John Ashbery | A Refutation of Common Sense

Adam Fitzgerald: So tell me how this all came about, you translating Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.

John Ashbery: It came about because Bob Weil, an editor at Norton whom I know and have seen many times over the years, said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could publish a book of yours.” And I said, “Yes, but I write poetry and I have a publisher whom I’m very satisfied with.” Anyway, at some point he said, “Well, maybe you could do a translation? Is there anything you’d like to translate?” And I thought well, I’ve always wanted to translate Illuminations. I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to translate for the joy of translating it, with the possible exception of a certain text by Julien Gracq.

AF: What was the actual experience of translating Illuminations like?

JA: It was a stimulating exercise for me because it got me thinking about my own writing as I was doing it. Translation is sort of like writing, but it’s not: it’s a parallel activity. Meanwhile, Bob Weil had edited Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf translation, Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and R. Crumb’s Genesis — not exactly a translation, but an interpretation of a classic by an eccentric contemporary artist. So he was thinking along the lines of pairing the right translator with the right text, hopefully to make a commercial success of it. We’ll see if that happens!

AF: Were you reading a lot about Rimbaud at the time?

JA: I read the Graham Robb Rimbaud for the first time then. I had read the Enid Starkie biography years ago.

AF: I wonder if the shadow of Rimbaud’s life, the enfant terrible myth that’s snugly enwrapped around it forever now, influences or means anything when you were translating the poems.

JA: No, the Rimbaud myth has become too much of a cautionary tale. I mean look at that movie, Total Eclipse. Nobody knows why he stopped writing so there’s not really much point in thinking about it, or looking for biographical material in his poetry, and I sort of resent the idea that poetry is veiled autobiography. There are several places in Illuminations, for instance, that are supposed to be descriptive of London, where he spent a lot of time, and which was at that time an ultra-modern metropolis as opposed to Paris, which was not yet quite demolished by Haussmann and rebuilt — and it may be a model, of course, but Rimbaud was quite capable of describing a mythological city without needing one to hand. And then there’s the question of his relationship with Verlaine. There’s a poem I translated as “Drifters” that’s been interpreted as his feelings about Verlaine.

AF: So the autobiographical approach to poetry doesn’t appeal to you, even curiously so?

JA: I resist the idea that a poet can’t invent his or her own life, which may or may not coincide with the real one. In my own poetry, there are autobiographical passages, and there are also ones that sound as though they’re autobiographical even though they aren’t. I reserve the right to invent my own life story.

AF: Why does [Illuminations] feel different than A Season in Hell? Do you prefer Illuminations?

JA: I like both of them, but A Season in Hell is maybe too loud. In Illuminations he speaks in many different registers. It’s more varied.

AF: One of the differences between you two seems to be his obsession, at least imaginatively, with violence and cruelty — a quality that doesn’t seem to resonate in your poetry at all.

JA: Probably not.

AF: Do you figure Rimbaud thought of the prose poem like we’d think of it today, like a James Tate poem, or something we’d see by you?

JA: He uses the term in a letter he wrote. He says, “I’ve been writing some poems in prose.” And he would have had the example of Baudelaire and the person who is technically credited with inventing prose poetry, Aloysius Bertrand, who wrote Pierrot Lunaire.

AF: So what’s the difference, in your opinion, between prose and prose poetry?

JA: I think one has to look for or be awake to the sudden appearance of poetry in prose. I’ve mentioned this when people ask me what I was trying to do in Three Poems. My answer was I wanted to call attention to the poetic quality of prose that seems totally prosaic, and which can sometimes suddenly grab and move you to tears while reading a newspaper or a timetable or a guide book, and penetrate that source of the awe with which we respond to poetry.

AF: Do you worry about comparing your translations to other versions?

JA: I have looked at other versions. Sometimes to find out what the hell Rimbaud meant, and in other cases to avoid repeating what someone else has come up with. I didn’t let it become a rule.

AF: Getting back to your introduction and your fondness for “Génie,” why does it mean so much to you?

JA: It just seems very beautiful. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

AF: About the oft-quoted formulation Je est un autre (“I is someone else”), which you quote in the intro, do you think this has been terribly misunderstood?

JA: I think too much has been made of it as the lynchpin or key to everything Rimbaud wrote. There’s always the temptation to do that when a poet comes up with a line that sounds like an exegesis of their writing, like [William Carlos] Williams’s “No ideas but in things” — which I never thought he meant to be a pronouncement on the way poetry ought to be, but was just something that came up in that particular poem.

AF: You write, beautifully, “The self is obsolete” as a counter-riff on this famous phrase. Could you elaborate?

JA: The self has been replaced by the simultaneity of all of life, everything happening in a given moment becomes the source of the poem, rather than the writer thinking about what he or she is going to write.

AF: So writing’s a healthy way of escaping our good ol’ selfhood?

JA: No, I think it’s unhealthy! [Laughs] The cubists’ coexisting views of objects that could not be seen by the human eye the way they’re portrayed on the canvas is a way of going beyond the self, or acknowledging it’s no longer doing its job.

AF: That a single perspective is inherently limited when it comes to art?

JA: Or that there’s no reason why multiple ones shouldn’t exist, too.

AF: OK, you mentioned before how you peaked into other translations to help understand some of the more enigmatic utterances of these poems. What does Rimbaud mean by “We have no desire for complex music”? I’m reading the line from the version you have in a bound galley, so maybe it’s changed.

JA: I puzzled over that for a while. It was a hard nut to crack. I changed the phrasing in the final version to “Wise music is missing from our desire.” Savant is the adjective, and it means scientific, or knowing, wise. But who knows what this means? I have a Rimbaud dictionary that I got in Paris about twenty years ago, but I found I didn’t use it at all when I tried to translate him, even though words occur that do puzzle one.

AF: Yes, like when you choose “buggered” to give us the line in English from “After the Flood”: “They are sent off to be buggered in cities, swathed in disgusting luxury.”

JA: Other translations have been too ambiguous — no one wanted to use that word. [Rimbaud translator] Wallace Fowlie was apparently ashamed. Didn’t want to “go there.”

AF: Luckily, you did!

Boston Review April 2001