{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026981450252951095, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003372681281618887, 'mean_word_length': 5.118556701030927, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Task of the Tusitala: Tusiata Avia’s Wild Dogs Under My Skirt

This article argues that Tusiata Avia’s first volume of poetry, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004), is premised on the recognition of the poet’s work as first and foremost that of the translator. Moreover, Wild Dogs perpetuates an investigation of the politics of translation by pursuing its own interpretation of what Samoan culture refers to as the va — the indefinable concept (or more properly, non-concept) of spatial and temporal relation and difference. As such Avia produces what could be referred to as a va-poetics, a poetics of translation that eschews the notion of the otherness of culture for an understanding of the otherness of translation. In this respect Avia’s text is sympathetic to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the task of translator, that figure charged with the responsibility for translating a work’s relationship to possibility, to reproducibility itself, rather than ideas of similarity, likeness or analogy. In this way Avia’s work negotiates for itself a non-naive charting of Western aesthetics, especially as these are implicated in discourses of neo-colonialism and commodity consumption.