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.Look at all the new Mexican poetry that has carried across the border.Besides anthologies such as Reversible Monuments: Contemporary MexicanPoets; Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico; and Sin Puertas Visibles, booksby important individual poets like Gloria Gervitz, Laura Solorzano, andCoral Bracho are now available in English.And this translated workhas already been striking sparks of response from U.S.poets, amongthem poets who don t read Spanish, like Stephen Burt, C.D.Wright, andMichael Palmer.I would guess that translations of contemporary French poetry havehad the greatest impact on U.S.poetry in the last twenty years, and booksby younger poets like Lisa Lubasch (Twenty-One After Days), MarcellaDurand (Western Capital Rhapsodies), and Laura Mullen (Subject), amongothers (Michael Palmer, Rosmarie Waldrop, Cole Swensen), make thatcase.But the spectrum of influence is much wider.John Ashbery lifts aFinnish form for his own Finnish Rhapsody. Serial poems by CharlesBernstein take their cue from Louis Zukofsky s homophonic translationsof Catullus.Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun s translated work is the cata-lyst for John Bradley s book of poetry and invented correspondence,War on Words.Prageeta Sharma s new work reveals an infatuation withtranslations of Kim Hyesoon, and Brenda Hillman s water poems werenourished, in part, by Hans Favery, a Surinam-born poet who wrote inDutch.We can see that Guy Davenport s Greek translations inspiredKent Johnson to write The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek,and that Sappho translations affected the form and tone of Mei-mei Bers-senbrugge s early poems.In his book O Wheel, Peter Sacks acknowledgesthe influence of translations of medieval Hebrew poet Shmuel HaNagid.Juliana Spahr s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is strongly markedby her reading of Alphabet, the English translation of a seminal book byDanish writer Inger Christensen.Both Paul Hoover s recent Poems inSpanish and George Kalamaras s Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hairare inspired by translations of Spanish-language poetry.And GeraldStern is one of several poets to record his encounter with translations ofpoems by Taha Muhammad Ali, a Palestinian poet.Arabic, Spanish,Danish, Hebrew, Greek, Slovenian, Korean, Danish, Latin, Finnish,The Great Leap: César and the Caesura109 French . . .I could continue, but I think the point is clear: contemporaryAmerican poets are being influenced by translations from all over theworld.Several years ago, before I was hired as the Briggs-Copeland poet atHarvard, I was interviewed by Helen Vendler, who asked me, afterlooking at examples of my projected syllabi, how I could teach books oftranslation to students who were not even thoroughly familiar with theirown (by which she meant British and North American) literary tradi-tion.It was, probably, an appropriate question to pose to someone aboutto be hired into something called the Department of English and Ameri-can Literature and Language.And yet the notion that literary traditionmight be pruned between geographic lines seems to me a constructedand unhealthy convenience, and one that runs the danger of advocatinga kind of academic feudalism.I don t believe that writers care where theirinfluences come from.They re alert for images, rhythms, forms, anythingat all that will feed the burning tree.I think readers are the same.Chau-cer had his ear tuned to French poetry before he shifted the rhythm ofhis own lines from tetrameter to pentameter.Shakespeare cribbed morethan once from Arthur Golding s translation of Ovid.For George Herbertand Henry Vaughan, the translation of the Bible they read was a matter ofthe utmost seriousness.Keats penned an ecstatic poem to honor a trans-lation of Homer.And Hopkins, when he wrote Wreck of the Deutsch-land, had Pindar in mind.There are, of course, political ramifications to crossing linguisticborders.Each language is a modality of life.We might go so far as to saythat one form of totalitarianism is the stuffing of expression into a single,standardized language that marches the reader toward some presump-tively shared goal.If our country s self-assurance, its reliance on a gram-mar of linearity and commerce, its obsessive valuation of measurementand scientific objectivity brackets off realms of perception, of possibilityand difference, then translation offers refreshment.It shifts our perspec-tive and realigns our relation to the world, bringing us into proximitywith other modalitites.With others.It can draw us across that mostguarded border, the one we build around ourselves.The big question for me, then, is: To what degree do host languages andhost cultures attest to constructions of the world that are incommensu-rable with my own?Part II: The Translator at Work110 For instance, I wonder at the implications of the metonymic locationof agency in Spanish I don t hurt my hand, but me duele la mano, me ithurts the hand and what seems (from my linguistic perspective) to bea separation or objectification of body parts.An English reader wondershow anyone can think of their own hand as the hand, as if it were anindependent entity.(In English, we only speak of the body in this waywhen the body is a cadaver.)The zinging run-on sentence that launches the marvelous César Ai-ra s Diario de Hepatitis, deployed with serial prepositions, past and presentparticiples, conditional and future tenses, mentions a number of suchbody parts.Here s my English translation:If I m found undone by disgrace, destroyed, impotent, in extreme physi-cal or mental anguish, or both together, isolated, for example, and con-demned on a steep mountain, drowned in snow, frozen to the core,after a fall of hundreds of meters, bounced from the edges of ice androck, with both legs severed, or my ribs smashed and cracked and alltheir points perforating my lungs; or at the bottom of a ditch or theend of an alley, after a shootout, bleeding into a sinister dawn which,for me, would be the last; or in the ward for incurables at the hospital,losing hour to hour my last functions in between paroxysms of atro-cious pain; or abandoned to the avatars of mendacity and alcoholismin the street; or with gangrene shooting up my leg; or in the phantas-mal progression of a glottal spasm; or purely insane, going about mybusiness in a straitjacket, imbecilic, opprobrious, lost . . .it s probablethat, even having a little pencil and a notebook at hand, I wouldn twrite.Nothing, not a line, not a word.I absolutely wouldn t write.Notbecause I couldn t, not on account of the circumstances, but for thesame reason I don t write now: because I don t feel like it, because I mtired, bored, fed up; because I can t see it serves any purpose
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