Poetry and translation at No Wave (part 2)

Speaker 1 00:02

This is a Vision Australia radio podcast.

Speaker 2 00:04

On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversation programme Emerging Writers. I'm Kate Cooper. This week, we're bringing you the second part of our recording of the April No Wave poetry event held at the Wheat Sheep Hotel.

Speaker 2 00:20

In last week's episode, we heard poetry translations by Gemma Parker, Steve Brog and Juan Garrido Salgado, all past guests on this programme, as well as translations by Chilean Australian poets Sergio Olas.

Speaker 2 00:35

This week, Gemma, Steve and Juan read some of their own original poetry, and reflect on the theme of translation. Just a reminder that this No Wave poetry event was recorded at the Wheat Sheep Hotel in Theberton, and this venue is on the Adelaide flight path, so from time to time, you will hear aeroplanes in the background.

Speaker 2 00:58

We hear first from Juan. And advise our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners that this next section of the programme contains reference to someone who has died.

Speaker 3 01:12

And now Juan's going to read some translations. By way of introduction, Juan's published eight books of poetry in Australian Chile. His works being widely translated into a variety of languages. He's also translated works by Australian poets and published them abroad, including Aboriginal poets into Spanish.

Speaker 3 01:37

Among them a great book by a poet called Robin Walker. He died in custody in the 80s. His most recent collection is Hope Blossoming in their Ink and also The Dilemma of Writing Poems, which are both published by Puntran Watman.

Speaker 3 01:56

Thank you, Juan.

Speaker 4 01:57

Thank you Steve, we are standing in Ghanalan and I will start reading the translation of Robbie Walker poem what Steve mentions and I want to just say Robbie Walker was the first of original poet who I met in an English language and that time when I just arrived in Australia 1990 and I was so touched by his work even it was a very small book very simple book of poetry I think he wrote most of his poem from that book in jail in that and custody and shameful anyway for a young man and beautiful and talented very human person who died in that circumstance so I will read the poem comparison human being up like a guitar string if they are not in tune with each other the resort is noise no music and I think this is quite our work is now we now in tune to each other so it's noise of war genocide and in famine everything terrible comparación los seres humanos somos como la guitarra si las cuerdas no están afinadas entre sí el resultado sólo será ruido no música and I am very privileged there in Chile they publish most of his poem as a bilingual version and this very important magazine in in in Argentina and Chile viva viva Robbie Walker I want to read another poem from this book this is my last book published in Australia is by punch and what man the dilemma right in a poem I will read in Spanish and then in English I read in Spanish well for many reasons but tonight I will read because it's my mother and my sister they're here and my compañeras well but my mother and my sister they just arrived from Chile to visit our family and friends so they are here tonight and we live as a family or the terrible situation due to the Pinochet regime for 19 years without they laugh and they support I am I think I will be not here tonight thank you I wrote in Spanish first and English later when the covid situation what happened here and around the world and no one was able to move anyway so it was terrible experience as well the dilemma of writing a few verses the dilemma of writing a poem without a light without the amenity of paper and ink without the digital keyboard but with memory correcting each verse like a clock tires of telling the time a fallen rhythm into the language into the calm of the dawn only then rereading it but the blue caracing, the dew of the glass in my window, only pinning it in the flight of the last waking dream.

Speaker 4 07:14

Just to finish, I want to read one short poem. It's called The Moon of My Verses. And I dedicate to the people of Gaza The moon and my verses. The moon bites my verses on this night of absent. I bike my bio.

Speaker 4 07:39

I chase in its consonants. My dreams are frightened of asses. I lie exalted on the dark shore where the silence of the war murmur on the sand corner. I flee the light, dragging the pain among the rubble in Gaza.

Speaker 4 08:06

The moon and my verses. The moon bites my verses on this night of absence. I ring my vowels. I chase in its consonants. My dreams are frightened of abyss. I lie exalted on the dark shore where the silence of the war murmur on the sand corner.

Speaker 4 08:32

I flee the light, dragging the pain among the rubble in Gaza.

Speaker 3 08:43

Thanks very much for that wonderful greeting, Juan, and I'm sure everyone will agree it's so good to hear the poetry in the original Spanish, in addition to the translation, whether you understand Spanish or not, it's lovely to hear the intonation and the rhythm of the language.

Speaker 2 09:12

On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our Emerging Writers Programme, this week featuring live readings by Gemma Parker, Steve Brock and Juan Garrido Salgado at the No Wave Poetry series. We hear next from Gemma.

Speaker 5 09:30

We're just going to have some creative readings. Now I'm going to read first and then I'm going to introduce our MC and host for this evening, Steve Brock, who we'll read next and then we'll finish with a reading from one.

Speaker 5 09:45

So what I'm going to read tonight, I'm just going to read a little bit from the PhD that I wrote. I did my PhD in creative writing and graduated last year and I wrote a collection of essays and fragments called Moon Overhead, Nothing Moving.

Speaker 5 09:59

So I've gone through and I've pulled out a few of the fragments that are about my relationship with the French language and my experience of learning French as an adult. So I'm worried that they're a bit disjointed but I'm just calling them fragments and we'll hope for the best.

Speaker 5 10:19

So each fragment has a title so I'll read the title and then I'll read the the fragments. The first one is called Pouche.

Speaker 1 10:26

Thank you.

Speaker 5 10:28

My favourite French expression is n 'a pas de quoi. Translated variously as whatever or what nonsense. Sometimes rendered in subtitles as bullshit. Whenever I say it to my children they shriek with laughter.

Speaker 5 10:41

So unexpected it is for me to round on them with French to catch them out in whatever absurdity or cheekiness they are trying to tell me to convince me is real. My personal translation for n 'a pas de quoi is humbug.

Speaker 5 10:57

It doesn't have the same feel in the mouth on the tongue but if my mother had said humbug to me as a child I too would have hooted with delight. What my French is like. Tell me what my French sounds like I say to my husband.

Speaker 5 11:16

I tell him I want to be able to explain my level of French to an English speaking audience. He plays me a clip of Tina Arena doing a TV interview in French. She answers fluently with an accent making a stream of errors a series of questions as she promotes her new album.

Speaker 5 11:34

I can't tell people I speak French like a multilingual soprano answering in name questions on morning TV. I snap at him. He shrugs. That's what you sound like. Shame. I still remember the sticky awkwardly early years of learning French.

Speaker 5 11:54

I remember throwing a box of tissues at my husband in frustration when he laughingly corrected my pronunciation. I remember confusing the words bet, beast and bit which is slang for cock when I tried to talk to a friend about the film beauty and the beast as we walked around the city of torque.

Speaker 5 12:14

My friend laughed so hard she had to stop walking wiping tears from her eyes gasping that la belle la bite would be a good title for a porno.

Speaker 3 12:25

Thank you.

Speaker 5 12:27

rebellion, stupidity. Jumper Lahiri is eloquent about the pain and discomfort of learning a foreign language as an adult and wanting to speak it fluently. As she describes it, a stubborn attempt, a continuous trial.

Speaker 5 12:43

It is desperately slow in a way that feels unnatural, that goes against the internal wiring of the mind and body. Lahiri calls it disorienting, disquieting. It is a process that denies shortcuts, that refuses to be accelerated, that takes its own time, despite effort, despite commitment.

Speaker 5 13:05

Given it is difficult, why? Why persist? Lahiri calls it a transgression, a rebellion, an act of stupidity.

Speaker 4 13:16

Hmm?

Speaker 5 13:19

overheard. Do you want, I hear my son ask my daughter at dinner, a goat that speaks French? She shrugs in response and he continues, I do. I think it would be good for Mammal's language.

Speaker 1 13:34

Thank you.

Speaker 5 13:37

French. I think I would have quit trying to learn French if I hadn't met my husband. Being clumsy and ashamed was too much for my ego. Guillaume did not need me to speak French. He was already bilingual after spending most of his adult life in Australia.

Speaker 5 13:53

In fact, he was more comfortable in English. Do not, his French friends warned me, let Guillaume teach you French. He speaks French like a dumb teenager from the 1980s. But after our children were born, he spoke to them in French every day and learning French just became something that had to be done, like learning to be a mother.

Speaker 5 14:18

Thank you. So I have the privilege now of introducing Steve Brock. Steve Brock published his first collection of poetry The Night is a Dying Dog in 2007 and received a grant from Art South Australia for the completion of Double Blaze, published by Five Islands Press in 2013.

Speaker 5 14:42

Here's the co -translator with Sergio Olas and Juan Garrido Salgado of Poetry of the Earth Mapuche Trilingual Anthology. I think I pronounced that with a French accent, sorry. Interactive Press 2014.

Speaker 5 14:56

Steve completed a PhD in Australian Literature at Flinders University in 2003. His work has featured in best Australian poems and has been published in journals in Australia and overseas. His most recent collection is the chapbook Jardin du Luxembourg in 2016.

Speaker 5 15:15

Steve was a featured writer at Adelaide Writers Week in 2017.

Speaker 3 15:20

Thanks for that Gemma, I really enjoyed the humor in that reading and it's funny my daughter tells me I pronounce French when I'm using Jewelingu with a Spanish accent, the common complaint. I've got a few poems from the current collection that I'm working on and just selected poems largely on the theme of translation.

Speaker 3 15:46

This first one's called translating tomorrow. A full moon hangs above Hindley Street like a coin just within reach everyone has had their hand on. The same moon above the skate park is lighter and higher, a ball to be thrown through hoops or something to jump with scooter and skateboard or header until someone kicks it out of bounds over the horizon where a stranger picks up a pen and translates an evening like this one in today.

Speaker 3 16:23

Waxing or waning like an exchange of currency you work over in your mind. This next poem is called Louise and this is someone that Sergio Olas introduced me to. He was a tutor in Spanish at Adelaide University and one thing about I think languages and translation is also the relationships that you've fallen through knowing other languages.

Speaker 3 17:01

Louise, I'd see him in the food court sitting alone in the same black leather jacket, unshaven, long hair, always happy for me to join his table and talk about Bacowski, Juan, Louise, Quartieres, Cuartasa, the classics in Spanish or English.

Speaker 3 17:23

He also introduced me to the Korean steakhouse, $13 for a New York cut cooked by a five star chef. Lewis worked as a Spanish tutor and on the side ran a rare book business. Works he'd collected through a lifetime of travelling.

Speaker 3 17:41

He told me about a first edition of Lordica's poetry. He'd let go for $60, a fine edition but we never got to close the deal. A few months went by without seeing him in the food court and then Sergio told me he'd died suddenly alone in his apartment.

Speaker 3 18:02

The landlady was at a loss of what to do with all the books. He had no family in Australia. Not long after I moved jobs to an office on the other side of town but still got a hankering for those states and would walk the extra few blocks to the food court and eat on my own until one day I went there and the Korean steakhouse had closed.

Speaker 3 18:26

Within another couple of years they bulldozed the whole place and all that was left before the rubble was the 19th century heritage facade propped up by an array of steel beams like a door to a time I could never return.

Speaker 3 18:45

Reading Toofoo late at night. It's nearly midnight, the family asleep Christmas night. I'm reading Toofoo's poem, 100 Worries Gathering Chant and Sipping Whiskey. Suddenly there's an explosion at the front door.

Speaker 3 19:04

I run outside without my glasses to watch a firecracker launch in flashes of red and blue above an empty street as I scan for kids. Awoken, my wife calls me in. My daughter and cat now awake. They go back to bed as I try to pick up where I left off.

Speaker 3 19:25

The next poem is titled Autumn Wind Ravaging Thatch House Song. And Toofoo rages at a band of youths from the south village, stealing his rooftop thatch blowing off in the wind. At 50, Toofoo is too old to give chase and the kids disappear in the bamboo.

Speaker 3 19:47

I too am 50 and sip my whiskey while Toofoo leans on his cane and sighs. So it's a translation I think is like a lot Chinese poetry in which only access through translation. But it's interesting how you can get these convergences even someone who's writing.

Speaker 3 20:11

So around 700 AD. I'll be to now. This next poem is one which I thought was a kind of untranslatable poem, which I thought would be interesting to read, in that it's quite localised in terms of place.

Speaker 3 20:32

But then upon rereading it before tonight, I did find a reference to translation in the glove box. It's called Archaeology of a 98 Magna. The six arms of your exhaust manifold are folded in resignation where you sit in my driveway.

Speaker 3 20:55

Moss and small greenery grow in your rubber seals where once there was only opening and closing and a wipe of armour all through wind and speed. I open your glove box and remove the evidence of our time together.

Speaker 3 21:11

Area maps of Fleuryo Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, York's and the bottom end, Air Peninsula and the West Coast, Canberra and the Hay Plains, the Overland Roots to Melbourne, all marked out in red and black texture.

Speaker 3 21:27

Your service history largely intact. A cassette tape, Sumo's greatest hits, purchased in Santa Fe, Argentina in the summer of 89. A slim can of impulse, 60 grams of coconut oil, 15 grams of Lucas pawpaw on it.

Speaker 3 21:47

Extra gum wrappers, an assortment of hair ties, a phone charger from another era and a lifetime of small change that's oxidised in the pockets of your interior trim. I gaze into the sunken eyes of your speedometer.

Speaker 3 22:08

384 ,656 kilometres. I've surrendered your plates, summoned the records. Now let me pull just one last poem from your remains. Hearing Gemma's poetry and her references to Gim was quite touching and my wife is from Chile, originally.

Speaker 3 22:37

Her family migrated here in the late 80s, escaping the Pinshame regime. And this poem is dedicated to her. It's called Out of Season. Sometimes things just fall together, like the cat leaping through the hole in the screen door to join us for beers on the back veranda and the mid -summer rain.

Speaker 3 23:04

Miles Doobot playing on the speaker, a CD we wore out in our youth. There's a fog over the sea and our garden is lush and green. It's the end of the holidays. We have the house to ourselves. You put on a dress purchased in your 20s from a boutique around the corner of a share house we lived in.

Speaker 3 23:26

The rain stops. We make love and doze late into afternoon. Beyond our breath, a plane distances itself from the world. Upon reflection, our youth was something less misspent and more indulged. Miles blows and blows, regaining lost time.

Speaker 3 23:50

And now I'll invite Juan up again to close out the evening of the poet who needs to know introduction.

Speaker 4 24:02

I'm just going to read a few poems from these two books when I was clandestine and my last one, The Dilemma of Writing a Poem. The Petal of the Cosmos Flower. It is a galaxy in the garden sink. The bees confuse.

Speaker 4 24:24

They don't know if they are swimming or arguing about the pollen to drink. I leave that dangerous conversation. I am citizen of the earth. I am not ethnic. I was born on the Mapudungun land in 1957. I am not a refugee, but suitcase with full of memory, love, family, tears, and a lost kiss.

Speaker 4 25:09

I am a political prisoner from Pinochet regime. I mean, my cell was a dark and painful space filling with those days of freedom. I no longer have the permanent visa to enter Australia. I am only an F citizen.

Speaker 4 25:40

I am a citizen of this battered land, walking with a broken verses to pronounce to you, holding the hope that is still grow like a scorched seed in this forest burned by the silence of the water arriving to the shore long ago.

Speaker 4 26:16

I took this line from Ali Kovid Ichetman from the aboriginal poet. She is very well known. Then through the tus frasos I pass. In your arms there is peace. In the mirror, there is a moon coming back from my heart.

Speaker 4 26:40

I see a spider walking in peace through the walls of the bathroom. I wish the children of Gaza could walk in peace through the rubble of their street and house. Boom this morning, I hear a voice asking, where is the peace?

Speaker 4 27:15

In the street where the blood of our mother is the eternal shadow of the dry moon. Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 27:30

Thank you everyone. Thank you again so much to Steve and Juan, like I said before, it was a real privilege to read with them this evening. Thank you all for being a wonderful audience. I'd like to thank the Weed Chief for having us.

Speaker 5 27:44

We are here, No Wave runs on the first Wednesday of every month, so we will be back in May, the first Wednesday of May. We have a lineup that will be hosted and curated by Gillian Haganus. I just wanted to finish with a little quote that I found in this book that I've been reading about poetry and about the language of poetry.

Speaker 5 28:04

The man is talking about teaching children to write poetry and he writes, When teaching elementary school students to write poetry, I proposed a poem in which some Spanish words would be used. To help prepare my students for writing, I asked them to close their eyes and tell me which word was darker.

Speaker 5 28:23

Night or la noche? Everyone in the class thought la noche was darker and one little boy couldn't wait to tell me that la noche also has a little purple in it. I thought that was so beautiful. The way we feel language is a special part of what we did this evening.

Speaker 5 28:44

Thank you all very much for being here and thank you again to Steve.

Speaker 2 28:51

You've been listening to a live recording of poetry and translation as part of the No Wave Poetry series at the Wheat Sheaf Hotel. Our emerging writers program comes from the Adelaide Studios of Vision Australia Radio and can be heard at the same time each week on 11 .97am, VA Radio on Digital, and also can be heard on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts where you can catch up on earlier episodes.

Speaker 1 29:40

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Speaker 5 29:51

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