What is your name?
Nathaniel Tarn
What years were you in Borneo?
2005 – for 2 months
What areas of Borneo were you in?
Much of Sarawak & Sabah
What brought you to Borneo?
I volunteered as an anthropologist to work with the Borneo Project on the relation of Indigenous problems to environmental problems. But, as a poet, I also wanted to see the country. I had always found photographs of the people, the art, the material culture and the landscapes exceedingly beautiful.
How have your experiences in Borneo impacted your life outside of Borneo?
I have the Sarawak flag hanging on my bedroom door. It reminds me every night if I need it.
What do you think people in the US who have never been to Borneo should know about it?
Its beauty, its history and its huge environmental value, which is in major danger of being destroyed in part or in total.
Who was the most memorable person you met in Borneo, why?
My colleague on the Project’s project (in photo).
Do you have a story or experience you would like to share with us?
My colleague’s tragically unexpected death close to the start of our work. The story is briefly told as a post face to the title poem of “Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers” published by New Directions in New York in 2008. A French edition is just out from Vif Editions in Paris. Click here to check out “Ins and Outs of Forest Rivers“.
——
Nathaniel Tarn Bio
Nathaniel Tarn is an American poet who was born in 1928 in Paris and educated in France, Belgium, England and the U.S. He obtained degrees from Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Chicago. He emigrated to the United States in 1970, where he taught at American universities until his retirement. He now lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Although he is best-known these days as a poet and essayist, he is also an anthropologist, with a particular interest in Highland Maya studies and the sociology of Buddhist institutions, and a translator of the highest order (see above all his versions of Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and Stelae by Victor Segalen). His first collection of poetry was Old Savage/Young City (Cape, London, 1964, Random House, New York, 1965). All subsequent books until the 1970s were published in London and New York. In London he was Founding Editor of the remarkable Cape Editions series of seminal modern texts many of them in pioneering translations. He also co-founded the Cape Goliard poetry press.
Among post-1970s publications, major ones were: “A Nowhere for Vallejo” (Cape & Random,1971); “Lyrics for the Bride of God” (New Directions, 1975); “The House of Leaves” (Black Sparrow, 1976); “Atitlan/Alashka” (Brillig Works, 1979); “The Desert Mothers” (Salt-Works, 1984); “At the Western Gates” (Tooth of Time, 1985); “The Architextures” (2000); “Selected Poems 1950 to 2000” (Wesleyan, 2002). “The Beautiful Contradictions” (Cape, Random 1969) is being re-issued by New Directions in 2013.
Among important essay and prose volumes are: “Views from the Weaving Mountain” (U. of New Mexico, 1991); “Scandals in the House of Birds: Priests and Shamans on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala” (Marsilio, 2005) and “The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics & Anthropology” (Stanford, 2007).
Tarn’s work is remarkable for expansiveness and its willingness to absorb material from very disparate sources—in this, it owes something to the examples of Pound and Olson, but also a lot to the author’s own anthropological training, his knowledge of other languages and his many interests, in areas such as archaeology.