Entre la extrañeza y las equivalencias naturales: traducir la poesía experimental de Lorine Niedecker

This paper shows how my translations of objectivist American poet Lorine Niedecker for the bilingual volume Y el lugar era agua: Antología poética, published in 2018, have constantly sought for natural Spanish equivalences in sound and rhythm while trying, through different translating and rhetorical techniques, to keep the tone of strangeness that a more literal approach to the translation (after Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the translation of experimental poetry) would render. To this end, specific translation uses (punctuation sings such as the long dash and other visual display elements, paraphrasing and amplification, homophony, alliteration, and techniques for the reproduction of a sustained tone in the target text) will be explained with respect to the translation choices for some of the most successful poems of the author.

The Left Needs Rhythm

This chapter considers the role of the archive in left literary studies through a recovery of Jewish-American communist poet Martha Millet. Specifically, it uses Millet’s work to trace a history and theory of poetic rhythm that rethinks the relationship between modernist poetic forms and left politics. The chapter’s first section uses Millet’s involvement with the children’s magazine The New Pioneer to unpack the historical relationship between traditional forms and political community formation. The generic histories enacted by communist children’s poems provide a foundation for considering how rhythm was evoked in Popular Front and antifascist poetic discourses. The second section argues that during the Popular Front diverse traditional genres were collapsed into an ideal rhythmic poem, where rhythm described both form and function. The third section focuses on Millet’s contributions to Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944) to demonstrate how rhythm was redefined in antifascist discourses. Throughout, the chapter suggests how Millet’s poetry might be read in relation to poets such as Carl Sandburg, Lorine Niedecker, and Kenneth Fearing. A coda returns to Millet’s Cold War criticism in order to ask what is at stake in her critical erasure and her critical recovery.

Past storyworld possible selves and the autobiographical reformulation of Dante’s myth in Lorine Niedecker’s “Switchboard Girl”

This essay focuses on the autobiographical reformulation of Dante’s myth in the short story “Switchboard Girl”, by the Objectivist American poet Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970). Within the cognitive linguistics paradigm of storyworld possible selves, or SPSs (Martínez, María-Ángeles. 2014. Storyworld possible selves and the phenomenon of narrative immersion. Testing a new theoretical construct. Narrative 22 (1). 110–131, Martínez, María-Ángeles. 2018. Storyworld possible selves. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), the study explores the projection of a past Dantean SPS as key to individuals’ perspectival alignment with the narrator, and concomitantly, with the author’s fictionalized formulation of the realities of American working-class women in the 1950s. The linguistic anchoring of this Dantean SPS is also analysed and discussed. The results highlight Niedecker’s concern with drawing readers into sharing the personal hell of an intelligent, rural middle-class, mature woman with a serious visual disability, who is unsuccessfully applying for a menial job as a switchboard operator. The analysis also prompts a revision of the original SPS typology to include the author SPSs likely to be generated by readers of autobiographical narratives.

The Objectivists

The Objectivist poets were a group of first- and second-generation modernist writers who emerged in the USA during the 1930s. The writers most commonly associated with the movement are Louis Zukofsky (who first used the term ‘objectivist’ to describe poetry), Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Charles Rakosi, the British poet Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker (other poets, such as William Carlos Williams, however, were published under the banner of ‘objectivist’). Most objectivist writing was characterized by an attention to specific particulars and the belief that poems could be material or social objects. Beyond these broad tendencies, however, each writer associated with the movement offered different definitions of ‘objectivist,’ and developed divergent writing practices. Consequently, the term has historical, critical, and evolutionary implications, referring both to specific literary publications, a core of poets whose relationships and affinities continued beyond the early 1930s, and the many subsequent attempts by poets and critics to use ‘objectivist’ as a critical concept.

North Central, South Side

The opening chapter reads two mid-century poets, Lorine Niedecker and Gwendolyn Brooks, as chroniclers of socioecological transition in the immediate postwar period. While environmental historians have recently turned attention to the suburbs as the key site of inquiry into changing postwar conditions, the chapter emphasizes the rural and urban peripheries as locales that reveal many of the emerging characteristics of the Great Acceleration. Turning first to Lorine Niedecker, the chapter describes her development of a poetics attentive to uneven development, residual forms of life, and ecosystemic degradation in the mixed economy of rural Wisconsin. The second half of the chapter moves from Niedecker’s rural Wisconsin to Brooks’s urban Chicago. Brooks explores the production of space in relation to the forms of environmental racism emerging in South Side housing and neighborhood conditions after 1945.