Veronica Forrest-Thomson, "S/Z" & "Lemon and Rosemary"
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The PoemTalk team once again went on the road — or, anyway, over the sea — and spent a glorious week in Scotland, talking and filming new discussions of poems with many colleagues. On one of those days we gathered with friends at the Fruitmarket Arts Center in Edinburgh. Poet Iain Morrison, one of the PoemTalkers in this episode and a member of the Fruitmarket staff, helped us coordinate and host this event. The other colloquists are Laynie Browne, Lee Ann Brown, and Anthony Capildeo.
March 21, 2024
Bright arrogance #4
Translation as total listening
Like many traditional translators, Benjamin describes a bad translation as the “inaccurate transmission of inessential content,” an inaccuracy that experimenters may revel in, as they amp up the noise between versions . . . We could say in a Lacanian moment that these new translators make a pere-version of the original, seemingly derailing the paternal metaphors and prohibitions implicit in God-as-namer and the translator as the guarantor of the name. But what would it mean to take Benjamin seriously (and, with Lacan, to avow the unavoidability of the paternal imago), to search for the Adamic patois, divine remnants of the sacred language in the infomatic jumble of disaggregated signs in our literary arcades?