Interview with Anthony Seidman
RG: You are a poet as well as a translator. You are a very prolific translator of Latin American poetry. Since there are so many great Latin American poets that remain un-translated or under- translated into English, how do you choose which poet to translate?
AS: First, I choose a poet whose work must be translated so that readers who do not know Spanish can experience the event, the charge. Next, I must ask myself if I am capable of recreating the poem into English. Will be I able to carry over the tone, social register, allusions? I also attempt to narrow in on poets from specific countries and literary currents. Mexican poetry, from the Modernistas to contemporary poetry—especially from the Northern border—and 20th century Peruvian poetry crackle and blaze. Nicaraguan poetry from the generation of Coronel Urtecho through Carlos Martínez Rivas flexes an incredible muscle of sophistication and insurrection. I have also developed a deep interest in the poetry of the Dominican Republic whose literature has been overlooked (only isolate luminaries like Juan Bosch or Pedro Mir appear in the industry anthologies for undergraduates). I have had the pleasure of translating and publishing work by Frank Báez and Homero Pumarol, two poets now in midcareer. Their poems have toppled the norms of poetry in the Dominican Republic.
RG: You are fluent in French and Spanish. Have you translated from the French? What is your connection to the French language? Your poetry seems influenced by some aspects of French surrealism.
AS: I have only translated small fragments from French, although I return to Desnos, Depestre, Baudelaire, and others in the original language. My mother is French, as well as my step-father, and my uncle immigrated to the States (we shared a bedroom for nearly two years). French was in the household. Family visited from Paris and Limoges. I spent many summers in France, and I have returned to Paris for extended stays in order to see family. Nothing nicer than an afternoon playing Pétanque, drinking a few beers, and eating merguez with my cousins. All of that being said, I feel that my French is more domestic and tied to the quotidian, unlike my Spanish, which I studied at the academic level, as well as learning nuances and tone while living and working at a university in Mexico. As a young adult, I experienced some amusing moments when I employed slang in circumstances that called for formal French. I had no awareness of the distinctions! For example, diners erupting in laughter when I asked for some pinard at a restaurant with starched table cloths, or telling a waiter that I was ready to bouffer. I have since learned to stick to the most formal manner of speaking when in public. But yes, I read many of the Surrealist poets, especially Desnos, and the admirable Péret. His adherence to Surrealism, his time in Mexico, his translation of Piedra de Sol by Paz, all make him an alluring individual. Another Surrealist poet who haunts my imagination is Joyce Mansour. Although not widely read as a poet, and despite the fact that his work is in Spanish, the poems of Luis Buñuel are on my nightstand.
As a gesture, I offer the following poem, which I wrote after a dream several months ago. I think it bests explains my relation to the languages. This was a once-in-a-lifetime jolt from French. I don’t know why…
Me voici
étranger entre trois langues
le feu
les nuages
et la terre
où je ressemble
aux rochers qui résistent
à la foudre de la quatrième voix
RG: Do you think translation is a good practice for poets? Has it been a good practice for you?
AS: Poetry demands translation; reading proves to be a form of translation. Many of the best poems in modern English by Sir Thomas Wyatt and others were translations from Petrarch, Cavalcanti. It is impossible to place a dividing line between influence, appropriation, and originality…everything mixes…. Chaucer was a poet translator. Longfellow felt that it was his duty to learn other languages and render work by Manrique and others into English. I am drawn to poets like Édouard Roditi, who existed in that abeyance or threshold…translating, drawing inspiration from diverse languages, writing poems in English that carry some resin from French, Hebrew, or Lenga d’òc, There is no such thing as purity or a poem or a tradition that doesn’t carry the dirt and pollen from another garden on its roots and stems. Sometimes the convergences are even mysterious: Vallejo’s poem imagining the weather and color of his death-day was then transmogrified into a formidable poem by Donald Justice, and yet neither Justice nor Vallejo knew that the Greek poet Kóstas Ouránis had birthed a similar poem earlier in the 20th century.
RG: You rediscovered the poet Facundo Bernal, a completely forgotten poet from Mexicali, Mexico,who wrote about Mexicans on both sides of the border. The book of Bernal’s writing, with your translations, A Stab in the Dark (LARB books, 2019), was a great revelation to me, since thanks to your work we have an important reference for the historical emergence of border literature, Chicano writing, and the de-centralization of Mexican literature. How did the book come about and did you have some goal in mind in bringing Facundo Bernal to light?
AS: Bernal was unknown or recognized by the literary establishment in Mexico, that’s for certain. It is only since the 90’s, more or less, that readers and scholars speak of a literature from the north of Mexico. That region was considered tierra de nadie by the elite in Mexico City. Vasconcelos quipped that civilization ceased where people eat carne asada…a popular northern tradition. Still, scholars of the literature from the border region and Baja California, like Trujillo Muñoz, were well aware of Bernal’s poetry. And I first came in contact with his poetry in one of the numerous anthologies edited by Trujillo Muñoz. Boris Dralyuk from LARB asked if I would like to translate Palos de ciego. When I began the translation, I was concerned about carrying over the usage of Spanglish and caló, border region realities, and the creation of that estuary—that neither here nor there—that characterizes many aspects of the border. Certain poems about Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana and Mexicali prefigure Chicano literature, as well as serve as a harbinger to border literature, or literatura del desierto. One senses that Bernal was prescient of what was to be written many decades later by poets like Rubén Vizacaíno or Roberto Castillo Udiarte, or the novelist Luis Humberto Crosthwaite.
RG: Which poet do you regularly re-read? Perhaps a poet you read in your youth that has aged well for you.
AS: If I can riff a bit on the question…I prefer the poem to the poet, just as I prefer the concept of Poetry to the Poem. There are many poems I re-read with a reverence bordering on the religious. Too many, far too many to list, but I will do the best to mention the first dozen or so that pop up…El mirlo, el gaviota by Cernuda, as well as Si el hombre pudiera decir. That sonnet by Quevedo ending with y no hallé cosa en que poner los ojos que no fuese recuerdo de la muerte. Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me,” and many poems by Hart Crane, especially “O Caribe Isle!”. Plenty of pages from Un arc-en-ciel pour l’Occident chrétien by René Depestre. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Blake’s wedding of the infernal and the celestial. The very phrase by Desnos J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité is enough to haunt me for hours. Celan’s “Death Fugue”. “On the Life of Man” and the stark and steady verses by Sir Walter Raleigh written on the night before his execution. “The Debt” by Eugene Frumkin. I can go on and on. Poems from the Greek Anthology. Catullus. Breton’s assertion that poetry is made in bed like love, or his L’union libre. Definitely that kiss for Lot’s wife that Carlos Martínez Rivas imagined. I will finish with some sobering lines from a prose poem in The Bourgeois Poet by Karl Shapiro as they reflect the current daily newsfeed of shrapnel and hatred: Soldiers fall in love with the enemy too easily. It’s the allies they hate. Every war is its own excuse. That’s why they’re all surrounded with ideals. That’s why they’re all crusades.
RG: Is there a poet you read when you were younger that you don’t need to re-read, or that you outgrew to some extent?
AS: I tried my best to read and appreciate Frost. Can’t read the majority of his work. Yvor Winters wrote a wickedly clever essay on his poetry and it helped me close the door to the majority of Frost’s poetry, apart from obvious jewels like “Acquainted with the Night”. And then there’s a poet like Carl Sandburg, whose work I thought I would outgrow. Nope. I just returned to his work during a translation workshop I ran in Ciudad Juarez during a recent book festival. We were able to do so many creative twists and turns with his poem “Mag”. Sad that he isn’t read much anymore.
RG: Is there a poet that is new to you and that you were happy to discover, or read for the first time?
AS: Yes. Laurence Weisberg. It was thanks to Will Alexander that I discovered his poetry, and that I heard anecdotes about their friendship over some drinks at The Dresden. I think that Weisberg is up there with Lamantia—and Alexander and Heller Levinson— as being soothsayer, seer, the one peering into the marvelous, or the “kiss of magic” as Weisberg wrote. Another poet who must be read is Paul Stubbs. He is a major poet.
RG: I know that you once met Allen Ginsberg when you were a teenager. Can you tell us that story?
AS: I met with him in his office in the Village. I don’t know how, but my father—who encouraged me in poetry from the earliest—found out his address, and I sent Ginsberg a letter stating that I would be in New York (my father was from Brooklyn and we often visited my grandfather). I did get a response from Ginsberg, including his phone number. It was a sweltering New York August afternoon. He was seated at his desk yelling on the phone. When he hung up, he informed that he had been berating Gregory Corso, who was “incorrigible”. He sized me up and down. He asked me if I liked “girls, boys, or trucks”. When he discerned that we weren’t going to fuck, he listened to some poems. Disapproved. Said that I was lacking detail and focus and fortuitous accidents like “hydrogen jukebox”. Then we wrote some haikus, and he suggested some poets to read, and he talked for some time about other contemporary poets. He signed several books. He asked how I got to his office, and I mentioned that my father was waiting at a corner coffee shop. He then quipped: Tell him to relax; it’s not like I’m gonna rape you! This to the current generation sounds terrifying…cancel culture…. I thought it was hilarious. I remember it with a smile. And it was all said in jest. He gave me a hug goodbye. He insisted that I read The Idiot and Blake. A week later, I received a nice post card from him which I still have. The postcard simply asked if I had read more Dostoevsky.
RG: Do you consider yourself a California poet? Do regional or national categories mean anything to you?
AS: Yes and no. The vastness of Los Angeles itself is hard to understand. Being a San Fernando Valley native, the beaches, the skyscrapers of downtown, etc, are so distant. But then I travel to another state and I feel that my blood is being pulled by the Santa Ana winds, sky of fleckless azure, chaparral, dust, and expanses of asphalt. As my first (journal) publications were in New York and Mexico (The Bitter Oleander, Hunger Magazine, Parque Nandino, Tierra Adentro), and that the poets who were earliest friends were primarily Mexican—like Martín Camps, Gaspar Orozco, or Bernardo Jauregui—I feel that I never became an LA poet. Actually, maybe 15 years ago or so, one of the “Major” poets from LA asked me why she had never heard of me when I insisted that, indeed, I not only lived in LA, but had grown up in the city, yawned in public school classrooms and ate Wednesday Pizza at the cafeteria, gloomed through YMCA summer camps, scoped for import LPs at Bleeker Bob’s Records on Melrose, shoplifted poetry collections from Dutton’s, once had a sweetheart who lived by Normandie and Third and who inflicted numerous hickies on my neck, and that I sweated on interminable RTD routes, and scarfed on Tommy’s chile & cheese fries with friends after house parties.
RG: To end, what are you working on and is it connected to work you’ve already undertaken?
AS: Am currently working on translations of Mexican poet Enriqueta Ochoa. According to the great Elsa Cross, Ochoa is one of the true ecstatic voices in Mexican poetry. Ochoa drew her inspiration from Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. That yearning for the cosmic reminds me of my work with the poetry of Rodolfo Hinostroza. Moreover, this all encompasses my belief that a poet must deeply engage with the work of other poets, especially via the translation of their poetry.
Anthony Seidman Poetry
Reaching the Step that Doesn’t Crumble
Between stars and bread,
between the click of a light switch
and the bulb’s white flash,
between the taste of salt
and waves folding foam on the shore,
(around the bend of a coastal hill),
between this or that, and
between the between which resounds in this chant,
the cherry ripe in the brain,
the panting of a man running in his sleep,
fishnet swollen with a catch of air,
twig-snap thundering in a canyon,
and a basement perched on the shoulder,
and an attic rumbling in the stomach,
there is a word which can be peeled,
there is an odor sweet as a dead goat,
a color blinding as a lemon,
and all that passes through my brain
as I sit at this desk is like
a breath whirling between
5 o’clock and the universe,
where clouds litter leaves,
and a rain falls up from the earth to
plant swallows on the branches of this tree.
In 2,300 BC, Emperor Yao
Beheaded
his royal ministers
because
drunk with courtesans
behind rice-paper screens
they forgot
to warn their Lord of
an eclipse.
Thus
in the thinning
summer I write
between steel-blue sky
and sand where tarantulas molt,
and seek
an omen that
will fix the moon
with the roaming black
dog of my heart.
Domesticated
Sad, isn’t it, when the pianist is playing above another pianist buried upside down?
Across such forests one can speak of sebaceous appendages or taxidermy
but the antechambers have been locked,
and the hour for arpeggios will not undress.
Best butter up the toes of noon
after laving the soles of evening before
finding out where artisanal bread is baked for the leprous.
I attach no importance to homing pigeons or neuroplasticity.
Simply stoop to my stature and delight at
the mistress ordering her paramour’s castration.
Escape
To float, I jabber and gestate.
All other maneuvers prove cinderblocks tied to my ankles.
Between my fingers, long threads of silk
spooled by red spiders with a penchant
for arabesques and palindromes. To take flight,
I write my name backwards and then forwards,
and I scrub the word ADJECTIVE
with coal on my bed sheets because I have no can-opener.
Soon after, a birdcage marks the center of my chest
and I feel the architecture of flight tip towards moonlight.
Somewhere left of a total eclipse, I shall pernoctate.
Jewel of Thirst
The door of fire is a harpsichord of blood.
The door of fire is palm leaves laid supplicant at the hooves of a goat.
The door of fire is hope in a maguey thorn.
The door of fire is a needle threading water through the eye of a camel.
But you are a door of fire with your stomach of wheat,
You with your tongue of mud,
You with your fingers of rain,
You with an ax splitting open the sun,
You with your feet of milk,
With your breasts of ivy,
With your eyebrows that rustle at night and weave a frond for the moon,
With your eyes the color of a lion’s mane.
Oh world forever eaten by thirst,
The door of fire is water and
Words brimming a sky no birds contain.
Oh thirsts never slaked by life,
The door of fire is Time that spawns, suckles, then devours me.
