Bright arrogance #1

Joe Milutis

Image from Jonathan Stalling's "Please I apologize" from Yíngēlìshī (on Vimeo)

“Please forgive me.” These words appear in the beginning of Jonathan Stalling’s Yíngēlìshī—an experimental “transgraphic” work written in what he calls “Sinophonic English,” which strains the parameters of what we call “translation.” Stalling’s work evinces a deep knowledge of and sensitivity towards Chinese language, philosophy, and culture; yet, he plays with misrecognitions and mishearings that emerge in the heterocultural space of mistranslation. In his book The Poetics of Emptiness, he even expresses a deep appreciation for Ezra Pound, bête noire of Sinologists, whose appropriation of the Chinese ideogram (via Ernest Fenollosa), while based on some fundamental misunderstandings of Chinese language, provided a basis for the imagistic poetics of Western modernism. If these cross-cultural misrecognitions can be so productive, and indeed if they form the source of Stalling’s own work as he bends the unauthorized sonic territories between languages—in order, as he says to “mock a metaphysics of equivalency”—why start with apologies?[1]

“The translator must fight . . . against the desire to be innocent,” according to Derrida. Yet while traditional translators readily recognize the impossibility of remaining noiseless relays in their tasks, they are not required to apologize, or perform any other sort of admission, other than a generalized cultural one, that their work mutates the original as a matter of fact. It is, however, the “experimenter”—one who plays more fast and free with the original—who must announce the presumed harm s/he is doing, exuberantly or penitently. A number of terms have emerged to mark this growing practice of non-innocent translation, almost as if to signal that the artist-translator is presenting damaged or admittedly fraudulent goods: dystranslation, transmutilation, translucinación, transcreation, translanation, trans-elation, transluciferation—in addition to “conceptual,” “experimental” and “new” translation—have all been proffered by various poets to distinguish their work from translation that is still based, like the similarly dubious promises of digital replication, on a 1:1 correspondence.[2] And while the digital world of online text and textual translation has allowed these mutational practices to proliferate (and perhaps enables them to become the global condition of language transfer for our times), this need to situate the boundaries between a “true” and “false,” translation is not new, although it becomes much harder to maintain in a world of Siri, Google translate, and global “Netlish.”[3]

Given that we are in the midst of remix culture, where appropriative transformation of source texts is the order of the day, why apologize for playing with hallowed originals, especially of long dead, non-royalty collecting authors? Why not play with the transmissional noise inherent in the act of translating a text, especially if our computers allow for a kind of research into these textual transformations that is historically unprecedented? Indeed, there is a kind of deformational translation that arguably may carry with it imperial pretensions. But you’ll get more complaints if you’ve confused the consumer, if you’ve goofed the armchair imperialist who mistakes your translation for a more or less direct version. As I write, Brandon Brown’s marvelous Catullus—which returned me to the shapes of the original even as it detourned me from a clear, dutiful communication of it—has a single one-star rating on Amazon.com: “UGH: I expected a translation from Latin. This is a rewrite of the poems, not nearly as good. Ultimately, just vulgar.” All odi, no amo.

Brandon Brown’s translation of the 31^st poem of Catullus reads as an explanation for why he is not apologizing, even though his sullying of Catullus invites such trashings of what amounts to his literary Yelp rating, “I choose to not. And I don’t feel bad about it either. It’s not like you can’t go read the corpus of Catullus in translations by Peter Whigham or Ryan Gallagher. Or Bernadette Mayer or Louis Zukofsky. And those translations are terrific. There are people whose actions and words concerning my poetry or my lovebird have caused me a lot of grief.”

This might in the end be a question of cultural capital, or the ghost of Sonny Bono and Mickey Mouse dancing with Rimbaud and a complacent literary establishment. But we hope that the cabal is not that disturbing, and that as we explore these experiments in the coming posts, cries of traitor! cheater! poacher! hack! will be kept to a minimum. We will, in the end, proceed without apologies.

~NEXT WEEK: THE TRADUTTOREADOR TRADITION!~

1. This column will perhaps hyperextend the propriety of the blog format, while still not erring on the side of the bookish. Accordingly, the citational structure will be as light but as accurate as possible, with full bibliographic information given in a separate later post. The title of the column, “Bright Arrogance” is taken from legendary translator Willis Barnstone's description of Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyámin The Poetics of Translation. Special thanks to the Royalty Research Fund of the University of Washington, and a Wave Farm AirTime Residency, for support of my extended research into experimental translation; this column is a partial fulfillment of the aims of those two grants.

2. Other languages might have some solutions to this linguistic impasse. See, for example, Bassnett and Trivedi's discussion of the sanskrit anuvad in Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice, or the remarkable catalogue of terms available to the Japanese, as described by Michael Emmerich.

3. Of the older ways to designate artistic liberties taken by the translator, there is the idea of what Robert Lowell (perhaps influenced by Dryden and Schleiermacher’s theories of translation) called an “imitation.” There is the modest tradition of saying that a poem is “after” another author, although Spicer’s more “cheeky” implications of his After Lorca seem to target this tradition, perhaps in an attempt to overturn how we think of the very nature of tradition and influence.

March 16, 2015

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BRIGHT ARROGANCE: A COLUMN ON EXPERIMENTS IN TRANSLATION

Recently, contemporary poets have explored translation less as a dutiful way to carry meaning from one language to another, and more as an experimental mode in which to investigate the noise inherent to any act of transmission. Benefiting from a long history of such experiments, such work now is potentiated by access to online digital translation engines, and a growing consciousness of the history of these techniques. How are these types of literary experiments flourishing now in tandem with a remix culture that privileges mutation over originality, sharing over intellectual property, and modes of sampling over dutiful emulation? This column will assess experiments—both historical and contemporary—that exceed the boundaries of translational propriety, and as such, perhaps promise new hybrid modes of creation, communication, and being.

Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the author of Failure, A Writer's Life (Zer0 Books, 2013) and Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (Minnesota, 2006). He has produced a number of chapbooks, media works, experimental pdfs, internet writing, and performances that intersect experimental poetics with other interdisciplinary practices. See both his Penn Sound page and his personal web page for other work.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.