{"id":860,"date":"2021-10-04T12:29:18","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T17:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/?p=860"},"modified":"2021-10-04T12:36:45","modified_gmt":"2021-10-04T17:36:45","slug":"practicing-detours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/practicing-detours\/","title":{"rendered":"Practicing Detours"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Michelle Gil-Montero, whose original poetry and whose translations of <\/b>Mar\u00eda Negroni’s work appears in SRPR Issue 46.1<\/a>, turns on translation, traces, and solidarity. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many poets, I\u2019m taken by the turn, in its many forms, as the kernel of a poem\u2019s uncertainty. Lately, as my writing practice increasingly involves shifts from translating to editing, printing, and teaching, then back to my own poems, I\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I keep turning to the work of Martiniquean writer and thinker \u00c9douard Glissant, an indispensable guide to this thinking. For Glissant, writing is \u201cthe practice of detour\u201d; by necessity, it tears away, deviates, to return. The separation is inevitable; even the most stringently mimetic writing cannot avoid \u201coverstepping\u201d its subject matter, venturing somewhere else. Glissant\u2019s 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 \u201csolitary and solidary,\u201d that is, should \u201clive adventurously in the thinking of wandering\u201d and \u201cgrow up completely in the thinking of\u2026place,\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> a formulation that resonates for me both for its translation ethics and its poetics of place.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poems in this issue of SRPR<\/em>, both mine and the ones that I translated from Exilium<\/em> by Mar\u00eda Negroni, are adventures in the thinking of wandering. Negroni meditates on exile in a faint, meandering way that recalls Argentine poet Juan Gelman\u2019s statement that \u201cexile has no form but leaves a trace.\u201d The poems never refer to historical-autobiographical experiences of exile\u2014though 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\u2019s as if there\u2019s a slight gap between the language and its place in the world\u2014which 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) \u201cforce their entry\/slowly\/into the rhythm of\/the world.\u201d Present and absent, here and there, language enters the world as foreign, and only by detours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014to quote a Negroni poem, they \u201cforeignized everything.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to keep thinking about the solidarity half of Glissant\u2019s formula: “to grow up completely in the thinking of place.\u201d 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.          <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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[1]<\/sup><\/a>\u00c9douard Glissant, The Baton Rouge Interviews, with Alexandre Leupin, Translated by Kate M. Cooper (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 26, 27, 59, 60.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Michelle Gil-Montero has several book translations, most recently Edinburgh Notebook<\/i> by Valerie Mejer Caso (Action Books). Berlin Interlude<\/i> and Exilium<\/i>, both by Mar\u00eda 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 <\/i>(Brooklyn Arts Press) and Object Permanence<\/i> (Ornithopter Press), and her work has appeared in jubilat, North American Review<\/i>, Seedings<\/i>, Conjunctions,<\/i> 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<\/a>). <\/p>\n

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You can order a physical copy of 46.1 on our website<\/a>, or purchase a 2-year subscription.
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Michelle Gil-Montero, whose original poetry and whose translations of Mar\u00eda Negroni’s work appears in SRPR Issue 46.1, turns on translation, traces, and solidarity. Like many poets, I\u2019m taken by the turn, in its many forms, as the kernel of a poem\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[263,270,12,266],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogpost","category-poe","tag-issue-46-1","tag-michelle-gil-montero","tag-poetics-of-emplacement","tag-srpr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":870,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}