QWF Writes

Tag: translator

  • The Joyous Sea of Words—by Erín Moure

    The Joyous Sea of Words—by Erín Moure

    “one dusk après une autre I sit ici on this sofa diagonal to the window, and in sitting it’s presque as if everything’s crumbling into bits: cramps in the guts: setting sun weaving humid nuances: spaces from où move déjà les occupations cérémoniales of light and lune: between the crowns of sombreros or entre les durs vides of the fig tree that devastate into shadow and suspicion in the crépuscule of the sea resort: figuier, couronne, sombreros: la ancestral speech of fathers and grands-pères that infinitely vanishes into memory, they entertain all speech et tricot: these Guaraní voices simplement eternalize as they go on weaving: ñandu: there is no better fabric than the web des feuilles tissées all together, ñándu, together and between the arabesques that, symphonique, interweave, checkerboard of green and bird et chant, in the happy amble of a freedom: ñanduti: ñandurenimbó:”

    — Excerpt from Paraguayan Sea

    1504277468990On the evening of November 9, 2017, there was sheer delight on all sides at Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery in Montreal, where the public gathered with me, artist Andrew Forster, and renowned translation theorist and researcher Sherry Simon to talk about Forster’s outdoor exhibition, Mer paraguayenne / Paraguayan Sea. For months, the EV building at the corner of Ste. Catherine and Mackay streets has been wrapped with wide, yellow banners holding words from Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea, in my translation. The bright colour of the banners and the strangeness of Forster’s barbed font attract the attention of passersby to words in three languages.

    Forster, a longtime creator of design works and mixed-genre, public access art, teaches part-time at Concordia. He created a font that seems to have an excess of serifs, that looks almost like barbed wire and seems to needle the viewer. The text on the banners is from the late Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno’s novel, Mar Paraguayo—famed in South America—which I recently translated from the original Portuñol (a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish) and Guaraní (an Indigenous and official language in Paraguay).

    Translating this novel was a daring act. How to translate a mixed-language book into English? Well, by translating into mixed languages, of course—into a “mixelated” English. I ended up producing a polylingual text incorporating French, English, and Guaraní. And what better place to do that than in Montréal, a ville francophone majeure that deliciously contaminates all the other languages brought to it?

    At the event, I read for five minutes from my translation of Paraguayan Sea and talked about how languages change the mouth, and how, therefore, reading from a mixed-language book confounds the accent, creating an aural sound event that is unexpected every time. It is as if my mouth were a public hubbub and not mine, as if my mouth belonged now to language itself and not to me and my Erín brain.

    Forster spoke about his work of art, and the way he chose to “turn Bueno’s language toward the street,” via my translation. He wanted Bueno’s text to flow there, to make a building vibrate with language that interpellates the passersby. He asks: “How does this viscera of poetic language compete with all the other words of advertising and branding on the street?” The text, he noted, is not simply bilingual, or trilingual, but moves in and out of three different languages, making one meaning coalesce, then shatter, then re-form. As such, the banners reflect not an official politics or policy of language, but a lived and creative amalgam of language and meaning, one reflective of Montréal’s urban multiplicity. Forster quoted art critic Stephen Horne, who says in an as-yet unpublished essay that my collaborative work with Forster resists and protests not meaning (for it overflows with meaning) but “proper meaning.” It’s an unruly text that Wilson Bueno created in Brazil, and now we can embrace it as ours.

    Forster spoke too of creating the font, and how the project was funded. For it was funded not by the agencies that fund laboratories far from the street, but in great measure by the part-time faculty association at Concordia, CUPFA—which believes in art and language as well as in collective agreements. The banners, Forster noted, even become part of the view from inside the Pharmaprix drugstore across the street.

    We heard comments from folks who’d seen the work from taxis, and, amazingly, there were two people from Paraguay present. They had come because the Guaraní language called to them from the street.

    “: here I sit: ñandu: to inflect into the crochèterie my ñanduti renderings: ñandutimichĩ: smallest ti-fleur that persists with the needle barely for the excruciating patience of a few hours: in these sutures, salt clocks, that keep themselves smeared with the fluctuating couleurs du coucher du soleil that play themselves out in les automnes de maintenant: here ñandu: an opacity of feeling: je m’assois: assise: ñandu: my cancerish word is s’asseoir: me voir: ñandu: winter more than automne panique autumn: ñandu: what is the secret of identité entre these deux things absolument distinctes: spiders and scorpions?”

    — Excerpt from Paraguayan Sea

    1504277528360Ñandutí, said Valeria, a Montréal architect from Paraguay, I saw nothing else but the word “ñandutí” and I thought: “What is this word doing here? How did it get here?” It is not usual to see Guaraní in Montreal. She googled the word and Concordia together, found out about the event, and came. She spoke of the significance of the fabric and lace known as “ñandutí,” how it weaves seven-million Paraguayans together, and how amazing it was to see its weft embracing English and French in Montréal.

    It’s one of the joys of translation that, as a translator, I can bring a work into my community and convoke other people into the flow of words that is also a sea of language containing us all. In this case, though, Paraguayan Sea, in my translation, was published in the USA, not Canada. Canadian literary small presses rarely publish translations of works by foreigners, even if translated by Canadians, because they are not able to use their Canada Council funding in such cases to offset the cost of publishing and marketing. As a result, it is difficult to invite Canadian-chosen and translated works across borders to join us in book form. This time, it was an artist (Andrew Forster), a university (Concordia), a fine arts gallery (FOFA), and a part-time teachers’ association (CUPFA) who invited the words of Wilson Bueno across that final border. To be with all of us.

    erin-moure_authorphotoErín Moure is a poet and translator. She has published over 30 books of poetry, essays, memoir, and translations from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. She lives in Montreal.

    Author’s note: Thanks to the FOFA Gallery, Concordia professor Sherry Simon, Montréal artist Vida Simon, Paraguayan poet Christian Kent, Chilean poet Andrés Ajens, Brazilian poet and editor Claudio Daniel, the spirits of Wilson Bueno and Nestór Perlonguer, and above all Andrew Forster, all of whom are now joined in the beautiful web of language to which Wilson Bueno convokes us, urging us to move across borders, languages, genres, and genders, to delight in literature and reading and life.

    Andrew Forster’s exhibition, Mer paraguayenne / Paraguayan Sea, is held at the FOFA gallery until December 8, 2017 (FOFA Courtyard, intersection of Ste. Catherine and Mckay streets).

    Visit the Nightboat Books web page to learn more about Erín Moure’s translation of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea.

    Photo credits: Guy L’Heureux (yellow banners); Terence Byrnes (author’s headshot)

  • Gadfly at the Festival by Peter Richardson

    Gadfly at the Festival by Peter Richardson

    In the hospitality room at the Hôtel Gouverneurs in Trois-Rivières, you are greeted by two perky volunteers whose first question after introductions is: “Will you three be reading the French translations of your poems yourselves, or will you be requiring the services of a French reader?” Oh, my, you think. What translations? The hotel carpet begins to yaw under your chair. What was I thinking coming to a poetry festival in a city whose population is 97 percent French—without translations?

    “Ahhh,” your hand goes up, feigning nonchalance, “I don’t have any translations with me.” The two other English-language poets and the volunteers swivel their heads in your direction as if you had just morphed into a large red crustacean whose claws and antennae waved merrily in their direction. “Can I give a short explanation of my poems in fluent French and then read them in English?” One of the cordial volunteers laces her fingers together and lowers her voice: “You see, people reserve restaurant tables months ahead to hear our guests read in French. It would be unfair, don’t you think, to subject them to English, when most people here rarely speak it?”

    How could you have not foreseen this eventuality? For the next twenty-four hours, you huddle with a hotel dictionary, churning out translations and cross-checking these with your translator sweetheart via long distance telephone. You thank fate that years before, you earned a university certificate in French-English translation. Although that hardly qualifies you as an ace in Gallic syntax, it limits the number of world-class howlers you’re likely to churn out. You are going to have to revise up to the wire. And once a reading is finished, there will be no stopping off for sparkling conversation with fellow scribes in downtown Trois-Rivières. It’ll be back to your room to crank out more translations. There are four readings a day in restaurants, bars, parks, and libraries; you’ll have to furnish two poems, four times a day.

    Accordingly, you show up for each venue as if this were a lark, your fraudulent grin assuring audiences that you’re dishing up the real thing, the slaved-over equivalents they’ve come to expect. The rest of the time you are a mole, looking up words like “dip” or “wobble” in a battered Robert-Collins. At readings, you unfold two sheets of spiral notebook paper and smile at your hash-marked, arrow-filled texts as if it were normal to achieve verbal legerdemain with the French versions overnight.

    You can’t point to the Russian poet, Evgeny Tchigrinne, huddling by the hotel elevator in a rumpled hockey team manager’s parka, and say to his interpreter companion: “It’s not fair. He should have to read his stuff in French too.” You can’t complain that Andrés Morales—one of the leading poetic lights in Chile, a man who also speaks Croatian and English—should be prevailed upon to read his translator’s French versions. His credentials precede him, and plus, with his dark suits, Brylcreemed hair, and killer smile, he is a serious candidate for the festival’s Mr. Cordiality Award.

    “At readings, you unfold two sheets of spiral notebook paper and smile at your hash-marked, arrow-filled texts as if it were normal to achieve verbal legerdemain with the French versions overnight.”

    The other English-language poets seem like consummate professionals. The Canadian geneticist-poet, Jan Conn, for instance, looks you straight in the face and says: “Months ago, I commissioned someone to translate twenty of my poems. I knew I’d have to have this stuff ready. I practiced it for weeks.” When she says this, you feel as though you’ve been transported back to that fourth-grade field trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where, standing in the cafeteria’s lunch line, you reached into your pants pocket for change and pulled out pebbles. Earlier in the day, while waiting for your mother to drive you to school, fearing you would miss the bus from school to the planetarium, you found yourself scooping up pebbles and chucking them by the handful, and some of these found their way into your pockets. But so what if you’ve spent a lifetime picking nickels out of the pebbles in your pockets?

    Does it stop you from making interesting acquaintances? No. And your readings manage to clear those imaginary telephone wires at the opposite end of an airfield that is a reader’s five minutes at the microphone. Your cloth-and-wire craft ascends. It swoops up to a reasonable height in the short runway’s space over the tilted beer glasses and stilled bar chatter and its undercarriage avoids calamity. But without good conversational French, without a chameleon-like ability to don an entertainer’s alter ego at brasserie readings, without a knack for chuckling your way through introductions which contain a reference to the dog-eared papers you clutch, you shudder to think how this forty-eight-hour period might have transpired, and how close you came to earning the title: Worst Anglo Festival Invitee Ever.

    IMG_1483Peter Richardson is the author of four collections of poetry: A Tinkers’ Picnic (1999), finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award; An ABC of Belly Work (2003), short-listed for the Acorn-Plantos Award; Sympathy for the Couriers (2007), winner of the QWF’s 2008 A. M. Klein Award; and Bit Parts for Fools (2013), which was short-listed for the Archibald Lampman Award. A retired airline worker, he lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

    Photo: Via Flickr; no changes made (top); Martine Chapdelaine (headshot)

    Peter Richardson, Jan Conn, and a small group of other authors will be reading on April 11, 2016 at the launch party of Vallum Magazine‘s Issue 13:3. The Brass Door Pub (2171 Crescent Street, Montreal), 7:30 p.m.