I'll start.
Sure.
Tell us how you pick who you're going to translate
and how that influences your work.
I'm trying to think.
In the case of Galo's book, I had a friendship with him,
I guess.
I had read his book, and he knew about my work.
And he had published some of my work in Chile.
And I guess one of the sort of criteria that I've developed
is that I want to work with somebody who I like,
and who I think is a nice person,
and who I think is not going to make me feel as if I'm being
annoying when I write to them 15 times a day with questions
about the inflection and a word that they wrote 14 years ago
and can't even remember what they were doing.
[LAUGHTER]
And so that is part of it.
With Raúl Zurita, I had been asked by a very small
magazine--
I've told this story a few times.
But I was asked maybe in 2007 to translate a few of his poems
for a very small journal.
And he didn't know me.
I didn't know him.
And I wrote to him with a question
out of the blue about the poem.
And then he wrote back the next day,
and he had changed the poem in response to my question.
[LAUGHTER]
And at that point, I asked him if he had a book
that he wanted translated.
And that was how that relationship started.
And again, I think that criteria--
I don't know.
Maybe through my relationship with Raúl,
and then maybe through dealing with writers who are not
as accommodating and easy to work with-- with Raúl,
it was a very--
so in The Country of Planks, for instance,
it's a book that's filled with historical references.
And I had to spend a lot of time asking him a lot of questions.
He's trained as an engineer.
And one scene in the book has a very complicated description
of bridges.
And at some point, he drew me designs of the bridges.
And so those kinds of little details
have been really important to how the translation
work has happened.
Great.
Thank you.
Sure.
More questions?
It's a very bright light.
Well, one has to be struck, of course, by your powerful use
of repetition.
And I found myself thinking of, I think--
isn't it Adorno's famous comment that after Auschwitz there
cannot be poetry.
And I wondered if that use of repetition
is in a way in your poetry--
I don't agree with Adorno's statement.
Your poetry demonstrates it, among many, many other people.
But I found myself thinking of that
and wondering if, in a way, it is that use of--
I'm not going to find the Greek term for it.
But use of repetition is in a way an emphatic statement.
There's not metaphor here.
There's not-- it is what it is.
That continual tautology.
And I don't know if you would just speak to it.
I could try.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of your statement,
I think that is probably the closest--
you probably answered it in a certain way.
I mean, I think there's a lot of ways
of answering the idea that there can't
be poetry after Auschwitz.
But I think one answer to that is
to reconceive of metaphor and literalism in a certain way.
And maybe that's in some of the work that I have been doing,
is--
I don't know, trying to be as literal as possible,
in a certain way.
Trying to-- I don't want to use the word hide,
but trying to not--
I'll just say it.
Trying to not hide behind a metaphor
and trying to deal with things as directly and maybe
painfully as I can.
There's another question somewhere.
So sort of going off that question,
it is as it is, there is a poem--
I don't remember the title of it, where you say,
this thing is this thing.
And so you're kind of refusing comparison or equating
horrors or people's different experiences of violence
towards them from the state, mostly.
And you're refusing it by saying it is what it is.
But then you're putting all these things in comparison
to each other by them being near each other,
I guess, in this list.
And I'm just curious to hear about your process
for writing that poem and what tension
is arising in the inevitable comparison of things
that you're also refusing to compare.
So to backtrack, there was a really bad review
of The Performance of Becoming Human
that came out where the writer had said something
like I was a--
oh, god, what was-- it such a nice phrase.
It was like a raving didact, or something like that.
And then sort of made this kind of throw--
and then brought out this line from Neruda's "Explico Algunas
Cosas" and was trying to explain my work through that line.
And the blood of dead children is like the blood
of dead children.
And I had always loved that poem,
but that review kind of invited me to reclaim it
in a certain way now that it was sort of being used against me.
So that was part of the process, [LAUGHS]
if I'm being totally honest.
That was where that poem sort of re-injected into my life.
At the same time, both in Chicago
and throughout the country there were various police shootings
of young black men that were happening.
And then it was August of 2017.
And there were Nazis marching through Charlottesville saying,
"Jews will not replace us."
And there was like this--
our president having a conversation
where he was asking whether or not
they were reasonable or not, whether or not Nazis
were OK to be marching down the street.
So all of those things at the same time
led to the writing of that poem.
And if there's a certain sort of layered effect,
I think it was because I was feeling overwhelmed
by the layering of those three things happening,
or those multiple things happening at the same time.
And especially with Charlottesville
among the other things sort of being
in the specter of all of these other national acts
of white supremacy.
I don't know.
It felt like a very traumatic moment, but also
a very telling one as well.
OK, well, thank you very much.
Thank you.
And please come buy some books.
And we will be sending them in shortly.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]