rob mclennan : Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo), by Erín Moure

Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo), Erín Moure
House of Anansi Press, 2023

 

 

 

Listening. The patter of voices elsewhere in the house. In the Room, the three women American modernist poets whose works/voices I have chosen to open myself to: all have in some way a relation to elsewheres. Thus translation. An elsewhere of nearly forbidden light:

To expose my Being to their voices in the Wood and Light of the Room. We say we are hearing a ‘Voice’ but is it not the Breath making this Voice, and who can breathe? who speak? who listen? I breathe and listen: how and with what Text or Articulation will I Respond?

All three poets have made migrations, are formed by elsewhere they touched or inhabited, and each has been marked as ‘questionable’ in some way—gender, sexuality, race—by the socius in and through which they vanish and appear.

Over nine days in the Room, I try to discern the forms (what’s still), grasp the contrasting shapes (what moves) in the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop and Angelina Weld Grimké. In the United States of America in 2017 at Harvard in the Woodberry Poetry Room, I arrive across a border to apprehend an American poetry of the 20^th century as a translator might approach works in another tongue.

To extend English from a foreign English, and a foreign time.
To attune to a minor language (Kafka, Deleuze). To listen. Breathe.

Then I didn’t write anything new in poetry for over three years.

The latest from Montreal-based translator, poet and critic Erín Moure is the expansive Theophylline: aⁿ a-po^retic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2023), a collection that achieves a remarkable balance of referential complexity and linear clarity, writing on and through the threads of three other poets. Moure focuses on, around and through the interconnected writing and lives of modernist poets Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958), as much to speak of them as on the act of translation, a notion of fluidity that emerges from that single and mutable point of perspective, offering the distances of certain offerings that are wildly outdated, and others clearly offered years before such might be possible. “Even though a woman, a lover of women, a Jew, a single mother are conditions encumbered by prejudice and misogyny in America,” Moure writes, “Rukeyser can assume the rostrum. Wind in her hair. She steps off the plane in Barcelona, in Hanoi. She clears her throat and looks outward.” Moure’s migration begins with an opening of grief, a distance from her own writing and a deep dive into the archive; it begins with a cough, and a wheeze, as she worked through the Woodberry Poetry Room, her opening notes dated April 17, 2017. There is an echo of American poet Susan Howe’s prose through Moure’s explorations, exploring the archive and seeking narrative threads on literary construction and creation, comparable as well to those essay-poems of such as Barry McKinnon and Phil Hall, but with a far more expansive canvas and deeper complexity. Moure threads the lyric through narratives of these poets, their approaches and decisions, and how they lived their lives and their work.

This is a book simultaneously on the act of translation, the works of these three modernists and of asthma, writing of queer bodies and breath, sexism, racism and female histories, all the shared and discrete threads of otherness that permeates both her own perspectives and the perspectives and responses of the three poets she focuses on. As well, Moure is fully aware of her own perspectives, referencing her frustration that there are no audio recordings of Angelina Weld Grimké’s readings or voice:

Will some future bring Grimké into the archive of a Poetry Room, she and other women of the Harlem Renaissance, into the publicly available? ‘Poetry’ ‘Room’ ‘Archive’? What even are these words? Will we hear their voices? They are already always there. Will the archive itself shift and break so they are audible?

Angelina Weld Grimké in this book appears inevitably in the pattern of my voice, which is no voice. A white voice. I have no other.

I’m fascinated by how Moure works to articulate the act of translation, as she describes it as something that exists in motion, as opposed to a fixed point: a living, breathing entity that exists within its own time and space. And she, as translator, operating at the compositional consideration of attempting a single moment from a particular perspective at a particular time. Even for the same translator to attempt to translate a single work a year earlier or a year later might result in a variation. As she offers as part of her section around, on and through the work and life of Elizabeth Bishop: “The desire that utterances exist in a language other than that in which they are created: translation. In the body, an awareness of where in the mouth a particular language is spoken. Between languages, form is not still.” A bit further on, she adds:

Translations age and need redoing (as they are readings, and readings are always contemporary), whereas texts, on aging, simply gather exegesis. Exegesis is reverence, points to the eternal. Translation is a cut in time, and its texts bleed time and are often later discarded, bled out. Its perpetuity falls away. It is not naïve. Black Brazilian culture born of forbidden speech has today long outlived Bishop’s gaffe.

I recently caught an episode of David Steinberg’s 2012-2015 series Inside Comedy that interviewed American comedian Chris Rock, who offered a similar perspective on the temporality of comedy: “Comedy rots,” he said. In many ways, Theophylline: aⁿ a-po^retic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) is simultaneously a book of mothers, and a shortness of breath; a book on culture, a difficult breathing, and the mutability of language as culture evolves; how easily the landscape of cultural modes of thinking become outdated, and others emerge. And of course, Moure’s hetronym, her alternate (even, translated) self, the wry and sly troublemaker Elisa Sampedrín, offering lyric and commentary in a way that perhaps Moure herself could not, providing this lyric as part of the section on and around Angelina Weld Grimké and her work:

Regard
Elisa Sampedrín

Where would I take decidability
if weary were a game I

could stop reviling?
Delirious in fields and

pondered by grasses, amid
timothy’s green-grey feathers,

as if I were lying down every day
in my very creature

not abstract as endeavour but pure
homonym

or sexonym or synonym

For life?

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan's latest poetry title is World’s End, (ARP Books).