Translating Translating Tengour

Abstract

Chapter 1 begins with a study of the most evidently literal, translational rewriting of a classical Arabic literary corpus. It analyses in depth Habib Tengour’s chapbook Césure (2006). I read Tengour’s literal translations of images and metaphors culled from the archive of the classical Arabic odes, alongside his American translator Pierre Joris’s rendering of his translations of translations. The juxtaposition of the old Arabic texts, the history of their English translations, and Tengour’s original French language poems, which are then cut through with Joris’s American translational idiom, produces a four- sided linguistic refraction that unravels how Tengour unwrites the Arabic, so as to rewrite it forward into a falsely, seemingly monolingual French. I situate the poetics of translation and intertextuality in relation to Tengour and Joris’s respective, trans-Atlantic editorial and publishing worlds. I pay particular attention to how they capture and maintain the ‘pseudo-opacity’ of an original translingual, translational poetics, which they premise on the multicultural plurilingualism of the Maghreb. In so doing, we revisit translation theory from Joris’s perspective as an active contemporary American translator, theoretician, essayist, poetician and poet, with a particular focus accorded to a consideration of the formative, vagrant structure and thematics of the classical Arabic odes. Together, Tengour and Joris point to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century tradition of trans-Atlantic Franco-American translations, which undercuts the place afforded to the French language. I conclude with the assertion that Tengour and Joris render the French language an effaceable, hopelessly transparent mode of translation between two series of opacities: classical, high literary Arabic on the one hand, American English on the other.