Hillary's Ethnopoetics Blog

2010-05-29T19:48:00.001-07:00

Revisiting Technicians of the Sacred

2005-11-28T18:21:00.000-08:00

Talking with a professor the other week, I came to learn that, when broken down, the term “translatio” (“across/carry”) is a classical rhetorical term for the Greek word, “metaphor (“across/bear”). In light of this knowledge, I came to appreciate the brilliance and hilarity of The Tablets, a work that owns not only its expression, but also its origin/inspiration and its interpretive/critical reception. By confining the terrain of meaning to the text itself, Schwerner suggests, “It’s all right here…everything to feel, everything to understand…it’s all present in the text.” But, it isn’t. The Tablets shows us ellipses, stutterings, gaps galore. And so it seems there is much to be “carried across” within a single text, a single voice, a single poetic vision.

Revisiting The Technicians of the Sacred for this week, I was struck by Rothenberg’s prefatory note that “[…] the carry-over (by translation or interpretation) necessarily distorts where it chooses some part of the whole that it can meaningfully deal with”(xx). So, it seems that the carry-over, the metaphor, the translation…any re-articulation or re-presentation...will necessarily change the “original.” In class, like a swarm of bees, we have hovered around the idea of the “original” as a mere construct that makes translation possible. Thus, what is altered in a translation is simply an illusory notion, the notion of an original and definitive starting point. What does it mean to re-articulate, re-present an illusion? In a self-reflexive, tongue-in-cheek manner, Schwerner forces us to question this question…and, thereby, to meditate upon our motivations, interests, and tendencies as translators…and in this meditation lies the “honey” of it all.

It was fun and enlightening to review The Technicians of the Sacred this weekend. I enjoyed remembering how I approached the text the first time (my notes still in the margins) and to recognize how my perspective on Rothenberg, ethnopoetics, translation, and this class in general has changed. I looked over my marginal notes, all marked by a frustration with paradoxes and discrepancies which I now understand are necessary, and I realized that I must’ve condensed the discourse of ethnopoetics to the level of the primitive in an attempt to understand, even dominate, it. But, what is seemingly primitive (the ethnopoetic debates) is, indeed, complex, not to mention humbling in its provocative limitlessness.

Unlike my interpretive perspective, my particular attractions to Technicians of the Sacred have remained the same. I still love the idea of challenging the boundary between poetry and the world in which it “lives” by including taxonomies as literature. I’m also very fond of the picture songs, which require a new kind of reading, one not limited to the dynamics among the graphic image, its conceptual anchor(s), and the reader’s particular associative investment. This new kind of reading, with pictures atop words, forces a kind of interaction/exchange/dialogue within the solitary, monologic act of reading. Lastly (it must be said) I adore the particular brand of scatology found in Technicians of the Sacred. Rather than dropping curse words (and, thereby, neutering the would-be perversity with overt self-consciousness), these poems harness the truly transgressive in the form of good ol’ potty mouth.

delivering meaning in eshleman and schwerner

2005-11-15T10:43:00.000-08:00

Both Juniper Fuse and The Tablets animate and reify the otherwise referential (that is, externally-dependent and, therefore, essentially neutral) space between (1) totality and (2) indeterminacy. Suggesting an attempt to extend across the expanse and plunge down the layers of truth (or at least meaning), both Clayton Eshleman and Armand Schwerner draw and play upon wide and varied incorporations of genre, voice, tone, and subject matter. Despite the poets’ shared desire to harness “total translations,” however, both Eshleman and Schwerner cite magical (or imagined) inspirations for their poetry and, thus, naturally adopt ludic (sometimes ironic) approaches to their poetic creations. These practitioners, therefore, present total play as literary artifacts (as opposed to presenting total literary artifacts as (based on) play). While, on the total level, Eshleman and Schwerner deny the conclusivity (ultimate authority) of their texts, on the localized level, these poets strive to incorporate as much narrative/poetic diversity as they can wedge inside a single book’s binding. In other words, the constituting selections of Juniper Fuse and The Tablets are each marked by their power to represent a piece of the total range of human vocality and vision.

Personally, I was much more affected by Juniper Fuse than I was by The Tablets. This is probably due to the fact that I’m very interested in psychoanalysis and feminism and some of the ideas that Eshleman presented and then wove through poetic designs have special significance in these domains. I’ll touch on what I felt to be the most striking example from each category.

First of all, Eshleman notes that “cave exploration in the Upper Paleolithic was stimulated by regressive fantasies concerning the insides of the mother’s body”(xvii), that “[t]hose who do not attempt to realize their symbolic fetal role risk moving from substitute womb to substitute womb their whole lives”(xxi), that “[t]he transformation of regressive penetration into the forming of self-conceived images is one of the ways this second birth is brought about”(xxi), and, finally, that “…the oral-oriented ‘scooping out’ of the mother’s body (which it is believed imbues caves with a womblike atmosphere) becomes in a later phase a genital ‘scooping out’ or masturbation (with its lateral analogues to image making”(232). The transition from wanting to return (get back into) the mother’s body to the formulation and recognition of the desire to enter substitute (symbolic) wombs, and to the displaced desire to “make fire” through masturbation is echoed in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s explanation of the emergence and re-direction of desire.

Lacan explains that desire emanates from the separation that an infant experiences during the mirror stage of his development. During this stage, the infant comes to a pre-verbal awareness that his inner world of introjected images is separate from the outside world of actual objects. The remnants of otherness that remain in the infant after this realization produce a profound anxiety. The infant’s response to this distress is to attempt to “reunite” with the outer world that he paradoxically believes was once a part of him and of which he now understands he is a part.

Not surprisingly, what is most traumatic for the infant during his identification of otherness is his understanding that he and his mother are separate entities. Thus, desire’s original (and most representative form) is the infant’s yearning to re-unite himself with his mother. As this potential unity is now tinged with the awareness of otherness, however, the desire to return or retreat inward to a state of homogeneity is quickly transformed into a desire to re-cognize (i.e., know again) this state of homogeneity via the embodiment of otherness.

Regarding the second (feminist related) point, in Barbara MacLeod’s 1972 report of her sensory isolation in the caves of Belize, the woman writes, “The most striking feature of the early phase, beginning within some four hours, was synaesthesia”(133). In the Middle Ages, a female saint (anchoress) would enclose herself from the outside world in a tiny dwelling, barely large enough for her body. Within her tiny enclosure, deprived from “outside” sensory experience, the saint would sometimes report to have “visions” during which she would claim to have used all of her physical senses to perceive external stimuli. MacLeod’s observations that, within the cave, she “felt that ‘anything’ could happen”(133-4) and, later, that she “…felt [her]self to be everywhere in [the cave] all at once”(135) serve as personal testimony to the fact that sensory deprivation of one kind can force new alignments (and degrees) of a sensory experience.

Also in Juniper Fuse, I was fascinated by Eshleman’s idea that humans used cave engraving/painting to objectify (and, thus, abstract) the animal half of themselves from which they sought to separate (recalling Schwerner’s inextricable face/ass dualism(79)). Eshleman notes that the act of drawing lines across a wall (as opposed to breaking into it) suggests a displacement from being at one with the impulsive animal to becoming an imaginative human. (In Schwerner’s case, by referring to the Tablet, the title of his book, as “The Rorschach idea,” as “completely [ ],” and “like the bird that flies up its own asshole”(127-28), it seems that the poet means to present The Tablets as a “wall” for his readership to recognize as an artifact pregnant “with value” and to help deliver this value via the birth of one’s own imaginative investment).

On a final note on Juniper Fuse, I also enjoyed learning that, in a particular cave painting, man is depicted as a fleck that has the power to puncture and fracture the whole scene with his “point”(32). I was further struck by a fact concerning a Cro-Magnon depiction of a horse painted on a cave’s ceiling. Regarding this painting, Eshleman observes that “…to view it one must scrunch backward on one’s back, head craned back in the same position as the stag’s”(xvii). Interactive visual art of the Cro-Magnon era? Who knew?

"speech" transcription

2005-11-06T17:16:00.000-08:00

First a note on this week's readings:
I found Dell Hymes' "Breakthrough into Performance" to be an incredibly useful guide for one (such as myself) who wants to execute a highly elaborate transcription/translation experiment, yet has no idea where to begin (i.e., which criteria of performances to examine, emphasize, compare, and, in my case, abstract from).
Hymes notes that a performance is inaugurated when an individual assumes the responsibility of performing. Once a performance is underway, the performer showcases his creativity by adapting his performance to accommodate ("reach") the audience at hand. The idea of a performative act being energized by a conscious/active will (not to mention the suggestion that creativity is an integral feature of performance) is a marked departure from the notion of performance as "blind and passive imitation," an idea that we've touched upon in class. On this note, Hymes also presents performance as the symbiotic counterpart to tradition. That is, performances constitute traditions and "tradition itself exists partly for the sake of performance"(86).
Hymes suggests that, by attending to features and devices such as narrative concepts, stages, and sequences, generalizations/specifications, euphemisms, local and total syntax, verb tenses, repetition (of phonemes, parts of speech, etc.), one can begin to formulate narrative "shapes" from a collection of performances. In turn, one can compare these shapes and abstract from them a truly representative keynote, from which an all-encompassing transcription/translation can be created.
Further (and most interestingly) Hymes seems to encourage transcribers/translators not to accept the position of "outsider" to performance, but to situate themselves upon/identify themselves as frames between performance (expression) and interpretation (reception and response). With one eye on the living performance (oneself) and the other on the performance's reception (the audience), a true performer becomes what (s)he does (i.e., the middle point between expression to understanding).
Dr. Sherwood, I wonder if you can refer me to materials that are similar to "Breakthrough to Performance" in terms of their suggestions for how one might identify/analyze performativity.

Now...
Seeing as how my first transcription was a kind of performance (it was my index finger, after all, that served as the "bouncing ball" by which the class could follow along with the transcription), I decided devote this week's remaining blog space to another transcription, that of Anne Waldman's "Two Hearts," a selection that I found through the link entitled "PennSound Digital Audio."
Here goes...
sheeez got my hart and I've got herrr's
It was faaair we fell in LUUHVE

...........her's precious.........mine................misss
I hold..........................and.........she would

there Never was anything (((like this)))

> >>>
Her Heart in my brain
.........................................

111111111111ENO

keeps us ((()))NE

111111111111ENO

my heart in her guides thoughts and feeeling

she loves my heart for it once was her rrr's
......................................................................................

................................................................ME
.........................................................IN
I love her-......because it LIVED

.................rr's..................................

"I once" woohnded her / it was misunderstanding

and then my heart-hurt for her heart

asformeee on herherhurt didsit so I felt stillinme her hurt-hurt

hurt both
............f-us.....................hurt simultaneously

and then we saw hoowwww

.................................................... ...wwwwwww

we're =[STUCK]= with each other's hearts,,,

poem as voice; voice as bridge

2005-10-30T21:59:00.000-08:00

I’m grateful.

I’m grateful to Cecilia Vicuna for how she so brilliantly “weaves out” the knot of difference between orality and textuality. Through her “word work,” she both confronts and incorporates (questions and answers) the entire “axiom of frames” in which she’s situated. It is through this simultaneous challenge and incorporation, this exuberant struggle between the interiority of “what is” and the exterior realm of determinate meaning-making, that Vicuna is able to super-situate (i.e., both contextualize and explode) herself, her words, and her performance.

Vicuna occasions the merging of orality with textuality by way of uniting her inner body with its external “frames.” In a rather direct (albeit metaphorical) manner, Vicuna acknowledges that her body can be read. (She states in the first recording made available on AudibleWord, “A body is already a writing of arteries and veins traveling without end.”) Also, in a less forthright (i.e., de-worded) manner, Vicuna synthesizes (and, thereby, invalidates the independence of) the ostensibly separate concepts of inner purity and outer contaminations/complexities. Her sounding out of words, made palpable with emphatic use of breath (and saliva), remind one of an industrial factory…pneumatic machines releasing compressed air in a strictly patterned rhythm and tempo. Further, on at least two occasions, Vicuna brings within herself (via her words) the greater, external phenomenon of the echo.

I’m also extremely grateful to Dr. Sherwood for his both illuminating and provocative treatment of Vicuna’s 1994 performance in Buffalo. In “Sound Written and Sound Breathing: Versions of Palpable Poetics,” Sherwood reminds his readers that The New Critical perspective, founded upon the idea that a work of art is an object unto itself, generates the ancillary impulse to confine our evaluation of art to the terms of “the (singular and stable) work” itself. Further, the conflation of oral poetry with the idea of myth results in these poems’ distilled textualizations “in the course of which the variations between the tellings, the exact phrases used, the very names of the tellers, may be dropped off as a new, generalized, and condensed Myth is produced”(76). When combined, the perspective of New Criticism and the notion of “oral poem as myth” serve to circumcise the span and to castrate the virility of poetic performance. As Sherwood notes and Vicuna demonstrates, poetry can be created and understood by delving into the “versioning” of individual words, poems they comprise, and language systems at large.

In short, Sherwood shatters the relatively myopic “poem-as-site-of-meaning” perspective by echoing, through analysis, Vicuna’s sentiment that “poems have a desire of their own.” As desiring subjects (as opposed to inert objects), poems cannot be pinned down and studied as stagnant singularities. Rather, notes Sherwood, “…the difficult navigation across the versions’ spans is the only site that a poem can have”(92).

That's Not Funny

2005-10-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

For this week, I presented three recordings and a translation (in the form of a conceptual formula/essential representation). The translation represented my endeavor to encapsulate the three versions/tellings, the differences between them, and the fundamental nature/essence underscoring each and all telling(s).
What I gleaned from my presentation (thanks to Amanda) is that, because I served as both a unique subject and an interested translator, I "put some of myself" into an otherwise objective/scientific (albeit conceptual) translation. Thus, my translation represents the marriage of my inevitable subjectivity and my purpose of establishing total (i.e., both formulaic and metaphorical) accuracy. My process of translation is, thus, like the translation itself, a synthesis in that it is informed by both my unique "voice" and my desire to transcend the idea of singular (i.e., individual) expression.
Three cheers for constructive feedback!
Below is a copy of my project, complete with line-by-line commentary on my translation.

PROPOSAL:

If our aim, as translators, is to honor the contextual, corporeal, communal, and transient “present”ness of oral poetry, we must allow the spirit of oral poetry to overshadow our own purposes in translating it. Clearly, the opposite of honoring oral poets/poetry is infringing upon (and, thereby oppressing) the “other” kind of spirit, consciousness, and voice that these poets/poems epitomize. This infringing/oppressing to which I refer is the inevitable result of translation methodologies that seek only accuracy, definition, and totality, regardless of the nature of the objects to be translated. Such methodologies isolate and accentuate the dynamic between textual translations and their effects on literate audiences. What is compromised (if not entirely forgotten) in this dynamic is the very thing that is represented, the oral poem.

How is this form of oppression to be avoided? I propose that, before devising methodologies of any kind, textual translators must, in a grand communal gesture toward those from whom they wish to learn, introspectively examine their own assumptions, tendencies, and intellectual/creative desires. What I believe they will find is not a desire for fundamental change, but, rather, a common imperative for the innovation/expansion of poetry as it currently exists.

If this is, indeed, their aim (and I think it a worthy and wonderful one), their next course of action should be designing methodologies that reflect 1) who they (we) are and 2) what they (we) want. We are textual creatures who want definitive answers informed by intellectual and creative innovations. We want to see the big picture (all perspectives and all modes of communication)…but we only want to see it on our own terms. Thus, I suggest that our translations of oral poetry should take the form of conceptual formulas. The two-fold composition of these translations will, in turn, generate two-fold (and simultaneous) effects. The formulaic ½ of these translations will both make them palatable to our textual sensibilities and force us to encounter the limits of these sensibilities; the conceptual ½ will both present us with the easy challenge of interpreting an impressionistic representation and make us recognize that singular abstractions (no matter how representative they may be) will always be the secondary, solitary shadow of the vibrant panoply of play that is oral poetry.

EXPERIMENT:

I have chosen to refract an orally-based joke through three tellers, each differing from the others in terms of his/her familiarity with said joke. Subject A, whose father once told him the joke, was both familiar with the joke and comfortable telling it. Subject B heard the joke the day before she delivered it for this recording. Subject C heard the joke the day before this recording; yet, in his case, the joke was re-told to him immediately before he delivered it for this recording. I then transcribed the three versions of the joke.

MAKING A TRANSLATION:

Where/when the versions parallel one another, I have simply transferred the language from the transcriptions to the translation. On the other hand, where/when the tellers’ versions differ from one another, I have created particular metaphors that encapsulate each difference, the range of these differences, and the concept of difference itself. That is, single, textualized, and example-based metaphors serve to represent the essence of differing presentations (from the level of lived example to the plane of pure abstraction). The notion of an essential representation is paradoxical, even oxymoronic. Thus, this kind of translation is a ticking bomb that, upon the reader-interpreter’s realization of its paradox, implodes in a self-sacrificial gesture to that which it aims to honor.

Another (personal) kind of sacrifice is also at work here. Our translation reflects the limits of who we are (i.e., the personified tension between living and understanding). It is through this very reflection that what we want (i.e., to expand/enrich our own poetry) is sacrificed for what we need (i.e., a full and genuine acknowledgement of the “other.”)

AND NOW FOR THE TRANSLATION...

I would like to tell you a story about people just like us who lived long ago.

As we see in the transcriptions, the verb tense of Subject A shifted from past to present. Subject B consistently used the present verb tense. Subject C shifted from present to past to present and back to past verb tense. To incorporate both a present, living character and an ancient, traditional context in the translation, the first line contains the phrases “just like us” (the now) and “long ago” (the then).

These people were the Trids.

The ceremonial syntax of this line encapsulates all three tellers’ emphases on the Trids as a community of people who figure prominently in the joke.

The Trids lived where the rising ground began and the falling ground ended.

Because Subjects A and C used the term “mountain” and Subject B used the word “hill,” the translation contains the phrase “rising ground,” which captures the essence of both ideas. Furthermore, acknowledging that the Trids reside at both the beginning of ascension and the end of descension “sets the stage” for what’s to come (i.e., the Trids’ tumbling down).

All they ever wanted was to see what was on the other side of the rising ground.

At the summit of the rising ground there was a mighty Giant.

The Giant was not a friend of the Trids.

In all three versions, the giant was depicted not as the ill-meaning enemy of the Trids, but, rather, as a mysterious and mighty force that, for some reason, stands in the way of the Trids’ desires. The ambiguous expression “not a friend” is meant to convey the enigmatic quality of the Giant’s intentions toward the Trids.

The Trids often climbed the rising ground so that they could see, from the top, what lay on the other side.

But, the Trids never saw beyond the Giant’s summit.

Every time they climbed to the top, the Giant KICKED them down the rising ground…and they tumbled to the bottom.

By capitalizing the word “Kicked,” I wish to signal future tellers to emphasize this word because it is such an essential component of both the story and the joke.

The Trids did not know why the Giant did this.

A rabbi came upon the Trids one day.

In the versions provided by Subjects A and C, a traveling rabbi either deliberately or circumstantially comes to the village/town of the Trids. In Subject B’s version, however, the Trids “somehow get in contact with a rabbi.” The phrase “came upon” accommodates all of these versions.

“Please, rabbi, in the name of your holiness, wring some sense out of the Giant,” pled the Trids. “It makes sense for us to see what we want. He should realize this sense and let us pass.”

Replied the rabbi, “Yes, Trids, I suppose I must do this for you.”

To varying degrees, the phrases “set up off the mountain,” “goes up,” and “goes on up” suggest a lack of enthusiasm (if not a reluctance) to make the ascent. Yet, because the Trids appeal to his rabbinic position (“holy man”) and his associated obligations, the rabbi “must” perform the favor that is asked of him.

The rabbi was sure that the Giant would kick him down the rising ground

and that he would tumble to the bottom…just like the Trids.

Despite this, the rabbi lumbered up the rising ground until he reached the Giant.

The term “lumbered” reinforces the rabbi’s unenthused view of his mission.

The rabbi was overwhelmed with confusion and awe.

At this point, Subject A switches verb tense, Subject B questions the narrative altogether, and Subject C quotes the rabbi directly. Thus, at this point in the joke, some kind of shift is registered in each of the tellers’ deliveries. This temporary fraying of the common narrative thread is represented by the concepts of “confusion” and “awe,” which are referred to directly in the translation.

The rabbi stammered, “Gia…why…why…how…did…why didn’t you kick me down the rising ground? Am I so different from the others?”

At this point in the joke, all three Subjects insert the self-conscious expression “you know,” which is presumably not a part of the rabbi’s quote, but an address to the listener (i.e., the cameraman). The desire to bridge the communicative gap with “you know,” an expression that demands affirmation, is conveyed in the stammering form of the rabbi’s questions.

AND THE GIANT ROARED WITH LAUGHTER

At this point in the joke, it is revealed that the Giant, like the story itself, has a sense of humor. Thus, it is befitting to endow the Giant with laughter.

“SILLY RABBI!!!! KICKS ARE FOR TRIDS!!!”

If one can learn anything from Subject B’s humiliating butchery of the joke’s punchline, it is that emphasis is IMPERATIVE! Because “for kicks” is a commonly used expression, it is easy (believe me) to flub this joke’s punchline. By bold-facing and increasing the font size of the word “Trids,” I hope to steer future tellers toward a successful delivery of the joke’s final line.

Translating Tedlock

2005-10-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

I found Dennis Tedlock’s “Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability” to be fascinating, yet I wonder what others think about how (i.e., from what perspective) Tedlock views the major poetic strategies of the Maya. Tedlock asserts that Mayan poetry seeks to sustain the incompleteness of objects by “raising the discontinuity of the ‘presence of the same object’ to a high frequency.” He notes that the Mayans’ long lists, which omit certain items, endeavor to “[resist] totalization.” Furthermore, Tedlock states that, in placing epithets and nicknames alongside proper names, the Maya wish to shatter the notion of selfhood as consistent and unified. For us, as a literate culture, these poetic effects are well received. As a culture that seeks (and often believes to find) meaning and truth on the written page, we share a proclivity to seek total conclusivity of all things, concepts, and people. Thus, it is with open arms that we receive the Mayans’ poetic evocations of discontinuity, incompleteness, and differentiation. On the other hand, as a culture that regards objects, ideas, and selfhoods as fragments contributing to an overarching and ongoing narrative, the Mayan people, it seems, do not require the same poetic effects as do we. Is Tedlock tacitly presenting oral cultures to be one step beyond literate societies or is he isolating Mayan poetic effects upon a literate audience, regardless of what these poems’ intentions and strategies mean/are to the Mayan people?

On a separate note, I appreciate Tedlock’s mentioning that, for oral cultures, such as the Zuni and the Maya, paraphrase is not heresy and translation is not treacherous. Says Tedlock, “Translation is a continuation of a process already under way in the poem itself” and, thus, it is accepted, even encouraged, between and WITHIN cultures, poets, and even poems themselves. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller, for example, the stories entitled “Cottonwood: Part Two: Buffalo Story”(page 67) and “Storytelling”(page 94) contain the same conceptual nexus (i.e., the capturing of Yellow Woman by Buffalo Man), yet the narrative perspectives, tones, emphases, details, and conclusions of these versions vary significantly. The first version, told from the third person perspective, adeptly merges realistic, historical, and utilitarian features of storytelling with supernatural, fictive, and entertaining ones, thereby producing a captivating tale that smacks of mythological folklore. The second version of the story, on the other hand, compresses a skeletal version of the first story into a few stanzas, devotes the middle section to a 1967 news report concerning the kidnapping of four Laguna women, and then moves from the third to the first person perspective, as the narrator identifies herself with Yellow Woman. What the reader/auditor gleans from recursive (“doubling back”) narratives with different deliveries and foci is a pluralized appreciation of the poems’ fundamentally plural (i.e., versatile) narrative idea/spirit. In the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as so appropriately quoted by Tedlock, “The successive impressions of discourse, which strike a redoubled blow, produce a different feeling from that of the continuous presence of the same object, which can be taken in at a single glance."

If I embody the story, its spirit envelopes me

2005-10-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

Okay

go ahead

laugh if you want to

but as I tell the story

it will begin to happen.

-Voice of the witch from an untitled

poem in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller

Of all the definitions, explications, and demonstrations of the translating process that we have reviewed so far this semester, none come as close to my idea of true translation than do the works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Jerome Rothenberg. Rather than trying to convert and/or displace original stories and poems through a conventionally formulaic act of translation, both Leslie Marmon Silko and Jerome Rothenberg enter themselves, exuberantly and fully, into the spirit and character of the works that they mean to honor, rejuvenate, and, in Rothenberg’s case, use for inspiration. When the quality of human particularity is embraced in the original story, poem, or song and capitalized on by its translator(s), the aim of objective accuracy in translation is subsumed by the “total” purpose of discovering humanity’s “psychic and biological unity.”

In Storyteller,Leslie Marmon Silko re-creates the stories and poems of her Native American roots by recalling and presenting narratives that were told to her during her upbringing on the Laguna Pueblo, 50 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jerome Rothenberg, on the other hand, reports himself to be unfamiliar with both the Navajo and Seneca languages, yet, having lived with the Senecas, claims to be familiar with the culture, as well as with the collective character, of this tribe. His poetic mission is analogous to that of Silko in that he aims “to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present.”

As Silko and Rothenberg share a similar artistic attitude and purpose, it is not surprising that the poets’ methods and creations are likewise comparable. As our class has seen and discussed this semester, the most characteristic features of oral (“tribal”) poetry include the ever-present context of the performed poem/song/story, the corporeal quality of both the poet who embodies narrative characters and the audience in whom physical responses to these poems are to be evoked, and, of course, the living memory, which both inspires and depends upon embodied, contextualized poems and their continual re-tellings. The living, collective memory, complete with particularity of context and corporeality, is both passively honored and actively applied through the act of re-performing lived story-events via the re-embodying of these stories’ characters.

For Leslie Marmon Silko, the tradition of using the embodied presentation to preserve oral stories, poems, and songs is a necessary part of her heritage and culture. In Storyteller, Silko reports that, when telling the story of the girl who ran away, her Aunt Susie would relay the tale “with great tenderness, with great feeling as if Aunt Susie herself were the mother addressing her little child”(15). To endow this story with resonance (i.e., to keep it memorable), Aunt Susie would also use varying facial expressions, gestures, and vocal tones to convey the emotions of mournfulness, excitement, and wonder. Similarly, Silko reports that her Grandma A’mooh, while reading a selection from her collected book of stories, “always read the story with such animation and expression changing her tone of voice and inflection each time one of the bears spoke – the way a storyteller would have told it”(93).

In Jerome Rothenberg’s case, embodiment of presentation is revealed not only in the works that he translates, but also in his means of translating them. In his Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian Poetry, Rothenberg reports that he discovered a means of “totally” translating Navajo vocables when he “began to speak, then sing [his] own words over [the original recording], replacing…vocables with sounds relevant to [him], then putting [his] own version on a fresh tape”(87). The sounds and melody of Rothenberg’s translated recording did not mimic the those of the original (in fact, Rothenberg considers the duplication of original poems to be dangerous); rather than infringing or imposing upon the original, Rothernberg brought himself (i.e., his own language, voice, and particular nature) into the heart of a foreign poem and then wiggled his way out of it, through its unfamiliar physical sounds and particular dimensions of circumstance, back into a relevant and familiar domain.

In different ways and on different creative levels, Silko and Rothenberg make use of the physicality of motion and emotion and the transient, yet memorable, nature of context. These poets share the crucial understanding that translation of any kind requires a total investment, genealogical or artistic, on the part of the translator. By uniting him or herself with the original poem, song, or story (and, thus, taking on its original character), the translator will, in turn, be able to infuse the original spirit of the poem/song/story into any kind of translation.

spiritual translation

2005-10-04T18:40:00.000-07:00

ORAL POEM

culture is collective and unified/individual is interconnected
medium is sound (speaking and hearing)
poetic properties: balance, rhythm, repetition, alliteration, assonance, epithets
measure of poem's success: its applicability
measure of poem's originality: rearranging traditional stories to successfully accommodate new situations/contexts

WRITTEN POEM

culture is individualistic and divided/individual is egocentric and introspective
medium is sight (writing and reading)
poetic properties: [see those of the oral poem]
measure of poem's success: its potential to endure over time
measure of poem's originality: creating completely novel stories

In the last several weeks, we, as a class, seem to have come to an agreement concerning what a translation should look like; in its ideal form, a translation is that which accurately renders the language, the concept(s), and/or the spirit of something (I’ll use the generic term, “poem” here) in a different context. This description seems simple and innocuous enough and so we, generally, take it as a given in our reactions to assigned readings and contributions to class discussions. Yet, when we break our common intention as translators into its constitutive elements, we come to understand that our shared purpose as translators is contradictory, antagonistic, even violent, to both the pure translating process and to the objects of translation themselves.

The most critical words to examine in our definition of a successful translation are “ideal,” “accurately,” and “spirit.” Only when the act of translation is situated between ourselves and a textually bound, analytically fuelled, and linearly directed culture just like our own are the terms “ideal” and “accurate” relevant. We, as a literate society, strive for the accurate, the ideal, and the definitive only because textuality has made possible an outside frame of reference known as objectivity, with which we constantly strive to align ourselves and our productions. If a poem is to pass, unscathed, from one language, culture, situation, and consciousness into another, it is the spirit from which the poem emanates that must be translated. In the case of an oral poem being translated in a textual form, the spirit that must be translated does not embrace or even understand the abstract ideal of accuracy; it is rather characterized by recursivity of thought, interaction of community, and a simultaneous, unified, and omni-present sense of the human experience.

How does one infuse a textual representation with a spirit that’s, for all means and purposes, antithetical to textual imperatives and ideals? The answer, it seems, does not lie in producing a complete textual score that one may use to perform the poem as it was originally delivered. After all, form must be secondary to spirit. The textual medium must be endowed with the specific oral qualities of presence, power, and polyphony, properties which both inform and result from the spirit of orality. These can be captured in text by providing specific directives for each translated oral poem. Some of these may include 1) while reading along, crossing off lines, syllable by syllable, to evoke the sense of time as a continuous present, 2) “saying back” to the poem (through analysis, critique, or emotional response) after it is read in an effort to empower oneself as both recipient and author, and 3) in a group setting, taking turns reading the poem aloud to create an interactive, give-and-take atmosphere to accommodate the poem’s communal spirit.

Transcription

2005-09-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

For my transcription, I created a conceptual score of Tracie Morris's performance poem, "Project Princess." Below is the poem as it appears in an anthology of performance poetry entitled Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Project Princess

Teeny feet rock layered double socks
The popping side piping of
many colored loose lace-ups
Racing toe keeps up with fancy free gear,
slick slide and just pressed recently weaved hair.

Jeans oversized belying her hips, back, thighs that have made guys sigh
for milleni-year.

Topped by an attractive jacket
her suit's not for flacking, flunkies or punk homies on the stroll.

Her hands the mobile thrones of today's urban goddess
Clinking rings link dragon fingers there's no need to be modest.

One or two gap teeth coolin'
sport gold initials
Doubt you get to her name
just check from the side,
please chill.

Multidimensional shrimp earrings
frame her cinnamon face

Crimson with a compliment if a
comment hits the right place

Don't step to the plate with datelines from '88
Spare your simple, fragile feelings with the same sense that you came

Color woman reworks the french twist
with crinkle-cut platinum frosted bangs from a spray can's mist

Never dissed, she insists: "No you can't touch this."
And, if pissed, bedecked fist stops boys who must persist.

She's the one. Give her some. Under fire. Smoking gun. Of which songs are sung, raps are spun, bells are rung, rocked, pistols cocked, unwanted advances blocked, well-stacked she's jock. It's all about you girl. You go on. Don't you dare stop.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Below are pictures of my transcription as well as my commentary on what my images are meant to signify and how these significations can be infused into the spoken word. The entire transcription, save for the examples addressed and explained below, appears in purple to reflect the majesty and power that the performed poem is to carry within itself and to evoke in its audience.
The transcription begins with the image of a road surrounded by jagged rings. This image is intended to create an urban ambience within which the rest of the poem is to be read. The first three lines of the transcription all collapse into a swirling sphere consisting of the splintered remains of the word, "socks" (e.g., saw, ss, sok, ok, ocks, s). The blue cloud is meant to infuse its enclosed words with an ethereal, melodic, fairy-like character and rhythm. The dark blue arrows above and below the phrase "racing toe" signal the reader to deliver the lines with purposeful momentum. The slimy, slanted green appearance of the word "SlickSlide" is meant to suggest that the phonemes of the word are to slide into each other suggestively, like underwater algae. The beige quotation marks and boxed frame are intended to endow their enclosed words with an "outside" and artificial (think fake tan) verbal character and the prison bars around the word "jacket" signal the reader to deliver the word as would a prisoner (not an actual/literal prisoner, but a prisoner of an "outside" voice). The pink swirls to the right and left of the word "Goddess" suggest that the word is to be read with much ceremony and grandeur. The blue, slanted appearance of the word "COOL" is meant to evoke a specific kind of cool...2 o'clock in the morning, outside a jazz bar, smoking cigarettes in the alley...you get the idea. The arced and self-reflexively gold "gold" suggests that the word is to be used as a verbal jump, but the prolonged and slowly descending arc suggests that the jump is slow and easy, as opposed to quick and impulsive. The profile of a cheerful child with the word "side" painted upon it demonstrates the light, playful tone in which the word is to be delivered.

The fireflies are to infuse their associated words with a flickering (here one second, gone the next) quality. The next line's gradual collapse into pinkness, ending with the word "face" is meant to demonstrate the increasingly feminine (i.e., high and light) delivery of the line. The picture of the growling face, who twice delivers the syllables "com" indicates that these syllables are to be issued with clenched teeth, a furrowed brow, and a 1/2 surly, 1/2 aggressive tone. The g-spots embedded in the words "hits," "right," and "place" are self-evident. Next, there is a figure in mid-step, prevented from moving forward by an obstruction that projects a series of prohibitive imperatives. The narrowing of the red in this section reflects how the prohibitive power of the words taper off as the they move forward. The pleading figure, embedded in the word "Spare" is meant to demonstrate the imploring quality of the word. The pouring tears endow their word-sources with an excessive, almost maudlin sentimentality. The "pissed" figure is intended to evoke the real-life image of an irritated, dissatisfied, or otherwise agitated girlfriend. The long box lined with inward-pointing spikes is meant to endow the enclosed words with a frantic, panicked tempo and tone. The tiny coiled lines bordering tiny, enjambed words signal the reader to deliver this section as if being electrocuted. The final line of the transcription, as accentuated by glittery swirls, is to be read with much flourish and confidence.

Says I Am

2005-09-20T22:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard some of my favorite painters, directors, and musicians proclaim themselves to be conduits through which other-worldly inspiration makes its way into the realm of human artistic expression. Taken at face-value, this explanation for creative genius seems indicative of the kind of circuity and pomposity that I’ve always resented in artistic virtuosos. The notion suggests that, while the artist herself claims and exercises no agency and no authority in the creative process, her particular presence is crucial in converting the raw inspiration she receives into the artistic masterpieces that she yields. In addition to this paradox, the idea of artist-as-intermediary is infuriatingly tautological. The notion first presupposes that there are essential and/or ultimate ideas that exist only to be filtered down to the plane of human perceptibility. Yet, because we automatically deem our reception of artwork to be both derivative and partial, we (as an audience) endeavor to imagine what we must already hold to be true for this kind of creation to occur in the first place…the existence of the absolute.
Upon first consideration, Maria Sabina seems to fit neatly into the artist-as-conduit category described above. After all, she reports that, after experiencing a life-changing vision, she “gave [her]self up for always to wisdom”(14). This statement of self-surrender suggests that Sabina chose to embrace the role of human mouthpiece for transcendent ideas and powers. While this is technically the case, Sabina sets herself apart from other artist-as-intermediaries when she goes on to state, “I cede my body and my voice to the saint children”(72) and, later, “Language belongs to the saint children. They speak and I have the power to translate”(76). Aha! So, Sabina’s role in the creative process is not that of a passive vessel, but of a finely attuned, directly active translator. Furthermore, the healing that she provides for humanity comes in poetic language that is not coded with words/coated in perception, but immediately and wholly relayed to those whom she seeks to cure. Sabina is no passive conduit. Her poetry demands both her complete surrender to its forces and her total involvement in its struggle to reach the verbal; it is motivated both by a functional purpose (i.e., curing the ill) and by a mystical desire (i.e., to expose the fluid nature of the human spirit/soul); finally, it reaches us as both the poetic language of humans and the literal language of the “saint children.” It is, perhaps, by consequence of its power to merge these would-be contradictions that Sabina’s poetry establishes its extraordinary resonance.

All My Life I Have Been Seeking

2005-09-20T22:21:00.000-07:00

During our last class, a question was posed concerning why America’s curiosity about and, later, fascination with Native American culture seemed to be most potent after major world conflicts, such as World War I and the Vietnam War. From what I’ve studied and observed, at times of war, the circulating rhetoric and propaganda are grounded in notions of anchoring and inspiring national qualities, the principles that we’re fighting to defend, the practices that we’re pushing to globalize for the supposed betterment of the world. When indecipherably fuzzy and/or highly complex war-time issues and agendas are “boiled down” to fundamental and sweeping national characteristics, we, as citizens, are forced to confront the validity of these characteristics. Do we promote multiculturalism? How have we demonstrated the tolerant, community-minded reputation that we claim to uphold? Are we truly free? What is freedom? When we address these questions head-on, we discover that we are neither communal nor free; quite the contrary, we have proven ourselves to be a nation marked by self-interest, individualism, and fierce competition. Thus, we discover that the well-rounded American consciousness that we purport to uphold and aim to promote is sorely incomplete. How can we reach into “ourselves” and excavate the missing fragments of our national spirit? Enter Native American culture.

During our last class, Amanda insightfully remarked that, in the Indian tradition, “when a word is spoken it is” and went on to note that, for oral cultures, “language is not a means to an end, but and end in and of itself.” The notion that time and consciousness can be unified through the power of language is the perfect philosophical foil for the United States, with its teleologically-fuelled globalizing objectives and emptily rhetorical defenses. The inevitable offshoot of a nation so desperate to establish a dominant global position and exert influence solely by means of its power is a body of literature that is likewise characterized by its permanence and inflexibility…literature that is historical and/or patriotic as well as immortalized in writing. The artistic counter to this is, of course, performance art like the oral poetry produced by Native American cultures. As I gleaned from this week’s readings, a performance is a ceremonial ongoing of presence and presentness. Rather than seeking to preserve an abstract and absent idea, a spoken performance stretches the now into a narrative preservation. It is undeniable in its being because, as Amanda so poignantly point out, “IT IS.”

During our last class, Erin opined that a written, Americanized rendering of a “foreign” culture’s oral song is impossible to authenticate…at least on every level…and Castro’s piece for this week certainly buttresses her position. Castro presents a miscellany of methods for translation, all of which involve either “sacrificing the content in favor of preserving the form, or of sacrificing the original form to bring out the hidden content”(31). Further, in a draft entitled “Imagism and Densmore’s Ghosts,” Sherwood points out that a translated oral poem is not a re-presentation or even a re-creation of the original, but a translator’s projections of “preformulated, if not exactly dominant, modernist aesthetics”(9) onto a “foreign” phenomenon. In the name of “Try[ing] Harder!!!” (as Sherwood urges) translators may look to their own emphases, omissions, and projections in order to identify the preoccupations and tendencies of their own cultural traditions (literary and otherwise). By subordinating these proclivities to the greater imperative of creative growth, they will be able to find better means of “present”ing the liberating and unifying spirit of oral poetry and song.

translation as transformation

2005-09-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

“…a Zuni narrator emphasizes the climactic third line not by loudness but by a decrease in amplitude, thus preserving the delicacy of the moment of birth.”

- Dennis Tedlock

While reading Dennis Tedlock’s “Ethnopoetics” last week, I lingered upon this sample of how one might interpret a textual score of oral poetry. Something about the reading seemed to me hasty, incomplete, and somehow unfair. Although this was just a sample, a mere introduction, I was disconcerted nonetheless. I was comforted during Wednesday’s class, however, when we were given a bare-bones outline of the conversion from oral poem to textual representation. We learned that a narrator sounds what we will term a “poem,” that this poem is then phonetically transcribed, and, finally, that the phonetic text is translated by one who is familiar with the narrator’s language. Given the considerable metamorphoses that an oral poem undergoes when it’s funneled from the open realm of sound to the concrete domain of paper, I gathered that the scholars of ethnopoetics must assume that the translating process necessitates great distortion of the original performance. In turn, I assumed that these scholars, like Tedlock, must acknowledge that any interpretive contributions they themselves make to the movement of ethnopoetics will be necessarily colored by their own histories, interests and exigencies. This assumption was substantiated in Kenneth Lincoln’s foreward, which introduced me to translator Frances Densmore. When struggling to choose between the adjectives “rustling” or “rattling” in one of her translations, Densmore was impelled to question whether an “authentic crossing” (of languages, cultures, media, even human beings themselves) will ever be possible.

This semester I look forward to learning more about how oral poetry is translated into visual poetry, modified musical scores, and other textual media. Specifically, I’d like to address my question of whether poet-narrators ever clarify the significance of their variations in pitch, enunciation, and amplitude or if ethnopoetic scholars always impose conventional strategies (e.g., quietude to suggest the “preservation of delicacy”) onto “foreign” poetic styles? Perhaps these variations are intended to keep listeners’ interest; maybe the oral poets view poetic performances as opportunities to showcase their vocal ranges; possibly, oral poets use variations in clarity, tone, and loudness to create aural metaphors that are to be “read” in conjunction with the poems’ themes. I hope to interrogate and explore these and many other interpretive possibilities throughout the course.