Clever dogs speak in tongues to find food

Apparently, when they smell food on the breath of their fellow dogs, they communicate to each other how to get more. Haven't read the full article--why should I when the headline is so interesting? Clever dogs!

Anyway, my brain has been working furiously at 4:30 a.m. lately (only to quit for the rest of the day) and I had an idea this morning why Oulipo might be more valuable to U.S. poets at the present moment. And that is perhaps because we need to or are interested in identifying the processes/procedures underlying our work, and Oulipo points toward that sort of analysis/recognition. I was very interested in this article on the math underlying city populations, and I wondered if the same sort of analysis could apply to, say, my own poem Traffic & Weather, which I did not consciously write in a mathematical form. I remember Allen Ginsberg identifying close to a 9-syllable count per line in my long poem "Mystery of Public Places III," which I hadn't consciously planned. That identification helped me shape the remainder of the poem, which had been a big mess up to that point.

Michèle Métail certainly made me think a lot about form (although she no longer identifies herself as a member of Oulipo), particularly when she said, "First I find the form, which crystallizes the sense." Each of her poems has a unique form, bound to and arising from the subject of the poem (and thus one fracture in her relationship to Oulipo--in that her forms are not duplicable beyond the specific poem). But back to math and Traffic & Weather--I like the idea of being controlled beyond my own conscious search for form, that instead I'm closer to "nature" or reality (and my idea of nature is very different from most definitions of it) when I write conscious of being close to it, but not conscious of actual equations or numeric counts. It must be inevitably be there, as none of us can really avoid math or physics or nature (although I tried my very best in high school to cut as many math classes as humanely possible).

Here's a wonderful quote on translation I received from Stephanie Gray this morning:

from Wonders of the West by Kate Braverman, a novel from early 90s: "I realize it is possible to be ambushed by revelation. It would be a brutal night of too many stars. Heaven would be filled with tiny metal pins. You would recognize the constellations and where they were going. Their faces would be familiar as photographs on the table next to your bed. You would remember everything. You would know what they were saying. Nothing would require translation."

A Byzantine Day

I interviewed Jacques Roubaud on Saturday for BOMB magazine—a haunting experience, on many levels, but starting with the venue itself, the French Embassy on 5th Ave. and 79th St. I had been there before, but oh, joy! This time I had the place mostly to myself. Once the people at the door let me in, I clambered up the looping velvet-covered stairs to the 4th floor (actually, I had to resort to the tiny coffin elevator on the 3rd floor), with nary a soul to be seen. Echo, echo! And I never knew that there is a little in-between floor (2nd floor and a half) with half windows, ugly grey carpeting and lots of file cabinets. I adored the contrast of faded magnificence, office clutter, and emptiness.

Anyway, Roubaud, who was waiting patiently in a sort of conference room (I was a few minutes late, as usual). I had received the English translation of his memoir/novel/history, THE LOOP, about three weeks ago (although, as Roubaud indicates, linking internal memory of time to actual time/events is a treacherous endeavor), and have been reading it frantically in order to finish it by the interview. (I made it to within 50 pages.)

Frankly, I drifted in and out of liking the work. (And I enclose all sorts of verbs within “liking,” i.e., finding it thought-provoking, beautiful, and yes, haunting.) I found it astonishing the way he established, in the face of Proust, a new mode of “remembering” within language/writing. I don’t want to give the interview away completely, but he told me he wrote/remembered in order to destroy his memories, while Proust wrote to create them. And one question, that he didn’t quite answer to my satisfaction, was what is left of the creator/author after memories are destroyed—where does Roubaud move now?

He tells the reader straight out that what he writes becomes true in that it is written as he writes it—that the chronology of “events” occurs as they are written. He tells the reader this in way of an invitation, an invitation that one can either accept, or decline. I could have put the book down right there, if I wanted. I think American memoirists tend, almost involuntarily, toward “selling” their book, trying to get the reader to “buy” the narrative—they wouldn’t invite, with such casual insouciance. To Roubaud, I don’t think it’s so important that his book is read, as that it is written.

Where I most drifted out of “liking” was in Roubaud’s images. Often, I find that he chooses an image that’s not up to carrying the weight he gives it in terms of its place in the occurring memory—and the image ends up becoming too precious, too diminutive, as does the language used around the image. Yes, we all know the strawberries tasted better when we were young (see John Steinbeck, East of Eden), but I’m not sure the strawberry (or fig) is always up to carrying the emotional/linguistic weight of a memory.

But the translation is stupendous—I only had one or two moments where the English drifted into a slight awkwardness. And, as ever, anyone who translates any Oulipean work deserves a special round of applause.

Anyway, you can read the interview in Bomb “soon.” Is that vague enough?

As for the subsequent brunch and reading, it was quite a spread, with lots of recipients of, as Trevor Winkfield calls it, that Legion of Honor “thing,” showing up, either for the food, the wine, the company, or the event (in that order?). Plenty lubricated by 3 pm on a Saturday (Charles Bernstein said, “not before 5 pm!”), the crowd became more and more festive (although Monica de la Torre said she found it quite restrained compared to events at the Mexican Consulate).

The readers—Roubaud, Hervé Le Tellier, Marcel Bénabou, Ian Monk, and Anne Garréta—gave a loose and rather goofy reading. There was just about no introduction, so any audience member (such as myself) who had missed the previous events, was left to figure out who was what from the books the authors carried up to the podium. Ian Monk read in both French and English—the French going over much better with the audience (understandably, since it was peppered with naughty language!). He seemed much happier reading in French, too, although he’s British.

I could hardly stop laughing during Anne Garréta’s reading because she looked exactly like her book cover photo. It was sort of like that scene where Groucho asks Harpo who he is, and Harpo shows him his tattoo of his own face. She wore dark aviator glasses (this is inside on a cloudy day) with a distinctive haircut, which were all reproduced to a “T” on the cover. Andrew Hultkrans at Artforum has more to say about Garréta. Anyway, Roubaud raved about her novel, the English translation of which I’m looking forward to (apparently, according to a secret source at Dalkey Archive, the wheels are in motion to get a translation done).

Afterward, I headed over to the Met, where I took a right where I usually take a left, and ended up wandering through period rooms, each of which seemed stranger than the last (I’m quite sure I never saw that totally bizarre blue poster bed before), and ended up in the new Byzantine “room” (actually the space underneath the Grand Hall Stairway). I was soon snared, as the Byzantines intended, by the 200-400 AD textiles, with intricate labyrinths woven into them, to tangle the eye and prevent it from casting evil with its glance.

Five steps of translation

I've been handed another translating assignment--an excerpt from Michèle Métail's LA ROUTE DE CINQ PIEDS (The Road of Five Steps), which I'm to complete by June for a translation festival that will take place either in a) Connecticut or b) France.

On the surface, the Oulipian constraint is relatively straightforward, five "steps" per line, and Métail has made it even easier for me with a note to the translator calling my attention to the form and that the "silent e" of French may throw off the syllable count in English.

However, one does not write a 16,000-verse and counting poem without some other constraint pulling it along. She says in her introduction that the poem was "conceived as a continuous chain of pictures," but I just know there's something else lurking in here. So far there doesn't seem to be a repetition of words between verses (in fact, I think it's just the opposite--that no repetition is allowed), nor a repetition of sound. Perhaps a clue can be found in her introduction, when she says that the poem is based on 8 trips to Asia (with a 6:1:1 ratio of China, Taiwan, Japan). Perhaps this is the additional constraint? Eight characters perhaps with five syllables? 16,000 divided by 8 is 2,000...

On another subject, Pierre Joris included Jean Sénac’s Oeuvres poétiques (Actes Sud 1999) on his 10 best reads of 2008. I’m very happy to see Joris draw some public attention to Jean Sénac. He was one of my major finds during research for the anthology, and it does pain my heart a bit that we probably won't be the ones to bring his poetry into English, after all.

But Joris has reminded me I should reread Sénac. With Ismael now in my life and reading Senegalese writers such as Ousmane Sembene, I'm even more interested in the struggle shared by so many Francophone writers, such as Sénac, between an interest in and passion for French culture and language, and a hatred for French colonialism. Here’s a quote from Justin Vicari’s article at APR, which also includes some translations of Sénac’s poetry.

Sénac entered the French language as a deliberate outsider, from the beginning
mixing in polyglot words pell-mell from Spanish, Arabic, and English, while
inventing many bold neologisms of his own. Later, Sénac actively joined the
resistance against French colonialism in Algeria, fighting as a soldier for that
cause: yet, one feels that Sénac was fighting only against the France who
conquered with armies, not the same nation who conquered with images.

France was where his books were published and what he wrote in. And if I translated his work into English, would I compound the colonialism? How can one reconcile culture with colonialism?

Exuberant Waters Fray

I signed up for Harrap's month-long free trial, as I liked the pirated copy that M. Oliver gave me so much, but which is, alas, not transferable from my vieux computer to my nouvel computer. (I think it pretty funny that computer is ordinateur in French, but also "computer." Actually, the definitions associated with "ordinateur" are rather fertile: you've got "macro-ordinateur" and "micro-ordinateur" that mean, respectively, mainframe and microcomputer. Now, I don't think the Academicians are doing a very good job when they allow "laptop" to be translated as "micro-ordinateur portable"--you're practically begging for the English (or would that be American?) to be used.)

Anyway, before I digressed there, I signed up so that I would work on my translation of Earth's Horizons. Like, as in, that I must do work before the month elapses, because otherwise Harrap's is very expensive. So, a few days ago, I achieved this:

EVEN IF THE MASS PERSISTS IN RECOILING FROM
PRIMITIVE EXTENSIONS THAT CULMINATE ON DUPLICATE SIDES
WHERE FLESHY SUMMIT RIDGES OUTLINED IN THEIR
ROUNDNESS TILT TOWARD THE NORTH DEPRESSING PLACES
OF ERRATIC CONVERGENCES THAT THE DESERTED SLOPES
TO THE BENEFIT OF CRESTS MORE ACCIDENTAL IN THEIR
DOING WHEN THEY SHARE EXUBERANT WATERS FRAYING
OVER THE STEPPED SPURS OF WHERE THE UNDULATING HEIGHTS
DRAW AWKWARDLY THEIR CLIMBS DISAPPEARING ON THE FLANK

I had a short consultation with my father about translating "AU PROFIT DES CRETES" to "TO THE BENEFIT OF CRESTS" instead of "TO THE PROFIT OF CRESTS." I'm also not happy with "DEPRESSING" as that's got another connotation in English that overpowers the meaning of the French. I'll have to resort to the dictionary of geological terms to find some alternatives. But ultimately, all of the above lines, after this first rough translation, must be put into a line of 48 characters, per Metail's original Oulipian form. So enjoy what you see above as it will be changed, as summits tilt and waters fray, to perhaps unrecognizable form.

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...