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.