Eliot Weinberger: Ain't a Thing Changed Since I Was Twelve

I’m a little incredulous about this claim, but it is a nice interview:

ND: Is it marketing or the academy who makes those distinctions? There are a lot of writers who write things that can’t be called necessarily fiction or non-fiction, people like Bolano or Sebald.

EW: Well, all of these boundaries have certainly been blurred in so-called postmodernism, but what interests me in terms of writing essays is blurring the formal boundaries, because the essay has been stuck in basically the same format for centuries. So what you can do with the essay form itself– the blurring of those boundaries– interests me much more than the fiction/non-fiction boundary, which has become something of a cliche.

ND: So how has your writing developed since you started writing essays?

EW: It really hasn’t developed at all. I recently came across a box of old papers of mine, including a report I did in junior high school, during a brief period of exile in suburbia. I had a wonderful teacher who was fired in the middle of the year for being a Communist. I did two reports for her, complete with the required illustrated cover. One was on fallout shelters– those were the days of fallout shelters– and the other was on the John Birch Society. Both of them were stylistically exactly as though I had written them yesterday– a kind of documentary prose poetry– though my vocabulary is now slightly larger. I couldn’t believe it. Basically my style has not changed, let alone developed, at all. I was completely unaware of this. It’s both moving and depressing. Everything was already in place at age 12. Or, to put it another way, it had gone as far as it was going to go.

And this is a cool story:

ND: How did you get into translating Borges and Octavio Paz?

EW: When I was thirteen I wanted to be an archeologist, and for some reason I thought that I was going to be an archaeologist in Central America, so I was reading all the books I could find about the Mayas and the Aztecs and so on. I was in a high school with a really good library. And accidentally stuck inside of some fat book on the Aztecs was this little pamphlet, published by New Directions of course, which was a translation of Octavio Paz’s poem “Sun Stone”, translated by Muriel Rukeyser. At the time, ND had done a series of tiny little square poetry books. So that was the proverbial book that changed my life. I hadn’t really read any poetry before that, but I saw that the poem was based on the Aztec calendar and I knew about the Aztec calendar, so I thought I’d check it out. That was the book that made me want to become a writer.( If you talk to lots of writers, you’ll find that for many of them it was a New Directions book that started them off.) Anyway, in high school I was translating poetry as way of learning how to write poetry, and I was translating a lot of Paz, but also Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo,and so on. And then when I was eighteen, I met somebody who knew Paz, and I said, “Oh, I’ve got all these translations sitting in my drawer.,” The guy sent them to Paz, and Paz liked them a lot and asked me to translate a book. I was a teenager, I had dropped out of college after one year, and I was a hippie with nothing to do. So now I could tell my parents that I had something to do– translate a book by Octavio Paz. That was okay, and that’s how I got started. And I ended up working with him for more than thirty years, until his death.

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