Looking at Barbara Guest Translated en francais: If (Published Marseille, 1998)

(Note: I apologize that I will not be including accents, as I hate trying to figure out where they are on a qwerty. I tried scanning the pages but for some reason the type started breaking up, and I didn't feel like messing around with scanner DPI.)

I imagine translating Barbara Guest into any other language would be an incredibly demanding task, since her poetry takes to the subterranean lexical passageways, the mythopoetic subway, so often. And she has other ways of dematerializing and materializing that rival some of Cocteau's characters. I think the poem apres Guest might invite comparisons to Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, where a glove fitted on one's hand can shuttle one between worlds, except the glove would be a precise word alchemized at the exact moment.

I think she said it best herself once in a poem, and gave us her poetics in three words: "Hecate managed me."

If magazine was published in Marseille, and the Barbara Guest issue was Numero 12 from 1998. I don't know if the name of the magazine was a nod towards the English language, or if it's just a false friend and the French meaning of the word ("the yew tree") is the intended name. Probably a combination of the two.

This issue featured a very brief introduction to Guest's work by Norma Cole and Michael Palmer and a large suite of poems by Guest translated into French, and others in their original English.

Other writers who published in this issue include the redoubtable Hocquard (who collaborates with Juliette Valery on a strange comic book-like scenario), Dennis Cooper, Jerome Mauche, Jean-Pierre Faye, and others.

There is a charming full-page ad for Bob Perelman's La marginalisation de la poesie with a stunning cover of the Format Americain translation that appeared in 1997. It's very frameable art!

Anyway, I loved the poem "The Advance of the Grizzly" from the time it debuted in the pages of APR, along with several other amazing Guest poems. If you read these poems in that issue of APR and then in their final book placement, you will see at least one of them underwent significant revisions.

Here is "The Advance of the Grizzly" as it appeared in Defensive Rapture (Sun & Moon) and in her Selected Poems from the same press...


     The Advance of the Grizzly


go from the must-laden room

move to the interior

the remarkable bird in the case;

    wing

(like a pillow).


bird out of cloud--dissembling of trees; locks;

the icicle; out of the margin


falling from the grim margin the axle of skin;

enamoured with the fell wing.


I will move in my skin with the hollow

the neck and the brimming over the latitude

over the latitude onto the brink.

    frame of snow "within

squares of diminishing size"

ink hushed the snow; a blank sky rolled to the verge

parable heaved through drift...

and the moon weighted

with this the coil


evoked our willing to believe in a sudden pull

of the immense frame at the heel:


     spilled exactly

to destroy a circular return

from the ragged prose clump

clump on the cold landscape


white grown fatter...place of sharpened skin

romantic fever and snow

fresh from the gorgon bed

    dendrophagous "feeding on trees"

to sustain the romantic vision route over snow

the sudden drop into pines:


    "feeding on trees"

new mouths red of Okeechobee


(and ate the alligator and spat out the part

wedded to the green clavicle.)


loss of the sun


blight of the sun the looney forest

who will walk out of the plush interior into

the excited atmosphere?


an outlet for prose the advance of the grizzly.




It's hard to put into words exactly how or why this poem impacts me so strongly, as intensely now as when I first encountered it. Great poets like Guest give us back the ineffable. A great poem is always protean, and this poem lives up to that requirement; it's no sooner looked at than it's morphing, changing, yet somehow again resolving into another tenable construction. It seems to be endowed with infinite plausibilities, rather like energy itself.

I would say the poem seems to deploy a Mallarmean field. The poem seems to be racing its own heels and grazing itself, huntress and hunted both. I think this would fall into the category of what I like to call poetic endgame, when the poet sees the art for the ouroboros it is, yet is going to attempt to limn the paradox that the autotelic still has inner workings. I'm thinking of late Stevens ("the poem that took the place of a mountain") or as I said above, Mallarme with his "un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard." "A throw of the dice will never abolish chance itself."

That Mallarme poem, a shibboleth for the nascent realization of indeterminacy in linguistic (poetic, if you will) construction was pretty much a prefigurement of much that was to come after and could have been profitably discussed by the author of Godel, Escher, Bach had he wanted an example to match his titular ones in the realm of literature.

Of course, Guest seems to distill, distill relentlessly, so this new indeterminacy comes down to white grown fatter. That white is most likely the Mallarmean vide blanc de la page.

I am intrigued also by the way this Guest poem above seems to recapitulate the history of poetry's evolution from the concrete towards almost a spoondrift of competing abstractions, which would also apply to the history of the visual arts and artists which proved such a profitable fascination for the poet. The opening three lines of the poem seem to invite a move from the external, objective world towards a realization of perhaps quantum mechanical "frames" which can change incessantly: "a sudden pull / of the immense frame at the heel."

One could speculate and read this poem in a completely different manner. I know I have had many such readings over the years, and it holds me ensorceled still.

So, let's look at how one translator is going to deal with the holographic structure of this poem...


    le deplacement du grizzli


laisse la chambre toute moisie

va vers l'interieur

extraordinaire l'oiseau dans la boite;

    aile

(comme un oreiller).


oiseau hors nuage--rideau des arbres; serrures;

le glacon; hors marge


tombant de la marge ricanante l'axe de peau;

amourache de l'aile feroce.


je vais bouger dans ma peau avec le vide

le cou et combler a ras-bord la latitude

a ras-bord la latitude jusqu'au point-limite.


      encadrement de neige "comprenant

carres de tailles degressives"

encre etouffait la neige; un ciel blanc roulait jusqu'au bord

parabole palpitait sous le courant...


et la lune alourdie

par ca le cordage


eveillait notre desir de croire a une traction soudaine

du cadre immense au talon:


    renverse exactement

pour aneantir le retour circulaire

d'une prose depenaillee boum

boum sur le froid paysage


blanc plus gras devenu...lieu de peau aiguisee

fievre romantique et neige

fraiche sortie du lit de gorgone

    dendrophagous "nourriture sur arbres"

pour soutenir la vision romantique chemin sur neige

l'affaissement soudain dans les pins;


    "nourriture sur arbres"

nouvelles bouches rouge de Okeechobee.


(et mangea l'alligator et degueula la partie

mariee a la clavicule verte.)


perte du soleil


rouille du soleil la foret felee

qui traversera le luxueux decor pour entrer dans

l'atmosphere excitee?



une issue pour la prose le deplacement du grizzli



Traduction: Anne Portugal



First off, before looking at what sort of compromises the translator was forced to make (and when does this not happen?) I'd like to stress that the translator clearly worked hard on this, and overall did what she needed to do. Isn't Anne Portugal one of Guest's collaborators, on one of her livres d'artiste? Maybe I'm crossing wires.

So where are the casualties? Where does the poem take the greatest hits in translation?

Well, the title itself leaves much to be desired. In French, deplacement is exactly what it sounds like: "displacement; movement; travel; transfer; shift." There is not the menace that "advance" carries in the context of the phrase.

And then we can turn to the brilliant first line, where "must-laden room" makes a philosophical pun, probably at the expense of previous poetries, where models of representation are enforced; you must do this, or that. So the "must-laden room" becomes a philosophical mainframe where minds can be trapped.

The French "chambre toute moisie" goes only with the sense where "must" is moisture.

The next logical quibble would be with "rideau des arbres" where the translator chose a concrete noun in French to replace an abstraction in English which has much negative capability. A "curtain of trees" is not the same as "dissembling of trees" wherein matter is endowed with a sort of intentionality, which seems to be a recurrent theme throughout Guest's collection Fair Realism, in particular.

There is a big ambiguity in Guest's phrase "out of the margin." The translator chooses to translate it as "outside of the margin" and not opt for the possibility that something is emerging "out of the margin." (The liaison with "falling" in the next line could justify going the other way as a translator.) But I understand a decision had to be made. She had to go with head or tails; there's no standing the coin on its edge there.

But with "ricanante" I can only assume the translator got confused or was misled by one of her dictionaries. This feminine form of the adjective from the verb "ricaner" would not equate with "grim" in any way. Maybe she misread "grim" as "grin." That's the only likely explanation I could settle on.

ricaner: intransitif 1er groupe (conjugaison)

Rire avec une affectation d’impertinence et dans une intention de moquerie.

Au lieu de répondre sérieusement, il se mit à ricaner.
C’est un homme qui ricane à tout propos.

"Fell" is such a Shakespearean word. "Feroce" will work, I suppose. But I feel there was a better word, one that would connote the archaic in French the same way "fell" does in English.

One could argue whether "comprenant" is the right word, or whether that is confusing how the relationship is structured; i.e. is the frame of snow within the squares of vanishing size, or is Guest saying "frame of snow...and within there are squares of diminishing size." The translator had to choose one construction, understood, but I think she went with the less likely construction.

"Cordage" for "coil" is unfortunate. Again Guest has chosen a word that has a Shakespearean resonance here. "This mortal coil" was probably not in the translator's mind at all. But then choice quotes of Racine probably wouldn't be in the mind of most translators translating a poem from French into English.

Translation is always a messy business, but especially translation of poetry. I want to stress these compromises are probably typical for the course for a gifted translator.

With that said, one could say "Evoked" is not "awoke"("eveillait").

Oh god! The horrors of onomatopoetic words and their translations. "Boum / boum" is not "clump / clump." The ghost of Wittgenstein is surely wringing his hands at this point in the poem.

The translator has clearly confused what is a participle in the definition of "dendrophagous" for a substantive, a noun. So the activity of feeding becomes feed itself: "la nourriture."

The translator has chosen "affaissement" for the sudden "drop" which occurs in the pines. In English, it comes across more as a quick change of terrain, with the trope possibly indicating a shift in vision or aesthetics. In French, "affaissement" is a "sagging, cave-in or collapse." This would be an easy nuance to miss.

"Rouille" ("rust") is a bad substitute for "blight." There are types of blights (on plants) that are indeed called "rust." But that's so particular and unwarranted here.

I wonder if the translator was tempted to use a version of "farfelu" (shades of Malraux!) instead of "felee" for "looney." Barbara Guest likes to use l'orthographie etrange sometimes. I think of her "range of the sandle-footed" in her poem "Sand" which was clearly intentional, as it was kept through several different settings, and different books. Here, "looney" evokes not only cartoons, but the false orthography evokes marginal entities, circuses and carnivals and such.

"Decor" for "interior" loses much, philosophically.

And as I stated with the title (which here recurs in the last line of the poem) I think the translator could have chosen a better and stronger word for "advance."

That much said, I apologize for taking this machine apart piece by piece. I think the translator did a decent job.

I do think the translation could be much improved by addressing some of the issues I raised above.

Translation of poetry seems to be a battle that never ends. Or a battle within a battle. Because the poem itself should not really be amenable to paraphrase. So how to translate what can't be defined?

I can only answer: divine birthright and total arrogance.

God bless the translators, for they must become the Devil to get anything done.