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When you're in the mood for music, do you limit yourself to intellectual
stuff that plays around with theorems? Do Schoenberg and John Cage wet your noodle more than disco
sensations? If so, Jacqueline Rissett is not for you, because I doubt you
like to read difficult fiction.
My theory is simplistic, but it's very rare to find a person whose tastes
are the same in any one medium. You like base feelings one place, complex
abstractions at another. I think The Translation Begins is for
bubblegum pop fans, because it's very uncompromising poetry, with themes
that are generally built upon intellectual arguments that would send the
DeFranco Family into a tizzy.
Rissett is French, and seems grammatically inspired by Arno Schmidt. Words,
piled into squares, say less than their enclosure, or are pushed out
from colons whose openings dictate both the pause and the burst that
follows.
To follow her toughest poems, you almost have to wait until the straight
lines hit your eyes like the furthest tip of Earth. Walk beyond the line to
the next stanza, and you fall off the poem. You drift from its meaning.
It's impossible to get all these poems right away, and I doubt I'll ever
figure some of them out. I keep trying, though, because I adore the
beginning, her simple stuff, the poems she wrote when she was seven:
Order still exists -- but no longer the objects
Take the objects, put them back at the core
Those two lines come from "Corpus (Story)", a poem that works like John
Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" in that it's about the act of storytelling,
and the process of writing. It's not even a wee bit nostalgic, though, and
is more preoccupied with its ideas than its potential emotional release. Bissett
writes:
there is a uniformity that comes from the world -- every
letter inhabits the very same space, with or without
descenders
From this, you might have a clue where she comes from. She loves her craft,
so she thinks about it; she thinks about it, so she writes about it. Far
from a self-indulgence, such a process makes you feel the writer always
being honest, never making a word up. To some degree, I underestimate the
emotional content that's included here, as there are beautiful lines about the
way inspiration helps you see your first glorious intentions were crap:
("in the same instant he misses both his works and sees
his dream vanish")
Following "Corpus (Story)" is "Corpus (Notes)". As recent Burning
Deck publications have shown, footnotes and endnotes can be the sole
entity within a work. Here, that's not the case. Nor is it the case of notes
fleshing out the "Story"; these "Notes" assert the inescapable failure of
words to tell anything:
Wanting to speak exactly, we must tell or speak of what
Is vulgarly called: memory -- object conventional and
present -- indicating
-- not a precise point...
The Notes section is essentially an expansion of Queneau's opinions after he
left the surrealist camp. It is a lengthy treatise on why Beat poets appear,
by their aesthetic alone, to be like dumb blondes gathered around an
Alphabet Book. That said, a Beat writer can be fun. I always got pleasantly
drunk when forced to climb up boring mountains with Kerouac, but drinking never
helped me navigate Rissett's later, headier works.
In "The Affirmation", there's a line that goes "my (arrow sign) s (arrow
sign) mor". I never figured out the "s" before "mor" (which is Latin for
"death", and rhymes with "s" in translation), though I read it in every
possible mood at every possible time of day. Eventually, the poem made me
just develop an urge to buy marshamallows, graham crackers, and chocolate,
and I'm sure that wasn't the poem's intentions. And yet, with every thought
clipped by the poet, I found my own wings were clipped. I fell from this poem
like Lazarus from Heaven, and the only reason I kept coming back was, hell,
it might be heaven. I just couldn't tell.
I'd like to say Risset's work has been impeccably translated by fellow poet
Jennifer Moxley, but I really don't know Risset in any other language but
the English Moxley has placed her in. Through Moxley, she seems to be a poet with
a gift for subtle rhymes ("running" and "unsettle"; "grottoes" and
"scattered") and for compelling repetitions that bring music and
accessibility to her thoughts:
oh, I know you
I know you little fork
I have not missed you
Where Burning Deck
and the annual Serie d'ECRITURE series have given us wonderful,
inexpensive translations of the modern French avant garde, I do wish they
also provided short essays, with samples of the writers' work in their
native languages. They don't do this, so that the books remain cheap, but you
wind up wondering what exactly was the relationship between translator and
the text before them.
Was the occasional French found in these translations written originally in
English? Is that a language game that both Risset and Moxley play? And why
did Moxley feel compelled to keep Risset's abbreviations (like "I CH 61",
which refers to I Ching, hexagram 61)? If made to maintain the visual
effect, as I suspect, what possible visuals were lost?
Like David Bellos' translations of Perec's La Disparicion and Les
Revenentes, Moxley appears to have done the impossible, by at least
giving English readers a great sense of Risset's pleasures. Since I had no
success quenching my curiosity at a local library, I recommend The
Translation Begins most to those who are near an academic library with a
good French literature section. You will want to know more, after
Translation ends, because, as that short poem goes, "Risset: missed
it."
-- Theodore Defosse
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About the Publisher:
Burning Deck Press publishes serious literary work, with an emphasis on
poetry, fiction and French and German contemporary literature in
translation. Run by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop (poets, translators, and
beautiful people), their books are available from the Small Press
Distributors (SPD).
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