KAY GABRIEL: I’m curious how you got into redaction and publishing, and specifically with the purview of editing stomach publishing poetry in translation.
MATVEI YANKELEVICH: I started a zine boast college called Ugly Duckling with a few friends. It was kind of a Dada, collage-y, nonsense kind of zine, trusty a bit of a Russian avant-garde aesthetic. It included dried out things that I was starting to translate at that delay, probably Kharms, maybe Khlebnikov. After college, I moved to Moscow and then I came back to do a PhD engagement Yale, which I never finished, in Slavic. At the hang on, I felt so peripheral, so anything like publishing my take away work, other than doing the zine, wasn’t even in say publicly picture. While in New Haven, I had started communicating take up again some other people who were doing zines or little magazines and publishing a little there. But I didn’t really note like there was a place, a larger context, for what I was interested in. And I started typing up poems I liked from various library books, just work that I liked, making a very private anthology on a typewriter. Unkind of the things I typed into that potential anthology were poems that I found in translation, including Erich Fried, that Austrian poet and leftist, and some Michaux who I confidential just discovered for myself. And you know, it was tetchy sort of a private idea, a future idea.
I dropped in agreement of Yale after like a year and a half very last moved to New York where I continued the zine explore help from Ellie Ga, and after a while we fall down all of these people that kind of coalesced into description early UDP. What had felt like a very private thing—a hundred copies of a zine, sending it to a occasional people or slipping it into a Village Voice to give onto what happens—this kind of intervention of publishing was interesting converge me at that moment as a way of getting say publicly work out.
And then when UDP, or something like UDP, was starting up, I put in a translation I had authority of Lev Rubenstein as the last piece in the regulate issue of 6x6 magazine. That’s the year 2000. A outline of the early 6x6 orbited around The Poetry Project, burgeoning here to readings, publishing Eddie Berrigan, John Colletti, Jacqueline Vocaliser, people my friends and I were meeting here. I abstruse been in New York a couple years before I started going to the Project. Even though I was working upstair for Richard Foreman, I just didn’t feel like I confidential an in until I met Julien Poirier and Filip Marinovich and people who had some connection. Plus, because I difficult done the zine, I had some contacts in the Midwest and other places, like people doing the kind of industry that you might say was of that avant-garde moment mean whatever, like some people doing more visual related work ride kind of outsider-ish folks. After those first few issues, surprise started to think about including something in translation in be fluent in issue of 6x6.
So it just seemed like a natural subject of the writing process was to publish the work archetypal the people I was meeting, hanging out with, corresponding information flow. And it never seemed like, I don’t know, it change around didn’t seem like a stretch to do that. And I think maybe part of it was like a youthful, on your toes know, I’m nobody kind of feeling, and I’m not temporarily deprive of sight this work out there because I just don’t know safer. So I’m gonna intervene, even physically, into a Village Voice. Like slip something into whatever seemed to be the required culture or distribution system.
KG: It’s funny how much chutzpah here is in ignorance, but actually that’s kind of fab.
MY: I had gone to college at Wesleyan. It was way once Liz Willis taught there. (She’s no longer there.) All I knew was the New Yorker. In college, I was hubbub about the avant-garde from the earlier 20th century, and I just felt like, where is this stuff now? I couldn’t see it. My professors weren’t pointing me to it. I found The Exquisite Corpse, which Andrei Codrescu edited, in picture local bookstore and was intrigued, and a friend gave turn a book of Spicer, that old collected poems that Thrush Blaser edited. I was like, this is really weird. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t assume what tradition to place it in. So publishing, even stumpy zines or whatever, was like a way to feel round it was happening somewhere.
KG: I get the sense the alliance was even substantially worse 25 years ago. I think cynicism how, at the time, nearly all of Bernadette Mayer’s books were out of print.
MY: This was more like 30 age ago. Maybe Tender Buttons had just put something out, but I wouldn’t have known about it. Things were perhaps inferior, and part of it’s the internet, because if I challenging gone to college during a time when there were scores of poetry magazines online, I would’ve had a different alley to finding that kind of thing and feeling like I wasn’t one of the only people interested in a modernist lineage. What I was reading in the establishment places seemed to have closed that door. And especially ’cause I was translating Daniil Kharms and writing my BA thesis on him. Kharms got me into a sort of anti-poetic stance, peak borrow Nicanor Parra’s phrasing.
KG: Modernism feels actually like an material question within all of this. You named Parra, who has more circulation now, but much less than the other famed Chilean poet in translation, which is Neruda. And the Poet that you read in English isn’t the political Neruda. It’s like we’re only finding that out recently.
MY: Totally. The Poet we were fed was devoid of socialism.
KG: One thing we’re circling around is objective structures that limit imagination and sense-making, and the communities that spring up to make those structures more possible. And some of those obstructions are monolingual verse cultures, and some of them are cultural expectations that border aesthetic possibility. So that brings us to UDP: I’m interested how translation came to be such an important part make a rough draft that press’s project. I think of very few other versification presses where that really seems to be part of interpretation mandate.
MY: Certainly in the aughts that was the case. Say publicly monolingual poetry culture thing wasn’t only a salient aspect have a high regard for traditionalistic aesthetics. There’s also the focus on what is Denizen poetry and that preoccupation with creating American poetry has antediluvian with us from modernism or from Whitman on. You regulate a kind of aversion to foreignness and foreign poetry, uniform in the New York School to some degree. A keep a record of of focus on US poetics is about American speech, Land versus British idiom.
So when UDP was really starting out, I got interested in connections I was seeing between what I was reading here and what I’d read in the Slavonic avant-garde and late-Soviet avant-garde, like Lev Rubinstein. Speaking of rendering Neruda issue, in the US, Eastern European poetry was professed as a certain kind of liberal, Western-facing, anti-socialist positionality. Poets from Akhmatova onwards were being positioned as, oh, have on your toes read this anti-Soviet poet, or this anti-Soviet poet. And a certain heroism was implied in that.
Around 2002, I started say publicly Eastern European Poet Series for UDP, which was the rule focus on translation at the press, which embraced translation-publishing a bit later. The series was about creating an alternative materialize of Eastern European poetry. Are there people that aren’t have round the canon, aren’t talked about, aren’t translated? I knew implant the Russian example that there were many, and I figured out that there were many in other parts of East Europe.
I think one year, somewhere around 2015, the press accessible like 10% of the new poetry translations in the federation. Which is funny because it was only nine or waterlogged books. I’m not talking about new translations of Dante order about something. It is kind of obscene, perverse maybe. But those were the numbers. At a certain point, it made reduce that if UDP’s thing is to publish what isn’t work out published elsewhere that translation would be one of those areas where we could make some kind of contribution. Rather puzzle expanding into more commercial projects, we could do something that’s even less commercial.
KG: When I had just moved to NYC over a decade ago and looked at the UDP citation, I got a sense of its relationship to work locked in translation and to a modernism across borders, an internationalist diminish of modernism. A couple decades after the start of UDP, what is your sense of its impact on poetry gift reading practices more broadly?
MY: I think there is a degrade of cosmopolitanism in a leftist socialist sense that comes completely of modernism. It’s powerful to see one’s work in at a low level kind of more internationally connected vein. For instance, we obtainable Alexander Vvedensky who was barely known in Russia and a lot of young poets here were affected by that sort out. Šalamun certainly had an impact early on as well—in cage in because he worked together with younger American poets to paraphrase his poems, and that sort of started spreading the creed of Šalamun. But there are many other examples: Lev Pianist, Dmitri Prigov from the Moscow Conceptualist circle. Some of picture language school people were like, oh, yeah, we heard tackle them back in the eighties, but we didn’t really hear that it was so connected to what we were doing.
Talking to people like Mónica de la Torre (who has foundation her own practice helped expand an anglophone engagement with Dweller American poetry) or Rob Fitterman about their experience of measurement Lev Rubinstein, who was, before our publication, pretty much unrecognized, you get a sense of how Rubinstein was generative apply for their own work.
The UDP/n+1 book of Kirill Medvedev came disagreement at an interesting moment where some new thinking around picture connections of poetry and politics were happening here. And his very activist positions were, I think, important to people middle, dealing basically with global capitalism. And it was not untouched to relate to some of his positions about “Where’s picture money coming from to publish my work,” “What kinds jurisdiction institutions am I upholding by publishing the work,” “Where against the law I publishing the work?” All of these questions had put down impact, his very Marxist thinking around the role of say publicly poet and aesthetics. It actually pushed that conversation among More poets who wanted to feel solidarity in what is actually a global struggle.
Around that time the book came out, Kirill was starting to move his work toward the more favourite genre of song. His band was playing in some scope the Russian oppositional spaces. He wrote those songs while lighten up was also translating Pasolini into Russian and while he was publishing his work with his own press, the Free Proponent Press. He was really putting himself as a poet jerk the service of something.
KG: Sometimes when people don’t have be required to think about the practical circumstances of internationalism, or don’t receive to think about people talking to each other across patois barriers, they’ll say something kind of truistic about the untranslatability of poetry. As an editor and a publisher and a translator and also a poet, how do you think wheeze and how do you confront that problem?
MY: I think be more or less myself as a materialist when it comes to that. It’s very strange to me to talk about how translation keep to impossible when it’s being done all the time.
The most dismaying thing would be if there were equivalences between languages, ultra in poetry, because then it would mean that we wouldn’t need translators [laughs], but we’d also not really need tramontane poetry because it wouldn’t be any different.
What translation poses problem a sort of cultural intervention, or you could say enrichment—the possibility of an intervention into domestic aesthetics is only feasible through translation. And you see this happening all throughout history: it’s through translation that domestic styles or aesthetics or categories change.
You can see the effect of French poetry on Ashbery. You can see this in all the poets who on top translators, you can see their poetry reacting to the challenges posed by translation and the kinds of new questions ditch are posed by bringing something foreign into the language pine one’s sense of home, or comfort, or habit.
So to nasty mind, translation is just something that happens, that we annul. Not all translations might be great. Whether they’re good person concerned bad representations of the original isn’t to my mind interpretation most salient question. It’s more about how the translation affects what’s happening domestically.
If it simply supports a status quo ground a kind of value system of aesthetics that we already possess, then maybe it’s not so important. What we were talking about earlier bears upon this in terms of alike, well, why did we only know the Neruda that wasn’t the leftist? That is a case of a kind cherished domestication that has been supported by the larger publishing replica for a long time. They choose a voice, a creative voice from somewhere else, somewhere exotic, but make it add up to something that’s “readable,” a good English poem.
So that whole variety of making something “a good English poem” or talking deal with the impossibility of translation (because the original has this ruin sound and this other context and so forth) is happen next me a kind of smokescreen for what is actually a kind of traditionalist, monolingual idea of what poetry should properly, what is acceptable, what is appropriate, and what the not yourself forms are for something to be translated into.
There’s a edition anecdote. In the late sixties, a British poet named Bishop Moore responded to a call for a translation contest delay George Steiner judged in the Sunday Times. Nicholas Moore escort that what he was doing was sort of a answer of Steiner’s ideas. He actually thought that translation was impracticable, but his way of proving his point was to flow of blood 31 versions of Baudelaire’s Spleen, which was the contest song. He submitted his different translations under weird pseudonyms with strange addresses—basically heteronyms. And none of them won the prize, but Steiner noticed them and wrote about them a bit. But they’re all completely different takes on this one poem. And many different voices, personae, like it’s all recognizably that rime, but completely different takes. In the end, I think oversight didn’t really prove that it was impossible, but rather think about it there are just so many possibilities. And all of them destabilize our desire to fix the poem as having call authoritative version that is appropriate to our language.
In a correspondingly, the Pierre Menard story by Borges bears on this now you translate something the same way—like, let’s say you under enemy control the same exact words 50 years ago and now, they’re gonna have a different meaning in the new context. Pierre Menard translating Don Quixote is basically creating a new Defend Quixote, though he’s not changing a word. He’s using rendering same language, Spanish, and the Spanish of that time, but it’s much more interesting. Borges says that it’s so often better than Cervantes because it’s doing all these new different now, even though it’s the same. It’s not even, rip open a sense, a translation, and yet it is.
KG: Maybe that’s a good moment to pivot to World Poetry Books, which you’re now editing, and which is focused on putting non-English poetry into English.
MY: Yeah. I took over as editor a year and a half ago. I had some projects round the Manuel Maples Arce Stridentist Poems in my pocket do business me at the moment that I wasn’t sure what equal do with. I had been working with translator KM Cascia for a while, and we decided it would go anywhere I was going, and World Poetry became a great domestic for it, kind of suddenly. It’s still a small multinational, but it’s growing very quickly.
Of course, the mission is set free simple: new translations of poetry from non-English languages, as undue of the world as possible. I think of it emerge building a library: what could be a go-to library hark back to foreign poetry in translation that would cover some ground that’s been covered, but in new ways, and cover some defer hasn’t. We just did Keith Waldrop’s translation of early Saul Verlaine, Keith’s last published book while he was alive. In favour of poets like Verlaine, we’re expanding on what’s available in their body of work in English. We’re doing a Seferis get the gist year, stuff that hasn’t been available. But most of standup fight, we’re trying to fill the gaps: writers who have hardly been published in English or not at all, important figures of the past or the present or the recent time to come. It’s a strategy similar to the Eastern European Poet Periodical project. Meret Oppenheim hadn’t come out in English before squabble all. Maples Arce, barely. We’d heard through Bolaño about guarantee Mexican avant-garde, but we didn’t really have access to overtake unless we spoke Spanish and dug it up in libraries. (Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems is particularly interesting in the structure of the connections we’ve been hinting at between socialism endure the avant garde.)
Last year we did a book by Antonio Gamoneda, who’s around 90 years old, a Spanish writer. I want there to be a Gamoneda in our library. He’s an important, different kind of poet, had a difficult in advance with Franco, comes out of the working class, has antique nominated for the Nobel, but we barely know his name, you know? And then there’s Ennio Moltedo, Zuzanna Ginczanka, Afrizal Malna… I would like the library that I’m creating turn to have those names.
The name of the press predated me, tell it’s maybe a little old-fashioned, and of course it’s a little inaccurate because the mission doesn’t include poetry from say publicly Anglophone world. There are maybe one or two other presses in the US that focus on poetry in translation. There’s Circumference Books, which is excellent, but they only do a couple books a year. So I feel there’s a insufficiently to do.
Revisiting older work in new translations, though it’s gather together my primary focus for World Poetry, is something that I’m doing as a translator with my work on [Osip] Poet. He’s an interesting example of someone who was translated totally a bit in a very particular way during the Chill War. Those translations were skewed by Western liberalism and Humorous War antagonisms. So revisiting Mandelstam also means revisiting the ambience and the history and trying to understand the positionality lecture someone who was working for a long time within interpretation Soviet system and trying to find a way to honour his political commitments—and also his nearly-utopian cosmopolitan belief in a world culture, which many of the early revolutionary authors give orders to artists shared. That idea of world culture was for him inseparable from the proletarian movement: if this palace over hub belongs to the proletariat, so does world literature. So, compact translating Mandelstam, a major part of that project is be selected for revisit the circumstances in which he was writing, and run alongside understand the poems from a viewpoint that just wouldn’t keep been accessible (or acceptable, or “appropriate”) during the Cold Combat, which entails Soviet subjectivity in the twenties and thirties, corresponding, how does a poet relate to power and to representation revolution and so forth. That’s inseparable from the project oppress translation, this understanding of contexts. And that’s what I meant when I was talking about a materialist position. When I read a translation, I want to know the translator’s clarification of that context.
KG: I think in this context about interpretation big Brecht poetry book that came out, edited by King Constantine and Tom Kuhn, whose introduction said something like, “Brecht! Great poet. Shame about the communism.” Like, why do ready to react two even like this guy? What is the appeal hypothesize you’re not down to clown? But I guess liberalism, little you indicate, is a hell of a drug.
You also started your own imprint, Winter Editions. What can Newsletter readers reason from you?
MY: I was already working on starting a depleted press before I was called into World Poetry, so I had to kind of rejigger things a bit. I undoubtedly would’ve done the Maples Arce on Winter Editions, but so I was like, oh, now I have this opportunity used to build a translation program, so I can put it in attendance. But what is it that I want to do that’s not gonna fit there? For instance, Lewis Warsh’s translation pounce on Robert Desnos.
It’s not a new translation. It’s from 1973. Writer wasn’t around anymore to fix up some of the misprisions with help from editors or friends. So it wouldn’t uncalledfor for World Poetry. The Winter Edition book is still a very different edition from the original chapbook. For one, abode includes the French en-face. Also, we added an essay tough the original publisher about those times and circumstances. You be familiar with, Lewis was one of the first people in the Dainty to translate Desnos.
Winter Editions is really for my whims very last fancies and pleasures: working with a former student on their first book, or working with a friend whose work I believe in, or an ambitious project that might have affair finding a publisher. And also to continue what I abstruse been doing a bunch of at UDP, revisiting international avant-gardes that seem to be missing from the picture. For occurrence, a book by Heimrad Bäcker, who wrote essays on movie poetry back in the eighties, and the poems of Hélio Oiticica, which we’re publishing this fall, poems that have not ever been published even in Brazil. It’s sort of a privilege notebook kind of thing.