Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, Winter 2009: "Beyond Stasis: Poetics and Feminism Today"
Edited by Barbara Godard and Kate Eichhorn
Excerpt from “Rewriting, Translating, Echoing: The Post-Modern Feminist Poetics of Margaret Christakos, Sandra Alland and Angela Carr”
John C. Stout
“II Altered Subjectivity, Translation and the Movement between Languages: Sandra Alland’s Blissful Times.”
Sandra Alland has been an active participant in Canada’s poetry community for many years now. Her first book of poems, Proof of a Tongue, appeared in 2004. In her most recent text, Blissful Times (2007), Alland problematizes language and translation in fundamental ways, as the book’s back cover suggests:
Do we, any of us speak the same language?
Blissful Times is a collection of poetry that
tries to find out. Beginning with found text
from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, Sandra
Alland ‘translates’ the poem 63 6imes, morph-
ing it into different poetic forms and emotional
states, even different media. Edgy, passionate,
amusing and intelligent, Blissful Times is a poet-
ic cocktail for our troubled times.
Alland is defining, and practicing “translation” here in an unorthodox but compelling way. One would usually regard translation as a “carrying across” of a text from one language to another with the goal of presenting the same meaning using different words. In Blissful Times, however, the words and the meaning change each time the poet shifts to a new approach to Beckett’s text. Each page of Blissful Times features a completely reworked version of the speech appropriated by Alland from Beckett’s play.
Sandra Alland’s sense of translation is eccentric, challenging and original. She defines “translation” as follows:
Translation is, simply put, the reinterpreting
of words from one language to another. I be-
lieve that translation also exists within langu-
ages. That we are constantly translating, based
on our particular understanding of words, and
based on our particular experiences in the world.
And that language is rarely universal. With Blissful
Times, I’m attempting to poetically envision how
many ways there are of understanding one text. But
also, I’m looking at the fact that, despite variations in
understanding, there is often a core meaning (or feeling)
that emerges, insists. It’s this tension I love. The almost
of understanding. The nearly of communion.
(S. Alland, e-mail to J. Stout, July 28, 2008)
Throughout Blissful Times, Alland performs translation in multiple and surprising ways: “The translations I perform range from re-arranging the text according to the length of the words, to rhyming each word in the text, to putting the texts through online translations to taking pictures of the way the text feels to imagining how words could apply to me or a war” (S. Alland, e-mail to J. Stout, July 28, 2008). Translation, accordingly, becomes a shifting process, assuming numerous guises. It yields unpredictable results. Alland’s use of translation makes words strange, other.
Her appropriation of Beckett’s Happy Days as the source text for her idiosyncratic “translations” is oddly fitting, since Beckett himself acted as a translator of his own words. As Marjorie Perloff notes, “Between the writing of Molloy in 1947 and Company in 1979, all of Beckett’s fiction [and plays], with the exception of From an Abandoned Work (1957), was written first in French, then translated by the author into English.” Self-translation and bilingualism are, thus, fundamental aspects of Beckett’s creativity. He made the decision, early in his career as a writer, to compose all his new works in French, ostensibly as a means of simplifying his style. He aspired to write “without style.” A linguistic strangeness inhabits Beckett’s work; so, Alland’s manner of “translating” it feels very appropriate.
Alland employed voice-activated software to help generate some of the poems in Blissful Times. Also, some pages of her text refer the reader to a website and the website reference (url) actually appears in lieu of a poem on those pages. This appeal to digital poetics is, certainly, innovative. It connects Blissful Times to a broader trend within contemporary Canadian poetry. (Works like Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources (2007), Rob Read’s O Spam Poams (2006), and Darren Wershler-Henry’s and Bill Kennedy’s Apostrophe (2006) offer other recent examples of this new digital poetics).
Although her inclusion of technology as a poetic tool constitutes part of the originality of Alland’s text, the aspect of Blissful Times which actually seems to me the most innovative is the way in which it rewrites, or un-writes, Beckett’s Happy Days (1961). (Even Alland’s title, Blissful Times, repeats Happy Days while altering it substantially.)
As the curtain rises in Act I of Beckett’s play, the audience sees an “expanse of scorched grass rising centre to a low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage […] Blazing light”. The audience sees that Winnie, a middle-aged woman, is buried up to her waist in this mound of sand or earth. “Long pause. A bell rings piercingly, say ten seconds, stops”. In response to the bell, Winnie begins speaking her long monologue and gesturing with her arms and hands, often picking up the various props (hand-bag, parasol, toothbrush, gun…) which surround her, placed on the mound. Occasionally, her husband, Willie, who lies behind her on the other side of the mound, mutters a word or a few words in response to a question from Winnie. The audience eventually realizes that Winnie is being buried, little by little, in this mound of sand. (When the curtain rises on Act II, she is buried up to her neck. She continues to talk but can move only her mouth and eyes).
Unaware of, or barely aware of, the burial to which she is being subjected, Winnie carries on talking. Her monologue is filled with banalities and brief evocations of a lost past – the “happy days” which no longer exist and have now been replaced by the grim present reality of the sands of time that are gradually burying Winnie. The dramatic situation on stage mocks the optimism and cheerfulness of Winnies’ perspective on life: ironically, Winnie is losing a battle against Time.
Winnie is the first major female character in Beckett’s theatre, which, until Happy Days, had focused on pairings of male characters (Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, Hamm and Clov, Krapp and the voice of Krapp himself at a younger age). Winnie’s forced cheerfulness provides a striking counter-example to the dark “gallows” humour of these male characters from Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape. So, why does Beckett switch to a female main character in Happy Days? What view of women does the play propose?
At first glance, one might assume that the playwright was constructing a mocking, cynical image of a genteel, middle-aged lady chattering away and fondly recalling “the old style!” while she is being buried in sand, as though she were standing up-right in the lower half of an hour-glass. Nevertheless, this view of Winnie is not shared by the various actresses who have played her onstage. In the collection of essays and commentaries Women In Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, several actresses discuss their take on Winnie. Billie Whitelaw, who is celebrated for her many outstanding performances in Beckett’s plays, describes Winnie in this way:
Yes. Winnie is terribly brave, terribly
courageous. She is marvelous; she hangs
on and hopes things will be better. She is
slipping down, slithering down, yet holding
on by her eyelashes. She has the self-discipline
to get on with her day.
German actress Nancy Illig echoes Whitelaw’s appreciation of Winnie as a courageous, strong figure:
Winnie never asks herself [why she is stuck in a
sand hill]. It seems that she is at home in her as it
is, that she prefers leaving it to us – the actors and
listeners – to puzzle over her conditions and to ask
in her stead, Why is it like this? She keeps to her bag,
which contains whatever she needs to subsist, and she
keeps to her survival rituals. Lipstick, toothbrush, and
comb are her weapons, as well as her wonderful elo-
quence. She juxtaposes an incomprehensible universe
to a bunch of banalities, left-over information, bits of
mutilated memories. She is as courageous and ignorant
as only a human being can be who perseveres in the face
of such an abstruse situation.
Irish actress Aideen O’Kelly even suggests that “Happy Days is a tribute to womanhood.”
Sandra Alland’s own image of Winnie is similar to those offered by Whitelaw, Illig and O’Kelly. Alland writes that “Happy Days is a play I constantly come back to. The imagery is sharp, funny and painful, the disconnect enormous. Winnie […] reminds me of myself. She reaches out, gets hurt of hurts or fails to make herself understood, but keeps reaching out anyway. Winnie is like most of us. We try, even when there’s no point. We blether into the void. We hope someone will understand if we keep saying the same thing, in better ways.” (S. Alland e-mail to J. Stout, July 28, 2008).
The epigraphs Alland has selected to open Blissful Times all foreground ideas of beginning, repeating and echoing:
The greatest thing about language is that
we should forget and begin over again.
Gertrude Stein
The book’s measure is the word. But what
of the power of the echo?
nathalie stephens
No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail
better.
Samuel Beckett
Implicit in each of these three quotes is a view of literature that is distinctively post-modern: the idea that all current writing constitutes an echoing or recycling of earlier texts. Language begets language, ceaselessly differing from itself as it “begins over again.”
In her opening poem, entitled “Blissful Times”, Alland repeats one of Winnie’s speeches from Happy Days but she rearranges it into lines of verse adhering to a left margin and descending vertically down the page. The sixty-three poems which follow this first poem all “translate” this speech. A different poetic strategy is undertaken in each poem. So, Blissful Times becomes a rather amazing tour de force showcasing poetry’s aptitude for invention and re-invention. As Alland constantly repeats but alters Winnie’s words, estranging them from their source, the reader must rethink the meaning of those words. S/he must reconsider how and what they mean.
In some of her poems, Alland places the words from Winnie’s speech in a new order; in others, she “translates” the sounds of the words into similar-sounding equivalents. Thus, the title “Blissful Times” becomes “Fistful Rhymes” and “One does not appear” becomes “Gun was wrought to fear,” and so on. Certain poems include objects that served as props in Beckett’s play: Winnie’s parasol, her handkerchief, the revolver. In one series of poems – “Rain Dialogue 1-6” – Alland stages a minimalist dialogue between two voices (“A” and “B”), through which she replays the quirky exchanges between Winnie and her taciturn husband, Willie, which punctuate Winnie’s long monologues in Happy Days. Alland’s frequent use of clichés and non sequiturs further recalls the Absurdist language typical of Beckett’s plays.
Blissful Times, clearly, pays homage to Happy Days. At the same time, Alland’s text rejects the static, hopeless vision of human existence which characterizes the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd. In the introduction to his book The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin quotes Ionesco, who defined the new theatre of the 1950s and 1960s represented by his own plays and Beckett’s as follows: “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose… Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless”. Alland replaces this Absurdist vision of meaninglessness with a dynamic – indeed, radical – political vision. Many poems in her book confront the reader directly with serious and difficult political issues, such as racism, colonialism, violence and homophobia:
AFTER GOING OUT
I didn’t want to ruin
another party,
but Palestine
burst from my lips
like, yes, gunfire.
The revolver onstage in Act I of Happy Days was a signifier for possible violence. Here, the metaphorical gunfire references a very specific historical site of violence – Israel/Palestine – which the reader must attempt to come to terms with.
Elsewhere, Alland shifts from direct political statements to more oblique, Steinian evocations of politics:
SECRETS OF THE GAME, THE
[…]
The poem is rubbish; death clock meal for self
cleaning Canada. History also replaces. Owners
who limbo the chance to attack often the
Holy Global Agenda? Communication disorders.
Webloggers debated melting point on human
war, and give fate part of the radical ten mistakes.
Blues for hundreds of unpatriotic and Washington
Redskins.
Blissful Times is a disarming text, playful and entertaining, yet troubling. A doubleness and ambiguity traverse it.
Further Interview with Sandra Alland from Open Letter