Katrine Øgaard Jensen Talks to Johannes Göransson About Transgressive Circulation

Translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen interviews poet, translator, and Action Books publisher Johannes Göransson for BOMB. They discuss Göransson's new book, Transgressive Circulation (Noemi Press), which comprises "six essays on topics that include the threat of foreign influence and the 'hoax' of translation." A snippet from this conversation:

KØJ Your book returns a few times to the ideal of the poem as non-paraphrasable, the idea that any (translated) version of a poem is inherently a degradation because every word is in the right place in the original poem. How have you encountered this in the past, and why do you think it’s still “one of the most pervasive rules in modern discussions of US poetry”?

JG On an informal level, I always run into people who say things like, I wish I could read this in the original because I want to know what the poet really wants to say (and because I can’t, I won’t read the work in translation either). Or more fundamentally, it’s in the rules of academic study of poetry: you have to study it in the original. In the New Critical ideal, the poem cannot be paraphrased.

Behind this idealization of the non-paraphrasable lies an idealization of the non-mediated. US poetry has tended to see itself as an ideal communicative act that is able to express interiority with the minimum amount of mediation. This is of course BS and translation constantly foregrounds the falseness of this rhetoric.

I like your use of the word “degrade” here as well. It makes me think of Bakhtin, who makes some guest appearances in the book and whose writing shaped a lot of my critical views. In his book about Rabelais, Bakhtin argues—in the English translation by Helen Iswolsky—that one of the key features of the grotesque is that it “degrades.” So perhaps there is something grotesque about translation (and the other way around): it degrades, it “parodies,” it imagines counter-hierarchies. 

Read on at BOMB.