‘The sum of all my sins’

March 10, 2014 In a sense, when she speaks about her poetry, she speaks in poems. Every turn of phrase Portugal uses has the potential to become a formula, every cluster of words; ingredients enlisted in a method she is inventing to achieve something specific (quite often something as of yet unnamed because as of yet unknown).
 
Yet, if hidden desires are generative forces in Flirt Formula – and one would be well-advised in guessing so – it is telling that in interviews Portugal does not directly speak of attraction, of fantasy, and of seduction, but rather attributes the overarching impulses in flirtation to modalities of restraint: “the crux of poetry is the art of not touching it”.
 
At a moment when other French and Francophone poets are actively inscribing personal identity into politically motivated forms, anchoring their meaning making processes deep in the inner workings of project poems, Portugal undertakes an entirely different set of risks.  Some of those risks are still attached to what may, in the current context, be considered antiquated versions of poetry, all of them are invested in the strategic displacement of meaning in verse: “I wanted to do the opposite, to make something that would be like a glancing, that would also be that very way meaning has in settling into lines of verse without however being perceptible; that is, the idea of a ‘flirtation’ is still the idea of an avoidance”.
 
In her paratextual remarks, the metaphor Portugal recursively uses to explain the set-up of Flirt Formula hinges on the introduction of a single named figure, a central persona who enacts, if only once, the dramatic constitution of subjectivity, a purely grammatical affair in this book, as indeed it is in her previous writings: “There is a character who appears just once, the character of Jane from Tarzan”.
 
Undoubtedly, this choice of figure implies primal urges, and the bodacious nudity that springs to mind based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books, or their screen and comic book adaptations.  And, casting Jane and Tarzan in flirt scenarios might well prompt the rehearsal of such communicative difficulties that beset the newly lovelorn, especially those complexities facing couples for whom there is a language barrier.  But these are not the traits Portugal explicitly underlines in ‘how Jane speaks’ (43).
 
Rather, it is the athletic ability associated with this intertextual figure that helps Portugal establish the conceptual rigging for the hermeneutic code at play in her poem; in the figure of Jane she identifies a swinger, one who leaps into the void of a sentence, grabs onto a vine of syntax, and swings through a jungle of meaning: “In truth, what amused me was precisely adopting [Jane’s] position in relation to the text: that is, you leap, you grab a vine, you swing, and thus you think you’ve accomplished the poetic gesture, only to find that it must be replayed”.
 
If this meaning game seems tailor made for the trapeze artist reader, one who delights in launching into each new sentence in an adventurous spirit of discovery, its mechanisms are predicated on some of Portugal’s greatest poetic predilections – her so-called ‘sins’ – namely, her weakness for poems that, in the self-same gesture, theorize their very ground of becoming, attempt to realize those terms, and, in imitation of nineteenth century models, allow for failure to be a full measure of success: “it scares me, moreover, really scares me because, basically, there’s an old school aspect to the project; that is, the idea of replaying an old-fashioned notion of poetry, right at the moment when absolutely everything [traditional] is being abandoned”.
 
Flirting with failure in this context is not merely an enticement into self-destructive release (see ‘the lorelei model’ [72]). Rather, the risk taking, however sincere its approval of naïveté, and however extreme its allowance of difficulty, is uncompromisingly underwriting conditions for permanent renewal: “in fact, it’s a small pleasure to which I treated myself, with all the dangers it entails”.
 
In the degree to which these perpetual first encounters do lead to a great love story, one that unfolds over the course of the poem – and Portugal’s ambition in this is unmitigated – its greatness is sustained through an expansive, disciplined love of language in all of its formalities, beginning and ending with the possibilities of the single sentence. Each sentence, of which there are exactly forty-four in Flirt Formula, set into motion according to the codes of its typographical setting.
 
In other words, the opening line – think of it as an icebreaker – is the principal technique in Flirt Formula.  Portugal’s ‘phrase d’attaque’ undauntedly recalls both Mallarmé and Ronsard in its compressed, accelerated parataxis. Half blackmailed come-on, half abstracted renunciation (the rather rare kind that wins the day by surrender), each first line is also the last line, is already all middle, and, stretching from the capital letter of the first word on the top left to the full stop on the bottom right of the facing page, it characteristically swerves in register from popular diction to diction that verges on the precious, noble, and awkwardly self-discovering.
 
The facing-page stanzas, in other words, while distinct typographically, are intertwined and act as if they were one and the same body.  Constituted of desiring words, they work with, against, and on each other; they are in constant conversation, very much as if each stanza were a condensed corporeal emanation resulting from the flirting couple’s discourse.
 
If in most cases there is some independent grammatical unity at the level of the stanza, the line of verse and the syntactical clause do not necessarily coincide (as they would in traditional French prosody), thereby keeping the way in which words can recombine very much up in the air.  How to punctuate the main sentence, how to prioritize or subordinate clauses, which words to read as if off-set by imaginary dashes or commas, all of this remains open-ended, in flux – tasks for the reader to determine.
 
The metaphor of vine swinging comes in handy to explain how this all works: at times, small word clusters may appear dense, heavy with g-forces when, at the lowest point in the arc of their swing, compact in the velocity of the curve, the production of even loosely fitting meaning requires a firm grip on the part of the reader who, like the grammatical personae inhabiting the poems, circulates by bobbing up and down through the jungle of signs. At times, other word clusters may appear as weightless as when, at the apogee of their upward trajectory, they momentarily stall, as if suspended, afloat for an ephemeral second in the melody of the sentence. Portugal evokes this tension between the mass and the weightlessness of words, again, as one of her particular pleasures in writing: “What I especially like is to embark words that sometimes weigh a ton into a principle of lightness.”
 
To achieve this principle of lightness, Portugal injects a steady flow of airiness and levity into the joints of the sentence, often simply by eliminating what normally joins syntax together (conjunctions, prepositions, articles, punctuation). Consequently, in Flirt Formula the elements of storytelling, synecdoche, metaphor, and allegory all remain just partially present in the ‘manic articulations’ (22), each participating in building the duo’s meditative contra-facing postures, but each also ultimately truncated, telegraphed by the fast thinking, the glancing by, the target missing.
 
Here too, the near miss, the trajectories that barely touch, are not quite inconsequential. They produce a peculiar kind of distinction.  In the snatches of words, however fragmented, there is often a core distillation of gestures, distinct in themselves, though run together over the course of time, minutely intertwined and traversing one another along the obstacle course of the sentence. These “tiny vision[s] of confection” enjoy such distinction as can be made by a visual image (especially partial), by a song clip (even if distantly implied), by the precise character of a passing phrase reused just so, at a precise moment, in the midst of an initial conversation, along the way on a road trip, inside the desperate whispers of a blistering love affair, each made into a moment textually by the disposition of sensations that memorably creates them in precisely that way.
 
How then do you locate what’s weightless in this poem? How are its networks of vines illuminated?  The principle of levity is animated by multiplicity. On the one hand, temporality in the poems is most often plural, intersecting the imperative mood with the present, and the past perfect tense with the past imperfect; seduction, recollection, and loss seamlessly inhabit the same breath. On the other hand, there are multiple ways to string meaning together between the poems.
 
Portugal has stated that the ‘swinging’ can be imagined as contra-sensual, where the implied subjects – the he and she, the I and you, often implied by way of carefully placed possessive adjectives – swing in opposite directions, crossing and swapping places somewhere in the middle of the sentence. These orchestrated chassées-croisés establish an immediately apparent echo-network, a constellation of call and responses between the “juxtaposed bouquets” (7): where the left-hand poem speaks of a “small décor”, the right-hand poem speaks of a “shrunk edifice”, of a ‘set’ made “in alfa precision” (10-11).
 
Such corresponding associations in the lexical field accrue through recursive variation and repetition (‘she overexposes in repetition’ [27]), and it is as if the act of missing each other, the glancing right by one another, were rooted in saying the same things differently, or saying different things with similar words. In addition, the fact of missing one another is already inscribed, as the opening poem states, in the very condition of apostrophe: the ‘simple exercise’ of speech ‘cannot ring white lily triumphant’ because ‘address misplaces’ the potential beloved (8).
 
Alternately, the ‘swinging’ can be imagined as consensual, where the implied subjects may cling to the same vine, or different vines, leaping more or less at the same time, more or less in the same direction, arriving more or less to the same place, and so on. In speaking about how this style of reading works in her poem, Portugal uses the French expression meaning “to go away on an extended weekend” (faire le pont), but the lover’s leap to which she refers – “the idea of a bridge in its making” (53) – is the acrobatic leap the reader can make from one poem to the next, such that the first line on the left is followed by the first line on the right, and so one, down the page. Consider, for example, the extended top line on pages 44 and 45:   “Imagine deepening the impression // that ideas are simple their tiny vision // of green . . . ”
 
Spanning the gutter in this fashion only works for some poems in French; I have attempted to allow for it to work in some poems in the English translations. Since Portugal is consciously reworking traditional poetic forms, it is useful to remark that this re-introduction of a caesura in this bridge or leaping line recalls the balanced hemistiches of traditional French verse form. In addition, jumping over the fold of the book in this manner, casting the space of the poem over two face-to-face pages recalls the basic set up of Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés’, though in Portugal’s work, the visual clusters of words have blended back into deceptively normative looking stanzas.
 
There are in fact many invisible games at work in Flirt Formula, some of which pose insurmountable challenges to a translator. During the translation process, a particularly salient example came to light while speaking with Portugal about the poem beginning ‘Fantasized ruled out’ (72-73). The problem has to do with a sound game she is playing in the French, a game that is briefly described elsewhere in the poem – “Inverse inverse but french in saying it” (68) – and that only a very careful, carefree, reader of French might catch onto. Here, for the sake of explanation is the stanza in question: The poem itself contains two famous figures of jilted love, Lorelei and Parthenopa (Jane does indeed have good company in Flirt Formula). Thus, being a poem about rebuff and consequential suicides, its meanings are particularly dense and especially difficult to decode in this second stanza. What Anne quickly pointed out to me in passing, is that the last segment of the poem was made to be reversible, almost the way we used to play vinyl records backwards.
 
That is, “hymne fait accompli” (which I’ve opted to keep in the English) can be read backward, as “pli qu’on a fait hymne” (fold we made into a hymn). An alternate transcription of this stanza, one that differs from the one found on page 73, might attempt to present these lines in their opposite direction, to present the ‘Inverse in verse’ but in English, which might look something like this:  
For readers familiar with Portugal’s work, such acrobatic syntax is not too surprising: the traces of reversible parataxis are visible in some of her earlier writing (for example in a poem in which the verbs “passes” and “gives” alternate [see Nude p. 35], a poem that has been set to music by Rodolphe Burger). In this case, however, it is difficult not to wonder if the presence of reversibility is not there to add another allusive fold to this already richly intertextual poem, namely a gestural reference to the poem ‘Reversibility’ by Baudelaire.
 
The principal difficulties of translating Flirt Formula, present at every turn, are nearly always associated with rendering the precise lightness of each phrase. There is something singularly cool about the tone of Anne’s sentences, a unique liveliness that immediately strikes you, though its techniques are hard to perceive. In an attempt to translate the hues of her cool tones, I have, at times, taken quite a bit of liberty, mostly encouraged by the author who was exceptionally generous with her time throughout the process. In many cases, what came to light was that word for word translations were the clunkiest possible solution, and the further away I moved from these, the lighter the solutions became. The classic case in point, one to illustrate what I mean, is none other than the flirt formula itself, the sole phrase to appear on the back of the book:
   
The simplest, most direct rendering of this signature phrase would probably be the first of the five solutions listed below. Yet the one I’ve chosen is rather far removed from it, and I could be guilty here, as well as throughout, of preferring solutions motivated by invisible desires of my own:  
Within the realm of making meaning, the imminent dangers of flirtation keep us vacillating between being misunderstood and being too well understood. This poetry can teach us how to walk the thin line between remaining desirable (precisely by what is left unsaid) and risking rejection (for wanting too much, or for being found wanting).
 
When reading Flirt Formula, think of the mechanics of movement in hot and happening couples dancing, the way energy coils tight in the dancers’ bodies, releases, extends, bounces back, keeps moving along the elasticity of multiple, united but diverting, lines of action, driven onward partly by the pulse of the music, partly by sheer attraction, and the panoply of eschewals that ensues.  The greater the tug on the habits of reference, on the worn out habit of sensation, the more illuminated are words and things, and what we make of them within their dynamic contingencies.
Jungle vine image via Shutterstock.