TY - CHAP

T1 - “Who was ever only themselves?” Cross-border Ecologies of Translation

AU - Skoulding, Zoë

N1 - Due to be published September 2023

PY - 2023/9/29

Y1 - 2023/9/29

N2 - The work of Forrest Gander, in its close engagement with ecopoetics, exemplifies an important area of post-millennium poetry of the US, though translation, with which it is equally concerned, is less broadly represented. Yet, these aspects are necessarily interrelated, and a nationally focused lens does not provide an adequate means of discussing its transnational and cross-cultural commitments. I consider his poetry in the context of his work as a translator, particularly of Mexican poets Coral Bracho, in Firefly Under the Tongue , and Alfonso D’Aquino, in Selected Poems: Fungus Skull Eye Wing. In discussing these works alongside Gander’s Core Samples from the World , Be With, and his 2021 collection Twice Alive, I examine a planetary notion of “world” in its cultural, political, and ecological dimensions (distinct from the generalizing assumptions of the global), as inextricably bound up with the process and materiality of writing and translating. Birgit Mara Kaiser and others have in recent years drawn on Karen Barad’s posthumanist perspective to describe the process at work in reading across cultures. Barad’s term “intra-activity” proves particularly useful in locating poetries of the US and Mexico in a North American configuration, revealing that the poetics of poet and translator are also subject to the destabilizing of boundaries and properties, and similarly enmeshed in material and discursive practices. In reading them together, I consider what is at stake in reading writing and translation diffractively, as forms of enacted knowledge in their articulation of the nonhuman world.

AB - The work of Forrest Gander, in its close engagement with ecopoetics, exemplifies an important area of post-millennium poetry of the US, though translation, with which it is equally concerned, is less broadly represented. Yet, these aspects are necessarily interrelated, and a nationally focused lens does not provide an adequate means of discussing its transnational and cross-cultural commitments. I consider his poetry in the context of his work as a translator, particularly of Mexican poets Coral Bracho, in Firefly Under the Tongue , and Alfonso D’Aquino, in Selected Poems: Fungus Skull Eye Wing. In discussing these works alongside Gander’s Core Samples from the World , Be With, and his 2021 collection Twice Alive, I examine a planetary notion of “world” in its cultural, political, and ecological dimensions (distinct from the generalizing assumptions of the global), as inextricably bound up with the process and materiality of writing and translating. Birgit Mara Kaiser and others have in recent years drawn on Karen Barad’s posthumanist perspective to describe the process at work in reading across cultures. Barad’s term “intra-activity” proves particularly useful in locating poetries of the US and Mexico in a North American configuration, revealing that the poetics of poet and translator are also subject to the destabilizing of boundaries and properties, and similarly enmeshed in material and discursive practices. In reading them together, I consider what is at stake in reading writing and translation diffractively, as forms of enacted knowledge in their articulation of the nonhuman world.

U2 - 10.4324/9781003187028

DO - 10.4324/9781003187028

M3 - Chapter

BT - The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics

A2 - Fiedorczuk, Julia

A2 - Newell, Mary

A2 - Quetchenbach, Bernard

A2 - Tierney, Orchid

ER -