{"id":297556,"date":"2014-04-14T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/04\/14\/elsewhere\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:23","slug":"elsewhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/04\/14\/elsewhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Elsewhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

What a wonderful, idiosyncratic book Weinberger has written. I say book, but the closest comparison I could make to other works being published right now are from Sylph Edition\u2019s “Cahiers Series“\u2014short pamphlet-like meditations by notable writers such as Ann Carson, Elfriede Jelinek, and L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai among the architects, playwrights, painters, and philosophers. Weinberger certainly belongs in such company; anything he writes can be assumed to be interesting, different, intellectually engaging. The essay collections he writes\u2014and Elsewhere<\/em> can be considered to be an extended meditation\/essay\u2014puts him as well alongside Rebecca Solnit, Lawrence Weschler, Sven Birkets, and Ilan Stavans.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere<\/em> consists of poems, all in translation, by writers of the Modernist era (by Weinberger\u2019s use here roughly 1910s-1940s) illustrating a broad sensibility that Weinberger calls the sense of being \u201celsewhere\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Victor Segalen, in China at the beginning of the century, writes of the \u201cmanifestation of Diversity,\u201d a \u201cspectacle of Difference\u201d: everything that is \u201cforeign, strange, unexpected, surprising, mysterious, amorous, superhuman, heroic, and even divine, everything that is Other<\/em>.\u201d Picasso put it more bluntly: \u201cStrangeness is what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While certainly many English speakers\/authors wrote poems about travel to foreign places during the same era, by relying on works in translation, of a Japanese traveler writing about Paris or a Senegalese poet in NYC<\/span> for example, Weinberger doubles down on the foreignness, the dislocation and wonder of the experiences.<\/p>\n

He organizes the selection of poems first into three geographical locations\u2014Paris, NYC<\/span>, and Los Angeles\u2014then the experience of travel in a section \u201cTrains and Cars,\u201d followed by \u201cImaginary Countries,\u201d and concludes with a coda about the end of journeying. With only a few poems in each section. Weinberger is neither trying to anthologize nor exhaust the poetic expressions of elsewhere; the prospect of doing so for any one of the cities for example\u2014Paris\u2014would require hundreds of poems to do justice. Instead Weinberger is free to choose unique poems, under topics specific to his interests without being tied down to any taxonomic-like system. Of the thirteen poems in total, Weinberger is the translator of four, along with others such as Thomas Merton and Langston Hughes.<\/p>\n

The first poem, \u201cCathedral in the Thrashing Rain\u201d (trans. Hiroaki Sato) is by Japanese poet Kotaro Takamura. I suspect that he is heretofore unknown to 99 out of 100 English readers (unless familiar with a Green Integer edition from 2007 of the poet\u2019s The Chieko Poems<\/em>). The poem lauds the Cathedral of Notre Dame in an extended address to it, a pattern of address that repeats several times throughout in this book; there\u2019s an odd, quaint tone to the address to this \u201cyou\u201d that is actually charming and engaging. The first stanza begins:<\/p>\n

\n

O another deluge of wind and rain.
\nCollar turned up, getting drenched in this splashing rain,
\nand looking up at you\u2014it\u2019s me,
\nme who never fails to come here once a day,
\nIt\u2019s that Japanese.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Takamura goes on to evoke the cathedral and immediate environment in the middle of a storm, outside weather in the real world perhaps mirroring the passion of the poet who describes the building in an affectionate embrace:<\/p>\n

\n

O Cathedral, you who at such a moment keep ever more silent and
\n soar,
\nCathedral, you who watch motionless the houses of Paris suffering
\n the storm,
\nPlease do not think me rude,
\nwho, hands on your cornerstone,
\nhas his hot check pressed on your skin,
\nit\u2019s me, the drunken one
\nIt\u2019s that Japanese.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yes, the reader comes to agree, this is truly an experience of elsewhere, \u201cforeign, strange, unexpected, surprising, mysterious, amorous . . .\u201d <\/p>\n

Weinberger follows each poem with a quite brief biographical account of the poets. The choice to order this explanation after the poems rather than before brings a direct experience of the poems first. It is rewarding to read the poem, then the biographical context, and finally to double back and reread the poem.<\/p>\n

Some readers might be familiar with Garcia Lorca\u2019s poems about NYC<\/span>, with one in this collection as selected by Weinberger, and others might even know Brecht\u2019s poetry\u2014although I suspect more know him as a writer of plays (albeit in the sense of Jeopardy answers rather than readers of the actual plays). Others might be familiar with the Turkish poet Hikmet, South African\/Portuguese Pessoa, and French Apollinaire, I\u2019m willing to wager that no one until Weinberger has brought together such disparate voices, added to by several other lesser-known Latin American writers, others from Senegal, Haiti and Austria. One of the great joys of reading this book is putting yourself in the hands of Weinberger and his selection of voices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What a wonderful, idiosyncratic book Weinberger has written. I say book, but the closest comparison I could make to other works being published right now are from Sylph Edition\u2019s “Cahiers Series“\u2014short pamphlet-like meditations by notable writers such as Ann Carson, Elfriede Jelinek, and L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai among the architects, playwrights, painters, and philosophers. Weinberger certainly belongs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338206,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297556\/revisions\/338206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}