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Naya Clark discusses with Peter Ramos his book Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge. In Remarkable Bridge Ramos delves into what goes into poetic translations, referencing poets such as James Wright and César Vallejo; Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes; Luis Palés Matos and William Carlos Williams; Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz, and more.
In this interview, Ramos answers questions regarding how language and place literally and figuratively cross boundaries and connect poets to one another’s works. He also uncovers how references impact their own origins, and the difference in academic and poetic writing in his writing processes.
Naya Clark: In what other ways do you think language overcomes and infiltrates socio-political blockages for people?
Peter Ramos: That’s a good and tricky question. Or maybe the answer is tricky. There is, on the one hand, the undeniable fact that there are plenty of words and cultural items that find their way into U.S. culture. Let’s take the most basic example: food. I’m sure there are plenty of people in the States who enjoy Mexican food, tequila, etc. And I’m equally convinced that some portion of these people are vocally opposed to Mexican immigrants. So, there’s that. But even with food, I think (and Anthony Bourdain made this point over and over again in his shows) once you get invested in the people who make the food and you do so with generosity and respect, I think you’re making a bridge toward another group of people and culture outside those of and in the U.S. I guess what’s necessary are these opportunities for curiosity and generosity; these fight xenophobia; these lend themselves to thinking beyond our borders. Here’s an example, though I don’t bring this into my book: In 1992, I bought 100 Poems from the Chinese, all translated by Kenneth Rexroth. My knowledge of Chinese culture before this was limited to Chinese-American food and a small amount of basic knowledge of China’s economic ties to the U.S. But even though I didn’t speak or read Chinese, this book opened a door to another culture that I wanted to explore. The same was true for me when I read translations of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. I’d never been to their homelands, but I felt a human connection to these poets and their worlds. Maybe this is patronizing, but I don’t think it is. Literature (and art and music), as much as if not more than scientific, technological advances, has always represented the height of any civilization’s achievements, so reading translations of poets from around the world often (always?) shows us what is most noble, least downtrodden, about the cultures and people whom these literary writers create. And this, at its best, leads or should lead to geopolitical breakthroughs, generosity, respect.
NC: Within Remarkable Bridge, you discuss the connections poets are able to make with one another through translation. In your opinion, what would be the most defining sort of connection/understanding between poets from translating each other’s work?
PR: As I try to explain in [Remarkable Bridge], the poet who translates a work from another language has to do the work of lifting up her own language (or stretching it, moving it beyond the recognizable terms) in order to accommodate the translation of that which is in the other language always beyond mere transmission of the words into the new language. I’m paraphrasing Walter Benjamin here, and I use his extensive parts of his essay “The Task of the Translator ” (itself in translation in my copy) in the book. This way of finding new phrases and metaphors to accommodate and do justice to the poetry in translations offers the translator-poet new opportunities—in terms of language and form—for her “own” poetry. I also allude to and rely on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of obligation to an “other” who both cannot be fully understood yet obliges the poet translator (in this case) to respond to that “other” with care. Or, as I write in the book’s introduction,
In his “The Ego and the Totality,” Levinas makes the following argument about the self and its ethical relationship to the other, a relationship of mutual obligation based on the fact that the other, who is equally a free subject, cannot be completely known to the self. And yet we are also obligated to the other because meaning, which is essentially social, can only come about in a relationship with the other: “To show respect is to bow down, not before the law, but before a being who commands a work from me. But for this command to not involve humiliation…the command I receive must also be a command to command him who commands me” (43).
Translation in poetry takes a similar form, an obligation to an original work (an other) that is always in excess of any single translation of it. The original is always beyond a translator’s rendering of it, yet that surplus, precisely—which accounts as well for the necessary strangeness that a translator can capture in her translation—must be respected; it thus compels the translator to be responsible to and for it.
NC: As a poet, how has focusing on Remarkable Bridge as a scholarly, analytical text impacted your way of writing poetry?
PR: When I write literary criticism, I’m trying to make a certain kind of point or argument. When I write poetry, I’m not trying to make a point in the same way. When I write poetry, I’m trying to invite more mystery and atmosphere or mood. For me, there’s something more rational involved in teaching and writing criticism than in writing poetry.
NC: One of the notable points that recurs throughout Remarkable Bridge is that translations and references impact their origins just as much as they’re informed by them. Do you have contemporary examples of this?
In [Remarkable Bridge] I discuss, in some depth, two contemporary poet-translators: Roberto Tejada and Rosa Alcalá. They’re both U.S. citizens, and I believe that the translations they have rendered bring more attention to the work of the original poets besides informing the original work of these poet-translators, themselves. In the case of Tejada’s work, he has helped bring more visibility to the Cuban poet, José Lezama Lima. The same is true about the artist Alcalá translates, Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. This idea (that poet-translators impact the work of the poets they translate) seems to come— however indirectly— from T.S. Eliot’s often-quoted lines in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the new (the really new) work of art among them. (Selected Prose 38)
NC: In reference to Clayton mentioning that Vallejo’s poetry should be read in context with where he wrote them (Peru, Paris, etc.), how important is place when writing poetry versus making translations?
PR: I’ve never rendered poetry from another language into English. In my own poetry, place plays a significant part (as well as the people I meet and befriend and get to know in a specific place). I grew up in Maryland until I was 30. And I’m sure the rural areas I had easy access to back then helped me fall in love with the writings of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Sherwood Anderson and others. And I believe these writers had a great influence on my poetry back then. In 1999, I moved to Buffalo for graduate school. And that area—with its elegant, worn down post-industrial rust-belt environment, in many ways like Baltimore, the city I knew so intimately, as well as the fellow grad student I got to know, and still speak to—all of that changed my writings and my life, my sense of the world, in ways that are incalculable. There’s a terrific book of essays called Buffalo Trace: A Three-Fold Vibration by Mary Cappello, James Morrison, and Jean Walton, each one of whom is an author in her/his own right, but these are their reflections on moving to this city to enter University at Buffalo’s PhD program in the 1970s and 80s. It’s an amazing book, and each writer captures the essence of that city in that time and of getting to know other graduate students and how all of this affected them deeply. It’s also worth mentioning that Robert Tejada sent me this book and that he, Rosa Alcalá and I all met as PhD students at University at Buffalo at the same time. These two, as well as other graduate students and some of the professors, made my time as a graduate student in Buffalo so rich, intellectually and in many other ways.
NC: Remarkable Bridge discusses how language has the ability to change writers’ writing style and personal politics. For instance, Langston Hughes’ travels to South America and Cuba. On a personal level, has travel affected you as a writer and scholar, or people you know?
It has. And this is probably more true for people like Roberto Tejada (who lived in Mexico City for a decade or more) and my brother, Stephen Ramos, who besides the traveling he did with our family, went to Spain and then Nicaragua for more than three years. I know this kind of travel (and what are the right words here, temporary expatriation?) deeply influenced their intellectual, political, aesthetic and cultural values. And obviously these experiences made them even more fluent in Spanish. To learn another language is to double your world. For my part, I would travel with my family to Valencia, Venezuela on most Christmases until I was 21. My father was a Venezuelan citizen, and his mother and brother (and extended cousins, aunts and uncles) all lived there, even after my father arrived in the U.S. in 1964. For reasons I think I understand, my father didn’t speak to us in any language other than English, though he could speak five. I believe he thought our being bi-lingual would interfere with our assimilation. I’m sad he didn’t teach us Spanish, but I understand. Therefore, when we went to Venezuela, our cousins and my brother and I would speak “Spang-lish,” and this was an introduction into speaking another language. Also, of course, just experiencing the culture, the landscape, the people of a country like Venezuela deeply affected me. It wouldn’t be until a few years after I went there last that I would bring my senses and recollections of the place—the Indigenous and metropolitan cultures, the music, the food, even their version of Catholicism (so different from that of the Catholic churches we attended in those days that were made up of the descendants of Irish, German, Italian, and Polish immigrants) and the people—into my own poetry at some point.
NC: Some of the most complex forms of translation in Remarkable Bridge are William’s Translations of Palés Matos poetry, which makes reference to specific words and phrases within afro-Caribbean dialects, surrounding the complexities of race. You discuss what Walter Benjamin describes as “pure language”, stating that a translation needs to be transparent. What is your personal perspective of how transparency can be maintained across language barriers?
PR: I’m not sure I would say that Benjamin’s “pure language” is the same thing as or an example of transparency. In my chapter on William Carlos Williams, my argument is that Williams generates an English version of Palés Matos’s poem that involves a fraught (and in some ways problematic) version of minstrelsy in which Williams is trying to approximate an Afro-Caribbean tone in his translation without merely “copying” or finding each exact word in English. The translation has to honor the original without being a mere translation of it; in some senses it has to be a different poem.
NC: When you refer to a poem’s afterlife, is this after translations, references, or interpretations have been made? What is the defining moment of a poem having an after life?
And to continue my answer from the previous question here, my arguments threading the book together involve the way in which the work of honorifically and artistically translating a poem from another language often shows up in a poet’s “own” poetry. So, for example, Williams’s sense of the New World, with all of its Indigenous, colonial, racial hybridity (often fraught, obviously) that he picks up from the Palés Matos poem that he translated will ultimately show up in Williams’s own poetry and its appearance there, maybe more than in the translation, should be noted as an afterlife of the Palés Matos poem. Williams’s mother was Puerto Rican (like Palés Matos), but it’s also important to remember that Williams never thought of himself as other than White. Such encounters in the New World—between lighter skinned Latin Americans and those that have more visibly African features— have a history of explosive violence, oppression, injustice, as is hopefully obvious to most people, and Williams is himself guilty of blind spots to race and class. But he also suspected that Latin American poetry (as well as the poetry from Spain) could offer more opportunities to poet-translators in terms of their own work. He understood that such encounters were also rich, worthy of celebration.
NC: What is the major impact/takeaway you’d like for readers to get from Remarkable Bridge?
PR: I quote from the last paragraph of my book, which I hope will interest and inspire poet-translators, critics, poetry lovers and others:
Within the world of arts and letters, especially, canon formation is a way of establishing political hierarchies, a way of centering cultural politics. Asserting the need to reexamine the ways in which poetry canons across the Americas have far more connections than has been assumed or critically assessed is ultimately to exalt both U.S. and Latin American/Caribbean poetry. Such a (re)vision would also avoid a paternalistic or condescending approach to the latter, even as it acknowledges the aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic debt so many U.S. poets owe to those who lived and wrote below our border. In the name of national self-interest [at least], we should look upon translations into English as an important means of keeping our own language vital, rejuvenated, refreshed. This book examines such intersections as they have occurred throughout the Americas, and I am hopeful that others will take up this kind of critical approach and apply it to cultures and countries around the globe.
NC: What would you recommend for those interested in reading or conducting translations?
Wow! There are so many, I feel overwhelmed by the question. How to translate poetry is not something I’ve done yet, but those interested in translations should pick the poets they are interested in and see if any of them have translated poems into English. One might also look into a country that he/she is interested in and find out which poets from that country have made it to the U.S. (or English-speaking countries) through translation and then begin there. It’s a long road and it takes some digging, but it’s also filled with delights. The “new” is always a promise, and the world is still much bigger than we imagine.
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Naya Clark is an Atlanta-based writer from New Jersey. Clark enjoys the challenges of writing articles, reviews, poetry, and interviewing other writers and artists. She is an Assistant Editor at Urban Ivy and an interdisciplinary freelance writer. In her spare time, she is underlining good sentences and organizing local art events. More of her work can be found at NayaClark.com.
Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared in New World Writing, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online), elimae, Mandorla and other journals. Nominated several times for a PushcartPrize, Peter is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections. Lord Baltimore, his forthcoming book of poetry, will be available in January, 2021 on Ravenna Press. An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.