In 1965, Blaser published versions of these same poems in the San Francisco magazine Open Space. The word “versions” here is used with care, as Blaser was careful to indicate the space between his versions and the original French. Blaser took major liberties in bringing Nerval into his own poetic world. Robert Duncan, Blaser’s longtime friend and Bay Area compatriot, took offense at Blaser’s translation. In a special 1967 issue of Audit dedicated to Duncan’s work, Duncan published his own attempts at Nerval translations alongside a cutting exegesis of Blaser’s, as well as excerpts of correspondence between himself and Blaser regarding the matter. Ever the rigorous theosophist, Duncan compares individual poems line by line and chastises Blaser for neglecting to attend to the particularity of Nerval’s occult allusions and for his lack of fidelity more generally to the original French, its music, and its references. (Blaser’s rendition omits proper names of places and people from certain poems, and changes entirely the length of lines in others.) The occult severity of Duncan’s own rhetoric heightens the drama of the whole thing. Jack Spicer passed away in 1965 just as this debate between Duncan and Blaser picked up, but his work is an important pretext. It was Spicer who introduced Duncan and Blaser to one another, and the three together formed “The Berkeley Renaissance.” Spicer himself is famous for his ideas about derivation, dictation, and translation, which he developed across his poems and lectures, most famously in his 1957 serial work After Lorca, which troubles the lines between translation, homage, and rip-off. This debate over translation is one of several instances in which Blaser and Duncan made competing claims on Spicer’s legacy.
Looking at this dispute, one can readily see the largeness of the questions at stake, for Duncan and Blaser then, just as for Arjoon now: how does the U.S. poet, through his poetry, forge his subjectivity in terms of others, where “others” includes both the big Other of poetic lineage and tradition and the ostensibly smaller and more local other of his own peers, publishers, and friends? Sixty years after the opening of this debate between Duncan and Blaser, Terrence Arjoon makes a singular contribution which both synthesizes and moves beyond the rigid positions on each side. Where the Duncan/Blaser dispute sets up two poles, one of total fidelity and the other of complete autonomy, The Disinherited charts a third path forward.
Take, for instance, the different renderings of the first poem in Nerval’s sequence, titled “El Desdichado” in the original, translated by Blaser as “The Shadow,” by Duncan as “El Desdichado (The Disinherited)”, and returned by Arjoon it to its original “El Desdichado.” Discrepancies in a few lines in Blaser’s version of this poem seriously offended Duncan. One line in the middle of Nerval’s poem introduces two pairs of figures: “Suis-je Amour ou Phébus?... Lusignan ou Biron?” Duncan suggests that Nerval here is introducing two orders which in turn order the poems: one of myth and one of history. He censures Blaser over his omission of the proper names Lusignan and Biron, as well as the place name Posilipo and the title of a print by Dürer, placing import on the precision of Nerval’s terms. Duncan regards these terms as examples of “the revealed places and persons of Poetry,” which have major personal, mystical, and historical significance to the poem. Arjoon’s version of the line departs even more dramatically from the original. It reads “Am I Nerval or Villon… Harris or Rodney?” Arjoon, even where he omits those same names Blaser does, preserves the length and overall prosody of Nerval’s line, where Blaser does not, replacing the Romantic poet’s mythic figures with figures of Arjoon’s own poetic world, where Nerval himself becomes one of those revealed persons of Poetry, and an important part of the poetic order which undergirds Arjoon’s work.
Many figures on that order populate The Disinherited, and this is one of its most enchanting qualities. In addition to those figures of myth Arjoon receives from Nerval (Daphne, Isis, etc.), he fills the book’s imaginative world with characters of his own: Eight-Bog Marie and the Cinnabar Kid are strange and warm companions to the reader as we move through the book’s sometimes opaque poetic world. Arjoon wields these figures in almost allegorical terms, but as soon as we move to interpret their allegorical significance, they elude our understanding. These figures sometimes take the whole space of a poem (“Sestina for Eight-Bog Marie,” “The Cinnabar Kid”), while other times they appear only for a fleeting moment (“The Hours,” “El Desdichado”). The following lines which appear in “The Secret of Nerval” (one of a few poems in the book with this title) move quickly through a set of figures who by the point in the book where the poem appears are already familiar fellow travelers:
I never slept
for a long time.
Too many people
were talking.
In Cairo, in Todi,
on the train,
the Cinnabar Kid, drones,
Eight-Bog Marie,
blue frogs, Aurelie,
Nerval, pottery shards,
mineral springs, Isis,
Charlotte, scorpions, lamps,
and I wrote through silence.
All my notebooks
left blank.
One is left with the sense that these near-allegorical figures appear in the poem to move us between dream and waking life, private and public, where writing itself is both private and public in the life of a poet. It is through a chain of these figures that we are transported from the poet’s sleep, or the impossibility of that sleep, to the poet’s writing, or its impossibility.
A reader in the know will recognize some of these figures from the social world of the poet himself: Vlad, Charlotte, Thea. The Vlad who opens the poem “In The Studio” will be immediately legible to some as the poet and publisher Vladimir Nahitchevansky, whose Kingston-based publishing project 1080 Press, which Arjoon has both published with and edited for, is an important node in a constellation of young poets working in New York and elsewhere. Evoking such figures, Arjoon places himself in a kind of coterie, and grounds his otherwise opaquely imaginative world legibly in his place and time. Like Blaser before him, Arjoon is concerned with translation as a way of bringing over Nerval into his own life and poetics. This life and poetics, as Arjoon tells us in the poem “Antlers” (a version of Nerval’s “Anteros”), is “marked by History.” Consider the poem “Golden Lines”, where Arjoon takes Nerval’s “mur aveugle,” Duncan’s “blind wall,” and transforms it into a “blank screen”:
Beware the blank screen’s gaze;
verbs are attached to things themselves:
be careful how you use them!
In this turn of translation, Arjoon brings Nerval’s mythic dictum into our time: the screens which mediate our social worlds have the capacity to gaze back at us, Arjoon reminds. Knowing this, we should approach them warily. Arjoon’s lines are a prescient warning.
As these figures figure and refigure across poems, the work establishes itself as decidedly serial, taking a cue from both Nerval and Blaser after him. After Lorca is a crucial intertext here, as Blaser developed his sense of seriality in conversation with Spicer. Spicer’s homage to Lorca resembles Arjoon’s homage to Nerval in that both poets use seriality to make their own writing indistinguishable from the translations of their influences. While both Blaser and Duncan present Nerval’s Chimeras in their original sequence, Arjoon takes after Spicer by placing Nerval’s poems out of order and amongst his own original works. A reader with no knowledge of the original poems might not be able to tell what is Nerval’s and what is Arjoon’s, and this is precisely the point.
Beyond these recurring characters, the poems establish themselves as serially bound through the consonance of their music. Each poem’s music resembles the music of other poems in the book, as well as the music of Nerval’s French. Arjoon’s verse is as sonically considered as it is imagistically dense, and the poem’s sonic sophistication keeps us from getting lost in a sea of revealed and received images. Arjoon preserves Nerval’s music and incorporates it into his own style, which bears the imprint of other influences from the intervening two centuries. Carefully measured, long lines plod along lyrically. Anaphoric sameness, repetition, and strange rhymes sometimes appear as uneasy contortion, but then elegantly modulate into lyric satisfaction. Take the likeness of movement and moment in the following lines from “Low Tide”:
There is in me now a wormlike moment.
This movement makes me sweat painting clowns
The book’s sprawling but steady lyric resembles both Nerval’s Romanticism and the poems and prose of more recent influences named by Arjoon: Leslie Scalapino, Lisa Robertson. In that ‘60s debate, Duncan accused Blaser of making lines shorter so they would more closely resemble early love lyric. To the contrary, Arjoon tends toward a steady and lengthy line, both in his interpretation of Nerval’s music and in the making of his own. Arjoon is sometimes terse, and his terseness feels less like classical love lyric and more like the modernist verse of Gertrude Stein (as in “The Secret of Nerval”) or the condensation of the Objectivists (as in “Pattern & Decoration”). One such poem, “The Secret of Nerval,” teases us with its jauntily brief lines. Having spent some time coming up against the book’s lyric opacity, such a title offers us the promise of a revealed secret: a key, we hope, which will unlock the meaning of Nerval, and in turn help us to understand Arjoon. Instead, the poem presents series of images which displace one another in a dizzying chain:
The door is the bee.
The bee is a stress position.
A stress position is a peach pit.
A peach pit is ambiguity.
Ambiguity is a matter of style.
Then again, maybe this semiotic chain is itself the key. The symbolic density and stylistic clarity of this chain reveal what is so pleasurable about the book. Ambiguity is a matter of style, and this book has style by the boatload.