poetry! dreams! food!

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Maybe we’re all – or the best of us, anyway – bilingual poets.

Talking about translation issues, Joan Margarit, a wonderful Catalan poet (published in the UK by Bloodaxe) who will be appearing at Poetry International, says this about his method of apparently writing almost simultaneously in both Catalan and Castilian:

“A person may have one or several cultural tongues, but it may be that none of these allows you to enter the place where the poem is.

As in fairytales, it is about entering a crypt and you have to know the password that opens it.

All these questions are irrelevant when the mother tongue and the cultural tongue are one and the same.
When they are not, the cultural tongue may be a cathedral built on top of an inaccessible crypt.”

This is fascinating and illuminating; translation is a thorny issue, of course, and one I’ve mentioned before in these columns. What would Brodsky have said?

It strikes me though that there is another way of reading this idea, too, which is less about empirical – or “cultural” – language, and more about each person’s own private language – our unconscious lexicon, our dream world which has its own language, unknown even to us except in translation. In other words, we are all simultaneously translating our inner material, our crypt-material, as we go. (For Margarit this will add another layer to his process…)

I suppose it’s only your bog-standard Jungian dream-analysis model of the house, in which the house represents your self, and the higher you go in your house the higher you’re going in your conscious or intellectual mind. The language of the cathedral in that case would necessarily be the most socially-accessible language.

Here is a website that pretty much lays out the way I deal with my dreams. I was raised among the Jungians, what can I say, hundreds of them – I had no idea at the time. But then, we did live one block from the Hartford Seminary Foundation campus. My high-school boyfriend’s mother – who did T’ai chi and was writing a thousand-page novel about the Indians of Connecticut (in particular the sad, bloody chapter known as King Philip’s War), and wore a kaftan around the place and had a black-rights-activist boyfriend, and was incidentally also an insurance company executive – said that when recounting a dream to myself I should say “in me” after the key words: as in, “there is a glass of water in me, sitting in a dark room in me,” etc.

It has been said about me that there are “layers” of “dream-work” in my poems, which I would have to admit is true, though it doesn’t seem like work to me (and I hope not to the reader). Some of my most vivid and important experiences happen when I’m asleep, and several of my poems – even, I hope, my best ones – have originated in dream, which – as Margarit hints – has to be translated as one writes into language that fits the outside world, which is after all where the poem now lives and where the readers are.

I’m told that when my sister and I were babies, only a year apart, we had some language in which we talked to each other, that no one else could understand. Or maybe it was just baby-babble, and we were both unfussy about consonants, who knows. She was one of those difficult children who speak late, everyone is worried about them, and when they do finally talk to the grownups it is with a remark on the soundness of some principle of aesthetics or morality or something. Not just to say she wants more treats, which is all my oldest baby said for months, and that was around the one-year mark. Food! Food! Food!

Elsewhere in the same interview, with his translator, Sarah Crowe, Margarit is talking about the “precision” and “exactness” that poetry shares with architecture – he is an “architect of structural engineering” (PEN). If you want to know what he means by precision and exactness, it will help to know that one of his presiding spirits is Elizabeth Bishop. Think forensic. He says: “A good poem is found only in that zone of poetry that passes very, very close to the abyss. The abyss of the ridiculous. But without falling into it.”

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