Murat-Nemet-Nejat/Kent Johnson
A Dialogue Between Two Poet Friends: Murat Nemet-Nejat in Correspondence with Kent Johnson
I. Preliminary Note
I met first Kent Johnson on the Buffalo Poetics List in the late 1990’s. His name was often mentioned angrily as the perpetrator of a “hoax” titled Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. The heated debate around that book, international in the scope of its attention, was just beginning then, and I was not yet familiar with the work. As the nature of the poetic fiction became clearer to me, and as I began reading passages from the work (which resonated with extreme beauty to me) and sensing the “editorial” reflective processes by which it had come about, I realized that this “hoax” was asking profound questions about the nature of ownership and originality in poetry. (I had just finished writing my poem Turkish Voices, which grappled with these questions.)[1] And, even more subtle and radical to me, was what the work was implying about the nature of any book, how a work of poetry is put together, what “a book is.” The editorial details that framed Doubled Flowering were extended in Kent’s next work, The Miseries of Poetry. The humorously pages-long list of blurbs on this follow-up book (reminiscent to me of Swift’s The Tale of the Tub), along with the even more Byzantine editorial passing of batons, convinced me Kent was an original mind – even as critics went on calling him names--one Language poet even pronouncing at an MLA podium, and later in a widely distributed essay, that he was an example of “white male rage” (though in what way, to this day, is unclear to me).
I began to defend Kent publicly on the Buffalo List and other venues. In an essay I wrote for Cipher Journal “Translation: Contemplating Against the Grain” (https://www.cipherjournal.com/html/nemet-nejat_spicer.html), I stated in its last paragraph that he was one of the very few American poets who had a vision of a new kind of poetry. Kent later did a long interview with me, published in Jacket. I reviewed his Homage to the Last Avant-Garde for Rain Taxi in 2008. A decade later I became a contributing editor to his and Michael Boughn’s Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. We then recommenced an occasional but substantial correspondence by e-mail. We became comrades, amigos, in the Poetry Wars.
Kent and I never met, but our paths crossed in unexpected moments, often bent by the tendency of poets to associate us. Douglas Messerli, in 1996, accepted my manuscript, for Sun and Moon, of Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies almost by return mail, leaving an acceptance message on my phone. These poems were written during the 1960’s, and I had translated them in the early 1980’s through a labor of love, unwrapping Ayhan’s mysterious Turkish in English. No publisher was interested in it, finding it totally incomprehensible (except for one who found it too “cliché”). The manuscript had lain dormant in my drawer over ten years – I had sent it to Sun and Moon on the spur of the moment. Douglas had one request – wanted to see a reference to Ayhan’s name and a picture of him in an official publication. Presenting to him the pictorial proof weeks later, under the Biltmore clock in New York (the picture that appears on the cover of the Green Integer edition of the poem in 2016), I smiled. He said that he couldn’t believe such poetry could have been written in the 60’s by a poet nobody had heard of, in a country whose poetry nobody gave a second thought to, except for Nazim Hikmet. The first Poems for the Millennium Anthology was being edited at the time, and the only Turkish poet included was Hikmet, despite all my protestations to Pierre Joris. At that time, strongly approved by Neruda, I suppose only Hikmet qualified. The assumption was all the new, real stuff occurred in some kind of association with the Language School group. Its relevant pedigree – if it existed and was not immaculate conception-- could only derive from the West. Douglas encountered a new universe, with its rules and dynamic force, and wanted to be sure it was “real.” “I didn’t want to be the butt of a second joke,” he said to me (the silent referent being Yasusada.
An even more striking encounter occurred when Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry was published by Talisman Books in 2004. During dinner after a reading at Orono in 2005, the poet sitting next to me told me in a gracious manner that there was a rumor my anthology was a hoax and asked whether it was true. Of course not, I replied. Every translation in it is connected to an index at the end of the book, specifying the date and place of its publication. She didn’t seem convinced. I looked around, everybody at the table was staring at me. Obviously, the subject had been on their mind for a while. “Then why does everybody think it is a hoax,” she said. I said, “I don’t know. Maybe because I have defended Kent Johnson over the years?”
The stigma of hoax hounded the anthology in Turkey as well. Though obviously not true, a group of Turkish critics applied the same term as well. I began to think that perhaps “hoaxiness,” so to speak, is the character of certain kinds of writing-- part of the DNA of an underground, subgenre expression. What was this expression? Was it merely an illicit, even criminal tendency of writing, as the current norms held it to be, or was it something else, much more central to poetic nature and potentially legitimate in its many and even ancient tributaries? This question occupied me the next fifteen years and directed the path of my work.
Kent and I had two extended dialogues in 2020, the first initiated by me. I asked him to explain the difference between the Latin American Neo-Baroque and European Art Nouveau and Modernisme. The second occurred well into the pandemic and was initiated by Kent. His questions related to the Eda anthology. The result was an expansive exchange where both our works were explored, reflected in each other’s work.
The following is the text of the second group of e-mails between Kent and I. I tried to keep them as close to their original state to preserve their flavor, the spirit in which they occurred, excluding only the most intimate personal details unrelated to poetry. What remains, I think, has some relevant things to say about the state of modern American poetry and its Poetry Wars.
The following is published with the permission of Murat Nemet-Nejat and Kent Johnson.
--Murat Nemet-Nejat
II. Dialogue by E-Mail
Kent Johnson (Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:28 PM)
...
your EDA is a freaking, strange, utterly unique masterwork.
I went back to it two days ago and have been reading for hours.
Whoa.
I still don't understand, though, why this caused so much antagonism towards you in Turkey?
Why wouldn't Turkish poets have seen this as a profound gift to Turkish poetry? I face my naivete in asking that. Maybe the scene in Turkey is even more vindictive than it is here?
love,
Kent
KJ (Wed, Jul 29, 2020nat 11:32 PM)
Murat, how much of you is in EDA?
The question involves the problems of translation, of course.
Is that part of the problem with your fellow poets in Turkey, that you translucinated the poems in a radical way, instead of just simply "translating" them?
...
Murat Nemet-Nejat (Sun, August 2, 2020 at 6:25 PM)
Dear Kent,
Let me first respond to your question, why the Eda anthology was so controversial in Turkey. In fact, years ago I gave a talk in front of several hundred people at the major Bilkent university in Ankara arguing the reasons. One of the faculty members, a well-known poet, in the audience was a major critic of the anthology. My talk was followed by an extensive Q&A during which the scholars and the poet mainly critiqued me and the students understood and defended me. My work spoke to them.
There are multiple reasons, the first of which is quite simple. Some poets and critics considered very important are not in the anthology (or are represented with one or two pages) while others considered minor by the same critics occupy prominent places. The poet who attacked me during the Q&A, for instance, was one of the poets not in the anthology. The way perhaps Pound does with with English poetry, my anthology rearranges the canon of modern Turkish poetry to the chagrin of most of Turkish critics.
The second has to do with Turks' sense of themselves. The Turkish literary scholars essentially see the Ottoman court poetry (the Divan) and modern Turkish poetry as a continuum. This enhances the importance of Turkish poetry by adding historical depth to it. To the contrary, I see a radical break between the two. Ottoman court poetry was written in a hybrid Persian, essentially using a Persian syntax, the word order much more stiff being an Indo-European language, using Persian prosody which is based on syllable stresses, with a vocabulary which is a mixture of Persian, Turkish and Arabic words. Modern Turkish poetry is written in Anatolian Turkish which is agglutinative and derives from Central Asia. There lies all the difference. Unlike Persian, Turkish syllables do not have stress values. Music in Turkish is achieved through manipulation of word order in a sentence to achieve different tonalities and processes of thought. The music is in the cadences, that move to a zero point of yearning or a point of infinity in a sentence. I explain how this works in detail in my introduction in the Eda Anthology.
Turkish words also follow the rule of vowel harmony (each word can have either only close or only open vowels) besides having, compared to English, a relatively small vocabulary. The upshot of these two factors is that, in Turkish, multiple meanings have the tendency to implode towards the same sound, the same word. To me, this implosive force is profoundly linked to Spicer's vision of the "paradisaical language" being one with "infinitely small" vocabulary. Eda, embedded in Turkish and in Turkish poetry, is that vision of "Mars" and of Benjamin's "ideal language." Translating from Turkish poetry (the way I envision Turkish poetry) closely echoes the practice of the serial poem for Spicer, a "writing against the grain" that elicits in words the traces of a remote ideality, whether of "low ghosts/logos" or the Sufi divine.
This is one key way, Kent, that my practices as an American poet (not only a translator) and a translator of Turkish poetry --i.e. the personal and the objective-- are synthesized. This does not mean that I am not truly an American poet (that's what Bernstein thinks and once referred to me as, "he is not one of us" or another one asserted, “he is not an American poet, he is a translator ) or that I am distorting Turkish poetry. On both accounts, far from it. But it means that, in both cases, I am forcing the reader to look at the subject in an altered, new way. In English, I am offering a poetry based on cadential movements for its music, using space and the eye in dynamic ways, and breaking up the traditional autonomy of the form of the poem (the way you break up the concept of ownership/authorship in Doubled Flowering and The Miseries of Poetry) by adopting the language of film --in essence, a poetry contra Language Poetry, a poetry of the future. In Turkey, I force the critics and many older poets to look at Turkish language in a completely altered way that leads to a new understanding of what a Turkish poem is and does and says, where its awesome strength lies, resulting in a rearrangement of their poetic firmament. Except for a few younger generation of poets and one or two critics, that was a hard pill to swallow.
80 to 90% of what I say about Turkish poetry in the Eda anthology was unknown before the book came out in 2004, both in relation to poets about whom a lot was written and by those poets themselves who appear prominently in the anthology. Simply, no intellectual or critical language existed to define this poetry in its own terms.
For instance, it is quite clear that Istanbul plays a central place in 20th century Turkish poetry. But literally no one, critic or poet, had noticed that, seen in its totality, in different periods poets focused on different parts of the city, progressively revealing the names and lives of suppressed populations, the underbelly living in those areas, minority groups, Greeks, Armenians, Jews --as opposed to "Turks" -- gays, prostitutes, child hustlers, transvestites, etc., etc. (I discuss this aspect of the poetry in detail in the introduction to the anthology and in Ece Ayhan's A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies). A subversive arc, a subtext, of spiritual/political liberation runs through twentieth century Turkish poetry. Nobody literally had noticed or written about it. By the late 1980's, Istanbul had changed from a city of one million to twelve million. Around that time the poetry changes once again. It becomes more abstract, dialectic, a poetry of ideas -- rather than images. I call this poetry, unnoticed as something radically new before, "the poetry of motion." It is the poets of this movement who embraced Eda as the poetics for their poems and loved the translations in the anthology.
There is an intimate link between the spiritual, cultural and political life of Turkish people and Eda poetry. They mirror and are affected by each other. This synthesis creates truly a poetry of the people. As a "paradisaical" ideal, Eda stands in stark contrast to the "avant"/"post-avant" (or European avant-garde) that are relegated more and more to a place of coterie and irrelevance. By the way, that is what I love about Runa's poetry. In a subtly subversive way, it reflects the ideas and spirituality of the Hindu culture --it directly derives from it -- despite her background as a scientist and the sophistication of her work.
The connection between the agglutination of the Turkish syntax and the spiritual potency of Turkish poetry is something no Turkish critic had mentioned or even hinted at before the anthology. I first began to sense this link -- that I was missing something, something is eluding me -- in late 80's and early 90's (like a fish slowly realizing it lives within the medium of water), and the growing realization reached its fruition in a stretch of 5-6 years writing the anthology, as the idea of Eda as a poetics developed. I explore the inherent unity between agglutination and Sufism and style in detail in my introduction and multiple other essays in the anthology, particularly the essay, "A Godless Sufism: Ideas On the 20th Century Turkish Poetry." "Godless Sufism" is the most explosive idea in the book. It cuts right across the political divide in Turkey between the radical secularism of followers of Atatürk, more centered in urban areas and among intellectuals and the rest of the population, mostly from Anatolia.
When Ahmet Hasim (the first poet in the anthology and inventor/creator of the sinuous, feminine, yearning, arabesque movement of Eda line/sound, see "That Space" ) began to write in Turkish in the early years of 20th century, Turkish (the language spoken in the street) was an oral literature, with centuries of some very powerful folk poems by Anatolian troubadours. The themes are erotic, spiritual (a populist, pious, mystical "have-not" Sufism), political (for instance, under the guise of Sufi sacrifice inviting rebellion against the central Sunni government) or a combination of all. It had its own form, the Koshma, which was syllabic and more suitable to the rhythms of the language. The word "eda" comes originally from koshmas. It refers to the allure of the walk of a beautiful woman, her beauty not fragmented and fetishized, as "lips" or "eyes" or "eyebrows," etc., as in Ottoman/Persian poetry; her beauty is in the totality of her walk, "a beauty of motion." Eda destroys and feminizes the patriarchal architecture of earlier poetry, its "stressed" metrical sound. Instead, it opens a sinuous music running through the cadences of the subtle, agglutinative arabesques of the Turkish syntax: a poetry of thought's movements embodied in a poetry of motion.
Ahmet Hasim was born in Iraq and his education in Persian and Arabic, and the themes and forms of Ottoman poetry. Writing in Turkish, the nearest written model he can turn to was a 16th century Sufi poem Leyla and Majnun by Fuzuli, a Turkish poet also born in Iraq and who wrote also poems in Persian and Arabic. In other words, Hasim's poetry is written in a virginal language the poet did not quite "know" or "master" -- a second language so to speak, an open territory of language -- that the poet has to explore and discover to survive in it. ("Arguments On the Origins of Turkish Poetry," pp. 319/22). In the poem "That Space," for instance, Hasim suddenly introduces key phrases/ideas in Persian because he doesn't have a Turkish expression for it. The Indo-European based syntax of of these phrases and the stressed syllables of the words clash with the flat, agglutinated fluidity of Turkish. The result is sudden gaps, openings, an "awkwardness" reminiscent to me of the burns in Papaditsa's manuscripts. Turkish critics assigned this aspect to his "lack of craft." In truth, it is the heart of his strength as a poet. His poetry taps into a language "small" in vocabulary and "narrow" in physical sound range --the language of a melancholy paradise, of an arabesque of turns and twists full of yearning. All the poets in the anthology regard Turkish, implicitly, as an insufficient language that they must explore and bend to imprint their meaning. Their multi-faceted experiments constitute the explosive power of modern Turkish poetry. That's what Eda is.
There are additional aspects to Turkish that intensify the minimalist, implosive vision of language that Spicer implies. Turkish has no gender distinctions, nor does it distinguish between human and non-human (animal, plant or object). The same pronoun applies to all. Given the inherent instability of Turkish syntax due to a lack of fixed word order and the fact that single words may possess multiple meanings due to vowel harmony and "poor" vocabulary, utterances in Turkish are implicitly ambiguous. A sentence in a Turkish poem may have independent parallel meanings, depending on what meaning of a sound or declension the reader focuses on, leading the entire poem in multiple directions. These poems disperse in the mind simultaneously, as multiple meanings ( silent clicks logs make hitting each other in the water), instead of linearly going their merry way on the page. This essence of dispersal in Eda is what I project in my poems, placing them in space: full of puns, words breaking up, often multiple poems clicking against each other on the same page, the reader's eye absorbing them all -- in that way, liberating English syntax from its own rigidity. That is the "structure of escape" of my 7-part serial poem.
Kent, perhaps the greatest difficulty Turkish critics had was my not treating modern Turkish poetry as a collection of well crafted, gem-like, autonomous poems by great poets. That I placed its power in the genius of the language multiple poets explored and expanded. During my talk at Bilkent University, the critics in attendance assumed the meaning of "eda" to be tone, voice (common meaning of the word at the time, implying a macho attitude) and kept telling me that every poet had his own eda (his own voice, own attitude) and I had arbitrarily included some and not others. They could not see the transformative way (honestly, subversive, feminized. queer way) I was using the word. Consequently, they decided I had invented my view of Turkish and my anthology was a hoax. Students in the audience, and a poet who had come from another city to hear me, knew different and asked the most penetrating questions.
Encountering you for the first time in Buffalo Poetics List, hearing of the attacks on Yasusada, particularly after reading The Miseries of Poetry, I realized that your view of language as magma, transcending individual poets' egos and senses of ownership, was very akin to my own sense of poetry. I'd just written the poem Turkish Voices. We shared an attachment to Pessoa. From that moment on, I considered you a comrade and was on your side in the poetry wars.
I hope this answers some of your questions.
You and your family keep safe.
Affectionately,
Murat
KJ (Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 6:07 PM)
Dear Murat.
This is one of the most interesting emails I have received in quite some time. That it comes from you is hardly surprising. I am honored by our friendship and our close affinities. Isn't it strange and sometimes magical how those affinities find poets and not the other way around? Maybe that is EDA, too. EDA being, I sense, even still, for me at least, something much larger and more mysterious than anyone knows about here. I will confess something, and I say this, or ask this, knowing that those folks at Orono asked you a similar question--but I hope you know that I ask it with a bit less naivete about issues of translation and poetical fiction than was informing their uncertainty: Are all the poets in EDA real, or are some of them “yours”? Or might there be real ones whom you have partly invented, as it were? I am fully aware that this gets very complicated. And I am aware that much of the spirit of the book is to be understood not so much in the discrete poems, as it is in the totality-- the overall flow and symphony of the sequence and arrangement. Anthologizing, in a sense, as a poetics, which Rothenberg and Joris achieved, I think, in the first two books of the Poems for the Millennium (even as they had prepared a big section of Yasusada, only to excise it at the last moment, after Eliot Weinberger’s article in the Village Voice, in the mid-90s). How in touch are you with Rothenberg? Though he may not be in the best of health now, I don't know…
love your way, deep poet.
Kent
MN (Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 11:47 AM)
Dear Kent,
...
Let me answer your question. Every poet, every poem in the anthology is real. The index at the very end of the book is an authentic index. Every poem can be connected to a specific book or magazine, published in a specific date in which the poem appears, in at least recognizable form, in Turkish. On the other hand, sometimes my own lines are added to the translations. A number of times, the translations exist as metapoems from the original texts focusing on, expanding inherent qualities, not semantically expressed, in the originals. If the anthology is still read in the future, a critic who knows both English and Turkish will discover a treasure house of ideas, processes, from the absolutely literal to "revelatory," how a translation can occur; and that is why translation, in my view, is the dominant poetic genre of our time. Within that frame, both Doubled Flowering and The Miseries of Poetry are translations, not merely a hoax (Yasusada) or a heteronymic mask (Papaditsas). Let me explain. (By the way, my afterward to Seyhan Erozçelik's Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds, Talisman, 2010, describes in great detail why I translate Coffee Grinds section of the book with total fidelity to the rhythms, cadences of the original so that one listening to a public reading of the Turkish text while looking at the translation can tell where the reader is without oneself knowing Turkish. And why, in the Rosestrikes section, twenty-four poems become forty-seven (fragments, faithful translations, rearrangements, mega poems, etc., etc.) The essay presents a concrete example of my ideas on translation. Seyhan Erozçelik himself loved these translations and so did many other poets of his generation.
In 1991, I wrote a short essay, "Translation and Style" for Talisman print journal (http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/murat_nemet_nejat.html). In it I write that every authentic ("transparent") translation has a stylistic identity ("style precedes meaning") that separates it from a poem that is "original" in that language. A transparent translation never gets integrated into the second language; remains on its peripheries, acting as a ideal, a distant and distinct paradigm (in Spicer that becomes Lorca's voice from the dead, later Mars) that poets in the language can feed on to satisfy a linguistic "lack" and expand, change. Walter Benjamin says a translation hits the target language tangentially, meaning is attached to a translation loosely." What remains is style, an ideality, belonging to, is a fragment of an ideal language, the intentio that belongs to all languages. In original poems, style is more contingent on meaning, integrated with (trapped in) it. A translation makes the intentio (potential possibilities) of a language visible. That's why transparent translations are inflexion points in a language. Pound's "The Seafarer" can not be considered an "original" American poem. Its harsh sounds, its archaic phrase inversions disorient the idea of poetic beauty, opening the door to a modern American poetry to come. Its sound/style acts as a liberator, a portal, though not many other poems in Anglo-Saxon scansion has been written afterward. Many poems in Doubled Flowering and those in The Miseries of Poetry have a strong stylistic identity. That's why the foreign name Yasusada and a gnostic Monastery in Greece, and many editorial interventions in between, are attached to them. Among other things, Eda is such a stylistic marker -- a sound saturated with silence, a poetic direction, a way of reading/looking at a poem, integrating a modern way of seeing -- words as if they are moving images in a film that the eye/I/mind must follow -- into poetry.
Eda, as the unifying poetics of modern Turkish poetry, did not exist when I wrote the anthology. As the editor of the anthology, I invented it. In that way, one can say the anthology is a hoax, not describing a pre-existing reality. In fact, Ben Friedlander told me that the book felt like a hoax because of its organic unity (elaborations around Eda), and that I often forgot to mention the poet's name while reading translations from the book, plus, in his word, the "audacity" of not containing any biographical information on the poets (except for their birth and death dates). On the other hand, the younger poets (two-fifth of the translations in the book) "discovered" Eda and embraced it as their poetics. In that way, true.
This kind of hoax -- true and false - is related to prophecy: a prophecy uttered in the present tense, in a state of trance. It is a linguistic/imaginative gesture, a leap of faith probing the dark, a fact (pre)existing there, but not yet happened -- infinite potentiality (which a transparent translation real-izes also. This faith connects it to sacredness, the magma that it is. After reading my 1993 essay "Questions of Accent," the translations in Eda anthology and Animals of Dawn, Runa told me she saw them as beacons to what she was moving toward and doing as a Bengali poet, called them "quantum correspondents" of her work, speaking through the submarine layers of language.
There are certain works that feel like hoaxes, that sense being inherent to them. When I first read Moby Dick I thought and assumed that Melville had made up all the encyclopedic details and lore that constitute the beginning of most chapters. Charles Olson must have felt the same because the first chapter of Call Me Ishmael points to all the historical documents that support the "truthfulness" of those, some way, phantasmagoric lists -- imagined and true.
Anthologies, Sacred texts, translations and hoaxes are related. Aren't books considered sacred (the Torah, the Bible, Veda, Ramanaya, even The Iliad and The Odyssey, etc.) historically, often anthologies, collections of earlier stories, songs, prayers, poems, etc., selected by an editor (or editors)? But a single author is assigned to them, essentially God. That's what a hoax does. But the people accept the book as the truth, the word (not words) of God: true and untrue simultaneously, sacred.
The sacred texts are not written by their authors, but edited. They are collections of earlier poems, prayers, proverbs, stories (often oral in their origin) without the authority of authorship: "utterances... in a state of trance." The naming reveals their truth. In other words, a holy text is a collection of prophetic utterances in the past whose truth is realized (revealed) by God. The potential reveals its truth. Time is reversed from chronology to idea, potentiality.
Transparent translation enacts the parallel process purely on a linguistic level, revealing the potential meanings, directions, entrapped in the original text in another language. Both languages open to each other --the second one absorbing what it lacks (growing a new limb) and the original --in the mirror of the translation -- looking at itself in a new way, altering and expanding its view of it. Such translations occur on the level of intentio (total intent, possible utterances of all languages), liberating each from its specific modes of intention. They cross cultural lines and meanings are not bound to observe specific literary traditions.[2]
That's the reason why Jerry calls the translator "the technician of the sacred."
Take care of yourself and be well.
Affectionately,
Murat
KJ (Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 8:25 PM)
Murat, your letters are like a new genre--the epistolary essay. And so deeply interesting. Thank you for this, so informative and fascinating.
I wish we still had Dispatches, because we'd feature this in a heartbeat.
my best to you, and thank you for this fine letter, poet.
tu amigo, siempre,
Kent
...
[1] In Turkish Voices, written in 1990/92, a good number of the poems consist of translations of lines from one or more Turkish poets spliced together to which, often. my own lines are added also. In Turkish Voices one can not tell which poems are original and which translations from which poem or poet. The idea of ownership of a poem or the distinction between original and translation is blurred. The purpose is to evoke the poetic quality that belongs to a language. Turkish Voices anticipates the poetics of the Eda Anthology (Talisman, 2004) where my purpose is to translate the totality of a language, individual poets placed in relation to that totality. As the first sentence of its introduction says, "As much as a collection of poems and essays, this book is a translation of a language." ("The Idea of a Book").
[2] The absence of a definitive text (but a meandering, often contradictory collection of scenes) and the historical questions around Shakespeare as the true author of his plays places Hamlet among those sacred texts. My poem Animals of Dawn, written the form of “commentaries,” are additions to, an extension (transparent translation) of that text.
I. Preliminary Note
I met first Kent Johnson on the Buffalo Poetics List in the late 1990’s. His name was often mentioned angrily as the perpetrator of a “hoax” titled Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. The heated debate around that book, international in the scope of its attention, was just beginning then, and I was not yet familiar with the work. As the nature of the poetic fiction became clearer to me, and as I began reading passages from the work (which resonated with extreme beauty to me) and sensing the “editorial” reflective processes by which it had come about, I realized that this “hoax” was asking profound questions about the nature of ownership and originality in poetry. (I had just finished writing my poem Turkish Voices, which grappled with these questions.)[1] And, even more subtle and radical to me, was what the work was implying about the nature of any book, how a work of poetry is put together, what “a book is.” The editorial details that framed Doubled Flowering were extended in Kent’s next work, The Miseries of Poetry. The humorously pages-long list of blurbs on this follow-up book (reminiscent to me of Swift’s The Tale of the Tub), along with the even more Byzantine editorial passing of batons, convinced me Kent was an original mind – even as critics went on calling him names--one Language poet even pronouncing at an MLA podium, and later in a widely distributed essay, that he was an example of “white male rage” (though in what way, to this day, is unclear to me).
I began to defend Kent publicly on the Buffalo List and other venues. In an essay I wrote for Cipher Journal “Translation: Contemplating Against the Grain” (https://www.cipherjournal.com/html/nemet-nejat_spicer.html), I stated in its last paragraph that he was one of the very few American poets who had a vision of a new kind of poetry. Kent later did a long interview with me, published in Jacket. I reviewed his Homage to the Last Avant-Garde for Rain Taxi in 2008. A decade later I became a contributing editor to his and Michael Boughn’s Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. We then recommenced an occasional but substantial correspondence by e-mail. We became comrades, amigos, in the Poetry Wars.
Kent and I never met, but our paths crossed in unexpected moments, often bent by the tendency of poets to associate us. Douglas Messerli, in 1996, accepted my manuscript, for Sun and Moon, of Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies almost by return mail, leaving an acceptance message on my phone. These poems were written during the 1960’s, and I had translated them in the early 1980’s through a labor of love, unwrapping Ayhan’s mysterious Turkish in English. No publisher was interested in it, finding it totally incomprehensible (except for one who found it too “cliché”). The manuscript had lain dormant in my drawer over ten years – I had sent it to Sun and Moon on the spur of the moment. Douglas had one request – wanted to see a reference to Ayhan’s name and a picture of him in an official publication. Presenting to him the pictorial proof weeks later, under the Biltmore clock in New York (the picture that appears on the cover of the Green Integer edition of the poem in 2016), I smiled. He said that he couldn’t believe such poetry could have been written in the 60’s by a poet nobody had heard of, in a country whose poetry nobody gave a second thought to, except for Nazim Hikmet. The first Poems for the Millennium Anthology was being edited at the time, and the only Turkish poet included was Hikmet, despite all my protestations to Pierre Joris. At that time, strongly approved by Neruda, I suppose only Hikmet qualified. The assumption was all the new, real stuff occurred in some kind of association with the Language School group. Its relevant pedigree – if it existed and was not immaculate conception-- could only derive from the West. Douglas encountered a new universe, with its rules and dynamic force, and wanted to be sure it was “real.” “I didn’t want to be the butt of a second joke,” he said to me (the silent referent being Yasusada.
An even more striking encounter occurred when Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry was published by Talisman Books in 2004. During dinner after a reading at Orono in 2005, the poet sitting next to me told me in a gracious manner that there was a rumor my anthology was a hoax and asked whether it was true. Of course not, I replied. Every translation in it is connected to an index at the end of the book, specifying the date and place of its publication. She didn’t seem convinced. I looked around, everybody at the table was staring at me. Obviously, the subject had been on their mind for a while. “Then why does everybody think it is a hoax,” she said. I said, “I don’t know. Maybe because I have defended Kent Johnson over the years?”
The stigma of hoax hounded the anthology in Turkey as well. Though obviously not true, a group of Turkish critics applied the same term as well. I began to think that perhaps “hoaxiness,” so to speak, is the character of certain kinds of writing-- part of the DNA of an underground, subgenre expression. What was this expression? Was it merely an illicit, even criminal tendency of writing, as the current norms held it to be, or was it something else, much more central to poetic nature and potentially legitimate in its many and even ancient tributaries? This question occupied me the next fifteen years and directed the path of my work.
Kent and I had two extended dialogues in 2020, the first initiated by me. I asked him to explain the difference between the Latin American Neo-Baroque and European Art Nouveau and Modernisme. The second occurred well into the pandemic and was initiated by Kent. His questions related to the Eda anthology. The result was an expansive exchange where both our works were explored, reflected in each other’s work.
The following is the text of the second group of e-mails between Kent and I. I tried to keep them as close to their original state to preserve their flavor, the spirit in which they occurred, excluding only the most intimate personal details unrelated to poetry. What remains, I think, has some relevant things to say about the state of modern American poetry and its Poetry Wars.
The following is published with the permission of Murat Nemet-Nejat and Kent Johnson.
--Murat Nemet-Nejat
II. Dialogue by E-Mail
Kent Johnson (Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:28 PM)
...
your EDA is a freaking, strange, utterly unique masterwork.
I went back to it two days ago and have been reading for hours.
Whoa.
I still don't understand, though, why this caused so much antagonism towards you in Turkey?
Why wouldn't Turkish poets have seen this as a profound gift to Turkish poetry? I face my naivete in asking that. Maybe the scene in Turkey is even more vindictive than it is here?
love,
Kent
KJ (Wed, Jul 29, 2020nat 11:32 PM)
Murat, how much of you is in EDA?
The question involves the problems of translation, of course.
Is that part of the problem with your fellow poets in Turkey, that you translucinated the poems in a radical way, instead of just simply "translating" them?
...
Murat Nemet-Nejat (Sun, August 2, 2020 at 6:25 PM)
Dear Kent,
Let me first respond to your question, why the Eda anthology was so controversial in Turkey. In fact, years ago I gave a talk in front of several hundred people at the major Bilkent university in Ankara arguing the reasons. One of the faculty members, a well-known poet, in the audience was a major critic of the anthology. My talk was followed by an extensive Q&A during which the scholars and the poet mainly critiqued me and the students understood and defended me. My work spoke to them.
There are multiple reasons, the first of which is quite simple. Some poets and critics considered very important are not in the anthology (or are represented with one or two pages) while others considered minor by the same critics occupy prominent places. The poet who attacked me during the Q&A, for instance, was one of the poets not in the anthology. The way perhaps Pound does with with English poetry, my anthology rearranges the canon of modern Turkish poetry to the chagrin of most of Turkish critics.
The second has to do with Turks' sense of themselves. The Turkish literary scholars essentially see the Ottoman court poetry (the Divan) and modern Turkish poetry as a continuum. This enhances the importance of Turkish poetry by adding historical depth to it. To the contrary, I see a radical break between the two. Ottoman court poetry was written in a hybrid Persian, essentially using a Persian syntax, the word order much more stiff being an Indo-European language, using Persian prosody which is based on syllable stresses, with a vocabulary which is a mixture of Persian, Turkish and Arabic words. Modern Turkish poetry is written in Anatolian Turkish which is agglutinative and derives from Central Asia. There lies all the difference. Unlike Persian, Turkish syllables do not have stress values. Music in Turkish is achieved through manipulation of word order in a sentence to achieve different tonalities and processes of thought. The music is in the cadences, that move to a zero point of yearning or a point of infinity in a sentence. I explain how this works in detail in my introduction in the Eda Anthology.
Turkish words also follow the rule of vowel harmony (each word can have either only close or only open vowels) besides having, compared to English, a relatively small vocabulary. The upshot of these two factors is that, in Turkish, multiple meanings have the tendency to implode towards the same sound, the same word. To me, this implosive force is profoundly linked to Spicer's vision of the "paradisaical language" being one with "infinitely small" vocabulary. Eda, embedded in Turkish and in Turkish poetry, is that vision of "Mars" and of Benjamin's "ideal language." Translating from Turkish poetry (the way I envision Turkish poetry) closely echoes the practice of the serial poem for Spicer, a "writing against the grain" that elicits in words the traces of a remote ideality, whether of "low ghosts/logos" or the Sufi divine.
This is one key way, Kent, that my practices as an American poet (not only a translator) and a translator of Turkish poetry --i.e. the personal and the objective-- are synthesized. This does not mean that I am not truly an American poet (that's what Bernstein thinks and once referred to me as, "he is not one of us" or another one asserted, “he is not an American poet, he is a translator ) or that I am distorting Turkish poetry. On both accounts, far from it. But it means that, in both cases, I am forcing the reader to look at the subject in an altered, new way. In English, I am offering a poetry based on cadential movements for its music, using space and the eye in dynamic ways, and breaking up the traditional autonomy of the form of the poem (the way you break up the concept of ownership/authorship in Doubled Flowering and The Miseries of Poetry) by adopting the language of film --in essence, a poetry contra Language Poetry, a poetry of the future. In Turkey, I force the critics and many older poets to look at Turkish language in a completely altered way that leads to a new understanding of what a Turkish poem is and does and says, where its awesome strength lies, resulting in a rearrangement of their poetic firmament. Except for a few younger generation of poets and one or two critics, that was a hard pill to swallow.
80 to 90% of what I say about Turkish poetry in the Eda anthology was unknown before the book came out in 2004, both in relation to poets about whom a lot was written and by those poets themselves who appear prominently in the anthology. Simply, no intellectual or critical language existed to define this poetry in its own terms.
For instance, it is quite clear that Istanbul plays a central place in 20th century Turkish poetry. But literally no one, critic or poet, had noticed that, seen in its totality, in different periods poets focused on different parts of the city, progressively revealing the names and lives of suppressed populations, the underbelly living in those areas, minority groups, Greeks, Armenians, Jews --as opposed to "Turks" -- gays, prostitutes, child hustlers, transvestites, etc., etc. (I discuss this aspect of the poetry in detail in the introduction to the anthology and in Ece Ayhan's A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies). A subversive arc, a subtext, of spiritual/political liberation runs through twentieth century Turkish poetry. Nobody literally had noticed or written about it. By the late 1980's, Istanbul had changed from a city of one million to twelve million. Around that time the poetry changes once again. It becomes more abstract, dialectic, a poetry of ideas -- rather than images. I call this poetry, unnoticed as something radically new before, "the poetry of motion." It is the poets of this movement who embraced Eda as the poetics for their poems and loved the translations in the anthology.
There is an intimate link between the spiritual, cultural and political life of Turkish people and Eda poetry. They mirror and are affected by each other. This synthesis creates truly a poetry of the people. As a "paradisaical" ideal, Eda stands in stark contrast to the "avant"/"post-avant" (or European avant-garde) that are relegated more and more to a place of coterie and irrelevance. By the way, that is what I love about Runa's poetry. In a subtly subversive way, it reflects the ideas and spirituality of the Hindu culture --it directly derives from it -- despite her background as a scientist and the sophistication of her work.
The connection between the agglutination of the Turkish syntax and the spiritual potency of Turkish poetry is something no Turkish critic had mentioned or even hinted at before the anthology. I first began to sense this link -- that I was missing something, something is eluding me -- in late 80's and early 90's (like a fish slowly realizing it lives within the medium of water), and the growing realization reached its fruition in a stretch of 5-6 years writing the anthology, as the idea of Eda as a poetics developed. I explore the inherent unity between agglutination and Sufism and style in detail in my introduction and multiple other essays in the anthology, particularly the essay, "A Godless Sufism: Ideas On the 20th Century Turkish Poetry." "Godless Sufism" is the most explosive idea in the book. It cuts right across the political divide in Turkey between the radical secularism of followers of Atatürk, more centered in urban areas and among intellectuals and the rest of the population, mostly from Anatolia.
When Ahmet Hasim (the first poet in the anthology and inventor/creator of the sinuous, feminine, yearning, arabesque movement of Eda line/sound, see "That Space" ) began to write in Turkish in the early years of 20th century, Turkish (the language spoken in the street) was an oral literature, with centuries of some very powerful folk poems by Anatolian troubadours. The themes are erotic, spiritual (a populist, pious, mystical "have-not" Sufism), political (for instance, under the guise of Sufi sacrifice inviting rebellion against the central Sunni government) or a combination of all. It had its own form, the Koshma, which was syllabic and more suitable to the rhythms of the language. The word "eda" comes originally from koshmas. It refers to the allure of the walk of a beautiful woman, her beauty not fragmented and fetishized, as "lips" or "eyes" or "eyebrows," etc., as in Ottoman/Persian poetry; her beauty is in the totality of her walk, "a beauty of motion." Eda destroys and feminizes the patriarchal architecture of earlier poetry, its "stressed" metrical sound. Instead, it opens a sinuous music running through the cadences of the subtle, agglutinative arabesques of the Turkish syntax: a poetry of thought's movements embodied in a poetry of motion.
Ahmet Hasim was born in Iraq and his education in Persian and Arabic, and the themes and forms of Ottoman poetry. Writing in Turkish, the nearest written model he can turn to was a 16th century Sufi poem Leyla and Majnun by Fuzuli, a Turkish poet also born in Iraq and who wrote also poems in Persian and Arabic. In other words, Hasim's poetry is written in a virginal language the poet did not quite "know" or "master" -- a second language so to speak, an open territory of language -- that the poet has to explore and discover to survive in it. ("Arguments On the Origins of Turkish Poetry," pp. 319/22). In the poem "That Space," for instance, Hasim suddenly introduces key phrases/ideas in Persian because he doesn't have a Turkish expression for it. The Indo-European based syntax of of these phrases and the stressed syllables of the words clash with the flat, agglutinated fluidity of Turkish. The result is sudden gaps, openings, an "awkwardness" reminiscent to me of the burns in Papaditsa's manuscripts. Turkish critics assigned this aspect to his "lack of craft." In truth, it is the heart of his strength as a poet. His poetry taps into a language "small" in vocabulary and "narrow" in physical sound range --the language of a melancholy paradise, of an arabesque of turns and twists full of yearning. All the poets in the anthology regard Turkish, implicitly, as an insufficient language that they must explore and bend to imprint their meaning. Their multi-faceted experiments constitute the explosive power of modern Turkish poetry. That's what Eda is.
There are additional aspects to Turkish that intensify the minimalist, implosive vision of language that Spicer implies. Turkish has no gender distinctions, nor does it distinguish between human and non-human (animal, plant or object). The same pronoun applies to all. Given the inherent instability of Turkish syntax due to a lack of fixed word order and the fact that single words may possess multiple meanings due to vowel harmony and "poor" vocabulary, utterances in Turkish are implicitly ambiguous. A sentence in a Turkish poem may have independent parallel meanings, depending on what meaning of a sound or declension the reader focuses on, leading the entire poem in multiple directions. These poems disperse in the mind simultaneously, as multiple meanings ( silent clicks logs make hitting each other in the water), instead of linearly going their merry way on the page. This essence of dispersal in Eda is what I project in my poems, placing them in space: full of puns, words breaking up, often multiple poems clicking against each other on the same page, the reader's eye absorbing them all -- in that way, liberating English syntax from its own rigidity. That is the "structure of escape" of my 7-part serial poem.
Kent, perhaps the greatest difficulty Turkish critics had was my not treating modern Turkish poetry as a collection of well crafted, gem-like, autonomous poems by great poets. That I placed its power in the genius of the language multiple poets explored and expanded. During my talk at Bilkent University, the critics in attendance assumed the meaning of "eda" to be tone, voice (common meaning of the word at the time, implying a macho attitude) and kept telling me that every poet had his own eda (his own voice, own attitude) and I had arbitrarily included some and not others. They could not see the transformative way (honestly, subversive, feminized. queer way) I was using the word. Consequently, they decided I had invented my view of Turkish and my anthology was a hoax. Students in the audience, and a poet who had come from another city to hear me, knew different and asked the most penetrating questions.
Encountering you for the first time in Buffalo Poetics List, hearing of the attacks on Yasusada, particularly after reading The Miseries of Poetry, I realized that your view of language as magma, transcending individual poets' egos and senses of ownership, was very akin to my own sense of poetry. I'd just written the poem Turkish Voices. We shared an attachment to Pessoa. From that moment on, I considered you a comrade and was on your side in the poetry wars.
I hope this answers some of your questions.
You and your family keep safe.
Affectionately,
Murat
KJ (Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 6:07 PM)
Dear Murat.
This is one of the most interesting emails I have received in quite some time. That it comes from you is hardly surprising. I am honored by our friendship and our close affinities. Isn't it strange and sometimes magical how those affinities find poets and not the other way around? Maybe that is EDA, too. EDA being, I sense, even still, for me at least, something much larger and more mysterious than anyone knows about here. I will confess something, and I say this, or ask this, knowing that those folks at Orono asked you a similar question--but I hope you know that I ask it with a bit less naivete about issues of translation and poetical fiction than was informing their uncertainty: Are all the poets in EDA real, or are some of them “yours”? Or might there be real ones whom you have partly invented, as it were? I am fully aware that this gets very complicated. And I am aware that much of the spirit of the book is to be understood not so much in the discrete poems, as it is in the totality-- the overall flow and symphony of the sequence and arrangement. Anthologizing, in a sense, as a poetics, which Rothenberg and Joris achieved, I think, in the first two books of the Poems for the Millennium (even as they had prepared a big section of Yasusada, only to excise it at the last moment, after Eliot Weinberger’s article in the Village Voice, in the mid-90s). How in touch are you with Rothenberg? Though he may not be in the best of health now, I don't know…
love your way, deep poet.
Kent
MN (Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 11:47 AM)
Dear Kent,
...
Let me answer your question. Every poet, every poem in the anthology is real. The index at the very end of the book is an authentic index. Every poem can be connected to a specific book or magazine, published in a specific date in which the poem appears, in at least recognizable form, in Turkish. On the other hand, sometimes my own lines are added to the translations. A number of times, the translations exist as metapoems from the original texts focusing on, expanding inherent qualities, not semantically expressed, in the originals. If the anthology is still read in the future, a critic who knows both English and Turkish will discover a treasure house of ideas, processes, from the absolutely literal to "revelatory," how a translation can occur; and that is why translation, in my view, is the dominant poetic genre of our time. Within that frame, both Doubled Flowering and The Miseries of Poetry are translations, not merely a hoax (Yasusada) or a heteronymic mask (Papaditsas). Let me explain. (By the way, my afterward to Seyhan Erozçelik's Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds, Talisman, 2010, describes in great detail why I translate Coffee Grinds section of the book with total fidelity to the rhythms, cadences of the original so that one listening to a public reading of the Turkish text while looking at the translation can tell where the reader is without oneself knowing Turkish. And why, in the Rosestrikes section, twenty-four poems become forty-seven (fragments, faithful translations, rearrangements, mega poems, etc., etc.) The essay presents a concrete example of my ideas on translation. Seyhan Erozçelik himself loved these translations and so did many other poets of his generation.
In 1991, I wrote a short essay, "Translation and Style" for Talisman print journal (http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/murat_nemet_nejat.html). In it I write that every authentic ("transparent") translation has a stylistic identity ("style precedes meaning") that separates it from a poem that is "original" in that language. A transparent translation never gets integrated into the second language; remains on its peripheries, acting as a ideal, a distant and distinct paradigm (in Spicer that becomes Lorca's voice from the dead, later Mars) that poets in the language can feed on to satisfy a linguistic "lack" and expand, change. Walter Benjamin says a translation hits the target language tangentially, meaning is attached to a translation loosely." What remains is style, an ideality, belonging to, is a fragment of an ideal language, the intentio that belongs to all languages. In original poems, style is more contingent on meaning, integrated with (trapped in) it. A translation makes the intentio (potential possibilities) of a language visible. That's why transparent translations are inflexion points in a language. Pound's "The Seafarer" can not be considered an "original" American poem. Its harsh sounds, its archaic phrase inversions disorient the idea of poetic beauty, opening the door to a modern American poetry to come. Its sound/style acts as a liberator, a portal, though not many other poems in Anglo-Saxon scansion has been written afterward. Many poems in Doubled Flowering and those in The Miseries of Poetry have a strong stylistic identity. That's why the foreign name Yasusada and a gnostic Monastery in Greece, and many editorial interventions in between, are attached to them. Among other things, Eda is such a stylistic marker -- a sound saturated with silence, a poetic direction, a way of reading/looking at a poem, integrating a modern way of seeing -- words as if they are moving images in a film that the eye/I/mind must follow -- into poetry.
Eda, as the unifying poetics of modern Turkish poetry, did not exist when I wrote the anthology. As the editor of the anthology, I invented it. In that way, one can say the anthology is a hoax, not describing a pre-existing reality. In fact, Ben Friedlander told me that the book felt like a hoax because of its organic unity (elaborations around Eda), and that I often forgot to mention the poet's name while reading translations from the book, plus, in his word, the "audacity" of not containing any biographical information on the poets (except for their birth and death dates). On the other hand, the younger poets (two-fifth of the translations in the book) "discovered" Eda and embraced it as their poetics. In that way, true.
This kind of hoax -- true and false - is related to prophecy: a prophecy uttered in the present tense, in a state of trance. It is a linguistic/imaginative gesture, a leap of faith probing the dark, a fact (pre)existing there, but not yet happened -- infinite potentiality (which a transparent translation real-izes also. This faith connects it to sacredness, the magma that it is. After reading my 1993 essay "Questions of Accent," the translations in Eda anthology and Animals of Dawn, Runa told me she saw them as beacons to what she was moving toward and doing as a Bengali poet, called them "quantum correspondents" of her work, speaking through the submarine layers of language.
There are certain works that feel like hoaxes, that sense being inherent to them. When I first read Moby Dick I thought and assumed that Melville had made up all the encyclopedic details and lore that constitute the beginning of most chapters. Charles Olson must have felt the same because the first chapter of Call Me Ishmael points to all the historical documents that support the "truthfulness" of those, some way, phantasmagoric lists -- imagined and true.
Anthologies, Sacred texts, translations and hoaxes are related. Aren't books considered sacred (the Torah, the Bible, Veda, Ramanaya, even The Iliad and The Odyssey, etc.) historically, often anthologies, collections of earlier stories, songs, prayers, poems, etc., selected by an editor (or editors)? But a single author is assigned to them, essentially God. That's what a hoax does. But the people accept the book as the truth, the word (not words) of God: true and untrue simultaneously, sacred.
The sacred texts are not written by their authors, but edited. They are collections of earlier poems, prayers, proverbs, stories (often oral in their origin) without the authority of authorship: "utterances... in a state of trance." The naming reveals their truth. In other words, a holy text is a collection of prophetic utterances in the past whose truth is realized (revealed) by God. The potential reveals its truth. Time is reversed from chronology to idea, potentiality.
Transparent translation enacts the parallel process purely on a linguistic level, revealing the potential meanings, directions, entrapped in the original text in another language. Both languages open to each other --the second one absorbing what it lacks (growing a new limb) and the original --in the mirror of the translation -- looking at itself in a new way, altering and expanding its view of it. Such translations occur on the level of intentio (total intent, possible utterances of all languages), liberating each from its specific modes of intention. They cross cultural lines and meanings are not bound to observe specific literary traditions.[2]
That's the reason why Jerry calls the translator "the technician of the sacred."
Take care of yourself and be well.
Affectionately,
Murat
KJ (Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 8:25 PM)
Murat, your letters are like a new genre--the epistolary essay. And so deeply interesting. Thank you for this, so informative and fascinating.
I wish we still had Dispatches, because we'd feature this in a heartbeat.
my best to you, and thank you for this fine letter, poet.
tu amigo, siempre,
Kent
...
[1] In Turkish Voices, written in 1990/92, a good number of the poems consist of translations of lines from one or more Turkish poets spliced together to which, often. my own lines are added also. In Turkish Voices one can not tell which poems are original and which translations from which poem or poet. The idea of ownership of a poem or the distinction between original and translation is blurred. The purpose is to evoke the poetic quality that belongs to a language. Turkish Voices anticipates the poetics of the Eda Anthology (Talisman, 2004) where my purpose is to translate the totality of a language, individual poets placed in relation to that totality. As the first sentence of its introduction says, "As much as a collection of poems and essays, this book is a translation of a language." ("The Idea of a Book").
[2] The absence of a definitive text (but a meandering, often contradictory collection of scenes) and the historical questions around Shakespeare as the true author of his plays places Hamlet among those sacred texts. My poem Animals of Dawn, written the form of “commentaries,” are additions to, an extension (transparent translation) of that text.