162OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDof the hybrid. While the mostly lyric poetry I examined in the previous
chapter depicts the human speaker approaching the individual animal,
and even speaking to it, these lyric poems keep the boundary line
between human and animal subject fairly clear. A poem with an animal
as speaker obscures this line and crosses into usurpation and absurdity.
I would argue that for these poems to become hybrid, they must fore-
ground the trouble of the crossing, reminding us that speaking for an
animal is an experiment in testing human-animal boundaries and not
a slide into sentiment, amusement, or allegory.
The Australian poet Les Murray, to whom I turn in a moment, calls his
series of poems with animal (and other) speakers “translations,” and it
is helpful to think of poems with animal speakers as an extreme form
of translation—one doomed to fail, but still with the earnest belief, as
Walter Benjamin says about translation between languages, in profound
communicative kinship. For Benjamin, the successful translator needs
to believe in the possibility of the intentionality of the language of the
other, that there is some “pure language” that all languages have in com-
mon and that translating must in some way posit or imply. Benjamin
was of course referring to translations of literary texts, not of animal
being; however, his notion of translation as double, as altering the orig-
inal even as it alters the translator, well describes the kind of hybridity
produced by speaking as an animal. Speaking for or as an animal
assumes the existence of some common intentionality in the world, that
the consciousness produced by living in the world implies the possibility
of communication within and between species. And while this seems
pleasantly plausible when we speak to or for our companion animals, it
seems something fantastical when it becomes poetry. Poetry of the
speaking (or translated) animal can produce a hybrid space in which,
as Benjamin writes, the poet’s own “language [is] powerfully affected by
the foreign tongue.... It is not generally realized to what extent this is
possible, to what extent any language can be transformed.”^12 The desire
to translate is, finally, an act of sympathetic imagination, which Percy
Bysshe Shelley saw as one of the essential characteristics of poetry.
Speaking as an animal can work if the speaker actually tries to meet the