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Carefully stowed and catalogued among the 173 boxes of the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library are three unremarkable folders containing translations of Philippe Pétain’s Paroles aux Français.[1] Alongside Stein’s introduction,[2] the manuscript notebooks and few typed pages they contain are the corpus delicti of her collaboration with the Vichy regime. Despite their centrality to the controversy over Stein’s war years, however, the contents of these folders (thanks probably, in part, to Stein’s more than usually formidable handwriting) have not been extensively studied or understood. It is the purpose of this piece to clarify what they contain and to offer a suggestion as to why Stein translated Pétain’s speeches the way that she did.

Perhaps the most detailed description available of Stein’s Pétain translations is given by Barbara Will in her recent book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Regime. If I quote Will at length, it is because her words serve as the best introduction:

At the end of 1941, Stein undertook a project to translate the speeches by Philippe Pétain that had been collected in a book edited and introduced by Gabriel-Louis Jaray, a friend of Bernard Faÿ. It was no small endeavor. For the next year and a half, Stein translated some thirty-two of Pétain’s speeches into English, including those that announced Vichy policy barring Jews and other “foreign elements” from positions of power in the public sphere and those that called for a “hopeful” reconciliation with Nazi forces. The last of Pétain’s speeches that Stein translated was from August 1941, but Stein did not cease working on the project until January 1943 — several months after the Germans had occupied the whole of France in November 1942 and long after the United States had entered the war against the fascist forces that Stein was promoting to her fellow Americans. […] The first speech translated is Pétain’s address of 1936, delivered at the inauguration of a monument to the veterans of Capoulet-Junac; the last, Pétain’s 1940 Christmas address. Stein followed the erratic chronology of the original text, Paroles aux français, messages et écrits 1934–1941, translating approximately the first half of the fifty speeches published. Still, she leaves some speeches untranslated, and it is interesting to speculate as to why.[3]

Here, as elsewhere in her absorbing account, Will’s historical research regarding the circumstances of Stein’s project is thorough. Apparently translating until January 1943 when “her friend Paul Genin and the sous-prefet of Belley, Maurice Sivan, urged her to abandon the project,”[4] Stein continued her work for three months after the United States had severed diplomatic relations with the Vichy government. There are, however, two potentially misleading details in Will’s description of the translations themselves which are worth clarifying. Firstly, by my count, Stein translated only twenty-seven full speeches (one of which is separated into five sections).[5] Among these twenty-seven there are abortive attempts at two others, making a total of twenty-nine, not thirty-two. At the beginning of folder 1141 are also typescript copies of part of the second speech and all of four others (listed below as 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). Since the original French version of these speeches is easily accessible, both in the volume that Stein used[6] and in more recent critical editions,[7] I include here a list of their dates, so that the curious reader may consult their contents:

Folder	Speech	Date	Number of Speech in Paroles aux Français	Title of Speech in Paroles aux Français and Notes
1140	1	1936	II	Le paysan français
1140	2	1938	III	Pour l’union des Français
1140–1141	3	November 1938	IV	L’abandon de la vie spirituelle et de l’esprit national
1141	4	17th June 1940	VI	Appel du 17 juin 1940
1141	5	22nd June 1940	VII	Appel du 20 juin (Misdated by Stein as 22nd June)
1141	6	20th June 1940	VIII	Appel du 23 juin (Misdated by Stein as 23rd June.)
1141	7	25th June 1940	IX	Appel du 25 juin
1141	8	11th July 1940	X	Appel du 11 juillet 1940
1141	9	13th August 1940	XI	Appel du 13 août
1141	10	9th October 1940	XIII	Appel du 9 octobre
1141	11	11th October 1940	XIV	Message du 11 octobre
1141	12	30th October 1940	XV	Message du 30 octobre sur l’Entrevue de Montoire
1141	13	18th November 1940	XIX	Déclaration du 18 novembre aux représentants de la Presse à Lyon
1141	14	14th December 1940	XX	Message du 14 décembre sur le renvoi de M. Pierre Laval
1141	15	1st January 1941	XXI	Allocution du 1er janvier 1941 au Corps diplomatique (Stein only translates the first five lines of this speech, before crossing it out.)
1141	16	19th March 1941	XXII	Message de Grenoble
1141-1142	17	7th April 1941	XXIII	Message du 7 Avril
1142	18	11th May 1941	XXIV	Message du 11 Mai pour la fête de Jeanne d’Arc
1142	19	15th May 1941	XXV	Message du 15 Mai
1142	20	8th June 1941	XXVI	Message du 8 juin aux Français du Levant
1142	21	17th June 1941	XXVIII	Message du 17 juin
1142	22	8th July 1941	XXIX	Discours du 8 juillet sur la Constitution
1142	23	12th August 1941	XXX	Message du 12 août
1142	24	19th August 1941	XXXI	Discours du 19 août au Conseil d’État
1142	25	26th August 1941	XXXIII	Lettre du 26 août aux prisonniers libérés
1142	26	15th September 1940	XXXV	La Politique social de l’avenir (Revue des Deux Mondes)
1142	27	10th November 1940	XXXVI	Le Secours national
1142	28	30th November 1940	XXXVII	Appel en faveur des expulsés lorrains
1142	29	24th December 1940	XXXVIII	Message de Noël 1940 (Unfinished after two pages.)

As the reader will observe, speeches I, V, XII, XVI–XVIII, XXVII, XXXII, and XXXIV are not translated by Stein. In addition, Stein evidently gave up on Pétain’s New Year speech of 1941 (XXI), as well as leaving the last speech unfinished. Since this speech ends with her notebook, however, Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo speculate that there may have been another notebook following on from it:

The last text translated, a routine speech for Christmas 1940, stops at the end of her manuscript notebook in midspeech, midsentence, a procedure quite unlike Stein, who was orderly and finished what she started; was there another notebook, not preserved, which might have gone beyond and revealed what happened to make her stop?[8]

Burns and Dydo do not suggest a likely answer, writing instead that “The texts and letters preserved do not give us enough facts for interpretation” (409). In what follows, I will have occasion to consider both Will’s question (why did Stein choose the speeches she did) and Burns and Dydo’s (why did she stop so suddenly?). However, taking Burns and Dydo’s warning seriously, I do not pretend to have arrived at a definitive interpretation; any conclusions suggested are speculative.

To return to the second potentially misleading moment in Barbara Will’s description of Stein’s translations. Will writes: “Stein translated some thirty-two of Pétain’s speeches into English, including those that announced Vichy policy barring Jews and other ‘foreign elements’ from positions of power in the public sphere and those that called for a “hopeful” reconciliation with Nazi forces.”[9] From this report, the reader might assume that Stein’s translations involved writing out in English the anti-Semitic and xenophobic portions of Pétain’s new policies. Certainly Stein did translate Pétain’s declarations of support for Adolf Hitler, and his injunctions to the French to collaborate with the Nazis. However, Stein did not translate any specific reference to Jews. This is not because of her selection, but for the simple reason that there are no such references in Pétain’s speeches. Although Stein did translate one speech by Pétain announcing changes in Vichy policy (Oct. 9, 1940), and although this change in policy did refer in part — but not by name — to the infamous Statut des Juifs of October 3, 1940, the speech itself does not mention the specific changes wrought on French policy. (Stein, apparently, did not translate Pétain’s announcement of modifications to this policy on June 4^th 1941.) Pétain was remarkably silent on the “Jewish question” in his public pronouncements — a fact which, perhaps, can be explained by suggesting that Pétain wanted his speeches to emphasize national unity and solidity. Here are two samples of such references in Pétain’s speeches to his changed laws from October 9th, 1940, with Stein’s translations below:

Un statut nouveau prélude d’importantes réformes de structure, déterminera les rapports du capital et du travail. Il assurera à chacun la dignité et la justice.[10]

A new law a prelude to important constructive reforms will decide the relation of capital to labor. It will assure to each one justice and dignity.[11]

Dans un message que les journaux publieront demain et qui sera le plan d’action du gouvernment, je vous montrerai ce que doivent être les traits essentiels de notre nouveau regime. National en politique étrangère; hiérarchisé en politique intérieure; coordonné et contrôlé dans son économie, et, par-dessus tout social dans son esprit et dans ses institutions.[12]

In a message that the newspapers will publish and which will be the plan In the of action of the government I will make evident to you what should be the essential character of our new regime government. National in foreign politics, hierarchic in home politics affairs, coordinated and controlled in its economy, and above all social in its spirit and its institutions [?] institutions.[13]

Pétain, it seems, was careful to keep explicitly discriminatory statements out of his speeches. His euphemism for the revised polity was the “hierarchization” of France.

In 2010, a newly released draft of the 1940 Statut des Juifs revealed that Philippe Pétain was not only personally willing to propagate Nazi anti-Semitic policy in France, but went beyond Hitler by making his already appalling strictures more comprehensive.[14] However, before the discovery of this document showing the extent of Pétain’s anti-Semitism, his personal involvement in French anti-Semitic policy was debatable. Arguments to the opposite end were common: that under German pressure Pétain was forced to instigate anti-Jewish laws, but tried to temper them in France.[15] In trying to understand Stein’s actions, it is important to note that translating Pétain’s speeches would not, in itself, have brought her familiarity with the nature or extent of his involvement with the anti-Semitic policies introduced on October 3rd 1940 and June 2nd 1941. Indeed, the fact that Pétain, through the mediation of Bernard Faÿ, accepted Stein as the translator of his speeches into English may have suggested to her that he was not prejudiced against Jews. Moreover, in one of the speeches that Stein translates (30 Nov. 1940), Pétain defends the refugees from Alsace-Lorraine, of which a large portion were Jewish. Since the publication of this speech was banned by German authorities in occupied territory,[16] its translation may have seemed to Stein a long way from a pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic act. (Stein’s translation is included in the note below.)[17]

If insisting on the contemporary representation of Pétain’s person here seems like quibbling (there is, after all, no denying the fact that Stein translated speeches from the leader of a regime that contributed to the Holocaust), it is an ad hominem focus suggested by Stein’s introduction to her project. Pétain, to the Stein writing this introduction, was a mythical hero above suspicion:

Like George Washington [he] has given [his countrymen] courage in their darkest moment held them together through their times of desperation and has always told them the truth and in telling them the truth has made them realise that the truth would set them free.[18]

… one thing that was certain and that was that like Benjamin Franklin he never defecnded [defended] himself, he never explained himself, in short his character did not need any defence.[19]

everybody had feelings about the Marechal, about one thing they were all agreed and that is that he had achieved a miracle, without arms without any means of defense, he had succeeded in making the Germans more or less keep their word with him. Gradually this miracle impressed itself upon every one.[20]

I must say little by little the most critical and the most violent of us have come gradually to do what the Marechal asks all French people to do, to have faith in him and in the fact that France will live. And this is to introduce the actual words said by the Marechal when it was necessary for him to say something and it is a convincing and moving story.[21]

One might theorize that it was Stein’s own explorations of celebrity and identity in works such as Lectures in America or Everybody’s Autobiography that led her towards this stance of hero worship. Stein’s enthusiasm for Pétain in this introduction appears to have had much more to do with his personal aura than the specificities of his policy.

Looking at Stein’s translations through the optic of her cult of personality for Philippe Pétain offers a potential motivation for Stein’s choice of speeches to translate. Stein, it seems, was often more interested in those speeches in which Pétain’s rhetorical persona as the savior of France was most prominent. Thus she omits speech XVIII “Discours du 18 novembre a la Chambre de commerce de Lyon” about the organization of the state and its departments, but includes, from the same day speech XIX “Declaration du 18 novembre aux représentants de la Presse à Lyon,” which is Pétain’s response to those who have accused him of shying away journalists. The choice is not unreasonable, considering the purpose of her translations: to introduce Pétain to readers in the United States. Likewise, Stein omits speeches with distant subjects. Thus speech V, Pétain’s  message on the “moral example of Canada” and speech XVI addressed to the colonies are left out, while III — “Pour l’union des Français” is included, perhaps because it foregrounds Pétain’s rhetorical role and immediate presence.

Stein’s enthusiasm for Pétain’s person has also been used, by Barbara Will, to suggest an explanation for the style of her translations. As the reader will have noticed from the samples given above, Stein’s translations are often extremely literal. Thus Will writes,

what is most striking about the text is its almost stupefyingly literal rendering of the French original. Translating word by word, Stein completely ignores questions of idiom or style: “Telle est, aujourd’hui, Français, la tâche à laquelle je vous convie” becomes “This is today french people the task to which I urge you.” An idiomatic phrase such as “Le 17 juin 1940, il y a aujourd’hui une année” becomes “On the seventeenth of June 1940 it is a year today.”[22]

One conclusion we might draw would be Stein’s own ineptitude. However, as Will points out, Stein had already composed original work in French, and had allegedly translated Flaubert’s Trois Contes, as well as Georges Hugnet’s poem cycle Enfances.[23] (Reading her literalism as incompetence, one might add, is to run the risk of sounding like “the director of the Grafton Press” in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, who was “under the impression” that perhaps Stein’s “knowledge of english” was at fault.)[24] “Hence,” writes Will, “the striking literalism of Stein’s Pétain translations seem[s] to point to a deeper issue than linguistic ineptitude.”

Stein’s attempt to render the French original into English through a one-to-one correspondence between signs seems to be conceding authority, interpretation, and interrogation to the voice of Pétain. This compositional submissiveness suggests a subject in thrall to the aura of a great man: the savior on a white horse, as Stein describes Pétain in her introduction to his speeches. In an interview with her local paper Le Bugiste in 1942, Stein is in fact described in a curious state of ravishment: “she abandons herself to her subject, to her hero, she admires the importance of his words and the significance of the symbol.” To invoke Susan Sontag: Stein appears “fixated” or “fascinated” by Pétain, mesmerized and rendered passive by an almost masochistic desire for the figure of the authoritarian dictator.[25]

I find this conclusion highly suggestive in the ways that it makes us think about the queerness and erotic charge of much of Stein’s writing. But when one considers the kind of portrait that Will paints of Stein, one is confronted with a counterintuitive image. Stein, the author of “Patriarchal Poetry,” as a meek woman rendered passive and incapable of personal expression by her “ravishment” for the strong male dictator? Of course, more “unlikely” things have happened; beside the fact of Stein’s collaboration, such a submission to patriarchy is not inconceivable.

Rather than multiplying unlikelihoods, however, I suggest a more mundane option. In most cases, Stein, I think, used a literal translation because she thought that this was an appropriate way to translate prose. (In 1928, she apparently insisted that Bernard Faÿ and Georges Hugnet render The Making of Americans into French through what Ulla Dydo calls “sentence sense, as it were, word-for-word meaning.”[26] When Stein’s translation of Pétain’s speeches becomes so literal as to be sloppy, I think it is because, given the project by Bernard Faÿ, Stein rapidly lost interest in her task, and yet continued out of a dogged determination. As Burns and Dydo suggest, this would be characteristic of her, since although she often set out on projects with which she grew disillusioned, she also “finished what she started.”[27] This interpretation is supported by the fact that Stein’s translating is not ubiquitously literal. Passages where her interest was apparently more strongly engaged, particularly towards the beginning of the project, show evidence of numerous revisions, which carry the English version away from the literal French version rather than towards it. So, for example, in translating Pétain’s most memorable speech, that of his assumption of power on June 17, 1940, Stein used both sides of the notebook pages, going over multiple options for possible versions. Pétain’s line, “je fais à la France le don de ma personne pour atténuer son malheur,”[28] goes through at least ten variations. I transcribe only those that I can read:

(click here to view a high-resolution scan)

I give to France myself

 I make a gift to France of my person to attenuate its misfortune

                                                      to help it out of

                              of all of me myself to weaken its unhappiness

                                                                               misfortune

 I make a present to France of the whole of me to attenuate

                                                        me myself to diminish its misfortune

                                                                               soften

                                                                               alleviate

                                                                               calm its distress

 I now make a present to France of myself in order to strengthen it in its
misfortune trouble misery. I dedicate the all of myself to the country France to
appease its misery agony.

 I dedicate all of myself to France to appease its agony.[29]

One can see here a general trend away from the French constructions to less literal, and more natural-sounding English constructions. Thus with “je fais le don,” Stein settles not on “I make a gift” but on “dedicate”; and “atténuer son malheur” becomes not the stilted “attenuate its misfortunate” but the much more expressive “appease its agony.”

In contrast to this speech of June 17, 1940, Stein’s translations in folder 1142 show fewer traces of revision. The work that she probably did during the last three months of her translating — that is, during the period after the US had severed diplomatic relations with the Vichy government — appears half-hearted. A glance at the broad sweep of her handwriting in the unfinished final speech from December 1940 suggests that she was working rapidly. In the following passage, Stein seems to have always opted for the first word that came to her. The French word order is unchanged:

In many homes, there are empty places — the places of dear ones. Many will never come back, who were seated there joyously last year, on leave for ten days around the family table; that our first thought should be is for them: they have saved their honor. Others await far from you prisoners in foreign lands; perhaps they will hear this evening mass said in their camps? Perhaps they will open with love the beautiful packages that you have sent them? Never than in their xile and in their solitude They have they never been nearer to us than in their xile and in their solitude: I think this evening night of all who suffer, of those who have not in their fire-places neither wood or coal, of those who have heard, in past times in past times, spoken of in past times of Christmas eve and who do not spoken of and who do not know if they will eat to-morrow; of children who will not find toys[30]

The infelicitous phrase “they have saved honor” in French reads, “ils ont sauvé l’honneur.”[31] Likewise, the double negative “I think this night of all who suffer, of those who have not in their fire-places neither wood or coal” reproduces a French grammatical construction: “Je pense aussi, ce soir, à tous ceux qui souffrent, à ceux qui ne mettront dans leur cheminée ni bûches, ni charbon.”[32] This perfunctoriness does not seem to be the work of a translator in awe of her author; it is, however, quite possibly the work of a creative artist disheartened by a task, and one increasingly uncertain of its virtue.

Before we leap to the conclusion that Stein realized the error of her ways midway through her translations, it is worth considering that her disillusion with the project, as I sketch it here, need not have been purely due to a sense of impropriety aroused by changing historical circumstances. If one reads Pétain’s speeches in the order in which they are presented in Paroles aux Français, one cannot help feeling that the earlier portions of the work are more interesting: the narrative of Pétain’s ascent to power, his arrangement of an armistice with Nazi Germany, and his meeting with Hitler, make for more compelling reading than do his later pronouncements and struggles to maintain order. I think it is possible that Stein, regarding the political ramifications of her task as secondary, was primarily motivated by such concerns over readerly interest. This, at least, would explain why she revised the translation of Pétain’s speech explaining the meeting with Hitler at Montoire on October 30^th, 1940, almost as rigorously as she did that of June 17, 1940. And, in this context, it is also plausible that when Stein reached the end of her third notebook, she did not begin another one for the simple reason that she was no longer sufficiently interested.

These are only speculative suggestions attempting to understand the scope and style of Stein’s translation of Philippe Pétain’s speeches to the French. Others, I hope, will approach the same material in a different manner. For, if anything, it seems to me that “setting the record straight” when it comes to Gertrude Stein’s war years is a misnomer. She was a queer writer adept at getting by and always capable of surprising her readers; it would be interesting to see radical readings which responded to her provocation. Rather than dismissing her collaboration as purely negative, in contrast, say, to Samuel Beckett’s war years, one could, for example, place Stein’s writings for the Vichy regime beside works such as Funeral Rites by Jean Genet. Stein’s translations of Pétain’s speeches, like her other work, present a diversity of possible interpretations. If we are to understand them, we do well to reserve a priori judgments about their meaning and to pay attention to their range and peculiarity.

 

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Quotations and the holograph reproduction from the Stein translations are used without objection from the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the estate of Gertrude Stein.

1. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, MSS 76, box 64, folders 1140–1142.

2. YCAL MSS 76, box 64, folder 1139 (in English) and folder 1143 (in French translation). Stein’s introduction has been printed in Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo’s appendix to The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. Edward Burns, Ulla E Dydo, and William Rice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 406–408, as well as in Modernism/modernity 3, no. 3 (September 1996): 93–96.

3. Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 138.

4. Edward Burns, “Gertrude Stein: A Complex Itinerary, 1940–1944,” Jacket2.

5. The speech with five sections, for each of which Stein begins a new page as if beginning a new speech, is dated 11 Oct. 1940. The speech was actually given on 10 Oct. 1940.

6. Philippe Pétain, Paroles aux Franc̜ais; messages et écrits, 1934–1941 (Lyon: H. Lardanchet, 1941).

7. See, e.g., Pétain, Discours aux Français, ed. Jean-Claude Barbas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989).

8. Stein and Thornton Wilder, “Appendix IX: Gertrude Stein: September 1942–September 1944,” in Burns, Dydo, and Rice, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, 409.

9. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 138.

10. Pétain, Discours aux Français, 73.

11. YCAL MSS 76, box 64, folder 1141, Speech 10.

12. Pétain, Discours aux Français, 76.

13. YCAL MSS 76, box 64, folder 1141, Speech 10.

14. Information on this document is available from a number of new reports describing its discovery. See, for example, the Lizzy Davies Guardian article; see also the French Wikipedia page “Lois contre les Juifs et les étrangers pendant le régime de Vichy” for a discussion with more context.

15. See, for example, Monique and Jean Paillard’s Documents secrets pour servir à la réhabilitation du maréchal Pétain (Paris: Editions du Trident: Diffusion, Librairie française, 1989). Versions of this argument are common in nonacademic writing. One made by “VSA” is available online.

16. Pétain, Discours aux Français, 99.

17. Stein’s translation:

Appeal inform [?] of the Lorraines

French People.

Seventy thousand Lorraines have come into the free zone¨, having had to abandon everything; their houses, their goods, their villages, their church, their cemeteries where sleep their ancestors all in short that makes life worth living.

They have lost every thing, and they have come to ask sanctuary from their brethren in France. Behold them in the threshold of winter, without resources, having nothing left of wealth, except their pride in being still french[.] they accept indeed their evil plight without complaint and without recrimination. They are the french people of a great race of energetic souls with souls full of strength and valiant hearts. A great number of them are peasants. Living in the vicinity of a  frontier they have throughout the centuries suffered more than all others the hardships of war. I feel as you feel yourselves all their agony suffering agony. The government is doing all in its power to comfort their misfortune to furnish them the means of living and worship. But the Lorraines deserve better; it is necessary that the feeling welcome they receive is the feeling welcome of the heart such as one shows to brothers and clansmen whom one loves. That ever one thinks of a way of showing that there where they are seat they will find a home the sweetness of a home and the gentleness comforting of the the great entire friendship of the french people.

Already there have been many offers of properties, houses, [word?] to be placed put found to the put at the disposition of the refugees. It is necessary that these shall be more and that each department which welcomes receives them should discover search out everything ways which, will can soften palliate their fate. situation. Forced to leave with little but their skin and a very small possesions, they need everything.

That  every one of you make an effort to help them, to comfort them, to given them work, in all ways in which they can be employed. That all this should will be done with an ardent enthusiasm ration: underline;">in short is that they feel all about them sympathy and affection.

With this effort at helping united effort in helping our unhappy compatriots we will come not make us better and more united.

(YCAL MSS 76, box 64, folder 1142, Speech 28)

18. Stein, “Introduction to the Speeches of Marechal Petain,” Modernism/modernity 3, no. 3 (1996): 93.

19. Ibid., 95.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 139.

23. For an excellent discussion of the complex story of this translation alongside Faÿ and Hugnet’s translations into French of The Making of Americans see Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 278–374.

24. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 68.

25. Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 139–40.

26. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 299.

27. Stein and Wilder, “Appendix IX,” 409. The classic example is The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), in which Stein’s narrator often bewails having to keep writing: “Mostly then I have to tell it” (323), “I am all unhappy in this writing” (348), “It is so very confusing that I am beginning to have in me despairing melancholy feeling” (459), “I am altogether a discouraged one. I am just now altogether a discouraged one. I am going on describing men and women” (548), “I am in desolation and my eyes are large with needing weeping and I have a flush from feverish feeling … I tell you I cannot bear it this thing that I cannot be realizing experiencing in each one being living … I am filled then with complete desolation” (729).

28. Pétain, Paroles aux Français, 41.

29. YCAL MSS 76, box 64, folder 1141, Speech 4.

30. YCAL MSS 76, box 64, folder 1142, Speech 29.

31. Pétain, Paroles aux Français, 179.

32. Ibid., 180.

A way is open(ed), a hole is made
— Myung Mi Kim, Dura 

In an interview, the poet Myung Mi Kim explains her prosody as a temporal/spatial concept, existing in “the space between time and space”[1] that can be understood only through an experience of the “sensorium” — when “all your senses are involved in understanding.” There is clearly much that needs to be unpacked from such a statement. What does she mean by this inter-temporal/inter-spatial site where her poetry is located? Why is her prosody — her (mis/dis)use of meters, lines, rhythms, beats, sounds, poetic melodies — so “different” and “difficult” (two comments that Kim admits she has received most frequently), and what does this say about her concept of the nature of poetry? How does one overcome ocular-centric tendencies and use one’s breath and ears when reading her poems, and how is this central to the understanding of Kim’s idea of versification? These are, of course, vast questions that have no definite answer(s), but I believe that they lay adequate groundwork on which a study of the Korean-American poet Myung Mi Kim, a veritable tour de force in contemporary American poetry, may proceed. 

The hyphen between the words “Korean” and “American” in the previous sentence, then, would be a good point of departure for a discussion on Kim. In her talk at the fifth KAFSEL conference entitled “Translingual Consciousness: A Meditation in Four Movements,” Kim talks about “the predicament of the hyphen”:

I could be (and am often) variously hyphenated as a Korean-American poet, a Korean-American woman poet, an immigrant Korean-American woman poet, a Korean-American woman poet of the diaspora, a bilingual Korean-American woman poet, and so on. These markers of ethnicity, gender, displacement, migration, and linguistic affiliation, however, tend to reiterate the “purity” of languages, inviolability of nation boundaries, and fixity of categories that elide the complex geopolitical and historical forces that produce these hyphenations.[2]

What is implied through the small punctuation sign of the hyphen is a forced conjoining between two uncombinable languages, cultures, and sociopolitical ideologies. For Kim, a subject who left Korea at the tender age of nine, “Korean” and/or “American” are categories that cannot specifically define her own current position. Though her ethnicity as well as her childhood memories depicted in her poems are both intensely Korean, her Korean language itself is “truncated, stunted, and ruptured,” and thus “something [she] do[es] and do[es] not know or ‘possess’” (F, 30); hence she is a Korean but not really a Korean. On the other hand, though her tongue finds English more effortless to pronounce and her hand finds Romanized alphabet more comfortable to write, she is still an “otherized” figure in the landscape of America because of her Korean appearance; hence she is an American but not really an American. Perhaps this tension between the two categories that are neither equivalent nor selectable to Kim is shown best in the following line from “And Sing We”:

Um-pah, um-pah sensibility of the first grade teacher, feet firm on the pump organ’s pedals, we flap our wings, butterfly wings, butterfly butterfly, fly over here[3]

Here Kim describes a Korean memory, abundant with Korean sounds (“Um-pah, um-pah”) and melodies (“butterfly butterfly, fly over here” being the lyrics of a well-known Korean children’s song) in an anglicized mode, but this instance is much more than a mere transliteration. If transliteration is an act that is linear in its dynamic and is based on the assumption that there is a fixed co-relation between word A and word B, what is taking place here is significantly different from such an act in that a communication of languages is occurring. It is not so much a “tension” between two words and/or phrases that is taking place, than it is an act of what Kim refers to as a “hybridization” of language, a formulation of a third linguistic mode C through the dialogic interaction between language A and language B, in her case English and Korean: “I am constantly aware of this particular English I participate in — perhaps an English that behaves like a Korean, an English shaped by a Korea.”[4] Thus Kim can be seen acknowledging how languages are continuously influenced by other languages, whether it be through emulation or repulsion, and through this process, “the spectral, the remaindered, the asymmetrical, and the incommensurable in traversing languages and cultures” (F, 30) is revealed. The “residual” material that emerges from this process is what comes to compose the language of languages, namely the language Myung Mi Kim aspires to transcribe and enunciate in her own writing.

For Kim, then, capturing the access to a language that is both permitted and denied becomes the site of attention she wishes to delineate first and foremost in her poetry:

So, in this effort and failure of bridging, reconfiguring, shaping, and being shaped by loss and absence, one enters a difficult negotiation with an Imaginary and a manner of listening that to me is the state of writing. (JKL, 95)

Writing for Kim is an act that occurs in the interstices and/or ruptures of languages and cultures; it is the ongoing “effort[s] and failure[s]” of narrating the “spectral” and the “incommensurable” that have been unseen/dismissed by so many other writers in the past that characterize Kim’s poems. She accepts the trauma of her displacement and her diasporic positioning and utilizes it to examine how “the space between the two languages [becomes] a site of mutation between an English and a Korean” (JKL, 94) and thus a hybridization of language occurs. This third space Kim’s prosody finds itself located on is a space that is situated on the process of “languaging,” on the intersections of temporal and spatial construction.

“Languaging,” then, as Kim explains, “is a practice of language that reconfigures legibility, intelligibility, and sense-making by heeding the liminal — the not-yet-available to culture” (F, 31).[5] If “language” implies a conforming to a fixed set of rules and is judged according to whether it has been mastered or not, “languaging” — language as an ongoing act of (re)creation — is a process which accepts that there can never be an either/or situation when it comes to lingual orality and/or textual legibility. Through this process, language “factors in, layers in, and crosses fields of meaning, elaborating and extending the possibilities for sense making,”[6] and it is this continuous fluidity and subsequent polysemy of language that enables “[a] measure, a page, the book to embody the multivalent, the multidirectional — a cathexis of the living instant” (Commons, 111). In other words, for Kim it is the incommensurability of language that both limits and legitimates one’s recognition of his/her present space at the moment. Because language is always approximate, and “diction(s), register(s), inflection(s) as well as varying affective stances … have and will continue to filter into [language]” (Commons, 110), it can never comply to the demands for a linearly coherent history nor a narrative that can be encompassed by all. In this way it is limiting. But it is also liberating in that, through “languaging” one is able to express an individual experience, to make visible the invisible, to let the unheard be heard through nonteleological enunciations. I believe this is precisely what Kim strives to articulate through her poetry.

How, then, does this idea of language as an activity manifest in Kim’s poetry? An instance where the “lyric as it embodies the processural” (Commons, 111) and the ongoing act of languaging is depicted by Kim can be found in the third part of “The Bounty”:

attenuate	in measure and in collusion separate and bound	wrench
mill	by nine entries in the figure of nine propertied	cell
given	by nine entries in one acre shallow well and pump	force
familiar	hairy snouts arrows in wealth parade of gifts	precisive
bestiary	rain soaked evergreen	tooth
reflex	note circles heat swelling	need
root	familiar dipthong again siege	defer
temper	wrench its nature alloy encumbering	pool
espouse	quality of light mineral	dulled[7]

This is only the first page of part 3; eight more pages continue in exactly the same format — three pillars of words placed in three rows (except for the last page, which is to be discussed in detail later on in this essay). How is one supposed to read, moreover understand, this passage? Of course the obvious answer would be that there is no definitive interpretation, and as Kim always emphasizes, “confusion [can] be productive … [as] reading and poetry are sites of self-reflexivity, even if they fail.” In other words, it is the process of reflexivizing that Kim valorizes, and there are various possibilities of such an act of languaging that can occur here. A reader, for instance, could read the words/phrases line by line, from left to right: “attenuate / in measure and in collusion separate and bound / wrench / mill / by nine entries in the figure of nine propertied / cell.” The thought process starts in medias res with forceful imperative verbs that seem to command the reader to participate in actions of violent pounding and weakening (“mill,” “attenuate”), twisting (“wrench”), and tying up (“bound”). What is being separated and beaten to a pulp, so as to be fragmentized to the minimal size of a “cell” is yet to be revealed. The second column on the following page, however, provides a hermeneutic opening: “village home for bridal bequest fish by dozens to fry” … “proffer armfuls of just pressed noodles” … “ivy and clematis unhurried / one and one conjoined” (The Bounty, 92). By ceasing to read from left to right, and applying a vertical reading, from the top of a respective column to its bottom, an environment of patience and generosity can be seen to be depicted, which is juxtaposed with the brutal violence drawn on the previous page. While the piercing sounds of “wrench / cell / force / precisive” are accentuated in the third column of page 91, more rounded out sounds, in the form of “o” — “threshold” … “rotation / born” — occur on the third column of the following page. Thus a shift in the poem’s mood is brought about through not only how the poem is textually approached by the reader, but also through how the reader aurally voices the poem itself.

There is also a contrast that emerges in the imagery: the “unhurried” (92) sense of the past, where communal rituals of “hairy snouts arrow[ing] in wealth parade of gifts”[8] (91) and meals of “armfuls of … noodles” along with “fish by dozens to fry” (92) on wedding days, are suddenly forcefully ceased; “the property of daughters” (96) ends up having to resort to sparse resources (“shallow well and pump” [91]) and even endure a surrender of language — “familiar dipthong [sic] again siege” (91). Hence the vowel diphthongs in the left column (“familiar,” “bestiary,” “espouse”) are “in measure and in collusion separate[d]” (middle column) to become a “cell” (right column) and/or its “nature” is “wrench[ed]” (middle column) as its “alloy [is] encumbering” (middle column) and thus meaning is “force[fully]” (right column) extracted. What we see here is not only how language that once “bloom[ed]” in the “fertile” “unctuous hills” (92) is grinded, “dulled,” and “defer[red]” (91) by external forces, but also how the middle column acts as a phrasal bridge that connects whichever word on the left with whichever word on the right, thus enabling numerous chiasmatic readings to be possible. If the interpretation focused on a convergence towards the word “need” (right column), then the ominous reading of a language “wrench[ed]” out of its due environment would be overturned, and one would be able to assume that the reading is actually championing a “need” for redemptive measures, thus tinted with a more optimistic hue. This myriad of polysemic interpretations is especially apparent in page 98, where Kim writes, among other words, “resilient” and “bare” on the right column. Whichever action in the left column (“envision” / “recitation”) and phrasal bridge in the second column (“her, and reading” / “object and word”) is used, the meaning of the resulting line will differ greatly. Compare, for instance, “envision / object and word / resilient” and “envision / object and word / bare”; while the former opts for the possibility of language, the latter rejects it and thus the “bare” ends up sounding inconsolably hollow.

As noted earlier, the final page of the poem is drawn out differently from the previous pages, with its disorganized form and erased/missing parts of the column:

ground	its own property chemical and	fiber
	bricks    free    of straw	reading
acute	alter           primacy
jaw	strike	fluent
	firmament	method
sinew	brush    mound   and   gravel
	synaptic
	unruly enter

(99)

Gaps occur in the columns that were, in previous pages, so meticulously formed to perfection with nine words on each left and right column and nine phrases in the middle. Here, in not only the final part of the poem but the final page of the book itself, the reader’s participation is maximized through the processural space of languaging opened up by the poet. The “synaptic / unruly enter” may, as Kim points out, “fire or misfire, connections can be constituted or dismantled [and] no conclusions are possible” (JKL, 101). However, it is because the blank spaces can resonate a sound of their own, according to the voice the reader hears from it, that “the synapse of language” and the “perpetual motion toward the beginning and not necessarily toward knowing” (JKL, 101–102) is deemed so important in Kim’s poems. Both the words/phrases and the gaps are like tesserae that create a textual mosaic according to the method of languaging the reader implements, thus producing a different picture for each respective process of cognitive organization. Kim’s third space of language, then, becomes an inter-temporal, inter-spatial plane on which not only the writer participates in the act of creating her own language, but where also the reader joins in the act of writing as well; the act of languaging becomes a joint endeavor.

It is important to explain, at this point, why Kim locates herself in the spaces between languages and finds it impossible to recite her story in a putatively conventional way. For Kim, the story she wants to tell about herself is a specifically personal one, meaning that it is one that cannot follow the narrative trajectory that has been traditionally agreed upon nor be transcribed with the tools of an accepted storytelling mode. If there has been an assumption (or at least an agreement) between the writer/transmitter and the reader/recipient that the historical continuum is linear and exists on a single plane, in Kim’s poems such an assumption ceases to exist. It is only though the refusal of chronological linearity that migratory, diasporic, and traumatic experiences can be faithfully written out. As she remarks in her own talks, this is the only way she can “show a respect” to her own particular specificities. The polysemic reading of the three columns, whether it be from left to right, from top to bottom, or in the form of chiasmus, is, essentially how Kim understands her own fragmented experiences and thus the only way she knows how to write it out in paper.  

Her experimental uses of meters and rhythms can further be seen in “Hummingbird,” a poem included in Dura (1998). In the following passage the reader is able to experience Kim’s own modification of the caesura, here visually re-created to divide and/or connect syntactic phrases and meanings:

Argue:   precedents,   oaths,   public record,   witnesses
Deliver:   introduction,   narration,  statement of the case,  and  peroration
The   writing   hung   on  the   wall]        [whose  writing  is it
Meal   means:   stuff,   material
Hummingbird    happens   as   a   sound   first
Is  it  clear]      [then   it   is
Heal]     [landed   parole
Continuous,  as  of   line   or   time
A    perceiver  without   state (100)

In the lines “The writing hung on the wall]  [whose writing is it” and “Is it clear]  [then it is” the brackets — and the space between — act as visualized caesuras that not only break or interrupt the flow of thought but act as, to quote Kim’s explanations, “a pivot.” Kim defines her use of the caesura as a device similar to the “hinge,” for it is a “break in the measure [that] travels both ways … like sense breaking and joining simultaneously.” If a caesura in traditional English verse were simply an audible pause used to break up the line, Kim’s caesura acts as a transhistorical space where the line not only shifts forward but thrusts backwards as well: one sees “the writing hung on the wall” and subsequently asks, “whose writing is it[?],” but this question sends one back to look at what is written on the wall once more, and the process is continued over and over again until an answer is deduced. But can there be an answer? Do we know whose writing consists the language of “precedents, oaths, public record, witnesses,” not to mention the formulaic linguistic modes utilized when “deliver[ing]” an “introduction, narration, statement of the case, and peroration”? For these are all static forms of language that were concocted and solidated before we even learned how to speak our own first words. We have been seasoned to believe that language is resolute and knowledge exists in corresponding equivalents, and this is shown through the use of colons. A:B means that A and B are correlated, and therefore “meal” is automatically linked with “stuff, material.” But this is far from how language truly exists for the poet and moreover ourselves as well; “meal” does not necessarily share a relation with “stuff, material,” and the words and language used in “argu[ments]” and “deliver[y]” are not commensurate to the actual experience itself. This is what Kim means when she writes “Hummingbird happens as a sound first,” for it is never the written words but the resonating sounds that can be most truthful to the re-enunciation of the experience. Hence the question “whose writing is it[?]” naturally shifts to “is it clear[?]” for clarity (the basis for transmission/communication) is of more importance than the actual writer — if it is sincere toward expressing the truth, “then it is.” In this sense, through this use of an end-stopping and simultaneously open-ended caesura, Kim emphasizes the “perceiver without state,” always in the fluid process of experiencing without the linguistic means to re-create his/her perceptions. Experience, for Kim is “continuous, as of line or time” and she strives to implement language as an “instrument for gauging, approximating, and rendering” (JKL, 103) the ever-changing world and her own specifically shifted/shifting position in the “clear[est]” way she can.

It is Kim’s aforementioned attention toward the sounds of experience and language (“Hummingbird happens as a sound first”), most prominent in part 1 of “The Bounty,” that makes her poetry so rich in its portrayal.

Lilacs   to   the   post   foretold
Learning   fetch   of   water
                    ranges   lingering
Funnel   thirty
                    merges   temporial   wreath

For shelter the pounding sheet rain	ponder shir rain roof
Hovers it starts start over field and plain	mute forging how compass
Locate a thousand arrows deciphering one	degree salted (down)

By granite specked by pink	fraction to aim so
Uterus as uphill child’s heartbeat	repentant am in
Distinct from awash of mother blood	rimless to whole

Without specifics, wind	broken participle
Pins joints held forth	two a nestle axis to tunnel
As axis what revolves	three behest insistence

Lilacs   to   the   post   foretold
In   the   first                           in   three   as
Signal   and   hook               fey                       lingual
                                                                                (The Bounty, 67)

Kim remarks that she when she wrote this she was able to hear the five columns “more or less simultaneously,” as if five voices were speaking all at once. Her focus on the “materiality of language” in which “[e]very world, every syllable—each sound, each rhythm jostles meaning, contributes to meaning-making” (F, 32) enables a prosody of the polyvocal to materialize. Poetry for Kim is no longer limited to the confines of the page, but rather, its lines are able to sonorously resonate in a cognitive space created by a sensorium — a place where sensory reception and interpretation all converge. Using one’s ears to hear the reverberating “r” sounds in the lines “For shelter the pounding sheet rain” and “ponder shir rain roof” when spoken at the same time, or breathing out the spaces between “Learning fetch of water / [    ] ranges lingering / Funnel thirty / [    ] merges temporal wreath” to feel the slow movements of “lingering” and “merg[ing]” occurring here is the way one needs to experience Kim’s poems, for they tend to demand a synesthetic application of senses. “The essence of poetry,” Kim explains, “lies in what emerges at that very moment of encounter with the written text, with your ears, body, psyche, historical condition.” Reading and writing, speaking and listening all become acts that not only Kim partakes in, but acts she urges the reader to join in as well, so that language can reach its potential of dialogism to the fullest degree, and so that the process of communication can be observed.

In this sense, Kim’s own personal experience becomes a metaphor for the possibilities of language itself: her loss of language (Korean), her newly acquired but still awkward new language (English), and the third space on which she can only reside in her linguistic endeavors becomes analogous to what all experience in today’s world, where the locus of enunciation is ever-shifting and the belief in a historical continuum — where experiences can be faithfully expressed — is questioned. For Myung Mi Kim, who often finds it difficult to find by herself an exact word to replicate an experience — “Hummingbird  No word for its size” (Dura, 94) — writing becomes an act that is simply a part of a larger process in “the language of languages, the communication of communications” that she so emphasizes. The ideal reader of her poetry is not one who extracts meaning from the text, but one who accompanies it and the process in which it was created. The third space erected for the progression of understanding and/or language is what needs to be acknowledged by those who endeavor to both study Kim’s poetry and participate in the translingual experience.

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Notes

1. An interview with the poet was conducted on June 18, 2009, at the Ewha Womans University BK English Lab, thanks to the generous efforts of both the BK and HK organizations. Unfortunately, as the interview content has yet to be published, all remarks referred to will be missing paginations. The full transcript can be provided on demand.

2. From the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the Korean Association for Feminist Studies in English Literature, held June 12–13, 2009, at Ewha Womans University, 30. Hereafter cited as F.

3. Myung Mi Kim, Under Flag, 14.

4. From James Kyung-Jin Lee’s interview with Kim included in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, 94. Hereafter cited as JKL.

5. All citations of “F” refer to the proceedings of The Fifth International Conference of the Korean Association for Feminist Studies in English Literature, held June 12–13, 2009, at Ewha Womans University.

6. Kim, Commons, 110.

7. Kim, The Bounty, 91.

8. It is Korean tradition to place a head of a pig on a table at the beginning of a financial endeavor (such as an opening of a store, the first day of planting crops, etc.), and put money into its mouth as a way to pray to the gods for success.

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Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. “Images of Form vs. Images of Content in Contemporary Asian-American Poetry.” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 4 (1996): 764–89.

Chiu, Jeannie. “Identities in Process: The Experimental Poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim.” In Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen, edited by Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 84–101.

Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. “Speaking in Tongues: Myung Mi Kim’s Stylized Mouths.” SLI: Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 1 (2004): 124–48.

Kim, Elaine. “Korean American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Cheung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 156–91.

Kim, Myung Mi. Under Flag. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1991.

———. The Bounty. Minneapolis: Chax Press, 1996.

———. Dura. New York: Nightboat Books, 1998.

———. Commons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Lee, James Kyung-jin. “Interview with Myung Mi Kim.” In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. 92–104.

Liu, Warren. “Making Common the Commons: Myung Mi Kim’s Ideal Subject.” In American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics,edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. 252–66.

Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. “‘Composed of Many Lengths of Bone’: Myung Mi Kim’s Reimagination of Image and Epic.” In Transnational Asian American Literature: Site and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 235–56.

———. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Xiaojing, Zhou. “‘What Story What Story What Sound’: The Nomadic Poetics of Myung Mi Kim’s Dura.” College Literature 33, no. 4 (2007): 63–91.

———. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.

———. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.