January 20, 2015

One Day1976 Esteban Vicente b. January 20, 1903

“Ontogenesis and the Ethics of Becoming”An interview with Elizabeth Grosz by Kathryn Yusoff

I hope to show that terms that we consider opposites – mind and body, self and other, reason and passion, male and female, ideality and materiality – cannot be considered as opposed. There are no oppositions in the real but only differences, productive differences to the extent that difference is not assimilated into an oppositional form itself (as, say, identity). I wanted to show that this is not an original idea at all but that it has marked the history of Western thought intermittently, from the time of the earliest origins of Greek philosophy, in the Presocratics through to the present. What this tradition has established is a new place for philosophy, or thought more generally, not in the creation of truth but in rethinking the (internal) relations of thought to things. Thought is not a mirror of the real, but its own processes of living. There is something of thought that lives beyond the expanse of materiality, something that the Stoics, Spinoza and even Nietzsche understood as touching eternity. I want to give a secular understanding to this divine (or for Nietzsche, demonic) impulse to aspire to the eternal, to think the eternal and to act in accordance with it. This has a decidedly old fashioned tinge, but I believe that in fact the contemporary emphasis on materiality has missed this element of the eternity of thought and will.

Esteban Vicente

Poems by Ilya Krieger Translated by Alex Cigale

A house is not a house unless it is inhabited. K. Marx

In forests, in deep blue forests, In the house, assembled out of pine trunks, In the house, assembled out of forest shadows, In the house, assembled out of the night's silence, In the house darkening and dozing, Where whispers remain, where whispers stroll on the ceiling, Where there are clipped wings, where there is honey and milk, Where there are hushed sobs, where ivy covers the ceiling beams, Where time stands still, where motion is outside only, not here, In the house made of rain and fog, In the house that stands over trampled stars, In the house, assembled out of trunks of pines, In the house, assembled from the forest's gloaming, In the house, assembled from night's silence, In the house, assembled out of viscous dreams, In the house, where a part of me has securely settled, For that house - is the end-all and be-all, He who spends a night in the house, which I, fortuitously, vacated, He will not continue on his path unaltered, He will die and be reborn, his friends will not recognize him, A part of him will remain there, within the walls of the house, In the forests, in deep blue forests, In the house, assembled from trunks of pines, In the house, assembled out of the forest's dimness, In the house, assembled out of the night's silence.

Esteban Vicente

Foreign Bodies: Gottfried Benn, Patrizia Cavalli, and the Situation of Translation David RivardNumero Cinq

In Another Republic, Strand and Simic brought together a much wider range of poets in translation than had been previously available, with generous selections by seventeen poets. More ethnically and aesthetically diverse (though, inexplicably, all men), the poets in Another Republic were largely the inheritors and adapters of High Modernism—sometimes combining modernist techniques with the more fabular and allegorical impulses found in folklore traditions; sometimes focusing literary cubism on the apparently banal and everyday, endowing ordinary people and places with strangeness and mystery; almost always deploying a self in the poem that was both mordantly comic and humanly vulnerable. Paul Celan, Yehuda Amichai, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Drummond De Andrade, Zbigniew Herbert, Fernando Pessoa, Czeslaw Milosz, Yannis Ritsos, Jean Follain, and the others were largely unknown to American readers at the time. Many, if not all, had experienced exile and/or the violence of mid-century history. They often wrote with far more nuanced consciousness of the political than Americans were used to in their poetry. They were also highly tuned to the absurdities that historical fate has increasingly had in store for all of us. The variety of their approaches to writing a poem was stunning. For those in two generations of American poets who have read Another Republic, the influence has been profound I suspect. That the book is no longer as well known as it should be, and that the poets included in it have mostly passed into the oblivion of the canonical, speaks volumes about contemporary American poetry. Solipsistic, driven by social media and the marketing campaigns of publishing companies and academic trade groups like AWP, ensconced in print and digital affiliations that function like gated-communities, monetized by the promotional efforts of well-meaning institutions such as the Academy of American Poets and bien-pensant congregations like The Dodge Festival, American poetry no longer seems as open to the influence of work in translation, despite the fact that more of it is being published than ever.

... Translated poetry seems like just another marketing niche, easy enough to avoid if one is intent on maintaining ignorance and preserving one’s assumptions. Inattention or indifference or distraction, whatever the case, some recently published books by major figures, books bringing world-class writers into English in a comprehensive way for the first time, have been largely ignored. Two in particular, both issued in 2013—by the long-dead German Expressionist, Gottfried Benn, and the very-much alive Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli—slipped almost totally under the radar. Oddly enough, both were published in handsome editions by Farrar Strauss Giroux—a house whose reputation and promotional reach would, in another time, have guaranteed a thoughtful, widespread reception. Neither seems to have found the notice and readership it deserves.

Esteban Vicente