 Hi, everyone. We're going to get started. Thanks so much for coming. I'm Lucina Schell. This is approaching wholeness in another language, translating poetic fragments. And I'm really excited to see you all here. We don't have one yet. Oh, there's no mic. They should come. Yeah, it would be great. I don't think we can project our voices all the way back to whether the back of you guys are. It feels so fragmentary. Please come down to the front. We don't have a mic. There are handouts in the back. So please grab them. Everyone has a hand out. Beautiful. So we're trafficking in fragments. And I think everyone's fragments that they're presenting on are certainly going to be poetic, but they're not all strictly poetry. So that's exciting. And I'll just have the panelists introduce themselves briefly. So let's go this way. I start. Hi, everyone. My name is Ghada Murad. I'm a PhD candidate in comparative literature at UC Irvine. I am also a fellow in literary translation. I translate from Arabic and French into English. I work on Arabic and Francophone literature of the Middle East and North Africa. So when I translate from French, I mainly translate North African writers and poets. Hi, I'm Susan Bernofsky. I translate from German. I specialize in modernist literature and also contemporary. So mostly 20th century. I teach in the creative writing program at Columbia University. And my name is Yvette Siegert. I translate from the Spanish, lately mostly Latin American Spanish, but also peninsula literature, also more 20th century poetry and fiction. And I'm not affiliated with the university, but that's all. Hi, I'm Cain Cheshire. I teach Greek and Latin at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. I translated primarily from ancient Greek. I have a recent work. It's a translation of Sophocles, if you look under S in the book fair. It's Sophocles' Woman of Trachas. And it's retitled Murder a Jagged Rock. So you might not think it's Sophocles at first. I speak first, so I'm going to go ahead and stand up. What I'd like to do today is just this work started sort of as an end of discussion to the whole topic, I think. I just talk about just an opera story of a satanic song. And sort of take this little fuzzy back all the way from its original context forward through its kind of different ways of receiving fragments or acquiring fragments, but a group of higher fragments from Egypt. And then moving into the whole concept of the addition. And then finally the various ways that those edited fragments might then be translated by a variety of translators. I'm going to turn to something that could be an hour lecture. It is something much shorter, but I think it will, I don't know how long it's going to take. This is a sort of potentially idealized representation, ultimately necessarily idealized representation of satan. It was coming from the end of the fifth century. It happens in a different state or nation, if you will, from Lesbos, which happens actually. And coming 200 years later after the revolution. So you see a representative here looking at a text, which is potentially problematic. We don't know Sappho was literate, even. It's not necessary. It's such a world culture, it's such a world phenomenon, an olden phenomenon, an antiquity, that one need necessarily to be literate, to be a composer or a poet. A slave's friend can read to you, for example. But by this time, there's the idea that Sappho should certainly be literate. And many works have been written down. And writing to some extent is even a process perhaps of composition by this point. You see tragedians in antiquity represented similarly on face paintings in a scene with a scroll in front of them. But this is the point out that how far removed Sappho and the experience of poetry is from our own, or song, I even call this the sapphic song, because almost all of her poems are very likely than poems. All of her poems would have been performed, not read, never read cycle. Alphabetical letters were invented by not spacing between words, not punctuation. It was always performative, whether you do it yourself, and discover what's on the page by hearing it, or how there's performance, which is more common. When performed, they're very often occulted contexts. Formalized occasions, or say, for example, in writing. So moving on to fragments. This is one page of fragments from Oxerikus in Hysian, Egypt, which has a tremendous trash dump, garbage dump, that was used for a thousand years, west of the Nile River, higher ground, so the virus didn't decay for the most part. And I'm going to zoom in on one of these for a sapphic fragment. And you can see the Greek letter in here. You can see how truly fragmentary this is. This is labeled P-Oxy from the fire of Oxerikus, 1787. Also named 2166 B-1. First published in 1944, so this is part of the process. This is found and it's published by someone needle to publish. Then you get later editions coming out that try to compile all the known fragments of Sappho, and usually Sappho's characters will see us also from the island of Lesbos, the male point of the island of Lesbos. You can check wherever you're in first. I've highlighted a kind of a peak, what I think is really significant. First of all, the dates. As we move forward, we discover more and more Sappho, and I'll see you so we get newer editions. But also, and also on the underside, we get different fragment numbers. So by the Hellenistic con, we've got Sappho divided up, not necessarily through the original occasion, under poetry that was orally composed before, but rather orally performed before, but rather according to nine books, nine books for each of the nine pieces, Sappho was known to tend to use. And then we're metricly divided. So the meter of poetry is defined in one, which book, one through nine, poetry percentage, or what the ten, poetry percentage. So moving forward from that to the text, we get here an example of pyrus being converted in a very scoutful fashion to an edited text. I'm going to zoom in on this edited text so we don't let go of the real thing. Or one representation of the real thing. For this representation of the representation of the real thing. So you can see certain devices are used to your brackets, show where the fragments, where nothing else occurs to the right or left. There are dots to show that their letters were there. If we're not sure about what those letters were, dots are placed under the letters. So you see these subscripted dots there to show that we're not really sure about those letters. You can see there's a lot of uncertainty in this tiny, tiny fragment of Sappho's. Below we have Testimonia. I've published scholarship on the, on this particular fragment. Places where phrases from the fragment occur in the Iliad or the Odyssey. The big cap of letters, such as Gamma refers to the Iliad. Lowercase letters such as Campo refer to Book 11 of the Odyssey. Then critical, the apparatus critical is scholars that propose different readings for these supposed correct readings of the original fragment of the virus fragment. So then we move to new poems. This is coming from 1982. Anyone who's moved to the Little Class of the Library? David Campbell has published a translation of those in 1982. And you can see this. This isn't a qualitative sort of evaluation of the translation. What I want to do is show you differences in the way this is a scholar trying to offer a very literal translation of the original. We get question marks afterwards that he's not sure about. We get an ellipsis everywhere that's something missing. He's just bearing, well that's an epithet of Zeus. So maybe Zeus. I don't have a question mark. Keteria, maybe Keteria, but we're missing the cap of the Ups along. We can't be too sure on a footnote. This could be after how he was associated with Keteria and so on. Below here is this by Ann Karsten. On the right. Not. 2002. And I've offered you the Greek on the left. I don't know why. But Campbell's an offer. You can sort of see where they've departed. So the style, I don't think it's worth it. Karsten has chosen to have open brackets only to the left. So there's something aesthetic and visual going on here. But don't be misled. Everything to the right is also missing. One may not necessarily know without being carefully at the introduction. And Karsten, of course, the scholar would have to be aware of this. We've got quiet with the aegis, Keteria and Keteria holding the heart. Some of the language has changed. Holding the heart rather than something more like having in heart, which Campbell takes as with his tiny spirit of being characterised in someone like an emotion. And forsaking. Stronger than leaving. Harsh. Stronger than difficult. Those words have those full semantic ranges. Neither is incorrect. But it's a different way of representing a bragg. And then more recently, Willis Barstow in 2006. I had a panel on Thursday, actually, which talked about, but I'm not I couldn't make it because I was on another panel at the same time. We were speaking about translation without knowledge of the original source language. But Barstow collaborates closely with the classes as well. What's really interesting here is we've moved away from brackets entirely by this point. We've got anyone coming to this without understanding the fragment would think we have a full moment for it. We can get it entirely. Barstow is bothering days of harshness. And further interpretation can come to my severities. Severities couldn't be an accusative plural direct object in the original fragment of which one of the pirates is an impossibility. But we get another level, or another movement away from the fragment into form. And a different kind of perception. Finally, I just wanted to confer really quickly to just the new context. I already mentioned the different fragment numberings. Each of these Campbell, Carson and Barstow all have arranged their fragments in different words. So that the fragments, these are fragments. And when fragments follow fragments, fragments are received differently relative to one another by being necessarily. So these are just examples of three different fragments that fall about all periods of time. I think I'll just finish assuming I'm on a water snap. She loves South Hope. I've been leaving her hometown. With the graffiti, I don't want to talk about graffiti at all. I'll leave there time. But I can take a look deeply into that text. Thank you so much, Cain, for that classical introductions of fragment. I am really excited to have Cain give us that context for the way fragments have originated historically speaking. And as we move on to the rest of the panelists, we're going to be talking about contemporary fragmentation, which is of course more intentional. So by way of introduction to that, I just wanted to offer some ideas about reasons that writers would choose to write intentionally in fragments. And these are borrowed from an essay by Delo Revelle called Better Instead on Poetic Fragments' Throw Essay. It's an amazing essay and it's really brief and concise and wonderful. So do look for it. It's widely available. So as Cain was kind of getting us into fragments are of course robbed of context, even in a historical sense. Sappho's poetry or lyrics are obviously complete narratives and now they exist as fragments and my context is one. When writers choose to write in fragments today, we're also missing a sense of context. And I think as translators, we can try to kind of imagine what it is or approximate it. But it's missing. Fragments have no beginning or end. We can think of them as kind of pieces of middles or anything about them. And so Revelle, I'm just going to gloss over a few of the talks about reasons for writing fragments mainly as being the impossibility of encompassing the subject in form. This subject is too beautiful, incredible vast and it cannot be encompassed by the poetic endeavor. Fragments are an attempt that is always false short and should. He says it is as if the interruption instigated by the poet's eye actually emphasizes the ceaselessness of what is seen compulsively following what allows no leisure for interpretation or for shape. He talks about awe as being a reason for writing fragments established by awe. And then Piety, fragments Revelle considers as always being pious, which I think is very related to the translator Rean Dever in many ways. He says, the good fragment renouncing even the modest posterity of a completed utterance and choosing to exist not even once of the poem is innocent of presumption. It is transparent because it cannot be read in the usual manner of meaning received even once. It's illegibility is an inexhaustible necessity which I think is wonderful when we're thinking about translation. I quoted that in the panel description in front of them. It's illegibility is an inexhaustible necessity and I think many of the panelists are working with original texts that are more illegible to begin with which obviously challenges and opportunities. And then finally I want to linger on this extremes of human experience Revelle says is a primary motivator for fragmentation. So he says at extremes of human experience the habitual reflective syntax of language breaks just as reflective consciousness breaks opening to the catastrophe of a present that recalls no precedent and anticipates no aftermath. Poetic form is acquitted of intention when destroyed by extremes of passion or grief that compel poetry towards the speech of speechlessness which struggling to survive at those extremes must encode the unnameable truth of catastrophe known not even to itself. A fragment can be the testimony of what did not escape to tell but chose instead to remain the sight of the unspeakable entity there. And I think that applies to all of the fragments that we're going to be considering today by contemporary fragmented. And then Revelle doesn't get into this so much but along those lines there are political linguistic motivations for fragmentation intentionally breaking language. You see this in Paul Fillon for example and I'm saying that some of the panelists will be covering as well and then representation of history or historical trauma as a reason for fragmenting. And then finally some of the panelists are going to be talking about fragmentary sensations using fragments in a way of engaging with other texts in intertextual ways. So now I'm going to put on my panelist test and I'm going to talk a little bit about my translations of Revelle. I wanted to give you a sense of what these fragments look like and then I'm going to be discussing today. So Revelle Haldusso is an Argentine poet with a writing in the 60s published five books of poetry in his lifetime. Born in 1932 was disappeared in 1976 at the beginning of the military dictatorship in 1921. And these are from his third book Garmentos Fantásticos which is titled for the series of fragments. In his third and fourth books he has long numbered series of kind of amperistic fragments. In Garmentos Fantásticos he has seven numbered fragments and then in the fourth book I believe there are 127 and these make up sections of the books. The other poems he has kind of crone poems he has traditionally laminated poems so they're playing with these forms. I'll just give you a sense of what's pretty short but they also tend toward narrative at times. These little paragraphs seem to be a total map of the person and now it moves over to the dark side of the disease and I'm like unthinkable. Alright, so I want to focus on these as kind of piece studies in what I was working with here. And these fragments of Gusto's in Garmentos Fantásticos experience situation at the time he had gone through a nervous breakdown he had attempted suicide and then he was interned in a psychiatric hospital for a period of time and that's the context that this book comes out of. He's really wrestling with with serious pain and depression and also very philosophical questions. And so just to get right into it one of the challenges of this was like I said balancing this tension of these aphoristic fragments with these more narrative fragments. So this one of fragment 34 you can see that's the whole fragments from here to the end of this asterisk and then 62 is really the same thing. Another part was an interesting kind of thing to translate. So in fragment 34 he has the book of miracles of the country of another part two lions roar in the middle where the roars collide as tiger is formed. And they're very kind of fun and playful. But he's also working with lions scimbalized for him. He has lucid madness but related to the sun tigers symbolize suicide. So you know there's a lot of pain and there's a lot of it's fraught. But there's this mirroring that's going on. There's a collision between the roars that's forming new animals. And I wanted to play play out or maintain the sense of mirroring that happens in these little aphoristic fragments. And it's kind of key-outness of the mirroring version that happens where the statement is negated which is very kind of fragmentary. It's like the struggle to even be and as it's said it's negated by the end of the clause. And then this one has a little paragraph of narration in the middle. It ends with a flower reflects another in another part. That was an interesting translation question. I workshopped this with the Chicago Land Translators Group that I meet with and I was not really happy with another part because another part is really existing as a place here. It's trying to evoke an actual place. And I felt like another part doesn't really sound like a place. And somebody suggested elsewhere which I thought was a wonderful suggestion. I went and I replaced these are the only places where another part appears. So I replaced them all with elsewhere. But then as I thought about whether that was really right and I kind of translated back into Spanish. So there is not a word equivalent of elsewhere in Spanish. At least not a single word. You could say another part would be the third option. So another site another place and another part is obviously the least specific way to kind of say that. And I realized that I think Gustav's choice of a part is very intentional. I'm going to mine for the reader that these are parts of a whole. And that over the birthday is really kind of like a parallel universe where other things happen in the text. And it's signaling to the reader to look for that. So Psygnus 62 which is fun. On television St. George told the duel with the driver that his proclaimed victory was along. At the same time in another part Dragon related his triumph. Dragons are terrifying. Better to say yes, yes, yes. So there is a sentence that in this parallel universe of another part different things happen that predates those other things. I'm then moving on another challenge in terms of trying to maintain that kind of consistency with Lord Olvillo which I don't have. So I've highlighted here these are all places where in the original Lord Olvillo it can be translated as forgetting generally would be like the typical translational translation but it can also be translated more philosophically and it can kind of culminate as oblivion. And so I'm going to contradict myself in all the places where it appears here but there's a reason I did that and so in Fragment 7 when my father died his oblivion was born again it has this sense of paradox internally which complicates the little optimistic fragment. I really wanted that oblivion was born which you know how kind of oblivion would be born. The ghost of the dead as lovers is exactly the opposite of what you would think you know if you're trying to forget someone who died would you not seek out a living person to help you forget as opposed to the ghost of the dead. And then 54 is fairly long I'm not going to do the whole thing but forgetting is the memory of time obviously it has to be forgetting the opposite of memory. Like 56 69 and 78 I felt like it had to be oblivion because they had to be consistent they're the same kind of variations on the same statement but dust and oblivion which appeared again and again boards and oblivion and dust there's a physical object being referred to as oblivion is the absence of an object. And then finally the last place that this appeared is oblivion 80 my clay is there in horizon my father lost an oblivion I wanted that to come full circle and to echo oblivion when my father died because oblivion was born from that first fragment and I realized when I pulled all these out so there's 87 fragments the father and oblivion forgetting the area of begins and fragments in 580 which is kind of a fun mathematical pattern and I'm wondering if I'll find more of those as I keep doing them so anyway I decided that and then we find out to Gada he was he lived a big part of his life in France and then back in he died in Malogre and he's considered along with Kateriassin all the pioneers of the Francophone Malogre literature and the way he introduced many techniques in this literature whether it's a stream of consciousness splitter persona fragmentation discontinuity and multiple perspectives so he was a novelist and a poet but his works are characterized by transgressive subversive character and a poet of violence with a lot of violent imagery in his poetry against the established orders from his father the king and god these were his three enemies in his writing and he transgressed a lot about the established traditions literary traditions, linguistic traditions and religious orders, morality and society and his writings what she calls guerrilla and mystique because he wrote in French they were directed towards the traditional literary punctuation rules, models chronology and literature theology every literary tradition in French he attacked it and linguistic tradition he attacked it in his writing for him writing is a space for experimentation investigation that held the primacy of the image over the name so meaning was not another importance for the importance so fragmentation in his poetry of many things he used fragmentation to express his exile not only a geographic exile because most of what he wrote was what we learned in France but linguistic exile because he was writing in French which was not his native language it's also a deterioration of French because he wants to foreignize French while also writing in French so he used a lot of genealogies he broke the sentences broke meaning it's also an iconoclastic gesture toward literary tradition and respect of theology as I just mentioned it's also a figure of freedom on freedom by his writing fragmentation if we look also at because he comes from the islamic tradition so if we look into the Arab islamic tradition by writing with the first person it's also considered a kind of fitna which is fitna means splitting fragmented thing so you are considered to be splitting the unitary fabric of national or islamic society so when you write a lot in the first person it's also considered that you are fragmented in this fabric it's also while it's also asserting his own singularity and difference his eye is also so multiplied and fragmented the person we never know who the eye exactly is every time we encounter an eye so that's why his eye at the same time it is fragmented between the fabric this eye is fragmented by itself because it's very multiplied so it's not that sovereign eye is very much unsolvable so I'll talk about this and how I worked with this eye and what happened with this eye so with that in mind if I was looking at how can we translate this kind of writing and I went back to my Bible of translation which is and he also thinks that when we translate a text into another text these two texts as fragments who fit into each other like two parts of a castle so here again we have two fragments complementing each other's intentions and if we go back also to the pluralization of fragmentation I want to read again about fragmentation and fragments to see what it could also be in order to conceptualize many eligible facts by parity we are chose by noise, blanchion, or action but fragments make us read without looking for wholeness they're not I think it was something that it's not a becoming they're not supposed to lead to a wholeness and then they don't have previous wholeness behind them and they become fragmented now they exist as fragments and we have to accept them as fragments and as such we shouldn't look for anything beyond or before and from this perspective they are just opposed in a text and not composed so Khayretin was not composing in order to achieve a wholeness he was just just just opposing these fragments and the relation with each other is also sometimes it's complementary in some context which I will go through now and sometimes there are intentions so in this arrangement there are also expressing a condition of exhalal because they are exhalal from each other but the relation to each other is a relation of an outsider to another outsider so by keeping all these discussions about fragments in mind I'll go through the first four mutinies and in the handouts we have also on the left the French original so if you look at the French when you see the jus which is the eye it's never we start sometimes with a jus it's not capitalized so I don't capitalize that I took the eyes all in small letters but I submitted it for publication at Benpo and the editor did not agree they didn't like a small eye they wanted a bigger eye and so this is for discussion of the unsalvied eye that during the discussion of all this they didn't like it so they put it as a capital letter publication of the Benpo I didn't fight as I was supposed to fight I gave my letter capitalized for the eye so if we go to the French you will notice the letters F the starting Fondue Fondue which means split refers to the the woman which is pretty much the signal which means also splitting fragmenting causing tension in society Fondue then no fraget passed away going down in the French so all these starting with the F associated with negative meaning F was fragmentation which is by coincidence started with an F again after that the firm last ciflant griffure down there and he repeats the first stanza down there with Fondue Fondue translating I couldn't keep this F throughout the poem so this translation was lost in the translation but I could come to say it was something else which is with the letter S and it's also because so I will go to the translated text C split vices skin screaming number star split so the split is introducing all these S so I hope by doing this that I would come and say it was the last of the F which is the first Fondue which is splitting and split and the continuation of the S to convey this in the sense of fragmentation also he introduces a lot of Latinate words instead of using the German terms for that use the Latin like it's mostly in the second one let me just mention toward the end in the original we have the set of the C that was a happy because I could sell it at the end of midnight I could keep both which were so I was able to I was thinking although we had this but there was something to refer to through the sound and then forever on keeping them at the same time keeping what's foreign to by using Latin Latin word which is the name of the mountain and I did some we have these I don't know which I get these letters whatever used as which mostly are made of parasites and insects that's the Latin medical terms for them I kept them in the English and I also worked on keeping the sound I was able to keep most of the S sound here but let's look at the last one so this was in the original put you in extravagant there to talk so you hear the sound of the cut some I was able to keep it here for some time another happy going for the rest I would like also to point out this that was a very challenging moment here in the original it's the way he writes it G at the end but one interrogation is a question mark with one take so it's our if I put it interrogation first it would lead also to the prison the interrogation the torture or the physical violence but if I put it in questioning first and my questioning first maybe it leads to his own questioning constant questioning of any order he is encountering and resisting in life so that was a difficult choice between because he is also against political orders and torture order so I asked some questions I don't know what do you think about this I think that's probably thank you thank you so much for organizing this I'm happy to talk about the process oh so the one with the book paper there are actually several colors in here oh right it's our presentation I'm Susan I was going to be talking to you about two different projects that I worked on that both used fragments in a sort of constitutive way and how I went about translating and thinking about them as fragments in the test some of those anyone who was at the punctuation panel yesterday you got a setup of this with Lisa Bradford's presentation which involved punctuation a fragmentary punctuation problem there's a lot of this and what I'm going to share with you so the two projects the first of them is a book by Ludwig Haareich who is a journal H-A-R-I-G I was on the handout he's a he's still alive I hope I think in the 60s was writing experimental fiction and I translated a book of his for Rosemary Waldra of Burning Dead called Die Reisenau Bordeaux which is an experimental novel in 29 chapters each of which is written in a different style he is a translator into German of Hamon Canot which explains a lot of things he's a translator author himself he translated Canot's exercises in style into German and so Bordeaux, Home of Haudenly and Home of Montaigne four of his chapters out of these 29 are Montaigne chapters and I Xeroxed one page out of my translation the preliminaries of Monsieur de Montaigne and I discovered well actually let me just read a little bit of this and then I'll tell you what the deal is my chapter headings were not released into the world by the indeterminacy of the word hawk in the theory of transubstantiation these anecdotes and the many quotes contained in them are not always plain examples and do not always exhaust their subject matter much as in the case of a man who meeting fire visits his neighbor to obtain some I sometimes lose my thread if not the lab robe I prefer the sort of gate familiar in poetry with unexpected leaves whether it be on horseback at table or in bed either since I myself am one person one day another on another front and back facing left and right and in all my natural attitudes but especially on horseback where I engage in my most protracted conversations if you're having a little difficulty following this it's because what you are reading is a bunch of Montaigne quotes and it took me a little while I think this book was written in German to figure out if this chapter consisted 100% of Montaigne quotes the only problem was that Harvard did not quote full sentences any time but quoted third of sentences half of sentences bits of sentences but there's basically no words in this that did not come out of a Montaigne essay and so once I figured that out I thought okay let me just translate this as if it were just written as one thing and the really interesting thing I discovered in doing this is that it was almost impossible for me to translate this collage of fragments without normalizing it and creating meaning I found it incredibly difficult for me to translate this collage of fragments without normalizing it and creating meaning but it was incredibly difficult to not create meaning which completely destroyed the effect and then I thought what am I going to do because this is not interesting it doesn't fulfill the constraints also the things were blurring into one another because when you recast the complicated sentence sometimes things wind up in a different order in English so the fragments were blurring together it was a mess and so I wound up doing the following I had these I had all these quotes I was able to separate out where one began and one ended and then I took this was before I did this in the early 90s the internet was not what it was today so I was working in Berlin in the Staatsbibliothe a big great library with a wonderful big well-stocked reference group and using this reference room I found an enormous concordance in French of the complete works of Montaigne I mean most of you everybody people in the room were my age and probably know what concordance is but I think with the internet concordances are losing in favor so the younger people in the room may never have seen a concordance but before the internet and before searchable texts and some of these large books along with the works of Shakespeare you look up the word problem and someone's made a list of every time the word problem appears in Shakespeare's work so it was a scholarly tool so I used this concordance of Montaigne's works to find where each one of these fragments came from so I looked at the German I tried to find key words and figure out what that key word in German would have been in French and then looked it up in an old I used the color translation of Montaigne because I liked it's slight old fashioned tone looked up the fragments in the English and then cut and pasted in collage this is a collage of the color translation of Montaigne because I was unable to create the fragment feel by just translating it straight up so I used this translation technique which took a little more hours than you can possibly imagine okay that's the hardest part of this publication so the most recent book of hers that she's a really really great German writer in her late 40s now and I'm going to be talking about her book The End of Days which is a book that's I have to give away a little bit of plot but it doesn't make sense if you don't have basics of this book so it's a book that keeps retaking history and so the main character of the book dies as an infant on the first page and the book keeps telling me history and then taking it back with the what if the baby dies and then read about all the horrible things that happened to the families and so the death of this child which includes deaths and immigrations and all the incredible consequences that one deed can have or what event can have the book then says but what if instead of when the baby started crying like this and then it occurred to the mother to thrust open the window, grab a handful of snow and put it under the baby's shirt then the baby's heart would start beating, blah blah you get this what if that turns into the narrative you're reading over and over again and so we have these many many lives which however you forget about where you're reading so each time it happens even if you're expecting it it's a little bit of a shock so our main character who died on the first page winds up the middle aged woman who has fled Nazi Germany because she's a Marxist she also has Jewish roots so she's doubly endangered and she's living in Moscow where a lot of people from Germany and Austria have fled having political conviction only to find themselves shortly thereafter victims of Stalin's show trials so she's in this horrible position her husband has been taken away and she's writing the course of this chapter on account of her life she has to account for herself and this account of her life must be submitted to the authorities she's written several accounts of her lives and each one of them was sort of politically expedient and she's thinking about if I write this what's it going to do, what's it going to do and she serves to have a lot of memories of her political experiences which get broken down into fragments and fragments are really important in Jenny Ebenbeck's life because I think that this is the fourth book of hers I've translated so I feel like I know her pretty well now I think that she believes it seems to be the case from her work that she believes that if you break down everybody's lives into sorts of incidents and events that happen all lives become like one another in there with minus the trappings but in the sorts of things that happen and like here's a quote from her work now it's like this and this is from the end of of a random chapter now it's like this the one hand knows that a man's member doesn't hurt when you squeeze it even applying a fair bit of pressure it's just a muscle another hand has known for a long time that caution is required when pouring water over the cacha in a pot because the water can splash up and possibly scald you one hand grasps the handle of a drill in a factory 800 times a day one hand washes the other another gets slipped through a person's hair another drops a quarter into a gas meter one hand pulls a sheet taut another wipes crumbs from the table a third flips a light switch and in this little montage of hands she's retold given a resume of lives of like five different characters in the book that we've had and she sort of distilled their lives into the thing that the gestures a hand performs and then for the point I made about lives being hauled some strange way the same life here's a short quote about that gestures a shared experience she thought at times that deprivation made people more alike made their movements down to the gestures of their hands and fingers ever more predictable when she encountered other people in the woods who are also looking for wood because you're freezing in wartime outside of Vienna other people looking for wood she saw their bending over their breaking twigs they're stripping off the dry leaves exactly resembling her own bending breaking and stripping and so how do you survive a war in the woods and you bend, break and strip so these are the gestures and so there's a thematic link in this book between these isolated gestures and the story of political history, human history 20th century history in the German-speaking countries that she's telling the history of the world is a series of moments and each of these moments leaves physical marks behind our bodies and muscle memory these things so she's mapping this pattern of marks so I've given you a couple of pages which you can actually ignore or you can look at if you want to from the Moscow chapter I gave it to you in German in case some of you know German if you want to check my translation you can talk about that excruciating later or we can skip that that's as great as you will but I wanted you to see that there are a bunch of fragments and even if you don't know any German look at page 164 and 165 all of these things on the left hand side of the page on 164 are fragments and at the top of 165 you see that they're getting shorter that's the only thing that I want you to note at this point so lots and lots of fragments getting progressively shorter it turns out because I asked Jenny what's going on this on this page all of these fragments are quoted from an actual book that existed in German called Dezäuberung, Moscow 1936. Dezäuberung is the cleansing Moscow in 1936 so it's talking about the show tries it's the transcript the protocol of a closed party meeting in which all the Marxist German language writers in Moscow are having a meeting in which they're basically jockeying for position and figuring out how to one cleanse their ranks to keep them as a body safer so there were sacrificial victims in this and on the other hand strategize how to present ourselves to the authorities a very fraught situation and people who are present go and look at the book like I did the people who were present were people like Georg Lukacs, Johannes Erbecher who is like became one of the most celebrated poets in East Germany Friedrich Wohl so known figures and they are arguing about their political position and who is politically clean and who is not and what that means and so she's taken from these protocols fragments out of context in such a way that sometimes they answer each other and sometimes they don't it becomes about the gesture of survival and so keeping the fragments she's distilling you don't even see what they're talking about you just get the rhetorical gestures in a sense and so like her gestures of gathering were the gestures of ensuring one's survival in this very dangerous environment the same bit is in English on the pages Mark 138 and 140 which are on separate pages because technologically you know not quite as sharp as it could be I guess I can read a couple of these so at the top of 138 this was a weekend in early spring perhaps around Easter a leg outside the land utterly disgraceful one should put a stop to it such a narrative well we wanted to pat across an archaic serves him right I remember that the weather was not on our side that day turned out to lack all talent and by the end of page 138 you know tried to incite me to his solid almost stocky figure to say that the book is garbage we're down to shorter and shorter phrases to them you may notice that some some of these have sprouted ellipses in English that were not there in the German why did Susan translate the ellipses I'm with you sometimes I don't want to pick too many fights with my editors the editor of this book was distressed by all the fragments and said people will not be able to follow this and somehow I was able to convince him that people not being able to follow entirely was part of the point and that the reader would probably be able to go with the flow and we compromise rather than turning all rather than putting too much sense making I sometimes you have to give your editor things that the editor was because I was fighting other battles too and if you if you fight every battle to the death you wind up damaging your relationship with your editor to such a point that it's not really good and so sometimes you compromise a little I hope I decided that this compromise was not the sort of compromise that would make me have you know hang my head in shame for the rest of my life you may disagree we could discuss that but I agree to some ellipses and the ellipses are a physical signal to the reader hey these are fragments which I think the reader probably knew anyway and the German reader may have some of them so it goes on the top of page 140 um here we'll just read that there's the top of that page with the roller to the side of the typewriter so we're back to back to her writing the report that may determine her life or death right with the roller to the side of her typewriter she scrolls back up the last eight lines then strikes the X key over and over until the paragraph she's just written becomes illegible then she goes on writing active in while fighting journey to at work on he he and she and so the words of her report are also turned into these gestures just like the transcript of the of the party fighting um and those my editor did not find me on which I was very happy about because I think the reader gets it that it was very important to keep these fragments you know feeling fragmentary because that's what and that's all I have to say thank you for organizing that discussion can everyone can I speak at this volume next I'm going to follow along with Susan's technology if you follow along on the handouts there should be putting more in the back if you would like to grab one but the text that I'll be talking about today is by another that I've been trying to edit for a long time I'll find out if you saw me who lived in Argentina between 1936 and 1972 and this text is called blood countess the Condesa Sambienta which is very different from the rest of her work it's a hybrid text it's unclassified but it's one of the most iconic texts in the Latin American corpus of the 20th century and it's very difficult to say that it's poetry as in the case of the other texts but it's a collage similarly to what Susan experienced with Montaigne it is a collection of 36 prose poems it is a gory account of this biographical speaker who was notorious just in time for Halloween as a female Dracula who for many years lived with impunity even though she was responsible they say for the death of over 650 young women and the text from a translator's point of view presents a number of challenges because it is a palimpsest of other citations that Pizarna is engaging with as a poet so thinking about the poetic fragment in blood countess is a way of being forced to think about questions of tribute of intertextuality of citation, of ambiguity and even of plagiarism because the strange thing about blood countess is that it began originally as a book review someone said review La Contessa en Glance by Valentin Penrose which came out when Pizarna was living in Paris so imagine you're a young poet and you're trying to make money as a book reviewer you take this text, you start reading it you start quoting taking notes of passages that you want to talk about in your review underlying phrases and let's say it so happens that this is a book that moves you so completely that you almost don't know what to do with it you might write a text like Blood Countess so if you look at the passages that I give you you can see a progression in the tone starting with the first fragment which is the opening passage of the text that has this kind of critical tone so what I saw as I was re-translating this text a text that I avoided for so long because it is very difficult and gory to hear and read about so much torture, violence, rape murder of these women was that the prose is very different from Pizarna and I resisted it I actually hated this book for the longest time and I postponed it as much as I could but I knew that it was important and so I kept coming back to it trying to like it and failing so I thought maybe if I read Penrose's text I'll have a better insight into what gripped Pizarna so much so I read Penrose very slowly and fresh I read the translation by Alice under Trokey and then I went back to Pizarna and I saw these skeletal residual fragments that helped me figure out what she was doing and then I was stunned by the text because you can see narratively how the fragments that she chooses to hypothesize from Penrose's book try to create something entirely different transforming the text into something else almost empirically and if you look at the first section it opens with a quote by Jean-Pierre and Pizarna writes Valentine Penrose has collected various sources and accounts concerning the Countess Bathory a real but larger-than-life figure who murdered over 650 young women fine she's writing a book review and it sounds critical the language of that section is very formal fourth paragraph she's third paragraph Countess Bathory's madness and sexual perversity are so self-evident that Valentine Penrose has set these issues aside and focuses entirely on the convulsive view of the subject to show us this kind of beauty is no easy task but Valentine Penrose has managed to do it really with the more aesthetic qualities of this dark history Asheba Bathory's subterranean realm is inscribed here in the torture chamber of a medieval castle and if you don't know the background of this text you think why is subterranean realm italicized in the Spanish or in the English translation and the impulse is to emphasize it the subterranean realm is in a wide section that's a quote that she's building her book review on after reading this text many times you go back and you see that in the paragraph above however where she says the convulsive beauty of the subject convulsive is also taken from Penrose but it's not cited there's no acknowledgement that this is Penrose's language so that already should make the re-reader begin to wonder as the text progresses you develop this very prismatic narrative of the countess's life and further you get into the story the more Penrose's language starts to take over the text because if you look at the second section that I offered you on the lethal cage something shifts here it says this is talking about a tortured method that the countess uses I won't read it out loud at this point but the middle of the paragraph reads in italics the lady of these ruins appears et cetera and here again she's quoting Penrose with a purpose of elucidating the poetical beauty of this very grim biography and I find it a haunting phrase on a third read it's an even more haunting phrase because I have figured out much like Susan figured out that almost that entire piece the lethal cage comes from Penrose that Kizarnik has sort of stepped back from and rewritten or retold throughout the passage she uses Penrose's structure her narrative structure phrasing but repurposes it in some way and it feels like plagiarism sometimes but it also feels like a beautiful homage and it can also sound very different knowing that Kizarnik is engaging with this French text translating it into Spanish creating her own Spanish prose out of it and then physically changing translations for her own purpose so when I submitted this to my editor when I started to write the note that accompanied the translation I said to make things simple and to give a regular sense of the thick intertextuality I have tried scriptlessly to adhere to the excellent English translations in this book and I feel very proud of myself because it was hours of research and hours of intense engagement with this very gory story it felt like watching episode after episode of SNAP where you see the text of some newspaper article and several key words are highlighted to show how crazy the subject is but by the time I sent the email I knew that I couldn't no longer be sustained as an effective strategy for translation particularly because Kizarnik goes on and changes so much so how much time do we have I feel guilty because I think we're on the edge of the no you're fine it's like another five minutes so to turn to the third section to black magic this is a place where using this method a very faithful citation from the existing English translation wasn't effective because Kizarnik is herself transiting a text and she says I'll read the magic herbs I'm reading at the bottom of the first page the magic herbs the spells, the amulets even the bloodbaths all of it held a medicinal function for the characters to arrest her communities that they couldn't remain forever when we read the pier and this was a pitfall because I knew that when we read the pier it wasn't in Penrose it's very clearly called there that she's quoting here the whole text is so full of quotes the Butler citation the importance of Penrose has the text to quote him the way she quotes Penrose suddenly made my theory more hard that somehow this mixture of readings had to be addressed so knowing that helped me when we started questioning my approach to this she goes on so she worked close to her heart beneath her luxurious gowns and sometimes in the middle of a party she would reach for it surreptitiously here's my translation of the prayer and now Kisarnik translates what really modifies the passage that she initially used as a citation so another layer of problematic citation occurs and it's never really credited to Penrose and throughout the past that of the beauty is maintained you don't know who is speaking in the final section on the bottom of the page who never denied Thurzo's accusations she says the countess declared that quote all of that was within her right as a noble woman of high rank I condemn you to life in prison within your own castle and in this case the phrase all of that was within her right as a noble woman of high rank is a direct citation from the Penrose text but the second I condemn you etc that's just Kisarnik italicizing herself making a dialogue to perform this incredibly critical moment in her story so it's almost as if she's saying I am taking Penrose's text appropriating it and then I'm giving you my text encoding myself you do something different than this and it's very moving to engage in this brutal text like that what I sense is this incredible tension in the text and what I find one of the questions in the description of this panel was to consider the reverberations of poetic writing and to me the italics seem to perform a very special function they're like residues or skeletal remains that in a sense tell you this or somehow mark this moment of convulsive creation and literary texts or rather it shows the complex relationship between reading and writing and translating here is this moment where a book really grips you and you start to write something and then it transforms into something else entirely I've never seen a text that does exactly that so I find it beautiful to think of these italics that used to bug me so much as these highlighted passages and say this is pointing to an act a process a performance of reading and writing that has to be acknowledged that is part of all our work I find myself I find my voice trembling saying this because I think it is something very personal but to see how a text can go from being so inscrutable and something that you resist as a translator to something that is so instructive for this work has made a hundred hours and took to translate this 66 pages really worthwhile so that's all I want to thank all of the panelists so much for presenting these gorgeous fragments and insights to all of us and we are actually at time there's a beverage break now I think there's lunchtime so we can continue to take questions if you'd like I have a question I'd love to know if you've got a little bit sort of a composition we have translators that are forced to do all of our it's called generative translation generated I know I do St. Teresa said that it's a beautiful poem just wonder if you've thought about I'm sure you've thought about but what do you want to say about how the original readers took those they didn't even realize the generative translation I don't mark them noticeably you have footnotes for our use I'm not using footnotes at this stage what I've decided to do is write an introductory essay explaining what is happening but I think Pizarnik who would use footnotes in different contexts resists doing so in the original publications of these texts and I kind of honor that because it seems that she's saying that you write is full of all these things that you read and it's nice to know that that's Baudelaire but you don't really have to know it's a short answer well she was a translator in French I mean she spent a lot of her time in Paris translating Michel and Arthur and Baudelaire doing this work at UNICEF UNESCO sorry and I think part of it was that she was trying to make money from some commission but also I think she was translating poetry to learn her chops as a writer she was incredibly erudite and she would copy all these texts that she loved into a notebook her Palais de Vocabulaire she collected it and then she would take phrases and fragments and create these very tight prose poems we'll just follow up with we just said that practice is a medieval practice that you take passages, copy passages in some sense memorize them and then they became part of your language and maybe all of you going back to Sappho and further that this idea of a fragment, a citation what the boundary is that the way any creative work maybe is part of a fragment of a larger tradition even maybe a set kind of literary vocabulary that this intentional writing in terms of fragmentation is just a simplification or a revelation of the way literature has always really been written and performed and enacted in some sense just a different more obvious form I know that sounds like a dedication but not something that's a process that's always happened it's far back it's far back as Homer the term Rhapsod for those poets who recite and improvise on Homeric poetry out of the Homeric cycle and tradition I mean they're called stitchers the image behind it being that they're putting the column together swaths of narrative but also down at the verbal level just phrases that might be two epithets and nouns or or a single hexameter lines and integrating and then call it together in exciting new ways that was allowed and preferred in antiquity we want a text today we want the Homer the other in the Odyssey and we have these textual editions to try to get back to what was exactly right but in antiquity it was the oral performance and you wanted something fresh and you know tragedians innovate on myth and so even at the mythological level there's a cobbling that's going on outside just the purely verbal production so yes I mean you remind me of something I read in Rosalind Morris she's a professor of anthropology at Columbia she wrote a book called In the Place of Origins and there's this beautiful section talking about how in Thai Poetics part of the coming of age of a poet is to create a palette of a vocabulary gleaning words from different regional languages that are then given the of being part of that poet's vocabulary and I think Pizarnik would probably say something like writing poetry is a practice and a process of knowledge and every poem is a kind of collection of knowledge in some way so here I was wondering it's to what point at what point I think I heard this at what point is a fragment a part of a whole and at what point is a fragment indicative that there is no hope to what extent are you seeing translation always as a fragment of the source of the source culture so I guess we're sort of does it have to be a dichotomy does it have to be one or the other because I think fragments usually work in both directions at once yeah I mean I can speak to that a little bit in terms of what I worked on I wanted to allow them to work in both directions so I really focused on making sure that each individual fragment stood on its own as it not as a whole but as a piece that reverberates and that is suggestive something larger than itself outside of itself but then also that those reverberations that pick up other fragments throughout the text and suggest that they're approaching a wholeness but that wholeness is never going to be realized but to allow the reader to kind of imagine it as a potential I don't think there's a lot of literary works out there that really celebrate wholeness maybe in a Walt Whitman most of literature about breakdown and fragmentation anyway I'm going to fragment the panel I'm really sorry I have to go to a committee meeting but carry on without me the translation of the sapphic the stuff that fascinates me for that very reason whether we want to insist on its fragmentary nature or we move forward and sort of try to construct something that's appalled in its own right where the translator comes the fragment I use as an example it doesn't appear in a lot of translated editions of Sappho at all Marxlin gives a whole page but Josephine Ballmer doesn't have it and her edition is called the complete works of Sappho which is already sort of an oxymoron right? I don't know how to answer your question but it's a beautiful and important one I think in the Pizarnik she's leaving vestigial traces of process that says nothing that I write is ever going to be what I want it to be and yet I think she's more interested in saying look at this new different thing I can make this transformation of one thing is into another and that's I think very life affirming in the work I can say one thing about translation as a fragment after I started translating and that sometimes I have to make choices whenever I read a translated text I feel this fragmentation it's like I need to read the source to see what was the original term what was the original intention is it actually a choice of the translation a translator made or was it there's always this in the back of my mind and this gives me the feel of fragmentation in any translation thank you all so much