Thanks a lot.
That was great.
Simple question-- the last name of the Bolivian poet Jaime?
Sáenz, S-Á-E-N-Z, Jaime Sáenz.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And now I'm remembering those things
I wanted to say in the beginning too.
Like, one of the things, I wanted
to thank Tyler because I just really like his spirit.
I met him when he was a grad student.
And he's, like, he's naked.
He's just, like, so purely there and present and honest.
I really-- what a great person to be.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi Forrest.
Can you say a little bit-- you kind of alluded
to it-- but about your practice, getting ready, studying up
on the author before you do a translation?
Like, you talked about seeing Neruda's library.
Maybe you can speak about it in terms of Neruda
or terms of anyone who translated.
Yeah, well, I think it's--
one of the things I'm really interested in,
in my own poetry, is the relationship
of different places, landscapes, cityscapes, to language,
how it affects our perception and how
that perceptual relationship to our space
affects how we use words, and even the kinds of metaphors,
for instance, that we might use.
So, for me, it's really important to go to the place
where a poet is.
So I first tried translating Sáenz with Kent Johnson before
going to Bolivia.
But it was only when we went to Bolivia
that we understood his work and saw this landscape,
and it began to make sense to us, and talked to people.
And then, also, you pick up nuances
of language that you don't have in books, from the locale.
So a part of studying for a translation
is, if you possibly can, going to the place where
the poet was.
I have a question now, back here.
Hello.
So I'm wondering about that process of co-translation
with Kent and/or with Keith Waldrop
and/or any other partners you've had,
what that process looks like, and if it's
the same across those two, or et cetera, just to describe it.
Yeah, Keith and I both separately co-translated poems
with Xue Di.
So Keith and I weren't working together,
though I would have been proud to work with Keith.
The only person I've really co-translated with,
I did two books with Kent Johnson of this same visionary
Bolivian poet Jaime Sáenz.
And it was a terrific experience.
I really love the way that collaboration and translation
humble the ego.
That working with someone, you give up--
and that, in even translating, I think
of it as a spiritual activity that you have to disappear.
You have to get out of your ego, and out of your head,
and out of the rhythms that you make your poetry with.
So far out of them that that space can
fill with someone else's mind.
The music that was in someone else's mind, who may not even
exist anymore.
That's a spiritual openness.
And then you come back with everything that you have.
But my experience working with Kent,
who has a bit of a reputation as a hothead,
was absolutely terrific.
And we worked really well together.
So I'm really interested in the way
that translation kind of exists in the mind
as a series of possibilities, and then,
to get it onto the page, you have to make decisions, right?
And I feel like some translators I've
talked to have resisted that moment of decision
for as long as possible, And some translators
get there a little bit faster.
Could you talk about what the moment of decision,
as a translator, is like for you?
The best answer to that question would
be to show you books that I've published
of translations that I've corrected and [INAUDIBLE]..
But also, it's a really good question.
The most recent project that I had,
which I have to warn you about in case you go over there,
because I see some piles of them,
is a Japanese poet named Gozo Yoshimasu, Yoshimasu Gozo.
And his work has been considered the most untranslatable work
that there could be.
He writes in three different kinds of Japanese script.
He's making visual rhymes between Chinese characters
and Japanese characters.
And the sounds that--
the visual sign often can be pronounced
in two different ways.
He's playing with rhymes like that.
He's also very influenced by Okinawan shamanism,
and goes to places of trauma, like Fukushima most recently,
and sets up a space and listens for ghosts.
And in his work, it takes everything into account.
Anyone who speaks to him, he gives an honorific to.
Mr. Sakinora said to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The honorable dog of Mr. Sakinora
was walking along beside us.
It's this incredible generosity that makes an almost impossible
poetry to read on the page.
And I'd looked at-- there were earlier translations
of his work, from the '60s, that were terrible,
that were just semantic translations.
So just what he was saying semantically,
which isn't at all what makes poetry.
So I thought the best way to go at poetry
like this would be to find these hotshot
younger Japanese translators, which
we have now, who have been raised up in postmodernism
and might be able to approach his work from lots
of different directions.
And so I edited a book, asking a number of different translators
to translate them.
And each of them approaches in a very different way, recovering
some things, losing some things.
But the combination of having all those translators
gives the largest, I think, effect of Gozo's work.
These lost works of Neruda, how do you answer claims
that, since they were so obscure, that they may not
have been his best work, or that he
felt they were his best work?
How do you square that?
You're the one that has to square it, you know?
I thought exactly that.
And then I looked at the work.
And you heard it.
It's, like-- it's Neruda.
And he wrote so much, and he was traveling so much.
I don't know if you've seen the new Neruda film.
It's actually not so bad.
It's pretty good.
I liked it.
But he's traveling all over the world.
He's writing wherever he goes.
And he's got things that he stuffs
in notebooks and everywhere, and they get lost.
But some of it is clearly not finished.
The first poem I read ends with a comma.
And some of it is finished and is strong.
But you're the-- we're the judge, yeah.
Great, well, let's all judge.
Thank you, Forrest.
[APPLAUSE]
Joshua mentioned it in the introduction,
but I was intrigued by what you said about putting
your own writing on hold.
And during the translation, you acquire a different vocabulary
and adopt a fresh set of syntactical and rhythmical
strategies, which I found intriguing.
Was there something you could say about that,
from different languages that you're translating
in your unique [INAUDIBLE].
Yes, absolutely.
And that's what I think the beauty of translation
is, that if we don't have other languages translated
into English, carrying with them those elements that
are novel to English--
syntactical, rhythmic, ideational, and imagistic--
then a language dies.
And it's translation that keeps our language changing
and alive.
And you know, one might connect that to immigration.
[APPLAUSE]