Poetry, Bolano, and Jim Morrison

Words Without Borders covers the the Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry panel:

I was late to the Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry panel at the Philoctetes Center this Tuesday. I was late because I was puttering around the fourth floor poetry section at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square here in New York City. Among the shelves, out of place, was a book which has nothing to do with Latin American Poets, but everything to do with translation and so I thought you’d find it interesting, as I did. You probably already know of this book but I am younger than you and so I got a late start. The book is called Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet, and was published by Duke University Press in 1994. The impetus for the work was a letter that Jim Morrison wrote in 1968 to a Rimbaud translator and French scholar at Duke University named Wallace Fowlie. The letter was a thank-you note to the translator. It read, in part, “I don’t read French that easily. I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me.”

And here’s the Bolano part:

In a tag-team reading style, Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs followed with her yet to be published translation of Bolaño’s Tres. The pieces effuse the cheeky inappropriate humor we have come to appreciate, including one in which Bolaño imagines he is having sexual intercourse with American author Carson McCullers.

“I dreamt that Georges Perec was three years old visiting my house…I dreamt I was falling in love with Alice Sheldon. She didn’t want me so I tried getting myself killed on three continents.” Healy’s translation of Bolaño’s as yet unseen work Tres brings the art of the prose poem as form to the forefront and it was a treat to be privy to the yet to be seen in print translation.

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