Poetry's
Geographies. A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations,
eds. Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding
Eulalia Books/Shearsman Books, 2022
The translations in this volume are not
brought together through the cartography typical of anthologies, which
justifies choices through the slippery concept of representation where poems
stand in for so many others and focuses on place and rootedness. Instead, as
the editors invited translators to choose poets they would translate, the
individual choices of the translators and the resonance between them and their
poet come first in the composition of the book. The presence and creativity of
each translator is then brought forward by their own essays on translation.
Alternating between poet-translators and translated poets ensures that neither
role is forgotten, and allows the translated, recreated poems to stand on their
own.
Indeed, the focus on the book is very much
on the translation of poetry rather than on poetry in translation. Skoulding
writes of her and Hedeen's intentions that: "We wanted to create a frame
for encountering translation that does not bracket off poetry within national
determinations that it may resist or evade, but that describes some of its
movements and relations through the practice of translating." (21-22)
And so rather than offering a guide to the
poems the co-editors collected, Skoulding offers an introductory essay that
opens up the reading rather than orienting it. She favours the notions of
counter-mapping, ripple effects, surroundings, intersections, the erratic,
Glissant's errancy, Kaiser's intra-actions, and ultimatelt, friction and
friendship. The selection then offers "glimpses of a world that does not
appear on any map." (16)
The focus on the acts of translation and
the choices of the editors and translators show that the blurring of borders
and movement through their isolating effects is already a part of US and UK
poetry. Against the view of the poetry of these areas as insular and unreliant
on translation – an absence mentioned in the introduction but perhaps belied to
a point by the volume's existence – this non-anthology brings to light existing
practices and dynamics that may be marginal but nonetheless form a part of the poetic
landscape the nation-state defines.
Mapping out this book would consequently
be a waste of time and effort. Instead, following the editors' lead, I can pick
up and manipulate a few instances of the inquiry into the act of translation
the authors laid down for us.
*
* *
Must translation be difficult? Johannes
Göransson openly rejects the focus on its difficulty and the imperative
distance of the translator from the text to appeal instead to the possibilities
opened by mimesis and sympathy. The translator becomes the poet – neither the
original nor the second poet, but the one whose voice is heard in the poem.
Erín Moure goes even further and absorbs her poet. The difficulties of
translation being a given, she finds in the intranslatable a different ground
for her work. After all, languages create speakers by creating habits in their
mouths, and hold vast cultural iconographies. They are made up of shortcuts to
what readers already know, and these elements become unrecognizable after
translation. She chooses to focus on the particularities of the poet’s own
speaking and habits and on her accent. She writes about intranslating, which is to “translate across a self, produce a
version that relies on the gulf or gap just as it abhors it.” (222) The
intranslatable is not untranslatable,
but rather present in the translation itself. Shall we go even further?
Co-editor Zoë Skoulding describes her response to the poet – her positioning
herself alongside him, practicing an open-ended listening, aiming for
receptivity – as being alike to listening to music. Translation then is
resonance with the langage and the world where it finds its origin. There is a
deep aesthetic satisfaction in the process for her: “the pleasure of
translation is immersion in a different sound and communal encounter through
the text, the sense of being between languages.” (242)
We can see these choices in the translated
poems. Frédéric Forte’s is the only poem I can read in the original. Forte is
also, I believe, the only poet I had read prior to opening this book (if we
exclude Moure’s and Skoulding’s own poetry). A member of OULIPO and a
collaborative writer, Forte stands as a great example of the search for
alternatives in approaching writing. After all, his book Dire ouf, as Skoulding points out, is a non-translated response to
the homophonically name musical group Deerhoof. Skoulding performs Forte’s poem
here: the words and feel in the mouth will not be the same, meaning will reach
for other places, but we get the same ascent in images and feeling, the same
descent in the scattered short lines. The format of this review only allows me
to reproduce the words without their arrangement on the page:
—ou monter
une expédition
dans les branches
et s’apercevoir
qu’on vit là
depuis
depuis toujours,
face
au soleil
même quand il
frappe
( dans le temps )
à rebours—
—or mounting
an expedition
in branches
and then realizing
that you’d always
lived
there always,
facing
into the
sun even when it
hits ( in time )
runs backwards—
Skoulding maintains the speed of the
French by adding the word “runs” and keeping shorter words in the last part;
lets the reader climb into the poem by substituting “you” for the stodgier but
more accurate “one”; repeats “always” instead of “since” and erasing since
altogether, because it is not needed after so much eternity; and re-creating
the final pause by adding a line break at the end. It is the same poem, only it
has continued to become since it was written; it is the same melody and rhythm,
only it is melody and rhythm as they are heard instead of as they are played.
Or to take Moure’s translation of Chus
Pato, we have a poem that speaks to the English readers, instead of speaking to
the Galician readers:
If you watch me in
the mirror
you’ll see poplars
toward sunrise a
park
at its top, urban
structures,
toward sunset the
waters run freely
and the trees
bunch in oakwoods
or are dome for
the river
the fields soak up
water and reflect wintry skies
behind them,
industrial zones.
Moure gives movement to Pato’s speech,
transitioning from quick, immediate images to slower, longer phrases and
thoughts that are more difficult to pin down. The comma on the last line add
ambiguity on the function of “behind them,” moving from the safety of familiar
surroundings to the vast expanse of what the them in “behind them” might refer back to, the permutations of what
can be found behind what else.
*
* *
Must translation draw a straight line from
the origin to the destination? This book is full of refusals. Co-editor
Kathering M. Hedeen’s refusal of the treatment of Spanish in the United States
and, along with it, of the Global South as a whole, leads her to a translation
practice of mirroring, traveling, countermapping, and charting (much like
Skoulding). Meena Kandasamy’s refusal of the traditions in the translation and
interpretation of the Tamil classic Thirukkural
and the patriarchal institutions they uphold leads her to change the form of
the poem in order to remain true to its mood and open possibilities. Don Mee
Choi’s refusal of distance becomes a practice of return to the poem through the
translation and to what is intertwined in the language of origin and
specifically war, since translating between English and Korean entails at once
an unavoidable continuation of neocolonial language and the choice of resisting
it.
*
* *
Must translation give us something of the
original author? Ghazal Mosadeq evokes the poet’s style and choices, preserves
his penchants as well as his oscillation, but translates, she says, only the
poem. Lived personal and political experience cannot be translated; context can
only make sense of the work of the poem, not give it directly, nor undo the
equivocality of the poem. Forrest Gander presents the personality of the poem,
shows the life that is its own, by following its own arc, its own way of speaking.
Poems live through their need for interpretation, Gander tells us, but also
through their sound, which cannot pass into a different language. Translation
becomes guesswork; it is not archive, it does not document anything that might
have been original. Translation, as Sasha Dugdale suggests, becomes part of the
poem’s history and part of its growth; it transplants the poem to new soil so
that it may grow differently there. The translator, as Dan Eltringham suggests,
maintains the displacement operated by the poem and looks after the new place
it creates. What remains, according to Steven Watts, is a physical presence,
the bodying forth of the poem, a language that is shared between the poet and
the translator, a sharing that seeps into the translation.
*
* *
In this reversal of the standard stance
toward translation, this anthology allows for many points of entry and
departure, and resists any kind of linear reading. It does not rely on unity of
origins or destinations, or even of movements between them. It relates a series
of encounters between translators and poets, poets and poets, translators and
translations and, above all, the reader who becomes translator and the reader
who becomes so while reading the translations. Perhaps its one constant, in the
absence of the possibility of any one appearance or presence of a poem, is the
focus on movement at the heart of writing, reading, and interpreting that
beckons the reader who attempts to move from one act of language to another
while encountering poem and translation.
Jérôme Melançon
writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His
third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water,
was published by above/ground press in August 2023. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and
Coup (2020), as well as his most
recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la
langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry
with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes
pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque
part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited
books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have
nothing to do with any of this. He’s on various social media, with handles
resembling @lethejerome.
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