October Feature: Jay Hopler

We at The Blueshift Journal are excited to feature Jay Hopler as Blueshift's inaugural Featured Artist for the month of October.

Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970 and his poetry, essays, and translations have appeared, or are forthcoming, in numerous magazines and journals including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and SLATE. He has published three anthologies, one of which (Green Squall) was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He lives in Tampa and is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida.

Jay’s translation of Georg Trakl’s Im Winter is currently on the Blueshift Homepage. Another of his Trakl translations, Liturgy of the Dark Hours, will be published in Issue 01. Jay was kind enough to answer several of Claire’s questions on what it’s like to be a teacher, translator, and poet.

Tell us about writing In the Winter and Liturgy of the Dark Hours.

Once I gave up my misguided attempts to bring the poems perfectly from German into English (I dream of one day making a German poem and its English translation exist in both languages simultaneously in exactly the same way), working on “In the Winter” and “Liturgy of the Dark Hours” was a great deal of fun. In other words, I had to loosen up and let the poems happen in English. I lament the fact that languages are, as Mark Rudman reminds us, “incommensurable.” That incommensurability makes a perfect translation impossible. However, there is a freedom in that impossibility; the trick is finding the moxie to make good use of it.

Why did you choose Georg Trakl? Do you translate from other languages?

There is something about his darkness that is familiar to me. I hesitate to call him a kindred spirit, as he was probably the most dysfunctional human being ever to walk the earth, but we would have had much to talk about. In fact, we are talking, he and I, through the medium of translation.

How did you start writing poetry translations? What’s the hardest thing about them?

I started translating poetry when I moved to Rome in 2010. I taught myself how to speak Italian so I could have some sort of a life over there and figured, as long as I had access to the language, I might as well try my hand at bringing some Italian poetry over into English. I translated D’Annunzio, Gozzano, Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, Pavese, you name it. I finally found Giacomo da Lentini, the thirteenth-century inventor of the sonnet, and translated his poems. I’d like to publish a volume of those da Lentini translations at some point, but I haven’t gotten them quite where I want them yet.

While living in Italy, I fell in love with German and taught myself the language as soon as I returned to the States in 2011. I’d been reading the work of poets like Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, Bachmann, and Inge Müller for years, but only in translation. What a difference it made suddenly to have access to those poems as they were originally written! As beautiful as those poems are in English, they are infinitely more beautiful in German, which brings me to the second part of your question.

The hardest thing for me about translating an Italian or a German poem is deciding how far I am willing to go to make it a good poem in English, how much violence I’m willing to do to the original to make it work not just as a translation, but as a poem in its own right. Those two Trakl translations of mine that you were kind enough to feature in your journal are versions of the original German poems, not strict translations. I tried to stick as close to the original poems as I could, at least at first, but the results were unsatisfactory in the extreme. The poems were leaden, lifeless, unproductively awkward. So, I had to ask myself what was more important, making accurate translations or making good English-language poems. I chose the latter.

How is it balancing your voice with the original in translations?

It depends on the poet I’m translating and what kind of translation I’m doing (a version is more of a collaboration than a translation; it’s a melding of voices). With Trakl, and I’m speaking now of the more straightforward translations I’ve done of his work, it was relatively easy. He has a strong, distinctive voice; all I had to do was get out of the way and let him talk. Some poets, though, speak more softly and translating them can be difficult. I have to take great care that I don’t colonize them.

Tell us more about the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Did it change your style or process?

It didn’t change my style or process, but it certainly changed my life. It made me employable, for one thing. I have the job I have because of it. It also gave me a readership, which is something that is simultaneously exciting and disconcerting. Having spent most of the last thirty years working on my poems in near-complete isolation, the idea that people are reading what I write and paying attention has taken some getting used to. I’m still not used to it.

What writers inspire you most?

The answer to this question depends on the day. Right now, I’m reading Günter Eich, James Wright, Pablo Neruda, Tomas Trantrömer, Italo Calvino, James Schuyler, T.S. Eliot, John Donne, and Aleksandar Ristović. I read as widely as I can and I read all the time. There is no writing without reading.

As a teacher and poet, what advice can you give to our (predominantly young) readership?

The life must never be privileged over the art; the art must always be privileged over the life. Translation: no one cares how it really happened. Write about your lives, by all means, but do whatever you must in order to make the poems sing, to make them beautiful. If you have to change the facts, then change the facts. If you have to exaggerate, then exaggerate. Or downplay, or omit, or whatever. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson said, and she knew a thing or two about writing poems.

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Want more of Hopler? I know we do. Don't worry, Jay's Liturgy of the Dark Hours will be appearing in Issue 01, set to come out on November 1st. You can read more about Jay and his work at: http://www.jayhopler.com.

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