos a la voluntad constructiva propia del concretismo. (Aguilar, 116) The key concept in this incorporation was that of anthropophagy, but not in the wider cultural sense in which it has been later understood (and of which the São Paulo poets also took part) but rather in a very specific aspect: the capacity to incorporate the most diverse materials to the constructive will of concretismo. Following Aguilar, the key connection between de Andrade’s anthropophagic impulse and the de Campos brothers’ revision of Sousândrade lies in the concept of “constructive” incorporation. Thus, the critical work of the de Campos brothers expands and transforms the basic principles

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of the anthropophagic impulse characteristic of Brazilian modernismo, which attempts to establish the intellectual autonomy of Brazilian culture through a series of constructive incorporations of diverse cultural products. Tracing the source of the concept of antropofagía to the baroque origins of Latin American art and culture, Fernando Rosenberg describes the historical dimension of Brazilian concretismo as a “continuation” of Brazilian modernismo in the following terms: For this influential poet and critic [Haroldo de Campos], the Baroque initiates in Brazil a mode of operation characterized by polemic selection and incorporation from within the universal archive. Modernismo was the moment of self-consciousness and his own concretista poetic movement the continuation of this development. Despite the subversive intention of this strategy, it ends up confirming the universality of the archive it attempts to contest, which tends to be centered in the European literary tradition. (Rosenberg, 79) Rosenberg conceives the teleological progression of this Brazilian incorporative spirit as a “self-consciousness” characteristic of Brazilian modernism that is inherited and later expanded by the poetics of Brazilian concretismo. However, contrary to Rosenberg’s reading of a Brazilian “self-consciousness” that confirms an essentially Eurocentric “universality of the archive,” the critical revision of the work of Sousândrade offers a slightly more nuanced perspective on the particular universal tendencies of the concretista mode of anthropophagic incorporation at the core of the de Campos brothers’s project. However, as analyzed here, the concretista revision of the work of Sousândrade does not necessarily suggest a teleological progression of a Brazilian “modernista” self-consciousness in the Hegelian terms suggested by Rosenberg, but rather goes back in time to recover a forgotten romantic author in order to re-create a new constitutive moment of “selfconsciousness,” using Rosenberg’s term, for the Brazilian avant-garde. This anamnestic effort to bring back into the present a forgotten moment in Brazilian literary history partly bypasses the notion of Brazilian modernismo as the moment of “self-consciousness” for the Brazilian concrete movement as Rosenberg describes it. The revisionist project of the de Campos brothers similarly circumvents the repository of the European literary tradition as the center of the universal archive that their concretista strategy “confirms,” according to Rosenberg, for the sake of constituting a brand-new genealogy based on a truly native Brazilian origin for their own avant-garde project. Thus, the two key areas that require

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further critical inquiry within the context of ReVisão de Sousândrade are first, the Brazilian concrete movement’s relation with European and Anglo-American literature, particularly manifest in their incorporation of Poundian poetics, and second, the extent to which their conceptualization of the notion of “universality” related to that same corpus plays a role in their actual revision of Sousândrade. The “anthropophagic” dimension of the concretista incorporation inherent in the de Campos brothers’ revision of Sousândrade primarily constitutes an assimilation of diverse material to what Aguilar describes as the “constructive will” (voluntad constructiva) of their avant-garde poetics. In this context, the constructive will of the de Campos brothers aims in ReVisão de Sousândrade at a radical rewriting of literary history at both a local and universal level. In this dual sense, the figure of Sousândrade offers the brothers de Campos a Brazilian “luminous” source who not only incorporates “the archive” of European literature into the composition of a truly innovative Latin American epic poem, but more important, as they demonstrate, also predated some of the key formal innovations of European and Anglo-American modernism. Moreover, the anthropophagic “constructive will” of Brazilian concretismo also manages to incorporate Pound’s modernist poetics in a rather paradoxical way as an inherent component of the “luminous detail” of Brazilian concretismo itself, in particular as anamnestically embodied in the poetry of Sousândrade. Perhaps the most crucial significance of their anthropophagic incorporation of Pound’s method is their use of its intrinsic positivism, which manages to convert Sousândrade into the Brazilian and Latin American precursor of nothing other than Pound’s own seminal Cantos, as they argue here: Realmente os dois círculos infernais sousandradinos (o primeiro, no canto II, datado de 1858), fazem-no creador de uma posição precursora de importantes linhas de pesquisa da poesia atual, e em particular, temática e estilísticamente, dos Cantares de Ezra Pound. Nenhum dos antecessores de Pound, nem mesmo Robert Browning, poderia exibir algo tão chegado à concepção do autor de The Cantos como o “Inferno de Wall Street” do poeta maranhense. (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 109) In fact, Sousândrade’s two infernal circles (the first one included in Canto II dated from 1858) make him a creator of a precursor position of important exploratory venues of contemporary poetry, and in particular, thematically and stylistically of The Cantos of Ezra Pound. None of the predecessors of Pound, not even Robert Browning, could have exhibited anything as close to the conception

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of the author of The Cantos as “The Wall Street Inferno” composed by the poet from Maranhão. The de facto conversion of Sousândrade into Pound’s precursor entails a new and previously unacknowledged dimension of their constructive incorporation of Poundian poetics that is clearly located outside of the universality of the archive inherent in European and Anglo-American literature. A main theoretical implication of converting Sousândrade into Pound’s precursor is precisely the subversion and destabilization of European and Anglo-American hegemony in the definition of the origins of the historical avant-garde. In so doing, the de Campos brothers ultimately rewrite the genealogy of Poundian poetics as having emerged originally in a clandestine chapter belonging to Brazilian literary history. This “luminous” conversion of Sousândrade—that initially emerges in ReVisao de Sousândrade through a Poundian analysis of Sousândrade’s poetic style—culminates in a series of translations of Pound’s poetry into Portuguese. The de Campos brothers’ use of translation as a tool to incorporate Sousândrade as a precursor to the experimental poetics of Anglo-American modernism is obviously influenced by Pound’s own conception of translation as a form of criticism, always on the lookout for more significant “luminous details” to incorporate within his own paideuma.6 Ming Xie precisely emphasizes this aspect of Pound’s translation theory in her article “Pound as Translator”: “Thus translation is by necessity disruptive, distorting and transformative. Pound’s acute awareness of the need for a cultural paideuma makes it imperative for him to graft and appropriate fragments from various traditions to form a new hybrid, a pattern of universal significance” (Xie, 220). Partly mirroring the appropriating ethos of Pound’s take on translation, Haroldo de Campos argues that the main motivation for the translator is “la configuración de una tradición activa [ . . . ], un ejercicio de intelección, y a través de él una operación crítica al vivo” (“De la traducción como creación y como crítica,” 197; the configuration of a living tradition, an exercise in intellection, and through it a live critical operation). In this sense, the series of translations included in ReVisão de Sousândrade enact the kind of “live critical operation” that could simultaneously incorporate both Sousândrade and Pound within the critical body of Brazilian concretismo by providing a series of self-sufficient literary “facts” in which diverse poetic images from Pound’s Cantos look extremely similar to the poetic imagery of key passages from Sousândrade’s poetry.

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Pound: Crescent of blue-short waters, green-gold in the shallows (Foice de água azul-cambiante, verde-ouro nos baixos) —Canto IV Black, azure and hyaline glass over Tyro (Negro, azul e hialino, onda de vidrio sobre Tiro) — Canto II Sousândrade: Em sempre-móvel íris, verde-neve Azul jacinto e as abrasadas rosas — Guesa, Canto X 7 Dos areais o espelho te reflete O nimbo áureo-diáfano-cinzento. —Guesa, Canto VII8 Pound: The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees, The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top, Like a fish-scale roof, Like the church roof in Poictiers If it were gold. Beneath it, beneath it Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disc of sunlight Flaking the black, soft water. O vale é espesso de folhas, folhas, árvores, O sol brilha em seu topo, Como un telhado de escamas, Como o telhado da igreja em Poictiers Se fosse de ouro. Sob, por sob Nem raio, nem lasca, nem parco disco de sol Franja a branda água negra. Sousândrade: Os derradeiros fogos do ocidente Jorram lâminas e ouro sobre a massa

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Da viva treva, líquida, luzente — O Rio-Negro susurrando passa — Guesa, Canto II9 Móveis noites d’estrelas que fagulham — Guesa, Canto I10 (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 28) The specific use of translation by the de Campos brothers in their comparison of passages from Pound and Sousândrade, however, does more than merely provide flashes of the evidence—as Pound argues in relation to his own series of translations included in his “Osiris” essay—of similarities between Pound’s and Sousândrade’s poetry.11 It marks, more importantly, a crucial component of the overall process of cultural circulation insofar as these juxtaposed translated passages create a series of apparently similar images in the work of both poets. Thus, the de Campos translations of Pound’s poetry ultimately incorporate a hybrid poetic image into the theoretical body of Brazilian concretismo, constituting a “luminous” image paradoxically composed of both Pound’s and Sousândrade’s work that is facilitated by an act of translation that, as Haroldo de Campos argues here, aims at the re-creation of the original: Para nosotros, la traducción de textos creativos será siempre recreación, o creación paralela, autónoma aunque recíproca. Cuanto más lleno de dificultades esté un texto, será más recreable, más seductor como posibilidad abierta de recreación. (“De la traducción como creación y como crítica,” 189) For us, the translation of creative texts will always be re-creation, or parallel creation, autonomous although reciprocal. The more filled with difficulties a text may be, the higher will be its potential for re-creation, and the more seducing as an open possibility for re-creation. As a literary, linguistic, and critical practice as conceived by Haroldo de Campos, translation plays a fundamental role in the form of cultural circulation that the Brazilian writers are articulating in ReVisão de Sousândrade. Their translation of the lines of Pound’s poetry not only establishes the connection between Sousândrade and Pound but, more important, constitutes an act of cultural circulation, since it produces in itself a particularly meaningful event that can be used to alter how the interpretive community (primarily configured by writers and literary critics in Brazil, but at the same time with a clear intent to reach beyond that local community) constructs and conceptualizes the field of

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literary history, and the way that history is interpreted. In other words, in ReVisão de Sousândrade, translation is not only able to re-create an original work, but as a key part of the overall process of cultural circulation, it also has the potential to re-create and transform the very interpretive community that ascribes value to that same original work, in this case Pound’s poetic images as they relate to Sousândrade’s. At the same time, translation emerges as a cultural process necessary for the de Campos brothers to claim their own cultural autonomy—both in relation to their own autonomy as critics from older and traditional forms of literary history, and to the proposed autonomy of Brazilian literature at large in the face of the universality of the archive implicit in the dominant forms of European literature previously highlighted by Rosenberg. Moreover, as a process of parallel creation, the translations of Pound’s poetry into Portuguese included in ReVisão de Sousândrade re-create the intrinsic nuances of Pound’s poetic imagery so that it could be “luminously” contrasted with parallel passages from Sousândrade’s poetry, and thus incorporated within the Brazilian avant-garde tradition. Hence, in the light of Lee and LiPuma’s definition of cultural circulation, the de Campos brothers’ translations of the work of Pound and their juxtaposition to the work of Sousândrade are ultimately located within an “interpretive community” determined by its own particular “internal dynamics” in the terms suggested by Lee and LiPuma here: Cultures of circulation are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate among them, including—critically—the abstract nature of the forms that underwrite and propel the process of circulation itself. The circulation of such forms—whether the novels and newspapers of the imagined community or the equitybased derivatives and currency swaps of the modern market— always presuppose the existence of their respective interpretive communities, with their own forms of interpretation and evaluation. These interpretive communities determine lines of interpretation, found institutions, and set boundaries based principally on their own internal dynamics. (Lee and LiPuma, 192) Their key notion of an “internal dynamics” and its relation to how cultural circulation is established by a particular interpretive community deserves further consideration in relation to ReVisão de Sousândrade. One of the aspects of the vital connection between translation and circulation examined here is the ways in which translation particularly entails for the de Campos brothers an internal critical move that incorporates the poetic images of both Sousândrade and Pound as forms ultimately

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determined by the poetics of Brazilian concretismo as an interpretive community. In other words, translation in the hands of the de Campos brothers ultimately constitutes a form of literary incorporation of the work of both Pound and Sousândrade—figures previously located outside of the “set boundaries” of modern Brazilian literary critics and historians as an interpretive community—that is ultimately determined by the internal dynamics of concretismo. Overall, the internal dynamics at the core of the process of cultural circulation carried out by the de Campos brothers in ReVisão de Sousândrade—especially regarding their conception and practice of translation as a re-creation of the original—operates structurally as a mode of introjection. By introjection, I mean here rather literally the concept succinctly defined by Laplanche and Pontalis in The Language of Psychoanalysis (1967) as a “process revealed by analytic investigation: in phantasy, the subject transposes objects and their inherent qualities from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ of himself” (229). The concept of introjection was originally developed by the Hungarian–born psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in his essay, “Introjection and Transference,” and was rapidly incorporated into the standard corpus of psychoanalytic discourse.12 In his seminal essay, Ferenczi uses the notion of introjections to discuss the mechanism of certain transfers of affect carried out by the analysand when confronted with the figure of the analyst during the course of the psychoanalytic treatment of neurotic patients. For Ferenczi, introjection is triggered through a process of analogical resemblance that, in fact, constitutes an instance of figural likeness—for example, the “‘paternal’ air” (41) of the physician is grounded on particular visual details that look like those experienced in the past for an original love-object—that generates an anamnestic recognition, turning the external object into an affectively charged figure due to its figural relation to a previous past event. Ferenczi’s conception of introjection constitutes a translational and transferential mechanism that is based on a certain imaginative abstraction of phenomenal detail recognized not in terms of that particular external source that triggers the actual transferring process, but rather of something other than that same phenomena, that is, as something else formally related to it. The process of introjection is therefore grounded on a figural interpretation of formal details that structurally operates through a combination of synecdoche and metonym. Whereas synecdoche leads to the recognition of a part-whole presentation that generates the anamnestic recuperation of a past event through the reenactment of the original transference, metonym leads to the consequential substitution of the former event for the actual moment of analysis.

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These two key interrelated aspects inherent in the notion of psychoanalytic introjection (i.e., a figural correlation that triggers an anamnestic recognition) are particularly relevant for the analysis of the internal dynamics of cultural circulation at work in the de Campos brothers’ critical revision of Sousândrade. Based on the concept of introjection as a figural incorporative mechanism, the role of the de Campos brothers as translators entails the re-creation of the inherent difficulties or peculiar imagery of Pound’s poetry in order to incorporate them within the critical corpus of concretismo, since, as they argue, these difficulties are intrinsically related to their own imagist interpretation of the forgotten body of Sousândrade’s poetry. Thus, the translations of Pound’s poetic images juxtaposed with various passages from Sousândrade’s poetry constitutes a process of “anthropophagic” introjection through which a particular symptom—here circumscribed to a kind of poetic image defined by Pound as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (“A Retrospect,” 4)—is re-created in a brand-new historical context as it pertains to Brazilian concretismo. Moreover, the use of translation by the de Campos brothers is also connected to the anamnestic feature inherent in the notion of psychoanalytic introjection. Based on Ferenczi’s formulation of introjection, the interrelation between Sousândrade’s poetry, Pound’s original poetry, and the de Campos brothers’ own translations of Pound’s poetry can be analyzed to operate through a complex system of analogical resemblances in which two different external manifestations of the same “symptom”—as a poetic image in this case—are interpreted to be intrinsically alike and thus inherently related to each other. Similarly, the transfer mechanism defined by Ferenczi as introjection revolves around the experience of a figurative correlation that departs from the recognition of a series of similarities between the new and former symptoms, acquiring a formal and historical significance when the new symptom is incorporated as a prior “sensation” of itself, and thus correlated anamnestically to its newly discovered “original sources.” My use of the concept of introjection to analyze the internal dynamics at play in the cultural circulation established by the de Campos brothers in ReVisão de Sousândrade reveals that through their translation of Pound they are ultimately leading the imagistic elements of Pound’s poetry back to their “original sources,” which the de Campos brothers consider to be embodied in the work of the romantic poet from Maranhão.

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The Brazilian Subversion of Pound’s Modernist Critical Method The important fact that Brazilian concretismo appears roughly four decades after the emergence of the historical avant-garde emphasizes the programmatic need to find a precursor that could legitimize the historical relevance of the Brazilian Concrete movement in particular and the global relevance of Brazilian literature during the twentieth century in general. As the de Campos brothers argue, their revision of Sousândrade constitutes an attempt to add a Brazilian chapter to the literary history of the avant-garde—similar to the incorporation of the poetry of Luis de Góngora by the Generación del 27 in Spain, the recuperation of the English metaphysical poets by T. S. Eliot, or of the Provençal troubadours by Ezra Pound within Anglo-American modernism: “Pode-se dizer que uma das características do movimento de renovação literária que se consolidou neste século é a de ser ele acompanhado pelo redescobrimento de poetas e fases literárias boicoteados e obscurecidos pela rotina de uma tradição petrificante” (ReVisão de Sousândrade, 23; It can be argued that one of the features of the movement of literary renovation that became consolidated in this century is that it was accompanied by the rediscovery of poets and literary periods that had been boycotted and obscured by a petrifying tradition). The anthropophagic incorporation of Poundian poetics in ReVisão de Sousândrade and the conversion of Sousândrade into Pound’s precursor, as argued previously, constitute an overall attempt to establish the intellectual autonomy of Brazilian literature and culture in and of itself, albeit in the particular terms established by the de Campos brothers. Referring again to Benedito Nunes’s analysis of the anthropophagic spirit of de Andrade in its incorporative capability to integrate “everything we should repudiate, assimilate and overcome in order to conquer our intellectual autonomy,” ReVisão de Sousândrade constitutes thus an attempt to reconfigure the internal dynamics of Brazilian literary criticism so as to produce a relevant local literary history that could overcome the dominance of European and Anglo-American modernism in the avant-garde renovation of world poetry during the twentieth century. Despite the connections and similarities that exist between the formal revolution carried out by Sousândrade at the end of the nineteenth century—which can be described as being rooted in his Pan-American and romantic cosmopolitanism—and the one carried out by Pound during the early decades of the twentieth century—which clearly emerges from an overpowering critical concern regarding the invention of a modernist literary history—it is important to examine some of the secondary

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effects of the concretista introjective incorporation of both Pound and Sousândrade into the avant-garde critical project of the de Campos brothers. One relevant consequence is the general loss of the deeply subversive spirit of Sousândrade’s characteristically revolutionary romanticism owing to the nearly exclusive concern by the de Campos brothers to ground the modernity of Sousândrade as a form of proto-Anglo-American modernism figured in the Poundian poetics of imagisme. Thus, two of the key features of Sousândrade’s poetry that become partly lost in the concretista revision are his lyrical exaltation of the natural exuberance of South and Central America, and, more important, his general lack of concern regarding poetic form. As Sousândrade suggests in the Memorabilia that introduces the 1876 publication of Cantos V–VII of O Guesa, it was precisely his rejection of a formal concern for poetry, as well as his neo-pagan conception of the natural world of the Americas as the creative source for his poetic imagination, that led to the generation of his groundbreaking epic poetry: Deixemos os mestres da forma—se até os deuses passam! É em nos mesmos que está nossa divindade. Não é pelo velho mundo atrás que chegaremos a idade de ouro, que está adiante além. O bíblico e o ossiânico, o dórico e o jônico, e o alemão e o luso-hispano, uns são repugnantes e outros, se o não são, modificam-se á natureza americana. Nesta natureza estão as propias fontes, grandes e formosas com os seus rios e as suas montanhas . . . e é aí que beberemos a forma do original carácter literario qualquer que seja a língua diferente que falarmos. (Sousândrade, Memorabilia, 167) Let’s leave behind the masters of form—even the Gods pass away! It is within ourselves that our divinity lies. It is not through the old world behind us that we will arrive at the Golden Age, which is well ahead of us. As for the biblical, the Ossian, the Doric, and the Jonic and the German and the Luso-Hispanic, some are repugnant and others, if they are not, alter themselves within the nature of America. It is in this nature where the very sources lie, large and beautiful with their rivers and mountains . . . and it is there that we will drink the form of the original literary character regardless of the different language we may speak. Perhaps part of the reason for the disappearance of these two key elements of Sousândrade’s romantic poetry from the concretista reevaluation of his work is that those revolutionary elements do not fully fit within the critical project through which he is incorporated into the body of

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the Brazilian and Latin American avant-garde, especially regarding the internal dynamics of their own interpretive community. In this way, their interpretation and selection of Sousândrade’s work constitutes a symptom of a positivist method of scholarship that paradoxically chooses to ignore that which is not perceived rather literally as “luminous” in the Poundian sense of the term. As in Pound’s positivist method of criticism, one of the problems with the critical method of ReVisão de Sousândrade is that it is exclusively grounded on the judgment of the critic—here critics—to construct a poetic system that could legitimize in itself a critical and aesthetic project. Wai Chee Dimock emphasizes the conceptual problems inherent in the kind of aesthetic judgment that lies at the core of Pound’s critical system as follows: Aesthetic judgment is most often, and most powerfully, a lone judgment. Its force is never generalizable, for that force is measured by its peculiar grip on one person, a grip that bears the imprint of one subjectivity, as it does no one else’s. It is at this point, where an across-the-board “taste” turns into something much more luminous (and much more obsessive) for one particular person that aesthetic judgment can be said a vital mental event, an event that marks that person. (Dimock, “Transnational Beauty,” 121) Despite the fact that it provides for a controversial reassessment of Brazilian literary history, the critical project at the core of ReVisão de Sousândrade is mainly grounded on the authority established through the same kind of aesthetic judgment that cannot be generalized and that “bears the imprint of one subjectivity” just stated by Dimock. As such, it constitutes a theoretical project intrinsically related to an authoritarian form of criticism, based exclusively on the series of self-evident facts established solely by the Poundian authority of the critic’s aesthetic judgment. Although the groundbreaking critical work developed by the de Campos brothers in Revisão de Sousândrade effectively rediscovers and puts into circulation the forgotten poetry of Sousândrade for an audience contemporary to Brazilian concretismo, it does so only through the invocation of their own authority as critics to make readers believe in the self-evidence of the “unparalleled” modernity of Sousândrade’s poetry. A brief quotation from Pound’s essay on “Ecclesiastical History” (1934), in which Pound nostalgically invokes the making of religious history, illustrates the authoritarian tone of his method of “the luminous detail”: “Time when Church no longer had faith enough to believe that with proper instruction and argument the unbeliever or heretic could be made to see daylight. Invocation of authority to make him believe” (61).

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It is obvious that the positivist nature of the “new” critical “method of the luminous detail” through which Pound attempted to rewrite literary history, and the totalitarian concept of “daylight” that could be forced faithfully on the “unbeliever and heretic” which Pound describes in relation to the ecclesiastical form of history he favors are intrinsically related to each other. However, in the very process of translating and transferring Pound’s poetics to their own Brazilian interpretive community, the de Campos brothers subvert and destabilize the power of the same critical authority they use in their attempt to rewrite Brazilian literary history. By effectively converting the work of Sousândrade into a precursor of the work of Pound through a process of poetic translation and cultural circulation, the de Campos brothers ultimately challenge the theological foundations of Pound’s conception of history in which the “unbeliever or heretic could be made to see daylight.” In other words, by rather literally transferring Pound’s method of criticism into the Brazilian interpretive community for whom the publication of ReVisão de Sousândrade was originally aimed, the de Campos brothers ultimately subvert the form of history that originally lay at the very core of Pound’s method of the “luminous detail.” This complex process of translation and transfer creates a new native origin that displaces and subverts Pound’s hegemonic authority as the basis of his own method of criticism used for the conversion of Sousândrade as the lost patriarch of the Latin American avant-garde. This paradoxical power of translation to both convert and subvert a particular cultural paradigm is demonstrated in some of its key theoretical implications by Vicente Rafael in his influential work Contracting Colonialism. In his study of translation, religious conversion and cultural subjection during the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, Rafael provides evidence to support how translation is endowed with a double potential within a colonial context: first, translation as the interlingual practice used to enforce the ideological subjugation entailed in religious conversion of the colonized natives, and then, as the linguistic and cultural tool for the vernacular reformulation of this colonial conversion into a subversive productive force to establish new forms of cultural autonomy for the colonized culture: Translation, by making conceivable the transfer of meaning and intention between colonizer and colonized, laid the basis for articulating the general outlines of subjugation prescribed by conversion; but it also resulted in the ineluctable separation between the original message of Christianity (which was itself about the proper

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nature of origins as such) and its rhetorical formulation in the vernacular. For in setting languages in motion, translation tended to cast intentions adrift, now laying, now subverting the ideological grounds of colonial hegemony. (Rafael, 21) Therefore, in their own attempt to establish a form of cultural autonomy, the Brazilian Concrete poets end up articulating a model of avant-garde literary hybridity that subverts—through their use of the vernacular and the local—the hegemony of Pound’s authoritarian critical method, in terms parallel to those just unveiled by Rafael. On the one hand, it is evident that their critical analysis is partly “subjugated” to Pound’s authoritarian critical method, his conception of translation, and his modernist “invention” of literary history. On the other hand, within the system of cultural circulation they establish around the figures of Sousândrade and Pound, the former becomes the latter’s precursor for all the critical intents and purposes ultimately determined by the Brazilian Concrete movement, with the effect of subverting Pound’s role as the sole “origin” and gravitational center of the avant-garde poetics of imagisme. Although there is no doubt that the avant-garde cultural memory re-created around the figure of Sousândrade by the de Campos brothers is grounded on a critical method that shares fundamental features with Pound’s own method of the “luminous detail”—especially since they are both based on “a universal cultural memory which knows itself by its difference from the very elements which compose it,” as suggested by Carol Christ—it is also evident that one of the consequences of this revision is not so much to reinforce but rather to subvert Pound’s hegemonic role as the sole origin of the very poetics he promoted in the numerous invocations to his own “luminous” critical authority. In its wider historical terms, the subversion of a previously hegemonic order literally aimed at converting the “heretic” is a particularly important aspect of the process of cultural circulation developed by the de Campos brothers as Brazilian writers. As mentioned previously, the Brazilian cultural autonomy that the de Campos brothers are trying to rearticulate in the 1960s is necessarily related to what is referred to within Brazilian culture as the Caraíba instinct at the core of the anthropophagic poetics of Brazilian Modernismo from the 1920s. It is precisely in the context of the “Manifesto antropófago” of Oswald de Andrade where the power of Christian conversion as the ideological method of hegemony enforced by the Portuguese colonizers is consciously subverted into a vernacular cultural power that disrupts and problematizes the very ideological basis of that same hegemonic power of colonial oppression

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and religious conversion. As de Andrade mentions in the aphoristic tone of his “Manifesto antropófago,” “Nunca fomos catequizados. Vivemos a través de um dereito sonâmbulo. Fizemos que Cristo nascer em Bahia. O em Belém do Pará” (145. We were never transformed by catechesis. We live through a somnambular right. We made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará). It is this modern Caraíba Brazilian cultural impulse which originally emerged as a subversive response to the colonial ideology that reduced the colonized to the terms of the teleological law of Christian doctrine, and through which “the unbeliever or heretic could be made to see daylight,” using Pound’s words in “Ecclesiastical History.” This aspect of the ideology of religious conversion and interlingual translation at the core of the Portuguese colonial empire is precisely emphasized by Vicente Rafael in relation to the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, which followed a similar process of Christian conversion and colonial subjection to the one experienced in Brazil. Rafael describes this colonial process of ideological reconstitution and geographical relocation of “native bodies” in the Philippines as follows: The relocation of native bodies—or at least the designation of their areas of residence as parts of a larger administrative grid—permitted them to be identified in Spanish political and religious terms. Resettlement and evangelization were consistently denoted by the same term used by translation: reducir. To reduce a thing to its former state, to convert, to contract, to divide into small parts, to contain, to comprehend, to bring back into obedience: the multilayered definitions of reducir allow for a variety of contexts. It thus sums up the thrust of Spanish colonization as both a political and a moral undertaking designed to reconstitute the natives as subjects to divine and royal laws. (Rafael, 90) The internal dynamics at the heart of the process of cultural circulation that I have analyzed as a mode of translational introjection are based on a vernacular cultural memory that effectively subverts the hegemonic force at the core of Pound’s project based on a nativist logic. Similar to Rafael’s analysis of the subversion of the “reductive” logic of translation within a colonial process of conversion in the Philippines, my final claim in this chapter is that the de Campos brothers subvert that same logic of translation ultimately at the core of Pound’s critical method by literally relocating the figure of Sousândrade within the literary history of the avant-garde as a moment of literary history previously constituted within the hegemonic Anglo-American and European traditions. In this sense, the mode of universality that the Brazilian Concrete movement

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tries to establish through the figure of Sousândrade does not necessarily end up “confirming the universality of the archive it attempts to contest” (Rosenberg, 79) but rather, ends up generating a different modality of this universality that is not necessarily centered on the European tradition. As shown here, the main critical objective is to locate and root this new modality of universality within what the de Campos brothers see as the intrinsic difference and originality at the core of the Brazilian and Latin American literary traditions embodied in Sousândrade. Haroldo de Campos, referring to the work of Derrida, precisely emphasizes the importance of the concept of différance for the notion of subversive fragmentation at the core of a national remaking of history and tradition for Brazilian culture in the following terms: Hence the necessity of thinking the difference, nationalism as a dialogic movement of difference (and not the Platonic anointing of origin and a conveniently homogenizing strickle). The need to think the uncharacter, instead of the character; the rupture instead of the linear course; historiography as the seismic graph of subversive fragmentation rather than the tautological homologation of the homogenous. A rejection of the substantiality metaphor of a natural, gradual, and harmonious evolution, a new idea of tradition (antitradition) functioning as a counterrevolution, as a countercurrent opposed to the glorious, prestigious canon. (“Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture,” 162) By “thinking the difference” at the core of Brazilian literature, the de Campos brothers subvert the tradition of the historical avant-garde they inherit from the poetics developed by Ezra Pound while rewriting the field of Brazilian literary history. Therefore, the figure of Sousândrade is in this sense not only the “terremoto clandestino” (clandestine earthquake), the de Campos brothers write, “that still stirs Brazilian poetry,” but at the same time the “seismic graph of subversive fragmentation” that they critically historicize in order to subvert the normative history of the avant-garde from their antitraditional stance from a postcolonial perspective. Ultimately, ReVisão de Sousândrade constitutes a crucial document in the literary history of the global avant-garde since it unveils the complex mechanics of a theoretical project that aims at introjecting and subverting its own history in the revolutionary spirit of the differential mode of Brazilian nationalism they ultimately claimed.

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The Digital Vernacular: “Groundation” and the Temporality of Translation in the Postcolonial Caribbean Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite

The poetic work of the Barbadian historian and cultural theorist Kamau Brathwaite (Bridgetown, 1930) has constituted from its inception the fundamental part of an intellectual project aiming at the articulation of an original Caribbean aesthetic. From his first published poetic work, Rights of Passage (1967), Brathwaite’s poetry has documented his own intellectual search for a Caribbean form of expression that could embody the complex history of the folk culture of the West Indies in general and of Barbados in particular. Brathwaite’s attempt to establish a Caribbean aesthetic originally took shape as a radical response to a seminal question Brathwaite himself posed in his early critical essay “Sir Galahad and the Islands” (1957): “The question therefore is: will the folk society on which the Islander is based be able to nurture and sustain him ‘home,’ or will he, too, turn away from his sources?” (Brathwaite, Roots, 18). In its original context, Brathwaite’s rhetorical question succinctly summarized the main cultural dichotomy that structured the work of key Caribbean writers working during the 1950s—such as George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Eric Roach. The contradiction seen by Brathwaite between his notion of the Caribbean as “home” and the tendency of some Caribbean writers to move away from their “sources” primarily implied for him a tension between a return to the folk culture of the Caribbean and a shift toward a position closer to the culture of the metropolis, which, as Brathwaite argued, partly ignored the historical roots of the Caribbean. By asking this crucial question early in his career as a historian and poet, Brathwaite was not only documenting the two main aesthetic and

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historical paths taken by Anglophone Caribbean writers during the 1950s, but he was also ultimately aiming to transcend the conflicting and problematic nature of this crucial dichotomy within Caribbean history and culture. Brathwaite crafts his own response to this foundational question as a paradoxically utopian “return” of the postcolonial emigrant writer to the Caribbean as follows: The future development of West Indian writing depends upon the state of health of society in the West Indies. If society is in good health, our “central” writers (those based on the folk) will continue to find nourishment from their soil. To this not impossible utopia the emigrant would, no doubt, gladly return, bringing with him those metropolitan standards of taste and judgment that might help keep our Muses innocent of parochialism. (Brathwaite, Roots, 27) Brathwaite’s attempt to conceive an aesthetic that could articulate an essentially utopic return to Caribbean sources is partly determined by his own position as a migrant writer for whom a return to the Caribbean meant a necessary recuperation of his own cultural “sources” and “roots.” As Brathwaite himself acknowledges, it was precisely owing to the particularities of his own historical condition as a “roofless man of the world” that, after his education in England, he ended up taking a position in Ghana in 1955—a job with the Ghanaian Ministry of Education, which he held for the next seven years of his life and which would completely mark the rest of his career: “Accepting my rootlessness, I applied for work in London, Cambridge, Ceylon, New Delhi, Cairo, Kano, Khartoum, Sierra Leone, Carcassone, a monastery in Jerusalem. I was a West Indian, roofless man of the world. I could go, belong everywhere on the worldwide globe. I ended up in a village in Ghana. It was my beginning” (Brathwaite, “Timehri,” 38). Brathwaite’s proposed recommitment to the land and people of the Caribbean archipelago is intrinsically related to his conception of “rootlessness” as the essential West Indian condition. His view of the Caribbean artist as “emigrant” is thus solidly grounded on what he defines as an ancestral “spiritual inheritance of slavery” (30), primarily associated with the Middle Passage as the foundational event for Caribbean culture. This historical and “spiritual” heritage—which Brathwaite describes as “the migrant African moving from the lower Nile across the desert to the Western Ocean” (30)—operates as a powerful cultural matrix for the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, ultimately rendering the folk culture of the West Indies the direct result of the “adaptation and transference” of African folk culture into Caribbean plantations.

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Overall, this historical transatlantic cultural transfer from Africa into the Caribbean implies for Brathwaite a rearticulation of African forms primarily determined by the unique geopolitical context provided by the Caribbean archipelago. As Brathwaite suggests, “African culture not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived, and creatively adapted itself to its new environment. Caribbean culture was therefore not ‘pure African,’ but an adaptation carried out mainly in terms of African tradition” (Brathwaite, Roots, 193). In this sense, Brathwaite’s proposed “return” to the Caribbean as the foundation for a Caribbean aesthetic hinges on his groundbreaking critical reconceptualization of the notion of the “Creole” as a model of cultural hybridity—perhaps one of the most influential and relevant theoretical contributions of Brathwaite to the fields of Caribbean history and cultural studies.1 In his doctoral dissertation on the formation of Creole society in Jamaica (published as The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820) Brathwaite defines his use of the term Creole in the following terms: The word itself appears to have originated from a combination of the two Spanish words criar (to create, to imagine, to establish, to found, to settle) and colono (a colonist, a founder, a settler) into criollo: a committed settler, one identified with the area of settlement, one native to the settlement though not ancestrally indigenous to it. . . . In Jamaica, during the period of this study, the word was used in its original Spanish sense of criollo: born in, native to, committed to the area of living, and it was used in relation to both whites and slaves. It is in this sense that the word is applied in this book, with the overtone as may be heard, say, in present-day Puerto Rico, of “authentic,” “culturally autonomous.” (xiv) Based on Brathwaite’s etymological definition of the Creole within the context of Jamaican society, the relation of the artist as migrant with the folk tradition that sustains Brathwaite’s project implies a foundational recommitment to the West Indian land or settlement in search of a distinctly “Creole” aesthetic expression, positively defined by Brathwaite as “authentic” and “culturally autonomous.” Thus, for Brathwaite it is only through a commitment to the local “sources” of “nourishment” that the Caribbean artist can eventually develop a genuinely Creole Caribbean aesthetic. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin argue in The Empire Writes Back, Brathwaite’s theoretical articulation of the notion of the Creole as a process of adaptation and transference able to alter previous cultural configurations is ultimately grounded on the spatial and environmental specificity of the Caribbean archipelago:

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For Brathwaite, Creolization is a cultural action based upon the “stimulus response” of individuals to their environment and, within culturally discrete white-black groups, to each other. . . . Thus Brahwaite’s concept of a distinctive “Sun aesthetic” includes place as a dynamic factor in the contemporary Caribbean reality. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 146) While Brathwaite’s work as a historian has documented in detail the multifaceted nature of this Creole transformation of African folk culture in the Caribbean (primarily in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica [1971] and in Contradictory Omens [1974]), his attempt to articulate an original West Indian aesthetic is grounded on a migrant “need” that goes beyond the empirically based form of knowledge generally provided by modern historiography. In this sense, Brathwaite emphasizes the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of this characteristically West Indian “need”: “I want to submit that the desire (even the need) to migrate is at the heart of West Indian sensibility—whether the migration is in fact or by metaphor” (Brathwaite, Roots, 7). Therefore, perhaps the most crucial aspect of Brathwaite’s conception of migration as the foundational West Indian event is that it needs not only to be traced, located, and documented in historical terms, but, more important, as a constitutive “desire” it must also be conveyed in an originally Creole aesthetic form. Peter Hitchcock characterizes Brathwaite’s intellectual project as powerfully affirming the cultural particularity of the Caribbean as a “voicing of history”: “Brathwaite’s sense of Caribbean cultural specificity argues for a historically embedded internal distancing of colonial lore at the level of language, music, and memory. Brathwaite attends to the elaboration of that connection/disjunction by voicing a history, polemically and poetically” (Hitchcock, 65). Brathwaite’s own “voicing of history” has articulated his work as a poet, historian, and cultural theorist of the Caribbean for more than fifty years. His ongoing aesthetic project has essentially constituted from the beginning a witness to his own search for a model to transcend the Caribbean impasse embodied in the seminal question in “Sir Galahad and the Islands” and that is conveyed in the following section from Brathwaite’s first collection of poetry, Rights of Passage: Where then is the nigger’s home? In Paris Brixton Kingston Rome?

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Here? Or in Heaven? What crime His dark Dividing Skin is hiding? What guilt now drives him on? Will exile never end? (Brathwaite, Arrivants, 77) Brathwaite’s poetic “voicing” of the Caribbean experience departs from the premise that the progressive synthesis of the key historical dichotomy of home/metropolis that structured Caribbean culture during the 1950s was ultimately doomed to a standstill. The problematic nature of this potential cultural stasis is emphasized by Brathwaite in Contradictory Omens: “The optimistic expectation of dialectical ‘progressive’ synthesis/solution, therefore, leads to impasse; it is an aspect of Caribbean reality our model-makers will have to take account of” (63). As Simon Gikandi argues, one of the critical mechanisms initially conceived by Brathwaite in his attempt to overcome the stasis inherent in this dialectical opposition was to confront the historical roots of Caribbean identity: “Brathwaite begins with the assumption that black or Caribbean identity cannot be found in a reconciliation between the alienated self and its Euro-American figures of desire; rather than to seek to overcome this gap the self must come to terms with the history of its repression” (Gikandi, “E. K. Brathwaite and the Poetics of the Voice,” 23). Brathwaite’s consideration of the potential synthesis of contradictory historical forces as ultimately leading to an alienating “impasse” for the West Indian writer is because the notion of synthesis itself is the result of an imposed Western dialectical logic of history that he has determinedly tried to challenge throughout his work. In order to counter this historically grounded “impasse” within the realm of West Indian culture, Brathwaite has gradually developed the foundations for his Caribbean aesthetic based on an alternative logic to Western Hegelian dialectical thinking that he has called “tidalectics,” or “a tidal dialectic” (Third World Poems, 42). As a cultural logic not determined by the insular environment of the Caribbean, Western dialectics entails for Brathwaite a logic that is essentially

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alien to the Caribbean condition. The notion of “tidalectics” primarily aims at countering the teleological or progressive linearity of Western culture. Thus, in an interview with Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite says that the notion of “tidalectics” implies “the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic, I suppose, motion, rather than linear” (Mackey, “An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 14). Regarding Brathwaite’s conception of tidalectics as “a dialectics with my difference” (“Interview,” 14), Peter Hitchcock has suggested that its cyclical cultural logic manages to open a spatiotemporal dimension for Caribbean cultural identification conceptually parallel to Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic, with the following implications: The challenge of tidalectics, like dialectics, is to think simultaneously its time/space coordinates without sacrificing the specific nuance of either. This, of course, is something of Paul Gilroy’s approach to the Black Atlantic, which is a heuristic device in the “inner dialectics of diaspora identification.” Indeed one could argue that Brathwaite’s tidalectics is a poetic elaboration of the main tenets of the Black Atlantic, a conceptual space of identification that links blacks across the Atlantic by culture, politics, and history (although one of the reasons Brathwaite uses tidalectics is to separate his spatial imagination from the colonizing and racist consciousness of European dialectics, particularly, of course, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). (Hitchcock, Imaginary States, 69) As discussed by Hitchcock, Brathwaite’s “tidalectical” model aims at providing an aesthetic realm or “conceptual space” that could articulate a reconnection with the African presence in Creole society. However, while Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic constitutes in his own words “the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black Atlantic” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4), Brathwaite’s tidalectics is an exclusively Caribbean formation grounded on the specific environmental particularity of the Creole roots of West Indian culture.2 Although Brathwaite’s proposed tidalectics can be seen to entail a rhizomatic “literature of reconnection” (as he has argued, “a recognition of the African presence in our society not as a static quality, but as a root living, creative, and still part of the main” [Roots, 256]), Hitchcock’s conflation of Brathwaite’s tidalectics with Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic clearly ignores the Caribbean and Creole specificity of Brathwaite’s overall intellectual project, that is, that the “our” of “our society” refers exclusively to Caribbean society.3 In this sense, Brathwaite is rather clear in his emphasis of the importance of the local

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versus the international in his drive toward a Creole aesthetic, as he argues here: It is my contention that before it is too late we must try to find the high ground from which we ourselves will see the world, and toward which the world will look to find us. An “international” tradition by all means for those that wish it. But a Creole culture as well. And a Creole way of seeing, first. It is from this stone that we must begin. (Brathwaite, Roots, 79) Paradoxically, Brathwaite’s attempt to counter the internationalist and cosmopolitan impulse of Caribbean culture during the 1950s and ‘60s through his proposed West Indian aesthetic—which as suggested here aims at relocating the “need” of migration back to its “authentic” Creole sources through a “tidalectical” cultural logic—can be expressed only in nonparochial terms, as he declares, “bringing with him those metropolitan standards of taste and judgment.” Thus, at the very core of Brathwaite’s conception of a West Indian aesthetic lies a problematic relation between the local source of “nourishment” (62) needed by the West Indian artist—conceptualized by Brathwaite as a “New World Negro cultural expression, based on an African inheritance” (62)—and an equally necessary cosmopolitan aesthetic influence that constitutes for him “a superstructure of Euro-American language, attitudes and techniques” (Roots, 62). Ultimately, if Brathwaite’s Caribbean aesthetic configures “a conceptual space of identification” for Caribbean culture, it can do so only as a conceptual space that explicitly resists being cosmopolitan by being at the same time radically local. Although Brathwaite’s primary cultural “stone” for his Caribbean aesthetic is grounded on a “Creole way of seeing,” it ultimately represents a vernacular mode of cultural perception and expression that not only responds originally to the cosmopolitan tendencies of other Caribbean artists (Naipaul and Walcott are two key Caribbean authors generally mentioned by Brahtwaite in this context) but also requires an “international” superstructure of “languages, attitudes, techniques” for its articulation. In this sense, the cosmopolitan and the vernacular within Brathwaite’s proposed West Indian aesthetic are not opposite cultural forces in tension, but rather, as Sheldon Pollock argues in his analysis of the dialectic between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan in the cultural context of Southeast Asia, they are “mutually constitutive” cultural forms: “These cultural forms are not just historically constituted but mutually constitutive, for if the vernacular localizes the cosmopolitan as part of its own self-constitution, it is often

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unwittingly relocalizing what the cosmopolitan borrowed from it in the first place (Pollock, 39). Following Pollock’s succinct analysis of this mutually constitutive dynamic, the form of vernacular expression that Brathwaite is trying to establish implies the relocalization of a cosmopolitan impulse that precisely mirrors the relocalization of African culture at work in Brathwaite’s conception of the Creole. As in the case of the transference and adaptation of African culture into the Creole cultural forms historically developed in the Caribbean, Brathwaite’s Caribbean aesthetic implies a creolization of constitutive cosmopolitan poetic techniques based on the local particularism of the cultural logic he defines as “tidalectics.” In this sense, Brathwaite’s utopic configuration of a Caribbean aesthetic not only emphasizes the importance of the notion of the Creole as a foundational concept for Caribbean culture but also ultimately highlights the “mutually constitutive” interaction of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, in Pollock’s configuration of this relation. This mutual interaction also unveils a larger cultural implication as a “critique of the oppression of tradition,” which is here described by Pollock: Affective attachment to old structures of belonging offered by vernacular particulars must precede any effective transformation through new cosmopolitan universals; care must be in evidence, a desire to preserve, even as the structure is to be changed. . . . It consists of a response to a specific history of domination and enforced change, along with a critique of the oppression of tradition itself, tempered by a strategic desire to locate resources for a cosmopolitan future in vernacular ways of being themselves. (Pollock, 47) Applying Pollock’s magisterial work on the relation between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular to Brathwaite’s project, we can analyze his vernacular poetics as constituting both a reaction to an “enforced” cultural superstructure, as well as a new cultural form that could in itself function in a “cosmopolitan future.” Brathwaite’s project toward a Caribbean aesthetic can thus be read as primarily emphasizing the relevance of the “old structures of belonging” he traces through his work as a Caribbean historian in order for those “vernacular ways of being in themselves” to provide the “stone” or foundation for a true transformation of the cultural logic of Caribbean experience.

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Grounding the “West Indian Voice”: Brathwaite’s Vernacular Poetics One of the key features of Brathwaite’s overall intellectual project toward the development of “a new species of original art” (Roots, 235) constitutes what I will describe here as its incommensurability, that is, the fact that it ultimately aims at a total manifestation of Caribbean culture. As perhaps the most essential constituent element of Brathwaite’s aesthetic project, Caribbean literature had to incorporate not only the complex series of historical and cultural dichotomies that structure Caribbean history but, more important, do so in a way that could embody in itself the Caribbean as its total expression. This holistic aspect of Caribbean literature for Brathwaite is conveyed in some detail in his interview with the Caribbean poet and scholar Kwame Dawes: When I talk about Caribbean literature I’m talking about literature which addresses and informs and comes out of what I call Caribbean Cosmology. The nature/natural of the Caribbean. Our sense of our space/time. . . . The relationship of landscape to time, the movement of landscape and manscape in time and to time’s riddims; our sense of our history out of this and the details of that history, iconographically expressed. The paradoxes, violences, and futures of society; people’s relationships, integuments, physical, social and spiritual; the language we speak among each other and how this relates to Nature. (Dawes, 31) As Brathwaite suggests, Caribbean literature must become a total expression as a worldview or “cosmology,” as well as establish a relationship of the Caribbean self to the realms of nature and history. Despite Brathwaite’s own recognition of the fragmentation and tension among the different historical forces that have shaped Caribbean culture into an essentially Creole form, it is evident that his project toward a Caribbean aesthetic ultimately emerges as an attempt to arrive at a unified and coherent expression of its totality. Brathwaite thus endows the literary or poetic event with the seminal power of articulating this aesthetic project as a whole, that is, of providing a coherent and authentic form of expression for the Caribbean as an individuated culture of “local authenticity.” J. Michael Dash highlights the troublesome conceptual contradiction between the fragmentary nature of the Creole logic that pervades Brathwaite’s project and the idea of “wholeness and reintegration” toward which he is ultimately aiming:

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The strength of Brathwaite’s ideas in the Seventies is tied to a seminal vision that privileges the creative confluence of contradictory forces and a poetics that requires a new sign system be invented to represent this vision of repressed tensions and unvoiced interactions. . . . The logic of this model would seem to push Brathwaite not towards an integrating text or a reestablishment of lost continuities, but towards an anti-essentialist concept of radical incompleteness. However, there is a tension between such a radically transgressive idea and another impulse that haunts his poetic imagination, that of wholeness and reintegration. (Dash, 193) Paradoxically, both the nature and the form of this coherence and unity sought by Brathwaite emerges as an indeterminate and ultimately incommensurable force, an aspect largely missed by Dash in his critical view that Brathwaite’s work implies a somewhat essentialist idea of Caribbean completeness. In fact, Brathwaite’s project is characterized by a radical uncertainty as to the actual form of that coherence. As Brathwaite would candidly suggest later in his career, “I don’t know the nature of that coherence but one hopes that the coherence will be observable” (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 18). Although there is no doubt that Brathwaite’s project aims at the very sense of “wholeness and reintegration” that Dash mentions, it constitutes a form of wholeness that does not have a determined unity or configuration, and in which, as Brathwaite would put in “tidalectical” terms, “The unity is submarine” (Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 64). Owing in part to this “submarine” incommensurability of the impulse toward cultural cohesion, Brathwaite carries out through his Creole aesthetic a radical intellectual critique of the West Indian condition. Brathwaite’s critique essentially implies a reexamination and redefinition of the very terms that could lead to the conceptualization of Caribbean culture as an original historical event independent of its European sources. It is only through a critical reevaluation of the defining concepts of West Indian culture that the path for the revision of the Caribbean folk tradition as the source for a “literature of local authenticity” can be established, as he argues here: Until, therefore, our definition of “culture” is re-examined in terms of its totality, not simply its Europeanity, we will fail to discover a literature of negritude and, with it, a literature of local authenticity. Likewise, the African presence in Caribbean literature cannot be fully or easily perceived until we redefine the term “literature” to include the nonscribal material of the folk-oral tradition, which

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on examination, turns out to have a much longer history than our scribal tradition, to have been relevant to the majority of our people, and to have had unquestionably wider provenance. (Brathwaite, Roots, 204) Perhaps the fundamental element of Brathwaite’s critique of Caribbean culture intrinsically related to Dash’s idea of “wholeness and reintegration” is the rediscovery of the power of the “folk-oral tradition” as historically preceding the “scribal tradition”—which Brathwaite clearly identifies with European culture. As with his conception of Caribbean history, Brathwaite uses the notion of a Creole “local authenticity” as the foundation for a genuine Caribbean literature. It is precisely within the Creole linguistic framework intrinsic to the Caribbean that Brathwaite’s notion of the “West Indian voice” becomes the absolute key to his tidalectical Caribbean aesthetic. Brathwaite conceives this “voice” both as a hybrid of European tongues creolized by the “folk-oral tradition” and as a foundational rebellious force potentially able to provide the basis for an authentic Creole aesthetic for Caribbean culture: The West Indian voice is a complex of imposed “establishment” tongues (Standard English, French, Dutch, etc.) and the mainly submerged patterns of the “folk”—the peasants and illiterates who carry within themselves a transformed but still very real and essentially non-European tradition of Africa, Asia and the Amerindians. (Brathwaite, Roots, 115) This “complex” of standard European tongues and “submerged patterns” of folk culture can be further analyzed in terms of its intrinsic syncretism resulting from the fused or amalgamated set of historical and linguistic forces suggested in Brathwaite’s notion of the “West Indian voice.” Moreover, based on the “tidalectical” logic at the very core of his project toward a Caribbean aesthetic, Brathwaite’s notion of a “West Indian voice” does not constitute the kind of synthetic dialect that Henry Louis Gates defines within the context of African American culture: Afro-American dialect exists between two poles, one English and one lost in some mythical linguistic kingdom now irrecoverable. Dialect is our only key to that unknown tongue, and in its obvious relation and reaction to English it contains, as does the Yoruban mask, a verbal dialectic, a dialectic between some form of an African antithesis all the while obviating the English thesis. (Gates, Figures in Black, 172).

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As opposed to Gates’s dialectical approach—in the Hegelian sense of the term—to the Afro-American dialect, Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice” essentially entails a transformative and transferential conception of vernacularity in which specific verbal patterns of local sounds and rhythms reenact and embody the experience of the Caribbean. In Brathwaite’s linguistic model, both of the “poles” Gates describes in his definition of the Afro-American dialect are not synthetically but syncretically incorporated into the “West Indian voice” as a signifying totality. Thus, contrary to the conception of the “source” language as an “unknown” and “irrecoverable” tongue, Brathwaite conceives this linguistic “source” as a local form of West Indian expression that can— and, more important, should—be recuperated for the purposes of a truly original Caribbean aesthetic. The notion of syncretism appears in this context as an extremely productive concept to describe the Creole logic that, as suggested by Brathwaite, is inherent in the development of the “West Indian voice.” Based on the groundbreaking work on the cultural conditions of the Caribbean by the Cuban critic Antonio Benítez Rojo, it becomes clear that Brathwaite’s “West Indian voice” constitutes a characteristically Caribbean “syncretic artifact,” with the following theoretical implications: A syncretic artifact is not a synthesis, but rather a signifier made of differences. What happens is that, in the melting pot of societies that the world provides, syncretic processes realize themselves through an economy in whose modality of exchange the signifier of there—of the Other—is consumed (“read”) according to local codes that are already in existence; that is, codes from here. (Benítez Rojo, Repeating Island, 21) In the light of Benitez Rojo’s conception of the Caribbean syncretic signifying artifact, Brathwaite’s “West Indian voice” becomes a powerful signifier able to provide the Creole “stone” to ground his intellectual project toward a Creole Caribbean aesthetic. From this perspective, the “West Indian voice” as a “signifier made of differences” is the product of the kind of syncretism proposed by Benítez Rojo resulting from a transferential “modality of exchange” which reads “the signifier of there” based on local “codes from here,” since, as Brathwaite argues, it constitutes a local form of language which is “constantly transforming itself into new forms,” as well as “adapting to the new environment” (Brathwaite, Roots, 262). From this syncretic lens of constant transformation, transference, and adaptation, the foreign condition that Brathwaite ascribes to the European “establishment” tongues amalgamated into the “West

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Indian voice” is always read and incorporated through the local folk codes that Brathwaite considers to be original to—albeit “submerged” in—the West Indian experience. The transferential tension between a local ground (here/folk) and global influences (there/Europe) at the core of Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice” constitutes a syncretic and translatable force that facilitates the articulation of a vernacular system as the basis for his Caribbean aesthetic. It is precisely because of the syncretism characteristic of the modality of exchange at the core of Brathwaite’s conception of the West Indian voice that the mutually constitutive relationship between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan described by Pollock emerges within Brathwaite’s project. Moreover, Brathwaite’s “West Indian voice” articulates a signifier that constantly translates the local word into a form of cultural and spiritual power able to articulate in itself an original (Creole in this case) system of signification that can universally embody the experience of the Caribbean. For Brathwaite, this universality of the local word—to which he refers throughout his work as either “nam,” “nommo,” “the Word” or “name”— endows it with a primal and constitutive “secret power” able to articulate a new system of signification for the Caribbean: “We are dealing here with a local concrete force, a flow of power, and impetus that carries with it word, image and consciousness” (Brathwaite, Roots, 70). Ultimately, Brathwaite asserts the power of the “West Indian voice” as a syncretic artifact in which the local signifier can ultimately channel and express the totality of Caribbean experience and beyond in the following terms: “Nam” means so many things for me. “Nam” is “man” spelt backwards, man in disguise, man who has to reverse his consciousness . . . in order to enter the new world in a disguised or altered state of consciousness. “Nam” also suggests “root,” or beginning, because of “yam,” the African yam, “nyam,” to eat, and the whole culture contained in it. It is then able to expand itself back from “nam” to “name” which is another form of “nam”: the name that you once had has lost its “e,” that fragile part of itself, eaten by Prospero, eaten by the conquistadors, but preserving its essentialness, its alpha, its “a” protected by those two intransigent consonants, “n” and “m.” The vibrations “nmnmnm” are what you get at the before the beginning of the world. (Brathwaite, “History, the Caribbean Writer and X/Self,” 33) Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice” as a local signifier that embodies “word, image and consciousness” ultimately enacts a “groundation” of his work as a Caribbean cultural theorist and

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historian. Brathwaite’s peculiar use of the notion of “groundation” or “groundings”—a key term of Rastafarian culture—appears in the context of his development of the notion of “nation language” in his article “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” (1973): In addition to sound-symbols, nation language sets up certain tunes, tones and rhythms which are characteristic of the folk tradition, and are often essential features of its expression. The overall space/patterns of this language, we might say, are controlled by a groundation tendency in which image/spirit is electrically conducted to earth like lightning or the loa (the gods, spirits, powers, or divine horsemen of vodum). (Brathwaite, Roots, 243) As Brathwaite suggests, nation language as a vernacular linguistic system constitutes a “total expression” (273) that provides a “groundation” of the “image/spirit” signified or channeled “to earth” by the very sounds and rhythms of the “West Indian voice.” In “History of the Voice,” the seminal essay in which Brathwaite develops his theory of a Caribbean vernacular, Brathwaite conceives “nation language” as a “submerged” linguistic form parallel to the notion of the “West Indian voice.” He particularly defines “nation language” as “the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and laborers” (Roots, 260). Brathwaite’s use of the Rastafarian concept of groundation to describe his own theory of nation language deserves further analysis. Within Rastafarian culture, groundation, or grounding, constitutes an important religious ritual as one of the main cultural forms for the everyday transmission of Rastafarian experience, described here by the sociologist of religion Ennis Barrington Edmonds: Grounding, in the context of the yards, takes place when a few Rastas gather to smoke ganja spliffs, or “to draw the chalice,” and to reflect on their faith or on any current or historical event that affects their lives. This is the more informal level of grounding, and it can take place anywhere and anytime without any prearrangement. However, for many, grounding is a daily activity, which takes place in the yards of leading brethren and elders. . . . These gatherings are somehow more formal, and in addition to ritual smoking and reasoning, drumming, chanting, and sometimes “speechifying” and feasting are often elements of the grounding. (Edmonds, 74) Based on Edmonds’s detailed description, groundation can be regarded as the performative and material manifestation of Rastafarian ideology,

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specifically in Althusser’s material conception of ideology (i.e., “Ideology has a material existence”) developed in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” According to Althusser, the ideas of the subject are ultimately constituted by “his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject” (243). If according to Brathwaite, the “space/patterns” of nation language imply a form of groundation, it can do so only as a medium which can perform in itself the historical and spiritual tensions at the core of Caribbean history, in much the same way that Rastafarian groundation materially performs some of the key tenets of Rastafarian ideology. In this sense, Brathwaite’s conception of vernacular language as a performative “grounding” of Caribbean experience lies at the very core of his overall aesthetic project. The radically performative nature of Brathwaite’s poetic voicing of Caribbean experience inherent in his use of the concept of groundation is vividly emphasized here: as the poem write, first the song arrive, its tune, its mourn, its riddim, and as it take its shape upon the page, so does its meaning—the limbo stick and the slave ship and the dance—its splay & sprawl, agony of contortion of body— becoming a memorial— a kind of Rosetta Stone for all these centuries of apparently forgetting—of the way this voyage is. (Williams, Critical Response to K.B., 301) Brathwaite’s work as a West Indian poet claims to perform in itself the very same process of groundation of the historical and spiritual experience of the Caribbean that he claims for his theory of nation language. As such, Brathwaite’s poetry emerges as the aesthetic expansion of the same “West Indian voice” he previously documented historically, but that urgently requires its poetic practice—as a spiritual groundation—in fact, “becoming a memorial” of the past, present and future of the Caribbean experience. Therefore, Brathwaite’s role as a Caribbean poet precisely becomes the complex process of unveiling different manifestations of the “West Indian voice” as the syncretic signifier that could effectively lead to the establishment of a nation language for the Caribbean and which could provide a tidalectical sense of “coherence” and “unity” to Caribbean culture as whole.

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Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video Style: A Virtual Caribbean Voice Since the publication of his first collection by Oxford University Press in 1967, Brathwaite’s poetry has undergone a progressive textual, visual, and material transfiguration in his attempt to articulate the history of the “West Indian voice.” In his ongoing poetic search for the very sounds that could provide an original expression of Caribbean experience— ultimately conceived by Brathwaite as “a rhythm that approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience” (Roots, 265)—Brathwaite carries out a gradual process of decomposition of the traditional rhythm and meter patterns of English verse, as well as standard English syntax and grammar. This radical linguistic transformation has been described by the poet Nathaniel Mackey as a process of rupture that essentially aims at destabilizing the semantic and structural coherence of words. For Mackey, the end result of this poetic reconfiguration of the English language is an extremely particular form of linguistic minimalism that ultimately opens up the path for the emergence of the essential Caribbean form of signification associated with Brathwaite’s conception of the “West Indian voice,” that is, his notion of “naam,” “name” or “the Word,” as Mackey argues here: Returning to the smallest particles of language, syllables and letters, he assaults the apparent solidity and integrity of words, destabilizing them (showing them to be intrinsically unstable) by emphasizing the points at which they break, disassembling them and reassembling them in alternate spellings and neologistic coinages. . . . Words are reopened, broken open, their semantic integrity unsealed by “shadows of meaning” that are played upon and thereby shown to permeate “the Word.” (Mackey, “Wringing the Word,” 45, 48) Overall, Brathwaite’s process of destabilizing the structural and conceptual consistency of words, as described by Mackey, represents the textual embodiment of his notion of tidalectics and his attempt to disrupt the linear logic of European dialectical thinking he has been trying to counter throughout his work. Thus, Brathwaite’s textual tidalectics entails a syncretic amalgamation of the kind of linguistic ruptures that Mackey refers to, aiming at fragmenting and dissipating the conceptual and formal coherence of the English and European cultural traditions through a performative strategy that keeps repeating and reiterating itself throughout his poetry. At the same time, this linguistic tidalectical process keeps recovering a series of cultural sources that resurface and

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recur in his poems, ultimately leading to a process of rewriting in which poetic tropes, images, and full sections of poems are constantly revised, reincorporated, and rewritten into new poetic compositions. This tidalectical progression of Brathwaite’s poetry is, at the same time, parallel to the oscillation from the historical to the autobiographical taking place in his poetic work. Whereas Brathwaite’s first trilogy (Arrivants) deals primarily with the Middle Passage as the fundamental historical and spiritual event for the Caribbean—as Brathwaite comments to Mackey, “It is history, it has happened” (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 18)—his second trilogy (Ancestors) places Brathwaite himself at the very center of his poetic project, in fact as a personal “groundation” of Caribbean experience. As Brathwaite argues, while the first trilogy— composed of Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969)— deals “with the communities that give rise to Caribbean peoples and their problems,” the second trilogy—configured by Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987)—treats “the grounding of that whole thing into person. It’s about my mother, it’s about Barbados, it’s about myself within the family context” (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 14). However, Brathwaite himself and, consequently, his aesthetic project experienced a series of tragic blows that led to a standstill and ultimately a temporary silencing of his poetic voice. During a span of four years (1986–90), generally referred to by Brathwaite as his “Time of Salt,” he suffered the tragic loss of his wife, Doris Monica Brathwaite, in 1986 due to a virulent cancer, the destruction of all of his personal archive of Caribbean culture by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and finally a brutal assault at his Irish Town home by three Kingston gunmen in 1990. As he describes it, these series of tragic events marked the rest of his poetic production by ultimately leading to the “dreamlike” emergence of the Sycorax video style (SycoraxVS) he would develop with his Apple computer—a now obsolete Mac SE/30: I come to Sycorax during my Time of Salt: death of Zea Mexican 1986, loss of Irish Town Library of Alexandria 1988, murder by Kingston gunmen 1990 . . . just look at the dread frequencies of these catastrophes. My writing hand becomes a dumb stump in my head. . . . I mean I can’t write or utter a sound or metaphor. But Sycorax comes to me in a dream and she dreams me a Macintosh computer with its winking io hiding in its margins which, as you know, are not really margins, but electronic accesses to Random Memory and the Cosmos and the Iwa. (Dawes, 37)

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As Brathwaite confesses in this interview with Kwame Dawes, his “Time of Salt” undoubtedly constituted a painful period of poetic silence and crisis caused by a series of tragic events. Indeed, it is as if the realm of history, or Caribbean history to be more precise, managed in a rather brutal way to silence temporarily Brathwaite’s attempt to articulate a history of the “West Indian Voice” through his poetry as a form of groundation. It is precisely in the face of these new painful conditions, however, that the rhetorical force of Brathwaite’s seminal question originally voiced in 1957 (“Will the folk society on which the Islander is based be able to nurture and sustain him ‘home.’ or will he, too, turn away from his sources?”) regains the full uncertainty of its rhetorical undecidability and transforms itself into the following key question that will mark the rest of Brathwaite’s intellectual production: How does my self now go forward into that wider community again, seeing it now from the point of view of a new personal baptism into unexpected areas of loss and hopeful reconstitution of all this once more into the psycho-natural elements of wind, water, metal fire, green history? (Mackey, “Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” 14) Although Brathwaite’s personal crisis during those four years can be interpreted as an inability of the Caribbean to adequately “nurture and sustain him ‘home,’” Brathwaite overtly refused to turn away from his sources after the traumatic series of events. Instead, the sudden appearance of SycoraxVS as a new medium for his work provided Brathwaite the tool to transfigure radically the mode of groundation of the very same “psycho-natural” sources of inspiration lying at the very core of his project. As I argue in the rest of this chapter, SycoraxVS offered Brathwaite a new medium to recast the two main components of his Caribbean aesthetic, that is, the vernacular linguistic form he refers to as “nation language” and the form of archival memory ultimately required for the production of historical knowledge. It is only through the material transfiguration of Brathwaite’s own poetic practice—literally of “his writing hand”—into the digital medium embodied by his SycoraxVS that Brathwaite’s own history of “the West Indian voice” was able to continue to exist as a virtual reconfiguration of itself. As the name of Brathwaite’s visual style indicates, the main creative source recovered through his Mac SE/30 after his “Time of Salt” was the figure of Sycorax—perhaps Brathwaite’s key tidalectical source for his Caribbean aesthetic. Sycorax, the figure of Caliban’s mother from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, first surfaced in Brathwaite’s Mother Poem as

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a powerful syncretic signifier within Brathwaite’s dense poetic iconography—which gradually took on the maternal roles of womb, Barbados as homeland, and the Caribbean as mother nature, among many other significations. The actual moment of creative reconstitution that led to the symbiotic union between the figure of Sycorax and the digital medium of the computer as SycoraxVS is originally described in the section of X/Self (1987) titled “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces,” through which the characteristic tidalectical progression and variations of his work later became “Letter SycoraX” published both in Middle Passages (1993), and in Ancestors (2001), in the section reprinted here. As X/Self relates Sycorax in this version of the passage, the computer articulated a new form of writing that can be instantly accessed, altered, and rewritten (“yu na ave to benn dung over to out out / de mistake dem wid white liqrid paper”), since it is not restrained by the material conditions traditionally associated with print. The digital textuality offered by the computer medium is also seen by X/Self as a liberating force for the purposes of Caribbean culture that could provide an alternative response to Caliban’s antagonistic stance toward Prospero: (& learn-in / prospero ling/age & ting / not fe dem / not fe dem / de way caliban / done but fe we / fe a-we / for nat one a we shd response if prospero get curse / wid im own / curser” (Ancestors, 449). In this sense, the cursor of the computer as “prospero’s curser” offers a new creative positionality for Caribbean culture that transforms Caliban’s oppositional stance into a new potential force able to carry out a productive rearticulation “for a we” of that same “curser”—now as the basis for a new “ling/age,” constituting at the same time a language, a linguistic age, and even a nation language for the Caribbean. One of the most productive cultural rearticulations provided by “prospero’s curser” is the fact that it allowed Brathwaite to turn virtually the figure of Sycorax into the computer system itself. As Brathwaite relates in an interview by Emily Allen Williams, “Sycorax by the way is my SE/30 Macintosh computer and ‘lives’ in the computer” (Williams, Critical Response to K.B., 299). At the same time, as Brathwaite describes to Dawes, a key characteristic of SycoraxVS is its visual potential, “allowing me to write in light and to make sound visible as if I am in video” (Dawes, 37). It is precisely through SycoraxVS that Brathwaite’s seminal statement regarding nation language—“What we see is in fact the speaking seeking voice” (Brathwaite, Roots, 244)—finally becomes a literal visual force that fully pervades all of his work since the appearance of his “video style.” Hence, in Brathwaite’s conception, SycoraxVS operates as a complex syncretic signifier that combines the oral and the visual in

figure 5. Kamau Brahwaite’s Sycorax Video Style, section from “X/Self’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces,” included in Ancestors. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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the new medium offered by the digital computer, in his words, a “weld of computer and visual orality—scrollature—videolect—a kind of improvisationary hieroglyphic enactment—an expression of multiple representation” (Williams, Critical Response to Kamau Brathwaite, 298). It is as if the complex process of generation to which Brathwaite subjects his own poetic voice (and, ultimately, his conception of nation language) through the inception of SycoraxVS manages to produce a virtual aura that illuminates its own spatiotemporal presence, or its own moment of groundation. Mirroring Brathwaite’s own conceptualization of SycoraxVS as a new medium for the groundation of Caribbean experience, most critics have emphasized the role of the computer precisely as the seminal syncretic signifier Brathwaite imagines it to be, instead of analyzing the way the digital technology of the computer allows Brathwaite to imagine Sycorax as such a syncretic artifact. A relevant example of such a critical response to Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS is offered by Elaine Savory here: But by imagining the computer now as a medium which can help Caliban turn back towards his mother, Sycorax, by liberating him from some of the strictures of the written conventions of the English language text, Brathwaite has stepped into a space in which orality, the book and the screen combine to project an immediate sense of cultural identity and linguistic freedom. (Savory, 217) If Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS can “project an immediate sense of cultural identity” associated with the way “orality, the book, and the screen” are intermedially combined, as suggested by Savory above, I would argue that this is exclusively due to the digital nature of the new medium Brathwaite has been using since the late 1980s for his Caribbean aesthetic. As Graeme Rigby points out, this new syncretic form adopted by Brathwaite’s “welding” voice is solely facilitated by his use of computing technology: “The Apple Mac has enabled Kamau to hold the very tool which shapes the image, to shape it himself in its minute particularities, to emphasize and sing the shapes as he creates them” (Rigby, 252). Although as a medium SycoraxVS clearly emphasizes the visual or sculptural dimension of his writing as if it were video, the fact remains that SycoraxVS is not the result of the recording visual technology referred to as “video”—whether analog or digital—but rather of the digital computing phenomenon generally known as word processing. In other words, although it has always been published in print format by a wide variety of publishers who have adapted or reproduced with some alterations the digital form of Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS (usually as typecast or photooffset versions), the format itself as produced by Brathwaite through his

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Mac SE/30 essentially constitutes a form of digital poetry. Although this important fact regarding Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS may seem self-evident, Chris Funkhouser’s succinct definition of the field of digital poetics is extremely useful for my analysis of Brathwaite’s use of digital technology in his work: “A poem is a digital poem if computer programming or processes (software) are distinctively used in the composition, generation or presentation of the text (or combinations of texts)” (Funkhouser, 22). Therefore, since it originally constitutes a form of digital poetry, the power of SycoraxVS as a “writing in light” able “to make sound visible” and to rearticulate Brathwaite’s poetic practice as a groundation of the “sources” of Caribbean experience is fully dependent on a crucial form of language that has been generally ignored regarding Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS, that is, the computer language of programming code. In order for Brathwaite’s poetic performance to become effectively a “writin in lite” (Ancestors, 455) which can ultimately provide a conceptual topos of reconnection with the cultural sources of the Caribbean, Brathwaite’s poetic voice must necessarily be translated into a new medium through the language of code. This form of translation of Brathwaite’s “voice,” or rather of his keyboard-typed words by computer coding, is required in order for it to be processed by the computer processor and thus to appear visibly as SycoraxVS in the monitor of the Mac SE/30. As N. Katherine Hayles argues in her effort to bring the language of code to the foreground of literary studies, programming code constitutes a language that must necessarily perform itself before any human can interact with the computer: Code that runs on a machine is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language. When language is said to be performative, the kinds of actions it “performs” happen in the minds of humans . . . . By contrast, code running in a digital computer causes changes in machine behavior and, through networked ports and other interfaces, may initiate other changes, all implemented through transmission and execution of code. Although code originates with human writers and readers, once entered into the machine it has as its primary reader the machine itself. Before any screen display accessible to humans can be generated, the machine must first read the code and use its instructions to write messages humans can read. (Hayles, 50) As Hayles’s analysis of the performativity of programming code makes clear, Brathwaite’s poetry as a groundation of the sources of Caribbean experience can perform itself only after the language of programming

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code has literally run its own digital performance. In fact, Brathwaite’s poetry can only exist as SycoraxVS once the poetic voice has been subjected to the performativity of the computer code that enables the mechanical processing of the poem’s words to be translated into the visual images that appear in the monitor of Brathwaite’s own Mac SE/30. One of the key theoretical implications of such a process of digitization is that Brathwaite’s vernacular articulation of the “West Indian voice” is ultimately constituted as a virtual voice. The virtuality of Brathwaite’s poetic “voicing” through his SycoraxVS is extremely relevant in two different ways. First, the process of digitization that converts Brathwaite’s poetry into bits of digital information carries out a literal de-vernacularization of his notion of the “West Indian voice” since code constitutes, as the new media philosopher Pierre Lévy describes it, a nonactualized linguistic form essentially “inaccessible to humans”: “Digital information (0s and 1s) can also be qualified as virtual to the extent that it is inaccessible to humans. We can only directly interact with its actualization, through some sort of display” (Lévy, 30). In this sense, the local and material dimension of Brathwaite’s nation language is radically delocalized, rather literally losing its material and signifying ground as a formalized linguistic medium into the virtual domain of the mathematical language of programming code. Second, the process of virtualization of Brathwaite’s voice into computer code can at the same time be interpreted as a process of deterritorialization, since as Lévy also highlights, digitization implies a de facto rootlessness of the information processed because it is practically independent of “any spatiotemporal coordinates,” as he argues here: Any entity is virtual if it is “deterritorialized,” capable of engendering several concrete manifestations at different times and places, without being attached to any particular place or time. . . . The computer codes written on diskettes or computer hard drives— invisible, easily copied or transferred from one node of the network to another—are quasi-virtual, since they are nearly independent of any spatiotemporal coordinates. Within digital networks, information is obviously physically present somewhere, on a given medium, but it is also virtually present at each point of the network when it is requested. (Lévy, 30) The inherent deterritorialization of any virtual entity described by Lévy is, at the same time, extremely relevant for the transfiguration of Brathwaite’s conception of history and historiography through SycoraxVS. In this sense, the digitization of his poetic voice in SycoraxVS also provides

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Brathwaite a virtual form of archival memory and, consequently, a rootless repository for his own writing that mirrors what Brathwaite conceived as the essential rootlessness of the Caribbean condition. A key practical consequence of this material transfiguration of Brathwaite’s poetic practice into a virtual form was, in fact, to save those same Creole sources lying at the core of his Caribbean poetics from what Brathwaite considered to be the reactionary cultural conditions of Caribbean culture. As Brathwaite mentions in the introduction to his “Time of Salt” long poem Shar, the unreadiness and inability to protect the cultural production of the Caribbean constitutes one of his major concerns after his “personal baptism into unexpected areas of loss:” You have to be concerned with the sources of a poet’s life a people’s inspiration and try to protect care for as best you can, those sources. . . . We have to be concerned with the poet’s health well being comfort. yes; but above all there are archives—that written memorialized recorded record of his / her life / hope / history / art. . . . As far as I can see our Caribb culture is too much a reaction—if not a reactionary plantation culture. We are not prepared to foresee to foresay to forestall to help in that real way. Instead we prefer/we proffer help—if help at all—after the accident after the death after the hurricane. (Brathwaite, Shar, n.p.) After the historical trauma of Brathwaite’s “Time of Salt,” his MacSE/30 provided a form of archival memory that, owing to its intrinsic virtuality and deterritorialized form, facilitated a brand-new—and safe— repository for his “archives,” as well as a new textual medium for his own “written memorialized recorded record.” As channeled through his Mac SE/30, Sycorax offered Brathwaite “electronic accesses to Random Memory” not only in a symbolic or metaphoric way, as he mentioned previously, but, more important, in a strictly literal sense. In fact, the specific form of “Random Access Memory” through which he has been able to reconstruct his poetry is the rootless, random, and virtual memory provided by the 32 KB of RAM of the Mac SE/30.4 The tremendous impact of SycoraxVS as a new archival medium for the virtual recording and storage of Brathwaite’s sources rests on the fact that he decided to rewrite, save, and publish in his Mac SE/30 a considerable part of his previous work, as well as almost all his work produced after the inception of his video style. Among other works composed in his newly minted SycoraxVS, Brathwaite recast the set of historical experiences that determined his “time of Salt” in the highly autobiographical poetic works Shar—Hurricane Poem, Zea Mexican Diary, and Trench Town Rock. At

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the same time, during the 1990s, Brathwaite also re-created in SycoraxVS his Casas de las Américas award-winning collection Black and Blues (1976)—published by New Directions in 1995—and his aforementioned second poetic trilogy Ancestors, also published by New Directions in 2001. Apart from the practical consequences just described, one of the most important implications of the virtual transformation of Brathwaite’s Caribbean project through SycoraxVS is that the “deterritorialized” memory provided by the RAM card of his Apple computer was incorporated as a new paradigm for his own tidalectical conception of his work. As Brathwaite explains to Emily Allen Williams, RAM becomes in fact the archival form of random memory that articulates his overall oeuvre: EAW: Are you suggesting that the reader’s view toward your work must first be chronological? Historical? It’s not simple—is it? Toward understanding? KB: Not, it’s not that simple, but you’ve got to— EAW: Go back to go forward? KB: Yes . . . but more like random access memory really . . . the way that works . . . And you have to know what you have read before, and then read it in sequence . . . and in historical context. And still be able to make connections from any one part of the work to another. And not to confine it to poetry either. I mean, the history, the prose, the dreamstories, even the photography are all connected. (Williams, Critical Response to K.B., 305) As Brathwaite suggests, the form of memory provided by his Mac SE/30 has offered him a virtual temporality in which any point in time can be retraced and accessed instantaneously, allowing for the emergence of the tidalectical sources that implicate for Brathwaite the totality of Caribbean experience. At the same time, this virtual form of memory is able to save his creative sources from the historical conditions of Caribbean culture before the foundational “sounds” for a nation language can be materially lost or forgotten. Therefore, the digital medium that constitutes Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS provides a virtual reconstitution of his writing as a radically new form of groundation of the Creole sources of Caribbean experience. Moreover, it is finally in SycoraxVS that Brathwaite finds a digital language able to transfer his voice into the kind of rootless syncretic signifier that can coherently match the rootlessness and homelessness that Brathwaite sees as the essence of the West Indian condition.

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Brathwaite’s Nation Language and the Temporality of Translation As shown in this chapter, Brathwaite has effectively adopted throughout his career a double role as poet and theorist of nation language who both documented the rhythms and tones of the West Indian voice as its premier historian and archivist,5 and at the same time performed and articulated that Caribbean voice in his own poetry—both in analog and digital media. Silvio Torres-Saillant describes this dual aspect of Brathwaite’s intellectual project toward a Caribbean aesthetic as follows: In his search for an authentic Antillean expression, Brathwaite has sought to piece together the history of the voice for his people, but he has also invested much energy and imagination in the task of inventing that voice. The repetition, recurrence, and recasting of ideas and verbal performances in many of his works suggest the urgency with which he has assumed the task of unearthing and creating. (Torres-Saillant, 154) The key aspect of this double position of cultural urgency that is adopted by Brathwaite, as Torres-Saillant suggests—and which the critic largely ignores in his analysis—is that “piecing together the history of the voice for his people” constitutes a radically different heuristic action from the “task of inventing that voice.” Thus, in order to understand the tidalectical logic of Brathwaite’s attempt to establish an “authentic Antillean expression” it is important to analyze the oscillation between history and poetics that structures his oeuvre—a movement characterized by its repetitive, recurring, and circular form throughout Brathwaite’s work. In this sense, the location of Brathwaite’s overall project at the juncture between the archaeological “unearthing” of history and the poietic “creating” of poetics aims to bridge the ambivalent split of two differing temporalities (one diachronic or historical, the other synchronic or performative), which Homi Bhabha defines as “the site of writing the nation” with the following implications: In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation. . . . The tensions between the pedagogical and the performative that I have identified in the narrative address of the nation, turns the reference to a “people”—from whatever political and social position it is made—into a

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problem of knowledge that haunts the symbolic formation of social authority. (Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297) The importance of the fact that Brathwaite’s overall work is situated precisely at the juncture of the two splitting temporalities that, according to Bhabha, lie at the site where the narration of nation is produced cannot be critically overlooked in the context of this analysis. As previously mentioned, in his attempt to establish a nation language for Caribbean culture Brathwaite drew upon the Rastafarian concept of groundation as a model for welding the “piecing together” of history and the “creating” of poetics, and consequently the splitting temporalities of nation production each heuristic action entails. In this sense, groundation articulates an ambivalent mode of temporality somewhat in between the merely “pedagogical” and the merely “performative,” using Bhabha’s terms, since it produces its own local form of history in the repetitive ritual through which it is enacted. Similarly, Brathwaite’s poetic take on groundation represents an alternative temporality for the Creole articulation of the local sources of Caribbean culture through which they are constituted historically. As a vernacular performance that aims at grounding a particular accumulative history of the Caribbean, Brathwaite’s poetry literally becomes a “memorial . . . for all these centuries of apparently forgetting.” Bhabha describes this ambivalent temporality at the core of Brathwaite’s conception of groundation as the “temporality of translation or negotiation” (Location of Culture, 26) in the following terms: When I talk of negotiation rather than negation, it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History. . . . In such a discursive temporality, the event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory and antagonist instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle and destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political reason. (Bhabha, Location of Culture, 25) Brathwaite’s tidalectical Caribbean aesthetic constitutes precisely the kind of “dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History” that Bhabha refers to regarding the “temporality of translation.” As Bhabha argues, the temporality of translation opens a space of transferential exchange as a negotiation of differing historical, epistemological, cultural, and linguistic forces that ends up producing

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a hybrid topos, which, in the case of Brathwaite’s poetics, becomes the basis for the constitution of a new vernacular culture. Referring again to Bhabha’s seminal work on the task of nation writing, it becomes clear that Brathwaite’s development of a nation language for the Caribbean represents a “contentious” acknowledgment and “inscription” of Caribbean culture as a national culture, ultimately constituting a form of what Bhabha defines here in terms of the concept of “minority discourse”: Minority discourse acknowledges the status of national culture— and the people—as a contentious performative space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of time. Now, there is no reason to believe that such marks of difference—the incommensurable time of the subject of culture—cannot inscribe a “history” of the people. . . . They will not, however, celebrate the monumentality of historicist memory, the sociological solidity or totality of society, of the homogeneity of cultural experience. The discourse of the minority reveals the insurmountable ambivalence that structures the equivocal moment of historical time. (Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 308) In the light of Bhabha’s argument, the power of Brathwaite’s poetic groundation lies precisely in the way it manages to inscribe a nonteleological “history” as translated by the “marks of difference” he ascribes to the Creole specificity of the “West Indian voice.” Hence, Brathwaite’s work reveals “the insurmountable ambivalence” that governs the temporality of translation articulated through his own poetic voicing of the differential particularity of nation language as the vernacular foundation for Caribbean culture. Thus, one of the most powerful characteristics of Brathwaite’s work is his own struggle with the problematic tension inherent in the temporality of translation owing to its location between the accumulative temporality of history, on one hand, and the performative temporality of poetics, on the other. A key consequence of the temporal tension inherent in his poetics is that it ultimately leads to the intrinsically modern “hurtful” anxiety expressed in the following explanatory note heading the footnotes to Brathwaite’s X/Self: The poetry of X/Self is based on a culture that is personal—i-man/ Caribbean—and multifarious, with the learning and education that this implies. Because Caribbean culture has been so cruelly neglected both by the Caribbean itself, and by the rest of the world (except for the spot/check and catch-ups via cricket and reggae), my references (my nommos and icons) may appear as mysterious,

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meaningless even, to both Caribbean and non-Caribbean readers. So the notes . . . which I hope are helpful, but which I provide with great reluctance, since the irony is that they may suggest the poetry is so obscure in itself that it has to be lighted up; is so lame, that is to have a crutch; and (most hurtful of all) that it is bookish, academic, “history.” (Brathwaite, X/Self, 113) Brathwaite’s poetic voicing of the history of the West Indian voice tends to move toward the archival knowledge of historiography—requiring footnotes and historical contextualization as suggested in the excerpt just quoted—while, as an “inscription of the history of the people,” it is based on the “multifarious” and incommensurable realm of the “personal.” Therefore, the “hurtful” result of the temporality of translation at the core of Brathwaite’s overall project lies in the fact that the heuristic difference between history and poetics for the articulation of a nation language is ultimately lost within his work. As Bhabha claims, the hybrid space opened by the temporality of translation constitutes a negotiating discourse that ultimately manages to “destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects.” Although Brathwaite’s conception of his poetic practice as a groundation does produce its own history, its ambivalent temporality gradually collapses the epistemological difference—and thus the split—between the pedagogical temporality of history and the performative temporality of poetics. The end result of Brathwaite’s conception of nation language as a groundation of the sources of Caribbean experience is that as history of the West Indian voice it can continue to exist historically and poetically as a temporality solely grounded by Brathwaite himself. The emergence of SycoraxVS in Brathwaite’s work after the sudden silencing of his voice during his “Time of Salt” implies a renewed attempt to rearticulate an ambivalent temporality between history and poetics for the development of a nation language for the Caribbean. The medium that channels—electronically now—the sources or the essential “image/ spirit” of the Caribbean experience as SycoraxVS is not so much the “space/patterns” of nation language as voiced by Brathwaite himself, but rather as digitally translated by the language of computer code. Through SycoraxVS, Brathwaite’s voice ceases to be the medium that articulates the process of groundation, ultimately shifting the translating agency to the new medium articulated by programming code, which rather literally “illuminates” his voice. In this sense, SycoraxVS provides a new virtual temporality of translation that manages to avoid the kind of historical forgetting feared by the destruction of his “archives”—“after the accident

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after the death after the hurricane” (Brathwaite, Shar, n.p.)—providing a digital form of memory in which, as suggested by Lévy, “information is virtually present at each point of the network when it is requested.” However, Brathwaite’s insistence both in using SycoraxVS as exclusively channeled through his Mac SE/30 and in choosing the medium of traditional print as the only format for its publication denotes a particularly distinctive attempt to subject the virtual temporality of translation inherent in SycoraxVS to Brathwaite’s own historical positionality. Althouh the generation of Apple computers to which the Mac SE/30 belongs was cutting-edge technology in the late 1980s, by the late 1990s it had already become outdated and technologically obsolete, even requiring, as Chris Funkhouser notes, “emulation programs to be viewed—if it is even possible to load the media (usually a diskette) onto the machine” (Funkhouser, 21). Therefore, being able to view and experience SycoraxVS as originally produced by Brathwaite himself is not only a challenge for his publishers and readers, but a nearly impossible deed unless one has access to Brathwaite’s very own Mac SE/30. Ultimately, the traditional print format in which Brathwaite has chosen to publish his digital poetry reinforces his authorial control over SycoraxVS as a syncretic signifier for Caribbean culture. At the same time, it emphasizes the potential of groundation of its original digital format as a form of visible writing through which Brathwaite has struggled intellectually as well as creatively to ground through his poetry the constantly splitting temporalities of history and poetics within the context of Caribbean culture. However, by radically subjecting SycoraxVS to his own authorial, editorial, and interpretive position, Brathwaite ends up historicizing the digital syncretic signifier that has transfigured and regenerated his work so effectively since the 1990s. As experienced by readers of Brathwaite’s SycoraxVS, the medium itself, in its available printed form, constitutes a mere visual record of its original digital form, in fact losing its intrinsic virtual temporality and deterritorialized mode of archival memory, something that could be avoided if published in various modes of digital media, such as the World Wide Web. More important, Brathwaite’s decision to de-digitize SycoraxVS by exclusively publishing his work in traditional print format has not only done away with the intrinsic virtuality and rootlessness of the digital medium but has also eliminated the productive positionality symbolically embodied in the computer’s cursor. It is precisely Brathwaite’s original recognition of this creative potential of the computer’s digital cursor as “prospero’s curser” (Ancestors, 449) for the vernacular rearticulation of Caribbean culture that is virtually lost in the published version of SycoraxVS.

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Through this loss, SycoraxVS essentially becomes Brathwaite’s particular version of the “distinctive kind of written discourse” that, as the literary theorist and historian Hayden White describes referring to history, mediates “a certain kind of relation to the past” (White, Figural Realism, 1).

Afterword. The Location of Translation: The Atlantic and the (Relational) Literary History of Modern Transnational Poetics Poetry’s circulation and its action no longer conjecture a given people but the evolution of the planet Earth. That too is a commonplace, one worth repeating. We have to know that this activity pinpointed here in French literatures operates for all the others, each time on the basis of a different perspective. Every expression of the humanities opens onto the fluctuating complexity of the world. Here poetic thought safeguards the particular, since only the totality of truly secure particulars guarantees the energy of Diversity. But in every instance this particular sets about Relation in a completely intransitive manner, relating, that is, with the finally realized totality of all possible particulars. —édouard glissant, “Poetics,” in Poetics of Relation

It appears that Paul Gilroy’s crucial argument in The Black Atlantic (1993) that “cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (15) still has not registered within the scholarly discourse of transnational literary studies in the United States. Twenty years after Gilroy proposed a holistic approach to Atlantic studies in what constitutes perhaps the foundational work in the field, scholars working on various facets of transatlantic culture and literature have not generally adopted that framework. Instead of “one single, complex unit of analysis” we have many parallel but divergent scholarly areas of transatlantic analysis that glaringly tend to ignore each other. Currently there is an AngloAmerican version of “transatlantic literary studies,” recently defined as “an examination of communications between Britain and the Americas” (Bannet and Manning 2012, n.p.); a version of “Estudios transatlánticos” that generally focuses on the relations between Spain and Latin America within Hispanic studies; as well as transatlantic area studies mostly focusing on political, economic, social, and security relations between

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North America and Europe, as particularly embodied in the Transatlantic Studies Association.1 In addition to these three main scholarly areas explicitly labeled “transatlantic,” there are other fields of study that do not necessarily use that denomination but that, in practice, fall one way or another within the Atlantic rubric originally envisioned by Gilroy— among them Francophone transatlantic studies, Lusophone studies, Caribbean diaspora studies, Afro-Hispanic studies, and African diaspora studies, to name some of the most important academic fields and areas of research. There is no doubt that part of the reason for this multitude of fields examining transatlantic cultural exchange and circulation still lies precisely in the problematic “nationalist and ethnically absolute approaches” (15) that Gilroy originally tried to overcome with his critical approach to Atlantic cultural studies. However, the problem resides more specifically in a historically related issue, namely, that the transnational study of literary and cultural forms is still mostly bound to the scholarly traditions institutionalized in departments of national languages, literatures, and cultures in the United States and Europe. This issue brings us to the question of language and translation at the core of this book. Indeed, although this diversity of transnational fields focusing on the Atlantic as a space of transcultural mediation and exchange is not intrinsically problematic, what ends up getting lost in this Babelian multitude happens to be the concept of translation. By losing sight of the concept of translation, both literally and figuratively, these areas of transatlantic research lose an opportunity not only of reintegration but ultimately of properly encountering the inherent complexity and spatiotemporal ambiguity at the core of the transnational dimension of their objects of critical analysis. The implications of this loss of translation connected to the overall lack of critical communication between various fields that study different forms of transatlantic encounter and exchange—namely, the mistranslation, untranslatability, and lack of translation of each of these fragmentary areas of Atlantic scholarship in relation to each other, and in relation to the concept of translation—is indeed rather paradoxical since the notion of the Atlantic as a geopolitical space of cultural mediation has been articulated upon the notion of translation since the colonial period. As Julio Ortega has argued throughout his rich oeuvre, and particularly in his essay “Transatlantic Translations,” the need to translate different temporalities, notions of history, and cultural forms lies at the very core of the transatlantic experience. Through his analysis of differing colonial testimonies, historical texts, and oral legends retelling and reevaluating

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the foundational encounter between the Inca Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, Ortega defines translation as “the first cultural act that places languages and subjects in crisis, unleashing a redefinition of speakers, a debate over protocols, and a struggle over interpretation” (26). Ortega further develops his definition of “transatlantic translation” in the following terms: The day after the conquest, the postcolonial world began in the scripts of translation. In partial versions and overlaid readings of events, the New World subject who had learned to speak and read in the language of the Old World was already an interpreter, and from that moment onward translation would define this modern subject of the Americas. (Ortega, 39) Ortega locates the act of translation at the core of the foundational moment of transatlantic encounter—an ambiguous “memory continually reenacted” as he describes it—that inaugurated a “postcolonial world.” In so doing, he stresses that the relevance of the act of translation within the context of transatlantic encounter is not so much the transmission of equivalent meanings between two different cultures—a nearly impossible deed when those cultures are as incommensurable as the native Incan and the imperial Spanish cultures of 1532—but rather, the articulation of a constitutive “crisis” at the heart of this ambiguous, paradoxical, and violent transatlantic historical event. Thus, within Ortega’s conception, translation constitutes a transferring act between different cultures and temporalities connected by the Atlantic that effectively displaces speakers and problematizes attempts of interpretation by generating a series of syncretic and differing versions of a partly unknown original event. Ultimately, and as Ortega’s work highlights, the historical, epistemological and ontological centrality of translation within the transatlantic encounter challenges monolingual and mononational approaches to transatlantic cultural forms precisely because of the intrinsic translational complexity and ambiguity at its core. Consequently, within the fragmentary fields of transatlantic studies operating today, what tends to get lost is not only translation but also the fluid and circulatory form of relationality inherently connected to it, which is emphasized by Édouard Glissant’s foundational notion of a “poetics of relation.” If, as Glissant argues in the epigraph heading this afterword, the forms of circulation of modern poetics “no longer conjecture a given people but the evolution of the planet Earth,” it is only through a multilingual and transcultural framework of analysis not determined by a national model or language that scholars can account

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for the complex and paradoxical planetary implications of this circulation. This is particularly the case in the field of transnational poetry and poetics when approached from a transatlantic framework, in which the specificities of various languages and translation play a foundational role in the transnational circulation of modern poetics, as shown throughout this book. By avoiding and implicitly rejecting Gilroy’s critical reformulation of the Atlantic as a single unit of analysis, modern poetry scholars have traditionally reduced the historical, theoretical, linguistic, and cultural implications of the forms of relationality lying at the core of transatlantic modernity as historically experienced by key modern poets such as the ones studied in this book. The case of Spanish American modernismo at the end of the nineteenth century is particularly important and glaring within this problematic paradigm for the study of modern transnational poetry. Even though modernismo is generally regarded as the first modern poetic movement consciously connecting and bridging both sides of the Atlantic, the critical impact of the movement outside of the field of Hispanic studies remains completely negligible, literally as though it had never taken place.2 This is striking since the movement included major poets, writers, and intellectuals living and publishing throughout Latin America, the United States, France, and Spain— among them authors the stature of Rubén Darío (1867–1916), José Martí (1853–1895), Manuel Gutierrez Nájera (1859–1895), Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), and Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958). This point is strongly emphasized by Alejandro Mejías-López in his groundbreaking study of the movement, The Inverted Conquest. For Mejías-López, the critical disavowal of modernismo as a category central to the study of modern poetry, modernism and literary modernity is related to the rise of Anglo-American modernist poetics as a key component of the new canon of English studies, in what he describes as a “critical operation of exclusion,” with the following implications: As modernism came to be the object of increasing theorization in the Anglo-American academy and beyond, reaching its peak with the advent of the postmodernism debate, Hispanic modernism (perhaps never more than a curiosity in those same circles) was rapidly set aside, not as a result but as a precondition of that theorization. Hispanic “modernism,” the first movement to coin and theorize the term, may be condemned to remain untranslatable, italicized, and often accompanied by an explanatory note to reassure any unsuspecting reader that indeed modernismo is not modernism. (Mejías-López, 2)

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The terms used by Mejías-López in his critique of the disavowal of modernismo within Anglo-American studies of modernist poetry indicate that the problem is indeed a question of translation, or rather an unwillingness to translate modernismo into the Anglo-American canon of modernist poetry and poetics. In other words, if modernismo has remained “untranslatable,” using Mejías-López’s term, it is not because of its historical relevance as a transnational poetic movement that articulates a pioneering transatlantic response from Latin America to modernity and colonialism—clearly affecting the fields of Latin American, European, and world literatures—but rather, because up until now it has not been deemed worthy of critical consideration and translation within the hegemonic Anglo-American modernist canon produced by scholars and critics of Anglo-American literature. This symptomatic problem connected to the untranslated status of modernismo outside of the Spanish-speaking world leads to the problematization of traditional literary history as constituting a universally valid form of articulating knowledge regarding particular areas of the world, nations, cultures, time periods, genres, and literary traditions. The key problem here is that the Enlightenment model for writing modern literary history since its inception in the nineteenth century as a scholarly field has been essentially a national model, indeed as an explicit manifestation of a teleological conception of Western history and the modern notion of the nation-state. As Jenaro Talens has argued, “Cuando [la Historia de la Literatura] se instituye como disciplina académica . . . esta institucionalización no va tanto asociada al deseo de abordar analíticamente un patrimonio artístico y cultural, cuanto a la necesidad de cooperar con la constitución de una forma de estructura politica y social” (Talens, 11; When [Literary History] is instituted as an academic discipline . . . , this institutionalization is not so much associated with the desire to analytically engage an artistic cultural legacy, but rather with the need to cooperate with the constitution of a form of political and social structure). In this sense, Luiz Costa-Lima has identified the following five characteristics of nineteenth-century literary history, which bear repeating in the context of this argument regarding the form of historiography produced by modern literary history: (a) the assumption that the passage of time is identical with progress; (b) the loss of the absolute prestige that mathematics had enjoyed since the Renaissance; (c) the inference that positive—that is, nonspeculative, nonmetaphysical, not purely rational—thinking presupposes that there are no interruptions or gaps between

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the species of entities; (d) the perfect fit, made possible by the idea of representation, between the creative individual, national history, and the general history of civilized nations; (e) the individual as the primary center, his quintessence being genius. (Costa-Lima, 51) Although the practice of contemporary literary historiography has come a long way from the model of the Enlightenment respectively analyzed by Talens and Costa-Lima—as, for example, in the comparative literary histories proposed by Mario Valdés and Linda Hutcheon in the 1990s that led to a series of groundbreaking comparative literary histories, or projects such as the multilingual anthology of American literature edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors—the historical remnants of nineteenth-century literary historiography mentioned by Costa-Lima are still prevalent in the study of Western national literatures, particularly aspects “(a),” “(d)” and “(e).”3 There is no question that the presence of these historiographic remnants in contemporary academic institutions still makes the articulation of transnational and transcultural literary histories a rather difficult task today. As Ansgar Nünning has demonstrated in relation to the characteristic form, content, and role of the literary historian, recent national literary histories—particularly English ones, as Nünning shows—articulate “an invented tradition” that ends up reproducing the form of national identity (“Englishness” in his case) at the core of the genre itself, as well as the notion of nation-state that sustains such a scholarly project. Thus, in order to arrive at a transnational and transcultural literary history, for Nünning, “it is high time that we became aware of the merits of comparing not just the literatures of different countries but also, and even more so, the various national traditions of literary historiography, and that we move beyond the epistemological limitations both of national boundaries and of institutionally driven conceptual frameworks and historiographic styles” (Nünning, 168). Nünning’s critical aim to deconstruct the grip of national literary historiography in defining the object of literary scholarship is clearly necessary for the purpose of creating a new institutional space for the scholarly articulation of transnational and transcultural literary history. However, his own analysis of recent histories of European national literatures demonstrates that his revisionary project, despite being laudable, faces an obstacle as challenging as overcoming the project of modern nationalism, or of the nation-state as the epistemological and geopolitical center that articulates literary and cultural studies. Another option—perhaps more practical now—for the articulation of a transcultural literary history is to use historiographic models that

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either avoid the national framework altogether in their critical study of particular cultural forms or traditions, or models that trace historically the transcultural circulation and forms of relationality and exchange established between particular writers, journals, publishers, or groups of artists and intellectuals from different parts of the world. Both of these alternative models for the generation of a transnational literary history share the following features: They acknowledge the importance of translation as a foundational hermeneutic and linguistic process; they adopt a multilingual framework of analysis of literary and cultural forms; and they are intrinsically connected to the critical methodology of comparative literature as a scholarly field, albeit in different historical moments of the evolution of the discipline. The first model of transnational literary history I am referring to here is embodied in the foundational work of Erich Auerbach. An extremely relevant example of the second model of transnational cultural history—in fact more recent and germane to Gilroy’s vision of an Atlantic framework for cultural analysis—is Brent Hayes Edwards’s pathbreaking The Practice of Diaspora. As the previous chapters show, my study of modern transatlantic poetics follows these two alternative comparative and multilingual models of literary history: It constitutes a critical method of analysis based on the concept and practice of translation; it examines the transfer or figural correlation between different poetic forms written in different languages; and it traces the processes of transnational circulation of these poetic forms and the particular historical conditions that determine these processes. Although Auerbach’s work of literary history clearly falls outside of the area of Atlantic studies and the historical period and scope of this book, what is extremely relevant about his critical method is the way in which he is able to establish in historical terms the basis for forms of relationality between different authors or works not determined by a particular nation-state or a national language. In his well-known essay titled “Figura” of 1939, Auerbach sets the theoretical foundations for his method of interpretation of a series of canonical literary texts at the core of the corpus of Western literature, a project fully fleshed out in his masterpiece Mimesis. For Auerbach, the notion of “figura” essentially constitutes a conceptualization of a relational form that can be traceable in different works, theorized through a philological examination of the various linguistic and literary manifestations, uses, and implications of these relational forms.4 As Claus Uhlig has argued, Auerbach’s conceptualization of “figura” as a tool of critical interpretation articulates a mode of historical analysis based on the figural relationality of particular literary forms: “Figural or typological interpretation, according

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to this essay expounding the time-honored method of biblical exegesis, is a way of connecting two events or persons in historical time, whereby the first of the two signifies both itself and the second, while the second, the antitype to the preceding type, fulfils the first, much as a prophecy can be said to be fulfilled by a later happening” (Uhlig, 41). This is the historical process that Hayden White has referred to as a “figural causation” based on Auerbach’s notion of “fulfillment (Erfüllung).” For White, the figural fulfillment of an original form through another articulates a causal force in which “historical events can be related to one another in the way in which a ‘figure’ is related to its ‘fulfillment’ in a narrative or a poem” (White, Figural Realism, 126). As Uhlig argues, Auerbach’s method of critical exegesis “differs from the old habits of thought that take for granted historical sequence, i.e., a continuous development in chronological and horizontal succession, whereas typological interpretation, by combining two events causally and chronologically remote from each other in time but having a meaning common to both, operates along a vertical line” (Uhlig, 41). This “vertical” correlation of disparate events from two different historical periods, materialized in a particular “figura” is intrinsically connected to the historical implications of Benjamin’s conceptualization of translation as “form” discussed in the introduction of this book. Indeed, if both Uhlig’s description of Auerbach’s method of secular exegesis— originally developed by Dante in his Commedia—and White’s analysis of this typological relational process as constituting a “figural causation” sound conceptually similar to Benjamin’s theory of translation, it is because they articulate parallel conceptions of history. As Tejaswini Niranjana has already pointed out, Benjamin’s theory of translation is closely related to his scholarly work as a “materialist historiographer,” in the following terms: “For Benjamin, on the other hand, translation—in a project that seems at first glance to be absolutely essentialist and nostalgic—is to point toward the realm of reconciliation of languages. This realm of reconciliation or redemption later appears in Benjamin’s work as the ‘end’ (Ende not Ziel) that guides the translations of the materialist historiographer” (Niranjana, 145). As Niranjana suggests, for Benjamin, translation produces a historical correlation materially articulated through language as a form that points toward that realm of “reconciliation or redemption” embodied in the notion of “pure language.” Benjamin’s conceptualization of “pure language” constitutes thus the ultimate end or higher purpose of translation encountered in its “afterlife,” a notion he also describes as the “innermost relationship of languages to one another,” adding that translation “cannot possibly reveal or establish

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this hidden relationship of languages itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form” (Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 255). In fact, Auerbach’s conceptualization of “figural causality” entails a correlation between history and the “revelation” of a hidden realm of signification parallel to the one Benjamin ascribes to translation. This correlation is emphasized by Auerbach in his essay “Figura,” referring to Dante’s figural method: “Actually there is no choice between historical and hidden meaning; both are present. The figural structure preserves the historical event while interpreting it as a revelation; and must preserve it in order to interpret it” (Auerbach, “Figura,” 68). A key aspect of their respective conceptualizations of translation and figural language is the way each constitutes an extremely valuable historical form in itself able to transcend, both for Benjamin and Auerbach, particular historiographic narratives—as forms of “continuous development in chronological and horizontal succession”—that are intrinsically extraneous to their very form and historicity. Thus, the significance of translation for Benjamin and of figural language for Auerbach as linguistic forms does not lie in the historical signified they may represent, transmit, or communicate, but rather in the way they articulate in themselves the different “vertical” modes of historical correlation described by Uhlig and the mode of “figural causation” suggested by White. This is, in part, what leads Michael Holquist to assert in 1993 that Auerbach articulates in Mimesis “a paradigm for cultural studies in the future” (Holquist, 387). For Holquist, the Berlin-born Jewish scholar—“great singer of diversity, sublet opponent of all homogenizing forces” (390)— who was forced to a homeless diasporic exile in the face of the rise of Nazism, establishes in Mimesis a work of literary history that instead of upholding a sense of national identity and a nationalistic form of history, ultimately constitutes “an elegy for the lost moment when stoic heroes resisted the reductive winds of uniformity and glimpsed the randomness and teeming difference of history without blinking or falling back on glutinous ideologies” (388). Auerbach’s deep commitment to difference and to a multilingual critical framework is also shared by Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora as a work of transnational cultural and literary history. In his study of black internationalism in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s and its relation to the Harlem Renaissance, Edwards uses a methodology that is largely based on a thorough critical examination of the concept and practice of translation. As Edwards argues, “The cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation. It is not possible to take up the question of ‘diaspora’ without taking into account that the great majority of

186 / afterword

peoples of African descent do not speak or write English” (Edwards, 7). Hence, within his project to study the transnational circuits of black culture, translation is important for Edwards not only at a linguistic level— literally “by grappling with the semantic shifts and altered vocables” (Edwards, 25) emerging through the different “diasporic encounters” that articulate black internationalism across the Atlantic—but also in the ways in which translation as a set of historical practices of linguistic and cultural exchange are “crucial for the fabric of this transatlantic print culture” (Edwards, 9). Moreover, by focusing on translation on these two levels—both as a linguistic process that alters meanings and the cultural value of words, and as a transcultural practice that articulates the material circulation of cultural forms—Edwards is able to locate and theorize “difference” as “the trace or the residue, perhaps, of what resists and escapes translation” (13). An essential feature of the kind of cultural and literary history proposed and practiced by Edwards is that it is dependent on the generation of a new archive previously unavailable as such and that emerges precisely by critically tracing the material residues of that transnational circulation that he conceptualizes as the “practice of diaspora” within his project. In other words, it is a literary and cultural history that does not follow or reinforce a previously given national, linguistic, or methodological framework; rather, its methodology in fact articulates the archive documenting the transnational circulation of cultural forms sustaining the relational force of “difference” that “escapes translation.” This last aspect of his scholarly project is emphasized by Edwards in the following terms: It should be evident that undertaking such a project necessitates unearthing and articulating an archive, in the sense not so much of a site or mode of preservation of a national, institutional, or individual past, but instead of a “generative system”: in other words, a discursive system that governs the possibilities, forms, appearance, and regularity of particular statements, objects and practices— or, on the simplest level, that determines “what can and cannot be said.” (Edwards, 7) Edwards’s proposed archive that ultimately grounds and articulates his method of cultural historiography in The Practice of Diaspora can be analyzed thus as a “poetics of relation,” in Glissant’s use of the concept. The purpose of this method of historical analysis and its inherent articulation of an “archive” as a “generative system” is ultimately, quoting Glissant, “no longer [to] conjecture a given people,” but rather to

afterword / 187

unveil critically the various historical forms of relationality that emerge as material and formal expressions of an “evolution” that conjectures “the fluctuating complexity of the world” (Glissant, 32). This is a critical method that is in principle at the core of both Benjamin’s and Auerbach’s respective historiographic practices and conceptions of language, history, and figural representation. By unveiling the particular material configurations of the poetics of relation as the “generative system” mentioned by Edwards, this form of transcultural literary history ultimately unveils the location of translation as the spatiotemporal realm in which “[a] particular sets about Relation in a completely intransitive manner, relating, that is, with the finally realized totality of all possible particulars” (Glissant, 32). As I have shown throughout this book, what articulates this poetic relationality embodied in the transnational circulation of modern poetics across the Atlantic in the five different cases I have examined is not the need to “conjecture a given people,” as mentioned by Glissant, or, for that matter, the need to “conjecture” a “given” region, nation, language, institution, academic department, or methodological heuristic corollary. It is a transnational circulation ultimately articulated by a series of poetic transfers that aim at some higher relational purpose or, as Glissant argues, as the manifestation of a relation that ultimately strives “to be complete.” For in reality, Relation is not an absolute toward which every work would strive but a totality—even if for us this means disentangling it, something it never required—that through its poetic and practical and unceasing force attempts to be perfected, to be spoken, simply, that is, to be complete. (Glissant, 35)

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Notes

Introduction. Poetry after Translation 1. See Richard Sieburth’s introduction to Ezra Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, Haun Saussy’s “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, and Steven Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism. 2. At the end of this sentence, Gaonkar and Povinelli use author-date citations (“Asad 1986, Povinelli 2001b”) to refer to two essays that tackle the specific problem they are addressing: Talal Asad’s “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” (in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986]); and Povinelli’s “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability” (Annual Review of Anthropology 30 [2001]: 319–34). As I will discuss later, their reference to Asad’s essay is particularly relevant for my analysis of their notion of “transfiguration.” 3. By focusing on the work of influential British cultural ethnographers of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Ernest Gellner and Godfrey Lienhardt, Asad points out the way in which the anthropological act of interpretation tended to “preempt the evaluation” of particular foreign cultures (“Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” 21). For Asad, this is particularly problematic in ethnographic writing characterized by the linguistic phenomenon he refers to as “unequal languages,” in which “the languages concerned are so remote that it is very difficult to rewrite a harmonious intentio” (21).

1 / Heteronymies of Lusophone Englishness 1. Pessoa’s own analysis—written in English—of his transpersonal tendencies is worth quoting in full: “My interest in Francis Bacon’s horoscope is due to several circumstances, of which the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy is only one. The chief interest arises from a desire to see what in Bacon’s horoscope registers his peculiar

190 / notes characteristic of being able to write in different styles (a fact which even non Baconians admit) and his general faculty of transpersonalisation. I possess (in what degree, or with what quality, it is not for me to say) the characteristic to which I am alluding. I am an author: and have always found impossible to write in my own personality; I have always found myself, consciously or unconsciously assuming the character of someone who does not exist, and through his imaginary agency I write.” Fernando Pessoa, Correspondênça Inédita, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva, 92. 2. Some Pessoa scholars have recently emphasized the relevance of the fact that Fernando Pessoa developed as a writer through a bilingual interaction with the canon of Anglo-American literature during the early 1900s—for example, George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature and Maria Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism. But only a few critics have actually emphasized the importance of Pessoa’s own English poetry. Two important exceptions are Jorge de Sena with his groundbreaking introduction and edition of Pessoa’s English Poems in Poemas Ingleses: Obras Completas de Fernando Pessoa—and Georg Rudolf Lind, with his article “Oito poemas ingleses inéditos de Fernando Pessoa,” in Estudos sobre Fernando Pessoa, 385–425. 3. As demonstrated by João Gaspar Simões, Pessoa excelled academically at Durban High School, winning a series of prizes in English composition, among them the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize in 1904 for best English essay at Pessoa’s matriculation examination for admission to the University of the Cape of Good Hope. See João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa. For a more recent study of Fernando Pessoa’s formation at Durban see also Alexandrino E. Severino, Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul. 4. An extremely detailed analysis of Pessoa’s different readings of English literature as well as the actual poetry books by English authors he owned while living at Durban is carried out by João Gaspar Simões in his Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa. 5. See D. J. Palmer’s study of the rise of English literature as an academic discipline during the Victorian era, The Rise of English Studies. 6. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Portuguese and Spanish original texts included in this book are my own. 7. “Sebastianismo” refers to the myth within Portuguese history and literature of the messianic return of the young Portuguese king Dom Sebastião who died in the battle of Alcácer-Quibir in 1578, leaving the Portuguese throne temporarily in Spanish hands until 1640. The establishment of a Portuguese “Quinto Imperio” through the mythic second coming of D. Sebastião constitutes a theme thoroughly explored in Pessoa’s 1934 collection Mensagem. For a thorough study of the theme of Sebastianismo in Portuguese and Brazilian literature see António Quadros, Poesia e filosofia do mito Sebastianista. 8. Pessoa’s full statement goes as follows: “É um imperialismo de gramáticos? O imperialismo dos gramáticos dura mais e vai mais fundo que o dos generais. É um imperialismo de poetas? Seja. A frase não é ridícula senão para quem defende o antiguo imperialismo ridículo. O imperialismo dos poetas dura e domina; os dos políticos passa e esquece, se o não lembrar o poeta que o cante.” (Is it an imperialism of grammarians? The imperialism of grammarians lasts longer and goes further than the general ones. Is it an imperialism of poets? Be it. The phrase is not ridiculous except for those who defend the old ridiculous imperialism. The imperialism of poets lasts and dominates;

notes / 191 that of politicians goes away and is forgotten if the poet that may sing it fails to recollect it.) Fernando Pessoa, Sobre Portugal, ed. Joel Serrão, 129. 9. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud defines the fetish as the replacement of the normal sexual object by another object with which it is synecdochally or metonymically related, in the following terms: “There are some cases which are quite specially remarkable—those in which the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but it is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim. . . . What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and pereferable to that person’s sexuality (e.g., a piece of clothing or underlinen)” (249), 10. In his study of Pessoa’s life in South Africa, Alexandrino Severino refers to the complete absence of any reference to Durban in Pessoa’s work in the following terms: “Jamais em seus versos ou nos seus escritos em prosa apareceria qualquer refêrencia direta à cidade que o abrigara durante nove anos.” (Neither in his verse, nor in his prose writings is there ever any kind of direct reference to the city that accommodated him during nine years.) See Alexandrino E. Severino, Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul, 32.

2 / The Translatability of Planetary Poiesis 1. In 1917 Huidobro published in Paris Horizon carré, his first main collection in French. In 1918 and while living in Madrid he published Ecuatorial, Poemas árticos, Tour Eiffel, and Hallali—the last two also written in French. 2. As Huidobro relates during an interview in Chile during the summer of 1919, Pound apparently offered to translate Huidobro’s Horizon carré into English: “Hay además un joven poeta inglés, Ezra Pound, que también ha deseado venir con nosotros y que iba a traducir a su idioma natal mi libro Horizon carré (Cruchaga, 64; There is also a young English poet, Ezra Pound, who also wanted to be with us and who was going to translate Horizon carré into his native tongue). In the same interview Huidobro also mentions Pound’s imagisme as one of the most relevant avant-garde poetics at the time: “La de los ‘imaginistas’, que es una escuela oriunda de Inglaterra, con ramificaciones en Estados Unidos y Canadá” (that of the Imagists, a school which originated in England, and derived groups in the United States and Canada). 3. “Pues la rueda de nuestras evoluciones literarias, después del impulso novecentista, gira muy lentamente y en un silencio de maquinaria gastada. Sus engranajes se oxidan faltos de una vívida lubrificación mental” (Guillermo de Torre, “La poesía creacionista y la pugna entre sus progenitores,” in Costa, Vicente Huidobro y el creacionismo 130; since the wheel of our literary evolution, after the impulse at the turn of the century, spins extremely slowly with a silence of used machinery. Its mechanisms rust lacking a vivid mental lubrication). 4. Bürger incorporates cubism within the different movements that configure his category of “the historical avant-garde” in the following terms: “The concept of the historical avant-garde movements used here applies primarily to Dadaism and early surrealism but also equally to the Russian avant-garde after the October revolution. Partly significant differences between them notwithstanding, a common feature of all these movements is that they do not reject individual artistic techniques and procedures of earlier art, but rejected that art in its entirety, thus bringing about a radical break with tradition. In their most extreme manifestations, their primary target is art

192 / notes as an institution such as it has developed in bourgeois society. . . . Although Cubism does not pursue the same intent, it calls into question the system of representation with its linear perspective that had prevailed since the Renaissance. For this reason, it is part of the historic avant-garde movements, although it does not share their basic tendency (sublation of art in the praxis of life)” (Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 109). 5. In the early 1920s Huidobro started working on his visual novel Cagliostro, subtitled a “Novela-Film,” which was first published in an English translation as Mirror of a Mage in 1930 and which, in 1927, won a $10,000 prize by the New York–based League for Better Motion Pictures as the “book of the year with best possibilities for moving picture adaptation” (De Costa, Vicente Huidobro: The Careers of a Poet, 129). 6. See Trayectoria del caligrama en Huidobro. POESIA I, 3. Madrid, 1978. 7. This idea is also emphasized by Gerardo Diego in one of his articles on creacionismo: “Pero esta conducta, que puede parecer descastamiento aunque en rigor no lo sea, es consecuencia obligada de su concepto de la poesía como idioma universal, en el cual es indiferente usar una lengua u otra, porque en la imagen creada, su invención es válida en todos los organismos linguisiticos y resulta, en lo que tiene de creación, traducible” (Diego, “Poesía y Creacionismo de Vicente Huidobro,” 216; But this behavior, which may seem a form of uprootedness although in fact it is not so, is a necessary consequence of his conception of poetry as universal language, in which it is indifferent to use one language or another since the invention of the created image is valid in all linguistic forms and is translatable as a created thing). 8. See Huidobro, Altazor: Temblor de cielo, 40. 9. “Who has been the assassin? Facing the judge the cadaver of the woman lies like the mummy of the most beautiful female pharaoh. Shout, accusers. . . . Suddenly a deafening cry raised across the air. ‘To the guillotine. The guillotine, the guillotine.’ Moments later, in front of the bloodthirsty crowd, the fatal knife cut the marble head of the accused, and an immense stream of light endlessly emanated from his neck. At that moment, there was a horrifying earthquake in the sky. The stars shattered in a thousand pieces; the planets set on fire; pieces of moons were flying around; burning coals were coming out of volcanoes on other planets and came down at times shrieking into the burst-out eyes of men. . . . In the midst of the catastrophic chaos and general confusion two arms stronger than a hundred oceans grabbed my neck. ‘Isolda, is it you?’ ‘How many years apart from each other.’ ‘There had to be a catastrophe such as this one for us to meet again.’ ‘You, tree of wisdom, with the ripe eyes at the threshold of dreams and that elephant swagger with the feet of an idol.’ ‘Show me your breasts. Let me see your breasts’” (Huidobro, Altazor: Temblor de cielo, 153, my translation). 10. “Ladies and Gentlemen: the snake of shipwrecks bites its tongue and grows bigger, grows bigger into infinity. We are inside its circles absorbed by the abyss of the future putrefaction, spilling pus through our eyes like ocean foam. Meanwhile, the inner landscapes feel the flight of trees; our ears before taking off manage to hear the whirlwind of the spikes that are sinking deeper, falling like leaves. There is no hope for rest. In vain the skeleton behind its glass adopts the posture of the person who is about to sing. The inner doors of the planet cover the ears with violence like the nurse who hears the terrible adventure in the last frontier. Nothing is gained by thinking that perhaps behind the abstract wall extends the voluptuous zone of amazement. . . . That was the discourse that you have called macabre without a reason, the beautiful discourse of the announcer of nothingness.

notes / 193 Go ahead. Follow your journey as I follow mine. I am too slow for dying.” (Huidobro, Altazor; Temblor de cielo, 172, my translation).

3 / Queering the Poetic Body 1. Daniel Katz and Jonathan Mayhew have written two very different but equally relevant analyses of After Lorca. Katz’s “Jack Spicer’s After Lorca: Translation as Decomposition” is a highly theoretical essay that focuses on the role played by translation as a process of transmission. Mayhew dedicates a section of one of the chapters of his Apocryphal Lorca to Spicer’s work, carrying out a rather useful and detailed comparative reading of After Lorca as an apocryphal version of Lorca’s poetry. Neither of these two critics, however, reads Spicer’s After Lorca as part of the larger translational project of queer poetics that, in my analysis, characterizes the poetry of the Berkeley Renaissance as a collective. 2. Dante’s complete sonnet quoted by Blaser goes as follows: Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io fossimo presi per incantamento e messi in un vasel, ch’ad ogni vento per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio; sì che fortunal od altro tempo rio non ci potesse dare impedimento, anzi, vivendo sempre in un talento, di stare insieme crescesse ‘l disio. E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi con quella ch’è sul numer de le trenta con noi ponesse il buono incantatore: e quivi ragionar sempre d’amore, e ciascuna di lor fosse contenta, sì come i’ credo che saremmo noi. 3. Robert Norton, in his groundbreaking biography of Stefan George, describes his relation with Morwitz in the following terms: “A nineteen-year-old admirer named Ernst Morwitz, a native of Danzig, had just been reading George’s works and providentially discovered through one of the newspaper articles about the trial that the poet lived in Bingen. The letter Morwitz wrote to him in August 1905 laid the foundation for a friendship that lasted until George’s death more than a quarter of a century later. . . . Morwitz, who became a successful lawyer in Berlin, was one of George’s chief legal advisers in later years. After 1933, Morwitz, who was a Jew, fled to the United States and there continued his work as a staunch defender of George’s legacy” (Norton, Secret Germany, 346). 4. As anthologized by Francisco García Lorca and Donald Allen in the 1955 New Directions edition of Lorca’s Selected Poems primarily used by Spicer during his composition of After Lorca, Lorca’s poetry displayed a series of poetic features with a strong appeal for Spicer, among them a return to traditional medieval poetic forms in poems belonging to Romancero Gitano or Poema del Cante Jondo, an original take on surrealist imagery at work in compositions posthumously published in Poeta en Nueva York, as well as the radical embrace of popular culture that pervades Lorca’s

194 / notes overall oeuvre. Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian mentioned these details in Poet Be Like God, their biography of Spicer: “Spicer had begun, in Boston, to translate some of Lorca’s work, with a copy of the recent New Directions edition of the Selected Poems kept by his bedside” (81). Also, according to Clayton Eshleman, Spicer also used the 1955 Aguilar edition of Lorca’s Obras Completas. 5. As Clayton Eshleman patiently shows in his relevant “The Lorca Working,” of the thirty-four poems that make up the series, eleven are Spicer’s own poems, clearly written under the spell of Lorca’s ghost. Eshleman describes the “typical” Spicer translation of any of Lorca’s poems in the following rather vague terms: “The greater percentage of the poem is accurately, if uninventively, translated, with matches of mistranslation, some of which appear to be meaningful, some of which appear to be arbitrary” (33). Moreover, Eshleman’s overall effort seems futile mainly because Spicer is clearly not interested in producing faithfully equivalent translations of Lorca’s poems, but rather, as I am arguing here, in leading Lorca’s words across time. Donald Allen also points out in his introduction to Spicer’s One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980) the list of original Lorca poems included in After Lorca. 6. George’s poem “Der Teppich” (The Tapestry) together with Morwitz’s English translation, follows here: Hier schlingen menschen mit gewächsen tieren Sich fremd zum bund umrahmt von seidner franze Und blaue sicheln weisse sterne zieren Und queren sie in dem erstarrten tanze. Und kahle linien ziehn in reich-gestickten Und teil um teil ist wirr und gegenwendig Und keiner ahnt das rätsel der verstrickten. Da eines abends wird das werk lebendig. Da regen schauernd sich die toten äste Die wesen eng von strich und kreis umspannet Und treten klar vor die geknüpften quäste Die lösung bringend über die ihr sannet! Sic ist nach willen nicht: ist nicht für jede Gewohne stunde: ist kein schatz der gilde. Sie wird den vielen nie und nie durch rede. Sie wird den seltnen selten im gebilde. Framed by a silken fringe, in strange accord Here men are intermeshed with beasts and plants, And sickles blue with stars of white are scored And traverse them in the arrested dance. Through lavish broideries run barren lines, And part for part is tangled and at strife. And none the riddle of the snared divines . . . Then, on a night, the fabric comes to life. The frozen branches tremulously veer, The beings close in line and circle fused Emerge before the knotted tassels clear

notes / 195 And bring the answer over which you mused! Not at your beck it is, and not for each Accustomed hour, nor guild’s enriching share, And never for the many and through speech, It comes incarnate rarely to the rare. (Stefan George, Poems, 100–101)

4 / Transferring the “Luminous Detail” 1. The Provençal term—whose meaning could never be fully ascertained by modern scholars—was rescued by Pound from the poetry of the French troubadours of the Middle Ages. As generally acknowledged, Pound incorporated the term from the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, using it in Canto XX of his magnum opus The Cantos of Ezra Pound (“Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by noigandres?” [89]). 2. In New York, Sousândrade wrote opinion articles as well as literary essays regularly for the Portuguese-language newspaper O Novo Mundo, owned and edited by another cosmopolitan expatriate from Brazil, the publisher and journalist José Carlos Rodrigues. 3. Sousândrade specifically quotes a passage from Humboldt’s Vue des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810) as an epigraph for O Guesa. 4. The concept of phanopeia is part of the poetic taxonomy developed by Pound famously published in his article “How to Read”: MELOPOEIA, wherein the words are charged . . . with some musical property . . . PHANOPOEIA, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination. LOGOPOEIA, “the dance of the intellect among words.” (Pound, “How to Read,” 25) 5. 1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding to rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome. (Pound, “Retrospect,” 3) 6. Pound primarily develops his notion of paideuma in his essay “For a New Paideuma” (included in his Selected Prose). Pound defines paideuma as “the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal, reaching the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time” (Pound, Selected Prose, 284). 7. “In always-moving iris, green-snow / Blue hyacinth and the fulgent roses.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão,28, my translation) 8. “The flat mirror of sand reflects / the golden-diaphanous-ashgrey nimbus.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 28, my translation) 9. “The last fires of the West / cry plates and gold over the mass / of live darkness, liquid, luminous / The Black-River runs whispering.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 28, my translation) 10. “Moving nights of sparkling stars.” (Campos and Campos, ReVisão, 28, my translation) 11. “Assume that, by the translations of ‘The Seafarer’ and of Guido’s lyrics, I have given evidence that fine poetry may consist of elements that are of seem to be almost mutually exclusive.” (Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” 26)

196 / notes 12. Ferenczi’s formulation of introjection as an unconscious identification with an external object had an impact on the work of Freud himself, who picks up the notion to describe hysterical identification in essays such as “Mourning and Melancholia”: “Identifications with the object are by no means rare in the transference neurosis either: indeed they are a well-known mechanism of symptom formation, especially in hysteria” (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 587). At the same time Ferenczi’s notion is crucial for the development of Melanie Klein’s studies of ego formation in children. Ultimately, Ferenczi’s “introjection” becomes extremely relevant for later psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the actual structure of the ego, which is seen in this case by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok as the total sum of introjections, as they argue in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: “We understand Ego as the sum of its introjections and define introjection as the libido’s encounter with a potentially infinite numbers of instruments for its own symbolic expression” (Abraham and Torok, 4).

5 / The Digital Vernacular 1. It is important to point out the fact that Brathwaite’s reevaluation of the notion of the Creole as a conceptual foundation for the development of Caribbean culture predates by roughly ten years the so-called Créolité movement that would later be developed by the Martinican writers Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant. 2. “The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation I want to call the Black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constrains of ethnicity and national particularity” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 19). 3. “His nation language is not the language of a nation, but of an ocean: it is the discourse of the Black Atlantic” (Hitchcock, Imaginary States, 73). 4 Macintosh SE/30: Technical Specifications. http://docs.info.apple.com/article. html?artnum=112170. 5. As stated in the introduction to Brathwaite’s Shar, prior to its destruction by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, his personal library at Irish Town was arguably one of “the most important archives of Caribbean literature and culture, . . . possibly one of the largest collections of Caribbean poetry in the world” (Brathwaite, Shar, n.p.).

Afterword. The Location of Translation 1. The Transatlantic Studies Association was founded in 2002 in the U.K. The following information is available on their website: “The inauguration of the Transatlantic Studies Association took place on 11 July 2002 with the first of its annual conferences. Lord Robertson, Secretary General of NATO, welcomed the delegates with a video message commending the new initiative. The conferences have grown in strength ever since and now attract over 100 delegates each year drawn mainly from North America (35%), from Europe excluding the UK (25%), and UK (35%).” http:// www.transatlanticstudies.com/. 2. The term “modernismo” has been the topic of innumerable theoretical disquisitions. As the scholar Max Henríquez Ureña showed in his magisterial Breve historia del modernismo, Rubén Darío originally coined the term in 1888 to refer to a particular “absoluto modernismo en la expresión” (Henríquez Ureña, 156; absolute modernism of expression), used by the Mexican writer Ricardo Contreras. Earlier critics, who generally received Spanish American modernismo as a highly artificial and decadent

notes / 197 poetic trend directly borrowed by Latin American poets from contemporary French poetry, used the term with clear negative connotations emphasizing the frivolous excesses of form of their poetry, as well as its corrupting potential for what critics took to constitute the overall purity of the Spanish literary traditin. However, starting with the groundbreaking assessments of the period by figures such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, the above mentioned Henríquez Ureña, Ricardo Gullón, and Iván Schulman, modernismo has been gradually analyzed as a crucial phase in the overall evolution of modern poetics, being parallel in terms of cohesiveness and relevance to other fully fleshed aesthetic responses to modernity such as French modernisme, Brazilian modernismo, and, more importantly, Anglo-American modernism. 3. See Rethinking Literary History—Comparatively, by Mario Valdés and Linda Hutcheon; Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, edited by Mario J. Valdes and Djelal Kadir; A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors; and Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translation, edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors. 4. As Auerbach argues regarding the conceptual implications of the term “figura” in classical antiquity, “Side by side with the original plastic signification and overshadowing it, there appeared a far more general concept of grammatical, rhetorical, logical, mathematical—and later even of musical and choreographic—form” (“Figura,” 15). In his foundational analysis of Dante’s method of representation, Auerbach emphasizes the way Dante’s use of the figurative power of allegory recuperates both its typological and spiritual completeness, by being fully based not in abstract notions or concepts as its ground of representation, but in the figural interrelation of two different real events represented mimetically. It is important to emphasize that, for Auerbach, the intellectual recognition of the figural connection between two events distant from each other within the realm of historical time—the two poles of the figure—constitutes in itself an extratemporal recognition.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas, 196n12 Adorno, Theodor W., 56, 113–14 Africa, 18, 22, 24, 26, 32, 45, 47, 48, 121, 122, 147–49, 151–53, 155, 156, 158–59, 178, 186, 191n10 After Lorca (Spicer), 19, 81–82, 88, 97–108, 109–15, 193n1, 193n4, 194n4 Agamben, Giorgio, 18, 43–45 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 130, 132 Aldington, Richard, 127 Allen, Donald, 193n4, 194n5 Altazor (Huidobro), 19, 53–54, 71–72 Althusser, Louis, 160 Álvarez, Enrique, 105–6 Ancestors (Brathwaite), 162–67 Andrade, Oswald de, 130, 139, 143–44 Anglo-American: literature, 1, 19, 118, 132, 133, 177, 180, 190n2; modernism, 1, 2, 5, 26, 45–50, 118, 124, 133, 139–40, 144, 181, 197n2 Antinous (Pessoa), 26, 29, 30, 32–38, 43 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 51 Apter, Emily, 5–6, 14 “Aquatic Park” (Spicer), 106–9 Arenas, Fernando, 35 Arrivants, The (Brathwaite), 150, 162 Asad, Talal, 10–11, 189n2, 189n3 Ashbery, John, 84 Atlantic Ocean, the, 1, 24, 47, 53, 55, 57, 71, 72, 82, 97, 117, 121, 148, 151, 177–87; and cultural circulation, 15; and the

experience of modernity, 18, 179; and literary history, 181–87; and modern poetry and poetics, 5, 6, 57, 71, 121, 180; and poetic transfer, 1, 18, 82, 187; and Spanish–American modernismo, 180–81; as a spatiotemporal realm of mediation, 1–5, 178; and translation, 178–79. See also transatlantic Atlantic studies, 177–80, 183 Auerbach, Erich, 183–85, 197n4 Badiou, Alain, 18, 23, 36, 48–49 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 177 Barbados, 146, 162, 164 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 20, 157 Benjamin, Walter: and “afterlife” of original in translation, 13, 110, 184; and alterity,16; and cultural translation, 10–11; and George, 113; and history, 184–85, 187; on intentio, 10–11; on “pure language,” 13, 16, 69, 112, 114–15, 184; on translatability, 13, 15, 111; on translation as form, 12–14, 113, 184. See also “The Task of the Translator” Berkeley (city of), 83, 84, 86, 89, 98 Berkeley, University of California, 82, 93 Berkeley Renaissance, 19, 81–116, 193n3; and After Lorca (Spicer), 81–83; and American poetry, 84; and homosociality, 84–87; and impact of Ernst Kantorowicz, 82–83, 88,

212 / index 93–96, 99–100; and influence of Stefan George, 83, 88–93; and queer ethic, 82, 84–88, 92, 95, 98, 114; and queer poetics, 19, 82, 84, 88, 93, 100–101, 105, 112–15, 193n1; and sovereign artist, 88, 95, 99–100; and translation, 85–86, 97–108,115–16. See also After Lorca; Duncan; Spicer Bhabha, Homi, 20, 171–74 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy), 151, 177–80 Blaser, Robin, 2, 19, 81–88, 93–95, 97–100, 106, 108, 112–16. See also “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere” Borges, Jorge Luis, 55 Borges, Norah, 55 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1 Brathwaite, Doris Monica, 162 Brathwaite, Kamau, 2, 16, 20; and Africa, 147–48, 151–52, 155–56, 159; and Anglophone Caribbean literature, 20, 146–47; and Barbados, 146; and Caribbean culture, 20, 146–57, 171–76; and Caribbean history, 146–48, 156, 162–63, 170, 171–76; and conceptualization of Creolae as foundation for Caribbean culture, 148–49, 151–52, 154–58, 161–65, 170, 171–76; and nation language, 158–60, 163, 170, 174; on poetry as groundation, 159–60, 172–73; and the “temporality of translation” (Bhabha), 172–76; and “tidalectics,” 150–52, 155, 161; and “Time of Salt,” 162–63, 169; and vernacularity, 20, 148, 152–53, 156–60, 168–69, 172, 174; on the West Indian “voice,” 149, 156–61, 163. See also Sycorax Video Style Breton, André, 51 Bürger, Peter, 18, 54, 56–58, 61, 66, 191n4 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 25, 121–22, 124 Campos, Augusto de, 2, 19–20, 117–45. See also ReVisão de Sousândrade Campos, Haroldo de, 2, 19–20, 117–45; on anthropophagic reason, 129–32, 138, 143; on Brazilian cultural difference, 145; and Brazilian modernismo, 130–31; on translation as criticism, 133–35. See also ReVisão de Sousândrade Cansinos-Assens, Rafael, 51, 55, 60–61 Caracciolo-Trejo, Enrique, 57

Caribbean: culture, 16, 20, 146, 148–49, 152–53, 154–60, 164, 169, 170, 172–75; history, 147, 149–51, 152–53, 160, 163–64, 176; literature, 20, 146–47, 151–52, 154–60, 169 Cendrars, Blaise, 51 circulation: across the Atlantic, 1–5, 15–17, 54–58, 82–86, 100, 178; of cultural forms, 183, 186–87; of George’s poetry, 82–83, 86; of Huidobro’s poetry, 52; of Lorca’s poetry, 82–83, 86; of modern poetry and poetics,1–5, 53, 82–83, 179–80, 186–87; of poetic forms, 8, 17; as a poetics of relation, 177; of queer poetics, 19, 81–108; of Sousândrade’s work, 119–21, 124, 141, 143; transnational, 4, 186. See also cultural circulation; planetary Chamberlain, Lori, 110, 112 Chile, 54, 56–58, 63, 65, 71, 121, 191n2 Christ, Carol T., 128–29, 143 comparative literature, 2, 5, 12, 183; and literary history, 182–83, 197n3; and translation, 5–6 Concha, Jaime, 52–53 concretismo: antropofagía and, 130–31, 139, 143–44; and Brazilian cultural autonomy, 131, 139–45; and Brazilian literary history, 117–21; and Brazilian modernismo, 131, 143; and cultural circulation, 120, 135–38, 142–44; history of, 117–18, 139–40; and Latin American literature, 120–21, 125; and world literature, 120, 127. See also Pound; ReVisão de Sousândrade Conte, Joseph, 102 cosmopolitan, 15, 16, 18, 20, 51–53, 121, 139, 152–53, 158, 195n2 Costa, René de, 18, 56–59, 62, 72, 191n3, 192n5 Costa-Lima, Luiz, 181–82 creacionismo: and cubism 18, 57–58,191 n4; evolution of, 71–80; and the historical avant-garde,18, 51–58, 66; and the intermedial, 58, 61–64; and planetarity, 65, 79–80, 192 n7; and poiesis, 58–60; as a transatlantic poetics, 52–58, 71; and translation, 66–70, 76–77; and ultraísmo, 18, 51–52, 5. See also planetary, poiesis Creeley, Robert, 84 cultural circulation: in the Berkeley Renaissance, 86; in Brazilian

index / 213 concretismo, 135–38, 142–44; as conceptualized by Gaonkar and Povinelli, 8–12; as defined by Lee and LiPuma, 7–8, 86, 120, 135–37. See also circulation “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity” (Lee and Li Puma), 7–8, 86, 120, 135–37 Dante, 47, 81, 85, 89, 91, 94–97, 99, 184–85, 193n2, 197n4. See also “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere” (Blaser) Dash, J. Michael, 154–55 Davidson, Michael, 83–86 Dawes, Kwame, 154, 162–64 Delaunay, Robert and Sonia, 51 Deleuze, Gilles, 41–43, 46, 49 de Man, Paul, 35–36 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 145 Dettmar, Kevin, 2 Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, The (Brathwaite), 148–49 Diego, Gerardo, 55, 63–64, 71–72, 192n7 Dimock, Wai Chee, 64–65, 68, 80, 141 Duncan, Robert, 2, 19, 81–88, 90–98, 100, 108, 111–13, 114–16. See also “The Homosexual in Society” Eagleton, Terry, 25–26, 44 Edmonds, Ennis Barrington, 159 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 183, 185–87 Eliot, T.S., 46–48, 124, 139 Ellingham, Lewis, 106, 194n4 English Poems I–III (Pessoa), 18; cycle of, 30–32; fetishism in, 32–36; front cover of, 27, 29; homoeroticism in, 30, 35–37; obscenity in, 32–41; in relation to heteronyms, 28–30; as a response to Englishness, 23–24, 26–28, 38–45; as simulacrum, 38–45; as translation of English poetry, 36–37, 49–50 English studies, 4–5, 25–26, 42–44, 46–47, 180, 190n6 Epithalamium (Pessoa), 26, 30, 38–45; cover of, 39; obscenity in, 32–33, 37; in relation to Spenser’s Epithalamium, 40–45; as simulacrum, 41–45 Eshleman, Clayton, 194n4, 194n5 Europe, 7, 51, 52, 54, 121, 122, 158, 178, 196n1 European: culture, 151, 155–57, 161; literature, 47, 52, 59, 86, 118, 124, 131, 132, 133, 136, 144, 145, 181, 182;

modernism, 7, 26, 49, 118, 139; settlers, 24–26, 123 Ferenczi, Sándor, 137–38, 196n12 fetishism, 22; Agamben’s definition of, 43–44; Freud’s conception of 37–38, 44, 191 n9; Marx’ s conception of, 38, 43; in Pessoa’s English Poems 37, 43–45, 48–49 form: in cultural circulation, 8–10, 135–37, 179, 186; in culture, 7, 152–55, 159, 178, 183, 186; intercontinental, 15–17; and introjection, 137–38; linguistic, 14, 61, 67, 111–14, 159–63, 168, 173, 185; in literature, 1, 15–17, 124, 182–83; poetic,1–5, 8, 17, 61, 62, 68, 75–77, 84, 99, 101, 110, 114, 124–26, 128, 132, 140, 146, 183; and translatability, 13–14, 17; as translation, 3, 12–14, 111–15, 167, 183–85; transnational movement of, 7–13, 15, 17, 20, 86, 178, 187 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 37–38, 44, 191n9, 196n12 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 4 Funkhouser, C. T., 167, 175 Gaonkar, Dilip P., 8–17, 189n2 García Lorca, Federico, 2, 19, 81–83, 86–88, 97, 193n4; and “Oda a Walt Whitman,” 103–6; and Spicer’s After Lorca, 97–115, 193n1, 194n4 García Lorca, Francisco, 193n4 Gates, Henry Louis, 156–57 George, Stefan, 19, 108–9, 113–15; and Circle, 89–93; circulation of his work in the United States, 83, 86–88, 97; and Kantorowicz, 82, 93–96; influence on the Berkeley Renaissance, 82, 87–88, 90–91, 97; “On the Life and Death of Maximin,” 92; and Morwitz, 88–89, 193 n3; Poems edited and translated by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz, 88–92; “The Tapestry,” 114–15, 194 n6 Gikandi, Simon, 20, 45–46, 150 Gilroy, Paul, 20, 151, 177–78, 180, 183, 196n2 Ginsberg, Allen, 84 Gizzi, Peter, 100, 102 Glissant, Édouard, 177, 179, 186–87 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 89, 122–24 Góngora, Luis de, 139 Graham, Joseph F., 13 Granada (city of), 88

214 / index “Great Companion: Dante Alighiere” (Blaser), 81, 85–86 Gris, Juan, 18 Hayles, N. Katherine, 167 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 127 Henríquez Ureña, Max, 196n2 Herbert, George, 62 heteronyms: Badiou’s interpretation of, 23–24, 36, 48–49; and English Poems, 31–34; Pessoa’s conception of,18, 22–23, 46; series of, 28–30; as translation of Englishness, 24, 26 heterosexuality, 18, 30,105; in Pessoa’s Epithalamium, 38–43 Higgins, Dick, 61–62. See also intermedial Hitchcock, Peter, 149, 151, 196n3 Holquist, Michael, 185 homoeroticism, 3, 30, 34; in Antinous (Pessoa), 30, 35–37; in Lorca’s poetry, 103 “Homosexual in Society, The” (Duncan), 87, 93–96 homosexuality, 18, 19, 83; in the Berkeley Renaissance 86–88, 95–96; in George’s Circle, 90–91; in Spicer’s After Lorca, 98, 101–4 Horizon carré (Huidobro), 62, 63, 66, 191n1, 191n2 Huidobro, Vicente, 18–19; and cubism, 57–58; in Madrid, 51–53, 55; in Paris, 51–52; planetarity in, 53, 65,79–80; on the reformulation of poetry as medium, 58–62, 69–70, 71–80; and theory of translation, 66–67, 76–77; transatlantic tension in, 52–54; and use of French in his work, 64–65; and ultraísmo, 52, 55–56. See also creacionismo Hutcheon, Linda, 197n3 intermedial, 20; Higgins’s definition of, 61–62; in Huidobro’s creacionismo, 62–69, 79; in Sycorax Video Style, 166 introjection, 129; and cultural circulation in ReVisão de Sousândrade, 137–38; definition of, 137–38; translation as, 138–39. See also ReVisão de Sousândrade; translation Isolda, (Isolde): in Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel (Huidobro), 72–75, 192n9 Jackson, K. David, 48–50

Jacob, Max, 51 Jald, Wladyslaw, 51 Jamaica, 148–49 James, Henry, 15 Johnston, John, 42–43 Kadir, Djelal, 197n3 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 82–83, 88; and aequiparatio, 99–101, 102, 106, 108; and the Berkeley Renaissance, 93–97; and George, 93; and human dignity, 94–95; “The Sovereignty of the Artist,” 96–97 Katz, Daniel, 193n1 Kayman, Martin, 127 Keats, John, 18, 25, 34–36, 43 Keenaghan, Eric, 104 Killian, Kevin, 106, 194n4 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 19, 59–60, 77–78 Lamming, George, 146 Laplanche, Jean, 137 Larrea, Juan, 52–55, 71 Latin America: 55, 177, 180–81 Latin American: avant-garde, 19–20, 125, 131, 141–42; literature, 55, 64, 117–18, 120, 124, 129, 132, 145, 181, 197n3; poetry, 19, 52–53, 126, 197n2 Lee, Benjamin, 7–8, 86, 120, 135–37 Lennon, Brian, 3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7–8 Lévy, Pierre, 168, 175 Lind, Georg Rudolf, 190n2 LiPuma, Edward, 7–8, 86, 120, 135–37 Lisbon (city of), 23, 24, 26, 44 Literary Absolute, The (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy), 19, 59–60, 77–78 literary history: of Brazil, 19, 117–24, 130– 34, 136, 139–45; of English literature, 47, 182; and literary historiography, 181–83; of modern poetry, 1, 5; of modern transnational poetics, 177–87; national, 180–83; Pound’s modernist invention of, 127–29; of the San Francisco Renaissance, 83; transcultural, 182–83; transnational, 5, 182–83; of the United States, 81 Mackey, Nathaniel, 151, 155, 161–63 Madrid (city of), 18, 19, 51–53, 55, 68, 71, 103, 104, 191n1, 192n6 “Manifesto Antropófago” (Andrade, Oswald de), 130, 143–44

index / 215 Manning, Susan, 177 Maranhão (Brazil), 117, 121, 133, 138 Marcus, Greil, 197n3 Marx, Karl, 18, 38, 43 Marx, Olga, 88–90 Mayhew, Jonathan, 193n1 McFarland, Thomas, 34–36 McGann, Jerome, 101 Mejías-López, Alejandro, 180–81 Middle Passage, 147, 162–64 Miller, Joshua, 3–4 Milton, John, 25, 26, 47 modernism, 2, 15, 20, 24, 26, 58, 118, 180; Anglo-American, 1–2, 5–7, 45–50, 124, 132–33, 139–40; of Ezra Pound, 20, 118, 124, 125–30, 132, 139–43; of Fernando Pessoa, 18, 24, 26, 32, 35–38, 43–50 modernismo: Brazilian, 131, 143; Spanish American, 180–81, 196n2 modernist studies, 2, 4 Monteiro, George, 190n2 Moraes, Jomar, 121 Morrell, Robert, 24–25 Morwitz, Ernst, 88–92, 193n3, 194n6 multilingualism, 4, 6, 179, 182–85, 197n3 Nägele, Rainer, 115 Naipaul, V. S., 146 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 19, 59–60, 77–78 negative capability, 34–36 New York (city of), 19, 61, 84, 88, 105–6, 121, 122–23, 192n5, 195n2 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 184 Norton, Robert, 89–93, 193n3 Nunes, Benedito, 130, 139 Nünning, Ansgar, 182 “Ode for Walt Whitman” (Spicer), 103–8 O’Hara, Frank, 84 Olson, Charles, 84 Ortega, Julio, 178–79 Palmer, D.J., 190n5 Palumbo-Liu, David, 15, 17 Paris (city of), 18, 19, 51–53, 58, 62–63, 64, 71, 87, 121, 149, 185, 191n1 Paskiewicz, Marjan, 51 Pessoa, Fernando: and Anglo-American modernism, 45–50; Alberto Caeiro, 28, 30; Álvaro de Campos, 28, 30; and concept of poetic tradition, 45–50; and conception of heteronyms, 22–24; and Englishness, 25–26, 32, 44, 46,

49; and English studies, 26, 42, 44, 46–47; heterosexuality in, 38–4; homoeroticism in, 30, 35–3; and life in Durban (South Africa), 18, 22, 24–26, 45–46; and Lusophone Englishness, 25, 44, 46; modernism in, 18, 24, 26, 32, 35–38, 43–50; Antonio Môra 28; Ricardo Reis, 28, 30. See also Antinous; English Poems; Epithalamium Picasso, Pablo, 18, 58 Pignatari, Décio, 131 planetary, 4, 6, 19, 53–54, 64–65, 67–68, 71–80. See also Dimock; Friedman Poeta en Nueva York (Lorca), 104–5, 193n4 poetic transfer, 14–18, 20, 70, 82, 120, 187. See also transfer poetics: modern, 1–21, 60, 127, 179–80, 187, 197n2; modernist, 2, 5, 20, 22, 46–48, 125–30, 180; transnational, 2–4, 177–87 poiesis: in German romanticism, 60, 77–78; in Huidobro’s creacionismo, 57–60, 70–80; planetary, 65–67, 71–80. See also The Literary Absolute Pollock, Sheldon, 152–53, 158 Pontalis, J.B., 137 Pope, Alexander, 25 Pound, Ezra: and Anglo-American modernism, 5, 46–47, 139; and Brazilian concretismo, 19–20, 118, 129–38, 139–45; and critical method, 19, 128–29, 132–33, 141–43; and history, 141–42, 144; and imagism, 20, 125–29; and literary history, 127–29; and modernist poetics, 20, 51, 124–29, 132, 145; and translation, 16, 118, 133–35 Practice of Diaspora, The (Edwards), 185–87 Puchner, Martin, 6–7, 20, 54, 58 Quadros, António, 190n7 queer, 15, 38, 43; culture, 87, 94; ethic, 82, 84–88, 92, 95, 98, 114; ethic and notion of creative sovereignty, 91–92, 95–97, 99–100, 114; poetics, 19, 82, 84, 88, 93, 100–101, 105, 112–15, 193n1 Rafael, Vicente L., 142–44 Ramazani, Jahan, 2–4, 6 Reverdy, Pierre, 51, 55 ReVisão de Sousândrade (Campos and Campos), 20; and Brazilian concretismo, 117–20, 124–29, 130–38, 139–45; and Pound’s imagism, 125–29,

216 / index 134–36; and Sousândrade’s O guesa, 121–24 Rexroth, Kenneth, 83 Rigby, Graeme, 166 Rights of Passage (Brathwaite), 146, 149, 162 Roach, Eric, 146 romanticism, 1, 15, 71, 100; Brazilian, 118–19, 124, 140; early German, 19, 59–61, 78–79; European, 124; Latin American, 124 Romero, Sílvio, 118–19 Roots (Brathwaite), 146–61, 164 Rosenberg, Fernando, 131, 136, 145 Ruehl, Martin, 93 Rumaker, Michael, 83–84 San Francisco, (city of ), 2, 19, 81–83, 87–88, 93, 94, 97, 98, 105–7. See also “Aquatic Park” (Spicer) Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho, 190n2 Saussy, Haun, 5 Savory, Elaine, 166 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 84 Sena, Jorge de, 31–34, 190n2 Sennet, Richard, 16–17 Severino, Alexandrino E., 190n3, 191n10 Shakespeare, William, 25, 26, 28, 89, 163, 189n1. See also Sycorax Video Style (Brathwaite) Shell, Marc, 197n3 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 25, 81, 85 Sieburth, Richard, 5, 189n1 Simmel, Georg, 16 Simões, João Gaspar, 30–32, 190n2, 190n3 simulacrum, 15, 41–44, 49. See also translation Sollors, Werner, 197n3 Sousa Andrade (Sousândrade), Joaquim de. See ReVisão de Sousândrade Spenser, Edmund, 40–45 Spicer, Jack, 2, 19, 81–88, 90, 92, 97–108, 109–16, 193n1, 193n4, 194n5. See also Berkeley Renaissance; After Lorca Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 6 Sycorax Video Style (Sycorax VS), 161, 165; as digital poetry, 167–68; emergence of, 163–64, 170, 174; and memory, 169–70; as new positionality for Caribbean culture, 164, 175; and use of Mac computer SE/30, 163–66; and vernacularity, 168–69; as a virtual voice, 168, 174; visual aspect of, 166–67;

and word processing, 166–68. See also Brathwaite, Kamau Talens, Jenaro, 181–82 “Task of the Translator, The” (Benjamin), 10, 68, 110, 111,185 Temblor de cielo / Tremblement de ciel (Huidobro), 19, 51, 58, 68–70, 71–80 Torok, Maria, 196n12 Torre, Guillermo de, 51, 55, 191n3 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 171 transatlantic: circulation of modern poetics, 1–2, 15–16, 19, 53–58, 81–82, 86, 100, 181; cultural circulation, 8, 148, 177–78; experience of modernity, 17, 52–54, 79, 105, 122, 178–80; “literary field” (Bourdieu), 1; poetic transfer, 15, 18, 82; poetics and poetry, 1–8, 15, 20, 58, 183; studies, 177–87, 196n1. See also Atlantic Ocean transfer: aequiparatio as, 96–97, 99–102; concept of, 15,16–17; cultural, 147–48, 157–58; and cultural circulation, 8, 16; intermedial, 20, 79; as introjection, 137–138; poetics of, 19–21; translation as, 6, 12–13, 20, 38, 65–67, 100–103, 113, 141–45, 179–80. See also poetic transfer transfiguration, 8–12, 16, 71, 161, 163, 168–69, 189n2 translatability, 12–15, 17, 51, 76–77, 109, 111–13, 178 translation: and anthropology, 7–12; and circulation, 1–5, 53, 82–83, 136–39, 142, 179–80, 186–87; and comparative literature, 5–6, 183–85; as criticism, 133–35; cultural,1, 7–12, 16, 26, 49–50, 64, 86, 120, 142–45, 179–80; as form, 3, 12–14, 111–15, 167, 183–85; interlingual, 1–2, 5, 66–68, 80, 82, 97–109, 118, 133–35, 144; literary, 1, 5, 49–50, 76, 80, 82, 85–86, 89–90, 97– 109, 118, 133–35; and modern poetics, 5–6, 18–20, 24, 34–36, 49–50, 58, 86, 97–109, 109–16, 118, 128, 133–35, 138; studies, 9–12, 14, 21; temporality of (Bhabha), 171–74; theory, 10–14, 20, 66–68, 76, 109–16; and transatlantic studies, 177–87; transfer as, 6, 12–13, 20, 38, 65–67, 100–103, 113, 141–45, 179–80; and transfiguration, 8–12; transnational poetry studies and, 2–7. See also After Lorca; Benjamin;

index / 217 Campos (Haroldo de); Huidobro; Pound Tzara, Tristan, 51 Uhlig, Claus, 183–85 Undurraga, Antonio de, 72–73 United States of America, 3, 4, 6, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 121–23, 177, 178, 180, 191n2, 193n3 Valdés, Mario J., 197n3 Von Humboldt, Alexander, 121, 124 Walcott, Derek, 146 Warner, Michael, 86–87, 94, 106 Weber, Samuel, 13, 111 Weinberger, Eliot, 53

White, Hayden, 176, 184–85 Whitman, Walt, 19, 103–4, 108, 114, 115. See also “Ode for Walt Whitman” (Spicer) Williams, Emily Allen, 160, 164, 170 Williams, Fredrick G., 121, Wollaeger, Mark, 2 Wordsworth, William, 25, 34, 100 Xie, Ming, 133 X/Self (Brathwaite), 158, 162, 164, 173–74 Yao, Steven G, 5, 189n1 Yurkievich, Saúl, 65 Zohn, Harry, 13