{"id":4978,"date":"2010-09-30T09:34:39","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T13:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=4978"},"modified":"2010-09-30T23:53:13","modified_gmt":"2010-10-01T03:53:13","slug":"seven-minutes-on-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/seven-minutes-on-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Minutes On Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Giordano Bruno, Patron Saint of Translators<\/p><\/div>\n

Going through some folders I came across the little piece below which I gave orally somewhere\u00a0 in the seven minutes allotted for the occasion (can’t for the life of me remember where \u2014 if any one can, please contact me). As far as I know it was never printed anywhere, so here it is, e-printed or posted:<\/p>\n

Seven Minutes on Translation<\/h3>\n

The text that opens my recent volume of poems, Aljibar II, starts with a line that came to me unbidden, out of the blue. It reads: \u201cMy father was a healer and a hunter; is it any surprise that I became a poet and translator?\u201d The algebraic ratio the sentence proposes would equate healer with poet and hunter with translator. This may seem a bit too pat, too linear, and maybe it is more useful to imagine the terms as occupying the four corners of an X, crossed sticks, a chiasmatic figure that creates movement and connections between all four terms.\u00a0 And indeed, I can easily see the poet as both healer and hunter, and the translator as both hunter and healer. But the details of that discussion will have to wait for another time \u2014 today I want to briefly address the question of translation. Let me try to do it in a kind of list, i.e. a kind of list poem, perhaps.<\/p>\n

Why do I translate?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because<\/strong> it pleases me.
\nBecause<\/strong> it beats watching television, except when the Mets are on, but they play so lousily much of the time that I avert my eyes & continue to translate looking up only to check the score.
\nBecause<\/strong>, to be frank, I want to know what the poets in Ghana are up to.
\nBecause<\/strong> I am foolish enough to believe the 16th C philosopher & poet Giordano Bruno who said that all science has its origin in translation, and was burned at the stake for that and a few other peccadilloes in 1600 on the Campo Fioro in Rome. Bruno is of course the patron saint of translators.
\nBecause<\/strong> by accident of birth I was blessed or damned with a batch of different languages and a perverse pleasure of pitting them and their different musics against each other.
\nBecause<\/strong> I can.
\nBecause<\/strong> I love doing it.
\nBecause<\/strong> I have to because if I and everybody else don\u2019t translate the world will be a way shittier place than it already is.
\nBecause<\/strong> when I can\u2019t write poems I can still do so by translating other poets\u2019 poems.
\nBecause<\/strong> once upon a time in a far away country in this galaxy I was foolish enough to believe that I could, as an impecunious (translate that word!) young poet possibly pay the rent with translation gigs, which never worked as I found out that I hated translating those books \u2014 novels, non-fiction treatises, how-to-do manuals etc. \u2014 that would have generated enough money to pay the rent.
\nBecause<\/strong> I speak with many-forked tongue and always wanted to be a Mescalero Apache healer.
\nBecause<\/strong> the congealed mass of anglo-\u2018merican ugliness, greed & basic Christian fascism will continue to blow up the people & libraries & homes & museums of a hundred Baghdads unless we can make enough American citizens realize the beauty of the other, of the poetry of the other, of the speech of all the others.
\nBecause<\/strong> I have never been able to convince my department (at the University, that is, not the store where most everything is indeed made in China, Mexico, Korea & elsewhere) to impose the learning of (at least) two foreign languages, one of which should be a non-Indo-European language, on the graduate program as a conditio sine qua non<\/em> (translate that) for being admitted to a Ph.D. in literature.
\nBecause<\/strong> outside of writing and cooking translation is the only practical thing I have the skills and know-how to do.
\nBecause<\/strong> I love to steal lines & images & sounds from all the foreign poets I read & incorporate them into my own poems (that\u2019s the poet-as-hunter).
\nBecause<\/strong> it is the best excuse I\u2019ve found to buy many books & travel to many countries to hang out with poets & other alien deviants.
\nBecause<\/strong> the best way to learn how to read poems is to translate them.
\nBecause<\/strong> the best way to learn how to write poems is to translate other poets\u2019 great works.
\nBecause<\/strong> in order to think new thoughts we have to renew the language & the best way I\u2019ve found to do that is to spindle, mutilate & mutate it by writing with the language of the foreign poet in English (cf. H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s working of Greek language into German).
\nBecause<\/strong> it permits you to have intense love affairs with people far away or long dead.
\nBecause<\/strong> I have this weird ethical sense that because I can do it, I have to do it so as to help out my linguistically challenged concitoyens (untranslatable due to inevitable loss of pun).
\nBecause<\/strong> translation & its social counterpart, miscegenation, are the only things that can possibly make this world a safer & more viable place.
\nBecause<\/strong>, although I gave up translating into French a number of years ago, last year I could not resist saying yes to translating 25 pages of Allen Ginsberg’s poems for a French version of Philip Glass\u2019 opera Hydrogen Jukebox<\/strong>,\u00a0 given that the last time I saw Allen in Paris he asked be to be involved with the translations of his work, something I had neglected to do until now when the occasion to pay back my dues presented itself out of the blue.
\nBecause<\/strong> 40 years later I still have not translated all of Paul Celan\u2019s work & for some crazy un-reason I feel that I should do so.
\nBecause<\/strong> most of my US poet friends are on good terms with their franco-French compadres & translate each other with fierce intensity which gives me the space to concentrate on translating the North African poets who would otherwise go untranslated; there are thus books forthcoming by Habib Tengour, Abdallah Zrika & Mohammed Al Amraoui.
\nBecause<\/strong> the Mets are losing again.<\/p>\n

\n

[[& darn, didn’t the Mets lose two in a row against the Brewers last night…]]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Going through some folders I came across the little piece below which I gave orally somewhere\u00a0 in the seven minutes allotted for the occasion (can’t for the life of me remember where \u2014 if...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[838,601],"class_list":["post-4978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translation","tag-giordano-bruno","tag-pierre-joris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4978","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=4978"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5002,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4978\/revisions\/5002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}