 Bon dia a tothom. És un plaer donar-vos la benvinguda a tot l'alumnat que esteu aquí, que esteu per primera vegada la Pompeu Fabra a la Facultat de Traductiu i Interpretació, a l'alumnat que ja esteu des de fa alguns anys, a tot el professorat i personal de l'administració i servei. Benvinguda a l'acte dins de l'acte d'inauguració del curs acadèmic de la Facultat de Traductiu i Interpretació. Vull en primer lloc traslladar-vos la salutació del rector, el doctor José Juan Moreso, aquí estic representant perquè li ha estat impossible estar aquí i per suposat, molt interessat en el que serà el contingut acadèmic d'aquest acte. Jo no parlo més perquè precisament aquesta és la part més important, el contingut acadèmic de l'acte i us adreçaré algunes paraules al final, simplement com a reflexió general del curs. Per tant, iniciem el que és la part acadèmica amb la intervenció dels estudis de la Facultat de Traducció i Interpretació, el doctor Luis Pegenauté. Sí, moltes gràcies. Tinc el gust de presentar-vos la doctora Susan Basnet, en ocasió de l'inauguració oficial del curs acadèmic 2006-2007, el 14 de la assignadura de la nostra facultat. La doctora Susan Basnet és professora del Center for Translations Studies central que va fundar al SANS-80 i que va fer de la Universitat de Warwick un lloc de referència internacional en la formació de posgrau en l'àmbit de la literatura comparada i dels estudis de traducció. Susan Basnet és autora, editora o coeditora d'una vintena de llibertes. Aquí, per exemple, sobre traducció el següent translation studies, un altre translation history and culture, un altre translating literature, un altre en cara poscolonial translation, theory and practice, en cara a un altre constructing cultures, essays on literary translation, també sobre literatura comparada, comparative literature, a critical introduction, també sobre literatura en llengua anglèsa, Silvia Plath, an introduction to the poetry, també sobre historias studies culturals. Elisabeth I, a feminine perspective, també feminist experiences, the women's movement in four cultures. També studying British cultures i també breeding at the turn of the 21st century. Susan Basnet, a mes, exclu poesía. La seva última colecció és exchanging lives del 2002 i col·labora frequentment en diversos diaris. En la meva opinió hi ha dos aspectes que cal destacar en la biografia acadèmica de la professora Susan Basnet. En primer lloc, la participació activa en la fase inicial de desenvolupament de la disciplina dels estudis de traducció, més concretament en la seva branca descriptiva, als anys 80, quan el seu nom es va associar amb els dels integrants de la anomenada Escola de la Maniculació. És cert que en realitat es tractava més d'un grup d'investigadors a uns interessos comuns, en alguns casos orientats cap a la teoria polisistèmica i la recuperació dels formalistes russos, i una escola en el sentit estricte del terme, però la influència d'aquest grup en qualsevol cas va ser determinada. D'aquesta època data una de les aportacions més conegudes de la Susan Basnet, el famósissim Translation Studies de l'any 80, que es va convertir en una de les primeres publicacions a proporcionar una visió general del camp objecte de estudi, adoptant ja en el títol la denominació per la qual seria coneguda més tard la disciplina. En aquesta obra s'analitzen algunes qüestions teòriques principals, es revisa la història del pensament sobre la traducció, cosa no tan corrent en aquella època, i es presenten els principals problemes de la traducció literària, distingint entre les tres gèneres, teatre, poesia i brossa. Però sobretot, jo destacaria el que potser és més important i que ha estat una constant en la trajectòria acadèmica de Susan Basnet, l'intent continuat de diferenciar els estudis de traducció com una disciplina autònoma i de ple dret. I és que, ja a la seva primera pàgina d'ella, translation studies is indeed a discipline in its own right, not merely a minor branch of comparative literary study, nor yet a specific area of linguistics, but a vastly complex fields with many far-reaching ramifications. En segon lloc, podem destacar la portació feta una década més tard, al 90, en una publicació que certament va iniciar una nova època en el desenvolupament de la disciplina. M'estic referint al recul de Sajus, que sota el títol de translation, history and culture, va publicar conjuntament amb Andrele Faber, teòric amb qui mantindria una prolífica relació investigadora fins a la seva mort. En la introducció al volum, advocàvem per transcendir el tractament merament linguístic de la tradució i per centrar-se en la relació entre tradució i cultura a través de qüestions com són el context, la història i la convenció. Estractava d'un intent de superar la aproximació textual a la tradució per passar a entendre-la com una manifestació política i cultural tot incident en les implicacions ideològiques que comporta l'exercici traductor. A la publicació d'aquest volum, es prefigurava ja l'adveniment d'algunes manifestacions teòriques que tindrien una gran influència en la disciplina en anys posteriors, com som el poscolonialisme, el posestructuralisme i el femenisme. De fet, moltes vegades s'ha assenyalat aquesta obra com la inauguradora del que s'ha anomenat el gir cultural en els estudis de tradució. Bé, no voldria acabar aquesta breu presentació de referència a dos treballs mes de Basnet, en els quals defensa ultrança la labor desenvolupada en els estudis de tradució, en molts casos superiors, en la seva opinió alè desenvolupada en altres disciplines amb les quals aquests estudis mantenien relació. Així, per exemple, en l'article titulat The Translation Term in Cultural Studies, publicat en la seva colecció Constructing Cultures, defensa que si bé des dels estudis de tradució s'havien estudiat ja qüestions relacionades amb la rasa, el gènere, les mitjans de comunicació de masses, la cultura popular, etc. En definitiva, s'havien adoptat com objectes d'estudi, qüestions propies dels estudis culturals, havia arribat ja el moment en què els estudis culturals es començessin a interessar per la tradució. Al cap i a la fi, la costament cap a la tradució ja s'havia iniciat en altres disciplines, com, per exemple, els estudis poscolonials. En últim lloc cal esmentar com al seu llibre Comparative Literature, a Critical Introduction, no només defensa la independència dels estudis de tradució respecte a aquesta altra disciplina, la literatura comparada, de la qual alguns l'havien considerat una mera branca, sinó que fins i tot posa de manifest la patent fossilització de la segona en comparació amb el fructífer de s'envolupament que havia experimentat la primera. Diu allí. Comparative Literature continues to argue about whether it can be considered a discipline or not, translation studies states boldly that it is a discipline and the strength and energy of work in the field worldwide seem to confirm that assertion. The time has come for a reconsideration of the relationship between Comparative Literature and Translation Studies and for a new beginning. En definitiva, tenim avui amb nosaltres de les personalitats acadèmiques que més han contribuït a dinamitzar el desenvolupament de la disciplina des d'una perspectiva no lingüística incorporant el seu desenvolupament teòric les aportacions més innovadores procedents d'altres àrees, però mantenint sempre, per sobre de tot, la genuina independència que aquesta disciplina es mereix. Ja sense més preàmbuls, li dono la paraula. Molt bé, no, moltíssimes gràcies. Ara té doncs la paraula la doctora Susan Bassnet i repeteixo, no, professor de la Universitat de Warwick i fundadora del Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies d'aquesta universitat. La lliçó inaugural, com sabeu, porta partítol de Translator as Writer. Volem també agrair-li el que acceptés estar aquí amb nosaltres. I, evidentment, per la universitat i per del rector, moltes gràcies. La distinxió que, en la crítica literària, ha tendit a ser feina entre translators, que s'han vist com aquí, i writers com aquí, és una distinxió falsa. Això, si us plau, és la hipòtesi bàsica, i el que em demanaré és com veig la distinxió que parlo d'allà. Vull dir que és molt difícil per entendre l'argument de la translatoria i de la lliçó. I que, efectivament, el que és una translatora literària és una rewriter de la feina, en una altra llangua, en el primer instant. I vam veure, en les últimes dues hores, l'anunciament de la lliçó turística, Orhun Pamuk, per rebre la lliçó de la literatura. I alguns de vosaltres en aquest lliçó són Orhun Pamuk. I, certament, he rebre Orhun Pamuk perquè és translat per un col·leg i un amic de mine, Morin Frili. Però el punt és, ningú de vosaltres, sense turcà, podria començar a rebre Orhun Pamuk si no teníem bons translatoris. I la qüestió, és clar, és que, quan dic que he rebre Orhun Pamuk's novel Snow, he rebre Orhun Pamuk o he rebre Morin Frili. Certament, sense Frili, no seríem donant Pamuk els bons reviews en anglès. Podria igualment dir, com en molts de vosaltres, que he rebre Tolstoy. He rebre tres versions d'Anna Karenina, dos en anglès i un en italiano. I què he rebre? A la llengua, que he rebre? Como la literary, ¿un castellano? ¿un castellano? Les llenguers, les llenguers, les llenguers de la llengua, diuen que és un llot. Em va dir que et porten un llot. tot i que et porten un llot. I el que volem fer és que volem invitar un nombre de translators treballant en diferents llengües, uns translatant en xinès, uns translatant en anglès i altres llengües, uns translatant en clàssic llengües. Vam invitar-los a reflectir en el procés de llengüe. Què volia fer a ser una translatora? El tasc, que believem, és exactament el mateix, si la llengüe és translatora o no, va ser llençada dos anys abans, o si va ser llençada 2.000 anys abans. El tasc per a la translatora és fer-ho fer a la feina d'un llengüe, vivint o mort a un nou llengüe public, i ensurtir, en qualsevol manera que sigui possible, que la llengüe i l'excitement que una llengüe generada per la primera grup de llengües pugui ser regenerada per una altra grup de llengües. Això és el tasc bàsic. Si la translatora transmet una llengüe en qualsevol manera que la segona grup de llengües trobi aquesta texta abismal, que és una fàcil, perquè l'excitement ha de ser generada en la segona llengüe. Ara, ens ens va preguntar la qüestió. Aquesta és la distinció entre la translatora i la llengüe. ¿És el processament de treball? Què ho fas? Perquè moltes de les llengües que contribueixen a la nostra llengüe també serien novelistes, poets, o altres, com els translators. Ens va preguntar a pensar en el processament. I el que vam veure és el fet de la distinció entre la translatora i la llengüe was very, very fuzzy indeed. And fuzzy is a wonderful word, because I think it's pretty untranslatable. You know, in most languages, the word fuzzy is borrowed. Is this the same in catalan? Very much so. You borrow fuzzy. And it's good, because it's actually one of those words where things are not, there's a lack of clarity in fuzziness. And that's good. What is different though, what we found was different, is that the working processes of writers who are writing and translating initially might be different. And the biggest difference is that what a translator has to do to begin with is to read very, very carefully. There's a reading dimension in translating that is not necessarily there when you start to write. That doesn't mean there's not a vast amount of research, but the basic thing is if you are translating something that has been written somewhere else, you first have to read it, and you have to read it well. However, two of our writers, one is the writer-translator, Anthea Bell, and she's very well-known as a translator from French and German, and she's also the woman who has translated as Derix into English. And you can imagine how difficult this is and what kind of cultural shifts involve. But Anthea Bell says, the end product of the writer and the translator is not distinguishable. Whatever the process is, the product is a text for people to read. And Josephine Bauma, who is a translator from the classics, and also author of a recent collection of poetry called After Catullus, where the boundary is between translating and writing are very, very fine. She says, and I quote, the one leads into the other, and in their continued practice, the two, that is writing and translating, become indivisible. Now, what I have here, and perhaps if we publish this later, I will do the full text, but I'm going to shorten it, because what I had is a number of examples taken from literary history, which actually shows something that I think is a fascinating question. And that is, how many of the great literary figures in European literatures have also translated? A fact that very often, when we look at traditional literary history and the way it's written, is marginalised. And so part of my argument is going to be that the way literary history has been formulated has tended to focus so much on, if you like, issues of nationalism and the national tradition, that it has sought, in all kinds of ways, to push the role of translation in writer's works to one side. I just give you three examples. One example is Alexander Pope, who is, if you study English literature, you're always taught a great satirical writer. Actually, he translated more and was best known in his own age as the translator of Homer. The second one is George Eliot. We remember George Eliot as a novelist, author of Middlemarch, et cetera. George Eliot was a prolific translator from German and actually translated Spinoza for the first time into English. And the other, of course, is Walter Scott, who we all think of as a great, romantic historical novelist. Goethe's first play was translated by Walter Scott. And you can just do this, it's a kind of game. I do this sometimes with my students. Go and think of a great literary figure and actually look at a little bit of investigation. How much translation did many of these people do? And it's a fascinating issue. So, really, there's two basic questions, I think, that we need to address. Is that going to go on, do you think, or...? The ambulance, there is a little bit sometimes. Okay, all right, I shall raise my voice past it. Two basic questions, then, that need to be addressed. On the one hand, the question is, why have so many writers chosen also to translate? And the second question, why has the translation work of so many writers been ignored by literary historians? So, there's two questions. I do think that there has been resistance, very strong resistance, certainly over the last couple of centuries, to the idea that the polysystems theorists posited very strongly, which is that translation is and always has been a major shaping force in literary development, a major force for innovation. And a good example is what's happening today in China. China has opened up to the West, translation is absolutely booming, the enormous amount of translation happening in China. And through that translation, an enormous amount of innovation in the work of contemporary Chinese writers. The Chinese novel, for example, is being expanded in all kinds of fascinating ways. And this is essentially through translation. And I think that this idea of recognising that translation is a major force for innovation in the history of literature, doesn't fit comfortably with, as I said before, nationalistic theories of creativity that emphasise the importance of so-called native products and reject ideas of importation. And I think that is a very crucial issue and it needs a lot more research. But what has always happened is that writers have always gone out into the wider world in search of inspiration from somewhere. D.H. Lawrence, another good example, you can argue that the impact of the Italian Verista novelist, Giovanni Verga, or Lawrence, was absolutely fundamental. Lawrence translated and translated and translated. And he translated in a particular way, there are accounts of how he translated. He would sit with the Verga text and a pen in his hand, just writing, writing, writing, almost at the speed with which he read so that the reading and the translation initially were almost the same. He was desperate to try and understand what was happening in Verga's writing. And I recently, earlier this year, I was doing a workshop with the Irish poet, Kieran Carson, who has translated Dante's Inferna. And we were talking and I said to him, why have you, you know, why did you come to translate Dante? Because he's not really an Italianist. And he said, well, he said, I was fascinated by Dante's Inferna. Because I thought, Dante was exiled from Florence. In Florence, in the 13th century, you have the Guelfi and the Gibellini. You have these factions. I've grown up in Belfast. In Belfast, we've got the Protestant and we've got factions. And so what he had done was to kind of reconstruct or reread Dante through contemporary Irish political and social culture. And what he's done with the text is absolutely fascinating. But it was, in a sense, a departure from his other kind of writing, but a very logical thing for him to do. And I think what we can say is that sometimes, or rather always, let's say always, when a writer translates another writer, there's a good reason for it. And I don't just mean the reason is that some publisher is giving them money. I mean, in terms of your own personal development, there's always a good reason. And sometimes it is possible to argue that a writer will translate another writer simply because that work to be translated is what he or she wishes they could have written at that point in their career. And Kieran's argument would be precisely that. He needed to translate Dante because it was the best way of writing about contemporary Belfast. Now, you'll see that part of what I'm arguing, I'm arguing in two ways. I'm arguing about the creative process of the writer-translator. But I'm also really saying that things have happened in terms of the writing of the history of literature that have increased the problem of this boundary between translating and writing. I mean, we all know, I think, that over the last 40 years, literary criticism has also undergone a revolution in the Western world as the concept of what is the canon has been challenged. For many different perspectives, we have asked questions, how do writers become canonised? Who determines and who sustains the literary canon? Why are there so many writers who remain outside of the canon? And obviously, one of the principle arguments in feminist scholarship was to look at why so many of the people outside the canon are actually women. There are obviously some writers whose work endures over centuries, but there are also other writers who are hugely successful in their own time and then disappear. So the whole question of literary history is indeed one of, basically, manipulation. The literary history is written and rewritten and reinvented at different points in time. But I would argue that far from being a marginal activity, at whatever point we look in terms of canon formation, translation has always played a very central role. I think that it's important for us to remember, and I come back to the beginning, that what translating is about is about recreating, reproducing, rewriting for a new set of readers. And hence, in the process of canon formation, the role of translation is also enormously significant. I want to just make a little digression for a moment here to use one of the essays that we had in our book was by the New Zealand scholar and translator, Michael Hanna, who wrote an essay that we used as the epilogue, entitled Matchmaking, Cannibalism, Transplant Surgery, and 97 Other Metaphors for Translation. And the essay explores the metaphors used by translators at different points in time. And again, this is a really interesting way of thinking about translating and thinking about writing. So, for example, he has transportation metaphors. He categorizes them, transportation metaphors, carrying across, bridging, ferrying. Organic metaphors that have to do with plants, transplantation. You think of Shelley's metaphor of putting a seed in new soil. Bodily metaphors, including digestion, which was hugely popular in the 17th century, the idea of digesting a text. Lots of interesting bodily metaphors involving, indeed, blood transfusion and transplants and grafting. Very violent metaphors of penetration, rape, violation. Metaphors of subservience, of taking possession of a text and the translator being in a slave relationship. Lots of references to handmaidens and servants. The whole notion of the bel infidel. So what you can begin to see in these metaphors are very, very different conceptualizations of what happens in the translation process. Some of which are clearly thinking about an unequal power relationship. And some of which, like the organic ones, are not conceived in terms of unequal power relationships, but conceived in terms of difference. Parallel, but difference. We've had the Brazilian writer, Araldo de Campos, has talked about patricide. The translator, effectively, is killing the paternal text. And also, from de Campos and from the Brazilians, we get the notion of cannibalization, cannibalizing a text. We get metaphors of following in footsteps, changing clothes. Metaphors of import and export. And if any of you at any point want to think about doing a dissertation or to look more closely at the metaphor in particular moments in time, this is a really good way of getting right to the heart and thinking about how individual writers, or indeed how particular cultures. It would be fascinating, for example, I don't know, to speculate on what have been dominant Catalan metaphors, at which points in time, how the figurative language evolves. What we have had in recent times in the English-speaking world, though, is the dominance, whichever metaphors you use, of the notion of acculturation. This is something that Lawrence Vanity, of course, has written a great deal about. The idea that a text should somehow, in translation, lose that which it carries with it of foreign and become acculturated in order that it can be read as though it had been written in the target language. Very complex question, this. And it's a complex question that relates also to questions of power. It's also by no means being consistent, at different points in time, different writers, and indeed different cultures, have preferred a foreignisation approach rather than a acculturation approach. And the cannibalisation principle is by no means acculturation. It's something very different. But again, you can actually begin to see, when you look at literary history from a translation point of view, you can begin to see very different kinds of patterns emerging. And I think, really, this is partly what I would like to see. I would very much like to see more literary history written from the perspective of translation studies, rather than, as has been the case so far, from the perspective of literary studies with translation added somewhere in the middle. Now, I said before, I'm okay? Yeah, good, no problem. I'm thinking about the time here. My principle is usually, when the audience goes to sleep, or some of them do, I stop. But you seem to be fairly awake, so that's okay. The innovative potential of translation, then, I would suggest, is one of the principal reasons why so many writers choose to translate. What can be brought in? How can translation be used to innovate, to move on? And it's also important when we think about literary history to remember something. It is relatively recent that we have made a distinction between writing and translating. In the Middle Ages, and right through into the Renaissance, there was no such distinction. There was a very interesting study done a few years ago, and I should remember who it was, but I can't, on the English writer Chaucer, pointing out how extraordinarily complex it is to try and distinguish between translating and writing in the Middle Ages, if we take Chaucer as an example. Why? Because Chaucer. Sometimes he translated and admitted he was translating. Sometimes he translated and did not admit he was translating. Sometimes he wrote things and said they were translations when they weren't. Sometimes he just bore... It's a wonderful case of a writer who was simply reflecting the norms, the rightly norms of his time, and does not make this distinction. And we now are in our kind of dividing and separating. I think we've caused quite a number of epistemological problems for ourselves, quite apart from the fact that we've also caused other kinds of problems by downgrading translating. And if I were doing a different lecture, I would also be talking about the way that translators are paid so much less than writers and the status of the translator, which is so much lower, and so on, and so on, and so on. But that's not what I'm talking about today. But that is implicit, in a sense, or in what's happened. Now, let me give you an example of innovation and ways in which a writer can use translation in a very exciting way. And that is the example I'm going to give you is the example of the late English poet laureate, Ted Hughes. And I've been working all this summer, I finished writing a book on Ted Hughes this summer. And I've been very interested in his because his reputation is all about his English poetry. Actually, he was a phenomenal translator. And not only was he a phenomenal translator, but he founded in the 1960s the journal, which is still going, Modern Poetry in Translation, deliberately to try and break the insularity of English poetry. One of the texts that he was translating in the last years of his life, he died in 1999. One of his last works was the translation of Euripides' Alsestis. And he was performed a year after his death by a company in the north of England, working who do very interesting things with language, actually. They go away from standard English and, in fact, use regional pronunciation. And Alsestis is an interesting play. It's a play about a wife who offers to die in place of her husband. It's a play therefore about goodness. It's a very life-enhancing play. Because at the end, the wife who has agreed to die is brought back into life through the intervention of the great hero Heracles. The opening sequence of the play shows death coming to claim Alsestis, because she's offered to die. He should be taking her husband. She said, no, no, I'll die in his place. So death comes to collect her. Now, most of the translations, the standard translations, follow the Greek in rendering this scene. This is a dialogue scene. It's a dialogue between death and the god Apollo. And Apollo is basically saying to death, don't do this. And death is saying tough. It's his time to die, but she's offered to die instead, so she's gonna die, isn't it? So it's an angry exchange. And when I looked at what Ted Hughes did, I was really fascinated, because Hughes, he keeps the exchange, so he's keeping the form. But he actually shortens the scene quite a lot, and he gives death many more words. Hughes' death gets a lot to say. And Apollo has really very little to say in comparison. I want to just read you a speech and listen while I'm reading this to what is happening in the language. This is a translation from Ancient Greek. But listen to how many contemporary words are actually in this passage, okay? So here's death attacking Apollo. You fill the minds of human beings with lunatic illusions, a general anesthesia, a fuzzy euphoria, a universal addiction to the drug of their games, chasing a ball, or power, or money, or torturing each other, or cheating each other, all that drama. Life is your hospital and you call it a fun fair. Your silly sick room screen of giggling faces. You're quiverful of hypodermic syringes that you call arrows of inspiration. Man is deluded and his ludicous gods are his delusion. Death is death is death. What's he put into this? Well, addiction, hypodermic syringes, chasing a ball, chasing power, chasing money. What he does, and he does this in all his translations, in his translations from Ovid and so on, he effectively takes these texts from Ancient Greek or Ancient Roman writers and renders them contemporary. He retains the form, the plot, the sequence of scenes, the sequential order in other words, but what he's actually doing is giving a contemporary input that brings the plays. If we think of the famous essay by Walter Benjamin that I'm sure you've all read, and if you haven't read, you will be going to read it, your professors will be making you read it, but the famous essay by Walter Benjamin, when Walter Benjamin says, what is translation? It is the giving of life. It is the reinvigorating. It is translation, is that which breathes life? It is a kind of resurrection. Nobody, in this day with Ancient Greek disappearing from European schools, nobody would read Euripides or Iskulus or Homer without translation. And in order for us to understand the impact, the powerful impact of the early writers, we need to understand them in terms of modern science. And another one little quote before I just sort of move from this. Wonderful quotation from another very famous contemporary English poet who's translated from the Greeks, Toni Harrison. And he asked this question. How was it, I asked myself, that the Greeks could present the worst things they could imagine? Gaze into terror, as Nietzsche said, and yet not be turned to stone. And my argument is that what Hughes and Harrison and many, many other writers have been doing in the latter part of the 20th century and continuing strongly now into the 21st, they've seen this period as a time when art has been pushed to its limits. And so one way of exploring the limits is to explore again through the ancient world. So the horrors of the Trojan Wars become parallel and a way of talking about the horrors of the wars in the 20th century, the suffering of the Trojan women becomes comparable to that of the deportees to Nazi slave camps and the Gulags, and the absolute unblinking cruelty in Greek drama and poetry can be reflected in a post Auschwitz, Iraq and Afghanistan age. There are ways in which these bridges can be built and these ancient texts can then become perhaps even more powerful contemporary than many of the contemporary texts that have been written. So what are they saying? What's happening here? Well, what's happening? Can I have 10 minutes? Sure, good luck. Right, what's actually happening here, and I'm trying to argue, is that there is just in the case of Hughes and in the case of many, many writers, a relationship that is a relationship very strongly of empathy. This empathic relationship between some writers and the texts they translate is enormously important. And I want to use the metaphor, the image is one that Michael Hanna doesn't use, of the love affair between a translator or writer and a text. And I want to do this now for the next 10 minutes by talking a bit about my own work and my own writing process. And talking in a sense about the kind of passion that one can have with a writer and the sort of impact this can have on that writer's development. For many years I had what I can only describe as a love affair with the Italian writer Luigi Perrandella. He's a writer who died in 1936, who wrote plays, I mean, he's actually given his name to an adjective, Pirandellian. We think about the Pirandellian type of humour. Very ironic writer, rather very intellectual, produced these often rather dark plays, had an uncomfortable relationship with fascism and with Mussolini, a very kind of tortured writer. I found Perrandella's work absolutely fascinating. I was intrigued by it. I wrote a couple of books on Perrandella, translated a number of the plays in a couple of cases for the first time into English for the BBC. I was very involved with Perrandella and there were Perrandella conferences and I would be invited to a conference here and I was a Perrandella expert. And then I literally woke up one morning and all my passion had gone. I had no interest in Perrandella and I have never been to a Perrandella conference. I have never looked at a Perrandella play. I have just had nothing to do with Perrandella ever since. And this is why I use the parallel of the love affair. There's a phrase in English, there is nothing so dead as a dead love. And end, end abrupt end. Now, why? I have no idea why. Because what I'm now talking about in a sense, I'm trying to get at these notions of empathy and what people need at certain points in their own writing career. And obviously the intellectual games that Perrandella played were clearly very important in terms of my own writing for a long time. So then I translated all sorts of things. I translated a Mexican novel. I translated some contemporary English poetry into Italian. I translated some work by a 16th century Anglo-Latin poet. I translated another long Italian novel. I did all sorts of things, but there was no passion. And then I found another, in a sense, passion, not for a single writer, but for a group of writers. And this came about towards the end of the 1980s with working with a colleague, my Polish colleague Piotr Kohevjak, and I experimented with co-translation. We translated a number of Polish women poets. I had no Polish. What I did have was some basic Czech. And so I could read, I would be given the poems. I would look at the poems through my Czech. I would try to decipher keywords, anything. Then I would get a literal translation. Then we would rework. We wrote an essay about this in modern poetry and translation of the process. It was a complicated process. But I actually liked working like that. It was very challenging. And a lot of the Polish women writers were, again, quite ironic, quite very personal, writing about themselves and also using mythology in ways. And in terms of empathy, the sort of themes that the Polish women were dealing with were themes that I was also writing about at the same time. And I want to just read you one poem. It's the title poem for the collection. The collection was called Ariadne's Thread. And it's based around the idea, again, another Greek myth, Ariadne, the woman who helped Theseus go into the labyrinths to kill the Minotaur. So a very kind of famous story. It's an interesting story, of course, because Ariadne, I was writing a lot of poetry about Ariadne, but I was writing it from a feminist perspective. Ariadne did all this for Theseus, and then he abandoned her on an island. So she didn't exactly, it didn't really work out very well. However, the title poem is called Ariadne's Thread, and it's by a woman called Maria Pavlikowska Jesnosewska, and it's, which you can't remember, no, and you couldn't spell, and if I try to spell it, we'll be here for a long time. It's a poem above where the idea of the labyrinth is built in to Hitler's invasion of Poland and the flight of Poles out of Poland, the woman going into exile. So here it is, Ariadne's Thread. Down in Żaleśiszka along Ribaszka Street is the Ariadne Hotel. The nearby hills were spread against the sky in a tapestry blush of honest autumn colors. Shallow and sleepy, the Nista crept along and cut off Polish tragedy from Romanian silence. Up in the cloudy sky, a monastery reared like a clump of bluebells. At dawn you couldn't see the sun in the abyss, but by nine o'clock it cleared the hurdles proudly like a golden horse in slow gleaming leaps. The lazy waters brightened unexpectedly and slowed down further. Shimmering leaves brought by the wind fell into the border waters and the neighbouring land. Roses shed petals across gardens. Poland was withering. The Ariadne Hotel was the last place I stayed in that country. After that I entered the labyrinth. But may the name of Ariadne be a good omen for me. I am holding the ball. The string is fixed to the threshold. I will be back. What I loved about these writers was the way in which they continually dealt with adversity, using these extraordinary images and these powerful mythologies. And in my last few minutes, very few minutes now, you can then go and have some lunch. I want to tell you about my last great love affair which resulted in the publication of the little book that Professor Pergonauta mentioned, The Exchanging Lives Book. And this was a very powerful relationship with an Argentinian poet, a woman called Alejandra Pizzarnik, who I met some years ago when I was in Colombia and I was given some of the poems. And I'd written a book on Sylvia Plath. And my friend in Colombia said, Alejandra Pizzarnik is the Latin American Sylvia Plath. Okay, it's an interesting idea. Image poems, she committed suicide young, you know. So there are some parallels. And I got very interested in this and I began to translate. And I translated, oh, I don't know, maybe 300 little pieces or little tiny fragment poems. And it was very compulsive working like this. But my own poetry was quite solid. I don't know how to explain it. What I would work on in English, which is why I like the Polish poetry, was irony and quite complex games with words. And so the poems on the page looked like little blocks. But Pizzarnik's poetry was tiny, imagistic, very, kind of, almost, how to put it, very, very slight, it looked quite fragile and was actually very, very strong. And so I got completely fascinated by this. And in the end, the book that came out is a collection of poems and translations, of which the first section, it's in four movements. So the first section was poems by Pizzarnik with her Spanish and my translation. The second section was a dialogue, a poem by me and then a translation of a poem by her, because ironically, we hit the same themes, time and time and time again. And then the third section, which was the most curious thing, consisted of a sequence of my poems, a new sequence, that were, however, completely different from anything that I'd written before. And this is my argument. My argument is, had I not been translating, I would not have written the poetry that I came to write completely differently. And I took, you know, the very first point I made about translation as an innovative force, I feel that I have had this experience demonstrably in my own writing by having changed a writing style, having learned to write differently as a result of the activity of translation. Do I have time to read a translation or not? Do I? Shall I read a translation, just one piece? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Cos I was just going to read you, what I was going to read you was one thing. I was going to read you one poem, which illustrates this whole question of empathy, and then I'm going to conclude with the final point. And it's two poems, her poem and my poem, about fathers. And this is, we both wrote a poem with the same title. I had written and published a poem entitled For My Father, and then I found a poem by Pizzardnik For My Father. And when I translated the Pizzardnik poem, there were incredible parallels. The parallels were about the father being silenced through death and illness. They were, they had Shakespearean echoes. My poem had King, oh. My poem had King Lear, and her poem had the Tempest. Oh, dear. But the parallels were extraordinary. And I'd like to just read it to you because again it's about relationships and empathy. When I wrote my poem, I had no idea that this woman 40 years earlier had written her poem, but then I translated it. So here's mine, and then there's my translation. And then I promise you, I will conclude with just a few words and you can have lunch. Poem For My Father. This is Basmets version. Rain for five days, the fields a lake, the house walls seeping wet. Before dawn broke, I lay and listened to a world awash with water. Inside the ward, it's dry and far too warm for tears. I sit beside the man stuffed in a wheelchair, hands like leers, plucking at flowers that were never there. This was and is my father. Quite oblivious to rain outside, or me. Once he would tell me stories, tales of wars and men, Troy and Tobruk, a blur of past exploits. Now, waiting to die, words fail, blankness for him. For me, prospect of summer somewhere through the rain. And his pizzanics and listen again to the parallels. And then it was that with his cold, dead tongue in his mouth, he sang the song they never let him sing. In this world of obscene gardens, of shadows that came abruptly to remind him of songs from his time of boyhood. He, who never could sing the song he aspired to sing, the song they never let him sing, except in his absent blue eyes, his absent mouth, his absent voice. Then, from the highest tower of absence, his song rang out through the gloom of concealment, through the silent spaces, filled with uneasy hollows, like these words I write. I, in this relationship, I found again and again, parallels, extraordinary parallels. And I think that when you start to look back at the history of why writers translate, you find this pattern, you find a certain kind of empathic relationship. And I'm going to conclude with a tiny little piece, tiny little poem. It's the fourth section of this book, and it raises for me very interesting problems about translating. Alejandra Pizzanik wrote her own epitaph, and she wrote it in three lines. It's very simple. It is Alejandra, Alejandra, debajo estoy yo Alejandra. Just those six words arranged. It is, of course, perfectly translatable. Anybody in this room could translate it. But it is also, I would argue, completely untranslatable, because the moment you start to put it into English, it loses all its beauty. Do you translate the name or not? And if you don't, does it sound foreign? It raises huge, in a sense, theoretical problems. So I decided to translate it by writing my own epitaph. And I decided to keep the rhythm, keep the three lines. I decided to use two versions of my name because I grew up in Italy, and so one of my names is Susan, and the other version is Susanna. So I had the two names, by which I'm equally known. And what Pizzanik does is she has debajo estoy yo, which has double meaning. And so I made a double meaning in my middle line. And my translation of Pizzanik's poem is Susan, Susanna, Lying Below, Susanna. And I would argue that that is a translation. If I may say, thank you very much. Susan was saying, perdó, la Susan, Susanna, m'estava dient que estava molt contenta d'estar aquí, jo crec que tots nosaltres també estem molt contents d'haver-la sentit. We're all very pleased to have heard you. Us dic dues cosetes molt ràpidament per acabar l'acte. Deixeu-me dos minuts. Volia simplement formular en paraules el que em sembla que és qualsevol acte inaugural, que és dir que és un moment d'il·lusió. Un acte inaugural d'un nou any acadèmic representa l'il·lusió de començar les nostres activitats, les vostres, que són d'emprendre estudis. O bé de primer any, que m'imagino la il·lusió, és imbèndiament forta, de segon, de tercer, els nostres de començar assignatures, de vegades noves, de vegades no, però sempre amb il·lusió. M'agradaria referir-me a tres qüestions ja molt concretes del que representarien il·lusions d'aquest curs escolar, 2006-2007, i que també compartim. La primera és que ensetem en aquests estudis, i dic ensetem perquè jo estic aquí com a vice-rectora, però soc professora d'aquests estudis, evidentment, com sabeu. Doncs ensetem una implicació complerta en el model Bologna, i això es fa amb il·lusió, es fa amb il·lusió però evidentment comporta reptes i comporta dificultats. Tenim una altra il·lusió, que és també que cada vegada està més apropet al moment en què es farà realitat el projecte de l'estació de la comunicació de Calaranyó, i que aleshores es traslladarà tots els estudis que estan aquí a Rambla, el que és la difícil de Calaranyó, i quan dic que s'acosta és perquè és difícil dir una data, però ja fa anys que el projecte l'estem consolidant, i sí que estarà aquí. També el repte és aquest, la impaciència, és un projecte molt maco, que volem que sigui realitat tan aviat com sigui possible. La tercera il·lusió, i aquesta sense cap repte, i potser de la qual heu sentit a parlar una mica, però no tant com de l'altra, és simplement el fet que des del Consell de Direcció de la Universitat Pumpeufabra s'ha decidit dedicar aquest any a fer un homenatge, precisament la persona que dona nom a la universitat, que és Pumpeufabra. Aquest és un homenatge que sent Pumpeufabra qui és, que era molt a prop dels estudis de traducció. Això s'ha fet en motiu de la celebració del 75, aniversari de les normes de castelló, del centenari del primer congrés internacional de la llengua catalana, especialment, i de dades rellevants respecte a la bibliografia del Pumpeufabra. Aleshores us vull convidar a tothom que tingueu molt present el que s'anirà dient com els actes importants d'aquesta celebració. Ja la conferència inaugural de l'any va ser sobre un tema relacionat amb el Pumpeufabra, les confessions d'un aprendit de l'exicògraf, que conferència que va donar el José Antonio Pasqual de la Real Acadèmia, i per dibuixar-vos una miqueta que passarà, hi haurà jornades en torno del personatge com a filòleg i en torno del personatge i al seu temps. Recordeu que era un personatge de múltiples facetes, el Pumpeufabra, que va ser autor de les normes ortogràfiques, reformador de la llengua, autor de les gramàtiques, d'aquestes gràmàtiques i en diferents idiomes, i home molt compromès amb el catalanisme i les seves institucions. Per a l'alumnat hi haurà qüestions importants i de caire acadèmic, i en concret hi haurà una convocatòria de beques per a presentació de treballes específics en relació amb la figura del Pumpeufabra, i aquell aspecte de la seva figura que està relacionat amb la llengua, potser és el com que ens podrem plantejar. Jo sé que des de la facultat hi haurà també tota una programació, no estic entrant en aquesta, sinó que us dono la programació de la universitat en general, i sí que potser, com dic, és una informació que en alguns casos, especialment per a vosaltres, potser és nova. Amb això ja no us retingueu més. La il·lusió de l'inici de curs, jo la remato amb la frase formal que s'ha de dir i és Declaro inaugurat amb il·lusió el curs 2006-2007 de la Facultat de traducció i interpretació de la Pumpeufabra.