Atelier XIV :
Poétique et traduction de la poésie :
Rimbaud, Celan, Brossard
(salle 524 au 54, bd. Raspail)
Présidente : Clíona NíRíordáin (Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Retranslating Rimbaud’s Fervent Cities. Angela Carr (Canada. Toronto New School of Writing)
Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath. On Transtranslating Paul Celan. Mark Goldstein (Canada. Toronto New School of Writing)
Translation : Tonal Strain: Anagrammatic Translations of the Poetry of Nicole Brossard. Bronwyn Haslam (Canada. Montréal)
Abstracts /Résumés/ Zusammenfassungen
Retranslating Rimbaud’s Fervent Cities by Angela Carr
The centripetal attraction of the author function in literary criticism and canons has meant that many translations of one author are often made while most other foreign language authors are ignored. For the translator of an author like Rimbaud, do extant English translations of his work create an impasse or do they urgently solicit that a specifically new translation be made? What does it mean to translate again within a wide field of English translations of a poetic text, albeit none local to Canada? Further, what role do variant translations play in the act of renewed translation? How have various translators’ poetic choices been inflected by cultural context? Considering poetic tropes such as metaphor and metonymy, and using my own work with Rimbaud as a case study, I examine how a translator’s cultural context emerges in translation of Rimbaud’s oeuvre. Yet perhaps the greatest challenge to the translator of Rimbaud is how to write through his radicality, to follow its movement to the contemporary world and contemporary poetics.
Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath. On Transtranslating Paul Celan by Mark Goldstein
"[...]most of the perennial debates about what translation can or ought to do hinge on the delicate balance between the two functions and processes – and on differences, either individual or historical. In the relative importance attached to the one and the other. These differences are partly historical, because they depend on changing notions of what a poem is and does; for instance on whether – as in classical practice and theory – primary importance is attached to what a poem says or tells, so that such features as rhythm, euphony, and imagery or metaphor are regarded as ornaments of the primary “content” or gist; or whether – as in Romantic-Symbolist practice and theory – the emphasis shifts from what a poem says or tells to how it does so, to the point where rhythm, euphony, and imagery, far from being ornaments of any separable “content” or gist, become primary, if not autonomous or “absolute.” – Michael Hamburger, On Translating Celan
Tracelanguage is a necessary response to Hamburger’s polarities. It is a book of poems that parallels all radical translation by functioning outside such prescribed approaches. Tracelanguage is part of a literature whose best works are exemplified by books such as Louis Zukofsky’s Catullus, Robin Blaser’s Les Chimères and Erin Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil By A Fervent Person. Tracelanguage is a serial poem comprised of six cycles, each corresponding with those found in Paul Celan’s seminal work, Atemwende. Here, Celan’s poems are re-inscribed via a transmutation of word material found or developed from within the original text. Tracelanguage is a retransmission of poetic energies, revivifying German into English using tools such as homophonic translation, combing, and mis-quotation. Celan’s poems are re-written from a third-generation Jewish-Canadian perspective. A language of landscape figures prominently in the work, and the ‘trace’ of Tracelanguage gauges Celan’s music – amid the rubble of its German, post Shoa – as heard resounded through the stone soundings of the Canadian shield. The end result is a reinvigoration of Celan’s poems, renewed for a readership such as our selves, thus opening the field of retranslation and retrotranslation to new possibilities.
Translation : Tonal Strain: Anagrammatic Translations of the Poetry of Nicole Brossard by Bronwyn Haslam
I am currently translating the poetry of Nicole Brossard through anagrams, using the same number of letters and the same number of each letter in my English version as there is in Brossard's French original. An arbitrary characteristic of the source text accrues a distorted importance in my translational process. The letter count of a poem is arbitrary to the extent that it is a product of the language itself, rarely something that an author would give conscious attention to. For while French and English use the same 26-letter alphabet, they use it in distinct and identifiable ways. Translating anagrammatically inflects English with the letteral profile of French; an excess of Es, Qs, Us, and a penury of Ks, Ws and Hs yields a latinate lexicon and an idiosyncratic, accreting syntax. Anagrammatically, translation is tonal strain. The process thus turns English to French as it translates French to English. Within the context of Nicole Brossard's work, this is a political gesture. The colonial history of English in Québec, and in Montréal, figures importantly in Brossard's poetry. Also, it is largely through the translation of her poetic and theoretical texts that continental feminisms reached English Canada and influenced the development of innovative women's writing there. These anagrammatic poems attempt to convey both the meaning of Brossard's poem and to “purify” English in both Benjamin's sense in “The Task of the Translator,” and in joyfully subverting a language of domination. Some of these poems have appeared in The Capilano Review or are forthcoming in Matrix magazine. I have attached one as an example below.:
Ce sont des passages soulignés, des fragments de bonheur qui traversent le corps et dressent tout autour des ponts car ailleurs et au grand vent dit-on il y a allégresse. Ce sont des écritures avec leurs meurtrissures, l’abondance de la vie éclatée à sa mesure dans un monde et ses niches de vieux parcours qui lèchent l’ombre des os.
Nicole Brossard
from “SoftLink 1”
It’s underlined passages, pieces of happiness that course a torso, erect
bridges all around as out in squares, museums and neon marquees elan
murmurs, a relearned reverse elegy. It’s letters and sentences’ bruises,
existence sluiced, deluged, scattered across oceans and rivulets, curled old routes that tongue bones’ velvet coves.
« Skin Loft » tr Bronwyn Haslam
Bios:
Poète et traductrice Canadienne Angela Carr est l’auteur des receuils The Rose Concordance (BookThug, 2009) et Ropewalk (Snare, 2006). Ses poèmes ont paru dans des revues littéraires au Canada, notamment Open Letter, Jacket, Action Yes et textsound. Elle a presenté sur la traduction poétique à CUNY et l’Université de Calgary (Translating Translating Montréal). Elle enseigne au Toronto New School of Writing, mais elle vit à Montréal.
Le livre de poèmes le plus récent de l’auteur Mark Goldstein de Toronto, After Rilke: To Forget You Sang, a été publié par BookThug au printemps 2008. After Rilke est une série de traductions homophoniques basée sur les Voix, un travail écrit par Rilke en 1906. Plus récemment, sa propre petite presse, Beautiful Outlaw, a publié Handwerk, un ensemble de six chapbooks par les poètes Phil Hall, Erin Moure, Oana Avasilichioaei, Angela Carr, Jay MillAr et Goldstein. Sa collection de poemes suivante, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath, les trans-traductions le travail séminal de 1967 du poète Paul Celan, Atemwende, sera publiée par BookThug au printemps 2010.
Bronwyn Haslam est un poète originaire de Calgary, au Canada. Elle a étudié à l'université de Calgary, où elle a obtenu un B.A. (hons) en littérature anglaise et un B.Sc. en biologie cellulaire et moléculaire. Ses poèmes ont été publiés dans des revues canadiennes telles que Matrix, The Capilano Review et The Last Supper. Elle habite actuellement à Montréal, où elle travaille comme écrivaine médicale.
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