The texts which comprise this small book — forms of
essay, talk, dialogue — at one time saw themselves as
individualists who went somewhere (to small press
magazines) on their own. Now they are here, collected
with the chance of going nowhere together. As it should
be: since they represent the fate of language and
translation in the memory of aliens living inside
America — like a family going nowhere together, but at
home. The philosopher Jacques Derrida and his family are
part of this family in the dead letter office, and
curiously they are named going nowhere together at home.
Along the way, so are the poets Charles Reznikoff and
William Carlos Williams and Emmanuel Hocquard and
Juliette Valery and Charles Olson, as well as Horace’s
Odes in translation. You will find in this Memoir what
it means for an alien to search for his family in a book
outside the time of its writing. You will find him
discovering that translation is a personal story and
that poetry might not have a home without it. You will
find him wondering: whose voices are these which we hear
around us as we write, as Babel turns to rumor through
the fact of translation, wherein a book is being made
and remade from American to French and back again? You
will find him through translation like a Being in the
Poetry of the Extraterritorial, an un-owned territory
which is neither French nor American but is negotiated
by the rumor of a poetry which emerges from both, a
future condition (État) which seeks the name it could be
but is not. Follow this alien Being’s trajectory: he is
not of America but grows up in it. He publishes a book
in French translation before it appears in the American
English original. He becomes native to a writing whose
eloquence is always in question, at times because it is
passive, at other times because it is unpronounceable.
Who, over time, finds his Memoir? In the dead letter
office, we do. We find someone somewhat like ourselves,
who uses language and translation as if these were a
poet’s gifts in the making of history, a history which
is foreign yet integral to his homeland. We find someone
who uses it to return to his own people and place, so
that he can “only stand more/revealed.” We find someone
who will act the new basis for his identity — the
consciousness whose coming into Being must be premised
on his existence in another world.
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