On The Power And Poetics Of Ambiguity

According to my Japanese-English dictionary, "ambiguous" is defined as,

1) having more than one meaning, so that it is not clear which meaning is intended

2) difficult to understand, or not certain

Poetry without ambiguity is simply fractured prose. When this is successfully done, the seduction is more an invitation to the identity of the "poet" rather than the poetry. For instance, a "You" we're reading in the poem has just taken part in a one-night stand. Our loins go on fire too. And then after that settles down and we return to the poetry, you can't help but wondering who is the "you" of the romp and the one proclaiming the right to write up a "You" for the occasion in the first place.

The seduction game extends to literature, and personally I don't see that as a literary fault. Like any sensible male with an appreciation for feminine beauty, I'm inclined to want to know more about Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith for this quality they have as much as any other. Jhumpa's characters all have a familiar enough spectrum. At this point, it appears it's simply going to be storytime with her from here on out. How she has been able to take a good look at both literature and American society and turn it into a pleasing, non-threatening style is an astonishing feat, though not exactly a seductive one. Zadie continues to be a more compelling artist, because it's fairly obvious she has the quick irritability of your average arbiter of cultural values any decent artist needs, and if it weren't for that extraordinary knack she has for building novels, she'd be forced into finding some other vehicle for suppressing what ought to be anyone's sensible anger.

I now have a theory in mind - which I plan on adhering to for a while - that the source of power to be found in the ambiguous poet isn't shaped by a revolt against self and society, but against the tyranny of pronouns. Now that I've established it well enough in mind what Shakespeare and Basho, Dickinson and Mallarmé, Yosano and Emerson are doing, with their poetics of ambiguity, I see in each the hunger for a larger world that proper names limit.

Up until this weekend, I've avoided reading Dickinson's letters for fear it might indicate too much about the poetry. Impatient, I went ahead and dipped in these past few days, and on January 29, 1850, I see she's doing the same thing with herself, her fictional "I", "Him" and "him", as she does in her poetry, namely conflating, blending, perfecting them for the power of suggestion. Together with Mallarmé, and at the same historical moment, they discovered what a transference of power it is, forsaking your private morality all for the public one of culture, to claim your personal "I". At that historical moment it was a revolutionary discovery. The accompanying religious terror has now been mitigated, but the terror of the option of ambiguity still thrives.

By itself, the application of the ambiguous, however, is not transcendent alone. At times I do see that what distinguishes poetry from a solitary, emotional outpouring is simply that limitation, an expression of style alone within the ambiguous.

Translating on this blog Basho's "The Narrow Road to the Far Interior" has been a revelation. So far, through the first four chapters, I see that Basho has not used the "I" once, and yet in English translation, the "I" has constantly been imposed upon his narrative (you can see here nine variations of the opening chapter).

The "I" is ideological, which the great poets over four hundred years across the globe have resisted. Instead, what you see Basho doing, is simply leaving the personal pronoun out. He refers to his traveling companion Sora by name, but not anything resembling "You." That's why I have decided to translate Basho's journey more like an internal, poetic monologue, and not as a series of diary entries or a lyrical essay. In fact when Basho does mention Sora he adds the prefix 同行 to his name. Together the two characters would read "accompanying" in English, but separately, "the same", along with "go; in the direction of", which could ultimately then be read as "of the same direction".