The Untranslatable Stacy Doris (original) (raw)

Writing-Translating (from) the In-Between: An Interview with Gail Scott

Studies in Canadian Literature-etudes En Litterature Canadienne, 2006

While Gail Scott is well known in Canadian and American avant-garde literary circles as a writer of experimental novels, short stories, and essays, she is perhaps less well known as a literary translator of Quebec fiction. Since 1998, Scott has published four literary translations of works by contemporary Quebec authors whose writing reflects many of her own aesthetic concerns: Laurence by France Theoret (1998), The Sailor's Disquiet by Michael Delisle (2002), Helen with a Secret , also by Michael Delisle (2002), and Mile End by Lise Tremblay (2002). Although she has often addressed, in her essays and interviews, the importance of writing "in translation" when one lives at a linguistic and cultural crossroads, Scott has been less explicit about her work as a translator. This is the first interview in which she reflects on her conception of literary translation, as well as on the function, strategies, and liberties of the English language translator, notably in the cont...

Translation as a Liminal Poetic Practice.

Poetry Wales, 2018

In the afterword of "Currently & Emotion: Translations" (Test Centre, 2017), Zoë Skoulding states that ‘[a]s poets seek to orient themselves in rapidly changing configurations of time, space and technology, translation and poetry become ever more interdependent’ (Skoulding: 340-341). Contemporary experimental poets have recently shown a lot of interest in translation, to the extent that creative translation has become a poetic practice, or at least an important part of its forms and discourse. In this piece I will show how this interest continues practices originated by twentieth-century avant-gardists. I will address two creative translations of the last century and two contemporary pieces in order to trace a liminality common to these works. In all of them the position of the poet moves between and within the texts, constantly reconfiguring their role, while the texts also move between and within languages, questioning concepts of ‘originality’ and authorship throughout.

Crossing Over: An Interview with Translator Suzanne Jill Levine

Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, 2019

In this interview Don E. Walicek speaks with Suzanne Jill Levine, Director of Translation Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Levine looks back on her book The Subversive Scribe (1991) and comments on changes that have transpired in the field of translation studies since it was published. Their exchange gives special attention to translation in the context of Caribbean and Latin America, including the work of the Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares and the Puerto Rican writer Luis Negrón, among other topics.

Gwendolyn Moore: The ‘Ordinary’ Translator as Cultural Intermediary

2023

This essay draws on archival materials in the Harvest House fonds housed at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) to recover and demystify the nature of Gwendolyn Moore's formative work in French-to-English translation in the years 1970 to 1973. The essay responds to Jeremy Munday's call to attend to the "ordinary" translator who did not gain prominence but whose work was nonetheless integral to the cultural fabric of her society. In focusing on Moore's connection with Harvest House publisher Maynard Gertler and studying her role as the trailblazing translator of Yves Thériault and Anne Hébert, the essay argues that she became a key intermediary of cultural exchange in the early 1970s, when the Canadian government was yet in the process of formalizing a program of arts translation grants under the aegis of the Canada Council for the Arts. In essence, before translators had acquired professional standing within literary Canada, Moore conducted herself as a professional.

Self-Translation, (Anti-)Translation: Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s Poem 45

CEA Critic, Volume 86, Number 3, 2024

In response to the 2017 Puerto Rican hurricanes María and Irma, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera's 2019 while they sleep (under the bed is another country) alternates between various Spanish-English translingual strategies. This paper discusses one of these translingual strategies, a technique named here as (anti-)translation. As exemplified by the collection's poem 45, (anti-)translation is the ironic performance of a failed and violent style of translation-critically staging how Puerto Ricans were translated into silence in the hurricanes' wake. In the poems that (anti-) translate, fragments of Spanish-language voices return in the footnotes to haunt the failures of English-language, translated texts. As English is subverted by Spanish and the main text is undermined by paratext, Salas Rivera's (anti-)translation dramatizes how translation has reinforced colonial power through the stories that such translation has left actively untold.

Translation on Edge: The Wager of Multilingual Poetics in Tessera’s Last Volumes (2002-2005)

Canada and Beyond. A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 2013

As a feminist bilingual journal dedicated to experimental writing, Tessera’s fostering of a concerted dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone women writers played a pioneer role between the 1980s and 1990s in inscribing the question of translation at the heart of feminist discourse. Critical attention has been steadily directed at the work of the journal’s mostly Anglophone first collective (1984-1993), which promoted a hopeful erotics of translation, driven by ‘sextual’ pleasure in the polysemic variances of languages and a deep seated trust in translation’s capacity to modify different languages’ topographies of sexual difference in profound ways. Tessera, however, published regularly for over twenty years and had three different collectives working at its helm. This paper seeks to address the critical imbalance by focusing on the poetics of translation promoted in the last years of Tessera’s life (2002-2005), when operations shifted from Toronto to Montreal and a mostly Francophone Editorial and Advisory Board took over. Indeed, against the optimism of the early bilingual experiments that emphasized common cross-cultural understandings of writing in the feminine, the texts published in the early 2000s consistently draw attention to the constitutively exilic relation to linguistic diversity held by diasporic queer bodies that live in the interstices of overlapping cross-cultural norms. Nathalie Stephens (now Nathanaël), a poet featured prominently in Tessera’s last volumes, is possibly the most significant writer to perform the un-decidable dimensions of such interstitial dwelling. In particular, I analyze a multilingual text by Stephens published in Tessera in 2002, whose overt intertextual allusions to Nicole Brossard and Suzanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s bilingual text Sous la langue/Under Tongue provide an interesting terrain of comparison with previous translation poetics. Contrary to the utopic ‘dream of a common language’ of Sous la langue/Under Tongue bilingual cross-contaminations, Stephens’ jagged multilingualism weaves lesbian desire with questions of bodily and cultural/linguistic exile, which provoke a radical queering (and querying) of such dream. At the crossroads of erotic and genealogic affinities Stephens gestures towards a space of collapsed translation, where the ideal “fusion” of tongues evoked by Brossard and de Lotbinière morphs into a painful and yet necessary con-fusion of languages marked by transversal alliances that anchor the text’s ‘je’ to the provisional rootedness of a diasporic memory. Despite the marked shift in tone, at the end of the essay I argue that both Stephens and her predecessors participate in Tessera’s consistent commitment to inscribing translation as a creative practice of heterotopic displacement and semiotic proliferation. A commitment, I would argue, which remains to date singularly feminist and singularly productive.

Sociologies of Poetry Translation: Emerging Perspectives

Bloomsbury , 2018

This is an edited collection. While the sociology of literary translation is well-established, and even flourishing, the same cannot be said for the sociology of poetry translation. Sociologies of Poetry Translation features scholars who address poetry translation from sociological perspectives in order to catalyze new methods of investigating poetry translation. This book makes the case for a move from the singular ‘sociology of poetry translation’ to the pluralist ‘sociologies’, in order to account for the rich variety of approaches that are currently emerging to deal with poetry translation. It also aims to bridge the gap between the ‘cultural turn’ and the ‘sociological turn’ in Translation Studies, with the range of contributions showcasing the rich diversity of approaches to analysing poetry translation from socio-cultural, socio-historical, socio-political and micro-social perspectives. Contributors draw on theorists including Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann and assess poetry translation from and/or into Catalan, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish. A wide range of topics are featured in the book including: trends in poetry translation in the modern global book market; the commissioning and publishing of poetry translations in the United States of America; modern English-language translations of Dante; women poet-translators in mid-19th century Ireland; translations of Russian poetry anthologies into modern English; the translation of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets in post-colonial Tanzania and socialist Czechoslovakia; translations and translators of Italian poetry into 20th and 21st century Sweden; modern European poet-translators; and collaborative writing between prominent English and Spanish poet-translators. Contributors: Susan Bassnett Jacob Blakesley Tom Boll Michelle Milan Gisèle Sapiro Cecilia Schwartz Eva Spišiaková Serena Talento Sergey Tyulenev Lawrence Venuti