This week as I blog for the Kenyon Review, I am in fact at Kenyon College, visiting during the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop–getting as an outsider to witness and share in the workshop’s energy and exuberance, and also slipping off to wander the campus and surrounding farmlands and swimming holes on my own. This means such activities as: stopping by the Yeats archives in the Greenslade Special Collections. And: listening in as the workshop’s instructors discuss a wealth of writing prompts, or Prompts, as I’ve come after so much discussion to hear the word in my head.
And so this morning, walking in the heat across campus, slipping as quickly as possible back into air-conditioning, I wonder, how to connect these thoughts, of items preserved and inspiration offered? In the past few days, I’ve also had occasion to hear a little of the discussion around an author who passed away a few years ago, and those who are now attempting to collect, locate, and find a home, physical and digital, for her papers, and what family members or former lovers may be involved. At the same time, I have witnessed the teenaged writers here, writing passionately to fill not just notebooks but hard drives–the poems they write today won’t be in some notebook that is, at best, buried among boxes in their parents’ basement, but will move with them, one hard drive to another, for how long? What will be the effects of this preservation? Will they reread these poems years from now, incorporate them in some form into the canon of their adult work? Be somehow more beholden to their past selves than we whose notebooks, cassette tape collections, and shoeboxes of photos did not journey with us into adulthood? On the computer on which I type this I also have a selection of my own adolescent work, which I often consider deleting, then never do. I suppose it is interesting every now and then to open one poem and consider how often I was writing unexpectedly specifically of hawks or fish or turtles back then, and whether there may be a nature writer buried deep in my soul still today. (Though if there is, I suspect that it would take me more than nostalgia to find her…)
In my own writing, I have also been participating in a sort of informal Prompt with poet Zach Savich: every day I describe roughly what I am working on–the plot and character elements, etc.–and he, who is happily in the midst of reading 2666, tells me “OK, this is what Bola??o would do.” The next day, that’s what I do; then we start again. I have not read Bola??o, and yet I feel that he would not mind such a prompt too much, based on this passage of his which I think often:
How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading it makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale. (via)
I first encountered this passage (translated by Natasha Wimmer) in the Center for the Art of Translation‘s Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal (those of you who don’t know the CAT’s anthologies, head over there immediately). The passage is from Bolano’s essay “La traduccion en un yunque,” which in the CAT anthology is titled “Translation Is a Testing Ground,” but in the just-released collection of Bola??o’s nonfiction Between Parentheses is titled “Translation is an Anvil.” Translator Natasha Wimmer discusses this re-titling choice in an interview with the CAT’s Scott Esposito:
“Yunque” means “anvil,” so the suggestion is that translation is the anvil on which literature is tested. If it’s good enough, it will survive even the worst translation, or the most brutal pounding of the hammer. It seemed to me that the meaning of “La traducci??n es un yunque” was more immediately obvious in Spanish than in English, so I gave the title an interpretive rather than a literal translation. In retrospect, though, I wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to leave it as “Translation is an Anvil,” which also (it occurs to me now) suggests that translation is a heavy weight falling from a great height on a poor unsuspecting text.
And here we are “in this day and age,” in which the line the between book and machine has officially and to Amazon’s great profit been broken down, and real work has to be done to consider how lines of poetry may be preserved on e-readers, and what effect the rising tide of self-published e-books will have, etc., etc. (I was recently caught up in just such anxiety)… In the midst of which it’s nice to hear Bola??o’s (Wimmer’s) voice saying, “Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic”–a faith that despite our best, worst, or just human efforts the dark forest endures.