The Best of Last Year

For those of you tuning into the blog for the first time, here are some of last year's highlights:

• David Hinton and Marilyn Hacker weighed in on the art of translating poetry 
• Adam Zagajewski taught us all what 'epithalamium' means
• We heard the Grace Paley poem that Galway Kinnell reads to himself daily
• Children's author Helen Frost discussed 'freedom in form'
• Maureen McLane read from her debut poetry collection

And here's a link to highlights from 2007. Did I miss anything good? Is there anything you'd like to hear more about this year?

Marilyn Hacker On "That Balance Of Foreignness And Familiarity"

And now, we have another guest post from poet and translator Marilyn Hacker. Her translation of Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen was the first winner of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize earlier this year, and it will be published by FSG in the fall. Marie Etienne is a French poet who has published eight volumes of poetry, five novels, and two books on the theater.

Here is Marilyn Hacker speaking about what drew her to Etienne's poems (if you have not read Hacker's earlier comments on translation, you might want to read this post first):

"In the case of Marie étienne’s poems, I am attracted by a considerable otherness: the absence of a unified lyric « I »;  a lifelong familiarity with and reference to landscapes, languages and cultures I have not experienced. But there is, too, a comity of interests including an intense focus on form and its inflections of content; on the disjunctive ways the poet can utilize and subvert narrative. King of a Hundred Horsemen’s sequences derive from both the sonnet and the prose-poem. They are oneiric and ekphrastic, and delight in blurring limits between the two as they (also) swiftly shift landscapes. As poets, we share pleasure, in very different registers, in integrating correspondence and dialogue, sometimes at its most demotic, into a poem. This not unrelated to the insistence on irony and humor as possibilities for poetry, noting the way irony can metamorphose to tragedy, to political statement, or both.

It is perhaps just that balance of foreignness and familiarity which draws the bilingual or polyglot poet-reader to the exercise, the art, of translation, and the maintenance of that balance in the translated poem which may most intrigue and delight its reader."

--Marilyn Hacker

 

Marilyn Hacker On "The Most Engaged Form Of Reading"

Poetry-in-translation week continues, readers! And today we have our first guest post on the subject.

I was especially excited when Marilyn Hacker agreed to to write about her experiences translating because she a long history as a poet and writer herself. In addition to her award-winning translations, Hacker is the author of eleven collections of poems and seven published books of translations from the French. Information about her original books of poetry can be found here, and her most recent translation, of Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, will be published by FSG this Fall.   

You'll find more information about her translation of King of a Hundred Horsemen in the post later today. Below is what I think of as a perfect introduction to the art of translating from someone who connects with poems in much the same way as I do. Here is the first word from Marilyn Hacker:

"For the poet who is also a translator, the great pleasure of translation – of poetry – is, shall we say, the continuation of the struggle by other means. The struggle in question is the angel-wrestling with language of which poetry largely consists, and here, the participant in the « Mental Fight » (Blake, of course) is handicapped by the removal of ego, and, indeed, of the resources of anecdotal memory, from the translator-poet’s corner. What can happen at best is the transformation of a struggle to a dance, performed by two resonating but never-exactly-mirroring constructs of language. Capoeira, anyone?

More concretely: I have translated a dozen or so (almost all contemporary) French or Francophone poets, and I’d be hard put to explain my choices except for that chemistry poems exercise on their destined readers. Translation is at once the most engaged form of reading and (as above) an earthy, hands-on engagement with language. The translator must be faithful to the text’s linguistic valence, its connotations, to its music as well as its meaning; yet a translation succeeds when it exists independently as a poem in the receptor language. Poet-mathematician Jacques Roubaud’s theory of translation leads us to deduce that there are an infinite number of possible valid translations of a poem (Baudelaire’s sonnets as prose poems! Baudelaire’s prose poems as sonnets!), thus an infinite number of independent poems one poem might generate. But dizzying oneself staring in a kaleidoscope distracts from the work."

--Marilyn Hacker