Reading Response 3/18- Claire Kapitan

 

In “The Art of Losing,” Clare Cavanagh explores what is lost and gained when translating poetry—how “form, substance, and joyful failure” are defining elements in lyric poetry and in poetic transition. I also liked how she explored ownership—how you can think of a poem as yours when you sit with it long enough, or feel a closeness to it, but then you “turn back to the poem itself at some point” and are hit with the reality that it still exists—this original that you’ve worked from or with. 

In the article where translators of Wisława Szymborska talk about her work and personhood, I liked how her work was described as “treacherously simple” and “modest.” Some translators, like Piotr Wojciechowski, found that this made Szymborska's work easier to translate—that it was almost as if it was written to be translated because of its ability to be grasped and understood. It is “full of wit and at the same time philosophical reflection.” Other translators like Piotr Kamiński found it deceivingly hard. When he copied a poem word for word, he discovered that the poem “leaked,” and went down the drain without him realizing until there was no poem. This was in direct conversation with Cavanagh’s chapter about loss in translation. 

In “Metaphors, Women, and Translation,” I was interested in how Godayol broke down the “ages” of metaphors within translation—how the “first age was that of the man, of Plato, of the truth, of the source text,” and the second age was “that of the woman, non-truth, distance and translation.” In the first age, the man (the active subject) manipulates while the woman (the passive subject) is manipulated. I liked how this was disrupted by the idea that women, writing, and translation are the border or point of difference—that they are open, unlimited, and foster non-truth. I also liked how Godayol wrote about originality and source material: “No text is original because it is in itself a translation of a translation of a translation…The translation can never be definitive because the meanings always suggest other meanings,” and “texts always suggest other texts. The relations of sexual and textual subordination have come to an end.”