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[Alcalay continues]... Things always work at cross-purposes: as I worked to make things accessible, the accompanying risk is that some of those things would just become commodified. In our post-NAFTA world, I'm coming more and more to feel that now Americans feel they have a right to literatures from other parts of the world, much like they have a right to Chilean cherries in New York in the middle of January, Argentinian wine, or an endless flow of products made somewhere else. At such a point, I think it may be wise to NOT translate certain things because we are then only reproducing the process of getting something at no cost, of occluding the labor involved and the price one pays for that kind of knowledge. If you have to learn a language and immerse yourself in another culture to the point that you can begin discerning things about it, there is a significant cost and a significant renunciation of one's own powers in American English, as an inhabitant of the empire. Interestingly enough, after this whole circuitous journey, up till now at least, I've come back to thinking about this continent and its writers in a way that may be closer to the kinds of intuitions I had when I was much younger, almost as if I had to undertake these journeys and involvements just to verify those intuitions.

LRS: What are your intuitions regarding this continent and its writers? Whose work have you found yourself gravitating or re-gravitating toward?

Alcalay: Well, the experience of playing badminton with the 6 ft. 7 in. Charles Olson in the back yard as a 5 year old is kind of indelible. I was lucky enough to grow up having all those small press books and little magazines around the house - Black Mountain Review, Evergreen, Big Table, Yugen, etc. - and when I started exploring, these are the things that I encountered. So Kerouac, Burroughs, Olson, Creeley, Robert Duncan, Douglas Woolf, Denise Levertov, Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka - these were all familiar names. When I started writing poetry as a teenager, I sent it to Vincent Ferrini and had a great correspondence that has lasted until now, as Vincent recently turned 92! Vincent, of course, is the person to whom the Maximus Poems are addressed and, although he sometimes gets a bad rap by people who haven't read deeply in Olson because of the one famous poem in which Olson takes him to task for certain things, the fact is that Vincent is that rare poet who spans the pre-cold war political poets of the 30s and all the post-1945 trends, from the Beats to Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, New York School, and all the other inadequate labels that only get us to a section of the shelf without really letting us see the extent of the whole library.

For many years I found myself questioning this "Americanness" as against some other sense of history or collectivity that I centered around the Mediterranean and that I explored deeply but, in coming back more strongly to myself as a poet rooted in this language, I have come to see these writers with ever more resonant layers from which I feel there is always more to learn. Moreover, because of the ways in which I familiarized myself with layers of the Mediterranean, I've come to see these poets as just one recent manifestation of the incredibly complex history of this continent. These are concerns that I'm actively engaged in now - my current project is an attempt to write something akin to After Jews & Arabs but about North America; an in-depth geographical, cultural, intellectual mapping going back to its earliest inhabitants, through the settlers to our present condition, all the while using the poets as a filter for ways we might apprehend or lay knowledge out.

LRS: Going back to what you said earlier, I think the importance of NOT translating certain things is essential. On the other hand, I'm interested in your own approach to translating, given the range of materials you've dealt with, from testimonials of torture victims to poetry. How do you adapt your approach or methodology to these very different forms?

Alcalay: I think there's a lot of mystification in translation. For me, an essential element has to do with the choice of the materials and figuring out ways to somehow insulate or attempt to insulate the fate of the text. In other words, can you figure out ways to build in some of the resistances that the text might have presented to its readers in the original in its new context. The conditions will vary wildly - for example, I'm just finishing a project that I embarked upon as a group effort with some younger Arabic scholars and translators. We've translated a book of poems by a Syrian poet, also a former political prisoner, whose name is Faraj Bayraqdar. Now the language of these poems is exceedingly hard to transmit into American English because it can easily sound, at times, banal - when the poet is referring to a bird, for instance, he is at the fence of the prison, thinking about his wife and daughter, in conditions in which he hasn't had paper or a proper place to sleep for a very long time and has undergone unspeakable physical torture. The poems were sometimes written with twigs using old tea on cigarette papers, that kind of thing. So you somehow have to transfer the use of a repertoire of fairly standard metaphors from classical to modern Arabic poetry that are sometimes being employed by this poet in a conventional manner and sometimes in a dramatic manner.

One way to build in a certain readership, or a certain consciousness of the readership for a text like this is to think very hard about where such a thing should be published, what context it will appear in. Once it appears in a certain context it can provide new ways of reading other things that have appeared in that context. I would say that we managed to pull this off with the work of Semezdin Mehmedinovic, by publishing with City Lights. His work spoke to other works people might expect from a press like City Lights and created new and different resonances with those texts. It's very interesting how these things work - by publishing with smaller presses, I think I've made some of these texts matter at a point closer to production; that is, the kind of writers I identify with have gone to these sources. Had the books appeared more commercially, they would enter into the discourse at a stage further from the initial production of innovative writers and have much less of an effect, become easily consumed and so on. A perfect example of this is that the books I've translated with smaller presses remain in print while important books, like the first account of someone from a Serb camp, The Tenth Circle of Hell by the Bosnian poet Rezak Hukanovic, published by a major press with prominent reviews, is out of print. In other words, it had some immediate effect, got a nano-second of air time, and disappeared, while the other stuff has remained, and been influential in deeper ways.

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