Poetry Weekend: Bits on Linh Dinh at the Holloway Poetry Series, UC Berkeley 03/21/2008

This is by no means comprehensive. Here are some quick thoughts.

Last weekend was indeed another poetry weekend for us, with Linh Dinh in town for a quick visit. I am happy to have heard him read from Blood and Soap, which I have blogged about before. Blood and Soap is marketed as a collection of short fiction, though I still think of it as a volume of prose poems. Actually, I think about this collection being discussed as “fables,” though “the moral of the story” kind of easy pay off doesn’t happen so easily, and I think this is due to what I believe I have previously called Linh’s strategic omissions. Some of my older thoughts on Linh Dinh can be found here.

As a reader, Linh I believe is effective in really getting his audience to want more, and I believe this has to do with his strategic omissions, as well as his unabashed disregard of internal social decorum; here is another previous blog post on Linh and Borderless Bodies. We are left to fill in the blanks in his troubling scenarios, and so we have to decide whether we abide by the same perversities he’s set up for us. Also regarding this “getting his audience to want more,” is the fact that his work is really very funny when he is performing or presenting it to an audience. I am not sure if this is due to his almost deadpan, deliberately flat delivery style while saying very perverse or strange things, or if it’s that the work itself is really very batty independent of his delivery.

On translation, as he was reading from Jam Alerts, in one of his poems he discussed aspiring to say the thing in squirrel, underscoring what is problematic about some translators of literature/poetry — what do translators misunderstand, disregard, dismiss, due to their lack of direct life experience in the culture and language in question. What do they not admit they do not get? What happens when they don’t get it, and they don’t admit it? As well, this saying the thing in squirrel makes me think of my ongoing suspicion of translators who translate literature in so many different languages into English, and the languages of others as objects and commodities that can be acquired.

Oscar and I have this joke that [unnamed translator] can recite the poem in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Mesomerican clicks and whistles, and of course, the original Martian. And isn’t Poetry in a better, a higher place because of this.

“Excuse me sir, but I speak Jive.”