The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
evident in the notion that complex thought — philosophy, in particular — is reducible to a set of key terms. Zukofsky’s use of translation, however, is not to simplify a complex and unstable original, as with Ogden’s translation of Joyce into BASIC, but to reorient its claim to value and meaning. What I will call the source text (Cavalcanti) is rewritten by means of poetic vocabulary (Marx or Spinoza) toward a target form (the text of the poem); the value of the resulting poem is a synthesis of its prior languages. “A”-9’s complexities demand a thorough account of the relation between its source text, Cavalcanti’s canzone, and its poetic vocabularies from Marx and Spinoza.47 Zukofsky’s intent is to align value in economic and aesthetic senses; poetic vocabulary is his chosen vehicle, as it is the self-evidence of words creating conditions for meaning that brings out ethical possibilities of language as agency. As Zukofsky’s text famously begins:
An impulse to action sings of a semblance
Of things related as equated values,
The measure all use is time congealed labor
In which abstraction things keep no resemblance
To goods created; integrated all hues
Hide their natural use to one or one’s neighbor. . . . 48
The poem claims an equivalence not only between use and value but between the language of the poem’s argument and its critical force — as both opaque and transparent.
Zukofsky seems to be trying, in a series of controlled textual experiments, to create that moment of polysemy in which new meanings are produced in the expansion of language (or many languages), with the proviso that these meanings will turn out to be just the words themselves. He continues this project in his translation of Catullus, which moves from a mode of translation that bears a transparent relation to its Latin original to one where the translated text is almost entirely opaque, masking any relation to the original standing behind it.49 In Catullus, the linguistic distance from source text to target form is stretched to a virtually unrecognizable degree. The Latin original virtually becomes nature to language’s science; through the application of poetic vocabulary, a kind of curve fitting of sound and meaning results in which American English in all its idiomatic complexity is twisted to approximate the sound and meaning of the original Latin:
Quiddity, Gelli, quarry, rosy as these too lips belie
they burn defiant, candid hoar snow renewing
morning to homecomings, exit come too active a quiet or
a mole longing resuscitate eighth hour of day? . . .
Quid dicam, Gelli, quare rosea ista labella
hiberna fiant candidiora nive,
mane domo cum exis et cum te octava quiete
e molli longo suscitate hora die? . . .50
Zukofsky’s layout of originals and translations on facing pages, both equally unreadable, recalls the juxtaposition of Finnegans Wake with its BASIC translation.51 Unlike BASIC’s concern for the transparency of scientific language, however, the objectivity of science for Zukofsky authorizes seeing language as a material sound shape rather than as a conveyor of meaning, providing an opposite basis for an epistemology of translation that structures its values into the material fact of the opaque language that results. The beauty of this synthesis for Zukofsky is that it unites material culture, where the many languages of Babel surface through the text, with standards of scientific objectivity that guarantee a universal value for poetry. What Zukofsky avoids, in these pathbreaking uses of poetic vocabulary, is the normative value for form that has made poetic diction a dead letter ever since Coleridge’s original formulation. Zukofsky’s poetry is as sublime as a case full of printer’s dingbats translating a revelatory notation for the theory of relativity.
MAC LOW’S LEXICONS
From the 1950s on, the postmodern poet Jackson Mac Low has developed numerous literary and performance strategies for employing the constructive potentials of poetic vocabulary, and he frequently uses vocabularies taken from the BASIC word list, among other sources. In a correspondence following the original publication of this essay, Mac Low questioned the label “postmodern” for his work.52 There are important periodizing distinctions directly resulting from the difference between a modernist use of poetic vocabulary (such as Zukofsky’s) and Mac Low’s, however. While Zukofsky’s work with poetic vocabulary was directed to the composition of formally autonomous texts, Mac Low’s chance-generated poems and texts for ephemeral performances argue for more contextual values. Zukofsky and Mac Low both enact a cultural politics based on a language-centered critique, but in Zukofsky’s work critical values are equated with the irreducible autonomy of the text while Mac Low’s insists on interactive, collective strategies for their realization. In the textual weaving of Bottom: On Shakespeare, for instance, Zukofsky thought he had “done away with epistemology” and achieved a condition of textual practice where “the words are my life.”53 While equally involved in a life of words, Mac Low continually exploits the difference of texts from the real-time, historically specific conditions of their performance. Zukofsky produced an epic poem, “A,” that represents language and culture in the unfolding structure of autonomous form; Mac Low has written a large number of experimental works that include the possibility of their realization outside the confines of the text, but he has by no means contemplated an epic.
Mac Low’s poetry addresses the historical expansion of meaning in using poetic vocabularies derived from specific source texts and organized in target forms. But where for BASIC and Zukofsky the ethical consequences of poetic vocabulary are in its relation to the natural or cultural object status of its referents, the ethical consequences of Mac Low’s work, even when purely aleatorical, are in how they are to be performed in real-time situations. Such formal procedures for the generation of poetic vocabulary are evident in Mac Low’s 1955 “5 biblical poems,” which comprise his first composition of aleatorical or chance-derived poems by what he has more recently called “nonintentional” means.54 Mac Low converts the text of biblical narrative by means of ostensibly value-neutral, random procedures into a disjunct text that provides, in turn, the basis for its final realization in performance. In translating the Old Testament into sequences of vocabulary and ellipses (to be performed as temporal gaps), Mac Low transforms the authoritative original into a source text that produces the target form of the printed text. This text becomes, in turn, source text for the final target form, the work’s performance. In what appears to be a reenactment of the textual project of romantic hermeneutics, the horizon of the text’s “original” meaning can thus only be realized in the historical act of the poem’s reinterpretation in a way that fuses the horizons of the original language of the Old Testament, the interference of the printed version, and the contemporary meanings of what has now been rendered as a neutral and pseudoobjective poetic vocabulary:
For the utmost saying . . . 55
Where Zukofsky’s “Thanks to the Dictionary” draws meaning in to the opacity of textual form, Mac Low’s work pushes meaning outward via performance. Each target form will be realized at a point in time after the initial work on the source text, making both source text and target form historical. While the realization of the first target form (the printed text) involves the indeterminacy of chance procedures, that of the second target form (its performance) will be open-ended, the result of guided choices among performance options that Mac Low gives, in the 1985 version of his Representative Works, in a preface that accounts for the poem’s history and specifies parameters for its future. Mac Low’s use of the preface, like that of American modernist poet Laura Riding but to constructive rather than obfuscatory ends, is a constitutive part of his poetry. His work exists in a series that begins with the act of poetic composition from original source text to stages of realization and performance, augmented by interpretive framing and publishing history.
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