Vertical Fishing Rods

I've been known to complain about the lucidity and denotative nature of French. However, this morning I've run into a word that's competitive with any connotative English word in its range of possible meanings.

It doesn't help that I was already having some trouble translating the verses prior to the line: "lancer, relancer." The preceding verses had something to do with a copper drum, which doesn't seem to be a particularly Tibetan musical instrument--I'm thinking Metail is describing some mechanical device the identity of which is not clear to me. Then the most popular (or common) translation for lancer is "thrown," which doesn't make much sense with a drum. So I google both "lancer" and "tambour" (drum), to receive back a bunch of pages that have to do with fishing. The tambour is the reel part of the fishing rod (I guess--I'm not up on fishing paraphenelia lingo), while lancer is to cast the line. So I try "cast," but that doesn't seem to make sense in the context of the line, either.

I decide to let it go and forge onto the next couple of lines: "bruit de mécanique/moulins verticaux." This translates roughly into "mechanical noise/vertical mills." OK, mechanical noise is 5 syllables, great. But "vertical mills" is only 4, plus I'm not sure what exactly vertical mills are. I look in the dictionary, to see that a few lines down, temptingly, is "moulinet," which means, fishing rod. But if Metail meant fishing rod, she would have used "moulinet," right? Is this a coincidence of the dictionary?

This reminds me of my idea, expressed in some essay I wrote on how to read ecological poetry, that dictionaries should be arranged so that words with companionable meanings follow one another, rather than alphabetical. This is along the same lines I used to arrange books, thinking how the books (or the authors) might like or appreciate one another. I appreciate dis-organization. I wish there were more of it.

The Savage Anthologists, biting off more salsa and chips than they can chew

While I was dipping into French and Francophone poetry at the NYPL, change was afoot at my day job. One day our editorial team was told that Cats magazine was shut down and that we were being assigned DogWorld magazine instead. (OK, I’ll admit that I found this mostly hilarious, although my poor boss was beside herself.) But being the efficient professionals that we were, in a matter of months we turned what had been a fuddy-duddy publication partial to 5-part dry-as-a-bone articles on canine genetics into a snappier (as you can see, in the pet writing world, the puns are endless) read.

But alas, all that didn’t prevent DogWorld from quickly being sold to a company way out in California. And we wanted to stay in NYC. Thus, come spring 2002, I was out of a job. Joy! This meant I could spend entire days in the Wertheim Room at the NYPL, reading French poetry, courtesy of the wonder (alas, all too evanescent) that is unemployment.

And the Wertheim room, it was like how one romanticizes what monks’ cells must have been like—the long wood tables, the silence, the flirting. People often slept in their chair, sometimes tilted back, or with their head on their book or computer. In the absence of words, human interaction had a sort of heightened power, like how silent movie stars have an extra puissance. Olivier, Kristin and I all felt like we were falling in love with someone in the Wertheim. But outside the heavy wooden door, if we happened actually to talk to object of our affection, the illusion would instantly dissipate. As I write this, I can’t even remember the person I was interested in the least, or even if he or she was a man or woman. It was like being in love with a soap bubble.

Cosi was our library mess hall across 42nd St.—we would help ourselves to their free bits of bread in a bowl, and then race back to the library, chancing traffic. One time Olivier and Kristin ran across to meet me—it was a drizzly day and their long raincoats flew back and suddenly I had a vision of a great “author photo” for our anthology, obviously some sort of desire to pin the moment in time. Our other hangout was Festival, a Mexican restaurant as unromantic as running across 42nd St. on a rainy day in a long coat is romantic. The margaritas were made of cleaning fluid and gasoline, but were cheap ($3.25 if I remember correctly), and the waitress was stunningly unfriendly. We always left her giant tips, and went there regularly for years, yet she never so much as twitched a lip in an upward direction when we came in ready for another round of watery salsa and stale chips. Olivier was at the time living around the corner and I think it became a kind of United States citizen’s test to get that waitress to say hello to him.

At our meetings, we’d hash out lists, lists, lists—crossing off dozens of poets when, as I understand now, we should have been honing our vision for the anthology. From the start, we were biting off way, way, way more than we could chew—we had chosen May 1968 to the present as our time frame (foolish, foolish! 40 years to be foolish within!) and basically the entire Earth as our geographic arena. This left aesthetics as any kind of narrowing criterion, and while we all liked each other enormously, we inevitably discovered that we had slightly different aesthetics, which we somehow avoided being able to articulate.

Updating things

The anthology of French and Francophone I've been working on for the last 9 years (almost a decade--scary!) is stirring back to life, along with the U.S. side of the Double Change Collective, my translation of Michele Metail's The Earth's Horizons, and hopefully this blog!

The shape of the anthology is going to be vastly different from our original vision (which, as far as I can tell, was a multivolume, densely printed set encompassing every innovative poet working in the French language from May 1968 to the present day--ha, ha, ha!). Co-editor Kristin Prevallet (the other editor is Olivier Brossard) has come up with the wonderful idea of us writing a collaborative introduction/histoire of not getting the anthology together, based somewhat on Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, as we certainly had an interesting, and extremely poetic (in the sense of the word portraying poets as unstructured individuals unlikely to take the direct route to point A from point B) experience (not the least involving the New York Public Library's Wertheim Room). Anyway, I thought I'd begin my own contribution on this blog, so stay posted. I'll also add updates on what's happening with "DC," as we call it in-house.

Up Again

I've decided to restart my blog on translation, originally established as part of the "Translate This!" workshop at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's last fall. Alas, my decision was not influenced by popular demand (ha, ha!), but by that I think it's an interesting (at least to me) topic. I'd love it if my fellow translation travellers, particularly the people in the workshop, chimed in once in a while if they've continued any forays into other languages.

My latest translation news is publishing the first page of "The Earth's Horizons" in The Nation. I've been working on translating this text for at least five years. Les horizons du sol is by Michèle Métail, one of the few (if not the only) female members of Oulipo and was published by the cipM, a fantastic poetry center in France that is actually in danger of losing its space due to bureaucratic machinations. The text is a "history" (a term used extremely loosely) of the geological formation of Marseille, which is where the cipM is based, and written 48 characters to a line, 24 lines to a page, with accompanying illustrations.

To translate this text, I've had to discover equivalent geological terms in English, particularly in that many of the terms she uses are specific to the geology of Marseille. I've often thought I should probably have a geologist review my translation to make sure I've gotten all the terms right! My most reliable source has been an old French-English dictionary for chemists--it actually has contained definitions for many of the scientific terms that Métail uses. I then doublecheck the definitions in an English-only dictionary of geological terms. I've found the Larousse to be extremely stilted, and have found the Harrap's online much more useful.

The other challenge has been to preserve the form, and thereby the length of the original. English is a much more concise and compressed language than French, so I've often had to pad out my translation in order to achieve the 48/24 form. Also, Métail did not use any punctuation--the text is basically one long sentence with continuous geological "action," one thing (such as a mountain eroding into a valley) leading to another so I've had to try to fold in many, many "thats" linking sequences together without making the repetition too obvious.

The first page, the one published in The Nation, is the first completed page (with many more to go). I was only able to complete that page, plus page 2 and half of page 3, thanks to a mini-residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space program, which had no Internet access, so I was literally forced to translate. My dad, Michel Durand, and Olivier Brossard have been my primary native speaker help on the project, letting me know when I've made grievous errors...