Retranslating Ibykos and Li Bai: Experimental, Rhizomatic, Multi-Media Transformations

Abstract

Retranslating Ibykos and Li Bai:Experimental, Rhizomatic, Multi-Media Transformations Adrienne K.H. Rose (bio) Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways” and the 85 project’s “Common Autumn Song” raise important questions about the retranslation of ancient Classical texts, specifically lyric poetry. Both works are retranslations that challenge the conventionally singular, linear and unidirectional movement of an original “source” towards a translation “target.” Multiple retranslations—translations of a single original text over and over again—offer unique and complementary facets of the original, and highlight the fact that a text is not a closed unit with a single, identifiable, retrievable meaning. Retranslations also reflect the ideological and poetological currents of the time in which they are made. If nineteenth-century English-language translations of Latin poetry rhyme, even though the Latin does not, then what ideological and poetological currents are motivating Carson’s six ways of Ibykos and the 85 project’s versions of Li Bai? Carson retains the structure and rhetorical gestures of the original poem while breaking with the historically conventional poetic diction used in traditional translations of ancient Classical texts. The 85 project relies on unconventional visual layout and deferral techniques that attempt to mimic for the Western reader the experience of reading Classical Chinese poetry. Carson’s Ibykos and the 85’s Li Bai offer challenges to existing translation and retranslation theories. In this paper I examine a contemporary literary phenomenon in which rhizomatic retranslations metabolize the ancient Classical canon through modern poetic experiments. The rhizome (ῥίζωμα) is a “mass of roots,” or a “stem” or “race.” The botanical rhizome is a subterranean root system that grows new auxiliary shoots from its nodes and is capable of generating new plants from its separated parts, like aspen trees or gingerroots. In the hands of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (D&G), the rhizome is an “image of thought” which challenges the arborescent metaphors that pervade Western culture, a culture in which the mind organizes its knowledge of the world in terms of the tree image, where centralized, hierarchical principles—branches—are grounded in foundations—roots (D&G 1980). A retranslation is a second or later translation of a single source text into the same target language (Koskinen & Paloposki 2010b: 294). It is not the first translation of a work in the translating language. Since my paper addresses ancient Greek as well as Classical Chinese literary texts, I include the national designations. When “Classical texts,” “ancient texts,” and “Classical canon” appear without any cardinal or national specification, I mean to refer to both Western and Chinese literary texts traditionally accepted as most representative and influential in shaping later literature and culture. Responding to the “open concept” and “open field” [End Page 83] descriptions of translation and Translation Studies (Tymozcko 1085), I use Deleuze and Guattari’s open system rhizome, a model that challenges the arborescent metaphors that inform western language and thought, as a scheme for reimaging the discourse of Translation Studies with regard to multiple retranslations of Classical texts. I will outline relevant models of Deleuze and Guattari’s project as they apply to Translation Studies and retranslation, show how the rhizome is an appropriate image for retranslation of Classical texts, and propose a rhizomatic model for multiple retranslations illustrated by Anne Carson’s “A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways” (LRB 2012; Sylph 2013) and Claire Huot and Robert Majzel’s multi-media distillations of Li Bai’s “Common Autumn Song” in the 85 project (www.85bawu.com; Les Figues/Moveable 2013). Existing Translation Studies discourse is rich with dualist models, like source/target, foreign/domestic, alienating/naturalizing, even original/translation, and I will use some of this language, too. These models describe the process of conveying a literary work in one language unidirectionally into another language for the first time, which is the case with much contemporary literature. As other papers in this volume attest, Classical texts thrive on retranslation—that is, translations that are not first translations but second or third, or more likely hundredth—and Classical retranslations flourish on those translations that precede them. In the case of experimental rhizomatic translations, they sometimes even depend on readers’ knowledge of...