Words Apart: Sandra Alland’s Blissful Times is gained in translation
by Lynn McClory
Blissful Times needs an introduction and a farewell: an introduction to a wide readership and a farewell to its writer Sandra Alland, an independent bookseller and community activist who left Toronto in June to live for a year, or two, in Edinburgh.In preparation for living among Scots, Sandra studied Scottish — which is not a form of Gaelic, or English — she explained in conversation. Like Jamaican in Jamaica, Scottish has its own grammar and is the common language of the Scots. Alland also reads, writes and speaks fluent French and Spanish. The poems in Blissful Times translate all her languages, including English to English, 63 times from language to language, run though software translations of the book’s introductory poem.
The title poem is found-text from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, taken from one of Winnie’s monologues while sand threatens to bury her alive, and as she tries to reach her husband who may, or may not, be listening.
One does not appear
to be asking a great deal
indeed at times it would seem
hardly possible
to ask less of a fellow creature.
Whereas actually,
when you think about it
(look into your heart),
see the other,
what he needs:
peace,
to be left in peace.
Then perhaps the moon
(all this time),
asking for the moon.Filtered through multiple translations of Winnie’s last-ditch recognition, Alland’s poems respond to the dangers of unexplored distance between our speaking and our listening. They ask existential questions throughout this linguistically suggestive, beautifully designed book that features a metric ruler along its cover’s front outer edge and a standard rule along the back. Can we measure, it seems to ask, how much of our communication glides past us? What vestiges of our meaning reside inside our skewed interpretations? Can we close the distance between us with our words?
The sense of near loss in Blissful Times resonates throughout, but the poems do not give over to despair or mockery. Alland’s affinity to Beckett surfaces in the smile behind his “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” included in her quotes on the tribute page. To express a mix of desperation moderated with comfort and a lightness of ironic being, she has chosen to translate the female voice in Happy Days, rather than the more somber banter in Endgame and other of Beckett’s plays.
Blissful Times captures all of Alland’s poetic influences. They stretch back to studying languages in high school, and a degree in theatre. After university she worked as a theatre writer and actor before moving into poetry through Spoken Word, a natural form for her animated presentations.
In 2002 at a Banff translation workshop, Alland shifted to work on the page with her chapbook Broken Telephone where, echoing the game, she passed a collaborative poem around a circle to a cultural and linguistic mix that took 20 months to complete and publish in Sandraslittlebookshop. Instructor and poet, Fred Wah, took his turn translating a poem from Spanish to English homo-linguistically (a poem translated from its sounds). At Banff, Wah introduced Sandra to one of her defining influences: bp nichol’s multiple translations in his “Translating, Translating Apollinaire.” Alland folded this idea “in her pocket” for a few years and saved it for Blissful Times.
The poems in her 2004 first book, Proof of a Tongue, demonstrate her wit, emotional depth, her political awareness, outrage and compassion for victims of poverty and racism. But nothing shouts her rage for justice as loudly as her “Rant” at a university women’s Eco Poetics conference last year. Check out page 50 of Blissful Times with its online poem, or click and listen to it right now. This book is as up-to-the-minute and Internet-friendly as it is conscious of the medium’s many-sided messages.
Because she has fibromyalgia, Alland uses a variety of voice-activated software programs to alleviate the strain of typing. Evidently, the programs activate her already vibrant imagination as well. Responses from “Dragon Naturally Speaking” are based on who it thinks Alland is from studying the language she has typed into her computer. Programmed with corporate speech, brand names and right wing political names and figures, poems translated from this software become political statements similar to one of the Spanish translation poems run through the program’s English language software.
pre-gun terminals die on a Korean tour of igloo,
condo in act to Ali’s dad,
condo pie and sauce and Esso.
Mirror us into core of sun.In a translation from French to English, Alland first translates her found text. “Blissful Times” becomes “Les Temps Délicieux /Temps are Delicious” where the temps “Learn the napalm air/of detrimental grand affairs. — Abused/in the lap of Exxon”. When this homo-linguistic poem is run through the software program, free translation.com, “Les Temps Délicieux” morphs into “Darned Game This Year” with contemporary references to corporate power golfers on the green with Saddam.
Another poem, “Secrets of the Game,” uses Google to translate each word into two different words that echo the word from which they were searched. Software generated poems and their combinations seem endlessly open to translation possibilities, like the interpretations that both connect and distance all of us, or with the recognition that all our speech and written language is ultimately our own translation.
In a talk Alland gave in 2005, she cited Beckett, bp nichol and bill bissett as inspirations for her translation projects, as well as her own intent listening to a musician friend’s language re-learning after an accident impaired his speech. Alland is fascinated with people’s insertion of their own meanings into social encounters and texts, and fascinated with the idea of how we miss each other so often with what we say, or don’t say.
She approaches her readers from many linguistic directions in an attempt to reach out and close the world’s ever-widening gap of alienating speech acts. Two of the volume’s most moving poems expressing this desire are aptly positioned after Alland’s “Rant,” the first a software translation and the second, her poem after the loss of a friend. “Blissful 2For1” recalls “Blissful Times” with hints of near devastation echoed in the following poem, “After Her Suicide.”
One does, undress in the mall.
To be covered, him
indeed. At vine flowed the liquor of werewolves
(hardly possible), of burning grapes.
To ask dogs on a wounded August night.
Whereas actually, rigorously devoured.
When you dovecote — plummeting ice.
Look into exotic stores.-----------------
she didn’t need us it was we who held on for touch
and better than thisbut she she could fly
so she did
Alland’s poetry also flies, and it is full of her life’s intelligence and emotion, social and political connection. Her Blissful Times deserves to be flying off bookstore shelves. Consider buying it appropriately at your local independent bookstore.