Context and Culture: Breathing Technique by Marija Knežević

Daniel E. Pritchard
| Reviews

 

Then there are recurring references to the global south, which risk fetishizing the otherness of these cultures, deploying them as ornamentation. This stanza from “Casa,” for example, seems to dehumanize by placing foreign visitors to an international festival in a list with stray animals:

The women flung African flowers from their dresses,
India arrived, a Brazilian round dance spun like a thistle,
A dog strolled in, a tomcat sat down on the mat.

There’s a lot of that slippage, even in poems that are otherwise effective. In “The Inca,” written with clear empathy from the retroperspect of a Columbian-era indigenous person, she describes “trained snakes / And the regal bowls with noble poisons.” It’s an image that could be taken straight from Said’s Orientalism. In “Morning Coffee,” she asks, “Does it bother you that you’re a Black man / or are you agonizing that your white skin is 102 years old?” Then, in “The Spirit from the Gas Bottle”:

Toward the world’s shore therefore floats heavy news of another country
Which those exhausted from hunger come from, or souls released
From bodies the marine population feeds on. The Mediterranean’s
Tender digestive tract is a bubble of the indigestible before a shooting.

These poems reach for the balance between irony and candor, between provocation and empathy, but they too often miss the mark (at least, in the English). She deploys these touchpoints of otherness too much like “a gesture / of selecting / in a souvenir shop” even if, in the end, she wants to say something about both the gesture and the shop.
I hesitate to attribute too much of my reading to the fact that this is translated work. It’s important to engage with a new writer in another language with humility and an open mind, just as it is when you encounter a new writer in your native language. Poet, translator, theorist, and publisher Johannes Göransson has described an American fear of “the reader who is overtaken by the foreign, influenced by the foreign, counteracts this centripetal enforcement of monoglossic standards of reading and writing.” We give in to this fear by treating all translated work as if it were beyond comprehension without a thorough, scholarly, official knowledge of the originating context and culture.
As a reader, I am more comfortable situating myself in a neither-nor position. While a certain amount of context can help me engage with poems, human art is also intelligible through the individual experience with the object alone. Poems are not merely puzzles to be unlocked by historical knowledge. Still, different language cultures have distinct norms, traditions, and tonal ranges. No doubt my reading of Knežević is shaped by all of these. I’m drawn to some poems and puzzled by others because I’m unfamiliar with Serbian culture and because every poet’s work presents, on first encounter, a chance to transform my reading practice by examining those experiences of familiarity and puzzlement.
All poetries take certain risks. As a poet of the public sphere, Knežević engages history, societal tropes, politics, and ethics. When the poems are effective, they offer complex new visions and insights. The reader’s view of the world is refreshed. When they don’t work as well, the poems can become didactic, sound almost like propaganda, or even reinforce the tropes that they intend to critique. They stand on opposite sides of a mirror. It’s impossible to achieve the successes without wagering them against the failures.
“Her course is full of consideration and therefore meandering,” Knežević writes of the river. The same is true of this volume. It travels from the politics of family relationships to the possibility of global literature, through complicated social ills, across the failures and triumphs of public and private love. It examines the risks inherent in the borders we create: between one language and another; between my experience and my self-awareness; between the individual and society; between the author, the translator, and their reader.

Daniel E. Pritchard is a writer and translator as well as the founding editor of The Critical Flame. His work has appeared in Pangyrus, Response, EuropeNow, SpoKe, Harvard Review Online, Missouri Review Online, Anomaly, Kenyon Review Online, LARB, and elsewhere. He lives in Greater Boston.

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