And my heart had to make a great effort to drive the blood into the Big Thing; there was hardly enough blood. And the blood entered the Big Thing unwillingly and came back sick and tainted. But the Big Thing swelled and grew over my face like a bluish boil and grew over my mouth, and already the shadow of its edge lay upon my remaining eye.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. by M.D. Herter Norton

Smoke stings silk. Sweetness is like
whiteness. Screams: Don’t do it!
It is I! Be sweet dark dear!

— Unica Zürn, trans. by Sade LaNay

But still, it’s interesting the ways that books live in us over time, even as memory fades. What I can recall of Tropisms is that it seemed to replace the conventional components of stories with the sensation of these plant-like inclinations that exist in humans—leaning one way or another—I can recall the way that book felt, more than anything else about it.

— Sawako Nakayasu, from conversation with Alexis Almeida

I open with this quote from Rilke’s Notebooks (which I only discovered when the poet Zoe Tuck assigned it in a workshop on transfeminine literature) because it does what the poets of this issue are doing. How do we write when we are pumping all our blood into the “Big Thing”? If there is a connection between the poets and artists we’ve chosen for this issue maybe it has something to do with finding a space for desire from whatever scraps of it are around us, from Jayne-Ann Igel’s diaristic meditations (being themselves closely tied to Rilke’s own potential) on transness, to Wu Ang’s tracing the rags of lovemaking which poet and translator Cecily Chen calls a “fraying cocoon,” to Sade LaNay’s translations of Unica Zürn, whose anagrammatic poems conjure up the specter of universality only to cut it to pieces. In other words, maybe they make work against the “Big Thing” or in spite of the “Big Thing,” attempting to chart a course through desire which cannot be subsumed within the unthinkable violence of the world around us.

Maybe then to reconcile with the “Big Thing” we must be divergent, or to let it run itself out while we focus on the background. For Fernanda Laguna, whose work appears on the cover of this issue, her solution comes in the form of a glorious chaos, as her solo show last year at the Drawing Center made clear, creating as many forms of a work as possible, an obsessive practice with the movements of the heart, of the individual but not as a unified subject, as finding itself in its others. In this way it feels strange to include her work on a cover, as it faces away from the things inside it; it makes me want to draw little hearts on it, or write in the margins. So this issue looks at translation as something which we do in the background, as a way to get towards our poems, as a project which we find ourselves doing compulsively. Rilke does not really have a way of “escaping” the Big Thing—but he keeps writing and sleepwalking through Paris anyways, even as it becomes unrecognizable. Here I think also of Jack Jung’s translations of Kim Hyesoon’s “From Aerok,” of the poet as a wanderer of this “makeshift stage of a city.”

But looking at translation as a background shouldn’t take away from its ability to deal with exile, perhaps by searching beyond the “poetic,” as Mirene Asanios’ review of Olivia Elias’ Chaos, Crossing suggests. In her review of Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation of Elias’s book, she writes, “If this review has now devolved into a statement, it is only because form, as Elias teaches, must rethink itself to meet the present.” Yet Elias shows us that cutting through poetics does not mean that “her militancy [is] opposed to the indeterminacy of dreamscapes,” as Arsanios writes. In other words, we are tired of being told our militancy isn’t complex enough.

But what does it look like to see translation as not the Big Thing but as something which resembles being in the world? At JFK they’ve started a new practice of security: before going through the detectors they make you walk by a police dog, with a partner. So even if you travel alone you must be matched up with someone to go past the dog. They clear out about a 20 meter long area for this.

I met Cecilia Biagini in the middle of winter in Buenos Aires, meeting by chance at Fernanda’s gallery in Villa Crespo, wandering our way to catch the bus back downtown. We talked about the cold, how easy it is to catch cold when coming from the New York summer. All it takes is a slight underappreciation and it comes in, it being heavier, wetter and stickier than the cold in New York. Even the snow here “feels” dry. Biagini’s paintings reflect the movement of the world as her prose attempts to re-establish its disunion (the genreless-ness of her writing in this issue might be another corollary to Rilke), the constant generative disunion, which is a part of translation itself, which is constantly occurring whether we want it to or not. As Matvei Yankelevich states in a interview with Kay Gabriel, “It’s very strange to me to talk about how translation is impossible when it's being done all the time.”

Finally, this issue does have an actual Rainer in it, in Rainer Diana Hamilton’s review of Courtney Bush’s I Love Information which tracks how poems “think.” It also has Terrence Arjoon’s review of KM Cascia’s translation of Manuel Maples Arce, Igor Gulin translated by Ainsley Morse and Timmy Straw, and many more.

Bianca Messinger
“Buffalo, NY”
10/15/23