Ellen Hinsey: Over the last decade you have been recognized as one of the most outstanding of a new generation of German translators. You have recently published more than a dozen volumes in translation of poets and writers such as Mayröcker, Seiler and Kluge. In 2023, for Penguin Classics, you completed a new translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a work of immense complexity—and correspondingly, a great challenge for a translator. Before we discuss these projects, I’d like to start with your own work as a poet. How would you characterize your poetic project?
Alexander Booth: I suppose I’d say that I am attempting a certain kind of painting-within-the-word, one in which the sharp distinctions between the interior and exterior landscape begin to blur. Essentially lyrical—or I’d like to think so anyway—my work makes use of open forms and concentrated language to create imagistic nexuses of highly charged moments, unearthed fragments, flickering chiaroscuro. As such, a good deal of the main narrative details remains unstated or, as in classical miniatures, float just beyond the edges of the frame. This combination of elements is there to focus contemplation on the aesthetic experience as a whole, while at the same time directing attention to what is at its heart: the expression of our most fundamental human emotions.
EH: If we were dialoging in the seventeenth century, I would say that your work reflects a kind of spiritual Quietism, in the best sense. It exhibits and inhabits a reflective, meditative space where compassionate observation is more present than the ego or will—you once spoke of preferring the “eye” to the “I.” This is an approach that is oft-times absent in contemporary poetry—
AB: Perhaps the world has always been a little too much with me, which is to say, the seismic sensitivity of my emotional antennae. If we consider quietism to be an attitude of a certain kind of humility, stillness, silence, and compassion, it’s probably easy enough to understand why it might be appealing. Less me, more world. Gary Snyder once wrote, “A clear, attentive mind / Has no meaning but that / Which sees is truly seen.” The working-through of our histrionic and narcissistic needs can be done elsewhere. Je est un autre. Amen.
EH: One senses that there are some specific philosophers/thinkers with whom you are engaged in an inner dialogue. Does your poetic work draw any of its inspirational sources from particular texts outside the poetic or literary lineages?
AB: I have no academic background in philosophy, but was lucky enough to be introduced to Buddhism by a Jesuit priest during my first year in high school and, a year later, Taoism and the work of Viktor Frankl. As a young man, I became interested in some of the medieval Christian mystics as well as Renaissance and early modernist currents of Western esotericism. Gaston Bachelard’s work was and is important to me. More recently, thanks to my professional training, the existentialist philosophers have come back to loom rather large, along with the work of Carl Jung and later so-called neo-Jungians such as James Hillman. All of this cannot help but be present.
EH: Who are the poets with whom you personally feel the closest affinity?
AB: More than half a lifetime ago, after an early infatuation with the first and second-wave English Romantics, I was in thrall to a spare approach, think early Ungaretti, Bunting, Niedecker, Oppen, Cid Corman, up through contemporary poets like Lisa Fishman, that kind of thing. And I really wanted to love the hard, at times absurd, geometry of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry and the elliptical ethereal folks like Michael Palmer. But nowadays, though some of those writers certainly remain a part of me and my approach, not to mention my being, it is not really what I have been engaging with. More recently, I have been moved by work that feels somehow rounder and looser. One of the most haunting works I have read in quite some time, and one to which I keep returning, is Jindřich Heisler’s and Jindřich Štyrský’s On the Needles of These Days, translated by Jed Slast. Then there is the mostly forgotten—if ever a name on anyone’s lips to begin with—French writer Joë Bousquet. Others include: Bob Kaufman. Valerie Rouzeau’s beautiful Cold Spring in Winter, translated by Susan Wicks. Jeff Young’s intoxicating Wild Twin. I always have time for Charles Wright. And I cannot leave out the great wealth of translations of classical Chinese and Japanese work that we are so lucky to have in English.
EH: Your poems, including those in this NASJ special issue, don’t present themselves as formal classical verse. But you have spoken about “ghost iambics” being present in your work, and one senses, behind the scenes, the presence of formal concerns. In his classic Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell speaks of the idea that the poet sets up a “poetic contract,” in a poem, which then unfolds over the course of the poem. However this contract is envisaged, it creates a dimension that can be sensed by the reader. Would you speak a little about your individual engagement with form and how you understand it?
AB: They’re not formal, no, but, as Mr. Eliot once said, no verse is free for the person who wants to do a good job, right? Interestingly enough, for the poems included in this NASJ issue, it was almost like they were dictated, there was very little reworking (and I am certainly no fan of hokum like “first thought best thought”!). In any event, they were a departure. Now, Fussell is correct when he talks about how the reader’s response is determined and governed by the first lines of any poem and, in lyrical poetry anyway, that will inevitably have to do with its music. More traditional forms can help you learn about that music, both good and bad, and sensitize your ear in a way that little else will. Not to mention the weight of a line. And even if I personally have been a lifelong traveler on the Pound—Williams—Olson route (all of whom, of course, knew their traditional forms and well), I have great respect and admiration for people who successfully employ more traditional verse forms. Apropos, I saw that NASJ has featured poems by Gjertrud Schnackenberg—talk about a master!
EH: You grew up in the United States and moved to Germany in 2013, settling in Berlin. Your mother was originally from Upper Silesia, Prussia. Before Berlin, you also lived, off and on, for fourteen years in Rome, and read and speak Italian—thus, you are a poet with a number of geographic and linguistic archeological layers. As this is a special issue on American writers in Berlin, in what ways do you feel your “German layer” influences your work?
AB: My goodness, that’s a difficult question. A particular sensitivity to displacement perhaps. Something in the landscape that intimately speaks to the knell of distant wounds. Perhaps I can catch a little of what both Germans and Americans might miss, for their respective reasons. After living in West Germany briefly as a child, at nineteen, I moved to Bremen, and that, looking back, really was the start of all that led me to where I am now. It was also the first time I went to Rome. At that time, I first encountered the work of James Lee Byars. Edward Kienholz. Anna and Berhard Blume. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Fundamental to my later development as a person and artist. Germany has taught me a very tough lesson in self. Italy an erotic of the everyday.
EH: In addition to your literary projects, you have a parallel profession as an existential counselor and have worked with populations such as refugees. One senses the importance of “care” as an important personal—as well as aesthetic and philosophical—belief and dimension in your work. There is “care” in your descriptions of place, and care in your evocations of emotions, your and others. At a time when the world seems determined to return to a glorification of force, would you speak about this dimension of “care” in your lifework(s)?
AB: Wisława Szymborska, as ventriloquized by Clare Cavanagh, once wrote, “After every war / someone has to tidy up. […] No sound bites, no photo opportunities, / and it takes years.” Our existence is precious and extremely fragile, and it can be extinguished—and all too often is—in the literal blink of an eye, without a second thought. It is imperative that we keep this in mind. Sadly, we live in a world of torturers and tormentors, not least in the form of those economic and informational systems we have invented that are in turn our social models. Moreover, if we look at our basic experience of the world and find an essential unsatisfactoriness or even suffering, and recognize that that is universal to us all—as are aging, illness, and death—not doing our best to practice care, to be care-full at every moment, to whatever degree possible, for me, is simply impossible.
EH: Let’s turn now to your translation work. Do you principally translate poetic work with which you feel an affinity? You have previously spoken about the sense of recognition you felt when you first read Lutz Seiler’s work, whose book in field latin you have translated, and for which you received PEN/Heim Translation Fund award. What first drew you to his work?
AB: Yes. I would find it quite a challenge to translate poetry with which I did not. Having said that, I try to find the poetic in whatever I do and do what I can. Now, with Seiler, the work just sang. That’s it. It sang. And I knew I could sing it back. And that I had to. That is rare. That is poetry, and it’s not there every day. I was lucky. A similar thing happened with Friederike Mayröcker and Sandro Penna. I am very thankful it did. My work translating those poets greatly enriched my being-in-the-world. The artist Brion Gysin once wrote, “I Am the Artist when I Am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin.” Exactly.
EH: As you have just mentioned, you have also translated a number of books by challenging poets such as Friederike Mayröcker, and Alexander Kluge. Did you have the chance to meet Mayröcker, and can you say what is involved in your creative process as a translator when approaching Mayröcker or Kluge’s often “mindbendingly” complex, and dynamic writing?
AB: I did not meet Mayröcker, no, though I had the opportunity, as I know her editor and was given the opportunity to go to Vienna. But I just did not want to be another gushing stranger. I don’t really like meeting strangers at 50—I can only imagine what it’s like when you’re in your 90s. I suppose it comes back to what I was saying a bit earlier, maybe it doesn’t really have to be about you all the time, you know? I did have an encounter of sorts with Mayröcker in 2004 when she read here in Berlin at the Literaturhaus, I walked past an elderly woman draped in black on the back stairs who was pausing to catch her breath, and that was enough. As for Alexander Kluge, we have met and speak not that infrequently on the phone. He is wonderful. As far as the translation of his work goes, however, it’s very different. It can be very choppy, halting, and fairly hard going. We must not forget that he was a student of Theodor Adorno’s! Ultimately, as with all translation, it’s a process of deep listening, wide awareness, distance vision. As is life. My theory? By any means necessary. Which is to say, whatever works.
EH: These and other accomplishments led to you being asked to translate one of the monuments of twentieth century philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for Penguin Classics. One can only imagine the extent to which this was a daunting task. Speaking about your own journey, how did this project impact on your creative work and thought?
AB: It was one of the most difficult things that I have ever done. There’s a pre-war Tractatus and a post-war Tractatus and, if anything, it’s the latter that interests me. Though the process taught me a lot, I’m not sure how much of an impact it has had on my thought or my work as such. Maybe I just came to it too late in life, that window had already closed, so to speak. And yes, windows close. But there is one thing that, though Wittgenstein was not the first to state, he states very well and it is something we should all carry around in our proverbial pockets: “Philosophy isn’t theory, but activity.”
EH: What is next on the horizon for your poetry and translation work?
AB: Firstly, I have just completed the poems for a new chapbook, Carnation, which will be available in Berlin. A selection from my work over the last decade is also gathered in a book-length manuscript. In addition, throughout the year I will be translating further work by the graphic artist Nicolas Mahler, Friederike Mayröcker’s penultimate book entitled Pathos & Swallow, more by Alexander Kluge, and a disturbing and intriguing collection by the late-80s Austrian—let’s say neo-Actionist playwright—Werner Schwab. No doubt the unexpected will make an appearance. Watch this space.
