Eleni Sikelianos on Translating Lorine Niedecker into French + Slime Molds!
Eleni Sikelianos discusses—for The Capilano Review blog—her translating of Lorine Niedecker's forthcoming selected poems into French. Starting with the simple "sublime / slime- / song", Sikelianos notes all the options: "sublime / chanson / du limon" or "sublime / berceuse / limoneuse" or "vibrante / voix / de vase." She then writes:
Each of these translations carries its own resonance, of course, and Nicolas [Pesquès, one of three co-translators of Louange au lieu et autres poèmes] reminded his Anglophone audience at the University of Denver last week that the translation was for the French ear, not the North American one. Cole Swensen and others preferred the sound of “sublime/chanson/du limon,” which Nicolas assured us had no music for the French oreille. I was pushed to think about what I hear in Niedecker’s slime — which is Darwin, creation, beginnings, life — tones not carried (to my American mind) by limon, which means silt, or vase, which, besides silt, is also sludge. The choice of berceuse (lullaby) for song is interesting, because it does touch on the feeling of childhood (early life) Niedecker captures in her slime. But as Nicolas said, a lullaby is for putting a child to sleep, and this is clearly an awakening of energy rather than bedtime.
There’s lots more to talk about in the translation choices — like what to do about the alliteration, the visual elision between sublime and slime or the fact that LN makes a million things happen with ONE word per line (Robert Urquhart, also present, commented that he reads Niedecker word-by-word), or what to do with the peewee that immediately precedes these lines, and about translation in general, but I want to go where slime leads me, which is to slime molds.
Slime molds! This is where Ernst Haeckel (image of his mycetozoa slime molds, 1904, above) could come in. "There are all kinds of wonderful terms associated with th[e] wild behavior [of slime molds], like 'swarming motility' and 'quorum sensing' ('quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system'"), Sikelianos writes. Then:
I guess slime molds are heterokaryotes (different kinds of nuclei in one organism).
Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) was the first to theorize an evolution that imagines symbiosis as its origin, when one single-cell organism (prokaryote) cooperated with or tried to eat another, and thus the first eurkaryotic cells were formed (eventually leading to us). For years, she was called a crackpot, but her notions are now orthodoxy. Besides the fact that she taught in Emily Dickinson’s hometown, she seems to have a bead on poetic thought. In her book What is Life? she discusses autopoiesis, a concept I became somewhat obsessed with. The term obviously has appeal to poets, though here it’s a biological function—self-production or self-creation:
Autopoiesis was originally presented as a system description that was said to define and explain the nature of living systems. A canonical example of an autopoietic system is the biological cell. The eukaryotic cell, for example, is made of various biochemical components such as nucleic acids and proteins, and is organized into bounded structures such as the cell nucleus, various organelles, a cell membrane and cytoskeleton. These structures, based on an external flow of molecules and energy, produce the components which, in turn, continue to maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components.
An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something other than itself (the factory).
To see how Sikelianos relates this to Lorine Niedecker, read the rest of the post here.