I’ve been obsessively poring over poems for two different projects, and the task has filled me with the usual brain whirring mixture of fatigue and excitement. So much of my performance and academic personae (if the two can even be distinguished from one another) and of my interaction with the world is built on the profound enticement of interpretation and analysis. My relationship to analysis – particularly of poetic text and of music, as these are the artforms I’ve spent so much of my time contemplating and participating in – is built on two contradictory impulses: the comfort of solving a puzzle and the freedom of relational invention.
Lady Reading Poetry by Ishibashi Kazunori (石橋和訓), 1906
Analysis as puzzle: I fell in love with math when I discovered algebra. Childhood arithmetic had neither bewildered nor particularly attracted me. I was good at memorizing multiplication tables; I don’t remember having any great difficulty or joy doing addition and subtraction. I had no real relationship to numbers. But once the possibility of solving an equation came into the picture, numbers became a game.
At around the same age, I discovered Latin. I discovered translation. I had previously learned English as a [barely] second language, but both it and French were integrated into my childhood almost equally. Moreover, they were swimming in that mysterious, spongy thing which is the child mind, and I don’t remember contemplating how to “solve” English much before I knew how to speak it. Mostly, I rather incuriously accepted that I didn’t understand it, until I abruptly decided that I was tired of failing English as a Second Language (ESL) and that I was going to learn it. Immersion and a plastic childhood brain collaborated to make that process pretty painless, and very fast. At least that’s how I remember it.
Latin, however, was not going to be a language I spoke (1) but rather one that I would decipher. It gave me the opportunity to dig my pre-teen fingers into a knot and try to undo it. Solve the mystery of an unfamiliar permutation of familiar letters. The appeal grew stronger still when I reached a certain aptitude and began translating poetry via Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil. I discovered scansion – marking the pattern of word stresses in verse. (More puzzles! Pattern recognition!) I became enthralled with “understood” elisions or formulations – words dropped for the sake of poetic concerns such as rhythm – and convoluted sentence structures that I had to untangle. Latin poetry offered an entire world of secrets to be ushered into and, increasingly, to notice myself: structural conventions, allusions, rhetorical devices, and on and on…
What I’m describing is essentially a love affair with finite solutions. How delicious to be given all the necessary information and simply be asked to organize it! But quickly, a new, even more exhilarating possibility emerges: The more complex the material, the broader the array of potentially divergent methodologies or understandings becomes. Solving becomes a creative act.
Years of tender interest and practice have specialized and honed my attention on translation and poetic analysis, and I’ve come to view both as essentially the same thing: interpretations that I get to write myself into. A frequent impediment people face when approaching reading poetry is the fear that they won’t “get it.” That they won’t discern and pry out the proper, intended nuggets of meaning in a text. But the privilege of the comfort I’ve simultaneously inherited and sharpened has offered me the assertion that I have a great deal of freedom to read what I want to read into a text. Analysis is my playground. It’s my opportunity to do more than uncover what an author intended. That discovery process can be rich and intoxicating in its own right, but it’s always a conversation. I can’t help bringing myself into a reading, and over the years I’ve decided to do this with increasing intent. Rather than offering myself up as a novice to lap up what an author means, I’ve decided I can tell them what they mean, too.
I peel through a text not just to be granted the gift of a finished product but to seek out and even generate my own raw material. We often view deep – or obsessive – analysis as a means of finding the most faithful sense of a text, the true, inherent core of its [intended] significance, but the heat of attention also allows wild fermentation. Because the root of my artistic training and practice comes from interpreting the works of others, it’s perhaps no surprise that I approach creative [re-]interpretation with such enthusiasm as a means of working out and imposing my own self. I’ve always felt that self to be made up of the strands of things I took in, reimagined, synthesized and performed. There’s so much I want to say or could say, and exegesis of pre-existing words is a comforting skeleton onto which to grow my own flesh.
Brief and charmingly embarrassing counterargument: I did have a penchant around age twelve for walking around the house in a tunic pretending to be a young Roman girl and having simplistic, halting conversations with myself in Latin.