Against Translation

Alan Shapiro

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226613642
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation—not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language—where "the signs loosen, fray, and drift"—Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn't yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking "girly"; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss—moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.

Three

Oracles

Black boom box of the town loner, one hand propping it on his shoulder, pressing it against his ear, as it blasted a force field of electric outrage all around him as he walked the streets, in his own parade of being no one anybody knew, in black boots, black pants and shirt, neck shackled with austere chains, while a heavy key chain clanged from his belt. Mute but for the blasted sound, the indecipherable screeching, he passed by too quickly to be hassled, to care if he was jeered at or merely seen and then forgotten, just part of the scenery, part of the background, the background’s angry edge of caring not at all about him, appearing in our lives the way a stranger might appear by accident in a photograph taken by a loved one of a loved one—a wandering oracle, but of what? What didn’t register? What mattered little then, and less now, or mattered, we were certain, unforgettably until it didn’t, remembered if at all as just a black blur in a torn-off corner of an absent photograph he’s stepping out of, into where for him we all along had been, and for each other soon would be?

First Love

Before he happened the body was to me

like weather in a place where weather changed

so little it never needed to be noticed,

a sleepwalk through long spells of fog

effusing inside out and outside in

until one day the feeling for him in my body

made of my body the isolated site

that seeing him could only happen from.

His presence fell impartially as sunlight,

indifferent, needless, blindingly unaware

that I was brightening alone below it,

like Blake’s sunflower, fixed, drawn, leaning up toward

the golden clime whose going left so fresh

a dark around me I was grateful for it.

Grateful because so long as it was dark

the wanting could be imageless and placeless,

not a being with of bodies but an in-

between so dense with wanting to be filled

that wanting to fill it was itself the force

that held me at the edge of having what

the wanting somehow wouldn’t let me have.

Was he my otherwise? Or was I his

the day he leaned across the front seat to

unlock the door for me the way he had

for others so we could go somewhere the smiling

promised would be mine alone, or ours,

long hair the sheen of corn silk, hand on mine

that on its own refused to pull away

the more I tried to pull it, pulling me after

even while I withdrew, like the sun caught

between collapsing and exploding, which meant

I wanted to and couldn’t while I did,

both drawn in and withdrawn held down

and hovering galaxies away above

the small boy looking up from where the wanting

wouldn’t let me enter, or escape.

How I grew up is how a black hole shrinks

by sucking into its event horizon

all of the emptiness around it, which

it squeezes to a dot that keeps contracting,

sucking until the space increasing in

the shrinking speck has grown too vast to cross.

Mirrors

The amusement park of my childhood was called Paragon. Paragon Park. And in it was a “ride” that wasn’t a ride at all but a crooked hall you walked through called the Crooked Hall that was in fact a crooked hall made entirely of funhouse mirrors, not just on either side but floor and ceiling too. I pretended to love it because everyone else did or seemed to. Maybe we all pretended to love it, anxious to show the world how confident we were, how free of vanity, that we could laugh in clinical fluorescence at the monsters we became inside it, on one side the body pulled like agonized taffy to a barely human smear, while on the other it swallowed itself up into a paramecium blur, a fat puddle. Jeered at by our bodies warped and morphing all around us, we didn’t laugh, or I didn’t, not really. The mirror did the laughing for me. It was like being caught inside a nightmare particle accelerator—in which the images I presented to the world were all exploded down into some grotesque confessional essence, the Higgs boson of a self-contempt I hid even from myself, except in dreams, or in sudden eruptions out of nowhere of disgust that had no aim or object, that, not to feel myself, I would have to train on others, usually the weakest ones I knew. Getting older, at least, changed that. Getting older is a new park; it’s still called Paragon, though no one goes there for amusement. Yet stuck inside it we still joke a lot, we say things like all mirrors laugh now when we are in them, but while the mirror on one side is a young self laughing at an old self in the facing mirror laughing back, we ourselves don’t laugh; we are where the laughs collide and shatter.

Grasshopper

to the little ant that was me,

intrepid Stevie, pretty

Stevie for whom the future

was a foreign movie

without subtitles,

bad boy of the moment

of the high school

parking lot, the hallways

and classrooms too,

flask peeking out

from shirt pocket,

always a little drunk,

or high, a different girl

or boy clinging to his arm,

envy of girl and boy

alike, by me especially despite

my ant ways, my little

drone ambition, glanced

at and envied not

so much for the beauty

as the beauty’s fuck-it-

all serenity, magnetic

pull of couldn’t-give-a-shit,

the you-know-I’m-me face, bright shock

of blond hair, body tall

and slender flexed

with having, taking,

giving, body both

a shameless dare

and warning, and warned

and dared was how I

ant-like, drone-like,

navigated, tray in hand,

the hormonal roar and milky

sourness of the lunchroom,

the sticky linoleum hubbub

each step had to be un-

stuck from as I searched

for a seat at any table

but his, but never too

far from his, and always

near enough ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• one
• two
• three
• four
• Notes