{"id":3007,"date":"2010-01-26T09:54:57","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T14:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=3007"},"modified":"2010-01-26T09:54:57","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T14:54:57","slug":"haiti-cesaire-translation-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/haiti-cesaire-translation-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Haiti, C\u00e9saire, Translation, & The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The New Yorker<\/em>, as we well know, has a house style and is proud of it. That this may be a natural thing to aspire to for such a venerable old publication isn\u2019t too problematic as long as it applies to its journalistic pieces, from \u201cTalk of the Town\u201d to the various in depth investigative pieces The New Yorker<\/em> is justly famous for. But this gets problematic when the same stylistic gauge is applied to its choice of literary artifacts, the translations of poems, for example. Now, we also know that in its stance for ethical correctness and good liberal relevancy, the magazine will speak its mind on current problems & disasters, natural or manmade. These two preoccupations came together in the recent issue that speaks to the earthquake in Haiti: the editors must have decided that the traditional light fare of its poetry department, which has usually been intellectually somewhat less demanding than its cartoons, needed to be upgraded for the occasion.<\/p>\n

Thus they printed a poem by Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire entitled \u201cEarthquake,\u201d\u00a0 translated (for the occasion, and therefore all too hurriedly?) by Paul Muldoon, the current poetry editor. C\u00e9saire is of course from Martinique, but I guess that is close enough to Haiti, or could even be the same speck somewhere off to the left of the page, if checked on that old map of America as seen from Manhattan looking out across the Hudson once published as a cover by The New Yorker<\/em>. And given the poem\u2019s title, \u201cEarthquake,\u201d it is possible to assume that it has something to do with a natural disaster in the Caribbean. Of course if one checks closer, one realizes that C\u00e9saire\u2019s poem was first published in his book Ferraments<\/em> in 1960, and may refer to some temblor in the Caribbean, though who knows? Well, if we go to the little Seghers Po\u00e8tes d’aujourdui: Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire<\/strong><\/em> volume, its editor, Lilyan Kesteloot, a Belgian scholar close to the poet from early on, makes it clear (cf, pp. 74-75) that the temblor in question is symbolic and that C\u00e9saire is referring to the political situation in Martinique during the fifties and describes \u2014 as Gregson Davis, another C\u00e9saire translator, writes \u2014 \u201cevents that culminated in C\u00e9saire’s disenchantment with and resignation from the French Communist Party.\u201d So, using this poem to make a point about the current natural disaster in Haiti is sloppy literary adequatio<\/em>, and disingenuous at best.<\/p>\n

Worse than that, however, is the translation: Paul Muldoon must obviously have done this one rapidly to get the poem in under deadline and in basic New Yorker<\/em> style, for it is a flat, bland, workshoppy version that loses all the power of C\u00e9saire\u2019s language. Muldoon should have stayed with another of his magazine\u2019s time-honored policies, namely never to print a poem that has been translated and published before \u2014 or, if willing to breach such a time-honored if somewhat non-sensical habit, he should have used one of the two extant translations of the poem that are way better than his quickie version (he may of course invoke the excuse of the deadline). The poem was\u00a0 first published in English in Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith\u2019s version in Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire: The Collected Poetry<\/em> (U of Cal Press, 1983) as well as by Gregson Davis\u2019 translation, in Non-Vicious Circle \/Twenty Poems of Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire<\/em> (Stanford U Press, 1984).<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have the time or the inclination here to go over Muldoon\u2019s version (which you can consult here<\/a>) line by line, or to do a detailed comparison with the other two versions, but let me quickly point out a few inaccuracies, using the Eshleman\/Smith version which I have at hand: in the first line, Muldoon translates the French word \u201cpans,\u201d which refers to sections or surfaces of walls, as \u201cstretches,\u201d which is abstract and forces him to add \u201cscapes\u201d to \u201cdream,\u201d which scapes are not there in French. Line two is even more puzzling: what E\/S give as \u201cparts of intimate homelands\u201d (an accurate and literal version), PM renders incomprehensibly as \u201clines of all too familiar lines.\u201d Line 4 is indeed difficult because the French is so assonance-charged, and thus the E\/S version, “fallen empty and the soiled sonorous slipstream of the idea,” rich in assonance and accurate in semantic meaning, is much superior to PM\u2019s boringly flat “caved in so the filthy wake resounds with the motion.” In line 7, Muldoon wrongly puts \u201cserpent\u201d for \u201ccouleuvre\u201d (a grass-snake,) but maybe he wanted us to \u201cavaler une couleuvre\u201d in the French expression meaning \u201cto have to do or accept something that one doesn\u2019t want?\u201d I could go down the poem line by line, but it would become an exercise in triviality. So let\u2019s just go to the final lines, which in C\u00e9saire read \u201cjusqu’ici dans la r\u00e9serve d’un oubli \/ gitant\u201d translated by E\/S as “until now in the reserve of a supine \/ oblivion\u201d is turned by PM into “that had hitherto been consigned to a realm of forgetfulness \/ itself quite tumbledown.”\u00a0 An awful rendering apparently meant to remind the reader than an earthquake is\u00a0under discussion.<\/p>\n

Clearly, it is a disgrace both to the enormity of what happened in Haiti and to the art of translating poetry to do such sloppy work, even if well-meant \u2014 and get away with it because it appears in The New Yorker<\/em> and because the perp is that mag\u2019s poetry editor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker, as we well know, has a house style and is proud of it. That this may be a natural thing to aspire to for such a venerable old publication isn\u2019t too...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,74,91,103],"tags":[132,291,1719,707],"class_list":["post-3007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-haiti","category-natural-disaster","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-aime-cesaire","tag-earthquake","tag-haiti","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}