Interview with Austin Carder
I have produced and hosted LivingArt on Houston's Pacifica station, 90.1 FM, kpft.org, since 2002. For a year now, I have made a point to interview artists from Caesura magazine. Why? Caesura seems critical of an absence in art; art is hardly alive. Art compromises its vitality. Art yields to social propaganda. Creativity hides in the wing of a museum’s Human Resources department. If the history of art is the root of art today, it is buried in the rubble of the 20th century. It is more tired than true that art ubiquitously opposes capitalism — or whatever you name our current age. Art can’t help but sleep outside of dreams. The unconscious is purged of its future. Anti-whatever-exists sells like hotcakes: Aimless, Righteous, Tendentious, Illogical. It is the history of good intentions and large hearts. Art’s impossible, creative insight lends itself finally to forgetting the terrible costs of its own failed efforts: “That had no impact, either.” “But we meant well.” And then we die. The necessity of transcending an age passes down like the ages themselves. Possibility paints in its corner. Art stands in defense. Victory is naive. Passion has no way to smile.
—Michael Woodson
Austin Carder’s essay, Translation as Conquest, was published in Caesura in four parts. They are available here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.
Michael Woodson: The title of your piece, appearing in Caesura in four parts, is “Translation as Conquest.” What is the scope of your meaning of translation? How is it both very particular and yet general? That is, might it apply to both translating a text from a foreign language as well as any artwork that is created in response to another?
Austin Carder: The same dynamic is at play in both original composition and translation. In the case of writing something new, there are always multiple “sources” — including, but not limited to, other works of art. An emotion, an experience, or a memory might also be translated into writing or given an aesthetic, objective form in language. Movies, paintings, or music could also work their way into it. And of course, other literature, other poems, would provide more direct models for what a writer does. In every case, the artist transforms this material — whatever it may be — into something else. But that something else is also the way that the original survives. It remains what it is by becoming something else. The same thing happens in translation but in a more explicit way. The sources are fewer, usually only one — the original text. The category of experience connects original composition to translation. Just as poets shape their experience into a poem, the translator shapes a more specific experience, the experience of the original poem, into the translation. Or more to the point, the translator makes a new poem in another language that couldn’t exist without the earlier one but is nonetheless independent of it.
Jasper Johns, In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara, 1961. Oil on canvas with objects (two panels). Whitney.
What about the purists who want fidelity and don’t necessarily appreciate what you’re talking about?
You can’t escape fidelity. You encounter it in all theoretical discussions of translation. It involves being faithful to the text, right? I wouldn’t dismiss it as merely relative, i.e., depending on whom you ask, they might give you a different answer of what counts as faithfulness to the text. It’s inevitable that readers will come to any translation they encounter with a sense that what they’re reading owes something to the original, and the word that they use to describe that debt is fidelity. It’s the translator’s task to decide what fidelity means in the specific case of what they’re translating. It’s their job to prove, in practice, that what they’ve come up with as their translation is, in fact, loyal to an experience of the original. That’s what would validate a translation to a reader, even if they see it departing from the original: if they recognize that a genuine experience of reading is guiding the translation, it registers with them, and they accept it as legitimate. Maybe the translator’s idea of fidelity differs from that of the readers. But it’s up to the translator to convince them that all the choices they made were actually warranted and necessary, that they were the right choices. And this only works when the translation delivers on that experience and makes it as binding for its readers as the original was for them. This is why I focus on the idea of conquest, to encourage a boldness on the part of translators that is too often lacking in contemporary literature. It requires trusting your experience as the reader of the original to fulfill the tall order of actually providing something that’s on par with it for readers in your own language.
Chrispijn van den Broeck, An Allegory of Fidelity, c. 1560. Oil on canvas.
Expand this idea of conquest for us.
Conquest would mean going beyond the original, and I intentionally chose this title from Nietzsche because it was provocative and emphasizes some key points about translation as a mode. First, it reminds you of the audacity necessary for translating. Usually the flip-side — the humility — is highlighted. The idea is that you want to serve the translation, and you don’t want to get in its way. You are expected to represent individual authors in a way that is respectful and ethical. It often has a moral valence to it and isn’t really an aesthetic question. But with audacity and humility, what you need is both and neither. If you depart from the original too much when you translate, if you abandon your experience of it and overstress the independence of the translation, then you’ve lost touch with what even drove you to translate. You lose the indispensable source of resistance that actually animates the whole endeavor. If you go too far in the direction of conquest, you’ll be unchecked. I think of something the poet and translator Keith Waldrop said: that when you translate, you take a poem, subtract all of its words, and refill it with other words, words of a different language. Throughout that work, you have to hold onto your sense of the poem itself — that thing you take words out of and put words into. But it never really exists an sich; it must be discovered. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno says that art’s being is a process of becoming. Nowhere else do you see that as clearly as in translation. You need to remember your experience of the original to develop an instinctive feeling for what the translation needs. It’s very much based on feeling and intuiting what is right, why you must use a particular word that sounds a certain way and carries a unique set of associations, why you have to place it in just the right spot to where it reacts to the other words around it along all of these lines and more. That is the humility side of translation, maintaining a sense of proportion and remembering why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place.
Marc Chagall, Half-Past Three (The Poet), 1911. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In “Translation as Conquest” you bring up Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche. What is their significance to your essay?
I don't even talk about Benjamin's “Task of the Translator” essay, which is canonical in Translation Studies. What I focus on instead is Benjamin’s philosophy of history that is coming out of Nietzsche’s critical way of articulating the present’s relation to itself through the past and his critique of 19th-century historicism. Nietzsche and Benjamin help us think about history as such, not about its iron laws or grand narrative but about what it could mean if we task ourselves with finding and making its meaning. This is a mostly forgotten way of thinking about translation or art more generally. The postmodern ways we learn about art in universities today are thoroughly historicist. We are taught that a poem is a document or a simple illustration of social realities. A lot of the time, it's just an indicator of its author’s “subject position.” For Benjamin, following Nietzsche, it’s different. A poem can be a repository or a sedimentation of history; it’s not just an advertisement for it. They both saw the movement of history, respectively in the 19th century and then in the early 20th century, as riddled with contradictions, as harboring tendencies for development in different and opposing directions.
That’s where Nietzsche’s idea of conquest comes in; it requires this actively subjective factor to intervene and pull the brake on what’s otherwise a runaway train. I remember something that Horkheimer wrote in his book of aphorisms, Dämmerung; he said that history doesn’t have to go along unless it’s compelled to. That captures this double motion well. Nietzsche’s comments on translation were about how the Romans absorbed the Greeks and the Revolutionary French absorbed the Romans in their translations. They had no respect for the fundamental differences that existed between their languages and historical conditions. The supposedly incommensurable cultural otherness of today pales in comparison. They pillaged and plundered what would otherwise go to waste. They laid hold of the past sedimented in literature and used it in their present to build their consciousness of the future, or at least to take the first steps toward building it. With Nietzsche and Benjamin both, the focus is on using this relation to history in the service of life, in the service of the present. Benjamin writes:
Historicism presents the eternal image of the past, whereas historical materialism presents a given experience with the past — an experience that is unique. The replacement of the epic element by the constructive element proves to be the condition for this experience. The immense forces bound up in historicism’s “Once upon a time” are liberated in this experience. To put to work an experience with history — a history that is originary for every present — is the task of historical materialism. The latter is directed toward consciousness of the present which explodes the continuum of history.
In these essays, I ask what it would mean to put to work an experience with history. In the work of translation, one will undergo an experience of history itself: not only the moment that the original is written in, but all the time in between then and now. The translator will feel all of that and register it either more or less consciously.
Why are we shuffling through the archive of history? Why does our attention come to rest on this particular object? Why do we want to spend a little more time with it, read it again, and just let it wash over us? That’s where Benjamin is coming from when he talks about the coincidence, the flashing up of a constellation between the past and the present. Maybe, for example, in a poem, we recognize a formal innovation that was never fully developed, its consequences weren’t explored to their ends by the poetry that came after it. And so we see then that there’s something maybe we could do, an unfinished project we can take up and realize some of its latent possibilities.
Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, 1789. Oil on canvas.
We’re approaching the issue of uncovering a text’s meaning. In your essay you quote Greenberg to connect this to the autonomy of the author. Can you say more about this?
With the Greenberg quote, I mean to remind people of what is a forgotten — really repressed — idea in aesthetics about the autonomy of art. Art follows its own laws and has different metrics for success than the newspaper, for example. We’re not just reading information and downloading that data to our brains. With art, there’s a whole experiential aspect that most often involves your feelings. In the full quote from Greenberg, he’s actually making a very limited claim about art. He says:
There are more important things than art or the aesthetic. Art is autonomous, it’s there for its own human sake, sufficient to its own human self. But this doesn’t seal it off from society or history. What its autonomy does mean is that it serves humanity on its own terms, i.e. by providing aesthetic value or quality. Art may provide other things as well. But if it does so at the cost of aesthetic value, it deprives humanity of what is uniquely art’s to give. Art that does this is not forgiven in the end, and the refusal to forgive asserts and confirms the autonomy of art, or as it’s time to say, the autonomy of aesthetic value.
And just today, I was rereading another book, where I came across this quote by Paul Valéry, whom I also bring into my essays, and I think it links up really well with this Greenberg quote. Both are about what the artist is actually after, and how their project has its own values and serves, as Greenberg said, humanity on its own terms:
When the poets repair to the forest of language it is with the express purpose of getting lost; far gone, in bewilderment, they seek crossroads of meaning, unexpected echoes, strange encounters; they fear neither detours, surprises, nor darkness. But the huntsman who ventures into this forest in hot pursuit of the “truth,” who sticks to a single continuous path, from which he cannot deviate for a moment on pain of losing the scent or imperiling the progress he has already made, runs the risk of capturing nothing but his shadow. Sometimes the shadow is enormous, but a shadow it remains.
The idea is that the poet is working on language, and the tasks and outlines of his work are really dependent on the material and the different opportunities for developing it. If he’s disregarding the material for the sake of going in a straight line towards communicating a certain idea, then he’s really lost the plot.
There’s the usual way of understanding what you’re doing when you’re writing or translating that most people get from the university or from contemporary criticism: either they feel the education on offer is irrelevant to what they’re trying to do, or it points them in the direction of turning art into a vehicle for ideas. Ideally, theory would affect but not dominate the practice of art-making and the practice would compel aesthetic theory to respond to what’s happening in art production and push itself further.
Paul Cézanne, Bibémus, 1895-1899. Oil on canvas. Barnes Foundation.
Could you say something about your inclusion of Poe and Baudelaire? How was it that Baudelaire found a voice in Poe? Why is that significant to the argument you’re making in this essay?
It’ll be helpful here to trace the literary history that I leave out of the essay, to explain why I went for this connection. In the third part of the essay I mention an article written in 1984 by Harold Bloom, one of my teachers who made a deep impression on me.
Harold was one of the few professors that people read outside of academia. In fact, he’s increasingly read exclusively outside of academia. He’s considered outdated, but he’s also dismissed by the epigones of the postmodernists with whom he was friends, like Derrida and Foucault. He was a highly polemical critic, and he made a lot of enemies. He called the ways of reading that understood themselves as politically radical, and which were gaining ascendancy in academia in the 80s and 90s, “the school of resentment.” They consider aesthetic experience irrelevant or even reactionary.
I invoke him for several reasons, one of them being as a tribute. It is also an effort on my part to do with his work what I say Baudelaire does to Poe. I was trying to draw out some of the latent potentials of what Bloom writes about Poe, who was his absolute least favorite American writer. What interested me was how he struggled to account for Poe’s greatness while also denying it completely.
Harold was a voracious reader who could recite on command anything from the history of literature. He was perceptive and eloquent about the psychological dynamics that operate behind the backs of writers in relation to their predecessors. That was what he became known for: his theory of the anxiety of influence. He’s an example of someone who put to use an experience of history and enlisted in the service of life — what he always called “the blessing of more life.” Some of the greatest writers of the past 50 years — like John Ashbery, Philip Roth, or Cormac McCarthy — really valued what Harold said, even when they disagreed with it. He made them see things happening in what they had written that they not only hadn’t noticed, but hadn’t intended. At the same time Harold never really had much to say about society or history. For him, literature was a separate realm. It was its own world. And he much preferred it to the real world. Who can blame him?
What drew me to his essay on Poe is how you see him simultaneously at his strongest and at his vaguest. He accidentally provides a theory of translation that I find much richer than the theories that we encounter in Translation Studies. I agree with him that Poe is improved by translation. That’s the basis of my argument in these essays. Then again, I think everyone could or should be improved by translation. But there’s more to it than the way that Harold explains it, which is that Poe has good content and bad form. The reason I discuss Poe’s work is that modern literature, especially poetry, is unimaginable without him. But that’s only because of his absorption into the work of Charles Baudelaire, through translation. It’s true what Valéry said, that Poe would probably be completely forgotten today — including in America — were it not for Baudelaire’s efforts. It’s hard to paint the picture, but Poe is still held in much higher esteem in France than any other American writer.
I mentioned Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in my essay who, both in themselves, and because of how much they shaped American literature, are really more significant to American poetry. When I read Whitman or Dickinson, I hear the echoes of all the American poetry that came after them. When you’re there at the source, you can see everything that later poets would take up. You see it in its nascent form. And, of course, even that stuff is not completely new. Even their English is coming from somewhere else, especially from Shakespeare or the King James Bible.
The French read Poe in a really similar way as what I just outlined with Whitman or Dickinson. They recognize everything that instigated their modern literature in Poe, or rather, in Baudelaire’s Poe. His influence was broad; in France it went beyond poetry. Of course it was important for Symbolist poetry in French, including for the poets Stéphane Mallarmé and his disciple Valéry. But what was actually more impressive is that he spawned entirely new genres in French literature, for instance the scientific-fantasy short stories of Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Jules Verne. There’s also the Decadent writer J.K. Huysmans and his novel À Rebours, or Against the Grain. Not to mention that the whole genre of detective fiction, in French, comes out of Poe. Later in the 20th century, there’s Surrealism with André Breton and his compatriots who read Baudelaire’s Poe very closely.
What is ironic is that the French poetry of the late 19th and early 20th century ended up having a huge influence on English and American avant-garde practices later in the 20th century. After WWII, we have American poets being influenced by all this French poetry that was itself influenced by Poe. He ends up being a decisive factor to American literature by way of the French. So now we take the time to read him and see the substance of what’s really there, but it’s only in the light of that substance having been unearthed and activated initially by French writers.
Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Baudelaire, 1848-49. Oil on canvas.
That complements what Bloom was doing with Poe for you. You’re recovering Bloom in a way.
I picked Bloom in part to illustrate what Valéry says about Poe’s countrymen not appreciating him. American writers often can’t directly see, without this bigger picture of Poe, what is so generative in him. What was and is so great about Poe is what was made great about him by Baudelaire, first of all, and then by everyone else. I think of how Mallarmé begins his elegy “Tombeau de Poe” with the line, “Such as into Himself at last eternity changes him.” This is an important point to what I was trying to say about history: history is not simply given or merely there; instead history must be constituted.
To get more specific about Baudelaire, I demonstrate that he didn’t translate Poe word for word. He didn’t make the most obvious decisions. He also did not go for the smooth translation that would just leave French undisturbed. There’s plenty of evidence in the story I look at, The Man in the Crowd, to prove that Baudelaire does what I talked about earlier: he delivers to us his experience of Poe’s work — his experience of it as a reader — which means that he creates an integral new work of art where every piece of the puzzle, every choice of word and its placement, reacts to every other piece and contributes to the overall effect.
Can you tell us a little bit about Poe’s story The Man in the Crowd?
It’s set in London, where Poe lived for a few years when he was young. It was the most industrialized city in the world at the time, more so than anywhere in America. Poe is sitting at a cafe, like a writer does, watching the crowd. The crowd in the square is moving, everyone is flowing past each other, bumping into each other, and ignoring each other; the crowd appears as a giant monstrous organism with a pulse. The people are grotesque to him. He’s trying to read them and speculates about their role in society or what they’re wearing and what it means about where they’re going or where they’re coming from. Out of everyone, a creepy old guy catches his interest, so he gets up from where he’s sitting and follows this old man through London. He’s captivated by the mysterious allure of the man in the crowd. He pursues this man until he loses him in the night.
Baudelaire sees people in much the same way in his poetry. Unlike Poe, he turns them into strange allegories either of Modernity or something else. But what they represent in Baudelaire is not self-evident, as it used to be in allegory. It used to be very clear when a figure in a painting or poem represented justice or love or truth. But when Baudelaire sees these modern men and women who are ground down by society into dirt, he’s not sentimental. He doesn’t think, “How sad is that? They’re dehumanized.” Instead, he’s finding some distinctly new, modern form of beauty in exactly that ugliness that proliferates in the modern city.
That’s the emphasis on experience and making something of your subjective reactions. That’s what matters. It’s not so much what is there. Who knows who this man in the crowd really is, or where he’s going? We do know what the author, or the narrator, makes of him. He doesn’t invent the guy; it’s not a hallucination, but he does, nonetheless, bring so much of himself to the experience of the anonymous man that, ultimately, that’s what's decisive for us.
Baudelaire sees the reality that he lives with every day in Paris refracted through the prism of Poe’s story. When he’s giving it language in French, this feeling and the weight of the words in French are drawn from his own life. He’s imbuing it with that power, and we feel it — maybe even more than we feel Poe’s. That’s where the implications lie for imagining the way we relate to history or to the tasks that have been abandoned.
Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, 1605-6. Oil on canvas.
Maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit.
In Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditation: On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, he discusses the monumental or the unhistorical, the antiquarian or the historical, and the critical or supra-historical ways of doing history. In the monumental, there’s just great events and individuals of the past. The present has meaning to the extent that it maintains that greatness. For the antiquarian, it’s a romantic notion that the present has fallen hopelessly below the threshold of the past. What is important about the past becomes unclear, so every detail comes to matter. The antiquarian can’t distinguish between what elements of the past are still weighing on the present and those that need to be forgotten.
Nietzsche knew this firsthand. He was a classicist who worked on ancient Greek. He was trained to relate to the past in the museumified way of the antiquarian. In his own lifetime, he sees history emerging as such, as a discipline. He thinks history isn’t anything in and of itself: it’s the way the present understands itself through the past. He doesn’t think we can objectively say “the way it really was” — and this is something Benjamin is fascinated by in his philosophy of history. Instead, all we can do is decide actively in the present the way we need it to have been for us, to use the past in the present. That doesn’t mean lying to ourselves about what did or didn’t happen; it’s actually about becoming a subject relative to it and finding the strength to do that. So, in translation, there’s no way it really was or what it really means. There’s only what it means to the translator in the present, what the translator makes it mean in the translation. One must condemn, as Nietzsche says, the default correct reading, the one that privileges just one aspect. You condemn it at the court of judgment and strike out into uncharted territory.
In terms of thinking about this politically, I would bring it back to what I was saying earlier about forcing art into a political posture. The most art can do is affect your consciousness; it can make you aware of contradictions and possibilities in reality that you would have to go elsewhere to deal with. It might point outside of itself to politics without participating in it directly. In the example of translation, with what Baudelaire did to Poe, you see a different kind of relating to things that involves taking up a role of agency: making oneself into a subject and getting a hold on all of history instead of going along with it, instead of affirming it as: this is how it is, how it’s always been, this is how it always must be. Even if you sympathize with the downtrodden and defeated, you’re still ultimately affirming the course that history took. That is a completely different way of relating to the past than the one embodied by translations that are bold enough to look at a work and make it mean something else for their moment, to use it to go beyond where they’ve gone before.
Édouard Manet, Le Corbeau sur la buste (The Raven on the Bust of Pallas) (plate 3) illustration from Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of Poe’s The Raven, 1875. Lithograph. MoMA.
