Interview with Mr. Eliot Weinberger, a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator.
By Ben Andoni
Essays from Montaigne (Michel de Montaigne Eyquem) has become an independent way for creating an autonomous genre which is very pleased today. Having read your book, Karmic Traces, translated into Albanian and very well received, seems that you have made a reconstruction of the traditional essay by turning it into a different genre of literary aesthetic. This has been intended as a trend or this kind of essay you have invented during the writing?
“The essay is centuries older than Montaigne (in Latin, Chinese, and Japanese, for example) but it is true that its form has remained basically the same since the time of Montaigne: a first-person inquiry into a given subject. With certain notable exceptions, the essay, unlike fiction or poetry has never really had an avant-garde, especially in English. It’s almost entirely unexplored territory. A few younger writers in the USA are beginning to discover this, but it is certainly not a trend or a movement”.
You are widely recognized as one of America’s leading translators of Latin American poetry. The translation of poetry should be satisfaction and one of the most difficult jobs of a man of letters, at the same time. How difficult it was for you translations of Latin American poetry and why decided to bring this kind of poetry to the American public?
“Translation is a form of advocacy criticism: here is something I think you should read. Every literature needs to know the literatures of other languages. If not, one’s own literature petrifies. American poetry, for example, was completely transformed by translations of classical Chinese and Greek early in the 20th century and, in the postwar period by translations of Latin American and Eastern European poets.
In my own case, I began translating the work of Octavio Paz as a teenager, and worked with him for thirty years until his death. Paz, of course, was not unknown when I began, but I also helped to introduce into English some other Latin Americans, such as Vicente Huidobro and Xavier Villaurrutia, who were less familiar. As for the difficulties, every poet must be translated in an entirely different way. Academics consider this a “problem” of translation, but I consider it a pleasure”.
You have said time ago that Translation feeds a national literature, and in that sense we are, at the moment, starving. Does the translations help or ruin the cultures in Globalise word, according Uō
“One of the curiosities of globalization is that is moving in two directions. On the one hand, English- or a kind of airport English- has become the lingua franca. On the other hand, there has been a tremendous renaissance of literature in what the United Nations calls “languages of lesser currency,” particularly the indigenous languages of tribal cultures. Globalization has, perhaps inadvertently, also led to a reassertion of ethnicity. All the talk of a global monoculture is only partly, or barely, true: these are very distinct, and very proud, cultures who are all drinking Coca-Cola”.
You have made a classification of American poetry, firstly starting with poetry of Ginsberg (particularly in the 1950s and early 60s), Wretched (particularly during the Black nationalist period), Rexroth and Rukeyser (throughout their careers) and Duncan… In what vector is today the worldwide poetry?
“American poetry is extremely varied and complex: I would say the most wide-ranging poetry of modernism. (I should quickly add that this is not nationalism: American poetry has always been produced in spite of, not because of, the US government.). Some years ago I edited an anthology that attempted to delineate one strain or lineage in the postwar period. It began with the late works of Pound, Williams, HD, and Langston Hughes; continued with poets who began in the 1930’s, known as the Objectivists (Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff); then the poets from the 1940’s such as Rukeyser and Rexroth; and then the explosion of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Beats (Ginsberg, Snyder), the New York School (Ashbery, O’Hara), the Black Mountain poets (Olson, Creeley), the San Francisco Renaissance (Duncan, Spicer) and on to some important, more recent poets, such as Michael Palmer and Susan Howe. (I am, needless to say, leaving out many names.) This was only one line: there are many others. (For example, I did not include such well-known figures as Lowell, Plath, Bishop, Berryman).
In the lat 25 years there has been such a proliferation of poets- some 10,000 in the USA today- and such a limitless variety of poetry that the word “poetry” itself has become rather like the word “dance,” which includes salsa, Merce Cunnignham, Broadway musicals, etc. No one can possibly know what is going on, and people tend to be familiar only with their subgenre or group. So any generalizations about American poetry, let alone world poetry, can only be false”.
You’ve pointed out that ‘most of the great ages of literature have been great ages of translation”? How lost literature by translation or vice versa?
“I don’t think anything is lost in translation. I think many things are found in translation. Everyone who reads has found a great deal in books not written in one’s own language”.
Essays that tell the history of culture and ideas do carry themselves and the risk to be a form of real history, so a kind of emulate with history. At the other hand, your essays seems otherwise. Why happens so to You?
“All works of art of course reflect the historical moment in which they are created, usually in ways that are not apparent to their creator. I don’t see how I am any different”.
Your prose is hardly limited to the didactic and polemical, regardless than to Karmic Traces it be in very lyrical states and even poetic, as critics say. What is it real essay? What is it not essay?
“My one rule is that all the information must be verifiable. I don’t make anything up, or play the postmodern game of false scholarship. Beyond that rule, anything is possible. Some of my essays veer toward a kind of documentary prose poetry, some more toward narrative. To me, they are essays because they are written in prose sentences and because they are not fiction”.
Do You consider that in our times, modern or postmodern literature can focus bit by bit to essay, making more pale some of expressing on classical literature forms (novel, story, etc.)?
“Poetry and stories are older than the essay, but in the West, the essay is older than the novel. It is already a classical form. But it is only rarely a modern (let alone postmodern) form. The essay, stylistically, is now somewhere around 1910. We have a whole century ahead of us”.
Among the essays that did era as them of Emerson and essays of Borges, whom you prefer more. Can You say the opinion for their essays?
“I edited and translated a very large selection of Borges’ essays. To me, they are his best work, even better than the stories, and certainly better than the poetry. I admire Emerson more as a mind than as a writer. But it is a myth of Harold Bloom that all American writers are Emersonian. I am a first-generation American, and Emerson is more remote to me than, say, Chuang Tzu.Or more exactly, I’m much more at home reading Emerson’s sources in German Romanticism and Hindu philosophy than with Emerson himself”.
If We stay at Borges’ essays (which U translated and publish), you have said that: for the first time the state of American PERIODICALS was most apparent to me when I edited book of Borges’ Essays. Why wasn’t printed media interested in publishing essays as it happen and with Borges?
“America only has a very few intellectual magazines with any circulation, and they are all locked into fairly rigid formats (the book review, the memoir, first-person journalism, etc.). When I edited the Borges book, I had some 500 pages of previously untranslated Borges essays, none of them particularly difficult, all of them originally written for Argentine newspapers and popular magazines. But not a single American magazine wanted to publish any of it before the book appeared, even though Borges is widely read in the USA. It was a telling moment on the state of American publishing”.
Which is Your relation with publication? Are U worried when can not publish essays. Where can fill better Eliot in translation or essays?
“In my own case, my more radical essays are published in English in small literary journals, or not published at all until they come out in book form. But they appear in translation in many languages in larger-circulation magazines. (The more traditional ones do appear in places like The New York Review of Books or The London Review of Books. I don’t worry at all, as I have a wonderful publisher for my books: New Directions, the oldest and best independent literary publisher in the US, the one responsible for introducing many of the greatest writers of modernism (Neruda, Paz, Brecht, Camus, Sartre, Nabokov, Pound, Tennessee Williams, and on and on…)- so I’m published in a kind of contextual bliss”.
Can U explain the rapport of essays itself with what is called discipline of artistic criticism. Where the difference between them, consists?
“Art criticism or literary criticism is certainly a subgenre of the essay, but one that is read for the ideas more than for the quality of the writing. To my mind, there are only a few literary critics who were also great writers. Walter Benjamin is certainly one of them”.
Between the two traditions of European essay (which represented by Montaigne and Paul Val곹) and American essay (Emerson and Herald Bloom) do exist possibility for contacts element?
“I must confess that seeing Harold Bloom in that company makes me laugh. He is an extremely well-read minor literary critic with some overwrought Freudian theories (the “anxiety of influence” etc.)and a truly repulsive system of exclusion (the “Western canon” etc.). He is not a writer, not a part of literary “tradition,”and one who is already rarely mentioned outside of certain academic circles.
As for tradition, my personal tradition would include Artaud more than Val곹, and William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Guy Davenport, and Susan Howe (as American essay writers) more than Emerson”.
May you say something for Albanian’ Literature. You have wrote for Albanian poetess Leshanaku. Can U explain your connection with our literature? How U contact it for the first time?
“Other than the novels of Kadare, my first exposure to Albanian literature was when my publisher, New Directions, sent me a manuscript of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poetry. I was enormously interested and excited by the work, and ended up writing a “blurb” for the jacket..I suppose it was unusual for an American writer, not a specialist, to be interested in an Albanian writer- though I think Lleshanaku is a poet of international importance. So this eventually led to my invitation to Albania a few years ago, where I gave some readings, met many writers, and, happily, a publisher who wanted to do a book of mine.
The problem, of course, is that almost nothing has been translated, so I know very little about Albanian literature, other than some scattered poems and stories. Judging from the many intelligent and enthusiastic conversations I had in Albania, there is no doubt a whole world of writing to be discovered, and I can only wait for the translations to trickle in”.
The last one. What’s about prizemania. Everytime, we can hear that people of letters say the same about the latest no-talent getting more prize. Are U sensitive to the prize and fame?
“What I always find hilarious is that most writers think that prizes always go to mediocrities, but that their own genius is so evident that they should be given the prize. The sunlight of their greatness will blast through the fog of dullness that normally surrounds prize committees. I have always believed that one should work in such a way that no one would ever dream of giving you a prize”.
Mr. Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages
Eliot Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. His many translations of the work of Paz include the Collected Poems 1957-1987, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among Weinberger’s other translations are Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
His political articles are collected in 9/12, What I Heard About Iraq, and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism and selected for the Times Literary Supplement’s “International Books of the Year.” The Guardian (UK) said of What I Heard About Iraq: “Every war has its classic antiwar book, and here is Iraq’s.” It has been adapted into a prize-winning theater piece, two cantatas, two prize-winning radio plays, a dance performance, and various art installations; it has appeared on some 100,000 websites, and was read or performed in nearly one hundred events throughout the world on 20 March 2006, the anniversary of the invasion.
A co-author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Weinberger is the translator of Unlock by the exiled poet Bei Dao, and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, also a TLS “International Book of the Year.” He is the editor of the anthologies American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders and World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions.
In 1992, Weinberger was the first recipient of the PEN/Kolovakos Award for his promotion of Hispanic literature in the U.S.; in 2000, he became the only American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico. He is prominently featured in the Visitor’s Key to Iceland, and was chosen by the German organization Dropping Knowledge as one of a hundred “world’s most innovative thinkers.” At the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival, he was presented as a “post-national writer.” He lives in New York City.
