Let me begin by telling you how old I am. I remember the first telegraphic appliance, I remember how my father, a railway attendant, put its magic powers to his use. I remember how he used the incredulous device to communicate, to tell the attendants at the next station line when the last train had left. When the next one was going to come. No surprises, precise exchange of meaningful data; all in the sequence of the pointing finger and the telegraph’s awaiting ledge. I also must tell you that learning how to tame ‘this beast’, how to utilize its powers, was a revelatory experience; it was an initiation ritual: by acquiring the telegraphic skill, I was able to communicate with places near and far. My thoughts could reach the people on the other line. Even though most of the time I communicated arbitrary data, all in declarative mode, I felt a certain exhilaration; I felt free, I felt as if I knew them, the people on the receiving end; as if we were a part of a secret society, no handshakes yet a common sense of belonging, of knowing, of sharing.

The reason why I have decided to share this bit of autobiographical remembrance with all of you, friends and acquaintances, old and new, today, comes from my layman’s understanding of the doings and the undoings of the World Wide Web. Having told you just now of my age, obviously one with the near proximity to a dinosaur from the Jurassic era of technology, you might wonder about my inter/intra- action with this worldly communicator. How does a man my age, how could a man my age talk lightly of the Internet and its crumbling, mischievous, conniving, deviously threatening effects on literature as we like to see it: a beautifully creative art of freeing the mind, the body, the heart from all inhibitors, manly or manmade? We, men settled comfortably in the eight decade of our fruitful lives, tend to like the stability of our immediate worlds: we cherish the tactility of our surroundings. We like our books with covers we can see, with pages we can smell, with publishing rights we can attest to. We like things ‘bound’: to our sense of what is real, what is factual, what is factually created. All at an arm’s (or leg’s) length.

However, when my granddaughter went away for her studies, my wife and I depended largely on the powers of the same ‘worldly signifier’, the Internet. ‘It’ brought us news on daily basis; for the first time in a long time, we felt as if she were here, with us, sharing her thoughts, her struggles, her hopes. Day in and day out. So when she came back for the summer, and we sat down to talk and discuss the course of her work, I became that boy again, one from 60 years ago, eager to comprehend how she trusted this web. I heard of ‘websites’, ‘servers’, ‘chat rooms’, ‘virtual forums’, ‘virtual identities’, ‘chat lists’, ‘links’, ‘hypertextuality’ ‘hyperbooks’ or ‘ebooks’, all seemingly familiar words of a despairingly distant lexicon. She spoke of it with such ease and such vigor that I couldn’t help but question my up-to-then stoic view of a literary work. Poststuructuralism, postmodernism, postconceptualism, post-all late 20th century aside, I saw her enthusiasm for the possibilities of the Net not too dissimilar to my own enthusiasm for the monster telegraph, or the phone for that matter. Who would have thought that I now use a cell phone, no visible cords, wires, ‘bounds’ around.

I sat down and as most men my age, analyzed my new found trust/faith in the Internet’s creative powers. What made, what makes this too complicated for my understanding power system so ‘approachable’, what is it about this virtual fishing net that attracts millions of trout as we speak? What if any is there about this magnanimous mechanism that creates such a creatively zealous following? Is there really a creative side to its autonomous almost too plastic versatility? Does it ‘breathe’ art? Does it ‘give life’ to a meaningful story? As I look back on my countless encounters with the telegraph, I can begin to sense the viability of my granddaughter’s and countless other, young and older followers, enthusiasm for the prospects of the Web’s beneficial nature. Yet, their society is a rather public one; the only handshake is the ability to ‘connect’, to ‘stay online’. Thus, they create and recreate, assemble and reassemble units that no longer belong to them, but are a part of the whole that is never truly there. They sit in virtual cafes, drink virtual spirits, share a virtual present, but the stories they partake on are far from virtual; they are not unlike the ones we so painstakingly bind in tactile covers. They are the tales of their multifaceted lives; the stories of how they are, what they see, why they feel the way they do. Why they are angry at our prehistoric notions of ‘author’, ‘subject’, ‘work’, ‘self’.

Of course, there is the question of theft, of a real threat coming from a virtual source. The daily print is filled with stories of such incredulous frauds; people’s lifework gone in a matter of seconds, not to be retrieved. But then again, it was a human hand that reached for the virtually preserved art work, the same way another human hand (or hands) plagiarized someone’s yet to be ‘bound’ novel, collection of poems, or a handful of essays. I can’t say that I am a full-fledged convert; I do have a slew of reservations as far as the Web is concerned. And my age is the least of my ‘virtual concerns’. But then again, what is the use of our words, our thoughts, our senses if they cannot reach other people, near and far, creating a society of diversity, of friction, of exchange, virtually transmitted yet quite real communication between us and them, me and you, one and all? Being a writer whose vessel of language is a rather limiting one, I must say that I welcome the linguistic equivocality of the Internet as a good step towards the creation of such a society of amongst other literary peers. A truly good start.

The following 2 blog posts are a part of an unpublished series my grandfather, Tome Momirovski, writer and activist, has written in the past few years. He rarely writes in the medium of English, and when he does, we do enjoy it. Hence, have decided to share his thoughts with the greater English-speaking community.

In the wake of political turmoil, quaintly labeled post 9/11 sensibilities, almost everywhere we turn to, talking about the vestiges of inter/intra cultural translation, particularly those pertaining to artistic creation, seems oddly out of place. Day in and day out, the diligent reporting of the media brings to our dinner tables countless stories of old, man-inflicted abuses, now with newer faces and western names. We look, we gasp for breath, we sneer (ah, the Americans, we always knew that they were the problem!), and then, almost relieved, we assure ourselves that we are nothing like those men and women. How can we possibly be like them? We are considerate, compassionate, we create. We are Artists. We help establish cultural links, within and without our communities. We translate pages and scripts of great merit. Is, then, this singular ability of ours to ‘read between the lines’ and to ‘recognize various cultural traits’ that which helps liberate our compassion gene and makes us immune to violence and vile acts? Is it all that simple?

I have always believed that before taking the glorified ‘we’ step, and speaking in the name of one’s culture’s life and its ‘translated existence’, the individuals in question need to take a closer look at where they stand, themselves, in the grand scheme of things. In other words, what of my pluralized, writing ‘I’? How ‘culturally liberated’ has is come to be? How compassionate? How well have I ‘translated’ its, meaning ‘mine’, liberated stance?

I suppose older age affords us the liberty of publically voicing such queries, and listening to where they take us. My own quest has always strutted between what I see around me and what I seek within me. Growing older, I turned eighty-two this past April, hasn’t brought me closer to finding that magical solution to my many ebbs and flows, as a man, a husband, a father (and grandfather), a writer, a European minority. Luckily, having spent my entire life in and out of situations, experiences, events, that have required, at their best and their not so famed, a grain of translation, I have learnt that patience and reverence for the other, or others, alongside whom I have worked, debated, plain argued, could prove of good use. However, it seems that my coveted patience and embraced reverence are two old-fashioned (almost old-world) values that do not fit today’s ‘bill’. People nowadays get rewarded for their claim on the speed of things: as a result, we live in a perpetual world of Olympic proportions, running fast, jumping high, breaking bones while setting records. For what, one might ask? For a better health care system, higher wages, job security, greater tolerance towards those who think, feel, pray differently than we do? Somehow, it all doesn’t seem to add up: while we focus on achieving the speed of the moment, we breathlessly pass by the things we had entered the race for, in the first place. But who needs an olden voice, with former Yugoslavian (pre- and post- World War Two) life memories, to remind us of the traps we set ourselves up for. I keep hearing these newly coined terms: ‘multiculturalism’, ‘transcultural communication’, ‘decolonized spaces’, ‘transnational cultural denizenship’. I give my best to follow up with the debates that surround these postmodern vestiges of cultural understanding; I read, I rejoice at their successes, and I read some more; but then again, I keep having these pensioner’s doubts, if you will, I ask myself, have these pulsating and very much needed and heated debates, truly narrowed the gaped spaces between postindustrial and Third World nations, between those who have had their dinners and those with no such ‘luck’? And if they have, at least made a dent in the widening crevice, how lasting will their impact be, how sustainable their liberating thump?

Gregory Rabassa, the American translator, who over the course of the past forty years has translated into English the literary journeys of the South American cultural giants, believes that his life choice, translation, is a ‘difficult and poorly understood art’. Like good wine, well done translation gains its momentum with time, rather than out of it. More than often it proves to be a financial blunder and if done not to the particular satisfaction of the reading public, the ‘text’ dies a painful death. On the other hand, if done with some understanding and reverence for the ‘original’ material, then the words live on, taking their meaning from the present circumstances of those who choose to open themselves up to them. And, in a sense, liberated ‘cultural denzienship’ might ensue.

I can’t help but wonder, my aged existence meddling again, if at the end of the day, a good job at ‘translation’ is all we can leave behind. Our own cultural existence measured against the life-span of the various cultural ‘translations’ we have provided over the years, in print, or in voice, with our neighbors, through our children, students, fellow human beings.

When man supposedly conquered space, during the 1960s exercise into Cold War politics, the race for broadening the human potential, in all of its cultural versatility, was rapidly approaching its designated end. Today, however, we live out an immediacy, where now more than before, as one largely, dysfunctional human kind, we are on the look-out for something that will get us ‘going again’, with the similar ‘innocent gaze’ of the 1960s quest, for wider frontiers, better possibilities, greater compassion. Is ‘cultural translation’ the key to surviving a terrorizing present, and a not so bright time ahead? Can it lead us into the humanizing appeal of great classic works, such as Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, or Charlie Chaplin films, or the biblical ‘Song of Songs’? I’d like to say a resounding ‘Yes!’, but being a proponent of patience and reverence, I am going to ‘sit this one down’, and work on my pluralized ‘I’ and its cultural contribution, in and out of translated spaces. And see where it takes me.

Throughout the course of a semester in 2003 I had my preconceived views on identity (especially those focusing on the process of self-formation in a literary text) challenged, almost on an everyday basis. I have always tried to keep an open mind; however, I felt that the scholarship I encountered in a graduate level class, taught by Professor Maryemma Graham, as well as in the other two classes I was taking at the time (namely a course on modern American poetry and the graduate introductory seminar into American Studies) had pushed my understanding of one’s cultural identity and its rendering in a written work (a novel, a poem, a play) to the limits. I struggled and continue to struggle with conflicting views on the (re)presentation of one’s identity in an autobiographical act, particularly if language is key component to the realization of one’s self (or selves).

How does the autobiographing self carry itself across language as the primordial medium of self-realization, without coming off as a repetitively tricky, or even an engagingly manipulative voice?

Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts has made me think of at least one way to approach this pending question. Kingston was born and raised in an oral tradition, which influenced the choice behind her autobiographical act and the text it produced. These two (the act and its product) can be conceptualized as a spoken rather than a written performance, since Kingston attunes her voice to suit the timbre of her mother’s autobiographer, a teller of “talk-stories”.

In her essay on Kingston’s family narrative, critic Kathryn VanSpanckeren reads Kinston’s narrative “as a recasting…of a three-thousand-year-old literary tradition.” She examines Kingston’s “presentation of her work as nonfictional ‘memoirs’”, i.e., VanSpanckeren sees this conscious choice on Kingston’s behalf as being in tune with the principals of the classical Chinese canon, thus enabling the author to display her Asian heritage while foregrounding her pastiche of miscellaneous “taking stories”.

What VanSpanckeren leaves out of her singular analysis of Kingston’s autobiographical narrative is the underlying power language possesses amidst the work’s thematic density. As she carefully notices the narrative’s voicing of multifarious voices and issues pertinent to Asian and Asian-American women’s writing and women’s writing and writing in general, at the same time she does not address the importance of language in a multicultural self-actualization. Without acknowledging the role that language plays in Kingston’s performance as an autobiographer, we cannot fully encompass the author’s own understanding of the act of self-invention, as one which is guided by the dialectics of the individual’s relationship with his or her culture.

It is language that Kingston turns to in her autobiography, no matter how compromised or compromising it may be, in her search for a possible reconciliation with her family and her culture, and with her own self, something that she has done since childhood. Identity in Kinston’s heroines’ culture is not only determined by gender distinctions (Kinston’s female figures live out their lives in an engulfing patriarchy); it is also purposefully linguistic.

For both mother and daughter, language is a mode of existence, a principal act of the self-being. As Maxine approaches adulthood, her adult self emerges in her own performance of “talking story” on the pages of her autobiography, language becoming a part of her “doings”, too. Therefore, in her clearly ontogenetic casting of her self, to begin in life is to begin in language. For Kingston, there seems to be no life or language for the autobiographical self outside culture. Having her speech understood by others, she (her entire composite female self) can make her self break free of the conforming isolation that silence, solitude and unspoken of realities impose on her identity, and thus on the identities of other Chinese-American daughters.

Let us consider Kingston’s account of her list. The list is comprised of things untold, unsaid to her mother, secret, repressed, guilty questions about her cultural heritage. Her “narrative program” (confronting her mother with one item from the list a day), can be read as an act of resistance to the self-inventing practices that otherwise guide her autobiographical act. However, the list continues to grow as she tells it, the pain in her throat eventually bringing her closer to her mother. Maxine seems to be “condemned” to a life of a perpetual storyteller, almost a crazy woman unable to explain herself to her listeners. Whether we accept to look at Maxine’s list as a prototype of Kingston’s autobiographical act or not, we come to an ending of reconciliation, discovering, together with Kingston’s self, a sameness in the character of the mother and daughter as they embark on the final act of “talk-story”, now a collaborative venture. The language exhibited here allows the self to join the community of others in an act of discourse where sameness and difference co-exist, almost peacefully. That is to say, “Only when she turns to her mother’s stories and joins in talking story does she finally come to her own way of articulation. The narrator now willingly “translates” her mother’s stories, but in her own words.”

Coming full circle, Kingston’s autobiographic palimpsestic self carries itself across language with more grace and dignity than any we have encountered so far in our readings. Her product, the beautifully poetic cultural narrative as it grows out of a composite self’s individual story, resounds both in theme(s) and gesture the irreducible connectedness between the self and language in our cultural existence, a relationship which builds its strength on planes of mutual interdependency.

Myth is the story told of what cannot be told, as a mystery is the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known. The myth-teller beside himself with the excitement of the dancers sucks in the inspiring breath and moans, muttering against his willful lips; for this is not a story of what he thinks or wishes life to be, it is the story that comes to him and forces his telling.

Robert Duncan

In 1968, when Duncan’s study on the correlations existing between what we may consider to be of mythological proportions and what we may take as real, factual, life-deeming, The Truth &Life Of Myth, came out in print , the United States of America were living out a reality of war, home and abroad. This gruesome and yet by some necessary playing-out of life brought the once unified Promised Land many changes. The casualties, human and social, were numerous; some painful, other desired, needed, ground-breaking. While American youth was denied its casual post-teen existence by being shipped off in the jungles of Vietnam, Americans at home, young and older, were standing up for what they believed in, by either organizing peace-marches, burning their draft cards, challenging the segregation policies in the South, or by accepting the given, fiercely protecting what once was considered as just, rightful, in its place, no matter how hurtful or damaging it may be to the self. Duncan, who had spent most of his adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area, was not exempt from the immediate reality of the sixties. Along with the above mentioned study, he published a collection of poems under the title Bending the Bow in 1968.

The collection, that is to say, the poems in it, revolve around two main, opposing centers; on the one hand, there is the presence of the Vietnam War and the strife it created at home, and, on the other hand, there is the notion that poetry may be a passage through which one (the person/individual and the nation) may transcend this (or any other similar) disassembling pain. At the same time, neither the poet nor the poem are free of the plight of war; therefore, Duncan attempts to avoid the path of the self-righteous that many around him chose. However, following the publication of Bending the Bow is a long period of silence, or better abstinence from the resonance of publishing, until 1984, when Ground Work: Before the War was published. In this mediating period of sixteen years, a few poems did appear in print (for example, in 1970, the group of five “Passages” in a volume titled Tribunals) , but they were not meant for a broader circulation. This conscious choice on the behalf of the poet was not a solitary one, since many others around him, as well as before him, have also decided to withdraw their work from the public’s eye. With this absence he has allowed for his subsequently published poetry to speak freely of the times it rendered while still in a manuscript version. One such reverie of man and myth is “Achilles’ Song”.

The myth surrounding the champion for the Greek polises (city-states) in the Trojan War, Akhilleus (most commonly known as Achilles in the English tradition), is one of the outlining threads in the tapestry structure of Homer’ Iliad. As the greatest hero of the Iliad , Achilles is faced with the greatest of human challenges, our transience, our mortality. This burning sensation within the hero’s mythical presence, as we learn from Homer’s epic, has largely influenced the hero’s life; he is a monolithic, fiercely uncompromising individual who actively chooses violent death over life, so that he may win the glory of being remembered for posterity. As a man of unbending principles, uncompromising values (not even when his dear friends beg him to yield a bit, to save his people), he becomes a man of constant sorrow, never being able to forgive himself for having unwittingly allowed his nearest and dearest friend, Patroklos, to take his place in battle and be killed in his stead, being slaughtered like a sacrificial animal. His human sadness grows into unspeakable anger, fury so intense that Homer words it the same way he words the wrath of the gods, even of the chief god Zeus.

Duncan’s Achilles is a quiet voice seeking return, to the “crumbling shores” of what once was. He tells us that his mother, the sea goddess, had promised him, once, long ago, “the mirage of a boat, a vehicle/ of water within the water,/ and [his] soul would return from/the trials of its human state,/ from the long siege, from the/struggling companions upon the plain,/ from the burning towers and deeds/ of honor and dishonor,/ the deeper unsatisfied war beneath/ and behind the declared war,” a vessel that would be his “lover, an up-lifter of [his] spirit/ into the rage of [his] first element”. Duncan’s hero is a fallen man seeking solace, seeking a continuation in life, not a renewal of innocence, but a possibility even for an allusive return to one’s beginnings, one’s home. This new phase of Achilles is a departure from Homer’s representation of the hero’s consummation in a paroxysm of self-destructiveness. Duncan’s Achilles does not exert his brutality in a physical sense; this man does not want to eat Hektor’s flesh. The mythical hero had already done that, his rage has taken him to the depths of pain; now that the enemy is no longer the ultimate Other, he is his own worst nightmare.

The ending of the Iliad allows for the culmination of Achilles’ anger, and yet it also leaves enough room for the fallen hero to redeem his humanism. As the savage brute begins to realize the pain of his mortal enemy, the Other, he also begins to achieve a true recognition of the Self. Since the anger is at an end, so the story can end as well. However, Duncan’s “Achilles’ Song” is not a song about anger, the doomed and ruinous anger, of its hero Achilles; it a song about the possibility of life after anger, after the victorious defeat of a country’s pride, after the peace-talk agreements, after the political accords and the insignia on war documents, after the nightmares of the disillusioned self. As “Achilles in Leuke has come home” , the process of myth-re-telling is immanent, since there has come a time in a civilization’s existence when “we at once seek a meaningful life and dread psychosis, ‘the principle of life’”.

In Ancient Greek (Hellenic) epic tradition, the singer (since Ancient Greek epics are relics of a vibrant oral tradition) summons the Muse to help him tell his story. In the Iliad, the singer calls upon the Goddess to tell the story of Anger, of the ruinous and doomed anger, of the hero Achilles, which caused countless losses and woes for both the Greeks and the Trojans in the war that later culminated with the destruction of Troy. Duncan’s spiritus movens in telling Achilles’ song, in the 1960s, is a composite force, consisting of his life experience, his imagination as a poet, his words, and his actual body. He is a poet present in the words of his poem. This is not to say that “Achilles’ Song” is a poem that necessarily fulfills a personal desire, an ego-fest; rather its language draws its strength from Duncan’s sensibilities, emotions, his imagination, his experiences as a poet.

Few readers today have empathy for the Ancient Greek’s hero (as he is presented in Homer’s epic) and for his sorrow, which Achilles himself describes as an everlasting one. The present-day reader finds it easier to empathize with the hero Hektor, the champion of the Trojan side in the conflict, whose farewell to his wife Andromaha and his son (soon to become his widow and his orphaned child) is heart-breaking at every instance; however, at a closer look, the pathos of Hektor resembles the pathos of Achilles, i.e., Duncan’s Achilles. They are both in pain, one a hero forced to face his mortality and the subsequent destruction of his people, the other a man tired of facing death for all the wrong reasons, ready to surrender to his “princedom/ in the unreal, a share in Death.” However, Duncan’s Achilles moves one step further in learning to live with his shattered existence. In the beautiful incantation of this ancient hero’s present, Duncan leaves no room for utopian thinking, common for the other voices of the sixties’ counterculture. As he tries, through/in his poem, to redeem the shattered (hi)story of Achilles, by allowing it to speak, through him as a medium, he delivers us from our solitude, from our sheltered ego-focused existences, he enables us to rise to the occasion, the occasion of life merging with myth to reclaim the truthfulness of our reality as violent and as fallen it might be. The poem’s hero is us, looking for a way to appease our interrupted lives; searching for renewal. A difficult and yet life-restoring activity, of the selves and by the selves through the poetic dictum of a voice like Duncan’s Achilles.

In lieu of a formal summery to my rough examination of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible against the theoretical assumptions of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, I would like to offer a revelatory, longer passage from Miller’s 1987 autobiography titled Timebends, which poignantly reiterates my crude efforts to view Miller’s play as an enduring ‘autonomous art-form’ that expresses a critical, if circuitous, relation to social history and cultural life as we (American- or foreign-bred) take them to be. On page 348, Miller memorates:

In less than two years, as always in America, a lot would change. McCarthyism was on the wane, although people were still being hurt by it, and a new Crucible, produced by Paul Libin, opened in one of the first off-Broadway productions in New York’s history, at a theatre in the Martinique Hotel. It was a young production, with many of the actors neophytes who had none of the original cast’s finish, but it was performed this time as it was written, desperate and hot, and it ran for nearly two years. Some of the critics inevitably concluded that I had revised the script, but of course not a word had changed, though the time had, and it was possible now to feel some regret for what we had done to ourselves in the early Red-hunting years. The metaphor of the immortal underlying forces that can always rise again was now an admissible thing for the press to consider.

And, if I may add, too powerful of a ‘spectacle’ to be ignored.