Practicing Detours

Michelle Gil-Montero, whose original poetry and whose translations of María Negroni’s work appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, turns on translation, traces, and solidarity.

Like many poets, I’m taken by the turn, in its many forms, as the kernel of a poem’s uncertainty. Lately, as my writing practice increasingly involves shifts from translating to editing, printing, and teaching, then back to my own poems, I’ve even started to identify a deeper necessity in my habit of turning from one thing to another, and to think about how these deviations inscribe themselves in my poems. Detour as practice, and as turn. 

A poetics of emplacement need not be stuck in one spot, not even in one spot at a time; it can occupy a here-there, imbue an essential foreignness. Growing up in a bilingual family of immigrants, and living now in a bilingual/immigrant household, I have always recognized a foreignness in myself, an unsettled quality of abiding in two places at once, two languages and cultures, not quite belonging in either. Translation taps this feeling, and so does writing poetry. Both practices allow me to reimagine my feeling-foreign not as a problematic split but as a poetic necessity, a dimension of solitude and possibility. 

I keep turning to the work of Martiniquean writer and thinker Édouard Glissant, an indispensable guide to this thinking. For Glissant, writing is “the practice of detour”; by necessity, it tears away, deviates, to return. The separation is inevitable; even the most stringently mimetic writing cannot avoid “overstepping” its subject matter, venturing somewhere else. Glissant’s writings allow me to conceptualize my own detours in relation to my foreign-feeling. For Glissant, the writer, as apprentice to the world, should be both “solitary and solidary,” that is, should “live adventurously in the thinking of wandering” and “grow up completely in the thinking of…place,”[1] a formulation that resonates for me both for its translation ethics and its poetics of place.  

The poems in this issue of SRPR, both mine and the ones that I translated from Exilium by María Negroni, are adventures in the thinking of wandering. Negroni meditates on exile in a faint, meandering way that recalls Argentine poet Juan Gelman’s statement that “exile has no form but leaves a trace.” The poems never refer to historical-autobiographical experiences of exile—though they might have, as Negroni does elsewhere. Instead, the poems attest to the stubbornness of the residue of these experiences. I mean, could these poems be read in Argentina without calling to mind the last dictatorship, even though they make no explicit mention of it? It’s as if there’s a slight gap between the language and its place in the world—which makes the poems feel foreign, estranged. Translating these poems felt like watching poetic language form in real time, as its strange, twisting gestures (to quote a few lines) “force their entry/slowly/into the rhythm of/the world.” Present and absent, here and there, language enters the world as foreign, and only by detours. 

In brief departures from those translations, I wrote the poems that appear in this issue. They occupy a here-there that is both Pittsburgh and Buenos Aires, as well as the not-Pittsburgh and not-Buenos Aires that I inhabited after two shocking experiences (a mass shooting and a post-partum illness). Both events, with their unreal, dislocating effects, were a form of separation—to quote a Negroni poem, they “foreignized everything.” In these poems, again, narrative situation hangs back but hovers in proximity. And again, what is legible is the trace that they leave in the real, and the shape of my wandering there, a circuitous wayfinding via sound, through punning and word-to-word slippages. 

I want to keep thinking about the solidarity half of Glissant’s formula: “to grow up completely in the thinking of place.” From my perch in translation, I can begin to imagine a place-based poetics that abandons the illusion of rootedness and fixed identities, one that is willing to let go of attachments to the world to return all the more fully to it, one that turns in opposite directions at once, toward and away.          


[1]Édouard Glissant, The Baton Rouge Interviews, with Alexandre Leupin, Translated by Kate M. Cooper (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 26, 27, 59, 60.

Michelle Gil-Montero has several book translations, most recently Edinburgh Notebook by Valerie Mejer Caso (Action Books). Berlin Interlude and Exilium, both by María Negroni, are forthcoming from Black Square Editions and Ugly Duckling Presse, respectively. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Howard Foundation, as well as a Fulbright US Scholar’s Grant to Argentina and a PEN/Heim Translation Prize. She is the author of the poetry books Attached Houses (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Object Permanence (Ornithopter Press), and her work has appeared in jubilat, North American ReviewSeedingsConjunctions, and other publications. At Saint Vincent College, she directs the Minor in Literary Translation and is the founding editor of the small press poetry publisher, Eulalia Books (eulaliabooks.com). 

 

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