The International Literary Quarterly
Contributors

Shanta Acharya
Marjorie Agosín
Donald Adamson
Diran Adebayo
Nausheen Ahmad
Toheed Ahmad
Amanda Aizpuriete
Baba Akote
Elisa Albo
Daniel Albright
Meena Alexander
Rosetta Allan
María Teresa Andruetto
Innokenty Annensky
Claudia Apablaza
Robert Appelbaum
Michael Arditti
Jenny Argante
Sandra Arnold
C.J.K. Arkell
Agnar Artúvertin
Sarah Arvio
Rosemary Ashton
Mammed Aslan
Coral Atkinson
Rose Ausländer
Shushan Avagyan
Razif Bahari
Elizabeth Baines
Jo Baker
Ismail Bala
Evgeny Baratynsky
Saule Abdrakhman-kyzy Batay
Konstantin Nikolaevich Batyushkov
William Bedford
Gillian Beer
Richard Berengarten
Charles Bernstein
Ilya Bernstein
Mashey Bernstein
Christopher Betts
Sujata Bhatt
Sven Birkerts
Linda Black
Chana Bloch
Amy Bloom
Mary Blum Devor
Michael Blumenthal
Jean Boase-Beier
Jorge Luis Borges
Alison Brackenbury
Julia Brannigan
Theo Breuer
Iain Britton
Françoise Brodsky
Amy Brown
Bernard Brown
Diane Brown
Gay Buckingham
Carmen Bugan
Stephen Burt
Zarah Butcher McGunnigle
James Byrne
Kevin Cadwallander
Howard Camner
Mary Caponegro
Marisa Cappetta
Helena Cardoso
Adrian Castro
Luis Cernuda
Firat Cewerî
Pierre Chappuis
Neil Charleton
Janet Charman
Sampurna Chattarji
Amit Chaudhuri
Mèlissa Chiasson
Ronald Christ
Alex Cigale
Sally Cline
Marcelo Cohen
Lila Cona
Eugenio Conchez
Andrew Cowan
Mary Creswell
Christine Crow
Pedro Xavier Solís Cuadra
Majella Cullinane
P. Scott Cunningham
Emma Currie
Jeni Curtis
Stephen Cushman
David Dabydeen
Susan Daitch
Rubén Dario
Jean de la Fontaine
Denys Johnson Davies
Lydia Davis
Robert Davreu
David Dawnay
Jill Dawson
Rosalía de Castro
Joanne Rocky Delaplaine
Patricia Delmar
Christine De Luca
Tumusiime Kabwende Deo
Paul Scott Derrick
Josephine Dickinson
Belinda Diepenheim
Jenny Diski
Rita Dove
Arkadii Dragomoschenko
Paulette Dubé
Denise Duhamel
Jonathan Dunne
S. B. Easwaran
Jorge Edwards
David Eggleton
Mohamed El-Bisatie
Tsvetanka Elenkova
Johanna Emeney
Osama Esber
Fiona Farrell
Ernest Farrés
Elaine Feinstein
Gigi Fenster
Micah Timona Ferris
Vasil Filipov
Maria Filippakopoulou
Ruth Fogelman
Peter France
Alexandra Fraser
Bashabi Fraser
Janis Freegard
Robin Fry
Alice Fulton
Ulrich Gabriel
Manana Gelashvili
Laurice Gilbert
Paul Giles
Zulfikar Ghose
Corey Ginsberg
Chrissie Gittins
Sarah Glazer
Michael Glover
George Gömöri
Giles Goodland
Martin Goodman
Roberta Gordenstein
Mina Gorji
Maria Grech Ganado
David Gregory
Philip Gross
Carla Guelfenbein
Daniel Gunn
Charles Hadfield
Haidar Haidar
Ruth Halkon
Tomás Harris
Geoffrey Hartman
Siobhan Harvey
Beatriz Hausner
John Haynes
Jennifer Hearn
Helen Heath
Geoffrey Heptonstall
Felisberto Hernández
W.N. Herbert
William Hershaw
Michael Hettich
Allen Hibbard
Hassan Hilmi
Rhisiart Hincks
Kerry Hines
Amanda Hopkinson
Adam Horovitz
David Howard
Sue Hubbard
Aamer Hussein
Fahmida Hussain
Alexander Hutchison
Sabine Huynh
Juan Kruz Igerabide Sarasola
Neil Langdon Inglis
Jouni Inkala
Ofonime Inyang
Kevin Ireland
Michael Ives
Philippe Jacottet
Robert Alan Jamieson
Rebecca Jany
Andrea Jeftanovic
Ana Jelnikar
Miroslav Jindra
Stephanie Johnson
Bret Anthony Johnston
Marion Jones
Tim Jones
Gabriel Josipovici
Pierre-Albert Jourdan
Sophie Judah
Tomoko Kanda
Maarja Kangro
Jana Kantorová-Báliková
Fawzi Karim
Kapka Kassabova
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Mimi Khalvati
Daniil Kharms
Velimir Khlebnikov
Akhmad hoji Khorazmiy
David Kinloch
John Kinsella
Yudit Kiss
Tomislav Kuzmanović
Andrea Labinger
Charles Lambert
Christopher Lane
Jan Lauwereyns
Fernando Lavandeira
Graeme Lay
Ilias Layios
Hiên-Minh Lê
Mikhail Lermontov
Miriam Levine
Suzanne Jill Levine
Micaela Lewitt
Zhimin Li
Joanne Limburg
Birgit Linder
Pippa Little
Parvin Loloi
Christopher Louvet
Helen Lowe
Ana Lucic
Aonghas MacNeacail
Kona Macphee
Kate Mahony
Sara Maitland
Channah Magori
Vasyl Makhno
Marcelo Maturana Montañez
Stephanie Mayne
Ben Mazer
Harvey Molloy
Osip Mandelstam
Alberto Manguel
Olga Markelova
Laura Marney
Geraldine Maxwell
John McAuliffe
Peter McCarey
John McCullough
Richard McKane
John MacKinven
Cilla McQueen
Edie Meidav
Ernst Meister
Lina Meruane
Jesse Millner
Deborah Moggach
Mawatle J. Mojalefa
Jonathan Morley
César Moro
Helen Mort
Laura Moser
Andrew Motion
Paola Musa
Robin Myers
André Naffis-Sahely
Vivek Narayanan
Bob Natifu
María Negroni
Hernán Neira
Barbra Nightingale
Paschalis Nikolaou
James Norcliffe
Carol Novack
Annakuly Nurmammedov
Joyce Carol Oates
Sunday Enessi Ododo
Obododimma Oha
Michael O'Leary
Antonio Diaz Oliva
Wilson Orhiunu
Maris O'Rourke
Sue Orr
Wendy O'Shea-Meddour
María Claudia Otsubo
Ruth Padel
Ron Padgett
Thalia Pandiri
Judith Dell Panny
Hom Paribag
Lawrence Patchett
Ian Patterson
Georges Perros
Pascale Petit
Aleksandar Petrov
Mario Petrucci
Geoffrey Philp
Toni Piccini
Henning Pieterse
Robert Pinsky
Mark Pirie
David Plante
Nicolás Poblete
Sara Poisson
Clare Pollard
Mori Ponsowy
Wena Poon
Orest Popovych
Jem Poster
Begonya Pozo
Pauline Prior-Pitt
Eugenia Prado Bassi
Ian Probstein
Sheenagh Pugh
Kate Pullinger
Zosimo Quibilan, Jr
Vera V. Radojević
Margaret Ranger
Tessa Ransford
Shruti Rao
Irina Ratushinskaya
Tanyo Ravicz
Richard Reeve
Sue Reidy
Joan Retallack
Laura Richardson
Harry Ricketts
Ron Riddell
Cynthia Rimsky
Loreto Riveiro Alvarez
James Robertson
Peter Robertson
Gonzalo Rojas
Dilys Rose
Gabriel Rosenstock
Jack Ross
Anthony Rudolf
Basant Rungta
Joseph Ryan
Sean Rys
Jostein Sæbøe
André Naffis Sahely
Eurig Salisbury
Fiona Sampson
Polly Samson
Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Maree Scarlett
John Schad
Michael Schmidt
L.E. Scott
Maureen Seaton
Alexis Sellas
Hadaa Sendoo
Chris Serio
Resul Shabani
Bina Shah
Yasir Shah
Daniel Shapiro
Ruth Sharman
Tina Shaw
David Shields
Ana María Shua
Christine Simon
Iain Sinclair
Katri Skala
Carole Smith
Ian C. Smith
Elizabeth Smither
John Stauffer
Jim Stewart
Susan Stewart
Jesper Svenbro
Virgil Suárez
Lars-Håkan Svensson
Sridala Swami
Rebecca Swift
George Szirtes
Chee-Lay Tan
Tugrul Tanyol
José-Flore Tappy
Alejandro Tarrab
Campbell Taylor
John Taylor
Judith Taylor
Petar Tchouhov
Miguel Teruel
John Thieme
Karen Thornber
Tim Tomlinson
Angela Topping
David Trinidad
Kola Tubosun
Nick Vagnoni
Joost Vandecasteele
Jan van Mersbergen
Latika Vasil
Yassen Vassilev
Lawrence Venuti
Lidia Vianu
Dev Virahsawmy
Anthony Vivis
Richard Von Sturmer
Răzvan Voncu
Nasos Vayenas
Mauricio Wacquez
Julie Marie Wade
Alan Wall
Marina Warner
Mia Watkins
Peter Wells
Stanley Wells
Laura Watkinson
Joe Wiinikka-Lydon
Hayden Williams
Edwin Williamson
Ronald V. Wilson
Stephen Wilson
Alison Wong
Leslie Woodard
Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese
Niel Wright
Manolis Xexakis
Xu Xi
Gao Xingjian
Sonja Yelich
Tamar Yoseloff
Augustus Young
Soltobay Zaripbekov
Karen Zelas
Alan Ziegler
Ariel Zinder

 

President, Publisher & Founding Editor:
Peter Robertson
Vice-President: Glenna Luschei
Vice-President: Sari Nusseibeh
Vice-President: Elena Poniatowska
London Editor/Senior Editor-at-Large: Geraldine Maxwell
New York Editor/Senior Editor-at-Large: Meena Alexander
Washington D.C. Editor/Senior
Editor-at-Large:
Laura Moser
Argentine Editor: Yamila Musa
Deputy Editor: Allen Hibbard
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Advisory Consultant: Jill Dawson
General Editor: Beatriz Hausner
General Editor: Malvina Segui
Art Editor: Lara Alcantara-Lansberg
Art Editor: Calum Colvin
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Shanta Acharya
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Frank Ankersmit
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Thomas Bartscherer
Susan Bassnett
Gillian Beer
David Bellos
Richard Berengarten
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Jean Boase-Beier
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Jenni Calder
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Susan Stewart
Interlitq’s “The Groves of Academe” series:

Susan Stewart, Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, interviewed by David Garyan
 

 



DG: It’s a pleasure for me to say that one of the most wonderful poems I ever had the chance of discovering was “A Language.” Having had to be a first-generation immigrant twice, it resonated deeply with my own linguistic journey. As I read about the two inmates, one becoming the other’s language teacher and the learner subsequently having to fare for himself in the free world after his instructor dies, I was moved by these lines:

          He travels to the country of his new
          language, fluent, and full of hope.
          Yet when he arrives he finds
          that the language he speaks is not
          the language that is spoken. He has learned
          a language one other person knew—its inventor,
          his cell-mate and teacher.

Indeed, a great deal surrounding language, and by extension the world we inhabit, encompasses not only what’s out there, but our own internal environment. As the poem develops, we discover the same story in another form—Gombrowicz trying to teach his girlfriend “a Polish that does not and never / did exist.” The poem ends on a most powerful note—two twins speaking a private language, one of total truth and the other of complete lies: The savior getting “mixed up with the traitor, but the traitor / stays as true to himself as a god.” The ending takes somewhat of a pessimistic tone, echoing the diverging yet cynical view of two famous playwrights—the late Pinter who thought individuals spoke to conceal while Mamet, on the other hand, thinks that people communicate because they want something. From your perspective, what’s the role of language and do you take perhaps a more positive view on it, at least in terms of everyday life?

SS: Language works because of our good faith and optimism that it works: we assume we understand each other, that a language has a social world. That assumption suffices for understanding until the point when we discover, by some slip or contradiction, that we don’t understand and then we use language itself to remedy the break or failure. The poem explores, however, breaks or failures that cannot be remedied: deluding someone with a fake language that in truth has no social world beyond the claustrophobic binary of one teacher and one pupil–or, more generally, telling a lie.

Within the poem a husband, sitting at a dinner table with his wife and guests listening, tells the story of how the trickster Gombrowicz taught his own wife, Rita (a French Canadian), an imaginary “Polish” that no one else in the world would understand.

There is another, related and in many ways similarly large, concern and that is the meaning of the word “miscarriage”—the miscarriage of a fetus and the miscarriage of justice. The loss of a desired child, after many months of hopes, expectations, and plans is the destruction of a good intention, as is the breaking of the bonds of truth or the abandonment of an agreement. The pain of such a broken contract is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition: the Hebrew Scriptures tell the stories of one broken and remade covenant after another. Those stories have to do with human failures to live up to obligations to the divinity, but anyone who suffers a miscarriage (or for that matter, a serious illness or approaching death) knows the feeling of being abandoned by divine forces. In the end, at least from my perspective, the poem is about language in light of theodicy.

DG: Let’s shift the discussion from something living—language, that is—to something inanimate, ruins. In your most recent book The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture, you highlight the fascination people have with them, even though, really, as you mention, they don’t symbolize the accomplishment of any specific goals, but rather embody precisely destruction—the inability of anything to stand the test of time. The lives of artists in many ways reflect the fate of ruins—more precisely, those who are no longer alive can offer nothing but the apparent perfection of their work, supposedly a product of their self-destructive madness, as Plato believed, but this perfection itself is always aging and over time being interpreted differently as a result. In your view, does ruin symbolize only destruction or perhaps also something else?

SS: Not all ruins are destroyed: there are ruins that are the result of sudden violence and left without name and location, but there also are ruins that are slowly eroded, returning to nature, and representing sites of significance, even if their import has changed. Plato thought that poets did not exercise their reason or possess any particular skills. He seemed to think that architects, like the composers of hymns, could serve a social purpose and noted that architecture is not an imitative art. That said, he’s also not the only ancient thinker; Aristotle was interested in practices and tools; Pythagoras had an enduring effect on the mathematics of structures, etc.

Renaissance humanists appreciated ruins and learned to name them, even as they often dismantled and reformed their materials. In the Enlightenment ruins were measured with an intention to record and imitate them. The subjective projection of Romantic melancholy, the republican identifications of 19th century nationalism, are yet other approaches to ruins.

DG: If we could ponder a specific passage from the book, it may add further complexity to the issue: “What we can learn of ruins necessarily comes from the legible and visible record of the past, but we might remember that ruins often are both steeped in and surrounded by absence. They invite quiet contemplation as much as response, and they immerse the viewer-listener in association and reverie.” In this respect, do you think it’s plausible that ancients probably saw their own temples and philosophers—at that precise time—in the same way we look at our amazing skyscrapers and poets—impressive, but rarely anything people would venerate, much less pay to see? It seems there were no qualms about killing Socrates back then, something unthinkable today, and, yet, many a Socrates have been threatened and even put to death for their controversial views in our time. Still, is it possible for living artists to be revered with the dignity we now accord to ancients without them having to pay the ultimate price for such reverence?

SS: If there were no qualms about killing Socrates, we wouldn’t know the story of his death and the suffering of his followers. Each person should be afforded the dignity and respect of others. Artists have something to say to us, an intention we are invited to trace to its completion; we do so not out of obligation, but of our own volition, which makes our attention to art all the more valuable for the artist and for ourselves.

DG: One of the most fascinating aspects surrounding any kind of art is aesthetics. Various theories, such as art as a political objective and art for art’s sake, have been proposed. Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, believed that beauty was inherently based on feelings of pleasure rather than speculations on the characteristics of an object, and that any kind of verdict on the nature of something effectively turned the issue into a moral question, not an aesthetic one. Similarly, In The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy made the following observation: “What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.” As both a scholar and poet, how do you perceive beauty and does it have a moral component?

SS: I don’t think that aesthetics is an aspect of the artwork except, importantly, in the ways the artist is her or his own audience, but of course aesthetics by definition is fundamental to the reception of an art work. I am a Kantian in that I find beauty everywhere, not only in works of art: the experience of beauty is a consequence of being awake and alive to the world without pre-conceiving or preemptively framing experience. Yet I would agree that when we find beauty in the finality of forms, we are in the realm of something just and true (in the metaphysical sense, but also the sense of the plumb and the level)–something that must be what it is and could not be otherwise.

DG: Aside from your work as a poet and scholar, you’ve also made substantial contributions in the field of translation, particularly from Italian into English. In this respect, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, for example, was highly praised and very well reviewed. In an addition, you’ve co-translated the poetry of Milo de Angelis and Patrizia Cavalli with Italian scholars Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Brunella Antomarini, respectively. In this sense, how did you become fascinated with the Italian language and which factors influence your decision about the authors you ultimately choose to translate? Additionally, what are the differences in approach, if any, between translating a piece by yourself and doing the same work in a collaborative manner? Do you prefer one over another?

SS: Is there a more beautiful and musical language than Italian and a more important body of literature than Italian literature? I don’t think so. For personal and academic reasons I began traveling to Italy in the late 1970s. I did not learn any Italian until my early middle age and I am not a fluent speaker because of that late start. When I have translated contemporary works I always have been grateful for the help of friends who are native speakers, whether these friends were the poets themselves, or scholars of the texts, or full co-translators (Brunella Antomarini and Patrizio Ceccagnoli, as you mention, and also Sara Teardo with respect to Bonanni’s The Reprisal and the scholar Luca Grillo as I finished the Merini translations). My work also has been sustained by the interest and enthusiasm of my own translator, Maria Cristina Biggio. In every project my role is to think through the range of literal meanings and turn the work into an English poem or novel. I don’t consider myself a professional translator; translation has been an outgrowth of friendships, a desire to communicate, and an aim of helping to make the English-speaking literary world less parochial.

DG: What are you reading and or working on at the moment?

SS: At the moment I am writing a new book of poems.

The Groves of Academe