I thought I'd spend the rest of my time
talking a little bit about translation
poetry and the acquisitions and editing process--
a process that hasn't changed much
since the early days of indie.
Here's one emblematic lineage of how certain titles came
to new directions.
Ezra Pound told Laughlin to publish Henry Miller.
Miller recommended Hermann Hesse Siddhartha
which Laughlin found, quote, "pretty sugar-candied
Buddhism."
But he still published it.
And fortunately, it went on to become
a huge hit that helped him publish more obscure authors.
I found my job, as an editor, has many things in common
to both poetry and translation.
They each demand careful attention
to how words are being used on the page
and how individual books are structured.
The tools and skills required for each feed into one another.
So that the three are quite happy in the company
of the other.
And all three embody a kind of spirit of the age.
As an editor, I'm always noting down
authors and books that might be of interest to the press.
Whether it's a recommendation from another author
or a translator or if I read an interesting excerpt
in a literary journal or if something unexpected pops up
in an article or a book review.
We also get submissions from agents here and abroad,
as well as from publishers and cultural foundations
around the world.
I feel like a certain kind of intuition
develops as an editor as my feelers
are constantly on the lookout for possible books
that fit the particular vision of the press.
And in this sense, trying to build a list of authors
at a press is a creative act akin to writing or translating
a poem.
Though I'd say the editor is the most surreptitious
of the three.
So when I see a book I've edited on a shelf in a bookstore,
I sometimes secretly feel like one of those scientists
who manufacture synthetic tastes and scents in hidden factories
as he walks the aisle of a supermarket.
And his heart beats with knowing excitement
as he catches a glimpse of a box of Cocoa Puffs,
knowing he's responsible for that particular addictive
taste.
Not long after I started working at the front desk at New
Directions in the fall of 2000, another editor
had a psychotic episode and left.
So I was quickly ushered into the official world of editing.
The first thing I worked on were cloth to paperback conversions.
Then I became an assistant editor
on certain titles, writing catalog and back ad copy
and eventually joined our biannual sales
conference where we pitch each season's books to the sales
reps.
I believe the first book I actually
acquired was a volume of short stories called Where Europe
Begins by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German
by Susan Bernofsky and from the Japanese by Yumi Selden.
And I just heard Tawada was here a few years ago, reading
in the German department.
Tawada who also-- she writes in both Japanese and German.
I'd fallen in love with her work as a graduate student
in a class on Japanese literature and theory.
One time, I saw her read with a jazz pianist
where she threw ping pong balls onto the open piano strings
as the pianist pounded out some chords and runs,
making the little balls dance into the air
as the hammer struck the strings.
I had noticed some stories Bernofsky
had translated in a literary journal
and contacted her out of the blue.
She responded positively.
And together, along with Yumi Selden,
we put together a collection of stories
that bridge Tawada's work in both languages.
I also included a little homage to Tawada
that Wim Wenders wrote as a preface.
Strangely, a Japanese foundation caught wind of our book
and decided to buy a couple thousand copies of the print
run and distribute them for free as publicity.
We've since published two more books by Tawada,
including a novel called The Naked Eye where
the protagonist is a young Vietnamese woman who
gets stranded in Paris and becomes infatuated
with Catherine Deneuve.
That was also the first time we worked with translator Susan
Bernofsky.
And since then, she has translated other books for us,
including work by the Swiss writer Robert Walser
and the young German fiction writer Jenny Erpenbeck.
In celebration of our 75th anniversary
last year, I edited this anthology of nature poetry
called Birds, Beast and Seas that
was culled from the very long poetry backlist.
I spent a few months in the office library
reading and rereading poetry collections,
trying to figure out an interesting, fun way
of organizing the book.
I described the result a little in the preface.
And this is from there.
Structurally, the collection is arranged chronologically
by each poet's birth year, opening
with a few ancient poems of China, Greece, Rome, Japan,
India, and Persia then dipping briefly into the Troubadour
Renaissance and Elizabethan periods
before blossoming into a constellation of poets
from the 19th and 20th centuries,
crossing movements in schools, geographies and cultures
into our present.
Usually, only one poem or a section
of one poem by each poet has been selected in order
to present the widest range of indie poets
within the limits of this edition.
But this limitation has its benefits, too,
as poets rub directly against their peers, poem to poem.
Well, connecting threads between poems are heightened.
And lines from distant times and places
converse with one another, all in the splendors and shadows
of nature.
Choices were made in the spirit of this conversation
so that the book can be considered as linked whole.
The criss-crossing of cultures and ages,
the constant translation of the present through the past
is fertile soil for poetry.
That translation reinvigorates language and culture
and has been a pivotal practice for American poets
from the last century into this one is evident in these pages.
And here, I'd like to read "Two Poems" by Danish poet Inger
Christensen that are in the anthology
and from her collection Butterfly Valley, translated
by Susanna Neid.
So this is Christensen.
"With peace of mind and fragments of sweet lies,
with downy sheen of emerald and jade,
the iris butterfly's bare caterpillars
can camouflage themselves as willow leaves.
I saw them eating their own images which
then were folded into chrysalis, hanging, at last,
like what they simulated--
a leaf among the other clustered leaves.
When with their image-language, butterflies
can use dishonesty and so survive.
Then why should I be any less wise?
If it will soothe my terror of the void
to characterize butterflies as souls and some revisions
of the vanished dead--
and some revisions of the vanished dead.
The Hawthorne butterfly that hovers like a white cloud
splashed with deep pink traces of flowers interwoven
by the light.
My grandmother enfolded in the gardens
thousand fathoms, stock, wallflower, baby's breath.
My father who taught me first names
of all the creatures that must creep before they die.
Walk with me into the butterfly valley where everything exists,
only apart, or even the dead hear the nightingale.
Its songs glide with an oddly mournful lilt.
From lack of suffering to suffering,
my ear gives answer with its deafened ringing."
Christensen is another typical example
of how an author came to New Directions.
Years ago, the translator Susanna Neid
saw Denise Levertov read at San Diego State University.
She introduced herself to Levertov and found the courage,
she said, to show her some translations.
She had been working on Christensen's collection
Alphabet.
Levertov liked them so much she passed them
on to James Laughlin, who published
an excerpt in New Directions in poetry
and prose number 49 in 1985.
In 2001, New Directions published Alphabet and later
published her cosmic epic It with an introduction
by Anne Carson.
Butterfly Valley, her novel Azorno and most recently,
her early poems and one volume called Light, Grass and Letter
in April.
I like to read another poem in the Nature anthology
by Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, translated
by Robin Fulton.
And it's called "The Blue Windflowers."
"To be spellbound, nothing's easier.
It's one of the oldest tricks of the soil and springtime,
the blue windflowers.
They are, in a way, unexpected.
They shoot up out of the brown rustle
of last year in overlooked places
where one's gaze never pauses.
They glimmer and float--
yes, float from their color.
The sharp violet-blue now weighs nothing.
Here is ecstasy but low-voiced.
Quote, "career," irrelevant.
"Power and publicity," ridiculous.
They must have given a great reception up
in Nineveh with pompe and trompe up, raising the rafters.
And above all those brows, the crowning crystal chandeliers
hung like glass vultures.
Instead of such an overdecorated and strident cul-de-sac,
the windflowers open a secret passage to the real
celebration--
quiet as death."
New Directions first published 15 poems by Transtromer
in 1966, again, in the annual number 19.
In 2006, we published his complete works The Great
Enigma: New Collected Poems.
At that time, there was only one or two slim volumes
of Transtromer still in print.
Transtromer's UK publisher Bloodaxe Books
had published an earlier edition of the New Collected
Poems, which we completely revised with the translator,
adding missing sections plus the whole of Transtromer's most
recent collection called The Great Enigma.
And when Transtromer and his wife came to New York
a few years ago for a couple of readings,
I asked them what they wanted to do.
And without hesitation, they said that they
would love to tour Harlem.
And actually, this was not a couple of years time.
It's more like seven years ago.
I was living in Harlem at the time.
And my roommate not only happened
to drive a car for a living but has lived
in Harlem for over 35 years.
So we hired my roommate for the day
and gave the Transtromers a driving tour of Harlem,
which I actually filmed with my cheap video camera.
In the spring of 2011, Bloodaxe then
published our edition of the New Collected Poems in the UK.
And it ended up being a positive example
of how two publishers in two different countries
could collaborate on a single project.
And I remember soon after I started working at the press,
I had dinner with Bei Dao--
ND has been his US publisher since the late 80s--
And after a few beers, I asked him to name his three
favorite poets.
And with hardly a pause, he said Georg Trakl Tomas Transtromer,
and Gennady Aygi.
The first two I had read.
The third I hadn't.
A few weeks later, I was browsing in a used book shop.
And by great fortune, happened upon a little chapbook
of Gennady Aygi's work translated by Peter France,
published by Duration Press, it used to be out in Sausalito.
I flipped the pages of the chapbook in the bookshop,
totally mesmerized.
The others in the office also liked his poetry.
So eventually, I contacted Peter France who lives in Scotland.
And together along with Aygi, who
was living in a village in an autonomous region in Russia
called Chuvashia where he was born and raised.
We put a collection together called Child and Rose which
is passing around as well.
The first section: Veronicas book
is a series of poems written about the first six months
of Aygi's daughter's life.
It's a celebration of childhood and fatherhood
and about the growing awareness of an infant's life Aygi calls
quote, "the period of likenesses"
where he sees the first weeks of life
up to about the age of three, children experience, undergo,
and bear both in and upon themselves moments, days,
and, weeks of likeness and likenesses
with a multitude of relations, both living and departed.
Here is his poem "Beginning of the Period of Likenesses"
translated by Peter France.
"And the forces of the tribe are stirred
and they float and turn like wind and light.
Carrying over your face, cloud after cloud,
all expressions of vanished faces
to manifest to confirm the definitive appearance,
your own.
With fire, standing firm in turbulence.
Is it not with this same heat that, peering, I
shudder as if amid some singing, pain came in like the wind."
Not long before Aygi passed away suddenly in 2007,
we brought out another collection called Field Russia
and have plans for another one called Time of Gratitude.
So I've just read poems by three different poets, translated
from three different languages.
Each conveys an intensity of emotion and thought,
as well as the stillness and quietness
in their new existence.
Each points to that quote, "invisible poem" as Transtromer
calls it.
That's beyond language while making our language
into something new.
In other words, poetry's resonances
are transformed across languages,
a transformation that is at once ordinary and miraculous.
Perhaps the cliché of being lost in translation persists
because of incompetent translators and our own
prejudices and ignorance as readers.
In thermodynamic terms, translation
is like a steady state system in an ever-changing world.
It keeps language, culture, poetry alive--
a living presence.
As a Chilean, Roberto Bolaño writes in his collection
of essays between parentheses--
translated by Natasha Wimmer.
"How to recognize a work of art?
How to separate it, even if just for a moment,
from this critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless
plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate?
Easy.
Let it be translated.
Let its translator be far from brilliant.
Rip pages from it at random.
Leave it lying in an attic.
If after all of this, a kid comes along and reads it,
and after reading, makes it his own and is faithful to it
or unfaithful, whichever, and reinterprets
it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge,
and both are enriched, and the kid adds an ounce of value
to its original value, then we have something before us--
a machine or a book capable of speaking to all human beings.
Not a plowed field, but a mountain.
Not the image of a dark forest, but the dark forest.
Not a flock of birds, but the nightingale."
Yael Evelev who runs the world music label Luaka Bop
that David Byrne founded once said, "Luaka Bop doesn't
follow a traditional plan.
We're trying not to grow big.
It's a balance between enjoying our lives,
being true to our artists, and managing to stay in business."
New Directions chugs along with a similar tune.
If we followed a traditional plan of expansion and profit,
we wouldn't be publishing literature.
The success we've had in recent years with Bolaño, W.G. Sebald,
new editions of the plays of Tennessee Williams,
and books like Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden
and Carson's Knox and Helen DeWitt's novel Lightning Rods,
along with continuing steady sales of our long backlist
allow us to publish other unknown writers who need
the time and space to hopefully find patient readers.
It's a precarious balancing act.
But sometimes, there are unexpected surprises
like just last week, Cornell University
wanted to order 40,000 copies of Romain Gary's novel
The Life Before Us to give to their students
as a university-wide summer read, which
is always welcomed surprises.
And so that's the bright note I'll end on.
And I thought let's take the rest
of the time for any questions.