Placing the Poem in Translation

Abstract

Abstract:The refuses to be pinpointed to a specific locality. If we want to think of it in spatial terms, we need to regard it as encroachment. Influenced by cognitive research on conceptual blending (conducted by Fauconnier and Turner) and inspired by Clive Scott's suggestion that literary translation is designed to trace original's trajectory between its birthplace and translator's here and now (cf. Translating Rimbaud's Illuminations, 2006), I demonstrate how can be composed and read surrounded by expanding archival and bibliographical material. The understanding of text as an environment of borrowed from genetic criticism (cf. Deppman, Ferrer and Groden 2004), allows me to consider not so much as a locality bounded by translator's native culture, but as a place expanding while translator traverses surrounding territories of page, textual variants and readings in other cultures. To illustrate my argument I examine how Frank O'Hara's spatial engagement with New York, reflected in sprawl of his verse, has assisted my thinking about Marcin Swietlicki's (non-)participation in Polish urban culture and his projections of city. My English translations of Marzanna Kielar's poetry located conceptually in Poland's north - poet's imaginary homeland - embrace other norths. The experimental work of Krystyna Milobedzka attempts to hint at between, where language meets experience, page and silence. In my variants a Milobedzka poem has relocated itself to accommodate spacing of Pascale Petit's versions of Chinese poet Yang Lian. My examples show as a manipulable array of mental spaces (see also Lefevere's view of translation as manipulation).Key names and concepts: avant-texte, bilingual consciousness of a text, blend (multiple blend of poem), cognitive (linguistics, poetics), conceptual integration (otherwise known as blending), generic space, genetic criticism, mental space, poem-in-translation, Polish (language, poetry), rewriting (translation as rewriting), variant (of a text), word environment (of a text), translator-writer(ProQuest: ... denotes strike-through in original text omitted.)The conceptual, linguistic, temporal and spatial placement of a poem via process of translating relies on encroachment. Translators usurp for themselves right to intrude and trespass on territory outlined both by original text and by its translation. They make gradual inroads upon words, images, thoughts, emotions and silences of original poem and its variants: its multiple readings, drafts, annotated versions, re-drafts, renditions into another language, unpublished and published texts. As a translator-writer who moves in her work between English and Polish, I would like to contemplate this dynamic mental space which a poem - to be translated, being translated, after it has been translated - claims as its own. I call it the poem-in-translation to emphasize its processual character, its inbetweenness, its expansiveness.Mental Space of Poem-in-translationAs a cognitive scholar, I use term mental space advisedly, referring to cognitive research on mental networks and conceptual integration (otherwise known as blending) which posits existence ofsmall conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. [Mental spaces] are partial assemblies containing elements, structured by frames [long-term schematic knowledge] and cognitive models. (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 102)Following Fauconnier and Turner's classification of mental spaces presented in The Way We Think (2002: Chapter 14), I have suggested that poem can be seen as a multiple blend - integration network with numerous input spaces that can be projected in parallel or successively into intermediate blends, which themselves can serve as inputs to further blends (Wojcik-Leese 2010). …