word: Toronto's literary calendar
April 2004
Maggie Helwig

 

 

“For various reasons, I've been thinking a lot about translation recently, and so I was naturally intrigued by Broken Telephone/teléfono descompuesto/au téléphone, a chapbook assembled by Sandra Alland out of a translation experiment carried out by herself and 19 other writers and photographers. They began with a single poem by Alland, which was then passed to each writer in turn with the following (somewhat abridged) rules: translate the poem into Spanish, English or French; the translation can be literal, or can focus more on rhythm or meaning; you may use a dictionary, but do not ask for help from anyone else; do not take more than one hour to finish; take away either the first line or the last line of the poem, then add your own line. (This last rule, by the way, strikes me as possibly over-egging the pudding -- the translations are interesting enough on their own, and I found the dropping and adding of lines to be a bit of a distraction).

 

Since all those involved were artists -- very few of them, Alland notes, fully bilingual -- most of the "translations" can stand on their own as poems, but it is also fascinating to observe the different approaches taken to the task. The first few participants produce more or less standard translations -- preserving meaning above all, with some attempts to mirror syntax and imagery -- but are then thrown for a loop by Fred Wah, who produces a translation from Spanish to English , which is based almost entirely on false cognates ("espera” becomes "sparrow," "camisa" becomes "calm"), which is then transformed again by a free translation into French by Richard Baillargeon... and so on, until transformation #21, which is in fact a photograph of a box of shards. Some fascinating food for thought about how we approach language and meaning.

 

The chapbook -- which I'd recommend to anyone interested in words -- costs $5.”