Behind the Poem: Item 143
By Michael Hessel-Mial
Published May 7, 2026
Welcome back to Behind the Poem: Angry Gable edition!
Like last time, I’m leaving my usual substack haunt to bring my reflections on poetry to Angry Gable Press readers. If you’re new to this column, I write speculative poetry as entries of a far-future literary anthology. Behind each poem’s exotic form or strange content is a reflection of our own world literary history, and with it, the social struggles that poetry gives voice to. My “Behind the Poem” essays are a chance for me to explore the poetics, world-building, and politics I was thinking about as I wrote a given poem. Since I have three poems in the fabulous Katabatic Circus, Vol. 2, the editors were kind enough to give me space in the Angry Gable column!
In this essay, I’ll be talking about a second poem that appeared in Katabatic Circus, Vol. 2: “Item 143,” a poem by Thriving Shelter (but mistranslated here by Protecting Bolt). This poem was written around 2,000 years in the future. Like “Scoring Performance 9,” this was one of the first handful of standalone poems I wrote from the sci fi universe I’ve been building. And like that poem, it was a chance to explore a literary history tidbit that ended up being foundational for how I think about writing. This time, it’s the fraught colonial politics of translation. As anyone who’s read R.F. Kuang’s Babel (or taken a postcolonial literature class) knows, translating literature involves choices about how to represent the culture the text comes from. In colonial contexts, translations often present the writer and culture in ways that flatter the colonizer. Let me give you an example I’ve read fairly recently. Martha Beckwith’s translation of the Indigenous Hawaiian epic The Kumulipo (a translation funded by a family of sugar barons), actively downplayed the political and historical dimensions of the epic in favor of a purely “mythical” rending of the poem. This distortion matters, because The Kumulipo has played a role in Hawaiian sovereignty movements; it is an inherently political text (all credit for my knowledge of The Kumulipo goes to the scholarly work of Brandy Nālani McDougall).
“Item 143” is an attempt to write a “colonialist mistranslation.” The ‘original’ poem has its origin in the planets of the Clear Extent regime, which in this secondary world have faced direct and indirect colonial control from first the Community of Improvement worlds, and then the Covenant of Cycles worlds. (Clear Extent would come to reorganize under the revolutionary Great Chain of Seeking regime, with subsequent poetry engaging a differently fraught relationship to its past). The immediate precedent for the poem was Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat translations of poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam, as well as various other Victorian-styled translations of Asian poetry into strictly English metrical forms. (Some other examples I referenced were Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi 1953 translation of poems attributed to Qu Yuan, and Sir Edwin Arnold’s 1885 translation the Bhagavad-Gita, both in heroic couplets). The incongruity of English poetic form and rhetoric representing, as well as projecting onto, non-Western poetry traditions is fascinating, cringe-inducing, disturbing, and sometimes beautiful on accident.
If, like me, you read a lot of world literature in translation, I highly recommend learning about scholarship on translation in general. I was lucky to take a class on it in undergrad way back when, and we worked through Lawrence Venuti’s edited volume The Translation Studies Reader, which I’d point others to to get a gist of the field. One of the key distinctions that Venuti offers is between a translation that “domesticates” the translated text and one that “foreignizes” it. Meaning that when choosing how to convey syntax, word choice, form, themes and connotations, allusions, even the basic narrative or rhetorical structure, a translator might choose one of two philosophies to guide those choices. They might try to find style equivalents in the target language, which would be a “domesticating” translation. For example, the idiomatic English phrase “hit the nail on the head” would be replaced in the target language with a comparable phrase conveying ‘getting it right.’ But in a “foreignizing” translation, the phrase would be translated more exactly, in order to convey something of the thought-world of the original language. This is of course a very simple example. They’re both ‘valid’ approaches to translation, but a domesticating translation has more obvious risks of erasing unpalatable features of the source text/language.
There is a long tradition of American avant-garde poets doing creative (mis)translations of Asian and Indigenous poetry, which they claim has poetic style similar to their experimental home poetics. Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese and Jerome Rothenberg’s Shaking the Pumpkin anthology of translated Indigenous poetry are two famous examples. But both of these are domesticating translations, drawing pretty haphazardly from the traditions they translate to fit their poetic preconceptions. And in the process, they project stereotypes back onto the source texts. It’s a pretty messy business. The point isn’t to say that creative translations are bad (they can be aesthetically interesting and unproblematic) or that there’s a single way of translating well/respectfully. Just that when we look at works in translation, we must work to pick up the underlying philosophy of the translator, and see the translation as simultaneously a creative work in its own right, a representation of the original poem, and (if you’re lucky) a little echo of what the original might have been.
Before I spend the rest of the column continuing to talk about language, I want to spend some time on world-building and form. So I knew that for “Item 143,” I wanted a poem to be ‘translated’ into an ill-fitting canonical form. I just had to invent the form first. I created “palindromic rhyme” or “mirror-rhyme,” where the first half of the line rhymes with the second half in reverse, following randomly-generated syllable counts for each line. This is one of the prestige forms of the Community of Improvement regime, which was also carried over to a more limited extent in the later Covenant of Cycle society. My choice to structure poetic form around the palindrome, typically self-contained in a single line, was based on some speculation on the nature of communication in space. Our early planetbound poetic forms link words with sonic devices that also serve as memory aids. Long distance messaging in space is still a primitive, vulnerable technology, and it’s easy to lose information. Messages with a lot of vital content would have to encode themselves against loss with redundant structures. I thought that the palindrome structure, also reflecting a wave pattern, might reflect how a spacefaring people might adapt their comms structure to the poetic line. (Of course, we’re all just making things up in sci fi).
This poem was my first wrestling with that very difficult form, and to some degree I experienced what a lot of poets in a new form experience, being slightly ‘led’ by the form in early experiments with it. In retrospect, I wish I had written the ‘original’ version of the poem and then rendered it in mirror-rhyme, but the poem ended up having to work out the prosody of mirror-rhyme in the first place. I’ve since developed the poetic form for the original poem, then written a more ‘accurate’ translation of the original. Clear Extent poetics applies the same principle of the palindrome to syntax, and the mirror-syntax version of “Item 143” is a lot of fun in its own way, more rowdy and earthy, less meditative. The “Item 143” I’m writing about here, which you’ve hopefully read, is different; austere, formal, existentially anxious. It’s got something of Protecting Bolt’s preoccupations, and something of their assumptions about what Thriving Shelter’s culture might have been like.
Back to translation and language. In writing this poem in early 2024, I stumbled onto a literary theory proposition that joins speculative fiction and translation theory. Here’s the proposition: the more remote the secondary world, the more these questions of translation show up in the story. An invented world implies linguistic difference. We can read remote speculative stories as translations, to find hidden dimensions of their secondary worlds. For example, Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy uses “rust” as a curse word. If we read “rust” as a domesticating approximation, we can ask more specific questions about the role of metal and deterioration in the story’s metaphorical system. This type of reading isn’t completely left field. People with some proficiency in Middle Earth know that The Lord of the Rings is an in-world “translation,” and a transparently domesticating one as well. Banazîr Galbasi is the real name of the character we encounter as Samwise Gamgee. Tolkien takes pains to make Middle Earth legible to our ideas of a premodern English world (how else would potatoes have gotten there?!), and it’s those domestications that give the most fuel to reactionary readings of the story. Knowing that the story is a translation allows us to read against the grain, armed with Tolkien’s more critical private thoughts on nationalism and tradition. There’s a lot of potential here!
As I also mentioned in my writeup on “Scoring Performance 9,” I think one of the most important assumptions of my own poetry and secondary world is that readers will juggle the conflicting demands of aesthetic appreciation and mistrust of the speaker in the story. In the same way that we read literary history for questions of power and of aesthetics, looking in what’s unspoken for additional tensions that might give meaning to the work, we can do the same in speculative stories, against the grain of both the speaker/narrator and the author. For “Item 143,” the question of translation is a window into those unspoken tensions. And I hope to have convinced you that this question can apply to a wide variety of other speculative texts.
AUTHOR BIO
Michael Hessel-Mial teaches university writing at the University of Minnesota. His previous poetry work was in digital image macros, which appeared at Columbia Journal, The Fanzine, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. Michael’s current interests are in science fiction poetry narratives of class struggle. He invents or repurposes alien forms that reflect the ideology of interstellar class society.
Angry Gable Press 