ALEXIS ALMEIDA: Hi! Can we start with hockey? I remember when we knew each other in Providence, you told me you had played street hockey in Tokyo and San Diego, and wrote “hockey poems” for a while. My first thought was, I wish I had played hockey. I grew up in the Midwest—I was around it a lot, and I always wanted to play but for some reason didn’t. The “I wish I had done that…”—what’s that verb tense? Where the past perfect and the past continuous touch… Anyway, do you have that feeling when you come to work that you admire, and want to translate?
SAWAKO NAKAYASU: Maybe it’s the past perfect subjunctive? I do have that feeling with work I love, that flavor of admiration where you think, I wish I had done that myself. I don’t feel that way about everything I admire, but now this brings me back to the first text that I attempted to translate, which was Tropisms by Nathalie Saurraute.
AA: Ah, I love that book! And just read it for the first time last year.
SN: Now that I think about it, I must have felt something around that book even before I translated some of it (just a few pieces). I first read it in French class as an undergrad. And there was an assignment, to write my own “tropism,” in French. There’s something about those pieces that I always wanted to inhabit. In any case I never pursued it (translating Tropisms), and eventually I switched to translating from Japanese, but I still recall vividly the sensation of wanting to have written it myself. I’ve heard musicians say something similar about cover songs, too.
AA: Yes, I do remember starting that book and falling immediately in love with the repetition of different words at the start of sections—“they,” “this,” or “here” and “there”—words that lead into descriptions of moments/movements in people’s lives, a choreography. They weren’t immediately connected in terms of plot, but definitely connected in terms of tone and feeling. But I need to revisit it.
SN: I haven’t read that book in decades. 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.
AA: Yes. I’m in the middle of moving, so my life is in boxes and fragments (as is my frame of mind), but I remember falling in love with the shapes the language was making, and thinking I wanted to write into those shapes, or wondering if I could move in and out of them. I also keep making the shape of a small square with my hands as we talk over Zoom [laughs]. The edition I read was small and so portable. I’d read a few pages at a time on the train, and it led to a small piece of writing/portraiture I’ve been working on since.
SN: It’s interesting to hear that you had an experience with Tropisms that led to writing. I’ve always been curious (for others as well as about myself) about what texts (or artworks) beget new writing—it’s mysterious to me, even though it happens all the time. I did bring a Saurrate book with me when I went into the Pink Waves performance, not Tropisms but The Use of Speech, alongside a few other books. And I’ve often found Will Alexander’s writings to be “useful” to me in these ways, sometimes I find myself almost trying to trace some aspect of his work.
AA: Yes, this feeling—an erotic pull toward the work, wanting to be close to, or finding a place within the work from which you can begin—is something I experience when reading many of my favorite writers: Renee Gladman, Hervé Guibert, Lisa Jarnot, Roberta Iannamico, S*an D. Henry Smith, and others. That feeling of wanting to understand something aesthetically, or maybe feeling an affinity or the beginning of an affinity, sometimes makes you want to respond or make something else in the world. Or when a friend is telling you a story about their life and you’re like, Oh, I wish I had done that! (Like hockey!) The limitation—you didn’t do this thing—is an important part of this feeling, but that realm of possibility, even in the past tense, can be generative.
SN: I like this notion of a beginning of an affinity, as something pointing you towards a new possibility, be it an aesthetic gesture or something else. I feel like there are many things I wish I had done, but the big one for me is music. I sang in choir, but in college I was the music major without an instrument—I sang ok enough for choir, but couldn’t possibly call my voice “my instrument” the way vocalists did. So all my life I’ve carried a feeling of wishing I had played an instrument.
And because I didn’t have an instrument, when it came down to choosing a “track,” I chose composition, which allowed me to spend time probing that relationship between text and music. I felt like in most cases the rhythms and syntax of the text was secondary to the larger formal rhythms in the musical composition. If I had continued with composition, I would have loved to explore that further—to compose from a place that started with the text—not “setting the text to music,” but “setting music to the text.”
AA: Yes, a few things come to mind. Something I notice a lot in your work is repetition—and now learning about your background in music and music composition adds another layer to that. I’m thinking immediately of the phrase “variation on a theme,” and then of Bach’s cello suites, which I played a lot as a kid—I played the flute, and often played string parts because they share a clef with some woodwinds—and which were written to be a cycle, with similar structures and movements that refer to each other, rather than just discrete pieces.
SN: You are so lucky to have grown up playing the cello suites!!
AA: It’s an inexact analogy, but I do think making variations is not so different from what we do as translators—acknowledging that something lives at the center of the work that began someplace else, and that someone else authored—and making an attempt to bring that into a different context, a different language, while of course adding your own nuances. Those structural throughlines can be so hard to bring across in different languages and versions (in Bach’s case, Prelude, Allemande, Courante…). But the desire to do so can also be an exciting driving force of the work.
I also wonder about the impulse to repeat, the way we unconsciously repeat mistakes, destructive patterns, etc. But also the way repetition can lend itself, or open itself up to change over time. That feels hopeful, watching something molt and adapt. It’s something I admire about your work, Pink Waves, which begins with (and modulates), “It was a wave all along,” but really so many of your books rely heavily on repetition.
SN: I love the cello suites—what a gorgeous example of repetition—I love how something can be grounded and floating at the same time, to hold the contradictions of motion and stillness together in one place. Likewise with variations on a theme—like etudes, or studies, or sketches—you see it more often with visual artists and composers than with writers, but I like the way it allows you into the mind of someone as they work something out, going back to it, doing and repeating it, observing how their mind moves around a fixed thing, and eventually as it opens up to change. In many of my books there is that sense of “working something out”—in Pink Waves the repetition is visible, but also in books like The Ants and Texture Notes, I’m also thinking something through by repeating the same question: What is the texture of this? Or, What can ants tell me about this?
And then there is our repetition as readers, how we read and reread something. (All the more if you are translating!) If you could transcribe your mind as it read a poem—how it might loop around a word, a phrase, a line, multiple lines, reread the whole poem, return to an earlier part—some aspects of reading might be incredibly repetitive, but it’s all lost to the extremely ephemeral performance that happens in the privacy of your own mind.
In a way I’ve always been most attracted to process, the thick juicy middle of being in the midst of art-making. I remember singing four-part harmony, and how things would sound funky and weird in rehearsal until the harmonies truly clicked together. That precise moment, when the music shifted from dissonant (incorrectly dissonant) chaos into its intended harmonies, that always felt like the true magic, and also an experience that you can only have as a performer, and even then only in rehearsal.
I have always longed to get inside the work—maybe this is similar to your sense of wanting to merge with something—especially with music, and as an audience member, I so dearly wanted to get as inside as I possibly could. The best seats were of course the ones right in the middle of the orchestra. Janet Cardiff gets close to this idea in her “Forty-Part Motet” piece at MoMA PS1.
When I wrote Mouth: Eats Color, part of what I was doing was trying to capture the “real-time”—the inside elements—of translation, which in part accounts for the multiple iterations (though there were other things going on too), and which I also forced into existence by framing it as a durational performance—in this case, the duration was one month. During that month, I went to the office every day and worked on that book. (One day there was a fire drill and we all had to leave the building. But I didn’t want to stop, didn’t want to leave my (desktop) computer. I kept working by hand, outside on a picnic table, and included that handwritten page in the book as well.)
[Jona Kang-Nakayasu wanders in sick; Sawako tells him to take an orange to his room.]
…I’ve also always been interested in trying to find ways of translating the modes of repetition in music, into repetition in text. Maybe this applies to translation, too, so when I’m translating, especially if it’s poetry and if there is an abstract quality to it… I mean, sometimes the aspiration is to translate not the repetition (or whatever element) itself, but the way that repetition feels to the receiver. With Tropisms, it wasn’t about repetition, but I was interested in translating a quality of the sensation caused by that particular writing style. With Pink Waves, I wondered if I could give the reader an experience that was not unlike the way we experience repetition in music. For example, in orchestral music you often have a melodic element that is passed between different instruments—accruing via repeated iterations and layerings—so you have this vertical layering repetition among the instruments or vocal parts, and then a lateral repetition over time, and what you receive from that is familiarity and difference at the same time, where you feel grounded and elsewhere simultaneously.
I wonder, too, if there is a relationship between my interest in repetition and my interest in texture—that repetition resists a kind of linear progression, and instead opts for layering, weaving, a thickening of the original material.
And, given your own (much bigger!) background with music, and also poetry and translation, I wonder where you feel certain resonances of overlaps between these parts of your artistic being?
AA: So much I want to respond to here! “If you could transcribe your mind as it read a poem,” I love that so much. I think you have just captured why I love hearing poems read out loud, why I sometimes (often) read poems out loud to myself, or speak the words as I’m writing. This grain of the voice, I can feel it in some writing as a texture. It’s exciting because it feels like modes crossing—you can watch thinking unfold there, or listen to speech become music. When I first read Samuel Beckett I was like, Oh, I can’t remember anything before this… This also happened when I first read Marosa di Giorgio—I was in awe of her sentences unfolding (in a durational sense, as you mention above when talking about performance)—and Ed Roberson’s Aquarium Works is incredible in this way, that unfolding of the mind into music, and the repetitive structures bringing that out.
I recently saw some of Julius Eastman’s music performed by the Wild Up ensemble. There was one specific piece, “Stay On It,” that involves a lot of layering of instruments and vocals into harmonies, and the repetition of that single phrase. There was a liberatory sensation in the room, but I also felt like the audience was being brought incrementally closer to something. It reminded me of playing the same line over and over again as a kid, trying to figure something out (to touch something), and I experience something like this when I try to translate a line over and over.
SN: I would have loved to go to that Eastman performance. His minimalism has a maximalist flavor to it, and I like that you linked it to the act of translating—as if there is an Eastman-esque explosion of repetition (in reading and interpreting) that happens in the mind of the translator, in what I imagine as the “process” of translating—the transcript of the internal monologue of the translator mid-translation?
AA: I like that. Returning to Pink Waves, from the minute I read “It was a wave all along,” it had such a distinct texture in my mind, and such an elegiac quality/tone to it. The book later mentions sitting with a friend and the loss of her child, and meanwhile one (I) can palpably feel time moving through the book, each moment: “Stacy Tran has left / in the wake of accumulated war neverending / mass breathing / dislocation.” I think the book addresses the tension between the desire to hang on to something, to stop and look at it, and the way time moves things along—so the book also has a very ephemeral quality to it. The reader can sense certain feelings morph into other ones—it’s almost like the book is letting that happen, not just directing its motion, and that was very exciting to me as a reader.
Going back to the performance of Pink Waves you mentioned, I know that you composed some of it “live.” I definitely felt this as a reader. Can you talk more about this?
SN: Thanks for that, Alexis—it makes me feel like you were the perfect reader for this book. I do think grieving is repetitive. And that much of it is out of our control. And perhaps that it changes shape over time, too. I’m glad you felt, in your reading, some of those temporal aspects of the book, like you tuned in to the way the book was written—perhaps to the way that I was carried by it, too. It’s not that the book wrote itself as if on auto-pilot, but there is a sense in which I was writing quickly, and that the act of writing was as much an act of listening as it was one of generating language. Feelings do morph into others, but they also carry the residue of the previous ones, and so I guess they coexist in this way, releasing and returning in cycles.
I’ve been thinking about “form” in these contexts, too—that the existence of the structure, any structure, can create a place to release the work. Sometimes I think form is more of a shape, and sometimes I think form is more of a mode. The form for Pink Waves is based on the syntax of Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” which itself had taken its form from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. They were both very kind in supporting this sort of translation-adjacent move of mine, even as it doesn’t really look like a translation at all—and yet, in a certain sense I was invoking an “accurate” mode of translation, I was translating one and only one element from my source text, the syntax, in what I call a “micro-translation.” I’ve always been drawn to the ways in which syntax conveys emotional content. There was some aspect of that that I was pulling out of my reading of “Black Dada,” and wanting to see if I could use that syntax as a poetic form.
On the other hand, elegy, more than anything else, seems to choose its own form. I’m not entirely sure of how much agency I had, ultimately, in choosing the form for Pink Waves.
I took these materials with me when I went into performance, which I did mostly because I wanted—or needed—to allow myself the time and space to complete the writing. It was the end of the school year, and I knew that everything was going to shift, once summer kicked in. But I was in the middle of this book and I didn’t want to let it go, so I used the framework of performance to force that. It wasn’t a lot of time: three consecutive working days, 9 to 5. And during those hours I wrote non-stop. And by “writing,” I mean that it wasn’t always about adding words to a document—sometimes “writing” involved reading a current draft out loud, into the mic I had set up, and sometimes it was more like editing.
There’s also something about performance and grieving that felt like an appropriate way to process this desire to mourn a loss. Maybe all the more because it was a loss that I couldn’t find any other way to grieve. Writing gives us those spaces. There was some detritus—materials in the physical world—that I wanted to process via performance. Sometimes you need to burn the remnants, for closure. (Though in this case, “burning the remnants” was enacted by eating french fries.) The writing, the performance, the processing of materials, they all created closure, and a space to grieve. The part about my friend losing a child… Their situation moved me because I could see how impossible—societally, socially—how impossible it was for them to mourn the loss in this particular context, even in spite of how very real the loss was. It wasn’t a conventional situation, and they seemed trapped in a space where their suffering was not understood. Our social lives provide space to mourn only certain losses in certain ways, but it doesn’t hold everything as we need.
Earlier this year, Gabrielle Civil invited me to participate in her performance project with Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, called Translated Bodies. Madhu Kaza, JD Pluecker, and I were invited to join her in a three-day performance series where we explored the intersections between performance, writing, and translation. As one component of that event, I made a piece called “Invisible Losses,” where I invited people to share with me one sentence, describing an invisible loss of their own. They were written down, and on stage I ate those invisible losses. (At one point the piece was titled “I will eat your losses,” which I also liked as a title.) I guess I’ve continued to want to make space for that, because I now have a second, web-based iteration of “Invisible Losses,” in collaboration with Theo Ellin Ballew and their ORAL.pub project. The invisibility aspect here is so powerful. I find that I’m still unable to actually say what it is that I lost, which is interesting—the saying and not saying of it all. The things and spaces we hold and carry for the different parts of our emotional selves.
AA: I’m very interested in the idea of making space with language, and that language itself can be spacious in its syntax—I feel this even more since becoming a parent. It’s a painful thing to experience in this country, that things like healthcare are considered a “benefit” rather than a basic human right, even having space to grieve, to parent, and to make things apart from your job. When you talk about making (and wanting) a space to write and grieve, it very much resonated. The period after Ash was born—one of the hardest times in my life—I wanted this space (to write and grieve) very much and felt it was almost impossible to create within the context I was in. I actually just finished a long poem I wrote in response to this time, which is basically a series of ideas for books I wanted/want/have started to write. That crossing of time periods, and supplanting of desire into the past-tense, the acknowledging and making something of a limitation, showed up again as a major driving force.
Also what you say about only certain losses being grievable (or being given the social space for grieving) is so true. It makes me think about the state-sanctioned rituals we have for grieving (“bereavement” days at work, etc.) and then the private ones—invisible, as you say, even invisible within close communities, because some losses are impossible to articulate, at least not right away. It makes me go back to temporal modes that cross, which you seemed to capture in your performance. Grieving happens over time, is continuous, emerges, is sometimes swallowed, or is absorbed by a loved one. The way grief is articulated (by the body) changes given the context.
SN: To finish writing Pink Waves, I felt very compelled to actively carve out time (and space) where I could finish it—even though my life is full of unfinished projects, or unexecuted ideas, something felt different about this book, where I wasn’t okay letting it go. And I knew that if I didn’t finish it in that moment, I never would. So I forced that situation by creating a performance to hold it. (Some other time we can talk about Settle Her, the book I wrote on the #1 bus line in Providence the year I quit Thanksgiving.)
It was a bit Yoko Ono-like—sometimes there were no audience members. I mean, who is going to come to watch me sit and write into my laptop for hours on end? Though people did join me in writing their own things. There were plenty of times when I was all alone in the theater. But I’ve always had an interest in non-performative performance, or performance for a non-audience. Or performativity as abstracted from the noun (a performance), and just left as a concept.
Just this second I saw my own reflection wavering in my cup of tea and that, too, felt like a micro-performance-slash-self-portrait. And I’ve always loved Trisha Brown and her walking series.
There’s some connection, too, to my aunt, who is a calligraphy master, who I studied with when I went to Japan. You look at a piece of calligraphy and it feels fixed in time, but when she was teaching me how to do it, it was all about movement—like she was teaching me the dance moves. When she sets out to make a work, she prepares for it like a performer—there is a specific date and time, she assembles all the materials, the right paper, selects the soundtrack. And then this very live performance happens, even though there is no live audience, and the work is a document of her performance. This feels so very true and resonant to me, with regards to writing, and the relationship between writing and performance. Part of my writing Pink Waves on stage was that I wanted to call in my “performance mind” in order to do the writing. So Pink Waves, too, is a document of a performance. I didn’t add or subtract or change anything after the performance ended. And because I knew that that was the plan, it put a certain improvisational pressure on the moment.
AA: It feels important to say here that your Ants, as well as having lived around South American book fairs—which I love because they rely on print rather than internet distribution—gave me some inspiration for this small press I started, 18 Owls. The textures and repetitions in that specific poem of yours I printed as a broadside—“Battery”—brought me closer to feeling like I wanted to learn printing methods like letterpress, risograph, etching. I learned to letterpress at AS220 when we both lived in Providence, so I found some beginning in that poem—thank you for that.
SN: Alexis it’s super lovely to hear that Ants helped lead you on the path to Owls!
AA: But I think we’re well over the word limit, and we need to stop. How do you know when something is finished?
SN: Most likely there are different levels of certainty, with each thing. Some things feel more clearly “finished” than others, especially if I’ve set a temporal (performative) deadline, like with Mouth: Eats Color or Pink Waves or Settle Her. And some things feel less in my control, and more just a vague sense of knowing, or feeling… Perhaps this goes back to the beginnings of a work too, something like that erotic pull you mentioned: you might know to enter something in the same way that you know to exit it—a little bit like relationships with people, actually. We enter a relationship, there is some degree of merging, but sometimes you get to a point when, for whatever reason, it’s over. And I suppose with human relationships, too, we often have trouble knowing when it is over, or when it’s time to exit.
But in either case, if my heart isn’t in it anymore, I don’t stay (!)—which makes me want to say something about my long-term relationship, and repetition. When I look back at the long period of time I have spent with the same person, it appears to me like a series of choices—made by both of us—I choose you, and again I choose you, you need to choose me right now (instead of xyz), and again I choose you—over and over again—because different choices appear in life, as in music, and in poetry, everything is an accumulation of choices, from the micro and the macro. And sometimes the choices are more difficult to make than other times.
When you translate, it puts you in a relationship with a text, something external to you that you’re in conversation with. There is an aspect of give and take, a sense of listening. Being in the middle of a project, you feel engaged, and alive—it’s exciting. And then at some point you might feel differently. That shift in feeling might be the end of the relationship. But in the very-alive-feeling midst of it, there can be a lot of feeling in a single choice—I wrote about luxuriating in “the micro-erotics of choosing this word over that word” in Say Translation Is Art. I do think there is a deep linguistic eros to translation, and I suspect that our very best translators put that kind of feeling into their choices, a form of love—you can almost tell when a translation is made without any love.
JONA KANG-NAKAYASU: Mommy could you please stop making your speeches now?
[Conversation ends with more insistent pleading from the sick child…]