The Multilingual Erín Moure Talks Translation

The Ploughshares blog brings us an interview with the inimitable Erín Moure, whose Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, edited by Shannon Maguire, was published in March by Wesleyan University Press. Moure talks with Rob Mclennan about translation (she works in French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese), how she came to it, how it's affected her own writing, and how there's much to be learned from it. An excerpt:

RM: I’m fascinated by the idea of statements in English about poetry being “local statements.” I’m curious, also, as to what your engagement with translation might have taught you more specifically about writing. Is there something about the sentence or the line-break that engaging with non-English works, for example, that you might not have been introduced to otherwise?

EM: It’s not quite as simple as that. I won’t repeat what I’ve written elsewhere, for example, in Planetary Noise, in Rosalía de Castro’s Galician Songs and New Leaves, or in short essays at the end of my translations of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea or François Turcot’s My Dinosaur.

[But] when you only read/use one language, it is like an infinity pool; you think it extends everywhere and what is visible to you seems a truth. But this may not be so. By exposure to other languages, and engagement in the work of “versing” a poem from one language and culture to another—where not only the sounds but the context and references and history are very different, so words adhere differently to other words—you learn to attend more closely to the sinews of the language in which you are writing your own work, whatever that language is. Or languages. And this attentiveness to the moments in/of language leads you to places/spaces/sounds that you would not otherwise have found. There’s no “fruit” you can pluck off the tree that is one language and just graft onto your tree. It’s more about understanding the differences in the sounds of leaves, their veins, how their stems discuss light and movement, how bugs crawl up the bark and enter or burrow, how the leaves divide and reverberate the light in different seasons, how and into what terrain do the leaves fall in autumn, how do the flakes of snow fall on them.

Also, it means attending to the political history of the tree-language and of its speakers, particularly those speakers who are furthest from the usages that capital mandates—the poor, the mystics, the silent. You learn over time how silence works in a different language, how the blank of the page therefore works differently... 

 Please do read the full interview right here.