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Martin Lammon Rates of Exchange |
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As I write, my wife and I are preparing for a
trip to A person grows up in * Inscrutable comparisons and disparities are at
the heart of Adam J. Sorkin’s translations,
although I can’t buy his intriguing tale on “The Absence of ‘Absence’,” in
which he explains why there is no Romanian original to accompany his
translation. I remember in an interview asking Donald Hall about a comment
Shelley once made, that the poem one writes will never be as good as the poem
in one’s head. Hall responded in the essay “Flying Revision’s Flag” from Death to the Death of Poetry: Shelley was a philosopher who thought he was a
poet. There is no poem inside the head. There is the longing toward a poem, the
dark leaning, the inarticulate impetus, the dim luminosity.… You direct a
poem in response to the urgency, to answer
the urgency, but not to copy an ur-poem that exists
in your head. The poem is its own words and not some other thing. As a poet, I agree with Hall, but as an editor, I am still intrigued by
what Sorkin has to say. He is a translator, used to
making “some other thing.” Perhaps more than anyone, the translator knows
that “the poem is its own words” yet despite this knowledge attempts to make
“some other thing,” something Sisyphean that will always be an “inarticulate
impetus” compared to the poem itself. Critics have long argued about what a
translation is, and what it isn’t, in comparison to the original poem. Such
arguments miss the point. No poet or translator would claim that a
translation (or version or imitation, to use terms favored by
some) is equal to the original poem. But I would trade one hundred critical
essays about Daniela Crǎsnaru’s poetry for one
copy of Adam Sorkin’s new book. At its best,
translation opens up worlds we might otherwise never know, and I for I might not have bought the story, but we did
pay for a poem that I hope pleases some of our readers. One hallmark of Arts & Letters will be to publish
an eclectic gathering of works and ideas. Personally, I lean more towards Neruda than Crǎsnaru, but
as an editor, reader, and sometime voyager, I want more than just what I lean
towards, and Sorkin’s translations draw me to them.
Responding to our first issue, readers have singled out for praise Stuart Lishan’s poem “Blood Odds” more than any other work. Of
all the poems in issue one, Lishan’s was least like
the poetry I write or prefer. When I saw his poem, however, I knew I wanted
it for Arts & Letters. I’d be a fool if I depended only on my own good
intentions and disinterested editing to produce the range I want for this
journal. Most contributors we accept for publication have been “found” among
unsolicited submissions and recommended by nearly everyone on the editorial
staff. Two-thirds of the contributors in this issue were discovered this way.
Among our senior editors, Gail Galloway Adams (fiction), David Muschell (drama), and Marc Snyder (art) represent a range
of opinion and taste that extends my own boundaries in ways I could never
have imagined. Dean Dass’s remarkable prints are
just one good example, images I liked even more when I read about his
interest in Georg Trakl,
a poet I’d learned of twenty years ago from reading James Wright’s
translations of Trakl’s poems. I’d be naive to claim that the journal’s
boundaries were limitless. There are stories, poems, translations, artwork,
and essays that won’t likely find a buyer here. But every submission that we
receive is reviewed and considered carefully. Readers have my promise that Arts & Letters will strive to
cover as much ground as possible. Our Mentors Interview Series is a case in
point: issue one featured Ernest Gaines; issue two features Bobbie Ann Mason;
upcoming interviews will feature poets Jean Valentine and Charles Simic. * I said that we paid for Sorkin’s
poem. Another hallmark of the journal is that our writers and artists receive
an honorarium for their work, hardly a fortune—$10 per published page of
original creative work, with a minimum honorarium of $50—but payment
nonetheless for work that deserves recognition and also merits remuneration. That said, I am
pleased to congratulate James Crnkovich of I am also pleased to announce that Arts & Letters is publishing work
by five other writers selected for honorable mention by our final judges. In
addition to publication, these authors will receive the usual contributor’s
honorarium for their work. In fiction, we are pleased to publish Roger Sheffer’s “Yellow Blazes.” In poetry, we are delighted to
have four poems, one each by Ōnē
Buchanan, Jennifer Fumiko Cahill, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Thea S. Kuticka. I wish to thank Doris Betts, Alice Fulton, and
Horton Foote for their good will and good judgment. Their participation in
the selection process has expanded even further the editorial boundaries of Arts & Letters. Our second competition will begin accepting
submissions on * I hear the exchange rate in Earlier this summer, writing new poems, I found
myself going back to James Wright, the In the last book James Wright published before
he died, To a Blossoming Pear Tree
(This Journey and Above the River: The Complete Poems
were published posthumously), there is a poem called “Hook.” “I was only a
young man / In those days,” the poet begins, on an evening when the “cold was
so God damned / Bitter there was nothing.” At a bus station, a man with a
hook for a hand offers money for bus-fare. The poem ends: Did you
ever feel a man hold Sixty-five
cents In a hook, And place
it Gently In your
freezing hand? I took it. It wasn’t
the money I needed. But I took
it. In his essay “Lament for a Maker,” Donald Hall recalls Wright’s
fondness for reciting a poem by the fifteenth-century Requiescat in Pace, Jim. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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