Julia Joy ’20
Professor Wang Ping warned everyone against cutting their pears to open the event Entering Fire: Panel and Reading on Translation and Poetics on October 4th. That day, she explained, was the Chinese Moon Festival, a time of unification during which pears and mooncakes are eaten whole, as the word for “cutting the pear” means “separation.”
The event featured poets and translators Harvey Lee Hix and Paul Hoover, and literary translator Elizabeth Harris, reading from their new books, which are all, in one way or another, exercises in translation. Ping named the event to reflect how she sees the process of all translation, poetry, and art: “entering fire” and coming out as a phoenix, accessing the energy of the original and kindling it.
H. L. Hix began by reciting “Beverly Hills, Chicago” by Gwendolyn Brooks. This poem, he said, “touches on American anger.” Hix explained how, “though the speaker professes not to be angry,” Brooks’s poem exemplifies his attempt in American Anger: An Evidentiary to identify “forms of injustice that often are taken as inevitable and normal.” Hix read two of his poems from this collection, the second of which was a “found poem” of data sets on firearms, such as deaths by firearm. He prefaced this with the poem “Readings” by Czesław Miłosz which, Hix posited, directly addresses the topic of poetics and translations.
Paul Hoover’s new book, Desolation Souvenir, attempts to access the grief which led to Mallarmé’s inability to finish A Tomb for Anatole, and filling in those blanks. Sophie Hilker ‘19 introduced Hoover, calling his most recent collection “achingly beautiful.” He took the mic, welcoming the assistance of Ramon Molina ‘19 to read the Spanish translations. Hoover added right before reading a selection from Desolation Souvenir, “I was thinking, what is the souvenir of a desolation? Possibly a sorrow, or maybe a joke. I mean, maybe closer to a joke.”
Elizabeth Harris then read a few excerpts from her translations of Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. Harris sang the opening of the novel Tristano Muore, or, Tristano Dies in its original Italian to the tune of an Italian polka, with interposed lines of speech. She said that she can get nervous when reading Italian but “when I sing it I don’t have any problems.” She then read from her translation of For Isabel: A Mandala, which Harris described as a “cosmic detective novel” in which the narrator has come back from the dead to find a lost love. Harris quoted a recent review describing it as “an investigation, a journey, and a prayer.” In the passage she read, the narrator tells his interviewee “‘I’m here for Isabel,’” and when asked if he is a journalist replies, “‘Your guess is completely off-track. Death is a curve in the road, to die is simply not to be seen.’”
On the panel, when discussing how her background in creative fiction and her conceptualization of language shape her as a translator, Harris spoke about her understanding of style and character. She said the characters in the texts she translates cannot come forward into English until she has invented their voice. The characters inevitably change, she continued, but it is ultimately an interpretive act, aiming to translate, for example, what “Mr. Tabucchi would have done were English his language.” Hoover responded that once he got used to a character’s way of thinking, he was able to say, in English, what that character “was after,” what he meant. Hix added that a similar challenge in translating poetry lies in recognizing “the personhood of the language,” or its agency and attributes.
The event ended in a buzz of thought and discussion about literature, poetry, language, and the discussion still continues even a month later. To find more events like this, check out the Macalester English Department Facebook page and the English Department Events Page.