[In the transnational assemblage of the Americas (“from origins to present”) that Heriberto Yépez and I are now composing, a wide range of English-language poetry will be positioned alongside the multiple languages spoken and/or written on the two American continents. As with the work of Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868), we will also be giving special attention to a number of earlier poets still awaiting recognition in whatever we take to be an American canon or pantheon.
[A talk presented November 16, 2018 as a keynote at “The Fabricant: Symposium on the Figure of the Translator,” University of California, Santa Barbara. Original title: “Toward a Poetry and Poetics of the Americas: A Transnational Assemblage in Progress.”]
[A talk presented November 16, 2018 as a keynote at “The Fabricant: Symposium on the Figure of the Translator,” University of California, Santa Barbara. Original title: “Toward a Poetry and Poetics of the Americas: A Transnational Assemblage in Progress.”]
“Harpy with Bull’s Head and Four Little Girls on Top of a Tower with Black Flag,” Plate 13 from the Vollard Suite, December 1934
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. While Pierre Joris and I were translating and putting together Picasso’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems (2004), I began a translation of Les Quatre Petites Filles, the second of the two full-length plays Picasso wrote in the 1940s.
Translation from French by Jerome Rothenberg.
The scene — a vegetable garden almost smack in its center a well.
four little girls singing — we’re not gonna go to the woods no more the laurel trees are down on the floor hey the beautiful babe will go pick them up then we’ll come out to dance hey just like they dance oh you sing dance and hug anybody you want
Poems and poetics