Stingy Kids

Good Things

Following up on my previous post on ASL poetry, I recommend that you read H-Dirksen L. Bauman's article "Redesigning Literature: Poetics of American Sign Language Poetry."  Bauman employs the lexicon of film studies to discuss ASL poetry as a visual art.

"Whether flesh, celluloid, analogue, or digitized, the ASL text is always a human body, projecting its own visual-spatial-kinetic experience, awakening similar lived experiences in the minds and bodies of the viewers...The two bodies together, the poet's and the viewer's, ultimately combine to create the text which is more than a script of linguistic signs, but a lived cinesthetic experience."
...

"While many presume that film has introduced a uniquely modern means of perceiving the world, we can reasonably assume cinematic-like composition of Sign predated the cinematograph by a good 2500 years. We can speculate that the Deaf signers mentioned by Plato in The Cratylus conversed through a series of visual images that were constantly being framed, cut, and edited throughout the course of a narrative. In this sense, cinematic experience may be akin to aspects of Deaf epistemology that have been around as long as signing communities. Cinema is but one medium through which we can produce moving images; Sign is another such medium-perhaps even the ur-medium-for producing moving images."

Plato's The Cratylus:

SOCRATES:  ...Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another, should we not, like the deaf and dumb, make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?

HERMOGENES:  There would be no choice, Socrates.

SOCRATES:  We should imitate the nature of the thing; the elevation of our hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness; heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop to the ground; if we were describing the running of a horse, or any other animal, we should make our bodies and their gestures as like as we could to them.

HERMOGENES:  I do not see that we could do anything else.

SOCRATES:  We could not; for by bodily imitation only can the body ever express anything.

HERMOGENES:  Very true.

******

The Frick Collection is currently showing  "Antea," a beguiling portrait by Parmigianino.  It's a one work show, which made me think of the last one work exhibition I saw: Jay DeFeo's "The Rose" at the Whitney.  "The Rose" weighs over 2000 lbs and took DeFeo about eight years to complete.  It was featured on the main level of the Whitney in a space that seemed too small, too claustrophobic for a work that massive.  But the longer I spent in front of the painting, the less constrained I felt by my physical surroundings.  There were a few other drawings and paintings by DeFeo on display in that wing, but I still think of it as a one work exhibition.

Fans of John Ashbery may recognize the name Parmigianino.  It was his self-portrait that inspired the title poem of Ashbery's 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Paul J. Karlstom's 1975 interview with DeFeo is a first-hand account of the post-Depression history of fine arts pedagogy in California.  I wish I had taken more art history courses in college but, honestly, I never honed the skills necessary for retaining dates (my Achilles heel when it comes to history, in general, and birthdays, in particular).  But I found this interview to be a very engaging history lesson.  "...when I say that, when I went to the University of California, we were hanging on to the apron strings of Cubism, I mean I was hanging on for dear life. And I've never let go because I still love that period."

Flying Words

In 2003, Slope, an on line poetry journal, published a special issue devoted to American Sign Language (ASL) poetry. The issue featured the winners of the 2003 Heart+Express National ASL Poetry Prize and presented their work in video format.  There is no other way to "read" this work.  Unlike Deaf poetry, which can be signed and/or written, ASL poetry is in, and only in, ASL.  At first, I assumed that the videos would feature subtitles, some printed "translation" of what the poets were signing.  This wasn't the case.  Instead, the videos are completely silent--that is, to someone who doesn't know ASL.  But it's clear from the careful hand, body and facial movements that a great deal is being expressed, and it is maddening not to be able to understand the poems. On the other hand, I think that the decision made by the Slope editors was brilliant.  ASL isn't simply a way of "miming" or literally translating English, rather, it is its own language and needs to be approached on its own terms:

ASL incorporates all the functions and structures of a fully developed language system, capable of expressing abstract ideas and poetry....Variations in handshapes, palm orientation, movement, and placement create rhyme, rhythm, tropes, symbols, stanzas and other recognizable characteristics of spoken and written poetry.  You need a video camera to publish a "book" of ASL poetry.

The judges of the contest, Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner, are also known as the Flying Words Project. For over twenty years, they have traveled around the United States and abroad sharing ASL poetry with deaf and hearing audiences.  Cook, who is deaf, signs on stage while Lerner, who is usually off stage, provides a voice for hearing audiences (you can view two of their performances on the Slope site and also in this YouTube video).  Cook is committed to sharing ASL poetry with hearing audiences but when asked if there is a sign for poetry, he draws an important distinction between "hearing" and "Deaf" poetry:

The sign for Hearing poetry is a generally traditional sign. The handshape is "P" (at dominant hand) and flat "B" (non-dominant hand). The P moves while the B stays. It is almost the same sign as for music. This sign is strongly associated with rhythms/rhyme. The other sign was created at the Deaf Way Festival at Gallaudet University in 1989 (I think)...I remember a meeting where we were discussing that we needed a sign that shows our poetry. Finally, we decided to use this sign: Handshape "S," start at the chest then move forward into handshape "5." This sign is similar to "Expression." It looks like this: HEART+EXPRESS.

Lerner's voice gives the hearing audience a sense of the poem, that is all. "My words are not designed to create the whole picture...If you close your eyes and just listen to my voice, you won't understand the poem," he says.

Amy Radil's excellent article "The cultural clamor of American Sign Language poetry" explains in greater detail the formal elements of ASL poetry:

Handshapes are at the core: They are basic forms like letters or numbers, which can be used in combination to construct many different signs. Repeated handshapes become the rhymes in ASL, while repeated signs or sequences generate the rhythm. In addition to handshape rhymes and repetition, poets can create tone through fluid or jerky movements. Two hands can perform different signs at the same time to juxtapose images. A poem can progress through different uses of space, with the performer turning to face different people or take on different personas. Signs for English letters may be incorporated into the poem, to intertwine the spelling of an English word among the signs. Eye contact, or a break in it, can signal shifts and interruptions.

Cook thinks of the process as creating a "language sculpture" that can be experienced as a pause or in motion. I think that attempting to translate these details of motion and gesture in writing would encourage written poetry to move in new and surprising directions.   This certainly was true of translation into ASL.

In 1939, Eric Malzkuhn ("Malz"), a graduate of Gallaudet University, translated Lewis Carroll's poem "The Jabberwocky" into ASL. His masterful translation is regarded by many scholars and poets as the beginning of ASL poetry:

[Malzkuhn's] ASL translation walked the same line between known signs and previously unimagined combinations. Not only was it a hit with audiences, it awakened Deaf people to a new dimension of their language. The performance helped ASL speakers in the audience see their language's potential to astound, to transform normal communication into something else entirely.

I wanted to see if I could locate a clip of Jabberwocky in ASL and found Carl Schroeder's version on YouTube.  From the comments left on his blog, I gathered that his version differs from Malzkuhn's but I recommend that you check it out.

Jabberwocky has been translated into many languages, and in most cases it requires that a translator really push the limits of the target language and, ultimately, embrace the creation of total nonsense.  This means, of course, that what results is not really a translation but a new poem entirely.  The same is true, I imagine, with the ASL translation(s) of Jabberwocky.  In Schroeder's version, his hands seem to fuse into each other in constant flows of movement.  In ASL, which Cynthia L. Peters calls a "visual-kinetic vernacular," Carroll's linguistic hybridity and play is animated, activated in ways that seem to me to be very true to the original.

What goes on here

Two publications of mine that I forgot to mention:

In December, Zeek: A Jewish Journal for Thought and Culture published my translation of an excerpt from Maya Arad's novel in verse Makom acher ve-'ir zarah (Another Place, A Foreign City).  From Adam Rovner's introduction to the translation:

Arad’s novel pays homage to Pushkin’s masterwork, using Onegin stanzas to tell the story of two young lovers, Orit and Jay, against the backdrop of Tel Aviv in the early 1990s. In these eleven stanzas excerpted from Canto II, we meet Jay, an immigrant from Canada who is ambivalent both about his military service and Orit, the love-struck soldier assigned to help him acclimate to Israel. Through Adriana Jacobs’ graceful and witty translation, the serious complexities of Israeli and Jewish identity emerge with a sense of the same playful irony as in Arad’s original

The first question I am asked regarding this particular translation project is "will you keep the rhyme and meter?"  The answer is "yes" and "no."  The formal properties of Arad's sonnets are pretty consistent, but I made it a point to observe when Arad allowed herself to shift, change or ignore elements of form and prosody.  These moments allowed me to determine my own ways of dealing with rhymes and rhythms that don't always work well in English (to my ear, at least).  My approach, so far, has been to keep a sense of the form and prosody but without feeling tied to or obligated to a pattern that was designed to work in another language.  I thought in terms of cadence and rhythm over meter, and my rhymes often rearranged the Pushkin pattern.  And yet, the more I worked "loosely" with the structure of the poem, the more things started to fall into place, the more formal the translations became.

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This month, my friend Miranda Gaw launched Peter Parasol, an on line, literary zine.  It's gorgeous, and I am honored that she included one of my poems, "It's enough that the child live."  The title of the poem refers to the last words Pocahontas spoke, "All must die. 'Tis enough that the child liveth."  The child in question was her son with John Rolfe--Thomas.

Notes: AWP Panels

Notes: AWP Panels

I found my notes/fragments from the AWP panels "The Disabled Body Poetic" and "Writing as Translation."  They are far--very far--from being extensive or coherent.

from "THE DISABLED BODY POETIC"

Gregory Fraser

--brother had spina bifida
--"to strike poses on the page"
--poetry's "obsession with the material nature of language"
--"hyper-material"

William Carlos Williams--focuses on the thing of language

FORM: Hugo's choice of villanelle
      meter
      terminal rhyme

--using orderly form (ironically) to encase the representation or voice of disorderly bodies
--playing on expectations of how poems should look and behave

Paul Guest

--to rest on a bag of sand
--"the brain left to believe that something has vanished"
--"the rest of me floating away"
--spinal fluid coming out of the nose

Susannah B. Mintz

--"poems as representations of self experiencing can be though of as happening randomly"
on Fraser--brothers hips are "where his knees should be"
--loving what is wild, even in one's mind
--poetry not redemptive--writing doesn't repair, heal--rather it represents this intensity, this wildness

Jim Ferris

--how is disability useful--for a poet?
--structure of rhythm of body on the poem
--tides, sun, season--rhythmic workings that are ubiquitous ("waxing and waning of the desert")--the pacemaker, metronome
--the novel is always about disability, the breaking of norms (didn't catch the source he quoted)
-- promote a "disability aesthetics"--that isn't apologetic

from "WRITING AS TRANSLATION"

--"the tentacular relationships between all of our cultures" (Hugh Ferrer)
--lyric poetry is a translation ("one doesn't go around walking or humming in meter"--not sure who said this)

2008 AWP

My winter conference season finally came to an end with the AWP, the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.  This year's AWP took place in NYC and I was urged by many friends to give it a try, "if only for the bookfair."  As far as conferences go, this one was pretty laid back for me.  I didn't give any papers or feel compelled to attend many panels.  I spent my mornings working at the American Literary Translators Association table, raising visibility for my beloved organization, and my afternoons at the occasional panel or reading.  But most of the time that I wasn't with ALTA, I was at the bookfair.  The bookfair involved the participation of the usual suspects--mass market and university presses--but the real draw for me was the opportunity to support my favorite small and independent presses and to discover new, emerging publishers.  One thing that I noticed is the increased interest in translation, which I found very encouraging both as a translator and scholar of translation.  Action Books, in particular, stood out for me as a small publisher committed to English translations of contemporary writing.  At their table, I picked up Jen Hofer's translation of Laura Solórzano's Lobo de labio and had a nice chat with Johannes Göransson, Action Books co-founder and editor and a translator of Swedish literature into English.  He remarked that their decision to publish a translation is rarely guided by what is canonical.  Their manifesto declares "We want poetry that goes too far," and that commitment to bold, experimental writing carries to their translation choices. 

If you take a look at my book list (see post below), you'll notice quite a few purchases from Etherdome and Belladonna*, two presses that promote work written by women (in fact, only four of the books I acquired were written by men).  Etherdome publishes two chapbooks a year and each one is stunning.  I love the simplicity of their books--the layout of the poems is uncluttered and the covers always feature a delicate print in monochrome.  Belladonna* refers to its chapbooks as pamphlets or "chaplets" and they have more of a classic zine feel to them than the Etherdome books.  But belladonna* publishes with greater frequency, usually timing their chaplets for a poet's reading, and the range of the work they promote is more extensive (including poets like Marcella Durand, Alice Notley, Laynie Browne, Jen Benka).   They also publish translations, most recently a gorgeous English translation of Lila Zemborain's Malvas orquídeas del mar (Mauve Sea-Orchids).  (On 2/12, belladonna* is hosting a reading with the poets Barbara Cole and Elizabeth Robinson, who is one of the editors of Etherdome.)

AWP Book Bag

A long post on the AWP is forthcoming.  In the meantime, here's a list of the books I purchased or otherwise acquired at the conference.  My friends weren't kidding when they told me that the bookfair was reason enough to register for the conference.  Most of the books on this list are from small and independent presses, so I made it a point to provide links.

coming down in white by Lori Shine (Pilot Books, limited edition of 200)

nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she by Sawako Nakayasu (Quale Press, 2006)

Kiss Me with the Country of Your Mouth by Amy King (Dusie, 2007)

The Desires of Letters by Laynie Browne (belladonna*, 2006)

Befallen I by Erín Moure (belladonna*, 2005)

A Revisioning of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America by Jen Benka (belladonna*, 2003)

Mauve Sea-Orchids by Lila Zemborain (trans. Rose Alcalá and Mónica de la Torre) (belladonna*, 2007)

Specimen, Specimens by Anne Heide (Etherdome, 2008)

Learning the Language by Kate Greenstreet (Etherdome, 2005)

passing world pictures by Valerie Coulton (Etherdome, 2002)

Some Bridges Migrate by Scott Pierce (Small Fires Press, 2007)

Air Pocket by Kimiko Hahn (Hanging Loose Press, 1989)

Fieldnotes by Mark Weiss (Junction Press, 1995)   

Isa the Truck Named Isadore by Amanda Nadelberg (Slope Editions, 2006)

Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetry ed. Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath Press, 2008)

Nylund the Sarcographer by Joyelle McSweeney (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007)

[one love affair]* by Jenny Boully (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006)

Exit Interview by Paul Guest (New Michigan Press, 2006)

The Cow by Ariana Reines (Fence Books, 2006)

Mommy Must Be a Mountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon (trans. Don Mee Choi) (Action Books, 2008) ,

Lip Wolf by Laura Solórzano (trans. Jen Hofer) (Action Books, 2007)

At the Drive-In Volcano by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Tupelo Press, 2007)

You Can Tell the Horse Anything by Mary A. Koncel (Tupelo Press, 2003)

Bright Turquoise Umbrella by Hermine Meinhard (Tupelo Press, 2004)

The Bad Wife Handbook by Rachel Zucker (Wesleyan UP, 2007)