When is a translation not a translation? When is it a different version of the text? What would happen to the poem if it were written by someone from another culture? Who wrote the poem, the author or all the cultural-historical context and readings that informed the author? These are some of the questions I want to explore with my project One-Handed, which will get all my favourite translators and Mexican and Scottish poets speaking to each other through their work (and mine!). This is a playful experiment which will be published as an ebook only, and which I hope to bring to you very soon.
The idea behind the project began during my MLitt in Creative Writing: I was struck by how differently literature, and creative writing in particular, is conceptualised and taught in Mexico and in the UK, and the possible resulting differences in what kind of writing is produced and published in either country. Mexico with its eternal rebellious spirit, in which transgression has become the standard and genres are considered to be a thing of the 19th century, versus the UK with its focus on more subtle nuances and subject-matter, ranging from nature poetry to Oulipian wordplay to fantasy fiction, in which whether or not someone is 'conforming to the norm' isn't really something that needs to be discussed. I found the differences staggering, and this is how I started trying my hand at translating Mexican poetry into English, to see what kind of explosive magic might happen. Still, with my leftover bits of Mexican rebellious spirit, I couldn't really bear to simply put together a bog-standard anthology.
Thankfully, attending the Translation Summer School held by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the University of East Anglia gave me some very good food for thought which would later crystallise into my idea for One-Handed. There, Adam Thirwell and Tash Aw presented their project Multiples, published by Granta, an experiment in which a story would be translated several times by different writers, always coming in and out of English so we could read the process, in a game similar to Chinese whispers. (Read more about the book in Daniel Hahn's article in The Guardian). What I found really fascinating about this project is that the more the translation departed from the original, the more interesting the game became: the whole project seemed to be deliberately set up to cause mistranslations, celebrating infidelity as far more interesting than fidelity. Which made us, a room-full of professional translators, shift in our seats with some degree of unease. One of the most interesting jumps in the sequence of translations, was when one of the author/translators --though it's unclear which-- was so intent into bringing the story into their own culture that they changed the name, occupation and entire life story of the character and brought him into China, possibly also in a specific historical period. Indeed, the character could not have been more thoroughly translated--or should we say colonised? Tash Aw actually went so far as to say that Zadie Smith's translation was 'rather prim,' inasmuch as she had not attempted to undermine or alter the story in her translation in any way. Quite a statement about our life's work as translators. And it really got my brain cells moving.
When is a translation not a translation?
Another project which really inspired me was Transversalia: Horizontes con versos / Horizonte in verkehrten Versen, edited in Berlin by Rike Bolte, in which she really got Latin American and German poets speaking to each other telegraphically other through their writing. She paired up Latin American poets with German poets working on similar themes, and got them each to provide a poem, which would then be translated into the other language, and which the other poet in the pair would write a "poetic telegram" in response: a brief, visceral response to the other's translated text. The results were then translated back, creating a very interesting bilingual anthology at the same time as a fertile ground for dialogue between poets from both cultures.
All this lead me to want to put together a One-Handed collection after my own poetry collection Manca, which is about to go to print this week in Mexico with Tierra Adentro. For this project, I call all my favourite Mexican poets to re-write my book in Spanish by following the exact same methodology which I followed to write it. I then plan get their poems translated into English by my favourite translators, and present the results alongside translations of my own poems by my favourite Scottish poets. Most of the Scottish poets, thankfully, will have very little knowledge of Spanish, so their translations are going to be versions based on literal translations, which, correct me if I'm wrong, actually used to be considered a valid method for translation back in the day when people weren't so multilingual. Except here the literal versions will be provided by GoogleTranslate, just to be a bit more deviant. What I am aiming to play with is all the space for error, and the borders of what would traditionally not be considered as translation, or even a piece of original writing, questioning the nature of writing, translation, authorship, plagiarism, appropriation... Can the same poem be written again and again by different people, as Borges famously questioned in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote? And could this not in fact be considered what translation essentially consists of? And the question I ultimately what I want to get at is: with our modern faith in individuality, have we lost sight of how collaborative and multiple our processes actually are, often without us ever taking notice?
