In this series, we listen in as Drunken Boat’s renowned translators talk with one another about art, craft, and the role of translation in the world. This third installment features Zachary Rockwell Ludington and Paul Legault.
Zachary Rockwell Ludington teaches Spanish at Emory University in Atlanta. He received an award in 2014 from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund for Pixel Flesh, his version of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Carne de píxel. His work has appeared in Drunken Boat, PEN America, Exchanges and elsewhere.
Paul Legault is a poet, translator, and editor whose works include The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2 (Fence), and, with Sharmila Cohen, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat/Telephone Books). He co-edits the translation press Telephone Books.
Zachary Rockwell Ludington (Z): Thanks for meeting with me on this and talking.
Paul Legault (P): Thanks for inviting me.
Z: Absolutely. I thought, “Yeah, Paul Legault, he’d be a cool person to talk to,” and it’s because I was thinking about seeing your translation of Rimbaud in Drunken Boat and also because I had encountered your work before, so I guess…
P: Were we at UVA at the same time? I guess not…
Z: I don’t think so… I think… I don’t think we overlapped because when I first heard your work or read any of it was when you gave the reading of your Emily Dickinson translations at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Which was when you were already gone but you had come back to Charlottesville.
P: Yeah, I was back, back in town.
Z: You know, one of the things that I thought when I heard you give that reading was, wow, these are really playful poems and really cheeky, and maybe even irreverent. That’s an adjective that I think worked for me then but I don’t know that I buy that adjective now. I think some people hearing you read that day would have accepted that adjective, “irreverent” — — I wonder what you think of that kind of appraisal.
P: That’s interesting. I guess I would object to the term “irreverent” because I’ve always been an Emily Dickinson fan. So in the case of translating her work, even though the project itself was kind of a joke and it stemmed from being in a class where people would kind of translate her work as a way of reading, just a way of interpreting, like, “Oh, I read this poem, what it means to me is…” and they’d try to find some sort of biographical connection.
Z: Right.
P: So if she wrote a poem a week after her cousin died they’d argue that that poem was in response to her cousin dying. But a poem is more than that and you can never really summarize it. That’s what I love about poetry; it can have so many meanings and you really can’t track down all of them. That’s the point, you know, it’s this refractive object that is full of ideas. So, even though I objected to it, to this kind of process of interpretation, I also understood why you would want to summarize her poem in your own words, right? That makes sense, even if it is a byproduct. You know? It’s not the original thing; it is kind of irreverent so say, “This poem means she wants to have sex with her sister-in-law,” or whatever, or “Emily Dickinson was sort of a goth.” But I also like identifying with her, so it was this mixed thing. At first I was like, “I hate how people interpret her poems.” But then I started writing people’s versions of the poem in the margins and then it became a project where I wanted to do a whole book.
Z: So once you’d collected a ton of these interpretations you felt you had to go forward with it.
P: Yeah, yeah. It was a joke that became serious. I was like, “I should just finish it. I mean, there are only 1700.”
Z: Yeah, I read some of your remarks in McSweeney’s about this project. There you say that if Dickinson were a cathedral — , maybe you didn’t say cathedral, maybe it was just a church — , you’d be inside her. I think in that little sentence there’s some of the reverence, some of the playfulness, and also the really personal connection that you’re talking about.
P: I mean, yeah, you must have a personal connection to anyone you’re translating, even if you’re coming at it entirely as a reverent spectator of Spanish or French… you translate from multiple languages, right?
Z: Yeah.
P: How do you choose who you’re gonna translate?
Z: So one of my favorite projects I’ve done is this book of prose poems, mostly prose poems, some of them are in verse, but they’re these broken verse compositions extracted from this long article on black holes. It’s a book by Agustín Fernández Mallo. So he’s cut it up and made these verse poems. But mostly the book is these blocks of prose. When I read the book I was impressed with how quickly and how surprisingly it all came together in a kind of geometric form… I was like, man, that’s a hell of a book. I wish I had written it. I guess that’s my standard: I wish I had written that. Well, by translating it maybe I can.
P: A good standard.
Z: I mean, if a great translation of that book into English already existed then I’d say, “On to the next one.” But what’s interesting about a lot of your work is that you move from English to English, like with Emily Dickinson, and you bill the products of your work explicitly as translations. And your latest book is John Ashbery’s English moving to your book in English. But it’s not called a translation. Do you feel like you have two different hats, translator sometimes and poet other times?
P: Yeah, definitely, but also with the Ashbery project I did think of it as a form of translation. And especially when translating from English to English, that’s not exactly what people think of when they say “translation.” Even though it may make sense to use that term, you know, the way an artist would use it to translate between media, from sculpture to painting to video to mixed media to installation. I feel like translation is useful as a practice beyond the word’s standard use.
Z: Yeah.
P: But the Ashbery book was a translation from memory. So I would read each of his poems and then write my own versions. And what I like about Ashbery is that… there are many things I like about John Ashbery… but one of the things that intrigued me was that I would often try to memorize his poems. And I would get to a certain point and be able to do it, but they kind of resist that process.
Z: Yeah, memorizing Ashbery is like trying to memorize pi. It’s not like trying to memorize Robert Frost.
P: Yeah, or like “Paul Revere’s Ride.” There’s no kind of mnemonic set, you know, no rhyming or anything, that allows you to remember and repeat. In Ashbery, the end of each line kind of jets off, and that’s the fun of it. You never know when the sentence is gonna diverge and then come back. So I thought, I really like John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. And it’s taken a place in contemporary poetry, in the culture of poetry, because it won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. And also, you know he has his collected poems in the Library of America, which is…
Z: Yeah, I think he’s the only living writer that they’ve done that for.
P: Yeah.
Z: It’s kind of crazy.
P: Yeah, it’s kind of a bizarre honor. So, he’s very much established. Like you were saying, you wouldn’t necessarily translate a work that had been translated before because maybe you felt it had been done, but for me, because I was using it as material, I felt safer working with something that was so established because my version isn’t the only version out there. The original version still exists — , people can still easily access it.
Z: Yeah. It’s still very vital.
P: So they end up being my own poems. For me it was like a writing exercise. To read a poem and then write it from memory is one way of telling yourself, “Go write a poem. All right. You’re going to write a poem. Pick up this book, pick up your pencil, and go.” That’s one of the challenges of writing, is teaching yourself to write, or kind of being your own instructor. It’s a convenient way of structuring that.
Z: So then, since you said a lot of people don’t consider the work you’ve done with Dickinson or Ashbery to be translation, since you work in English and in English — ; do you get pushback, do you get any flak, for working in English on both sides?
P: Um, I don’t know. I have gotten a little flak, but it’s always interesting. It’s a good sign, I guess.
Z: Yeah, somebody cares.
P: Particularly with The Emily Dickinson Reader. Because I guess if you were just coming across the project and you didn’t realize that I was a fan of Emily Dickinson you could think that perhaps I was trying to dumb her down or I was working with a purpose because I didn’t like her work or I didn’t think it resonated. But if you read my versions I hope they come across as being a kind of homage. I mean, I’m kind of an obsessive, but I’m not the only one: there’s a huge contingent of Emily Dickinson fans and some of them are extremely hardcore. Like myself: I’ve visited her house, I’ve visited her grave in Amherst, and I kind of feel this kinship with her. And that can be a very private thing. If you’re just there in your home reading Emily Dickinson’s poems, it’s you and her ghost. It’s a very private, beautiful relationship, and if you feel like that’s attacked I can see why you might object. What I do like is that there are some fans that are so hardcore that they hated my project, but there are those who loved it too. I sent it to Susan Howe because her book, My Emily Dickinson, was very meaningful to me in terms of framing Emily Dickinson as a feminist and a badass and something really radical, right? As opposed to a hermit spinster who didn’t have a social life; she actually had a very intense social life. Her poems were directed at individuals, she wrote for real people.
Z: And she lived in a world that was so different to our own. She was close, physically and emotionally, to people in a way that we’re often not. Hell, you and I are talking over Skype right now and we were saying earlier, both of us, how we have to move around the country all the time. She obviously didn’t live that reality. Her poems existed in different kind of social space.
P: Yeah, but I did get a little bit of flak. Like, on Amazon there are some negative reviews. One time I met this guy at a reading who had translated Emily Dickinson into haiku. He had done a similar project and he didn’t seem to appreciate my project. I don’t know. The flak was… I actually had an old professor who became really upset. Before that I had published two books of poetry that are very much just written by Paul. They’re lyrics, they’re collages, they’re contemporary poetry. So I am really dedicated to that craft, but, for me this did seem like a separate project. It’s a book of humor, technically, I mean, that’s how it came to be categorized, but it’s also poetry. Anyhow, my old professor really didn’t like it. I haven’t been able to explain to her why it’s ok. It’s actually been a point of tension.
Z: Yeah, but that’s what translation’s all about, right? Plurality. It’s increasing the number of angles and, I guess, reflections of a work.
P: Yeah, and I also practice a more standard translation. I translate from French, with the help of my boyfriend, who speaks better French than me. For me, each project kind of dictates the way I’m gonna write. So thinking through Ashbery as a way of working through memory was interesting to me, and because Emily Dickinson’s verse is so… what is it so?… it can be very obscure, and it’s so… tight… very tightly knit, or like a tightly welded box, so to unpack that made sense. To unpack it in prose. But then when I’m translating a work from French that hasn’t been translated into English before, I feel more responsibility to the text; to try and keep it closer, so someone who’s never read this poet before can get to the work. Like this one poet whom I enjoy translating, who’s never been published in English: her name is Sophie Podolski. And she wrote just one book called The Country Where Everything Is Permitted. It was published in her handwriting. She died when she was 21, after a suicide attempt in an insane asylum. She died at a very young age and she only had this one book out. She’s kind of like this quintessential poet figure. I really enjoy her work and I feel a certain kinship to her, but I also feel a certain responsibility when translating that work to try and get what she was saying in the original French into the English, which is itself a similarly impossible task because there are so many connotations to each of her words.
Z: Right, and you might not even know what one word is because of the handwriting or because something went wrong in the photocopying…
P: Yeah. And I do believe in many kinds of translation, and I believe in the work of translators who are fluent in the language. B, but I also feel that all writers should have a little more freedom … I mean I personally embrace Google Translate as an important tool for all writers and readers. So even though I can’t read Arabic or Russian or Portuguese, I’ll take a stab at translating from these languages with these tools.
Z: Yeah, and maybe you discover things about syntax and about language generally that you wouldn’t have found otherwise. One of my favorites is Google Images because, especially when I’m translating and I’m having trouble settling on something in English, I can say, “Well, what do I imagine this thing to be?” and I’ll say, for example, “What’s the difference between a hut and a shack?” That can be hard to pin down. You look at Google Images and you get a thousand huts and a thousand shacks and suddenly a more solid idea for each begins to take form, because you’re looking at them. You’re seeing what people call huts and what people call shacks.
P: I like that. What are you working on translating now?
Z: I just read some translations of San Juan de la Cruz at ALTA, and I’m trying to do a few more. From the Cántico but in a very modern, kind of jaunty English. I’d love to make that into a chapbook. And I’ve got a couple other things in the pipeline. With San Juan, I’m getting pretty audacious. They’re translations, but I’m feeling very free to move the work into new territory. And I certainly think there’s a bit of audacity to your work, like your most recent book of poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2. I was reading it and I was like, “Yeah, that’s a definitely translation project,” but you also talked about your other work that’s more your own personal lyric, “‘written by Paul,”’ as you said. For example, I’ve got this book of yours, The Other Poems, here. I’m thinking that in this there’s so much translation going on as well. You’ve got so many different voices. Each poem has a cast of characters. They’re characters but sometimes they’re… whatever; they’re a chair or a feeling and they depend on one another to take shape. So, has a translational mode always been a part of your writing or did you kind of discover translation when you already felt like you were a poet?
P: Hmmm. That’s a good question. I like… I guess I did think that I had just been writing but then I began to investigate translation. But actually the two did kind of take place at the same time. The Other Poems, as you mentioned, are dialogue. They’re like little closet plays. They each have seven characters, each is a little mini-play. And they’re not necessarily a real person; they’re inanimate objects talking.
Z: Sometimes they come out of… sometimes their very existence comes out of whatever the previous character says.
P: Yeah, they bounce of each other or they bounce off of things that my friends say or that I hear on television. That was very much a celebration of overheard language. You know, you get this kind of disjunctive language that you could hear on the train. You hear many voices and they aren’t necessarily in conversation with each other but through your hearing them they are. I guess you could think of that as a translation of overheard language into little sonnets.
Z: And that’s kind of a translation of things that other poets have done: found poetry, Apollinaire’s café conversations.
P: Yeah! I love Apollinaire. I even translated all of Apollinaire once. Into that form. Into these little sonnets. And there are a lot of references to other poets. So we can think of translation, this community, as a very broad term. It’s also a form of remix culture. The Other Poems was very much that as well… But then translation kind of became central to my conversations about art when I moved to New York because my friend and I, my friend Sharmila Cohen and I, started a journal. Our other friend Nick said that we should call our journal Telephone because we were both interested in translation. She lives in Berlin and she translates contemporary German writers; that’s her thing. And at the time I was translating Emily Dickinson into English. And what’s interesting about our conversation was that it wasn’t like she would say, “Oh, this is what’s going on in Berlin,” and then I would say, “Well, this is what I think of Emily Dickinson”; there were a lot of things common to both our projects, even though mine was from English to English and hers was from German to English. What we both liked about translation was that there were so many ways you could do it. Anyhow, we started this journal and in each issue we picked a new language. And we had ten poets translate a contemporary poet’s poem ten different ways. And I guess I see that as this testing ground. It was a way for us to meet people, first and foremost. We met Uljana Wolf, who is married to Christian Hawkey, and we became friends with them in Brooklyn, but she’s a Berlin poet. And we became friends with these poets in Montréal: we have a Quebecois issue. We became friends with Augusto de Campos and later we became friends with Sveta Litvak, a Russian poet. I mean, translation has been this kind of gateway into relationships with other people with literary interests. So the poet enjoyed being translated ten different ways and the group of translators enjoyed having the same exercise, being given the same challenge. And I think that was exciting because it created a community, and I think translation does that. It connects you at the very least to one other writer in an intimate way. And it connects you to all their traditions and all their friends.
Z: Also that exercise of having everyone do the same text operates as a really good defense of translation. You know I was on the website of the American Translators Association the other day, not ALTA, which is great too, and I’m a member, but the ATA, and they have this little line that says, “Translation is not a commodity.” Translation’s not like granulated sugar — all sugar is essentially the same. You don’t just pay a translator to translate something and then have it and that’s it. Having ten people translate the same text is a great demonstration of the plurality of translation and the ambiguity of language and the fact that there’s no definitive translation ever. It’s always productive and it’s always going to create new possibilities.
P: Yeah and ALTA’s such a great organization for that too. One thing that struck me when I went to their conference, I went to their conference in Kansas City, and there were people gathering who were translators of Chinese poetry, Russian fiction, German poetry, Iranian poetry, and they’re all gathered there. And it wasn’t that one language trumped the others. What happened is that everyone had this similar interest in translation, even though they all had completely different approaches. And that excited me: to think that translation is a very broad thing and everyone uses it differently and that the people you have to bond over it with aren’t necessarily translating from French like you, they’re people who are translating from other languages who have the same experience. It’s such a kind of motley crew.
Z: You could be interested in French poetry and talk to other people interested in French poetry who just don’t care about translation at all. And then you could talk to people interested in nineteenth-century Russian novels and maybe you have that interest too, but the fact that they’re interested in translating those novels and you’re interested in translating something else, that’s the connection.
P: Yeah, it’s an interesting patchwork.
Z: Yeah, I’ve been to ALTA a few times and it’s always fun, and it is a great way to build community. And you’ve done that kind of work on several different levels, like with the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses…
P: Yeah, I had been working with them. I’m still a member because I edit a magazine but I’m not currently director of programs there anymore.
Z: Right, but you’ve worked for them, you’re working at Fence, and also, for example, you’ve taught at Wash U.: when you’re doing other work that’s literary, that’s related to the promotion and publication of poetry, but not necessarily in translation, what kind of opportunities or lack of opportunities do you see for translation? Is there anything that frustrates you about the way people who are interested in literature generally perceive translation or think about it?
P: I mean, I’ve been lucky at my different jobs to be working with literary culture kind of head-on. So, at Wash U., I was lucky to teach a class on translation in a very fluid way. We talked about different uses of appropriation, remixing; we talked about translation in this fluid way and I was able to teach translation as a creative practice for writing, because I was teaching in the MFA program and in the undergraduate poetry program. So, luckily for me, I’m surrounded by creative writers who are thinking creatively about the topic. At CMLP I worked with about 500 small presses that make up this network of independent literary presses and journals. And that’s a lot of different….
Z: Constitutents…
P: Yeah, different angles… I could list some presses, but they’re all very different and have different approaches. What jumps out to me, like thinking about 3%’s blog and how it’s named after the 3%…
Z: Yeah, the sad fact.
P: Yeah, the 3% of literature in English that’s translation. I think the thing that’s always going to be frustrating about translation is that there aren’t enough translators. There are infinite texts growing and being written. I was talking to someone who was saying that there are very, very few philosophical essays translated from Arabic into English and he was trying to find resources for that. That could take a whole lifetime, developing resources for that. It could take a lifetime to translate one writer’s work into English. And how do you choose which text to work from? So, one thing that is frustrating about translation is that a lot of people can dismiss it as not their own life goal, to be a translator, but we need translators or else we won’t have access to so much great writing. I feel like that’s one thing about translation that kind of overwhelms me. But it’s also kind of inspiring because there’s this one perspective towards art and writing and thinking that says, “Everything’s been done before so why would I write a novel about a coming-of-age story set in London at the turn of the century? “‘Cuz it’s already been done before,” but when you think about this problem of translation there’s so much work to be done, there are so many texts that haven’t been brought to English. And then, there are so many ways… all those texts should be brought into English multiple times for you to understand the full consciousness of the writer. It’s exciting to feel like there’s infinite work to be done.
Z: Of course, then the problem is that those of us who do translate and want to translate, whatever our criteria when choosing the texts we work on — — we love them, we pour our energies into them, we translate them — — but then it’s often a slog to try to see anything actually published.
P: Yeah. I mean, I think of how the CLMP recently honored Michael Reynolds, the publisher of Europa Editions, for innovation in literary publishing. And he has a very optimistic viewpoint about what we can do with translation, and obviously the success of Elena Ferrante’s four-book cycle is emblematic of that success, of what you can do, and the fact that there is this hunger for foreign literature.
Z: And there’s a hunger for… I’m thinking of Ferrante’s recent unmasking… there’s this hunger to know who the author really is, which is always a central question of translation. Where’s this text come from? Who’s really speaking? And with the revelation of Ferrante’s identity people were really bent out of shape in all kinds of different directions.
P: I want to say that this will be the case for translation: presses don’t know where to look for it but when it comes to them it’s an exciting opportunity to publish a new writer. But I guess there are a lot of reasons why it’s not marketable. And that’s half the battle too; I don’t know how to change the culture. People should be hungry for the next modern Russian translation or the next contemporary Spanish writer that they’ve never heard of.
Z: People should do a lot of things that they’re not doing.
P: Right. And some presses are better at getting the word out than others. It’s partially due to resources; it’s a complicated cycle. But I do think that if you’re a small press and you’re interested in publishing literature in translation then it’s also your responsibility to find an audience for that, whether that’s a small audience or a big audience, either way it’s a good thing, but the more the merrier. I think if we apply some of our innovation and our energy towards actually marketing and distributing these books they’d be well spent. I don’t know why this comes to mind but I was hosting a conference (also related to CLMP) and one of the panels featured Lisa Lucas of the National Book Foundation. And she was saying how she wants writers to be thought of as celebrities. I mean, she wants the National Book Awards to be treated like the Oscars. I think even just setting that as the goal pressures literature into a new level. And I think she actually has some success. I don’t know, I think it’s an interesting dilemma for publishers.
Z: Yeah, and you’ve got to be strategic. I’m thinking of Deep Vellum in Texas, right? They do really beautiful books and it’s all translation — , that’s what they’re all about.
P: And they have their own bookstore!
Z: Yeah, and I think they’re doing really well. But they have to be strategic. So they’re only doing novels and creative non-fiction. They’re like, “Maybe one day we’ll do poetry but right now it’s just not viable. We’ve got to be careful with how we spend our money.” You can’t just publish anything you think is cool. You’ve got to try to make it work in the world.
P: Yeah. They have a market for novels in translation so they should capitalize on that. It’s a dilemma. Because I also understand how hard it is to sell poetry in translation; books of poetry in general are difficult to market. So you can’t be surprised when a publisher can’t afford to get behind something. So translation is a labor of love but that’s actually a good thing. It’s actually a strength.
Z: Yeah, of course. It means there’s almost no chance of someone translating a piece of literature totally cynically, not having their heart in it. That doesn’t happen.
P: No, you can’t sell out that way with translation. It’s just not gonna work.
In this series, we listen in as Drunken Boat’s renowned translators talk with one another about art… was originally published in DrunkenBoat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.