1
WE LAY
already deep in the
macchia, when you
finally edged into
view.
Nevertheless, we could
not
darken out to you:
ruled by
lightduress.
2
WHO FOUGHT FOR YOU?
The lark-figured
stone from the fallow.
No tone, only that
mortalbrightness carried
within.
The height
whirls itself
out, more violently
still
than you. (“from Schwarzmaut (Blacktoll) by Paul Celan,” Mark Goldstein)
As
Jenny Penberthy writes in the “Editor’s Note” for the new issue of The Capilano Review, the “Languages”
issue (May 2014) is filled with “Multilingual poetry, ‘the clockwork discourse
of Doctor Who,’ the language of invertebrates, the Red River Twang, Chiac, the
language of the Psalms, html, and much more. An extraordinary variety of voices
and languages is embedded in these pages, each piece a response to TCR’s call for ‘translations of new or
old texts, re-translations, comparative translations, experimental translation,
language/s behaving in unexpected ways, multilingual writing, older Englishes,
mimicry, mis-translation, fumblings between languages, faux-translation,
trans-translation, the ‘languages’ of different genres and the interplay
between them.’” One of the most striking sections in the issue has to be by
Christian Bök, another interplay on bpNichol’s infamous Translating Translating Apollinaire as “Translating
Translating Apollinaire (Gallifreyan),” raising the bar on a piece that Darren
Wershler once translated into Klingon. Through his sequence of circular
visuals, Bök translates bpNichol’s piece into “the clockwork discourse” of
Gallifrayan, the language of the Time Lords in Doctor Who. There are some other lovely interplays throughout the
issue, some by writers emerging as some of our most challenging and engaged,
from Jordan Abel to Oana Avasilichioaei to Liz Howard to Sarah Dowling, as well
as more established poets such as Colin Browne, Nicole Brossard, Erín Moure,
George Stanley, Rachel Zolf, Peter Culley, Steve McCaffery, Ted Byrne and
Stephen Collis. Collis’ contribution to the issue is a translation of
Empedocles' Fragment 17. As he includes in his short piece on the translation:
I began translating
Empedocles when, after publishing too many books too quickly, I didn’t know
what to write, and didn’t want to write anything really. Translation,
especially the slowness of translating ancient Greek, seemed the ideal stop-gap—the
ideal way of feeding my compulsion, while in some sense avoiding writing. A means
of resistance. A brake.
Empedocles had been an interest since I re-read the
Presocratics while working on a book about change. That dialectic—it struck me
as a dialectic—of Love and Strife, of attraction and repulsion, union and
division, stuck with me. Everything now especially seems such a tug of war—the things
I want to join, defend, and hold together—those things I want to resist, cut loose,
disperse forever. To at once love and struggle against a humanity bent on the
beauty of creation and the ugliness of destruction. To find these human
attributes incommensurable and yet indissoluble. Walter Benjamin: “There is no
document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
How to resolve this? I fear we cannot.
Part
of the appeal of The Capilano Review
is how each issue works to engage with the visual arts as well as writing.
Allyson Clay, who provided the cover art, has a sequence of paintings
reproduced in the issue, “Groundsplatpink,” which she writes of to introduce
her section: “My recent body of paintings, collectively titled Groundsplatpink
(2013/14), stems from my longtime fascination with how paintings, particularly
abstract paintings, are written about and described. Such descriptions are
ubiquitous in art history texts and catalogue essays dealing with modern and
contemporary painting. Books about painting tend to concentrate on surface
treatments. (Interesting writing about painting can also be found occasionally
in ‘how to’ books on painting.)” Really, there’s an enormous amount of worthy
material in this issue, and far too much to write about in a single posting,
from the synaesthesia works by Nyla Matuk, visual works by Margeaux Williamson,
Michael Turner’s essay, “Text-based Public Art Works in Vancouver,” and Colin
Browne’s exploration of Apollinaire’s Vancouver. Well known as being a
translator as well as one of our finest poets and thinkers, Moure, for example,
includes “A tale of a translation in process: François Turcot’s Mon dinosaur,” composing
an essay as a sequence of journal entries:
I’m almost halfway through
a first draft of Montrealer François Turcot’s fourth book of poems, a homage to
a father, his father, and a
co-presence with the final days of co-being with his father. And, après, a meditation on his absence. It is
a Book of Hours, lost by the father
and rewritten by the son. The book accompanies me eerily in these first months
that follow my own father’s finale, in Edmonton.
Here, almost halfway:
what does it mean to be almost halfway?
Time’s membrane?
As
well as a piece by Brossard, there are three translations of her works, by Amy
Butcher, Karen Ocaña and Lary Timewell, who writes:
love cobbles its unreal
span, a fragile above
among animals amongst words among doves
in the present
continuous we wake, are awoken
repossessed of now as
our own, the body s/urges
all possible plurality,
ecstatic narrative of
the continuum caresses,
(each)
tendril-exfoliate,
(each) root of (each)world
knows this a
confoundment / an exhuberance
babies boom all day,
full-bodied from the hip, become
‘boys & girls’
rolling out from (onto) flat tradition script
to be ‘just & fair’
in the ‘near & far’, lost
realms & sentiments
& solitudes require
vertiginous words &
animal names, energies given that
in dreams from genre
& gender escape
No comments:
Post a Comment