Translating Procedural Poetry
When K. Silem Mohammad came to read with Christian Bök at the De Young Museum, we discussed at length how one could possibly translate his sonnegrams. If you recall, KSM's sonnegrams are more or less line by line anagrammatic poems written from Shakespeare's sonnets. I had been somewhat dismayed by some Italian translations of Google-sculpted poems by Gary Sullivan, which were just reproducing the meaning of the poems in question (mind you, I can read Italian, but I don't really know the language). The translator had basically worked from an artifact, rather than try to recreate a certain moment of writing. Of course, had the translator written the translation by simply entering the translation of the search terms into the Italian version of Google, he would have gotten a wildly different poem. But is it that bad?
My problem with such translation is that it treats more or less the poem as a communicative object. The poem as artifact has something to say. As Walter Benjamin wrote in "The Task of the Translator," translations will always be read under the shadow of their originals, but it does not entail that shadows have to be dull. And so, what is interesting about procedural poetry (Oulipo, flarf, some Language poetry) is not so much what they have to say but rather their gestures and their mechanics. The semantic acrobatics are icing on the cake.
What I proposed to KSM was to take a translation of Shakespeare (in French) and apply to it similar permutations to the one KSM operated on the English text. As KSM put it, it's writing a new poem out of a constraint/procedure. Which in itself is what poetic translation tends to be anyway, writing a new poem within the constraints of a foreign-language text. (Note that I am not planning right now to translate Kasey's sonnegrams)
KSM thought this was somewhat of a novel way of translating, but it's not really. In The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (ed. Mary Ann Caws), we find the following poem by Michelle Grangaud, "Isidore Ducasse comte de Lautréamont" (at least the first stanza):
If we had just translated the poem word for word, sentence by sentence (the way Georges Hugnet translated The Making of Americans), this is what we would have gotten:
Like the French, it's still funny and nonsensical, but Grangaud is an Oulipian and the poem is a repeated anagram of its title coupled with the structure of sestina. Here is the translation that Paul and Rosemary Lloyd did:
The translation here in term of gesture is more faithful to the original. Nevermind meaning, there wasn't any to begin with. However, I am not saying this should necessarily be the way to translate procedural poems. This translation is still problematic, in that it is syntactically more correct than its original, for example (there is almost no syntax in the original).
Another interesting translation of procedural poetry is Cole Swensen's work on Pierre Alferi's Kub Or. The original text:
And as translated in OXO:
Alféri's original is 7 syllables in 7 lines in conversation with 7 photographs by Suzanne Doppelt. What is so admirable about Swensen's translation is that she manages to keep both the structural constraints of the original, but also the dialogue it establishes with the photographs.
My problem with such translation is that it treats more or less the poem as a communicative object. The poem as artifact has something to say. As Walter Benjamin wrote in "The Task of the Translator," translations will always be read under the shadow of their originals, but it does not entail that shadows have to be dull. And so, what is interesting about procedural poetry (Oulipo, flarf, some Language poetry) is not so much what they have to say but rather their gestures and their mechanics. The semantic acrobatics are icing on the cake.
What I proposed to KSM was to take a translation of Shakespeare (in French) and apply to it similar permutations to the one KSM operated on the English text. As KSM put it, it's writing a new poem out of a constraint/procedure. Which in itself is what poetic translation tends to be anyway, writing a new poem within the constraints of a foreign-language text. (Note that I am not planning right now to translate Kasey's sonnegrams)
KSM thought this was somewhat of a novel way of translating, but it's not really. In The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (ed. Mary Ann Caws), we find the following poem by Michelle Grangaud, "Isidore Ducasse comte de Lautréamont" (at least the first stanza):
méduse l'auditoire mets sac à côté nord
et mise du crocodile dans ta mare ouest
démode du croissant au court à demi est
toast à taire consomme le décideur sud
sors ta mince camelote du désert oui-da
monte maturité à la corde cuisse de dos
If we had just translated the poem word for word, sentence by sentence (the way Georges Hugnet translated The Making of Americans), this is what we would have gotten:
mystify the audience place bag on the north side
and stake of the crocodile in your western puddle
old-fashioned croissant on the eastern court and a half
toast to shut drink the southern decider
show your narrow crap from the oui-da desert
increase maturity to the rope thigh of back
Like the French, it's still funny and nonsensical, but Grangaud is an Oulipian and the poem is a repeated anagram of its title coupled with the structure of sestina. Here is the translation that Paul and Rosemary Lloyd did:
I am more cursed at close a dent outside
a sluice meet roused a distracted moon
some toadies direct moat clause under
o I must care seamed a rose tinted cloud
lo our coast master educated me inside
so tailed mouse can't deem dour ice star
The translation here in term of gesture is more faithful to the original. Nevermind meaning, there wasn't any to begin with. However, I am not saying this should necessarily be the way to translate procedural poems. This translation is still problematic, in that it is syntactically more correct than its original, for example (there is almost no syntax in the original).
Another interesting translation of procedural poetry is Cole Swensen's work on Pierre Alferi's Kub Or. The original text:
au lieu de moquer marquise
me font vos yeux beaux mourir
penser images secondes
arrangement d'étourneaux
qui vont à la ligne haute
tension battre le flip-book
et revoir le mouvementcinéma
And as translated in OXO:
rather than mocking marquise
of your eyes so beautiful
die i think frames per second
the arrangement of starlings
aligned on the high tension
wire shuffles the flip-book
and revises the motioncinéma
Alféri's original is 7 syllables in 7 lines in conversation with 7 photographs by Suzanne Doppelt. What is so admirable about Swensen's translation is that she manages to keep both the structural constraints of the original, but also the dialogue it establishes with the photographs.
Comments
Another more or less "faithful" way of rendering a poem like Grangaud's would be via homophonic translation, which would preserve many of the sonic elements of the original, as well as reproducing some of the ludic arbitrariness of its anagrammatic procedure. ("Me, I'd use auditory mitts, sack a coat nerd," etc.)
I do like the "straight" translation you provided, though, because as you say it's funny. And part of its funniness, to me, comes from the fact that it's an attempt to render something basically unrenderable. For the same reason, I greatly admire Gherardo Bortolotti's translations of work by Gary and me and other flarfists (I'm guessing it was his work you were referring to). I find especially interesting--and amusing--his choices of what not to translate, as for example when he leaves the English phrase "sex dwarf" intact in my "Mars Needs Terrorists."
By the way, I spell "sonnagrams" with an A rather than an E. I mention this only because I found out some other writer uses the term "sonnegram" to describe the form he writes in (a completely different form from mine).
I think Gary, in his response, is onto something when he talks about how good and interesting procedural poems are in discussion with their originals and that their translation should indicate that.
As for the Bortolotti, I am not dissing on his work (even though my post seemed to indicate that in hindsight), but what is left untranslated shows how flarf could have only come out of America. It also shows how flexible the English language is. You couldn't make up a word such as "sex dwarf" in a Romance language.
I guess that another interesting thing about translating procedural poetry is because of their ties to their original languages, their translation shows how foreign those poems are, which brings us back to Johannes's discussion about translation.
It seems like 3 different functions here: translation, imitation, and replication. For the simplicity becoming of blog-comments I'll simplify and mutual exclude them.
To some extent, the meaning of poems can be translated.
To some extent, the sound of poems can be imitated, as in the homophonic translations Kasey mentions.
Meanwhile, the process of a procedural poem does not need to be tranlated or even imitated, it can be replicated.
These 3 functions are increasingly mechanical, and decreasingly subjective/mysterious/controversial.
Translations of a poem will change generation to generation, person to person, and would therefore reveal more about language, and more about the big bang shebang itself.
Replications, on the other hand, are dead as soon as they're born, and won't change or teach us much.
Not sure how you could use what I have written as part of a moral argument against procedural argument.
I guess I'm a bit late in this thread but I'd like to give my two cents. I see your point about translating procedural poetry and I could agree with it under many aspects. Anyway, I think it should be noticed there are different types of procedures one can use in procedural poetry and, consequently, we should imagine different translation styles.
Well, at least two. I mean: you can use a procedure that exposes itself (Perec's lipogrammes) or one that remains in the background (Perec's cahier de charges). In both cases, the question is the formulation of a new/different authorship but, according to one or the other, we have different jobs to do when we translate the texts they permit to produce.
In the case of googlism, I'd say we are dealing with the second kind of procedures. Google sculpting is a sort of abuse of databases (of the imaginaire databases foster, actually) that doesn't request you to know what's the first stone having been casted but just to let the results bewitch you. I mean: it's an objet-trouvé kind of poetic (but Kasey would correct me and say, more properly: not found but sought) and the "poeticity" of its texts is in the pieces they gather, in their gathering them, in the gaps the pieces show. So, when I translated Kasey's and Gary's texts I tried to maintain the fascination I had when I read them (successfully? I wouldn't bet on it ;-) and I tried to do it replicating the combinations they were proposing, that is the semantic material they were handling, along with its gaps, non-sequiturs, inconsistencies.
As for "sex dwarf"... What could I say? "Sex dwarf / isn't it nice / luring disco-dollies to a life of vice" (Sex Dwarf / Soft Cell, 1981)
;-)
Gh.