Translating Apollinaire

Clive Scott

Description

Translating Apollinaire delves into Apollinaire’s poetry and poetics through the challenges and invitations it offers to the process of translation.


Besides providing a new appraisal of Apollinaire, the most significant French poet of WWI, Translating Apollinaire aims to put the ordinary reader at the centre of the translational project. It proposes that translation’s primary task is to capture the responses of the reader to the poetic text, and to find ways of writing those responses into the act of translation. Every reader is invited to translate, and to translate with a creativity appropriate to the complexity of their own reading experiences. Throughout, Scott himself consistently uses the creative resource of photography, and more particularly photographic fragments, as a cross-media language used to help capture the activity of the reading consciousness.

Illustrations


Acknowledgements


A Note on the Text


Prefatory Remarks


Introduction


Chapter One: Styles and Margins


Chapter Two: Choices, Variants and Variation


Chapter Three: The Linear and the Tabular


Chapter Four: Frames and Blind Fields


Chapter Five: The Chromatic and the Acoustic


Chapter Six: New Sounds, New Languages


Conclusion: Repetition, Difference and Simulacrity


Appendix I: Texts


Appendix II: The Case for the Tabular


Notes


Bibliographical References


Index

Sujets

• European Studies
• University of Exeter Press
• General officer
• Literary theory
• Poetry
• Études européennes
• General

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780859899758
• Langue: English

Extrait

Translating Apollinaire

Besides providing a new appraisal of Guillaume Apollinaire, the foremost French poet of early Modernism and WWI, Translating Apollinaire aims to put the ordinary reader at the centre of the translational project. It proposes that translation’s primary task is to capture the responses of the reader to the poetic text, and to find ways of writing those responses into the act of translation. Every reader is invited to translate, and to translate with a creativity appropriate to the complexity of their own reading experiences.

Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature, University of East Anglia. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and 2014 President of the Modern Humanities Research Association.
Also by Clive Scott and published by University of Exeter Press
Translating Baudelaire (2000)
“Clive Scott’s Translating Baudelaire offers exhilarating perspectives on the practice of (verse) translation. . . . His unrivalled ability to analyse French verse and his remarkable talents as a wordsmith, indeed as a poet, combine to produce compelling renderings of some of Baudelaire’s finest verse.” Times Literary Supplement , 27 April 2001
Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations (2006)
“[Clive Scott’s] passion and enthusiasm for an experimental translation which defamiliarises and destabilises make this an exciting tour de force and a significant contribution to the field of translation studies.” Forum for Modern Language Studies , 43, July 2007
“Clive Scott’s highly original study forges innovative lines of inquiry, while being a pleasure to read thanks to its fluid prose, thorough research and clear presentation of the translation techniques.” Denise Merkle, Target , 21:1, 2009
Translating Apollinaire
Clive Scott
UNIVERSITY of EXETER PRESS
First published in 2014 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR
UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk
© Clive Scott 2014
The right of Clive Scott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Paperback ISBN 978 0 85989 895 9
Hardback ISBN 978 0 85989 894 2
Typeset in 10.5pt Plantin Light, by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter.
for M.-N., who else
Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
Prefatory Remarks
Introduction
1 Styles and Margins
2 Choices, Variants and Variation
3 The Linear and the Tabular
4 Frames and Blind Fields
5 The Chromatic and the Acoustic
6 New Sounds, New Languages
Conclusion: Repetition, Difference, Representation
Appendix I: Texts
Appendix II: The Case for the Tabular
Notes
Bibliographical References
Illustrations

The front cover reproduces a portrait of Apollinaire by Irène Lagut (1893–1994), frontispiece of Guillaume Apollinaire (1919) by Roch Grey [Hélène d’Oettingen].
Figs 1–2.
Translations, with photo-collage, of ‘Photographie’
Figs 3–4.
Translation, with photo-collage, of ‘Chevaux de frise’
Fig. 5.
Translation, with handwritten comments, of ‘Marizibill’
Figs 6–7.
Translation, with photo-collage, of ‘Marizibill’
Figs 8–9.
Translation, with photo-collage, of ‘Annie’
Fig. 10.
Verse adaptation, with photo-collage (Manet), of ‘Marizibill’
Figs 11–13.
Translation, with photo-collage and enamel-paint doodles, of ‘La Nuit d’avril 1915’
Fig. 14.
Translation, with photo-collage and handwritten interventions, of ‘La Porte’
Fig. 15.
Translation, with accompaniment of handwritings, of first part of ‘Lundi rue Christine’
Figs 16–17.
Translation, with accompaniment of handwritings and photo-collage, of ‘Lundi rue Christine’
Fig. 18.
Handwritten translation on music paper, with notation and photo-collage, of ‘Chantre’
Fig. 19.
Photopoem translation of lines 71–76 of ‘Zone’
Figs 20–21.
Two versions of lines 121–134 of ‘Zone’, with photo-collage and enamel-paint doodles
Fig. 22.
Cinematic translation of lines 121–134 of ‘Zone’, with photo-collage
Figs 23–24.
Translation, with photo-collage, of ‘1909’
Fig. 25.
Translation, with photographed textual fragments, of ‘Les Fenêtres’
Fig. 26.
Contact-sheet photopoem translation of ‘Les Fenêtres’
Fig. 27.
Translation of fragments of ‘Le Voyageur’, with photo-collage, handwriting, and doodles in enamel paint and watercolour
Fig. 28.
Translation, with photo-collage (Chagall and Bacon), of ‘A travers l’Europe’
Acknowledgements

I would like sincerely to thank editors and publishers for permission to make further use of the following materials: an earlier version of the first part of Chapter One appeared as ‘Apollinaire and Madeleine Pagès: Translating the Photography of a Relationship’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies , 2002, 38/3, 302–14; some part of Chapter Two, including the translations of ‘Marizibill’ and ‘Annie’, appeared in ‘Genetic Criticism, Text Theory and Poetry’, in Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush (eds), The Translator as Writer (London: Continuum, 2006), 106–18; a first treatment of ‘Chantre’ (Chapter Three) was offered in ‘Experimenting with a Single String: Apollinaire’s “Chantre”’, Norwich Papers: Studies in Translation , 2009, 16, 72–87, while the translations of lines 121–34 of ‘Zone’ and of ‘1909’ (Chapter Four) were first published in ‘Our Engagement with Literary Translation’, In Other Words , 2008, 32, 16–29; the translation of ‘Les Fenêtres’ (Chapter Five), with modified commentaries, was published first in ‘Translating the Art of Seeing in Apollinaire’s “Les Fenêtres”: The Self of the Translator, the Selves of Language and Readerly Subjectivity’, in Paschalis Nikolaou and Maria-Venetia Kyritsi (eds), Translating Selves: Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008), 37–51, and subsequently in ‘The Windows: Translating Apollinaire’s “Les Fenêtres”’, in Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella (eds), One Poem in Search of a Translator: Rewriting ‘Les Fenêtres’ by Apollinaire (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 234–47; the idea of approaching a translation of ‘Le Voyageur’ through an experimental language related distantly to Russell Hoban’s Riddleyspeak (Chapter Six) was first tested in ‘Intermediality and Synaesthesia: Literary Translation as Centrifugal Practice’, Art in Translation , 2010, 2/2, 153–70; an early and rather shorter tabulation of the differences between the linear and the tabular—see Appendix II—is to be found in ‘From Linearity to Tabularity: Translating Modes of Reading’, CTIS Occasional Papers , 2009, 4, 37–52, an article which also included a translation of ‘La Porte’ (Chapter Three).
The photographs, including the photographic copies of other photographs, were either taken by myself or are fragments of unattributed photographs.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Simon Baker, publisher and managing director at the University of Exeter Press, for his unfailing and sympathetic understanding of this project, and for his tireless oversight of its publication. I would also like to offer my warm thanks to Rachel Clarke and the production team at Carnegie Publishing for so elegantly solving the manuscript’s typographical problems and producing so handsome a volume; and to Sarah Harrison for her meticulous and helpful editing of the text. Any remaining shortcomings are wholly my own.
A Note on the Text

The use of the acronyms ST, TT, SL and TL, for ‘source text’, ‘target text’, ‘source language’ and ‘target language’ respectively may strike some readers, to begin with, as unnecessarily jargonistic. The full terms themselves (‘source text’, ‘target text’, etc.) are standard currency in the literature of translation studies, and avoid the ambiguities and unwanted implications of alternatives such as ‘original’, ‘translation’, ‘translated text’, ‘language of the original’; for these reasons, it is desirable that they should be used consistently throughout the text. The use of acronyms for these terms is, again, standard practice in the field, and, once accustomed to them, the eye does, I hope, instantly and painlessly identify them, without their repetition becoming cumbersome. From time to time in the text, readers are reminded of the keys to the acronyms.
In the matter of translations of critical and poetic texts, where no reference is given to standard translations they are my own.
Prefatory Remarks

This book is the last volume in two converging trilogies. First, along with Translating Baudelaire (2000) and Translating Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’ (2006), it constitutes the final stage of a journey from my beginnings in literary translation to my present practices and convictions; some of these convictions are laid out in the Introduction. However much my ideas may have modulated in the course of this three-station itinerary, my underlying concern has always been to elaborate a practice which allows and encourages literary translation to develop its own literariness, its own literature, rather than seeking to regurgitate the literariness it finds in the source text (ST). An important part of my argument has always been that it is not translation’s business to preserve the literariness of the ST, since textual preservation runs counter to translation’s propulsive or projective instincts; if the ST’s literariness does not ‘naturally’ survive in translation, then it is because the ST’s survival depends on its capacity to become different from itself, to inhabit a condition of constant becoming. And that becoming different necessarily entails a relocation of literariness, which literary translation, the translation of the literary into another literary, is expressly designed to achieve.
The second trilogy that this book completes has, as its first two volumes, Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (2012a) and Trans