A Radical History of the World: Fred D’Aguiar talks to Leo Boix

A few hours before the poet, novelist and playwright
Fred D’ Aguiar was preparing to launch his eighth
collection, Translations from Memory (Carcanet, 2018), I
met with him to talk about his new work, one that will
no doubt cement his standing as one of the most important
Guyanese writers of the twentieth century. D’Aguiar
talked of his many subjects and inspirations for his latest
book, about his ample readings of Latin American poets,
as well as the major themes in his oeuvre such as memory
and translation, racism and the legacy of slavery. On
reading Translations from Memory, I was impressed by
how effortlessly D’ Aguiar manages to weave together
memoir, history, and critical race theory in ways that
deepen our understanding of his poetics. His erudite work
confronts us with the richness of his multifarious poetry
readings. D’ Aguiar published his first book of poetry,
Mama Dot (named after his grandmother), in 1985,
notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation
language. Nine years later, he published his first novel,
The Longest Memory, which depicts slavery in the
United States. His many awards include the Malcolm X
Prize for Poetry (Mama Dot) and the Guyana Prize for
Literature (Dear Future).

LB: Translations from Memory is the title of your eighth
poetry collection, and in it you explore many subjects and
authors, philosophies and historical themes, from Horace
and Ovid, to St Thomas Aquinas and Dante, through
George Seferis, Nelson Mandela, Aime Cesaire and Alfred
Hitchcock. Can one read this as a personal encyclopaedia
of your world? How did you decide which subjects to
include and which to leave out?

FD : Poetry is everything that gets lost in translation, so
I was very aware as a lifelong reader who writes and a
writer who reads that when I recall a book or an idea it’s
always in terms of my teaching or moments with the
students. Then I felt: ‘Oh yeah, they understood that
because of the example or because of the feedback and how
we arrive at a conclusion.’ So I realised that my readings
were actually instructing me how I read, and also how I
write, by how I recall. Since I’ve done a lot of reading, and
have a really firm idea of the canon, and trained for years
in poetry- and am still training, and failing- I thought it’d
be really good at this stage to evaluate what is left of all
that reading.

LB: While reading Translations from Memory the work of
the Argentinean poet and short story writer Jorge Luis
Barges came to mind, in particular the fascinating ways in
which he approached universal literary subjects. He loved
encyclopaedias, historical biographies and dictionaries.
How do you relate to these encompassing entries?

FD : I’m glad you mentioned Barges. He is one writer I
didn’t put in because it would give away all of my
procedure. Sometimes you have to erase your tracks as a
poet, otherwise it’s too easy for the reader. I realised that
by declaring Barges I would have told them exactly some
of my loves- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Barges, Neruda. If I
put in Neruda, Barges, Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, I’d be
telling them what my Caribbean reading has been and that
would be too easy. I didn’t want to give it all away as
instruction; I wanted it to be discovery. For me the poetry
is all about not delivering something to the reader so much
as arriving empty-handed.

LB: The idea of memory recurs in your collection, not only
in the title of your book, but also on close reading of your
poems. From literary and cultural to personal, political and
communal memories. How important is the idea of
remembering or the ‘echo of an echo’ in your work?

FD : Robert Lowell said that memory is something
imagined, not recalled. I think what he meant was that we
shouldn’t be in service to memory without some kind of
artifice: an acknowledgement that we come to the table of
recall with some structure, some kind of poetics, and that
the poetics should rule, that they should throw out
anything in the memory that doesn’t work for a poem’s
procedure. I think I’ve been doing that because I am aware
of politics, and race and history. These have been really
strong subjects for me and I insist on being aligned with
them. But at the same time, I really do love a line that
seems to stand in the air without any gravitational pull. I
admire that. So I think that’s a negotiation- it’s definitely
a notion that they’re both locked in some kind of
conversation.

LB: In your sequence ‘Tidal’ you recount historically
factual stories of slaves in England, from a mulatto
man/woman/child buried in Gravesend, Kent, in 1603, or a
slave called Charles baptised at St Clement Danes in 1675,
to a black woman hanged in the Tybum Tree in London, in
1663. Can you tell me more about these stories and how
they came to be part of your book?

FD : I had a residency at Liverpool University, where there
is project called ‘Tide’ which brings together historians,
literary critics and teachers just to see how they work
together to pursue their own research. Most of it is
embedded in history and recovery. So when I got there I
thought, ‘What do I do with a fragment that just appears to
be abandoned, with nothing else to go on?’ And the first
poem of the book, ‘Museum Gilgamesh’, is all about
fragments. If you have a very tiny fragment you have to
grow it into something as they do in laboratories. I thought
that was the responsibility of the poet, where history
stops, and in a sense you begin because you have to –
because if you don’t, the fragment is all you have. And you
have to feel an emotional responsibility for, say, a lost life,
or a lost set of lives, or an injustice as massive as slavery. I
also think about this Faulkner idea: ‘The past is never
past.’ I felt these fragments are pinging at us, they have a
kind of coordinate that’s asking us to discover them and
talk to them – they are not lost. They have a transponder
box at the bottom of the sea and you can find them as they
were. I’m tuned into that pinging sound. I always feel that
if something bad happened to someone and they couldn’t
answer back, it would be my duty to speak on their behalf.
I lean towards that natural moral universe.

LB: You were born in London but grew up in the South
American country of Guyana, and now live in the US,
where there are at least forty-five million Hispanic and
Latino Americans. How do you think language,
multilingualism and cultural translations play a part in
your ongoing formation as a writer and poet?

FD: I teach at UCLA, which is not far from the
US-Mexican border, and there is a large Mexican/South
American population in LA. When they arrive in the city
they always try to work with English and their language,
as you do. And there is always a fertile land between their
bilingualism and the English they occupy, as a lifelong
endeavour, carefully nuanced, based on reading. I think
that negotiation happens, especially when I teach students
and they come in with bilingual poems. There are a bunch
of American poets writing … not Spanglish exactly, but
certainly writing and always registering Spanish inside of
English. I think that is where language is going in America
-it is away from some kind of edifice of English, where
you throw away complexities of other languages. You
develop a feeling that this has a Spanish rhythm to it. Is it
flamenco? You can feel something bubbling in the poem,
and because of that I feel that there is a real change in
contemporary poetics. So I am attentive to it, especially as
I am getting older and younger poets are coming up and
doing that. You have to look at their instruction.

LB: There is also the mass movement of people across the
world taking their language to their adopted country, for
example Venezuelans trying to cross to Guyana, or
Mexicans to the US. How do you relate to that movement
of people, languages, cultures?

FD: I think about this all the time. I am a part of that
movement: my parents moved, I moved. These days the
rarer thing is if someone says: ‘I’ve been here 45 years’ or ‘I
am not going anywhere.’ This Philip Larkin idea that you
stay where you are and that if you go somewhere you must
come back the same day. Yes, I am aware of Guyana’s
currents. There are more Guyanese abroad than there are
in Guyana. That is true for most modem countries. The
land mass of Guyana is only 28,ooo kilometres square
smaller than the UK, so it is a massive place in terms of its
emptiness, its jungle interior, and so on. Wilson Harris has
written about that. Martin Carter has written as a poet of
the city, but he’s been attuned to the idea of the bush, the
wild, that’s informing a kind of urban imagination. The
migratory patterns are all economic and historical,
political and linguistic. There are three Guyanas: Dutch,
French and English, and that tells you right away about
colonialism. You can’t really ignore it unless you stick
your head in the sand, or try to do a poetry of negation.

LB: I was fascinated by this idea of translation as a way of
reinterpreting, reading or simply decoding a language as a
preconceived system of ideas and notions. In which ways
do you think about translation when you write?

FD: The second I pick up a pen, but also in my library, I
have access to many poets in translation. I fell in love with
poetry and with the prose of writers like Neruda, but in
English. I read these poets both in Spanish and in
translation, though I am proficient in English and woefully
lacking in Spanish (I read with a dictionary and with any
sound files of the poet that I can lay my hands on). I do not
claim to be a speaker of Spanish. I’m surrounded by it and I
hear and understand much of it, but I read Spanish with
the help of dictionaries and with as much as I can hear of
the original. I always admire poets who spend their lives
translating. Without translation, you would cut down a
major stream of the imagination.

LB: In your latest collection you show a learned knowledge
of classical writers, historical epochs, classical philosophy
and modem poetry. How closely do you read around the
subjects you explore? Have you read Leibniz or Spinoza in
depth or are you more inspired by a general idea, or
biographies of their work?

FD: A mix. That is a really good question. Did I study
them first and then write the poem? Not in depth, not all
of them, but some. So with Karl Marx, I spent years trying
to read Das Kapital, progressing deeper into the book,
dipping into it, hearing about it, going to speeches by
people who are Marxists, who are telling you how to
change the world. There have been perpetual returns to
certain texts, individual books, but the key is not to show
too much. If you declare your learning, step by step, you
are writing an essay. You have to be very, very careful in
writing about someone to say something. You want to see
what poetry can do in negotiation with the text- what is it
that the poem can do without surrendering all of its
ground to understanding? That was the danger. So all the
time when I felt the poem was too much like an
instruction manual, I erased it. It had to chant, it had to
sing in some way, and that is where I think the poetry
began. Before, it was warming up, which could be very
frustrating if you were thinking, for example, to write a
poem about Irnmanuel Kant. What does he mean by that?
I walk backwards from that point and see if I can get to a
connection with the idea that I’ve been trying to talk
about. If the library is going to be carried, at what point do
I put that burden down because what I have left from the
text is exactly what I need for the poem to flow?

LB: You seem to be also very interested in form …

FD: Charles Olson says that form is an extension of
content. He was kicking and kicking against the tradition
because he wanted to write a freer, projective verse. But he
realised that there was a heavily formal procedure involved
in bucking tradition. I took from Olson that form and
content conspire in the enactment of the poem- that the
sparks generated by the two make the poem an event, a
happening ‘thang’. So the sonnets might tilt a little bit
towards content and refuse closure, refuse that final
plodding step of the fourteen lines and how it works.
Everything that is formal declares itself. Architecturally it
looks at you and says: look at me. It folds its hands and
fends you off. I’ve been interested in fractures, in
fragilities, as an act of writing.

LB: Your concluding poems in the collection are on the
poets Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, both masters
of language and form, and widely considered two of the
major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Were you
trying to link a past to a future lineage of writing here, to
somehow connect these voices to yours? Do you celebrate
their work and legacy by way of deconstructing and
reassembling new poetic possibilities?

FD: Yes. People always write about poets when they’re
dead. (Well, Derek Walcott is; Kamau Brathwaite isn’t.)
But when I wrote those poems I was thinking, how am I
reading them? I’ve always read them since high school or
secondary school, so it has been a long engagement with
their work, followed by a separation to make sure I don’t
sound too much like them. But they are both very different
as Caribbean writers. You can see the differences in their
islands, in what they produce, across that generation. So I
am very keen to re-evaluate their work as an act of reading.
It is an act of both homage and piracy. Jump in and take
what you can and run as fast as you can before they trap
you with their excellence. I don’t see influence as a bad
thing. I see it as something to do with your growth as a
reader.

Leo Boix is a poet, translator and journalist born in
Argentina who lives and works in the UK. His poetry has
been included in anthologies such as Ten: Poets of the New
Generation (Bloodaxe, 2017). He is a fellow of The Complete
Works Program and eo-director of ‘Invisible Presence’, a UK
national scheme to nurture young Latinx-British poets.
Fred D’Aguiar’s most recent collection, his seventh, is
Translations from Memory (Carcanet, 2018). He teaches
at UCLA.