The life of an artist is the search for a form adequate to her vision. Fanny Howe, who died on July 8 at the age of eighty-four, had a restless soul and was a restless writer. She worked in many different forms: novel, lyric, essay. In a recently published interview in The Paris Review, Howe spoke with the poet and translator Chloe García Roberts about the disciplined undiscipline of her poetry, which used long lines, short lines, and, on occasion, no lines at all: “It is troublesome sometimes, the way my lengths are so uneven. You can look at Emily Dickinson from a mile away and know that’s her shape, and her length, and her size. It’s as if I have never found the right form for all my thoughts.” If Howe never found the right form, that wasn’t a failure on her part as an artist. It was a sign of her devotion to bewilderment, which for her was both “a poetics and a politics.”

In her writing and in her theology (she converted to Catholicism in the 1970s), Howe embraced mystery, contingency, wildness, illogic. What is more puzzling than how a poem gets written or more inexplicable than God’s grace? We tend to think of bewilderment as a cognitive deficiency meant to be rectified. For Howe, it was a spiritual state meant to be cherished, and writing that would be adequate to such a spiritual state had to be fluid and changeable, “warped and refractive.” To read one of her books—her great book of lyric essays, The Wedding Dress (2003); her even greater collection of poems, Second Childhood (2014); arguably her greatest achievement, the novel Indivisible (2000)—is to be exhilaratingly unmoored, to never quite get your footing and to delight in the feeling of vertigo she creates. 

It’s fitting that Howe’s final public words came in a conversation with García Roberts, who is a rightful heir to Howe’s bewildering style. García Roberts’s recent book, Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology (co-im-press, $19.95, 136 pp.), is a shifty collection of lyric essays about time, love, and language. “Shifting is what we, the liminal, do,” García Roberts declares. By “we,” she partly means translators like herself, who professionally carry meaning from one language over to another and, in doing so, exist in transit. As she writes, “To shift, it is important to clarify, is not pretense it is translation. It means to change and replace.” But by “we” she also means those who grew up between languages (Spanish and English were both spoken in García Roberts’s home) and between borders (she was born in Mexico but raised in New Mexico); those who bear children (“to mother must be a form of molting,” she claims, and much of Fire Eater addresses how motherhood continually unmakes and remakes the self) and those who are children; those who believe and those who doubt and those who do both at the same (raised Catholic, García Roberts writes that her “faith is like light. Like all light, it is subjective, it passes, it flickers, it flares”); those who work in the in-between form of the lyric essay; those who are pilgrims on the way. Which to say, all of us.

What, exactly, is the lyric essay? Back in 1997, John D’Agata and Deborah Tall offered a classic definition: “The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.” García Roberts’s language certainly does tack between the linguistic playfulness characteristic of lyric (“A complication or it has no heft. A knot or it is not”) and the sharp claims constitutive of the essay (the book’s first sentence reads, “Memory’s inscription on the mind can be compared to afterburn on a retina after a flash of light”). More recently, Elisa Gabbert pointed to the lyric essay’s use of jumps and cuts,

the invisible transition, where there is no clear, necessary connection between two paragraphs, and yet—something happens. The juxtaposition isn’t as jarring as a non sequitur, but it could have been otherwise. In fact I’d argue that what’s mostly “lyric” about a so-called lyric essay are these transitions, these leaps, more so than some inherently “poetic” quality of the language.

Fire Eater is filled with such leaps, as in “Lineage,” where a paragraph ends with a last, mysterious moment spent with García Roberts’s grandmother (“A blessing for the crossing is the only thing we can give, it is the last shining line, snapped”) and the next paragraph begins with a matter-of-fact statement (“Yesterday, I went outside to pick some basil”). This is where Fire Eater is at its best, in the spaces between—and it’s where we can see how one’s training as a translator, where something happens in the leap between languages, might make the lyric essay an amenable form. (It’s probably no accident that the most renowned living writer of lyric essays in the English language, Anne Carson, is also an accomplished translator.)

In almost every one of Fire Eater’s ten essays, García Roberts drills down into the etymology—not just the deep history but the deep spirit—of words. As Emerson put it, “The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.” García Roberts is a poet because she is an etymologist, an etymologist because she is a poet, both because she is a translator. She tells us that “gleam” comes from the old English glaem, “which meant brilliant,” whereas “glean” comes from gleame, which means to “pick up produce after the reapers”: “Thus, you glean what remains, and you find what remains because it gleams, it shines with emitted or reflected light.” So much of the poet’s task is contained in this small freak (or is it a resonant pattern?) of language. The poet sifts through the detritus of language and notices something that gleams. Or—and García Roberts wants to suggest that both are true—the poet notices something that our language has left behind and, through noticing it, makes it gleam. In both cases, love of language, attention to the textures and tones and histories of seemingly insignificant words, is generative. Words emit and reflect light; they have their own life and the life we confer upon them. Language is incarnate with meaning.

Here is another example of García Roberts uncovering the fossil poetry in language:

The word wilderness is a desolate place, a deprivation of human togetherness or camaraderie. And the etymological root of desolate is desolare, which is to leave alone, to desert. In the Bible, the wilderness is always the desert because that was the landscape of the stories, but interestingly in that case the word has twinned itself, because the wilderness only entered when you desert what you were before. Entering the Biblical wilderness is a ritual of becoming, is a place one must pass through in order to unmake and then remake the self. And the key to its power to remake is that the wilderness is a space where we encounter the world as it is and not how we have made it. And we must pass through it because the journey is what remakes us, because if we rest we turn it with our presence from the wilderness to the hearth, we unmake it.

The desert can unmake us but only if we don’t unmake it, if we allow this desolate place to do its desolating work upon us. Fire Eater has literal deserts (“when I was a child,” García Roberts writes, “my home was in a valley oasis in the high desert”) but it also contains metaphorical deserts: experiences of physical, emotional, and spiritual desolation. She almost drowns at a beach in Mexico. She suffers a miscarriage. There are illnesses, deaths, and losses of various kinds. Such dark nights of the soul unmake us. But if we pass through them, if we allow ourselves to be carried over and through them (that’s the etymological meaning of “metaphor”— a carrying over), then we might be made new.

“I do this work in the spirit of reciprocity,” García Roberts writes of translation, 

because I need to believe that I might have something, anything, to give them, they who have given me everything. Because my faith tells me that the miracle is not transubstantiation but translation, as the divine remains intact, untouched, untethered by materiality as it turns from ash to flame, from light to night, from silence to speech, in an act that can be performed over and over and over again, amen.

Such is the bewildering work of translation, Fire Eater suggests. Such is the bewildering work of grace.