Keywords: community; translation; poetic practice; soliloquy; replay; Caribbean poetry; plurilingualism; hospitality
Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo was a guest speaker at both of the ‘Rethinking Lyric Communities’ workshops, held in Oxford and Berlin in 2022, which lie at the root of this volume. With immense generosity, Capildeo shared with the participants their reflections on lyric, translation, and community, based on their own poetic practice and engagement with the work and words of other poets. This conversation emerges from and expands on those dialogues.
Editors: Your writing is far from being a soliloquy. Your poems are often dedicated to specific people and seem to presuppose a collective addressee. Do you understand poetry and translation as ways of interacting with an existing literary or social community? Or are poetry and translation for you rather a way of creating a community — of inventing a collective addressee that transcends geographical, chronological, and linguistic boundaries?
Capildeo: Thank you for beginning the conversation with the chance to consider how poetry and translation ‘speak’, and with whom. Throughout the conversation, if I may, I shall answer as a poet, rather than an academic — as someone who constantly either makes or, at some level, is in the contemplative phase before or after making; even when wiping the kitchen counter, even when running for an early morning train. It occurred to me that my answers to your questions will be different if I speak from the place of making something, and how that thing is made, rather than speaking about what that thing is, or why it exists. To speak from the midst of process, and/or to spend more time immersed in process, creates a different rhythm of communicability.
Even if one of my poems arises from critical thought, or if critical principles may be derived from it after the fact — research-based practice, practice-based research — the possibility of (thinking about) writing often presents me with an untranslatable set of images and ‘music’. For example, this question brings to mind breathing during swimming; fluidity, effort, weightlessness, light, direction, an element which permits belonging both above and under a surface. Let me leave that image, and those sensations, there.
It’s interesting that you mention soliloquy. That invokes the idea of theatre — where of course the text (if there is one) is intended to be spoken to an audience, not in an empty room. In fact, in my earlier work (up to 2013 or so), lyrical and dramatic impulses frequently coexist. The variety and strangeness of voice and temper in Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personæ had a huge influence on me, as did Anthony McNeill’s more experimental, yet speaking work. I experienced these theatrical poems as lyrics revoicing themselves in my imagination. This saved me from falling into the contemporary trap whereby lyric poetry packages identity or rehearses anecdotes of the poet’s life.
In a sense I have written quite a lot of what I might call ‘lyric soliloquies’ — poems expressing an individual character’s voice, with the pressure of a stated or, more usually, unstated emotional situation. These are poems with a single voice, distinct from what I might call the ‘noisy’ or ‘boundless’ lyric I also practise. When I first moved to the UK as a student, I wrote a binder full of lyric poems spoken by ‘characters’ that distilled elements of the weird scene of Oxford in the 1990s. (These have been destroyed.) To shape language speaking as not-myself seemed the best way to integrate such a new way of life and such unfamiliar people with my imagination, while retaining an independent sense of self. ‘The Critic in his Natural Habitat’ (in Utter, 2013) is an example of a satirical lyric/soliloquy, which freed me — and, perhaps, other readers — from internalizing put-downs.
I would trace my sense of the lyric as a form for replay, for being heard and spoken by different actors/readers, to these influences and situations; also, to the drama teacher, Sonya Moze, in Trinidad, who made us write monologues (if I recall correctly, this was the occasion for the first of the disturbing poems about trees that I still obsessively produce!), and to my attending Trinidad and Tobago’s Music Festival, where you could hear the same song or piece performed over and over again by as many musicians or choirs as had entered, each trying to make it new, each trying to bring out certain essentials. I have no desire to write purely autobiographical, univocal lyric as a primary form. How would I find out anything about the world? Where would the fun be, for the reader?
However, you are right — in other senses, my poetry is far from being a soliloquy. It is always dialogic and always created in the imagination or hope of encounter. The dead, of course, are interlocutors — writers who have gone before; unwriterly people, whose stories are passed down in oral tradition; and the ordinary dead, who lived irrecoverable lives in the same places I now go about — for the last seven years, a coastal village with an unvisited, quietly historic fishermen’s cemetery, and a building with a staircase that has older fingermarks worn in to the stone where I lean for balance.
I do not think of myself as interacting with a social or literary community, but as releasing the poems to do so; as I’m thinking of the seaside, I have the image of green glass bottles with messages in them (an image liberated from cliché by Scottish writers such as Niall Campbell, in his extraordinary collection Moontide (2014)). The dedicatees belong to the paratext; mostly, these are poem-gifts rather than citational dedications, pointing to a nourishing ‘real-life’ environment of which writing is one small part, rather than towards an/other archive, oeuvre, or argument. I’m not sure whether the poems’ addressee is collective, so much as ‘choose your own adventure’ — unpredictable, multiple. The more ‘complicated’ a poem of mine seems, the more I’ve tried to work ‘ways in’ from a variety of angles, i.e. the more accessible it is, if only readers will have no fear and be ‘a reader’, stop trying to be ‘the reader’. It’s very hard to think of interacting with an existing literary or social community, one, because communities are in flux — they shift and overlap and understand ‘themselves’ and their boundaries differently all the time; two, because a series of startling and unspeakable experiences leads me not to trust too much in poets and critics being consistent or ethical. I love your suggestion of the invention or creation of a community through poetry and translation (note: not through being a poet or translator). Alongside that, I would place Martin Carter’s phrase ‘Discovery of Companion’. I would hope that the interaction between text and reader makes all sorts of connexions light up, carried into the world beyond the book and untraceably into other utterances, other writing, other forms of address and encounter. I would hope any collective be understood and loved as unquantifiable. Even at my noisiest, I am against the measurable, and for the still and small.
In your poetry you often focus on origins: birthplaces, homes, etymologies, and other forms of material or immaterial ‘provenance’. Our impression is that you understand such origins as something one cannot return to, because they are imagined. In your studies on the theory of translation, you similarly define source texts as ‘imagined originals’ to which readers may never return. The title of your first book, No Traveller Returns (2003), refers to travel as a process of translation and points out the impossibility of coming back to the ‘sources’. Do you see poetry and translation as attempts at ‘impossible returns to the original community’, impossible returns both to textual sources and to the sources of geographical-personal identity?
Continuing the theme of (not quite) soliloquy …! No Traveller Returns is, of course, Hamlet’s phrase, as he considers death: ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn | No traveller returns’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, iii. 1). Writing in PN Review (2016), I resituated — or saw one possible origin for — this famous speech, in the Caribbean: ‘discovery’ bringing death to the ‘New World’. I wondered if this resonance was present for others, whether or not it had been for ‘Shakespeare’. Readers, too, can create or invent a collective. Turning to French translators for companionship or elucidation, I found Pierre Le Tourneur in the late eighteenth century: ‘cette contrée ignorée dont nul voyageur ne revient’. Does the etymology of contrée enfold confrontational encounter, a whisper of guilt down the ages? Markowicz presents us with ‘Cette terre inconnue dont les frontières | Se referment sur tous les voyageurs’. In the twenty-first century translation, death is a place with closed borders; or rather, a place closing its borders on people. Suddenly I am back in the Caribbean, seeing massacred or trafficked bodies washed away by turquoise water on white sand; simultaneously, I am in Kent, the garden of England, seeing migrant bodies washed up by colder water in a colder land … In Kamau Brathwaite’s terminology, there is a ‘tidalectic’ movement between history, environment, literary text, translation/translator, and reader/recipient/actor. I write with the sense of an originary tide of inequality between prestigious texts and their global readership. One collective’s play relates to another’s nightmare … For me, origins exercise more strength than they retain reality; they are not entirely imagined, but not humanly graspable.
I cannot find sharp enough words for contemporary writers who would be horrified to be accused of softening up the culture for fascism lite. Yet that is what I see in the nostalgia industry. Popular non-fiction and poetry writers pen idyllic landscapes empty of anyone but the occasional tow-headed mystic. This is marketed as preferable to delving into the teeming and multicoloured truth of Britain as island nation: Romans from Arabia, Vikings who may have been to Constantinople, Black Tudors, Virginia Woolf’s dreamy, dark good looks handed down (as for so many Brits in the nineteenth century) from South Asian ancestors … You have only to see the attack on the arts and humanities in universities, where archives and analysis provide not only correctives, but colour. I would not care for an attempt at an impossible return, or even a magically possible return, to any kind of source, in the sense of a quest for purity; nonetheless, I do love curiosity and accuracy, the kind of attention to detail that, almost as a side effect, widens the scope of our lens on ‘origins’.
Two notes. First, on the idea of nothing, nothingness; being a citizen of nowhere, knowing nothing, being nobody, coming from nothing. What is recognizable as a home, or a birthplace? What can be distinguished, in and by poetry, where ancestral languages have been rendered inaccessible or records have not been kept or traditions of arts and crafts are neither perceived nor (should attention be drawn to them) respected? The impossible assertion of origin and originality as possible — not a return to textual or personal-geographical sources, but an act of faith in and task of recovery of what may or will have been — is something I seek in, and from, poetry and translation.
Currently, I am working on a series of erasure poems that will intermix repeated erasures of a line taken from, or resembling, common speech with new lyric lines. The whole effect will be like a lyric, at first glance, but one that includes the idea of replicability, by presenting a ‘sounding surface’ that is already rubbed smooth of some of its words, paradoxically roughened to softness, like the traces of a decorative border stencilled long ago on an old wall, or a stone worn away in a quick-running, clear stream. There’s a sense for me of the lyric being a place where songful or intensified speech can intersect with the historical; even with mumble or crumbling. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2008), may come to mind for some readers. I’m thinking just as much of the pitiful commemorative verses on rural and working-class tombstones, and the bored, tender, awestricken pause as a visitor deciphers a stranger’s memorial.
The second, much briefer note, is on humility, gratitude, and appropriation. Sometimes a tradition that is not and cannot be ‘mine’, by language, landscape, or affect, like the stylized dramas of interiority of Tamil lyric poetry, moves and changes me, as a person and in my practice. This will be a real transformation but also at second hand. In this case, the encounter came about through the work of translator-poets such as Shash Trevett and A. K. Ramanujan. Their work has a relation to sources and knowability which is more profound in both kind and quality than my response, however overcome I feel, and however much my own poetry and translation will never be the same — this cannot be, for me, originary.
Translation plays a crucial role in your work, not only at the level of theory, but also as an activity and a process that informs your writing. Could you give us an insight into your relationship with translation?
The Puerto Rican poet, translator, and scholar Loretta Collins Klobah, when I interviewed her for PN Review, corrected my references to the ‘multilingualism’ of her lyrical work, where Spanish and English intertwine, to ‘plurilingualism’. That prefix, pluri-, rang true to me and gave me pause for thought. It’s a softer sound and brought to mind James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle; the riverrun of language, beyond and including languages. As a student of translation theory, I was critical of the metaphors for translation that informed, formed, and limited reviewers and readers of literature in translation. Beginning with the overemphasis on the etymological, and the idea of carrying across, which not only suggests a binary, but implies a burden — then the notion of the ancillary, the handmaidenly, which implies a hierarchy between a probably singular, masterful source and an anxious, servile versioning — then the image of palimpsest, or shinethrough, which in some ways I liked best, but was too waxy, too papery — I found an array of sometimes unconscious limitation on how translation should behave, as well as what it might be.
I am sensitive to plurilingualism in what appears to be single-tongued. For example, it seems obvious to me that V. S. Naipaul’s novel The Mystic Masseur, partly set in rural Trinidad, records intergenerational linguistic change, though it is seldom read this way. Sometimes the dialogue between characters who normally speak Trinidad dialect becomes strangely formal, but not in a flowery, bookish way. The way it is patterned reflects a switch to Hindustani or Bhojpuri, of the kind that the generation closer to the emigration from India would make when they wanted to be eloquent or concise, speaking from their fully felt internal selves rather than the imperfection and the charge of ‘illiteracy’ forced on them in the English colonial situation. It is a private, quick, proud, or exasperated switch.
To be sensitive to this is not just to read for sociolinguistic interest, but to hear the different rhythms, the rolled r’s, the greater range of phonologically contrasted consonants and short or long pure vowels, the occasional fluting, thunder, or nasality of delivery — to hear neither through, nor alongside, but in a kind of sound-universe with the suddenly-formal English on the novel’s page. This is a poetic dimension to the prose text, which ‘lifts off’ for me, when I read as a writer, regarding technique and effect that can be ‘translated’ (in the carrying-over sense) into lyric practice, where a ‘single’ voice or cry can invoke, evoke, or seem to be stirred by another way of voicing, proper to another language that also belongs to/with that voice; other sounds, other conventions of expressivity.
Should this example be categorized (perhaps dismissed) as belonging to the ‘postcolonial’? So could the unworded co-presence of, say, Gaelic in the English-language lyrics of a writer like Iain Crichton Smith. So could, perhaps, the unworded co-presence of Old Norse and Latin in Old English poetry … How about Dante’s Purgatorio, xxvi, where Dante considers lust, or excessive vs moderate desire, and the last words are spoken in Occitan by the courtly love poet Arnaut Daniel? The plurilingual situation not only can arise in many ways, but arguably is an ordinary condition for the hearing (if not always the sounding) of lyric and other voices. When I write plurilingually, I am not attempting to disrupt or interrupt the lyrical, nor am I writing strategically — at the moment of composition, at least, it seems to me that I am merely writing musically, people who work with language being perpetual guests in the house of music.
Regarding an insight into my specific relationship with translation, I should say that I am not a translator or interpreter in the strict sense of either word; though there are languages I ‘know’ more than others, and texts in which I’ll immerse myself, and which become part of the ‘sounding universe’ against which my poetry-composing mind ‘checks’ the things it wants on the page. Taking up again the theme of choosing the role of guest, rather than host, let’s consider attunement and humility (which includes respect for accuracy or specialist knowledge). Rather than feeling challenged or annoyed by hearing or seeing words or a script I don’t ‘know’ or ‘understand’, and rather than treating it as pleasingly exotic or a form of birdsong, I try to become extra attentive, extra absorbent, extra open. It’s hard to explain rationally what this involves, and some kinds of academic writing might reach for an innovative use of prepositions, such as listening into. Perhaps it involves self-forgetfulness? If it’s a live performance, I let myself be moved (translated? carried across?) by the activation of different conventions of delivery as well as attentive to the patterning of sound. Is this poetry that issues from a static body, or one in motion? A mask-like face? A stylized ordinariness? Does the voice become songlike? How is the breath placed? I don’t know what my ‘host’ is offering, but I settle for a moment, trusting in their good gifts.
A number of poets and intellectuals originally from the Caribbean have reflected on the palimpsestic and composite nature of Caribbean cultures and identities, arguing that, as a result of the different phases of colonization, this composite and plural identity partakes of different cultures and languages, many of which, however, have their origins in violence and deracination, and feature therefore as phantoms or tragic losses. For many Caribbean authors, this multilingual stratification is a powerful tool for the affirmation of community but also represents the ultimate impossibility of affirming a common origin: this is perhaps a way forward for thinking of community in post-migration societies. You state that ‘language is my home […]; not one particular language’, and your poetry is nourished by a host of different languages and traditions merging with one another: is this aspect of your poetics also a way of responding to and partaking of this particular version of community?
As I reread this question, I am looking through shutters at a stormy spring day in the east of England. The wind is tossing a cypress tree. Small birds are hopping through grass to shelter in a hedge. It’s hard to compass what a way forward for post-migration societies might be, when the new reality including climate change is that we are asked to be complicit, here in the privileged north, in the death, detention, or deportation of people arriving on these shores. Migration is picking up as never before. At the very least, poets need to be able to praise and lament; to argue, and to fall in love. Yet it seems to me as if we are being invited, or pushed towards, not survivors’ guilt but what I would term survivors’ brazenness; not even silence, but speech styled as if perpetually ready for inspection, community as partaking of an official parade, not of mess or mosaic, not of the wonderfully bewildering scope of human emotivity/movement, physical and internal. This is our very contemporary violence and deracination: the blood-nourished rootedness of some, at the expense of others who uproot themselves as a life-affirming or saving move, because their home has become, in Warsan Shire’s phrase, ‘the mouth of a shark’. It makes me resistant to certain strands of soft-seeming or nostalgic nature writing popular at the moment in the UK, where celebrating and mourning in terms of lostness and/or simplicity acts a fig leaf to the otherwise naked formation of a violently rooted collective body.
There is increasing resistance, in colonialism’s beneficiaries, to acknowledging the horrors of colonialism. This includes the refusal to consider whether the transgenerational trauma passed down through the oppressed may correspond to transgenerational complacency passed down through the oppressors. I am not talking only of individual histories (which would include the complications of mixed heritage) but the wider structures, blanks, drifts, and riptides in ‘societies’, tangibly evidenced partly in who has paved roads vs who does not, who expects or enforces quiet in public transport versus who shares food or openly prays, whose existence is acknowledged by Internet algorithms, whose poems are on the radio, whose living communities and heritage inform the shape of the future via AI. I can’t feel a tone of pastness when considering origins. If anything, Caribbean and diaspora cultures could keep us attuned and open to origins as constantly in the making. What past shall we have been, and for whom, as in becoming the future, with any luck we also become the future future’s past? In other words, beyond the future that we can currently imagine relative to our past, there exists a further future that is unimaginable at that present point. While plurilingualism as an aspect of creativity ‘begins’ autobiographically in my Trinidadian childhood, I’d like to see the way that, from book to book, my writing changes without anguish in form, outlook, technique, texture, places, and points of reference as partaking of ‘Caribbeanness’ in some way.
Without anguish. For although your question rightly speaks of phantoms and tragic loss, and Caribbean anglophone literature has a great tradition of hauntedness — Jean Rhys, Edgar Mittelholzer, Pauline Melville, James Aboud, Kevin Jared Hosein, Sharon Millar are just a few names that spring to mind — there also are fierce, freeing, and joyful ways of inhabiting origin, such as the transformations of self and creolized channelling of spiritual and social history through Carnival. Wilson Harris and Peter Minshall would be among the better-known names globally, but the genius ‘on the ground’ is beyond description. I could never wholeheartedly talk about the only x, y, or z to focus on, perhaps especially at the time of hideous atrocities, such as the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians and the underreported occupation of Kashmir. There’s something coercive in the popular put-down, ‘whataboutery’. It suggests that dominant interests, whether in the mainstream media or social groups, prefer to impose a narrow focus and to prevent the imagination ranging and adding up. In the Caribbean and for the Caribbean’s children, the ability to ‘and/both’ has become an aspect of art because it has been and continues to be an aspect of survival. Of flourishing.
I’d like to distinguish between the Caribbean and the Antilles, or at least to say that it’s important to name the archipelago variously, to avoid anglophone dominance of the imagination of place. I’d also like to distinguish between writers in, or writing from, the region, and those like me, who live abroad, and have an ‘exit’ even if they make extended visits ‘home’. Returning to the bright clouds driven through a cold sky here at Eastertide in the east of England, I’d like to note that humans and ‘the environment’ are not so separated, or separable, in the Caribbean. The work of the Barbadian poet-philosopher and innovator Kamau Brathwaite (who also was a Poetry Fellow in Cambridge, the city from which I am writing this answer today) shows us how the actual wind and weather, the literal tide as well as the tide of history, must profoundly shape any truthful poetics. When J. R. Carpenter, whose background is in movement through Canada and France as well as the UK, asked me to contribute a poetic afterword to This is a Picture of Wind (2020), where Carpenter charts the winds of the south-west of England and calls attention to climate change, ‘naturally’ I reached for Édouard Glissant, to learn again how to write the wind …
You are both a poet and a literary scholar, but you have also worked as a lexicographer for the OED — an activity that is based, among other things, on the assessment, study, and representation of the usages, mutations, and circulation of certain linguistic features in communities of users through different epochs and linguistic areas: did you rather concentrate on the practical, or on the theoretical aspects of lexicography? What kind of impact has this work had on your poetry, if any?
Working in-house for the Oxford English Dictionary involved time-targeted editing of the ‘live dictionary’, via XML-based tagging of linguistic features and electronic notes, using special software, and checking the live dictionary against online and physical databases and materials, with consultancy from in-house and external experts as needed. It was intensely practical as well as analytical, and some of the most detailed work I have ever done! The demands on attention and the level of accuracy required meant that we were encouraged to take screen breaks and water breaks, and not to overstay our working hours too far, lest we start making slip-ups.
The good company in the office, and the strict boundaries around time, staved off the melancholy and isolation to which purely poetical or academic researchers can fall prone. Part of the impact that the Oxford English Dictionary had on my poetry was that this camaraderie, and structure, allowed my ‘free time’ on evenings and weekends to be more purely and shamelessly creative. There was not as much carry-over as one finds in other types of work. I recall going home to my flat in East Oxford and feeling well breathed and exercised mentally, able to relax looking at the movement of a buddleia bush against a wooden fence in my tiny back courtyard ‘garden’. The silvery leaves and their ever-changing imprint of shadow on the panels helped me find forms for the tree poems in Dark & Unaccustomed Words, my third full-length book, which I completed in 2008, although it appeared only in 2012 (and is out of print). I was finally able to address the lingering horror of having learnt in childhood of the nuclear devastation visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how the shadows of leaves remained imprinted after the vegetation had been vaporized by the blast.
Utter, my fourth book (2013), continued to be inspired by those years at the Oxford English Dictionary, though I had stopped working there by then. It contains words, such as cringly, dusken, and rivelled, which I loved but were marked as no longer being in regular use, or in use at all. I smuggled these into poems ‘unmarked’, as it were, in contexts where I hoped they would breathe anew. The driving idea of Utter arose from chit-chat within the Oxford English Dictionary etymology group, a wonderful place for cake and literary musing in between the high-speed, high-focus stints. The dictionary can be mistaken as monolithic. However, being ‘inside’ the live dictionary was to feel the coruscating variety of linguistic possibility and to swim in delightful unknowability even while naming and naming. In Utter, poems consider things that seem ‘monolithic’, blank, or unvarying — a field, a tower, time on a Sunday — and how they are alive and teeming with lovely detail. Of course, this lexicography-based feeling of the variegated gorgeousness of language influenced Measures of Expatriation (2016). Working at the Oxford English Dictionary sensitized me even further to ‘noise’, rather than silence, as the background against and from which lyric sings out.
In our conversation in Berlin, you talked about your creative response to the Odyssey, which was commissioned by actor Christopher Kent and musician Gamal Khamis for a narrative recital on ideas of diaspora and migration. Poets Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and J. L. Williams were also involved in the project. Your poems were then published in the pamphlet Odyssey Calling (2020). You condensed the Odyssey into a series of lyrics so that Kent and Khamis could rework it yet again. As you said, translating the epic poem into lyrics was not only a way of making it replicable, replayable, and shareable through different media and bodies, but also a way of breaking down something we have received as a long story of a people or peoples. Refusing to speak for a collective and to provide a poem that could be thought of as the story of a people, you narrow ‘the focus to one or two personal situations’ and keep ‘putting individuals into community situations’. Does turning episodes of Odysseus’s journey into lyric fragments mean reopening the epic poem to the very possibility of its circulation within a community both practically and poetically? Are lyric poems more shareable both because they can be re-enacted in different contexts and because they make room for readers as individuals, including you as reader and poet?
It was extremely exciting to write for an actor and a musician. As a poet, I have always longed for my work to be understood as shareable, created for reinterpretation and replay. At an early reading in Trinidad, I handed copies of some poems to people in the audience who had had a significant positive influence on my writing, and invited them to become co-readers, performing the texts and thus freeing them from ‘my’ voice, to belong to a collective body of voiceable and unspoken memory and experience. Now here was the chance to create texts for people I hardly knew at all, and to do so knowing that my words would be re-mixed in several ways. So, even before thinking about the transformations of epic, I was excited to find my voice, as it were, by giving my voice away.
In the current political conditions in India, academics, journalists, and others have been persecuted for their approaches to the epic traditions around ‘the’ Ramayana — ‘the’ Ramayana of course being plural, as A. K. Ramanujan, Vivek Narayanan, and many others have observed. Their scholarly and imaginative approaches apparently run counter to what seems almost a desire to narrow marvellously fertile traditions into a monolithic sacred text of scientific truth. (I have written about this for Long Poem Magazine.) So, it is both hard and easy to admit that inheriting something of that epic tradition formed my way into the Odyssey. I distance myself explicitly from posing as an heir to ancient tradition parallel to or (more truly) intersecting with the Greek. I simply recall that in my childhood, my parents sometimes would cite scenes, quite naturally, from the Ramayana (in the versions they knew) to compare to our everyday lives and look for guidance — rather like what I’ve learnt to do, since my conversion to Roman Catholicism, with reading the Bible and the adapted monastic techniques of lectio divina — but instead of mulling over a text of the Ramayana, we contemplated scenes both lyrically and dramatically. In other words, we replayed it.
I really admire Emily Wilson’s approach to translating the Odyssey and asked her permission to rely on her version when contemplating the text for reworking. I particularly love her attention to register, and her reconsideration of what would have been plain phrasing, and what would have been elaborate. I opened my imagination and set her text humming, attentive to what would resonate or light up in my memory of the past or awareness of the contemporary, and what would relate to the situations of modern-day refugees and migrants, which Christopher Kent and Gamal Khamis wished to honour and highlight.
Zoë Skoulding, in Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (2020), describes ‘thinking about the poem in acoustic spaces, seeing the poem itself as an acoustic space and thinking about how we attend to language in the context of other acoustic phenomena’. I tried to think about the Odyssey in lived spaces that I knew from ‘real life’ — I tried to think extratextually, in order to recontextualize the text — and, in the course of this discipline, or experiment, I found certain scenes or meetings or points of tension replacing/replaying themselves, say, in a Scottish cemetery, in a Trinidadian park, or even in a Sheffield tram. Most eerily, in an inside-out version of the process, I was transported in imagination to some original past and distant future that vectorized themselves according to the Odyssey, and then I created a lyric from that indwelling. The fragments that replayed/replaced themselves gave me confidence that they were willing to live, that they had life in them, that they could or would replay/replace themselves again, yes, for my readers and for Christopher Kent and Gamal Khamis’s audiences.
One of the aspects of ‘Odyssey Response’ in Like a Tree, Walking (2021) that we found most intriguing was the way in which you rethought and rewrote the notion of hospitality — a concept that has fascinated scholars for centuries. In section 4 of this work, entitled ‘Companion’, you mention a notion of hospitality of or through the imagination which seems to inform most of your work: could you say more about this concept? In Odyssey Calling you also emphasize that Odysseus may be a king on his island, but throughout his journey he is a guest, and he has to convince people that he is worthy of being hosted. Both positions, that of the guest and that of the host, can be difficult to occupy, and for everyone these roles can change in different places and at different times in life. You mentioned that you refused to become a host in order to remain that perpetual guest of being a poet. To conclude our conversation, would you like to expand on this idea of the poet as a perpetual guest in different places, among other people and ghosts, in language itself?
The idea of belonging seems fraught. ‘I belong to this place’, a feeling of one-ness with an environment, whether contented or gloomy, too easily flips into ‘This place belongs to me’. ‘Who else has been here?’ is an obvious question to ask, which leads into ‘Who else might be here?’ To inhabit these questions as if part of a history gentle enough to remain unwritten, rather than part of a past unquiet enough to become a horror story, is one of the joys of poetry. I’m not talking about cultural appropriation but lived experience when I say that it’s possible to fall in love with a place. Yet to speak lovingly of that place sometimes brings mockery, disbelief, or embarrassment, if one is perceived as unbelonging, or rather unpossessing; a pretender, a nowherian. I wonder why. It’s rather as if nobody ought to fall in love, or as if birth family has a prior claim on all love. One of the reasons that I gave up on the study of Old Norse was the hostility I encountered, as a scholar ‘of colour’, with people sometimes laughing in my face when I answered their small-talk question ‘What do you do?’. Yet I had fallen in love, both with the unclassifiable colours of landscape under Icelandic light, and a prose literature of eloquent silences … I desired not to speak for, merely to speak from and with … I feel as if I say these things again and again, in interviews, on replay, like a haunting, like an exile …
The Guyanese revolutionary poet, Martin Carter, in his ‘Suite of 5 Poems’ (2000 [1961]), writes:
I believe that here Carter’s lyric addressee is the land of many waters, Guyana, itself, as well as any human listener. He speaks from the land and to the land. The hospitality here involves being attentive to the population of a land; as the poet-guest listens, and speaks, the poem becomes populated by, and hosts, the unspoken/unspeaking/unspeakable. He loves into, and from, the silent or silenced. Arriving as a perpetual guest means one can host the ghosts of others … I wanted to take an epic that trails after a great war, and to recover personal address from the in-between, the silences, the trivial, and the too-big. The poet as perpetual guest loves through the hurt of the desire to give where there is nothing to bring, becoming part of an ecology of continuity with and against loss. The poet as perpetual guest cries the possibility of a future.
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