Jeffrey Yang is poetry editor at New Directions Publishing, a poet and translator himself, and the editor of the most recent issue of TWO LINES: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, which features a portfolio of Uyghur poetry. Yang will read with Dolkun Kamberiat the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco tomorrow 24 February 2011 at the Center for the Art of Translation’s Celebration of Uyghur Culture.
DS
I’m always interested in the initial attraction of the translator and editor to work in translation. How did you discover Uyghur poetry? What attracted you to it?
Each issue of TWO LINES has a section that focuses on the poetry of a particular people, culture, or region. When I agreed to edit the poetry content for the new issue, I originally thought it would be interesting to put together a poetry folio that focused on certain minority languages in China. It didn’t take long for me to realize that time constraints would make this impossible, so I turned to Uyghur poetry initially as a possibility. Here, to avoid repeating myself too much and as things on the web are so easily linkable, I’d like to point readers to this short interview I did with TWO LINES where I talk a little about this.
And, as it seems you’re doing David, kind of continuing that discussion here.
What attracts me to Uyghur poetry is what attracts me to French poetry or to Indian poetry or to poetry in general—its long tradition that builds and transforms from generation to generation; its capacity to serve as intersection of everything; the knowledge it passes down, its roots that branch underground; its resistance to easy answers and its preening of language; its mysterious music. The enthnopoetics movement of the ’60s and ’70s in the U.S. really opened our ears to the poetry of all tribes, bringing an awareness that this ancient art existed in all cultures since the beginning of language and continues to subsist somehow—“hope, only source of poetry,” Nathaniel Tarn writes in a poem. What initially attracted me to Uyghur poetry in particular was learning about its history and culture through its poetry—and in the modern era to the present, its resilience in the face of so much destruction and political oppression.
The TWO LINES portfolio contains a wide range of poetry: from contemporary work to older, traditional poems to fragments unearthed during archeological fieldwork. What unifies them?
The major unifying thread is a continuity of tradition; the transformation of a people and culture through time as embodied in poetry—even if this involves a disruption or resistance to tradition. But there are other threads. As far as the issue as a whole, including the rest of the work outside of the Uyghur portfolio, I wanted the poems to not only have overlapping themes but evoke a sort of diversity within a subversive aesthetic. When Roberto Bolaño meets Enrique Lihn in one of his stories, Lihn is not only already dead but looks younger, more handsome with brighter eyes, than in his author photographs: a Lihn who resembled his poems, who had adopted their age, who lived in a building similar to his poems, and who could disappear, as his poems sometimes did, with a characteristic elegance and poise. A disappearing aesthetic. Whoever uses English today has to contend with its army and navy, but it doesn’t have to be an entirely homogenizing force does it? It can be questioned, interrogated, changed by other languages; subsist in a way for other languages.
I’m always interested in collaborative translations, and I know you worked with Dolkun Kamberi to edit and translate this selection of poems. How did the process work? Did you use literal cribs?
Yes, I describe a little of this process in the other interview linked above. As I don’t know Uyghur and its many orthographies, I worked off of Dolkun’s drafts, and we continued on, back and forth. For Osman’s poem I worked off his draft.
The Uyghur language, spoken by about 10 million people, is quite different from English in its structure. Did that cause any difficulties for you as a translator, and were there any particular solutions you came back to?
I touch on this too in the other interview. As I don’t know the language, the difficulties for me in this regard were nonexistent. What I tried to do was make a good poem in English faithful to Dolkun’s faithfulness. One solution I returned to consistently was not keeping any end-rhyme scheme even if it was there in the original poem. I couldn’t retain this without the English sounding like Dr. Seuss, particularly with the ancient fragments. And then one has a litany of models in mind while translating, consciously and subconsciously—models of other translated poetry and models of poetry written in English.
Your own work incorporates a wide range of references, ranging from the indigenous Miskito of coastal Nicaragua to Vishnu Ivara, as well as mythologies of the Hawaiians, Maya, Olmecs, and others. How does your practice as a translator inform your work as a poet? How does it inform your work as an editor?
Well, each does feed into each other on many levels. Translating teaches you how to write which teaches you how to edit which also teaches you how to write and translate, etc. Each involves careful reading. Each gives some order to the chaos of the mind. Each treats words as living, transforming things that in turn transform us. Sloppiness, shortcuts, and a lack of rigor (in thinking, etc.) become quickly apparent. And as long as utopia exists there’s always room for improvement—which is also a humbling release. Plus in the U.S. there are many both dead and living who’ve made a model practice of these three connecting things, perhaps not even deliberately wanting to do so but just naturally following the one into the other.
Are you working on any other Uyghur projects? What else are you reading, watching, listening to, and working on?
I’m s-l-o-w-l-y working with Ahmatjan Osman on translating some of his poems. In the Two Lines issue, he has one poem on the back page. Many amazing things came out of this editing experience, and the thing I’m most thankful for is being able to connect with both Dolkun Kamberi and Ahmatjan Osman. Osman, who was exiled from Xinjiang, has published a handful of books in Arabic and, from what I’ve gathered, Adonis was an early admirer of his work.
Reading: Lots of my reading is connected to my job at New Directions. Susan Howe’s new poetry book That This is just out and is phenomenal; as we speak I’m going through Helen DeWitt’s new novel called Lightning Rods—out in September—that is hilariously intelligent, like Aristophanes for the modern, sexist, corporate office. Virginia Woolf’s essays; Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel; Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. Watching: puffed up bluebirds at the top of Mt. Beacon; Clive Owen in the Second Sight series; Maggie Cheung in Clean (who can top her performance!). Listening: Don Cherry’s Codona Trilogy; Paco de Lucia’s Antologia; Artur Schnabel; Alban Berg. Working on: translating Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies; editing a collection of nature poems for New Directions called Birds, Beasts, and Seas that comes out in April.
January/February 2011
