Poet, translator, and musician Jordan Lee Schnee’s poem “Maté” received the New Voices Spotlight in Chautauqua: Words and Music when he was seventeen years old. Recently, I had the opportunity to follow-up with him. In many ways, Schnee feels he has a similar mentality and outlook to when he was seventeen, even though his situation is very different. He now lives in Berlin, works as a professional writer and translator, and is working on a Ph.D on the intersection between the French programmatic literary movement Oulipo and Jewish Kabbalah. The Ph.D, funded by the German government, is a lifestyle change for Schnee as well, who had largely been working freelance prior to beginning this new phase of academic work.
“I’ve stuck to my guns in writing mostly poetry,” Schnee says. His work centers around sound, without rhymes or strict forms. His goal in writing poetry is still much the same as it was in his poem “Maté”:writing about the everyday “to get at something transcendent.” This is not to say that Schnee avoids prose entirely. He has published a book, The Dreadful Tropics, a travelogue, although he says even his prose writing tends to end up “on the edge of poetry.” Schnee has also published a poetry collection, Unapprehension, through Propeller in Berlin. Schnee is excited by his work with Propeller, which is a very underground publishing forum: they’re almost “Soviet samizdat-style editions,” Schnee told me.
In addition to being a poet, prose writer, and scholar, Schnee is an accomplished translator: some of his notable works include translations of Washington Cucurto’s poetry in the collection Some Dollars (2015) and Mike Wilson’s short novel Rockabilly (2018). When I asked about how Schnee got his start in translation, he told me it happened around the same time that his poem appeared in the pages of Chautauqua. Between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, he explained, he lived in Argentina, a place where he would return numerous times later in life and which became very important to him. During his time in South America, Schnee began learning Spanish and started to write in Spanish at the same time. He recalls that while living in Argentina, a poet had asked him to translate his poetry into Spanish: while that project never got anywhere, Schnee says, the fire was lit.
Schnee received further encouragement for his budding interest in translation when he returned to the United States to study at NYU. There, the poetry faculty urged their students to “just go for stuff.” It was a faculty member at NYU, Lila Zemborain, who introduced Schnee to the work of Washington Cucurto, an Argentinean writer and poet. Schnee had the opportunity to travel to Argentina on a grant to work with Cucurto, whose writings Schnee would translate and compile into Some Dollars. It was a learning experience for him. “You get a sense of how much of the lyrical ‘I’ is made up [by the writer] and how much is coming from them,” he says.
In terms of translation philosophy, Schnee believes it is extremely important to translate living writers. “Translation is a great political tool,” Schnee says. “It brings voices into the international conversation that just aren’t accessible.” As an example, Schnee related to me the fact that the Nobel Prize is only read in English. Through imperialism and cultural domination, English has become the lingua franca of the global literary scene, which excludes writers that don’t write in English. The act of translation helps to overcome that barrier. And it works the other way too, when translating out of English. Schnee gave the example of the Harry Potter series being translated into Yiddish. When you translate popular works like Harry Potter into other languages like Yiddish, says Schnee, it asserts that Yiddish is a part of the current discourse.
He’s very interested in the potential of the Internet in this regard. “The Internet is happening in English and Spanish,” he says, which attests to the up-and-coming multilingual global discourse. Not to mention that digital resources for less common languages like Yiddish—which is one of Schnee’s many working languages—are slowly becoming more and more available. There’s a lot of possibilities there that Schnee finds very exciting: the community is vibrant and alive.
On the flip-side, and yet part-and-parcel of the same goal, Schnee is also interested in translating the voiceless dead: writers whose work has been suppressed or erased. He talked to me about his work on Deborah Vogel, a poet who lived and wrote in German-occupied Poland before she was killed by the Nazis in 1941. Vogel’s work was revolutionary, Schnee says: very modern, Cubist poetry about alienation and living in the city. She wrote in Yiddish and was part of a major Yiddish publishing scene. But these works often don’t make it to the light of day thanks to institutional and cultural suppression, Schnee said, unless translators can uncover them and bring their work to the wider modern audience.
To that end, Schnee says that translation is often a thin line between over-localizing a work and leaving it too foreignized. The ideal for him is to aim somewhere in the middle. Translation is about making a coherent text in the target language that captures the meaning of the original. “Once you get the understanding of the text down, which isn’t always straightforward,” he says, “then it’s about making choices. You have to think, is that a defensible position?”
I was intrigued by his language of the “defensible position” in translation, and what that might mean for the translation community. Was it really so aggressive? However, he assured me that it was not as antagonistic as I had assumed. He gave the example of a German-to-English translation workshop he once attended, which was rigorous and challenging, but entirely constructive. In translation, where there’s a concrete original text, the translator needs to know exactly why they made the choices they did. It’s like any writing workshop, Schnee says, only the choice must be based on and bring out some aspect of the original.
In terms of reading, Schnee says he is both delighted and intimidated by the possibilities of working in numerous languages. “When you start branching out into other languages, you get super overwhelmed,” Schnee says. “Each language has its own canon; each language has its own classics.” The solution is to be selective: read what you like. For the translator, the language is a working language: one doesn’t need to know every work of every canon. He also admits that as a translator, he tries to not read work in translation. “I like to try the original,” he said, laughing.
I was curious about Schnee’s influences when it comes to his own writing, and music came out on top. It’s one of Schnee’s major passions. Schnee is a practicing musician and likes to incorporate music into his work whenever possible. He told me of a gig this past summer at a festival in Poland where he read a long poem in Yiddish, accompanied by bass and jazz flute. Music enriches the environment for him, Schnee says: it provides emotional color.
Much of Schnee’s work is influenced by music to some degree, including his latest project, a longer novel or novella with the working title Night Jags. It’s a piece that explores the jazz scene and nightlife of Berlin, using songs and fragments from various languages, including English, Quiché, Yiddish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sicilian, Italian… the list goes on. “It’s complete polyphony,” Schnee says, aligning with his deep fascination with sound. As a writer living in Berlin, Schnee’s project is interested in how these come together in the city’s “extremely scarred space.” He says, “Berlin is un-remembering itself to even begin to live with itself.” Night Jags is an attempt to examine that.
