Soft Skull Press, always the publisher of the underpublished or the edgy, has given us a revised and expanded version of the poet and translator, Clayton Eshleman’s, 1988 book of translations, Conductors of the Pit. The title is a line from one of Eshleman’s own poems announcing that this translator is not one who maintains distance between himself and his work. In fiction, a first person narrator is always a clue that the story, no matter how involved with other characters, may likely be about the narrator. Conductors of the Pit, similarly, is about Eshleman.

Or, I should say, Eshleman’s mind. While this is a fine book of translations of mesmerizing writers – Neruda and Vellejo most famously, along with Rimbaud, Breton, and others – this is also a book about the process of translation, about the fine mind, the mindfulness, the scope of mind, the music, the madness, the imagination of the translator. It is said some things, in some languages are un-translatable. Eshleman, in exploring and exploding poems that are from the abyss; climbing in himself to reveal that the process of confrontation with the other, the mind of the original writer through the writing, produces another kind of art, a shadow art, translation.

The introduction and the annotations by Eshleman reveal his engagement with foreign language poetics over the course of his lifetime. The original version of this book was published in 1988, but he has revised and co-translated poems as his insights and skills have deepened. Since 1962, he has published nine books of translation on the poets in Conductors of the Pit. He has also published some fourteen books of his own poetry as well as prose for which he is well renowned.

Still, there’s something about watching a person dance with a partner that is different and more intimate than watching a dancer alone. There is something that happens in a conversation with another person that doesn’t happen when we are talking to ourselves. Maybe this is why we read poetry to begin with. Maybe this is what is happening in Eshleman’s translations: we are watching the dance; we are overhearing the most intimate of conversations. We are seeing minds illuminated in relation to other minds.

But back to the poetry. This is a dazzling review of the surreal in poetry, though not all of these poets would have claimed that about their work. They are as fresh and perturbing as they ever were. And of translation, so many have tried to translate Neruda, for example, but Eshleman locates himself in relation to the poems differently than other translators (Bly, for example). A comparison of translations is useful. “Walking Around” is apprehended quite differently and more elegantly by Eshleman than by Bly. Here are the opening two stanzas from Bly’s rendering:

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie
houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse
sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

Now compare this to Eshleman’s more compact version:

It happens that I am tired of being a man.
It happens that I enter tailorshops and movies
shriveled, numb, like a felt swan
circling a pond of origin and ash.

The smell of barbershops makes me howl.
All I want is respite from stones and from wool,
all I want is to see no establishments, no gardens,
no merchandise, no eyeglasses, no elevators.

Eshleman’s translation gives us tight stanzas, the lines more tidy, the figurative language less clumsy as in “like a felt swan” versus Bly’s “like a swan made of felt.” The thrust is quite different: “howl” versus “sobs” and “respite from” versus “to lie still like.” Wherever he can, Eshleman uses the fewest words and relies more on imagery than prose strategy. He is a deft and subtle translator relying on poetic instinct and never settling for direct translation.

Still, Eshleman btrings intelligence and scholarship to his translations. This is clear in his introduction in his self-disclosures, but also in his references to literary critical lenses and, especially, his evocation of the Russian critic, Mikhail Bahktin who only came to the attention of the west in the last twenty or so years and is, for some, an answer to the problems of Derrida. Bahktin re-centers the author in the literary experience, the dialogue of the poetry, and reclaims the generation of meaning as personal, author-central, but not bound, and lays open a field for understanding the act, the process of translation in a more generous way. If criticism creates a way to discuss the dialogue that poetry is, then translation is another art, and we can apprehend layers of meaning: hence the dance, the whispering into each other’s arms of the poet and, in this case, the poet-translator.

Brilliantly and intimately rendered, Eshleman’s Conductors of the Pit succeeds on many levels, not least of which that he invites us to dance, too, invites us to the party of the mind which, in his view, can only be done on wires, can only be done on the edge of the pit, the abyss bringing us to the verge of ourselves.