link    |  08-29-08

War Stories: Poems and Essays
translated from Portuguese, and with an introduction by
Régis Bonvicino
MARTINS EDITORA (San Paulo, Brazil)
  R$ 31,50

"I am not a 'translator'; but rather a poet in dialogue with another poet, hence the liberties I took in the body of the translations."

Preface

From Within
Régis Bonvicino

I used a line by Charles Bernstein to begin the introduction to Histórias da Guerra: "the politics in a poem has to do with how it / enters the world" ("Sign Under Test"). Finally, Bernstein has arrived in Brazil, South America, a continent that, according to Marcelo Santos, Americans have a "racist, prejudiced and ethnocentric" relationship with.  Santos goes on to argue that, "in general, they refer to Latin Americans as backward, inferior, underdeveloped, barbaric, Catholic, mestizo, antidemocratic, unable to solve their own problems" and, as a result of that, he concludes, "they justify the intervention of the predestined, civilized, white Americans." The fair price of Latin American resistance to America is paid, paradoxically, by American high culture, specifically its poetry, which, as a whole, is the best of the 20th century along with that of the European avant-garde until the 1920s. Browsing through the culture pages of the major Brazilian dailies would suffice to verify that American movies and pop music are what guide them. It's enough to turn on the TV or the radio. It's enough to walk around the city to notice that store with an English name all of a sudden becomes "modern." It's enough to attend the yearly edition of FLIP (Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty) to find mediocre American fiction writers among the guests.
But not all American high culture exempted itself from political "service." For instance:

Once again, the CIA turned to the private sector to advance its objectives […] Pre-eminent amongst contemporary and avant-garde art museums was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Its president through most of the 1940s and 1950s was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had co-founded the museum in 1929 (Nelson called it 'Mommy's Museum"'). Nelson was a keen supporter of Abstract Expressionism, which he referred to as 'free enterprise painting'.
                                                       Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?

            Saunders adds that for the status quo, abstract expressionism represented an anti-Communist art affiliated with the ideology of freedom and free enterprise because, by being non-figurative, it became silent and convenient. Abstract expressionism was the first American pictorial movement and it acquired international prestige through painters such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the Armenian-born American Arshile Gorky (104-1948), Philip Guston (1913-1980), who worked with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Clark Coolidge, Willem de Kooning (190401997), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970), among others.

            Other than ideological resistance, Bernstein's poetry meets with resistance in Brazil because of its truly innovative nature, which destabilized the local circuit, nowadays, unfortunately, far removed from its better days. His poetry opens and expands possibilities. Furthermore, the results of his poetry are quite different from what was produced in Brazil under the label of "concretism," with the exception of a few commonalities that all so-called contemporary pieces may have, such as parataxis, collage, the break with traditional forms of signification, etc. His poetry does not "encounter" the reader—it runs counter to the reader. It is a poetry of "beyonsense," to use Anne Mack's expression—a poetry that disappoints the reader by distancing itself from "'a balance and reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities.'" She asks, "And why do you expect a 'comprehensible' meaning from a poem anyway?", and she characterizes Bernstein's poetry as that which "'censers' the 'censors'" so that the reader can imagine a literature that suggests its own interpretations, a literature that makes the production of its ideas tangible through the cuts, sounds and design of the poem on the page. Bernstein does not create poetry as a vehicle of readymade meanings in their usual repertoire. His greatest effort constitutes the creation of possibilities of meaning based on the deconstruction of usual meanings. Mack also notes that for Bernstein meaning does not preexist the poem but rather, it is "created" in language.

            João Cabral de Melo Neto used to say that Joan Miró did not paint paintings, but that he painted, period, and that by privileging lines and strokes he broke with the "Renaissance balance" of representation which led other painters to the canvas with preconceived compositions. Cabral defined Miró's poetry as a "constant dynamic," with no aspirations of becoming a grammar, something that can also be said about Bernstein's poetry. That's why I decided to focus on Bernstein the poet, and not the exceptional literary critic or leader of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement launched by him and Bruce Andrews in 1978 in New York and which quickly enlisted some of the best American living poets: Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Michael Palmer—along with John Ashbery, who was initially inspired by French writing and surrealism. And today Charles Bernstein is not only a world-renowned poet but also one of the best in the United States, if we don't consider official figures of the English-speaking world such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Louise Gluck, Anne Carson, Frank Bidart, Paul Muldoon or C.D. Wright, not to mention a mummified Jorie Graham, the "queen" of official poetry. Bernstein, at 58, however, still has no access to the pages of The New Yorker or the The New York Review of Books. I do not want to dwell the issue of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement because, like any movement, it was diluted by hundreds of imitators, and it became a club in which a self- or mutual congratulation prevailed uncritically, although the term "language poetry" is still a "dirty word" and the movement in fact reconfigured and made American poetry richer. The Finnish poet Leevi Lehto reminds us that for the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry group, Ferdinand de Saussure's concept that "language determines reality" was key. And he adds, "that's why L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an American phenomenon which could not be mechanically transferred to other literary arenas, concluding that its influence occurs as a stimulus for other poetries to think themselves as language and as a "uncommonplace." This observation is very apropos in a country such as Brazil, where "influence," as Paulo Franchetti has noted, becomes a matter of "pride."

            Bernstein's oeuvre is vast. As translation strategy, I decided to quickly sketch his beginnings and his present, drawing from With Strings (2001) and especially Girly Man (2006). The Sophist (1987) is considered one of the most important books of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. In the post-9/11 Bernstein, the Bernstein of Girly Man, the locked combat against the "I" and its clichés ("Sentences"), the fight against the culture of the flaccid post-World War II free verse, the "disagreement" with the reader give way to urgency and to aphorisms that—paradoxically—are direct, and to poems such as "War Stories": "War is surrealism without art." When I translated the poem, I noted a certain hesitation with respect to the Iraq invasion in 2003, which was perhaps due to Bush's satanic injunction: "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." The poem was written soon after the invasion, and I opted to translate “War is an excuse for lots of bad antiwar poetry” for “A guerra é um poema ambíguo, que tenta desqualificar a crítica da guerra” (literally, "War is an ambiguous poem that tries to disqualify critiques of the war"). At that time, for Americans to take a stance against the war (the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon) entailed —to a certain extent—a legitimizing of terrorism, although the impasse reveals, in the leftist author, the traces of American "manifest destiny," and in the translator, the Latin American "rebel." The poem is a panel of American culture under the pretext of tackling yet another war: "War is an SUV for every soccer Pop and social Mom." And I should note, in passing, that senator Barack Obama voted against the invasion. And that the United States became a terrorist state, as was seen in Abu Graib and Guantánamo.

            Half of Bernstein's poetry is decidedly American. I tried in vain to translate "The Ballad of the Girly Man," which in English flows so smoothly. The author himself explained my lack of success thus: "As you know, a poem like that is so culturally specific, in this case local American culture is not an export product" (letter dated March 14, 2007). The title Girly Man was an expression used by the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger during the Iraq invasion saying that, "only a girly man is against the war." I tried to translate a number (although not all) of the devices used by the author of With Strings: the prose poem, the poem crafted like a sculpture ("For --"), the ones that dialogue with popular culture, the lyric poem ("Rain Is Local") and a zaum poem ("Use No Flukes"), zaum being the word used by the Russian futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to describe their sound poetry experiments. I am not a "translator," but rather a poet in dialogue with another poet, hence the liberties I took in the body of the translations.

            The literary critic Marjorie Perloff—a great admirer of Bernstein and who has written several essays on his work—notes that Bernstein's poetry makes language work from within.  In this respect, I hope not to have cheated the Brazilian reader.

link    |  08-28-08

Charles Bernstein
HISTORIAS DA GUERRA - POEMAS E ENSAIOS
POESIA

War Stories: Poems and Essays
translated from Portuguese, and with an introduction by
Régis Bonvicino
with the collaboration of Maria do Carmo Zanini

ISBN: 9788599102572
250 pages
MARTINS EDITORA (San Paulo, Brazil)
  R$ 31,50

 

Traitor/translator: Bonvicino
Original: Bernstein

 

Prefácio
Desde dentro – Régis Bonvicino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
poemas e traduções
De Parsing, 1976
Parsing • Decantando . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
De Shade, 1978
“Take then, these...” • “Pegue então estes...” . . . . . . . . 40
Poem • Poema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
“It’s up up” • “Está alto alto” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
For –––– • Para –––– . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
De Controlling interests, 1980
Off season • Baixa estação . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
The blue divide • O divisor azul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
De The sophist, 1987
[De “Micmac Mall (Sunset at Inverness)”] . . . . . . . . . . . 96
The years as swatches • Os anos como amostras . . . . . 98
“The order of a room” • “A ordem de um quarto” . . . 104
Sonata for unaccomplished cello by Susan Bee • Sonata
para violoncelo inepto, de Susan Bee . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Use no flukes • Não use acasos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
De Stigma, 1981
September • Setembro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
De The absent father in “Dumbo”, 1990
Railroad Street • Rua da Ferrovia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Miolo Historias 7 7/29/08 6:18:06 PM
8
De Rough trades, 1991
The kiwi bird in the kiwi tree • O quivi no quiuí . . . . 122
The poet from another planet • O poeta de outro
planeta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
De Residual rubbernecking¸ 1995
Liftjar agate • Portajan ágata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
De With strings, 2001
Distance learning • Aprendizado a distância . . . . . . . . 130
Your ad here • Anuncie aqui . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Up high down low too slow • Toca aqui deixa que
eu toco sozinho . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
De World on fire, em Girly man, 2006
Didn’t we • Não é mesmo? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
The folks who live on the hill • O casal da colina . . . . 140
One more for the road • O último trago . . . . . . . . . . . 144
In a restless world like this is • Neste mundo agitado . 146
Stranger in paradise • Um estranho no paraíso . . . . . . 148
De Let’s just say, em Girly man, 2006
In particular • Em particular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
“every lake...” • “toda casa...” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Sign under test • Desmanifesto: Luminoso em teste . 162
De Girly man, 2006
Thank you for saying thank you • Obrigado por dizer
obrigado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
War stories • Histórias da guerra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Rain is local • Chuva local . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Variações . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Me transformo • Me transform– O! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Miolo Historias 8 7/29/08 6:18:06 PM
9
ensaios
Inovação é a marca da reconsideração . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Nossas Américas: novos mundos ainda em processo . . . . 224
Basta! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
Verso introjetivo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

link    |  08-27-08

Artists' Books
Online

Johanna Drucker's remarkable digital archive
of about 200 artists' books is now open for viewing.
Full digital versions of the books together with bibliographic information and commentary.
A treasure trove, including a full set of Drucker's books.
Here's a page from From A to Z (1977):

link    |  08-26-08

 

Blind Witness
Three American Operas

Blind Witness brings together three libretti written in the early 1990s by poet Charles Bernstein for composer Ben Yarmolinsky. Bernstein & Yarmolinsky's trilogy combines vernacular American lyrics with vernacular social forms.
Blind Witness News uncannily mimics the format of the eleven o'clock evening news with segments for international and local news, weather, business news, and sports. Then, as now, the dark undertone is war.
The Subject, at times elegiac, at times parodic, sets a psychoanalytic session to music, its central character, Jenny, subject to the sometimes solicitous, sometimes menacing probes of her doctors.
The Lenny Paschen Show focuses on Lenny, the Kamikaze King of Comedy, a late night talk show host at the edge of his career, pushing his schtick to the limit. His guests include a cross-over singer, a show biz legend, and a rising star, along with his sidekick announcer Bud Dickie, an inflatable ventriloquist's dummy.
When Blind Witness News was first performed in 1990, Allan Kozinn of The New York Times heralded a new voice in opera: “"Mr. Bernstein's libretto catches with near perfection the stock verbal moves — the forced laughter, empty banter, catch-phrases and cutesy segues — in which television news reports are cushioned.” Working in the tradition of Brecht & Weill and Stein & Thomson, Bernstein & Yarmolinsky have created three operas where biting social critiques dissolve into comic riffs, then lyric arias.

Now available at discount direct from
Factory School
Paper: $15
Cloth: $30
Signed: $50
Factory School's discounted price includes shipping to the continental USA.
Individuals only. limited time offer.
Support the press, order direct.

++++++++++++

Blind Witness @ PennSound

In conjunction with the publication of Blind Witness
PennSound has made available
complete recordings of Blind Witness News and The Subject
& video from the launch performance in New York.
(The Lenny Paschen show will be available soon.).

link    |  08-22-08

the last of the three videos from the book launch for
Blind Witness: Three American Operas
the book of my libretti for composer Ben Yarmolinsky
will be announced here soon


The Lenny Paschen Show
The video starts with my reading of the extended monologue
then goes to performances from the opera by
Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Ben Yarmolinsky, vocal and guitar

Go to main blog page or download mp4 to see this video.

download mp4

link    |  08-19-08

one more video from the book launch for
Blind Witness: Three American Operas
the book of my libretti for composer Ben Yarmolinsky
will be announced here soon

The Subject
reading: Bernstein & Yarmolinsky
Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Elizabeth Rogers, piano
note: Bernstein & Yarmolinsky read first, second half of video features Silvie Jensen's arias. Jensen plays Jenny Midnight, a psychiatric patient. In my reading with Ben, I read Jenny's part and Ben plays Dr. Boris Frame, psychoanalyst.

Go to web blog page to see this player.

download or stream mp4

link    |  08-17-08

Blind Witness: Three American Operas
the book of my libretti for composer Ben Yarmolinsky
will be announced here in a few days,
once the PennSound page for the operas is complete.
Joel Kuszai, of Factory School,
had been working on web video of the May 5 event for the book
at the Medicine Show, New York  Here is the first part:

Blind Witness News
Deborah Karpel, soprano
Nathan Resika, bass
Leandra Ramm, mezzo-soprano
Ishmael Wallace, piano

Go to blog web site to see this video.

download or stream MP4

 

link    |  08-16-08

New EPC author pages
Donato Mancini

rob mclenanan

Gustave Morin

A couple more newspaper reviews of
OEI selected poems & essays
De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högtspel i tropik-erna:
Dikter, essäer, samtal i urval, översättning & montage

Klassekampen (Norway)
August 9, 2008

Svenska Dagbladet
August 12, 2008

 

What's the Word?
2003 MLA Radio Program in which I am featured along with Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman
(29:11): mp3

link    |  08-14-08

Czernin & Schmatz: Die Reise

(This is a short excerpt from “Fraud’s Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with Fraud (No Pun on Freud Intended), with Special Reference to the Poetics of Ressentiment,” which appears in the new issue of Textual Practice 22:2, 207-227.)

In the early summer of 1986, two young Austrian poets, Franz Josef Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz, had the idea to write poems that closely resembled the poems they found most typical and at the same time most deplorable in contemporary poetry volumes, for example the work of Rainer Kunze, Günther Kunert, and Sarah Kirsch. At first they had the idea to call the poet Irene Schwaighofer (silent court), a poet born in a little town in upper Austria, who, familiar through schooling with the tenets of modernism, would need no time to forge her own distinctive style and upon being published would proceed to win many prizes and much praise. However, Czernin and Schmatz felt this process would take too long and in order to shorten the “difficult and boring” process, decided to give authorship of the poems to Czernin. They completed the work in a few weeks and the book was immediately accepted for publication under the title Die Reise (the journey). The book received positive attention, some of which suggested that at last Czernin has given up his thrashing about in the waters of experimentation and found a more profound and authentic voice. When Czernin broke the news of his own duplicitous relation to the poems in Der Spiegel in March 1987, a furious hale of criticism descended upon him, not the least from the publisher of the book, who felt he had been betrayed. Later the same year,  Czernin and Schmatz published a book-length account of the story together with exchanges between them and several interlocking essays.

Here is of one of the poems from Die Reise: In achtzig Gedichten um die ganze Welt:

fahr-plan

ist mein blick
nicht eine schere,
deren beine
schritte machen,
die alle fernen
auseinanderschneiden?

hat denn die schere
keine augen,
die zu ringen werden
jener finger,
die auf ihre ziele zeigen?

und gehen diese ziele
nicht auf zwei füssen,
deren zehen
auf nägel treten,
die meine ganze reise
zusammennageln?


agenda

is my glance
not a scissor
whose leg
makes steps
that cut through
all distances?

had, then, this scissor
no eyes
which will strive
to finger
loins of desire?

and will not such loins
walk on two feet
whose toes
tread on pins
fastening together
my whole journey?
                                    [my translation]

Schmatz and Czernin created a literary scandal with this and the other poems in the collection they were able to focus the discussion of issues of quality and judgment … Die Reise is motivated by a desire to critique the jargon of authenticity. There is no claim here that these are necessarily good poems or that we should look to the “poems themselves” for the meaning. The texts here have meaning in relation to the literary valuations into which they make an intervention; their meaning is social and diacritical. Indeed, late in 1987, Schmatz and Czernin published Die Reise: In achtzig flachen Hunden in die ganze tiefe Grube, a book about the affair in which they address explicitly the questions of authorship and motivation. In this book, Czernin describes Die Reise as a form of literary self-criticism. “Perhaps one must, to make a better poem, know how one makes a worse poem,” he writes. “I think it was Novalis who said that good literature is made from worse literature. He was right that there must be, in any case, worse poetry from which better poetry can originate, whereas for me it is self-evident that the contrary can also be valuable.” Die Reise, then, can be understood as an investigation of aesthetic judgment. And yet, as the Ern Malley poems also show, what is written out of a desire to expose the limits of a particular style (or rhetoric) may ultimately become exemplary of unrealized potential in the style; ironizing of the style may create a thickening of the artifice and with it an intensification of the aesthetic experience. Over time, the poems of Die Reise take on charm that goes beyond parody.In any case, Czernin is not asserting the objectivity of any such judgments but rather that “every objectivity is fictional.” His purpose then, as befits a poet who has written a study of Karl Kraus, is satiric adjudicative: the fraud remains a fraud.  

Franz Josef Czernin, Die Reise: In achtzig Gedichten um die ganze Welt (Salzburg und Wien: Residenz Verlag, 1987), p. 30.
Franz Josef Czernin, “Die Verdopplung des Igels,” in Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz, Die Reise: In achtzig flachen Hunden in die ganze tiefe Grube (Linz-Wien, Austria: Edition Neue Texte, 1987), p. 21

link    |  08-11-08

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Notable Books (2005)