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translation into one or ten or however many languages—all
these events do change the poem, enriching it, making it into a
more complex occasion.
Such a definition of the poem also does away with the
old romantic idea of the untranslatability of poetry, an idea
stuck in an idealist conception of the “oeuvre,” of the work of
literature, but also of the individual and the world, and of the
incommunicability of consciousness. If we acknowledge the
poem to be such a mutable complex of occasions, then nothing is
more translatable, nothing demands multiple translations more
than a poem—and nothing enriches the poem more than being
translated. This idea of instability, of relativity, of oscillating
meanings and objects also brings the act of writing-as-translating
and translating-as-writing into the various modern paradigms
of knowledge. Think back to one of the emblematic poems
of American Modernism: the opening poem of Ezra Pound’s
Cantos. This magnificent poem is simultaneously a translation
(forward into English but also backward into a form derived
from Anglo-Saxon poetics) of a translation of a translation
(Pound’s Englishing via Andreas Divus’ renaissance Latin
version of a scene from Homer’s Odyssey) and an homage to the
translator. Poet and translator, même combat!
Pierre Joris has published more than 40 books of poetry, essays, and
translations, including several translations of the poet Paul Celan, and
received two NEA Translation Fellowships in 1999 and 2012.
The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation
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