It's my pleasure to welcome up Joshua Marie Wilkinson,
a good friend, a colleague in the Department of English here
at the University of Arizona, who will help introduce
Forrest Gander to us tonight.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
"In the night, he rose and came out to piss.
The moon smoldered like a burnt tick.
Turning inside, he stepped on something he
thought was a clump of hair.
A wolf spider, with her ball of children, whose thousands
spilled over his bare foot."
That little poem is from Forrest Gander's second book,
Lynchburg.
And I share it with you for two reasons, because I love it
and because I can.
"I come to consider language by how it uses me," Gander writes.
"Poetry offers a transformative summons."
We're here to encounter Forrest Gander, the translator.
And as the translator, editor, and collaborator on at least 16
collections from three languages,
maybe more, into English, that is something indeed.
Julie and Sarah, across the breezeway here at the Poetry
Center, helped to locate all 16 of those volumes in the stacks.
And they remain on display across the way,
so I hope you'll check them out.
And a warm thank you to them.
When the editors of Copper Canyon
wrote to Forrest about translating Pablo Neruda's
newly discovered lost poems, Gander
writes that he thought, quote, "about what I'd need to give up
to focus on a job like this.
What do I ever give up to take on a translation project?
My own writing goes on hold.
But when, eventually, I come back to it,
I bring to it something new, a feral vocabulary
I have adopted from the translation, a fresh set
of syntactical and rhythmical strategies,
the image repertoire of someone else's imagination.
I always come back from translation changed."
From Mexico, Gander has edited two anthologies, Mouth
to Mouth, Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women,
and Connecting Lines, New Poetry from Mexico,
as well as individual collections
from Valerie Mejer, Pura Lopez Colome, Alfonso D'Aquino,
and Coral Bracho.
From the Chinese, Gander has translated
Xue Di's Another Kind of Tenderness, with Keith Waldrop,
and from Bolivia, two works with Kent Johnson, The Night
and Imminent Visitor by Jaime Saenz.
From the Japanese, Gander has translated three poets,
Kiwao Nomura's Spectacle & Pigsty,
and Kazuko Shiraishi's My Floating Mother, City,
and, most recently, Gozo Yoshimasu's Alice Iris Red
Horse.
From his introduction to that work
he writes, "Some readers may question
whether these innovative translations represent
the original.
But I wonder if the goal of representing the original
is the goal of translation at all, given that the work is
necessarily subjected to alteration, transformation,
dislocation, and displacement."
To name just a couple of the latest works,
Pinholes in the Night, Essential Poems from Latin America,
with Raúl Zurita, Panic Cure, Poems from Spain for the 21st
Century, and of course, a little known poet from Chile
and a brand new edition of Neruda's lost poems.
Forrest Gander is the author of at least eight books of poetry
of his own, an essay collection, an ecopoetics collaboration
with John Kinsella, and two novels.
He's been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award and the Pulitzer Prize, among dozens
of other honors and awards.
Forrest's late wife was the beyond-missed, beyond-loved
poet CD Wright, who passed away just last year.
It's hard to think of Forrest without CD.
And in this moment in history, whatever
it will become to be known as, it's
hard to imagine a world without her.
"All poems," writes Forrest, "are
untranslatable until the right translator shows up."
Well, tonight it would appear that the right translator
and poet and teacher, editor, publisher,
novelist, and recently inducted chancellor to the Academy
of American Poets, has shown up in Tucson.
Please help me to welcome Forrest Gander.
[APPLAUSE]