- D S Hall.

I do think Ali makes an interesting point about translation, though – the whole concept of ‘translation’ rather than just ‘communication’ is a complex beast, and not always treated as such…

‘I am not in the habit of replying to reviews’: seems a good policy, don’t see why you veered away from it.

The review is a great endorsement of the writing (albeit with a couple of concerns). Stuart seems to be celebrating the presence of a significant writer who might like to consider a couple of things in future. Is that a bad/negative position to take?

I don’t get this combative response Ali. If the reviewer has things to say (even if they’re misguided in your view) let them have their say. Isn’t that what reviews are all about? The reader’s response to the work is their response – you can’t have an ideal reader. Or can you?

And making the reviewer sound like some kind of ignorant tool isn’t particularly gratifying. It kind of confirms what he was saying in the first place.

In the interest of hopefully starting a discussion, however, I’d like to query the reviewer’s desire to see ‘the mission of many of [my] poems [be] precisely a kind of translation – from other languages, or other locales.’ Would it be too contentious to view this desire as a colonialist or least hegemonic one? I believe I should have the choice to not want to ‘translate’ my perceived Otherness for the Anglo-Celtic Australian reader. But is the reviewer correct in assuming that all Anglo-Celtic Australian readers want nothing other than exotica from writers like me? (My own answer to this is a resounding ‘No’; I believe most Australians are far more sophisticated than that.)

Much could be said about ‘nimbleness of movement’ (of word, of thought) in modern Australian poetry, Murray and Forbes notably. I press the term once more because to me, at least, it specifies an energy that can be brought to bear powerfully. In mentioning it with regard to six young poets, stating how its use is eased by postmodern habits, I didn’t mean to signify that their poems are quiet, or easy with their world. This is not the case if you read them – though obviously others may disagree with me, including possibly Alison. Any energetic poem includes some quiet moves; however, I’m too old, mad and blind, to waste precious time knowingly on whole poems of ‘quietness’ and ‘supple irony’. In fact I’ve always run a mile. Regarding ‘The Simplified World’, I do think it’s a remarkably bold book – a ‘livre compose’ that plays seriously around the subject of depression, and is still outward to a large world.

Thanks for patience, and thanks Ali for the review.

John Leonard

Yet I think Alison’s citation of Mayakovsky, and the pathetic Stalinist misrepresentations of his work (the opposite of Trotsky’s very acute appreciation of the poet) does remind one that if not always then at certain points poetic progress and political – or perhaps more accurately, as philosopher Alain Badiou might have it, ‘metapolitical’ – progress have gone hand in hand. But I repeat that this observation has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the left/right binary in Australian politics, so the comment about Tony Abbott is, at best, amusing. See, for example, Kristin Ross’s stunning book on Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (the Emergence of Social Space).

Ali