Yasmine Seale: Almost Always

Yasmine Seale: Almost Always

Dina Famin

 

As much as we wanted the lecture to be a surprise, we asked Yasmine Seale on Thursday over dinner what she was planning to talk about. “I’m at a crossroads,” she said, “and I’d like some input.” She didn’t end up talking much about the crossroads or the input she’s looking for, only saying that there is one, and that it concerns the tension between narrative complexity, stylistic experimentation, and reader comprehension.

Riding high on the excitement of the symposium, and steeped in the Nights since the start of the semester, what stuck most with me from Seale’s lecture was her explanation of the erasure poems. I’ve seen the poems before, read about how she started making them, but contemporary poetry is a field far beyond my interest and comprehension, as is contemporary art (forgive the gross generalizations), so I never really got them. But Seale highlighted a dimension I now think crucial for erasure poetry, namely awareness and deliberate use of a source text. Treating each page like a canvas for the scenario being created, Seale picks colors, shape, and movement that correspond to the words being erased and the words being emphasized. The resulting poems can be a multimedia collage. They are both a way of reckoning with the past of translation and the dynamics within the text itself.

As always, I noted things Seale said that were particularly interesting:

  • On the Nights:
    • “The Nights is a work that resists being known”
    • “It doesn’t really want to be a book”
    • “It’s less a text than a tradition”
    • “The Nights is all afterlife […] there is no text itself”
    • It is “like a living organism”
  • On style:
    • “Night thoughts are more like musical phrases than sentences”
    • The text is “closer to sedimentation” than genealogy
    • “Pattern is not boring if it’s interesting to look at”
  • On translation:
    • “We need to dig deeper into the toolbox”
    • [A paraphrase]: you can’t treat style as an optional aspect of a text
    • “Reshuffled, the text finds new things to day”
  • On her choices and wishes:
    • “Rather than freeze one moment, I would like to give [a glimpse] of the work over time”
    • “Embrace the dream logic of these stories”
    • Special interest in the “protective relationship of women between the living and the dead”
    • “Who could ever own a story?”
  • Shahrazad
    • “She is a kind of library”
    • “A kind of principle of reading and recombination”
  • Her central issues:
    • “Is the role [of a Nights translator] to recount the tradition or keep it going?”

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