You’re imagining the arc of a person’s future career?
Right. Maybe not the arc of a whole career, though that would be ideal—and I can think of a number of poets for whom we’ve published everything, and we envisioned that from the start. But I would never rubber-stamp any writer, for that writer’s own good. If somebody has been working with me across four or five books and sends a manuscript that repeats earlier work, I need the courage to say, “It’s not there, let’s keep working on it.” Those are hard conversations. I want to make certain that I check all of my prejudices. If I really care for someone I still have to be a hard critic—particularly if I really care.
That courage must come from a conviction about the work. How do you develop that conviction?
It comes from practice and learning on the job, realizing that a decision I make now may have an impact ten years from now. We all go into this because we want longevity. We want something of the eternal, if I can be a little pretentious about it. We want to be seen and acknowledged and remembered over the course of our lifetimes. When I work with someone I want to perpetuate that person’s career, to have it seen as an important body of work, to have a longer view of the work that we’re doing. Maybe the egotistical side of me wants to say, “Hey, I was that editor.”
I’ll go back to entering as the village idiot. Even someone like W. S. Merwin, who has published dozens of books and been awarded heavily, still wants an honest reading. I have his new manuscript right now and I will tell him what I’m seeing. Most likely he’ll say, “Well, I’m doing that because of this.” But entering those conversations with an author may turn the book away from some of its weaknesses, or it may help me advocate for what the author is doing. Both the thrill and the responsibility of the work are in asking those questions.
There are some authors I probably wasn’t hard enough on. You're not going to prevent negative reviews, but if you’re on your game as an editor you can protect the author from the obvious.
What does an ideal editor look like to you?
The idea I use to explain that is from Odysseas Elytis, the Greek Nobel Prize winner, from a book we published called Open Papers. He talks about every writer wanting a third reader. The first reader is your mom, dad, brother, sister, lover, husband, whatever. The second reader is that colleague, another writer—in this day and age, somebody in your workshop who is going to read your work with sensitivity, sensibility, and understanding. Any writer worth her salt has at least two good readers. But everyone seeks the third reader, an unknown beloved. In many ways I aspire to be a professional third reader and to meet people where they are.
The challenge for me as an editor, and maybe as a person, is not to be too judgmental up front. I take in as much of the picture as I can and then bring my critical skills to it. A lot of the people I know come from vastly different backgrounds than I do, or they may have little in common with the reality of my life. But that is what interests me. Editing is the opportunity to learn more.
It’s a challenge that with all we need to do to put a book out into the world—from making the physical object to publicity and marketing—we don’t spend enough time talking about the why of poetry. Why are we engaging in this? We don’t get to talk about why poetry has been the carrier of civilization from the start, from that first human scream. I look at each book we publish as another opportunity to recharge those batteries, to say, “Oh yeah, that’s why.”
In this day and age, the book business is so difficult. But the book business has been difficult in every day and age. There’s the joke that after Gutenberg published his Bible, his second book was about the death of the publishing industry. We all like to complain, but each time I enter into that sacred space with an author, it revives my life in the world of poetry. I hope to cast some of that enthusiasm into the world in the form of the books we publish. I love being able to say that we’ve got something I’m really excited about. That’s the publishing impulse: “Hey, you’ve got to read this.”
When did you first start translating poems yourself?
I first translated poems when I lived in Spain for a year as an undergrad, just out of personal curiosity. I started doing it on a more professional level when I was editing Reversible Monuments with Mónica de la Torre, and she suggested I try it. I think my first response was, “No, I can’t. I’m the editor, not a translator,” but then I started doing it and loved it. I would like to do more; it’s just a time issue. But I think I’m a much better editor than I am a translator, so I put my efforts there. The thing with translations is there’s always the original to compare them against and to show you where you failed. There’s that phrase traduttore, traditore: “translator, traitor.” You’re going to be held accountable to the original. But certainly somebody can look at the books we’ve published and say I suck as an editor, just as easily as that person can say I suck as a translator. [Laughs.]
But no one will compare the finished book to the unedited first draft until long after you’re dead, if ever.
Right. There’s also a little self-consciousness, plus being a perfectionist and believing, “No, I have to do this right.” Forrest Gander told me to just let it go at a certain point and not revisit it, because as a translator you can just keep revising.
I like that process, but it takes a different mindset and I need to close everything else out in order to get there. It takes longer for me to get into that role than it does for me to sit down and read a manuscript. I know that I can go home this weekend and edit two or three books, whereas in a weekend I may struggle to translate one poem to my satisfaction. But I love that translation forces me to slow down.
One thing I love about poetry is that it forces me to read and to be interrupted in a different way, to slow down, to pause. “Why is the line written that way?” Translation slows that down even further. It’s like I have to switch linguistic brains too, and have a conversation between the two languages.
It seems to me that the original poem also gets edited in the act of translation. How much do you make the translated poem your own?
I think you have to make the translated poem its own: It must become a poem in the language you’re translating into. I want that to happen without too many liberties, to have a poem that at least suggests the original. I’m trying to remember a poem that John Balaban translated, a Ho Xuan Huong poem written in Vietnamese. The tonal character of the language makes it sound like rain falling. He makes some vocabulary adjustments to create the same sound while conveying the same meaning. It’s not a verbatim translation but it’s trying to bring forth some of the characteristics beyond the vocabulary to make the poem more in parallel to the original. You’ve got to make some impositions along the way to bring your language to the original, or the original to your language.
Translated works have always been a part of Copper Canyon’s history. Where did that come from?
All the founders were very much into translation. One of the first successes of the press was Bill O’Daly’s translation of Still Another Day by Pablo Neruda. That book established that translations actually do well and they enliven poetry in the original. I think it’s been in the ethos of the press since then.
Let’s talk about the roots of Copper Canyon. How did the press begin?
It depends on who you talk to—I’ve heard various stories over the years. My understanding is that it all started when Sam Hamill and Bill O’Daly were editing a magazine out of UC Santa Barbara and they won an award from what was at the time the CCLM [Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, now the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses]. With that money they bought their first printing press. I don’t know if Tree Swenson was editing then—she may have been working on that literary journal—and she and Sam were a couple. But Jim Gautney is the founder I’m intrigued by, because he was the one who taught them all how to print using letterpress. I’ve looked for him at various times but can’t find him.
I think that a lot of presses start that way, with people behind the scenes and in the shadows who we never see. That’s not to discredit those we do see. I suspect Jim never asked for attention yet was instrumental in giving the others the knowledge to start the press.
They started in Denver when Tree and Sam and Bill were living together; Jim may have been living with them also. Then they were invited to come to Port Townsend by Centrum, an arts organization here, and so they all moved. My understanding is that Bill and Sam worked in a porn bookstore for their day jobs while they were starting the press. I’m not certain what year Bill left, but I think it was after the first couple years here in Port Townsend. Then it operated pretty much as a mom and pop shop with Sam and Tree and their friends.
A few years later Sam and Tree essentially sold the press to itself and created a nonprofit. That was a year or two before I arrived. The nonprofit status allowed us to get grants directly from the NEA, the Lila Wallace Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. They were instrumental in developing independent and nonprofit publishing as we know it today.
When did Sam Hamill leave the press?
I think Sam left the press about ten years ago or so, but again, like Allan Kornblum, he’s one of my great mentors. Allan taught me to be more of a publisher and Sam taught me to be more of an editor.
Would you explain the distinction?
Publishing is about getting the books out there, about getting an audience and expanding the reach of the book. It’s about making something public. Editing is about close contact with the text, and also about advocacy. Advocacy for the author, advocacy for the art form.
