Damion Searls is the author of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, a collection of short stories published last year by Dalkey Archive. He’s also an accomplished translator of, among others, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jon Fosse, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Marcel Proust. Everything You Say Is True (Agua Bonita) is an aphoristic travelogue; his poetry is forthcoming in The Paris Review. Most recently, he’s edited Henry David Thoreau’s Journal for New York Review Books.
Last summer, the Review of Contemporary Fiction published ; or The Whale, his re-edited version of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or The Whale. In this project, Searls reversed the editing of Orion’s Moby-Dick in Half the Time, an attempt to summarize Melville’s masterpiece: Searls’s version consists only everything the Orion editor excluded – down to, as the title suggests, the level of punctuation. This turns out to be much more interesting than you might expect. It’s hard to read this book and not start wondering why it is that we read what we read: when you hear the title “Moby-Dick,” you think of an idea about a story – whalers going to kill a whale – but it turns out that’s a very different thing from what’s actually in Melville’s book. Searls’s act of re-editing proves there’s life left in Moby-Dick, even if it is over 150 years old.
I liked Searls’s acts of translation so much that I peppered him with questions, which he kindly took the time to answer.
—Dan Visel
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Dan Visel: Looking around, it seems like there’s a huge amount of odd translation going on – right after your ; or The Whale came out, a proposal for an emoji Moby-Dick popped up on the Internet (a project which seems to have been funded, so it may actually appear). There’s also been Conservapedia’s insane effort to retranslate the Bible from the original King James Version to remove perceived liberal bias; more interesting might be R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is of course one of the few publishing success stories of the year. Wandering through Barnes & Noble the other day, I discovered that SparkNotes has released a facing-page translation of The Scarlet Letter for illiterate students. It’s easy to add to this list.
I don’t mean to compare these to your own creative endeavors: obviously they’re aimed at very different markets, and have very different artistic intentions (if they have any). But one is tempted to suggest that there’s something of a boom in translation going on, even if it’s not the sort of translation that PEN would be encouraging. Do you think that there’s a reason right now to revisit past works in this way? Publishers have been bemoaning the death of books for a long time now, but statistics show the sheer number of books that get published every year rises every year. Even without a decline in the number of readers, or the number of books each reader reads, this means less attention per book. Does it make sense for writers to go back to works that readers have already invested time in?
Damion Searls: I think the crucial thing that makes these projects interesting or not is the relationship between the new text and the implied reader’s earlier experience with the original text. They work if they’re addressed to re-readers, if they set up an interesting tension between the reader’s memory and feelings about the original and his or her encounter with the new one. Think how great a facing-page rewrite of The Scarlet Letter would be if Lydia Davis or William Gass or John Ashbery wrote it! That’s because it would assume that its readers already knew the original in one way or another. It assumes a literary culture where there are books people know.
The emoji project marks an important step forward in at least one way: someone told me he thinks one reason my Melville project got so much attention is that journalists and literary critics like to make dick jokes, and I think he’s right. I certainly courted that kind of attention myself, by landing so hard on the Adam Gopnik quote (the Orion edition as “all Dick and no Moby,” mine as “All Moby, No Dick”). Emoji-Dick makes progress, by punning on the other half of the title!
Other than that Emoji-Dick doesn’t seem very interesting. If ; or The Whale isn’t enough for you, or if on the other hand it’s 46% longer than you want, I recommend Four Percent of Moby-Dick, which is every chapter of Melville’s novel run through Microsoft Word’s auto-summarize feature. Those Conservapedia people are demented and stupid, it is not worth any more of our time to talk about them, but of course you can do interesting procedural translations of the Bible – Jackson Mac Low’s first works composed by chance operations were his five biblical poems.
Dan Visel: One of the first things you realize when you read Melville in any depth is that there’s a long line of bizarre secondary Melville literature. A short list: Jay Leyda’s Melville Log, an immense collaged timeline of the events of Melville’s life and books; Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael and C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways which both start as criticism & end up personal narrative; and Melville’s great-grandson’s Paul Metcalf’s Genoa, which builds a novel out of quoted bits of Melville’s works, the life of Columbus, and the Bobby Greenlease kidnapping. More recently, there’s been Herschel Parker’s re-editing of Pierre to make it less autobiographical (with decidedly adult illustrations by Maurice Sendak); POLA X, Leos Carax’s pornographic adaptation of that novel for the screen; and, in the past year, Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary, an alphabetized collection of prose poems on Moby-Dick‘s themes. You could even take this out to tertiary literature: there’s the Clare Spark book from a couple years ago studying Melville’s reception, where she argues that Melville originally intended Ahab to be the hero of Moby-Dick, but that this was camouflaged by the members of the Melville renaissance who were afraid of political repercussions.
Your Moby-Dick seems to fit perfectly in this tradition, revealing the weirdness inside a book everyone thinks familiar but which probably isn’t read as much as everyone imagines. My experience with the book is probably similar to most people’s: I remember reading an illustrated version for children when I was very young, then excerpts in a text book in high school, but not actually reading the whole book until I got to college, where I was astonished at how deeply strange a book it is. So why Melville? What is it about his writing that suggests such responses? Would this project have worked for other authors?
Damion Searls: Excellent list! I knew most of those, but I didn’t know Clare Spark’s book was out. Don’t forget Sendak’s earlier book Pierre (“I don’t care!”), which he has said was because he wanted to write a book with the same title as one of Melville’s but couldn’t find a good rhyme for Omoo. And you’re right. In another interview, I placed ; or The Whale in the tradition of chance-method or deterministic-procedure poetry, but it’s absolutely in the tradition of crazy Melvilliana too. Melville drives people to insanity, or attracts them. Pierre is even crazier, and I’d have to say my favorite Melville novel: POLA X (Carax’s movie) was if anything too straightforward, not crazy enough, though I thought it was great.
I definitely never considered producing the other half of Anna Karenina in Half the Time, or Mill on the Floss in Half the Time, or any of Orion’s other products. It was Melville about whom I felt that the digression, texture, and weirdness – everything other than the taut story arc – were essential.
Dan Visel: Reading through your Moby-Dick, I found that most of the scenes and passages that I remember most strongly from the book (it’s probably been six years since I’ve read it straight through, which is too long) were still there – chapter 42 on the whiteness of the whale was there entirely, the weird transcendentalist moment where the men are all squeezing sperm, most of the narrative of Pip. The Moby-Dick I like best is the Moby-Dick of digressions – where Melville wanders off from the plot & does interesting things: it’s fairly similar to the Moby-Dick you’ve made.
Damion Searls: That makes you the ideal reader of ;! More than me in a way. A lot of what I remembered about Moby-Dick turned out to be in the Orion edition, and so not in ; : Ishmael sounding his pockets with grappling-hook fingers looking for some spare change, most of the doubloon chapter, the cannibalistic shark eating itself which symbolizes American democracy.
Dan Visel: One of the things that this project makes evident is how many different versions there are, both mental (how we remember Moby-Dick, whether that’s the plot or not), but also physical. How do you feel about Orion’s editing of Moby-Dick? I assume that working on this book must have meant that you were probably the best reader that edition ever had. Could you understand where they were coming from & how they were editing the book? Do you feel any respect for their Moby-Dick or a sense of kinship with that unknown editor?
Damion Searls: I wouldn’t say I have the highest respect for Moby-Dick in Half the Time, but I have nothing against it either. The abridger did a great job! I mean, it’s a little crazy to set out to do that to this particular book, which is all about digression and weirdness, but whoever the abridger was did fine. In terms of where they were coming from, I assume it was a freelance assignment on orders from the marketing team.
Dan Visel: Your Moby-Dick could be read as having formal similarities to Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry – for instance, Day, where he typed in every word of a single day’s issue of the New York Times. Is there a link between what you’re doing and what he’s doing? My sense is that you’re coming from different places and ending up somewhere similar.
Damion Searls: I’m curious why you say that: my first reaction, reading your question, was: What do you mean we’re coming from different places? I like Goldsmith’s work a lot, and am one of the probably few people who bought Day and read it (not the whole thing). I do see ; or The Whale in the tradition he’s working in.
Dan Visel: My sense is that Goldsmith’s aesthetic is coming out of the visual arts: he sees language as something like the visual since the photographic, something that can be appropriated. Where he ends up is poetry – I think his work meshes nicely with the concrete poetry being done in this country in the 1960s, often by people who are best known as visual artists – Jackson Mac Low, Carl Andre, Emmett Williams, Dick Higgins – and it’s historically been given short shift in the poetry world, maybe because it’s “intermedia” & not fully one thing or the other.
Damion Searls: Interesting. I think I underestimate conceptual poets’ roots in the visual arts; I never think of Mac Low as a visual artist. So you’re probably right, that Goldsmith and I are coming from different places. I have written a lot about painters and other visual artists, but I come from a readerly set of interests, and may be misreading Goldsmith et al. as more firmly based in that readerly world.
Dan Visel: There’s been something of a hardening of the boundaries between genres in the past twenty years or so – a surprising number of younger fiction writers don’t seem to be interested in poetry at all (and vice versa, though I’m not sure if the poets are as actively anti-fiction); there’s a general scorn among writers for the visual arts. Your broad range of writerly activities seems to delight in crossing boundaries: if forced to, how would you classify yourself?
Damion Searls: I’d pick a classification that’s not too restrictive, like “man of letters.” I have the same sense as you that the boundaries have hardened, which is too bad – and I’d add one more boundary too, between writer and translator, which is endemic in the English-speaking world. Everywhere else, the major writers are all translators: Borges, Murakami, Singer, Rilke. . . . Elfriede Jelinek spent a decade translating Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s hard to imagine Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison or even V.S. Naipaul doing that.
It must be at least partly for commercial reasons; didn’t Elmore Leonard say “I wake up every morning and thank God in Heaven that I’m not a poet”? He’d sing another hymn he’s not a translator, if he knew.
Dan Visel: Did the experience of re-editing Melville inform your edition of Thoreau’s Journal? Obviously these are two very separate things: Melville’s novel was meant to be a unity, an intention which I assume Thoreau never had; with the journals, length is a problem an order of magnitude past Moby-Dick. How do these projects relate in your head?
Damion Searls: Chronologically the Thoreau project came first, even though it was published second: I proposed it in 2005, got down to real work in 2006, and went through round after round for years. Melville only took a couple months, mostly in 2008. So Thoreau informed Melville, not the other way around.
One thing the Thoreau project did was reinforce my lack of problem with Moby-Dick in Half the Time: I mean, I would be quite the hypocrite to complain about Orion while producing Thoreau’s Journal in a Tenth the Time myself! That’s my kinship with the Orion editor, which you asked about before. The other thing is that ; or The Whale gained a certain extra credibility from the fact that I’m a serious editor with this other, respectable American Renaissance book. At least I think it did – maybe no one really cared about my credentials.
I do disagree with your point about unity. Melville’s novel may have been intended as a unity (did he succeed?), but in any case Thoreau’s Journal is a cohesive, unified work – inherently serial and impossible to finish, but definitely an aesthetic and philosophical whole. It’s all about the relationships between whole systems: how the seasons affect water levels, how animals propagate seeds, how one growth of forest trees succeeds the previous one, how the lake affects the shore or the river the riverbanks, and, most centrally, how what Thoreau was doing and what Nature was doing, day by day, affected each other. In fact, this unity was always the guiding concept of my Thoreau edition: it’s not a selection of excerpts and “good bits,” which has been done before, but an abridgment of the whole.
Dan Visel: Turning now to What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going: what’s your relationship with the original stories there? Does the narrator in “A Guide to San Francisco” reflect his author when he says:
I feel that this is the only sense of art: to create an inner universe we prefer to the other one. If I could write enough and make it true enough then perhaps I could have what I write before my eyes always. After looking at enough van Goghs you go out into the world and everything seems like a van Gogh, and what else is Paradise? (p. 81)
Damion Searls: Yes. Joe Brainard wrote “Art to me is like walking down the street with someone and saying ‘Don’t you love that building?’ (Too)”
The original stories aren’t necessarily my world’s-favorite stories, or sometimes even my favorite stories by those writers, but they’re the ones that got me going, set me dreaming. They’re the ones I reacted to by thinking that that was a form I could use to write about something I wanted to write about.
Dan Visel: At the beginning of “The Cubicles”, the narrator, summing up his time in the cubicles, says that he thinks of himself “as a writer who responds, describes, rereads and rewrites, not as a writer with something inside himself that he tries to ‘express’” (p. 43). Towards the end of the same story, the narrator, who we sense is running away from his vocation, describes himself in a moment of crisis: “In the meantime there I was, a tolerably good editor instead of a tolerably poor writer, as old Hawthorne would say. That was all” (p. 59). We don’t know what happens to this character after the story, but we assume, from the evidence, that he becomes a writer after leaving the cubicles. Is the problem of coming to writing one of recognizing that writing creatively is more a process of editing & refracting what’s in the world rather than creation from nothing?
Damion Searls: That was the problem of coming to writing for me. I always felt like a describer, not an inventor – like a rewriter, not a writer. (A Borges comment consoled me: that he saw himself as a mediocre writer but a great reader.) What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going was my finding a way to make that style of creativity work for me, to use it as a strength, not a weakness, since in any case it’s all I had.
Dan Visel: Who should your reader be? What do you expect out of your readers? I ask because the stories in What We Were Doing are demanding: re-reading is fruitful, and a second or third pass pays dividends because the reader notices linkages between the stories, which had previously seemed to be separate. Another set of meanings is unlocked only if the reader tracks down the original version. I’m not suggesting that this isn’t a pleasant & immediate book – it certainly is, and it seems possible that a reader entirely unfamiliar with any of your sources could enjoy it as a book. These stories rewrite stories you’ve read: as an author, are you presenting yourself to the reader as a model of what reading should be? Is the ideal reader a translator?
Damion Searls: Is “demanding” the right way to put it? That sounds so Protestant and bossy. Books shouldn’t expect anything of their readers. (Frank O’Hara: “Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too.”)
Not so much that you need to re-read, as that the book is rich enough to pay more and more dividends no matter how much time you put into it: that’s the goal. Not that the good stuff is buried under layers you have to “work at” to dig through, but that there’s good stuff all the way up to the top, and all the way down.
I certainly wanted it to more than “seem possible” for readers to like the book if they’re totally unfamiliar with my sources – or unaware that the stories have sources at all. That’s why I acknowledge only at the end. The connections to the sources are like extra secret passages that you can explore or not, it’s up to you. I read like a translator, or maybe write like a translator, but I don’t have any desire to impose that style on anyone else.
That said, I do think there is a place for making demands on readers. But it’s the culture, not the books themselves, that should make demands. Saul Bellow has several little asides in his middle and later books about how lawyers and businessmen and doctors used to have to be able to say something intelligent about Stendhal or whomever, it was just part of the expectations of the culture – not any more. So when I read things online about how no one should finish a book they’re not enjoying, I used to agree, but now I’m not so sure. For example, I’m having a hard time finishing The Charterhouse of Parma, but you know what? I think cultured people should have read The Charterhouse of Parma, so I should soldier on and finish it. Partly because I love other Stendhal books and will enjoy them more once I know how they relate to this one, but also because it’s the right thing to do.
Harold Bloom had a kind of great interview in Vice, of all places, where he said that literary culture still exists and is accessible and available, it’s just that you have to want it and work to achieve it yourself. There’s no outside pressure from school or the workplace to push you there. That outside pressure was a good thing.
Dan Visel: It’s easy to deduce from your published work a set of writerly influences: most of them, for better or for worse, are in the past. Is anybody doing things now that you find interesting?
Damion Searls: Sure, lots of people. It’s just that the past is so much bigger than the present. If you don’t have a presentist bias, if you’re drawn to the good stuff, then a lot of it will be old. It’s nothing personal.
—I say that, but maybe I’m just being coy? It’s possible that our access to the two kinds of writers is different, and I only want to read people with an imprimatur, a weight of acceptance and integration into the tradition. Or maybe there’s something qualitatively different about past writers and present writers. In the Proust book I recently translated (On Reading), he argues against the position I just took, so let’s end with him:
In their taste for and enjoyment of reading, great writers are very quickly drawn to the classic books. They themselves generally believe that this predilection is fortuitous – they assume that the most beautiful books simply happen, by chance, to have been written by older authors. And of course this may be true, because the older books we still read have been selected from the entirety of the past, so enormous compared to our contemporary age. But an accidental and arbitrary reason like this is not enough to explain such a general cast of mind. I attribute this predilection that great minds have for older works to the fact that those works contain more than just the beauty which the spirit that created them put into them. Contemporary works have that, but older works have received another, still more moving beauty from the fact that their very material, I mean the language in which they were written, is like a mirror held up to life. A little of the happiness we feel in walking around a city like Beaune, which preserves intact its 15th-century hospital complete with well, wash-house, vault of painted and paneled timber, the roof with high gables pierced by dormer windows and crowned with delicate spikes of hammered iron – everything there that the age left behind, so to speak, when it disappeared; all the things that must have belonged to that age alone, since none of the ages that followed witnessed the birth of anything like them – we feel a little of that happiness again when we wander in a tragedy by Racine or a volume by Saint-Simon. For they contain all the beautiful, obsolete forms of language which preserve the memory of usages and ways of feeling that no longer exist, enduring traces of a past unlike anything in the present, whose colors only time, in passing over them, has been able to enhance.
