Turning Gas into a Solid: On Poetry and Translation with Sylee Gore and Aya Nabih

Berlin-based Indian American poet, Sylee Gore, is interested in synthesis. Her work is an amalgamation of radically different traditions with an acute attention to form. This attention manifests in her translations, visual art, and poetry, the latter tracing its lineage to the Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets, canonical poets, who, in her words, are best known for their harmony, rationality, and balance. But there’s also, almost always, theory at work in her poetry. She credits this to Language poets whose postmodern poetic philosophy emphasizes the reader’s role in manifesting meaning.
Gore’s debut chapbook, Maximum Summer, published with Nion Editions in March this year, is about photography, motherhood, heritage, light, and the city – a collection of brief prose poems fascinated with what photographs make of time and space, and how a writer tries, and often fails, to capture the rapidly shifting landscapes of childhood.  
Egyptian poet and translator Aya Nabih translated her poem, “Early July/I’ve Forgotten A Pen” from the collection for Rusted Radishes, which will appear in Arabic on the webzine. Nabih preserves Gore’s meticulous attention to the world and to her newborn, and the poetic rigor with which she examines them. The verbs in the poem are investigative and curious, and the images are laden with contrasts. These contrasts – of silence and language, dispossession and witness, heritage and new life – are deftly observed and preserved throughout. 
In a conversation with her, Nabih says that Gore’s “rapid movement from one shot to another, as well as the indirect relationships between image and moment” required her sensitivity as a translator to keep her intervention as “a whisper in the backdrop.” In this role, Nabih aims to be as invisible as possible, to stay true to the logic and heart of the poem. Nonetheless, Nabih accepts that something “always remains lost in both writing and translation”:  

I compare writing to a ball of tangled yarn; the idea of a text is searching for the end of the string. I might be able to reach the other end of the string and look at the neatly arranged ball of yarn, or it might get more complicated, and so I may decide to stop trying with this ball, at least for now. There are never guarantees. 

Part of the weaving process for Nabih’s translation includes addressing Gore’s sensitive questions: What changes from one month to another? What doesn’t? How does that shape our frame and the words we use to make meaning of what is within and without the frame of the poem? It’s true that Gore’s work requires reading and rereading; there are connections and questions she often leaves us to make and ask on our own. Meanwhile, the architecture of stanzas serves as a sturdy structure for a series of snapshots that help the reader navigate the relationships between photographer and image, mother and child, seasons and a city. 
Rusted Radishes will publish the translated poem, along with a brief Q & A with the poet herself on her creative process, how she differentiates between the art of translation and the art of poetry, and what it has meant for her work to be translated, or rewritten, into the Arabic language. 

–Nur Turkmani
Contributing Editor at Rusted Radishes

A brief Q & A with Sylee Gore

1.What do you think of the claim that “all writing is a form of translation”?

It’s my own work as a translator that has allowed me to become a practicing poet. Over the years, I learned to detach meaning from language and hold it aloft for a bare second before it finds other words. (Sometimes this process takes longer, moving through proxy forms that demarcate its boundaries.) Writing poetry is standing at a crossroads of music and that yet-unphrased meaning.

2. You are a translator and poet. What differences, in process and creation, do you experience when you translate a text versus when you write one “from scratch”?

My translations to date are in the creative realm of chiefly nonfiction – yet a nonfiction that is deeply poetic, allusive, gossamer, still. Art writing is its own magic show, and every essay needs its own voice, just as every catalogue makes its own meaning, plays a different role. To me, translating is nothing like writing poetry (I write this in conscious direct contradiction of my previous answer!) because the starting point comes from someone else and not myself, and there is little choice in what I receive. The translation begins with language. Poetry begins in a long phase of silence that precedes language. That brainwork of a poem before you’ve even caught the rhythm or major sounds or length or form – to have all those decisions made for you – this lets translation be a sort of gallop across a defined countryside, taking a series of fences and ditches in split-second decisions and thinking always of the goal, the silent audience waiting at the end of the race, who needs to understand the energy of this journey. 

Writing poetry is wholly different – it’s a process of distillation and extraction, of turning a gas into a solid. 

3. It is often said that it is hard, maybe even impossible, to translate the rhythm, culture, and voice of a poem from one language to another. How do you navigate that when translating poems? Does translation feel like a form of re-writing?

I think this is no truer for poetry than it is for other text forms (though people might say it is). It would be a pity if a poem might never meet a readership because their meeting is necessarily imperfect. The poem is already an imperfect thing. Perfection is an enemy of the creative force. 

4. Why did you want your work to be translated into Arabic? How does it feel to have your work in a language you do not have access to?

To be translated is a great privilege, one I’m grateful to be given. I loved your [Nur’s] recording of the Arabic translation. Listening to it let me tune into another level of meaning I hadn’t picked up on when reading my English original. Suddenly, I noticed how the hesitation of the opening sections gives way to a more fluent pace, revealing how the speaker settles into the amplitude of poem and moment. I was astonished to realize how much sheer sound – though I do not understand the individual words – can convey. 

A chain of connections led to this translation. That speaks to the importance of relationships in poetry. Our friend Mai [Serhan] connected us to Sara Elkamel, who recommended Aya [Nabih]. Aya asked me perceptive and sensitive questions as she was translating. I remember your and Mai’s excitement when we received her version. This process makes moving my words into another language feel like an intimate act.