Chloris a più voci (Translation as Reperformance, Part 2)

As a child I lived with a reproduction of an image of Sandro Botticelli’s Chloris—just the detail of the nymph’s face in torment, looking back, a stalk black—with age?—in her open mouth—on the wall of my parents’ living room. It hung there amidst the array of bizarre elaborated objects yielded from people’s garages and the trunks of cars chosen to be kept temporarily, rather than immediately resold. The picture disoriented and terrified me for years, and I had no idea where it came from, or that it was part of a scene of rape ensconced within one of the most “popular” paintings in the world; I never ceased to try resolving the image in mind, and would only unsee it when I learned about Botticelli’s painting at large, an allegory of spring, beguiled by the general exquisiteness of the thing.

When at the very end of a dozen-year period of translation, I decided that I would be remiss not to include the final section of Amelia Rosselli’s final work in my collection, despite my editor’s wish to keep the page count down, and began to disentangle one line from another, and finally apprehended—perhaps—the image of a woman absconding with a stalk in her mouth, something surged within me: the flood of an overwhelming, if momentary, sense of transit into this complex poet’s orientation.

Cloud, fill yourself with breath, as if the
twisted stalk in my mouth
were that exaltation of a
spring in rain, which is the
grey that now is was suspended in air . . .

To see, and hear, through Rosselli’s recording of Impromptu, that reticent image transfused into poetry, transmuted, was disquieting—or inquietante, the Italian term for the uncanny. To think that I had perhaps seen the same image as a poet I’d struggled for years to understand adequately, to render adequately into English, was stunning. Only perhaps. This is the desperation of the translator of an author who has passed away. A desperation all the rawer when translating a person who has taken her own life, generating a death that leaves the living dumbstruck.

The stanza that produced this encounter perplexes by linking the cloud and breath, the stalk in the speaker’s mouth, and the uncertain spring in quick succession, and through its jittery, tangled temporality—a conflict of tenses further confused by lyrical echoes between the words è, era, ora, and aria. You can hear these echoes if you cue to 13:50 of Impromptu.

Read from right to left, Botticelli’s Primavera pictures Zephyrus, Greek god of the fructifying west wind, raping Chloris, though the moment of trauma is not depicted—only those picturable moments of innocence and poise that come before and after: “una primavera in pioggia, / che è il grigio che ora è era appeso nell’aria.” The gray that now is was, suspended in the air, hovering over the contradiction that is metamorphosis. In abduction, Zephyrus breathes into the fleeing nymph, whose name is related to chlorophyll: the result is the phenomenon of spring, embodied in the haughty pulchritude of Flora pregnant with flowers fallen from Chloris’s mouth, leaving the violence of monochrome life behind. “Till then,” according to Ovid’s Fasti, “the earth had been of one color.” But in Botticelli’s picture, we can still apprehend Chloris’s mouth choked by this futurity—choked by this flowering.

Translating, and retranslating, Rosselli’s late distressed pastoral over the years has led me to regard the Chloris figure as the chlorophyll of literature. And it’s led me to propose this image of forced inspiration as a figure for translation. Zephyr, appearing as half dead, blue-grey, can be compared with the translator: Zephyr forces breath, life into the textual matrix, the mold and vessel, again, reversing the clock, making Flora-as-Chloris look back once more in flight—but this act is a species of rape whose violence cannot be neutralized. There is “a vital connection” between an original text and its translation; Benjamin, in his still inspiring essay on “The Task of the Translator,” writes of a translation’s issuing from the afterlife of the original, ensuring its continued life. Yet there is a fundamental incommensurability between the parts in commerce, and often an injurious one. Chloris didn’t necessarily ask to be the bearer of a new world.

In the case of Impromptu, the author’s first person has imagined the stalk transplanted in her mouth. As a subject between languages and political bodies, strategically deploying French and English throughout her “Italian” poem, Rosselli muddies the power dynamic of author, translator and mistress, resembling George Steiner’s description of those who have ceased to translate, “sometimes too late, because the inhaled voice of the foreign text had come to choke their own.” I stalking aspire to translate that image, that voice and its obstruction, its crowding with the shoots of regeneration. In order to do so without raping the original, I need to perform a rhythmic and melodic deformation of English. Translation shouldn’t further the transitive act of violation implicated in so much cross-cultural contact; it should instead honor, by giving prosodic body to, the wounded corpus of the source. It ought to add a strain to the discomfiting polyphony, resonating with speech choked by the stalk transplanted which gives rise, in pain, to a new language.

This task is particularly urgent when trying to do justice in another language to “translational” writing like Rosselli’s: to texts that, in Waïl Hassan’s words, “straddle two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation,” participating in the construction of cultural identities from a space between linguistic systems. (Look out for an issue of Translation Journal devoted to such writing, edited by Ignacio Infante.)

The violence of translation is made most obvious when I attempt to perform my poem with its Anglophone syllabics and syntax in the place of that extremely Latinizing mode of the Gregorian chant, to forge a recitative in an English-language oratorio or opera—musical forms whose names have been directly imported from the Italian, as if English syllables and signifiers would not do. I will never get the music right, and my own breath in the matrix of the original will always be that of an interloper. Still, if I’m lucky it will flower and generate music, dance, as in Botticelli’s tercet of Graces to the left, mirroring the tercet of violence at the painting’s right edge. Even Shelley asked for inspiration from the west wind.

If the translator succeeds, her belatedness is temporarily suspended; music emerges in the present, even dance. Yet to translate Amelia Rosselli without the curled stalk in her speaker’s mouth, without the stumbling feet of Chloris and transitively dazzling death, would be perjury. Through translation that attempts to be true to the formal and musical distortions of her work, I have tried to show that this author who stages the displacement of one language through another makes musical a fact that has only been amplified by the migrations of the last half-century or so: the fact that national languages and their speakers are at their core paesani zoppicanti, as Impromptu puts it—hobbling, half-patriated paisans on uneven feet, faulty syntheses of collapsed cantons. To reflect this churning of language as a process, translation needs to contend with the sounds of a language crematorizzata // dalla mia e vostra vita terrorizata (“crematorized // by my and your life being terrorized”). Out of the ashes produced by the terrorizing of the life of the first person merged with a second person plural, the canto, the canton, cycles between disintegration and reintegration, death and regeneration, choral.

 

[Note: “Translation as (Re)Performance (Part 1: Moonstriking)” can be found here.]