Poetry is a living creature; the aim of translators is not to tame it, but to cut its reins so that it may run free. This exceptional variousness is exemplified in the quadrilingual edition of word sonnets by Seymour Mayne: Wind and Wood, published in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. This work is the second sequence of Mayne’s larger collection, Cusp: Word Sonnets (2014), which marked fifty years since his poetry first appeared in Montreal. A translation of the entire collection into Russian (translated by Mikhail Rykov, Silver Age press) was launched on October 24 at Library and Archives Canada. In this essay, Daniel Persia, Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Brazil, discusses the new territory that this tremendous edition breaches, the generous particularities of Mayne’s form, and the dimensions of a single line, in different clothing.
Why settle for a good poem in one language when you can read it in four? Canadian poet and translator Seymour Mayne takes the art of the word sonnet to a new level in his quadrilingual collection Wind and Wood / Viento y madera / Vent et bois / Vento e madeira, published by Malisia Editorial (Argentina) just last year. In addition to an interview with Mayne himself—in which the author talks about the “intimate and creative relationship” between writer and translator—the collection brings thirty-three word sonnets, originally written in English, into Spanish (María Laura Spoturno et al.) French (Véronique Lessard and Marc Charron) and Portuguese (Maria da Conceição Vinciprova Fonseca). The project comes through the vision of María Laura Spoturno (Universidad Nacional de La Plata), who directed a collaborative effort in Spanish translation with sixty undergraduate students, successfully constructed bridges to Canada and Brazil, and served as general editor for the collection. Transcending the traditional two-language paradigm while exploring themes of aging, nostalgia, and the passing of time, Wind and Wood reveals new possibilities for translation and reinforces the age-old maxim that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
When we analyze a translation—that is, when we examine its components and (implicitly or explicitly) make a judgment about its “success”—we often comment on concepts such as equivalence, fidelity vs. freedom, or transparency, to invoke Benjamin’s classic metaphor. This kind of discourse—though useful in comparative studies—presupposes that translation is fundamentally about re-creation, re-signification, or re-formulation; in other words, an “original” thrives, and the translation serves to re-construct (construct again) what has already been assembled (presumably in the most careful way possible). Translation, as a product, is thereby seen as a re-articulation of the poem in another language. This notion fails to capture the complexity of Mayne’s quadrilingual collection, which arranges four versions of each word sonnet side-by-side, on the same page. Wind and Wood not only successfully sustains poetry in four languages, but also brilliantly illustrates the nuances of each language through the construction of the translations themselves. The precision of the word sonnet as a form helps to showcase some of the fundamental features of language: how we pose questions, how we express possession, how we locate (or don’t locate) subject, verb, and object. Translation thus becomes a mechanism for better understanding language(s), rather than simply a tool for transference from one language into another.
In her introduction to Ricochet (2011), a bilingual (English-French) collection of word sonnets by Seymour Mayne, translator Sabine Huynh describes the word sonnet as a “fourteen-line poem, composed of either monosyllabic or polysyllabic words,” in which “each poem contains a sentence, sometimes two.” The poem is monowordic in that each line contains only one word. Huynh highlights that, while Mayne is a contemporary authority on the form, others have tried their hand before him: French poets Marc Papillon (sixteenth century) and Jules de Rességuier (nineteenth century), for example, or Irish poet Augustus Young toward the end of the 1990s. Mayne draws a comparison between the word sonnet and three historical moments/movements: Imagism, Vorticism, and the rise of the haiku following World War II. He also cites inspiration from the proverbs and images of the Talmudic Prikei Avot, further demonstrating how Mayne’s sonnets are historically informed and rooted within a multilingual tradition.
Mayne counts on the reader’s familiarity with poetic forms, both past and present. “The clouds yesterday were only an alibi for the sun now rampant at noon,” he discloses in the poem “Alibi” (each word holding its own line). Those temporal markers—“yesterday,” “now”—are fundamental to Wind and Wood, which has an almost Eliotesque quality in its understanding of what it means to grow old:
65 Years Young
for Elena Sánchez Hernández
Old?
Just
the
clothes,
my
friends,
the
boy
still
has
mischief
in
his
bones!
Mayne meditates on youth and old age, later comparing it to a used car. He ponders what happens in “The End,” how nature wanders off, how words surrender to technology and suddenly we realize that, one day, we will all “take up about the same space—or ginger urn.” “My death is coming, my death is coming,” another poem announces, in a repetition that is reduced to a “delaying tactic.” It is hard not to be reminded of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”—such a strange but satisfying verse, as are so many of Mayne’s word sonnets. In only fourteen words, we are left with the sensation that these poems speak directly to us, as we wait for the harvest without losing sight of the roots beneath the ground. Perhaps the greatest commonality between Mayne and Eliot is this conscious recognition of the past. In many ways, Wind and Wood exemplifies Eliot’s belief that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” There is always something, someone, who has come before.
At the micro level, the sparseness of the word sonnet draws attention to even the slightest variations from one translation to the next: an inversion of syntax, the addition/alteration of punctuation, a runaway pronoun, etc. The image remains the same, but the linguistic tools used to depict it vary. Take the opening poem “Happy Hour,” for instance, which poses a single question:
“Happy Hour”“Happy Hour” “Happy Hour” “Happy Hour”
What ¿Y Pourquoi O
is esa cette que
this tristeza tristesse é
tristesse en à essa
at la l’heure tristeza
the hora nonchalante, na
lingering postrera, la hora
hour, la lumière alongada,
the luz encore a
light vencida mise luz
defeated nuevamente en novamente
again por déroute vencida
by la par pela
darkness? oscuridad? l’obscurité? escuridão?
Already in the first line (the first word!) we perceive a difference in translation, as the interrogative shifts from one language to the next. The English “What is this tristesse . . .” transforms into the Spanish “Y esa tristeza . . .” (literally, “And this sadness . . .,” or perhaps, more implicitly, “And [what about] this sadness . . .”). And what about it? Why is it there? Where does it come from? In French, “What” morphs into “Pourquoi”—“Why,” or “What for,” pointing more toward motive than existence. All of these variations force us to think more carefully about the question being asked—about its dimensions, its implications, and why the speaker is asking it in the first place.
Other poems in the collection gain a more complete, multi-dimensional image when read through a quadrilingual lens. In “Bully,” for instance, we observe the use of the English term bullying in the Portuguese translation, while the French opts for tyrans (tyrants, dictators), intensifying the relationship to one of absolute control. In “Fiddler,” the Spanish translation adds a color, blanco, to the “icy Montreal roof.” In “Message,” we find a peculiarity of English when placed in proximity to Romance languages:
Message Mensaje Message Mensagem
This Este Voici Esta,
is es le a
the el message mensagem
body’s mensaje du do
message: del corps : corpo:
am cuerpo: renoncerai estou
slowly cedo doucement cedendo
giving lentamente mais devagar,
up pero pas mas
but no encore não
not estoy prêt pronto
ready listo à para
to para me me
surrender. rendirme. rendre. render.
The absence of the subject before “am slowly giving up” (which would, expectedly, be “I,” the body personified) is immediately noticeable. That absence is barely visible in the Spanish and French translations, as subject pronouns are frequently omitted. In opting to maintain the present progressive tense (estou cedendo), the Portuguese translation adds the necessary subject pronoun. These small nuances bring us into the inner workings of the poem, the mechanisms that allow each word to fall onto the next. Even if the reader is not familiar with all four of the languages presented, they will be able to grasp a certain degree of detail and complexity from the visual depiction alone.
Rather than thinking about each word sonnet in one dimension (i.e., in its English dimension, its point of origin), we can now think about it in four dimensions, moving or operating along four distinct axes, in this case represented by four different languages: English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. With all four axes in motion, we see the poem in a new, fifth dimension; the images are the same, but the vocabularies and linguistic structures are different, and, when they meet, they necessarily alter (enhance) the way we, as readers, navigate (or move around) the poem. Much like the axes that operate in our own lives—love, hate, fear, wonder (to name only a few)—which are never unidimensional.
Mayne’s Wind and Wood is a treasure, that rare opportunity to reflect on the bigger questions in life without the limitations of a singular vantage point. His word sonnets teach us about language itself, and how different languages, when coming together, can create an even more stunning picture of the world in which we live.
Daniel Persia is a writer and translator currently based in Curitiba, Brazil, where he serves as Regional Leader for the US-Brazil Fulbright Commission and Editor-at-Large for Asymptote. Working primarily from Spanish and Portuguese, his research explores new frameworks for translating Afro-Brazilian/Black Brazilian literature. Prior to moving to Brazil, he earned a Master’s in Education from Boston College and taught at the Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts. His most recent translation, Writings, by Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, was published in April 2019 for the re-opening of the Chillida-Leku museum in Hernani, Gipuzkoa, Spain.
*****
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