The Action Books

1. 1. The "action" of Action Books is very much influenced by Translation, both our ideas about translation and the fact that we wanted to publish works in translation.

2. 2. One of the reasons we started the press was that Johannes had difficulty finding a publisher for his translation of Swedish phenom Aase Berg. We thought a lot about the reason why US poetry seems to be opposed to and anxious about (either explicitly or implicitly) works in translation.

3. 3. We realized: Translation is the site of excess. Poetry is what is lost in translation because Poetry is saturated with ideas of authenticity, hierarchy, and lineage. Translation introduces noise, wrecks the well-wrought urn, sets the poem in motion. The Poem is no longer just exactly these words in this order. Poetry is not just the Anglo-American canon. As Daniel Tiffany argues in his book about Ezra Pound, Radio Corpse (1998), translation fetishizes words (in the Marxist sense of the term)—creates a system of equivalence between systems that should be different. This abstracts language, disembodies language, sets language in motion. (NB. We take the term "equivalence" not to mean some kind of faithful semantic equivalence a translation guarantees, but rather the opposite, a kind of proximate exchange in which one entity passes for another, possibly under false pretenses or in bad faith.)

4. 4. One thing that is striking about small-press publishing is how few books of translation are published. Most supposedly "innovative" small presses publish no books in translation—or one, translated by someone already part of the "community." In contemporary experimental writing, "community" has become a key term, a key concept. It's an attempt to remove alienation of modern society, an attempt to create a feeling of authenticity around a particular site. The biggest fear of contemporary experimental poetry is that poetry should turn into a "wax museum" (to quote Jed Rasula's fine book American Poetry Wax Museum [1996])—that we should become unreal, unnatural, bad reproductions, fakes to each other. This attitude recapitulates the rejection of translation as a bad exchange.

5. 5. Action Books is interested in unreal fakes, in wax museums.

6. 6. We are interested in a notion of community—but not one based on authenticity. We are interested in a fake community, an unreal city of immigrants and emigrants, of language that moves internationally, supernaturally, and subterraneanly.

7. 7. We agree that poetry is what's lost in translation, so we want to lose and lose. Like Georges Bataille might say, poetry is a useless luxury. Poetry is the shit of art.

8. 8. We did not when we started the press want to have a "translation press"; we wanted a press that published works in translation and works by Americans, side by side. We felt that "translation presses" ghettoize translation, turn it into something nice and moral, something good for you that you read to broaden your horizons once in a while. We reject utilitarian notions of translation. We're not interested in self-actualization; we are interested in the motion of translation.

9. 9. Translation is a phantom limb, a violent femme and a moving target. Translation is also defined by its lack: it's the language of filmy ghosts, the production of spirit photography. The body of the text becomes a zone instead of a site. Translation is in motion; like all phantoms, it might collapse or go on forever, producing a series of bad copies and unnatural children. Translation is a corrupt text, with all of its connotations of moral and intergenerational turpitude. Ultimately, translation ruins even the binary between fake and authentic, source and target, native and foreign, original and reproduction. Indeed, there can be no healthy reproduction here, in this cut-rate zone.

10. 10. If you substitute "Poetry" for "Translation" in the above paragraph, you have some idea of our aesthetic. We drag poetry down to the kitschy, fake status of translation. Poetry is translation; translation is poetry. This doppelgänger effect is what makes people so angry at us. They want their poetry to be authentic; we want their hearts to be pure.