John Mateer is a complicated poet, in the best possible way. We met in London during a panel reading hosted by PEN International. Mateer’s poetry is often set in a wide variety of places, reflecting his own trajectory of upbringing and travel. His newest book, The West (Fremantle Press, $24.95 AUD), collects 20 years of his poetry about Australia, and several other collections are forthcoming as well. Our conversation is complete enough that I will leave his introduction brief, that he might introduce himself.
DS
You’re a poet of many places, many languages and cultures. Tell me about how place affects your work.
I don’t think in terms of place, language and culture, rather in terms of history: I see every place, just like every cultural act, and every person, as being an embodiment of History. I see it in almost the Buddhist sense of pratītya-samutpāda – that is that conditions produce phenomena – and so for me place is deeply connected with person and history. Something that means that I usually feel quite familiar in any place… A strange talent, maybe.
That is probably a consequence of the fact that when I was 6 years old my family immigrated from South Africa to Canada, travelling there via several European cities, and then only about a year later we returned to South Africa, ‘remigrated’ as it were. I have travelled a lot in the past decade, but it was only recently that it occurred to me that much of my experience in the present is influenced by that very formative one, the feeling that places are exchangeable. That Canada is a multi-cultural and – ideally – bilingual country, has strange parallels to South Africa and Australia.
In answer to your question, though, I must say that place influences the work in that the poems emerge from the circumstance of my knowledge, experience and sense of the history, one could even say Being, of the place. I’m interested in the transparency of the Self in a way that is closely related to that of the Buddhist notion of the Self as an imageless mirror. It might interest your readers to know that it was the poet Breyten Breytenbach’s writing that introduced me, and I imagine many others in South Africa to Buddhist ideas in the way that someone like Gary Snyder did in the US a decade or two before.
In our email correspondence it seems like you’re always on the move. Does that impulse affect your writing? Like Hemingway?
Like Hemingway?! Not sure what to say to that. The only thing I am sure I share with Hemmingway is a fondness for bullfighting!
The question of the use and meaning of traveling is related to what I said before – that it is about understanding the nature of History and how it is embodied, whether in a place, its architecture and art, its language, or in one’s Self.
One thing that I was surprised by in the last few years was the realization that mostly my travel has been to countries where English is not the primary language. My visits to the US and the UK have actually seemed to me the strangest because there I experienced encounters where the things and places and people were different while the language wasn’t, or wasn’t really. Once I was asked which country I felt was the strangest of those I’ve visited, and had to say the US. The US is the only place where, for reasons I don’t really understand – and they aren’t for anti-American reasons – I felt alien. I just don’t feel I understand in my heart the logic of the place, its particular mix of the colonial, imperial and its powerful, almost hallucinatory, Utopianism.
And yet I would say that I do feel some kind of emotional understanding of places as strange as Japan or China. The only way I can explain it is that the consciousness of certain white South Africans like myself, due to the nature of the brutality and absurdity of normal life during the period of Apartheid, experienced a kind of dissociation, literally, in the psychological sense of the term, and this led – and I know this isn’t only true of me but of some friends as well – to a disconnection from those usual identifications of ‘white’ and ‘Western’.
Yet in many ways I feel European, too. I am probably more comfortable in certain places in Asia than I am in South Africa or Australia or Europe. So how do these contradictions affect my writing? It makes me very open to influences. I know that openness is often disquieting to people, perhaps especially writers, who wish not to be influenced unintentionally. I don’t feel that at all. I would characterize it in another way, by not seeing influence as something that comes from outside of one’s self, but rather that it is selfhood that comes from the outside; that in our hearts – if I can put it in such a way – we are already pure and empty. Actually this fits with the Russian linguist Lev Vygotski’s theory of childhood language acquisition and concept development. Travelling is a way of changing the Self.
There is also another dimension to this which is that of investigation and exploration – it should be remembered that, when I was growing up in Johannesburg, Apartheid designations had it that I was ‘white’ and ‘European’, and the anti-colonial sentiments of most African countries meant that we ‘whites’ were unwelcome on most of the continent. The train carriage that I would have had to sit in in Johannesburg would have had a sign saying ‘whites/blanke’. ‘Blanke’ being Afrikaans for ‘white’. I, having English as my first language read it as ‘blank’! Perhaps that is the origin of my poetics, in seeing that evil sign with a child’s innocent eyes?
We met at an interesting reading, where I think you were the only writer in the up-and-coming world writers showcase that wrote in English. That’s interesting to me for two reasons. Obviously you’re a little beyond up-and-coming in your native Australia, but your appearance on that slate suggests you’re considered an international writer. What does that mean, if anything? Do you consider your poetry more international than Australian, more world literature than English-language?
I myself couldn’t, or wouldn’t, use the designation ‘Native Australia’, both for the reason that I was born in South Africa – anyway, during Apartheid the word ‘native’ only applied to ‘black’ South Africans – and because the question of nativity or nativism in Australia, or, as they would say in one of its expressions there, “aboriginality”, is profoundly vexed for ‘white’ Australians, the politics of which is too complicated to go into here. Though I recently heard someone say that the Aboriginal people of an area around Sydney – this may be true elsewhere, too – believed that the spirit of a child infected a mother-to-be in a particular place causing pregnancy. This is an intriguing conceptualization – which relates to your first question…
To go back to that aspect of your question, in that sense of native, of place, of birth, of origin, I, to a great extent, feel South African. In terms of my education about Nature, I feel Australian. And in terms of my education about Art and History, I feel European, perhaps even specifically Portuguese. While in a philosophic and spiritual sense I am close to the East, through my readings in Buddhist philosophy, which, of course, leads us back to that philosophical Superpower of India. Am I Indian as well?! Having said all that… I must answer that I regard my work as more International than Australian, more World Literature than English-language.
Yet… again there is contradiction, because I wouldn’t set up those polarities. Just as Buddhism might be seen as a reaction, almost a political reformation of Indian religion, of Hinduism – by allowing the believer the possibility of jumping the queue of reincarnation by being able to achieve Realization in one lifetime, that in no way means that Japanese Buddhism is Indian – I feel all these possibilities as being able to manifest within one another, within me, under the understanding that meaning is circumstantial.
It is possible for me to read a poem in English about Australia the import of which will not be properly clear to English speakers from elsewhere unless they know Australia, or even a particular part of the continent, its history and nuances of language. Does that mean I am only an Australian poet? This is a problem Anglophone post-colonial literary theorists and historians haven’t come to terms with very well. The US context is quite different in that it is vast and very active and – may I say – sometimes self-absorbed. So US literature has more or less not needed to reflect on the instability of contextual meaning in a language as apparently transparent as World English. I see that my work, if not regarded as a unified body, a corpus, is, in a way at least, like the corpse of a holy man of the Middle Ages – fragmented, turned into worshipped and traded relics, things in circulation in various places and languages.
I am very interested in my work going out of English into other languages which have what I consider to be more stable literary and linguistic histories. In that sense, I am definitely more interested in being a poet of the World, Cosmopolitan in the original sense of the word, instead of an English Poet. Which I couldn’t be, not being, not yet having been, in that native sense, English!
I always complain about the disconnect between American and British poetry, but I think we’re even more disconnected with Australia. What’s happening there, besides Les Murray? Who should we look out for, who do we need?
To answer that question would really require a separate interview… I discovered, when in the US that my peripheral position in relation to US poetry was, as someone coming from far away, surprisingly up-to-date on US poets, whereas they had, as you suggest, almost no knowledge of poets from my context. Here I must stress that I don’t simply come from an Australian background; a certain amount of my work has appeared since I have lived in Australia, but my reading and writing is eclectic and the first tradition with which I was familiar was that of Afrikaans poetry, even though it is my second language. There is also, a problem for me, the reality that Australian readers remain almost entirely ignorant of most of South African literature, but for a few novelists.
To investigate what’s going on in Australian poetry it would be best to start at Jacket magazine – which is pretty well-known internationally. There are also the smaller sites Cordite and Mascara, which give a better sense of what the newest poets are doing. But really I feel that to come to terms, as far as that is possible, with the central Australian tradition such as it is, it would be best to look at some anthologies – a good beginning would be to set John Tranter and Philip Mead’s The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry against Les Murray’s The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, the overlaps and clashes and absences between those two are genuinely insightful. If you want me to name names, I would have to say that I am more drawn to the earlier Australian modernists, Judith Wright, Francis Webb and Kenneth Slessor, who set up, in my mind, the dynamic of the contemporary poetry tradition. Of course, the closer we get to the present the more diverse things become with a vast range of poets. Of the slightly older generation who started publishing mostly in the 1970s, these are three whose work I enjoy: Robert Adamson, Antigone Kefala and Robert Gray. Another poet and writer I like, though largely a novelist of an earlier era, and someone who didn’t write very much, is Randolph Stow, who lived much of his life in a kind of self-imposed exile in England.
I must say something about the country of my birth. South African poetry is also largely unknown outside of the country, the two best known poets being – an interesting fact – Afrikaans: Breyten Breytenbach and Antjie Krog. Both of them are probably known more due to their prose than their poetry. There is an even more diverse world of poetry there than in Australia, of many kinds, and with complex relations to other traditions and languages.
Thinking just of established figures, there is the Zulu poetry of Muzisi Kunene, which has its debts to the Zulu modern poetry of BW Vilakazi; the amazingly synthetic work of Wopko Jensma, who somehow brought together a kind of multi-lingual Afro-American jazz voice á la Harlem Renaissance, certain aspects of experimental German poetry, and an African sensibility owing to his life in Mozambique and Botswana; then there’s Tatamkhulu Afrika, a poet and novelist who was encouraging of my returning to writing about South Africa, a man with a very interesting life story, whose poetry was a return to the possibilities of lyric poetry after the end of Apartheid, and who was a chronicler of great insight during and after that period of transition; and there is Wilma Stockenström whose evocative historical novella Journey to the Baobab Tree was translated by JM Coetzee. I would also add to this list the Mozambican short-story writer, novelist and poet Mia Couto who, though he writes in Portuguese and is now a well-known figure in the Portuguese world, was early on associated with Jensma in his time in Maputo.
Best for anyone interested to look at the site of Poetry International which provides a good point of entry, if with the inevitable blind-spots – I am included in neither! – for both poetries.
I know your work has been translated into a number of languages. Do you speak other languages? Do you translate from or into any of them?
Yes, there have been translations into European and Asian languages, and one poem each into Farsi and Uzbek. Some of them can be found here on Lyrikline.
This is certainly one of the reasons I hope reincarnation is possible – so that I might return and learn a number of other languages to a good level of proficiency! At school in South Africa I learnt Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Zulu and Latin; only the first of which I have properly retained. I have a smattering, as they say, from travel – Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese – but the only language I could say I am sufficiently familiar with is Afrikaans. I am able to understand German not too badly, having studied it for a year as an undergraduate; and I was surprised that I was able to read, without much of a problem, a Dutch translation of a book by the Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi which he kindly sent to me. This all remains a source of embarrassment to me. Hence the dream of a future incarnation.
On this subject, though, I must say that I used to feel ashamed of this. In recently years, I have been thinking that this embarrassment was also a curious one in that it presupposed that I could learn all the languages of the places and literature I am interested in, which is, of course, not the case. My imaginings and journeys exceed the practical. That presumption effaces the presence and activity of the translator. My fondness for translation has always been with me, ever since my earliest days. Something to do with the official bilingualism of South Africa and Canada, of seeing two names for things, as if things always have a mirror-image. I remember reading somewhere that this is an African metaphysic: that there is always the thing-itself and its invisible counterpart. I don’t know how true that is.
Due to my dissociated sense of English, I feel quite at ease with the idea that whatever I write might appear in translation. Actually, I would go further than that and say that often I feel as if I am writing in translation, and that when the work is translated it is actually completed. But for that to be true the work has to be related to the place of the language into which it is translated. For example, my poems about the Portuguese empire, which you can find discussed in a piece by Kris Hemensley, are naturalised in their translation into Portuguese.
To hark back to the question of nativity, one could say that I may be the child-spirit looking to be reborn in the language and place of the poem. I feel very happy to read with the translator, to the extent that I often feel, but it does depend on which part of my work it is, that the translator is the author and I am the translator, the mirror-image.
This is a poem which first appeared in The Harvard Review, a poem translators seem to enjoy, that I wrote about Andreia Sarabando, the Portuguese translator of my book Southern Barbarians: We were listening to the Mozambican-Portuguese poet Eduardo Pitta reading in the famous Baroque library at Coimbra.
TRANSLATORS ARE ANGELS
Translators are angels, I whispered
into the ear of my guardian-angel in King João Library.
They stand beside us, hearing our thoughts,
only muttering what’s necessary. Smiling slightly,
listening carefully to the speaker who’d mentioned my name,
she said: We are perfect nobodies; nameless,
voiceless, winged incandescence, except when we’re bad.
Then she turned to me: Like now, if I don’t tell you what he said –
That is the poem of adoration. As is always the case in the process of idealization, I have written another poem, about an imaginary Chinese translator, in which the poet and the translator are in a taxi going around Tiananmen Square, and the poet has a momentary vision, of the sort one might see in a Hong Kong horror movie, where the translator becomes an albino anaconda, the proverbial White Snake of Chinese folklore. I certainly meant no insult, just that, as all translators know, there is dangerous potential in translation as much as there might be wonder.
And yes, I have made some translations from Afrikaans, and what I would call versionsfrom other languages. Only the poems from Afrikaans would I consider translations: poems by Breytenbach, the modernist/symbolist Eugène Marais, the Jewish poet Olga Kirsch, and the controversial Peter Blum. I feel that I made rather tarnished mirror-images, resemblances, of their poems. The others, of a poem by the Dutch traveller J Slauerhoff and of Camilio Pessanha, the Portuguese Symbolist who lived in Macau, are not translations, just half-heard echoes, desperate works of homage to poets whose work I admire.
What are you reading now? What are you working on?
I thought it best just to mention what I have before me right now:
Two books related to Malay literature from the Oxford in Asia Reprints Series. The Hikayat Abdullah, an autobiography of Abdullah Bin Abdul Kadir translated from Malay, and A History of Classical Malay Literature by Sir Richard Winstedt. The translator Harry Aveling also sent me a copy of a translation of the “Shaer Kampong Gelam Terbakar”, a famous poem by Abdullah, that appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. I am reading these as I want to write a poem dedicated to or about Abdullah, a translator and champion of the modernity of Malay, and a person of an interestingly mixed cultural and linguistic background.
Missing Person by Adil Jusawalla and Jejuri by Arun Kolatkar. Both books I was happy to find in the library after having been introduced to their works recently by an anthology, The Bloodaxe Book Of Indian Poetry, edited by a friend, the poet and musician Jeet Thayil.
And Adonis’s An Introduction to Arabic Poetics. I am interested to read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses again after that. The question of the anti- and proto-modernity of Arabic literature, as Adonis presents it, in relation to the Koran, is something that I haven’t seen taken up by those who have written on Rushdie’s infamous book. That book, controversial and important as it was in its time, doesn’t seem to have been read as a discourse on the question of the poetic, in its broadest sense, and how that is related to the conjunction of the language of Arabic and Islam.
A selection of short articles – cróica – The Fat Man and Infinity by António Lobo Antunes in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation, small pieces that appeared originally in newspapers in Portugal. The form and practice of these kinds of texts interests me.
Last, in preparation for a paper I hope to present at a conference in Zanzibar, I am reading a book of Afrikaans essays on Breytenbach that appeared while he was still in prison, and one of the books of his selected poems in English, In Africa Even the Flies are Happy, which is translated by Denis Hirson, not by the poet himself as is his usual practice.
That’s a great list of books, its eclecticism certainly reflected in your own poetry. Jull Costa is a great translator.
What am I working on? The way I work is two-fold and cyclical. I write new work very quickly, often when I am travelling, and then I work on it very slowly, sometimes even after an interval of years; I also quite often write new poems that I add to already developed, sometimes even published, work. I once heard an artist describe his praxis as a spiral – repetition, but around an expanding axis. This describes the structure of my practice, too. For example, I have been writing new poems and revising older poems, some of which go back fifteen years, that will be added to an future edition of the recently published The West: Australia Poems 1989-2009.
At the same time, I have other work that is in development either on the page or in my mind. I am now working on a book of poems related to the vestiges and presence of Islam and Arab culture, or rather what I would characterize as the idea of ‘The Moor’, in places that I have been travelling to in the past few years, Spain, Portugal, as well as Dubai and South Africa. I am writing and finishing poems that I will add to my gathering of work related to Asia – Sumatra, Japan, Singapore and China – which will build on what appeared in the selected poems Elsewhere.
Then there are the books that translators are working on: selections, in German and, hopefully, Swedish; a new booklet to come out in Portuguese; as well as the Portuguese edition of Southern Barbarians/Barbáros do Sul, and a Spanish edition of my Ex-White: South African Poems that first appeared in Austria. It seems, too, that there may be a book containing the Portuguese poems with a number of essays by scholars interested in contemporary poetry and Camões.
I have only one book forthcoming in English: Southern Barbarians, a collection building on a South African chapbook edition. A book about the Portuguese Empire, including Macau and Timor, by an ex-South African, published in English on a continent they, the great explorers, are only rumoured to have discovered!
