Like hell, Leslie Kaplan’s Excess—The Factory has nine circles. But unlike the typical depiction of the inferno, these circles are only glimpses of a larger machinery whose punishing pace applies to everyone inside. The voice of these poems is not so much a guide as a rhythm, a pattern of human speech attempting to assimilate, for its own safety, into the patterns of factory life. In each circle, the speaker of these poems enters and leaves the factory, works on the assembly lines, and occasionally finds herself on break by the river or in a café. Once the author has become part of the line, its mechanisms creep into her daily ways of seeing, particularly the binaries of keep/toss, product/waste. In Kaplan’s vision, everything is falling apart into those categories, and even the landscape of neighborhoods becomes a series of “packages and ruins.”
Although this dynamic translation came out in 2018, Excess—The Factory was first published in French in 1982, to wide acclaim from writers like Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, who wrote that Kaplan’s factory had shown him “the infinite, but the infinite in pieces.” The book was Kaplan’s first, and with its focus on female labor, it was hailed as a feminist critique of social conditions. That focus was not accidental — when Kaplan went to work in a factory in the late 1960’s with the aim of organizing workers, gender segregation was a common practice on factory floors, so all of her coworkers were women.
I first encountered this book in the early 2000’s when it was given to me as a gift by Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin, a scholar of urban history who was hosting my mother and me in Paris. I was sixteen, an age when all around me, girlhood was coming apart and being put back together, with braces removed, bleached teeth, new button noses, and color contacts turning my friends’ eyes suddenly green. I had studied a lot of French vocabulary and grammar, but I’d never really practiced speaking it conversationally. My French was a bicycle I’d learned to engineer, but I couldn’t actually ride it without toppling. Our host had heard that I was interested in poetry and was kind enough to give this tagging-along teenager a book of poems by a writer who had “a good reputation as a feminist poet.” When I turned to my copy of the original French to write this essay, Cynthia’s note was still wedged inside.
At the time, I didn’t know what to make of Kaplan or her book, but her work made me curious. Her poems offered a soundscape I’d never heard before, raw and full of momentum. I hadn’t yet encountered alliteration that wasn’t designed to be “polished,” or worse, “romantic.” I didn’t know how to approach a poem that contains lines like “The skylight lets the light in, and the sun. Sparks. It is hot. You are absorbed, nowhere, floating at the end of the line.” I was overwhelmed by this book. And there were things I wanted to ask it.
“I think that being a woman, like ‘being a man’ or ‘being alive’ or ‘going to die’ or ‘having children’ is always a question, it’s a question and it creates questions. This is the way it interests me,” Kaplan says in “There Should Be Battles,” an interview with her translators. This constant sense of inquiry is part of being a human in spaces where you can’t get too comfortable, where at any moment something or someone might re-define your relationship to the world around you. We’re stuck with her in the loop of these questions, even as they carry her through the depersonalization of factory work in the Sixth Circle:
Nothing disappears, ever. The air swells, at each instant, with odors.
You advance through the round courtyard. The sky above, naïve. You
are afraid, endlessly.
Women arrive in soft blouses. You have eyes, you see their breasts.
Space is divided. It’s terrible.
You are not protected.
You come, you go. Cruel and soft spring.
Factory, the factory, first memory.
What does it mean to be a person here, she seems to be asking, or a woman walking through this courtyard? Kaplan’s hyper-awareness has an isolating quality, the loneliness of asking an existential question over and over, with slightly different results each time. Behind each direct observation is a kind of human backlash, a why that gets propelled along, building because there’s no time to answer. This why has a childlike quality, the way a three-year-old might question why the sky is blue or how airplanes work. In Kaplan’s work, there’s a parallel between the assembly line and the poetic line. For her, we’re born into the factory of language, and we learn how to make it come together.
In Excess—The Factory, words are not normal, they’re a luxury, as are the questions that form around them. In a recent lecture, “Writing Moves the Sky,” Kaplan quotes Mallarmé, who said that literature should prevent words from becoming “des pièces de monnaie usées qu’on se repasse en silence,” worn, spare change we pass around in silence. An economic system where rarity increases value won’t work for the world of the factory, where everything is touched by proliferation, production, and waste. Once you know how things are made, you see and hear the making everywhere. The speaker of Excess –The Factory can’t go to the supermarket without noticing how the strawberries are packed, how the trash is disposed.
In his excellent book Transgressive Circulation, Johannes Göransson compares the fear of translation in the US with the fear of inflation, refuting the idea that by bringing new ways of making language into English, we might somehow devalue the literary strategies we already have. He writes, “It seems the threat of translation is that it might produce an excess that would ruin the economy of meaning and taste.” What’s brilliant about Kaplan’s book is that she recognizes that on the assembly line, or in writing, excess is almost always reinvested and reused — any leftovers become fodder for the next round of making.
In her talk, “Writing Moves the Sky,” Kaplan quotes Kafka: “To write is to jump outside the line of the assassins.” For her, Kafka’s words are “the very definition of what writing is … the assassins, contrary to what one might believe, are those who stay in line, who follow the usual way of things, who repeat and start over again the bad life as it goes.” With its potential for carrying new ways of communication, translation may help to get outside deadening lines of thought. As Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap write in their translator’s note: “L’excess—l’usine makes suffering and alienation palpable. But as poetry perhaps it also performs the liberating gesture that Kafka claims for writing.”
As a vehicle for excess and wildness, Carr and Pap’s translation also performs this gesture. The English version captures the tension and momentum of the French, its alliterative machine-like rhythm, even though there is much less naturally occurring alliteration in English than there is in French. Excess—The Factory offers a new way of working in English, and Carr and Pap have done an admirable job of providing critical context for the book. It is also important to note that the book was made by a bilingual author — Kaplan was born in Brooklyn and moved to France when she was young, and has said that there was always English under her French. Her relationship to language, and the movement between cultures that comes with it, can’t be summed up by the typical translation metaphor of faithful exchange without loss. This book, in both the translation and the original, has something to tell us about English, about America. Bringing the book into English completes a circle that began in the industrial New York of Kaplan’s early childhood.
Excess—The Factory ends with a little girl. In the Ninth Circle, she plays with a baby while other women chat nearby:
“The girl repeats her game again and again. The baby has skin like rubber.
The little girl bends the baby, squeezes it. At one point the woman
who might be the mother says to the little girl: Come on, you’re going
to kill the baby. The little girl lifts up the baby and asks: Do you think
I’m going to kill you?”
These lines are full of cyclical ambiguity. Is the girl’s game a precursor to the assembly line? Are her mechanical movements treating the baby like another set of rubber parts? Among these three generations, will the girl become another one of Kafka’s assassins, following the usual way of things, the “bad life” that kills? All these questions hang open like gates.