Review of Terrence Arjoon’s The Disinherited:
This essay attends to Terrence Arjoon’s full-length poetry debut, The Disinherited, in which the author sets his original work alongside translations of Les Chimères, a poetry cycle by the French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval. If, for Nerval, writing is “unwriting,” then for Arjoon, translation is un-translation: a “metabolic vehicle” whereby Nerval’s language is processed and thus transformed. This essay, then, considers Arjoon’s alchemic (or chimeric) translations of Nerval as a metonym for intersubjective exchange, and for the processing of physical material across centuries of colonial and environmental extraction.
Nadia Mazonson is a writer and editor based in Providence, RI, where she studies comparative literature at Brown University. She was managing editor of the College Hill Independent, and the editorial intern at Dissent. In her free time, she walks, reads, and dances.