Poetry Translations as Legitimation and Recuperation Strategies for Poets: ‘Rewritings’ of Poems by the Flemish Writers Hugo Claus and Herman de Coninck: A Terminological Problem

Abstract

Writers’ translations of other writers’ literary work can be incorporated into poetry research from an institutional perspective. Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory suggests the concept of ‘strategic repertory’: literary agents (e.g. writers) translate texts from literary systems, not just because they feel poetic or aesthetic affinity towards them, but also and especially because they enable them to stress and/or legitimize their own artistic production and positioning in the literary field. The Flemish poet Herman de Coninck, for instance, produced a ‘free, and respectively very free’ adaptation of sonnets by the unconventional and popular American bohemian writer Edna St. Vincent Millay. After his neo-realist poetry debut at the end of the sixties, which was highly acclaimed, De Coninck’s poetics shifted towards a more ‘parlante’ romantic-expressive concept of literature. Volumes like Zolang er sneeuw ligt (As Long as there is Snow, 1975) and Met een klank van hobo (With an Oboe Sound, 1980) can be considered examples of neo-romantic poetry. It is in this period that he adapted poems of St. Vincent Millay. First, De Coninck published reworded poems in the Dutch neo-romantic periodical Tirade. Other adaptations are also included in the volume of essays Over de troost van pessimisme (1983). The whole series (33 poems in all), Ter ere van de goedertieren maan (Pity me not the Waning of the Moon), ultimately appeared in the anthology Onbegonnen werk. Gedichten 1964–1982 (Hopeless Task. Poems from 1964 to 1982, 1984). In the posthumous edition of De Coninck’s collected poetry, the St. Vincent Millay poems are incorporated into the primary creative work of De Coninck, as part of the emotionally expressive volumes As Long as Snow is Lying and With an Oboe Sound, not in a separate section devoted to translated poetry. In discussing this specific case and other cases like Hugo Claus’s ‘creative’ translations of non-Dutch poems, I intend to demonstrate in what way some writers appropriate the work of foreign authors and put it to strategic use to affirm their own position in a literary system. Not just what is being translated, or how and when a text is being translated, but also the manner in which the adaptation of the foreign source texts function in the individual body of work, are of importance for poetical/poetics research. Translations may have programmatic l value for the development of authorship (or an author’s poetics).