Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation

FOREWORD

[xi] Foreword Foreword poetic discourse has always held a singular fascination for translation theorists: many of the mechanisms, contradictions and aporia of translation surface in a particularly acute way when the text involved is a poem. Poetry is a non-instrumental use of language, one that uses “the words of the tribe” as raw material to be manipulated and re-motivated to provide some degree of adequation between the signifiers and the signifieds of the text-level sign constructed by the poet.The resulting “ratio difficilis”is a synergistic phenomenon,deeply rooted in the textures of its raw material:sound,prosody,imagery,denotations,connotations,intertextualities converge against all odds and enter into resonance,forming a nexus which,more often than not,cannot be replicated through the raw material of another language. Only by re-enacting—or better, re-inventing—the “ratio difficilis” invented by the source-language poet can the translator —the target-language writer—produce a text that not only resonates with the original but is capable of functioning as a freestanding poem. My focus throughout these essays will be on deriving poetry that meets these conditions—in short, on poetically viable translation. Little if any of the recent work in the field of translation studies is adequate to the dynamics of producing poetically viable translation. “Foreignizing”translation has received an enormous amount of attention in recent years, some of it devoted to the translation of poetry. But the focus seems most often to be less on the esthetically relevant structures that constitute the essential, idiosyncratic otherness of the source poem than on the grain of the source language—its linguistic microstructures— perceived, and valued (naïvely, I feel) as a carrier of cultural otherness. What the foreignizing approach fails to recognize is that poems are always written from more or less outside the language that constitutes their raw material, that they are inherently foreign, even to the language out of which they have been crafted. Much of the text-oriented discourse devoted to the problematics of translating poetry has never really moved beyond a static, retrospective, replicative focus on the original—a readerly approach that models the source poem right down to the level of the phonologically relevant feature , then formulates a priori criteria for an idealized, asymptotic target poem that will replicate the original. Epistemologically speaking, the readerly, analytic, ST-oriented approach may well have been a necessary and inevitable first step (just as nineteenth-century linguistics preoccupied itself with the origins and genealogy of languages). Such modellings , though, offer no insights into the heuristics of producing poetically viable translation. Not even Antoine Berman’s posthumous essay (1995), despite its avowed intention to offer an “analyse productive ,” goes far enough beyond the business of reading to offer any real insight into the business of making. In a word, from the standpoint of actually making poetry, this type of theory is inert. One would have to go back to Meschonnic’s 1972 essay,“D’une linguistique de la traduction à la poétique de la traduction,” or to Berman’s “La traduction et la lettre, ou l’auberge du lointain” (1985) for intuitions that can be metabolized into a proactive reflection on poetically viable translation. Meschonnic’s distinction between “traduction-texte” and “traduction non-texte” (or “traduction-introduction”) is fundamental, as is his emphasis on translation as writing rather than re-wording (“une pratique du traduire homologue à l’écrire” [1972, 350]). Berman’s “lettre”is pretty much what I have been referring to as“ratio difficilis”— the “lettre,” or “textedness,” of the poem being what the poet has done with her raw material to re-motivate it into a poetically viable sign.The corollary (and almost universally misunderstood) notion of “traduction littérale” refers, not, as so many theorists seem to believe, to grainy foreignizing, but to a translation practice that re-enacts, through the target language, the re-motivated “ratio difficilis” of the source poem. All this closely parallels my own distinction between “writerly” and “non-writerly” translation.Yet, as valid as their positions are, neither Meschonnic nor Berman ever made any real attempt to explore the dynamics of actually getting from poem A to poem B. [xii] [foreword] This collection of essays, I believe, marks a distinct shift in focus.The emphasis throughout is on the text-to-come and on the processes involved in making a derived poem out of the raw material provided...