Militant Translationality and the Language of the Barricades: Sean Bonney in Mexican Spanish

ABSTRACT

This hybrid, creative-critical, polyvocal work presents a short selection of the late British poet Sean Bonney’s discursive prose-poetry and theory that thinks through the terms of militant poetics, in English and in the Mexican poet and translator Hugo García Manríquez’s Spanish translation, El lenguaje de las barricadas [The Language of the Barricades]. These texts are prefaced by an English-language translation of García Manríquez’s introduction to his translations. A critical postface by Militant Ecologies special issue editors Daniel Eltringham and Fred Carter contextualises these translations in terms of the twenty-first century emergence of militant ‘translationality’, suggesting that Bonney’s theorisation of both the riot-form and the counterinsurgent microclimate of sensory derangement provoked by teargas is bound up with his reluctance to consider his own versions of nineteenth-century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire as creative translations. Yet translating Bonney’s work into Latin American scenarios of struggle including Mexico, Chile and Peru allows the translational thread leading from Rimbaud and the Paris Commune – through Bonney’s work – to be woven with García Manríquez’s own recent poetry, which inflects Bonney’s riotous joy with deeper temporalities of anticolonial and indigenous revolt.

KEYWORDS:

• translation
• poetics
• militant translationality
• atmospherics
• decolonial struggle
• counterinsurgency

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to the Estate of Sean Bonney, Editorial Matadero, Editorial Meladora, and the Frank Ocean Collective for the permission to quote from Sean Bonney’s poetry and reproduce images from El lenguaje de las barricadas, Lo común and ‘ACAB: Una Canción de Cuna’. We are also grateful for the reviewer’s useful recommendations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hugo García Manríquez, introduction to a selection and translation of Sean Bonney’s poetry, El lenguaje de las barricadas (Mexico City: Editorial Matadero, 2021), 7–10. This text was first published in Spanish and is reprinted here in Daniel Eltringham’s translation.

2. Sean Bonney, El lenguaje de las barricadas, translated by Hugo García Manríquez, 109–113.

3. Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (London: Unkant, 2011), 63–65.

4. Sean Bonney, El lenguaje de las barricadas, translated by Hugo García Manríquez, 38.

5. Sean Bonney, Our Death (Oakland, CA: Commune Editions, 2019), 73.

6. Sean Bonney, El lenguaje de las barricadas, translated by Hugo García Manríquez, 127–8.

7. Sean Bonney, ‘Notes on Militant Poetics’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 14(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.9255.

8. Critical postface by Daniel Eltringham and Fred Carter.

9. On Bonney’s non-translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, see Edmond (2012), Nowell Smith (2013), Sheppard (2016), and Hampson (2022).

10. See in particular Tim Atkins, Petrarch Collected Atkins (Crater Press, 2014), and Peter Hughes, Quite Frankly: After Petrarch’s Sonnets (Reality Street, 2015).

11. Jèssica Pujol Duran and Macarena Urzúa Opazo have recently published translations of a different selection of Bonney’s work, La revolución de las esferas celestes [The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres] (Santiago de Chile: Pez Espiral, 2022b). Pujol Duran also published her translation of Bonney’s sequence ‘Lamentations’ (Letters Against the Firmament) in the Spanish journal Revista Kokoro (2020).

12. The estallido social [social outburst] is the name given to the mass uprisings that began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019. Their catalyst was a modest rise in public transport fares, which constellated broader dissatisfaction with Chile’s authoritarian neoliberal settlement, spreading to all regions of Chile and leading to confrontation between protestors and the national police force.

13. Bonney’s ‘ACAB: A Nursery Rhyme’ was also translated into a comparable context in Peru by Valeria Román, where it was included in 11/20, a text-and-image response to the coup that removed president Martín Vizcarra in November 2020 and replaced him with Manuel Merino’s short-lived far-right government. Mass protests against Merino were violently suppressed; Román writes that the translation was ‘done following the events of the week of the 14 November. It is dedicated to the memory of Inti Sotelo and Bryan Pintado; to the people wounded, detained and tortured by Peruvian National Police and the de facto government of Manuel Merino; to the front line and the first aid brigades; to all those who resisted body and mind; to the urgency of changing things and the hope for the recuperation of the present and future’ (Román 2020, 12, trans. DE).

14. Paco derives from the Quechua word p’aqu or p’aku, meaning light brown or white, although this is usually taken to be a reference to the chestnut colour of the ponchos historically worn by the Chilean police rather than a marker of relative whiteness identified with the state per se, as Pujol Duran and Parker persuasively suggest. See Etimologías de Chile (http://etimologias.dechile.net/?paco). Corominas’s Spanish etymological dictionary includes an entry for alpaca that glosses the domesticated vicuña’s wool as p’aco, that is, ‘blonde, redish yellow’ (rubio, amarillo rojizo) (Corominas 1987 [1961], 44). Given the Inca empire’s organisation of pastoral biopower in the territory of Tahuantinsuyu, the Quechua-speaking Andean region, the notion that the present-day police might themselves discipline the populace as the Inca state had done its subjects is not altogether far-fetched. Brotherston (1992) notes that this American equivalent to the scriptural ‘folk-flock equation’ (199) allowed the consolidation of Inca power and perhaps the very possibility of a territorialised imperial state based on herding alpacas and llamas as at once the material basis of taxation and revenue, and the figurative ground of pastoral social relations in which ‘territory becomes the pasture and the Inca its divine herder whom only “outlaws” disobey’ (196–99). Brotherston acidly observes that the Mapuche peoples to the south of this territory – today regularly subject to racialised violence at the hands of the Chilean state – record paying tribute in flock and mounting raids into imperial territory to recover them (198).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the British Academy [British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship PF19\10001].

Notes on contributors

Hugo García Manríquez

Hugo García Manríquez is a Mexican poet and translator based in Oakland. His poetry publications include Commonplace / Lo común (2022 / 2018) and Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement (2015). His translations include Jack Spicer’s After Lorca (2022), a selection of Sean Bonney’s poetry, El lenguaje de las barricadas (2021), George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (2017), and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (2015). Earlier publications include Two Poems (2013), Painting is Finite (2012), No oscuro todavía (2005), and Los materiales (2009).

Daniel Eltringham

Daniel Eltringham is a researcher, writer, editor and translator writing a book about UK–Latin American poetic translation networks in the period 1960–1990. Currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, he has held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Sheffield, and took his PhD and MA at Birkbeck College, University of London. His academic monograph, Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure, is out with Liverpool University Press (2022). He co-edits Girasol Press, a small publisher that explores handmade poetics and experimental translation.

Fred Carter

Fred Carter is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Infrastructure Humanities Group, University of Glasgow. His current monograph project, Poetry & Energy After 1973, traces the emergence of a poetics of exhaustion and politics of refusal against intersecting crises of petroleum, productivity, and social reproduction. Recent work can be found in Postmodern Culture, Arcadia, and The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. With Jeff Diamanti, he is co-director of the practice-based research residency FieldARTS and his first poetry chapbook, Outages, is out now with Veer2.