Lisa SamuelsA Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature, by Jacob Edmond (Fordham University Press, 2012), 272 pp., $NZ 96.76.
Jacob Edmond’s refreshing book focuses on concerns common to avant-garde poetry and comparative literature, specifically poetic material produced primarily in the 1980s and 1990s by six writers from China, Russia, and the United States and comparative literature’s interest in negotiating dialectics between self and other. Edmond’s introduction indicates his interest in sighting a ‘third alternative’ to Maurice Blanchot’s 1971 concept of ‘common strangeness’: Edmond wants to write within zones ‘between the common and the co-man, between speaking of others—of exile literature, modernism, or world literature—and speaking to them: responding to how we can know or write about each other in the first place’ (10). I might wish the book had been titled something like Estranging Poetries: Avant-Garde Dialectics in a Transnational Era, especially given the distancing Edmond wants to achieve from the uses to which Blanchot’s phrase ‘common strangeness’ can be put. We can imagine more dynamism in dialectics than the advice to speak to rather than speak of, so I am certainly sympathetic to Edmond’s resistance to Blanchot’s cited stance. Such a stance arguably encourages identitarian siloing, and Edmond’s book is invested in building bridges across those silos, in this case avant-garde poetry and comparative literature on one hand and U.S. Russian, and Sinophone literatures on the other. Edmond proposes ‘encounter and superimposition’ (197) as ways to imagine what it means when something transcultural and translingual happens, especially when it happens self-consciously. This course of the particular—one writer going across to another culture and language—over-mapped with palimpsestual revisiting is figured as an alternative to historical repetition and so-called progress narratives, with all their damaging social and critical consequences.
The book stays true to the dialectical energy promised in its introduction. That energy shifts its sails in relevant directions, and it consistently concerns matters both brought forward and presumed as background to this work. One background, gestured to in the final chapter about U.S. poet Charles Bernstein, is literary modernism’s own transnational and translingual writings. The post-Cold War situation of fluxing borders experienced and reported by Edmond’s six poets has of course precedent situations, strongly among them the circumstances of early twentieth century Europe, the Americas, and even New Zealand, as witness the career of South African-born New Zealand poet Robin Hyde, whose travels to Japanese-occupied China at the end of the 1930s bear witness to the possibilities and the difficulties of avant-garde poets putting themselves to the test of other countries.
That sense of difficulty in cross-cultural and cross-lingual encounter is a hallmark of A Common Strangeness, even as it celebrates the ideational opportunities of estranging encounters. The experience of traveling outwards from one culture and one language towards another necessarily includes the experience of resistance to self-sameness, and this resistance can be said to add to the trauma experienced by Yang Lian, in his exile from China after Tiananmen Square and in the resulting haunted work traced in this book’s first chapter. At the same time, and with reference to Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, Edmond describes Yang Lian as creating a productive superimposition of Beijing and Auckland in flaneur-like acts of walking. This walking is figured as touch rather than seeing, a proprioception that is both bodily and empaged, the gap between body and page gesturing toward and enacting the gap between countries and languages, here and there, and life and death.
Baudelaire and Benjamin are brought in to that chapter as articulators of salient urban and historical commentary. Their recognisability helps to situate and suture the differences among the situations of this book’s poetic subjects. On balance, Edmond’s is a descriptive scholarly and disciplinary work rather than a manifesto or theorized treatise. Yet it has elements of the latter, and it participates in crucial work being done to make disciplinary contact points that cross borders of language- and nation-power. If the theoretical claims for the work outstrip the more apparent consequences of its author-focused chapters, that in some ways proves the point of the book’s ambitions. This is criticism as committed practice, and Edmond has the skills and has done the considerable work needed to meet his chosen poets at levels of language, locale, and self-and-other dialectic. The course, and the constellated intercourses, of the particular are consistently foregrounded in this author-focused work. Perhaps had Edmond had more space to range in than that provided by 198 pages (with an added 36 pages of end notes), he might have been able to push more on the theoretical particularities that fall out from, and are at times introduced in, each chapter’s authorial focus.
Each chapter sets a context, reads several poetry instances, and captures a gesture that summarizes an important part of what each author stands for within the logic of A Common Strangeness. Yang Lian illuminates events of writing and reading as cross-cultural “superimposition”; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko emphasizes ‘co-response’ (61), his biographical and cross-cultural work transforming the Cold War political ‘window’ into what we might imagine as a Russian transparency on which embodied letter-poems are gently written, expecting answers. In turn, in chapter 3 Lyn Hejinian investigates linguistic estrangement in very close transactions of ‘personhood,’ in terms of her travels between the U.S. and Russia, her language learning and translations, and the discursive eros of her friendship with Dragomoshchenko. In chapter four Bei Dao’s ‘translation style’ is characterized in the context of his opportunities and contesting interpreters. In chapter five Edmond reads Dmitri Prigov in terms of Prigov’s ‘intersections,’ iterations, and Russian conceptualism: as that triple focus might indicate, in some ways Prigov reads as the author to whom Edmond is most committed, even as Prigov’s Russian focus positions him less as a border-crossing writer and more as a discourse- and media-crossing writer. Edmond’s fascination with conceptual and iterative poetics comes out clearly in this chapter, and the points about contesting definitions of ‘conceptual’ poetry indicate how aware Edmond is of the arguments that often keep nation literatures separate from each other instead of border-crossing.
The final chapter on Bernstein brings us back to emphasizing the irreconcilability in the dialectic that Edmond points to: Bernstein’s ‘frame switching’ (165) will not be held to one side or the other of the transnational debates that interest him: Bernstein will insist on being, as one of his book titles indicates, a Girly Man. Bernstein’s is the sole example in this book of a writer whose transcultural interests do not extend to any sustained particular translingual or translation work, and to an extent this chapter seems least relevant to the particular dialectics that Edmond focuses on most strongly. To be sure, Bernstein is an influential and academically situated writer whose concerns about the global and the local, about refiguring poetic Englishes, are in the zone that Edmond is writing about. But there is little opportunity here for Edmond to perform his critical strengths regarding transnationalism and translation. Reading the commentary on Bei Dao and verbal conjugation in Chinese, for example, illuminates the special strengths that Edmond brings to the academic table: it is rare to be able to consider English rhyme, Chinese syntax, and Russian pronouns. However it is less rare to hear as in the Bernstein chapter, New York described as ‘the heart of the world’s geopolitical, economic, and cultural system’, a lapse into hegemonic rhetoric not characteristic of this book’s simultaneously widened and particularized scope.
The final chapter on Bernstein brings us back to emphasizing the irreconcilability in the dialectic that Edmond points to: Bernstein’s ‘frame switching’ (165) will not be held to one side or the other of the transnational debates that interest him: Bernstein will insist on being, as one of his book titles indicates, a Girly Man. Bernstein’s is the sole example in this book of a writer whose transcultural interests do not extend to any sustained particular translingual or translation work, and to an extent this chapter seems least relevant to the particular dialectics that Edmond focuses on most strongly. To be sure, Bernstein is an influential and academically situated writer whose concerns about the global and the local, about refiguring poetic Englishes, are in the zone that Edmond is writing about. But there is little opportunity here for Edmond to perform his critical strengths regarding transnationalism and translation. Reading the commentary on Bei Dao and verbal conjugation in Chinese, for example, illuminates the special strengths that Edmond brings to the academic table: it is rare to be able to consider English rhyme, Chinese syntax, and Russian pronouns. However it is less rare to hear as in the Bernstein chapter, New York described as ‘the heart of the world’s geopolitical, economic, and cultural system’, a lapse into hegemonic rhetoric not characteristic of this book’s simultaneously widened and particularized scope.
Along with the Prigov chapter, the chapter on Bei Dao is especially worth reading. Bei Dao’s ‘translation style’ might be thought of as similar to ‘signifying,’ in the sense that term is used to designate African-American literary and culture discourses that are set up to be read from multiple angles in order to both shield and deliver their messages. Edmond carries out his characteristic diction and image-based reading of poetry, here Bei Dao’s, in order to argue for its multiple interpretability. Reading that chapter, one can feel one has been here before: the very image of the ‘guitar’ in one of Bei Dao’s public and well-known poems points to contexts in which complex poetry is multiply interpretable. But Edmond’s important emphasis here is on literary criticism’s contests for meaning within global or world or transnational or ‘planetary’ discourses.
His rhetoric often replicates the matter of such contest: that is, Edmond often sounds like he wants to win one for the signifying team within comparative literature, even as he wants to claim a staunchly productive set of possibilities for the intelligibility and importance of complex or avant-garde poetry. Again, I am not only sympathetic to that stance; I also think that Edmond succeeds on the terms he lays out for success. One might have used Owen as less of a punching bag, perhaps, and reached out beyond allegory to signifying, or to constative metaphoricity (Nietzsche); but Edmond stays true to the allegory script indicated in the responses to Bei Dao over the last couple of decades, and in this way he respects the very audience he is perhaps trying to convince.
In reading the poetry up close, Edmond’s emphasis in on diction-oriented semantic readings of the poems and translations he provides. Occasionally formal considerations arise, often in overview terms such as the communiqué or epistolary personism of the striking relationship between Hejinian and Dragomoshchenko. Again, perhaps a longer version of this book would have afforded more leisure to investigate other correspondent differences, such as the material shift from Yang Lian’s ‘stone’ to Dragomoshchenko’s ‘window,’ or the pronominal shift from Yang Lian’s ‘you’ (32) to Dragomoshchenko’s ‘you’ (70). I wanted a bit more poetic attentiveness per se, but to be fair I almost always do, and it is customarily the case that literary criticism lingers in diction exclusively—the paraphraseable meanings and rhymings of semantically close words and images—when it lingers in ‘close reading’ of poetry.
Beyond my wish for this book to have been longer, which I mean as an indication of its keen pertinence for a transnational and translingual study of literatures, I also wished for more overtness in the disciplinary-specific criticism that Edmond engages. Frequently, Edmond paraphrases or quotes critical work without providing in-text citation, preferring endnotes. It might have been germane for the functional argument of this book, which seeks to foreground and elucidate extant transnational and translingual aspects in avant-garde poetry and comparative literature, to foreground the critical work it engages for some of its arguments. In one instance, the telescoped nature of Edmond’s citational style leads to the critical source text being occluded to the point of misrepresentation. Applied citations are necessarily partial, but this critical compression feature of A Common Strangeness stands in contrast to the explanatory care taken with respect to the authorial material discussed in each chapter. This care-taking is a positive feature of A Common Strangeness, which conveys a strong sense of respect for the poets whose work it has taken up. As the book repeatedly conveys with its interest in related dialectics, and as its conclusion re-visits, we are working after Benjamin’s world of repetition, which is better than being in a world that fancies itself as blooming ‘toward’ progress. Each iteration—each chapter here, each poet turning toward a different land of language and location—performs a differential repetition, or what Edmond calls an differential ‘insistence,’ that can turn us constantly toward attention to each other and our practices. It is that kind of attention, that suspending of tribal blinders, that Edmond’s book encourages, and it is a pleasure to see this kind of work in the world.
LISA SAMUELS is an American teaching literature and creative writing at The University of Auckland. She publishes on poetry and critical practice and is also the author of eleven poetry collections including Gender City (2011) and Wild Dialectics (2012). A creative non-fiction book, Anti M, is forthcoming from Chax Press.
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