Translation as Poetry’s Corrupt Double: An Essay by Johannes Göransson
In his Cordite Poetry Review essay, "Transgressive Circulation’: Translation and the Threat of Foreign Influence," Johannes Göransson provides arguably his most thorough examination of translation to date. Göransson asserts there is a pervasive suspicion and unease in U.S. literature concerning works in translation, particularly when it comes to poetry, and he seeks to theorize why. Göransson begins the essay where many a literary debate has begun, at AWP:
At the AWP writers’ conference in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, I attended a panel on Paul Celan’s poetry. In the Q & A that followed the panel, the first question was ‘How can we make sure that young American poets are not improperly influenced by Celan’s poetry without truly understanding it?’ The panel responded by offering a variety of possible solutions, such as reading the extensive literature about the poet or reading his letters and journal entries that have been published as well. However, none of them asked why it should be that this ‘improper influence’ should be the audience member’s biggest concern. I begin with this anecdote because it immediately struck me that the seemingly innocent question went to the heart of the marginalisation of translation in U.S. literature. In U.S. literary discussions, translations are – time after time – marginalised or dismissed in rhetoric that portrays translations as false, improper, counterfeit or of shallow ‘influence.’ The foreign poet is seen as a threat because he or she will ‘influence’ the young American poets who are vulnerable to such foreign forces, incapable of seeing the foreign writer in the proper ‘context’ (that is to say, one that is different from their own). These discussions about the dangers of the ‘foreign influence’ of translated texts betrays a fundamental anxiety about the ‘transgressive circulation’ of texts: an anxiety about the way they move from one context to another, about the way foreign entities may trouble our sense of agency and interiority.
Göransson moves on to think through notions of influence, contamination, "context," and the thing that is "lost" in translation. More:
The pervasive idea that translating poetry is ‘impossible’ is also part of this cultural maintenance of hegemony and tradition. It is a peculiar idea, since we know that poetry is translated all the time. It is particularly true of smaller, marginal countries, but it is also true of the U.S. The most obvious example may be Ezra Pound using his translations (however dubious) of Chinese poetry to create a U.S. modernism, and to rid modern poetry of the decorativeness of Victorian poetry. Another example, perhaps as obvious, perhaps as influential, are the translations of poets like Thomas Tranströmer, Frederico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda in the 1950s and 1960s (by poets like Robert Bly and Clayton Eshleman), challenging the aesthetics and reading strategies of the New Critical establishment and, thus, transforming U.S. poetry. But even outside of these moments of huge attention and influence, translators have been translating poetry throughout the twentieth century. How can their act be seen as impossible when it so clearly happens all the time? And what purpose does such a declaration serve? What model of poetry that it help establish? What models of reading poetry that is perpetuate? What is the purpose of such a limited and limiting definition?
What exactly is ‘lost in translation’?
To begin to answer this question, we might consider what is – on a very obvious level – ‘lost’ in translation. The short answer is the paradigm of the unparaphraseable text, written by a single author (Ramazani’s ideal, which keeps him from engaging with poems in translation). One of the keys for this model of the poem – an important rule for the New Critics (seen in the title of Cleanth Brooks’s The Wellwrought Urn), but persisting to this day – is that it cannot be paraphrased; any version of it is inherently a degradation. Another key is that the poet – whether writing about a personal memory or ‘appropriating’ what someone else has written – is in control of his or her project. This sense of mastery assures that the poem is not accidental, not noise (or if it is noise, it must be conceptualised as such). The translation removes the poem from the originator, the master, introducing the possibility of noise in the versioning of the translation.
In these dismissals of translation, the translator and the translation – and the author and reader for that matter – enter into a murky zone of infection (as the counterfeit infects both the original, the original ‘context’, the target language and the target culture. In this murky zone, we lose the illusion of a linear, patriarchal lineage, and with it, the objectivity of that lineage: Who is good? Who is influencing who? What if a writer is influenced by a text that is alien to her? Can she really be influenced correctly? Is she misreading it? The reader loses the assurance – or currency – of mastery. In Ramazani’s words, the text can no longer be ‘adequately studied’ because there is a loss of ‘pressure’ – the pressure of the illusion of a complete original.
In other words, the threat of translation is the threat of a kind of excess: too many versions of too many texts by too many authors from too many lineages. Perhaps most importantly, this statement (almost tautologically) denies an important fact about poetry: it travels. It crosses boundaries. It can exist in many places at once, even many places in the same place.
Poetry, it appears, is ‘lost’ in a noisy, infectious excess. Poetry is lost in a ‘transgressive circulation.’
Much more to explore here! Head to Cordite Poetry Review for all of it.