Geraldine McKenzie reviewsCalques, by Javant Biarujia
Monogene, ISBN 0 9587249 4 6 Cloth, ISBN 0 9587249 5 4 Paper |
In Twentieth-Century Modernism, Marjorie Perloff presents a persuasive case for the vigorous survival of modernism into this century. The distinction between postmodernism and modernism has become a ‘tired dichotomy’ and the perception of modernism as largely the province of an elite of white males has given way to a reappraisal of the modernist canon. Perloff’s selection of Eliot, Stein, Duchamp and Khlebnikov reflects this enlarged perception of modernism. |
The key concepts for each of these poets is that of constructivism — an understanding of poetry in its classical Greek meaning as poesis or making, with the specific understanding that language, far from being a vehicle or conduit for thoughts and feelings outside and prior to it, is itself the site of meaning-making. Of course, constructivism is integral to the early modernists. It is also the generating impulse of Javant Biarujia’s Calques, as the poet makes clear in a prefatory note on the text. I have gone beyond translation, through the various ploys/plays of amphigory, paronomasia, mistranslation, dislocation, collage, etymology and ‘extravagation’ (i.e., wandering beyond proper bounds), in order to test poetry — and prose — as Zukofsky would have it, through ‘the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection’ (A Test of Poetry, 1948).
Calques is a diverse and dazzling collection of poems that invites a medley of adjectives that would sit well in any blurb. It is flamboyant (being both flammable and buoyant), erotic, witty, acute, satirical, savage, compassionate, playful, thoughtful and, above all, resonant. This is a poetry that leads the reader not only in and down but also, through re-sounding, across, crossing boundaries, making unthought of connections, exploring the fertile errata of translation. Biarujia sends out sounds that skip from language to language in a series of transformations/ interactions. In ‘LET OM BODHI LAND’, for instance, the poet follows the word/syllable ‘om’ through Sanskrit, English and French in what becomes an ominous and mangled mantra, signaled by the disruption of the main text by bold upper case, spelling out variations of atom bomb. Gyorgy Ligeti pppppppp Pierre Boulez across five octaves
This is characteristic of the joyous bravura of much of the verse in a book which surprises not so much in its combination of playfulness and erudition (impressive as this is) but in the sheer fun of it (and fun is not a word I use lightly). Cadmusacteoniphisrunnymeadenarcississippus- The reader has to peer into this section to discern the words, generally figures from Greek mythology but with odd intrusions, including the word ‘usher’ which is there and not there, a nameless figure emerging between heroes and then disappearing. In the following sections the pseudo heroic world of the imperialist is shown ugly side up, ‘the tramp and ore lost mines trophies lashes sword fent’. Local references invoke the Australian experience, drawing on a shared anger and grief, Woe be janderlin, The poem shifts to an earlier occasion of empire-building by ‘the cagmag Sassynacks’ and one hears a voice, initially conversational and humorous, ‘Let’s cut to the Jase, for Argonaut’s sake!’ endowed with a sense of horrors past and to come: ‘open the floodgates’, and indeed they do open in the last section. This is visually distinct from the preceding sections which are precisely arranged on a single page, a sprawling paragraph shifting through a range of discourse, and featuring the intonation of a Scottish accent ‘Mock ma wurds, more fraudulentfoul than a stallion’s pissplot’, which intensifies the sense of one raging at this ‘foreign land’, Boner Fidos
‘WHEN I DANCEE’ also uses an accented English, suggesting both a child and an Indian or Asian speaker. It exploits a tension between the innocence of the nursery rhyme and the corruption signaled by ‘President Oily’, moving from the insouciance of ‘a friend say bum to the corner Muse’ to the explicit ‘ a friend suck up the cunt again’. The poem hints at political commentary, reminding the reader that many nursery rhymes originated from political/social trauma. say Ramayana gas masks
The puns, a recurring feature of these poems, are another way of jumping the border; particularly striking are the punned phrases/sentences e.g. ‘Calcutta’ which resolves into a mischievous double ‘quel cul t as’, ‘let om bodhi land’ and its shadow ‘le tombeau de l’Inde’ or, from ‘PURGES’, ‘J’accuse DaDa’, a mistranslation of Jacques Derrida. kiss thus the one mirliton
Biarujia also uses repetition and rhythm to great effect, the opening lines of ‘SCORDATURA’ catch up the reader in their momentum, shifting with each line as Biarujia alternately urges us on and restrains us and again, the sheer pleasure of words, ‘how rough he is and how tumble scrum and scurry’. If the rupee be a dearer
Language is perverted and intimacy the province of torture rather than love. do they silence each other with dirty stories This powerful sense of disorder climaxes in the concluding section (the book is in three, Q, E and D), BAQUIN/ PURGES is a stunning prose poem printed side by side with the Taneraic original. Again, Biarujia juxtaposes a range of discourse, the puns are wild, So said the Idiot Seer of Algerium the humour is black, ‘We do serve lobster Maldoror. May and the text is disrupted with asides both comic (‘Pass!’) and serious. (Isn’t it just as wrong to say of the disenfranchised poor, gays, immigrants, feminists, ‘It’s their choice’, as it is to say ‘I have an unconscious toothache’?)
Amidst the blistering parade of references to Nazism, the US and a history which ‘IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY’, there are those on the margins: the Idiot Seer who has mislaid his documentation and those ‘illegal immigrants without documents’, we are warned not to confuse one with the other but it’s an easy mistake to make, uncertainty is rife ‘Perhaps...Perhaps...Perhaps...’ and the reader/ seer/ assorted others are stuck on the border, the unknown world of Taneraic looming to the left, occasionally a line is identified ‘J’accuse DaDa’, but it’s a mistranslation, ‘The Girl from Treponema’ is paralleled by ‘jau jau Gabor’, ‘I only have socraties for you’ by ‘«Voulez-vous me socratiser ce soir? »‘. What is going on? Of one thing we are ‘assured’, ‘The innocent still die’. |
Works CitedHank Lazer, The Lyric Valuables: Soundings, Questions and Examples. Modern Language Studies 27.2
Marjorie Perloff, Twentieth-Century Modernism. Blackwells Manifestos, 2002 |
August 2003 | Jacket 23
Contents page |