Translating Artaud and Non-Translation

What does it mean to translate someone? If translation, as it is conventionally understood, refers to that activity by which meaning is transferred from one language to another, where and how does the self come into it? In Artaud le Mômo, Antonin Artaud marks his return to society after nine years of internment by creating a new man, endowed with a new language—a mixture of French and strange syllables, as incomprehensible as they are unreadable. Artaud’s later texts not only help to clarify the role of the syllables within Artaud’s poetics, but, by revealing a tension between translation and non-translation, they also deepen understanding of what translation might be. Asking what it means to translate Artaud uncovers the significance of the physical dimension that is involved in the process of translation and the role of the non-verbal (or pre-verbal), while testing the limits of identity, language, and understanding.

‘Making Strange’: Non-Translation in The Waste Land

This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.

‘The passionate moment’: Untranslated Quotation in Pound and Eliot

This chapter examines in depth the deeply personal use of ‘talismanic’ fragments of non-translation in the work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Viewed as a specialized branch of modernist allusion, examples are considered in detail, in particular, Eliot’s references to the Provençal of Arnaut Daniel in Ash-Wednesday and elsewhere, and Pound’s use of Cavalcanti in The Cantos, read as a complex double-gesture, highly personal and yet strange. The chapter closes by considering the development of Eliot’s poetic practices, including the deployment of allusion and relative absence of non-translation, in Four Quartets.

‘The patient, passionate little cahier’: French in Henry James’s Notebooks

This chapter is based specifically on the surviving notebooks in which Henry James recorded ideas for stories, and gave vent to his feelings about his art. There are six of these notebooks, covering the years 1878 to 1911. Pages of the notebooks on which French does not occur are the exception. This chapter asks how we might ‘read’ the use of French in this specific textual environment. It answers that question by comparing the notebooks with examples of James’s use of French in published fiction and in letters. In the notebooks, there is no addressee, or rather the writer is his own recipient. The chapter looks especially at passages where James reflects on his own practice as a writer; it identifies a cluster of key French words, all of them associated by James with the work of imagination and the craft of fiction.

An Introduction to Modernist Non-Translation

This first essay in the volume constitutes a substantial and wide-ranging introduction to this neglected topic, establishing the importance of untranslated fragments in modernist writing. The chapter expounds the complexities of the term ‘non-translation’, differentiating the practice from multilingualism, reading it alongside modern translation theory and practice. It situates modernist non-translation among a number of crucial contexts in intellectual history and literary theory: the ‘linguistic turn’ explored by contemporary philosophers, linguists, literary theorists, and critics; and examines broader sociopolitical issues relating to nationalism and language, the rise of English as an (imperial) global language, and the standardization of English. This introduction foregrounds key hermeneutical difficulties surrounding untranslatability and concerning reading or interpreting modernist non-translation, thus preparing the ground for the following chapters.

The Protean Ptyx: Nonsense, Non-Translation, and Word Magic in Mallarmé’s ‘Sonnet en yx’

This chapter presents an extensive analysis of questions of translation and non-translation through the focal point of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Sonnet en yx’. It traces early responses to this poem that highlighted the challenge to interpretation posed by ‘ptyx’: was this a nonsensical neologism or an untranslated derivation from another language? The chapter shows how the term resonated with other artists and moved ‘from the category of the untranslated to the untranslatable’. The term exemplifies a kind of ‘word magic’ that modernism conjures out of non-translation, a quasi-mysticism of unfamiliar noises that prompts readers to dwell on formal and sonic capacities as well as the conceptual contours of language.

‘Subrisio Saltat.’: Translating the Acrobat in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies

This chapter analyses in detail a charged moment in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the appearance of the figure of the acrobat and the Latin phrase that signals his smile. The untranslated Latin is read as emblematic of the nimble yet evasive gestures of this sequence, in particular as illustrative of how the poet communicates an experience of loss in these often cryptic elegies. The chapter examines the possibilities for translation (into English and Irish) of the Latin inscription, showing how translational choices at the interlingual level open out on to expanded understandings of trnalsation, which include the intermedial translations between the visual arts and poetry enacted by Rilke, and the translation of experience into poetic expression. Gadamer’s hermeneutics offer a way of theorizing the subtle shifts between experience, expression, interpretation, and understanding as a process of retranslation. In this way, the movement of translation becomes another figure for the process of Verwandlung – transformation – that is the Elegies’ central concern.

‘Orts, Scraps, and Fragments’: Translation, Non-Translation, and the Fragments of Ancient Greece

This chapter shows how a wide range of writers—including Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, C. P. Cavafy, and James Joyce—deployed contemporary interpretations and translations of fragments of Ancient Greek. A wealth of newly discovered source texts on papyrus was uncovered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Together with recent scholarly commentaries on fragmentary Greek authors, these were taken up by modernist writers, foregrounding the difficulties of textual and cultural transmission. The chapter emphasizes the remoteness of the ancient texts and examines how modern attempts to downplay this historical difference, as in Liddell and Scott’s celebrated dictionary, could perversely prove to be barriers to understanding. The chapter contends that attempts to express the meaning of an alien and irrecoverable ancient past can be more estranging even than non-translation.

‘I like the Spanish title’: William Carlos Williams’s Al Que Quiere!

This chapter ponders the decision of William Carlos Williams to give his volume Al Que Quiere! a Spanish title. It examines the social inequities implied—in a North American context—between this poet’s use of Spanish and English, and reflects upon not only the sociopolitical, but the creative aesthetic and the biographical ramifications of this choice. The chapter looks at the relationship between Williams’s use of non-translation and a democratic view of the pleasures of modern poetry. This chapter suggests that implications of the non-translated title speak to the pleasures and themes contained within the poems themselves, examined in a series of close readings of particular poems.

The Direct Method: Ezra Pound, Non-Translation, and the International Future

This chapter explores how literary non-translation might be considered as an instance in a broader reevaluation of translation as a social, political and pedagogical practice in the wake of the First World War and the rise of internationalism during the 1920s. What kind of literature would be produced by ‘the international mind’ of that decade, to use the popular phrase coined by Nicholas Butler? While the increased discussion and popularity of international languages like Interlingua, Esperanto, and Basic English might suggest that translation between languages was replaced by translation into a new or modified international language, writers appear to have been more interested in preserving the diversity of national languages by incorporating non-translated elements into their texts. The chapter explores these issues through analysis of Ezra Pound’s connections with The Future magazine.