Ugly Duckling Presse | Angel City Review

In several reviews on this website, I have expressed my view on the value of literature; namely, it is a necessary vehicle used to share human perspective and an intensely potent tool for empathy. If this is true, then there may be no purer manifestation of that value than that of literature in translation. It represents the crossing of borders and boundaries beyond the physical. It is often a deeply collaborative effort, as even authors who translate their own work must adopt hybridized linguistic and cultural perspectives. It, by its very existence, forces the reader to confront the existence of those they might otherwise be encouraged to label “alien”, “foreign”, or even just “different”. So maybe I am not in what one might consider a sufficiently objective mindset to examine Don Mee Choi’s essay “Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode”, but I do not care, because it is a fascinating and provocative distillation of the power of translation, and a vital framing device for how we must proceed.

I seek mirrors through which I can also traverse, in order to map out the neocolonial history of my home, to translate myself.

The heart of this essay is giving translation its proper context. Beauty can often be found in the wake of tragedy, and while said beauty never justifies said tragedy, you can never understand one without the other. Most translation is no different. Much of it is born of and necessitated by the inconceivably cruel legacy of colonialism. But when we look at that legacy, especially those of us who are the descendants of colonization, we have a nasty tendency to treat it as a barbaric ancestral practice that we have left behind. The truth is that colonialism, like so many other forms of oppression, has merely adapted to new circumstances. Neocolonialism, which is the invasion and enslavement of cultures by or on behalf of capitalist corporations in the name of profiteering, is its latest incarnation and the one Choi specifically confronts in the essay.

I am not content to just go from Korean to English. I am not content to uphold the notion of national literature – the notion that literature outside of the Western canon is always bound to national borders.

She takes the time to explore the intense relationship between translation and identity, of how work in translation can resonate with someone who is of two or more worlds, with someone who can still feel the amputated connections to multiple cultural pasts. She shows how translation can take the very impetus behind neocolonialism and repurpose it as a tool of resistance; where neocolonialism ignores boundaries and consent in its insatiable need to destroy, work in translation travels back along its rubble-strewn wake to undermine it at the source. She helps us experience the tragic beauty of translation in our modern context, namely the regretful necessity of its existence as an imperfect tool of preservation and communication. For Choi, translation is not merely a political act, but a defiant one, resisting not only human greed but the advance of time itself, and questioning the assumed inexorability of both.

But my tongue deforms, it disobeys. I translate this longing, entangled with neocolonial dependency, as homesickness, which is a form of illness, a form of intensity.

On a slightly more personal level, I can say that Choi’s manner of essay writing is one that makes me deeply regret the argumentative techniques being taught in most schools. I would not be against showing this essay to any number of professors and department chairs as an example of how it is more than possible to make a persuasive written argument that is profoundly informative, deeply emotional, and a joy to read. Especially in the latter half of the essay I found myself pausing after several sentences and bemoaning the notion that so many students are taught to approach non-fiction and academic writing divorced from their own personal perspectives, as if such a thing was even possible. Choi’s writing is clear and powerful, poignant and elegant. She takes hold of an utterly daunting beast, that being the infinitely stacking layers of identity and legacy at the heart of her essay, and renders it intelligible without sacrificing scale or impact.

My tongue and your tongue are already an aggregate, a site of multiple and collective enunciation.

It is no coincidence that violence and militarism are so intimately tied with Choi’s subject matter. Neocolonialism is tautologically violent, and as it faces growing resistance around the world, it shows that violence through continued attempts at cultural erasure, police and military brutality, and economic exploitation. It can only ever respond to challenges with cruelty and dehumanization. And what is literature in translation other than an attempt to acknowledge someone else’s humanity? I do not think Choi is arguing that translation is some silver bullet (even our metaphors are violent) that will save us from greed and hubris and hate. But she makes the best case I have ever seen for the necessity of translation in fighting that terrible hydra. Her essay reminds me that translation doesn’t merely grow in the wake of tragedy. It is a manifestation of the existential human need for connection and acknowledgment.

“Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode” is part of Ugly Duckling Presse‘s 2020 Pamphlet Series.

Can it be said that awe is an underappreciated emotion? I’m sure we’ve all got at least one friend that uses “awesome” as if it were going out of style (and let’s face it; it probably is and should). But I am talking about awe – that spine-shaking, finger-twitching, pupil-dilating experience of magnitude beyond one’s self. It is a sensation that ignites fight and flight. It is, maybe, the purest form of excitement, that moment balancing on a knife’s edge between dread and desire. Or, maybe, it is that knife’s edge splitting us in two, letting our halves drown in both extremes. I suspect that our current cultural lack of appreciation may have something to do with pride. Our egos get in the way, convincing us that humility is the same as weakness. Even when we are afraid of the awesome thing before us, our pride often blinds us to its full scale and potential of meaning.

and at the edge of the twenty-first century / anew
Narcissus and his double / clasped together / verging
on asphyxia / in rigid water /
locked / enclosed in green glass:
a Siamese fetus / in a test
tube /

These are the immediate thoughts I am left with after finishing Materia Prima, a collection of the poetry of Amanda Berenguer, one of Uruguay’s most renowned poets. This is the kind of text that you want to encourage egotistical people, especially those saturated in toxic masculinity, to sit down and just read. It is a beautiful, surreal read, almost oxymoronic. It is at once calm and intense enough to boil your marrow; it possesses the kind of fearlessness that can only be earned through facing true fear. If you’ve read any of my work on this website, then you know I have a deep-seeded attachment to the metaphysical, the cosmic, and the existential. Berenguer’s work plays those strings like a true maestra as she guides you through what I can only imagine was her own existential reckoning, and does so not as condescending instruction but as an invaluable lesson to the rest of us.

the gesture suspended adrift / taking measure of the world’s door / in the lapse / of thought’s pause / the exposed piercing amnesia shines / the Milky Way unknown.

“Materia prima” is a phrase from alchemy, referring to the concept of a base form of matter. It is, theoretically, the substance out of which all other matter is formed. It was largely dismissed as a concept when physics and chemistry overtook alchemy as the sensible branches of science. But the concept still exists; “materia prima” is still one of the holy grails of physics, even if the label is no longer used, and the search for it led to the discovery of the atom, the proton, the electron, the neutron, the quark, the neutrino, and still pushes the cutting edge of science to this day. Why am I explaining all of this? Because this is my review, and damnit if I am not going to spend a paragraph nerding out and talking about how amazing the choice of title is. Berenguer uses “Materia Prima” as the title for one of her more famous works, and editors Kristin Dykstra and Kent Johnson use it as the title for the collection, and I could not be happier. The concept connects on so many levels. It represents the connecting element of the largest and smallest scales, and resonates with us, we supposedly insignificant specks in time seeking deeper meaning in an unfathomably huge cosmos. It represents the eternal quest of the writer, trying to use beautifully imperfect language to reverse engineer sapient emotion and experience. It represents the effort of taking control of one’s own ego, breaking down all the constituent nonsense and hypocrisies and appreciating your scale and value as both what they are and what they could be. And the poetry of this collection is full of such explorations.

La Amaranta cree que es Madonna / y que lleva en sus brazos tatuados / un corazon verde como la luz de un semaforo. / San Jorge y Michael Jackson se le confunden.

For all of its impact on the conceptual side, Materia Prima does not disappoint on the technical side. Berenguer, continuing in her wonderfully deceptive contradictions, is both highly experimental and intimately structured. Some poems are akin to word searches or mathematical graphs. Others, like “Trazo” (Outline), use multiple text colors to create poetry within poetry in a way that is almost disturbingly elegant and simple. Still others, like “A Study in Wrinkles”, read almost alike prose poetry. On a very direct level, this means that the pacing of the text is enticingly variable. Each turn of the page has a reliable chance to bring innovation and a change in perspective. And yet, amidst all of that, Berenguer’s poetic voice is surprisingly consistent. The calmness I mentioned earlier is present throughout, even in moments of exhilaration, fear, or sadness. It is not calm in that it lacks emotions, or feels them in a stunted way. Rather, it is the calmness of letting yourself fully experience something, submitting to something powerful, knowing full well that you too are powerful and will emerge on the other side.

The notion of the divine / centers on a reality that is efficient / yet superhuman – whose mystery satisfies / darkness and infinitude. There’s neither blasphemy nor condemnation – there is poetry – word written – in the present / traveling across time.

For all the excitement this book stirs in me, it is something of a meditative experience. It is a strangely refreshing reminder that peace need not be stagnant or lacking in vitality. So often we are sold on the promise of conflict as the vehicle for inspiration and adrenaline. And, to be sure, Materia Prima does more than its fair share of wrestling with conflict. But there is a harmony here that I didn’t know I’d been missing. Or that I’d needed. I love most every book that I review (I wouldn’t be reviewing it here otherwise), but this is one that will likely go into my yearly rotation of things that require a return journey.

Materia Prima is available now through Ugly Duckling Presse.

Poetry collection by Marosa di Giorgio
Translation by Jeannine Marie Pitas
Review by Chris Muravez

This first comprehensive collection of English translations of Marosa di Giorgio’s poetry brings to the Anglophone-sphere an occult, surreal, and saturated poet from Uruguay. Jeannine Marie Pitas’ translations, and in-depth introduction, should, first and foremost, be applauded for what presents itself as an obvious labor of love for di Giorgio’s work. We should all be thankful for Pitas’ devotion to this poet, as that devotion in-turn translated itself into my own reading experience.

The title, I Remember Nightfall, captures the spirit of this collection, remembering the falling, not of sun, not of moon, but of night itself. Throughout the book are scattered memories that exist in the in-between times, the twilit mornings and evenings where shadows stretch, flowers begin to bloom, and imagination takes hold. The book itself contains four of di Giorgio’s volumes – The History of Violets, Magnolia, The War of the Orchards, and The Native Garden is in Flames. These sections, taken from her writings of the 1960’s-70’s, contain twilit memories that find their linguistic path through a simple language structure and a calming repetition of scene. Memory itself is not necessarily reliable though, as there are dream-like injections of surrealism and pastoral plays between life and death, light and dark. In this remembrance are also the fallen human and inhuman figures that saturate di Giorgio’s poetry – trees, animals, mushrooms, mice, grandmothers, God. How else could night fall further than the sun, if it weren’t chasing reality from a garden, or into a bedroom?

And still, this is a violent place for us to be. Not a loud, obtrusive violence though, but a quiet, reserved disorder; there is an ambient terror that seeks its refuge in di Giorgio’s registers and syntax. “The gladiolus is a spear, its edge loaded with carnations, a knife of carnations. / … / That crazy lily is going to kill us.” (29) What are we to do, as readers, with these often, though not always, subtle and threatening undertones? How are we to be killed by flowers?

I would say stay still. Stay absolutely still in this affective place, and let the threats, anxieties, and terrors territorialize your reading. This is another magic of di Girogio’s work – her ability to create an affective sense of place, be it a garden, bedroom, dining room, cupboard. I often felt like I was about to be devoured by a giant snail, or else make love with God dressed as a bat at a wedding. These disturbances to reason, order, and memory make her poetic turns from scenery to action, and back again, simultaneously violent and sensual. The intuitive danger here also creates a sublime sensation, specifically in the garden and bedrooms, which makes me think of the strange meeting places in Joyelle McSweeney’s Necropastoral:

The Necropastoral is a strange meetingplace for the poet and death, or for the dead to meet the dead, or for the seemingly singular-bodied human to be revealed as part of an inhuman multiple body. It is a sublime site: a site of soaring flights and subterranean swoons. It is also a strange meetingplace in the sense that diverse anachronistic poets meet in the Necropastoral, twinned in their imagery, motif, themes, spectacular strategies (Poetry Foundation, 2014).

In di Giorgio, Death and the Poet meet in twilit memories.

All of life and death was filled with tulle.

And on the altar of the gardens, the candles are steaming. Twilight’s animals pass by, their antlers covered with smoldering candles, and my grandfather and grandmother are there – my grandmother in her raffa dress, her crown of tine pinecones. The bride is covered completely in tulle; even her bones are tulle. (55)

There is also decadence – decadence in food, in life – which cause people to often associate di Giorgio with Baroque stylizations. Simplicity and exuberance, grandeur, excess – all revolving around life, and the sustainment of life – abound in Nightfall. There’s so much life happening in the twilight world of di Giorgio that Death is even welcome, given a seat at the table, and fed. Yet, how could Death possibly hope to eat its fill when such an abundance of life falls in crystals, jewels, and blood. Death cannot keep up, and the dead return to the living.

… It seems to me that this is Epiphany Night.

A handful of stars fall down as if made of sugar. And all the garden and the firmament are filled with cakes covered in candles; there are sprinkles from east to west, tiny silver pearls from north to south.

My animals of long ago live again. The come from far away, from the world beyond, to bring me toys. (89)

The supernatural figures of Death, God, and Angels find homes, outside the Judeo-Christian canon, by losing the baggage of redemption, of other-worldly paradise. Instead they invade di Giorgio’s world to offer comfort, to terrify, or to be torn apart. God fights back against the abyss of a remembered nightfall. Speaking of God, she writes

Suddenly I saw him, blonde, smiling, carefree; I knelt down; my father’s steps became light and terrible. The butterflies hit my face, crunchy, dark, tasty as live, winged cookies. When I looked again, the other’s face had changed; he was hardly moving he was recoiling, stammering, but my father jumped out like a black cat from among the leaves and seized him by the veins (123)

God (Death?) is suddenly attacked by an anti-Oedipal father-cat figure. This is one instance of a violence that traumatizes, and this trauma is both physical and temporal. At other points, inhuman forms form from the human form. The speaker’s body becomes multi-pedal, broken, either by fingernail or by bone, in order to kill mice under a dinner table. The mother figure disappears/dies, the name of the father remains unuttered, and the smell of blood salivates the now Pavlovian pup of a reader. Is this not the trauma of memories that have been tortured by time and law?

Ultimately, for di Giorgio, true cruelty rests in order and reason, in restraint and conformity. “And then the white chick – almost a dove – flew from the trees to eat rice from my hands. She felt so real to me that I was going to kiss her. / But then, everything burst into flames and disappeared. God stows his things away safely.” (25)

As with any poet who has dedicated their life to the art, it is impossible to summarize the complexities of her work in the span of a book review. The ambient terror of di Giorgio’s poetry lives between abject affect and an object of effect. The law, symbolic or otherwise, is toyed with, teased, beaten and beating. Her poetics are also sublime – the terror and territories so vast, imaginative, real and surreal – they give the affective sense of place its sublime qualities. This often causes the identities of her subjects to fall apart, to become hidden, unknown, unknowable. The ambient terror and archaic twilit memories of I Remember Nightfall make this volume a necessary read for anyone interested in the occult power of spellbinding words.

I Remember Nightfall is available now through Ugly Ducking Presse.

Chris Muravez is a petulant poet living in the Bay Area. His poems have been published in Flapperhouse, Santa Clara Review, Deluge, and elsewhere. He teaches at Diablo Valley College and writes about the apocalypse like it’s cool.