TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Neverending Quest

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Neverending Quest. I’m gonna tell your two stories, each one crazier than the next.  

The first one starts in the early 1300s, in Timbuktu. Timbuktu was the center of one of the greatest empires in the world, the Mali Empire, in West Africa. And early 1300s means it was before the radical “redistribution of wealth” commonly referred to as colonization. The king, Mansa Musa, was so rich it’s hard to wrap your head around. He commissioned the most spectacular buildings, including the University of Sankoré, and bought hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, attracting scholars from all over the Islamic world. Then, in 1324, this king decides to go on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and en route, he spends so much gold that he causes inflation so severe that even 12 years later the market in Cairo had not fully recovered. Maybe he overdid it just a little bit, because the money for the trip back, he had to borrow. That’s the first story. 

The second story is about another voyage. And the only documented source we have, for this story, is that same king, Mansa Musa. When he was in Cairo, a local emir asked him how he actually became the king. “Well,” Musa said—I’m paraphrasing—“my predecessor, King Abubakar II, refused to believe he would never see past the horizon. So he decided to go and explore.” He tells the emir that Abubakar II ordered 200 boats to be packed full with enough gold, food, and water to last the crew for years, plus another 200 boats with rowers. And he told them, “Don’t come back until you’ve reached the other shore.” The trip ended in tragedy. Only one boat came back. Its captain said that a powerful current had swallowed up all the others. But Abubakar II was not one for giving up, so he gave orders to ready even more boats, 2,000 in total. This time, he decided to go along, and he asked Mansa Musa to keep an eye on the empire while he was gone. As you may have guessed, that was the last anyone heard of him.

Now, here’s the reason I’m telling you all this. The story of this trans-Atlantic dare-devilling is the subject of a new book of epic poetry titled, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore. It was actually written in French, by the Senegalese-French poet and historian Sylvie Kandé, over 10 years ago, but now there’s a bilingual edition, with an English translation by Alexander Dickow. You’ll hear from both of them. First the author, then the translator, but you’ll hear the translator’s voice throughout, because as we discuss a few excerpts, he will be reading the translation. 

One last thing you need to know before I get out of the way—apologies this is so long—Sylvie Kandé has written three cantos: the first and second focus on the attempted ocean crossing of this king from the 1300s, Abubakar II. The third and last canto is about another attempted ocean crossing, set today, of a young African boat migrant hoping to make it to Europe. 

When I sat down with Sylvie Kandé to talk about her book, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, I asked her about those two stories, that of today, and that from the 1300s, and what they have in common. Here’s Sylvie Kandé.

Sylvie Kandé: So Abubakar II, couldn’t believe that the horizon was the end of knowledge. And he left and was never seen again. So the whole episode is extremely dramatic. The way Abubakar II was described was this thirst of knowledge, you know, this enthusiasm about going beyond what is possible, this hubris, in fact, that pushed him not to stay with this immense Empire that he had. He was not satisfied with that because he felt that there was something else to be seen. Then the last canto is exclusively devoted to contemporary voyages starting with the years … 1990s, I suppose, when a number of African migrants chose to cross the Mediterranean, but also part of the Atlantic, as the migration policies became more and more restrictive in Europe, and you know, the possibility of asylum was limited, more and more limited. So those dramatic crossings really moved me very, very deeply. And, at the same time, I was quite unsatisfied with the report’s, journalistic reports that were written and that emphasize, of course, the misery, the poverty of the migrants coming. Not only is it not accurate, but I felt that, you know, those voyages, those contemporary voyages were made in the name of values. Because there is a long tradition in West Africa of migrations. And migration is seen as something positive. Not everybody has the privilege to migrate. In general, the youngest in the family migrate and the elders and those keep the house together. But those who migrate bring back stories and bring back new knowledge. So it is valorized. 

Helena de Groot: That’s interesting. 

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah. So it is not as if all of a sudden, you know, poor people would come to Europe. There is this long tradition of traveling as an initiation. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Sylvie Kandé: So, I could not say when the two ideas came together, but when it did, all of a sudden I had a prism through which I could look at those migrations in another way. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. It’s beautiful. Especially what you say about this old tradition and the values attached to that of migration in West Africa, that it’s like a way to broaden your horizons, to bring in new knowledge. Because the way we talk about migrating Africans is often through the lens of misery, as you say, you know, economic necessity or, you know, worse, slavery, you know? Like that that is the only reason that people would ever leave their home. 

Sylvie Kandé: Exactly. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to a few excerpts and read that whole first page from Canto I. 

Sylvie Kandé: Okay. 

(READS EXCERPT)

Ils rament désormais sans chanson …

(FADES OUT)

Alexander Dickow:

(READS EXCERPT IN ENGLISH)

Ever since they row songless no heave-ho

For how long … how to know … how many seasons

how many mirage-islands the wind will sow

did they row past pitch-drunk and swollen with spindrift

A foggy memory of what-it-is-to-have-one’s-feet-on-the-ground

and eyelids fluttering

they heed nothing at present but the wave that goes

slips away

and returns

Country folk who made themselves belated mariners

their bodies cadence them

to cleave with the oar’s tainted tip

the purple mounds of the great salt savannah

which no furrow marks

where no seed takes root

(But to say the sea

earthly words are little suited)

At the point of the dream

they were a myriad

no less and no more

to cross the coral barrier in laughter with its vermillion flowers:

there remain but three barks adrift

full so full to the point of capsizing

With paddling their arms have become paddles

hard driven into their brown and knotted trunks

and their salt-eaten feet are now no more than stumps

that cleave to the hull with the agony of seven wounds

In their dizzying heights of suffering they yet find the strength to row

oh the arrogant zeal of those who know their death approaches

and prefer to gaze beyond what’s certain.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. You do such an excellent job at representing the strangeness of this landscape, you know, this landscape that goes on and on and on in all directions for months and months, the same, you know, the ocean, the waves. You know, just these opening lines: “Ever since they rowed songless, no heave-ho.” Like, they’ve even lost their song. That’s how long they’ve been rowing, you know. How did you evoke that experience for yourself enough so that you could write it?

Sylvie Kandé: Well, I think the main idea I had to guide me, especially in this first Canto, was this question of honor. That is very prominent in African cultures, and it’s not often probably known. So, the mariners know that they are lost. And yet in the name of the honor, they will continue. They do not have the strength to sing. Their body is wrecked by pain, and they will still continue because it doesn’t serve any other purpose than, you know, keeping the honor until the end.

Helena de Groot: That is interesting. Okay, okay. Because, that horror, you also describe it so well: “their salt-eaten feet are now no more than stumps.” I mean, it’s so graphic and it sounds so painful.

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And that was interesting also, like, you know, how you end that first thought, “Oh, le zèle hautain de ceux qui connaissent leur mort / approcher.” “Oh the arrogant zeal of those who know their death / approaches.” Why that word? You know why, “arrogant,” why “hautain”? 

Sylvie Kandé: Because this is not just by obedience to a leader. In fact, we meet these men and women. I put women in my boats. We meet them in media res, as they are, you know, lost at sea. And we meet them first before meeting their leader, who is really the spirit of the travel. So I’m interested in their take on this trip. They are committed to it and their commitment is of such depth that it is close to stubbornness, okay. They could rebel. In fact, attempt to at some point they could, they could do a number of—a limited number of things. But no, they won’t do it. And they will continue to row out of commitment to themselves and to their own vision of who they are, the vision of what they were present on earth. 

Helena de Groot: Hmm. This is so interesting because I—often when I was reading your book, I thought, there is another way of seeing this, right, like, yes, these people display all this courage and this zeal and personality, but of course, they are also employed or forced or dictated or whatever by a king, like a kind of grandiose, you know, leader, to go on this voyage that will lead to their almost inevitable death. And so in that sense, I was thinking, it maybe does have things in common with the Middle Passage. But if I’m understanding correctly, are you saying that, no, that these things don’t have anything in common, like, there’s free will here. These people were there of their own accord. How do you look at that? 

Sylvie Kandé: No, probably not. And in fact, this is the object of the second Canto, where I realized after Canto I that I don’t know much more about the trip so I want to go into more details. But who is this king? Who are the people who—what are their motivations? And I tried to explore that. And, you know, I imagine that, of course, some people will try not to be recruited for the trip, and they may belong to the elite, because they have more means to do so. Some will be forced because they are slaves in the domestic system. And some people will just love their leader and go just for that. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Sylvie Kandé: You were talking also about constructing a kind of landscape out of the ocean, which is by definition, without any type of bearings that can be seen. And this is also the object of the, in particular at the beginning of the second Canto, where I show that the men and women rowing attempt to give themselves those bearings by looking at the waves and, you know, trying to go to this particular wave and go beyond after that. They try to make some type of sense out of this senseless landscape. 

Helena de Groot: That was so thrilling to read too, you know, like, to see language fail, basically, you know, when confronted with something that, you know, we earthbound creatures are not used to describing at length, you know. And this failure of language, you capture that really well by using a lot of words from not just the Earth, but from farming. In the first canto, you write, “They cleave with their oar … la grande savanne salée (the great salt savannah) / que nul sillon ne marque (which no furrow marks) / où nulle semence ne lève (where no seed takes root).” It’s remarkably emotional, actually. Yeah. What it means for a human being to be stripped of anything they know and of the language to make sense of it. Can you tell me about your own struggle with language as you wrote this book set at sea?

Sylvie Kandé: My first struggle was against the text itself being in the process of writing itself. I wanted to write prose. And I wrote the beginning. And I saw that the text was breathing very, very widely and that it had a rhythm and it was inescapable and I said, no, not only is it poetry, but this is epic poetry.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Sylvie Kandé: And so I was frightened because I wasn’t sure I was ready for that, because of everything that went through my mind once I recognized it as an epic poetry. And of course, I wanted to avoid the trap of writing an epic that would be a nationalist one, you know, based on a nation. But at the same time, I think, you know, I said, yes, this is exactly what I want, because I want to show the heroism of those travelers of the contemporary migrants who go through extreme suffering, you know, be it in medieval ages or today, go to extreme suffering in the name of reaching the elsewhere, reaching themselves. So, I couldn’t escape continuing that in that genre. Although, you know, it was treacherous. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Sylvie Kandé: So, yeah.

Helena de Groot: It’s so interesting to hear you say that the epic almost forced itself on you, in a sense, you know, that you were not embarking on writing one. And I looked it up, actually, I looked up the definition, because I thought, do I know 100 percent what an epic is? You know? And the internet said that it’s a long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition—which I thought was remarkable, we should talk about that—narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the history of a nation. What does an epic allow you to do? 

Sylvie Kandé: So, so, yeah, the mood of the epic poem is grandiose and exalted. So, the goal is not objectivity. It’s not to bring things to their real dimension, but on the contrary, to expand them, to let them breathe and to have this type of, you know, out of worldly dimension. You know, the voyage on the ocean, the effort. The leader of the trip will metamorphose under the very eyes of his men. So the epic poem allows me to go beyond the notion of truth, but to extract from all that a poetic truth that allows us to fill the gaps in history. But epic poems have often been associated with, you know, the glorification of masculinist values and nationalist values. And I didn’t want to fall into that trap. So I had to use some strategies. Some of them had to do with, you know, the characters that I would emphasize. So women are very much part of these trips. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Sylvie Kandé: I wanted also to illustrate what Édouard Glissant had said, you know, he had this interesting intuition that an epic poem was not celebrating a victory, but a defeat.

Helena de Groot: Mm, wow. Yeah.

Sylvie Kandé: And this defeat coalesces a community and this is really what you see at work in the first canto. I also wanted to parody some of those epics because they precisely glorify combat between men and the blood and a false sense of honor.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Sylvie Kandé: And conquest, colonial conquest, of course. So I attempted to work all this in there too, to sort of allude, to show, also that it was an epic poem because it reverberate with other epics, but I pulled on a corpus, on an epic corpus, depending on what I needed to do. I didn’t go, you know, to Gilgamesh or ... but I pulled also from African epics and corpus, for instance, of cooperations’ epics. There are in West Africa cooporations such as hunters. And the hunters create epics. They sing songs and those songs have been collected. And I used very much those texts to feed my own. For instance, those mariners, they are also hunters on the boat. And how do they find their bearings? How do they translate the sea into something that they can approach, master, dominate. And there is in the second Canto, you know, a scene with a hunter who faces the sea monster, and unfortunately, apply his knowledge of the earth to the sea, where it’s no longer adapted and opened the way to add to misfortune for the rest of the crew.

Helena de Groot: It’s so interesting to hear you talk about these, these West African epics that are about a community, you know, or like a group of people, a cooporation like hunters. Because I was thinking, you know, when I was thinking about sort of the epic as a form, I thought, okay, we don’t write so many of them anymore today, but we do make movies. You know, like, I feel like the Hollywood blockbuster where one guy, usually a guy, saves the world from, you know, some disaster is very much structured like an epic. And I like the way that you did not do that. You know that, sure, this king is a part of the story, but there’s one scene where he’s sort of lying on a boat with a cat, sleeping at his armpit, which I thought was a hilarious image. So he’s not, like, presented as the one hero who’s going to save them all. And it’s really those rowers, the people and the storytellers, the griottes, you know, who seem to be like the collective heroes. 

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah, and the king is multifaceted. I didn’t want to deliver the truth on him.

Helena de Groot: Ah.

I wanted to show different possibilities about him and let the readers or the crowd or the chorus make their mind about who he is. Is he someone who is fascinated by science, is he someone who is looking for the rain, because the period of his travel, interestingly enough, matches a period of great drought. So, in my attempt to reconstitute the motivations of his trip, I also imagined that it could be a kind of holy expedition to try to go and get the rain from elsewhere, etcetera, etcetera. So, so, yeah, this idea of the fight between the good and the evil is very much part of the traditional epic. And I went against that.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can read one last excerpt from Canto I. So this is the end of Canto I. It ends, as you already said, in defeat, with a big storm that nobody survives.

Sylvie Kandé: Okay. 

(READS EXCERPT)

Preuve par le chant …

(FADES OUT)

Alexander Dickow:

(READS EXCERPT IN ENGLISH)

Proof by song:

Sylvie Kandé:. 

(READS EXCERPT)

un éclair vient séparer

la peau du ciel de celle de l’eau

(FADES OUT)

Alexander Dickow:

(READS EXCERPT IN ENGLISH)

… a lightning bolt comes and separates

the skin of the sky from the skin of the water …

Sylvie Kandé:. 

(READS EXCERPT)

tout à leur torride accouplement …

(FADES OUT)

Alexander Dickow:

(READS EXCERPT IN ENGLISH)

all immersed in their torrid coupling

Slumped on three canoes leaking everywhere

the spectral host glides into the interstice

to the waves and the flames debarred

The voyagers will no longer need to row:

to the infinite they shall henceforth accustom themselves

But in the depths of the greenish abysses

    the doubles of the to-be-enchained-branded-lacerated-before-

        being-thrown-mute-with-horror-screaming-with-rage-

        overboard-to-the-mercy-of-sharks

crossed their fleshless hands

on the tops of their skulls

No history would not be written otherwise

and so the sea takes on the tale

rolls its blues over the shipwrecks

and the long sad banquets of the shades

in their necropoles of white sand

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, I love how you also center the storytelling itself, you know, like how will this story be told, you know, will the waves take it from here, basically. And there are these central figures throughout this book, this character of the griot (masculine), griotte (feminine). You know these West African storytellers / keepers of history. Can you tell me about them? And what it was like for you to center your story around these storytellers? 

Sylvie Kandé: Well, I wanted to have the story told from several points of view, several perspectives, so there is in each canto a chorus of voices, a polyphony. And it’s possible to see them when you see that the narrative is interrupted and the other voice comes on top of the previous one. So I didn’t want to have a single narrator or an omniscient narrator or invisible narrator who would be me to tell the story. I want, at each turn of the way, to remember that this is a story being told a series of stories, and that there are many ways of looking at the past and the present, and that truth is in each of them, but in none of them at the same time. So the griot, or the griotte, rather, is a kind of a bold move that I made because obviously this not a griotte who would be near a king, a male who is almost in the position of a minister of communication, if I may say, so keeps the genealogy and translates the words of the king or the leader into a discourse for the crowd, for the citizens.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Sylvie Kandé: Here, I’m trying to work with the silences not only of history on Abubakar II that may be grounded on the fact that, you know, we just have one single reference to him, but also the silence of oral tradition. 

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. 

Sylvie Kandé: So if we think of Sundiata Keita, who was the founder of the Mali Empire, we have an oral narrative, we have several of them as a matter of fact. But about Abubakar II, more or less 100 years afterwards, silence. So it may well be that there was no Abubakar II. That’s a possibility, but because I’m writing his story, I have to sort of figure out what happened. Why is it that the griots and the jeli and the—refuse to include him in oral tradition? So it may well be that they feel that this is too much hubris, that this is this unheard of, you know, an emperor who just leaves his Empire to go at sea. And I imagine that a woman, a griotte, who will say, OK, in that case, I will be the one who will tell the story. And even if we are lost at sea, as she announces at the end of the canto, somehow the story will come back to shore and be told and people will not have died in vain.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, like, I cannot imagine really a more severe punishment for a king than to just be silenced.

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah. 

Helena de Groot: You know, griottes who are like, “I’m not going to talk about you because what you did was shameful, you should have stayed with us and stuck it out.”

Sylvie Kandé: Yes. Or talk about you in the conditional form. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Exactly. 

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can read one last excerpt from the book. This one from the third canto. So the one about contemporary time, about migrants, you know, getting into rickety boats and try and reach, you know, I guess, Fortress Europe is the official name of the security apparatus, you know, that Europe has put in place to prevent migrants from entering. I was thinking of an excerpt, it starts on page 140.

Sylvie Kandé: 

(READS EXCERPT) 

Au troisième jour un filet d’eau s’infiltra …

(FADES OUT)

Alexander Dickow:

(READS EXCERPT IN ENGLISH)

On the third day a leak seeped in

by a small orifice toward the front of the boat

and came and bathed the wounds of our feet

As it is my first time at sea

I resolved to keep gourds in my mouth:

strangers have big eyes 

but only see what they want

On the fourth day 

the water rose a bit a bit

and a quarrel broke out…

on the fifth a slat burst

and there was a brawl

a fight on the sixth

and three men overboard

for two words exchanged:

Someone thinks he can keep me from following my fish …

You too you don’t know this stretch of sea 

you want to fish in is already sold …

Come on over and I’ll teach you and your rags a lesson

(But things that do not please God)

On the seventh nothing to report:

we got our ration and moreover 

we learned while we were at it 

that it was all used up our food

once and for all

At the slightest chance that the calm sea laps

we prepare three rounds of tea

We chat about oh about this and that

while others bail us out in silence

and in turns so as to save sweat

They say the sea once made demands

giving license solely to her chosen ones

to ride upon her with their henchmen

In the end you knew her game

and you knew your heart

But today by way of mirrors

I see little at hand

but waves without silvering

and an immense deathbed

where we are left valueless

at the market’s brutal behest

On the eighth day

thirst found us

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, it’s very arresting. The way you just break it down in sort of like, this very dry way. Like, you know, on the first day, this happened, on the eighth day. 

Sylvie Kandé: Well, I didn’t try to enchant their experience. This is an experience of extreme confinement for a long period of time in terrible conditions. So, this is an experience that reveals everything about individuals, and what is revealed is not necessarily good. They are not hero in the sense that they are good people. They are hero in the sense that their action is foundational. They are at the foundation of the new humanity. Their sacrifices ushered, hopefully, a new era in which migration will be a right. And they pay dearly for that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. There’s something the poet, philosopher, cultural critic, Édouard Glissant, born in Martinique, who you already mentioned, he talks about “the prophetic vision of the past.” How does that resonate with you? 

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah, it’s (LAUGHS), really, this is at the core of this construction. In fact, one could read the text by starting with the third canto and then come back to the older ones.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Sylvie Kandé: The story of Abubakar II takes a completely new meaning because of the contemporary voyages and vice versa. I mean, it’s not a linear vision that I propose, not the past makes sense of the present, but the present makes sense of the past in another way. And this is really a concept at the core of the whole construction here.

Yeah.

So once I had that connection made, you know, I of course wrote to sort of prepare the parallel, or the mirroring effect. But at the same time, I was very surprised at times by characters, for instance, that I would find, you know, in both times, in different boats, but in the two eras that had sort of popped up as a kind of a resurrection of a past figure. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was also curious, I mean, I’ve had this question for a very long time, why those big figures in post-colonialism, you know, we were just talking about Édouard Glissant, but also Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, why are they all French speaking, you know, like, why are they all from former French colonies? Or is that a coincidence?

Sylvie Kandé: Well, I mean, we have also Homi Bhabha and, we have a number of—

Helena de Groot: Of course.

Sylvie Kandé: But no, I think that the confrontation, the double confrontation with a history of enslavement and a history of colonialism sort of brought about a kind of eruption of thought that really attempted to name things, to name things in a language that was, in a way, refractory to this naming. And, you know, I love French and, but English is much more open to a number of ways of talking. And until recently, French was much more guarded towards new ways of expressing things and especially, you know, ways that would undermine, in a way, the nationalist discourse. I mean, it has changed quite a bit, but it has long been the case. So, the work of the luminaries that you mentioned was not only to change the vision of history, but also to change the way of talking about that history, within a framework that didn’t really allow the space for that new discourse to emerge.

Helena de Groot: It’s interesting. It’s almost like there’s a pressure cooker or something. Because the French language did not allow it, there was much more of a kind of desire to make it work.

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Like, well, we’re going to use French to say these things that cannot be said in French.

Sylvie Kandé: Yeah. What other tools do we have, you know, when we are in a Francophone context? And one of my strategies in that poem was to refuse to use all the vocabulary that is usually reserved to Africa, you know, the huts and the chiefs. And I used instead a medieval French vocabulary. You say, you know, a baron, instead of saying, you know, chief.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Sylvie Kandé: And all of a sudden there’s another image that comes to mind. So, here’s an example where I used old French to tell African realities and in the process, African realities shine in another way. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: I have just one last question. What’s it been like to work with Alexander Dickow? How do I pronounce his name, for starters?

Sylvie Kandé: Dickow, I think.

Helena de Groot: Dickow. Okay.

Sylvie Kandé: I think so, yeah. I call him Alex, so. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Okay.

Sylvie Kandé: You will ask him.

Helena de Groot: I will ask him, I’m sorry, Alex, if I did get it wrong. What was it like to work with him on this translation? I mean, first of all, did you work together or did he just go off in his own corner and just kind of translate it? How did it go?

Sylvie Kandé: No, that has been a wonderful experience. I mean, his translation is phenomenal. I have heard only good things about them. I was, you know, at the time, I was really in awe when I saw the way he could translate, you know, without losing the essence of the passage. And this is a very moving experience to see a text that you brought about in another language, because it is the same and at the same time, it is another text. So you have this experience of uncanny familiarity with the text and you find in it things that you hadn’t seen before. So it has been a wonderful experience working with him.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I was curious about that too, because, of course, you speak English, you live in the United States, so you can see exactly what it is he does. You know, it’s not like when it’s translated to, I don’t know, Bulgarian, and you just have to trust that the translator does a good job. 

Sylvie Kandé: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I was fortunate also that he, you know, he asked me what I thought of the translation that we worked on them, because yes, you know, in another language I would have to let go. (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Next, to better understand how the bilingual edition of The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore came to be, I talked to the translator.

Helena de Groot: Before we go any further, I asked Sylvie, “What was it like to work with Alexander Dic—”, and then I just didn’t know how to pronounce your name. And I asked her and she said, “Oh, I think Dickow? I’m not sure. I just call him Alex,” which I thought was very sweet. 

Alexander Dickow: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: So tell me, how do I pronounce your name? 

Alexander Dickow: We pronounce it Dickow, and in the French, we pronounce it “dico,” like a dictionary, so. 

Helena de Groot: That’s great! It was written in the stars that you were going to work in words. 

Alexander Dickow: I guess. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: For someone who has never translated something, can you describe the state of mind that you’re in when you’re translating, what does that feel like?

Alexander Dickow: Give me a moment to think of an analogy. (PAUSES) Okay. It’s a little like rowing. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) That’s perfect. That’s great.

Alexander Dickow: For a very long time, and I say that not just because of the theme in the book, but because I also have a rower that I use downstairs for my weekly exercise. There’s a kind of monotony to it, but you just have to do one stroke after the other and keep going in spite of the fatigue or, you know, whatever it is that’s getting in your way. Just keep going, keep going, keep going. And that’s translation. 

Helena de Groot: Not quite the ringing endorsement I had in mind, but it’s, you know, it’s real. 

Alexander Dickow: I really enjoy it. I enjoy it in strange ways, though, and it’s different than other kinds of creative processes. You know, the exciting parts of translation for me are when I come across a really knotty passage where I just have to—knotty, K-N-O-T-T-Y, not N-A-U-G-T-H-Y—(LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Alexander Dickow: —where I really have to sort of buckle down and try and puzzle it out. And those are the moments where the rowing really picks up and you have to fight the waves a little bit. And that’s when it’s the most stimulating. But it’s not the same kind of exaltation that I get from writing a poem from scratch. It’s much more of a kind of discipline.

Helena de Groot: Interesting.

Alexander Dickow: With the hard edges that that implies and the notions of, like, persistence and sticking with it and buckling down. Those kinds of notions are, for me, a lot of what translation is about. And I love it. I love that. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Some of us are gluttons for punishment. 

Alexander Dickow: That’s right. Yes. No, it does take a particular kind of brain to do this sort of work. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Yeah, yeah. So before we go to your specific work on The Neverending Quest, I have a more general question about what it means to translate from French to English. And I was wondering, what are some of the traps that a rookie might fall into?

Alexander Dickow: The thing I see most often is ordinary words with multiple usages that, you know, students in translation, the undergraduates who I have do some translation in my advanced writing course, for instance, will not recognize that that word is not being used in its usual way. Right. And so in other words, they’re not using their dictionaries enough, right? 

Helena de Groot: They think they know what it means. 

Alexander Dickow: They think they know what it means, they immediately recognize it, and therefore they just automatically translate it without taking a step back and saying, “Is this—does this sound the way that it’s usually used? And maybe I should go to the dictionary if it sounds a little funny, to go and take a look at what other usages of this word there are.” So that’s what I see among, you know, beginning translators who are just starting out is that it will be a word like, something banal, like “regarder” or something. But it will be used in some idiomatic sense in combination with another word, and they’ll just pass right by it. And, “Oh, it’s look! To look!” And they’ll translate it that way. 

Helena de Groot: That’s very interesting. So, as a professional translator, as someone who has, you know, quite a lot of experience under his belt, how important is the dictionary to you still? 

Alexander Dickow: Oh, constantly, constantly, constantly. I spend 50 to 60 percent of the time on a, you know, on a difficult passage is going to be spent digging around in dictionaries and figuring out what I can do, looking at the thesauruses and historical dictionaries, sometimes, you know. And that’s, I’m close to bilingual. You know, I have a near native French level, and I still need to spend that kind of time in the dictionaries. It’s just constant. And to me, that’s, you know, that’s the difference between a professional translation and, you know, a translation by someone who hasn’t reached that level yet. It’s not linguistic capability, but rather the willingness and time and attention to detail that it requires to go hunting around in dictionaries.

Helena de Groot: That’s beautiful. So besides the dictionary, I was also interested in the preparation work you did to get ready for The Neverending Quest. When I talked to Sylvie, she told me that she prepared for writing her epic by reading epics. Not Gilgamesh per se, but things closer to her topic, like West African hunter epics, for instance. How did you prepare? 

Alexander Dickow: I read the book a lot, over and over. You know, I’ve read it many, many times now. And I wrote actually an academic research article on Sylvie’s book. And for that, there was a lot of the preparation that ended up feeding into, back into the translation, such as reading Sunjata the West African epic, reading about hunter epics. I don’t think I actually read any hunter epics themselves, but there were, you know, taking a look at things like Omeros by Walcott. And, you know, other epic poems. Reading about H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, reading about the one that Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, Aurora Leigh, you know, all sorts of things like that and really getting a sense of the epic tradition and where this book fit or didn’t fit, as the case may be.

Helena de Groot: Can you explain that a little more, because, you know, when you say that you’re reading and that that work actually fed back into your translation, can you tell me something that you learned that you could then use practically?

Alexander Dickow: Well, it’s a little imponderable, but one thing that I sort of focused in on after doing that research is the nature of the hero in Sylvie’s work. And heroes are very interesting in this book. They have a tendency to … to be elusive. So, for instance, Abubakar II transforms into a bird on the prow of the boat, the decoration on the prow of the boat, and vanishes, right, essentially. In the second canto, he’s described in a variety of different ways, right? In one description, he’s a man of action. In another description, he’s a, you know, a student of books of lore. So these heroes are very elusive, and of course, Alassane the character in the third canto, we see very little. We don’t we’re not exactly sure of his name. And he and his ultimate gesture is to leap into the water and swim for the shore. So all these heroes are very elusive, and they’re also crazy, right? Abubakar II is totally crazy to be doing what he’s doing. And that sense of démesure, of hubris, I think really animates all of the heroes in Sylvie’s book. And to me that was something that was really enriched by looking at the way that heroes are dealt with in other epics. And so I really tried to respect that aspect of the text.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to a specific line or verse, or even just word. Is there something that you’re particularly proud of?

Alexander Dickow: That I’m—yes, there is. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Alexander Dickow: (LAUGHS) There absolutely is. And I will have to take a peek and see if I can find the passage here. There it is, page 118, on the Google search.

Helena de Groot: Perfect. 

Alexander Dickow: So it says, ”While they upbraided the men / for being unworthy of the sea / all of a sudden it seemed to me / son of a talent thrown upon the shore / they took their fingers’ scorn / to spread apart the gills of me / in order to assess my agony / as dubiously fresh,” right. And so I captured the—there’s an ascendance between “ouïe” and “agonie”.

Helena de Groot: Because “ouïe” is “gill”, right? 

Alexander Dickow: That’s right. And so I captured the assonance at the end of the lines, “to spread apart the gills of me / in order to assess my agony,” which reproduces the assonance in the original, “ouïe” and “agonie”.

Helena de Groot: That is amazing.

Alexander Dickow: For some  reason, I just thought that was a particularly successful moment in the translation where I was like, “Oh, that was really hard. And I did it.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: It is amazing. And it also reads completely natural, you know, it doesn’t seem like this was belabored.

Alexander Dickow: No. Yeah, that’s why I think it works, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Alexander Dickow: I sort of pulled it off for once. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Okay, now of course, my inevitable question, what is something that you’re maybe not so happy with?

Alexander Dickow: There was one of those as well. I’m trying to remember what it was. I may have—my brain may have edited out this undesirable element.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Alexander Dickow: I can’t remember what it was. One thing that’s a little hard to capture, I think in general is, there are moments where the text gets very, very polyphonic.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Alexander Dickow: And sometimes I wondered if that came through in the English, right, if the polyphony was sort of pronounced enough and obvious enough for the reader to pick up on what was going on in those passages. 

Helena de Groot: Why do you think it’s easier—or like, what makes it more obvious in French? 

Alexander Dickow: It was sometimes difficult in French as well. Like, there were a couple of passages where I had to ask Sylvie, like, “What exactly is going on here?” And there’s actually moments where someone will start saying something and then what they say is actually completed several lines later. And in between, you get other voices that get mixed in. And once she told me that what was going on it was, it was very, very easy to figure it out. But I wonder if it translated well. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, it’s like that passage that we just read, right, where you have this very dry description of, you know, on the third day this happened, on the fourth day—and then all of a sudden you have this quarrel and you actually hear the lines of those people quarreling and then you just go right back to, “and then on the seventh day, and on the eighth day,” you know. So yeah, I mean, look, I don’t know what I’ve missed of course, that’s the nature of having missed things is that you don’t know you have. I thought it was as clear as poetry can be, you know?

Alexander Dickow: That was another thing that I really tried to do in this translation is, it’s still a story. And I think one of the great things about this book is that it’s a story. And it gets put in poetry sections, it gets categorized as poetry, but it’s also an epic story. It’s an act of storytelling. And, to me, that gets lost a little bit in categorizing it as poetry. People think about it as lyric and they want to sort of, you know, there was even one publication that published it as “poems”, which was OK, but you read different—you approach the text differently if you think of it as a story or if you think of it as a series of interconnected lyrics. 

Helena de Groot: Totally.

Alexander Dickow: And to me, that also sets it apart from something like Omeros. I mentioned Omeros earlier, the Derek Walcott poem, which is what’s referred to as a lyrical epic sequence, which is to say, its parts are fairly autonomous relative to one another. You can take them out and they work as individual poems. And that’s really not the case here. It really is a whole that needs to be understood as a whole. And I think that’s great that, you know, someone wants to write a poem that’s also a story in verse. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Absolutely. And Sylvie said also something about that that I thought was beautiful, is that, she initially started writing it in prose. And then she noticed that the text that she was writing was not behaving like prose. You know, she told me that it was “breathing widely” the way poetry does, especially epic poetry. I thought that was so good, “breathing widely.” So what was that like to render that kind of, you know, breath, that kind of rhythm, in English? 

Alexander Dickow: It’s great. There’s this word in French that doesn’t translate very well. You used the word “breath”, but in French, they say, “le souffle”, right? Which is something that’s used to describe that sort of breath or vastness, the sense of vastness that you get from reading epic poetry. And it’s really fun to translate. It’s very uplifting, ultimately, you know, when you manage to pull off a passage and it works, you get you get buoyed up by the text.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Alexander Dickow: And “le souffle”, I don’t think there’s anything equivalent in English. It’s like the breath, the divine breath that fills the verses when it’s working. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, because it also combines breath and spirit, right? I mean, spirit, in that. 

Alexander Dickow: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, what was it like to work together? I mean, Sylvie lives, works in English. So you’re not, you know—

Alexander Dickow: Alone. 

Helena de Groot: You can’t just go. Yeah, exactly. You know, she can scrutinize your work. What was that like? Like, did you show her drafts or were you really trying to, like, polish it as perfect as you can and then only show her? Or like, how comfortable were you with showing kind of the loose ends of things? 

v Dickow: So I’m very open about my, my writer’s workshop. So to me, it was OK to show her drafts and show her places that I wasn’t sure what to do. And, you know, unfinished passages and, you know, passages with things in bold that I wasn’t able to figure out. I was, you know, open about showing those to her. And then she would make additional comments on things sometimes that I thought were settled or that I thought was the good option. And she had a lot of input on the whole thing and not just the passages that I had bold. And I thought it was a great process. We work very well together. It was very harmonious and rigorous, but really fun. She’s really just a great person to work with. And it was very smooth. There weren’t many bumps along the way. 

Helena de Groot: I hear a little something that I am curious about, but I don’t know if that’s my place to ask, but if you say, you know, she was really nice to work with, very smooth, you know, I hear that you have had other experiences. 

Alexander Dickow: (LAUGHS) In translation, it’s been pretty good, actually. I’ve had pretty good luck. So I also have a translation of Alain Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent, which is a big, big work of science fiction in France. And that book was really intense to publish. We used to have these sessions, Zoom sessions, where we would sit down and work really hard on the translation together and that was fantastic. I mean, both Alain  and Sylvie have become really good friends, and I think partly because the translation work was just, you know, a way of connecting. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a question that is a little zooming out now, because last year there was this controversy in the world of translation, which doesn’t happen a lot. So you probably already know what I’m talking about. It was around that poem, “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman, that she wrote for the Biden inauguration. And that controversy started because the Dutch translator that they picked for the job was white, which Black activists and writers thought was incomprehensible. So this Dutch translator stepped aside. And I read that something similar happened with the Catalan translator, also white. And so, I was wondering if you know, here you are, translating a work written by a French Senegalese poet who writes the story of an African king and his followers, and also the story of African boat migrants. And you are white. Did that ever—you know, is that something that you think about?

Alexander Dickow: So the question is like, how do I position myself with regard to the controversy—

Helena de Groot: Yeah. 

Alexander Dickow: —given that I’m a white guy translating a story about Africa by a French Senegalese poet? 

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Alexander Dickow: And the answer is, I don’t know. I wanted to respect this text and to get this text to sing in English so that people could see what I was seeing in the French. And I hope I did that well. And that I did it, you know, respecting Sylvie’s story as well as the stories that are told in the book. And I can only try and do those things justice. I think that to some extent, what was at stake was not a matter of, you know, the translator needs to be of a given identity. What it was about is, if we’re going to promote a Black American poet, why don’t we also promote Black translators? And I think a lot of people were very upset because they thought it had something to do with, you can only speak about something if it’s, you know, from the perspective of your own identity. But I don’t think that that’s what the stakes were. I think the stakes were, had to do with marketing and branding and who to choose to promote and those kinds of issues. And those are distinct from the issue of who gets to talk about a given kind of experience. I do believe that fiction is a place where we should be able to explore different identities and different perspectives. But that’s a very distinct question from the sort of business of publishing and the business of who to promote.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting that you make that distinction. I’m also curious, you know, because you’re also a researcher of translation, and one of the things that you’re interested in is mistranslations, and what those mistranslations reveal about the translator and about, you know, their ideology or their implicit biases or, you know, the kind of framework that they work out of. And you approach it almost like a Freudian slip. You know, that they can also kind of be revealing of things that A) we’re not aware of, or B) that we are trying to keep hidden. 

Alexander Dickow: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: So given that, is there a way in which you ever thought, ‘What is it that I’m not seeing? What is it that I’m not aware of?” Because of course, an implicit bias is, well, implicit. We don’t know it always. So how do you look at the blank spots in your own approach? 

Alexander Dickow: I think that has everything to do with having other readers look at it. You know, it’s so crucial to have other people, you know, see the text and point those things out when they happen. So having Sylvie as a reader is, of course, incredible, but also, you know, the people at Asymptote and other readers along the line who have seen the text. But to me, that’s the only way to see the things you’re not seeing, or you know, to have someone else point them out to you. The other thing is that I was, I did become aware of, you know, ignorances that I had as I was working on the text. So, you know, I was like, I really need to read the Sunjata. And I did go and read it. And, you know, it led to an article. And that was part of the process was, you know, picking up just enough on, sort of, things that I didn’t know that much about and that I needed to know more about.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Alexander Dickow: It was part of the experience of the text. And, you know, I’ve learned enormous amounts just, translating this book. 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Okay, I have one last question. Is translating a “neverending quest for the other shore,” in your opinion? 

Alexander Dickow: Yes. You are … always trying to reach something that you can’t, (LAUGHS) that you won’t reach. 

Helena de Groot: Can you make that just a little more specific, like, what is that you’re trying to do and know that you’ll fail at?

Alexander Dickow: So, I wonder if it’s maybe more a matter of the particular esthetic shape of the object that you’re translating, rather than trying to reach the meaning of another language in general, you’re trying to reach what this particular book, this particular poem, this particular text has to say in the way that it says it. You know, I’m groping after my words naturally, but—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Naturally.

Alexander Dickow: What I’m trying to say is that, when you look in dictionaries, you get these disembodied meanings detached from their specific instances of use. You get a kind of abstraction. And translating is attempting to reach … the specific perspective that’s at work in … the words in that specific book. I don’t think I’m getting any closer to my object here. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) The quest for the other shore is indeed neverending.

Alexander Dickow: That’s right. That’s right. Absolutely.

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Helena de Groot: The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore / La quête infinie de l’autre rive was written by Sylvie Kandé and translated by Alexander Dickow. The book received the Prix Lucienne Gracia-Vincent, and was adapted for theater and staged at La Mézière in 2017. To complete his translation, Alexander Dickow received a 2018 PEN/Heim grant.

Besides The Neverending Quest, Sylvie Kandé is the author of two books that have only appeared in French, the poetry collection Gestuaire, which won the Prix Louise Labé, and a volume of memoiristic poetic prose titled Lagon, lagunes: Tableau de mémoire, which has a postface written by Édouard Glissant. She’s also a scholar of African history who has taught at American universities for over three decades. She launched the Francophone studies program at NYU and currently teaches at SUNY, Old Westbury. She lives in Harlem, New York.

To find out more about her work, check out her website, sylviekande.com. That is Sylvie, S-Y-L-V-I-E, and then Kandé, K-A-N-D-E, dot com.

Alexander Dickow is a translator, bilingual poet, and scholar of French and Francophone literature, who besides this book, has translated work by Gustave Roud, Henri Droguet, Max Jacob, and others. He’s also the author of several poetry collections, including Appetites, Caramboles, Trial Balloons, and Rhapsodie curieuse. Besides the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, he received the Albert Lee Sturm Award for Excellence in the Creative Arts, and was a Jacob K. Javits and a Fulbright Fellow. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he teaches at Virginia Tech.

To find out more about his work, check out his website, alexdickow.net, that’s Alex and then Dickow, D-I-C-K-O-W, dot net.

The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening. And thank you, too, to my editor on this podcast, who asked to be left nameless, and who is leaving the Poetry Foundation after 15 years. Thank you for letting me in when I came knocking on the Poetry Foundation’s door and for giving me a chance, and thank you for your kind and wise guidance these past few years. You will be missed!

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