I walked through Sydney’s back streets and upstairs to the crowded room where “Poetry Plurilingual” was about to begin. We sat on mismatched armchairs and wooden benches and squeezed up against each other. The night started with a series of readings of poems in foreign languages, followed by English-language translations. The focus of these readings was on the “original,” foreign, text. But the night took a sharp turn when two readers—Jack Breukelaar and Toby Fitch—boldly shifted the audience’s attention to the process and text of translation.
Jack introduced the audience to the work of Japanese writer and manga artist Kiriko Nananan, showing us a “1994 cool female authors” edition of Garo, an avant-garde manga periodical that began in the sixties, that he bought for a dollar at a discount bookshop. The book was visually striking—Jack didn’t know the work’s significance when he bought it—“but was drawn to [the] cover image by Nananan, reminiscent of Schiele or Baudelaire.” More of Nananan’s work has been translated into French than into English, and Jack had not found any previous English translation of his chosen poem:
Water
Kiriko Nananan
Translated by Jack Breukelaar
I will come to dislike myself completely.
Did you come to hate the nothingness in me?
that’s right you, in such a “now” style,
were enviably cool
compared to that I
Only wore Doc Martens in imitation of you.
Only listened to the music that you played when I was right next to you.
Only dilettantishly memorised the titles in film theory explained by you.
I am shamefully empty, aren’t I?
nothing
nothing
nothing
But what is the purpose of that something?
The flicker of a muted television.
The tick of an old clock.
An upsurged cluster of egoism.
A clustered upsurge of egoism.
well, that’s what I just what I think when I ponder it…
And yet, assuredly, I am here and I am no one else but me!
THE END
Jack zoomed in on the last words of each line, all inverse anagrams: “the first couplet’s anagrams make use of the repetitious nature of Japanese ideophones, these sort of onomatopoeic words that pervade the Japanese language… This particular couplet uses chikachika, meaning ‘flicker,’ and kachikachi meaning ‘tick.’ The second couplet is a palindrome that capitalises the syllabic nature of Japanese, playing with the verbs takamaru, meaning ‘to rise’ or ‘to swell,’ and katamaru, meaning ‘to clump’ or ‘to harden.’”
Jack got a few delighted laughs when he concluded that “the stanza is sort of an all-encompassing existential morsel—the first couplet sandwiching light, the ‘flicker’ and time, the ‘clock’ between sound, silence and ticking. The second wraps the most abstract sense of the psychological together with the most tactile sense of corporeality, ‘swelling’ and ‘hardening,’ into a sort of self-reflexive, ever-cycling orbit.”
Toby Fitch took a distinct approach. He read one of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, “Barbare,” followed by his “straight” English translation of the poem, called “Barbarian.” Then, surprising the audience, he read a third poem, a mistranslation or inversion, “Barbed.”
Barbarian
Long after the days and the seasons, the living and the lands,
The pennant of bloody meat over silken seas and arctic flowers; (they don’t exist.)
Surviving old fanfares of heroism—which still attack our hearts and heads—far from ancient assassins.
—O! The pennant of bloody meat over silken seas and arctic flowers; (they don’t exist.)
What bliss!
Blazing coals raining down in flurries of ice,—Bliss!—fire in the rain of a diamond wind, bursting through the earth’s eternally igneous heart for us.—O world!—
(Far from old retreats and old flames, that we can hear, can smell,)
The blazing coal and spindrift. The music, shifting the abysses and shocking the icicles into stars.
What bliss, o world, what music! And there, the shapes, the shivers, tresses and eyes, floating. And white tears, boiling,—what bliss!—and the voice of woman arriving at the depths of arctic volcanoes and chasms.
The pennant…
Barbed
IN THE LODGE
YOU REACH NEW DEPTHS
VOICE CHATTERING LIKE A GROTESQUE IF
A MUG COULD SPEAK FOR BOILING
WOMEN THE WAY YOU DO ICE
PICK EYES
SMARMY HAIR
WORLD VIEW A CLASH OF OLD FLAMES & OLD BOYS
THEIR MUZAK FORMING A SINKHOLE
FOR THE STARS TO MOVE INTO
BRAZEN SPUME
WHEN YOU SWEAT YOU BURST INTO CONFECTION
LIKE A FRACKED MINE
YOUR CHARRED HEART DIAMONDS FOREVER
I’D GIFT YOU A BUNCH OF FLOWERS FROM ANTARCTICA
’F I COULD AFFORD IT
SO MUCH FOR ASSASSINS YOUR HARDWARE
ISN’T WORTH HACKING LOOK
AT ALL THE FANFARE THE BLEEDING FLAGONS OF
MEAT IN THE ABATTOIR YOU ARE
FROZEN IN
SOME OTHER ERROR
THANKS TO YOUR CHOICE CUTS
ANTARCTIC FLOWERS’RE NOW AFFORDABLE I’M GONNA
BUNCH THEM UP IN SILK
FLOAT THEM ON THE PUBLIC SEA
FOR THE DURATION
YOUR BOAT-PEOPLED COUNTRY LISTING
IN THE WAVES
YOUR SEASONAL LIES SHATTER
Toby explained that he’s been “taking Rimbaud’s Illuminations, turning them upside-down, literally bottoms-up, and writing backwards through them, to create my own version” for the last couple of years. He thinks of his process as “a down-under conceit,” a kind of irreverent, experimental, Australian-ising approach, in the tradition of other Australian poets Christopher Brennan, Chris Edwards, John Tranter, all of whom (not so) famously (mis)translated French symbolist poets.
Toby said his process changes with each poem, “due to the different content in each, which [he] aims to invert, subvert, upset or hijack in some way, in a bid to create a new poem, but also to critique the influence [he] knows these poems have had on [his] work and others.” He doesn’t limit the possibilities: “there is nothing really that can’t come into the writing of these inversions.” Some of Toby’s techniques include homophony, malapropism, mimicry, metonymy, and lapsus calami, while other poems have “morphed into visual or pattern poems due to certain word and sense associations.” Toby emphasises the role of chance in his translations, throwing notions of fidelity out the window, preferring instead to follow intuitive associations of sound and/or meaning. With “Barbed,” Toby fed Rimbaud’s poem “through multiple languages on Google Translate to create a garbled version of the original before I turn it upside-down… For some reason, the French pavillon (“pennant” or “flag”) was misread by Google in between languages and came out as “pavillion” in whatever other language seemed appropriate to use at the time, which then found its way to “lodge” when I finally translated the poem into English. As this was in the last line of Rimbaud’s Barbare, I started my inversion with a line containing this word, “Lodge,” which in Australia is the official residence of the Prime Minister. With this in mind, I immediately had a seed to work with throughout the poem, that of an icy, ancient-thinking leader in the hot future waters of the end of the world. Barbare, after all, is an end times poem. The imagery and words of the original guided me from there. My inversion is in capitals; it’s a bit of an angry/histrionics poem, I think, because… wouldn’t you be a bit histrionic, faced with such a scenario? Many are.”
Later, Nathalie Camerlynck, one of the hosts of Poetry Plurilingual said: “I think what Toby Fitch did was great because he got up there and he massacred the French language and I think that the French language needs to be massacred. I think there’s too much reverence around it, I think it took a lot of chutzpah, guts, to do that.”
For an Australian audience, “Barbed” could be a meditation on the sexism in Australian politics. The current government, led by liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott, replaced a Labor government that, until June 2013, was led by Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. The fire and ice abysses of some geological, almost mystical bliss in Rimbaud’s poem become the more mundane, yet still-shocking lows of the boys’ club Abbott government. The “smarmy hair” is suggestive of comments fired at Gillard, whose partner is a hairdresser.
Rimbaud’s ancient, forceful earth is submitted to the will of mining companies in Toby’s inversion, with echoes of mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s own “poetry,” veiled in a Baz Luhrmann-esque aesthetic—diamonds forever. Toby jabs at Australian security intelligence and Treasurer Joe Hockey’s draconian budget cuts; Rimbaud’s silken seas become a special zone for inflation, short-sighted election promises, and the abuse of human rights.
Public forums for such playful translations are scarce in Australia. The night, then, was partly about creating a situation of de-familiarisation: “It would mean that people might not be too bored and people would leave feeling like they had maybe learnt something… so maybe if they’re not necessarily interested in things like more intellectual or avant-garde poetry, they’d still be interested in hearing the music of another language and learning a little bit about that culture,” Nathalie said.
The readers had different kinds of language aptitude—they were not necessarily poets, but were attentive to language and its malleability. Poetry Plurilingual, then, provided a rare opportunity for speakers of other languages to read publicly, and for people to listen purely to the language rather than to the ego-oriented work. Poetry Plurilingual is open to all of the possibilities of language and linguistic play: there are no curatorial decisions and anyone can contribute.
Nathalie told me: “It’s a bit weird, me talking about it, because it’s a poetry night but it’s not really about poetry. It’s just about listening. I think it’s about learning to listen. Listening to something you can’t understand, and appreciating it, and being open to something that you can’t understand.” While Jack and Toby’s translations re-inserted (or allowed for an upsurging of) some of the “ego” part of a poetry night by asserting their “original” translations and interpretations, they also jolted the audience into an understanding of the potential of literary translation.
***
Jack Breukelaar is an artist from Sydney currently residing in Japan. He has always had an interest in languages and is especially drawn to Japanese. “Water” is his first translation.
Nathalie Camerlynck was born in Sydney of French and Greek-Egyptian background. She is a PhD candidate in Self-Translation and Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. She holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from Paris IV Sorbonne and has worked as a commercial translator for Arts and Advertising.
Toby Fitch is the author of Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry 2012. His latest collection is Jerilderies (Vagabond Press 2014). He lives in Sydney, where he is currently writing a book of “inversions.” “Barbed” was first published by Seizure magazine.
Read more:
•Dispatch from Indonesia’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2014
•Judith Butler in performance
•Thomas Smetryns’ experimental comic opera