Abstracts, part II

David Evans – University of St Andrews

There is No Such Thing as the Source Text: or, What Translation Can Teach Us About Verse

Robert Frost’s attractive aphorism, with which the conference organisers launch their call for papers, chimes harmoniously with much critical, authorial and readerly discourse on poetry. Much of this discourse is extremely appealing, yet seems to me a fallacy. 

 

If, as Frost claims, ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’, then the poeticity of a text is unique to that source language artefact; the text’s inimitable combination of multiple meanings, sound patterns and complex layers of rhythmic and harmonic patterns refresh both the language and our relationship to the world. In this context, any translation can only be a defeat, unable to replicate in the target language the source text’s dense network of sonorities and signifiers.

However, this paper will argue, quite contrary to these mystifications to which readers and writers of poetry too readily subcribe, that verse poetry is also a game with words, a matter of placing them like building blocks within pre-existing fixed forms such as the sonnet, villanelle, rondel, pantoum or terza rima. In their writings on poetry, such major and internationally influential figures as Poe, Baudelaire and Rimbaud confront the unavoidable tension at the heart of their art form, namely that while poetry appears to transcend the everyday boundaries of language, poets widely regarded as geniuses, from Racine to Victor Hugo, are still obliged to rhyme amour with a restricted lexical set including that hoary old favourite jour.

Taking examples from the French poetic tradition, from the Grands Rhétoriqueurs of the C15th such as Charles d’Orléans and Clément Marot, to C19th and C20th poets such as Théodore de Banville, or Raymond Queneau and Jacques Roubaud of the Oulipo, I will suggest that there exists a significant tradition in verse poetry of foregrounding the materiality of language and the restrictions it imposes on the author of the source text. In a recent volume, Jacques Roubaud highlights this tension in a playful parody of Apollinaire’s ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ using nonsense words at the rhyme:

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule l’Y-onne       |     (Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Et nos amours                   |                            Et nos amours

Faut-il qu’il m’en souvionne        |                   Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne

La joie venait toujours après la ponne.        |    La joie venait toujours après la peine.)

Viewed in this light, Apollinaire’s poem foregrounds the themes of memory and loss purely because of the (arbitrary) name of the river. Much poetic expression, then, far from articulating an ineffable truth beyond the confines of language, actually emerges from within the linguistic and structural limitations accepted by the poet who chooses to write in fixed forms. Insofar as the translated text, then, is seen as a failure, I argue that the integrity of the hallowed source text is itself thrown into question, and may itself be seen as a similar sort of glorious failure as its translation. From this point of view, translation practice and poetic composition may have much to teach each other about the integrity of both art forms.

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Elise Aru – University College London

A creative translation approach of Surrealism: visual surrealisation

Surrealism is a major movement in the 20th century European Avant-Garde, still influencing current practices. It exemplifies the literary, aesthetic, and political importance of ludic activity. Surrealist practice brings to the fore the boundless potential of ludic invention to create new semantic possibilites. Play in Surrealism thrives on continual détournements or displacements in their own practices as well as in established works. Indeed, the Surrealists managed to juggle with respecting, bending and reinventing the rules of making sense, creating new forms of play and new semantic as well as formal results. This paper experiments with a ludic and creative approach to translation itself, and to translating Surrealist poems in particular. I propose a mise en abyme of the Surrealist manner. I reinvigorate certain Surrealist practices in the translation process itself by adopting the Surrealists’ own concept of displacement. My translations offer Surrealism within Surrealism. My presentation will then go on to address the notion of faithfulness in translation in relation to a referent - in this case, Surrealist practice itself – inviting reflection on appropriate forms of translation in the target language. An examination will emerge of the crucial importance of the relation between translator and reader in this creative approach to translation.

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Gisela Hoyle

What these Ithacas mean: after poem workshop

I would like to discuss three poems about Ithaca – all of them in a different language: Homer’s Odyssey, Cavafy’s Ithaca and Lawrence Durrell’s Standing on Ithaca. Two of them I only know in translation – or can only understand in translation. Does that mean I can never get to Ithaca? Can I even know whether I can or not? I think at least two of these poems will mean something to everyone in this room. I don’t think Ithaca is lost in translation.

In this workshop, we will read and discuss the two 20th Century poems on Ithaca. Ithaca in Cavafy’s poem is the Ithaca of Homer’s Odysseus. It is the place to which the audience of the poem is setting out – possibly. In Durrell’s poem, the speaker is standing on Ithaca and seeing it as miracle ground. 

Heidegger speaks of place, of location as the shelter for the fourfold. All of Heidegger’s fourfold can be traced through the poems of both Cavafy and Durrell, which through evoking them create the space in which something has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary. A boundary is not that at which something stops, but as the Greeks recognised, a boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. And it is at those boundaries too that translation would take place, where two sets of fourfolds would meet. Translation is another example of Bhabha’s third space.

We will discuss liminality as a necessary condition not just of translation but any cultural understanding – and therefore, in this global community we would like to be living in, as everybody’s Ithaca – home.

Participants will think about places in their own worlds and how they are made dwelling places, might be Ithacas – and write about that, perhaps using some images from the poems as stimulus. In this way we can experiment and see whether Ithaca, or the experience of Ithaca, the sheltering of the fourfold, can be translated through space as well as time and language.

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Gwyneth Box

Poetry translation and creation workshop: Blossoms from the mist

Joan Margarit is one of Spain's leading modern poets. Much of his work is published in parallel texts that he writes himself, in Castilian Spanish and Catalán, not as translations, but as two versions of a single work. This access to two 'original' versions by the same author offers a toehold in the complex task facing the translator, as variations in minor technical details can illuminate the author's own priorities. 

 

In the workshop we will consider the poem Flors blanques en la boira/Flores blancas en la niebla, from the collection Estació de Fança, (Ediciones Hiperión, 1999), and the English translation White flowers in the mist by Anna Crowe from the collection Tugs in the Fog, (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), as well as my own translation, first published on-line in 2002.

The aim of the workshop is to use the original poem(s) to trigger the creation of a new work. Whether the product is a formal translation, a transformation, or an entirely new text, will be part of the creative experience.

Note: The vocabulary of the original poem(s) will be looked at in some depth, so, although a knowledge of Spanish and/or Catalán would be useful, any modern Romance language coupled with interest and open-mindedness will probably be sufficient.

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Timothy Mathews & Delphine Grass – University College London

Michel Houellebecq, Le Sens du combat/The Art of Struggle, translated by Delphine Grass and Timothy Mathews: a reading of poetry in translation, followed by discussion

Translation is made in the moment when the uniqueness of a word sounds differently to different people. In composing The Art of Struggle we have tried to translate not just words but effects; not just sentences but structures. Our purpose is to translate Houellebecq’s injunction to the reader to engage. Metre is at the heart of his verse poems, and we wanted to communicate the way he uses it to give substance to voice, sensation and sense. Metre works together with rhyme; but the networks of rhyme and meaning cannot be the same in different languages. Should the translator translate the sound or the meaning? Sound is in any case in the service of meaning, sound in poetry reverberates in and through the meanings discovered. This is language, not music: that is the approach taken here to translating Le Sens du combat, a book which charts a struggle to give voice to depersonalization, and to personhood too. Emotion seems to have been quantified in every way imaginable in Houellebecq’s book. But there is a struggle towards some sort of resistance, as well as a meditation on the possibility of resistance.

Michel Houellebecq has a high profile as a novelist not only in France but in the English-speaking world and further afield as well. Few readers are aware of him as a poet, in spite of his three collections: La Poursuite du Bonheur/The Pursuit of Happines,1992, Le Sens du combat/The Art of Struggle, 1996, and Renaissance/Re-Birth, 1999. The Art of Struggle, published in October 2010, is the first translation in English of a complete book of Michel Houellebecq’s poetry; he expressed a particular interest in seeing this book in English. We would like to read from our translation, discuss our experiences of writing it, and invite responses on how it sounds to an English-speaking readership.

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Barry Wood – Manchester Metropolitan University

Simple Lyric: difficult translation

“All I have against translation is that it can’t be done!”

Moore’s dictum is as despairing as Frost’s more famous: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation” and comes from an essay “On the Impossibility of Translation”. And yet the essay is an introduction to his collection of 31 versions of Baudelaire’s Spleen poem: “Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux”. The translation of poetry is impossible but apparently must be tried, again and again. Translation is not so much finished as—to coin a phrase from Valery—abandoned. Moore’s despair, as poet, is precisely the challenge for the translator.At the very least we can learn from our failures. More positively, translation may inspire, stimulate and re-direct poets, on an individual level, towards discoveries of new forms and idioms, styles and themes; and, on a broader scale, may be the impetus behind development of a whole movement or period. As Pound suggested, a great age of literature is often if not always also a great age of translation.

The purpose of this workshop is to explore in small the creative paradox of translation. In the introductory session I will be looking at a number of versions of three short French lyric poems (Valery’s “Les pas”, Supervielle’s “Regards”, Eluard’s “L’amoureuse”) and considering:

•  some of the difficulties even the ‘simplest’ lyrics present to the translator
• what choices the poet-translator or translator of poetry must make in approaching the original work
•  what can be learned from comparing translations
•  and how far demands for accuracy and literalness can be reconciled with creative freedom and flexibility.

The workshop session will offer participants the opportunity to present either their own version of one of the three poems already discussed or a version of a short poem of their own choosing. Clearly it will be useful if participants have copies of their versions to distribute to the group.

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Abstracts, part I

Kerry Featherstone – Loughborough University

Finding Poems About Afghanistan: Translating Ingrid Thobois

This paper discusses the meeting point of three of my areas of interest: representations of Afghanistan, poetry and French language. In 2007, Ingrid Thobois published Le Roi d’Afghanistan ne nous a pas mariés; a novel about a young French woman who goes to teach at the University of Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. I met the author later that year, and decided to translate the book into English. What I did not know then was that the process of translation would lead to poetry as well as prose.

As a creative writing tutor, I’m well aware of the Anglo-American preference for spare, lean prose of the “Write Tight” variety. I’m also aware that French contemporary fiction does not necessarily follow this orthodoxy. Thobois’ work, not just in this novel, is an example of fiction in which flowing sentences shift perspective and metaphor, offering emotional engagement and an avowed subjectivity of the first-person narrator.

In the process of working on the translation, I’ve come across several sections in which the language, style, and sense of self-contained coherence have made me think of poetry rather than prose. On several occasions now, as well as prose translation, I’ve reworked extracts into poems. This means that I’m working across boundaries of form as well as language, and this gives rise to the subject matter of this paper.

Using two examples from Thobois’ novel, I propose comparing the French original with my prose translation and then with my translation-as-poem. As well as discussing my own processes, I intend to include Ingrid Thobois’ comments on both aspects of my work, in order to compare the viewpoint of author and translator. My discussion will focus on choices of extract, choice of form and organisation, and how to present on the page an English poem based on French prose. 

 

I hope, based on a reading of these examples, that a discussion might follow about how far the translator-as-author has authority over the text depending on how they translate it, how far the text can dictate this, and what role the author of the original might play in re-translating their work across form as well as language.

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Laura Rappa – University of Palermo

A classic that becomes a topos

When I think about translation I think about the Middle Ages. And basically, when I think about the Middle Ages and translation, I think about Dante's Comedy.  I am interested in those tercets that became a topos in Italy, that entered the language, that everyone knows. 

The object of my research is to outline the ways in which those particular tercets throughout the Comedy are translated in English and what kinds of echoes there are in the English-speaking world--if there are any. In so doing, I look at Dante’s words as a fund of linguistic knowledge across two different worlds at the present time.

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Aurélie HEC – Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne

A Poetic Chimera: the translation of The Hunting of the Snark in French

In 1929 the poet Louis Aragon published La Chasse au Snark, being the first one to translate into French Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem. Seven others have been made since then, including one made by another poet, Jacques Roubaud. 

 

But how can one translate « such Nonsense »? Different strategies have been set to deal with the text and its delicate form. Some French versions are in verse, some are rhymed and some are not, two are in prose, and four are in a bilingual edition. The form in itself can have an impact on the sense, which is already a main problem in the original text.

For example, the final verse « For the Snark was a Boojum, you see » looks like a non-solution and a denial of principles of logic. The question of identity, mentioned throughout Carroll's works, takes in that poem an unusual form, quite different to the problems involved in lyrical writing.

Nevertheless it is still a poem, though the musical aspect is combined with an apparent lack of sense (« absurd » meaning historically « out of tune »). Language in its physical dimension (including the coined words) cannot be separated to its metaphysical content ; for instance, does it make « more sense » to transcript the alliterative presence of the « b » (notably for the characters' names), which can be seen as an echo of « to be » ?

An ontological problem is at the stake in this poem of « existential agony ». It epitomizes the questions one deal with in translation studies: problems of equivalence, difference, identity. The Snark and the Boojum are like the original text and its translated version: differently named, ontologically the same, but not with the same features.

It is not only a translation from the English language to another language but also a translation from one culture to another. So, should we be afraid of the Nonsense it personifies? And what if it was a typical English-bred creature? Is it then chimerical trying to translate that poetic chimera, these portemanteau words? Is there some way to be more respectful of the text? All these questions will be examined through the selective reading of some translations, combined to the results of an interview with two translators of the poem, Jacques Roubaud and Gérard Hoepffner.

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Aneesh Barai – Queen Mary, University of London, PhD candidate

“His ineffable effable [/] Effanineffable [/] Deep and inscrutable singular Name”: Names and Rhythms in French Translations of T. S. Eliot’s Cats

Eliot’s collection of children’s poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is among his most popular works. Apart from its whimsical character portraits, Cats has garnered critical interest for its playful allusiveness and groundbreaking rhythms, proving to be as valuable a statement of Eliot’s poetic mission as any of his poetry for adults. Children’s literature in translation is a growing critical field that takes into account what is distinct about the child audience. The issue of domestication and foreignisation remains debatable in children’s literature if foreignisation may detract from the child’s pleasure in the text. Children’s entertainment is also put to the fore in Puurtinen’s concept of “read-aloud-ability” as essential in translating for children. A fluently readable translation is especially challenging when faced with a modernist poet such as Eliot.

Cats was translated in 1983 by Jacques Charpentreau and in 2010 by Jean-François Ménard. In his preface, Charpentreau suggests cats are alike the world over, justifying his domestication of places and names. Charpentreau’s domestications seek to maintain Eliot’s allusions, but in doing so, make them less subtle. The humourous repetitions of “Mr Mistoffelees” become formal and serious in Charpentreau’s “Monsieur Méphistophile”, and Eliot’s playful poetry is lost. Similarly, he gives Macavity as “Machiavel”. In building a strong link to Machiavelli, he diminishes the gentle association that the name Macavity has to Professor Moriarty, with both called “The Napoleon of Crime”.

Ménard keeps close to Eliot’s names, but chooses conventional French rhythms for Eliot’s unusual ones. For example, “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” is written in intricately patterned vers libre with a regular iambic beat and occasional run-away lines. Eliot generates a locomotive feel, as in the sixteen-syllable line “Saying ‘Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?” Charpentreau keeps the shape of Eliot’s verse: although his line is not as long – “C’est: ‘Rouli, où est Rouli, chasserait-il la poulie?” – he equally shortens the shorter lines, to give the poem the same feel. Conversely, Ménard’s line is a classical French alexandrine line of twelve syllables and a medial caesura: “Où est passé Skimbel? À la chasse aux ficelles?” Rhyme is sporadic in Eliot’s poem, but as rhyme is a central principle of French poetics, Ménard makes every line rhyme.

In these translations of a critically underappreciated text, poetry is not so much lost as new writing built of the parts of existing poetry, while other parts are harmonised with a new language. Two opposite paths are taken for Cats: Charpentreau domesticates names but replicates Eliot’s rhythms, while Ménard foreignises names but works in standard French poetic form.

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Louise Rogers Lalaurie – University of London Institute, Paris

"Dancing on ropes with fetter'd legs": the challenges and rewards of translating French livres d'artiste.

The livre d'artiste celebrates the book as a finely crafted art object combining text (often poetry) and images. Initiated by the Parisian gallerist and publisher Ambroise Vollard in the early 20th century, the livre d’artiste has inspired visual artists like Braque, Chagal, Dali, Picasso or Matisse to create striking visual translations of texts by Hesiod, Apollinaire, Gogol, Lautréamont, Balzac, Mallarmé, Ronsard, and many more. Often, the books reintroduce us to their creators as scholarly, insightful close readers of poetry, and shapers of literary narrative. By definition rare, often fragile and costly, they remain in private hands or displayed under glass, beyond reach, in public collections and exhibitions. But their remoteness to many English-speaking readers can also be explained by the simple fact that their texts are (frequently) in French or other languages.

This presentation asks whether livres d’artistes can be translated successfully, keeping the original relationship between their words and pictures intact? And how the attempt can inform the process of translating poetry as verse?

Focusing on Matisse’s Florilège des Amours de Ronsard (1948), I use Powerpoint to illustrate examples of Matisse’s extraordinarily sensitive visual translations of poetic imagery, rhythm and thought, and examine the rewards and challenges of attempting to re-translate the book into English while retaining the interaction between Ronsard’s words and Matisse’s pictures on the page.

I show how the translation of poetry in a specific, visual context can help clarify and re-focus the poetry translator’s many, often bewildering choices and dilemmas (metre, imagery, periodicity, rhyme…). Dryden famously characterized the translation of verse into verse as “dancing on ropes with fetter’d legs”. Risky, inelegant, intrinsically pointless… Livres d’artistes can, I suggest, provide the hapless verse translator with a visible but aesthetic means of support, even a safety net.

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Philip Wilson – University of East Anglia

Poetry Translation: A Surveyable Representation

Clive Scott (2008) has suggested that literary translation allies itself to forgery in that it ‘designs a text to be read by someone in no position to judge either its reliability or its quality’. Scott’s contention may well be phrased too strongly, in that most translators do not set out to deceive their readers, but his point is worth addressing. The increasingly common bilingual edition of translated poetry is one way in which the reader can be allowed to make a judgement on what is going on, in that even the reader who has no knowledge of the source language, for example, can at least compare the shape of the poem, use a dictionary or consult somebody who can read the source language. In some ways, however, the bilingual edition does not go far enough. Following Wittgenstein’s notion in the 1951 Philosophical Investigations (2009) of the surveyable representation – the attempt to attain an overview of a phenomenon – I suggest including not only the source text in editions but also its gloss, which can function as a metatext that enables the reader to be directly aware of what is going on in the source text, without consulting other resources, even if he or she does not read the source language. I illustrate my proposal with examples of: the monolingual translation; the presentation of source text with plain prose translation; the bilingual translation; a surveyable presentation of Goethe’s German poem ‘Wanderers Nachtlied II’ that includes source text, gloss and two translations (by myself) into English, one of which can be described as Dryden’s metatext, the other as Dryden’s imitation. Such a presentation illustrates how there is never a definitive translation of a poem and allows the reader an insight into the process of translation that is denied by other presentational strategies. Great attention has been paid in recent years as to how we translate poems. Perhaps we ought to look with equal care at how we manage the organisation of what we translate.

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