Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics by Pamela Banting

Abstract

W O R K S C IT E D Chicago Cultural Studies Group. “Critical Multiculturalism.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992): 530-55. Gunew, Sneja. “Multicultural Multiplicities: Canada, U.S.A., and Australia.” Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of Italian Emigration. Ed. Francesco Loriggio. Toronto: Guernica, 1996. 29-47. Loriggio, Francesco. “The Question of the Corpus: Ethnicity and Canadian Literature.” Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature. Ed. John Moss. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1987. 53-69. Padolsky, Enoch. “Cultural Diversity and Canadian Literature: A Pluralistic Approach to Majority and Minority Writing in Canada.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 3 (1991). Rpt. in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Ed. Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and J.R. (Tim) Struthers. Peterborough: Broadview, 1997. 24-42. d o n n a p a l m a t e e r p e n n e e / University of Guelph Pamela Banting, Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1995). xx, 250. $16.95 paper. By her own admission, Pamela Banting speaks only English. In her ac­ knowledgements, she (ironically?) thanks her professor “in Spanish 100” a decade ago for having “impelled this project in translation” (xviii). It is a project in “improper” translation, translation effects within a single “na­ tional” language. “The Promise of Translation,” title of the final chapter of her Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics, holds out the hope of a model of translation as seduction, translation as promissory, which doubles the covenant of a people among themselves even as it delays or defers such shared meaning by foregrounding the differences between languages. Follow­ ing the logic of translation she presents, Banting’s book offers no revelation, but revivifies the promise, suggestively braiding three strands of argument concerning the poetics of ordering the long poem, Canadian literature theo­ rizing, and translation as somatized practice. These are concisely linked in the final sentence of the book: “Translating, the long poem composes the body Canadian” (231). Translating Derrida into Canadian terms and in the process rewriting Robert Kroetsch to stretch further his punning “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,” this book enacts the poetics of deferral it proposes by preferring such (in)conclusions. Some of the strands are subject to more delay than others. A more salient formu­ lation of their interweaving is offered in the second last sentence: “The long poem is an ‘owner’s manual’ for the body.” The amassing of rich detail con­ cerning the theoretical positions on language and translation of Fred Wah, 224 Daphne Marlatt, and Kroetsch supports interesting and insightful readings of a number of their poems in an argument for an embodied poetics where text and body overlap, enwrap, interrogate each as signifier for the other. Translation, however, as becomes an art of approach, is a promise not fully respected (kept). Banting adopts Roman Jakobson’s distinction between three different types of translation to organize the sections of her book, one devoted to each of the poets whose texts are examined in three or four chapters. Fred Wah’s work with the pictograms of B.C. First Nations people and with the paratactical syntax of Chinese, his father’s tongue, is classified as “interlin­ gual” translation. Robert Kroetsch’s concern to rewrite classical epics in prairie vernacular, his focus on alphabets, archeology, and a decoding that will recover lost connections by rooting the borrowed word in an experience that questions its “proper” usage, is identified as “intralingual” translation or rewording in the same (national) language. Marlatt’s project of shifting the body from under the weight of the patriarchal dictionary that involves etymological investigations in order to re-member lost sensory memories of the body, an approach to language that sees it as part of a continuous rela­ tion to the phenomenological world where it is simultaneously mothertongue and (m)othertongue, is categorized as “intersemiotic” translation or rework­ ing of one sign system into another. Ethnicity, region, and gender as these inform language practices are the operative frames for Banting’s analysis of contemporary Canadian poetics. In each section, however, she blurs Jakobson’s distinctions to demonstrate that all three types of translation are practised...