Posts filed under 'parody'

Honoring the Art of Translation: Radu Vancu

It is [the poet’s] task . . . to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

With this first feature, we are honoured to introduce an original text by Radu Vancu, a brilliant Romanian writer and translator (and past Asymptote contributor!) who traverses the international literary arena with a virtuoso expertise and a seemingly time-defiant profusion. In the following essay, he discusses his ongoing project to translate the works of Ezra Pound into Romanian, and thus brings to the forefront the great modernist’s defiance of limits. This poetry, which spans time, language, and cultures, is a testament to the sublime nature of translation, and its endless capacity for encapsulation.

Ezra Pound quickly understood that, in the case of poetry, regeneration is actually reinvention—or, more synthetically and apparently more paradoxically, inventing is actually reinventing. Poetry can live only through the graft of all that is alive throughout all ages, all cultures, all languages. Therefore, Pound came to understand that poetry does not mean only regenerated language, as he originally believed; it is instead a translingual, transnational, and even transcultural body, built (or “excerned,” to use his own word) by the addition of all the “living parts” still active in the geological layers of poetic language.

He says this in more contracted and memorable form in a 1930 Credo: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.” J.J. Wilhelm also observes, in Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, that this proposition is in full consonance with a small text by Pound, Religio, from 1910—forming thus, in my opinion, an approximate backbone of Pound’s poetics, otherwise so branched and polymorphous.

The poet must coagulate in their work this migrant light which iridesces simultaneously the Eleusine texts, the Provençal ballads, the Italian sonnets, in addition to the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Latin poetry, and so on. It is their task, therefore, to not only regenerate the poetic language—this enormous burden is still too simple—but to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures. This is why it is hard to capture in translation the beauty of an Ezra Pound poem: because some poems substantiate the ancient Greek beauty, harsh and dangerous (“seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light / And take your wounds from it gladly,” a poem says); some others take the form of Medieval villanelles, ballads, or shapes invented by Pound himself (the villonaud, for example), coalescing in another kind of beauty—seductive, chanting, feminine, sweet; some others reinvent a traditional Chinese aesthetic in the English language of the twentieth century; and so on. What is remarkable and astounding is that you, a twenty-first-century reader of English, can resonate with all these varying types of beauty. Pound’s genius is precisely that he succeeded in making new and alive the beauty of all great poetic languages, including the old or “dead” ones.

His achievement is that he can adapt his resonating apparatus to all the diachronic wavelengths of beauty. The construction of the poem—his physis—also varies according to the oscillation of this wavelength; when “making new” the ancient Greek epigrams, the poem has two or three lines, quite rarely more, and the Idealtypus of the beauty targeted is that of an intense and sarcastic, sometimes quasi-licentious lapidarity. In other instances, when he pretends to be translating from the ancient Chinese, the poems become long, winding, archaic in lexis, but the intricacies of the lines are in actuality an ekphrasis of the Chinese ideograms. In the Cantos, this mechanism builds an enormous vortex-poem, or, more preferably, a poem whose vortex is that of History itself—infinitely commingling fragments of poems, fragments of languages, fragments of historical, economic, biological, political information, and so on. And the beauty of these demented, illegible, and hypnotic Cantos is the very demented, illegible, and hypnotic beauty of our times. READ MORE…

Festive Reads: Holiday Writing from Around the World

The Christmas season can be oppressive in everything from familial expectation to brow-beating advertising to relentless good cheer.

For many of us, Christmas is a time for gathering with family, giving gifts, and singing carols. For others, however, the holiday isn’t a snowy Love Actually postcard scene; in some parts of the world, it features tropical weather and end-of-year department store sales, while in others, it’s a just a regular day. You’ve read the blog’s Summer Ennui reading recommendations, and now we’re back with a list of our favorite Christmastime reads from Assistant Managing Editor Rachael Pennington, Communications Manager Alexander Dickow, and Editors-at-Large Alice Inggs and Barbara Halla.

Alice Inggs, Editor-at-Large for South Africa

Picture this: it’s December 25 in South Africa and there is drought somewhere in the country. Farmers pray for rain, sink boreholes, shoot dying sheep. The acacia in the bushveld to the north is bone-white and the grass invites fire. The heat is a white heat and cattle bones glare in the sun. The paint on Father Christmas statues outside shopping centres begins to melt and pine cuttings out of water droop. Tempers crackle and flare. The roads are too busy and the accident death toll climbs. White-robed umnazaretha worshipping in the open veld stand out against the brown-grey earth. It is hot and bleak and houses are full because all the family came to visit.

“It is a dry, white season” begins South African Black Consciousness writer Mongane Wally Serote’s poem “For Don M. — Banned.” It was written in the early 1970s for Don Mattera, a Xhosa-Italian poet and friend of Serote’s who had been banned by the apartheid government. The first line of Serote’s poem was later borrowed by Afrikaner André Brink for his 1979 novel ’n Droë Wit Seisoen (A Dry White Season). The book was banned too, as well as a subsequent film adaptation starring Zakes Mokae and Donald Sutherland. It’s been two and a half decades since those laws were repealed and the cultural whitewash acknowledged, but that line—“It is a dry, white season”—still echoes through summer in South Africa, the season in which Christmas falls; a reminder of the oppressive atmosphere that back then was not limited to the months when the temperature climbed.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Poetry by Nala Arung, translated by Tiffany Tsao

"Who would have guessed that love would collide / Into the wall that is FPI."

Efpei I’m in Love by Nala Arung

The cover of Efpei I’m in Love, a poetry collection by Indonesian writer Nala Arung, announces that it is “a book of tasteless poetry.” And it is apparent from the outset that its tastelessness operates on multiple levels.

Its title is deliberately lowbrow—a take on the title of the wildly popular teenage chick-lit novel, Eiffel … I’m in Love, published in 2001 and adapted for film as a romantic comedy of the same name two years later.

The Efpei that has displaced the original Eiffel refers to the FPI, or Islamic Defenders’ Front. A hard-line Islamic vigilante organization, FPI has gained national notoriety for using violence to enforce their interpretation of Islamic law. Its members often patrol areas for signs of un-Islamic activity, destroying property and beating up offenders. The organization has also attacked religious minorities, including Buddhists, Christians, and Ahmadi Muslims, whom they consider a heretical sect. FPI is certainly no laughing matter and hardly the stuff love poems are made of—or so it would seem until one reads the titular poem “FPI, I’m in Love.”     READ MORE…