Lisa Samuels (Photo: Joanna Forsberg)

Lisa Samuels‘s review of A Common Strangeness is just out in The Landfall Review Online. The review begins:

Jacob Edmond’s refreshing book focuses on concerns common to avant-garde poetry and comparative literature, specifically poetic material produced primarily in the 1980s and 1990s by six writers from China, Russia, and the United States and comparative literature’s interest in negotiating dialectics between self and other. Edmond’s introduction indicates his interest in sighting a ‘third alternative’ to Maurice Blanchot’s 1971 concept of ‘common strangeness’: Edmond wants to write within zones ‘between the common and the co-man, between speaking of others—of exile literature, modernism, or world literature—and speaking to them: responding to how we can know or write about each other in the first place’ (10). I might wish the book had been titled something like Estranging Poetries: Avant-Garde Dialectics in a Transnational Era, especially given the distancing Edmond wants to achieve from the uses to which Blanchot’s phrase ‘common strangeness’ can be put. We can imagine more dynamism in dialectics than the advice to speak to rather than speak of, so I am certainly sympathetic to Edmond’s resistance to Blanchot’s cited stance. Such a stance arguably encourages identitarian siloing, and Edmond’s book is invested in building bridges across those silos, in this case avant-garde poetry and comparative literature on one hand and U.S. Russian, and Sinophone literatures on the other. Edmond proposes ‘encounter and superimposition’ (197) as ways to imagine what it means when something transcultural and translingual happens, especially when it happens self-consciously. This course of the particular—one writer going across to another culture and language—over-mapped with palimpsestual revisiting is figured as an alternative to historical repetition and so-called progress narratives, with all their damaging social and critical consequences.

And concludes:

As the book repeatedly conveys with its interest in related dialectics, and as its conclusion re-visits, we are working after Benjamin’s world of repetition, which is better than being in a world that fancies itself as blooming ‘toward’ progress. Each iteration—each chapter here, each poet turning toward a different land of language and location—performs a differential repetition, or what Edmond calls a differential ‘insistence,’ that can turn us constantly toward attention to each other and our practices. It is that kind of attention, that suspending of tribal blinders, that Edmond’s book encourages, and it is a pleasure to see this kind of work in the world.

Read the full review here. (I should note that the quoted price of NZ $96.76 is not correct. The University Bookshop in Dunedin has been selling copies for around $40, and copies are available for purchase online for well under US$30.)

The words transnational and globalization appear frequently within scholarship on contemporary poetry, but so far there have been few sustained attempts to narrate recent developments across more than two language-groups or geographical regions. Academics in the field have generally chosen to challenge the primacy of the nation-state as the horizon for literary historical inquiry by studying poetry that shares a single language or script (for example, Francophone, Lusophone, or Sinophone writing); that originates in one part of the world (Latin America, the Pacific Rim, Central Europe); or that is produced within communities that share strong historical and cultural ties (the Black Atlantic, the British Commonwealth, the South Asian diaspora). Such projects are already daunting in scope. In the present era of pervasive budget cuts, curtailed language instruction, and increased productivity demands, who has the training, time, and resources required to engage in even more broad-based comparative research?

At least one person can now be said to fill the bill. Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature recounts the history of avant-garde poetry from the late 1960s to the turn of the millennium in the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Union/Russian Federation. Edmond concentrates on six figures: Yang Liang and Bei Dao, menglong shiren (Misty Poets) who defied Cultural Revolution-era restrictions on writerly freedom; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Dmitri Prigov, samizdat poets whose careers extend into the post-Soviet period; and Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein, founding members of the avant-garde movement known as Language poetry. Throughout, Edmond shows himself to be thoroughly grounded in the relevant literary traditions, and whether a given poem is written in English, Russian, or Mandarin, he proves able to supply the kind of intensive, patient, erudite textual analysis that one associates with the Yale school back in its heyday. (Incidentally, again like a Yale school alum, he frequently relies on Charles Baudelaire as a point de repère, by-the-by exhibiting, too, his advanced knowledge of French.)

If I seem to be praising Edmond for traits and achievements that used to be the norm within the discipline of comparative literature, that is precisely the point. One cannot take them for granted anymore in the academy, especially when it comes to the study of the canon-murky post-Vietnam War period. Indeed, as Edmond’s subtitle suggests, his book is at least partly intended as an inquiry into method, a demonstration of how one might analyze “cross-cultural engagements” and “constellated system[s] of interconnections” without falling back on discredited Eurocentric or area-studies-derived models for comparison (12).

Read the full review here.

I have made only a very modest contribution to the new collection, but it is one that is dear to me. My translation of “Everything is in decline” («Все приходило в упадок») has a history that is entwined with my memories of Arkadii.

I first met Arkadii in the summer of 2000 in St Petersburg. There, Arkadii took me on as his volunteer assistant tutor in the class he was contributing to the St Petersburg Summer Literary Seminar. This gave me access to all the seminar’s wonderful events and brilliant talks, by the likes of Misha Iampolski, without having to pay a cent––no doubt to the mild annoyance of the organizer, Misha Iossel (who, luckily for me, had the grace to let it go as one of Arkadii’s eccentricities).

My tasks as a tutor included talking about literature, drinking beer, and wandering the streets of St Petersburg––stopping especially in haunts such as the café and arts center Borei. At the same time, I tried, with mixed success, to advance my own project of writing about Arkadii’s work, a project that has, years later, finally come to some kind of fruition with the publication of A Common Strangeness. (I was also that summer undertaking a very much more conventional––but equally eye-opening for me––schooling in the Russian language and literary classics with my own tutor, the inspirational teacher Volodia Shatsev.)

A further task that Arkadii charged me with that summer was translating one of his poems for a bilingual reading that he was to give as part of the seminar. This was the untitled poem that begins “Everything was in decline” and that for many years was his “calling card” piece on the Russian poetry website Vavilon (a kind of Russian equivalent of the Electronic Poetry Center). In taking on this task, I again felt like an imposter, especially since Genya Turovskaya, a wonderful poet and one of Arkadii’s brilliant translators, was present.

I dutifully did my best, but felt at the reading doubly inadequate. Not only was I reading in front of translators and poets like Turovskaya and Sasha Skidan (who were both, I was sure, thinking that Arkadii could do much better than this odd student from the end of the earth) but I also faced the uncomprehending looks of rows of American students, who, it increasingly dawned on me, were utterly confused either by Arkadii’s strange and wonderful lines or by my strange and outlandish New Zealand accent, or, most likely, by both.

On nearly my last day in St Petersburg, later in the summer and well after the seminar was over, I went for a final stroll with Arkadii and his wife, Zina. It was only then that they asked me how old I was. I told them I was 22, and they burst out laughing.

When Zhenia Ostashevsky wrote to me at the end of 2011 to say that he had worked out that the English translation of the poem “Everything was in decline” that he had in his possession was by me and that he wanted to include it in Endarkenment, I was delighted. But I was also worried about how my translation, completed thirteen years before, would stand up. This worry was confirmed but also overcome when Zhenia wrote to me with a list of queries and corrections, which then prompted me to engage with the translation again and, thanks to his help, improve it.

There were many challenging moments in revising the translation. One was to try again to convey the resonances of “bones” (and so death) and “dice” (and so chance) in translating the line “filosofskie pory kostei.” I went in the end for “the philosophical times of a die,” hoping that some readers would catch a similar, though less eloquent, pun.

The poem concludes with a gesture whose ironies of authorship and arcs of continuation are similarly doubled in translation:

you sign for me dragomoshchenko;

the boredom is excessive;

the thread endless, like dust.

Dreams a continuation on a magnetic arc,

like the wind roaring in a bottomless ring.

With Arkadii’s passing, the poem’s themes of time, memory, chance, and death resonate in new ways for me and become again a task for translation. As Arkadii wrote elsewhere, “when the translation seems finished, it means one thing: translate again and again.”

Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation is a book concerned with variants of the epistemological act: reading, translating, writing. It investigates two broad theoretical and methodological questions that are crucial in cultural, translation and literary studies alike: the issue of interpretation and representation, and the need for a non-dichotomous approach to the study of literature and literary translation. The author, Cosima Bruno, engages with these questions by synthesizing and revising hermeneutical approaches and by providing new methodological tools for a textual exegesis of Yang Lian’s poetry – one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary work. The publication of this book thus marks a shift in the study of poetry translation, too often based on evaluative and contrastive analysis between two (typically western) language pairs.

You can also listen to Bruno talking about her book here.

Jacob Edmond’s work places the discipline of comparative literature against a deeply cosmopolitan, yet rarely juxtaposed, series of lyrical contexts. From the stakes of high modernism to the controversies over global literature and contemporary geopolitics, his discussions are admirable in their linguistic range, erudition, and critical vision. Cultural encounter––that experience so typically poised between strangeness and commonality––becomes here a poetic event. An original, sophisticated, and remarkable book.

To begin with, Jacob Edmond’s new book, A Common Strangeness, is anything but common and signals what I hope will be a new trend toward more ambitious studies of late-modernist to contemporary poetics on a global scale. While it might be premature to announce the arrival of a “global poetics,” there is a pressing need for a space to explore this genre specific cognate of World Literature, a space to reimagine what in China operates under the title: comparative poetics (比较诗学). This is a robust area of academic research in China, yet it tends to reduce poetry and poetics to the pre WWII traditional canon: Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus; Sidney, Pope, and Johnson; Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Emerson; Poe, Arnold, and Eliot; and perhaps Frost, Williams, Hughes, and, because it is China, Pound. In English literary criticism today, however, the term “poetics” often demarks poetry discourses consciously connected to avant-garde practice along the vectors of a more radical canon: Blake, Whitman, Stein, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, Mac Low/John Cage to Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian and others associated with the so-called LANGUAGE poets from the 1970s forward through neo-conceptual poetry, etc. Despite dominating critical discussions of English poetics over the last several decades, this avant-garde tradition has not found itself inside the fold of “comparative poetics” in China, and there are many reasons why it should. Of course, it should also be noted that critical studies of Chinese poetics inside and outside China are also playing catch up, and there is still so much work to be done. The current budding of critical work on the radical diversity of aborted, transfigured, and partially realized modernities sown by the hands of the so-called “Critical Review,” “Crescent Moon,” and “Nine Leaves” schools for instance are just now coming into full bloom. One should also mention that scholars tracking trends in contemporary poetics in the West have remained problematically Anglophonocentric and have largely failed to attend to poetic shifts on a global scale unless such shifts are explicitly conversant in the idioms of innovative English-based poetics (including those within the Sinophone sphere). So while no single volume could ever hope to connect the multitudinous and heterogeneous threads of a “global poetics,” A Common Strangeness succeeds in moving in this direction in part by offering a critical lens (strangeness) through which to view poetry on a global scale.

Read the full review here.

––Vitaly Chernetsky (Miami University; author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization), reviewing A Common Strangeness in the New Zealand Slavonic Journal

Read the full review here.

Aside from this review, the latest issue of NZSJ contains many other treats, including an article by Gerald Janecek on “The Roots and Development of Moscow Conceptualist Poetry: From Vs. Nekrasov to Lev Rubinstein.” The full table of contents is here.

Detail from The Crime LINKS in the Smoke, by Campbell Walker

The final post in my Jacket2 commentary on “Iterations” takes a very local turn. Like Prigov’s Little Coffins, New Zealand artist Campbell Walker’s 2012 work The Crime LINKS in the Smoke is an undead work that plays on the print book as both fetishized object and repeatable copy. The Crime comprises cut-up pages from detective novels that were burnt in the fire that destroyed Raven Books, a secondhand bookshop on Princes St in Dunedin, New Zealand. Walker’s book is a memorial both to a particular shop and to the town where it was located. Dunedin, the small city near the southern end of New Zealand where I live, is known for its penguins and sea lions but also for its crumbling Victorian grandeur. Now mainly a university town, Dunedin was once New Zealand’s largest and most prosperous city, and the energetic local cultural scene today springs partly from the spaces opened up by the slow urban decay of a city that never grew. Walker’s work links the fate of Raven Books and Dunedin to the fate of the print codex at a time when bookstores everywhere are closing their doors and e-book sales are increasing exponentially. Read more here.