Eliot Weinberger

JH What essayists have influenced you? Do you see yourself as part of, or as having an affinity with, any identifiable tradition?

EW Certainly there are writers who work under the influence of other writers, but I find the preoccupation with it exaggerated. One’s favorite writers often leave no traces in one’s own work, and alcohol, economic hardship, or personal relationships tend to be greater “influences.”

But, as an adolescent, Antonin Artaud’s work and D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities of the essay. Charles Reznikoff and certain poems of Lorine Niedecker have been my models for the condensation of historical data, and the Icelandic sagas and what the Chinese call “anomaly stories” are my models for writing nonfiction narrative. As for tradition, I’m just a neo- (not a post-) modernist.

JH Your literary essays have been enormously influential. I think there’s an argument to be made for considering your work, particularly in its formal innovations, as an essential forerunner to our present explosion of essay-writing. Your new book, though, is a long poem about the Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu. I know you’ve been intimately involved with poetry throughout your career, but in turning to poetry, do you feel you’ve opened a new path in your writing?

EW I’ve been poetry-adjacent my whole life: reading it, translating it, publishing it, writing about it. And what I call essays—though some think they’re poems—are written like poetry, in that I listen to the sound, use as few words as possible, try to come up with telling images, and avoid rhetorical transitions. So it wasn’t a big, or even a small, leap to write things that are now officially “poetry.”

I make no great claims for my essays. So I was puzzled when you say they have been “enormously influential.” If that’s true, however unlikely, I am completely unaware of it. I’ve always assumed my status, at least in the U.S., is “semi-obscure.”

JH The new book is hardly your first engagement with Chinese literature. In the past you’ve been involved in Chinese translations, and your essays have dealt with various Chinese subjects. What first drew you to China?

EW My interest in China began in childhood with the work of an illustrator and writer from the 1930s and 1940s, Kurt Wiese: The Story About Ping, which is about a duck on the Yangtze River, and You Can Write Chinese, which dealt with the simplest pictographic characters. This was long before emojis, and it was mind-blowing for the child me that the Chinese character for “person” looked like a person, or “tree” a tree. (Amazingly, Jonathan Spence once told me that his life as a historian of China also began with Ping.)

Then as a teenager I discovered Ezra Pound and was instructed by him that to understand poetry one needed to study Chinese. So I did, mainly on my own, for about seven years, and reached the literacy of an eighteen-year-old—I could write long letters to a Chinese friend—and the fluency of a three-year-old. But the problem with Chinese is one must devote one’s life to it, and I was too much of a dilettante.

I have, however, kept up with work in translation, editing an anthology of classical Chinese poetry for New Directions and the Calligrams series for New York Review Books, writing about things Chinese, and translating my good friend Bei Dao when there was no one else to translate him. (He now, luckily, has Jeffrey Yang.) But I should say that my interest—apart from some contemporary poets—is in classical, not modern China, which is preoccupied with erasing its history. And as a traveler, I’ve always preferred to go to India (though now it is preoccupied with rewriting its history). For The Life of Tu Fu, I tried to apply my practice of writing essays to poetry—condensing information. I read all of the 1,600 poems of Tu Fu and extracted ideas, images, sentiments, and allusions to write a serial poem about his life. It is not a translation of individual poems, nor is it cut-and-paste since, needless to say, the poems are in Chinese, and I’m writing the words in English. To my mind, it’s not exactly poetry, but it looks and sounds like poetry.

JH Your relationship with Chinese literature seems to fit into the American modernist tradition of the encounter with global literatures, particularly Eastern ones, which you wrote about in your 2003 introduction to The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry and other places. Does that still hold today?

EW American poetry is now too vast, and with too many poets, to make generalizations. But it seems safe to say that, with the exception of the work of a few individuals, poetry written in other languages has not had the influence on American poetry in this century that Chinese and French and Japanese and, later, Latin American and Eastern European poetry had in the twentieth century. It’s curious that in fiction there are living or recently dead foreign writers whom I think most literary readers read, but no living foreign poets whom most poetry readers read. Things are being translated, yet it is difficult to see any great popularity or effect on American poetry at large. And it’s a universal truth that a literature declines when it stops getting new ideas and new forms from abroad.

JH What sort of ideas do you have in mind?

EW In the twentieth century, there was a direct line to be drawn between the arts and what was happening in the sciences and technology: the new psychology (Freud and Jung), the new physics (from Einstein to Heisenberg and so on), the reports (and loot) coming from the new science of anthropology, the new technology (airplanes, radio, movies), and more. This applies to both form and content. Science informs twentieth-century arts as religion and mythology (using both terms as shorthand) did ever since people began making art. In the twenty-first century—with the possible exception, in fiction, of the parallel universes of quantum physics—I don’t see that same influence.

The universe that Dante inhabited was orderly, complete, and completely known. The universe we inhabit is 95 percent dark matter and dark energy, about which we mainly know what they are not. The more precisely we are able to measure and analyze, the more mysterious everything becomes. We are the first humans to realize that our stomachs are incredibly complex ecosystems whose ramifications we barely grasp. To put it another way, here we are in the vastness of the cosmos, and we don’t even understand our own stomachs.

JH How do you think that has affected writing?

EW In an inexplicable universe, on a planet whose potential environmental apocalypse (unlike the more abstract threat of nuclear war) is tangible in our everyday lives and under the continual bombardment of the banalities and evils of the world as we stare into our screens, it’s no wonder that so many writers now feel that the only suitable subject is the self. Despite the vagaries of memory, the one thing we know, and can be more or less sure of, is what happened to us as individuals. The writing school mantra of “write what you know” certainly applies to many great writers, but so many others wrote what they did not know but were able to imagine. In my case, I’ve always found myself a not particularly interesting person, so I write about things I’ve investigated.

JH And those investigations range widely, from medieval Daoism to contemporary American politics.

EW I try to balance my news addiction that leads to political articles with research into timeless “elemental” things that will inform essays that I hope are celebrations of the human imagination and the natural world. One might say that my essays are written out of either curiosity or indignation.

JH Perhaps your best-known work, What I Heard About Iraq, is hard to call a “political article”—it has a meditative quality.

EW What I Heard, like most of my political writing in the George W. Bush years, began as an e-mail to friends. It was an ideal way to publish: it appeared as soon as it was written, and readers could vote with their “delete” or “forward” buttons. (I recently did the same with a short piece on the Gaza invasion.)

Then the London Review of Books picked it up, and it took on a life of its own: a hit play, various radio plays, dance performances, installations, translations in thirty languages, a worldwide reading, and so on. I had nothing to do with all this: my role was simply to say yes whenever anyone asked.

I think there were two reasons for its success. First—though it’s difficult to imagine now—at the time, the major American media were basically propaganda tools for the Bush-Cheney administration. One had to read the foreign press for opposition opinion and information—luckily, there was the internet for that. And the origins of the war had fallen into the Orwellian “memory hole.” So merely presenting the facts was revelatory.

Second, unlike the Vietnam War, which produced so much powerful antiwar writing, there were few literary texts opposing the Iraq War, and none of any circulation. So What I Heard was something in the absence of anything else.

The U.S. may be the only country where literary writers are not public intellectuals. Our public intellectuals are professional pundits and think-tank types. So I often run into the confusion where people abroad assume I play a role in the U.S. that is almost funny to imagine. In Germany they gave me a prize as an “advocate for social justice,” and a collection of my political writings was a bestseller. They were surprised to hear that those writings had never appeared in an American newspaper or magazine, nor did the book itself exist in English.

JH That war was also a terrifying premonition of things to come: watching “shock and awe” on the evening news now seems like a grim forerunner to the live-streamed violence we see everywhere now, from grocery store shootings to ethnic cleansing. Do you think this proliferation of real-time, image-based representations of events has changed your political writing? I noticed that your piece on Gaza doesn’t share the form of What I Heard, and I wonder if that’s in part because we’re all seeing and hearing the same things and some other intervention is needed.

EW It’s often been noted that the Vietnam War was the first televised war, and its images were a major force in the creation of the antiwar movement. In the Smartphone Era, the onslaught of continual imagery flattens everything, reducing it to a sameness: the grocery store shooting equals the ethnic cleansing, in your example. And the new images erase the old. (Trump has been a master of that: today’s outrageous statement makes everyone forget what he said yesterday.) Pound said that poetry is news that stays news, but now even the news doesn’t stay news for very long.

JH Are there any writers working today you are excited by?

EW Rather than list my friends, I’ll mention five writers I’ve discovered in recent years, whom I don’t know personally (or have only briefly met) and whom I find thrilling: the novelists Alexis Wright, Marcia Douglas, and Hiroko Oyamada (as translated by David Boyd) and the poets Kim Hyesoon (as translated by Don Mee Choi) and Sylvia Legris. It may seem parochial that all of these writers are published by New Directions, but I’ve relied on New Directions my whole life to find the writers I want to read.

JH Returning to The Life of Tu Fu in the context of your other writing: do you have any sense of a literary project or task that would encompass all of your work?

EW Haha. I am not the Rev. Edward Casaubon.