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  • After Translation:Displacing Modernism’s Geopolitical Centers
  • Marta del Pozo
Ignacio Infante. After Translation. The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic. New York: Fordham U P, 2013. Pp. 232. ISBN 978-0-8232-5178-0.

Ignacio Infante carries out a process of actualization, dynamization and set into circulation of Modern poetics across the Atlantic. The author thus transcends static, monolingual and national approaches to modern poetics that conflicted with its announced agenda as a planetary literary movement. Infante not only reformulates translation as a dynamic and fluid form that manages to morph alterity, but he also articulates a much-needed theoretical framework for the modern poetics of writers whose work, in motion between national, linguistic and literary traditions, had the transatlantic experience at its most relevant morphing force. The book dedicates its main chapters to Fernando Pessoa, Vicente Huidobro, Stefan George, García Lorca and the Berkeley Renaissance, Sousândrade and brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, and Kamau Brathwaite, in an attempt to reformulate modern poetics as a locus of cultural, geopolitical, ideological and ethical transference.

Chapter 1 opens new horizons for the critical corpus of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic net. Infante approaches Pessoa’s English Poems written in Durban, South Africa, as a fetishized appropriation of English symbols, tradition, and language. The case analysis of Pessoa’s first heteronymic project therefore matches the author’s thesis of a transnational and translingual account of modernity in which heteronymity might be argued to constitute, in essence, a process of “self-translation.” By also pointing at the often-neglected erotic dimension of Pessoa’s first cycle of poems, Infante inserts Pessoa’s first heteronymic production, fluid in essence, in the mobile, transnational and even transpersonal experience of modernity.

In Chapter 2, Infante defends the idea that Huidobro’s poetics of Creacionismo stems from a deep nomadic impulse in the Chilean author, which led to his multiple transatlantic journeys, tension between literary traditions, and his quest for a planetary poetics. Opposed to paradigms of national literature, the agenda of Creacionismo rescues the essence of poetry as creation, poiesis. By invoking the intermedial strategies of Creacionismo that Huidobro developed in his Temblor del cielo (mostly visual and performative), the author [End Page 211] focuses on the aspired universality of the creacionista poem, thus freeing this poetics from geopolitical, linguistic and cultural borders. Since the preoccupations of the creacionista poem are not nationally or linguistically bound, but focus instead on the poetic “event”—the “creation” of a poetic object as an object of nature—translation results in a sine qua non for inherent universality, multinationality and multilingual dimension of Creacionismo.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to the influence of poets Stefan George and García Lorca on the queer poetics of some members of the Berkeley Renaissance, namely Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer. As the author points out when discussing Spicer’s theory of translation, we can “rethink the act of translation in the twenty-first century not only as a linguistic act… but also as a powerful ethical act.” This chapter is precisely dedicated to examining how translation, in the respective poetics of these authors, contributes to challenge heteronormative conventions and constitutes such ethical act.

In chapter 4, aiming to revise the work of Romantic Brazilian writer Sousândrade, Infante describes the de Campos brothers’s use of Ezra Pound’s Imagisme and his concept of the “luminous detail” in their Revisão de Sousândrade, which, as they wrote, “reminds one of the Poundian phanopoeia (‹the throwing of an image on the mind›s retina,›‹the moving image›) of poems from Personae and many Cantos.” The author remarks on how the de Campos brothers shattered the hegemonic centers of the avant-garde, mostly European and North American, and discusses that the poetics of Concretismo challenged the idea of geopolitical and lingual center by being articulated around the circulation and absorption of literary traditions.

Finally, chapter 5 reviews the poetics of Anglophone Caribbean writer Kamau Brathwaite, from the 1960s to the present, and his search for a “distinctly ‘Creole’ aesthetic expression” rooted on the West Indies. Brathwaite’s linguistic preoccupation has mostly dealt with the syntactic destabilization of language...

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