This chapter begins by arguing that debates about whether a poem can be translated reflect debates about the nature of the poem itself. Those who assert that poetry is untranslatable, for example, tend to believe that every poem is a unique event in a specific language. Conversely, those who assert the importance of translation tend to see poems as existing, and as having their meanings, only in relation to other poems or art forms. Considering examples from Roy Fisher, Friedrich Hölderlin, Vittorio Sereni, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, César Vallejo, Donald Justice, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O’Hara, the chapter demonstrates that in practice, both these conceptual positions are essential. It explores how the practice of translation generates networks of mutually referential identities over time, and it suggests that, more broadly, the emergence of the abstraction known as “the poem” depends on its relation to such interconnections between poems, poets, and translations, ones that may be shaped by imitation, parody, homage, and adaptation.

Set in Paris, Bolaño’s deeply contextualized novel, Monsieur Pain, takes place in a historical moment heightened with geopolitical tensions. The Spanish Civil War is raging, fascism is on the rise; Europe is looking back at the devastation of the Great War and forward to another world war. César Vallejo – the exiled Peruvian poet, a communist and supporter of the doomed Spanish Republic – is dying in Paris, stricken by incessant hiccups. Pierre Pain, a mesmerist who tries and fails to cure Vallejo, becomes drawn into a noirish intrigue he never manages to decipher. Layered upon this immediate context are other moments drawn from Bolaño’s own lived experience: the Cuban Revolution, the Latin-American liberation movements of the 1960s, the Tlatelolco massacre, Pinochet’s coup, the Dirty War in Argentina. Failure thus becomes the ultimate context of this novel, operating on multiple levels both within the diegesis and beyond: Pain’s failure implicitly points to all the defeats and betrayals of twentieth-century emancipatory projects; the novel sets readers up for failure by thwarting our efforts to navigate the dense intertextual web and by foreclosing resolution; and on the level of literary language the text admits and indeed announces its own failure as written expression.

This chapter tells the story of surrealism during the period of decolonization (and neoliberal re-entrenchment) that extends roughly from the end of World War II to the contemporary moment. It traces the overlapping but also discontinuous genealogies according to which anticolonial movements throughout the world – and in particular throughout the Global South – drew upon, rejected, and reinvented surrealist thinking. By studying surrealism as an anticolonial movement, this chapter inverts the common narrative by which it originated in Paris after World War I and “spread” to other countries, whether through the travels of individual European artists and writers, or through groups of second-order adherents. In place of a set of surrealist techniques and adherents disseminated throughout the nether reaches of the colonial world, this chapter explores the ways in which anticolonial thinkers throughout the Global South, particularly in North Africa and throughout the Americas, have built Afro-Caribbean, tricontinental, pan-African, and otherwise trans-Oceanic networks of artistic and political activity through the medium of a surrealist movement rendered plastic through translation.