Dennis Cooper |
Dennis Cooper in Translation: An Interview by Paul Cunningham
Paul Cunningham: As Diarmuid Hester points out in Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, two of your earliest and most significant influences include Arthur Rimbaud and Marquis de Sade. You’ve called Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom a “giant discovery” at the age of 15. Aase Berg’s With Deer was my own giant discovery at 17. For a long time, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books have both argued that translation can have a renovative, transformative effect on U.S. poetry. Was it a coincidence that so many of the works that influenced you in the beginning were translations? If not, what do you think it was that was happening in those books-in-translation that maybe wasn’t happening in American poetry at the time?
Dennis Cooper: Rimbaud and Sade led me into French literature, and, really, into serious literature for the first time. And I immediately became a diehard Francophile. At the time, in my mid-late teens, the American poetry that was current and cutting edge that I knew about — the Beats, the mid-western guys, Bukowski, etc. — didn’t appeal to me. It was too freighted with autobiography and emotional crescendos and stuff, whereas the French poetry I read (Reverdy, Mallarmé, Char, the Surrealists, etc.) seemed more daring and colorful and untethered. I was doing a lot of psychedelics at the time, and the French poets were a good match. I didn’t get into American poetry until I found and fell in love with James Tate when I was about 19. His stuff led me to the 2nd generation New York School poets (Berrigan, Padgett, Notley, Mayer, Brainard, Elmslie, et. al.) whose work had the qualities I’d loved in French poetry but with this gorgeous US vernacular and lightness. After I discovered them, I was ‘all in’ on American poetry after that.
PC: In The Paris Review, Ira Silverberg notes that your work was first translated into French in 1995. How did you react to this news at first? What was the first book (or books) translated into French? Do you recall any of those early reviews of your first books in translation?
DC: When my French publisher Editions POL started publishing me, it was a thrill beyond belief. The ultimate dream come true, really. They started with the George Miles Cycle novels. I think the first one they published was Frisk. And they’ve published all of my books ever since. Astounding luck. My French is terrible, and it was even worse back then, so I relied on my publisher giving me summations of the reviews. From what I gathered, they were excitingly positive and, more importantly, they seemed to really understand the novels in a way the American reviewers hadn’t. I didn’t have to deal with the ‘transgressive writer’ roadblock/tag over here because my work fits into a long-standing and respected tradition in French literature of dealing explicitly with ‘difficult’ subject matter.
PC: I remember God Jr. being published in Germany—2017, right? What was the reception of your work like there? What other languages has your work been translated into?
DC: I’m not sure what the reception of my work is like in Germany really. I keep getting published there, so I guess the response must be pretty good. Let me think … off the top of my head, the other languages my books have been translated into are Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese.
PC: What works in translation have you read recently? Anything you’re looking forward to in 2021?
DC: Recently I’ve read the two Nathalie Leger novels that Dorothy published (The White Dress and Exposition), Ariana Harwicz’s novels Feebleminded and Die, My Love, Aase Berg’s Tsunami from Solaris, and I forget what else. Some small US press is publishing Pierre Clementi’s book Quelques Messages Personnels next year, and I’ve been dying to read that for decades, so that’s probably my biggest want.
PC: Are there any untranslated French poetry collections or novels that you would like to see someone translate ASAP?
DC: Lots. People here in Paris are always telling me how much I would love a certain novel or poetry collection that hasn’t been translated. So many that I wouldn’t know where to start. I’ve long hoped that someone would translate Pierre Guyotat’s novel Prostitution. One chapter was published years ago in the US by Red Dust, and its translator, Bruce Benderson, told me it was absolute murder to even render that little piece of the novel into English because it’s basically impossible to translate. But that’s my translation-related pipe dream.
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DE OTROS MUNDOS
Dennis Cooper / Chaperos / Sadomasoquismo internauta
Dennis Cooper / Todos los males, el mal
Dennis Cooper / El creep entre nosotros
Dennis Cooper / “Si pudiese sintetizar lo que hago en un Tweet, no seguiría escribiendo novelas”
Chaperos
Dennis Cooper / Chaperos / Prólogo de Juan Bonilla
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Dennis Cooper / Lo peor
Dennis Cooper / Contacto / Anagrama
Dennis Cooper / Cacheo / Anagrama
FICCIONES
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / Sobre la destrucción
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / Franceses
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / Chaperos
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / La ciberconectividad
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / Provocador
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / Guía
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / Autores
Casa de citas / Dennis Cooper / Sobre la naturaleza del deseo
Dennis Cooper / El muerto
Dennis Cooper / Niña
Dennis Cooper / Hacha
Dennis Cooper / El cerdo
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