Against Translation (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Shapiro, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022661350X ISBN 13: 9780226613505

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation—not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language—where “the signs loosen, fray, and drift”—Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn’t yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking “girly”; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss—moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.

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Alan Shapiro has published many books, including Reel to Reel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
 

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Against Translation

By Alan Shapiro

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2019 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-61350-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
ONE, 
Against Translation, 
Manhood, 
Preposterous, 
Cuban Missile Crisis, 
Bystander, 
Hurricanes, 
Justice, 
Photograph of Neo-Nazi March through Skokie, Illinois, 1977, 
TWO, 
Ancestry, 
Father, 
Grounders, 
Shoelaces, 
Family, 
Devotion, 
Hands, 
Geese, 
Glamour, 
Encore, 
THREE, 
Oracles, 
First Love, 
Mirrors, 
Grasshopper, 
Puberty, 
Gary, 
Smell, 
Infidelity, 
After Flossing, 
Memory, 
Neo-Platonic, 
Late Desire, 
Countdown, 
Letter to the Cemetery Owner, 
FOUR, 
Turkey Vulture, 
Kindness, 
Letter to Kathy, 
Outcast, 
Ambition, 
Hell, 
Buddy, 
Wheelies, 
Keats, 
Nonsense, 
Teaching, 
Words, 
Patience, 
Diaries, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Against Translation

The songs swept down from the northern steppes
with cinerary horse
and sword and vestment
in the wake of battle
suicidal for a bronze
translation of flesh burnt
to a vertical vapor trail
of fame that, so they claimed,
would be undying,
by which they meant
the dying would be just
prolonged
a little longer
as on a ladder
made of air each
legendary smoke of name could only climb
by thinning
till it wasn't there.

And now as the steel tips of our devices
dig, sort through
and analyze
what's left behind,
scant traces
of berserk debris, dumb soot of ritual effaced
by dumber ash,
beneath ghost towns
the ghosts have all abandoned,
all we unearth
intact now
are the untranslated
bones of babies,
inhumed at home in older dwellings
on deeper strata
under mud floors
in pits — placed
carefully on sides, knees drawn to chests,

skulls cupped in pebble bones of hand,
the dead nursling,
the stillborn,
the miscarried — unnamed,
unadorned,
as if the only grave goods
buried with them were
their perishing,
as if that
were what the mothers
wanted to keep close,
keep hidden, safe
from the heroic
stench of burning
upward while their breasts
still swelling, dripping
freshened the black dirt
sucking at their feet.

Manhood

You were still too little for the new bicycle I'd gotten you but too big for the tricycle you still liked to ride, and so while the big bike stood unused in the driveway, you rode the tricycle around the cul-de-sac, knees banging on the handlebars, feet clumsily pedaling, happy to be too big for once for anything, laughing so goofily it made me laugh to see you laugh, which as I watched surprised me the way the plane-less silence in the skies that week surprised us all. 9/11 had just become itself. A new and heady unironic language you couldn't speak without and still be heard had overnight become our lingua franca, an Esperanto we woke up knowing, as if what tumbled down with the towers were the civic Babels of our separate lives, as if we had been blown by the explosions backward to a pre-Babel, nearly Edenic understanding, speaking the same tongue inside the same body politic that flexed its outraged muscle through the words we spoke, no matter whom we spoke them to. Our good neighbor Rob, the Vietnam vet, business school professor, church deacon, town council member, wandered over to where I stood. You were shouting "watch me daddy watch me," and as you pedaled by he said, "Big boy like you shouldn't ride a girl's bike." The barb of mockery was aimed at me, it seemed, not you. Yet you, not understanding what or why, you got it. Something wasn't right — something I hadn't told you about except perhaps in my too soft, understated, overnuanced way, conveyed without explicitly conveying, reluctantly, in stifled anger and impatience, in signals flashing by too quickly to notice even while they're felt. You looked at him and then at me, and in the look I saw inchoate bafflement, trace elements of shame, first inklings of an aura of the law that through him, at that moment, had finally found you out. And as you pedaled off, you were just like us now, not smiling, not laughing, serious and dutiful: you too had a job to do, so you did it.

Preposterous

To picture the infinitely
knotted up and tangled
ganglia of all life
in reverse, receding
like tipped over dominoes
tipping back
up to a first
not yet tipped over
into everything,

or back before that to that
four-billion-year-old
first billionth of a nanosecond
of a ghost
speck of no longer now
about to be, of lowest
entropy
that being anything,
by virtue of being, could permit,

to imagine
there inside it
in its next to nothingness all
possible combinations of all
somethings — the past
still in the future
and the future in the just
now not

even dreaming past now to itself —
and then to think how we too
were there, how the sheer
infinitesimal
nano-chance of us
was there already
as the unlikeliest
of crapshoots in that pre-coalescing
of postnothing,
makes me
wonder in the aftermath of
yet new carnage
if there isn't
something of that nothing
we began as
even now inside us grown
so tired of the attempt
at waking

into something
that it wants to just
go back
to what it was, to
sleep, to have the
whole thing over with
already, tiredness
so extreme
it hardly feels

the tribal bolt lock
sliding shut,
the finger itchy on the trigger
and the shoulder
against the buttstock
braced
for the automatic
bang and recoil.

Cuban Missile Crisis

The pipe smoke as smell when Uncle Charlie smoked it, the blue-gray, lazy, undulating bands above his head like a visual expression of the burly sweetness in the nose, and the pipe as taste when I'd sneak a hit, the sickening oily ash now burning on the tongue and in the throat, and how, despite that, the smell and look of it still made me want to try again, as if the bad taste had been all my fault, and next time would be different, though it never was. The film clips of the atom bomb exploding — so beautiful on the outside, the concentric soft flash at the moment of the blast, and the way organically and slowly it would rise out of itself, pulsing up into a still tornado, colossally calm on the TV screen until you saw it from the inside where blizzard gales of ash incinerated houses, whole towns and cities, bodies vaporized to streaks of charcoal on the ground. Or the way aluminum siding turned our gray house in a single day so brightly white you had to think only a family of angels could have lived inside it while inside it on that day we were almost like angels, sitting in quiet all afternoon and evening before the TV as our warships encircled Cuba, halos of smoke from Charlie's pipe spreading out above us all, the fear a kind of closeness, the cramped rooms for once no longer spacious with disaffection. Outside the Soviets were coming; inside, nobody was at anybody's throat.

Bystander

"I saw a man put together what was left of his son in a bag."

— USA Today

The words as I read them...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022661350X
• ISBN 13: 9780226613505
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 106
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar