{"id":300066,"date":"2014-12-19T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-19T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/12\/19\/thousand-times-broken-a-conversation-with-translator-gillian-conoley-part-ii\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:12:29","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:12:29","slug":"thousand-times-broken-a-conversation-with-translator-gillian-conoley-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/12\/19\/thousand-times-broken-a-conversation-with-translator-gillian-conoley-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousand Times Broken: A Conversation with Translator Gillian Conoley [Part II]"},"content":{"rendered":"

The writer Henri Michaux had two great missions in life: to explore the darkest parts of human consciousness, and record what he found in those explorations in the clearest possible way. That\u2019s according to Gillian Conoley, who recently published the first English translations of three of Michaux\u2019s books.<\/em> Thousand Times Broken is a collection of three works by Michaux which he wrote while experimenting with mescalin, a drug he believed would help him explore \u201ca state in which one part of the brain remains unillusioned and lucid during vision, fantasy, or hallucination.\u201d Conoley joined Peter Biello (of the Burlington Writers Workshop<\/a>) on behalf of Three Percent to talk about<\/em> Thousand Times Broken<\/a>, a collection of three books published by City Lights. This is Part II<\/strong> of the interview; you can catch up and read Part I<\/strong><\/em> here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

PB:<\/strong> Let\u2019s move on to Watchtowers on Targets<\/em>. This book was a collaboration between Michaux and Chilean abstract surrealist Roberto Matta. Tell us about their relationship and the product that came from it. <\/p>\n

GC:<\/strong> Matta was apparently the visual artist who Michaux felt the closest affinity with as a visual artist himself. And he was very drawn to the level of movement and a kind of frenetic activity that could sometimes be in Matta\u2019s work. The two of them decided that they would do this collaboration and the first two-thirds of the book are Michaux responding to Matta\u2019s etching. For the last third of the book, Matta would respond to Michaux. And they began and it\u2019s unknown as to who created the title Watchtowers on Targets<\/em>, but what\u2019s steady throughout the entire book is the sense of a human eye and a watchtower that has sprouted from it. And on the watchtower there\u2019s an observation post, and in the observation post there\u2019s an observer who\u2019s looking back at the human eye. So the whole question of subject-object and perspective\u2014who is looking at what and what is looking and what is seeing\u2014all of that is called into question. And in Matta\u2019s drawings you see different interpretations of what I\u2019ve described, though they\u2019re not ever really . . . you see it but it\u2019s not a direct representation of a tower, for example, but pretty close when you look at the drawings.<\/p>\n

Michaux\u2019s writing went unrevised and unedited, which is interesting. And it\u2019s a really wild book and it\u2019s really fast and it\u2019s unusual within Michaux\u2019s oeuvre because we don\u2019t have the narrative links you usually see in Michaux. Characters pop out of nowhere, begin to speak, and disappear. There\u2019s a plot at the beginning\u2014a crime is committed\u2014but that quickly vanishes. Toward the end of that book, he\u2019s got the postcards, and that\u2019s the only epistolary writing that Michaux did. <\/p>\n

PB:<\/strong> You mentioned the plotless aspects of this. This was for me, at least, the least accessible of the three. <\/p>\n

*GC:*Yes. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

PB:<\/strong> I mean they\u2019re all challenging to read, but this one is especially challenging.<\/p>\n

GC:<\/strong> Yeah, it\u2019s pretty wild. Michaux makes demands on his readers. He wasn\u2019t afraid to do that. I think it goes all the way back to his relationship to language. It makes sense that he would be seeking some other mode of expression. The French always looked down upon the Flemish, on Belgian people. The French language is seen as more beautiful, more expressive than Flemish. Walloon is a dialect of the peasant. He\u2019s got a complicated relationship with the language he\u2019s writing in. He doesn\u2019t like it. It\u2019s like the language of someone who disapproves of his very nationality, so there\u2019s that sort of tension. And yet he goes ahead and uses it.<\/p>\n

PB:<\/strong> The third book, the first one you translated, is Four Hundred Men on the Cross<\/em>. In this one, we\u2019re really seeing Michaux struggle on the page with the inadequacy of language. He\u2019s twisting the poems into the shape of the cross, so the words seem to crouch in the bottom left-hand corner of the page. The medium essentially becomes the message, in a sense, when the shape of the arrangement of the words becomes the message as much as the words themselves. <\/p>\n

GC:<\/strong> The place that he puts you in\u2014you can\u2019t say you\u2019re a reader, you can\u2019t say you\u2019re a viewer. You\u2019re caught in some place in between. He achieved that. He puts you in some completely different realm than you\u2019ve been in before, where it\u2019s unclear whether or not you\u2019re reading or seeing. And it\u2019s unclear as to whether he\u2019s writing or drawing. [Laughs] So that\u2019s what\u2019s really interesting. Just to be able to be in that completely different world. <\/p>\n

PB:<\/strong> Finally, you\u2019re a poet. Did translating this book change the way you write poetry? <\/p>\n

GC:<\/strong> Translating is wonderful, and this is the first thing I\u2019ve ever translated. You get to escape your own consciousness and enter someone else\u2019s. And especially with a book like this, when consciousness is the subject matter, that was an intriguing aspect of it. But in terms of my own poetry, I had been writing long poems anyway, but I wrote a really long one that seemed to be able to expand because I had translated a poem that had done that, so it\u2019s almost like learning to play a piece of music. You know? And then being able to do it in your own work, because you learned to play that music that someone else wrote. <\/p>\n

——————————<\/p>\n

Gillian Conoley is the author of seven collections of poetry, including<\/em> Peace ,<\/em> The Plot Genie ,<\/em> Profane Halo ,<\/em> Lovers In The Used World , and<\/em> Tall Stranger , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Conoley earned a BA in journalism at Southern Methodist State University and an MFA<\/span> at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is founder and editor of the long-standing journal<\/em> Volt. <\/p>\n

——————————<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The writer Henri Michaux had two great missions in life: to explore the darkest parts of human consciousness, and record what he found in those explorations in the clearest possible way. That\u2019s according to Gillian Conoley, who recently published the first English translations of three of Michaux\u2019s books. Thousand Times Broken is a collection of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300066","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\/300066","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=300066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336786,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300066\/revisions\/336786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}