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  • Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation
  • Jane Koustas (bio)
Barbara Folkart. Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation. University of Ottawa Press. xxiv, 562. $40.00

This collection of eight courageous and compelling essays offers a welcome continuation of Barbara Folkart’s previous scholarship. Approaching her subject with a personal passion uncustomary in scholarly publications, Folkart forcefully campaigns for poetry in translation that meets Emily Dickinson’s criterion for the genre; it should, like the original, ‘take the top of your head off.’ Advocating for ‘poetically viable translation’ supported by ‘writerly’ as opposed to ‘readerly’ theory, Barbara Folkart openly, and even somewhat hostilely, attacks translations, translators, and translation theorists who, not recognizing that ‘poetry is a non-instrumental use of language,’ refuse the challenge of ‘ratio difficilis.’ A poet herself, Folkart boldly promotes a poetics of appropriation, claiming, ‘[I]f you can’t make the poem yours, you won’t be able to make a poem.’ Folkart firmly denounces abstract theory too remote from the actual raw material of poetry to be of any use, as well as purely pragmatic translation methods that ignore that ‘poems are essentially performative.’ While some may object to Folkart’s self-declared right of appropriation and to her direct and frequently personal attacks decidedly more scathing than those found in standard academic writing, it would be difficult to fault Folkart’s knowledge of the subject or her own talent as a poet and translator. In this study of impressive depth and breadth, Folkart covers a wide range of poets in translation from Ovid to W.H. Auden, translates from numerous languages including Medieval French, Old English, Italian, French, and German, and considers translation theories and theorists such as Maurice Pergnier and Lawrence Venuti. Furthermore, while she shuns standard analytic, academic discourse, opting for a very personal, first-person, frequently acerbic style, Folkart remains very much a poet-translator/scholar throughout the over four hundred pages of carefully crafted argument [End Page 153] supported by numerous examples. The book also includes a critical lexicon and an annex of over forty poems and translations.

Folkart’s defence of the ‘inaugurality’ of poetry begins with ‘From Reader to Writer,’ invoking W.H. Auden’s poem ‘The Three Companions,’ and introduces the approach adopted in the study. She examines existing translations and then proposes a range of others as she herself progresses from ‘stodgy’ or ‘readerly’ translations, which reflect an effort to ‘re-do,’ to poetically viable, writerly versions that instead ‘do.’ Indeed, Folkart is as demanding of herself as she is of other translators as she advocates for the ‘reactivation’ of the poem. In subsequent chapters, dealing with the valency, or performativity of poetry or with intertexuality, Folkart condemns those who ‘translate down,’ who fail to re-enact the poem and thus to create ‘an act of poetry.’ Folkart’s emphasis is on the process, on the writing pathways by which the poet/translator, through writerly translation, become more himself or herself. Frequently comparing her own versions to those of others, such as to T.S. Eliot’s translations of Saint-John Perse, Folkart defends the right and responsibility of the poet/translator to produce translations that are actually poems rather than merely translations of poems. Aware that her writerly approach raises issues of authorship, ownership, and the translator’s visibility, Folkart explores these questions. However, her argument with Lawrence Venuti, for example, is not so much with his particular theory as with any politically or culturally motivated strategy that steers the translator away from poetry as enactment. For example, she praises Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s translation of Nicole Brossard while dismissing the feminist strategy by which the translator herself claims to have been guided. In sum, Folkart has little patience for translators or theories that treat the translation of poetry as a disembodied activity therefore detracting from the ‘jouissance’ of the poem.

Like Richard Wilbur who – in his poem ‘The Beautiful Changes,’ the inspiration for the title – bids the reader ‘wishing ever to sunder / Things and things’ for a second finding, to ‘lose / For a moment all that it touches back to wonder,’ Folkart persuasively invites translators to recognize poetry as a reinvention...

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