{"id":419992,"date":"2019-05-03T10:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-03T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=419992"},"modified":"2019-05-03T12:23:07","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T16:23:07","slug":"architecture-of-dispersed-life-selected-poetry-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/05\/03\/architecture-of-dispersed-life-selected-poetry-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Aditi Machado<\/strong>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Some Beheadings\u00a0and the translator of Farid Tali\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Prosopopoeia. She is the former poetry editor at <\/em>Asymptote\u00a0and the visiting poet-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry <\/em><\/a>by Pablo de Rokha, translated from the Spanish by Urayo\u00e1n Noel (Chile, Shearsman Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wouldn\u2019t it be perfectly delicious, I think, wouldn\u2019t it just, if all I did here was quote from\u2014<\/p>\n

Adding up the world<\/em>, the whole world<\/em>, Yankeeland, Yankeeland opens its IMMENSE mouth<\/em>, immensely full of<\/em> dead birds! . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014this vicious little (big) book? Maybe that\u2019s all I need to do, but then, I think, what if\u2014what if, not? What if they just don\u2019t\u2014<\/p>\n

Like an ample<\/em> blonde cow, like an ample<\/em> blonde cow, Yankeeland ambles arounds chewing over, chewing over, chewing over the future of beasts and defecating paradoxes; the cowboys bellow their green sonnets kicking and screaming, cornered, like<\/em> buffaloes, like <\/em>buffaloes bellowing prehistorically, bellowing, like rhinoceros chariots, the poems of the freest man, the freest, the freest \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014see what I see? Because do we (and by \u201cwe\u201d I mean those of us, in our various shapes and colors, trained to understand \u201cthe\u201d avant-garde as a set of Anglo experimenters who \u201cdid\u201d \u201cthings\u201d with syntax and perspective and I still love you Woolf and Stein) know anything about \u201cthe\u201d avant-garde that\u2019s\u2014<\/p>\n

Yankeeland flicks the ash, the ash, the honorable<\/em> ash of its<\/em> capitalist cigar on LIFE\u2019s wrinkled face and smiling, smiling, it says to the sun: Sir,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014not European and not United St-<\/p>\n

yield the sidewalk to me! \u2026 yield the sidewalk to me!<\/em> \u2026 ! \u2026 , and the SUN, the SUN, the SUN complies . . .<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014atesian? Ay, there\u2019s the rub! And wouldn\u2019t it be so very perfect if \u201cwe\u201d living in (if not belonging to) the United States were to reward a book so very, very and viciously critical of this\u2014<\/p>\n

Yankeeland the<\/em> COSMIC, the<\/em> COSMIC Yankeeland plays golf, plays golf, plays golf<\/em> with the great ball of THE EARTH\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014very land.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"The quotations above are all from a single long poem, \u201cYankeeland,\u201d by Pablo de Rokha\u2014described in a blurb by Daniel Borzutzky as \u201ca major Chilean poet of the early 20th<\/sup> century, who ought to sit front and center alongside Neruda, Mistral, Huidobro, Vallejo and Girondo\u201d\u2014translated by the stateless poet-performer-thinker Urayo\u00e1n Noel. The substantial paratext in this 300-page selected volume positions de Rokha (1894-1968) at the forefront (indeed, often, before Neruda) of Chilean avant-garde poetics, but also as an outsider: an indigenous poet, a polemicist, an artist of great fury, talent, and lust for life. All this is evident in simply the one poem, \u201cYankeeland\u201d (from an early book published in 1922), but Noel offers us selections from almost all of de Rokha\u2019s work, ranging from his early anarchism and formal daring to a middle period of explicit political activism as well as the elegiac turn of his final years.<\/p>\n

This is almost too much, Urayo\u00e1n Noel, and I can never say no to \u201ctoo much.\u201d There is indeed \u201ctoo much\u201d to quote from and \u201ctoo much\u201d praises to sing of this translator, so I\u2019ll only say that I watched some YouTube videos of Noel performing his work and believe that it is the fullness of this performative artistry, its critically somatic intelligence, that emerges also in his translations\u2014in having to recreate de Rokha\u2019s syntactical and sonic excesses, his idiosyncratic spelling, his outrageous and botanically precise diction, as well as his refusal to restrain language by means of what I\u2019ll call semantic \u201cborder control.\u201d An example of this latter is taken, here, from the book-length Southamerica<\/em> (1927):<\/p>\n

. . . the sun in the breakdown of autumn shines like ripe fruit the white guardians carry the dawn in their belt and the zeal of uselessly greek bastards puffs the chests of the honest pines each one has a water jug yes a water jug and smiles like a smartly dressed planet similar to a skyscraper to a prisoner to a sardine myself walking singing resinging countersinging with my subterranean papers my red pants my yellow hat my green sandals and my transparent jacket the color of god and my voice as black and thick as corpse moonshine \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This massive block of a prose poem is the embodiment of a landscape: \u201cThe punctuation-less blocks of text allow for endless and vertiginous chains of metaphors and modifiers, and for radical synaesthetic slippages, as the sights of rural Chile are also its sounds, smells, tastes, and bodies,\u201d writes Noel, who also points out that while South America is obviously located in opposition to the Global North in the early poem \u201cYankeeland,\u201d de Rokha\u2019s Southamerica<\/em> of 1927 is its own space, not reliant on anything but itself to be (un)intelligible, to simply be.<\/p>\n

\"\"I am grateful to Noel not only for his translations but for his selection and arrangement of these texts, as well as his scholarship. Architecture of Dispersed Life<\/em> is an extraordinarily generous English-language introduction to Pablo de Rokha and indeed the very first one in book form.<\/p>\n

Much of de Rokha\u2019s poetry feels terrifying relevant in our current, unhappy times (see the excerpts from \u201cYankeeland\u201d above). It is also evident that de Rokha is, as they say, \u201ca man of his time,\u201d and even, a man of our<\/em> time, given his depictions of women\u2019s bodies, frequently naked and mindless, to convey his sense of a world \u201criven\u201d by violence, and given his obvious homophobia and perhaps less obvious racism. I am grateful to the translator for acknowledging de Rokha\u2019s \u201cvitalistic hetero-masculinism and \u2026 the unchecked privilege that comes with it, even as his work consistently questions privilege in other ways (for instance, by affirming the working-class, the rural, the subaltern, and the indigenous).\u201d In championing this book, I am also championing the sort of reading that is willing to contend with and reject aspects of our literary ancestors (many of my Anglo literary heroes are under-criticized for their bigotry, if criticized at all) that we wish not to condone or allow to continue.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll end with where I began, with some quotations, which I hope will<\/em> circulate, and excessively, from this big (little) book:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why one understands more by living than my thinking, because living is thinking, with each and every muscle.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u201cArchitecture of Dispersed Life,\u201d 1934<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

let the poem become being, action, will, organism, virtues and vices, let it constitute, let it determine, let it establish its atmosphere, its atmosphere and the great custom of the gesture, the act\u2019s judgment<\/p>\n

\u2014Equation [Song of the Aesthetic Formula]<\/em>, 1929<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

everything lurks and i contain it and i desire it all and everything defines me happy from the other shore whose law presides over my boundless system an order emanates from disorder<\/p>\n

\u2014Southamerica<\/em>, 1927<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

My voice was walking down the void and my voice got tangled in my voice.<\/p>\n

\u2014U<\/em>, 1926-27<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I hate, hate the utilitarian, coarse, quotidian, prosaic work, and I love the illustrious idleness of the beautiful; to sing, sing, sing . . .\u2014that\u2019s all you know, Pablo de Rokha!<\/p>\n

\u2014The Moans<\/em>, 1922<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Aditi Machado\u00a0is the author of\u00a0Some Beheadings\u00a0and the translator of Farid Tali\u2019s\u00a0Prosopopoeia. She is the former poetry editor at Asymptote\u00a0and the visiting poet-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Architecture of Dispersed Life: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":420002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[68802,68772,68782,68792,37876],"class_list":["post-419992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-aditi-machado","tag-architecture-of-dispersed-life","tag-pablo-de-rokha","tag-urayoan-noel","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419992","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\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420112,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419992\/revisions\/420112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}