Negative Capability

It’s a perfectly still night, cicadas ringing and repeating their summer song, There’s a plane transecting the pink, gauzy sky and the jacaranda boughs, which overarch the eaves, are teeming with flowers. If it isn’t snowing here in the southern hemisphere, then purple trumpet blossoms are cascading from those trees, all day long and at night leaving a carpet of lilac on the lawn. Everything seems intoxicated, from dying, tumbling bees to the somnolent lizard, statuesque in the garden.

I drove to the coast this afternoon and felt the blazing sun, which illuminates and feeds the flickering eucalypts. I thought of the poet Dilip Chitre, who lost his battle with prostate cancer twelve months ago. Through my work as an editor, we became acquainted in the months before he died. Dilip was provocative and concerned about the state of the world. A brilliant writer, artist and filmaker who lived in Bombay and later Pune, Chitre pioneered internationally acclaimed translations of Marathi poetry, particularly Tukaram, a sudra of the 17th century Bhakti movement. We remember Dilip Chitre for his brave heart, his vivacity and humour, but mostly for his remarkable genius with words and images.

Will the Poem End ?

Will the poem end where
Barbed letters stare their black spells
Aimed at my eyes
Blood turns into tears shed by
An absent eye
And the admonition:
“Thou shalt not love this world
And sleep with thy enemy.”

Will the poem end when
All His light is spent
And to a standstill, to a standstill come
All heartbeats and all drums
The cosmic drone
Buzzes back into itself
Looking for its beginning

Dilip Chitre

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

So writes Keats in his famous sonnet, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”
I recall reading this for the first time and being awed by the power of that image of Cortez, the Spanish conquistador. Only later did I read that Keats had erred in attributing the discovery of Panama, for it was Vasco de Balboa who reached the Pacific first, Cortez, the valley of Mexico. Keats after reading William Robertson’s History of America had confused the two scenes. When Charles Clarke pointed out the mistake, Keats chose to leave Cortez in the poem, perhaps to preserve the iambic pentameter. The inaccuracy, as it turns out, has garnered interest for the poem. From an imperfection, a mutilation of history, the poem claims its own “pure serene”, its dominion of beauty, with all the implications of a question unanswered.

Literary translations take us to new worlds we would not otherwise encounter. This, not merely because they assemble in one language, words from another, but because they invite us as readers to discover in the source text a medium of linguistic difference. How accurately a translation may follow the original, depends not merely on the transference of surface meaning but on scholarship, methodology, the interpretation and contexualisation of formal elements, among many other considerations.

A few weeks ago I attended a wonderful symposium on Literary Translation organised by the University of Western Sydney. It brought together some fine translators and scholars from the States, South America, Asia and Australia, to brainstorm the controversies, applications and reception of literary translations in national and transnational frameworks. Brian Nelson spoke of the status and concept of World Literature within the territories of academic studies; Simon West’s paper raised some interesting questions about the role and reception of translation in literary spaces; Peter Boyle spoke of translations as renewed apprenticeship, of Lorca’s duende, of Montejo’s humanity; Stuart Cooke tackled the difficult ground of translating Indigenous Australian songpoetry with its polyphonic voices and communal authorship. His paper, partly informed by Strehlow’s research in Central Australia, suggests that performance as act rather than discovery of meaning(s) is a more authentic approach to more dynamic and complex representations of Indigenous songpoetry.

I left the conference thralled, as if I’d been walking an isthmus; glad that this preliminary conversation between languages, which are themselves translations, between writers and cultures is happening, to some extent here, in the local, monolingual, monocultural space which we inhabit.

Momijigari is a Japanese tradition of visiting gardens in autumn, when the leaves are turning red, notably in Kyoto and Nikko. It derives from the Japanese word momiji 紅葉, or the maple’s red leaves. This aesthetic pursuit became the inspiration for an innovative Japanese-Australian literary journal, Red Leaves 紅葉

Edited by graphic novelist, Kirk Marshall and Yasuhiro Horiuchi, copies of the anthology sold out quickly at the recent 2010 Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne. Designed by Liberty Browne, the journal is a bi-lingual compilation of prose, poetry, and manga. The Japanese translators are Sunny Suh who holds an MA in Museum Studies, having translated for the subculture magazine Tokyo Art Beat , and Asami Nishimura, who holds a double MFA, both in Literature and Queer Studies from Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, and in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex. Brainy and ultracool, Asami provides the journal with a new transliteration of Tokyo scribe Daisuke Suzuki’s personal philosophical essay on the marvels of the cooked *soba* noodle :)

Other graftings to this 300 page cultivar include Ivy Alvarez, Jayne Fenton Keane, Tokihiko Araki, Patrick Holland, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Ashley Capes, Graham Nunn, Mandy Ord and many others. I’m so honoured to have my writing selected for a project which is electronically networked, bridging cities, cultures, mediums and languages while offering an alternative to mainstream pro-forma publishing.

If you’d like a copy contact: redleaves.koyo@gmail.com Also available from Readings, St Kilda and other bookshops.