Posts featuring Erín Moure

What’s New in Translation: August 2022

August 15, 2022 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Alyea Canada, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

Introducing new translations from French, Persian, and more!

As the world reverberates with the powers and consequence of language, this month’s round-up of translations are especially resonant with their assertion of how texts can subvert, heal, and ascribe meaning to life. Below, find reviews of a text that gathers poetry and its translators in boundary-defying dialogues of methods and ideas; a novel that powerfully uses silence to address the transgenerational trauma of the Rwandan genocide; and a sensitive story of an Iran on the precipices of change by celebrated modern novelist Simin Daneshvar.

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Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding, Eulalia Books, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

How does one review a translation (or rather a set of translations) which center the translator? This is the question I’ve been asking myself as I make my way through Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding. This ambitious collection is unique in bringing together translation practitioners from the heart of the Anglosphere and giving them a space to speak about their practices—what Hedeen might describe as “countermapping,” what Don Mee Choi might describe as “lilymethod” mapping, and what Erin Moure might call “in”mapping.

As you may have gathered from this description, Poetry’s Geographies begins not with the text-in-translation but with the translator, with their essays and methods which speak in sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary dialogues. Through these, we, the readers, are asked to sit with the very contradiction of translation itself—the notion that one language can be “deformed” or “twinned” or “exploded” into another. Indeed, the acknowledgement of this impossibility, the greatest and most repeated cliché concerning poetry and translation, drives the collection. As Skoulding writes in the introduction, “Rather than making the world more transparent and ‘accessible’ for quick consumption, poetry and its translation can sustain opacité…as an opaqueness that allows the Other to exist in full, not to be reduced or subordinated.” Put differently in the essay from Sasha Dugdale:

I stand against this idea of translation as a vitrine in which we see the original. I stand against it here, me, many kilos of proteins, lipids, water, with a slow local history of my own composition and concurrent decomposition (I see also that it is a grave act to scribble in these lines)

no person is a pane of glass no person is of pure intent no person is devoid of history

In this approach, the notion of language as a window is cast aside. Language is smoke and mirrors (me). Language is air (Ziba Karbassi). Language is sound (Skoulding). Language is an infestation (Moure). Language is a sufism (Stephen Watts). Poetry’s Geographies asks us to stare into the mist and watch the swirling shapes, the fleeting shadows, the forms familiar, menacing, and absent. The thing we perceive, in Hedeen translating Victor Rodríguez Nuñez, may in fact be absence:

your existing is not shaped
from the knot that resembles the foliage weave
your being is not shaped
from the board sanded down by countless downpours
barely the keyhole owl eye
to look inside so nothing was left outside
an image in heat

fertilized by the void

A Language Like Life Itself: An Interview with Chus Pato

December 6, 2021 | in Interviews | by Chus Pato and Erín Moure

Poetry has no future because the time of poetry is always the present.

Chus Pato is one of Europe’s most significant contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia, in Northwest Spain, and writes in Galician, a language that over time has weathered censorship, dictatorship, colonialist policies, and administrative neglect, all aimed at impeding its survival. Here, she converses with Erín Moure, Canadian poet and her translator into English for twenty years, on the occasion of the 2021 Poesiefestival Berlin. They discuss the current situation of Galician, the ways that poetry allows us to think out or rethink our relation to politics, the language of the poem and its difference from the language of consensus, and her current explorations into articulated language and human action in her work-in-progress, Sonora, from which she read in Berlin.

The original Galician conversation and German translation by Burghard Baltrusch are available; the interview has been translated into English by Moure with permission from Poesiefestival Berlin. Chus Pato’s most recent book in English, The Face of the Quartzes, appeared in Erín Moure’s translation from Veliz Books in fall 2021.

Erín Moure (EM): We’ve often discussed your choice to write poetry in Galician and how it is a political decision, a demand for justice for the language of your people—a language prohibited under Francoism—as well as a resistance to the political undermining of Galician and subtle promotion of a single and compulsory language, that of the unitary state of Spain, which we in English call “Spanish.” What I’d like to point out is that on the other side of the Atlantic, for your audience that is not Galician and that reads you in English translation, Galician is not a minor or defective tongue but simply a European language, and you a European poet. How do you see your role as poet, in Galicia, in Spain, in Europe, and now in the city of Berlin, a European capital of poetry as well as meeting point of the west and the east of Europe?

Chus Pato (CP): I think that in Galicia and in general I am well known enough as a poet and am read by the community of those interested in poetry. I know many loyal readers read my books when they are published. This is what I most value. Even so, I still perceive resistance on the part of canonizing institutions that I think has to do with what these institutions see as the difficulties in reading what I write (hermeticism, experimentalism, etc.) and with issues related to my political stance, a position that coincides neither with the right that governs us nor with majority nationalism.

That my work is known at all in the Spanish state is due in great measure to the efforts of my publishers and translators, and my feeling is that they have been remarkably successful. I can’t really gauge how I am perceived elsewhere in Europe. I feel I’m read more on the American continents. In Europe, my gratitude goes to Frank Kaizer, my Dutch editor at De Vrije Uitgevers, for his efforts and courage, and also to the Rotterdam festival and its former director Bas Kwakman.

EM: How would you describe the current situation of the Galician language, both in cultural milieus—where Galician figures prominently—and in daily life?

CP: The situation of Galician is dramatic, really. The Council of Europe, in its recent report on the fifth evaluation of Spain’s implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, warns that only 23.9% of children in Galicia under the age of fifteen can express themselves in Galician.

Galician continues to suffer from a covert criminalization that has prevented generational transmission. The linguistic policies of the political party that systematically wins Galician elections are largely responsible for putting us in this extreme situation. Today, we can no longer say that Galician is strong in the private sphere, at least not in the case of younger generations.

We have to distinguish diverse political positions on linguistic diversity of the State: the Spanish right is always intolerant, and within the left there are degrees of tolerance. In the forty years that separate us from the end of the Franco dictatorship, we have not advanced much toward what is desirable, at least in my opinion.

What matters to me is what happens in Galicia, what the majority of Galicians think of their native language, and the reasons that lead them to turn away from it and not transmit it to their children as their mother tongue. These reasons have to do with the economic policies of the State, which has always viewed Galicia as a land from which to extract raw materials and labour. Two centuries of emigration and of the continual destruction of the values that constituted and still constitute us as distinct as Galicians largely explain the situation that faces us now.

Translator Profile: Katia Grubisic on Contemporary Canadian Literature

March 13, 2017 | in Interviews, Translator's Profile | by Lee Yew Leong

They push at these familial forces, the draw of the origin story, and the magic and tragedy as they try on and define new selves...

In this email interview conducted by Editor-in-Chief Lee Yew Leong, award-winning poet and translator Katia Grubisic took time out of her busy schedule to discuss the state of Canadian literature (in English and in French) as well as the challenges she faced translating David Clerson’s lyrical novel, Brothers (recently featured in our Translation Tuesday showcase at The Guardian), including “the ‘bitch’ problem.”

Lee Yew Leong (LYL): David Clerson’s haunting novel Brothers, in your outstanding translation, would not be out of place in the fiction section of our Winter 2017 edition, not only because of the seaward-facing figures connecting many of the pieces but also because of the strong animal motifs. Among the other elements that make up this story’s poetic permutation: brothers and fathers, dreams, the very act of story-telling. As the translator—and therefore arguably the closest reader of the novel—what do you think David Clerson is trying to say with Brothers, and how do you think these elements come together to fit the overall arc?

Katia Grubisic (KG): Thank you for your kind words.

Yes, the novel’s sea-journey theme, the search for the father, the pretty far-out cynanthropy, the origin story, the twin motif—it almost feels mythological, and David’s baroque style in this book lends it a kind of timeless timbre.

As the translator, I may, in fact, be the worst placed to comment on what it’s about, second perhaps only to the author himself! What drew me to the narrative was first the landscape, the way the sea and the briny hills become almost their own character, anchoring and tormenting the brothers (who try to escape their identity as determined by the place they’re from), and drawing them to their inevitable return. Brothers explores how who we are and who we become is shaped by those who make us, including in this case, literally the knife-wielding though well-intentioned mother, who wants to give her firstborn son a companion as a buffer against the cruel world. The brothers are shaped also by their absent “dog of a father,” or rather—and this is telling—by the often conflicting stories told about him. Yet they push at these familial forces, the draw of the origin story, and the magic and tragedy as they try on and define new selves, and their own universe, has such compelling pathos. You don’t want to be them, but you can’t look away.

LYL: The novel at once reminds me of The Return, a film by Andrey Zvyagintsev about two brothers waiting for their father’s return, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which not only involves an odyssey on a boat, but also similarly injects a magical realism into the story-telling. What other literary ‘predecessors’ might I, as a non-Canadian, have missed?

KG: I don’t know that Brothers’ ancestry is nationally bound. When I first read the book, it reminded me of Agota Kristof’s Le Grand cahier—the brothers, the old mother, the violence. Pas du tout, David told me; in an interview, he said he had been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy at the time! He wrote it too at the height of the Printemps érable student and popular uprising in 2012, which subtly tinged the narrative. Though I agree that both The Return and Life of Pi could be seen as kin, in terms of devices and preoccupations.

The wonderful thing about fiction is that it can belong to whichever reader happens to crack the spine. The region David evokes spoke to me so vividly of the Baie des Chaleurs shores in eastern Quebec and northern New Brunswick, but when I asked him about it, he conceded that many had pegged his setting as the Gaspésie region, but spoke instead of the imprint left by work he had read in his youth, including Golding and Stevenson, and even of a dream he once had, in which he saw himself fishing a dead dog out of a lagoon.