Renga and Heteronymy

This chapter uses the backdrop of the myriad international poetry conferences of the 1960s to analyze poetic performances of cosmopolitanism and the discourse of translation. The ethical role of convening poets to perform and translate one another’s works was mainstreamed as a literary idea in service to the maintenance of a peaceful world, so much so that Paz, in the multilingual, collaboratively authored Renga (1971), announced he was living in “the century of translation.” Juxtaposing Renga and Kenneth Koch’s collection of hoax translations “Some South American Poets,” the chapter elucidates how these antithetical authorial modes endorse and critique the tenor of cultural diplomacy under the Pax Americana. Through new forms of critical cosmopolitanism, these works alternately memorialize and parody the midcentury groundswell of poetic inter-Americanism that the book recounts.