the grammar of suffering war

In my first reading, I found this poem strong and, in line with what Alice says, a story about the inadequacy of formal systems--like schools, or like the grammar lessons taught in schools--to encompass the horrors of the experience of war. On my second reading, I found it a touching account of the ways in which we all use language in desperate attempts to sequence what is unorderable: writing sentences, writing poems, is how we shape a world that threatens to overwhelm us.

But then I found myself deep in two books about world literature, both of them reconceiving the field as about translation and reception. In What is World Literature? David Damrosch looks @ works that come to live within literary systems beyond their original culture. He considers circulation and translation, how literary works might manifest differently abroad than @ home. In his hands, world literature becomes the sort of writing that gains in translation--and it also becomes a mode of reading: a form of engaging with worlds beyond our own place and time.

In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter casts translation "as an act of love, and as an act of disruption...a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taken them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements. It is a truism that the experience of becoming proficient in another tongue delivers a salubrious blow to narcissims, both national and individual. Translation failure demarcates intersubjective limits....Translation is a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change."

Maybe you can anticipate, now, through these expanded lenses, the emergence of my re-re-reading of "Adjectives of Order." Thinking about the poem as a exemplar of world literature, as occupying a site "in-translation," it is still, of course about a "person working to make sense of his experience through language." But it becomes, in this re-framing, less about the "ruthless impersonality" of grammar, more an invitation to think about the limits of my own perspective, my own sense-making, my own grammar. Studying Spanish in Guatemala a few years ago was a profoundly dislocating experience for me; I couldn't "leave the planet English" freely enough to think through-or-with a new grammar. I hated the disordering and reordering required, resisted it heartily (and so was not very successful @ the project). Now, re-re-reading Teague's poem, I wonder: what is the grammar of Vietnamese? Does it place value on the order of adjectives? Is it a system that can express, any more effectively than English can, the experience of war and profound loss? What about French, the language which arrived in Vietnam in an earlier wartime? Are any of these formal systems more-or-less successful than others in sequencing the unorderable?

Apter's work focuses on the special relevance of translation as a matter of war and peace; she thinks about language politics, language wars and transmission failures. In her hands, translation shifts away from a model focused on "fidelity to the original," and more towards "transcoding," in which everything is translatable and nothing is: all words in a perpetual state of in-translation and mis-translation. But, taken as an a priori condition, translation failure  can be turned to advantage (as it is in Teague's poem), as an enabling mechanism of poetic truth.

The impossibility of translation also exists within a single language--Apter asks us to think of Jews, Arabs, and French, all "neighbored, yet separated by the French language," which had been "loaned to different communities of speakers." Think of being estranged in your home language. Apter calls up Spitzer's "Learning Turkish" and Said's "Living in Arabic" to evoke the ambiguity of comparison carried by every word, the grammatical markers of doubt that act as release value for the pressure that builds up in the course of fighting to stay alive...

Finally, in turning to the role of digital technology, Apter brings the question of translation back to those of formal systems which are bedeviling us elsewhere: as we pursue the goal of technological reproducibility, as everything becomes translatable through the medium of digital code, which aims to be unambiguous, what happens to the proliferation of meanings evoked by a poem like this one?