Ginczanka Wrap-Up and Muddern French Translation

It was wonderful of Joanna Trzeciak Huss to show us unfinished translations during her talk, and I think it's a brilliant idea that she plans to publish some of her translations with cross-outs and margin notes. As someone who's new-ish to translation, it's really refreshing to hear a seasoned translator talk through her trouble spots or her dissatisfactions in a draft. I think it's a good reminder to all of us that there isn't a magic moment where translation suddenly becomes easy or where you stop having doubts. Translation is problem-solving, and new problems crop up constantly. Huss mentioned changing singular "catkin" to a plural in subsequent versions of her translation of Ginczanka's "Senses" in order to link it to the counting in the following stanzas, and then she told us it's important to pay attention to the logic of a poem. I am often intimidated by poetry translation, but Huss's comment helped demystify the process for me. Poetry has a logic, just as prose does. Translating a poem prompts a series of questions, but the poem also has answers embedded within it: we just have to look closely for them. 

Emma Ramadan's translation of Garréta's In Concrete is a masterclass in compensation. There's a lot in Garréta's original that a translator would be hard-pressed to render in English (Ramadan touches on the homophonic language and misspellings in her translator's note, for example, and I have lots of examples to show everyone in class tomorrow). I loved Ramadan's description of how she took advantage of "linguistic blurriness" in her translation in order to make up for the lost language play. To me, this translation drives home the point that, in order to successfully translate the Oulipo, traditional ideas of "faithfulness" need to be thrown out the window. Since the point of oulipian literature is to challenge boundaries of language, translations of oulipian texts need to challenge their respective languages in different ways than the original does. Ramadan takes every opportunity she can find to add a pun, and her willingness to shape the translation into its own text with its own peculiarities makes it an exhilarating read. I found myself laughing out loud (or groaning at a pun) every several pages. 

Ramadan's linguistic ingenuity is on display in her translation of Matthieussent's Revenge of the Translator too, though she deals with fewer constraints. One thing that struck me last week when we read this book for Professor Vincent's class is that there's a lot of machismo in this text, both in the power struggle between author(s) and translator(s), and in their relationships with women. The author is not particularly kind to his female characters. I wonder what it was like for Ramadan to work on a project like this. In any case, reading these two books back-to-back proves just how versatile Ramadan's translatorial voice is. 

-Maggie