Poetics of Relation (review)

Betsy Wing's 1997 translation of Edouard Glissant's 1990 Gallimard edition of Poétique de la relation will prove, no doubt, most useful to the academic community. Anyone familiar with Glissant's extraordinary brand of French knows what an arduous task translating any of his works must be, even for an experienced translator. In several translation seminars, I and my graduate students have had the opportunity to examine excerpts from Michael Dash's meritorious English rendition of Le discours antillais. In all honesty, I must admit that whenever some criticism has come up regarding the translator's rendition of one particular word or section, most of the time, the choice of another, better solution has been quite problematic.

First, let me rapidly situate the original work within the general context of Glissant's productions. Poétique de la relation has been preceded by three other books of essays, namely, Soleil de la conscience (1956), L'intention poétique (1969), and Le discours antillais (1981). To Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (1966) and Traité du Tout-Monde, Poétique IV (1997), I would like to add the gorgeous Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), although some readers might not include this book in the same category as the aforementioned works (incidentally, Glissant's own subtitle to Traité: Poétique IV suggests that he had mentally excluded two of the preceding works (?) from the Poetics series). In any case, any good reader of Glissant's writings should know that all of them demonstrate the author's practice of creative repetition—a leitmotif of his—and therefore, any well-trained eye will detect in them many a page closely related to another, and this, in more ways than one. All of Glissant's texts, to use some of his seminal expressions, are indeed related: linked, relinked (relayed), told and retold. Of course, these few remarks could be extended to his other "types" of writing: poetry, drama, fiction. Glissant's work is truly a Poetics of relation in progress. The more one reads him, the more unable one feels to speak sensibly, truthfully, about his work to an uninformed group of students without a constant, quasi-superhuman view of the whole work in mind.

Half of the essays included in Poetics of Relation are based on oral versions presented at various places and on various occasions (the interface between oral and written being another important aspect of the Relation practice for Glissant, as well as, incidentally, the interface between original and translated texts). Once again, not surprisingly, the whole book takes up several of Glissant's most cherished themes, such as "Errantry, Exile," "Expanse and Filiation," "Closed Place, Open Word," "Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World," "Transparency and Opacity," "The Relative and Chaos" . . ., and most prominent of all themes, of course, "Relation" in all its dimensions. Of all these terms, "Chaos" is, I believe, the newest one in Glissant's idiom.

At first sight, one might believe that Glissant's essays are somewhat easier to translate than his fiction and poetry. After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that this is probably not the case, owing to the close intricacy between philosophical thought and poetic imagination that characterizes most of them. In Glissant, the sheer beauty of the language (langage) is a dangerous lure. One is tempted to let oneself be swept away by the stream of pleasure-giving words without having really understood what they mean. Hence, the patient scanning one will have to undertake, the repetitive attention one will have to pay to each segment of each sentence. The reward will be such that, step after step, the reader will be led to understand that nothing, in the text, is gratuitous, superfluous, or mis-placed, that everything means. At the same time, that same reader will become aware that she is both witness of and participant in...