Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation

ONE: Said Writer to Reader

Said Writer to Reader [1] chapter one SaidWriter to Reader Le passé ne saurait être sacré . . . Fini l’assassinat massif du temps présent! —Paul-Émile Borduas et al, Le Refus Global La subjectivité créatrice ne cesse de militer pour renouveler la puissance jamais tarie des symboles dans l’échange humain qui les met au jour. —Jacques Lacan [Le texte obsessionnel] se structure en clichés et stéréotypes culturels et moraux; ce qu’il faut relier à un désengagement du corps dans l’énonciation obsessionnelle . . .Ainsi, l’énoncé stéréotypé qui forme un texte sans corps constitue l’un des critères distinctifs par quoi l’écrivance s’oppose à l’écriture. —Jean-Michel Ribettes They turned her over like meat on coals, To find the secrets of her withered thighs, And shrunken breasts . . . And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls, To speak with her voice —Frieda Hughes,“Readers” what i stress in this essay, and indeed throughout this entire collection of essays,is the newness of poetry,its inaugurality.The vocation of the poem is to break out of the already-said, to force its way through the wall of language and to put us into more or less unmediated contact with fragments of world.And this,as I see it,stands in contradistinction to both the practice of translation and the practice of translation theory, mediated modes of writing which all too rarely transcend the already-said. The practice of translation seldom breaks with precedent (“Le traducteur ne peut pas se le permettre,” disait une de mes étudiantes, elle-même une professionnelle chevronnée), regressing routinely to the most lexicalized forms of the already-said. So too, to a lesser (but still significant) extent, the practice of literary translation theory, which all too often bogs down in precedents and auctoritates or wastes our time flogging straw men and dead horses. Like critical theory in general, the theory of literary translation tends to feed on itself, an inertial phenomenon already noted by Montaigne:“Il y a plus affaire à interpreter les interpretations qu’à interpreter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre subject : nous ne faisons que nous entregloser.Tout fourmille de commentaires; d’auteurs, il en est grand cherté.” (Montaigne 1950, 1199) Few and far between are the theorists who succeed in breaking through to the real—the poem itself, the reality onto which it opens and the actual conditions under which it can be made to give rise to a new avatar of itself in another language. Even Antoine Berman fell short of the authentically “productive” theory of translation to which he aspired: he spent far more time reflecting on existing translations and drawing up a sort of cahier de charges for re-translating John Donne than indicating how to get there—probably, and tragically, because he was cut short before he could go any further. Berman did have the grace and the finesse to recognize the shortfall explicitly:“parvenu à ce point, la critique doit se taire,” he wrote, nearing the end of his last book (Berman 1995, 228). Like all other forms of writing, poetry transacts with the alreadysaid —but only as its raw material.The resulting tension between inaugurality and already-said is what I wish to explore in this essay, originally intended as a contribution to a colloquium convened to re-evaluate (rehabilitate?) the notion of cliché—a venue for which it was spectacularly unsuited. [2] [chapte r one] Idiome, Lignification, and Cliché Where poetic discourse is inaugural, lignification (to borrow JeanClaude Michéa’s neologism) is the process through which living, breathing language necrotizes, hardening into fossilized remnants of itself. (In pathological cases, lignification gives rise to langue de bois, a thicktongued , dry-mouthed variety of sound and fury used to signify as little as humanly possible.)This process of fossilization is an inevitable stage in the life of language. Innovative uses of language invariably get standardized and resorbed into the already-said: the novel becomes the expected then degenerates into cliché. Cliché, then, is merely a stigmatized subset of a much larger category, the already-said.And the already-said is a functionally indispensable link between the virtually unlimited generative potential of the system (Maurice Pergnier’s term for the closed set of abstract underlying relationships that structures all the configurations—actualized or virtual—recognizable as well-formed manifestations of a given...