ABSTRACT
Queer-identified authors may use translation to articulate their own sexual identity or to develop a queer politics. The gay American poet Jack Spicer was particularly interested in using his translations for both ends. The juxtaposed surreal growth of the cocksuckers' fingers along the private space of Walt Whitman's homoerotic dream substantially blurs the line between fantasy and the cocksuckers' social experience. Spicer himself was hesitant to label the book's poems as translations. Even in a cursory reading of his translation of Federico García Lorca's 'Oda a Walt Whitman', certain words leap of the page: tight-cocked, cocksuckers, prick, hard-up, sucked-off, wet-dreamed. Although 'Oda a Walt Whitman' is laden with homoeroticism, the poem's reliance upon metaphor results in a homoerotic poesis that is too ambiguous to conform to Spicer's demand for a more concrete depiction of the male body and gay sexuality. Gay visibility comes with the attendant stipulation that it is now more easily subject to social control and containment.
