Remembering Clayton Eshleman

The poet and translator Clayton Eshleman was born on June 1, 1935, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and died on the night of January 29, 2021, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He had lived for lengthy periods in Kyoto, Lima, Paris, Los Angeles, and other cities, often to enable him to have access to the archives of the poets he was translating. Although he was an award-winning translator of the work of poets such as César Vallejo and Aimé Césaire and produced many volumes of his own poetry, he is best known as the foremost English-language translator of the work of Surrealist poet and theorist Antonin Artaud (1896–1948). I met Eshleman in Paris in the mid-1990s, at the moment when he was reaching the end of three decades of work on his Artaud translations, though he would return to them in the early 2000s as new material was published. Eshleman traveled to Paris each summer to supervise a tour group on a journey through the cave systems of the Dordogne, lecturing to the group on his own research into the cosmological belief systems of the prehistoric cave artists; these lectures were eventually published as the book Juniper Fuse (2003). He was a very determined man and had been able to secure access to caves, which were usually closed to visitors. I had been forewarned by people who had encountered him, such as the poet Anne Waldman and the novelist Edmund White, that Eshleman was an extremely irascible and argumentative man, and from my observations in Paris, that view seemed confirmed, though our joint interest in Artaud's work protected me from being the recipient of Eshleman's ire. He used his visits to Paris to meet Artaud's few surviving friends and collaborators, such as Florence Loeb, and we discussed translation issues around Artaud's multilayered and glossolaliac writings prior to Eshleman's first publication of his collected Artaud translations in 1995. Eshleman was intensely interested in all religious beliefs and rituals, from those of Zen Buddhism to those of the Tarahumara peoples of northern Mexico, whom Artaud visited in 1936. He was also keenly interested in the apocalyptic revelations which preoccupied Artaud during his visit to Ireland in 1937. While living in Japan in 1997–1998, I received many letters from Eshleman evoking his own years in Kyoto in the first half of the 1960s and his engagement with Zen Buddhism in that era. He wrote about his many visits to temples in Kyoto, such as Daitoku-ji, often in the company of the poet Gary Snyder, who was also living in Kyoto during that era, and expressed his desire to return to Japan and renew those studies. He told me that it was during his time in Kyoto that he realized his vocation was to be a poet and translator, and he foresaw a return to Japan as a reactivation of that commitment. But by then, he was working as a professor at a university in the Detroit area, and his duties there (the source of much of his perpetual rage) prevented such a step. In 2007–2008, I met Eshleman frequently; it was a year when he was based as a visiting professor at UCLA. I was working in the Los Angeles area at the California Institute of the Arts, where Eshleman himself had worked in the late 1960s, soon after that art school's foundation by Walt Disney and other benefactors. I invited Eshleman to make his first visit in 40 years there, to give a talk on his Artaud translations to my students, and he also evoked for them the wild atmosphere on the 1960s CalArts campus, with his students habitually attending his seminars naked and telling him of their renunciation of all books. Several tutors at CalArts had been there from the beginning and recalled to me that, even in the late 1960s, Eshleman had been the fiercest and most belligerent person on campus. We also gave a joint reading at UCLA from our Artaud translations, and the audience's warm response to the event seemed to be a source of pleasure to Eshleman, who often asserted that he was an unknown figure whose work, despite his obsessional devotion to it, had passed the world by. I was last in touch with Eshleman in 2019 to discuss a new edition of his Artaud translations with the publisher Diaphanes, and though he expressed great enthusiasm for that opportunity for new attention for his work, he told me that, as a result of declining health, he had now ceased all activity in translation and poetry. Even so, collections of his own work such as The Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader (2008) provide an aperture for readers to explore the depth of his own work, with its many engagements with worldwide belief systems, and their relationship to his work in translation. Artaud's engagement with religion had been an extremely fraught one. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic in Marseille in the first years of the twentieth century, but his family's background in Turkey and Greece also entailed encounters with Islam and Judaism. By the time of his involvement with the Surrealist movement in Paris in the mid-1920s, Artaud's position was adamantly atheistic. His apocalyptic manifestoes and travels of 1937 preceded his decade-long asylum incarceration, during which he would oscillate between atheism and a return to a mystical form of Catholicism. It is conceivable that those religious oscillations were a response to the antithetical belief systems of the asylum doctors who were administering electroshock treatments to Artaud, which terrified him; the asylum director, Gaston Ferdière, was a lifelong militant atheist and anarchist, while his assistant, Jacques Latrémolière, who performed the electroshocks, was devoted to mystical theologies. To placate both doctors simultaneously was a highwire act for Artaud. In the final period of his life after his release from asylum incarceration, 1946–1948, and through the body of writings that Eshleman translated, Artaud conducted a relentless combat against all religions, Christianity above all. This is reflected in the title of his final work, the radio broadcast for the French national radio station, To have done with the judgment of god, which was banned and not transmitted. At the same time, Artaud contradictorily empathized with Christ's torture to the extent that he viewed Christ as his “double” who had maliciously supplanted his own identity. Eshleman translated a passage of Artaud's 1946 poem Here Lies as follows: “Don’t we see that the fake son-in-law,/it's Jizi-cry,/already known in Mexico/long before his flight to Jerusalem on an ass,/and the crucifying of Artaud at Golgotha./Artaud/who knew that there was no spirit/but a body/that repairs itself like the gearing of a toothed cadaver,/in the gangrene/of the thighbone/within.’ In order to render Artaud's anatomically charged and religiously contested poetry, Eshleman himself required both empathy and an immense knowledge of the multiple contestations at stake in Artaud's work. For that reason and many others, his life's work in translating Artaud's work (alongside other equally demanding poets) deserves enduring memorial attention

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