Ventrakl is both a haunting book and a book that is itself haunted. Georg Trakl obviously looms over every bit of the work here, but Trakl’s own ghosts—his family and life, his hallucinations—also complicate the spook landscape here.
The most moving aspect of the entire work was the honesty I perceived to be on display from the constructor of this text, Christian Hawkey. I say ‘constructor’ because I’m not sure what role one might say Hawkey had in this book, moving through modes of being a translator both in actual translating and in engaging with the struggles of translation itself, but also an investigator, a curator of impressions about Trakl. Hawkey ponders photographs and biographical moments from Trakl’s life in what to my mind was at all times a deeply personal, occasionally chilling pursuit, seemingly looking for a particular something (a hole to fill) or an overarching takeaway from these searches and ruminations that doesn’t ever quite come.
It’d be easy to rattle on about how this book ‘raises so many questions’ about the nature of translation and appropriation, and it certainly does, but really I don’t think Hawkey was overly concerned with such questions; his preface to the book nods to all these questions and does seem interested in them to a point, but my deeper feeling was that this a book more at work with a more abstract obsession, an obsession along the lines of the ‘conversation’ that takes place between poet and reader in any book of poetry, translated or not. Hawkey clearly and repeatedly emphasizes this kind of connection—we know that it is something powerful in this connection that has subsequently produced this very book.
Hawkey wasn’t merely interested in the above-mentioned questions or in some strictly intellectual play as this book began and grew; churning at the core of this book like a reactor is something I took to be more emotional to Hawkey as the curation and production continued. This is why I find the numerous modes of translation and erasure spelled out by Hawkey to be intriguing and even amusing at times, but really their nature, at least occasionally arbitrary, is the means and not the end here.
What I was left with was a feeling that I had caught at least a touch of Hawkey’s haunted pursuit, felt the bits of quiet anxiety and melancholy that permeate the entire text. I didn’t ever think I quite knew what was being looked for or what was needing to be resolved, but I felt myself hoping it would come, and it’s there I think the resolution is in the swelling of that sad tension outside of oneself, returning to the same feeling at least of connection that also seems vital to the work here. If the book isn’t concerned at its deepest levels with translation and appropriation I think it’s because those seem moot pressures—fidelity isn’t important here, and there’s no appropriation if everything is felt to be shared.
The biggest weakness I felt in the text was the explicit nature of that sharing, of the ‘conversations’ between Hawkey and Trakl becoming a semi-literal reality in several italicized snippets of talking, ‘interviewing’ as the two sat in a room together. These exchanges were occasionally amusing or unsettling, but more often than not they just seemed a bit too easy, made the rich nuances of the entire project too simplistic and direct; they never did anything the rest of the book wasn’t already doing in a more powerful way. I also thought they occasionally seemed to rob Hawkey of his stature in the book, seemingly putting him in the role of the dense student who is always baffled by the genius of the teacher; while I don’t question that this is perhaps a genuine sentiment at times, it just struck me as an unsatisfying role for Hawkey who I always thought was on much more equal, insightful footing than he was perhaps comfortable giving himself credit for.
In conversations about this book I’ve read elsewhere, it has been suggested that these sections are unsatisfying because the silent presence of Trakl that throughout the book suddenly becomes literal—here sits the figure of Trakl, and the secondary figure of Hawkey is unable to really push him into voice in a way that seems to do any work for the text as a whole. This Trakl seems flat and contrived compared to whatever Trakl we perceive in the rest of the poems and photographs, his lingering gaze and tensions dissipating—if this was a novel we might say this faux-puppet Trakl is made of cardboard. Are these exchanges born out of some unimaginative sense of obligatory homage? If we think of the Zizek, is Hawkey acting through some sense of politeness, but failing in tact?
Joyelle has provided a rhizome in the question of holes, so I suppose a little water on it is due. Bearing this simple notion in mind we see holes everywhere—Hawkey’s violent erasure technique of taking a shotgun to Trakl’s poetry. On page 35, ‘But the more I look at that space between his lips the more it seems to widen, spread—shadowed and dark, ink-dark, warped.” Hawkey has saddled an obsession with this hole in particular in his attempts to invoke Trakl’s voice through his own via the contrivance of this book. In the section ‘Traces’ as well as basically everywhere in the book we get holes in everyone’s bodies, the invention of the machinegun and its absolute brilliance in achieving this. Trakl’s sister’s party-adjoined suicide, a hole to the head (an extra one, anyway). Wikipedia will tell you that after nursing hordes of hole-filled soldiers Trakl was traumatized and tried to add this precise kind of hole to his own head, though he failed the first time around. Eventually he opens a much smaller one, big enough for cocaine and is successful. The result of the eye-holes and all they take in. The hole-as-aperture, all the ominous photographs the book stops to obsess over. The hole of Hawkey’s Trakl obsession; the hole that every obsession is attempting to fill. “…a history of holes and what we put inside them, lose inside them” (19).
Can a book put a hole in itself? In a sort of concrete way I would say no, at least it only can when it has failed; intentional holes aren’t really at all, they’re the trick of an illusionist (we hope a skilled one), a few mirrors and angles when a hole is wanted as an opening, as something to fall into or as a portal to bring something out of.
And so many questions out of a book like this—questions might be holes too, awaiting an answer (a filler / filling). What label, if forced, to we give to Hawkey? Author? Translator? Blasphemer? Are these poems his or Trakl’s? If we imagine we might debate the ownership of each one (there would be grounds for this, I think) what of the whole book; to whom does it belong? If we agree on a notion of collaboration, in what ratio? What do we feel about the final poem of the book, the only one that appears as we might expect a translated poem to be arranged?
Are we troubled by the lacking confidence that seems to plague certain elements of the book or do we think they’re honest? Even if they’re honest are they compelling? Do we owe it to ourselves to take put a shotgun blast to each book once we’ve read it? Is Hawkey obligated to contextualize his ‘translations’ with five pages of prefacing? Would we feel better if Hawkey took that paper face off in his author photo and just stood up in the text for himself? If I find the text on page 143 to be so pat and lazy that it actively works to undercut a little of the book’s velocity, might I just tear it out and forget it was ever there on subsequent readings?
If the book can’t put holes in itself should I help it along?
Trying to come up with specific sentences to write about Ventrakl is overwhelming. Last week, we read about D&G’s rhizome and the numerous holes that it produces. Hawkey’s book has so many orifices and apertures that I don’t know which one to enter first. Sometimes I think I’m in a WWI hospital surrounded by rows and rows of German army personnel. I want to be here! I want to be in the frame surrounded by gothic, sickly, army boys. I want to hear war stories. I want to be swarmed with combat tales. But then Hawkey ejects me, and I’m at Starbucks in the 21st Century, listening to two mothers discuss the pro and cons of whether they should post pictures of their newborn babies online. I want to go back to Germany – to the war that started it all. But I can’t. I’m in Hawkey’s world. Though that’s imprecise. Really, I’m in Ventrakl’s world, but that’s not accurate either – it’s a combination of the two. They’re having conversations. But how? Ventrakl is dead. So, obviously, he’s in the perfect state for interaction. As our professor, Joyelle McSweeney, wrote in an essay, “Everyone who is dead is available.” This is correct. The dead don’t need the right to an attorney – they can’t be arrested. Nor do the dead have any use for freedom-of-speech protection, equality, or sexual assault laws. Go ahead, rape a dead person – he can’t feel it anyways! The dead are not humans! They’re not bonded by “tolerance” and “respect” and all those other “live” concepts that are taped to the high school classroom walls. The dead will not be oppressed! They are the rhizome – invariably deterritorializing and reterriotrializing, going forward, and then, oh, I forgot something, gotta go back. Look at what’s happened to Ronald Regan. Both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin evoke him as guides to good governing. But Obama and Palin are sworn enemies. How can Regan be on both their sides? Easy, the dead have mobility that humans, hamstrung by their love of physicality and groups, lack. The dead needn’t heed labels: they’re Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers -- everything at once and at the same time.
ReplyDeleteIf Ventrakl was sill alive, I doubt this book would be what it is. Then Ventrakl could speak for himself, he could rebuke Hawkey for a poor translation of “Grodek” for recapitulating all the sordid details of his life. Or, contrariwise, he could thank Hawkey for giving him some publicity, for taking such an interest in his work. Either way, it’d be an expected occurrence. Humans are supposed to interact with humans: there’s nothing special about it – it’s banal -- we see it everyday: at Starbucks, in school, and in pornography (where sometimes fifteen tops interact with one lucky bottom). So live people collaborating is nothing new – it’s old hate. Well, I want something new, I want to see lands that AREN’T trampled on every single day. I want to enter Starbucks and see a boy asking a rotting, smelly corpse whether or not he stepped into the pound. Surprise me! The dead inevitably have the capacity to uncover new areas – because they can do whatever they want: they don’t have to obey boarders. They can be simultaneously involved in WWI and protesting Bush’s Middle East adventures. Time is not an issue with the dead – they’re eternal.
I object to Ryan’s rather condescending blog post. First off, these two are not merely collaborating – that implies a distance that I don’t this is there. Rather, Ventrakl is in Hawkey or maybe Hawkey is in Ventrakl. But whoever’s drunk on who – it really doesn’t matter. What we have is a usurpation. No one has any stature or higher-position, it’s a rhizome, constant back-and-forth. On page 60 there begins a three-page prose block with Hawkey recounting all the things he “knows” about Ventrakl. There are no paragraphs breaks, no white space (except for the margins). It is an unceasing, obsessive synthesis between the two poets. The range of knowledge supports the idea that maybe Hawkey and Ventrakl have become one. When you know a detail about someone that’s as specific as walking into a pond, you’re certainly more than professional friends who only say hi to each other at luncheon. You’re close. That’s how intimacy (nonsexual) is gauged – by how much you know about someone. Who cares if these facts are “myths” or “half-truths”? They can be just as thoughtful and creative as “true stories.” Besides, the concept of truth (as opposed to lies) is a human one. John Keats was alive when he wrote “Grecian Urn.” But Ventrakl’s dead, so human ideas aren’t exactly applicable to him. Knowledge needn’t only be “factual,” like birthdays, it can be spiritual – you can know someone without even talking to them on Earth! The merging of the two texts deconstructs the modern theory of the bodily, proud, individual, agency-addicted person. Hawkey isn’t really conversing with Ventrakl about Wittgenstein – they’re not going to meet for dinner. But maybe they are. Or maybe someone doesn’t have to be alive in order to interact with them. Maybe if you read them “endlessly” (83), then they can become a part of you. There is no author or translator or any other noun that represents distinction in this book. Ventrakl is in Hawkey’s space, and agency is abandoned in order to capture and store as much as Ventrakl’s dead limitlessness as possible.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I'm not really sure what triggered any perceived condescension, so I'll pass on that. To use the word 'collaborate', to my mind, just means to have paid attention to all the very explicit ideas Hawkey was soaking himself in; I'm using his own notions about his book, that's all.
ReplyDeleteRE: the notion of conflation that Seth puts forward--I just didn't see this in the text. I really wish that I had! I think it would have made an already insanely good book even better.
This circles back to my only real complaint with the book, which is the way Hawkey sets forth very clear boundaries / roles for himself and Trakl--student/teacher (eventually, sentimentally put, 'friend/friend') and so forth. This two-person mechanism seems vital to whatever Hawkey was doing with the book. I wish there had been more complicating of that line, but I simply don't see it anywhere in my reading, I see the opposite, repeatedly. I think Hawkey was enjoying keeping that line very present while going crazy with things around it instead of making it blurry. Seth sees no difference in 'stature', yet it seems important to Hawkey to position himself in a distinctly lower position than Trakl--i.e., the hierarchy of the teacher and the student (and, at that even, sometimes not the most seemingly adept student, in those scenes).
RE: the intimacy / 'range' of knowledge; having been through the book three times now, there's nothing that I can see as far as actual knowledge that isn't just as available to anyone who has 10 minutes of time to give to Wikipedia. Give 10 more seconds to Google and you've got nearly all of the photographs in the book as well. I do think there's a lot of Hawkey mixed in with those aspects (Seth's mention of half-truths and their power) but why weave such nuanced elements into the book only to blockade their effects with strangely expected scenes (the ones I keep referencing)? To do what Hawkey did to make this book what it is he obviously enacted a remarkable conflation in process if nothing else, and I wish more ramifications of that had come through.
So when I started reading this book I was reminded of Johan Jonson’s Collobert Orbital. I feel like it’s the same idea of being in Collobert’s orbit – and inhabiting that – perhaps ghostly- space rather than actually inhabiting the body of the dead like trying on a suit. I think that there is definitely a strange spectral quality to Collobert (as much as I’ve read about her) and much the same to Trakl’s life – it seems that in ways that their living bodies were not but ghosts and then they multiplied as ghosts – each fracture of identity or limb became a ghost and all of these ghosts orbit.
ReplyDeleteI do get a strange – kind of uncomfortableness (that’s not really the word I want but it is the word that is in my head at the moment) in the poems that seem like interviews – p. 36, 49, etc. because I felt like Hawkey was putting on the skin rather than orbiting – if that makes sense. I think I agree with Jonson when he said that it’s important to let the dead the be dead and (paraphrasing) when writing about Collobert he had to kill her over and over again because she *is* dead. Whereas when I was reading those kind of interviewy sections of Ventrakl I felt like Hawkey was trying to reinvent the voice in order to bring Trakl to life again instead of killing him over and over again because he’s dead. I feel like I’m thinking about this rather narrowly but I’ve also thought about this a lot because I’ve written about the dead…
Somewhat rambly – but I’d also like to mention (and think it’s worth mentioning) Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. I feel like Ondaatje’s book works more around the lines of clearing up (or muddying up) the myth – the legend of Billy the Kid – and investigating the conjecture around his death – rather than trying to bring him back to life or be in his orbit – he tries to excavate – dig at a historically accurate truth – or as accurate as one can get with the limited information that is available to him. I am interested in what Ondaatje and Jonson were doing – a little less so in what Hawkey was doing (from the p.o.v of interacting with the dead only).
Hawkey’s work itself I think is amazing – I really enjoyed the poems and their spectral hallucinatory qualities. I especially enjoyed the part of the preface where he talked about the different techniques he used for the acquisition of poems/text (whatever you want to call it) – awesome!! I’d love to do work like that – a sort of composting of material. Even though there is translation involved I didn’t really view Hawkey as translator – I think I was feeling it more on the level of a Spicerian radio antennae – though I feel like I am contradicting myself here with what is said above – it does make sense in my head… I didn’t get a sense of a break in the language that I felt when we read Celan last semester and that is likely due to the fact that we were looking at Joris’ and Hamburger’s translation in comparison but I felt that there was an obvious tic in the language that signaled more a of a translatese quality (that I like) that I didn’t notice in Ventrakl.
I do think that Ventrakl does have a rhizomatic thing going on – esp cause it goes outside of this orbit into an organic machine – I think it’s filled with holes too. Not just the physical holes – the natural holes of the body but unnatural ones as well – and the hole in his sister’s head and the hole in Trakl’s brain – or seeming hole and the holes in all the machine-gunned bodies. Also the hole that is created by death or loss as a sort of hole which Hawkey pokes holes in as he revives Trakl. And I do think that the book can be a hole because it sort of exists in the negative space of Trakl’s life though Hawkey’s reinvention of it therefore I can think of the book itself as a hole.
oh bother! i've committed numerous typos. sorry, i composed my blog post in a storm and confused Trakl with the book's title... oh... but maybe i shouldn't be sorry... maybe that was one of the book's purposes.
ReplyDeleteryan, i think that you're trying to reduce the book through standards that don't have a lot to do with literature. So what if you can google the pictures and facts about Trakl? The point is that you don't have to -- that Hawkey has incorporated him to such an extent that everything you need is in between the pages. It can function by itself in its own world -- never mind earthly devices.
also, teacher/student binary is belied by the fact that it is Hawkey acting like the teacher by telling Trakl what he knows. Also, he's the one reading him (i.e. grading him). He's the one translating Trakl -- who's marking his paper, making it intelligible to the english-speaking world.
I'm not confident in whose judgments we should rely on as to which standards do / don't have a lot to do with literature. This idea itself is an act of reducing I don't think is very interesting.
ReplyDeleteWhat reading of any book isn't reducing? Even arguments of expanded readings are arguably just as open to accusations of reduction; i.e., by expanding in X direction you reduce the book in Y ways.
Art is reality filtered through a human individual; interacting with a text or other piece of art as another kind of filtering; no 'earthly devices' are more earthly than humans, what must that say of their works?
You refuse any discourse of Hawkey-as-translator (because such a label would be condescending, same as collaborator?) yet use it as justification for the reasoning of Hawkey-as-the-equal to Trakl rather than the (sometimes dense-seeming) student. Can't have it both ways.
This is all really beside the point. We actually very much agree that Hawkey's role is not nearly as subjugated as it appears--the metalayers to this book prove he isn't just the student, his acts of creation / curation that result in this book show him to be much more an agent than he would seem to want us to believe in the text itself. This is my entire point--Hawkey is just as present and compelling a presence as Trakl is, this is why I remain confused as to his efforts to draw himself into the book as a lesser being. He can apparently 'interact' with Trakl in all these wild and amazing ways, produce this stunning book, yet he seems to feel obligated to some caveat of 'Really though, folks, I'm so far removed from the genius of Trakl I'm nearly a blasphemer for touching his works, watch me look confused amid his floods of brilliance in these italicized scenes.' This is not true! What I'm intrigued by is where this sense of obligation comes from. Some anxiety of the canon, I guess.
well, your google comment bothered me. I don't think it accounts for the difference in mediums; that is, reading something in a concrete, interior medium like a book, and reading something online.
ReplyDeletealso, do u really think Hawkey's human? As filled w/ Trakl as he is -- I think he's like half-human/half-dead-austrian poet, or maybe all dead austrian poet, because if it weren't for Trakl the book would not have manifested. When one's writing a book, I hope they're not doing so in their common, regular, human state.
Also:
more wikileaks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/magazine/20FOB-Q4-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
another applicable live/dead combo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twkh0YiInPM
Thanks, all, for the posts thus far. I’m really intrigued by Kim’s sense of the book as a kind of hole—occurring in the negative space of Trakl’s life. I also find Seth’s notion of the dead as rhizomatic fascinating—and here I think the host-host nature of the text is critical (if, as Hawkey suggests in the introduction, consciousness is the “blank space at the site of intersection” of “voiced selves” (ours and others)/ the “reanimated” words of the dead) (5-6). Just as Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome deals with vibrations occurring through/over planes, in Ventrakl we’ve got texture deriving from the effect of the “in-between voice” (creating, as Hawkey writes, a kind of crowding in one’s reading voice—a kind of imperfect ventriloquism, maybe? Here I am reminded of the danger/overlap of voice(s) in Amanda’s captivating (both in terms of enthrallment and a kind of captive body) opera piece last week).
ReplyDeleteTo talk about this book in terms of frequencies, intonations, vibrations, etc.—suggests, perhaps (at least to me)—that tactility is important. In thinking about Hawkey as a curator, as Ryan suggests we might, we are attuned to the physical handling (/manipulation) of artifacts (this seems appropriate, too, given the Handler in Ryan’s work—the arrangement of bodies/landscapes/brain matter). Touch (or lack thereof—or its displacement, as might be the case with Trakl’s mother)—something we might typically associate with intimacy—produces holes in (through/throughout) Ventrakl. (While physical touch triggers a chemical response in the body, a “touch” of something suggests a sense of fracture, disconnection already). Obsessions (those of both Hawkey and Trakl—addiction, to be human, is figured in terms of touch, etc.—) and trauma create fissures—grooves in the brain, pressure points, maybe, in the textual surface (Nathan Lee writes that Inland Empire is "perpetually slipping through its own cracks to coagulate anew then fissure once more” as a movie whose “ideal spectator” is solitary, I wonder how we might figure the spectator of/in Ventrakl?). I might suggest that the grooves in the surface of the text are simultaneously soothed and agitated by the lapping of our tongues over the words as we animate/are animated by the text—a kind of meticulous hole producing/ face wearing away in kissing/resuscitation (we ingest the “breathing gaze”?)—or a kind of double-half-deadening as we are engaged in the process—one that feels interrupted, perhaps by the more conversational passages? Does that make sense? These moments feel less coercive (like the withholding of speech), less coarse—qualities the book otherwise demands as a ghost material (the variations in fiber/tone constellate the body, perhaps) (34). The repetition/lapping over these grooves suggests an immobility in terms of “healing”—but decay and decomposition allow for a different kind of architecture here (even, as Kim notes, in the production of the book as object) (55). The “squaring” of loss (the orphaned orphans, etc.) creates, maybe, a kind of space wherein or from which melancholy radiates (93).
Ventrakl for me was an exercise of chasing identity. What struck me last week has done so again. Inland Empire has this cardboard character atmosphere, and when I looked to the back picture of the Hawkey he has a cardboard cut our of Trakl’s face over his. The conversational and reflective quality of the poems left me within the feeling that identity is a hole. Identity is purely reflection, flat and malleable. We are formed by reflection and we become reflection.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I believe this on any given day, I’m not sure I can take credit for it, but if it’s not my own, what I’m saying resembles a Sociologist named Cooley. His theory is called the Looking Glass Self. I describe this best by using the example of Alice in Wonderland. Alice became Alice once she fell into the mirror. The interactions and perceptions within the mirror made Alice. Christian Hawkey fell into Georg Trakl and wrote or became his interactions and perceptions of Trakl. The notion of mirroring can be illustrated most clearly in the cover design. If you look at the back, Trakl’s name and title are backwards, much as if you would have seen them as reflected in a mirror.
The tricky thing about mirrors everything you see is backwards. Thus we are formed by false perceptions and we become and project the same false perceptions. Which in turn are even further warped by those with whom we attempt relationship. The poems were for me a dialogue between the poets and illustrate how exaggerated perceptions of relationship become. The poems that appear as some type of interview or actual conversation for me showed how what we say is taken by the person who hears it and is turned into something other than what is actually there. What is said in essence becomes what the other person either wants to or is only able to hear. Ryan saw them more as forced or predictable (I hope I got your sentiment right Ryan.) I don’t disagree with this, but I see the conversations as a desire, a desire to connect with what ultimately can’t be known.
One of the things I like about David Lynch is his ability to illustrate the barriers of self, perception and relationship. Twin Peaks use to be my favorite show with really strange heightened projections of self and experience driven by the hidden and unknown. Now that I think of it, it reminds me a bit of Alice in her Wonderland. But I think I digress here. Hawkey fell in love with a poet before he ever spoke German. He fell in love with an image, a shape, and a sound that was strange and unknown----and ultimately unknowable. For me one of the more powerful sequences of the collection began with the completely blurred picture of a boys face, followed by images of orphans, the hidden-ness of self, the alien, the distance of language—communication. In some way this series for me speaks to the artifacts of identity and the endless frustration of communicating identity, which is striving for connection. I think there is a certain brilliance that Hawkey chose a dead German poet to form a relationship because all that is left to the dead is their artifice and artifice is ultimately all anyone really has.
revolutions are made of ghosts & holes
ReplyDeleteThis is probably just because I’m in translation theory this semester, but to me, it seems impossible to discuss this book without discussing translation. The idea that it is somehow something beyond translation—or that it doesn’t concern itself with the particulars of translation/the question of appropriation—seems really strange to me. The preface does, as Ryan noted, outline the usual concerns associated with translation, but the idea isn’t suddenly dropped afterward; the author doesn’t, for all his reaching for “conversation” with Trakl, ever truly lose the sensation of translation or the controversies surrounding it. He is—as is the body of the text—haunted by the act of translation as much as he is haunted by Trakl. Rather, to be haunted by translation (the work, the voice, the host) IS to be haunted by the original source text’s author.
ReplyDeleteSome talk about translation, first. If you check the Wikipedia page for translation (or pick up any book on translation theory), the first definition you’re going to get is something like “derives from the Latin translatio (which itself comes from trans- and fero, together meaning "to carry across" or "to bring across")” (this one is from Wikipedia). Despite the English meaning of “translation” being used primarily to refer to the act of “faithfully” converting a text from one language to another, the actual meaning of translation, at its roots, remains wide open. Translatio/Translation can be used to describe the movement of objects/people, the translation of text, or the “carrying over” of ideas. This is the kernel of the popular argument that all writing/creation is an act of translation, the movement of a concept as a mental construction into a solid media, for example. That’s not the argument I want to make here though; the argument I want to make is that Ventrakl cannot honestly be read as anything but a translation because it is, from start to finish, a “carrying over” of the ideas originally laid out, written, and lived by Georg Trakl. (I’ll also, for the sake of time, be ignoring the “if everything is translation then nothing is original and therefore there can be no appropriation” argument. Sorry to anyone who likes that idea.)
To say that Ventrakl “carries over” Georg Trakl is really putting it lightly. As everyone else has noticed and Ryan and Seth have debated, there seems to be some desperate and sad pull on Christian Hawkey’s part to not only consume and regurgitate but to live inside the “holes,” to crawl inside Trakl’s body and be haunted by Trakl’s ghost and serve, perhaps, as the almost psychic medium through which the dead man could continue to impart his work and preoccupations to the world. Possession, as by some spirit, is the central motivating force here. Hawkey seems to genuinely desire to serve as, as he puts it, a host, an in-between voice, twining himself so deeply with Trakl that he can (he must) wear the author’s face over his own. Page 45 seems to lay this entire idea out in rather obvious terms: “not a poem translated from another but a poem woven around another, from another, an image from another image, a weaving or an oscillation around or from, a form of understanding”. This, right here, seems to summarize this project for me—like Kim, it both reminds me and does not remind me of Collobert Orbital; the idea of this oscillation around, weaving, orbiting is present, but as Kim remarks, Hawkey cannot seem to leave Trakl dead. He is not so much inspired by as desperate to converse with Trakl.
ReplyDeleteSo, in this sense, Ventrakl is clearly a translation—just not word-for-word, not faithfully—a translation of IDEAS, those things about Trakl, those things in Trakl’s life and writing which incited Hawkey’s obsession. Hawkey has, for lack of better words, translated poems and events from one language and life into poems and events in his own language and life. Translation. The end.
Of course, then we’re back at those questions of appropriation and translation controversy that Ryan mentioned in his post and Hawkey orbits about in his preface. If Ventrakl is a translation, how do we handle the fact that it is also an act of creation, a set of poems which are not word-for-word or faithful renditions of Trakl’s work but originated therein like species evolved from a common ancestor? Hawkey seems almost to think his act is entirely original, defiant of the system. He asks, as if there was no answer, “If such distinctions [between original literature and translation, original poet and translator, Trakl and himself] were decentered, or blurred, what would that reality look like, feel like, spell?” Yet Ventrakl itself exists in the continuum of a long line of translations which are sub-labeled “imitation.” Not a direct or purposeful copying, but a deviation from a source text (here, both original text and a physical life) in which the translator is free to create—or creates where he was not necessarily free to do so at all. The literal meaning of the source text is gone; the source text itself is gone, and what is produced is something halfway between interpretation and entirely original creation. This is what Ryan and some others seem to be noting here: the sense of “collaboration,” of duplicity in authorship, what Hawkey calls the “reanimation of voice.” Ventrakl is not Trakl. It’s Hawkey-Trakl. It’s imitation.
So: I can’t read Ventrakl setting aside its nature as a translation. I can’t, perhaps, read it as I should be reading it, as Hawkey seems to want me to—for me, Ventrakl is not a “conversation.” It can’t ever be a conversation. As Seth notes so vividly, Trakl is dead. The dead can be orbited I think, but they cannot be made to sit up and think again. Literature, books, poems—certainly these are all ghosts, as Hawkey notes in his preface, but they are ghosts because the voice with which they speak is not infinite; they are contained, therefore, they are constant. They can be read again and again. An un-thought thought (that is, a thought which someone dead might think, if someone dead could think) does not exist in the same way. A human being does not exist in the same way a poem does; you may resurrect and play host to the finite voice contained in a body of poems, but you cannot play host to a medium-free voice, particularly one which no longer speaks. THIS, I feel, is the reason that so many of us are having trouble with the interview sections/poems of Ventrakl. It’s exactly as Kim says: Hawkey will not let Trakl be dead.
ReplyDeleteHe tries, in these sections, to resurrect the man himself, rather than the art, and the result is “cardboard” as Ryan noted. In these sections, he steps outside the realm of imitation (or translation) sacrificing the “courageous melancholy” of existing as a creative force INSIDE of another’s body/work in favor of nostalgia or some type of validation. The problem with these interviews, quite simply, is that, although they contain a caricature of Trakl, they ultimately are the poems most “Hawkey” of the entire book, and they betray his singular existence divested of Trakl.
They contain their hierarchical nature because, in stepping back, in taking a breath as Hawkey outside of Trakl’s work, Hawkey’s nature as translator, imitator, derivative is instantly and plainly revealed. He cannot approach these interviews with the same confidence or creative power as he approaches the torn up, shot, rotted poems in the other pages because in the “interviews” he has placed himself in direct conflict with the original author, and to assume a creative voice in the presence of a “living” man requires far more boldness than imitating poems behind said dead man’s back. Hawkey has to be the student (working up to friend) because if he called himself anything else he’d have pedestal’d himself as a “creator” creating not only the entire concept and body of work found in Ventrakl but also Trakl himself, stretching the project from imitation/translation into some far more uncomfortable realm of colonization, where putting his name on the cover of the book would be supplanting Trakl with Hawkey in both English and German.
ReplyDeleteAnd so I get around the issue of appropriation at last. Because isn’t that what Hawkey does? He puts his name right over the top of Trakl’s on the cover! (Of course, as if in shame, he chooses to then cover his face…) There is an entire branch of translation theory decrying the art of the imitation, the “free” or “liberal” translation which occurs in Ventrakl, pointing out that it is, to some extent, a pilfering of corpses—Trakl is not, as Seth notes, able to defend himself or rise up and discuss Ventrakl with Hawkey. Would Ventrakl be allowed to exist if Trakl himself were still alive and writing? (Who knows, on that count.) There is, some critics argue, a line between being inspired by and virtually appropriating the work of others. If, for example, you auto-summarize The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland using Word, do you get to call it an original work? Do the poems in Ventrakl which contain translated lines of original Trakl poems count as true, original creations for which Hawkey deserves praise? He notes in his preface that the body of literature supporting his actions is matched by an equally large body of literature denouncing them.
It’s a personal matter, really. I loved Ventrakl (largely excepting the interview/room poems, yes). I felt that Hawkey brought enough newness and deviated enough from the original—and was, thankfully, very open and even insistent about his deviation—that I felt I could trust what I was reading to be an imitation, an “inspired by,” a mark of a deep obsession and an interesting endeavor. It did not feel at any point like an unfair appropriation. No plagiarism here.
And yet, I have to wonder how much of that was actually a product of the very poems I disliked the most. If I had not read the premise and the book lacked the interview poems or pages, we would be left with a series of poems composed half of Trakl translation/recomposition and half of Hawkey lines, immodestly inserted. We would have a cover with a covered up name and a photo of modern author pretending to be someone he’s not. Without the interviews to establish, as Seth and Ryan debated, the role of Hawkey in relation to Trakl, would we accept this book with the same sort of emotional response, the same sensation of near-pity for the man with an obsession over some dead German poet? Is that sensation of obsession (as opposed to entitlement) not a product of the pages were Hawkey subjugates himself to Trakl, makes us aware of his sense of failing and of his sentimental desires to be “a friend”? Can we view Ventrakl as a book which delicately assumes content from Trakl’s work because we feel that Hawkey approaches Trakl openly and literally?
ReplyDeleteThat brings me to the last thing I have to say about this work as translation and these interview pages in particular: I feel that they are here in large part to highlight the work as a translation, and they act to point out to readers that Hawkey borrows but is really-more-inspired-and-in-conversation-with-Trakl-than-stealing, but also act as an almost desperate cry for validation; the construct of the student seeking the theoretical and poetic advice of the master actually Hawkey asking for permission to commit his acts of imitation, to “translate” Trakl into Hawkey-Trakl, to make the readers aware of his actions as such. There is, in these pages, something of the sensation called translator’s anxiety, the agonizing twofold concern of first, failing the readers, and second, more importantly, failing the original author. He writes these interview pages, employs so many quotations on translation, makes so many statements about the art because he seems to be reassuring himself that what he is doing is allowed, is well-received by Trakl, is neither rote replication nor “unfaithful” translation. Perhaps because of this the sections seem weakest to us—they betray that he himself is not fully confident about the nature of his book or project or obsession, and they show to us that he would rather have permission, have a conversation, than boldly “translate” Trakl’s work and life.
Tada!
I was super intrigued by Hawkey's introduction to the text. While I'm not much of an intro-reader before reading the text, I knew vaguely some of the ideas that Hawkey was interested in and really wanted see for myself some of his ideas about his approach. I was super crazy taken by his play with Trakl books to an extent that didn't just emphasize the text-as-material, but rather a more interesting and complex relationship between destroying the text and creating a new one (reincarnating rather than resurrecting) in a way that preserves some of the original Trakl (like the remnants left behind after shooting it w/ a gun), discards the unusable (maybe, or maybe it uses the unusable as well), and goes from there. I'm fascinated by this approach because it seems to me like a way of doing away with the notion of the-book-as-sacred, and this idea that "You should never hurt a book!" in favor of an idea that uses physical damage to offer up a refreshingly interesting approach to translation/transmutation/transliteration that makes a text mobile rather than static. I’d be interested in reading this alongside some Trakl-Trakl to see how this idea might wake that up. I think we should hurt books. Not all books, certainly not, but I am very attracted to Hawkey's approach because it does not seem to be concerned with any kind of "responsibility" to creating a certain kind of Trakl translation that is "loyal" to the originals. I wouldn't have thought to, so I'm really excited that Kim brought up the Celan translations because, if I recall, there was one translation that seemed a bit more "true" to the language of the originals, and the other, to me, felt more integrated with the images portrayed in the Celan, and that was my preferable version. This is fascinatingly different because we don't necessarily have access to the true Trakl of Ventrakl--we have images and we can go find some original Trakl, and we know some of Hawkey’s techniques, but we don't have the books that Hawkey was working out of, so we're essentially always locked out of the "original" as this book had it. So I’m not interested in the book as a translation so much as I’m interested in the book as a reincarnation. In considering what Trish says about mirrors, I’m visualizing the book as a kind of mirror-within-a-mirror sort of thing, wherein the original image is so small and obscured at the core that it is no where near as captivating and strange as the repeating frame—the frame, for me, being what Hawkey “does to” the text.
ReplyDeleteA little on the relationship between Hawkey and Trakl: I’m failing to see the error in calling it a collaborative effort (Hawkey himself calls it as such) and I think it’s a mistake to consider a teacher-student relationship to be a lesser one, or one that doesn’t involve a fair trade of ideas. H&T complicate that relationship, of course, because, as Seth said, the dead never die, the dead can be reused and, in this case, re-spoken with, which I think complicates the student-teacher dynamic in a very weird way. The student conjures up the teacher in this case. Necromances him into a new existence. To do what, exactly? To take advantage of him, in a way. Not that this is a bad thing. I think we all do this, just a bit less mystically (generally). Minus the mysticism, I’m failing to see a real, arguable difference in merit between Hawkey summoning up some Trakl and “learning” something from him (which sometimes means taking something from him) and me, say, going to my adviser’s office and writing a poem about a Youtube video he shows me. So the fact that Seth finds an observation of that relationship to be condescending doesn’t make much sense to me. I do, though, agree that the two seem to be more integrated with each other than the binary of that relationship might imply, which is why I think that the soundplay between “Ventrakl” and “Ventricle” is super interesting—it implies to me a passageway inside of Trakl that Hawkey infiltrates, runs through as blood. Coupling this with the various holes mentioned explicitly in the book, lots of open mouths and darknesses, I feel that there is a distinctive system of holes/tunnels in the text and between Hawley/Trakl that allows the two to pass through each other—through one hole and out of another.
ReplyDeleteThis is a quality that I really enjoyed in the interview-style poems, where there was such a weaving in and out, where answers and questions sometimes had little to do with the each other but are somehow on the same plane, or are on different ends of one tunnel. I like the whole book in general, but I suppose I’m a minority in liking the interview poems the most. I like very much that they show a kind of anxiety between Hawkey and Trakl, between Hawkey and his work, because I’m attracted, I suppose, to that kind of humility. If it really even is a humility, because I think it would be just as easy to interpret that as an extremely self-aware gesture toward “translator’s anxiety” that, in its presence, is maybe not even all that anxious anyway. So a collaboration is somehow weaker than an outright translation or remastering of a text, etc., is a really, to me, frankly, boring line of thinking and I find that, for me, a “translation” more like Hawkey’s, in offering a conversation/collaboration, is a million times more intellectually/artistically interesting to me than 50 “definitive” “loyal” “masterful” Trakl translations. Why should he be entirely confident? How dull is that?
Hawkey experiments w/ the physical text through various means of letting-be and assault, to see what it would do, like a body, or an its own consciousness.
ReplyDelete(like what davis schneiderman said he did with his own books, assaulted them, encouraged others to, but his seemed more a performative act of “sacrilege” for the purposes of emptying out the politics of text-destruction, whereas Hawkey is poking at the text like it is an organism he found in the woods, perhaps torturing it a little too, but for the earnest purpose of discovery through experimentation and observation.)
He performs a similar engagement with Trakl, more tentative, ginger circling, hovering, orbiting, moving through [except not!--moving around], occasionally jabbing gently at (in q&a), observing and describing their dynamic in a room, the hole-space they’ve co-entered. He’s scientist-like in noting the repeating appearances of things, of colors...but breaking past the law of detached objectivity, embracing the infecting observer’s paradox as primary methodology, various rhetorical strategies/approaches, a wkshp blog post dissecting the decisions of a single prose-poem sentence, arriving at trauma...: is it all an act of reading the self into text as self-satisfying means for believing to have accessed this particular Other? (Does poetry rely on our self-aggrandizement, capitalize on it; does our own self-aggrandizement eventually mirror that of anyone else’s, so that, in delving delusionally into the self, we arrive all the way to china, to the other, anyway, the repeating happy mistake?)
-Lists like lab notes, delineating observations/realizations, eliciting maxims, announcing investigations.
The flattening of the face as ground for expression like Barthes’ fotographic image, the initial thing to be swept over by gaze (PS, we ought to keep our facial expressions to a minimum, to not encourage so much wrinkling and accumulating deposits of info on the facemap like a giant wikileaks dump); yes, the span of this project does feel rhizomatic in that it reconfigures The Past into perma-imminence. (Although, not, for me, so much in drawing visible or convincing links between political/war-waging climates (WWI & Iraq).) And holes abound, and the familiar becomes foreign/alien (the word “blue,” for example, sounds and looks nonsensical by the end of Bluetrakl), and identities merge and part, and it isn’t always clear if the italicized correcting voice is interior or exterior...
There’s a lot of power-playing here. Yes, as Ryan says, Hawkey sets up something like a teacher-student binary, and then, as Seth says, he upends it by showing to Trakl all the information he’s gathered and is disseminating about him; and so we move through several cycles of different arrangements of this relationship hierarchy. And at the end, they are friends. Is that it? I don’t want Hawkey to reduce his invocation-investigation of collaboration/appropriation/raising the dead to schlocky sentimentalism.
(PS #2: Has anyone ever read Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, where the fearless interloper author produces a rambling meta-narrative about his time spent writing about D.H. Lawence, much of which is spent, in fact, not writing, but in deciding how many books to lug overseas and in speculative daydreaming of himself into Lawrence and vice-versa, often via poring over fotos of Lawrence...?)
Like Kim, I also was reminded of Collobert Orbital, the conveyor belt of ---that is both constant movement of the voice of the dead and the manufacturing of dead bodies that are piling up.
ReplyDeleteHowever, instead of having bodies that are piling up like in Collobert Orbital, here everything seems to disappear through the hole, the hole of indeterminacy and incompleteness.
For an example, the photograph where the his family is present as tiny speck, is actually not containing the presence of his family or even a speck; the speck of his family in an odd shape brings in the odd reading of their activity—destabilizing the narrative—and flushes out what we or Trakl might have known or remembered. The dark speck becomes a hole, even more fragmented when enlarged. Even the identity of the family disappear, you can never be sure whether that was your family or the people who happened to be there.
The presence of hole, actually has been evident, when this book is written with the text of the dead, the hollowness, silence and emptiness—but never still; rotting, being shot, disrupted. But we try not to think about the vulnerability and permeability of our narrative/identity and body for our daily lives. Daily lives are narrative, clean surface. However, we already have seen too much; the presence of hole made the phrase “expressionless face” in page 56 almost surreal and grotesque because we all already have realized we have “mouth hole”; there is no clean surface/blank slate but holes.
As many also seem to have sensed, this nature of hole where constant escape and loss are occurring, very much reminded me of rhizome and David Lynch’s movie where narrative is constantly lost at the media’s impulse of making a hole through itself. Especially the page 141, the gaze of the woman directed to us, when she was actually gazing to the person she loved, or was thinking about the lover, the readers face the hole, the link, voyeurism and cameraeye. Her gaze cannot be communicated but is present, like the voice of the dead prom queen Laura Palmer in Twin peaks, who speaks in backward language, her arms bent back like the time she was murdered; the chilling presence of hole, death, permeability, and injury.
Amy -- don't feel alone, I like the interview poems best as well :) I think there's a really odd kind of double/simultaneous ventriloquism going on in these sections that speaks to the composition of the text as a whole. As other people have pointed out, this is not unlike the quality present in Collobert Orbital.
ReplyDelete