Translating Surrealist Poetics

Abstract

It can be argued that translations of Surrealist works entail obstacles and contradictions specific exclusively to this mode of literary production. What renders ‘Surrealist translations’ incomparable with other interlingual adventures of the literary avant-garde is the irreducible opposition between translation as a norm-governed, self-reflexive and intersubjective activity and ‘pure psychic automatism’ unconstrained by linguistic and cultural factors other than effectiveness of artistic self-expression. Hence, the translational mimesis involves mimicking the original creative process rather than its product. Indeed, the translators of Surrealist works have often no other choice than to take ‘unmimetic turns’ to convey the oneiric appeal, aleatoricity and figurativeness of the originals. Moreover, the translations of Surrealist works owe their distinctiveness to the neutralization of the opposition between foreignization and domestication in the sense established in translation studies. Their main task is rather to sustain the effect of defamiliarization and to recreate the unexpected clashes of entire semantic fields that animate Surrealist poetry. Of no less importance are the language- and culture-specific possibilities of recreating Surrealist ‘metaphors’ based on divergence and contradiction rather than correlations. Translation as a product of rational decision-making processes inevitably stumbles over the Surrealist metaphor born out of the irrational and coincidental.