the Buenos Aires Review » Interviews

Silence Is Meaningful

heather — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:38:20 +0000

Ilan Stavans and Charles Hatfield

The following discussion of Paz and Borges as translators is part of the work-in-progress The Big Theft: Adventures of Translation in the Hispanic World, a series of conversations between Ilan Stavans, the Mexican essayist, translator, and editor and the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, and Charles Hatfield, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.

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Charles Hatfield: I want to talk about Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges as translators. Let’s start with one of the translations in Versiones y diversiones (1973/1978/1995), the volume that brought together Paz’s translations of poets ranging from William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane to Pierre Reverdy and Guillaume Apollinaire. One of Paz’s richest translations is of Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Summer’s Dream” (1948), and maybe we should begin by reflecting on what Paz wrote about Bishop in an essay from the late 1970s: “Poetry is not in what words say,” he wrote, “but in what is said between them, that which appears fleetingly in pauses and silences.” Of course, we know that the idea of silence was huge for Paz. You once characterized Paz’s translations of poets like Bishop and others as “personal versions” and “appropriations.” Is there something we can say about Paz’s translation of “A Summer’s Dream” in particular that might help us understand the nature of Paz’s appropriations better? Or should we begin by talking about Paz’s theories of poetic translation (you’ll recall that in his 1973 prologue to Versiones y diversiones, Paz wrote that his essay “Literatura y literalidad” contained his “teoría de la traducción poética,” or theory of translating poetry)?

Ilan Stavans: The relationship between the two is fascinating: he translated her, she translated him. In The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry (2011), I included some of her versions of his poetry (as well as numerous poems by Brazilian authors she translated). To what extent is the relationship between them symmetrical? Who is more respectful?

Ezra Pound believed that no one who isn’t a poet should dare to translate poetry. He is right and he is wrong. Right because only a poet is able to understand another poet. By understand I mean to know what the trade means, what concocting universes through bricks of words amounts to. And wrong because a poet might know too much, might be too close to “the real thing” to engage in the effort objectively. In the comparison, Bishop strikes me as a more respectful translator of Paz’s Spanish than Paz is of Bishop’s English. Take the penultimate stanza:

He was morose,
but she was cheerful.
The bedroom was cold,
the feather bed close.

Él siempre malhumorado,
aleluyas ella siempre.
Recámara congelada,
mullido lecho de plumas.

Paz eliminates almost all the verbs and articles. He introduces a staccato quality to the stanza. But do they say the same thing? My answer is a rotund no: “He was morose” doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, “Él siempre malhumorado.” And so on. As an exercise, let me retranslate—rather plainly—Paz’s translation back to English (without looking at her English):

He always in a bad mood,
she always in halleluiahs.
Frozen bedroom,
fluffy feather bed.

Paz’s silences are thefts. Or else, I could gently say that he doesn’t translate as much as he rewrites. The latter is a polite statement. But his rendition—let me not sugarcoat it—at its heart, verges on disrespect.

That’s why I’m always in favor of releasing poetry in translation with the original serving as companion.

CH: Bishop’s poem must have interested Paz in part because of its treatment of silence. The poem, of course, isn’t actually silent, but the people and things in it are: the “gentle storekeeper” is “asleep”; the “shrunken seamstress” doesn’t speak and only “smiled”; the “boarding house” is “streaked / as though it had been crying” (its streaks are silent residues of a sound from the past). The speaker declares that “we listened / for a horned owl,” but they don’t hear it. When we do get sound in the poem, it’s not really language—the “stammer” and “grumbling” of the “giant”; and when we get language, it’s not really sound—it comes in the form of the “old grammar” that the “giant” is poring over. In the last stanza, the speakers are awakened by the brook “dreaming audibly,” which Paz translates as “soñaba hablando en voz alta.” Paz’s translation seems to diminish the paradox of “dreaming audibly” by having the brook actually speak out loud while dreaming (“hablando en voz alta”).

What I’m getting at is this: what must have interested Paz about this poem in particular is its treatment of both silence and the paradoxes involved in representing it (in his poem “On Reading John Cage,” Paz wrote that “Music is not silence: / It is not saying / What silence says, / It is saying / What it doesn’t say”). But in his translation of Bishop’s “A Summer’s Dream,” Paz actually adds sound to the poem where there was none. For example, Bishop writes that “Every night we listened / for a horned owl,” and so the horned owl is expressed as a kind of silence in the poem—the speakers listen for it, but it is not heard. Yet in Paz’s translation, the speakers “escuchábamos gritar al búho cornudo,” meaning they actually “heard” (escuchábamos) the owl “shout” or “cry” (gritar). Whereas the owl is silent and absent in Bishop’s poem, it is screeching and audible in Paz’s. Another instance of this (not to belabor the point), is Paz’s choice of the verb “rezongar” to express Bishop’s “grumbling” of the giant, in which what is clearly not language in Bishop’s poem approaches language in Paz’s—“rezongar” can mean “grumbling,” but it can also mean “complaining.”

I love what you did with Paz’s translation of “she was cheerful” as “aleluyas ella siempre.” I was struck by your idea that Paz’s omissions of fundamental linguistic components of the sentence—the verbs—constitute both a silence and theft. He literally takes words, verbs no less, out of his Spanish version. Yet it’s also interesting to note that Paz actually adds sound. Being “cheerful” doesn’t imply any kind of sound at all: it’s just a state of being that can be expressed without any sounds. But even though the idea of the landlady as “always in halleluiahs” gets us the image of a pretty cheerful lady, the literal meaning is of someone who expresses her state of being through sound. So we end up with a perplexing situation in which Paz translates a poem that masterfully renders (and depends on) silence in a markedly not-silent way. In fact, Paz seems to convert silence into sound at virtually every turn. What can we make of this? I have to wonder if it gets us to the problems involved in thinking of silence as meaningful. As Paz put it in “On Reading John Cage,” “Silence has no sense, / sense has no silence,” which is one way of saying that as soon we see silences as meaningful, it’s hard to think of them as silences, or at least as what Paz calls “the nothing in between.”

IS: Paz at times is right on target. And his talents as a translator—or, at least, as a poet—are obvious and consistent. Let’s consider another Bishop poem translated by Paz: the gorgeous “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” which dates to 1950 and is loosely connected with her friend Robert Lowell’s life. In this case, Paz does an admirable job. Yes, there are liberties, maybe even abuses. But in the end he lands on solid ground.

For starters, notice the double plural in the original. Paz translates the title as “Visitas a St. Elizabeth,” the hospital name now in singular. Bishop, of course, is invoking her own name. But it isn’t easy to translate. Anyway, the poem begins:

This is the house of Bedlam.

This is the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is the time
of the tragic man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a wristwatch
telling the time
of the talkative man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the honored man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

The poem falsely mimics a children’s song built around repetition. Paz’s delivery of these first five stanzas goes:

Esta es la casa de los locos.

Este es el hombre
que está en la casa de los locos.

Este es el tiempo
del hombre trágico
que está en la casa de los locos.

Este es el reloj-pulsera
que da la hora
del hombre locuaz
que está en la casa de los locos.

Este es el marinero
que usa el reloj
que da la hora
del hombre tan celebrado
que está en la casa de los locos.

Bishop plays with an archaism: bedlam is used for lunatic. The route she takes is intriguing: Bethlem is a mental hospital, Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, from which the word bedlam came to mean madness. She turns it into a name: the house of Bedlam, that is, the house of madness. There are strange word choices (“tan celebrado” for “honored,” and so on). But the soar, the biggest challenge is Bishop’s “house of Bedlam,” where she uses uppercase B to refer to the place. Is Paz creative? In this case, I believe he is, for I see no other way out.

In the last stanza, Bishop writes:

This is the soldier home from the war.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is round or flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances carefully down the ward,
walking the plank of a coffin board
with the crazy sailor
that shows his watch
that tells the time
of the wretched man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

In Paz’s rendition:

Este es el soldado que vuelve de la guerra.
Estos son los años y los muros y la puerta
que se cierra sobre un muchacho que golpea el piso
para saber si el mundo es plano o redondo.
Este es el judío con un gorro de papel periódico
que baila con cuidado por el dormitorio
caminando sobre la tabla de un ataúd
con el marinero chiflado
que muestra el reloj
que da la hora
del desdichado
que está en la casa de los locos.

Frankly, the rendition is admirable: one needs the liberties Paz takes in order to make the poem tick in Spanish.

CH: Let’s now turn to Borges. Elsewhere we have discussed in depth some of his strategies as a translator. Now I want to focus on some of the mysteries and polemics surrounding his translation of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. Douglas Day wrote a great essay called “Borges, Faulkner, and The Wild Palms,” which I will always be grateful to if only for having brought to my attention Alan Tate’s description of Faulkner as a “Dixie Gongorist.” Day’s essay settles an important point: it’s often said that Borges sanitized Faulkner’s text, when in fact, as Day points out, Borges was merely basing his translation on an already sanitized British edition of the novel published by Chatto and Windus in London.

We don’t need to get into all the intricacies in Day’s argument beyond the following: Borges, Day points out, wrote reviews of Absalom! Absalom!, The Unvanquished, and The Wild Palms in the journal El Hogar during the late 1930s, and while he had high praise for Absalom and The Unvanquished, he wrote that in The Wild Palms, Faulkner’s “technical novelties” seemed “less attractive than bothersome, less justifiable than exasperating.” In the end, Borges concluded that the novel wouldn’t be a good introduction to Faulkner’s writing. So why did he translate it? The reasons, Day suggests, are banal, having to do more with rights and contracts than with Borges’s own tastes and values. But the more interesting question has to do with why, years later, Borges seemed to attribute the translation to his mother. Day’s answer is that he did so because his translation of The Wild Palms came at a time in Borges’s career when he was turning away “from the psychological experimentalism and brutal (one is tempted to say ‘messy’) content of a William Faulkner and turned to a form which for him rendered the novel redundant and irrelevant: Ficciones.”

As to the translation itself, Day called it “very good.” There’s been a good deal of debate surrounding Borges’s translation of The Wild Palms. Whereas, for example, Day argues that The Wild Palms represented just the kind of fiction writing Borges was getting away from in Ficciones, Earl and Ezra Fitz argue just the opposite: Las palmeras salvajes, they say, “should be read in conjunction with ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ as a crucial part of Borges’s narrative revolution, one that depends on the reader’s role in the creative process and on the innumerable ways the act of translation makes manifest this then audacious theory.” I recently came across a useful account of different assessments of Borges’s translation in Gareth Wood’s book on Javier Marías and translation. One is by Marías himself, who wrote that Borges translated Faulkner “bastante mal,” adding that it was not “por sus argentinismos, sino por su conocimiento imperfecto del inglés” and also, more interestingly, because of his “falta de aliento novelístico.” Then there’s Piglia’s claim that “lo que uno encuentra en esa traducción es una lucha entre el estilo de Borges y el estilo de Faulkner.”

Wood looks carefully at Borges’s translation and uncovers interesting renderings, such as, for example, when Borges translates “You’re mad because he used a scalpel without having a diploma” as “Te has enloquecido porque ha usado un bisturí sin tener diploma,” mistaking mad meaning “angry” for mad meaning “crazy.” The other assessment of Borges’s translation that Wood discusses is by Juan Benet, who wrote in reference to Borges’s edition that “me veo obligado a transcribir las citas del texto traducido por Borges, por carecer de otra edición.” Wood himself calls parts of the translation—and the dialogue in particular—“flat and staid, attempting none of the verbal idiosyncracies of popular speech.”

I recently had the pleasure of reading your essay “Beyond Translation: Borges and Faulkner,” which ends with a detailed analysis of Borges’s translation of “The Wild Palms.” You suggest that Borges’s ars poetica of translation comes in four parts—his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” his essays “On Vathek, by William Beckford” and “The Translators of the 1001 Nights,” and finally his own translation of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. You note that “the resemblance—in syntax, in spirit—is startling” between the two texts, and you go on to argue that if it can be said there are two approaches to translation (one in which the translator “disappears,” and another in which “the translator endlessly stresses the artificiality of his endeavor”), Borges comes down on the side of the former. In his translation of The Wild Palms, Borges is “behind Faulkner, not in front or at his side.” Maybe we can continue our discussion of Borges’s translation of Faulkner, which raises a lot of questions and promises to be a long discussion, by asking you to revisit some of your claims.

IS: I’m glad you’ve found the essay provocative. Translation is a cornerstone in his oeuvre. Menardismo, as you know, has even become an ideology, just as Quixotismo is. Borges translated lots of texts throughout his career. He started quite young, with Oscar Wilde. The translation was for a time mistakenly credited to his father. He also translated Virginia Woolf, for whom he had little patience as reader. In Buenos Aires magazines, he translated ghost stories, essays by G. K. Chesterton and Poe, and other stuff. As for Faulkner, he loved him, as did Onetti and García Márquez: because his Deep South was much like Latin America, a region scarred by history. Except that Borges didn’t seek to rewrite Yoknapatawpha County; he simply savors it as a reader.

Reading and translating are one and the same thing, for Borges and for myself. In his essay on Beckford, he says that the original can be untruthful to the translation. And in his meditation on 1001 Nights, he argues that translators have taken liberties that have gone beyond the semantic level, sometimes introducing entirely new characters, as in the case of Sinbad.

Nabokov, in rendering Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into English, makes his version baroque, artificial. He abuses the footnote. His one-time friend Edmund Wilson attacked this Pushkin version rather viciously in the pages of the newly created New York Review of Books. Borges cannot escape his own semantics; he translates using adjectives the way only Borges would use them. (Remember the opening of “The Circular Ruins”: “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche.”) But he has no intention of upstaging Faulkner, at least not overtly.

CH: What fascinates me most in the end is the attention that Borges’s translation of The Wild Palms has generated. It sounds like a weird question, but why do we care so much about Borges’s Las palmeras salvajes? It can’t only be, I think, because the text was largely responsible for introducing generations of Latin American writers to Faulkner, nor can it only be because we all love Borges and thus we naturally are fascinated by his translations. In other words, I wonder if there’s some anxiety getting worked out through all of this—an old anxiety about the “originality” of the Latin American novel, or about what it would mean if el gran Borges just did the translation (as Day sort of implies) for the cash, or about translation as an activity writ large. It might not be an entirely useful question, but I do wonder what we’re all really trying to work out when we argue that Borges did it well or did it badly or made it his own or didn’t make it his own or theorized through doing it, etc. What do you think?

IS: Thank you for the intriguing context you’ve provided, which offers a more complete picture than the one I had when I wrote my essay on Borges and Faulkner. First, let me endorse the serendipitous argument. Biography is always written in hindsight, through the rearview mirror. Yet life is never lived that way: it’s always unpredictable, arbitrary, even chaotic. Borges was a master in the art of curating his own career. When we look at it, it seems consistent, coherent, straightforward to a degree that, frankly, is suspicious. We all take detours, don’t we? We all get lost. We embark on projects that become dead ends. Of course, a convincing career is always measured by the thread uniting the successful projects. Yet what happens with those that ended up in the dumpster? That Borges probably did the job for money seems too pedestrian, like when I was hired to write a how-to book for the Smithsonian: I needed money to pay for my first child’s diapers, plain and simple.

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of Piglia; but I like Piglia’s description of Borges’s translation of Las palmeras salvajes as a boxing ring. Borges’s false starts are fascinating. His incapacity to let Faulkner’s style breathe is symptomatic of his own overwhelming barroquismo. Why is this rendition so controversial? I think you may have hit the nail on the head. Faulkner will end up becoming the patron saint for Rulfo, Onetti, García Márquez, and others, the father of the fractured, experimental novel. Yet Borges, at this point, is already dissing the novel as a literary genre. He finds it exhausting, too malleable. He ridicules Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for convincing the reader that a heinous crime is worth committing for moral reasons. Plus, this comes at a time when translation is increasingly taken seriously in Latin America. Many intellectuals embrace it as a worthy endeavor. And finally: almost every translation by Borges has generated rivers of ink; therein his role as the Moses of literary translation in the Spanish-language Americas. The Faulkner case is emblematic, but so is his fragmentary version of Leaves of Grass, for instance.

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Image: “Autopistas” (Highways) by Max Murad

Bellatin and Japan: an Interview

heather — Tue, 12 May 2015 05:56:23 +0000

Mat Chiappe
translated by Anna Hardin

Mario Bellatin once said to me: “I don’t want to go to Japan.” I don’t know if we went on talking about something else or what happened, but I never got a better explanation. And so, when I was presented with the opportunity to interview him specifically about the relationship between lo japonés and his literature, I decided the most important thing for me was a response to that statement. I prepared a long list of other questions (as you’ll see, all useless), dressed as seriously as I could, stowed my computer in my backpack, and took the metro to his house. I rang the doorbell and waited until, from the other end of a long hallway, the author, filmmaker, lecturer, and translator appeared.

“Hello, Mat,” he said, holding back his dogs, “come through here, I was just making some passionfruit juice… have you noticed you can’t get it here in México?” I nodded, without mentioning you can’t get it in Argentina, either. We went into his house, the interior fluctuating between minimalist and colonial. I sat, played with his dogs, talked about how my studies were going, about his life, a recent trip, his son Tadeo, the teacher’s strike in the Zócalo, that he owed me some gnocchi. “Next time for sure,” he declared. I was a little nervous; I had seen him many times before and in more interesting situations than an interview; I don’t know why I felt perversely professional this time.

Because I’m scatterbrained, without even opening the computer I had planned to record him with, I blurted out the stupidest and most predictable question possible while he served me passionfruit juice: “So, Mario, which works of Japanese literature do you like most?” He gave me a long list, from which I remember House of the Sleeping Beauties by Kawabata and Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe as the best. “The first is simply fascinating, stunning, the scenes that pass one into the other in that closed room, as if in a camera obscura… and the other, I still feel the Kafka-esque anguish of that sand they can never stop moving.” He asked if I had read A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel. “No, should I?”… “Another gem… a woman in England remembers her past in Japan during the war, and the pre-war years, that other Japan, lost in time… Then, that’s all lost, and the text transforms into a typical European novel until the end.” Silence. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, you should go read it now.” He smiled.

He talked for a long time about how rootlessness, the memory of that ancient Japan, the traditional pre-war Japan, characterized the Japanese literature he liked most. “I’m also interested in intersections, mixtures, journeys.” I guessed that had to do with his Peruvian-Mexican status, the hybridization, the mixed nationalities. “Ah… I have another recommendation for you.” He reached for my computer. “Yes, yes, let’s watch the trailer, it’s great.” He took the device from my hands. “It’s called Kamikaze Taxi, have you seen it?” No, I hadn’t. “It’s delirious: two friends face off against the Japanese government and mafia: one of them is a doctor living in Peru, who builds a hospital there and then comes back with his Peruvian son; the other is a horrible guy who manipulates the first one to achieve his political ambitions… the craziest circumstances make the doctor commit ritual suicide by seppuku… His son becomes a taxi driver, meets a woman, they flee the yakuza together, she asks him to escape to Peru, to start a new life; he tells her he has a final mission, a score to settle.” I kept quiet. “Terrible,” he finished, “but the very fact that it exists, that someone could make a movie or write a novel or whatever about these intersections, these connections, seems absolutely fascinating to me.” He played the trailer again, and again. Then, the whole film.

He told me about his fascination with Japanese cinema, about Kurosawa and Kitano films, with particular emphasis on Ozu. “Seen anything of his?” No, Mario. “Alright, watch them… with Ozu, everything repeats: in one film a train passes into the distance; in another, the same scene, another train, but with a slight difference; in a third, another train. In another film there will be a family fight; you know what the daughter will say to defend herself, because you’ve seen it in another film; what you’re waiting to see is how the filmmaker will manage to insert a subtle difference in this one.” I recommended a film to him: Paprika. “Tsutsui Yasukata wrote it, the author of…”… “The one who wrote Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, yes, I loved those stories, the one about the bonsai that causes erotic dreams in those who sleep next to it is almost as Borgesian as it is pop.” Then he put on another trailer or some music (I don’t remember which). “Give me more things from Tsutsui to read, Mat, he’s brilliant: his perversions, his deformities, his strange, insecure bodies; it’s a really bizarre mixture.” I noted all this mentally. “And if this were possible… in a good translation, you see how it really is all there.”

Immediately, I pressed him to expand a bit on the subject of translation. “It must be so hard to translate Japanese literature to Spanish… yes, you’re totally insane.” (Indeed, I study Japanese and plan to translate someday). What he said was that “it’s like two worlds, a ‘there’ and a ‘here’, which are moreover fictitious, because underneath is something that unites us… it’s like two worlds created by language, and when you try to bring them together something is left over that can’t be said, fuzzy boundaries.” “You don’t have to be so politically correct, I’m not recording you.” “Ah… what I mean is that Spaniards translate like animals,” he concluded. We brought up words like gilipollas, chutar, sabéis, os, and so on. “They have nothing to do with us Latin Americans.” Then he brought up names I never thought he would know: Atsuko Tanabe, Javier Sologuren, Guillermo Quartucci, others I’d never heard of, a long list of Latin American translators and academics who specialized in Japan. I took the opportunity to interject Mexicans like Tablada and Paz, and Peruvians like Arguedas and Vargas Llosa, each one of whom included Japanese characters, elements, and themes in their works. I don’t think he liked the comparison at all, though he acknowledged he was closer to the phantasmagoria of the first set than the realism of the second. He returned to the subject of translation. “Octavio Paz was another awful translator… he could translate one measly haiku into fifty of his own lines.” We talked about Liliana Ponce, César Aira’s wife, who translated Murakami from the Japanese. “In terms of the translation, everything got worse when they started bringing in a lot of Kenzaburō Ōe… from then on, it was a total disaster.”

I asked which of his novels should be translated into Japanese tomorrow. He answered with the titles of those which made explicit reference to Japan: his Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose of Fiction, Illustrated Biography of Mishima, Mrs. Murakami’s Garden, and The Notary Clerk Murasaki Shikibu. The first is an apocryphal biography of a Japanese writer who immigrates to Peru and is tormented by his monstrous nose. The second narrates the wanderings of the decapitated ghost of the writer, soldier, and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima. In the third, the widowed and resentful Izu insists on having betrayed her artistic ideals in her youth, destroying her beautiful, traditional garden. The final novel relates the transformations of a Mexican writer into various others, including the author of the now-classic first novel in the history of literature: Murasaki Shikibu.

He served me more passionfruit juice. “Maybe the Japanese don’t want a novel a-la-Japanese, maybe they want something more, uh, Latin American,” I blurted out. “That’s true, you might have to translate a different one.” “What about Beauty Salon? It has just the right amount of Japanese-ness, what with that Kawabata epigraph, a subtle reference to the masterwork we already talked about: House of the Sleeping Beauties.” He agreed. “Just the same, this thing about lo-japonés and lo-latinoamericano seems a little outdated to me.” I asked if he knew, in relation to his novels, that various critics had voiced and repeated phrases such as “processes of decontextualization,” “strangeness,” “mechanisms of defamiliarization” in order to explain his use of elements and themes characteristic of Japan. According to them, Bellatin would use the Japanese world as an example of that farthest from his own culture. “What do you think about that?” I asked. “I don’t know… I just love Japanese literature. Maybe a few of them, when they say decontextualization, really mean escapism, which is ridiculous; this, the other… everything blends together in language.”

This “decontextualization” led to another, somewhat unexpected, topic: he started telling me about Fujimori and his youth in Peru. Regarding the former he elaborated quite a bit, with details, and even compared the former president with a samurai, whom the Japanese gave a hero’s welcome after he fled in 2000. There was Mario Bellatin talking to me about politics, ideology, like those Japanese poets of 1920 who couldn’t just write haiku or tanka like their contemporaries. Hayama and Kobayashi, among others. “My link to Japan also comes from my childhood,” Bellatin told me, or I read somewhere, “most of Peruvian society still has strong anti-Japanese feelings, a product of the U.S. propaganda from the 20th century; all Japanese were potential nationalists, and therefore a threat… So much so that my parents were always embarrassed that my grandparents had hidden a Japanese immigrant during the Second War, and Japanese food was actually forbidden in my house… I’ve lost touch with them now.” Some of his words sounded familiar; more of them I don’t know if he’d said to me or if I’d read them somewhere: “It’s more and more obvious to me that my characters are my other selves… It’s a way of understanding the world: every thing is everything, every thing forms part of everything.”

“But let’s change the subject…” Mario continued, “if you’re interested in all that about ‘decontextualization,’ the best story is Black Ball.” Son of a bitch; I hadn’t read that one, either. How can you interview someone about their links to Japanese culture if you don’t know the text he thinks is most important to this connection? “I didn’t read it…” I confessed. “Ay, Mat, Mat…” he laughed, “it’s about an apathetic entomologist, Endo Hiroshi, who finds an extinct species of insect on an expedition. He keeps it in a box, conserves it, treasures it, but the bug finally turns into a black ball… In the end, he only finds one way to keep it forever, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.” “Sounds like something from Abe, something from Shimada,” I added. “Very much so… although the story’s true significance is something else; come, follow me.”

We went to the guest bedroom. On the upper shelves were the first five thousand of the famous Hundred Thousand Books of Mario Bellatin. Underneath was a collection of his making titled Writers of America, two volumes of hollow books in which (he showed me) he kept the first, signed leaves of all the books he had been given. Beyond the occasional title (Rulfo, Tanizaki, Roth), there were no books by other authors. Some were stacked strangely, placed secretively, perhaps on purpose. I got the feeling some kind of ritual was regularly performed here, like the Japanese construction of Shinto shrines, or that popular gift-wrapping practice, furoshiki. Mario moved some books, took out magazines about Japan, his illustrated books, special editions – all a delicate collection of book-objects. Then he took out a small white box and gave it to me. It was the object-edition of Black Ball. It had a vial and a bulb on one side; turning this, a small hatch opened and inside was a canvas on which the entire story was printed. It was the little box of the entomologist Endo Hiroshi:

“Black Ball is going to be a movie now,” Mario continued. “not the same, I don’t even know if it should be called a documentary or a narrative or both.” He reached for my computer again; he put on another short video with images. “The worst thing happening in Ciudad Juárez is the naturalization of horror, it’s deterritorialized, everything’s already somewhere else; horror is the norm… in Black Ball, the musical of Ciudad Juárez, and I want it to have this title, Mat, different from the story’s; what I want to do in the film is decontextualize the decontextualized, imposing a seemingly unconnected story on the city, on reality, to see if the sentences can develop a new dimension and illuminate what’s happening there in another way; new ways of getting close to the facts, of feeling them… A novel that speaks quasi-heroically doesn’t interest me; I wanted to think about what would happen with a group of young people who are part of a choir and want to make an opera there, in the land of a horror that is not only normalized, but also institutionalized and corporatized.” The images continued on the computer, a strange superposition of the hills of Ciudad Juárez, businesses, kids singing. Then I realized that the story about a Japanese entomologist, that self-contained story seemingly unrelated to anything, from the remove of its little artisanal box in a guest room in the largest metropolis in Latin America, was also a symbol for all of México.

We went back to the living room. I stared at my still unused computer and tried to make a mental note of all the names and references and quotes, everything about Kawabata, Ozu, translation, the sinister and political past and present. “Look, Mario… everything you’ve told me is fascinating, but I still have one question I want you to answer, one that I think is behind all the others.” He looked at me. “What is it, Mat?… You’ve gotten very serious.” I told him: “You once told me you didn’t want to go to Japan… I demand a public explanation.

There was another long silence; I don’t know if I’d made him uncomfortable again. He smiled. “It’s simple… I want to maintain my distorted idea of what ‘Japan’ is, a sort of essence, a constructed essence, fictitious and flawed… My interest is in what remains of those ruins, not in their origins… What remains, the residue, what translations leave behind, the mystery, the text, the characters, a whole system of language, and, above all, how this can be transmitted through the centuries—these things are enough for me. I don’t care as much about the reality of Japan as I do about that illusion, or more precisely: how we construct the illusion.” I thought of Severo Sarduy, who said something very similar in relation to India. Roland Barthes also came to mind, and his words upon returning from Tokyo in The Empire of Signs:

If I want to imagine a fictional town, I can give it a made-up name, treat it as a fantastical object, found a new Garabagne, without compromising as such any real country in my imagination (but then this same fantasy is that which I compromise in the signs of literature). I can also, without any claim to represent or analyze reality in the least (here the greatest gestures of Western discourse), take somewhere in the world (there) a definite number of features (graphical and linguistic word) and with them deliberately create a system. I will call this system: Japan.

Mario brought out cuernitos, little pastries we call medialunas in Argentina. More than defending an exotic Japan, the orientalist construction of the West, Bellatin exposes that self-same construction, puts it onstage, tells us that yes, it’s no more than a fabrication, a system, that it is what we can and want to imagine. Those imaginations say much more about us than they do about the other, more about Latin America than Japan, more about Ciudad Juárez than the entomologist Endo Hiroshi, more about the transvestite hairdresser from Beauty Salon than Kawabata’s sleeping beauties.

We finished our snack and I took one last sip of passionfruit. It was night when Mario put on another trailer for a Japanese movie from the 40s. And then I remembered: “Ah, I didn’t even record you.” “Oh, well…” “Don’t complain later if I pull quotes from someplace else and make up an interview with it.” “No worries.” We say goodbye. While I waited for the metro I remembered that form of Japanese poetry, the renga, in which Octavio Paz, Charles Tomlinson, Jacques Rouband, and Edoardo Sanguinetti dabbled. In the renga, a poet improvises some lines, then another provides some new ones continuing the previous themes or words, then another does the same, and another, and seven or eight poets link verses like this until the circle comes back to the beginning. Finally, the copyists of antiquity transcribed what they wanted, and bitter debates arose about who was the true author of the poem. Bellatin himself, in a note for The Nation titled “Kawabata: Embrace of the Abyss,” through appropriation and copy-paste, plagiarized critics and Kawabata himself, using their phrases, quotes, references. This compulsory form of re-writing, which this interview would have to be, was what I discerned getting on the metro, during the journey, arriving home. In the end, as Mario has put it: “I don’t have anything to say, I only know that I want to say something, and to do that I need to create narrative forms.” I opened my computer and wrote all I could.

* *

Images: Sebastián Freire (portraits) and Mat Chiappe (Bola negra)

“I’m still falling” — Jeffrey Goldstein on Vivian Maier

Pola Oloixarac — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 21:25:38 +0000

Interview by Eliana Vagalau

Jeffrey Goldstein’s life took a very dramatic turn when he came into the possession of a large part of Vivian Maier’s artistic legacy. Now the Director of Vivian Maier Prints Inc., Jeffrey is a Chicago-based artist, carpenter, and collector who has dedicated the last couple of years to promoting Vivian Maier’s photography around the world. He has also been able to use the project as a springboard for vibrant discussions about art and new collaborations.

Eliana Vagalau: An artist yourself, as well as a collector, you are, today, the name behind Vivian Maier Prints Inc., a project which you run passionately and which will serve as our starting point. Tell us in brief how it was that you first came into contact with Vivian’s work.

Jeffrey Goldstein: I’ve been collecting since college. As an artist, I think it’s important to collect other people’s work, as an influence, but also as sensibilities’ checks and boundaries. It’s always nice to find works that reinforce what you’re doing; I think that’s why a lot of artists’ collections look so much like what they do. I’m also a rabid flea-market-goer and antique-buyer, and spontaneously a garage-sale goer—I’m curious, so I’m always looking for things, and there are a lot of wonderful things out there.

The long and short of it is that I knew some people from a flea market I go to who were at the original auction where the Vivian Maier material came—there was no Vivian Maier at that point, she didn’t even exist. One of the original buyers owed me a substantial amount of money, and so what they did, was they made good with Vivian Maier original vintage photos, which at that time were just starting to have some value. Now that I think about it, I don’t think that a single photo had yet been sold. And so we based the original value on what one gallery owner thought that they could sell them for at a show in New York. And so that was maybe the first established price of a Vivian Maier vintage work, which at that time was $250 per print. So that’s how I started segueing into this, and I thought that would pretty much be it. Normally, ten out of ten art projects fail, and this is just different from anything else, vastly different.

EV: When did you first sense that that was the case?

JG: I was guarded for the first couple of years with this, even after we’d had a few successful shows. The concern I had was that it was just the human interest story that was propelling it forward and that the work itself was going to get overlooked. Because, ultimately, the art has to stand on its own, without the backstory. You know, when you walk into a museum, and the piece is on the wall, there isn’t somebody standing next to it telling you the history or the story of the artist. I always thought the work had tremendous qualities to it. I have this inner bell that goes off when I see pieces of work that just strike me as being masterful. And these had that quality.

As far as a defining moment, I think it was when other media started showing interest in the work, not just photographers, but other artists—musicians, authors, film makers…. Somehow, the sensibilities in the photography breached through the world of photography further into the larger world of art, and usually those different pools of art interests don’t mix: painters stay with painters, photographers with photographers.

EV: As a matter of fact, I know that you had been collecting for a long time, long before this—were you collecting photographs specifically?

JG: That’s a good question, because I’ve gone through this incredible learning curve. What I’d collected in the past were mainly prints, but not photography, lithography and etching, you know, the idea of multiples, so with those sensibilities I could segue, in a physical sense, towards the multiples of photography. But I did have to go through this curve – besides the project unfolding, reading about the history of photography, photographers, becoming more aware of perhaps more obscure photographers and photography movements. In some ways, it’s far more condensed a timeframe than, say, for painting, which goes back to prehistoric times, and through many more periods and changes, whereas photography has a well defined start date in the 1830s. And in some cases, it really shifts when the digital age starts, so that timeframe is relatively short. So, learning about that, learning about the dark room process, learning about the sensibilities of photographers, which are different from painters’.

I had a carpentry and cabinetry business that I ran for 32 years previously to this, and I worked for some of the best-known Chicago based artists, who were also friends, and gallery owners, and collectors, so there’s this triad—and I imagine it’s a very dysfunctional triad, a lot of distrust—and each element of this three-pronged wheel needs the other in order to survive and move forward. So, I’ve navigated between those three entities—both in art and cabinetry-making—and have great empathy for all three, because they each have an upside and a downside that you have to deal with. And I enjoy working with gallery owners, because I constantly hear stories about how hard they have to work, how many times they do these things that don’t work—the financial loss, the time loss, the difficulty of dealing with quirky artists. So, knowing all that, it makes things easier for me to navigate through these people.

EV: And also, I imagine, to navigate the different roles that you are now taking on as well…

JG: Yes, and they’re pretty extreme. Everything from the physicality of packing and shipping, which I enjoy, because I suppose it’s reminiscent of cabinetry work. One thing I’m sometimes frustrated with is that there’s not a tangible product at the end of my day, at the end of my week, or at the end of the year, like there is with cabinetry-making or painting. I do everything from cutting the material for packing—I have a laser machine to make the stamps that we use for packaging—setting up the frame orders, putting the frames together, and then shipping. Two days ago, we had packages at FedEx that were going to Minneapolis, Cleveland, Shanghai, and Toronto, and there are all sorts of paperwork that go with that, different packaging systems… And I have to do contracts with gallery owners, sometimes international. And then international travel, which I love to do. So, my wardrobe is very interesting, because it’s morphed from construction, over time, to suits, and coats, and pants. I just got a pair of Italian dress shoes! I have to look the part, I represent the project.

There isn’t anyone in the project who is any more or any less than another, it’s really more of a group effort, so actually the title on my card is changing. I’m officially president, because I had to incorporate a company, and I feel that that’s really ostentatious and presumptuous, and so I’m changing it to director, because it’s not such an overpowering-sounding role, and I like to maintain a great deal of equity between the people who are all part of this. Although I do have Italian shoes, and they don’t!

EV: Italian shoes notwithstanding, one thing I noticed when I had the chance to spend a little time here was that you make a concerted effort to make this project a people’s project. You make an effort to impart responsibility, delegate, and, in a sense, use it as a ramp. Where does this impulse come from?

JG: I almost want to say from not wanting to accept full responsibility, in a certain sense… But I think in this kind of a project, you’re far more fortified as a team and, given the expanse of this, I know my limitations, and the idea is to bring in professionals. This is a multifaceted project, and you bring in people who have been working with a certain facet for a lifetime. And I’m really happy to say this, and appreciate the question, because I’m a very collaborative person by nature, and I don’t feel that anybody really owns a piece of artwork, or owns a collection. You’re the caretaker, the provider for it, the idea is that each generation takes over. It’s like archaeology, there’s a job of preservation, and, if done right, it allows the next owner, or generation to glean new information from it. The idea is that of a collective coming together. The new person coming in is in her twenties, Anne is in her thirties, I’m in my fifties, Sandy, one of the printers, is in her fifties, Ron is in his seventies, we have someone here who is in her sixties, the only age-range we were missing were the forties. I think this is important because times are changing so quickly that each of these ten years is almost a generation. And they say Vivian Maier is the people’s photographer, across the board, and I think that having people from these different age-groups is instrumental in assisting that.

EV: And probably also in understanding the different stages of her work…

JG: Surely, there are different insights. When you read a photograph, you’re saying something about your personal experience, you’re projecting, and so certain photographs may be far more appealing to certain age groups.

EV: It’s interesting to hear you speak about the idea of ownership, or, rather, non-ownership of a work of art. And I am wondering if that has anything to do with the fact that Vivian Maier really did not take ownership of her work in a sense, never planned on displaying or showing her work. Did that have an influence in the way you are presenting this project?

JG: No, there is a certain sense of non-possessiveness that she has, and maybe there’s just a parallel. I’ve gone through this process once before when my close friend Ed Pashke, a famed painter, died, and I had to dismantle his studio. And it’s like dismantling a friend, a person, and archiving his work, which is, in a sense, also a dismantling process, so that experience has really helped me with this. Morally, the question that has been asked is whether this is the right thing to do, would she have wanted it. And I think that at this point it is totally irrelevant. An artist has the option, and they should exercise the option, of editing throughout their life. Her body of work is completely unedited. They also need to make arrangements towards the end of their life, or at any point of their life. If I die next week, what happens to my work? And if it’s important to them, they need to make arrangements. Most artists don’t, and they end up dumping it on their kids. There’s just no proper way of handling it. She made no arrangements; it was obviously very important to her because she kept it throughout her lifetime. Whether she had ultimate goals with it or not, I don’t know, but it was very important to her. So my job is to maintain that level of importance.

EV: Her work having been excavated so recently, what, from your perspective, has made of it such an explosive phenomenon?

JG: I think there are a handful of reasons. Part of it is that she was such a miraculously good photographer. She was able to see an image a moment before it happened. There’s a timing element. Over and over, she captures the pinnacle or epitome of what might just be a small drama in the street, but she captures it exactly at the right moment, which means that she would have to click the shutter a nanosecond before it happens, which means that she was able to see that two nanoseconds before. So she had this uncanny ability to compose, and shoot, and hit the mark with one shot. She rarely, in fact, never bracketed, it was one shot and then on to the next thing. So in part it’s the quality of her work, but also the change in technology. Photography is so explosive on its own now; anyone can take a hundred photographs now and discard ninety-nine of them at no expense. So I think it’s also the recognition of how incredibly unique and rare it is for someone to go through the process of film, and dark room, and be able to capture shots of that quality. And the imagery is very compelling, and very informative. She hits into, in a certain sense, the world of fashion, architectural photography, the gamut of what she shot—people, animals, gardens, flowers. She shot things that all of us have seen, on a day to day basis, but we never have considered shooting, and most of us could not shoot those things as beautifully as she has. A couple of examples are tomatoes on a windowsill, or a pair of dish gloves sitting by a sink. And to make those into a metaphoric statement… Last but not least, Vivian Maier gives many of “us” a sense of hope. A sense of hope in that if we don’t achieve a certain degree of recognition in our lifetime that perhaps someday, somehow, somewhere, someone would recognize through what we have made and left behind, the indications that a noble and worthy life was led.

EV: I remember looking at one of the photographs with you representing a hand clutching a dollar bill behind a person’s back, and you saying that that would be more appealing to an American audience. And yet you have had so much international travel of late—Shanghai, Poland. Have you noticed a lot of cultural difference in terms of the reception of the work, or have you developed an eye for that?

JG: I think that there’s a classical, universal quality to the work that is appealing, whether you’re in Shanghai or in ParisThe hardest thing for me with this entire project, and there have been a number of difficulties, from financial, to sleep deprivation, to getting things to places on time, was public speaking. It’s the most common fear, and I had it. But one of the most important things I’ve learned in the arts, from Ed Pashke, was that if you want something, you just have to jump off the cliff. So the acquisition of this was totally jumping off the cliff; the public speaking, totally jumping off the cliff. And, in many ways, I’m still falling, not knowing where I’m headed, but I can’t think of a place I’d rather be. And, concerning the public speaking specifically, the response of the audience is very inviting, because it’s constantly been good. I don’t think we’ve had to defend points, but people ask us genuine questions, so it’s an opportunity to describe what we’re doing, and once we do, I think people have an even greater appreciation of what’s taking place. We’re always nervous before the talks, but we realize that these are fellow human beings who have a love of art and who are curious, just like we are.

EV: As you are travelling and opening all these conversations about art, about photography, about street art, and seemingly using this project as a springboard for others, where do you see it all going? In other words, is there a secret agenda, and are you trying to take over the world?

JG: If I told you, would it be a secret? This is a really great question, and I haven’t quite yet been able to verbalize an answer yet. Somehow this project hits the chord of what is supposed to be profound about art. It’s a level of communication and interconnectedness. A level of non-verbal communication that takes place in the world of art that creates fraternity, this brotherhood, beyond gender, race, creed, religion. There is a divine feeling to this- and I’m not a religious person- of an interconnection of how close we all really are. So the one thing I may be doing right about this is releasing it, and giving it a life of its own. People are connecting with it in different ways; it’s like a snowball going downhill. People are getting on board the snowball, adding something to it, it’s getting bigger, bringing in different media, and then somehow we’re all interconnected, in this case through the work of Vivian Maier. I think it’s a profound role that art plays, adding order and beauty to our lives on many levels, and that is maybe is easy to overlook in today’s digital age. But again, I haven’t quite yet found the right words for it- profound or cosmic- they sound a bit over the top, but there is something universal about this that strikes a human chord. I’ve never seen so many people so interconnected around something, it’s magnetic.

EV: I was struck by something in your biography, which mentioned that you see collecting as an extension of your artistic practice. Seeing your experience with this project, is there really much of a boundary between the two?

JG: Not for me. Not any longer. This project has impacted me so greatly, I no longer have an idea where things start and stop. My private life and my work life, as an artist or a collector… honestly, I don’t even know what my role is. I don’t know what I do, and I don’t know what title to give myself. It’s like the tide has come in.

EV: Then would you maybe like to end with an attempt at describing to us who you are?

JG: Yes, I can tell you who I am. I am the luckiest person I know, and I felt that way for years and years, way before this Vivian Maier project. Maybe because I had a rather unusual life style and unusual events have happened to me. Being born in Florida, moving to Las Vegas in the 60s, my mother died when I was young, we moved here to Chicago two days after the worst snowstorm in the history of Chicago… Becoming friends with my heroes, who were artists and whom I’d studied in college, which is why I’d come to Chicago. I’d moved here because of the artists, and became friends with them. And I had something to offer by way of cabinetry that was different from what they were offering. I’d worked in steel plants, I’d worked for a living, I’d worked with my hands, I’d traveled fairly extensively, so I had something different to bring to this art world that was otherwise somewhat insular. I’m fourth generation carpenter, and the first one who had the luxury to be able to go to college, to study art, which is what I have the most passion for, to be able to make a living, to collect art. What more could a person really ask for? And then this project comes along and brings it all together, and there’s also something completely new that comes out of that. If I were struck by a bolt of lightning right now, I’d be fine with it.

* *

Images by Vivian Maier courtesy of the Jeffrey Goldstein Collection

The Skies of Brasilia: an interview with João Almino

heather — Thu, 08 May 2014 21:19:11 +0000

Jonathan Blitzer

Jonathan Blitzer: You’re originally from northern Brazil—Mossoró—but your novels bring you to the geographic heart of the country: Brasilia. How did you wind up there, exactly?

João Almino: I did not want to revisit the Northeastern regionalist literature that I so admired, and I wanted to depart from the prevailing Brazilian literature of the time. Brasilia represented the new, was somehow an empty space with no literary tradition, and it therefore gave me more freedom to create. I knew the city, since I had lived there for a few months in 1970 and then again later, on three different occasions. I should also add that I could easily bring the Northeast to Brasilia, a city of immigrants.

JB: What interests you most about Brasilia?

JA: First of all, the city as a symbol or a myth that, as a project, accompanied the whole history of independent Brazil. Also the city as a metaphor for the modern world—with its promises and its frustrations. The tension between the futuristic project, the utopia, and the current urban chaos. The contrast between the rational elements of the project, still visible in the so-called Pilot Plan, and the spontaneous, irrational developments which surround it in the satellite cities and mystic communities. Also, the city as a crossroads of several Brazils, and its transcultural nature, through which I can see the country as whole.

JB: Do you have any particular memories of Brasilia growing up? You were just a boy when it was being developed… and yet I imagine you still must have felt its newness somehow…

JA: I didn´t live in Brasilia when I was growing up, but I have childhood memories of the city, reading about it in newspapers and magazines, listening to stories of family members who had visited it during its construction and even following on the radio all the events of its inauguration. The construction of Brasilia attracted the attention not only of Brazilians from all corners, but also of foreigners who were fascinated by the boldness of its project.

JB: When you set out to write Ideas on Where to Spend the End of the World, did you have any sense that five other novels about Brasilia would follow?

JA: In this first novel, each chapter has a central character. I thought at first that each one of those characters deserved a novel of his or her own. Although some of these characters were brought in to future books, already when I wrote my second novel it was clear to me that not all of them required further development. Minor characters sometimes took precedence over them, and new characters kept arriving.

JB: One character, in Five Seasons of Love, says: “My youth is lost. The Brasilia of my dream of the future is dead. I recognize myself in the facades of its prematurely old buildings.” This novel and the one that came after it, The Book of Emotions, are nostalgic, even melancholic books. But these feelings stand in proportion to a sense of possibility and belief in regeneration, too. This nostalgia doesn’t quite seem hunkered down in the past so much as attuned to the future. In Ana’s case, her regrets about the past are almost less poignant than that she should feel her ‘dream of the future’ dissolving away.

JA: One interesting aspect of Brasilia is that it represents the modern that can already be viewed as the past. The ruins of the modern are present there. Brasilia radicalizes a trait of Brazil itself, being a city of the future and yet with no past, so to speak. There is little memory and much hope. But of course reality can demonstrate that the new has its history, its memory; nothing can be created from zero, and utopia, instead of signifying an always unattainable future, can be redefined as a way of reorganizing the present. In The Five Seasons of Love, Ana attempts to forget so that she can be born again. Moving in the opposite direction, in The Book of Emotions, Cadu attempts to live again, through memory. Both are in a sense failed attempts, but they have meaningful results. The act of trying to erase the past as well as that of trying to recover it leave their own paths, creating a new reality: the stories that actually matter.

JB: Ana’s thinking reminds me of a line from the Argentine novelist Juan José Saer in a book called El entenado. An old man looks back on his life, and at one point says, “Y si ahora que soy un viejo paso mis días en las ciudades, es porque en ellas la vida es horizontal, porque las ciudades disimulan el cielo.” The Brasilia of your books might be the opposite. As the city towers upwards, Ana feels her life becoming more horizontal, even flat-lining a bit.

JA: Brasilia, which seems to be only sky, can be rediscovered through real lives and real drama. As Ana looks closer to her surroundings, she will find unexpected dimensions of her life that will remove her from the inertia she was in.

JB: Then there’s Cadu, from The Book of Emotions. He is a former photographer, a philanderer and bon vivant who lives his final years alone and blind. And yet this is where his story begins in The Book of Emotions. It brings to mind someone like Machado de Assis’s Brás Cubas: the backwards glance, the self-conscious piecing-together of the memoir. How present was Machado de Assis for you while writing this novel? Borges is also ever present. Could you speak to where you drew inspiration for this novel?

JA: Cadu is a photographer in my first novel. After publishing my third novel, The Five Seasons of Love, in which the narrator, in the first person, is a woman who had an affair with Cadu, I thought the time had come to write a novel from his perspective. I thought of an album of photographs that had special meaning to the character and whose description could in itself create a plot. Making Cadu a blind man who recreates his photographs by memory, he would be the kind of narrator I needed to convey to the reader these images exclusively through words. I also added a layer of reflection on photography. Long ago I had had the idea of writing an essay on photography, which I never wrote. So, fragments of this possible essay were dispersed in some of Cadu’s thoughts and observations. As for Machado and Borges, I do not try to imitate them, but I agree that some inspiration for aspects or passages of this novel may have come from them: Borges, after all, was blind, and the perspective of an old man keeping a distance from himself to better see his past is present in his short stories. Cadu may be seen as a Brás Cubas, but the structure of the book, through a diary, could more appropriately be compared to Aires´ Memoir, Machado´s latest novel, as one Brazilian critic has remarked.

JB: Where did you start with The Book of Emotions—in a mechanical sense? The book is basically a weaving together of two separate diaries, kept by Cadu, at two different moments in his life. How entwined were these two accounts when you began?

JA: The diary refers to the description of and comments on the photographs of the so- called Book of Emotions, a sort of sentimental album. So I had to weave the diary and the album together. The photographs were taken many years ago, but what the reader reads is what is in the mind of the narrator as he now remembers each one of them. While the narrator composes, with photographs, this book of his past, he lives his everyday life, which is the object of the diary.

JB: What was the “present tense” in which you were operating as you shuttled back and forth between these two moments in Cadu’s life?

JA: In fact I am always dealing with the present. The imaginary future in which the photographer looks at his past and composes his diary serves the purpose of making the past that is narrated coincide with our present.

JB: Who are the authors who have most inspired you?

JA: I don’t know if I have learned their lessons, but the Brazilian writers I mostly admire are Machado de Assis, Graciliano Ramos and Clarice Lispector. Besides them and to keep the list short, I should mention Borges, Proust and Dostoevsky.

JB: Your training is as a philosopher—is this an identity you keep separate from your life as a novelist?

JA: Yes. The processes are very different and in my case they have not coincided in time. Although I was trying to write fiction early on, I published first some essays in philosophy. When I started publishing my fiction writing, I abandoned the writing on philosophy—with the exception of a few essays—although not entirely the reading of philosophy. I never tried to transfer my philosophical enquiries into the novels. Nevertheless, indirectly some philosophical training may have inspired ideas, sometimes ironically, in some of my characters. For example, in The Five Seasons of Love, Ana develops a so-called philosophy of instantaneism. This philosophy is to some of the current real time concepts as the philosophy of humanitism proposed by Machado´s character Quincas Borba is to the 19^th century evolutionary ideas. It uses some valid premises to reach some absurd conclusions. In the case of instantaneism, the concept itself needs to be redefined almost at every new instant.

JB: Are you working on anything right now?

JA: After the novels you have mentioned, I published Cidade Livre (Free City), and right now I’m working on another novel. I don´t like to speak about the work in progress. What I can say is that, in this novel, my characters leave Brasilia for a while and even spend some time in Spain.

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Excerpt from the novel Free City, translated by Rhett McNeil (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013)

My present-day insomnia is an extension of those hours when, in the darkness of night, I heard sounds of drunkards out in the street, my dog Typhoon barking, macaws that lived out behind the house or a lone owl, and I’d open my eyes to the kaleidoscope of grays and blacks that turned into monsters on the walls.

To give the story some life, all I had to do was transport myself back to a day from my childhood, imagine myself in the middle of an avenue in the Free City, and then I could see my aunts sporting fine figures and scowls, Valdivino seated at a table transcribing letters, Dad talking with someone in the doorway of a bar, a little girl with braids and dark eyes riding a bicycle, Typhoon following behind me, and I could see the colors of the shops, the wooden buildings, bulky black cars parked on the side of the street, their white-wall tires exposed, and then the smell of gasoline would emerge, the smell of oil, the smell of trash heaps and horse manure, and the stories of crimes, sins, despair, and grandiose futures would appear on an enormous, colorful screen.

I look out upon a day from my childhood and see three male characters conversing in front of our house, where Aunt Francisca has just set out some chairs, and I don’t even need to describe to you the wooden house with no sidewalk, identical to all the others that you see in photographs from that era, in front of which, as I was saying, the three characters were having silent conversations, communicating phrases in gestures, uttering words that I can’t hear, or, if I do hear them, that I can’t understand, and which, if I understand them, don’t interest me, one of them with an oval face, white and freshly shaved, a trace of displeasure in it, a sharp, playful look in his eyes, the expression of a very successful man, one who had accumulated many experiences throughout his life. Typhoon is sitting beside him, listening to his conversations with ears perked up. This is Dad.

The second one, whose hands hide his hat as he doffs it, has a muscular, well-formed body, a strong, straightforward look on his sunburned face, a well-trimmed moustache, and anyone who looked upon him would envy his felicitous appearance. This is Roberto, back when it wasn’t yet clear whether he’d be the boyfriend of Aunt Francisca or Aunt Matilde.

The third one, of an unpolished simplicity, with a hat that’s much too big for his small head, is a talker, looks intelligent, and is the only one with spurs on his boots, having arrived on the back of a mule, but if he garners my attention, it’s because of his fragility. When he takes his hands out of his pockets, he gesticulates endlessly, swaying forward and back on his chicken legs, and gives the general impression that he’d be blown away if the wind were to catch him. The other two look him up and down when they pass by him. From this description, you will have already guessed it: This is Valdivino.

What feelings of longing are these that emerge from a happiness invented by memory? No, neither my mistrust nor doubts are of recent vintage, they were already present back when I was a boy, I just had to wait a few years to be able to perceive them. My desires have changed, my aspirations are different, I was successful once, before losing almost everything, but the hours pass just the same on different clocks, and the sun, facing the construction projects that filled the landscape, paints the morning with the same colors and conceals them, as always, at dusk. You, my lone, faithful follower on this blog, are right, why disturb what is quiet and forgotten?

On that first night when I met with Dad to clear up my doubts, he denied that he murdered Valdivino, it was a delicate thing for me to resurrect those old suspicions, and he told me that it was best to believe in the version told by the prophetess of the Garden of Salvation, Íris Quelemém, according to which Valdivino hadn’t died at all, and perhaps never would, he had always been an insomniac and a sleepwalker, and was still walking around aimlessly, walking day and night through the forest in search of Z, the lost city. Leave it be, João, those waters have passed us by.

Sometimes, as I was wrapped up in a daydream, our life in the Free City would invade my memory, a life made up of places and scenes, as well as Dad’s stories, and those of my aunts and the other characters around us—and of those others, mainly Valdivino’s—the things, facts, and people from my childhood arranged as if they were in an enormous family photograph, or on a chessboard in the distance where the distinctions between the pieces had dissolved into a uniformity imposed by time. Only Dad could, for the first time, reorganize the pieces on that board, and liberate my memory from that immobility. Fact is, he’s not dead, nobody killed him, Dad replied, he’s traveling or merely asleep, like Íris said.

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[Read it in Portuguese]

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Images: Pola Oloixarac

Interview with Roberto Jacoby

admin — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 20:00:19 +0000

by Reinaldo Laddaga
translation by Jane Brodie

Ana Longoni put it so well that I will just copy a passage from her introduction to essays by Roberto Jacoby and other documents related to his work collected in an indispensable book published on the occasion of El deseo nace del derrumbe,the Roberto Jacoby retrospective held a few years ago at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. It says:

It’s not easy to come up with even one “avant-garde scene” in Argentine art since the sixties that did not have him at the forefront. RJ has been at the heart (or in the brain?) of countless milestones (many of them now mythical) of Argentine culture and art from the last half century. The list is impressive: in 1966, the Arte de los Medios group, now recognized internationally as the beginning of what is called “global conceptualism”; in 1967, Be at Beat Beatles, an event that took place at the Instituto Di Tella where a number of founders of the Argentine rock music movement met; in 1968, Tucumán Arde, a collective action carried out by the Argentine avant-garde in conjunction with the largest nationwide union organization; in 1969, the anti-magazine Sobre, an experiment in agitation and propaganda in times of repression; in 1969, CICSO (Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales), a group of Marxist sociologists researching the Cordobazo¹ and growing political violence; in the early 70s, the cultural supplement to the newspaper La Opinión (where RJ worked with Juan Gelman, Enrique Raab, Paco Urondo, and other important writers) and the newspaper Nuevo Hombre, which—after its first director, Silvio Frondizi, was murdered by para-police forces—was produced largely in hiding; in the 80s, the legendary pop-rock band Virus until its leader and singer, Federico Moura, died of AIDS, and the cultural movement that began with the Body Art festival, and the Club Eros nomad parties; in the 90s, the group of artists connected to the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas; starting in the late 90s, a number of different micro-societies and networks of artists and non-artists, beginning with Bola de Nieve, followed by Chacra99 the following summer , gaining strength with Proyecto Venus from 2001 to 2006, continuing with 101 issues of the magazine ramona² published over the course of ten years, and now the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas, an artist-run platform for education and debate that is planning to open a center in the Centro Penitenciario de Devoto (the largest jail in the city of Buenos Aires); participation in the Argentine Brigade for Dilma, thirty-some artists and intellectuals who took a position on the Brazilian elections at the 2010 São Paulo Biennial …

All of that: art, music, politics, sociology. And all of it together in a perfectly original constellation always joined by the determination to interrogate, in specific conditions, a certain time and place and its workings, ways of living and experiencing together, zones of light and darkness that come into being when mutable individuals cross paths. Making connections visible and, by making them visible, giving them forms that we would not have been able to anticipate otherwise: that passion runs through the constellation of activities that Roberto Jacoby has persistently undertaken. That’s why it would make little sense to talk about his “work” as if it could be separated from the universe of connections that makes up the trajectory of his experience. This conversation in no way attempts to do that.

Roberto was recently visiting New York with Kiwi Sainz, who has been his constant collaborator for decades. The conversation took place at my house after a hilarious lunch.

Reinaldo Laddaga – Not long ago, Roberto, I was reading your book, and I noticed something that comes up time and again in your interviews and texts: the defense of what you call “the strategy of joy.” You often present that strategy as a response to a certain Argentine reality that you describe as problematic, traumatic, dark. The book made me think of a poem by Borges where, speaking of his relationship to Buenos Aires, he says, “we are not joined by love, but fear.” Your work is so deeply bound to Argentina… Is there an element of fear in that connection?

Roberto Jacoby – Maybe… Yes, that’s right! Though, at least consciously, it is more related to complaining than to fear, those words that you hear from the time you are a kid: “You can’t get anywhere here,”“What are you going to do that for if they’re not going to let you?,”“No one’s going to notice.” I think I’m responding more to that tango-like vision of things. Of course, there was no lack of fear, quite the contrary. And in the early eighties, in connection to Virus, the strategy of joy was directly tied to a superabundance of fear. At that time, I first understood how wonderful it was that there were people dancing and making such joyous music in a basement in the San Telmo section of the city at eleven at night—of course, I mean the San Telmo of back then, not today’s San Telmo. I realized that that’s infectious… It’s like when it’s really hot out and you go somewhere cool and stay for a while, and then when you leave that cool feeling stays with you for a bit. Joy keeps you going when you are in situations steeped in terror, which we had been in, right? The entire population was immersed in terror. I started to realize that joy was political, that making music, singing and dancing were political. At that time, I was working on a very long essay, a research project that I did not finish until 85, and I read some texts that confirmed that idea. One text by Canetti, for example, says that, to his mind, there is nothing more absurd than being in a concert hall: people sitting there, lined up in rows and columns, as if tied to their seats, listening to music even though there is nothing more alien to music than forcing the body to stay still. Music is actually a product of the body and, at the same time, the body moves to the rhythm of music. In Virus’s second album, the idea of not being seated while listening was very explicit, even though what was called “rock” in Argentina was listened to sitting down, like at a classical music concert. So we went against that tendency. What we set out to do at that time was get rid of the seats.

RL – I always have the impression that the reconstruction of the Argentine cultural scene of the late seventies and early eighties is not very precise, especially in the United States. It does not really seem to reflect just how rich what was going on then really was. In the seventies you left the art scene, to a certain extent, and when you came back in the eighties you—unlike most of the people who had come back to the visual arts—were not painting. What led to you to return to art?

RJ – When I left the visual art scene in 68 or 69, I started doing social research, working on conflict theory. My turn away from art was pretty radical. I felt that the art scene had run its course and there was nothing else to do there. It wasn’t limited to a feeling that “such and such an institution, the Di Tella, for instance, is a mess,” or “exhibitions are being censored, so…” Even if there had been no censorship, even if the Di Tella had been at its peak, it was all over as far as I was concerned.

RL – Did you believe art had lost its ability to make a greater cultural impact?

RJ – Partly yes, but it was also worn out intellectually. I had the feeling that we had reached the limits of what could be thought. In the group I was in with Masotta,³ the media group, we had reached a sort of maximum degree of abstraction. On the one hand, I felt that Pop art and Conceptualism, as well as media art, no longer had much to say. On the other, the political situation compelled me to work in that area. I didn’t feel the impulse to join the armed struggle or to be a radical working in the community, but to be a researcher. I decided to get involved in the Center for Research in the Social Sciences, which was supposedly going to help bring about a closer relationship between action and knowledge. But you’re right: there is still no research that really grasps the richness and complexity of what was going on in those years, and even during the dictatorship, right? More has been done about what happened towards the end of the dictatorship. More has been said about Teatro Abierto,⁴ for instance.

RL – There is, outside Argentina, a somewhat caricature-like image of what social and cultural life was like under the dictatorship, one that has little to do with the cultural reality of the country at that time, as is evidenced by everything that surfaced with the return to democracy. It was at that time that you got involved in the pop music scene, and from then on your connection to pop music has been very close. You circulate in the space between pop music and the visual arts. I don’t remember if you were a regular at Café Einstein⁵ in those years.

RJ – I was…

RL – Because the house band at Café Einstein was Sumo,⁶ right?

RJ – Yes, but Sumo was just one of the bands that played there. All kinds of things went on at Einstein. The stuff that Chabán was doing, the performances, Daniel Melero, Vivi Tellas… all that satirical stuff. It was not strictly rock.

RL – And, surprisingly, I think the underlying sensibility of that time still makes itself felt on the Argentine cultural scene. I don’t know if you have the sense as well that, in terms of strategy and sensibility, there is a very strong and unbroken connection between what was going on in the underground cultural scene of the early eighties and what’s going on now. I think there is continuity between, let’s say, Café Einstein and Belleza y Felicidad⁷ in the nineties.

RJ – I would say it’s more a question of affinity than of continuity: people working today see themselves in Belleza, and Belleza saw itself in Rojas,⁸ and Rojas saw itself in Einstein, and so on. A sort of relay race, where the legacy is passed from one runner to the next.

RL – What, in your view, have been the most powerful moments, the turning points, the moments of greatest cultural upheaval, in Argentina in recent decades? Because your interventions, the way you come in and out of the public scene, always seem tied to a strategic vision: it’s as if when you sense that something special is going on you get involved.

RJ – From the outside, it seems a bit more rational than it really is. It’s always a question of groups of friends, actually. We mentioned the return to democracy. And later—from 89 to 1993 or 94, more or less—it was Rojas, with Pablo Suárez, Gordín, Harte, people that I knew from elsewhere (not from Rojas). (I met Pablo, of course, in the sixties, and he was the person most important to getting me involved in the visual arts). But it’s really a question of affinity, friendships that pull people together. I wasn’t a big part of Rojas, for instance. I may have participated in two shows there, that’s it.

Anyway, I think that whole scene came to an end in 94, more or less. That goes for the nightclubs as well.

KS - Maybe the end was the show “Algunos artistas”⁹… which was in 94, right? No, in 1992. The enshrinement of Rojas at Recoleta…

RJ – The Age of Communication closed in 1993 or 94 as well. That was the nightclub that hung on after all the others (Morocco, for example) had become really commercial. It was run by Juan Calcarami, and his group had a more mystical vibe. It was a place for artists. Whether or not an institution or organization is run by artists has a huge impact on what it’s like. That’s been proven time and again, right? A bar run by Sergio De Loof is not the same as a bar run by some bartender. Anything and everything happened at Juan Calcarami’s club: there were even places to sleep, hanging gardens, a library area, and an area where designer clothing was sold…

It closed and there was a hiatus… The cultural scene moved elsewhere. Or it lost steam, in a way, or survived but ceased to be very interesting. Nothing new was happening. Rojas closed and many of the artists who had shown there went on to show at private galleries.

RJ – What did emerge at that time, in around 96, was HIJOS,¹⁰ and I think that was one of the milestones in the cultural scene. Because of their age at the time (they were around twenty), HIJOS began to effect an enormous change in the politics of daily life compared to Madres and Abuelas.¹¹ One of the most obvious things is their relationship with homosexuality and transvestites. If you introduced Hebe de Bonafini¹² or Carlotto¹³ to a transvestite in the eighties, they would have been horrified. HIJOS started to make things happen; they would get together at someone’s house and smoke pot, do everything that young people do. And that led human rights organizations and the most progressive political parties to accept a cultural change or revolution and that, I think, was very important. New groups of radical or activist artists began to emerge between 96 and 2000, until 2004, 2005, when they faced a crisis of institutionalization as well. Those groups started getting invited all over the place, to the Venice Biennale and so forth, and they ended up confused and began fighting amongst themselves, which is nothing new (that’s what always happens). Meanwhile, in the late nineties, another movement began which revolved around Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón, and their venue Belleza y Felicidad.

RL – Did you work with Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón when they were starting Belleza y Felicidad?

RJ – No, when they were putting Belleza y Felicidad together (November or December of 99, I mean, of 98) I was working on Bola de Nieve¹⁴ and Chacra 99, an artists’ residency. I was not a friend of Fernanda’s, I didn’t invite her to the residency because I didn’t know her. I did know Pablo Peréz, though, who was friends with Fernanda, and he was at Chacra 99. Another cluster of intercrossing artistic energies formed there. Some people had been around for a while, but there were a great many new people as well.

RL – There was no single nightclub or bar associated with the underground scene at that time, the way Bolivia had been, was there? Am I right that the scene that took shape in 99 was not associated with nightlife the way earlier scenes had been?

KS – That change took place around the world. There were more parties at people’s houses. Belleza was a place where DJs would get together, Panasonic played there. During the day or early in the evening, the dance club would be in the gallery then, later, you would go to clubs. Or sometimes take over places.

You didn’t have to wait until night fell for the party to begin.

RL – And in what exact year did Proyecto Venus¹⁵ begin?

RJ –In 2001, we began something called Plácidos Domingos. There were twelve Plácidos Domingos, which were supposed to be a sort of intellectual and theoretical preparation for what would become Proyecto Venus. I think it was in August 2001 that we started with the computer part, which was a real mess. At that time, computer technology was a lot of trouble… But we found great people who could handle it… We set up at my house. After a while, I had to move.

RL – And your apartment became Fundación START (Sociedad, Tecnología y Arte).¹⁶

RJ – It became Fundación START and housed the office, people, programmers. The Proyecto Venus website (initially www.proyectovenus.org and later www.proyectov.org) was more or less ready to go in March. The bills had been printed, and so the currency was launched in March as well. Everything that had happened on December 19 and 20, 2001¹⁷ was still very fresh. I had an idea about how to generate more interest in joining the project: I found a place where I could buy pretty good wine really cheap, and so I bought two hundred bottles (we kept them under the stage at START); I also got 750 grams of pot that we sold in the Venus currency. That was like the gold standard [laughter]; they say there always has to be something to back up a currency. What backs up money? In our case, it was wine and pot, convertible currency [laughter]… If at a certain point you wanted to change in your bills, you could go and buy some pot.

RJ – The myth was so powerful that years later people would ask me if I could get them some pot [laughter]. “No, that was just for the first two months.” A fairly bizarre economy materialized around a currency with backing, which is unheard of: no currency is backed by anything at all.

RL – So the late nineties, early 2000s, was another powerful moment, another juncture where energies converged.

RJ - Argentina had never been so good.

RJ –The year 2001, when the country seemed to be falling apart, was one of the most interesting moments.

The strange thing is it began in the art world, right? I mean, the things we were doing did not begin in 2001. We didn’t say, “OK, the country is coming apart at the seams, it’s the end of the world, so let’s do something.” I don’t want to repeat that old idea that artists can see what’s going to happen, that they are prophetic, but for some reason, we’re not sure why…

RL – Has there been a moment like that since?

RJ – I don’t know… I don’t think so…

KS – Well, what about what Néstor and Cristina (Kirchner) were able to generate, a different sort of connection with and between young people.

RL – And what’s that?

RJ – It really took off when Néstor died.

It started with people crying desperately in the street. But that turned into joy at a certain point, and then slogans appeared spontaneously in a way I’d never seen before.

RL – And has that had a palpable impact on the more restricted space of the art world?

RJ – Not directly or immediately. There were a number of distinct moments… One was when, in response to the resistance of the large agro-exporters to Resolution 125,¹⁸ an organization called Agrupación de Artistas Visuales con Cristina was started, and that is odd: I can’t remember any time when there was a group of visual artists in support of anyone, not even the Montoneros.¹⁹ And then there were initiatives geared to political action. Not long ago, a group called Artistas Organizados was formed in opposition to certain policies of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. For a long time, they held meetings and assemblies, made statements, studied issues. Everyone was involved. That had never happened before either. But I know you aren’t asking about this sort of thing, but about repercussions in the art world itself. The question of who makes decisions in the art world was formulated more explicitly; it is never artists. This has implications in other areas, like the number of galleries directed by artists, the number of artist-run projects around (dozens). All of this is, to some extent, an outgrowth of things that happened in the early 2000s. Artists opening their own gallery, their own museum, their own academy. There are artists who “copy” the Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas, who come up with their own educational or teaching structure, their own places of reflection.

RL – I want to know what you think about something. In the eighties, a great deal of the new aesthetic was defined in opposition to the cult of the national and a certain notion of the people, which we associated with the old left, the universe of tango bars, etc. But that contrast no longer seems particularly relevant. Or is it?

RJ – I think it’s gotten more complicated. On a cultural level, the policy of a broad Latin American alliance, for instance, has changed everything, all the different perspectives, a great deal. The national and the idea of the people and its culture have become regional, not confined to one country: Caetano Veloso sings Mercedes Sosa; contemporary music is composed on the basis of native chants. At the same time, reclaiming native cultures has great ideological weight not just amongst supporters of the government, but with the opposition as well. Internationally, the role of New York is not what it once was, let alone Paris (I haven’t heard anyone talk about Paris for twenty years)… Everyone goes to biennials in Indonesia, residencies in Thailand… In this context, I think that the national and the idea of the people and its culture mean something else, because Argentina’s position in the world is different, the world itself is different: it’s more polycentric. Artists are no longer combing over Art Forum or Art International. Everyone is concentrated on their own thing and on connections made on the Internet. I think the contrast you mentioned has been done away with; it is no longer relevant.

RL – You were saying that artists study… and that’s true: artists study more these days. There are more studio classes, schools, institutions. Does that mean that in Argentina being an artist is seen as a viable career?

RJ – Yes. I mean, they are kidding themselves [laughter], but that’s what they think. Another strange thing is that the social background of artists has changed. There are more young artists from families that can support them financially as they pursue the idea of being an artist, which was not the case when we were young. You had to make a living anyway you could. There was no way you could make a living as an artist, but that didn’t mean you stopped being an artist.

RL – Exactly, and that is a major change in the identity of the artist: suddenly, being an artist is a viable career option. I want to get back to something, though: it seems like you have never felt a pressing need to identify as an artist, in fact the lack of that identification is one of the things that seems to make your work possible. Is that right?

RJ – That’s right. I have never felt the need to identify as an artist. In the sixties we used that term, but sort of jokingly (I mean amongst the smaller group, with Masotta). And then I would say it was more like… let’s put it this way, when at immigrations they ask you your profession, you don’t say “novelist, writer.” It’s somehow embarrassing, inappropriate. That’s how I feel about saying “I’m an artist.” I say it but just as a formality, even though I don’t really know what it means. If I have to tell you what, deep down, I think an artist is, it is someone who lives like an artist, who is always open, always inventing new things, everything you can imagine that I might say about all that, which is just what you would say. Capturing and responding to what is happening around us, intervening in it… No one is like that all the time, it would be impossible to live that way all the time. But there are people who do it more than others… In any case, one of the things that makes me most suspicious about Argentina today is the number of institutions, of people with influence on groups of young people, who further the idea of the “professional artist,” with emphasis on professional, not on artist. That gives rise to a gap in language that complicates communication.

KS – There are a great many “cultural managers,” that’s for sure. It’s truly alarming.

RL – Your most recent organization-project is CIA. What does CIA set out to add or remedy or change in terms of the things you have done before?

RJ – Let’s take a look at how it began. Gachi Hasper, Diana Aisenberg and Melina Berkenwald wanted to organize a residency, a place for artists to come together… They wanted to get me involved, and I said, “I’ve had my fill of social projects, you guys do it. I’m through. What do you want me for?” And they said, “We promise you won’t have to do a thing, just let us use your name.” So far so good. We didn’t have a place for the residency, so we put an ad in ramona and the owner of the Hotel Ostende, a hotel on the beach, answered. That was perfect. “Great, I’ll do it. Two weeks vacation on the beach.” This was the first time I had been involved in a project that didn’t depend on me. It was a self-run project with others doing the running [laughter]. And it went on like that until 2009, when the material conditions that Judi [Werthein], Gachi [Hasper] and I needed to have a physical space appeared, along with a little money to get started. And at that point we designed a more detailed program of what we wanted to do. The premise was very simple: a space in Argentina for artists regardless of discipline to connect since the visual artist as such has become an abstraction. What difference is there between a visual artist and a filmmaker? Or a dancer or a performer? Or a musician and someone who makes sound works? Those differences are unsustainable, but still visual artists hang out with other visual artists, and dancers with other dancers. We wanted to build and facilitate connections, also between Argentine artists and artists from other places. Especially artists from other countries in Latin America because, unbelievable and absurd though it may be, Latin American countries have always had more contact with a central country than with a neighboring country that might be just an hour away by plane or boat, or just across a bridge.

KS – Connections with artists from other parts of Argentina as well. The first fellowship recipients at CIA, in 2009, were invited, but then there was a call for applications. There are more or less four hundred applications for twenty spots, and the juries have been great. Judi put it well: the category went from “fellowship recipient,” which is passive, to “agent.”

RL – In closing, what is your latest next project? Something we still don’t know a thing about.

RJ – I’m working on another album called Golosina Caníbal, after the experience of Tocame el Rok.²⁰

RL – Give me some background. Tocame el Rok…

RJ – Tocame el Rok began with the exhibition at Reina Sofía. Ana Longoni thought there should be something about my work in pop music. So she proposed a software containing all the songs I had written as well as pertinent information about them (date, where they were written, what was happening in Argentina at the time). At the museum, visitors could see the album covers, photos, and so forth. And then Ana thought there should be a part that was not confined to the past, not already closed off and recorded in an album, but happening in the present. She appointed singer and composer Nacho Marciano musical curator. They studied my files and came upon a ton of songs with no music. Ana’s project entailed producing something new for the show. And we developed the idea of Tocame el Rock, which consisted of working on some of the never-before-released songs from different periods with musician friends or musicians whom I had worked with in the past. We finished thirteen songs, but weren’t sure how to present them. It seemed strange and sort of dated to make a DVD or CD. And that’s how we came up with Tocame el Rok. We made rocks with the words Tocame el Rok printed on them, and you can hear the music through a USB port and cable connected to the rock. We presented the works as music and as art objects. We were trying to find a viable way for music to circulate today, so that we didn’t have to finance it ourselves. And it has worked out great! We were able to cover all the expenses and are paying the artists. Of course, since the rocks are sold as art objects, there is a serial edition of thirteen, each one unique because it is a rock, so no two are alike.

RL - The next project is seven never-before-released songs…

RJ – Sevensongs that have never been released. The title is Golosina Caníbal. They were on hold because, among other things, they were written at Chacra in 99. Leo García wrote the music to all the songs except one, which is by Nacho. Pajarito Ferrari—a twenty-year-old kid with an amazing voice—is the singer… Then, in October, Sebastián Gordín and I are going to have a show at the Nora Fisch Gallery of comics we made in 89 and 90. As you can see, I’m recycling everything I’ve got. As—who was it?—maybe Jayne County in Wayne County and the Electric Chairs said, “There is no junk… Junk doesn’t exist, just things waiting to be recycled.” [Laughter]

KS - The songs are beautiful. Here are four from Golosina… I’m always ready, if the situation arises…

RL – You’ve got the songs there?

KS – Yeah, I do.

RL - Let’s give them a listen and stop here.

Photo: Rosana Schoijett.

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Roberto Jacoby lives and works in Buenos Aires, where he was born in 1944. He is considered one of the pioneers of conceptual art. Nearly his entire life’s work has been produced collaboratively. In the 60s, he participated in the Di Tella and in Tucumán Arde. He was the song-writer for the pop band Virus and founder of Club Eros, ramona magazine and Proyecto V. In 2011, the Museo Reina Sofía hosted a large retrospective titled Desire Rises from Collapse and published a volume that collected his works, actions and concepts from 1966 to the present. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and currently directs the Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas.

1 A civil uprising in the city of Córdoba, Argentina in May 1969 in which students and workers joined together to protest the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía.

2A monthly magazine about the visual arts with no images that printed 101 paper issues in Buenos Aires between 2000 and 2010. From the start, ramona participated in emerging aesthetics and offered an alternative to traditional formats.

3 Argentine philosopher and literary critic who led the Grupo Arte de los Medios [Media Art Group], a collective of young artists started in the ‘60s.

4A cultural movement organized in 1981 by theater artists protesting against the military dictatorship.

5A bar and performance and exhibition space that was one of the important underground centers of Buenos Aires from the beginning of the 80s.

6An Argentine rock group fronted by Italian lead singer Luca Prodan in the 80s.

7A bookstore, art gallery and performance space directed by Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón that existed between 1999 and 2007.

8A cultural center of the University of Buenos Aires. The space’s art gallery was one of the focal points of activity for the artistic scene in Buenos Aires during the 90s.

9A show curated by Jorge Gumier Maier at the Recoleta Cultural Center in 1992.

10 The principal association of children whose parents “disappeared” during the last Argentine military dictatorship. It has been very active on the Argentine political scene since the middle of the 90s.

11 An association of mothers and grandmothers whose children and grandchildren were “disappeared” during the Dirty War between 1976 and 1983.

12 President of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

13 Leader of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo

14 An online database of contemporary Argentine artists featuring a short bio and questionnaire, photos of the artist’s work and/or video or sound samples, curated by the artists themselves.

15 A micro-society of artists and non-artists, with both on and offline life, that operated between 2002 and 2006. The project printed its own currency, the “venus,” in order to mediate exchanges of services, skills, knowledge and goods among “Venusians.”

16 Society, Technology and Art, an artist-run non-profit founded in 1999, fosters the development of new forms of interaction through the use of digital technology. START hosted all of the projects mentioned, including the magazine ramona, Proyecto V and Bola de Nieve.

17 Riots in the Plaza de Mayo precipitated by the Argentine government’s freezing of citizens’ bank accounts during the economic crisis left 39 people dead and brought about the fall of the government.

18 A controversial measure to raise export taxes on national agricultural products imposed by Cristina Kirchner’s government in 2008, leading to what has been called the Argentine Farm Crisis.

19A Peronist left-wing guerilla group known for its use of violent political tactics throughout the 60s and 70s and its opposition to the Argentine military dictatorship of Jorge Videla.

20 The title is a play on words; “tocame” in Spanish means both “touch me” and “play (as in play music) for me.”

An American Poet’s Dream: an interview with David Shook

Pola Oloixarac — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 14:00:19 +0000

Interview and introduction by Pola Oloixarac
translated by Heather Cleary

A young professor of literature in Los Angeles collects funding and poems online in order to make his dream a reality: he wants to fly over the territory, dropping poems like bombs. He believes that, in light of the recent history of the United States, cleaving the air with his own drone is the best way to protect poetry: everything else can collapse—NASA can close its doors and employees of the State can fall victim to the shutdown—but military programs remain intact, the drones still carry out their secret missions. By joining with these unmanned vehicles, poetry refuses to capitulate, David muses, twirling his long connoisseur moustache.

The son of preachers from the heart of Texas, David Shook grew up having faith in the spoken word. He studied the lost syntax of languages in danger of extinction like Kiowa and Nahuatl, and translates from Isthmus Zapotec and Zoque, the language of Chiapas. He was not able to raise the money he needed (some ten thousand dollars) on the internet, but that didn’t stop him: the song of the drones has attracted private investors, and he expects to be flying over Los Angeles with his poems within a month.

With his drones, David Shook joins the continent’s long tradition of fighting eagles. Among his inspirations he counts Raúl Zurita, who painted his poems in the air (antecedent prosthesis of Carlos Wieder, Bolaño’s fierce poet-pilot), the CasaGrande collective, which made poems rain down over London, and the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, whom Shook translated from Cyrillic and who was a kind of 1930s Kanye West that saw breasts as earthquakes and life as resurrection. The canon (the poetic canons) range from English to Pashto, Saraiki, Somali and Urdu, by authors like Todd Swift, Sam Hamill, Mandy Kahn, Danielle Moody and Víctor Terán. He hopes to be able to publish the poems of Gaariye, the preeminent Somali bard who sang about nuclear weapons in 1970 and whose recorded voice circulates as contraband; the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, a political exile living in London; along with Said Salah, Caasha Lul Mohamud Yusef, Rifat Abbas and the great Urdu poet Noshi Gillani.

He imagines them crossing the sky like geometrical insects, moving slowly 100 feet above our heads, opening their metal bellies, releasing their precious cargo. The wind is an issue, but publishing poetry is always that: tossing bits of paper into the breeze from too far up, without a care for which way it is blowing.

Pola Oloixarac: Obama tried to convince Congress and the G20 to bomb Syria. Whom do you have to convince in order to send out poetry drones?

David Shook: The most pressing people to convince are my potential funders, and I’m still working on that. I’d also like to convince my fellow poets that the Poetry Drone is more than just a gimmick, a look-at-me attention grab. To me it’s about more just the novelty of the poems’ distribution. It’s about the symbolism of transformation: the physical transformation of sword into plowshare. That physicality is crucial to the project—it’s as important as the poems themselves.

What’s behind the superposition of the most widespread literary genre in the USA—that is, war—and poetry, which is the most marginal? What are the implications of turning poetry into a geopolitical experience?

I like the conception of War as a literary genre. It certainly has been core to our national mythmaking. Poetry is a subgenre of speech, of language—it’s our least practical form of communication, and as a citizen of a nation often too impatient or too proud for diplomacy, poetry is a radical alternative to both rhetorical and physical political aggression.

I think it’s important to remember that all poetry is political, and that’s because all language is political. I’m not talking about Democrats versus Republicans, about political parties or principles—I think that kind of stuff typically results in some pretty uninteresting poetry. Language is political because it’s how we relate with other people—and I think that’s the important thing, that we relate with other people, people like and unlike us.

Modern warfare has worked hard to facilitate the dehumanization of our enemies—to eliminate the supposed barbarism of hand-to-hand combat, of seeing our enemies up close, of having to recognize their humanity. To recognize that our enemies are people. But drones are a perfect example of contemporary war’s very real barbarism—from the Greek barbaros, or “foreign.” We’re distancing ourselves from murder; since we’ve justified it in theory we ought not endure the ethical complications of carrying out its physical act. I think this conversation is a worthy topic for our poetry.

Do you think the people who do the bombing will read your poems?

The guys doing the bombing? The teenagers and twenty-somethings joy-sticking Predators from their bunkers in Texas/Florida/Nevada? Probably not. I’d like for them to, of course. I’d love for them to write some poems to be dropped from the drone. How amazing would it be to drop some poems over an army base? I don’t know if I’m ready for Guantanamo, though.

War is so interesting as a horizon; we live inside it, and that’s what I love about your drones: the state of poetry is right there, because war is the reality of the case (“case” in the sense of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus). How do you see this case, this war that is so different from the ones with Iraq and Afganistan?

The United States has been at war my entire adult life, my entire professional life as a poet. It’s difficult for me to know experientially how this case is different from others in the past, but I suspect that our displacement of war has reached new levels. War happens in the background, like an open window on your computer that you’ve buried under a thousand Word documents and Chrome tabs. The average American is not affected by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least not in terms of their daily living situation. This is somewhat less true for those in lower income brackets, and somewhat more true for those in higher brackets. This displacement of war is dehumanizing to those who suffer its effects. War is dehumanizing, period, but we have developed an unprecedentedly effective method of dehumanizing the objects of our supposedly just wars. But here’s the catch: you can’t dehumanize others without dehumanizing yourself. Drones are a physical manifestation of that idea, an emblem of our times. Afghanistan and Iraq are conveniently just beyond the visible horizon. I don’t know a United States at peace. I don’t know that one exists. Maybe that’s true of any political state, inherent to the nature of systems, but as an artist and poet I want to be one of those—and here I borrow from the fantastic South African magazine /Chimurenga/—”who no know go know.”

Have the conditions under which poetry is produced come to resemble the conditions of war?

No. We’ve allocated $91.5 billion to the war in Afghanistan this year, and just under $5 billion to drones, which is a little more than we’ve invested in poetry.

I produce most of mine in bed on a MacBook Air, in my Los Angeles studio, with a tiny chihuahua on my stomach and a fan on my face, or on the bus, on my iPhone. Although I guess that’s increasingly what war looks like to the soldiers on our side of the drones, I don’t think I can compare my own experience of writing poems to the experience of war. I’m immensely privileged, and I think that to claim otherwise is offensive. I do aspire to do more than just document the interior life of the privileged, but I think that the ability to do so is a function of my own privilege. Maybe the conditions under which a Twa woman composes an oral poem, or someone like Raúl Rivero writing poems in prison, or Recaredo Silebo Boturu’s veiled political critique of the police state approach the depraved conditions of war, but not the conditions I write in.

Has poetry gone to war against common modes of existence? Is this a challenge it should take on?

I’m not convinced that common modes of existence are all that common themselves. Common to whom?

Poetry is huge, so I’ll speak only for myself: my poems seek to explore and subvert common modes of language, of communication. That sounds very serious, which it is, but not at the expense of pleasure. Like Biko says, “I write what I like.”

I’m not terribly keen on these types of abstractions—they often lead to very romantic and bourgey notions about writing. It feels dramatic to say that poetry is at war with anything. If it is, it’s doing a pretty shit job of it. Have you seen the soldiers? Most poets can’t swim; their feet blister easily; they’re belligerent, get drunk on the job, and are prone to desertion. That’s our charm, but drones don’t fall for it.

If Hollande ultimately supports Obama’s bid to bomb, will you include poems written in French?

I’d love to include French-language poems! So far I have poems from Arabic, English, Pashto, Somali, and Zapotec, but I’d love to include all the languages I can get. There’s an open call for submissions on my website.

In Elio Petri’s La decima vittima, Ursula Andress is chasing after Marcello Mastroianni, trying to kill him. In the end, they get married and flowers sprout from the gun. If we consider the fact that, instead of bombs, your drones drop poems, doesn’t your project end up aestheticizing war? In the context of the USA’s proposed attack on Syria, is it possible that your project depoliticizes war, and is therefore an inversion of Walter Benjamin’s ideas?

I don’t know that I’ve contributed to an aesthetics of war, though I do appreciate some art that I think has done this, like Mahwish Chishty’s visual reappropriation of drones and Yoshua Okón’s re-contextualization of war exercises (Octopus).

The Poetry Drone is an attempt to aestheticize political engagement, to aestheticize protest. It offers a symbolic alternative to my culture’s promulgation of political and economic domination, of empire. I hope.

At the same time the Poetry Drone is more than just an exercise in aesthetics, in aestheticizing protest, or an experiment in the distribution of poetry. That’s the importance of its physicality. Like Pedro Reyes’ instruments and shovels. Reyes is an inspiration; I would love to meet him.

The PoDro repurposes an actual physical object intended to be used to kill people from the safety and comfort of a military installation some 7,000 miles away.

There are some obvious practical differences—I don’t have the millions it would take to control a drone from that distance, but the model I’m hoping to acquire, which is most often used for aerial photography, can be controlled from over a mile away. The poems that the drone deploys do come from that far away—from Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan—and from nearer by.

I’ve joked that if anything, the Poetry Drone might kill children from boredom, but honestly I don’t believe that will be the case. The poems I’ve collected so far are great, and the physical imposition of the drone—a seemingly autonomous machine humming as it hovers in place—will make for an impressive and I hope mildly terrifying display.

I think that Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics applies more broadly to empire, not just to fascist regimes, and thus also describes today’s United States. So sure, the Poetry Drone might politicize aesthetics, but I’m hesitant to say that it does so in the heroic and antidotal mode that Benjamin envisioned. I do think that there is an inherent relationship between aesthetics and politics, but I’m no scholar and I haven’t worked out its exact nature—maybe you, Pola, could help me come up with some wild theories?

* *

Artwork: Rosario Zorraquin, “Guerra” (2013).

* *

David Shook grew up in Mexico City before studying endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. His collection of poems Our Obsidian Tongues, longlisted for the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize, is available from Eyewear Publishing. He served as Translator in Residence at the Poetry Parnassus in London, where he premiered his covertly filmed documentary Kilometer Zero, featuring Equatorial Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang. His translations include Mario Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka, Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto, and Roberto Bolaño’s manifesto Leave Everything, Again. He lives in Los Angeles, where he edits molossus and Phoneme Media. (Photo: Crispin Hughes)

After Kenneth Goldsmith: an interview

heather — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:00:19 +0000

Michael Romano and Kenneth Goldsmith

I have a bunch of questions but they’re still pretty disorganized in my mind.

So let’s just shoot. It’ll all fall together on the editing board.

II.

I asked you something a few years ago, about whether you consider Ubuweb a work of art, and you said something interesting, but, you know, I lost the tape, and then I saw this book here, the Letter to Bettina Funcke.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Where you start off by answering that same question, and you say it is, that perhaps it’s the most significant work you’ll ever create, but then you veer off, plagiarize yourself and others, and it gets kind of crazy, and you don’t give anything like a conclusive answer. So I want to ask it again.

Well, I think Documenta didn’t really understand poetry, and they understood Ubuweb, and somehow they needed to legitimize me through Ubu, whereas they couldn’t quite legitimize me through poetry. They wanted me to claim it as an artwork, and I said okay, I don’t usually do so but I could go there if provoked. On my own, day in, day out, I don’t think about it, but it’s not so far from the concerns of the other stuff I do.

One thing I’ve always thought was interesting about Ubuweb was how it enacts the principles of the art it collects.

Absolutely. I mean, it’s all part of the same thing. Most of the materials on Ubu were never economically valuable, but floated freely from one person to another. They were shared, xeroxed, handed out, traded; it was this cassette culture, mail art, you know, all that weird ephemeral stuff that people tend to do. Most of it wasn’t meant to be sold or paid for. Most of the avant-garde was predicated on free culture, nobody ever assumed anything was going to be worth anything, and most of the time it wasn’t.

But at the same time it’s something more. You’ve spoken of cataloging and archiving as artistic endgames in themselves, and in your MoMA lecture, when you talk about the inversion of consumption, how we now spend more time organizing and archiving than engaging with content, I thought of Ubuweb.

Yeah, I mean, I have no idea what’s even on Ubu.

Ha.

I couldn’t consume it all. And this is something rippling through culture a lot right now. Even the data leaks from the NSA and Wikileaks, what they’re calling information vandalism, it’s too much to digest. And that was really the whole point of my Printing Out the Internet—it’s absurd, of course you can’t, it’s too much. There are new metrics of magnitude, of infinite. I think the web shows us, the 21st century, what infinite might look like, and it’s incomprehensible, mind-bogglingly incomprehensible, as big as the universe, that kind of big.

It’s big but we still hold on to these notions of cultural authority, of importance, entities we think of as important and authoritative but for obsolete reasons, based on the old situation. If you take a big institution like MoMA: obviously by most people’s standards a really important institution, but from another perspective almost completely insignificant.

Well, it depends. We used to think that those verticals were the ones that made the narrative and lived by it. Now most of the world doesn’t care about that because they have their own narratives, which are coming through online culture or meme culture. So the museum becomes not a space of authority but a social space, which is what I talked about in the MoMA lecture, how the role of the museum changes into a nightclub, or, you know, social, relational space. Most people don’t go to look at the art, they go to be with each other to show they were there at that monument.

You talk about some other interesting things in that MoMA lecture. One was this dynamic of how institutional critique, the critique of the institution, gets absorbed into the institution itself, becomes an institution of critique—that’s super interesting. The other was that idea of the institution as survival strategy for the artist, and the sort of inevitable drift toward institutionalization of the career of the artist. I thought that was interesting partly because I didn’t really buy it.

You mean the [Marcel] Broodthaers thing?

Yeah, you treat him as exemplary, but I mean … his case was interesting, but I don’t think his fate was inevitable.

Well, it’s enviable. He lucked out. I don’t know any artist who wouldn’t want to be crowned by the institution as being important.

Hm.

The institution has always acted as a filtering system; that’s what makes us pay attention to certain things and ignore others. All these people who critiqued the institution were then hoisted up by the institution and licked, not bit, the hand that fed them.

Haha.

You know? But that’s always happened. Everyone that’s claimed to be anti-art since the beginning of art has happily been embraced by the institution.

The part of the lecture about the White House was pretty amazing.

Yeah, that was funny.

You said something, I don’t remember the exact words, something like, The security is so tight there that it paradoxically becomes the most relaxed and welcoming environment, and I thought it was an interesting microcosm of, I don’t know, this idea that the institution of art can be so in control and welcoming of everything that nothing can really critique it or subvert it. Everything’s absorbed into it and there’s this kind of universal innocuousness.

Everything is relative. When I was the MoMA Poet Laureate, I did a series of guerilla readings, and everyone said, That’s not guerilla! MoMA knows about it! But I was like, Hey, man, within the rigid structure of MoMA, it’s pretty radical, haha. Of course they knew, of course they enabled, but nothing like this had been there before. It’s all contextual. All contextual.

When I was looking at those pictures of you in the White House I thought of how our word “parasite” comes from the Greek word for dinner guest. It referred to a professional class, guests of authority, who wouldn’t give anything but maybe a song. And there you were, reciting poems to President Obama. It’s such an interesting situation. And I thought of how your writing is always toeing this fine line between what is merely interesting or provocative and what is illegal or destructive.

Yeah, I’m trying to hit that line all the time, that’s what gets me in, into a place like the White House or MoMA or The Colbert Report, it’s this weird line between totally wacko radical and quite sane, complicit culture. It’s credible enough for the right so that it’s something they know, but it’s also breaking the law. Reading appropriated texts at the White House, they had no idea what I was doing, even though it’s more radical than getting up there and saying stop the war. I really like playing with that, it gets me inside a lot, to be able to mess around. And it’s the same with Ubuweb. People think Ubuweb is some big institution when it’s a total fucking pirate site with the institutional clothing of authority. I mean, it looks like the MoMA or something.

Yeah, totally.

So it must be very official, well-funded. No. There’s no money here at all. There’s no nothing. Even at [The University of] Pennsylvania, I teach plagiarism, they seem to think it’s great: teaching kids how to steal. I don’t say I’m not doing it and do it; I say I’m doing it and I do it, and they seem to love it. So I think that’s a very good definition, the fine line, I really like that. If it’s coming across that way, if it’s reading that way, I think I’m doing something okay.

I’m interested in where art becomes crime, and I think it’s interesting that you can do this stuff and not only survive in the institution but be endorsed and, you know, supported.

What I do really isn’t that dangerous.

No. Exactly.

I mean, no animals were hurt during the making of this movie. It’s harmless shit. People say Ubu is the Wikileaks of the avant-garde, but Wikileaks foments revolution, Ubu distributes abstract film. I mean come on, honestly, you can’t compare the two, it’s ridiculous, why would you? I’m dealing with poetry and avant-garde art, what the fuck, that’s not dangerous.

But that’s not what a lot of those avant-garde artists thought. A lot of them thought art could be revolutionary and subversive.

I don’t think it can from the outside, but I think it can change things from the inside.

Hm.

People screaming outside the walls of the academy are seen as insane and won’t get a chance to get in to change it; they never have and they never will. You’re going to be ignored. When you think of the most radical revolutionary art of the century: Warhol, super sane, Cage, super sane. These were not crazy people. Frank Zappa, super sane. Super straight, not outsiders at all. They were able to present a sane enough face to the world that they were able to get in and change the world. The outsiders never got in.

III.

Constantly toeing this line seems to boil down to a practice for you, a discipline. It’s like what you say in your essay on dumbness, where the state of smart dumbness is something you arrive at through smartness and requires skill and dedication to maintain.

Yeah.

And it’s the same with your writing. You touch on it in Uncreative Writing, and it can be inferred from your output, that your writing is rooted in a constant practice, less product-oriented even though it may materialize as a product from time to time. So this practice of being dumb and of uncreative writing, how does it manifest in your life? What is it like?

Well, I don’t have to be inspired to write, that’s for sure. I can do it anytime, anywhere, for ten minutes or ten hours, waiting for the doctor or in the airport. It becomes part of life, part of the rhythm. I don’t need inspiration. Though I do get inspiration. I get inspired once every eight or nine years and then I need years to get it out of me.

Inspired meaning you have, what, an idea you think is shareable?

Yeah, an idea that’s nagging at me, that needs to get out. I keep rolling over these ideas, testing them in my mind, and if one lodges in my mind and won’t leave while I’m working on something, then I think it’s probably worth spending another dozen years pursuing.

It seems like you had a moment of inspiration when you decided to do Seven American Deaths and Disasters. You wrote that addendum to your essay on boredom around then saying you were done with being boring and bored. How did you arrive at that point?

Well, I published Day, retyping a day’s New York Times, and it was constantly misread. Everyone thought the day was September eleventh two thousand and one when it was actually September first two thousand, but I thought, Hey, that’s a good idea, so I went and found the paper from September eleventh, not the twelfth, where you see the planes going in, but the day of, the paper everyone was carrying, and I retyped that whole thing, and it was very moving, everything was foretold in the paper, very ominous, very strange, and very moving, and I thought, Wow, I’m doing the same thing I did before but I’m working with hot content, hot material, and I’m having a whole different situation, this is amazing, I can do the same thing and get a different result. What if I start working with texts that are really hot, really loaded? So from there I went online and found nine-eleven air-checks from radio shows, broadcasting guys watching the towers fall, and I began transcribing those, and I thought these are good, very interesting, just transcription, which I love to do, and I thought, I should do a series of these, what else, what else would have that kind of emotional resonance?

That sudden fascination with dramatic, like you said, hot material, it does seem to, not contradict, I mean, it’s a perfectly natural development, but it’s different from your previous practice.

I was bored with that practice. I was bored with being bored. What could I do? Within uncreative writing there are legions retyping or data scraping the Internet and publishing books, but I don’t need to do that anymore, that work for me is finished. I did that for a while. Time to move on.

What are you moving on to?

Well, finishing the thing I’ve been working on for the last eight years, a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for New York City in the twentieth century. I just signed a contract to publish it and that’s what I’m working on now.

Are you nearing the end?

Yeah, well, now there’s closure. A manuscript of half a million words is due in two years, so I’ve got to tie that one up now. I’ve been working on it nonstop for eight years, and now I need to shape it and get to the finish line.

It seems like Benjamin’s been a touchstone for you.

I don’t know. I mean, Benjamin people are angry about this project, I’ve gotten a lot of pushback from people who feel they own Walter Benjamin. A lot of people think they own him, and he’s an untouchable figure, and of course a saint on a lot of levels, so the fact that one would redo Benjamin and rethink Benjamin is blasphemous for a lot of people. I don’t understand Benjamin the way most people do. I’m not too concerned with Marxism. You know, media theory I like; the collecting stuff I like. I’m not a huge Benjamin fan. But I really love that book. I mean, I liked Benjamin before that, but when I saw about that book I thought, Man, I want to do something like that.

You’ve said it’s a nice book to float around in instead of reading linearly.

Yeah, I’ve never read the thing.

I’m interested in these new ways of reading, new strategies, and how they relate to uncreative writing. It seems like you’re proposing a kind of experimental reading, where reading in new ways becomes a practice as well, just like writing and archiving; that the three go together.

Well, I’ve said the new writing is not writing and the new reading is not reading. It’s moving information, parsing, bypassing. You can’t do the deep engagement, there are too many interesting things. I talked about that in Uncreative Writing, about Twitter, the headline, but you see it even more so today. I think the citation today is more relevant than the thing it is citing. The citation is more relevant than the cited. Sometimes I’ll tweet out on Ubu a four-oh-four, a page where I messed up the link, and before I even have a chance to fix it, it’s been retweeted two hundred and fifty times. That means not a single one of them has clicked on the link! It’s just a cool name, Wow, William S. Burroughs, I’m going to pass that along and get some cred. People just move this stuff around.

That’s funny.

And that’s the evacuation of content. Content is no longer king. It’s all the scaffolding, the structural stuff around the content that we care about, all the paratextual stuff. The text is the last thing we care about, the last thing you read. Nobody reads it. You don’t want to say nobody. People still read. But I think a lot of people use language differently than close reading. We’re living in a time of radical changes and that’s one of them, that we all have short attention spans now. And I think it’s a new avant-garde, the short attention span.

I want to talk about “The Death of the Author,” Barthes, how what you define as uncreative writing grows out of a lot of the things he talks about there, and also his vision of the reader, the rebirth of the reader, and what that could mean. You talk about the difference between an absorptive relationship to a work and a, what was it, generative?

Reflective.

Yeah, it’s really in S/Z that he gets into that, the readerly text and the writerly text, the writerly text is the executable file, you can go in and tinker with it; one is untouchable and the other is ultimately remixable. I think S/Z gets closer to those ideas, the real exploration of that article; it’s a great book. Yeah, you know, I tweeted out that Barthes was on Ubu, the Aspen magazine from sixty-seven, which was the first time “The Death of the Author” was published in English, and somebody responded saying, Wow, I remember when I used to really believe in those ideas, and how far I’ve drifted from them now. When you look at culture now, there’s no trace of Barthes, no trace of the death of the author, it doesn’t exist, it’s been so forgotten, you have authorial voices, unchallenged authorial voices, literary fiction, no trace of that in writing of people like Jonathan Franzen or even people who know better, like Jonathan Lethem, or the entire New Yorker, it’s all authorial, you know, the authentic. But I actually think those writers are somewhat irrelevant. I mean, they’re entertaining, but it seems so naive to me. These guys know this stuff, but they’ll tank their market if they start fucking with it; they’re slaves to their multimillion-dollar market; they can’t write the books they probably know they should be writing because they’ll lose those big advances; they’re slaves, you know? But I think for anyone who’s not like that, and who’s in touch with web culture, Barthes and his ideas are still valuable signposts.

IV.

So I had this weird Ubuweb moment recently when right before going to bed one night I was reading that thing Three Dialogues with Beckett and this guy I forget.

Yeah, Georges … I know it. I know of it.

They’re talking about modern artists, and Beckett is trying to give his vision of a new art, and at one point he says, What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane?

Hm.

Then I closed my computer and went to bed, but couldn’t sleep. So I got up and took a book off my shelf, The Temptation to Exist, by E.M. Cioran, which has this great introduction by Susan Sontag. And the epigraph of the intro, one of the epigraphs, is that same Beckett quote!

It’s a good quote.

But it was uncanny, this really weird coincidence. And it’s been …

Rattling around.

Yeah.

Hm, interesting.

And I wanted to, I don’t know, just float the quote by you, because it seems like you’ve thought about Beckett a lot.

Hm, yeah. Well, writing that way is untenable. You’re never going to win doing that. Which is why Eugenides doesn’t do it. Clearly he wants to win. And yet, you know, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, like Beckett does. The untenable is also the utopian, that which cannot stand, for whatever reason. That’s why Ubuweb is untenable and yet it’s enacted, which is really remarkable, for all this time, it shouldn’t have gone on this long, it’s untenable. I’m going to break copyright law, that’s untenable. But it tests reality. And those are huge victories. Sometimes people give me things and sometimes I just post things and get away with it, and I get a much bigger thrill out of the untenability of breaking the law than I do making it more legitimate, moving toward tenability. The untenable is magic. The tenable, there’s nothing left to strive for. It’s not defeatist. You just try to live in a state of untenability.

I like that take. The Sontag essay with the Beckett quote is ultimately about John Cage. The other epigraph is from Cage: Every now and then it is possible to have absolutely nothing; the possibility of nothing. She talks about this kind of intellectual and artistic crisis mid-century, and how Cioran was the dark poet of the impasse, while Cage was really doing something new and opening new pathways.

Yeah, Cage opens a door. He doesn’t keep doing the same thing. He may use the same process but it’s a door out. An exit strategy.

And I wanted to ask what you think of Cage, what he’s meant to you.

I’ve found Cage to be very helpful at certain periods of life, philosophically, musically; you know, he had a beautiful ear; he’s been really important to me. But I found there were limits to Cage. He said anything could be music, but there were some sounds that weren’t permitted, sounds of violence, sounds of anger, sounds of hip-hop, most popular culture wasn’t permitted because it was violent; so his ethics, or what Joan Retallack would call his “poethics,” actually got in the way of him enacting what he really believed in. So then I jumped over to Warhol, who did away with that, who was a-ethical, not unethical but a-ethical, totally transparent and permeable for everything in a way Cage could only speculate about being. But it got ugly for Warhol, it’s really an ugly position, it’s real but it didn’t turn out well, and it turned out pretty well for Cage. Ethics helped Cage, but philosophically Warhol was truer.

This idea of the untenable reminds me of your essay “Provisional Language,” which forms this sort of coda to Uncreative Writing. Language waiting to be undone. It’s kind of utopian and apocalyptic at once.

Yeah, it comes off of Rem Koolhaas’s idea of provisional architecture, junkspace, the architecture of airports, the flimsiness: you go into Heathrow and realize the whole thing’s an ugly stage set. Everything’s so cheap but made to look really substantial. A Brooks Brothers shop in the Heathrow shopping mall is nothing but sheetrock you can punch your fist through.

Haha.

It’s architecture that wasn’t meant to last, and now it’s the same with language. Words come together temporarily, form constellations of meaning, and then are blown apart again. You take that into the digital world, the transferability of language in the digital ecosystem, it’s not that much different from busting down a sheetrock wall or reusing the wood in the store to build a hotdog stand over there. It’s all provisional. Language is provisional. This language wasn’t meant to stay together forever. The bound book is an absolute illusion. Words are splayed out, torrented, spammed, emailed. What are words worth now? They’re cheap. They’re super cheap.

It’s kind of like when you talk about how literary works and literary careers just pop up and spread like memes and then vanish.

Yeah, I mean, I see it. Like Printing Out the Internet, like, I actually became a meme, on Know Your Meme I was an official meme, and it was amazing, how it spread like wildfire and then died, bang, psh, fabulous. We generated six hundred pages of press around that fucking project, around the world. So I ended up enacting that scenario for real and it was fucking wild.

Can you step back and tell me about that show?

Did you see the pictures?

I saw the ones of

Of me floating on the giant sea of paper?

No!

Oh, go google that one up, it’s amazing, they’re all over the web. Anyway, yeah, it went really crazy. What happened was, I was asked to do this show as a tribute to Aaron Swartz at a big gallery in Mexico City and I began looking for artworks that materialized the quantity of the Internet. I came across some pretty amazing stuff, like a guy who made a book this high where he’d bound every picture of Natalie Portman on the Internet, and I was like, Wow, and another woman had bound every article written about the Iraq war, this high, seventy-two thousand-page volumes in this giant spread across a gallery.

Oh my god.

But each of those gestures seemed too small and too prescribed to get at the enormity of what Swartz heisted from JSTOR, or what Snowden was leaking, or Manning. And I started to think about how to deal with that quantity, that enormity, and I thought, Fuck it, let’s print the Internet, let’s crowd source it, there are ten billion pages on the Internet and six billion people in the world, if everyone sends in two pages, we’ll have more than enough!

Totally.

So I put out the call and by the time it was over I had ten tons of paper contributed by twenty thousand people from around the world, a giant pile in Mexico City up to the ceiling of a place like this. These boxes came in and I threw them into a big pile and that was it. It was pretty cool.

And is that all you really wanted to point to, the enormity?

Yeah, the quantity, the enormity, information overload, how little we are, how big everything else is, a scale thing, magnitude, the new metrics of infinite.

Something clicked in my head with Benjamin’s idea of the constellation, in this context of printing out the Internet at this one moment in time.

Where it can all constellate, come together, and blow apart again.

Yeah.

Yeah, hm, I like that too. I mean, I didn’t have much of an agenda, no political point, nothing ecological, not even much to do with Swartz in the end. It was a poetic gesture, like, Wow, what would happen if we fucking printed the Internet? Not a whole lot more behind it, but it triggered something I didn’t expect, a global conversation, it touched some kind of nerve I hadn’t intended. I was like, I don’t know, I’m a curator, let’s print the Internet! It was actually very stupid, very dumb, fucking dumb, no great idea, that was the dumb part, let’s print the whole thing, haha, of course it’s impossible, we don’t even know what it is, haha, so it was just a dumb idea, and it touched some crazy nerve, and vanished, poof.

Like everything.

Yeah.

VI.

Do you feel that, like Cage, you’ve opened doors for writers?

I think the work I’ve done points in a direction, not the direction; it’s some kind of bridge between. I look at some of these writers data scraping and publishing, you talk about untenable, ridiculous works, they’re publishing all in PDF and their publisher is Lulu, they can make the most ridiculous things; there’s this guy named Chris Alexander who made a work called McNugget where he scraped all of Twitter for every mention of the word McNugget and made like a six hundred page book.

Haha.

Now you can buy that book for 30 dollars, and I don’t know how many people will buy that book, but it’s wonderful, it blows open weird notions of authorship, poetry, publishing, code, distribution. I think a lot of the younger writers are moving toward this. But my production was always very prescribed, and when people criticize me for it, I take them and say, Hey, you’re absolutely right, but I’m 52 years old and I’ve been doing this for a long time. I think the next wave is really blowing the whole thing open. Things are changing really quick and you’re lucky to have a little window to work in before the culture moves on. One continues to work, but the game’s moved elsewhere now, beyond what I could ever conceive of.

Okay, so you feel like you have this window, you’ve imagined your own obsolescence. I’m just curious, looking into the future, if you feel like there’s some aspect of your work or something that you’ve learned that will continue to be relevant.

You know—if nothing else, I’ve tried to bring writing up to speed with things that have long been taken for granted in the other arts and never tested in writing. Copying was never tested in writing, never. I mean, it was proposed by Borges in “Menard,” but even that wasn’t retyping, it was an original work, this weird thing, kind of a magical realism. So that, wow, that’s weird, it’s weird that it hadn’t been done, and now it’s very natural, you know, with cut and paste and here we are in the digital age. Again, it’s so stupid, so dumb, that only an artist could do it, dumb like Duchamp is dumb, dumb like Cage is dumb. As far as the future, I don’t know. I see these younger writers data scraping and doing much wilder things than I did, it may just fizzle, there may be no legacy, it could be there was this weird moment of conceptualism in writing, and everyone’ll be like, Remember that? And everyone’s like, Oh yeah.

Ha.

Cage always said his audience was perpetually one of students, because people have the time and the open mind to embrace these crazy ideas, but the minute they, quote, “grow up” they reject them as a waste of time, because they have family to support. But he said, you know, Don’t worry, there’s always more students.

Nice.

So I don’t know if there’s a legacy to it, but I do know it’s been very much of its time, and I think that’s all an artist can hope for, and I think my writing does that pretty adequately, for writing, in this weird time, figuring that out. It’s of its time. But that time is moving on to another time.

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Image: Kenneth Goldsmith at Street Poets and Visionaries, Mercer Union. Toronto, 2009. Charla Jones/Globe and Mail.

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Kenneth Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb and teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published ten books of poetry, including Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001) and Day (2003), and the American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is also the author of the non-fiction work Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (2011). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art’s first Poet Laureate.

Junot Díaz: “We exist in a constant state of translation. We just don’t like it.”

admin — Sat, 04 May 2013 21:19:52 +0000

Interview by Karen Cresci

[The translation into English of the initial Spanish-language section of the interview can be found at the bottom of this page.]

One sunny November afternoon I met Junot Díaz in Washington Square. As I waited for him, I wondered whether I should greet him in English or in Spanish. I decided to let him issue the first word. When he got there, he embraced me warmly and said, “Hola!” (Aha, I thought: Spanish.) We started talking about life in New York and about NYU, where he was then Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, and about his visit to the Buenos Aires International Book Fair in 2010. We decided to go to a nearby café, and almost as soon as I began to ask him questions about literature, the writerly Junot came out and began to speak in English.

Díaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and immigrated to New Jersey as a child, speaks a language that is as hybrid as that of many of his fictional characters. With his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, he made a place for himself in American letters and has been widely acclaimed in Latin America, as well. He is one of only two Latino writers to win the Pulitzer Prize, and in May, 2010, Díaz became the first Latino to be selected to sit on the board of jurors for the Pulitzer.

Díaz spoke only his mother tongue when he moved to the U.S., but in his adolescence he went years without reading in Spanish, reconnecting with the language as an adult. He says that “returning to a language is like returning to an old relationship—it often requires more courage than striking up a new one.” So my first question was:

¿Cómo funcionó la colaboración con la traducción al español de Eduardo Lago de tu colección de cuentos Drown?

Eduardo was incredibly sensitive about this idea that si estamos hablando de un mercado latino, tú tienes que hacer una traducción neutral, que no puede ser muy español, no puede ser muy mejicano. Eduardo quería realizar una traducción muy neutral porque hay un mercado, pero—imagínate, me tenía al lado—también quería capturar los ritmos caribeños, dominicanos. Había esa tensión. Tienes que mantener the water level, pero también tú quieres calentar la vaina un poquito.

Con la novela era diferente. El narrador de la novela es tan fuerte que no valía la pena tratar de neutralizarlo, porque el tipo es tan agresivo. Eso nos dio más espacio, más libertad.

A Eduardo le interesan mucho los U.S. Latinos. Tu nomás tienes que ver lo que él ha hecho ahí en el instituto Cervantes, todo esos programas para U.S. Latinos, por primera vez. Estamos hablando de un hombre que tenía esa sensibilidad, esa filosofía. Yo creo que eso tiene que ver mucho con su trabajo como traductor, especialmente en ese libro. No es sólo tratar de mantener sonidos, mantener la estética, ese hablar del narrador. Había una orientación U.S. Latino que fue muy importante. There’s a flexibility to his castellano that is not always present in any of us who come from countries where we imagine que nuestro idioma is completely immutable.

We also have to understand that en los Estados Unidos we have a Spanish that is deeply affected by each other’s Spanishes. That un dominicano puede usar palabras mejicanas, palabras cubanas, palabras boricuas. It was important to have that kind of flexibility. It was very useful that Eduardo was oriented around this idea that in any U.S. Latino there are going to exist multiple Spanish registers.

I think that one of the most terrible inheritances of the colonial experience for us Latinos has been our fragmentation. We don’t consider each other’s Spanishes as anything more that idiosyncratic local peculiarities that are wonderful to make jokes about, but we don’t see them as sources of knowledge and experiences. We see them somehow as signifying cultural essences or being part of a moral code or calculus, some sort of moral metric. Because the way you speak represents “Argentineness,” which is a moral position, when we should be thinking of each other’s Spanishes as enormously rich bodies of knowledge, bodies of histories, bodies of experience, and inside of them, embedded in them, there’s an enormous amount of political apparatus. It’s the heartbreak of those of us who work in languages to understand this and to try to find a way to fight it.

It’s almost 20 years since Drown was published and I still have people saying to me:

“Listen, you used a Puerto Rican word here. That’s not Dominican and therefore you’re not Dominican.”

What is the role of English in the translations of your books? If you compare Achy Obejas’ translation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Eduardo Lago’s translation of Drown, there’s a lot more English in Obejas’ version.

We certainly talked about this. It often takes a while for you to figure out what the fuck you actually did. I was able to do things in Drown that I didn’t understand. Then one begins to understand it and it makes it easier to create a template for the translation. By the time Oscar Wao came around I was far more aware of the game I have with code-switching, with bilinguality, but also with the, I would call it, ancient somatic tension between English and Spanish. The two languages have felt themselves threatened by each other for a very long time.

The pivot of what we call the modern was around the eclipsing of Spain and the rise of England. The two languages circled each other. At any moment one could have collapsed or taken over far more quickly. For a very long time, the English went to sleep and had nightmares of Spanish. The Spanish would go to bed and have nightmares about the English. This most ancient competition plays itself out in the New World in very interesting and novel ways.

Do you think that discovering a pattern of what you are doing made you more confident to encourage Achy Obejas to include more English in her translation? Or was it her decision?

Both of us. Achy took one look at this and knew that what was important about this was maintaining the code-switching, the presences of both languages, the bilinguality, or better said, “linguistic simultaneity”. I also understood it clearly. When the book was I the first thing I knew was that I was going to do in Oscar Wao what I didn’t have the insight, nor the capacity, nor, I would argue, the facility to have done in the first book.

This pattern wasn’t as clear when Drown came out?

I don’t think it was clear in my head. My immigrant position, both in Spanish and in English—I’m as much an immigrant to Spanish as I am to English—means that I have no confidence of either language or in either language.

Doesn’t that also make you feel safer to play and experiment?

I don’t know, you tell me. When you’re uncomfortable with something do you feel that you can play with it? One should never be too deterministic about this. When you’re not comfortable with something you’re far more likely to be more formulaic.

What was so interesting about this thing is that there were certain translators in different countries who spent way more time harassing me. The French translator, she ended up winning this enormous award for her translation. That woman was on my case 24/7 because she decided to pretend that she didn’t know a word of English. It was fascinating. She decided to pretend that she was an alien to both languages. So the thing that would seem most self evident to you, she would query. And it helped her narrow in on shades of meaning. She got it on the “millimeter wave.” On the X-ray spectrum there’s this thing called the millimeter wave where you can X-ray down to an incredibly fine point. She’d brought her understanding down to that. And it really helped her with her translation. She knew where she could play and where she could go.

What about translations into other languages?

I can’t remember who it was, one of the Eastern European languages. That woman translator was so obsessive that she created 40 pages of queries that in fact ended up being used by everyone else. She just drove me nuts. Every five pages there would be five pages of queries. In the end she was a very good template.

The Japanese translator, rather than to farm out to query me, used the template and formed a team of experts that assisted him.

When I went to Japan, I met the science fiction role playing team. These guys know everything about table-top role playing games and therefore were able to assist them with even the most esoteric references which none of the European or Latin American translators cared about. When they would encounter “nerdish” they would skip over. It was so interesting. The Japanese took it very seriously. They figured out more than anyone else that the true meaning of the novel was in the nerdish. So they provided for their readers a key with all of them. They got almost everything. The head guy was basically crowd sourcing to a couple of thousand Japanese role-playing people. He would put a reference out that nobody in the Earth would know. There was a map from a role playing game. Not in the rules, not in the body of the text, but a map. In the map there was a location. I made a joke about a role playing game map that only has a thousand copies. These motherfuckers found it! That was most satisfying.

This is what I mean, we’re beginners. The way we think that our demotic idiosyncrasies that are idiomatic expressions are things that can be dispensed with, that we can find equivalences and therefore strip the text of all of its history, all of its politics—because usually that’s where the body of knowledge, the folkloric knowledge rests. These guys sought to understand it at every level, including the role playing games, because there is an enormous political charge in the role-playing references in the novel.

And that is belittled because of generic status?

Without question. Role-playing games are in narrative rankings what code-switching Spanish is in castellano. It’s amazing how you can give deference to one but still get rid of the other. Even the people who were sensitive to one set of registers were completely dismissive of others.

Do you enjoy working with translators?

We exist in a constant state of translation. We just don’t like it. We don’t like to be reminded that we are translating this experience. Translators remind us of our relationship with language the way not everyone is comfortable with. The idea that I would be perturbed or burdened by the only thing I do naturally which is to translate… Again, because I don’t have a natural language I’m not troubled by people who remind me of that. I don’t think it’s some virtue of mine, I think it’s just an accident of me, not a value that I have somehow cultivated.

You once said that “being read outside the U.S. now doesn’t change that my primary readership is still close to home. I don’t have an internationalism running through me.” Has this changed after Oscar Wao?

I think that what I was speaking to was the specificity of audience. Which is to say that for me what makes work rise to the universal, what makes work able to cross borders so that people are interested is by maintaining an obsessive particular focus on strategic audience. By keeping the audience incredibly local, or incredibly narrow you in fact become universal because the universal rises out of the particular. My audience, while narrow, is diasporic. It’s a very small group on both sides of this divide that we call immigration in Santo Domingo and the U.S.

What I’ve learned most significantly is that our geographic national projects for language are rarely more than inane simplifications. I think I have no more understanding of the way the immense wave of language works than a guy that surfs really well and speaks to this profound understanding of oceanic forces. The older I get and the more time I spend in language work, the more aware I am of how little I understand the powerful forces that have allowed both English and Spanish to spread across the world, to thrive, to create entirely new edifices for themselves, which permits the kind of linguistic simultaneity that I so thrill in.

How do you feel when you are labeled as “Latino”?

In my mind, names are a question to which there is never an answer. If we think that these names are answers, clearly we are never gonna be satisfied with any of them.

Names are both local and collective. It’s not enough if you wanna call yourself “reina.” If no one else does, how valid is your name? I think there is always an individual response and then there’s collective interaction.

I have absolutely no problem with being Latino as long as it doesn’t eliminate the fact that I’m also Dominican, and African diasporic, and from New Jersey. We can use these names strategically, sentimentally, politically, collectively, and I don’t see any problem in this.

Certainly I would argue that “Hispanic” is such a stupid name because it serves no real purpose, it’s ugly. I’m just offended on an aesthetic level. Only someone who doesn’t like to dance thinks Hispanic sounds good.

Because we are marginalized and subaltern, we take offense about generalities they way that people in power never will. Americans…There’s no such thing as an American! They are so incredibly fractured, but because there’s privilege in the fiction people have no problems with it. We, on the other hand, take offence at the fiction. I sometimes think it is because it would ask us to the occasion as a collective. Secretly we are afraid to identify as a collective. We’ve got too much the subaltern in us. I think there is unnecessary dialectics between self-identification, collective identification. This seems like the status of ‘native’ as a nervous condition that Fanon describes.

When the interview was over, Junot started speaking Spanish again: “No terminaste tu café,” he said—“You didn’t finish your coffee.” Junot, a Latino not afraid of identifying with his community, has done much to tell the story of his people in his work. His short story “Monstro,” a dystopic tale that takes place on the island of La Española, was published last spring in The New Yorker’s special Science Fiction Issue. That story serves as the point of departure for his next novel, also titled Monstro, to be released at an as-yet undetermined date. His last book, the short story collection This Is How You Lose Her, was released in the United States on September 11 of last year.

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Image: Nina Subin
Coming soon: A review of This Is How You Lose Her by Carmen Machado.

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[Translation of opening paragraphs of the interview; text in italics originally appeared in English. Click here to go back to the beginning.]

How did the collaboration between you and Eduardo Lago on the translation into Spanish of your short story collection Drown work?

Eduardo was incredibly sensitive about this idea that if we’re talking about a Latino market, you have to do a neutral translation, which can’t be too Spanish or too Mexican. Eduardo wanted to do this very neutral translation because there is a market, but—you know, he had me there—he also wanted to capture the Caribbean and the Dominican rhythms. There was that tension. You have to maintain the status quo, but you also want to cause a little stir, at the same time.

It was different with the novel. The narrator of the novel is so intense that there was no point in trying to neutralize him, because the guy is just so aggressive. That gave us a little more room, more freedom.

Eduardo is very interested in Latinos in the U.S. Just look at everything he’s done at the Cervantes Institute, all those programs for Latinos in the U.S., for the first time ever. We’re talking about a man with that sensitivity, that philosophy. I think that has a lot to do with his work as a translator, especially with that book. It’s not just trying to keep sounds, maintain the aesthetic, that way of speaking that the narrator has. There was a U.S. Latino orientation that really determined a lot. There’s a flexibility to his Spanish that is not always present in any of us who come from countries where we imagine that our language is completely immutable.

We also have to understand that in the United States we have a Spanish that is deeply affected by each other’s Spanishes. That a Dominican may use Mexican words, Cuban words, Puerto Rican words. It was important to have that kind of flexibility. It was very useful that Eduardo was oriented around this idea that in any U.S. Latino there are going to exist multiple Spanish registers.