Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation

6. Reading A/Drift: Robert Duncan’s Use of Foreign Words

chapter six Reading A/Drift: Robert Duncan’s Use of Foreign Words clément oudart The Silver Rib of the Foreign Word In his essay “On the Use of Foreign Words,” Theodor Adorno vouches for “a determined defense of the use of foreign words,” as he is waging a merciless war against purism, on the one hand, and “an immanent, closed organic language,” on the other.1 In his view, a proper defense should not so much try “to demonstrate the harmlessness of foreign words as to release their explosive force: not to deny what is foreign in them but to use it.”2 Displacing the polarity of purity/corruption to more subversive grounds, he wryly asserts that “one must defend them where they are at their worst from the point of view of purism: where they are foreign bodies assailing the body of language.”3 We are indeed reminded that “foreign” words are only alien to homespun words in the eyes of purism, whose proponents, suggests Adorno, should relinquish “the idea of a pure ur-idiom” altogether.4 Discussing Verlaine’s differential principle of nuance in his Art poétique, Rilke’s use of foreign words and their untranslatability in the Neue Gedichte, Adorno celebrates the fact that the modern writer surpasses this primordial pure versus corrupt dichotomy: The writer may well proceed in the way Walter Benjamin described in One-Way Street when he compared the man of letters to a surgeon who performs a difficult operation on his idea and in doing so inserts 108 Reading A/Drift the “silver rib of a foreign word” into the idea. But the silver rib helps the patient, the idea, to survive, while it sickened from the organic rib. . . . In the foreign word the nuance is both rescued and destroyed at the same time. . . . But while the writer still always thinks that he is quoting from his education and from special knowledge, he is actually quoting from a hidden language that is unknown in the positive sense, a language that overtakes, overshadows, and transfigures the existing one as though it were itself getting ready to be transformed into the language of the future. . . . The power of an unknown, genuine language . . . that arises only in pieces and out of the disintegration of the existing one; this negative, dangerous, and yet assuredly promised power is the true justification of the foreign word.5 Adorno’s critical prose sheds light on the polyglotic material of modernist palimpsests like the Cantos, which served as a model for Robert Duncan’s poetics in most of Ground Work: In the Dark—a poetics grounded in a “boundless creational field” that produced an increasingly polyphonic serial poem.6 Written in October 1979, “In Waking” gathers fragments in Latin and French and foregrounds the act of writing as re-membering. It is also an ephemeral address to the poet’s lover: the lines coming thru as I find myself    speaking, mouthing them, “We . . .” —toes (mes orteils), naming, flexing,    the calves of my legs (mes mollets) heavy— I am remembering.7 This tongue-in-cheek allusion to the resurrection of Osiris leads to selfreflexivity (the recording of the poem’s gradual making) and on to the blurred borders of the native/foreign binary opposition in language. This entails Duncan’s sense of self-estrangement in the experience of writing: In the customs of speech I have long known    —native to what speech?— a few words from an other language      I am seeking Clément Oudart 109 come thru you again where    foreign to myself I am reminded yours in every light.8 Interestingly, this poem from October 1979 about the poet’s sense of foreignness inhabiting the self and language was written immediately after a journal entry written in French on Tuesday, December 13, 1977. Indeed, Duncan’s notebooks from the late seventies testify to a daily practice of writ­ ing in French, enabling the poet to make his demeure (abode) in the foreign language. The poet mixes within the same genetic space vocabulary taken from French classic authors (such as Jules Verne, Colette, Simenon, Baudelaire , Nerval, among others) grammar exercises often bordering on the Steinian mode of repetition (as if to impregnate his own language with traces of the foreign syntax) and phonetic drills (yet another experiment in ciphering and deciphering). In December 1977, then, Duncan was at the peak of his “foreign” reading-and-writing...