The Translation and Transmission of Concrete Poetry

Translation and Transmission

John Corbett, Ting Huang, John Corbett, Ting Huang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351382281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

This volume addresses the global reception of "untranslatable" concrete poetry. Featuring contributions from an international group of literary and translation scholars and practitioners, working across a variety of languages, the book views the development of the international concrete poetry movement through the lens of "transcreation", that is, the informed, creative response to the translation of playful, enigmatic, visual texts. Contributions range in subject matter from ancient Greek and Chinese pattern poems to modernist concrete poems from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This challenging body of experimental work offers creative challenges and opportunities to literary translators and unique pleasures to the sympathetic reader. Highlighting the ways in which literary influence is mapped across languages and borders, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of experimental poetry, translation studies and comparative literature.

1 Concrete Poetry, Playfulness and Translation

Susan Bassnett

Introducing Playfulness

The opening sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella engaged the 16th-century reader immediately with something new, different and entertaining. For a start, the sonnet is composed in alexandrines, rather than in the expected iambic pentameter, and the last three lines offer an absurd image of a pregnant male poet struggling with his own inability to write:

Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

‘Fool’, said my Muse to me, ‘Take up thy pen and write.’

The reader is invited to smile at this admission of helpless foolishness. The Muse chastises the poet, and were that Muse a contemporary of ours, she would be saying, simply, ‘Just get on with it.’ However serious the love Sidney felt for his Stella might be, and the ensuing sonnets build on that emotion, this opening poem sets a more joking tone and uses an unfamiliar form. This was, in its day, a very avant-gardist piece of writing.

Centuries later, the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh used a comic parallel with his own local community to write about the Trojan War. In his sonnet, ‘Epic’ he draws ironic parallels between the Trojan War and local rivalry. The opening lines set the scene:

I have lived in important places, times

When great events were decided, who owned

That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land

Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.

The local Duffys confront old McCabe, ‘stripped to the waist,’ and Kavanagh then widens the gyre noting ‘That was the year of the Munich bother,’ the year, of course, when the seeds of the Second World War were sown. The poet asks himself which was more important, the local conflict or what politicians were failing to resolve in Munich, and then concludes with these lines:

Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind

He said: I made the Iliad from such

A local row. Gods make their own importance.¹

In both these poems the reader is confronted with the unexpected: Sidney mocks himself, and in so doing pokes fun at love poetry in general, while Kavanagh weaves the narrative of the Trojan War, the Second World War and a local struggle between Irish peasants together to show both the absurdity and the tragedy of conflicts over land, comparing the greatest poem in the Western canon to a fight between local Irish families. In both these examples the reader is engaged through the absurdity of the situation depicted by the poet, and the final lines leave that reader with a great deal to think about. The key to both these poems is the shock created by breaking conventional expectations, and doing so in a way that combines shock with the ludic.

There has been a vast amount written about poetry and about the difficulties of translating poetry, but not a great deal about poetry and humour. What there is tends to focus on satire and irony, rather than on playfulness, unless the poet in question is writing for children. Indeed, playfulness in poetry tends to be associated with writing for children where the use of rhyme is often combined with the unexpected. Shel Silverstein’s four-line poem ‘The Slithagadee’ is just such an example: in the final line of the poem the I-speaker is cut off mid-sentence as he boasts that the creature will never catch him: ‘You may catch all the others but you wo….’ The break in the word signifies that the boasting has all been in vain: the speaker is the creature’s latest victim.

The Tale and the Tail

The late Anthea Bell, who translated the Asterix books, where linguistic playfulness is essential, once told me that she was trained in lexical games by her father, Adrian Bell, the compiler of the first Times crossword. Play is crucial to crossword solving, and wordplay is a strong element in the Asterix books, which reach a reading public that spans generations. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland similarly reaches a vast global public, and the Index Translationum lists Carroll’s work as the 13th most translated text of all time. Carroll’s writing is full of jokes, puns, word games, and parodies, and one of the best-known is ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ which is set out in the shape of a mouse’s tail, a play on the words ‘tale and tail.’ Carroll writes that while the mouse was speaking, Alice’s ‘idea of the tale was something like this,’ and there follows the visual image with a story being told about a nonsensical trial. As the tail twists down the page the letters become gradually smaller until at the very tip of the tail the poem consists of just single words. This visual representation of a tale being told as a tail can be described as an early example of a concrete poem.

One of the most generally accepted definitions of concrete poetry is that the visual element of the poem is a vital structural feature. The current Wikipedia entry on concrete poetry declares it to be ‘an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than the verbal significance.’ This facile definition can most certainly be challenged: although the visual element may be given greater prominence than in other more traditional poetic forms, the typographical is not ‘more important’ in conveying meaning, it is one element in the construction of meaning, which will also depend on the agency of the reader. Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that ‘the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern,’ by which he meant the ‘unperceived intricate systematizations of [one’s] own language,’² and in poetry, as Charles Davy (1965) points out, patterns become more complex as they are articulated, involving sounds of words and their symbolic meanings. With concrete poetry there may be visual patterns, verbal patterns and sound patterns, and these can interact in ways that become realisable during the reading process. There is also a strong element of playfulness, and here the role of the reader is crucial.

Challenging Expectations: Filippo Marinetti

The shock effect of poetry by Apollinaire or Marinetti, for example, depended on challenging expectations and engaging readers in different ways. In his Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti declared that his new poetry would sing of danger, excitement, revolt against what he claimed was an antiquated museum culture. This was the age of the machine, he proclaimed, the age of the beauty of speed, the age of the ‘great-breasted locomotives,’³ of aeroplanes tearing across the skies, where the new sounds will be the roar of engines and the chatter of machine-gun fire. War, declared Marinetti, should be glorified as the only cure for a stagnant world.

In his poetry for this new vision of the world, Marinetti experimented with sounds, and he also experimented with typefaces, using different colours and different fonts, sometimes including letters cut out from newspapers or his own sketches. One of his best-known poems, Après la Marne, Joffre Visite le Front en Auto (‘After the Marne, Joffre visits the front by car’) (1915), uses a whole range of such techniques to create a poem that is as much a visual artefact as it is a piece of writing. The inspiration for the poem was the visit of General Joffre after the Battle of the Marne when his French troops held back the German forces. A sentence in French in the lower centre of the poem says that this is ‘Verbalisation dynamique de la route’ (Dynamic verbalisation of the route). In the top left is the word ‘FRANCE,’ in the bottom left ‘PRUSSIENS.’ Marjorie Perloff sees this poem as ‘maybe the first instance of visual notation in poetry,’ combining letters, words, numbers, crosses (which might indicate graves or plus signs) and serpentines to convey that dynamic verbalisation. She adds:

He also uses typography as an expressive marking, so that changes in letter size indicate an increase or decrease in volume, onomatopoeic repetitions of letters and words dramatise wartime sounds and heavily or lightly inked letters indicate verbal emphasis.⁴

Scattered across the page are words representing sounds which suggest the battlefield – a ‘toumb a toumb; tatatatata; traac craaac; tap tap tap’ – while the phrases ‘Mon ami’ and ‘Ma petite’ are drawn out as ‘Mon Amiiiii’ and ‘MaAa AAapetite,’ possibly reproducing the way in which General Joffre’s words floated across in the wind.⁵

Perloff also points out that there is a performative element in much of Marinetti’s writing, and there is a short piece on YouTube of Luciano Chessa (17 Feb. 2015) performing another of Marinetti’s war poems about conditions on the Alpine battlefields, ‘Carso=A Rat’s Nest: A Night in a Sinkhole + Mice in Love’ (c.1917). Here too the sounds of war (‘tuum tuum’) and the ‘popopopop’ of a motorcycle are combined with drawings of rats and cockroaches, a sketch of the captain smoking a long pipe on the left side, drawings of the mess hut and the latrine and even a rat on a high wire labelled ‘topo equilibrista’ (balancing rat). Marinetti’s concrete war poem combines sound and image, and sentences in French or Italian with nonsense, jokes and occasional obscenities in such a way as to create an impression of the chaos in which he was living. Hearing this poem read aloud gives added insight into what Marinetti was trying to do through a combination of words, sounds and images.

Is Concrete Poetry Trans-national?

In an essay on concrete poetry and translation, Kirsten Malmkjaer (1987) refers to the German T. Kopfermann, who suggests that concrete poetry can be seen as international, given that the language elements are not necessarily tied to the author’s mother tongue. This is certainly the case with Marinetti, and also with Apollinaire, a man of Polish descent, born in Italy, who grew up speaking Italian, Polish and French and who was able to switch languages with ease. Kopfermann suggests that the ‘concrete’ in concrete poetry consists in the linguistic items used, and these are purportedly used in such a way to eliminate from them any semantics – they are language as material, purely and simply. This leads on to his assumption that, at least between Indo-European languages, it is not necessary to translate concrete poetry, something that Malmkjaer challenges. Questioning Kopfermann’s notion of internationalism, Malmkjaer notes that most anthologies of concrete poetry do include at the very least glossaries and in the case of the two Marinetti poems cited above both contain linguistic elements that require some form of translation if the reading experience of target language readers is to be enhanced.

She concludes that concrete poetry is ‘neither more nor less translatable than any other type of poetry,’⁶ pointing out that any translation will reflect the set of priorities established by the translator. However, ‘The Mouse’s Tale/Tail’ not only depends on word play, but also relies on Western typography for it to be effective. Translating ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Concrete Poetry, Playfulness and Translation
• 2 The Origins of the Untranslatable: The Earliest Western Visual Poetry
• 3 Concrete Poetry in China: Form, Content, Theme and Function
• 4 Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry in Chinese Characters
• 5 Exploring the Structures of Chance: Transcreating Noigandres Ideogramas into English
• 6 Transcreation without Borders
• 7 Edwin Morgan as Transcreator
• 8 Constellations and Ideograms: Eugen Gomringer’s Multilingual Concrete Poetry
• 9 The Intermedial Recoding of Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções
• 10 Concrete North America: Some Questions of Reception
• 11 Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network
• 12 Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry
• Index