Reading Cavanagh’s essay felt like approaching a new philosophy of translation; a different understanding of this art, where we can celebrate loss as an opening of the poetic form, in which creation is in the middle of it all. It felt liberating, after reading and hearing so much about fidelity and other recently outdated concepts in translation, to read her analysis of Polish poets and their translations, where we can find joy in failure and opportunity in absence. As with Jacques Derrida and recently Matthew Reynolds, this differential perspective to translation is a fresh breath of air in a field where the past haunts the present: we still focus on a strict criticism of the translation process when only compared to the original text or to other existing translations, instead of a search for variance between translation strategies and interpretations.
Her final metaphor, deeply rooted in the maternal aspect of language which made me remember Godayol’s reading, portrayed exactly the kind of openness, compassion, and naivety that translation requires of us when approaching a text: a curios flexibility to trial and error, and an endless interest in an unfinished product. “And sometimes you even feel, for a while at least, for a day or two or even a couple of weeks, that you’ve got it, it’s worked, the poem’s yours. But then you turn back to the poem itself at some point, and you have to hit your head against the wall and laugh: it’s still there” (Cavanagh, 244).
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