Barrett Watten's "Plasma" in three languages: and the poem's curious absence

Barrett Watten

This is perhaps the first time I've written something as the result of an error: and that error was to accidentally buy Watten's Plasma in the French edition, foolishly taking the accented Plasma - Parallèles - X title as the English. Not that the Martin Richet translation (Le Quartanier: Montreal, 2007) poses any particular difficulties: it actually reads rather well, very faithful to the speed & levity of the original. E.g., "Faire d'un ville une saison, c'est porter des lunettes de soleil dans un volcan/To make a city into a season is to wear sunglasses inside a volcano" can almost be taken as mirror images. And as I was doing a little online research on Watten's text I came across an Italian translation by Gherardo Bortolotti, both the English & Italian posted at GAMM, a site that, in the words of its owners, "just hosts research. _ low-fi, low-res, fragments, installation, no performance, no show."

It occurred to me that the three were practically indistinguishable & could all vie equally for the honour of being the best version. Or the worst. There's no sense in which Watten's is primary. It's as though the texts couldn't be read in any one language without somehow having to sacrifice a vital part of the textual guts or intention meant to reside in the piece Watten himself wrote. The effort at subsititution, which normally takes up most of our reading energies, is missing here since the poem is essentially empty. If you translate any passage from Dante's Commedia, it's clear the great Florentine is calling the shots. Perhaps Watten's work is more prose than poetry with the emphasis always to be placed on the poetic autonomy of the sentence itself: a sentence-centered work, as Silliman says in The New Sentence (62) where "ambiguity and polysemy" (90) are to be desired above all else. But, to my mind, the text even if read as a 'new sentence' poetics, seems for all that to have lost itself in translation. The poem does seem curiously absent.

The sentence-paragraph in Plasma—the only section of Watten's tripartite work I'm taking my few examples from— is a beast without a heart, & that isn't something Language theorists had hoped for. Watten, to his credit, does try at times to verbalize the unsayable quality of his writing, as in the following "The effect of the lack of effect/L'effet du manque d'effet". The Italian "L’effetto della mancanza d’effetto" gets us no closer to the heart of the original, as completely fragmentary as if it had been the original. What is the status of this thing the poet's made? The connection with Language theory perhaps puts it in too much of a conceptual haze. Curtis Faville in a blog article on Watten goes so far as to suggest it's to Lacan & the denigration of any view of language with the capacity for giving real objects that we turn for an understanding of Watten's poetics: to "make an object" is always one and the same thing as to critique the conditions of its own possibility. Perhaps it's a case of a poetry so theory-driven both poet & poem disappear off the page. After all, what do you get with "the effect of the lack of effect"?

Maybe we ought to discard radical theory altogether & try for a more traditionalist fit, the poem to be guided by the usual syntagmic clues.

The dim-witted inhabitants fuse with the open areas. All rainbows end in the street/Les habitants idiots se fondent dans l'aire ouverte. Tous les arc-en-ciel finissent dans la rue/Gli abitanti ottusi si fondono con le aree aperte. Tutti gli arcobaleni finiscono sulla strada.

Again, nothing suggests one is more exemplary than any other, even if we appeal to the traditional subject, tone, & imagery paraphernalia, and a contextualizing whole in which to piece them together. A Watten line is something the Google 'translator', operating in its own linguistic limbo, could have mimicked easily enough. Translated from the French Watten's line becomes "The people idiots are based in the open area. All rainbow sky ends up in the street"while the translation tool turns the Italian text into "The inhabitants obtuse merge with the open areas. All the rainbows end on the road". A case of clumsy word-order, at best, is all that distinguishes a Google-made translation from the product of human labour: nothing a little tweaking couldn't fix. But then again word-order in a master's hand is not something that can be mechanically duplicated. Ted Berrigan, for example, can write a line like "Head, dapple green of mien, must be vacated" (The Sonnetts, "XLVII") without fear of being outdone by IT competitors & John Berryman's "he's about to have his lady, permanent;\and this is the worst of all came ever sent' (Dream Songs, "44") is exquisitely unassimilable to any poetic medium but the poet's own.

So how is it that a poetic style that's supposed to work by being removed "from originating contexts" (Silliman, 62) can have been formed to make its part so easily interchangeable in translation (whether translator is human or machine)? Jerome Rothenberg has recently posted lectures by Brother Anthony of Taizé on the difficulties of Korean -English translation, the message being that a translated text, even at the best of times, can never hope to achieve the "same immediate, intense response" as its source. Watten's verses, as a case of radical Language theory in action, rather than flouting the importance of cultural transmisson via translation seem to have brought the "originating contexts" issue back to the forefront. And if that's what we have, Watten's quite unwittingly undermined the Language cause. Sensing that inner-contradictoriness in his literary practice, he may perhaps have been quietly homaging 'form' in a line like

When you’re perfect, people can’t wait to pick you apart/Quand tu es parfait, les gens sont impatients de te mettre en pièces./Quando sei perfetto, la gente non può fare a meno di farti le pulci.

A reasonable compromise might be to see Plasma as a perfect illustration of what Derrida calls the "substitutive significations" of the act of writing itself & Watten's the writer who's necessarily "inscribed in a determined textual system" (Of Grammatology,160) beyond which he cannot go. Between the poem and translation are endless representations of the thing that continually eludes us, & one of them can even be machine-made.

So what are we left with? The sentence-paragraph is a purposely ambiguous mirroring of traditional writing designed to create "ambiguity and polysemy" or, after Derrida, a tacit acknowledgement of the limit of the text itself: the poem as either a disguised 'formalism' wrapt fatefully in its own arms or an amorphous quantity that lacks a poetic heart. Again, more theory & the poem theory's always hankering after is nowhere to be seen, not even when presented in three languages. Perhaps I've been too hard on Silliman & his Language contingent who should be applauded for giving us something 'new': a poetry comprised of sentences reduced to having their meanings stray almost effortlessly off the page. A poetry that is both there and not there, reduced to a perfect illusion. Lifeless plasma.