Boris Dralyuk gave a super entertaining lecture on the poems of Julia Nemirovskaya on Friday. One thing that stuck out to me is that he is clearly a very intuitive translator. He gave a great piece of advice with regards to translating poetry, which is to let your poetic voice take over first, and then come back to the translation with a critical eye second. Then, you can decide what to keep and what to take away. He also spoke of translation choices occurring to him and “ringing a little bell of rightness,” which I really related to. I can’t say I adhere to a specific translation philosophy when I work; I feel it out as I go. I also liked what he said about sticking the landing of a translated poem. Last week I mentioned that I found some of his free verse translations a bit rhythmically difficult, but I’d like to take that back after hearing him read them aloud!
The only thing I found a bit frustrating was a question from an audience member positing that perhaps Nemirovskaya wants to be under-read or under-studied (he cited another female poet whose name escapes me). It's reductive to assume that if any woman poet isn’t famous, it must be because she doesn’t want to be. But I thought Dralyuk fielded the question as gracefully as he could have and helped redirect that thinking a bit.
I found both Bassnett and Godayol’s articles really valuable. Bassnett’s text got me thinking about how, in addition to the gender embedded in the French language, the word for authorship and the word for paternity are the same: la paternité. I am as desparate for a new French word as I am desperate for new metaphors for translations. I have heard the gendered analogies that Godayol highlights in her text many times, and it seems we can never escape the binary of faithful and unfaithful. I had a male professor in undergrad who spoke to us about the act of translation as touching a virgin, which not only managed to alienate and upset a class entirely made up of women, but also perpetuated really harmful ideas about virginity and purity: following the analogy to its logical conclusion, that a source text is pure, virtuous, valuable, and the translation is sullied, impure, worth less than its source text. Yes, Derrida challenges the hierarchy of original over translation, but Godayol also points out that “he does not break entirely free from the sexual language of the dominant discourses” (104). This is why we need that Third Age, and why we urgently need metaphors not created by cis white men. That professor, despite being the biggest Derrida fan I’ve met, could not move beyond analogies that reinforced sexist notions both about translation and about women.
Regarding the Gorman translation articles, it was disappointing to see some translators seize Rijneveld's resignation as an opportunity to cry "cancel culture.” I think Rijneveld understood, as a lot of people have, that this isn't so much a "canceling" as it is taking the poem as an opportunity to welcome new voices into the translation world.
-Maggie
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