I’m interested in what the thunder says. I’m interested in the magic of printing., its rumbling divagation. My long-time poetry partner, fellow-traveler, Vlad, runs 1080press. I help sometimes. The problem of publishing often is, as Seth Price writes, dispersion. I like that ink has history, and color has history, that weighs it down. If you cut the paper cross-grain, if you put too much ink on the roller, the words might go nowhere.

English is my only language, and I am not at home in it. The arrangement of words on the page, or in the mouth, is, thus, brackish. Language spoken is the language of redemption. I came to Hölderlin late. I was in Filip Marinovich’s Shakespearean Motley College, misunderstood a prompt, and came face to face with Hölderlin’s alter-ego Scardanelli, dancing in some sub-basement of history.

My grandfather died, and my parents’ dog died. I think in this brief eruption of death I was faced with the problem of translation. As always, I am influenced by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson: “Translation is the persistence of the body, but it also enfigures the potential of the body to change, to rot or release emanations. Translation scandalizes the self-sameness of human presence · it is the corpse or the ghost that follows too late or too soon on human presence.” [1] Translation increases opportunities for misprision, which is why I am drawn to it—the embrace that creates closeness and distance. The embrace, across language, that commissions letters from dogs, and nocturnal perambulations from humans.





Note

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[1] Johannes Göransson.Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation. Tucson: Noemi Press, 2018. 22.