My Work as a Translator Is My Work As a Poet: An Interview with David Shook

After his moustache, it’s hard to say what David Shook is best known for; this multimedia, multilingual Renaissance man films documentaries, writes and translates poetry, contributes to periodicals far and wide, and mans the helm of world literature and film organizations molossus and Phoneme Media.

A student of endangered languages, Shook has translated not only from the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian but also from the Kirundi and Kinyarwanda (dialects of Rwanda-Runi spoken in Burundi and Rwanda respectively) and the indigenous Mexican languages Isthmus Zapotec, Zoque, and Nahuatl. His English translations of Víctor Terán’s selected poetry appear in The Spines of Love, which has been released this week from Restless Books. He is currently completing Like a New Sun, a documentary about Terán’s efforts to preserve the Isthmus Zapotec language.

After interviewing Restless publisher Ilan Stavans for molossus, he took his own turn fielding questions over email and discussed Los Angeles culture, the bearing of travel on his work, and his most recent book of poetry. Upon reading about his crafty methods of literary borrowing, it occurs to me that Shook can be classified as, in only the most positive sense of the word, an appropriator—of other poets’ verse and language for his own usage, of military technology for peaceful means. Ultimately, this global citizen brings it all home to us. 

—Jack Saul

JS: You’ve translated Roberto Bolaño’s “Infrarealist Manifesto” and spoken publicly about his work. Your documentary Kilometer Zero follows you as you try to track down poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang in Equatorial Guinea, a mission that, at least on the surface, reflects the quest that sets The Savage Detectives into motion. Your poetry drone project is reminiscent not only of Raúl Zurita but also Carlos Wieder of Distant Star. Did you have Bolaño in mind at all during these two projects? As a globetrotting poet, do you consider yourself an adherent to Bolaño’s instruction to “hit the road”?

DS: Traveling is a very important part of my literary development, and one that's come about quite naturally. I suppose I am an adherent to Bolaño's "hit-the-road" school of relentless curiosity. Bolaño, in his manifesto, is actually quoting Breton, in what is likely his own translation from the French. I wouldn't be surprised if he's also referencing the Nicaraguan poet Joaquín Pasos, posthumously championed by Ernesto Cardenal—another Nicaraguan that Bolaño explicitly engages with in his own poetry, who wrote, before his premature death at age 32 in 1947, a poem called "Leave It All," almost certainly in conversation with the Breton quote Bolaño cribs his excellent advice from. In that poem Pasos ends with the image of sorting through the flotsam of shipwrecks to "[recover] the shoes of the dead." Maybe that's a morbid way to explain my own work chasing poets and writers I admire, scanning the wreckage that I might try on their shoes, whether by visiting their homeland, in the case of Marcelo Ensema Nsang's Equatorial Guinea or Pasos' Nicaragua, or inhabiting their language and work as translator, the most closest and most intimate variety of reader there is. That's the curiosity that attracted me to Víctor's work, and which eventually led me to Juchitan's humidity, and one of the first things I noticed in Víctor's own work, which compelled me to translate it.

New York likes to give Los Angeles a hard time about (among other things) its claims to a literary culture. How would you describe LA’s lit scene? How would you say it compares to that of New York’s? Why base molossus and Phoneme Media there, rather than anywhere else?

I think the great thing about Los Angeles is that it doesn't give a shit what New York thinks. We've been there: it's cold, the rats are the size of small deer, and the only way people can survive the high rent and miserable conditions is by telling anyone that will listen how New York is the greatest city in the world. Sure, there's some great stuff happening, and some really great people there. But the lady doth protest too much, methinks. LA is an incredibly collaborative space where almost anything you can dream up you can make happen. I'll take Brecht over Brodsky, and raise you Caceido.

You’re a poet yourself, and your debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues (2013) was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize last year. How has your work as a translator influenced your work as a poet?

My work as a translator is my work as a poet, I think. I really don't think of myself as working in two separate fields. At the end of the day, I consider myself a poet, and my translations reflect that. My own poems, and especially those in Our Obsidian Tongues, do engage heavily with the many poets whose work I feel I'm in conversation with, often using experimental forms of translation to incorporate work by poets like Eduardo Lizalde and Tedi López Mills and even Víctor. I'm a fan of the literary cannibalism espoused by Oswald de Andrade, and Jack Spicer's ingeniously reimagined Lorca. If you really want to know, though, you can read the book!

Is your mustache really sponsored by Oregon Wild Hair Mustache Wax? Did President Carter really compliment it? Are questions about your mustache annoying?

Yes, yeah, and no, I think they're flattering. My moustache is meant to inspire a brief, fleeting experience of happiness, and I think it works—at least it did for ol' Jimmy, who has written a few poems himself, when I saw him at the Houses of Parliament in London.

But here's something I haven't told anyone yet, a Restless blog exclusive: after almost five years, I shaved off my moustache last night. It's not forever, just a brief intermission, but it is good to remember that I have an upper lip! I want to focus on grooming the Platonic ideal of a moustache, so I thought I'd start from scratch.

Thank you!

A Heroic Act of Survival: An Interview with Víctor Terán

One of Mexico’s “first languages,” Isthmus Zapotec is laden with x’s, drawn out vowel sounds, and glottal stops; the first time I heard it spoken, I thought that the recording was being played backward. As far as I know, nobody wields this gorgeous and little-known language with more lyricism, richness, and sheer attitude than Víctor Terán, a free verse poet and endangered language activist from Juchitán in Southern Oaxaca.

As his translator David Shook notes, for someone who hails from such a small place and works in a language spoken by so few, Terán is a remarkably global poet. His translations have appeared in Poetry, World Literature Today, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, Oxford Magazine, PN Review, and a Poetry Translation Centre chapbook (2010). His latest project is an Isthmus Zapotec anthology of forty poems by forty world poets—including Basho, Cavafy, Baudelaire, Whitman, and Eliot. A substantial trilingual selection of his poetry has been collected into The Spines of Love, which is out from Restless Books this month.

Recently he took the time to discuss over email how he has resisted power, learned to talk to himself, and constructed reality from scratch.

—Jack Saul

JSS: You’ve made great efforts as an activist to preserve the Isthmus Zapotec language, which is spoken by fewer than a hundred thousand people. Some Mexican political parties consider it a language of revolution and subversion and have made efforts to eliminate it. Do you direct your Isthmus Zapotec poetry more toward remaining speakers of the language in order to enrich an embattled tongue, or in an act of defiance to those who wish to squash it? In other words, do you consider whom your poetry is “for”?

VT: Honestly, when I write I don’t think about what I am doing to defend or preserve my language—I am compelled by the necessity to express my joy or courage before the things that happen in my life. I write because I am moved by beauty: flowers, women, the miracle of life; I write because injustice stirs me and kills my soul: the horribleness of poverty or the insolence and arrogance of the opulent.

Why do I write in Diidxazá (Zapotec)? Because it’s the language I have mastered. What writer in the world writes in a language he hasn’t mastered? And for whom do I write? For the world! What’s it matter if my language is of the majority or the minority? I, the writer, write inspired by what I see, think, and feel. And that’s the beauty of the work of the writer, which inspires its translation into other languages so that it might be known by the wider world, like what’s happening now with my collection The Spines of Love. Of course I am conscious of the fact that my language [a family of 60+ mutually unintelligible dialects, of which Isthmus Zapotec is one] has only 460,000 speakers, and that the 500-year assault by the plutocracy weakens and corrupts it more each day. Nonetheless, we resist doing things in our own individual ways: in the fields and in the home parents speak and transmit it to their children; writers polish and enrich it by reviving old expressions or creating neologisms; indigenous politicians and organizations fight for institutional programing and resources for its preservation and development. Political parties in Mexico don’t care about indigenous languages and cultures, the only thing they care about is getting votes so that they can continue enjoying the privileges and table scraps of the moneyed few; the Mexican people have become aware of this, little by little, and are organizing themselves to appoint government functionaries outside the official programs proposed by our political parties.

 The challenge to defend and preserve our first languages and cultures in my country, the neoliberal onslaught that seeks to impose, for market reasons, hegemonic languages and to end minority ones, through formal education and mass media, obligates writers not just to stand around with our arms crossed. It’s not enough just to write, we must raise our voice and organize ourselves to avoid the homogenization and impoverishment of the human being in favor of capital. 

Save the occasional poem like “Soldier,” the poetry selected for this collection generally abstains from overt political statement. Was this a deliberate choice? Do you consider the publication of poetry in Isthmus Zapotec a political statement in itself?

Today to write in an indigenous language, more than being a political statement, is a heroic act of survival. Survival because writing strengthens and extends the future of a language. Heroic act because it means pain and suffering before the indolence of many of its own speakers, who forget their responsibility to their mother tongue, owing to their desperate struggle to find the day’s food; because it means to endure the disregard of governments and institutions, who promote a double discourse, on the one hand passing “progressive” laws but on the other not allotting the resources that would make such laws possible; because it means discrimination on the part of mass media organizations and national publishing houses; because it also means desperation and sadness at not being able to hold the fruits of one’s labor in one’s own hands, not being able to publish it and share it with the Zapotec people.

The poem “Soldier” belongs to a series of political poems that I wrote in the period from 1975 – 1980, when I participated in starting a popular leftist political party, COCEI, that took back the municipal government of my town, which was in the hands of big business, the region’s caciques, and PRI, the official party of national plutocracy. The poem speaks of the kidnapping and physical disappearance of the peasant leader of the COCEI, Víctor Yodo, kidnapped in the very center of town in Juchitán de Zaragoza, Mexico, by a military envoy of the Mexican Army, in July of 1979. The title of the book that Restless is publishing, The Spines of Love, was what suggested the inclusion of this poem, without any political premeditation, because just as we’re injured by the spines of the love we feel for women, we’re also injured by the spines of our love for our companions who fight for a better world, like my friend Víctor Yodo.

There are many elements of heartbreak and pain in this collection. To what degree is the poetry autobiographical? Is the speaker in all of them “you”?

I am the shadow that my words cast, said Octavio Paz. Essentially one writes what he lives in and with this world; of course the poet doesn’t write things exactly as they are, he’s a great trickster, an exaggerated narrator, and in that way he recreates reality to exaggerate the good or bad. Remember that literature is an artistic composition, an art of language, a recreation of reality, not a reflection of that reality, but the making conscious of it, be it written in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Maya, or Zapotec.

In this book, then, I sing the joys and disappointments that love provoked in me as a young man.

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? 

I began to write poetry because I longed for my hometown, my family, my friends. At eleven years old I was taken to Mexico City, 900 km from the city of my birth. In the capital I didn’t have anyone to talk to in Zapotec, so I began to talk to myself, by writing. I didn’t know how, I crammed two 100-page notebooks full of writing. And on a visit to see my parents, in the month of December, 1985, I took those notebooks to a great man, who was at that time the director of the Casa de Cultura in Juchitan, the great poet Macario Matus. I read him a few poems and the poet stood up suddenly from the table where he was playing chess, and ripped the two notebooks out of my hands to look through them. Done, he said, go home, select no more than 40 poems, and bring them to me as soon as possible, because I’m going to publish your book in May. That was my entrance to the world of poetry, and the publication in May of 1986 of my first book, Barefoot Words.

What other Mexican poets writing in indigenous languages should we know about in the United States?

There is a very important movement of literary production in the first languages of Mexico, and this speaks to the notable vigor of these communities to survive despite the injustices they suffer and have suffered for more than five centuries. This tendency to write in indigenous languages will continue, with or without support from the Mexican state. The first communities of Mexico have understood that the issue of survival and development does not depend on the government but on their own actions and determination.

Many of the works being written today in indigenous languages aren’t lesser siblings of greater world literature at all. Names like Javier Castellanos Martínez, Briceida Cuevas Cob, Mikeas Sáánchez, Víctor de la Cruz, Juan Gregorio Regino, just to mention a few, prove that the literature known as “indigenous” is as powerful, artistically speaking, as that produced by writers working in dominant languages

I’ll end by saying that literature, besides serving to immortalize life and events, and helping us to think about and feel our common world from new perspectives, also functions as a safeguard for a language, a culture. That’s the importance of writers working in indigenous languages—they save their language and culture from impoverishment and disappearance. 

Translated by David Shook