Jonathan Fletcher

On Language and Translation, Literary Relationships Between Works, and the Revision Process

Recently, I spoke with Tiffany Troy, managing editor of Tupelo Quarterly, Book Review Editor of the Los Angeles Review, translator of Catalina Vergara’s diamond & rust, and author of When Ilium Burns and Dominus (BlazeVOX [books] and Bottlecap Press, respectively).  Among other topics, we discussed the relationship between translation, literary criticism, and poetry; her understanding of, and approach to, revision; her relationship to language; and the idea of travel as a vehicle for greater insight and the development of one’s own creative process.

JF: Aside from having creative work (specifically, poetry) published, both individually and as book-length, you also work in translation and literary criticism.  Can you talk about the relationship between the three? Did you venture into each around the same time? How does creative work inform literary criticism, how does creative work inform translation, how does literary criticism inform translation, and vice versa? Did literary criticism and translation help you compile and arrange When Ilium Burns and Dominus?

TT: I grew up multilingual, listening to languages and dialects, many (English, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Hokkienese, Tagalog) linked to cultural and political identities tied to history. That history in turn includes migration, including the movement of human bodies and the re-defining of home in a new land. I grew up in Flushing, Queens, and it is where I call home. Interpretation (translating a conversation from one language to another) and translation (in the written form) is a lived reality for the children in my community as they help their family members navigate life. I admire how they serve as the crucial link to language access (even if imperfect) in the United States. In a way, my first gateway to language has always been through its multiplicity, and in the ways that it’s tied to power and access.

Juan Pablo Mobili is spot on in observing that I saw poetry as an imperative. Poetry is my way to imagine a world before the Tower of Babel. Not in the sense that we can somehow step in the shoes of another with a different set of life experiences. But rather, it is an exercise in empathy, even if that empathy sometimes might take the shape of rage, in ambivalent feelings, and in voicing against the ecological calamity, which are the themes that I encounter through my personal translation journey of poets Santiago Acosta (a Venezuela poet and scholar currently in the United States), Ana Carolina Quiñonez Salpietro (a Peruvian poet residing in Barcelona, Spain), Catalina Vergara (a Chilean poet) who taught me how being a humanist means engaging with the world and constantly trying to imagine a better world.

That sounds a bit corny, doesn’t it? But moving past that awkward unease in a world filled with cynicism, there is poetry. Dr. Emily Moore, my high school English teacher, recently gave a graduation speech and explained how poetry magic is an antidote to a world that sought to replace us, in creating structures that bore the semblance of thought.

Literary criticism is about teasing out that thought, whether as a conversation with the poet or as an essay on what you have uncovered through the process of reading. They say it takes a village and I wouldn’t be where I am without Dr. Dorothea Lasky. She introduced me to the possibility of being a working lawyer-poet, as my father and I watched Monica Youn’s Library of Congress Lecture. In her workshops and seminars, Dr. Lasky taught her class to see both poetry and the act of criticizing poetry as an essai, or attempt in the Montaignian sense of the word. We were given the opportunity to write mini one-page reviews of poetry collections that became practice runs of the 1,200 word reviews that literary journals typically accept.

The pressure cooker of the quotidian features heavily in my collection and I can’t help it–that’s what I am the most interested about–my eyes light up explaining what a printer can achieve, with the correct settings. These become the material of poetry. The point I’m making here is that no matter how much you translate one poet or the other, ultimately what makes you you is your voice. The way you talk. What you are interested in. What jokes you laugh at. What stories you are drawn to. And my hot take on this is that this sense of who you are, in some ways, defies language but is also defined by it. But it’s also true that the text becomes absorbed by your inner consciousness and pops out when you need it, as a kind of allegory, like “The Twinkie’s Love Song,” in Dominus, for instance. Dominus has been influenced a lot by what I’ve read and admired in reading, even if I could not necessarily make sense of it at the time.

A chapbook like When Ilium Burns, like a one-page review of a poetry collection, is a comparatively low stakes way to organize individual poems into a sequence of poems in a way that makes sense to the reader. I didn’t know that then, of course, but my mentor at the time, Professor Timothy Donnelly, encouraged me to whittle down my 200-page thesis into a 20 page chapbook. And so I took the poems about being at once dumbfounded and excited about the Alice in the Wonderland-like world of the speaker, which are written mostly in the two Special Projects classes I took with Professor Thom Donovan, and made a little project.

This outpouring of tales I internalized, mythological or human became the chapbook. That then, in turn, became the scaffolding of Dominus and the bulk of the first section. Even today I am moving towards a kind of understanding with another overly burdened manuscript which the Special Projects Workshop instructor Thom Donovan said is a perfectly valid form of revision: dump the bad ones!

So what I’ll say is that the vision has to be yours, to be authentically yours. Give yourself the permission to explore and expand the possibilities of form and learning from other poets too, can help you better articulate and express what you want to say with greater precision.

JF: I’m really interested in the relationship between When Ilium Burns and Dominus, the former of which obviously predates the latter and shares much in common with it (such as the inclusion of the “character” of Master, as well as some of the language/imagery) but also is notably distinct.  Could you speak to that? How did the former inform the latter and vice versa? How do they still speak to one another?

TT: There are several ways through which I view the relationship between When Ilium Burns and Dominus. I created both covers. The cover on When Ilium Burns is a diorama that centers around a partially amputated/rearranged Maria Goretti, under an umbrella, in the rain. The rain is surrounded by the night light, pill-bottle pillars, and a metal-wire flamingo. In some ways that shazazz characterizes the collection, which moves from the hyperactive (even while waxing eloquent to self-pity) of the opening poem, “When Ilium Burns,” to the end with “The Hike.”

Stylistically, and formally, the poems are closer together, grouped together to fit the theme of growing up/maturing, as Alice learns the rules of the game and is no longer so naive, so to speak.

The cover on Dominus is that rich green. The green inspires awe as well as (a bit of) disgust, and yet the woodcut print is also my rendition of Master, which is of course a kind of self, too. If you think of the way in which the poems move, there are poems from When Ilium Burns in the first section of Dominus, but temporality plays a lesser role in this. There are less emergencies and more crises where the self becomes the ragged doll or the ball on the wooden floor. I would argue, though, that the speaker is actually even wiser through this journey, so at the end, she makes do with the men who talk over her, and gestures towards the sky as a kind of talking, as she narrates this vision of the pink sky.

JF: Interesting.  Yeah, I definitely see that.  I absolutely love the conversations you have going on across book-length works.  Speaking of which, do you have more book-length projects (be them chapbooks or full-length collections) in the works? If so, will that conversation continue through? If so, how?

TT: The genesis of my second manuscript-in-progress, tentatively called On the Extraordinary was sown en route to Santiago, Chile. It draws its title from Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a Netflix series involving a lawyer, Woo Young-woo. I was introduced to this series by a mentor. It became an obsession, as it raises questions about belonging, identity, and a desire to be loved. I saw in Woo Young-Woo a foil for the speaker in my collection. Fast forward a year, I was writing my way into a spiral of futility within a spiral of never belonging. The series and Woo Young-woo became a frame, if you will, to look outside of my positionality and to view the strands of thought that had coalesced within me but instead of rage or despair, I was able to express the terms of the all-American striving and the feeling of self-closure with the verve of my own voice, which had always been buoyed by the sight and faith of those around me. I hope what readers will see across my work are the ways in which Baby Tiger evolves over time.

JF: Though there is, of course, the common experience of being transported through the pages of a compelling book, I was intrigued by the idea of physical travel as a means for a writer to unblock/free themselves from situations in which they are stuck or even just uninspired. One of my friends (and fellow writers), ire’ne lara silva, who also served as Texas State Poet Laureate in 2023, once mentioned that it took her getting to Ithaca, New York, where she studied at Cornell, in order to read and appreciate Gloria Anzaldúa (despite both having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley), which, needless to say, influenced ire’ne’s own writing and growth as a writer.  All that to say, I was curious whether travel (be it Chile or elsewhere) ever provided insight or even just permission to read/write things you might not otherwise have and/or reexamine your work in ways otherwise thought impossible or even contemplated.

TT: Your connecting of the portal of literature (transporting the reader across time, space, and possibilities) and transportation is exactly on point. I am the product of the migration of human bodies, and shaped by my day-to-day commute. I hope readers feel some of that briskness of the New York way of life in my poems. On my commutes, when I find a moment, I’ll read, absorbing the individual poems with an eye towards the arc or structure of the book, any motifs, and craft decisions. Among strangers, paradoxically, it is far easier to imbibe something other than what is sanctioned in a different mind-space. Many of these spaces that are created by literature are real or adjacent to real experiences, with their own diasporas, and aspirations.

Andrew Grace, who has a new book out called A Brief History of the Midwest, has taught me that close looking is the antithesis and countermeasure of monotony. Close looking means appreciating the men and women around you, who get up and greet you in the bakery, to enjoy your work for being honest, and re-assess the outsider’s assessment of your community (in his case: “flyover country”; in my case: an ethnic enclave) which doesn’t mean sugarcoating the community and its realities but rather accepting it with its flaws and using what power you have to change it for the better.

JF: I really like the idea of close looking, and I wondered if that extended to your revision process.  I know you mentioned Thom Donovan’s insightful advice about dumping the bad pieces and Timothy Donnelly’s suggestion to whittle down your thesis to a chapbook-length collection.  How else has your revision process evolved? With whom or with what are you carrying as you continue your work in poetry, translation, and literary criticism?

TT: Close looking is linked to an aesthetics that is rooted in the poetry of place. In the revision process, close looking involves incorporating the sound, cadence, and color from the world to make the world come to life. It’s looking back at the shards of memory and listening to the chime of them hitting next to each other.

Professor Donovan was probably much more eloquent than my paraphrase of his idea. I’ve grown to appreciate the revision process a lot more over the years; after all, it’s your last opportunity to present your best foot forward in the world. I’ve learned to keep working at a poem till you are satisfied that the poem conveys what you’d like to articulate, with a clarity of vision, even if that vision may include idiosyncratic phrasing/ syntax/ grammar. What you don’t want is to have a noun-verb disagreement, etc. get in the way of what emotions you’re trying to evoke. So at the poem-level, working on a kind of precision while also allowing for the much-ness of your poetic voice to come through. Then at the collection-level, I’ve come to see poetry collection as either a selected (from a segment of one’s life; or a kind of a retrospective) or as a project (in theme) and so in the revision process, there is a desire to put it together while eliminating poems that are too similar to each other and poems that are discordant from the collection’s music, so to speak. I would definitely recommend Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, edited by Sarah Gargossian and Virginia Konchan, where various accomplished poets talk about their own processes in revision.

Harking a moment back to the commute, the going into and out of the ground (into the unknown) and the constraint of being contained for a finite amount of time definitely creates a kind of mirror that emphasizes thought. I would much prefer to rearrange them as a Word document, creating two levels of headings and adjusting the page breaks as I go.

A quote that’s included in my Calculus III midterm was by T.S. Eliot: “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” Obviously that’s one extreme position to take, but I think he’s absolutely right. Look for the god-tier poets, critics, and translators that you’d want to be one day. Don’t be too intimidated, and then take your seat at the table and forge forward at your own pace. At the end of the day, you’ll find what began as a hobby has evolved into a passion that you’re proud of, and that what began as a solo endeavor has become a group activity, a community of found family.

JF: Love that.  Thank you so much, Tiffany.  It was a pleasure to talk with you.  Best of luck in all of your literary endeavors!