KAY GABRIEL: I’m curious how you got into editing and publishing, and specifically with the purview of editing and publishing poetry in translation.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH: I started a zine in college called Ugly Duckling with a few friends. It was kind of a Dada, collage-y, nonsense kind of zine, with a bit of a Russian avant-garde aesthetic. It included some things that I was starting to translate at that time, probably Kharms, maybe Khlebnikov. After college, I moved to Moscow and then I came back to do a PhD at Yale, which I never finished, in Slavic. At the time, I felt so peripheral, so anything like publishing my own work, other than doing the zine, wasn’t even in the picture. While in New Haven, I had started communicating with some other people who were doing zines or little magazines and publishing a little there. But I didn’t really feel like there was a place, a larger context, for what I was interested in. And I started typing up poems I liked from various library books, just work that I liked, making a very private anthology on a typewriter. Some of the things I typed into that potential anthology were poems that I found in translation, including Erich Fried, this Austrian poet and leftist, and some Michaux who I had just discovered for myself. And you know, it was just sort of a private idea, a future idea.

I dropped out of Yale after like a year and a half and moved to New York where I continued the zine with help from Ellie Ga, and after a while we met all of these people that kind of coalesced into the early UDP. What had felt like a very private thing—a hundred copies of a zine, sending it to a few people or slipping it into a Village Voice to see what happens—this kind of intervention of publishing was interesting to me at that moment as a way of getting the work out.

And then when UDP, or something like UDP, was starting up, I put in a translation I had done of Lev Rubenstein as the last piece in the first issue of 6x6 magazine. That’s the year 2000. A lot of the early 6x6 orbited around The Poetry Project, coming here to readings, publishing Eddie Berrigan, John Colletti, Jacqueline Waters, people my friends and I were meeting here. I had been in New York a couple years before I started going to the Project. Even though I was working upstairs for Richard Foreman, I just didn’t feel like I had an in until I met Julien Poirier and Filip Marinovich and people who had some connection. Plus, because I had done the zine, I had some contacts in the Midwest and other places, like people doing the kind of work that you might say was of that avant-garde moment or whatever, like some people doing more visual related work and kind of outsider-ish folks. After those first few issues, we started to think about including something in translation in each issue of 6x6.

So it just seemed like a natural part of the writing process was to publish the work of the people I was meeting, hanging out with, corresponding with. And it never seemed like, I don’t know, it just didn’t seem like a stretch to do that. And I think maybe part of it was like a youthful, you know, I’m nobody kind of feeling, and I’m not seeing this work out there because I just don’t know better. So I’m gonna intervene, even physically, into a Village Voice. Like slip something into whatever seemed to be the dominant culture or distribution system.

KG: It’s funny how much chutzpah there is in ignorance, but actually that’s kind of fab.

MY: I had gone to college at Wesleyan. It was way before Liz Willis taught there. (She’s no longer there.) All I knew was the New Yorker. In college, I was all about the avant-garde from the earlier 20th century, and I just felt like, where is this stuff now? I couldn’t see it. My professors weren’t pointing me to it. I found The Exquisite Corpse, which Andrei Codrescu edited, in the local bookstore and was intrigued, and a friend gave me a book of Spicer, that old collected poems that Robin Blaser edited. I was like, this is really weird. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know what tradition to place it in. So publishing, even small zines or whatever, was like a way to feel like it was happening somewhere.

KG: I get the sense the terrain was even substantially worse 25 years ago. I think about how, at the time, nearly all of Bernadette Mayer’s books were out of print.

MY: This was more like 30 years ago. Maybe Tender Buttons had just put something out, but I wouldn’t have known about it. Things were perhaps worse, and part of it’s the internet, because if I had gone to college during a time when there were tons of poetry magazines online, I would’ve had a different avenue to finding that kind of thing and feeling like I wasn’t one of the only people interested in a modernist lineage. What I was reading in the establishment places seemed to have closed that door. And especially ’cause I was translating Daniil Kharms and writing my BA thesis on him. Kharms got me into a sort of anti-poetic stance, to borrow Nicanor Parra’s phrasing.

KG: Modernism feels actually like an important question within all of this. You named Parra, who has more circulation now, but much less than the other famous Chilean poet in translation, which is Neruda. And the Neruda that you read in English isn’t the political Neruda. It’s like we’re only finding that out recently.

MY: Totally. The Neruda we were fed was devoid of socialism.

KG: One thing we’re circling around is objective structures that limit imagination and sense-making, and the communities that spring up to make those structures more possible. And some of those obstructions are monolingual poetry cultures, and some of them are cultural expectations that limit aesthetic possibility. So that brings us to UDP: I’m curious how translation came to be such an important part of that press’s project. I think of very few other poetry presses where that really seems to be part of the mandate.

MY: Certainly in the aughts that was the case. The monolingual poetry culture thing wasn’t only a salient aspect of traditionalistic aesthetics. There’s also the focus on what is American poetry and that preoccupation with creating American poetry has been with us from modernism or from Whitman on. You see a kind of aversion to foreignness and foreign poetry, even in the New York School to some degree. A lot of focus on US poetics is about American speech, American versus British idiom.

So when UDP was really starting out, I got interested in connections I was seeing between what I was reading here and what I’d read in the Russian avant-garde and late-Soviet avant-garde, like Lev Rubinstein. Speaking of the Neruda issue, in the US, Eastern European poetry was perceived as a certain kind of liberal, Western-facing, anti-socialist positionality. Poets from Akhmatova onwards were being positioned as, oh, have you read this anti-Soviet poet, or this anti-Soviet poet. And a certain heroism was implied in that.

Around 2002, I started the Eastern European Poet Series for UDP, which was the first focus on translation at the press, which embraced translation-publishing a bit later. The series was about creating an alternative view of Eastern European poetry. Are there people that aren’t in the canon, aren’t talked about, aren’t translated? I knew from the Russian example that there were many, and I figured out that there were many in other parts of Eastern Europe.

I think one year, somewhere around 2015, the press published like 10% of the new poetry translations in the country. Which is funny because it was only nine or ten books. I’m not talking about new translations of Dante or something. It is kind of obscene, perverse maybe. But those were the numbers. At a certain point, it made sense that if UDP’s thing is to publish what isn’t being published elsewhere that translation would be one of those areas where we could make some kind of contribution. Rather than expanding into more commercial projects, we could do something that’s even less commercial.

KG: When I had just moved to NYC over a decade ago and looked at the UDP list, I got a sense of its relationship to work in translation and to a modernism across borders, an internationalist sense of modernism. A couple decades after the start of UDP, what is your sense of its impact on poetry and reading practices more broadly?

MY: I think there is a sort of cosmopolitanism in a leftist socialist sense that comes out of modernism. It’s powerful to see one’s work in some kind of more internationally connected vein. For instance, we published Alexander Vvedensky who was barely known in Russia and a lot of young poets here were affected by that work. Šalamun certainly had an impact early on as well—in part because he worked together with younger American poets to translate his poems, and that sort of started spreading the gospel of Šalamun. But there are many other examples: Lev Rubinstein, Dmitri Prigov from the Moscow Conceptualist circle. Some of the language school people were like, oh, yeah, we heard about them back in the eighties, but we didn’t really know that it was so connected to what we were doing.

Talking to people like Mónica de la Torre (who has in her own practice helped expand an anglophone engagement with Latin American poetry) or Rob Fitterman about their experience of reading Lev Rubinstein, who was, before our publication, pretty much unknown, you get a sense of how Rubinstein was generative for their own work.

The UDP/n+1 book of Kirill Medvedev came out at an interesting moment where some new thinking around the connections of poetry and politics were happening here. And his very activist positions were, I think, important to people here, dealing basically with global capitalism. And it was not hard to relate to some of his positions about “Where’s the money coming from to publish my work,” “What kinds of institutions am I upholding by publishing the work,” “Where am I publishing the work?” All of these questions had an impact, his very Marxist thinking around the role of the poet and aesthetics. It actually pushed that conversation among US poets who wanted to feel solidarity in what is really a global struggle.

Around that time the book came out, Kirill was starting to move his work toward the more popular genre of song. His band was playing in some of the Russian oppositional spaces. He wrote those songs while he was also translating Pasolini into Russian and while he was publishing his work with his own press, the Free Marxist Press. He was really putting himself as a poet into the service of something.

KG: Sometimes when people don’t have to think about the practical circumstances of internationalism, or don’t have to think about people talking to each other across language barriers, they’ll say something kind of truistic about the untranslatability of poetry. As an editor and a publisher and a translator and also a poet, how do you think about and how do you confront that problem?

MY: I think of myself as a materialist when it comes to that. It’s very strange to me to talk about how translation is impossible when it’s being done all the time.

The most frightening thing would be if there were equivalences between languages, especially in poetry, because then it would mean that we wouldn’t need translators [laughs], but we’d also not really need foreign poetry because it wouldn’t be any different.

What translation poses is a sort of cultural intervention, or you could say enrichment—the possibility of an intervention into domestic aesthetics is only possible through translation. And you see this happening all throughout history: it’s through translation that domestic styles or aesthetics or categories change.

You can see the effect of French poetry on Ashbery. You can see this in all the poets who are translators, you can see their poetry reacting to the challenges posed by translation and the kinds of new questions that are posed by bringing something foreign into the language about one’s sense of home, or comfort, or habit.

So to my mind, translation is just something that happens, that we do. Not all translations might be great. Whether they’re good or bad representations of the original isn’t to my mind the most salient question. It’s more about how the translation affects what’s happening domestically.

If it simply supports a status quo and a kind of value system of aesthetics that we already possess, then maybe it’s not so important. What we were talking about earlier bears upon this in terms of like, well, why did we only know the Neruda that wasn’t the leftist? That is a case of a kind of domestication that has been supported by the larger publishing world for a long time. They choose a voice, a new voice from somewhere else, somewhere exotic, but make it into something that’s “readable,” a good English poem.

So that whole category of making something “a good English poem” or talking about the impossibility of translation (because the original has this other sound and this other context and so forth) is to me a kind of smokescreen for what is actually a kind of traditionalist, monolingual idea of what poetry should be, what is acceptable, what is appropriate, and what the appropriate forms are for something to be translated into.

There’s a relevant anecdote. In the late sixties, a British poet named Nicholas Moore responded to a call for a translation contest that George Steiner judged in the Sunday Times. Nicholas Moore thought that what he was doing was sort of a refutation of Steiner’s ideas. He actually thought that translation was impossible, but his way of proving his point was to submit 31 versions of Baudelaire’s Spleen, which was the contest poem. He submitted his different translations under weird pseudonyms with weird addresses—basically heteronyms. And none of them won the prize, but Steiner noticed them and wrote about them a bit. But they’re all completely different takes on this one poem. So many different voices, personae, like it’s all recognizably that poem, but completely different takes. In the end, I think he didn’t really prove that it was impossible, but rather that there are just so many possibilities. And all of them destabilize our desire to fix the poem as having one authoritative version that is appropriate to our language.

In a way, the Pierre Menard story by Borges bears on this because you translate something the same way—like, let’s say you use the same exact words 50 years ago and now, they’re gonna have a different meaning in the new context. Pierre Menard translating Don Quixote is basically creating a new Don Quixote, though he’s not changing a word. He’s using the same language, Spanish, and the Spanish of that time, but it’s much more interesting. Borges says that it’s so much better than Cervantes because it’s doing all these new things now, even though it’s the same. It’s not even, in a sense, a translation, and yet it is.

KG: Maybe that’s a good moment to pivot to World Poetry Books, which you’re now editing, and which is focused on putting non-English poetry into English.

MY: Yeah. I took over as editor a year and a half ago. I had some projects like the Manuel Maples Arce Stridentist Poems in my pocket with me at the moment that I wasn’t sure what to do with. I had been working with translator KM Cascia for a while, and we decided it would go wherever I was going, and World Poetry became a great place for it, kind of suddenly. It’s still a small press, but it’s growing very quickly.

Of course, the mission is very simple: new translations of poetry from non-English languages, as much of the world as possible. I think of it like building a library: what could be a go-to library of foreign poetry in translation that would cover some ground that’s been covered, but in new ways, and cover some that hasn’t. We just did Keith Waldrop’s translation of early Paul Verlaine, Keith’s last published book while he was alive. For poets like Verlaine, we’re expanding on what’s available in their body of work in English. We’re doing a Seferis next year, stuff that hasn’t been available. But most of all, we’re trying to fill the gaps: writers who have barely been published in English or not at all, important figures of the past or the present or the recent future. It’s a strategy similar to the Eastern European Poet Series project. Meret Oppenheim hadn’t come out in English before at all. Maples Arce, barely. We’d heard through Bolaño about that Mexican avant-garde, but we didn’t really have access to it unless we spoke Spanish and dug it up in libraries. (Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems is particularly interesting in the context of the connections we’ve been hinting at between socialism and the avant garde.)

Last year we did a book by Antonio Gamoneda, who’s around 90 years old, a Spanish writer. I want there to be a Gamoneda in our library. He’s an important, different kind of poet, had a difficult time with Franco, comes out of the working class, has been nominated for the Nobel, but we barely know his name, you know? And then there’s Ennio Moltedo, Zuzanna Ginczanka, Afrizal Malna… I would like the library that I’m creating to have those names.

The name of the press predated me, and it’s maybe a little old-fashioned, and of course it’s a little inaccurate because the mission doesn’t include poetry from the Anglophone world. There are maybe one or two other presses in the US that focus on poetry in translation. There’s Circumference Books, which is excellent, but they only do a couple books a year. So I feel there’s a lot to do.

Revisiting older work in new translations, though it’s not my primary focus for World Poetry, is something that I’m doing as a translator with my work on [Osip] Mandelstam. He’s an interesting example of someone who was translated quite a bit in a very particular way during the Cold War. Those translations were skewed by Western liberalism and Cold War antagonisms. So revisiting Mandelstam also means revisiting the context and the history and trying to understand the positionality of someone who was working for a long time within the Soviet system and trying to find a way to honor his political commitments—and also his nearly-utopian cosmopolitan belief in a world culture, which many of the early revolutionary authors and artists shared. That idea of world culture was for him inseparable from the proletarian movement: if this palace over here belongs to the proletariat, so does world literature. So, in translating Mandelstam, a major part of that project is to revisit the circumstances in which he was writing, and to understand the poems from a viewpoint that just wouldn’t have been accessible (or acceptable, or “appropriate”) during the Cold War, which entails Soviet subjectivity in the twenties and thirties, like, how does a poet relate to power and to the revolution and so forth. That’s inseparable from the project of translation, this understanding of contexts. And that’s what I meant when I was talking about a materialist position. When I read a translation, I want to know the translator’s interpretation of that context.

KG: I think in this context about the big Brecht poetry book that came out, edited by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn, whose introduction said something like, “Brecht! Great poet. Shame about the communism.” Like, why do you two even like this guy? What is the appeal if you’re not down to clown? But I guess liberalism, as you indicate, is a hell of a drug.

You also started your own imprint, Winter Editions. What can Newsletter readers expect from you?

MY: I was already working on starting a small press before I was called into World Poetry, so I had to kind of rejigger things a bit. I probably would’ve done the Maples Arce on Winter Editions, but then I was like, oh, now I have this opportunity to build a translation program, so I can put it there. But what is it that I want to do that’s not gonna fit there? For instance, Lewis Warsh’s translation of Robert Desnos.

It’s not a new translation. It’s from 1973. Lewis wasn’t around anymore to fix up some of the misprisions with help from editors or friends. So it wouldn’t work for World Poetry. The Winter Edition book is still a very different edition from the original chapbook. For one, it includes the French en-face. Also, we added an essay by the original publisher about those times and circumstances. You know, Lewis was one of the first people in the US to translate Desnos.

Winter Editions is really for my whims and fancies and pleasures: working with a former student on their first book, or working with a friend whose work I believe in, or an ambitious project that might have trouble finding a publisher. And also to continue what I had been doing a bunch of at UDP, revisiting international avant-gardes that seem to be missing from the picture. For instance, a book by Heimrad Bäcker, who wrote essays on documentary poetry back in the eighties, and the poems of Hélio Oiticica, which we’re publishing this fall, poems that have never been published even in Brazil. It’s sort of a secret notebook kind of thing.