Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No. 4

At the Gal Vihara in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, 1979. Photograph by Nina Subin. All images courtesy of Eliot Weinberger.

Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No. 4

Interviewed by Srikanth Reddy

Issue 253, Fall 2025

For almost half a century, Eliot Weinberger has made an art of what might be called the impersonal essay. Scholarly articles, monographs, and ancient texts furnish the source material for these works, whose titles frequently resemble encyclopedia entries⁠⁠—“Agate,” “Angels,” “Empedocles,” “Ice,” “Lizards,” “Muhammad,” “The Sahara,” “Wrens,” “The World.” Some evoke the form of chronicles or oral histories; others read like excerpts from antiquarian commonplace books, accumulating aphorisms and anecdotes from various⁠⁠—often non-Western⁠⁠—civilizations. A reader opening Works on Paper (1986), Karmic Traces (2000), or The Ghosts of Birds (2016) to any page might come across a Tang dynasty governor’s address to the crocodiles of the Wu River; an account of the travels of Jón Ólafsson from Iceland to India in the early seventeenth century; or the final words of a Yorkshireman who spent forty-nine years in bed. There are many “I”s to be found in Weinberger’s literary essays, but the first person is reserved almost exclusively for others.

In the UK and Europe, Weinberger is best known for his writings on American politics⁠⁠—especially for “What I Heard about Iraq,” which compiles quotations from politicians, military personnel, aid workers, and Iraqi civilians into a litany of overheard speech (“I heard the vice president say, ‘I really do believe we’ll be greeted as liberators’ ”). First published in the London Review of Books, where Weinberger has been a frequent contributor ever since, the essay has been adapted for the stage and set to chamber music, and, in 2006, was read publicly around the world on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. A series of rueful dispatches on 9/11 and the War on Terror, with titles like “Republicans: A Prose Poem,” are collected in What Happened Here (2005).

He may be better known at home as a translator of other writers’ works⁠⁠—most notably nine volumes of poetry by Octavio Paz, including Eagle or Sun? (1951, first translation 1970), A Tree Within (translation 1988), and Sunstone (1957, 1991), as well as Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor (1931, first complete translation 1988) and poetry by Bei Dao. Many college students first come to read Weinberger, a Yale dropout, through his sardonic commentary on various English renditions of a four-line Tang dynasty poem in “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei,” which still regularly appears on syllabi for translation studies and world literature courses.

Weinberger was born in 1949 at Doctors Hospital, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and spent his first three years in Brooklyn, near Grand Army Plaza, before his family moved to Westchester County. He is adamant that he has never been a part of a literary scene, but in his small magazine Montemora, which he published in the late seventies and early eighties, and in the anthology American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993), Weinberger sought to foreground an earlier generation of avant-garde writers whose poetics and politics informed his own⁠⁠—among them Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and George Oppen. Since then, he has edited anthologies of classical Chinese and contemporary international poetry for his own publisher, New Directions. He describes his many book introductions and the pieces he writes for magazines as “oranges and peanuts for sale,” the title of his 2009 collection. Visual artists like Vija Celmins and Terry Winters have asked Weinberger to write texts to accompany their work; these collaborations have resulted in some of his favorites of his own essays, on birds, stars, and the color blue.

We spoke over four afternoons in late winter and early spring at Weinberger’s home in the West Village, where he’s lived with his wife, the photographer Nina Subin, for forty years. The house can be identified by the small handprints on the sidewalk outside; these once belonged to their son, Stefan, now a filmmaker and cinematographer in LA, and their daughter, Anna Della, a writer and editor who lives nearby. The house is decorated with travelers’ curios⁠⁠—illuminated manuscripts from Turkey (“probably fake, but beautiful”), Indian glass paintings, Tantric drawings. Over the living room mantel is a map of the Jain cosmos. On my arrival, Weinberger would brew a pot of coffee and lead us up the stairs to his orderly office, which overlooks a dry cleaner across the street; there we could smoke freely (he has made do with American Spirits since Nat Shermans were discontinued a few years ago) and talk for hours. In person, Weinberger is wry, observant, alternately quizzical and irascible, and⁠⁠—though he has an enviable memory for literary dustups, political events, and the details of his travels⁠⁠—is taciturn, even cagey, about his own psychology. When I suggested that his work, which appears to hold personality at a certain remove, might offer something like a fourth-person perspective on the world, he replied, “There’s lots of first persons, but I’m the last person.”

 

INTERVIEWER

I heard that you declined to be interviewed for the Review years ago because the editors wanted to bill it as an Art of Translation.

ELIOT WEINBERGER

I just thought they were sticking me in the wrong box. I’ve never thought of myself as a translator, more as someone who has done some translations. Of course, I worked with Paz for thirty years, and I did Huidobro’s Altazor, three times actually, and Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death (1938, 1992) and some other things. Bei Dao I translated because he kind of made me do it. But my last big translation, the Borges book of essays, was twenty-five years ago. I was never a Latin Americanist and never a real translator, wasn’t somebody you could hire to do a new novel by Vargas Llosa or something.

INTERVIEWER

But isn’t there a case to be made that even your essays are translations? You’re taking sentences from a source material and putting them in your own style and form.

WEINBERGER

Well, that gets us into that whole idea of translation theory⁠⁠—you know, every act of reading is a translation, every text is a translation, and so forth⁠⁠—which is true enough on a very basic level, but I don’t find it all that interesting or useful. I prefer the old-fashioned definition of translation as taking something specific from one language and moving it into another.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing essays?

WEINBERGER

After my parents died, I found a box of my old school papers, and one of them was a report I’d written in junior high school, for “American Civilization” class, on fallout shelters, which were then all the rage in suburban America⁠⁠—people digging up their backyards to protect themselves against nuclear war.

INTERVIEWER

I hear they’re making a comeback.

WEINBERGER

What amazed me about it was that it’s exactly in the style of much of my writing now⁠⁠—a collage of facts and quotations and a certain kind of irony, lampooning the people pushing these shelters. There’s even a poem in there. Of course my vocabulary is now somewhat larger, but you know what Auden said, that the sign of a minor writer is that their style never changes …

INTERVIEWER

So you never had to work to find your voice?

WEINBERGER

Well, I spent my twenties doing more reading, translating, editing, and traveling than writing. I wrote bad poetry.

 

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Ca. 1954.

INTERVIEWER

What kind of bad?

WEINBERGER

Just bad lyric poetry that was obviously under the influence of what I was reading⁠⁠—George Oppen, ethnopoetics, Chinese poetry. I remember Oppen, who seemed to me a model of how one should live as a poet, saying of some poet he thought of as mediocre, “He’s not scared enough of poetry.” I think I held poetry in too high regard. I was very unhappy trying to be a poet. I didn’t have the imagination. But when I turned thirty I realized that I could take things that were already in existence and do something with them. It was like painting a still life as opposed to being Hieronymus Bosch⁠⁠—arranging objects into a composition and painting them in my own way. As soon as I turned to prose, I was happier. Though from the beginning my prose⁠⁠—like that early essay “The Dream of India”⁠⁠—tended to look more like prose poetry.

INTERVIEWER

How did you come to write that?

WEINBERGER

I was following this trail of curiosity about Columbus, wondering what, when he thought he was going to India, he imagined he was going to find. So I started reading up on things about India that were written before 1492. Most of the essays that I call “elemental” begin with that kind of question. My essay on tigers started with the question of whether Blake, when he wrote “The Tyger,” had ever seen a real tiger. That got me looking into the mythology and image of the tiger in the West.

INTERVIEWER

What makes an essay elemental?

WEINBERGER

The elemental essays are about timeless things⁠⁠—the proverbial “news that stays news”⁠⁠—in contrast to my political writing. I guess you’d call them documentary prose poetry, if you have to have a label. Unlike commissioned pieces, like reviews or introductions, they’re written entirely for myself, and they’re where I feel I have total freedom. An Elemental Thing (2007) was intended as a serial essay, modeled on the American serial long poem⁠⁠—Pound’s The Cantos, Zukofsky’s “A”, Olson’s Maximus Poems, and so on⁠⁠—where the subjects keep changing but certain phrases and themes keep repeating. Other sections were added to the series in subsequent books. In Spain, they just did a collected “elementals,” and I organized it into a kind of mandala, with four wings and the essay about the vortex at the center⁠⁠—it’s a book that I hope people will open at random, rather than read sequentially. People always ask, “Who’s your ideal reader?” Mine is somebody who reads a few pages and then falls asleep and has a fantastic dream.

INTERVIEWER

I’m trying to imagine you writing here at your desk. I’m picturing a huge tower of books from obscure libraries that you’re collaging from as you go⁠⁠—you know, some ancient Greek texts about ant colonies in India or whatever⁠⁠—and a complex system for taking notes on all the source materials … Is that how it is?

WEINBERGER

Not exactly. I tend to do most of the research before I start. That can take months. And I’ve never kept a notebook or taken notes, because I can’t read my own handwriting. When I have to write little to-do lists, I do it in block letters.

INTERVIEWER

So where do you keep the research?

WEINBERGER

It’s all here.

INTERVIEWER

Are you pointing to your giant cranium?

WEINBERGER

No, no, I’m pointing to the books on the shelves, which are incredibly OCD-organized⁠⁠—they become my external hard drive. I don’t use libraries, as I have no academic affiliation, and the New York Public Library at Forty-Second Street … I can’t deal with that. Luckily, I have a lot of books around. As I write, I’m trying to remember where I’ve read something, so there is a chance that I’ll lose something forever, but mostly all the stuff I’ve read kind of flows through. It’s not like I’m scouring hundreds of books to find a single phrase from the Latin. I’m dependent on what they call secondary sources. I prefer to use work by scholars who aren’t good writers, because then I can extract information and write it in my own way, without any interference. Anything too elegant and I can’t use it.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say there was more of a virtuosic aspect to research before the internet democratized everything?

WEINBERGER

It’s true that scholars no longer have the exclusive claim to territory that they once had. But it’s what you do with what you find. Look at how Reznikoff wrote Testimony. He takes a hundred pages of court transcripts and turns them into a fifteen-line poem. If you give those same transcripts to anybody else, they’re not going to create anything near the same poem. My essay “Naked Mole-Rats” comes from a five-hundred-page book called The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat that I condensed to two and a half pages. I’m not so much collaging as rewriting everything.

For me, the technological innovation greater than the internet was word processing. Inertia is a great force for writers. Until word processing, I would just give up, because I’m a two-fingered typist and I didn’t want to bother to have to retype another draft. Afterward, every essay started going through dozens of drafts.

 

undefined New York City, 1970.

INTERVIEWER

Do you show your drafts to anyone?

WEINBERGER

I’ve never shown a manuscript to anybody in my whole life. The first person to read a manuscript has always been the person who, presumably, was going to publish it.

INTERVIEWER

That’s your secret sauce.

WEINBERGER

I did it my way. And, as you know by now, I’m a total diva with editors. I welcome corrections of actual mistakes, but when I hand in a manuscript, I think of it as finished, and I want to sink or swim according to what I actually wrote. I’ve spent weeks or months on it, so I have tremendous resentment of people who look at it for a few minutes and then decide they should start changing words or sentences.

Another weird thing about me is that I don’t agonize about writing. I totally enjoy the act of writing, and I think of myself more like a furniture maker, somebody who sits there sanding the table and staining and waxing it. I kind of have a blank mind as I’m doing it, like the butcher chopping meat in Zhuangzi. And I have a strange way of writing. Most people write a lot and then cut it down. I almost never delete any sentences, though I’m continually changing words. I start out with very little and then just keep adding and adding, to the beginning, middle, and end. It grows organically.

INTERVIEWER

Could an essay expand infinitely?

WEINBERGER

No. There’s a moment, like Zukofsky said about a poem, when it reaches a state of total rest, when it’s just sitting there like a rock. It becomes itself.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think reading Objectivists like Oppen and Zukofsky and Reznikoff led you to write a kind of Objectivist essay?

WEINBERGER

I love those poets, but I think that connection is a little overdrawn. In American poetry I’m really much closer to the mythopoetic tradition coming from Pound and H.D. through Olson and Duncan. Oppen loved Pound, but he was quite hostile to the mythopoetic. I remember him saying about H.D., “How can she use a word like angel and think she can get away with it?”

INTERVIEWER

How could you write a book about angels and think you could get away with it?

WEINBERGER

Angels & Saints (2020) was written during the first Trump administration, when I needed a relief from reading the news. I had written⁠⁠—a long time before⁠⁠—a one-paragraph essay about angels, and I thought maybe I’d expand it a little. I ended up immersed in the Catholic Church for three years and wrote a whole book. One surprise was that almost everything we think we know about angels is not in the Bible and was invented in the Middle Ages. And unlike any other religion, the Church was obsessed with the material reality of these incorporeal beings⁠⁠—do angels eat? If they have no tongue, how do they speak or sing the praises of God? Do they have a memory? How do they get from one place to another? It’s all just marvelous. The great source on this is Aquinas’s Summa theologica⁠⁠—there are hundreds of pages where he takes a question and then meticulously lays out arguments and objections before coming to his own conclusion. It’s a postmodern book, in many ways.

INTERVIEWER

One of the interesting things about your essays is that, despite appearing to be informational, they often take the reader on an emotional journey⁠⁠—wonder, joy, sadness, more sadness … Are there forms of essay that have influenced the structures of feeling in your writing?

WEINBERGER

My model for the narrative essays is the Icelandic sagas, because they present incredibly dramatic scenes without being dramatic. Another would be Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life⁠⁠—which of course has only four records. It’s a memoir, but it’s arranged emotionally, not chronologically. The narrative will skip twenty years from one sentence to the next. But most of my writing comes out of poetry. The poets I’m most attracted to have this enormous encyclopedic mind and curiosity that are also connected to a deep political engagement, people like Paz or Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, even Pound, though naturally I don’t adhere to his politics. People are always asking me about Borges, but he didn’t have that engagement. That blurring of fact and fiction, the faux erudition, was something wonderful to do once, but it doesn’t need to be repeated. His Chinese encyclopedia gets on my nerves. Foucault thought it was real, and everyone who reads Foucault still thinks it’s real. I have an essay that’s a bibliography of real Chinese books that are much stranger than Borges’s fake encyclopedia.

INTERVIEWER

Some people might suspect that what you write is also not strictly factual. Why not cite your sources?

WEINBERGER

Oh, it just seems too academic for a literary text⁠⁠—it’s not the place for footnotes. But I did include a bibliography in An Elemental Thing, to show that everything in my essays comes from somewhere, and that whether or not we would consider the information true is not the point⁠⁠—somebody believed it. I’m not pretending to be up on the latest research, but there’s still always some professor who writes, “I’m shocked that Weinberger is obviously not familiar with my article in The Journal of Slavic Studies, volume 13, number 6.”

Since we’re talking about criticisms of my work, did you know that I was once investigated by the Australian Human Rights Commission for human rights abuses?

INTERVIEWER

Go on …

WEINBERGER

So, how I became Pol Pot is, I wrote an essay on the Mandaeans, an ethnoreligious group on the Iraq-Iran border. They have a wonderful mythology. One of their figures is a man who is half-man and half-book, and he spends eternity reading himself. Isn’t that great? Anyway, the traditional Mandaean texts have some unkind things to say about Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, which I mention. The essay was originally published in Harper’s, and a Mandaean in Australia filed a formal complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission, saying that this was a vilification of the Mandaeans. The Australian Human Rights Commission then sent me a very long questionnaire, also asking about the nature of Harper’s as if it was some kind of white supremacist publication. The way it works is that they attempt to reach a conciliation between the two parties, and if that fails, the complainant can request that the offender stand trial. I kept saying, “He should just write a letter to the editor!” It became a political thing because the Mandaeans, who, as I mention in a postscript to the essay, had become targets of extremism in Iraq, were trying to get asylum in Australia. Ultimately, he did write a letter, as the final conciliation⁠⁠—and that was the end of it.

INTERVIEWER

I’m reminded of what you asked Gary Snyder, in his Paris Review interview, about the absence of Western culture in his work⁠⁠—where do you think that comes from in yours? Have people accused you of exoticizing your subjects?

WEINBERGER

Well, I have written quite a bit about medieval Europe and various forms of Western Modernism. But there was a Chinese American poet who criticized some poets including me and Snyder⁠⁠—the idea was that we care about, like, Tu Fu and Li Po, but not about Chinese people. Whatever that means. It’s like saying, He cares about Plato, but he doesn’t care about Greeks! The whole business of genetic authenticity is maddening. According to that logic, the only people I’m permitted to write about are a bunch of cabbage farmers in Eastern Europe and Russia. I just find the Tang dynasty more interesting.

INTERVIEWER

What makes you write about politicians?

WEINBERGER

Or, more exactly, politics. All my essays come out of curiosity or indignation, and obviously the political ones come from indignation. I had done a few earlier pieces in the nineties, like the one on Bush Sr.’s invasion of Panama, but I really started with the inauguration of Bush Jr. and the Supreme Court handing him the presidency. The first of those essays, by the way, in January 2001, predicted he would invade Iraq. Then 9/11 happened. I had been writing An Elemental Thing, but I abandoned it for the 9/11 essays, which started out as emails to friends⁠⁠—so many people outside New York were asking what was happening, how I was. I loved publishing via email, so I kept writing them with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. You have to remember that at the time there was almost no opposition to the Iraq War in what they call the mainstream media⁠⁠—The New Yorker supported the war, the front page of the New York Times was all about weapons of mass destruction, and so on. So a sort of community formed on the internet, people forwarding articles from the foreign press or alternative political websites to get unbiased information.

When I wrote “What I Heard about Iraq,” there was a general amnesia in the mainstream about how or why the war had even begun. So I brought back all these quotes from the Bush-Cheney gang, as well as from Iraqi civilians, and sent that out as an email. Tariq Ali picked it up and gave it to the London Review of Books, who published it, and then it turned into a kind of international phenom. When Bush went to Germany, Angela Merkel invited him to visit her constituency, and they had a demonstration there against him with a public reading of the text.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of “What I Heard about Iraq” as related to a poetry of witness?

WEINBERGER

Yes, apart from the fact that I didn’t witness it. The “I” is a complete fiction. The “I heard” is fictional too⁠⁠—some of those things I might’ve heard on the news, but mainly I read them. This is my old argument with the poetry of witness, that there’s this literalness to it⁠⁠—you had to have been there. But what about the imagination? There are many bad books by people who were there and many great ones by people who weren’t. Look at Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which is this incredible first-person account. Except that Defoe was four when the plague happened.

INTERVIEWER

I take it you’re less interested in the tradition of the personal essay, from Montaigne onward, than the impersonal one?

WEINBERGER

People are always asking me about Montaigne when the essay comes up, and I just think, If you’re a contemporary American poet, you’re not asked about Edmund Spenser. It’s interesting to me that, in the twentieth century, there was this tremendous avant-garde in poetry and fiction, but the essay never moved beyond the eighteenth century. We’re stuck with a certain vision of what an essay should be, when in fact its possibilities seem limitless. That’s what attracted me to it⁠⁠—it was this kind of unexplored territory. I do find it dreary that these essayists end up writing about themselves so much. Even if they’re taking documentary information, they add a lot of personal response to it, which seems to be what the new quote, unquote lyric essay is. I have no interest in first-person investigation. Personally, I’ve never found myself an interesting person.

INTERVIEWER

May I ask about your childhood? Did your parents encourage your reading and writing?

WEINBERGER

The short version is that my childhood was neither happy nor unhappy. I had lots of interests and I had the comfort of a middle-class life to be able to pursue those interests, and the freedom to do it without any encouragement or discouragement.

INTERVIEWER

What were your parents’ stories?

WEINBERGER

Both sides of my family arrived in New York before World War I, so they were spared all the horrors. My father’s father had a photo studio in a town in Bosnia. He wasn’t Bosnian⁠⁠—he was a Polish Jew in the diaspora of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1912, my grandmother ran off to America with her husband’s partner, whose name was Weinberger. She took her children with her, and they were given his name. Unfortunately, Mr. Weinberger died a few months later of the flu. My grandmother, now a single mother with four sons, sold towels from a pushcart on the Lower East Side. My father became an accountant and rose from absolute poverty into the middle class.

My mother’s parents came from Odessa as a married teenage couple in 1902⁠⁠—I still have their boat tickets to America⁠⁠—and her father was a fairly successful tailor. My parents met at NYU⁠⁠—my father went to night school there⁠⁠—and were not-so-happily married for seventy-two years. My mother started out as a public school teacher. Later she became an abstract painter.

INTERVIEWER

How did that happen?

WEINBERGER

I have no idea.

INTERVIEWER

Did you watch her as she painted?

WEINBERGER

Now we’re getting into psychological stuff. No, she wasn’t the type who’d say, “I’m working in my studio. Why don’t you sit there and draw?”

INTERVIEWER

Any siblings?

WEINBERGER

I had an adopted brother, who was six years older and had a host of undiagnosed mental problems. He was very violent. He dropped out of school at fifteen to become a professional twister at the Peppermint Lounge. He was a singer of what was then called blue-eyed soul and was always on the verge of huge success, but then he would do something to completely mess it up. There are many stories about him. For example, he was working in the mail room at the William Morris Agency, and his buddy there wanted to become an agent and decided he was going to represent my brother. My father lent this guy some money to get started, and my brother cut a couple of 45s. But my brother was too impossible, and his friend dropped him when he discovered a young woman singing in a café in the Village. That was Joni Mitchell.

INTERVIEWER

Was it a close family?

WEINBERGER

My family didn’t do anything together. It was like four random individuals living under the same roof. I ate dinner alone every night in front of the television. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of fifties television, including the lyrics to hundreds of standards, from watching the variety shows, and all the commercial jingles⁠⁠—for which, alas, there is no Delete button in the brain.

Anyway, let’s get on to the intellectual formation. My interest in China began when I was six or seven, with the works of Kurt Wiese. He was a German who came to the United States in the twenties, and he wrote or illustrated children’s books about China, most notably, for me, The Story about Ping, which is about a duck on the Yangtze River, and You Can Write Chinese. It completely blew my mind that there was a language where the word man looks like a person, and sun looks like the sun.

In 1957, when I was eight, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence, and for some reason I was completely obsessed with that. I loved Kwame Nkrumah, and collected all their stamps. I also figured out that if you wrote a letter to a consulate or embassy asking for information, they’d send you stuff, and I loved to get things in the mail, so I had all these wonderful posters from the Congo and Vietnam on my bedroom wall. A few years later I moved on to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and Nkrumah got replaced by Nelson Mandela.

Above all, my vision of the world was completely formed by Mad magazine. Mad was the only place that told the children of the fifties, Your parents are idiots, your teacher is an idiot, the president is an idiot, and the Lone Ranger is a racist. The ideological bedrock of the sixties counterculture is not Marx or Mao but Mad. In sixth grade, my teacher let me do a weekly satirical news show for the class, complete with parodies of commercials, while sitting at his desk. It was very Mad.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any idea what you wanted to be?

WEINBERGER

I’m getting to that! So I was also reading, when I was nine or ten, books on history for young adults. The Landmark Books were written by fairly well-known authors⁠⁠—most famously Shirley Jackson on the Salem witch trials. I loved The Walls of Windy Troy by Marjorie Braymer, about Heinrich Schliemann and the discovery of Troy and this whole idea that what we’ve taken as myth has actually turned out to be true. I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist, and I started digging holes in the backyard to see if I could find any shards.

INTERVIEWER

Did you find anything?

WEINBERGER

Maybe an old can or something. At thirteen I went away to a boarding school called Putney, in Vermont, and I was convinced that I was going to be an archaeologist in Mesoamerica. The school had a wonderful library, and I spent most of my time reading about the Mayas and the Aztecs. The story went that the Mayas were these peaceful star-watchers who had created this complex hieroglyphic system and they were then taken over by these warmongering human sacrificers, the Aztec Empire, the evil empire. Of course that’s not exactly true, because the Mayas were also human sacrificers, though not on the scale of the Aztecs, and the Aztecs, besides being mass human sacrificers, were also wonderful poets with a very complex poetics.

INTERVIEWER

The two traits don’t seem mutually exclusive to me.

WEINBERGER

True! One day I came across this pamphlet⁠⁠—Octavio Paz’s Sunstone, translated by Muriel Rukeyser and published by New Directions. I’d never read any poetry, but I saw that it had something to do with the Aztec calendar, so I thought I’d take a look. That was my epiphany moment. The poem also had the Spanish Civil War in it, which I was obsessed with, and girls, and I realized that poetry is a place that has everything. I remember taking that library book with me on my first big trip abroad, with my mother. She was always traveling, and I went with her to the Yucatán and sat in the ruins of Uxmal reading Sunstone at age thirteen. How romantic is that?

 

undefined With Nina Subin in Mandawa, India, 1980. Photograph by Mitch Epstein.

INTERVIEWER

Were you into school or did you just tolerate it?

WEINBERGER

My intolerance didn’t begin until my disastrous one year at Yale. Putney was one of the first progressive schools in America⁠⁠—it was founded in the thirties on a farm, where we all worked, milking the cows and shoveling manure, and it was coed. I loved it there. The kids were mainly the children of hardcore old lefties, classical musicians, folk singers, writers, and academics. A few of the teachers were exiles from the Spanish Republic. We sat around talking about Camus and Dostoyevsky. Rudolf Serkin and Pete Seeger and the Juilliard String Quartet would come through and give concerts.

INTERVIEWER

And you were also captain of the basketball team.

WEINBERGER

You’re joking, but they had this wonderful attitude toward sports, so we had softball teams that were coed, and I was actually the captain of my team⁠⁠—you’re laughing⁠⁠—and the pitcher. It was all just pure fun. There was only a kind of ironic competitiveness.

INTERVIEWER

I bet you were the editor of the literary magazine.

WEINBERGER

No, they didn’t make me the editor, which was probably a scandal. The big future literary star who was not a literary star then was Lydia Davis. She’s two years older than me, and we’ve been friends since I was thirteen, when she used to tower over me. But I did run the speaker program. Back then, one could get lots of interesting or wacky people to come for free. Denise Levertov, whose son was at the school, came often. She was the first poet I ever met. Decades later, someone I knew said to Denise, “I heard you knew Eliot when he was a child,” and Denise said, “Eliot was never a child.”

 

undefinedWith Octavio Paz, New York City, 1982.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have a teacher who guided you, some Dead Poets Society guy?

WEINBERGER

I’ve never had anybody who guided me. I’ve always just found things for myself. Another decisive moment was freshman year in high school. I told a teacher I was reading this poem I’d discovered by some guy named Eliot called The Waste Land and I wasn’t completely getting it, and he said, “Well, you’re too young for that.” It became clear to me that poetry was this secret world you just kept to yourself. I started to read through all the poetry in the library⁠⁠—Eliot, Hart Crane, Williams⁠⁠—and to translate poems, mainly by Paz, but also by Lorca, Neruda, and Vallejo, as a way to learn how to write. I still believe it’s the best way to learn, because you deal with the nuts and bolts of writing without all the psychological interference and embarrassment of, you know, “I’m expressing myself on a blank page.”

I found a copy of An “Objectivists” Anthology in a used bookstore on Fourth Avenue, and through those poets I discovered Pound. There’s almost no one I liked to read back then whom I’m embarrassed about now. I’d go to museums, too⁠⁠—as a teenager, I knew MoMA by heart⁠⁠—and readings. I met lots of people in the Caterpillar magazine crowd, Clayton Eshleman, Jerry Rothenberg, Paul Blackburn. Poetry was then a very small world in America. I basically knew who every poet in America was, not that I’d read every single one.

But the main event before I went to college was that, when I was sixteen, I spent three months traveling around Peru, Bolivia, and Chile with a friend, hitchhiking, jumping freight trains, sleeping in the mining camps in the Atacama Desert. We camped out in the ruins of Machu Picchu⁠⁠—there was no one around. We were so naive that nothing bad ever happened to us. People just took care of us along the way.

INTERVIEWER

How was the poetry scene at Yale?

WEINBERGER

The idea of a poetry scene at Yale is hilarious. I remember Cleanth Brooks saying in a lecture that nothing of interest had been written since 1935. I still can’t figure out what happened in 1935. When Louis Zukofsky came to give a reading, there were maybe four of us in the audience. I never should have gone to Yale, but nobody from Putney had ever gone, so someone engineered it so that I was rejected everywhere else. It was still a boys’ school back then. Half the students were smart and the other half were the idiot sons of prominent families. George Bush was there, and my classmate John Bolton was a top banana in the Young Republicans. Everybody I met had a name like “Hi, I’m Bob Colgate,” or “Hi, I’m Bob Schick.” It was like opening the bathroom cabinet. On my first day, I sat down in the freshman cafeteria across from a fellow frosh who was in a three-piece suit and reading the Wall Street Journal. He puts the paper down, looks me in the eye, and says, “The fucking Jews are ruining the market.” It was downhill from there. This was during the Vietnam War, and I was doing something very wishy-washy, collecting money for medical supplies for civilians, and someone threw a brick through my window.

I flunked most of my courses, I didn’t go to class. The only time I tried to do anything was in a huge lecture class on tragedy taught by Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, and he said that if you got an A on the paper, you didn’t have to take the final exam. So I worked really hard on what I thought was a masterpiece, and it came back with a grade of seventy and the comment “Your style of writing is more suitable for creative work than for an essay at Yale.” That was when I decided to drop out. Strangely, not many years later, I was invited back by Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Haroldo de Campos to teach a translation workshop. I refused to go into a classroom, and held my classes in a pizza parlor.

INTERVIEWER

How did your parents react to your dropping out? Did you have a plan?

WEINBERGER

They were more resigned than anything. I told them Yale was three thousand dollars a year with room and board, so they should give me that and I’d educate myself. And they somehow went for it. At least, unlike with my brother, there were no police involved. So I went straight to England on the student boat, then the cheapest way to get across the Atlantic⁠⁠—a thousand students without parents packed onto a very small boat for twelve days. You can imagine.

That summer was the first Poetry International festival in London, organized by Ted Hughes and featuring practically every great poet alive at the time. And because it was swinging London, 1967, there were these unbelievably fabulous parties every night, with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull over in one corner, and Neruda, Paz, Ungaretti, Olson, MacDiarmid, Bachmann, and on and on milling around. I was just an eighteen-year-old nerd wandering through the crowd.

Anyway, on the boat, I had met George Quasha, who was about to start teaching at Stony Brook, and he convinced me that it was going to become the poetry capital of the universe, so I decided to go hang out there as a nonstudent. We started Stony Brook magazine, which lasted two fat issues and had everybody in it. George really was an impresario. People were coming through all the time⁠⁠—Duncan, Creeley, Gary Snyder, Levertov, Nicanor Parra, Oppen. My unlikely good buddy was Jim Harrison. There were days when he was indisposed, so he’d have me teach his class. A group of us organized a huge poetry festival, and it was there that I met someone who knew Octavio Paz. I told him I had all these translations, and he offered to send them to Paz, who was then Mexico’s ambassador to India. Paz liked them a lot and, not knowing that I was a nineteen-year-old hippie, asked me to translate his book of prose poetry, Eagle or Sun? It was a relief because now I could tell my parents I had something to do.

INTERVIEWER

It sounds like you were part of quite a scene. Was that your education?

WEINBERGER

Except for my less than two years at Stony Brook, I’ve never been in any scene or community, ever. My self-education was that poetry was my gateway to knowledge. Thanks to Eliot, I read the Grail legends. Because of Lorca, I was reading about the Spanish Civil War. And I decided to follow the Ezra Pound program of what you need to do to become a poet, as outlined in his ABC of Reading. You read all the English poets. I went in chronological order from the Anglo-Saxons⁠⁠—though I got a little bogged down in the nineteenth century with Lord Byron and all the really long epics. You learn a little Italian and a little Provençal, to read Dante and the troubadours. And, of course, you learn Chinese.

INTERVIEWER

Did you teach yourself Chinese?

WEINBERGER

I studied on my own, and took courses at the Polytechnic of Central London, where I lived for two years, and, later, an intensive course at Columbia. In my twenties, I could write long letters to a Chinese friend, although when we met I conversed like a toddler. The problem with Chinese is that, unlike other languages, you can’t give it up for a while and come back to it. You have to spend every day on it forever. So, when I was thirty, I had to decide, Am I going to be a Sinologist or not? And I was too much of a dilettante, so I sort of gave it up, though of course I’ve been involved in things Chinese ever since.

INTERVIEWER

How did your early writing come to be published?

WEINBERGER

I had a little pamphlet of poetry published in my early twenties, by this wild Turkish American novelist, Erje Ayden, who knew my parents from East Hampton, where they had a place and ultimately lived year-round for fifty years. This was long before it became “the Hamptons”⁠⁠—it was a village of potato farmers, fishermen, and poets and abstract artists, who lived there because it was so cheap. Erje had written this underground classic called The Crazy Green of Second Avenue, in which the hero is named Elliot, after me, even though I was only twelve or something when he wrote it and the hero sleeps with a million women. He started a tiny press called Geronimo, mainly to publish himself, and he did this little book of my poetry. It’s very bad.

A smallish press finally published my translation of Paz’s Eagle or Sun?⁠⁠—it took them a few years⁠⁠—but they soon went out of business. You know, every writer has their ambitions. They want to be famous, win the Nobel, make lots of money, whatever. Since I was thirteen, all I wanted was to be published by New Directions⁠⁠—for me that was the temple of literature. So when James Laughlin said he wanted the translation, I achieved my ambition, and after that I could just worry about the work. With the Paz book, I looked over what I’d done, thought it was horrible, threw out the translation, and started over. 1975 and 1976⁠⁠—ages twenty-six and twenty-seven⁠⁠—were big years for me. I started my magazine Montemora. I moved to Greenwich Village, and have lived within a two-block radius of Sheridan Square ever since. I had my first book with New Directions, who has been my publisher ever since, and I started going out with Nina. So basically, after 1976, with the exception of the birth of our children, nothing happens.

 

undefinedWith Nina and their daughter, Anna Della Subin, in New York City, 1985. Photograph by Mitch Epstein

INTERVIEWER

You fall into a dull, lifeless torpor?

WEINBERGER

The only thing of interest is that, for a number of years before the children were born, I worked as a travel writer. Nina would take the photographs and I would write the articles. One article would pay for three months in India. She had to work on location, but I would write the piece in an afternoon when we came back from the trip, because these articles are very formulaic, with no deviations permitted. I could probably write a travel piece about anywhere in the world, whether I’ve been there or not. It’s always “My wife and I motored up to the castle, where we were met by the custodian, Monsieur Lafon, an affable man with a salt-and-pepper beard, who ushered us through the long corridors decked with slightly faded tapestries of lush gardens and stirring battle scenes, blah, blah, blah …”

 

undefinedParis, 1990. Photograph by Nina Subin.

INTERVIEWER

Please, don’t stop.

WEINBERGER

One night we’d be in a hotel where you’d have to sleep with your clothes on, and the next night we’d be in some palace for the article, and the hotel, eager for publicity, would put us in the most luxurious suite. The high⁠⁠—or low⁠⁠—point was when we slept in Franco’s bed in Santiago de Compostela. It was the only time in my life I’ve dreamed of cannibalism. Sleeping in Franco’s bed, I dreamed I was eating a human thigh.

INTERVIEWER

What made you want to start your own magazine?

WEINBERGER

The thing is, in the sixties, if you were a poet, as part of your community service you had to either have a magazine or translate. I was a little-magazine junkie, but by 1975 there weren’t any I liked, and people I admired, like Oppen or Reznikoff or Bunting, were rarely appearing anywhere, so I thought I’d start my own. Montemora went on for seven years, including the books I published. It was the kind of magazine I wanted to read. Besides the master elders, I published a number of younger like-minded souls, and lots of translations, especially from the Chinese and Japanese. In the later seventies there was also the feminist rediscovery of a number of earlier writers, so I did huge sections of unpublished H.D., Mina Loy, Niedecker, as well as Duncan’s H.D. Book … Let’s see … Look, this issue is a good one! Césaire’s complete Notebook, Edmond Jabès, the great Kotaro Takamura … But I stopped in 1982 because I was worn out from having to raise the money and do all the work myself. Clayton Eshleman was starting Sulfur, and Brad Morrow was starting Conjunctions, and so I thought, Okay, my time is over.

INTERVIEWER

Were you a hands-on editor?

WEINBERGER

No. Especially with poetry, I just assumed the poets knew what they were doing. The only time I remember changing anything was when I somehow persuaded Amiri Baraka to send me something and I made him change the word fags. My other policy was, for certain poets who I thought were extremely important, I just said, “I’ll give you the space for whatever you send me.” Nevertheless, Reznikoff always sent his manuscripts with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Of course, I had to reject many things, even from friends, and that was always depressing.

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever have an official role at New Directions?

WEINBERGER

I was never an editor there. I didn’t read manuscripts and I was never involved with anyone being rejected! But New Directions, since the time of James Laughlin, has relied on recommendations from writers. William Carlos Williams recommended Kenneth Rexroth, who recommended Gary Snyder, who recommended Bei Dao, who recommended Xi Chuan. So I campaigned, in one way or another, for many writers and for the reissuing of out-of-print books.

 

undefinedFrom left, Weinberger, Hans Meinke, Marie-José Paz, Octavio Paz, and Pere Gimferrer, at the 1990 Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm.

INTERVIEWER

Have you received important recommendations from other writers?

WEINBERGER

One would be Huidobro, whom I first heard about from Paz. Our first real meeting was in 1969, when he was in exile and had gotten a job teaching in Pittsburgh⁠⁠—I think he thought Pittsburgh was near New York. He was shocked that I had never read Huidobro, and proceeded to quote from Altazor at some length. I was shocked that he’d never read George Oppen, but I couldn’t quote him. In Mexico they recently published these letters that Octavio wrote to his friend Charles Tomlinson, where he says something like, I met this incredibly arrogant youth who’s translating me and he’s driving me crazy … Later, he grew to like me, I think. He was like my uncle. He had boundless erudition, boundless curiosity, a photographic memory, and this incredibly synthetic mind. He seemed to know everything, was up on the latest everything, and could put it all together.

Most translators have this problem when the foreign author knows some English, and they think they know English better than the translator. Octavio, who himself translated probably a thousand pages of poetry, would go through every line very carefully, but he always gave me the last word. Interestingly, he said on various occasions that he had doubts about his writing in Spanish but loved it in English. That wasn’t about the genius of the translator⁠⁠—it was about how, when you read yourself in translation, you become the reader, not the writer, of your own work. You can see the things that are good and the things that aren’t from a certain distance. We often worked from unpublished manuscripts, and there were times when, seeing the translation, he felt he then needed to change a word or a line in the Spanish.

I’ve always found it interesting that the Chinese poets I met in the eighties adored Dylan Thomas. For us, Dylan Thomas is kind of a corny poet you read in your adolescence. But if you reread him and imagine the work translated into Chinese, what you get is actually a really interesting, weird, semi-surrealist poet.

INTERVIEWER

How did you come to translate Bei Dao?

WEINBERGER

I was fascinated by this group of poets⁠⁠—sometimes called the Misty poets in English, which is a technically accurate translation, though obscure would be closer⁠⁠—including Bei Dao, who were against socialist realism and were writing highly subjective lyric poetry. They were like rock stars in China during the Democracy Wall movement in 1979. I first met Bei Dao in 1988, when Allen Ginsberg organized a tour of Chinese poets to come and give readings. Then, after Tiananmen Square, Bei Dao was in exile, wandering around Europe and then America, and that’s when we became close. He would get these residencies in remote places⁠⁠—Beloit, say, or Tuscaloosa⁠⁠—and invite me to come, to have somebody to talk to.

When I started to translate him, I’d have someone do a pinyin transliteration to speed up the dictionary work, and then I’d go over every line with him in person. Bei Dao is very complicated to translate, because line B finishes the thought of line A, but line B is also the beginning of the thought for line C. And you have this incredibly dense imagery, so if you don’t create some kind of music in the poem, you’re just getting stuck with a series of harsh images. You have to invent the Bei Dao sound in English. There are other problems, too, like the fact that Chinese doesn’t have singular or plural. I’d ask him, “Is that a trumpet or trumpets?” And he would say, “I never thought about it.”

INTERVIEWER

These complexities are the premise of one of your most famous essays, “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.” How did that essay begin?

WEINBERGER

Well, Caterpillar used to do this thing called “A Test of Translation,” where they’d compare two or three translations. I thought I’d expand on it, because there were so many translations of this Wang Wei poem. I wrote the essay in 1979, for a very short-lived magazine called Zero: Contemporary Buddhist Life and Thought. Paz picked it up for his magazine in Mexico, Vuelta, and added an afterword. Then it was published as a book in 1987 by a small press who will go unnamed, who held it hostage for thirty years. New Directions finally republished it in 2016, and that’s when it took on this second life. People are always asking me about it⁠⁠—it makes me feel like one of those bands who had a hit in 1972 and are always hearing, “Oh, I loved ‘Stuck in the Middle with You.’ ” You know, I was thirty, and it’s written in this kind of wise-guy style that appeals to students after all the jargony criticism they’re forced to read. What’s strange is that the book has now been translated into various languages, including into Chinese⁠⁠—they translated the English translations of the Wang Wei poem back again.

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to read the English translation of that Chinese translation …

WEINBERGER

It’s a wilderness of mirrors. “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei” is really a way of thinking about translations like covers of the same song. I’ve always loved covers, though I dislike the word. Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” or Miles Davis doing “Someday My Prince Will Come” are much more than that. One of my favorite groups is the Escorts, who were these guys in the seventies who were in a maximum-security prison in New Jersey⁠⁠—they had to be escorted to their recordings in a studio in the prison. They did the most sublime covers of familiar R&B hits⁠⁠—“I Only Have Eyes for You” and “La-La Means I Love You” and “I’ll Be Sweeter Tomorrow.”

 

undefinedWith his son, Stefan Weinberger, in New Zealand, 2004.

INTERVIEWER

I would think that the musical analogy for your essays would be that you’re sampling.

WEINBERGER

It’s definitely not sampling⁠⁠—I’m the wrong generation for that, anyway. And I don’t cut and paste, unless it’s a direct quotation. I write all the sentences, so it’s not like sampling at all. But many of my essays could be seen as covers of existing information. In that sense, The Life of Tu Fu (2024) is a cover of the Library of Chinese Humanities’s six-volume edition of the complete poetry of Tu Fu. It’s like one of those comedy skits, “Moby-Dick in Three Minutes.”

INTERVIEWER

Why Tu Fu?

WEINBERGER

Why? Tu Fu is the great poet of being human in a time of disaster. And it was the pandemic. I call the book a fictional autobiography, because it doesn’t exactly follow his life, but it’s scenes from his life. Everything in it is in Tu Fu’s poems, but they’re not translations⁠⁠—they’re images, sentiments, ideas, allusions. It’s an expansion of something I did in “A Journey on the Yangtze River,” which comes from a travel diary by someone in the Song dynasty in the twelfth century. He was a poet and was friends with various poets, so I took lines from different Song dynasty poems and had him say things like “My friend so-and-so wrote these lines when he was here.” So it’s kind of a fiction, because I’m inventing what he’s thinking about, but it’s also a way of putting this guy floating down the Yangtze River into a wider context. Same with the essay about John Wesley Powell’s journey down the Colorado River⁠⁠—I added all these excerpts from nineteenth-century hymns to the observations from his diary, as though he and his crew were floating down the river with iPods.

INTERVIEWER

What you’re describing as fiction or a cover seems to me a lot like poetry. There’s a river, a song … plus all the line breaks.

WEINBERGER

Yes, but I don’t really think of my Tu Fu as poetry. So many of my essays are laid out like that. I know Tu Fu has been categorized as poetry, but it didn’t come from the completely blank page. As I’ve said, I’m not a poet, I’m not a scholar, I’m not a translator, I’m not a critic, I’m not an expert …

INTERVIEWER

You’re like a handprint on the wall of the Cueva de las Manos, defined by what’s not there.

WEINBERGER

Yes, with a finger missing.

Source: the paris review