33
Transnationalism in American poetry
Nina Kremžar
Abstract
The article researches the concept of transnationality on the basis of American theoretical
sources and tries to connect it closely to the study of modern and contemporary poetry.
Among several challenges of the transnational approach, the concept of the nation is
mentioned as an important element, in addition to global connectedness, as is the im-
portance of studying transnational contacts with all involved cultures in mind. Tomaž
Šalamun and Charles Simic, two poets who have found success and a positive reception
in the other culture, are given as examples of a transnational contact between Slovenia
and the U.S. To explain and closely study this contact, the article offers an overview of the
characteristics of both poetics, which have made both poets attractive for American or
Slovenian critics and readers. Translation, its impossibility and urgency, is mentioned as
the central activity that creates transnational moments between cultures.
Keywords: transnational, translation, contemporary poetry, Charles Simic, Tomaž Šalamun
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.111(73).09-1:81'255.4
DOI: 10.4312/an.55.1-2.33-48
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34 NiNa Kremžar
INTRODUCTION
Due to globalization, we are witness to a constant flow of capital, people, ideas,
and also literary works, which now more than ever easily and often reach other or
distant cultures. Because it is impossible in today’s world to isolate and separate
any national literature from others, literary theory of recent years has started to
turn to transnationality. If the literature in focus is American, it is most important
to remember that the U.S. represent not only an economical but also a cultural
world power that, more than any other, intensively and constantly crosses the
borders of its own nationality, and transports its cultural products to the rest of
the world. The United States of America are centered around migration – from
the very beginning, it has accepted new cultures openhandedly, at the same time
connecting them and transforming them into American culture, which is a con-
glomerate of many different cultures that are still linked together by language and
national belonging.
A transnational approach is necessary, because it “puts the focus on how those
local and national structures interact with globalizing forces that work with and
against them” (Ramazani, Lines 310). The approach is even more essential in Amer-
ican studies, since it is precisely American nationalism (including its military atti-
tude) that brings the most consequences to the entire world. The turn to transna-
tionalism in the U.S. happened mostly due to the different movements of the 20th
century that denied the idea of American exceptionalism and started to foreground
ethnic studies, feminism, and minority studies (Davis 3). However, it would be
impossible to claim that the idea of American exceptionalism and superiority has
ceased to exist. That is why “[a] complex and nuanced picture of cross-national
and cross-civilizational fusion and friction is badly needed today, and denational-
ized disciplines in the humanities may be able to help provide it […]” (Ramazani,
Transnational Poetics 355).
TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF THE U S
Most critics agree that in the 21st century, when globalization has connected the
world to the degree where data from anywhere is accessible immediately every-
where else, a transnational approach is necessary also in literature. One reason
is that literature in our time of the Internet constantly crosses the borders of
individual countries. In this scope it is also important to note that the position of
English as a global language has made it possible for literature written in Eng-
lish to be accessible to everybody who speaks the language. However, different
critics of course understand and define the term transnational differently. At this
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35Transnationalism in American poetry
moment, we will deal mostly with critics who think about transnationality in the
context of the U.S., also specifically connected to poetry.
In the introduction to Singularity and Transnational Poetics, Birgit Mara Kaiser
summarizes the idea of transnational poetics in the following manner:
Transnational poetics has emerged as a term for literary production that trans-
gresses and questions national limitations and canonization, and critical literary
scholarship is increasingly aware that the national framework of literary analy-
sis has lost purchase in this regard. (Kaiser 3)
Winifried Fluck, on the other hand, very interestingly divides transnational
movements into aesthetical and political ones. The former describe transnation-
al phenomena in terms of experience that enrich and deepen cultural contacts,
and therefore focus on fruitful consequences of cultural plurality that the U.S.
has always been constructed of (368). According to Fluck, political transnational
movements strive for political change mostly by including those most pushed-
away groups that become new political actors (373). The mentioned division
obviously exposes the double role of the transnational approach – highlighting
intercultural connections and including the periphery. In the context of the U.S.,
transnationalism could be studied from both aspects, with the second one per-
haps being the more obvious choice, since the literature of the field offers a large
number of literary-theoretical anthologies and articles that describe and put focus
on peripheral and minority groups1. Nonetheless, this article will primarily deal
with the aesthetical aspect of the transnational approach, since its purpose is to
study the reciprocal cultural influences and relations between the U.S. and Slove-
nia through an overview of poetry translations. The aim of this article is therefore
not to surpass the peripheral position of the Slovenian literary space, which might
be achieved by translating Slovenian poetry into English, but rather to offer a de-
tailed overview of the position that is occupied by a dominant (American) literary
production in this Slovenian peripheral territory, which is also a specific crossing
of national borders on both sides.
Similarly to Fluck, Shelley Fisher Fishkin mentions four different approaches
to transnationalism, which currently represents the central approach in American
studies:
1 Routledge, for example, publishes a series of literary-theoretical anthologies and monographies
under the joint title Transnational Perspectives on American Literature, in the scope of which we can
find the following titles: New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer
Culture, 1880-1930 (edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham), Fictions of Black Atlantic in
American Foundational Literature (Gesa Mackenthum), Mexican American Literature: The Politics of
Identity (Elizabeth Jacobs), Native American Literature: Towards a Spatialized Reading (Helen May
Dennis), etc.
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36 NiNa Kremžar
(1) I’ll call the first category broadening the frame, integrating U.S. history and
literature into broader historical contexts and comparative frameworks and
integrating multiple national histories and literatures with one another more
fully.
(2) The second category involves work exploring the cross-fertilization of cultures,
particularly the ways in which literature and popular culture from different
locations influence and shape each other.
(3) The third category involves exploring previously neglected transnational
dimensions of canonical figures not generally viewed in transnational contexts
before.
(4) The fourth category involves renewed attention to travel and migration. It also
involves renewed attention to how texts travel and what we learn about different
cultures in the process. This latter category of work often involves recognizing
the limitations of an English-only approach to American studies. (14–15)
As can be observed, Fisher Fishkin’s idea is not far from that of Fluck. It could
even be said that Fisher Fishkin summarizes Fluck’s concept of aesthetical trans-
nationalism in her first and second category, and encompasses political trans-
nationalism in the third category. Similar to Fisher Fishkin and Fuck, Rocío G.
Davis, the editor of The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and
Music, also defines the term transnational in close connection to the context of the
U.S. and sees it as researching “the multilayered contexts of cultural production
in and beyond the United States” (1). The one word that can be foregrounded in
the mentioned quote is beyond, which is of key importance to Davis, who believes
that transnationalism examines “the ways U.S. cultural production has been reim-
agined as a result of political and social movements in the twentieth century, how
it has traveled and been received outside the country, as well as how globalization
has shaped American sensibilities and artifacts” (1). It is exactly these aspects – the
traveling of American culture, poetry specifically, and its acceptance in a foreign
country, which is in this case Slovenia – that I put in the focus. However, this
transnational consideration of the reception of American cultural production in
Slovenia has certain demands, since “[t]hinking through the prism of the trans-
national requires us to reexamine and reconfigure the political and theoretical
frames we use to discuss texts produced in the United States and/or consider the
ways ‘American’ themes, motifs, or styles have influenced cultural production be-
yond the country’s borders” (Davis 1).
In his article “A Transnational Poetics,” Jahan Ramazani, who is one of the
main experts in the field of transnationalism when applied to poetry, provides nu-
merous examples of American poets and on that basis lucidly explains the necessi-
ty of a transnational method in poetry studies. In the introduction Ramazani first
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37Transnationalism in American poetry
points out the indisputable influences “globe-traversing” has had on the shaping
of English-language poetry since modernism until now (Transnational Poetics
332). In the scope of the mentioned process of interaction, Ramazani especially
points out individuals – poets, novelists and playwrights, but also readers, who
together form new connections and surpass the boundaries of “geography, history,
and culture” (333).
According to Ramazani, it is exactly because, in times of globalization, the
Internet and ceaseless communication, literature cannot exist solely inside one
national frame, the only possible method to deal with contemporary poetry is
transnationalism:
The main reasons why mononational constructions of modern and contem-
porary poetry do not suffice should be obvious. That many of the key mod-
ernists were expatriates and exiles, transients and émigrés, is well known and
frequently rehearsed; yet, the implications for nation-based literary histo-
ries have not been fully absorbed within institutions of literary instruction,
dissemination, and criticism, which remain largely nation-centric. Further,
the modernists translated their frequent geographic displacement and trans-
cultural alienation into a poetics of bricolage and translocation, dissonance
and defamiliarization, and this hybrid and strange-making art also defies the
national literary genealogies into which it is often pressed. (Ramazani, Trans-
national Poetics 333)
Like Ramazani, in his article “A New Beginning? Transnationalism,” Fluck finds
the reasons for the increasingly more frequent resorting of American literary the-
ory to transnationalism mostly in the fact that American studies have recently
reached an “impasse”, where, in dealing with different questions, the effects of
power actually become inevitable, which means that while reevaluating the rela-
tions between countries even more obvious peripheries are created. Transnational-
ism, on the other hand, offers a retreat from the idea of “American exceptionalism”
and transcends national borders, which seems especially appropriate in a period of
globalization (365).
However, globalization (and the related fast global flow of capital that) is
not the only reason why the approach to contemporary American poetry should
be changed. As some of the changes that put American and British poets, even
those who never left their country, into contact with “images, peoples, arts, cul-
tures, and ideas” from all over the globe, Ramazani mentions researches done
by anthropologists, who are simultaneously world travelers, the expansion of the
British empire, which controlled a quarter of land before World War I, and the
development of the U.S. into a political and economic super-power (Transna-
tional Poetics 334).
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THE CHALLENGES OF A TRANSNATIONAL APPROACH
Despite a widespread consensus of the necessity of a transitional approach and
the aforementioned inevitable intertwining of American cultural production with
the rest of the world, it is interesting to notice that a large number of critical mo-
nographies and anthologies that dealt with modern and contemporary English2
poetry in the 90s and 00s adopted national approaches rather than transnational-
ism (Ramazani, Transnational Poetics 334).
Ramazani nicely describes this paradox and the senselessness of insisting on
a mono-national approach in his article “Lines and Circles: Transnationalizing
American Poetry Studies”:
Yet we still trick ourselves into believing there can be a poem or novel or
song unambiguously ‘made in the U.S.,’ when such works, however national-
ist in ideology, are verbal machines made out of words, techniques, and ide-
as of diverse origins. Their rhythms, images, or stanzas, their characters, plots,
or narrative structures bear a multinationally heterogeneous array of traces.
For scholar-teachers in the world’s most powerful nation, often susceptible
to self-congratulatory exceptionalism, it may be especially important that we
remind our students of the myriad extranational elements migrating through
culture’s porous boundaries, lest we communicate the illusion that the literary
or cultural artifact is a smoothly unitary mirror of the massive construct of the
nation and its monadic reflection in the citizen. (Lines 311)
It could be said that the transnational approach has been given more attention in
literary theory and has been used more consistently in the 21st century; however,
new problems have appeared. Fluck, who never denies the usefulness of trans-
nationalism and agrees that its different approaches can serve several purposes,
reminds us that the transnational is always inevitably connected to the national
of which it originates, or, in other words, that the two concepts create each other
and remain co-dependent. Therefore, we can conclude that American transna-
tionalism remains exactly that – American. By claiming that it widens the limits
of understanding, American transnationalism at the same time supports the idea
of America. And since a supposition about America always exists, every transna-
tional approach will likewise be determined by this very supposition (366–37).
Moreover, the U.S. have later started to excuse its imperialism with transnational-
ism and in this way remained the same leading force in new clothes (Fluck 370).
Ramazani understands this vastness of the American canon, which is possible
exactly due to the U.S.’s leading position, both as a positive result of the “Ameri-
can multicultural openness”, but also as “an unfortunate consequence of American
2 English here meaning written in the English language
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39Transnationalism in American poetry
cultural imperialism and its need for aggrandizing self-narration” (Transnational
Poetics 344).
The U.S., surely the biggest cultural melting pot in history, is therefore seem-
ingly setting a good example for the rest of the world by emphasizing the plurality
of cultures it encompasses or by insisting that this country includes and accepts all
cultures. But when considering this idea of complete acceptance of cultural diver-
sity, it is imperative to remember that we are talking about a country where it is
also expected that all cultures intertwine in a specific way – some of their aspects
can be kept, but at the same time they all should also adopt certain characteristics
of Americanness. For example, the culture of those with Italian descent living in
the U.S. (who maintain certain aspects of the Italian culture – be it the language,
customs, food, etc.) cannot be equated with present Italian culture in Europe –
even the contact between these two cultures is transnational. Thus, it could be
said that one of the characteristics of the American cultural area is precisely the
intensive mixing of different cultures; but this does not mean that this sort of
Americanness should not be studied in full through a transnational approach and
in the context of the rest of the world.
Ramazani expresses a similar idea when he writes that it is necessary to apply
the deconstructive approach “not only to mononational narratives but also to the
distinction between indigenists and cosmopolitans” (Transnational Poetics 348).
When rethinking transnationalism (in Ramazani’s case that of modern and con-
temporary poetry), “nationality and ethnicity still need to play important roles” and
cannot be erased. Ramazani also claims that “translocal poetics” is “[n]either localist
nor universalist, neither nationalist nor vacantly globalist”, but rather emphasizes
“dialogic intersections […] of specific discourses, genres, techniques, and forms of
diverse origins”. Transnationality therefore does not mean “postnational history,”
where the author is seen as “floating free” and not belonging to any nation. Even
in times of the most obvious globalization the existence of nation states and the
influence of national cultures cannot be denied (Transnational Poetics 350).
The transnational approach therefore should not be understood unambiguously
or as a negation of some other approach. In comparison to the national model that
adopts a binary division between “self ” and “other”, the transnational approach
is heterogeneous and emphasizes “infinite differences” that do not stem from us
ourselves and thus do not oppose the equality as “dialectical negation” (Spivak
in Kaiser 14). That is why, according to Kaiser, the heterogeneous approach does
not mean denied inequality, but also not “celebrating ‘global’ harmony” (14). The
transnational approach therefore neither excludes the nation nor presumes a ho-
mogeneous cultural area, but is based on pointing out differences and the dialogue
between them. It is only with this understanding that the transnational model can
really serve its purpose.
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40 NiNa Kremžar
Another challenge of transnationalism that Ramazani points out is also its
false inclusion under the broader term of modernism, which is supposed to simi-
larly include also postcolonialism and other movements. This type of categoriza-
tion would unite different cultures into a uniform category of modernist cultures
of 20th and 21st century and in this way erase the differences between nations and
cultures. Ramazani understands the term “global” as an expression for all world
literatures as a similar danger, since in this way “intercultural friction and assimi-
lation” (Transnational Poetics 353) would disappear once again. What is more:
When using such contested terms as transnationalism, hybridization, and creo-
lization, we need to remind ourselves constantly that the cultures, locations, and
identities connected or juxtaposed are themselves agglomerations of exceeding-
ly complex origin […]. (Ramazani, Transnational Poetics 353)
As mentioned, American culture is a conglomerate of its own history and an in-
tertwinement of cultures that migrated to the country with new immigrants, and
should be researched as such. But because the U.S. has always been primarily a
cultural melting pot, defining what is “American”, specifically what is “American
poetry”, proves to be problematic at times.
Ramazani, for example, disagrees with the following explanation of American
poetry, offered by editors Stephen Burt and Alfred Bendixen in their introduction
to The Cambridge History of American Poetry:
Although our focus on poetry in the United States requires specific attention
to the development of distinctively American literary traditions, including the
role poetry played in the work of nation building and in shaping the social and
political life of the United States, we also recognize that poetry crosses borders
and boundaries, and that American verse has always existed in the context of the
transatlantic, the transnational, and the international. (Bendixen and Burt 3)
Ramazani accuses the editors of maintaining a mononational approach under
a guise of transnationality (Lines 310). He is mostly bothered by the fact that
this definition of American poetry does not emphasize the concept “American”
enough or, in other words, that the editors do not “take the poetry’s ambition to
be self-consciously American […] as an index of its value” (Bendixen and Burt
9). Ramazani warns that the editors no longer understand “Americanness” as a
concept that unites American poetry, but they rather look at American poetry in
the narrowest of senses, meaning the poetry that is written by citizens of the U.S.
(Lines 309).
Besides the mentioned introduction, in his article Ramazani also deals with
Burt’s article “Is American Poetry Still a Thing?”, which was published in the
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41Transnationalism in American poetry
same issue of American Literary History and where Burt defines American poetry
as “a more or less diverse collection of representations – some apparently trivial,
some almost holy – around shared events, chosen and brought into shared spaces,
where they might be shining for a century or a day” (Burt 276). Ramazani sees
this definition as too broad and could, as such, serve also for “Jamaican, British, or
Indian poetry – or even world poetry” (Lines 310).
If we apply the transnational approach to American (or any other) poetry, the
question whether the term “American” poetry even still exists appears sooner or
later (Ramazani, Lines 308). I am of the opinion that all national literatures main-
tain certain characteristics that are bound to linguistic, cultural, historical, geo-
graphical, social and other differences between countries, and that uniquely form
every national literature. This remains true also for American literature, which
might be the most globalized, but also remains connected to a specific (Amer-
ican) cultural area, which was formed in a unique way – through the process of
numerous migrations, the entering of new languages and cultures, and their own
way of mixing and accepting the American culture as an open one, but at the same
time one that possesses dominance precisely because of its dominance. But even
if we disregard all the characteristics that separate American culture from others,
we can, as does Ramazani, agree with Burt, who points out that the expression
“American poetry” ultimately remains useful at least as an “organizing concept, so
long as we acknowledge its porous borders” (Ramazani, Lines 312).
POETRY BETWEEN THE U S AND SLOVENIA
The theoretical overview of the concept of transnationality has made it obvious
that no poet can be placed solely in the national frame from which they originate,
but is always also influenced by movements and influences from elsewhere. “[M]
other tongue and familial, religious, and educational background” are not the only
entities that affect the “poet’s sensibility”, since it cannot be overlooked that also
new “geographic, cultural, or linguistic displacement can alter these fundamen-
tals”. All migrations the poet experiences – acquiring new languages or intense
experience of foreign cultures – shape and change them (Ramazani, Transnational
Poetics 343).
Ramazani gives famous modern and contemporary poets (Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot, Mina Loy, Claude McKay, Denise Levertov) as an example to show how
deeply and fundamentally the transatlantic migrations of experience and ideas
affected their poetics. The reverse is also true, as some foreign poets who moved
to the U.S. adopted and adapted to the American cultural tradition and became
“American poets” themselves. As Ramazani writes, alluding to Shakespeare:
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42 NiNa Kremžar
“Some poets are born to Americanness, some achieve Americanness, and some
have Americanness thrust upon them” (Transnational Poetics 344).
At this point it is important to understand that Ramazani deals exclusively with
modern and contemporary poetry also because modernist poetic techniques (trans-
national collage, polyglossia, etc.) are precisely the ones that are based on intercul-
tural enrichment (Transnational Poetics 336). Therefore, we will look at two examples
of a transnational contact between American and Slovenian poetry on the example
of two contemporary poets – Tomaž Šalamun and Charles Simic – to practically
point out the characteristics of the American-Slovenian transnational relationship.
Tomaž Šalamun is without a doubt the one Slovenian poet who has gained the
greatest recognizability in the U.S. His popularity is noticeable especially in the
plentitude of translations and publications in numerous literary magazines and an-
thologies (Maver 24). The reasons for this can be mainly found in specific charac-
teristics of Šalamun’s poetry which are in one way or the other close to the Amer-
ican poetic tradition and have made it possible for American readers to genuinely
connect to Šalamun’s poems in translation. Igor Maver also points out the necessity
of certain connections between the cultures when he writes about the critic Robert
Hass, saying that in his introduction to The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun he
excellently “contextualizes Šalamun’s poems from an American point of view and
helps the reader view his work through American eyes while appreciating his popu-
larity abroad as well” (25). This quote actually rephrases the idea of transnationalism
where one work is moved or adapted in a way that can reach the members of the
other culture, while at the same time the multicultural influences and changes stay
recognizable. What is more, Maver emphasizes those characteristics of Šalamun’s
poetry that strongly resemble Walt Whitman (e.g., “catalogues, self-mythologizing,
an emphasis on the subjective view with the ‘I’ in focus, a kind of transcendental self
as the center of the universe, and, last but not least, a profound confidence in the
power of imagination”) and thus sound typically American, and which undoubtedly
contributed to Šalamun’s popularity in the U.S. (27–28). There also exists a signifi-
cant similarity between Šalamun and T. S. Eliot, which is mostly expressed in “mod-
ernist and radically experimental poetic language” (28). We could further point out
“Šalamun’s ‘radical imagism,’ which links him, if only indirectly, with the radicalism
and the powerful imagery of the American Imagist school of poets from the begin-
ning of the century” (31). However, Šalamun did not remain only a Slovenian poet
recognized in the U.S., but, according to Brian Henry, became (together with other
foreign poets, such as Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Czeslaw Milosz and others) an
important influence on the younger generation of American poets:
The international allegiances of these young poets make them distinctly Amer-
ican: what is American poetry, after all, but the absorption of the past and the
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43Transnationalism in American poetry
present, the local and the distant, the familiar and the foreign into the mind and
heart of a poet whose music is American English? (Henry in Maver 34)
The American culture, despite being bigger and more dominant, is therefore
prepared to accept contemporary Slovenian poetry, which is capable of inte-
gration, but of course the same is even more true when the roles are reversed.
The Slovenian culture has been accepting American contemporary literature
with open hands for some time. T. S. Eliot was the first poet to receive a very
positive reception in the 1960s, but was later joined also by Alen Ginsberg,
Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder, James Tate and John Ashbery in the 1980s. When
I say positive reception, I of course mean mostly a rise in interest in the poetry
of the mentioned poets, which resulted in new translations, since the number
of translations is surely the indicator that appropriately reflects the position of
foreign poetry in the local literary area. After the 1980s, the interest in trans-
lating contemporary American poetry into Slovenian has decreased, but some
poets remain interesting for the Slovenian audience. One of them is certainly
Charles Simic – an American poet born in Serbia, a recipient of numerous
awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990, and currently one of
the more important poetic figures in the U.S.
Simic’s poetry has been translated into Slovenian multiple times. The collection
Razgaljanje tišine (Dismantling the Silence)3 was published in Slovenian in 20014 and
then again in 2016 (when the poet was a guest of the Days of Poetry and Wine fes-
tival). Likewise, the collection Izbrane pesmi (Selected Poems) was published in 2012,
when Maribor was awarded the title of European Capital of Culture and hosted
Simic. Since Simic’s Dismantling the Silence was published already in 1971, we could
say that the Slovenian translation happened relatively late, which is also recognized
by Aleš Debeljak. In his foreword to the mentioned collection, Debeljak points out
that the translations of Simic’s poetry coincide with the interest of Slovenian read-
ership (241), which could be seen as another sign of the reborn Slovenian interest in
American poetry. In the context of transnationalism, Simic is an interesting figure
both because of his personal emigrational history and because of his connection to
the Balkan culture, where an opportunity to connect to Slovenian culture arises.
Interestingly, in her critique Gabriela Babnik points out that Simic is not only an
American poet, since he “unites different voices”:
Simic, born in 1938 to a bourgeois Belgrade family, could just as well be consid-
ered a Serb, a Balkan, a Mediterranean, later, when he found himself in Paris at
3 The translated collection has the title of one of Simic’s collections, but actually includes selected
poems from several collections, published between 1971 and 1999.
4 It is interesting to point out that the poems were selected and translated by Tomaž Šalamun himself.
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44 NiNa Kremžar
fourteen years of age and was faced with the limitations of his mother tongue,
he acquired the stigma of a “displaced person”; it wasn’t until 1954, when he
arrived in the United States of America and settled in industrial Chicago, that
he started drawing his poetical face, in which the anxious experience of being
uprooted is one of its most characteristic traits. (Babnik)
The characteristics that Babnik points out in Simic’s poetry are “leaning on the
Eastern-European experience”, irony, his focus on objects, and the easiness with
which he mixes opposite elements. Veronika Šoster shares a similar idea in her
critique of Dismantling the Silence, where she writes:
[H]is poetry is the constant mixing of tragical and comical, which has a reliev-
ing effect, but also a serious and strong one; but at the same time he is comfort-
able with playing with supernatural elements, mentioning all sorts of references
from philosophy to mythology and also keeping enough distance from what is
being said, and because of that manages to tell the most bitter of stories with
taste. (Šoster)
In his foreword, Debeljak also emphasizes Simic’s “emigrant fate”, but does not
see it as the main characteristic that makes Simic’s poetry quality. Debeljak be-
lieves the thing that makes Simic’s poetry great is “the masterful asceticism in
using lyrical language where the profane easily mixes with the sacred, the comical
with the tragical, and where a love ode walks hand in hand with rebellious rid-
icule” (224). Debeljak sees very obvious influences of the American poetic tra-
dition “from Walt Whitman onward” mostly in Simic’s “spontaneously refined
language that is intimately connected to the underground rhythms of jargon and
the grandeur of street talk” (228).
It might be that the feeling of not belonging, which he experienced as an im-
migrant, made Simic develop such a sensibility for otherness, making his poetry
more accessible to a wider audience and, consequently, more popular:
The high degree of universality, which has been noticed by both professional
critics and the wider reading audience (let’s not forget that Charles Simic
is one of the most popular poets in the U.S.), originates from a constantly
renewed tension between detailed displays of situations of mostly the throb
of city life on one hand, and the focal dilemmas of human existence on the
other: this makes Simic’s poetry attractive and fresh at the same time. (De-
beljak 235–236)
However, when researching the transnational contact between American and Slo-
venian poets, focusing only on the characteristics of specific poetics that manage
to find common ground between two different cultural areas and open doors to
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45Transnationalism in American poetry
cross this boundary is not the only thing to keep in mind. As mentioned, Šalamun
was the one who prepared the first translations of Simic, and Simic took care of
translations of Latin American and European poets (Šalamun among them) into
English. This fact emphasizes two things. Firstly, personal contacts between poets,
and their personal affinity to the poetry they write essentially influence or enable
transnational contacts. Isn’t it the national poet, who is inseparably connected
to the poetry and language of their home country, the one who will in a foreign
cultural space intuitively find that type of poetry that will be positively accepted
in their country? And secondly, translation is the only technique that makes a
transnational contact even possible.
THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION IN THE SCOPE OF THE
TRANSNATIONAL
Kaiser points out that for the transnational approach translation is the most
necessary foundation, since language is an inevitable trait of every literary work,
and precisely language, which is also intertwined with other languages, demands
translation (19). But translation also presents an unsolvable paradox, since
translation “demands that we develop literacies which move between transla-
tion and untranslatability” (15). To support his claim, Kaiser uses Derrida and
his deconstructive understanding of literature as something that can never be
truly translated, but also needs to be translated constantly. Or, as Derrida writes:
“what remains untranslatable is at bottom the only thing to translate, the only
thing translatable” (257–258). This means that both the idea that translation is
impossible and “a denial of their untranslatability” should be denied. No trans-
lation is final (Kaiser 16), translation is, as is transnationality, a constant crossing
of borders.
Translations also open up another dimension, since it functions as an indicator
of “how literary texts travel around the world” (Fisher Fishkin 23). “The project
of exploring what translations and adaptations of works by American writers can
teach us about the cultures in which these works are translated and adapted has
been a particularly fruitful one in recent years” (24). In order words, taking a look
at the reception of Simic in Slovenia has taught us just as much about Slovenian
culture as it did about American, and the same remains true for Šalamun and his
position in the U.S. This transnational contact between Slovenia and the U.S. is,
as seen, reciprocal and mutually enrichening.
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46 NiNa Kremžar
CONCLUSION
Even though literary theory still often overlooks the transnational approach, the
overview of American theoretical sources discussed in this article has shown that
this is the only sensible way of studying American literature, since American cul-
ture intensely crosses its own borders, imports, and mostly exports its own cul-
tural products, which are bound to transform at the very moment when they
cross the mentioned borders. It is then only logical to assume that no country, of
course not even the U.S., exists independently and untouched by the rest of the
world. The United States of America, where the flow of people, capital, knowl-
edge, and ideas certainly is not limited to only one specific political entity, need
to be understood in the broader context of the world in its entirety. Migrations
work in all directions, and that is why only a broad transnational approach can
deepen the understanding of the past and the present (Fluck 366).
The concept of the nation offers at least an organizational if not an identifi-
catory label and cannot be entirely excluded in the transnational approach, but
needs to be carefully observed so as to identify its characteristics and boundaries,
and determine the changes that happen when different nations meet. However,
when it comes to poetry (and literature in its broadest sense), it is also true that
poets themselves “make and remake their often-interstitial citizenship” through
writing and rewriting of their works “that can span multiple nationalities and
ethnicities” (Ramazani, Transnational Poetics 354). Both Tomaž Šalamun and
Charles Simic are good examples of poets who have in the process of crossing
national boundaries acquired multinational personas.
Modern and contemporary poetry that has been and is being made in the
times of globalization is a complex transnational mosaic, created by “unwill-
ed imaginative inheritances and elective identifications across national borders”
(Ramazani, Transnational Poetics 354). To study it, we need transnationalism
that will make it possible for us “to rethink the local and the global and how cat-
egories are modified when delinked from earlier static configurations” (Davis 2).
In the framework of the transnational, translation remains the main activi-
ty that enables transnational contacts between literatures and specific texts, even
though translation is still an act that remains unfinished or that constantly tries to
reach a text that will necessarily become different through translation. Neverthe-
less, these new translations sooner or later acquire a character and life of their own
and start forming an entirely new canon, which we could also call “the literature
of the transnational” (Lim in Fisher Fishkin 21). This new canon demands its own
approach – the transnational one, which can “reveal to us the ways in which crea-
tive intelligences and critical approaches formulate more comprehensive premises
about our place and action in a complexly interlinked world” (Davis 10).
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47Transnationalism in American poetry
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Babnik, Gabriela. “Charles Simic: Razgaljanje tišine”. Online. May 31 2020.
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Burt, Stephen. “Is American Poetry Still a Thing?”. American Literary History 28.2
(2016): 27 –287.
Davis, Rocío G. “Perspectives on Transnational American Cultures.” Introduction.
The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and Music. Rocío G.
Davis (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2013. 1–13.
Debeljak, Aleš. “Anonimne usode med bogovi in hudiči: pesništvo Charlesa Sim-
ica”. Foreword. Razgaljanje tišine. Charles Simic. Ljubljana: Beletrina, 2001.
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Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Fisher Fishkin, Shelley. “Mapping American Studies in the Twenty-First Century:
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Fluck, Winifred. “A New Beginning? Transnationalism”. New Literary History 42.3
(2011): 365–384. Online. April 29 2020.
Kaiser, Birgit Mara. “Singularity and Transnational Poetics”. Singularity and Trans-
national Poetics. Birgit Mara Kaiser (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2015. 3–24.
Maver, Igor. “The Fortunes of a Slovene Poet in the U.S.: the Case of Tomaž Šala-
mun”. Slovene Studies 18.1 (1996): 19–38. Online. April 29 2020.
Ramazani, Jahan. “A Transnational Poetics”. American Literary History 18.2 (2006):
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Nina Kremžar
Ljubljana
nina.kremzar.48@gmail.com
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48 NiNa Kremžar
Transnacionalizem v ameriški poeziji
Članek na podlagi ameriških teoretskih virov razišče pojem transnacionalnosti in ga po-
skusi čim bolj tesno vezati na študije moderne in sodobne poezije. Izpostavi tudi določene
izzive transnacionalnega pristopa, predvsem dejstvo, da je kljub globalni povezanosti na-
rod nemogoče odmisliti in je vsak transnacionalni stik potrebno premisliti skozi prizmo
vseh vključenih kultur. Kot primera transnacionalnega stika med ameriško in slovensko
poezijo sta izpostavljena Tomaž Šalamun in Charles Simica, ki sta oba na svoj način pres-
topila omenjeno mejo in doživela uspeh na tujih tleh. Pregled omejenih stikov služi pred-
vsem kot oris določenih potez obeh poetik, ki so privlačile ameriške ali slovenske kritike
in bralce. Članek izpostavi še nezmožnost, a hkrati nujnost prevajanja, ki je tisti postopek,
ki sploh omogoča transnacionalne stike med kulturami.
Ključne besede: transnacionalno, prevod, sodobna poezija, Charles Simic, Tomaž Šalamun
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