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.

*******************

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.

***************

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.

*****************

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.

*******************

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.

*******************

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.

*************************