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  Borges foregrounds what one might call the paratextual politics of world literature; his short descriptions of much longer works both illustrate and parody the degree to which translated literature tends to mandate prefatory protocols, particularly when geared toward an academic audience. Ben Belitt, who translated the work of Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda for Grove, acknowledged as much when he collected his translator’s prefaces into a book entitled Adam’s Dream: A Preface to Translation, published by Grove in 1978. Donald Allen had solicited Belitt as a possible translator for Lorca’s Poet in New York in 1952, and Belitt responded favorably, noting “the impressive record that your imprint has created for itself in its initial publishing commitments. It seems to me your combination of fastidious choice and public usefulness is already a unique one.”91 In the transcribed “conversation” with Edwin Honig that makes up the opening chapter of Adam’s Dream, Belitt credits Allen with the “uncanny facility of sensing what are generally called ‘vogues’ or waves in the making, and later turn out to be total landslides of taste.”92 Belitt backdates the beginnings of the Latin American boom to his bilingual edition of Lorca’s modern poetic sequence of surrealist impressions written during the poet’s brief visit to the East Coast during the Depression. In his translator’s foreword, reprinted in Adam’s Dream, Belitt affirms that “it was to American readers in the broadest sense of the term … that the poem was initially addressed by its publishers in Mexico, Argentina, and New York … Today, A Poet in New York remains an indispensable book for readers of the two Americas.”93 The positioning of this text by a Spanish poet in the hemispheric context of the “two Americas” was reinforced by the frequent critical references to the influence of Walt Whitman, to whom Lorca dedicates an ode late in the sequence, and to the possible influence on Allen Ginsberg, whose “Howl” it arguably anticipates. The initial printing of A Poet in New York sold more than thirty-five thousand copies.

  Belitt’s major achievement for Grove during these years was a sequence of anthologies of the poetry of Pablo Neruda, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and whom Rodríguez Monegal introduces as “the greatest Latin American poet since Rubén Darío.”94 Neruda’s itinerant career and international reputation undoubtedly helped realign the meanings of “America” in the postwar era. As with Lorca, this realignment ran through Whitman, to whose work Neruda’s was frequently compared. In his translator’s foreword to Selected Poems, the first of four Neruda collections he assembled for Grove, Belitt affirms that Neruda’s vision is “like Whitman’s” and further elaborates that the poet’s ambitious Canto general (General Song) is, “like Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass—whose cadences should convey it to American ears—a progress: a total book which enacts a total sensibility.”95 In the introduction to his collection of critical prefaces, Belitt clarifies how this hemispheric sensibility trumps and transcends the discourse of “three worlds” that dominated the 1960s, offering instead a cosmopolitan vision of “the literature of one world and a single community of tradition, rather than a symptomatic ‘third’ of it.”96 Grove organized a big party at its downtown offices for Neruda, an early hero of Rosset’s, when he came to New York to attend the International Progressive Education Network (PEN) conference in 1966, the year in which he also received a citation as an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association. At a well-attended reading at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association’s (YMHA) Poetry Center, his first in the United States, Archibald MacLeish emphatically introduced Neruda as “an American poet,” while Selden Rodman titled his review of the reading for the New York Times “All American.”97

  Neruda’s international significance was enhanced by his global itinerary. During his years as a Chilean diplomat, Neruda lived first in Rangoon, Java, Ceylon, and Singapore, after which followed posts in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Madrid, and Mexico City. After the war, he was briefly a Communist Party senator in Chile, but when the party was outlawed in 1948, he went into exile. He spent the next four years traveling across Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union, returning to Chile in 1952, where he remained until his death in 1973. By the time Neruda’s poetry became popular in the United States, he was already a figure of considerable international stature and experience. The titles of his two major poetic sequences—Residence on Earth and General Song—reflect the global scope of his life and reinforce the correlation between political and poetic diplomacy that coincided closely with the international vision of Grove Press.

  Grove’s decision to publish bilingual editions of Spanish-language poetry translated by North American poets (it also issued a bilingual edition of the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo’s Poemas humanos, translated by Clayton Eshleman) projected in material and textual form some of the complexities of a hemispheric literary field divided by both language and geopolitics. Belitt asserts that, in bilingual translations, “the binder’s seam is there to remind us that the translation of poetry is not a systematic plagiarism of the original, under cover of a second language: it is an act of imagination forced upon one by the impossibility of the literal transference or coincidence of two languages, two minds, and two identities, and by the autonomy of the poetic process.”98 For Belitt, this autonomy should be granted to both the original and the translation. Thus, he wrote to Rosset, regarding his translations of Lorca, “I would like to make it clear that the English text is a creative undertaking whose authorship is attributable to me in the same sense that ‘my own’ poems are attributable to me.”99 The “binder’s seam,” then, becomes a highly complex site of mediations and separations. It both marks and bridges the division between languages, affirming the impossibility of literal translation while simultaneously enabling the autonomy of literary translation. It also, significantly, allows Belitt to lay claim to the English translations without occluding the integrity of the Spanish originals.

  This tension between autonomy and appropriation is abundantly evident in the special issue of the Evergreen Review published in the winter of 1959, “The Eye of Mexico.” Donald Allen had originally arranged with Paz to be guest editor, but after he had selected the contributors, Paz became too busy and recommended Ramón Xirau of the Centro mexicano de escritores to take over. Xirau was in fact from Barcelona but had migrated to Mexico after the Spanish Civil War. He had studied in Paris and lectured in the United States under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had also provided the initial funding for the Centro, originally established by the American novelist Margaret Shedd. Xirau became subdirector and editor of its bimonthly Englishlanguage bulletin. In addition to issuing the newsletter, the Centro provided fellowships to Mexican and US writers, as well as labor and subvention for translations between Spanish-and Englishlanguage literature.

  “The Eye of Mexico” opens with an excerpt from Labyrinth of Solitude and includes prose by Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes, poetry by Jaime Sabines and Manuel Durán, paintings by José Luis Cuevas and Juan Soriano, and an essay by anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla, “A Náhuatl Concept of Art.” The poetry is translated by Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams, who, like Belitt, were “more concerned with recreation in English than with completely literal translation.”100 The Spanish originals are not included. The issue also provides a directory of Mexican bookstores and art galleries, ads for Mexican restaurants in Manhattan, and a back-cover ad for Aeronaves de México. Grove arranged for a front-window display in the Aeronaves offices, located at the heavily trafficked corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, featuring artwork by Cuevas and Soriano and a blow-up of the journal’s cover. Aeronaves agreed to fly a small group of Mexican authors and artists to New York for a cocktail party in their offices celebrating the issue, and Grove offered issues in quantity at cost for the airline to distribute on its flights. According to Publishers Weekly, Grove sold out its initial printing of twenty thousand in less than a month.

  The contents of the “Eye of Mexico” issue are framed by articles and review
s that place it in a more complicated global frame. It opens with “The Continuing Position of India,” a long piece by Anand (Arthur) Lall, India’s ambassador to the United Nations. Lall was one of the judges in Grove’s Indian literature contest and had become friendly with Rosset, who agreed to insert this piece into the Mexican issue at the last minute. This “special statement on India’s foreign policy” defending Nehru’s position of nonalignment begins before and ends after the contents of the special issue, inevitably reminding readers of the larger Cold War context within which this hemispheric dialogue is taking place. More specifically, it emphasizes the degree to which Cold War–era cultural exchange would be facilitated by diplomatic figures such as Lall and Paz, who was Mexico’s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968. Paz then resigned from the diplomatic service in opposition to Mexico’s suppression of the student protests in Tlatelolco, which he wrote about in The Other Mexico, also published by Grove. By then, the rhetoric of cultural exchange that Grove promoted in the late 1950s and early 1960s had been supplanted by a rhetoric, and practice, of political revolution.

  The special-issue contents of “The Eye of Mexico” are followed by a section of news and reviews. One of the texts reviewed is Paz’s Anthology of Mexican Poetry, which, as reviewer James Schuyler notes, was “published by agreement between Unesco and the Government of Mexico.”101 This volume, initially issued by Indiana University Press and then reprinted by Grove in 1985, features a preface by C. M. Bowra that, the flyleaf affirms, is intended “to emphasize the essential solidarity of creative artists in different nations, language, centuries, and latitudes, and to point out the fundamental identity of emotions to which the genius of the poet can give a form at once lasting and beautiful.” But Schuyler is less interested in Bowra’s “official bull” or Paz’s “informing” introduction than he is in the task of the translator, Samuel Beckett, whose labors he lauds as “a Horowitz performance of gift and skill.”102

  Beckett haunts “The Eye of Mexico,” as Schuyler’s brief appraisal of what S. E. Gontarski calls “the single most neglected work in the Beckett canon” is followed by Richard Howard’s translation of Maurice Blanchot’s landmark review of Beckett’s trilogy, “Where Now? Who Now?”103 In this somewhat unexpected New World context, Blanchot’s review creates a felicitous apposition between Beckett’s masterwork and the final lines of Paz’s excerpted chapter: “The Mexican does not transcend his solitude. On the contrary, he locks himself up in it. We live in our solitude like Philoctetes on his island, fearing rather than hoping to return to the world. We cannot bear the presence of our companions. We hide within ourselves … and the solitude in which we suffer has no reference either to a redeemer or a creator.”104 Beckett’s narrator can figure both as a reduction of Paz’s solitude to its purest generic state—and indeed, Beckett’s trilogy was frequently framed in precisely these “universal” terms—but also as a specification of the writer’s predicament in the twilight of modernism.

  If, in the postwar European context, this predicament solicited the strained silences and solitudes of Beckett’s austere universe, in the New World context late modernist exhaustion blossomed by a sort of dazzling dialectical reversal into an explosion of aesthetic opportunities, abundantly illustrated by Donald Allen’s landmark anthology The New American Poetry, issued by Grove in 1960. I conclude with this foray into a more conventionally organized anthology in order to point out the degree to which the project of postwar American literature was implicated in and inflected by the global literary field illustrated by Grove’s international title list. Most of the poets included in the volume, which was the first to lay out for a popular readership the now canonical—and significantly geographical—designations of the Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York school, appeared as well in the pages of the Evergreen Review, frequently as both translators and poets. While the exclusive US origins of the poets included in the volume itself seem almost blithely to disregard the hemispheric model endorsed by Grove’s simultaneous investment in Spanish-language literature, the international scope of Allen’s projects for Grove during these years dictates that we grant some dialectical nuance to its contents.

  Figure 10. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for The Art of Jazz (1959).

  Allen calls the poets in his anthology “our avantgarde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry” and further claims that “through their work many are closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting, today recognized throughout the world to be America’s greatest achievement in contemporary culture.”105 In this same period Grove published a number of pioneering studies of American jazz, including translations of André Hodeir’s foundational Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956) and Toward Jazz (1962), as well as important anthologies edited by Nat Hentoff, Albert McCarthy, and Martin Williams, who also wrote a regular column on jazz for the Evergreen Review. These titles, all heavily promoted in quality-paperback format, feature some of Kuhlman’s most characteristically abstract expressionist covers (Figure 10), evoking his designs for both Beckett and Tutuola. Allen’s goal for his anthology was to make “the same claim for the new American poetry, now becoming the dominant movement in the second phase of our twentieth-century literature and already exerting a strong influence abroad.”106 Allen places his anthology within the late modernist matrix, offering his cross section of postwar poets as an American contribution to an international scene. And it was a huge success; as Rosset affirms in an unpublished interview, “That book became the standard, the landmark book, and it sold and sold. It taught poetry to a whole generation of young kids.”107

  Publishing Off Broadway

  The early performances of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are landmarks in the history of modern theater. Roger Blin’s succès de scandale at the Théatre Babylone in Paris on January 5, 1953; Alan Schneider’s debacle at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami on January 3, 1956 (billed as “the laugh sensation of two continents,” and starring Tom Ewell and Bert Lahr, the play confounded the audience, who came expecting a light comedy); Herbert Blau’s triumph at San Quentin on April 19, 1957: all have become legendary events that anchor any study of Beckett’s dramatic work.1 Much less has been written about an equally significant event in the history of this epoch-defining play: Grove Press’s publication of a one-dollar Evergreen paperback edition in 1956. Spurred by the play’s Broadway debut, when it was sold in the lobby of the John Golden Theater, it eventually sold more than two million copies, becoming an iconic American paperback and one of the bestselling plays of all time.

  W. B. Worthen, one of the few critics who has considered the significance of plays as printed texts, affirms that “Beckett’s plays are an essential part of the modern drama’s seizure of the page,” particularly because Beckett’s authority over permissions to perform them was exercised with such high modernist imperiousness and exactitude.2 The authority of the printed play in Beckett’s case anchors the authority of the auteur as source and adjudicator of the conditions and conventions under which the play can be performed. As a profoundly literary figure, in many ways the last modernist genius, Beckett has been a crucial model for the authority of the modern playwright as writer, as producer of the printed text that determines the parameters of performance.

  Nevertheless, as Worthen concedes, “Theatre is particularly inimical to print, as print culture tends to derogate both manuscript and oral forms of transmission as lapses from the ideal, transparent, neutrality of mechanical reproduction.”3 This resistance to print was particularly true of the so-called theater of the absurd, whose postwar ascendance dates to the debut of Godot, influenced as it was by the antiliterary theories of Antonin Artaud. Artaud, whose international influence and reputation expanded considerably with the publication of Grove’s English translation of The Theater and Its Double in 1958, famously decried “the idolatry of fixed masterpieces which is one of the aspects of bourgeois conformism,” proclaiming that �
�it is in the light of magic and sorcery that the mise en scène must be considered, not as the reflection of the written text.”4 Artaud was also instrumental in replacing the authority of the playwright with that of the director, whom he saw becoming “a kind of manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies.”5