The Poet’s Version

“I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101,” writes Anne Carson in her elegiac collection, Nox, of her attempts to translate Catullus’ poem 101, which serves as inspiration for the book. She continues, “But over the years of working on it, I came to think of translating as a room, where one gropes for the light switch.” “Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light” she writes. “Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.”

I’ve quoted this passage over and over since first encountering Nox, a book that unfolds, literally, with Carson’s burgeoning translations of poem 101’s every word, each appearing opposite her own meditations on her brother’s death. I return to this passage, first, for the words I relish—prowling, kidnaps, discandied, barking—many of which drew comments from the participants in my Forms & Features workshop on translation as creative practice. And second, because Carson’s metaphors invoke translation as a kind of universe perpetually expanding beyond the page. Translators know translation is creation, and the indistinct boundary between writing a poem and translating one inspired the concept for this workshop. But translation also activates us differently, perhaps because, unlike poetry making, it demands one’s constant resignation to infinite and often exasperating alternatives. Barbara Cassin, philosopher and primary editor for Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, describes untranslatability as an indication of endlessness rather than impossibility—a characteristic held by works, like Catullus’ poem 101, whose nuances we never cease translating. My own work explores this poetics of untranslatability, and many of the translations that inspire me constitute what translation scholar Lawrence Venuti would call “poet’s versions,” or translations by poets of canonical texts that take liberties in the name of narrative appropriation. In his essay, “The poet’s version; or, An ethics of translation,” Venuti defines the poet’s version as ethical when it presents “an interpretation that is new vis-à-vis whatever interpretation has achieved authority in the receiving culture.” But as a model for our workshop I also favor Haroldo de Campos’s postcolonial theory of translative cannibalism—the notion that translators both honor and annihilate the influence of authoritative texts by consuming them.

In the workshop, we read poet’s versions of selections from the Iliad, Beowulf, Dante’s Commedia, and Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Those familiar with the latter might recognize the liberties in Alice Fulton’s poet’s version—the only version featured on the Poetry Foundation website—which includes references to “pocked tits,” “rude graffiti,” and spraybombing. We compared these versions to several different translations of each text, noting the selections’ variety—evidence, perhaps, of the source poems’ untranslatability. Although it wasn’t a requirement, many of the workshop participants were multilingual or had experience with translation, but our goal wasn’t necessarily to produce translations or even to reinforce translation as a creative act. Translations are unequivocal originals, but furthermore, any language’s body of translations constitutes a literary canon we might legitimize in drawing upon it for inspiration. Thus, the prompts we explored invited writers to cannibalize translations at their own discretion, and many devised novel ways to incorporate translation into their work. In our final moments, one workshop participant shared her translation back into English of a Korean translation of “Archaic Torso of Apollo”; her poem’s unexpected divergence from Rilke’s source text beguiled and thrilled us. 

To use translations as inspiration for your own poems, consider the ways your work already borrows from others, and experiment with honoring and incorporating translations or translation practice instead. You may want to compare multiple translations of a single text, and write your own in the space between them. Or “plagiarize” lines from a translation, reflecting upon where the ownership of translated language begins and ends. For poets hoping to cannibalize translations or translation practice in other ways, here are some additional suggestions from the workshop:

• Write your own poet’s version of a canonical work that’s been translated many times
• Write a translation that intentionally mistranslates a source text
• Write a cento with only language from a source translation
• Use Google Translate to experiment with machine writing in your translation
• Write a homophonic translation of a poem written in a language you don’t know
• Visit Outranspo’s comprehensive Classification of Translation Constraints & Procedures for more creative translation ideas