Liberation's Love Language: The Politics and Poetics of Queer Translation after Stonewall

Abstract

ERIC KEENAGHAN is associate professor and chair of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State UP, 2009) and coeditor of The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose by Muriel Rukeyser (Cornell UP, 2023). For his other publications about queer poetry and queer translation, as well as American modernist, Cold War, and leftist poetry and poetics, visit www.albany .edu/english/faculty/eric-keenaghan. From circa 1969 to 1991, from the Stonewall uprising through the AIDS pandemic’s first decade, gay and lesbian liberation activists trusted language’s power to establish new social and political commonality. Poetry, especially, was admired for its metaphoric translation of queerness, its ability to move LGBTQ+ desires and identities out of the closets of private, isolated experience into collective minoritarian language communities, even national public discourse. After Stonewall, American activist poetry also was translated literally to be used for consciousness-raising groups and grassrootsmobilization. Take the example of a reader from West Germany who wrote to the lesbian feminist magazine Amazon Quarterly that after encountering Judy Grahn’s now-classic poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death” (1974) in an earlier issue, she was so moved she translated it for rape survivors. “Finally some poetry to identify with!” she celebrated. Grahn’s poem proved a valuable resource for her community since “[g]ay consciousness in Germany is not yet [developed] far enough to really produce its own culture” (Barbara). Despite such early testimonials about queer poetry and translation’s healing power and agency-producing potential, only recently have scholars begun to address “theory, practice, [and] activism” as “thoroughly entangled” in queer translation, particularly of academic, theoretic, and political texts (Baer and Kaindl 4). Such work, as Michela Baldo argues in relation to translating queer and feminist theory, is performative, an “act of producing and making new discourses [about LGBTQ+ experience] visible” and thus generating new forms of politicized subjectivity and community (43). Though overlooked, the translation of queer poetry historically has similarly connected theory, practice, and activism. Lyricism, common to most