ekleksographia wave two

We live in a strange and unsettling time for literary translation. If getting from one day to the next didn't require a certain amount of self-anesthesia, most writers would probably be downright giddy, as would many people engaged in other activities. We speak, as we should, with alarm of biological species going extinct at an ever increasing rate. But languages are going extinct at a similar speed. We have more access to recording technologies, from the pencils of linguists in the field to listening and transcription devices that penetrate walls from a distance. Although resources for transcription and translation are available, the extent to which they will be used is questionable. Something that is not questionable is the simple fact that the number of native speakers of many languages is plummeting, and even transcription, translation, and the learning of an older language as a second language still don't prevent a loss for the varieties of human expression. We may be moving toward a world in which everyone speaks one of three or four languages—with luck, along with a native language that they stubbornly refuse to abandon. We may be moving toward what seemed a desirable goal at one time and still does to many: a world in which everyone speaks the same language. In addition to the loss of creativity, perception, word view, and literature inherent in each language, simply learning to say the same words in the same order does not mean that everyone will mean the same thing by them and that this "universality" will put an end to misunderstanding. Or even if it did that an end to misunderstanding would be an end to strife. Or that the in-group variants that would immediately start creating themselves would be better than those they replace, even if this is the most optimistic of the possibilities mentioned here.

At the same time as we acquire more access to more languages, texts, and recordings, post modernist tendencies tend to play down or put down the study of languages as such for language as theory, just as the same line of thinking puts down and tries to cast out history. Currently, the majority of North American poets are monoglots, their linguistic limitation reinforced by American English's status as the global language. Even in a world where everyone wears the same t-shirts made in the same sweat shops, uses or aspires to use the same electronic technologies, consumes variants of the same foods from global franchises, it seems hard for me to imagine that any sensible person would deny the importance and necessity of translation from the huge wealth of literatures now tentatively available. At present, that means attempts to save printed books from annihilation through library and archive deacquisition, often by digitizing them as fast as possible as a safeguard if not a complete means of salvage. Even if all this seems ethereal and impractical, it's difficult not to see the implications, whatever one's political views might be, of the U.S. Postal system cutting off its overseas surface rate mail at a time when the U.S. was fighting a war in Iraq and desperately lacked translators, particularly of Arabic, but also of languages ranging from Parsee to Urdu. If you can't afford all sorts of reading matter in another language, you're not going to become a useful translator. If your text book limits you to "See Ahmed tend his goats" and leaves out other forms of reading matter, audio and video recording, and all other means of linguistic transmission, you may kill Ahmed's goats for fun or by accident, you may even kill Ahmed or get him medical attention, but you won't be able to have a meaningful conversation with him.

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When I began my Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry in 1994, I saw the web as an opportunity for me to try to produce a multi-dimensional collection I would not be able to produce in print, even with the most lush of grants or contracts, but also to be able to do things with the concept of an anthology that print could not do for technical reasons. One of those possibilities was that my collection would become part of the far greater one being assembled on a global scale by virtually everyone publishing poetry that could be accessed with a basic internet account and computer system. Thus the "Ideal Anthology" would not exist solely at my or any other single site but be spread across the web and represent the work and view points of a huge number of editors. This freed me from my own limitations and allowed me a liberty of expression other anthologies would not permit. I wanted to make a collection that would suggest the range and variety of what readers have come to see as major avant-gardes of the last decades of the 20^th century. [Poets are remarkably bad at naming what they do. In this essay, I'm using avant-garde in part out of deference to Lettrisme, in part to distinguish the work I'm interested in from the less intentionally diverse work that appears on the web.] In this context, I could include or leave out virtually anything, with no responsibility to try to be comprehensive or to accept other people's sense of what was the most important work being done. If I could not get permission to include some of the work deemed most important by others, or even by me, I could hope that it would be filled in elsewhere on the web, along with the work that didn't particularly interest me, but would be essential in a comprehensive anthology. Thus my anthology could be highly personal, and reflect my interests rather than a consensus of opinion, but still represent as many as possible of the tendencies of the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries.

In 2002, about half way between starting the anthology and the present, I wrote "Toward an Ideal Anthology," an essay sketching what I wanted to do with Light and Dust, and how that fit into the global anthology of poetry that seemed to be in the process of forming. Some of my optimism has disappeared since then, many of my ideas have changed, and in the last several years I have not been able to devote as much time as I had previously to the anthology, in part because I was checking out other modes of cyber presentation. On May 16, 2009, Jerome Rothenberg, the Merlin of anthologists of the late 20^th century, reproduced the first half of the essay on his blog, Poems and Poetics at roughly the same time as a number of other poets of different orientations lauded the site as one of the best on the web—something that happened more often in the early days when there wasn't as much competition. One of the features that made the web important to me was its capacity for almost infinite translation. Although this may not have been as important to other commentators, my guess is that it was to Rothenberg. Here's a brief passage regarding translation from the essay:

On the web, which acts as a world wide distribution system in a literal sense, there's no reason why you can't present work in multiple languages, and you can add translations as you go along, not requiring them to be on-hand by a specific deadline. If the presence of work on the Web finds translators among readers, as it has done a number of times at Light and Dust, so much the better. Like most editors, I know more about what's going on in my own part of the world than anywhere else. But the global environment of the Web allows considerable outreach beyond that. The tendency toward expanded areas of possibility became apparent in anthologies before the Web appeared, but the Web allows considerably more room for exchange. Contributions from France and Japan, Paraguay and Eritrea don't simply make up addenda or footnotes to my anthology, but take positions as important as anything else at the site. My offering hardly represents everything that's going on in the world, but it moves more fully toward an international scope than any print anthology I know.

This is just a short sketch of possibilities. Some ideas have gone through drastic changes since I started the site, and others have suggested themselves to me as time has gone by. In this essay, I'd like to go into a bit more detail about a few of the translation projects I've tried on the web. I will discuss some basic underlying concerns with translation. I will go into significant detail regarding the importance of the material translated and the role of translation in one of the Features of Light and Dust. I will then do brief sketches of three others.

Underlying assumptions:

1. I am not one of those people who see a world in which there is only one language as in any way desirable. Although wide-spread mongrel languages, particularly English and Spanish, have seemed to dominate 20^th century poetry, and include much of the best of it, I really have no way of knowing how accurate the perception of excellence is. I've caught my share of glimpses of poetry elsewhere in near-total exclusion, providing examples of how warped, shallow, and presumptuous the view from English speaking North America can be. Despite the unlikelihood of my site making a perceptible difference in the march of language change, I can at least cast a vote with it, and it's not completely out of the question that it might make some difference among those who read contemporary poetry.

2. Poetry in the 20^th Century has become more and more a global phenomenon, full of strange and at times downright incomprehensible channels. Despite the decline in the emphasis on learning languages among North Americans in the second half of the century, interaction of cultures and languages has provided at least as much stimulus as any other factor. More often that not, new ideas have come from translations. Perhaps interestingly enough, mistranslations and erroneous conceptions of languages, literary forms, and cultures have exerted at least as much influence as those which remain as close to "accuracy" as possible. I want to keep the process going, even with the inevitability of misunderstanding.

3. The periods of active translation through the 20^th Century have included extensive experimentation with the nature of translation itself. Opportunities for new forms of translation have come from and been reinforced by a plethora of sources. These include the changes in expectations and desires of writers and readers by the multitudes of avant-gardes of the era. They also include changes in conceptions of virtually everything else. Perhaps the most complex channels in this delta have been changes in how we understand the nature of language itself. At least as forceful have been concepts of politics, gender, and other community issues. Those which deal with everything from epistemology to neurology to aspects of pop culture and daily life make up another set of currents affecting the nature of language and translation. There is also a huge zone of ambiguity surrounding translation proper and methodologies that rely on collaboration, paraphrase, adaptation, and other uses of source texts in other languages.

With Light and Dust, I have not only tried to provide as much diversity of poets and literary tendencies as possible, I have tried to experiment with the widest means of presentation I could manage. In contemporary work from other source languages, however, I have tried to stick as close to what I think of as "basic translation." Here basic translation means following the sense of the original as closely as possible, without much experimentation, and generally with as little ego-involvement or personal interpretation or embellishment or "improvement" by the translator as practical. I don't believe this is where translation should end or reach some kind of "definitive" position. But basic translation is where the process should start, and a type of effort to which poetry should keep returning even after standard and accepted translations have become available. I would like to put in a plug here for a book that should serve as a model for translation in the future. This is David Hawkes' A Little Primer of Tu Fu. In this book, Hawkes presents the source text, transliteration, basic translation, character by character analysis, and extensive commentary on everything from language to the events of the time to the history of interpretations of the poems. I have at times hoped I would be able to present similar work on the web. This is extremely difficult to do. I have realized my limitations and the unlikelihood of my accomplishing anything as complete, though I have sought as much contextualizing material as possible. I have more extensive projects in mind, some held back by my lack of funds and my technical limitations. Still, Hawkes' edition presents an ideal which other translators would do well to aspire to. The web may be a place where it can happen, at least occasionally.

There are several areas where "basic translation" presents more difficulties than might first appear. I'll mention two: Light and Dust includes many translations to and from languages which I am unable to read. I have tried to be careful in selection of translators, but have had to rely on them and other people familiar with the languages inaccessible to me. I would be surprised if I have not stumbled into types of rendering that don't follow my basic plan. In such instances, as in the inclusion of work from cultures and literary milieux unfamiliar to me, I would rather err on the side of inclusion rather than parochialism. Other problems arise from the nature of poetry in this century—not only its inherent mechanics but also its treatment by the world around it. I've avoided specific examples in these initial remarks. I will, however, use one instance as an example of a number of points. Although Alexi Kruchonykh flourished in the first quarter of the 20^th Century, he seems more "at home" in an anthology devoted to its last decades and the opening the next. Many of the poems in the selection I put on line had been produced by Kruchonykh in "editions" of four or five copies, circulated among friends, then repressed as completely as possible by the Soviet government. This wasn't as difficult as in other instances when an "edition" consisted of no more than a few carbons typed in one of the stations of the railroad on which Kruchonykh worked. Some of the poems I obtained from Gerald Janecek were almost simultaneously being made available to Russian readers for the first time. They were not only "News that stays news" in North America, they were also "breaking news" at home. Some seemed radical even by 1990s standards, where "asemic" writing seemed more timid and tended to maintain much tidier boundaries. Some of these are apparently untranslatable in any basic sense, though anything is amenable to transformation. As in the case of other poetry that many readers would find "difficult," I included a fair amount of commentary on the work itself—in this instance, being extremely lucky in that the commentary included significant samples of work that needed immediate annotation. And repeating another practice I try to follow as much as possible, I also presented commentary on contemporary Russian poets, running under the "Transfurist" banner, who picked up on some of Kruchonykh's ideas, both as commentary on Kruchonykh, and as contemporary poets in their own right (in fact, several already appeared at the Light and Dust site as part of Mail Art features). Translation often benefits from commentary, and in some instances needs it. In the Kruchonykh and Transfurist sections interconnections with all sorts of other, often surprising, poets and tendencies, are often important. I have written and presented the thoroughly abstract poetry of Rochelle Owens and Michael McClure of the early 1960s, done (as far as I have been able to discover from conversations with them and from reading) without any significant debt to each other, and with no knowledge whatsoever of Kruchonykh and late Zaum in Russia. Discovering such similarities, however, is one of the things Light and Dust is about. In this instance, I owe an enormous debt to the generosity of Gerald Janecek for giving me permission to use his work at my site, as do poets and readers of our time for making them available in other media. As important as Janecek's books have been, this is news that needs wider circulation—and particularly given its obscurity, the aid in sales which web production creates is particularly important with his Zaum, published by San Diego State University Press, with virtually no advertising budget. The debt poets owe Janecek also brings up an important aspect of translation. If Janecek had not been a translator, would he have made the extensive searches in Russian archives that brought much of this work back to light? I have seen numerous instances of translators acting as the main figures in creating awareness of the work they translate and generating interest not simply in readers but in publishers as well. It is not uncommon for the people of country X to pay more attention to their own poets when they receive attention, particularly in the form of translation, from other parts of the world. In the most often cited example, a fair number of commentators have suggested that Latin American Magic Realism owes a good deal of its success at home to its translations into other languages and the cultural prestige that has gone along with the translated books.

For Kruchonykh's poems, click the following:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kruch/lkron01.htm

For Janecek's comments on Kruchonykh, go to
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kruch/lkrucht1.htm

For Janecek's report on the newer, "Transfurist" poets, go to
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/janecek/janecek2.htm

In areas that do not include translation, such as the d.a.levy home page,
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/dalevy/dalevy.htm

I have not only provided extensive commentary in a number of different modes, a bibliography that would be exhaustive if it had been the work of a university library, and other aids and extensions, I've also set up a "satellite" at another web site http://www.bigbridge.org/levy.htm where the levy and several features of the other site interact, contextualize each other, and otherwise benefit from the association. In such examples I have contributed to the spreading out of the "Ideal Anthology" to sites other than my own. I have hopes that I will be able to do similar projects with works in other languages.

4. Even in arcane details, the web is global. Look at most urls: they start with "www." Where they don't, the "world" for which that first w stands, is implied. In the global environment of the web, with greater volume and faster speed of communication, misunderstandings stand a better chance of correction. The degree to which mistranslation has contributed to the arts of the last century emphasizes the importance of the influx of new ideas, not some inherent virtue in mistakes. My guess is that reduction in misunderstanding will not reduce creativity in the least. It may remain constant. However, the possibilities of conversation and dialogue seem likely to enhance and extend the stimulating effects on interchange. In the global environment, with statistics generators as partial guides, it is important for me to see what a large number of people access Light and Dust from other countries. Presumably, the majority read English. If they are learning English in the process of reading, it would be satisfying if part of that learning process included avant-garde poetry. I would like to think that work presented bilingually would act as a welcoming gesture and a token of respect: an indication that the site is friendly to speakers of other languages. I'd also like to emphatically negate a twist on an often quoted quip by Mallarmé: that everything exists to be translated into American English. I'd rather insist that the original wasn't there simply as a source, but as an essential and irreplaceable entity in itself, which should not be ignored. I assume that a reasonable number of people whose native language is English can read the source language. These readers may appreciate bilingual presentation as a means of getting to the original or practicing their abilities with the source language, or using the translation as an aid in passages that present difficulties for them in the original.

5. Ideas coming into the arts of the West have run parallel with North Atlantic influences on other literatures. From much of what's available in translation, it seems that the North Atlantic has gotten a much better deal. But I have found at least a few instances, particularly in the case of Japan, in which translation of avant-garde work from other parts of the world follows an odd feed-back loop. Westerners appreciate what reads like imitation. They have an extremely hard time with greater originality, and don't seem able to handle it when poets writing in other languages are ahead of them in closely related ideas, whether the source be local or imported. Hence, some of the most original and potentially beneficial work in other languages may be unavailable in English. The following may be extremely difficult, but I feel a cautious optimism about it: I would like to be able to get some sense of how people in other parts of the world use what we have to offer while they're in the process of doing so, not decades later when the process has lost much of its initial energy and become part of literary history. Ideally, this would work its way out with significant distance left, since too close scrutiny would probably involve corrections at the wrong time, a stifling form of nit-picking, and other negatives.

6. Demography is a difficult area in North American poetry. The number of those who write wildly exceeds those who read them. This can lead to a kind of inbreeding when poets concentrate too much on their own circles. I would like to see poets return to their former apprenticeship and discipline of translating. It would be enormously useful, but at the moment it doesn't seem likely. I and other netizens, however, may be able to increase the possibilities of what a large number of people can do by including a healthy presentation of work from other cultures and other languages in addition to presenting a broader spectrum of work from North America and the Anglosphere. This may more likely than not occur in unexpected ways, if it occurs at all. For me, personally, discovering Lettrisme as a student provided one of the strongest jolts in my life. On the one hand I was in the midst of a period of cultural foment in which "alternative" was a key shibboleth—in fact, many of us spoke of creating a complete "alternate society." Supposedly we had access to the artistic riches of the world on a scale never before dreamed. Yet Lettrisme, coming from a culture and a nation as close to mine as France, starting with a language that was one of the parents of my own, and which I was studying at school because it had produced so much literary creativity, was based in alternatives and presented what seemed like an endless supply of them, yet it was scarcely known in North America. If Lettrisme had produced so much without my knowing anything about it or being able to find anybody locally who did, how much else was out there? In 1967, when I received my first copies of Le Lettrisme, I also made my first literary pilgrimage to New York, which also opened up all sorts of doors to me. That the frantic pluralism of lower Manhattan could be matched by something similar going on in France along with such better known movements as Existentialism and Theaters of the Absurd and Theater of Cruelty, gave me a sense of the endless possibilities of avant-garde arts. I had taken the northern route to New York to check out the World's Fair in Montreal on the way. There I was not only delighted by the diversity and brilliance of the work shown at the Czech pavilion, which stole the show for the arts that year, there seemed no reason why a city like Milwaukee couldn't do something similar. That lead to a number of activities in the following years. One of them, Milwaukee's Woodland Pattern Book Center, which I co-founded, and to which I contributed ideas picked up from these and other sources, is one that's still around, even though I haven't been part of it for many years. In much different circumstances in the 1990s, with extremely few resources to draw on other than a rather primitive computer and an erratically functioning internet connection, I was still drawing on the models of huge ranges of alternatives, largely unknown to each other, in New York and Paris, and the impact a relatively small country like Czechoslovakia could make when I set up my web site. Knowing about the alternatives available helped me fight off a period of severe depression, and give me what I needed to start the web work. I'd like to think a non parochial view of the web could do the same for others, and perhaps contribute to easing some of the strains of a large number of poets with a tiny audience. This may be one of the most important influences on literature of the web, and one of the main benefits to contemporary poetry. And translation is an essential part of it.

7. Given the situations sketched above, I began early to present work originally written in other languages bilingually and in other multilingual arrangements. Difficulties in doing so have been legion, some of the biggest in editing and running the site. In some instances, I have not been able to find reliable translators at the right time, in one instance the original text was lost and nothing survived but the translation. On the purely mechanical level, changes in html code and a serious problem for my host wiped out the diacritical markings of hundreds of pages. I am not finished with the slow and unpleasant task of manually writing codes for diacritical markings that can't be trashed by such current technological accidents. Anticipation of such problems has slowed down my already disrupted progress during the last few years. Most of my immediate plans for the site focus on several English-based additions. But there are several multi-lingual projects temporarily on hold, and others I'd like to do when I get the chance. With luck, I'll be able to finish cleaning up the damaged pages before some new catastrophe strikes. With this bit of technological misfortune, the multilingual and translation parts of my web efforts have included some of the most miserable problems. Still, I would not want to do without them, and believe they are one of the essential, if as yet not widely used or discussed, features of the web.

Lettrisme—What Alternative Means

My introduction to Lettrisme has a curious history. I tell the beginning of it in At the Corner of Euclid Ave and Blvd St Germain written for d.a.levy and the mimeograph revolution, [edited by Larry Smith and Ingrid Swanberg, Bottom Dog Press, 2007]. Click the title for an online reproduction. The story took quite a few twists and turns between the first copies of its magazine I received in the mail in 1967 and the opening of the site 30 years later, in 1997.

During these 30 years, and the time since, the nature of my interest in Lettrisme changed relatively frequently. In the first decade or so, there were periods when I felt that it let me down—even for a brief and ridiculous period seeming to mark the last phase of major French poetry and making my study of it as a university student useless. Oddly, Lettrisme was scarcely known, if known at all, by the overwhelming majority of American writers and artists even in the late 1960s, when it was going at full throttle, let alone in the decades that followed. Yet it constantly produced new ideas at a dizzying rate. These manifested themselves not only in the movement itself, or even in its numerous splinters and spin-offs, but in groups founded independently and among individuals. Thus it could exert a strong influence on French artists who were not members, and even be ubiquitous among non-artists (in the late 60s, for instance, young "swingers" sometimes wore clothes with Lettriste or Lettriste inspired designs on them) It also influenced émigrés living in France from around the world. These included workers as disparate as Hassan Massoudy, Paul Nagy, and Constantine Xenakis. It also produced groups which took basic ideas from it, even though the members of the new group have never been Lettristes themselves. One of the most interesting of these was the Yugoslavian group, The Signalists, and INIsmo followed a strange trajectory, starting in France, though with a definite international and almost evangelical orientation.

Lettriste theory and practice have changed in an almost comically complex manner, and the Lettristes themselves have constantly created names for their various practices and even the group itself. I don't want to try to describe or chronicle the group in this essay, but there are a few basic ideas present from the beginning which might make the nature of the movement a bit less abstract. Historically, Lettristes see a progression of "Amplic" periods when basic concepts expand and multiply. These lead to periods of "Chiseling," during which forms may be reduced, refined, disconnected, or destroyed, and isolated elements, broken off from the rest, become more important than the whole work. After this a new Amplic period can begin with the pieces left from the era of Chiseling. There have been relatively brief periods when this has occurred, but they are not as important as the major one. This began with the great Amplic period initiated by Homer and reaching its maximum capacity with Victor Hugo, Eugène Delacroix, and Richard Wagner. Baudelaire begins the great period of chiseling which starts with the poem turning away from the world and existing as a self-contained entity, analyzing or refining itself as far as it could go. This comes close to a conclusion with several Surrealists, the most important of them being Tristan Tzara, who virtually destroyed language but stopped before destroying the word as a basic unit. At this point, Lettrisme comes in and both finishes the final phases of deconstruction and begins the process of reconstruction, along new conceptual and artistic lines, starting with the smallest element, represented by the individual letter. In acoustics, this base point would be phonemes and such sounds as produced by humming, whistling, breathing, etc. In some later discourse, Lettristes moved this onto the level of sub atomic particles, where they could discuss what could be considered the extreme of conceptual art, since it would always be too small to perceive.

Much of the earliest Lettriste work was with sound poetry and film. The implications for abstract sound poetry seem obvious. Yet film took a special place, since it used a newer technology with a dateable beginning so the process of amplification could be precisely chronicled. It also had a wider, newer, and less specifically artistic audience, and, at the time of its greatest Lettriste work in that medium, the 1950s, a sort of pop-panache absent from older arts. It also lent itself to multiple forms of destruction and recreation. Some of the most prominent of these included scratching and painting on the film, filming intangibles such as focusing the camera on a bright light or alternating between totally imageless passages of light and complete blackness, and almost invariably some form of asynchronous sound track.

Détournement was a root technique used in virtually all types of Lettriste creation. This is the taking of pieces of older works and reusing them in new ones. You can find all sorts of historical precedents for this, but in the context of amplification and chiseling, it takes on a new context simply by being there.

Steeped in history, Isou and his closest associates not only followed an avant-garde pattern that kept track of precise times of creation and change, it also looked forward to the work of new generations in ways that have been more common in the past than the present. Despite his great admiration for Tzara, Isou argued with him constantly, and even disrupted his readings and other events. In one particularly telling confrontation, Tzara was roaring about the absolute nature of his program. Isou's response was that if Tzara were right, what about the young? Tzara emphatically and unhesitatingly shot back: "They no longer matter. We have created the end of art!"

Most 20^th Century avant-gardes have included a form of visual poetry in their early stages. This is easy enough to see in the Futurisms and Dada, but it's there in virtually all movements. Perhaps the most problematic in this respect is the New York School, which didn't really develop a visual poetry per se, but was so profoundly involved in painting that it's first generation is inconceivable without its association with the visual arts. Even the intensely aural Beats had Kenneth Patchen and Wallace Berman at their base. Lettriste visual poetry, now more prominent than its other modes, grew more slowly and there was never a point where it was cast out in the search for a wider audience as was the case in many other movements.

It may be difficult to see Concrete Poetry as having a single origin, since North Atlantic Fluxus and Brazilian Noigandres began at about the same time. The two wings formed a natural alliance and could be seen as an international movement. However, Brazilians often like to claim it as theirs, making it the first global movement to originate in the Third World. And, indeed, the basic Noigandres platform included other arts as part of an attempt to create a specifically Brazilian base for something larger. Thus if they were not completely united, Noigandres could still make the same claim. Concrete went through its amplic and chiseling stages very quickly. Although initially wide ranging, it fixed itself on rigid geometry, minimalist presentation, simplicity of design and of verbal content. Although Lettrisme and Concrete coexisted in France, they recognized their differences early. By the time Emmett Williams' anthology defined the Concrete genre, it had been pretty thoroughly chiseled to conform to its rigid, simple, minimalism. You can find any and all of these qualities in Lettriste visual poetry, but it was never confined to the signature style of the Williams anthology and the painfully similar anthologies that followed it. Lettriste visual poetry could be textually elaborate, or textless, or contain invented alphabets and signs or designs that looked like letters but had no lexical significance. It could be built of geometric forms, or could be fluid, "painterly," intentionally sloppy or relentless in the refinement of small gradations. As Dick Higgins put it in a conversation with me (though quite possibly repeating something he'd written in an essay I didn't see), Concrete came as a great relief from the ponderous academicism and the excessively serious and often depressing Existentialism of the era. It enjoyed a period of popularity, but this proved more of a fad than anything else. It was easy to imitate, and a lot of people did just that. The deluge of trivial imitations essentially drowned out the masterpieces of some of its practitioners. By the mid 70s, it had become the most thoroughly despised of major literary movements of the century in the U.S. What's worse to me, audience rejection of what they saw was often justified. The fact that readers had been presented with an extremely limited range, including an internal homogenization of already similar works and a largely successful attempt at blocking out its predecessors and cognates, sealed the narrowness of the movement as presented. Kenneth Rexroth (though highly sympathetic with related Japanese modes and somewhat so with a few of the major North Atlantic practitioners) summed up the rejection in the most polite manner possible, repeated by thousands of readers since, "once you've seen one, you've seen them all."

In France, and in other parts of the world where presentation had been broader, there were plenty of people who didn't like what they saw in Lettrisme, but their version of the integration of word and image didn't go through the same boom and bust cycle. As a matter of fact, in the rebellion of May 1968, millions of French citizens set up blockades on highways, barricades in city streets, and factory shut downs with everything from clothing to signs to graffiti painted in Lettriste styles, and often bearing texts that sounded much like the Lettriste origins of the Situationist Movement which played a leading role in the revolt. In other words, Lettrisme, a thoroughly eccentric coterie, which had taken such ideas as social reform and even city planning as part of its base, fostered Situationism, a splinter group retaining most of the basic artistic ideas, and performed the completely bizarre task of coming closer to bringing about a popular revolution than any of the art movement of the century that set out to bring about just such a revolution. That people had voted with their clothes, their graffiti, their banners, and other paraphernalia, made it clear that an extremely difficult art form could gain acceptance, and actually find a serious social and political function.

For me, as a student going through the practical working out of approaches to the problem of reuniting the arts while these events were happening, it became clear that Lettrisme provided a much better model, however many weaknesses it may have had, and however silly it could at times get. I can still feel the sinking sensation as I watched the rejection of those Concretists most important to me. But nothing could have made the importance of a pluralistic approach more important than the contrast between the two movements. By the mid 70s, performance art and sound poetry had become prominent alternatives, and I could still go to, arrange, and/or take part in these arts in what could be considered both their chiseling function and their amplic period. The enthusiasm generated by these arts that shared a lot of the root concepts of most forms of visual poetry and carried on my underlying desire to see the arts interact instead of remain in separate departments, made the failure of Concrete easier, but still indelible. Later, when performance art and sound poetry ceased to have as wide a participatory character, and I was seldom able to participate in them as I had before, the importance of the difference between Concrete and Lettrisme became more important.

Lettrisme had given me an example of the need for fully presented alternatives on all scales of all arts. It was thus an early confirmation and stimulus to my sense of the need for pluralism. There may be some ironies in this as it lead me through a tightly-knit coterie, and how contact with one revealed the limitations of insincere concepts of liberty in American movements. The movement has also given me a great deal of hope for the arts I practice and the arts in general: when a small and exceedingly esoteric group can exercise as much influence on the art and culture of the second half of the 20^th Century, even though it exists almost completely outside of, and unknown to, the Anglosphere and usually doesn't get the credit it deserves, can nonetheless exert such influence on the art of the world at large, other marginalized groups may be able to achieve more than the condition of people with arcane and pointless hobbies. Even the first Lettriste publications I received made it clear that the movement saw the arts as part of an unbroken continuum with spectra that lead in and out of each other, and in and out of everything else. Hence visual poetry, sound poetry, and performance art were already accepted as givens, not as odd and questionable aberrations, but indisputably legitimate utilizations of broader bands of the spectrum.

By 1997, I felt confident that I could present an adequate Lettriste site at Light and Dust. (During the previous three years, I had been plagued by everything from the looming threats of the Communications Decency Act to the expense of disk space to the time it took to download graphics files. Crude audio was available by that time, though video was certainly not ready for the complexity of Lettriste film. Still, I could do the basics, which would have been difficult or impossible in print: I had enough room to present multiple contributors in an easily-readable bilingual format. I could present copious graphics in color inexpensively. I could correct easily made mistakes without resorting to a multi-volume errata sheet. A number of techniques the Lettristes had been using for decades could be reproduced or extended by online electronic technology. A simple but important one, for instance, is creating multiple layers of text and image with greater and lesser degrees of transparency. Some Americans have gone so far as to define art for the web by the use of programs which do this kind of thing easily—the most notable of them being PhotoShop. If some of the Lettristes wanted to work with me, we could use the site to realize more easily types of work they had been doing with difficulty for years.

Searches in Google, Yahoo (still a strong contender for top place in 97), and other search engines revealed very little about Lettrisme at the time. A good potion of what was there was from the Maurice Lemaître faction, the only really ugly and bitter of the schisms with the core group. Surprisingly, there was no basic Lettriste site, and since reference sources hadn't evolved to the state they're at now, there wasn't even an entity such as Wikipedia to provide much information at all, let alone the kind of archive I wanted to create or at least see if I didn't get to create it myself. One of the most important parts of the Light and Dust complex was Kaldron—as far as I'm concerned, and as I say in my introduction to it, the most important visual poetry magazine yet published. It's editor, Karl Kempton, believed that visual poetry should have a magazine of its own. A result of this was that for over a decade Kaldron became the Declaration of Independence for visual poetry, the only visual poetry magazine that sought to present the whole range of visual poetries, not just one of its factions. It had a dedicated global following, and during the decade of the 1980s, was the only magazine in the U.S. where you could regularly and dependably find any kind of Lettriste work, even if it was limited to Lettriste visual poetry.

I put up some samples of work by Allain Satié from pristine originals in the Kaldron archive in a sequester as a demonstration and discussion piece. At this time, Isidore Isou, the founder of the movement, was seriously ill and almost totally confined to his apartment. Satié spoke for him in most "business" dealings after discussing them thoroughly with Isou and adding his own insights into the process. The importance of this relationship, and of Isou's consent and blessing, is part of European coterie formation that sometimes baffles Americans, but it has its virtues, was necessary for what I wanted to do, and even had a serious personal significance for me. I contacted Satié and David Seaman, perhaps the only American who was a full Lettriste, and the most prominent commentator on the movement in the Anglosphere. We made arrangements to set up the site with the full cooperation of the Lettristes themselves. As perhaps the proudest feather in my webmaster's cap, the site became the official, Isou-consecrated home page from 1997 until November, 2004, run with student grade equipment from a tiny apartment in the great French metropolis of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The heyday of the Lettriste section ran along curious roller coaster tracks, some built of technology, some of ethics, some of experiment — all, even those which were and remain painful, built on a roadbed of optimism, good luck, and the belief in the possibilities of overcoming difficulties, whether I overcame them or not. All this depended on hosting the site bilingually, in creating a home page for the presentation and spread of Lettriste ideas for people who, in my opinion, could most use Lettriste ideas and the options and alternatives which Lettrisme made possible. As with other sections of Light and Dust, promote an understanding of what "alternative" can mean. Despite the lengthy explanations I've included here, the real crux of this part of the essay is the bilingual nature of the site.

Aside from the nature of the work itself, I don't think anything has contributed more than the bilingual format, which is as much as to say that translation performs a crucial role in this site. In this particular instance, it seems essential to have produced the majority of pages in the original French, even though the site emanates from America and usually has more English speaking readers than those the statistic generator identify as French. Among other things, this acknowledges the importance of language, including its destruction and recreation, so important to the Lettristes. It is a way of saying that just because English is the global language, and I have been asked to write English introductions to books published in countries where English is not the dominant language, I'm not going to push the fact that currently the second term in the phrase "lingua Franca" has been canceled by history. If I'd published the site only in French, few people outside of the French speaking sphere would read it. At a time of dwindling numbers, the death of Isou, with the rest of the first generation gone, and most of the second generation aging, this is a group that may need to pass its final torches on to other groups, many of them now, as in the past, not French, but not English speaking either. It's time to do so in as much of a controlled manner as possible. The ideal solution to these problems is to give the Lettristes the opportunity to say what they want in the way that they want, being able to trust not only me as the curator, but David as the main translator.

At times, the ideals expressed in the preceding paragraph could become complex and vexing. The biggest involved my playing the role of intermediary and host. I would have liked to have taken an historical approach which allowed me complete freedom in which works I chose, what I emphasized, and the polemics I added myself. However, I saw it as essential to present Lettrisme as the group wanted itself presented at the time. Though the movement was only half a century old, it had gone through hectic and massive changes. On one hand, obsessing on some of the most juicy of these could have a great deal of promotional value, but on the other, harping on the group's past would make the site a sort of museum piece, not a representation of a much reduced but still ongoing movement. 1968 was one of many key years for the group. Yet Catherine James, one of the most active and dynamic of the group at the turn of the millennium, hadn't yet been born in 1968. Why should she be held back by the publicity value of wildly phony TV documentaries based on the wretched journalism of a period the world lusts after misunderstanding? Even among intellectuals, you can find people who seriously believe that the strikes on the highways and the barricades in the cities were the result of over 11 million truck drivers, miners, and every other blue and white collar worker you can think of, taking their inspiration from student comic books.

Initially, Lettriste organization seemed strange, even comic, to me. To be a Lettriste, you didn't just see work you liked, associate with a few people doing something similar, try working with what you assimilated and personalized, and then declare yourself a Lettriste. In its heyday, you might actually get yourself in trouble for doing that. Lettrisme was an organization, and it was set up as one. Other schools around the world had greater or lesser requirements. To become a Lettriste you had to be approved by the group. If accepted, you had to sign a contract and renew it annually. Many of the main points, such as paying dues used to promote the group and help subsidize its shows, performances, publications, etc.; standing in solidarity with and supporting other Lettristes in times of trouble; even showing up more or les regularly at monthly meetings may not seem unreasonable. But some of the bylaws in the contract seemed to resemble Gilbert and Sullivan rather than one of the heirs of the Société des Inédependants. According to the bylaws, if one Lettriste insults another, for example, the amount of the fine due to the group and the individual is laid out according to definite conceptions of the gravity of the insult. I'm picking this area of seeming zaniness to show just how far something seeming bizarre can actually make sense. As in many groups, ranging from trade unions and human rights organizations to tribal members of primary societies to the nastiest cults (I'm not forgetting the Manson "family" or Jonestown), members report similar results. As part of a group like this, you always know where you stand. If you break away from the group, you can clearly state your reasons. But most important, the group gives you a sense of security and even liberty. As a member, you know that you will have support and condolence when hostile critics denigrate your work or use it as a means of personal attack. In an organization that ranks degrees of insults and puts a monetary value on them, you can have a better sense of proportion when literary or artistic antagonists attack you and steady yourself in an area where the isolated imagination can blow offenses out of proportion. Even if the outsiders won't pay the fines, at least there is a framework for your own sense of how to handle your feelings and responses, and a sense of the kind of support you'll receive from the rest of the group. As a member, you'll know you always have someone to talk to, and be freer from the isolation felt by many avant-gardists. Even in non-artistic situations, you may be able to get at least some support for problems with your landlord, handling debts, getting bailed out of jail in the instance of minor offenses, and, just as important, having a reference network for finding a good car mechanic or sales outlet for anything plain or unusual. Finding people who sell unusual items or offer unconventional skills can be even more important than ever for a group of artists who need assistance in realizing furniture designs and trying out odd concepts in the use of film. Having a loose consensus as to what the movement means and working with this as a set of stimuli rather than restrictions, the basic ideas of the movement have more of a generative than a restrictive force, and always provide an accepted base to return to when the problems of individual work you're engaged in may leave you feeling temporarily lost. You may even have a better idea of whom to discuss a specific type of problem with. Like any other group, the members in your immediate circle probably include a pecking order and may include bullies and people whom you shouldn't trust, but in this situation, they are easier to identify and it may be easier to deal with troublesome members if you get a better sense of how others deal with them. Generally, members who are content in this kind of organization say that it provides them with a safe zone where they enjoy greater freedom to explore the ideas most important to them and less distraction from hostile members of the world outside. They feel a sense of peer guidance rather than authoritarian demands.

By 1997, Lettriste concepts of organization and chiseling had become serious to me in ways I could not have imagined in 1967. Some of the literary scenes around me had continued the great American tradition of boasting and lauding individual liberty, and even incorporating notions of freedom in their statements of purpose and other polemics which had replaced the manifestos of the 1840—1960 period. Yet as far as I could tell, the actual degree of liberty within groups was often illusory. This could manifest itself in any number of ways ranging from bullying and excommunication to the sort of snobbish clique formation you can see in high school kids. Here I'm not talking about squabbles between individual members. Those will always be around, and at times serve important functions. But group excommunications, the erasure of important figures and even movements didn't seem constructive to me. I'd seen a destructive example of it in Concrete Poetry. In Egypt, I saw colossal monument after colossal monument where one Pharaoh after another had chiseled out the cartouche of his predecessor and replaced it with his own. This is not Lettriste chiseling!

It seemed clear to me that familiarity with a movement that had been completely honest with its members from the day they first signed the bylaws and paid their first dues could at very least bring some clarity to a scene that trumpeted individual liberty, but could still ostracize and blacklist its members for reasons that suggested more internal control than a group like Lettrisme which went into considerable detail as to what members could and could not do. Even a bit of clarification could help. I doubt that I'd be happy in a movement, even if it were more congenial to me than Lettrisme—and let me add that despite what I've learned from it, there are things I don't like about it. But even here, it has given me a glimpse of what an option or alternative really should mean. It should be something I would not have predicted and that anyone who encounters it should at first think at least a bit improbable or questionable, not just a slight variation on an accepted theme.

Early on chiseling had seemed to have some stimulus value. I didn't see the Amplic era as over nor did I see the only thing left for poets to do was to pick up the pieces left by chiseling. I loved various forms of what was called minimalism in verse. I had a great time trying to write the shortest poems possible, some no more than a word long, and delighted in the poetry of the great master Concrete minimalists, particularly Lax, Niikuni, and Gomringer. Other forms of what could be seen as chiseling or at least reduction included forms of détournement such as telling a story without recourse to any form of narrative, eliminating traces of immediately identifiable personal expression, lack of grammatical or syntactic center or continuity, slippage or other forms of obscuration of the subject or referent, and so on through most of the literary methods and stances I know of. Limited exercises in chiseling or elimination created all sorts of interesting results. A lot of my own poetry depended on such devices, and could sometimes be seen as related to work in modes that gained ground rapidly in the 80s. But by the 1990s, Post Modernism had started turning them into dogmatic prohibitions, at times oddly reminiscent of individual excommunications. Going without narrative was easy enough to do in the first place, and had been part of certain types of poetry since time immemorial. But prohibiting it was something else. This is almost like telling your blood not to circulate. As an ultimatum it was literally perverse: something that went against nature. The Lettriste sense of chiseling in this environment of constantly increasing prohibitions seemed salutary. I didn't have any illusions about it bringing about any large scale changes in the scene in the U.S., but it pointed to a movement that had systematically explored the possibilities of elimination could be relevant, and provide a broader range of options.

What I would have liked to have seen most, of course, from my Lettriste site as from most of what I was doing in virtually all areas of life, was assert a profound belief in the constructive power of options and opposing the smothering effects of dogmas and their sneakier manifestations, trends and fashions. Lettrisme seemed to still be news in America in the literal sense as well as Pound's "news that stays news" sense that remains a good working definition of successful art to me. I had the good luck to bear that news, even if it was often ignored. It was particularly important to do so on the terms of its members at the time. It seemed that I was partially repaying a debt and in some ways participating in a group I could not join.

The site reached its relative high point in the early years of the new century. In 2002, I had personal and serious health problems, which resumed at intervals after that. In 2004, the group opened one of several sites in France. The group, however, did not want me to stop working on my bilingual site. David Seaman and I prepared a large overhaul of the site with a fair number of new additions. One problem after another prevented us from putting them online. The biggest was that my web host had legal problems with another site. They moved everything to a new distribution disk in Canada until the problem was resolved. When they moved everything back, letters in languages that used diacritical markings not manually entered were destroyed. Oddly enough, for an anthology that placed so much emphasis on Lettrisme, chiseling, now carried out by machines, did not stop at the individual letter, but tore up a large number of those in French. To replace these characters, I started the process of coding them manually so that a similar trauma would not do them harm. Using this method, to get the letter e to appear with an acute accent above it, you have to type 7 characters. So far, I have redone about half the pages already online. I'm not sure what the group will want to do since Isou's death. I have every hope that I can continue with the site as the group decides how it will proceed and as I get some of my other affairs in order. It's possible that the group will want to take on more of a historical approach. Even finishing the work Seaman and I had in preparation would nearly double the site, and I certainly hope we'll do that much. If for some unfortunate reason I can't go farther, at least what I've got foregrounds what to me was one of the most productive movements of the 20^th Century, and sets up a strong range of alternatives. Certainly, the bilingual nature of the site, giving it a firm context, does more than put up a couple sloppy and badly scanned examples of visual poetry, or a few isolated film clips and sound poems. Aside from the stress on alternatives, Lettrisme remains important to me, and in the basic spirit of anthologizing, I want to share my enthusiasm.

Other Multilingual Alternatives

From Tigrinya

Again, important concerns for me include the preservation of languages, and the correlative preservation in the forms and configurations of art. Both offer alternatives in creativity, and in understanding the world.

Two of my Home Pages are particularly important to me in this respect. One is the English Home Page of Reesom Haile, who was for the last years of his life the poet laureate of Eritrea, an ancient East African nation, which reemerged in the early 1990s and fought a strong and steady battle to maintain its independence from Ethiopia. Its language, Tigrinya, is a cognate of Hebrew. Stele's written in its unique script more than 4000 years ago can still be found in the country, and in seemingly endless ways the country defies virtually all stereotypes of Africa past and present. The site centers on five basic poems written by Reesom Haile in Tigrinya, translated by him into English, and refined with the aid of his most important colleague in translation, Charles Cantalupo. Cantalupo curated the site with me. Reesom Haile is one of a number of African writers who follow a similar practice of writing in their basic language but immediately translating it into one of the world's major colonial languages. This defeats, at least temporarily, the march toward linguistic extermination and relieves the bind of people who speak small-population languages: they are free to use the language they love, but do so with an eye toward an audience that can sustain them and, with luck, make people around the world aware of their language and perhaps even help sustain it. Perhaps thinking, in part, in one language while bearing another in mind might have creative potentials not yet fully realized. After all, code switching in polyglot linguistic environments has spurred creativity in the formation of the major colonial languages, and given rise to invention at times of cultural transition and the interaction of dialects and argots. A mongrel like English produced Chaucer and Shakespeare following major transitions, and in the British Isles, the literature of the first half of the 20^th Century was dominated by Irish writers.

The five Tigrinya poems and their English companions appear with translations into colonial languages such as Spanish and Russian, widely read languages such as Chinese, mid-sized languages such as German and French, and small population languages such as Swedish. Thus well over half the world's population can read them from what we've assembled. We had links to a wide span of resources as well as our own essays. The site suffered from the diacritical crash, the closing down of many sites to which we linked, and most importantly, and most sadly, to the death of Reesom Haile himself. Cantalupo (who can speak with authority—I'm just an enthusiast) believes the site "was one of the first big breakthroughs for Eritrean poetry onto the internet and into the world of poetry" and we plan to continue it after the interruption of several years. We discussed a similar site for the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who works in much the same way. Whether we can bring any of this about, we have at least made early and dedicated moves towards promoting constructive interchange between the incredible linguistic arts of Africa and those of the rest of the world. It's difficult to imagine 20^th Century art in the North Atlantic cultures without enormous gifts from Africa. As has often been the case, Africa didn't get anything near as much back.

From Guaraní

A related sub-site comes from two linked projects which may or may not form the basis of a larger site. What this will be remains uncertain in part because we have several ways we could move out from here. The first of these two is another feature I'm particularly proud to present online. This is First Light: An Anthology of Paraguayan Women Writers, edited and translated by Susan Smith Nash. I'm still a bit surprised that this is the first anthology of its type issued in any print, electronic, or other medium and in any language. If Eritrea is a place very few people other than Classicists and Biblical scholars have heard of, Paraguay is considered almost a joke by the North Atlantic cultures: a banana republic, even if too far south to grow bananas. Like the other nations and/or regions of Latin America, it has a fascinating history. It acts as a buffer between the two giants, Argentina and Brazil, and shares borders with Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina. It holds some grim titles for "most" in Latin America. One of them being the war with the largest casualties since the Spanish conquests. Warfare seems endemic to the society. It seems particularly understandable that the country lost more than half its population in The Triple Alliance War of the last century, in which the small nation picked on somebody its own size, Uruguay, but also, and simultaneously, Brazil and Argentina. But wars continue with its neighbors and its civil wars of changing natures, including guerilla wars and the internal savagery of dictators such as Alfredo Stroessner. Three essential facts are particularly important for its literature, for my web site, and for this essay. It is an overwhelmingly native and mestizo nation with strong ties to its tribal past and the continual evolution based in that tribal culture. However you parse out its continued wars, it has a severe imbalance in the ratio of men to women. Changes in this have marked its history: the overwhelming majority of casualties of The Triple Alliance War were women. At present, however, casualties have left the country with far more women than men. This means that, although it's not a particularly good deal, they do have more control over the country's affairs than women do in most countries where there's a more nearly equal population balance. The other big surprise is the country's languages. About 75% of the population speaks Spanish, with over 90% speaking Guaraní, a Native American language that was old when the Spanish came, but has constantly changed by incorporating elements of other languages, native and European. The country is thus something most Northern Atlantic peoples think does not exist: A country with more of a Native American population and culture than anyone should expect and outsiders could imagine, nearly all of whom speak a still healthy and evolving Native American language, largely managed (if not politically controlled) by women. Those women are tough, resilient, and in control of the country's literature.

Many follow procedures similar to the African poets mentioned above: they write in Guaraní, but with a Spanish translation that almost immediately follows, in mind as they write the first version. This is not an absolute. Some write in only one of the two languages. I'd like to at least have a look at whatever they wrote with the kind of background they come from. Like Reesom Haile's Eritrea, Paraguay has a dream world dimension, even if the dream is often more nightmare than garden of Eden. But the qualities of their work function on two levels that make them remarkable by any standards. The first, for a devout pluralist such as I, is the wide range and variety of what they produce. This may be easier to identify by background than any other way, but its merits aren't the reason for my response. The women have various degrees of education; and with it, sources. Hence, some work is in Modernist modes that bring a whole new cast to the poetries of the North Atlantic and Spanish Speaking Latin America. This can include echoes and reinterpretations of Spanish language poets over centuries. Some not only draw on mythologies and folklore, but actually believe in the folklore in a way and to a degree that you don't find in much North Atlantic literature. When the modern world intersect with the tribal world in a way that's completely natural and lacks artificiality, you can find some rare delights. When modern mythology, such as the death of Princess Diana, joins tribal lore and/or deliberate modernist formal experiment and intellectual and psychological frameworks such as Surrealism, again, the quotient of options increases.

Clearly, anthologies contain work of varying quality and durability. I think it likely that some of the women in this anthology will continue to be read for a long time into the future, perhaps as long as people continue to read poetry. A good bet for one who might attain that status is Susy Delgado. The First Light anthology only included translations into English. In addition, one possible move toward building a larger site with First Light as its cornerstone, was to include a complete book of poetry by at least one of the contributors. We may include more, but the one we did put up, in all three languages, Delgado's Guaraní and Spanish, and Nash's English is Ayvu Membyre / Hijo de aquel verbo / Offspring of the Distant Word. This book is a long poem, though built of discrete units working in a very precise but very humane logic. The lines are relatively short, so I didn't have too much trouble coding the book so that the three texts appear in three parallel columns on most screens. The poem is hauntingly evocative, with minimal imagery, combining a form of direct and loving address but not much sense of who the addressee might be. It includes a good deal of parallel construction that gives it an almost incantatory quality while avoiding any suggestion of stereotypes of tribal chant. Nash at times described it as "earthy" but when she did, she usually said something like "no, I keep saying that, but that skews it—it leaves so many essential qualities out." I have at times thought of it as a book of the elements, since the sky and air get evoked often enough and it has as much an ethereal quality as an earthy one. It might be stretching it, and getting corny, to say that it includes a lot of the sap and fire of life, but that does at least suggest its refusal to let itself be pigeon holed or tied down. This refusal seems to work chronologically, also. Although the book has its 20^th Century characters, some even Post Modernist, it still seems timeless. If I were given a brief sketch of the history of Paraguay and a copy of the poem to read, I don't think I could confidently date it. Whatever it may or may not be in the long term, it is certainly unique in the poetry of the contemporary world to the extent that I've seen the world's poetry. As with the poems in First Light, it suggests and offers options that you won't find anywhere else.

The English and Spanish versions seem obvious for presentation on the web. How many Guaraní speakers, from Paraguay and the fringes and colonies in the countries around it, have read it on the web in that language, I have no idea. My guess is not many, though I could be wrong. Even if the number is tiny, I'm extremely pleased to have it online in that language as well as the other two. On one level this is because it firmly exerts its presence in the electronic environment of the internet, which can be accessed from most parts of the world. It firmly says "I'm here, I have not been extinguished. You can talk all you want about American Indians disappearing, but I'm here to show that you haven't exterminated us or our languages yet. I attest to diversity in the face of the more sinister aspects of globalism and the nightmares of monoculture." I'd love it if students of any of the languages in this book used it to practice learning one of the others.

Susan Smith Nash and I have worked together on various projects for decades. They often overlap, since they reflect the way both of us approach things in context. She learned basic Guaraní in order to better understand Paraguay and to translate some of the poetry of its women. While working on the two entries from Paraguay, I published what to me is Nash's most important book of her own poems. This book, Fly-Over States of Mind includes several lengthy poems in Spanish with English en face. They look like translations. And in places, they are fairly precise in that respect. But in others they diverge from each other, sometimes commenting on each other, sometimes contradicting each other, sometimes making fun of each other. Even though I wrote an afterward to the book clearly stating that this was going on and that it was done intentionally, a number of readers, and one particularly moronic reviewer, could not get it though their heads that the conventions of translation can lead to new forms of art. In one of the many paradoxes of the reviewer, Nash would not have had the linguistic ability to mistranslate the book in this way. And how can you mistranslate yourself when there either is no original or if the first draft written had no more "authenticity" than its partner? More importantly: I don't know whether Nash would have done the majority of this book if she had not worked with the strange process of trilingual texts in the Paraguayan books. I don't know if Nash knows for sure herself. Whether she does or not, there is magic in the spectrum of efforts, spanning the translations, Nash's original poems in multiple languages, the publishing of her book, and the web publications. The reviewer's lack of a sense of options seems pathetic to me, and symptomatic of people who don't like literary alternatives much. But I may have published in book form one of the first uses of options made possible by Nash's Paraguayan translations on the web. Again, I hope readers can pick up the roots of new ideas which they can make their own from translations in cyberspace.

From Japanese

I started making attempts at putting together anthologies of 20^th Century Japanese avant-garde poetry in the early 1990s. I had also taken part in traditional Japanese practice, being, for instance, one of the organizers of the first tour of Renku poets to visit the U.S. I got to co-edit and write the introduction to oceans beyond monotonous space: selected poems of Kitasono Katue, translated by John Solt, published in 2007. Kitasono is considered one of the greatest and most influential avant-garde poets of the 20^th Century by the Japanese poets who interest themselves in 20^th century poetry. Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth thought he was not only that, but one of the great Modernists, period—not just of Japan, but of the world. Robert Creeley published a small book of his, written in English, through his Divers Press, and later thought of it and Charles Olson's Mayan Letters as the most important works he published. Kitasono had similar acclaim from the few other poets in the North Atlantic cultures who encountered him without prejudice. Yet he remains virtually unknown in the U.S., as do most 20^th Century Japanese poets. This is particularly strange since, unlike Eritrea and Paraguay, Japan is a major player in the world economy, and a major contributor to global culture on virtually all levels. Even more interesting, Kitasono's work anticipated similar work in the west by decades. He was doing Concrete Poetry in the 1920s, for instance, something very close to language poetry in the 1950s, and the kind of photo-poetry made prominent by the web in the 1970s. In some instances, it seems that his western counterparts don't want to know about him. Still, the book was one of my most important publications to me, more important than most of my own poetry, even though I was just co-editor and the writer of the introduction. I don't think anything I've done makes the case for pluralism and the overcoming of prejudice against options as much as this book. It also gave me, a not particularly prestigious figure, the chance to co-edit and write the introduction to the major edition of one of the most important literary figures of the 20^th Century. It's like being able to do the same for Neruda or Vallejo, Mayakovsky or Breton. I'd like to think that the book and the web site would help change people's minds about his status and value. If not, well, I've seen some of the best American poets of my own time ignored while lesser figures were exulted beyond all reason. Lack of response or recognition didn't begin with Kitasono.

The web site allows me to do things I could not do in the book. And one of them is the latest in the ongoing process of adding translations to the web, as I mentioned in "Toward an Ideal Anthology." To start with a Kitasono translation project, I selected several poems that don't require a great deal of expertise to translate, and can be done from the English version. The poems are simple in vocabulary and their formal properties are built on repetition. The sound properties come from that, and whatever grammatical structure the target language may employ, the character of progression will follow whatever is natural to that language. It's difficult to imagine poems more easy to translate. The first of them "Monotonous Space" already had a history in the Atlantic cultures, being a major influence on, or from another partisan perspective, a prime example of the international Concrete Poetry movement. If Kitasono was shamefully neglected by the world outside Japan during his lifetime and since, at least my project of finding translators for these basic poems into a number of languages can't hurt, and, for me, is a highly satisfying form of presenting alternatives. You can find the translations of the poem from the link above, under the heading "Kitasono Katue and The Color of the World's Words." The colors of those words keep changing, and translation is one of the forms of energy that keeps them visible and delightful.