>Translation is certainly a tool for better communication but, where economics
>and power are the drivers, better communication doesn't necessarily lead to
>better understanding.
Has there ever been a time when economics and power were *not* the
drivers? Translations of poems trickle through to a small number of
people who may then have a window opened on a consciousness that is
different, exciting, but sufficiently familiar to understand a
commonality of experience - how many faux pas have I committed in this
sentence? A mutual love of poetry by the poets of two countries is not
going to stop the generals sending out the troops to the heights to drop
bombs on villagers: but it may make them arrest the poets.
There's an interesting story in Kapuschinski's book on the Iranian
revolution, The Shah of Shahs, which looks at the experience of two
poets: one who writes as a poet, one who writes doggerel in praise of the
Shah. Guess who is beaten up by secret police, and who has the
limousine? Shorn of its extremity (how many poets drive limousines in
the West?), it applies anywhere. We live nominally in democracies, which
mean that certain things won't be done to us: we certainly won't be
tortured or imprisoned because of what we write. That doesn't make
whatever struggles we might have as poets any less "real", but it does
create a sense of perspective. In the West, the mechanics of what's
coded as economic rationalism controls almost every area of our lives,
opening a bank account, paying a gas bill, attempting to earn enough
money to feed a family while at the same time keeping the desires and
freedoms enacted in poetry as a priority. The recent post on the British
Library is one example of that struggle. In Australia it sometimes seems
worse, because our politicians are cruder, less subtle: they make no
bones in their public statements about what their aim is, which is simply
to stay in or gain power. But you read this rhetoric, debased as it is,
knowing that it has very little to do with whatever is actually going on,
which is more to do with the real power of corporations. The state
terror of Indonesia is not very different from the kind of power that
enslaves women in Mexican factories that are so poisonous they bear
babies with no brains or spina bifida and suffer migraines for the rest
of their shortened lives, and are paid a pittance. We have very much less
access to any information on what these economic powers are doing, as
opposed to what governments are doing, as was demonstrated by the recent
shenanigans with the Chinese currency. How much coverage did anyone
read in the papers of the changes to international trading laws which
mean in effect that governments have no soverignty over their own
territory if a corporation decides to ignore local environmental or
safety laws?
Like Enzensberger said a few years ago, talking about the IMF, "Hypocrisy
does not have a fixed address; it can't be pinned down, not to the pair
of billion-dollar strongholds on 19th St in Washington. It contaminates
every continent, and nowhere does it express itself so callously and
brutally as in the countries of the Third and Fourth World ... local
elites consist almost entirely of criminals, who attempt to cover up
their incompetence and their murderous greed with anti-imperialist
phrases, a camouflage which grows more and more threadbare every year ...
It would be naive to take the noisy argument between the the "elites" and
the IMF at face value. A profound harmony is often concealed behind
their ritual shadow boxing." (Mediocrities and Delusions). In the same
book, he has a penetrating analysis of the sophisticated manipulation of
the mass media, using Bild as an example. It fits with my experience of
the media, anyway, as a journalist and reader.
I have no idea how you combat any of this, but to succumb to a sense of
powerlessness - which often seems the only possible human reaction - is
something I'm not prepared to do, because it seems like the ultimate
defeat, an inner as well as an outer defeat. "The only truth is face to
face". I think poetry *insists* on that meeting, and the quixotic
enterprise of insisting on that value is all there is. It's not utopian,
it's not even theoretical, and it's quite probably totally useless. To
pretend that poetry can do anything else is a terrible mistake, almost as
big a mistake as saying that that kind of resistance is valueless. Is it
self righteous to acknowledge the place of an ethics, which is struggled
for, made, like a poem, out of an endless and exhausting vigilance, and a
struggle which is never finished? What are we to do?
How the hell would I know? But I can't rid myself of the belief - it is
nothing else - that poetry matters.
Best
Alison
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3105
AUSTRALIA
home page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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