Who has the right to be incomprehensible? - In conversation with Rina Kenović

Mexican-Bosnian researcher, poet, performer and translator Rina Kenović explores the forms of expression that resist linguistic conventions. Ranging from experimental poetry to the myths around the mother tongue, this conversation examines our need to understand everything, the power relations that decide what is worth translating, and the political potential of opacity. But where is the line between resisting the demand to be intelligible and being elitist? What happens when a language refuses to be understood, when a poem escapes translation, when words come undone and sound wins out over sense?

Can you tell us a bit more about your research?

I'm working on a thesis entitled 'Saying the Unsayable, Hearing the Unintelligible: Forms of Experimental and Sound Poetry that Attempt to Signify through the Incomprehensible' ['Dire l'indicible, ouïr l'inintelligible, formes de poésie expérimentale et sonore qui s'essayent à signifier au travers de l'incompréhensible']. To put it simply, the thesis grew out of questions about mother tongues, and about the relationship that people with a plural linguistic heritage can have with them, as is my own case: I'm half Mexican and half Bosnian. From there, I became interested in how certain more experimental approaches to poetry – such as multilingual or sound poetry – can build meaning beyond the semantic, through what I call an aesthetics of the unintelligible. Historically, these poetic forms have been less associated with the political, so I'm trying to dig in that direction and look at the geopolitical and ecological contexts behind them, particularly questions of territory and of linguistic, national and agricultural homogenisation. In a nutshell, I'm trying to connect the linguistic and sensory plurality of experimental multilingual and sound poetry with other forms of plurality in specific territories.

Listening to you talk about translation as a bridge, I was thinking of Composition d'un lieu [the French translation of Amanda Berenguer's Composición de lugar, 1976]. You didn't just translate the text; you were also its go-between, the one who set its translation and circulation in motion. Since you said that translating is also transforming, how do you see the creative side of translation?

I'd say translation involves an element of creation insofar as there's no such thing as absolute transparency. On that subject, there's a podcast by André Markowicz, who translated Dostoevsky into French, that I find absolutely fascinating. In it, he talks about precisely this impossibility of transparency in translation. He says something along the lines of: if you really want to read Dostoevsky, you have to learn Russian. Acknowledging this limit of translation doesn't mean assuming we're missing something. On the contrary, it opens up other possibilities. It's also a reminder that there's an inescapable difference between languages, of course, but also between cultures, historical and territorial roots, ways of relating to the world, and so on. These issues seem essential to me precisely because they allow us to politicise language. They remind us that a language isn't an abstract tool, cut off from reality, but is always caught up in a history, in social, political and ecological realities.

What you're saying reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and the idea that not everything can be translated, or at least that there's always an irreducible remainder, especially when you're translating between languages that don't hold the same position of power. How do you think about this question of opacity, and more broadly about what resists translation between dominant and dominated languages?

I find that book compelling because Anzaldúa also gives us a way to think about a form of opacity as a political stance. For example, she talks about the fact that her text is written in English, in Spanish, in Tex-Mex, and in the various Spanishes she moves through as a Chicana. So she's working with the colonial language that also played a part in oppressing her own ancestors, which puts her in a complex position, straddling different forms of domination. She also describes the sense of exclusion she felt in the United States, where she constantly had to squeeze her language into forms recognised as legitimate in English. That meant scrubbing out her Mexican accent and erasing certain slang words or ways of speaking. Incidentally, there's a brilliant text by Iman Mersal on this, The Displaced Voice, in which she discusses the politics of accent. Anzaldúa felt excluded from linguistic codes she'd had no access to in her early upbringing, in her family environment, and she chose to channel that exclusion back into her writing. In a book published in English, she keeps words in Spanish or Tex-Mex that she knows the majority English-speaking readership won't necessarily understand. Not to exclude readers in return, but to make visible the element of opacity that exists in every language. Personally, I find that very important. It ties in with the idea that there's always an irreducible difference between languages, cultures, historical and territorial roots. And ultimately, it also echoes certain experimental poetry practices, such as Amanda Berenguer's. Even though Amanda writes in a single language, Spanish, some of the more abstract or visual versions of her poems can also produce a kind of opacity or exclusion. And that opacity shouldn't necessarily be seen as a flaw: it can also become a space of resistance, or simply the mark of something that won't be entirely reduced to transparency.

Poetry, language and linguistic experimentation play a big part in your work. When you talk about 'experimenting' with language, in poetry as in translation, why does this experimental dimension of language speak to you so strongly?

My interest in experimental poetic forms was very intuitive at first: those aesthetics spoke to me, and there was something magnetic in them that drew me in. On a more reflective level, what interested me later about these different experimental approaches is that they make it possible to question not only dominant ideas of poetic language, but also its potential political reach. I'm thinking of Audre Lorde and her famous line: 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' If language is one of the most powerful tools of domination, subverting it from the poetic and political margins opens up interesting perspectives and lines of thought. At the same time, poetry is a sort of little bubble within reality, relatively sheltered, which can also be elitist or exclusionary, particularly in its experimental or avant-garde forms. So these forms radicalise those issues by pushing language to its limits, both ethical and aesthetic, which raises the somewhat provocative question of what poetry can do in the face of the world's violence. Obviously, I don't think a poem directly 'changes' the world; it would be naive to credit it with that kind of power. But it's not quite nothing either. And it's precisely in that 'not quite nothing' that I find something very beautiful and powerful.

Do you feel that avant-gardism and elitism sometimes get confused, even though experimentation in literature or poetry can open up other spaces for reading, and other experiences, from the margins?

I do think there's a confusion between elitism and the avant-garde, but you can't approach it in black-and-white terms. Elitism can exist in some avant-garde practices, but the avant-garde can't be reduced to it. In any case, it's interesting to remember that the term 'avant-garde' is first and foremost a military one, referring to the front rank on the battlefield. That's a little paradoxical when you think of the historical avant-garde artists, who often deployed inaccessible aesthetics in order to subvert the traditional codes of society and its institutions. For my part, I think Amanda Berenguer's Composición de lugar can show that things are less binary: experimental practices can be demanding, marginal, sometimes seen as elitist, while opening up very singular forms of perception and attention, which can also function as subversive political strategies.

Ultimately, elitism is mostly a question of access to specific cultural codes, because forms of popular culture can also be completely inaccessible to some people. So there's a plurality of relationships to culture that goes beyond a simple opposition between the avant-garde and popular culture. The idea of elitism therefore rests on a specific hierarchy, in which certain art forms supposedly have more cultural or economic value than others. If we reject that idea wholesale, we could rethink these categories in a more horizontal way.

Some versions of Amanda Berenguer's poems are much more visual and sometimes very far removed from the poetic forms we're used to. I was wondering: do you feel these poems call for a different way of reading? And how have you seen readers react to this more experimental dimension?

I imagine some people might find it intimidating, especially as it's very mathematical, with symbols and so on, when really it's just another way of writing. I worked on these poems with my students and I was very surprised by the range of reactions. To me, it's obvious that these are welcoming poems, poems that call out to you, that are magnetic, but that wasn't always how others felt. Talking with them, I saw that some felt that magnetism too, that they wanted to explore further, to understand (some even started writing poems inspired by this aesthetic), whereas others, on the contrary, said the fragmented or enigmatic quality of the poems felt aggressive to them, that it put them off. I found that really interesting. I think Amanda Berenguer's collection is quite exceptional, both within experimental or visual poetry and within more classical poetry, precisely because she mixes registers. Across its three versions, I get the sense that she's holding out her hand to us in a way that's both firm and reassuring, gradually leading us into an increasingly fragmented world, while showing us how she gets there. I find that a very beautiful gesture.

What first drew you to her work? What was it about her way of writing and exploring different forms that particularly resonated with you?

I think it was precisely what I once called her 'brazen polyphony'; that really won me over. By polyphony, I mean the plurality of forms, lines of inquiry and registers in her practice. What struck me was that nothing was gratuitous or superficial: I never felt I was looking at purely formal experiments or hollow exercises. On the contrary, each of her explorations goes very deep into worlds that are different every time yet coherent with one another. And at the same time, she never limits herself to a single form or 'specialises' in a particular technique: she specialises in her own voice. To me, that shows a fearless kind of freedom, a search that keeps exploring different spaces, different forms, without ever settling into a formula or a comfort zone. Even when she finds something that suits her, she keeps on exploring. That really moved me.

In the preface, you say that your first encounter with Amanda Berenguer's visual poems made quite an impression on you. They hung on your wall at home for a long time. What was it about these poems that held you so strongly back then? What kept calling to you in this visual work?

When I came across these poems, they were on a scrap of paper, in a free newspaper that was a real hotchpotch. There were quizzes, articles, cartoons, and in the middle of all that, these poems. I remember cutting out the page they were printed on and pinning it to my wall. For years, I had it in front of me every day. I don't think I ever consciously said to myself, 'There's something behind this, I'm going to investigate.' But they had such magnetism that, little by little, I started wondering what was there, what was holding me so strongly. Why the sunset motif? It's something that could seem banal, almost hackneyed. And I think its strength lies precisely in starting from something very simple, very familiar, to talk about much more serious things.

Speaking of which, let's talk about the sunset motif that runs through Composición de lugar. Given Uruguay's very particular political context at the time, on the eve of the dictatorship, how do you read the use of this image?

The collection was written in the period spanning the end of democracy and the beginning of the dictatorship in Uruguay, at a time when you could feel in the air that things were really not going well at all. Amanda's son, Álvaro, actually talks about this in his essay for the virtual exhibition Los ponientes olvidados [The Forgotten Sunsets]. He explains that in this work, the sunset functions as a kind of allegory for what was happening in the country. It's that passage from light to night, from day – with all the freedom or democracy it can stand for, relative as that obviously is – to a much darker political context.

I think there's also something spiritual, almost religious, in this presence of the sun. Earlier you used the word 'litany-like', and I think there really is something of that order. In fact, in the very last of the rediscovered poems, she writes: 'perhaps from the very wounds / birds may begin to come out / to sing to sing / until they reach the dawn.' Overall, I see it as a very powerful gesture of hope. Even as the collection moves into the night, into that unimaginable, terrifying period, there's the cyclical idea that the sun will rise again, then set again, then come back once more.

You consider this collection one of Amanda Berenguer's most innovative works, and some have described your translation as a translational, artistic, literary event. What, in your view, makes it so important?

Beyond the pleasure or literary interest readers may find in this collection, I think what's at stake is also bringing to light the sensory strategies Amanda developed in that particular context. And they're strategies I think are worth keeping in mind, because they might show us some ways forward. I think it was a voice, v-o-i-x[1], that rang true, and a conscious one too, with its blind spots, of course. And that's quite rare, though there are certainly others. Translating this voice and making it accessible to French-speaking readers was also, for me, about offering an extra key, one reading strategy among others: the one a writer invented one day, in Uruguay in the 1970s, which can resonate with our contemporary concerns, here and now, on different levels. That, I think, is what drives this project: the idea that you can never have too many keys to open doors.

We once talked about whether the cryptic matters, and about sometimes choosing to preserve rather than reveal. In your view, can declining to reveal everything, leaving part of it hidden or enigmatic, also be a form of protection or resistance? And what purpose, ultimately, does the cryptic serve in poetry?

That makes me think of Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Undrowned. At one point, she addresses exactly this danger of being discovered, talking in particular about marine mammals that are hunted for their skin. Thinking about whether or not to make yourself visible obviously seems crucial to me today. We live with a kind of imperative to be permanently visible, tied to social media, which structures our capitalist societies and is, at the same time, potentially very dangerous. So the question you're asking, whether it might sometimes be better to leave certain things hidden, seems highly topical to me. In the case of this collection in particular, and in the decision to translate it and to include the forgotten poems as well (the ones that were most hidden within the body of work itself), I feel that the choices made themselves. I didn't feel I was going after a secret to uncover at all costs: it was as though the time had come for this text to resonate now. More broadly, this question of disclosure seems essential to me in translation. Tiphaine Samoyault discusses it very astutely in Traduction et violence [Translation and Violence]. Translation is often thought of as a generous gesture, a contribution to the circulation of texts. Yet that view is ultimately reductive and highly idealised. Making a text visible in a dominant language can, for example, run counter to the original intentions or the conditions in which it was written. So as a translator, you also have to ask yourself whether making something visible is always desirable. It's a dimension of translation that's still too rarely discussed, even though it's a deeply political practice, and always a double-edged one.

In the preface, you mention the idea of 'polyamorous translation'. What do you mean by that?

It's part of a way of thinking about translation informed by theorists of experimental translation such as Haroldo de Campos, Sawako Nakayasu and Vincent Broqua. This thinking sets out to grasp language in all its dimensions, as a sonic, visual, graphic, material, plastic entity. So when I talk about 'polyamorous translation', I'm referring to a relationship with language that I think is necessary when translating poetry, and even more so visual or experimental poetry. In this kind of practice, the semantic sometimes takes a back seat. The term is obviously a bit playful, as translation isn't instinctively seen as a particularly sexy activity. But perhaps that's exactly why we should make it a little sexier, because there is, after all, a love of language at work. That's mainly what interested me in the metaphor of love: in love, as in friendship, it's a matter of contact, of a sensory relationship to the world, to objects, to others. Language touches us, and when we work with it, as translators or as writers, we have no choice but to handle it; it's the very material of the work.

I'd like to come back to the notion of the mother tongue. What does it encompass, in your view? And does the idea still have a clear meaning, or is it already partly problematic in multilingual contexts and in poetry?

The very notion of the mother tongue is highly political in several respects. First, because it presupposes the existence of 'one' mother tongue, which isn't such a simple given for many people. Conflating language and motherhood isn't neutral, either: it's an ideological construct, directly linked to political contexts of national discourse and nation-building. Yasemin Yildiz, a Turkish researcher and writer based in Canada, discusses this very precisely in Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, a book I draw on heavily in my research. There's also the Lebanese-Venezuelan writer Mirene Arsanios, who works on the question and has written two brilliant texts – The Autobiography of a Language and the essay 'Motherless Tongues' – in which she challenges the very idea of a mother tongue. There's a whole genealogy of work opening up fascinating avenues of thought on the subject, and, incidentally, these thinkers are often women.

So, in the end, the notion of a mother tongue also reflects a nationalist approach to language. Is that right?

In any case, it's a notion that crystallises the intersection of many relations of violence, domination and control in our societies: identity, the nation, the nuclear family, the idealised mother, among others. Yildiz describes it as 'the affective knot at the center of the monolingual paradigm'. In my view, we shouldn't purge these terms from the language; historically, they're too deeply rooted. We're not going to start telling people to stop saying 'mother tongue'! But I think it's worth questioning how the concept was constructed, where it comes from, why, and what it carries, politically, symbolically and affectively. I think that's also where some people's reluctance to change their vocabulary comes from. By talking indirectly about motherhood, we enter the realm of affect and tap into an unconscious substratum tied to ideals of maternal love and security, which protects a certain idea of language as something that must be whole, singular and national, and also as the guarantor of the proud unity of a homogeneous nation-state clearly bounded by linguistic and military borders. I address these questions in the first part of my thesis, which deals specifically with the concept of the mother tongue: what language and motherhood are doing together, why, and what their link to territory is. As natural areas, territories don't come with an assigned language. Territories are alive; they're made up of a teeming diversity of beings, human and other-than-human. Then certain policies seek to stabilise these polyphonic cacophonies, to compartmentalise them, when they're not simply trying to destroy them. France is a very good example, because it's a territory that was historically so linguistically rich, and where that diversity of languages was so violently suppressed. Losing a language isn't just a linguistic loss – it also means very serious emotional losses, with many other effects, both psychological and social.

To finish, you've cited a lot of references throughout this interview. Are there any last ones you'd recommend, ones that have stayed with you?

I'd come back to Haroldo de Campos and his theory of anthropophagous reason, through which he examines the relationship between Brazilian and European culture in a postcolonial context, asking what forms of reappropriation are possible for 'subaltern' cultures in the face of dominant cultures and languages; he proposes the image of anthropophagy as a way of thinking through these questions. He was a Brazilian poet, translator and theorist, a major figure in South American avant-garde and experimental poetry. In a different vein, there's also Say Translation Is Art by Sawako Nakayasu, a Japanese-American translator and poet. And finally, Don Mee Choi, who wrote a text called Translation Is a Mode=Translation Is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, in which she reflects on these issues from her own position as a Korean American, and through translating from and into Korean. While researching Amanda Berenguer, I also discovered a vast literary heritage left by Uruguayan women, which moved me deeply. I realised there's a real wealth of women writers and poets in the Southern Cone who are still completely unknown in Europe. So I'd like to encourage other translators to go and read them; there are so many voices waiting to be discovered and translated into French.

[1] Translator's note: Kenović spells out voix, 'voice', to tell it apart from its French homophone voie, 'way' or 'path'.