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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