Posts featuring Hélène Cixous

Violence, Beauty, Structure, Freedom: An Interview with Translator Urayoán Noel

Urayoán is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word.

In the early days of the pandemic I became obsessed with a little book called Materia Prima (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) by Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer. Two years later, I’m still returning to it again and again. Berenguer’s poetry, ranging from a classically lyrical style to experimental concrete work, speaks to a certain gruesome dance that defines the intense moments of closure and euphoric freedom of the pandemic era. The poems—particularly her concrete works—contain wells of meaning; they dip into abstraction and yet are completely literal, hung in the spatial galaxy of the page, intimate and infinite, like vessels unto themselves. The English translations, pasted next to the original Spanish, felt like an impossible feat. How, I wondered, was it possible to translate these vessels in which every letter, fluidly molded in Spanish, was essential to their form?

 When I interned for UDP in the summer of 2021, I seized the opportunity to chat with one of the translators who had worked on the book, and specifically on these visual poems, Urayoán Noel. Noel is a poet, translator, and professor based in the Bronx, originally from Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. His poem “ode to coffee/oda al cafe,” named after the iconic Juan Luis Guerra song, deconstructs the relationship between English and Spanish, empire and cash crop, moving in and out of the two languages like a defiant and fluid snake. This is emblematic of the warm and brutal intelligence that Urayoán brings to the act of translation: he is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word, and he has a deep love for language and an understanding of all that it celebrates, erases, amplifies, and reveals.

Noa Mendoza (NM): I thought it might be nice to start out talking about a poem that I’m actually going to get a tattoo of soon.

Urayoán Noel (UN): No way, really?

NM: Yes! This graph one, it’s untitled, but it is a pictorial representation of a beach scene, with a jumble of letters underneath.

I’m wondering what your experience was translating this graph, and, more generally, the incomprehensible. The words in the middle that don’t necessarily hold semantic meaning. And also gibberish more generally, if you ever think about that when it comes to translation.

UN: I think I might make a distinction there. I certainly agree that Berenguer’s language isn’t linear. I’m not sure she’s a poet of gibberish. I think of gibberish as a kind of uncontained language. My sense is there’s always this rigor in her work and a constant struggle between freedom and constraint.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in global literary news from India to Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report news of book fairs, award winners, and recognition of presses publishing translated literature. Suhasini Patni highlights recent Indian fiction receiving acclaim, while Carol Khoury introduces us to an award named after Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a prolific Palestinian writer, artist, and translator. Read on to find out more!  

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

The JCB Prize announced its longlist on October 4, 2021. Two out of the three translations have made it into the shortlist (Delhi: A Soliloquy and Anti-Clock). The winner of the Rs 25 lakh prize—with an additional Rs 10 lakh for the translator if it is a translated title—will be revealed on November 13. A longer discussion on the JCB Literary Prize is available here.

Naveen Kishore, founder of Seagull Books, won the 2021 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Seagull Books was founded in 1982 and began with translating works by Indian regional dramatists into English. For his contribution to publishing, Kishore was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 2014 and received the Goethe Medal from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013. Seagull Books has published English translations of fiction and non-fiction by major African, European, Asian, and Latin American writers with over 500 books and authors such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mahasweta Devi, and Hélène Cixous. Seagull author Mo Yan was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kishore published “Notes from a Journal I could have kept [But failed to. Keep]” on Words Without Borders Daily.

GQ released their list of best Indian Fiction of 2021. In this list, they feature The Thinnai by Ari Gautier. Translated from the French by Blake Smith, the book gives a glimpse into the working-class quarters of Pondicherry. A Frenchman chases after a mysterious diamond named after Goddess Sita and explores the social history of the former French colony. An excerpt of the book is available to read here.

READ MORE…

Translating Finnegans Wake: An Interview with Hervé Michel

I would advise that a reader approach Finnegans Wake like a work of art—a composition of sounds and colors, music and painting...

Can Finnegans Wake be translated into another language? As the joke well-known amongst Joyceans goes, “Which language are you translating it from?”

If it is possible to translate Finnegans Wake, the next question might be: who on earth is willing and able to undertake such a task? Who even has the time to translate this work Joyce spent 17 years writing?

The Wake has been translated into French twice. Philippe Lavergne translated the book in the early 1980s, but unsatisfied with this edition, Hervé Michel has spent the last two decades working on a translation of his own.

Michel was born to French parents, in 1950s Morocco. He spent his youth “wandering across Europe, America, Africa and the Near East.” From 1979 until 1984 he lived in Casablanca, studying Arabic. Michel joined the French civil service in 1986 and eventually attended the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA). With an annual acceptance rate of only 6%, ENA is an extremely elite graduate school for French government administrators and officials. After a decade of varied work ranging from finance to international relations, in 1996 Michel accepted a high-ranking position within the French Ministry of Defense.

In his spare time, Michel reads the Wake. He first encountered the book in 1980 and began translating the text in 1997. He has tried at various times to find a publisher for his translation, but the audience for Finnegans Wake translations is limited. In 2004 Michel decided to publish his translation as Veillée Pinouilles online, a format that allows him to make ongoing updates and revisions à la Leaves of Grass.

As Michel prepared to retire from his career in the civil service, he graciously took the time to speak with me about this longstanding fascination with the Wake. The interview was conducted over email, a format allowing for conversation as well as textual elucidation and analysis.

Derek Pyle (DP): How did you first get interested in Joyce?

Hervé Michel (HM): My interest first went to Finnegans Wake, not to James Joyce. By 1985, I had returned to Paris from a five-year sojourn in Morocco—a country where I happened to be born and raised from 1950 to 1962 and where I had returned with my newly-met wife Constance Hélène in 1980—where I had spent a jolly good time studying Arabic and reading the Qur’an. Back in Paris I felt compelled to go to the Galignani English bookshop on Rue de Rivoli to buy Finnegans Wake, on the back cover of which I discovered the man-in-the-street allure of James Joyce which was a sort of a shock. For me, Finnegans Wake was the Sacred Scripture of the Modern Era. I was not to be deceived by a text displaying all the phatic function I expected and smearing a thick semiotic matter, so I immediately felt the need to have it rendered in French.

DP: So you began with Finnegans Wake. Did you go the bookshop specifically seeking out the Wake? Or did it just one day catch your eye, while you were in the bookshop? Can you also explain a bit more what you mean that this was a text ”displaying all the phatic function… and smearing a thick semiotic matter”?

HM: Reference to James Joyce was paramount in the French literary critique between 1960 and 1980, people like Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, all drove me to consider Finnegans Wake as the nexus of the modern literary fabric, which I, with my gross ignorance of the finesse of the English language and of the encyclopedic richness of Joyce’s culture, took at first as the thick material somebody like Jackson Pollock smeared on his canvasses, but eventually I craved to emulate this latter Indian creation dance myself with the French language.

READ MORE…