Picasso is obviously the titan of twentieth century visual art, but who knew he was a writer! Jerome Rothenberg, that’s who. Along with fellow poet/editor Pierre Joris, Rothenberg has edited and assembled an English translation of Picasso’s writing into a book, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Other Poems. Lest one think that these writings are mere dabblings, consider that Picasso himself said they were an essential part of his work: “Everything you find in these poems, you can also find in my paintings.”
In advance of his appearance at the Walker, Rothenberg answers a few questions from Rain Taxi Review of Books editor Eric Lorberer. Catch Rothenberg live on Thursday Sept. 6, when he reads from and discusses Picasso’s writing in a special Free Verse presentation, co-sponsored by Rain Taxi.
Picasso’s writing is no doubt going to take many of his admirers by surprise. How did you come upon the project of researching and assembling this aspect of his work?
In the 1990s, when I was assembling Poems for the Millennium as an anthology of twentieth-century poetry, I was impressed by the amount of verbal material, mostly from newspapers, that went into Picasso's cubist collages. I was also impressed by how meaningful some of it was - the reports or stories that he was bringing together - and I was aware too of his close relationship to important poets then living in Paris: Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and so on. So Pierre Joris & I decided that we would present one of those collages as a kind of experimental poem. But the next big surprise was that, thirty years or so after analytical cubism, Picasso got into writing at full blast - a kind of writing, though it used prose as its medium, that couldn't be thought of as anything other than poetry. In 1994 Gallimard in Paris brought out those writings - both French & Spanish - in a gorgeous, richly visual edition, maybe too gorgeous and visual in fact because the emphasis on the written or hand drawn text (all very painterly) obscured the fact that he was, for a period of twenty or so years, an extraordinary, greatly gifted, and highly experimental poet. He was also, and very much in tune with his other work, an incredibly prolific writer, going at it on a day-by-day basis and with no holds barred.
Did critics or fellow artists at the time appreciate his written output any differently than audiences today?
The best known response was Gertrude Stein's - very negative or negative enough to end their already badly fraying friendship. (Viz: “Of course he who could write, write so well with drawings and with colors, knew very well that to write with words was, for him, not to write at all.”) But the younger ones of that time - the Surrealists in particular - became his de facto companions in poetry, having already recognized him as their dominant predecessor in painting. And if his poetry gave the impression of automatic writing (the key to surrealism, according to Andre Breton, but actually denied in his own case by Picasso), the form that he used - wall to wall prose without punctuation or capital letters - was unprecedented at the time of the writing. (The explicit & sometimes brutal sexuality of the work also goes beyond most of the Surrealists, with Artaud the notable exception.) As for the poetry over all, Breton wrote enthusiastically about it in an essay called “Picasso poète,” and a number of the younger writers joined in amateur performances of Picasso's play, Desire Trapped by the Tail, which did in fact become a standard piece in the experimental European repertory. And there was also a remarkable tribute from the Surrealist poet and intellectual Michel Leiris who compared Picasso's late poem, “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz,” to James Joyce's “Finnegans Wake” - a little over the top perhaps, but a clear indication of Picasso's standing as a poet.
What’s the relationship between his painting and his writing?
The poetry, it seems to me, brings back a sense of how strong his work was - both existential and political intensities that are sometimes obscured or trivialized by the recent tendency to reduce so much of it to responses to his marriages and the various women in his life, and so on (= art as gossip.) Just as a point of interest: Picasso began to write poetry in earnest at a time when one of his marriages was ending disastrously but also when Spain was on the verge of civil war and Europe was careening toward World War II. One of his most remarkable poems from that time, “The Dream & Lie of Franco,” coincides with the iconic Guernica painting, and throughout his work, both as a poet and painter, the stronger motifs (for me at least) are social and deeply psychological. In the poetry, because it’s still fresh for us, the ferocity of his approach is unmistakable.
You’ve translated dozens of literary luminaries. Were there any unusual challenges to translating a major figure from the art world?
The only real difficulty was not to be overawed by Picasso’s art world reputation and to plunge happily into his dense prose & quick changes of voice and perspective. Aside from that, the virtues of the work - the rapid shifts and the lack of punctuation that I mentioned - made it a difficult work to go through, but I was assisted on my part of it by a Spanish friend & editor/critic, Manuel Brito from Las Canarias, who checked my texts and helped me with idioms that weren't otherwise easy to interpret. I gave myself a fair amount of leeway, as I do with other translations, while sticking close to the text and what I took to be the spirit of the work. Some of the specific sound effects (internal rhymings & such) were of my own devising, but I thought that Picasso’s words gave me an indication of how far I might want to go with those. I don’t know if I always caught the meaning (nor if Picasso always did, as far as that goes) but I think I was able to give a sense of his energy and the speed of thought that seemed to characterize the work.
How do you feel Picasso’s writing might be regarded by those who seek to engage with his art–or for that matter, by those who engage with modern and contemporary poetry?
For me it furthered a reengagement with Picasso’s art - the language work playing off against the paintings and allowing me to see the art anew. In its relation to modern and contemporary poetry, I think the writing reflects some of the more radical impulses from earlier in the twentieth-century and foreshadows much that’s current now. The extreme nature of modern art is well enough known, that of poetry much less so. To find, then, a comparable extremity of language in as visible an artist as Picasso offers a chance to underscore the common project shared by many artists and poets over the last 200 years - as often as not with the poets in the lead. And still another important point that may be missed when dealing with Picasso in isolation is that the crossover between language art and visual art was shared by a number of other artist-poets of his generation: Schwitters, Arp, Picabia, Kandinsky, to name the most prominent among them. Picasso, while he largely held back from publishing his poetry during his lifetime, had like those others a strong if somewhat guarded sense of his accomplishments as a poet. So there’s the playful statement attributed to him that we repeat in our Picasso book: “Picasso once told a friend that long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: ‘”Picasso, Pablo Ruiz - Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.”‘ (Miguel Acoca, “Picasso Turns a Busy 90 Today,” International Herald Tribune, October 25, 1971) It won't happen that way, of course, but through no fault whatsoever of the writing.
If you can’t make it to Rothenberg’s talk on September 6, tune in from home on the Walker Channel. His reading will be webcast live and later archived on the site.