Guilty: Poetry as Unreliable Translation
Guilty: Poetry as Unreliable Translation

Summary/Abstract: Lefevere and Bassnett’s assertion that “no translation is innocent” has become accepted as a given, and subsequent work has attended to understanding how this affects the practice of translation. My approach here is to acknowledge the creative possibilities of this statement, and to explore it in a series of poems that deploy two languages in the same text. The two languages work not to establish meaning but to destabilise it. Each element is ‘guilty’ in that it does not provide a reliable translation of the other, but instead contests it or complicates it. This includes the presentation on the page: languages are not necessarily held apart between versions; translations across columns are not necessarily translations of the opposite line. The witnessing voice of a French woman undercuts the English voice describing a wood-cut; the memories in “Cerisier” are fragmented differently in each version. There is the deliberate use of mistranslation; “Birthday Poem for Sandrine” offers ‘comme’ as ‘like’ meaning ‘affectionate’ rather than ‘similar to,’ and there is a difference between ‘the interior life’ and ‘life on the inside.’ In these examples, then, each poem deploys ‘guilt.’ The use of French and English here is to challenge the idea that one text is an ‘original’ whilst the other is a ‘translation,’ and so to open up readings that are made possible in the absence of ‘innocence.’

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