The Olson Affair: Charles Olson, Heriberto Yépez, and Poetry in Translation

Abstract

Between 2013 and 2017, a heated debate took place online and in print about US poet Charles Olson’s time in Mexico. Mexican poet and critic Heriberto Yépez criticized Olson for misunderstanding and exploiting the Maya, while a group of US-based poets, including Amiri Baraka, defended Olson. This article examines what came to be called the Olson Affair with a focus, not on the stalemate over Olson’s legacy, but on the Olson Affair’s politics of translation. The debate stems from the translation of Yépez’s book and hinges in part on Olson’s loose interpretation of Mesoamerican artifacts. Olson was fascinated by ancient Mayan archaeological sites and untranslated glyphs. His mistranslation of these ruins and glyphs forms the basis of what Yépez calls Olson’s “imperial psychopoetics.” Yépez sees Olson’s mistranslation as destructive while Olson sees it as creative. Olson, like his contemporary William Bronk, reads archaeological sites as ripe for an encounter with language and ruin. Yépez, however, sees Olson as emblematic of postmodernism, mid-century US poetry, and an imperial mindset. To move through this impasse, I examine Olson’s famous “The Kingfishers” along with Yépez’s critique. I argue that, from different perspectives, both Yépez and Olson espouse a poetics of inevitable destruction and mistranslation. As a result, the Olson Affair suggests a poetics of ruin in excess of its own contentious origins.