Papillonage

I was 16 when I was first mesmerized by Serban Foarță’s poetry—while listening to the greatest Romanian rock band of all times, Phoenix, whose lyrics he had written. The band was, at that time, banned by the communist regime for ‘defecting’ to the ‘imperialist enemy’ (illegally escaping to western Germany), but some connoisseurs still had the vinyl records. Foarță’s lyrics—mellifluous and sophisticated, mixing Romanian folklore and Western medieval folk books with alchemical references and modern poetic experimentalism—are still known by heart by millions of fans across Romania and beyond.

Later, as a younger poet, I got to dive into the incredible richness and complexity of Foarță’s oeuvre. He is arguably Romania’s most spectacular and diverse formal experimentalist since WWII. He also is formidably erudite; in the blink of an eye, his references can span the most distant and apparently incompatible areas and ages, but his ludic restlessness is always backed up by focused profundity and intellectual lucidity. One of his most recent feats is an impeccable Romanian version of Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems).

The challenges of translating ‘Papillonage’ (‘Buttérflyçion’) have been considerable, especially since the author takes advantage here of the special relationship between Romanian and French languages and cultures. I had to invent ‘English’ words to echo that relationship, while maintaining the poetic form and finding equivalents to the infectious puns and cross-cultural references. It is interesting to note that, paradoxically, when translating a multilingual poem and trying to render the various special (inter)lingual connections and interactions, it is the ‘main’ language (in this particular case Romanian) that disappears, since that is the most ‘translatable’ one, the one most exposed to rendition and foreignization.