Chatting with Mark Sussman at the Creative Independent

Recently I chatted with writer Mark Sussman for a short feature that has now posted at The Creative Independent, under the title "Writing from the Inside Out." It was such an honor to be invited to participate on the site, which aims to be "a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people," and features short interviews with an impressive array of creative people across the artistic spectrum, including Hilton Als, Björk, Taja Cheek, Scott Esposito, Shepard Fairey, Diamanda Galás, Roxane Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Jonathan Gonzalez, Rickie Lee Jones, Isaac Julien, Joseph Legaspi, Carmen Maria Machado, Aparna Nancherla, Morgan Parker, Brontez Parnell, Paul Sepuya, Prageeta Sharma, Danez Smith, Michael Stipe, and many others.

The site's first conversation, after its launch note, was with the incomparable Eileen Miles, and the one that posted right before mine engaged Mrs. Smith, a "philanthropist, tone poet, and the world's most unlikely guitar hero." My conversation with Mark, which took place via Skype, even spilled over the alotted time limit, I think, so he could include only a few key portions of it appear on the site. As always I tried not to cover ground that I had in other public conversations, though some of that is unavoidable. One other aspect of the exchange was the light editing; the transcript is very casual, and close to how it was recorded, so what we said is what the readers get. Mark also shared a few of the excerpts that didn't make to the TCI website on his personal blog.

Here are some thoughts about translation, why new translators for extensively or well-translated texts are needed from time to time, and more specifically, some thoughts about translators of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. The bolded statement is Mark's, the response is mine:

One of my teachers once said the text in the original language stays the same, but we always need updated translations. And we’re always getting new translations of old texts. Why is that?
Because I think, with each new translation, you bring a different perspective to it. Often, of course, what happens with new translations is they re-situate the work for a new context. I think of a writer that’s so beloved and has been translated by different people in so many different ways, like Rainer Rilke. Two people whose translations of Rilke I think are really great are William Gass and Steven Mitchell. I believe Gass’s precedes Mitchell’s. You know, William Gass was an extraordinary writer in English. But he was also a profoundly philosophical writer. And he, of course, spoke German. He had training in German. So his translations have a certain kind of philosophical sensibility, like he’s capturing something in Rilke, I think, that most translators probably wouldn’t.

With Steven Mitchell, you have a translator who has an extraordinary ear [and] an extraordinary eye and his desire is to give you a Rilke that, on the one hand is as approximate as possible, but also doesn’t lose any of Rilke’s strangeness. If you go back and forth between those two translations, and of course, many lesser translations, you really start to get a sense, if you don’t speak German, of what Rilke might be like. And that, I think, can be really great.

But at times updated translations can just be terrible. If you’re translating the work of a poet, particularly a poet who is also an extraordinary prose writer, you want to retain that poetry, so you want to err on the side of the lyrical that might not be as exact, as opposed to the exact that is not so lyrical, because [otherwise] you lose what is essential to that writer.

Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben
Mohammed Anoun, Moorish
Ambassador to Queen
Elizabeth I (1600), Anonymous
painter.

And here's one snippet from the excerpt, where we discuss William Shakespeare's Othello, which we both love and have taught:

There’s this amazing portrait of an ambassador, I guess, from one of the North African countries that would have existed then, it wasn’t Morocco. There’s this amazing portrait of this ambassador, and it’s unclear whether Shakespeare would have ever seen that particular picture, but imagery of that kind circulated about Northern Africa and the Middle East, and of course Africa itself. There was also a moment where, in his transposition of the story from Britain to Venice, he’s picking a very similar society. A maritime society, but also a society that you could say gives him a little bit more leeway, but, like Britain, [one that] is very much engaged in mercantilism. So there are all of these parallels between the Britain of his day and the fictional Venice.

But the fascinating thing that most people usually don’t talk about is that, in Shakespeare’s time, he would see Black people walking through the streets of London. They may have been working in the theater, or they may have been working on the docks. This is also the moment where slavery is getting going. So you have all of these things happening in the background, and as you pointed out, they all feed into the play.

I think it’s very interesting that in the play, you have these moments of slippage. One of the things the students always ask is, “What is a Moor?” This is what the dictionary says a Moor is. And then, when you read through it and you see how, in fact, it’s not even so much about Moorishness Africanness. It really is about Blackness. When you think about all of those insults that come out of Iago’s mouth or the horror that Desdemona’s father feels about this. He’s a warrior, he’s just like this big “black ram.” So you see that. Shakespeare was kind of working through multiple things at once, which makes the tragedy that much more powerful. So when Joyce Carol Oates makes the statement, I was just sort of like, “What are you doing? You’re smart enough to know, you’re not making any sense.” You know? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Do read the rest of both interviews if you can.