French & Polish, Polish & French

 Translations from Polish

One practical consequence of agreeing that any text is unstable is accepting that every translation is indefinite and no translation is ever done.  The idea of a finished translation—polished, packaged, and prepared for publication—, while an inescapable, a necessary convention of the industry, needn’t pigeonhole the evolution of a literary text.  A published translation is like a photo, a record indexed in time rather than an exhaustive description of where a text is or how, through translation, it evolves.  JTH’s willingness to share the process in addition to the product seems in concert with translation’s deeper structure.  The unpretentious humility with which she presented her work still under construction and credited a “network of actors” reminded me of the modest gratitude with which Michael Cooperson spoke of the numerous persons who helped him achieve the diversity of voices/registers in his Impostures.  Even if a translator has the appearance (or the airs) of working alone, that translator’s work nevertheless issues from an invisible network of precursors, constituted at minimum by the indirect collaboration of the authors that translator has read and the study that translator has done.

Speaking as a reader and a translator of prose, I suspect that one challenge of translating poetry is capturing the development, the maturation, and the tonal changes of a poet’s voice.  I’d venture that a poem is translated on at least two levels: as a coherent art object in and of itself, with its internal coherence and aesthetic uniqueness, and also as a synecdoche for a poet’s corpus.  Describing herself as a translator of Ginczanka interested in learning form Ginczanka, JTH posited translation as the fruit of the closest possible reading, impracticable without also investigating the multitudinous and often overlapping contexts which inform an artist’s production.  Ginczanka’s literary antecedents and the particulars of her historical moment are, along with the fact she emigrated to Poland and chose Polish as her literary language, indispensable for a close reading and, in turn, a fitting rendition of her poetry.  The literary, the historical, and the biographical—JTH presented all three in tandem, suggesting that downplaying or even silencing aspects of the latter in order to avoid a fetishized misrepresentation is to trade one skewed portrait for another.

Translations from French 

Opposed to the thesis of untranslatability, I must nevertheless admit that Emma Ramadan has valiantly translated two books that could have qualified as such.  The incessant verbal play of In Concrete, so dependent upon mechanisms particular to French, often lacks an English equivalent, obliging the translator to find a comparable effect or to create a homologous voice.  The situation needn’t be considered a loss.  As ER describes in her endnote, by permitting herself the puns, the phonetic misspellings, and the verbal splendor unique to English, more than compensating for a lost meaning, she discovered a new one.

In this novel, language is invariably cognizant of itself, every use of words complicating an ongoing inquiry into the production and etiology of meaning.  If this young narrator of purposefully ambiguous gender grew up pouring cement and running electrical wire, surely those experiences would shape the range of that speaker’s vocabulary and the rhythm of that person’s speech.  The novel’s farfetched case, testing the boundaries of verisimilitude, isn’t exclusively for diversion: Anne Garreta’s hyperbole, like a distorted mirror, surprises the reader with vestiges of her/his own reflection.

The earliest example of the metanovel, of nested layers of fictionality, is perhaps Don Quixote, a collection of tales allegedly written in Arabic and translated into Spanish before Cervantes collated them in a novel in two parts.  Both the Arabic source text and the pending translations are Cervantes’ inventions, part of his multilayered fictive universe.  In Revenge of the Translator, BM pushes the format to the nth degree.  And ER’s translation of this novel already located at the interchange of French and English adds yet another layer of complexity.  The best I can surmise (given my command of French is functionally zero) is that the last turn of the screw, when ER herself appears, implicated on the level of the narrative, is a device present in the original and reworked for the English translation: the fictional translator Mike Kirkfield ceding to the fictionalized translator Emma Ramadan.  I’d like to know how ER and BM arrived at this captivating last note.

 

-Josh