Marlatt, Daphne

English

Tessera (E-Journal, York University)

Translating MAUVE: Reading WritingDaphne MarlattTraduction de MAUVE: Lecture ecritureEn utilisant le glissement de sens qui lie la traduction et l'ecriture,Daphne Marlaft fait un compte rendu de sa traduction du MAUVE deNicole Brossard pour leur livret NB! / Ecriture. Elle compare l'horizonqui s'ouvre sur le mot de la fin 'MAUVE' au bord qui permet de sauterpar delal'impermeabilite de deux langues, deux esprits, creant unecoda afin de saluer l'experience de lecture / ecriture comme une trans-gression erotique de frontieres, ala fois culturelle et linguistique, OU lesens filtre atravers le poeme d'un esprit al'autre.Translation has always stood inan intimate relationship to writing forme, not the same but similar to, and it is this shade of difference that isfascinating, that is exactly the area - i might even add 'shady' area-that the process of translation works. Writing this, i'm assailed bywords like 'ground' and 'basis' which want to insert themselves, butwhat i want to say about translation denies those terms. For me trans-lation is about slippage and difference, not the mimesis of somethingsolid and objectified out there. Even though i begin with a text that isanother's, how i read that text orwhat that text seems to me to be say-ing will occur in an indeterminate space between its author's visionand my own: this is not the text i would have written but it is the textthat i am reading and, in a dubious sense, rewriting. 'Dubious'because nothing is decided ahead of time. What i 'write' will be theresult of the very elastic play between all that the poem might be say-ing and what i come to hear, complicated by the shift between thepoem's play of meaning inFrenchand what it comes to mean in play inEnglish. Since it is impossible to 'bring over' all of the complex ofmeaning in French, the difference is crucial. And fascinating. And forme a clear instance of what writing itself is about: sensing one's waythrough the sentence, through (by means of) a medium (language)28 . Tesserathat has its own currents of meaning, its own drift. So that what oneends up saying is never simply one with, but slipping, in a fine dis-placement of, intention. Meaning is the poem's complex issue, bothwhat i thought to say and what language brings into play beyond myintention.Ifwriting involves this kind ofslippage, then translation involves iteven more, since there are two minds (each with its conscious andunconscious), two world-views, two ways of moving through twodifferent languages. All of this is compounded when you have twowomen writers aware of the displacement that occurs between theirown experience as women and the drift that is patriarchally loaded intheir language. Then you have both drift and resistance, immersionand subversion - working together.So i was delighted when Colin Browne asked me to translate apoem by Nicole Brossard for the new series he and Michel Gay wereinaugurating in a joint publishing venture between Writing and NBJ.It was to be a series of 'transformances,' he said. How could or evenwould i refuse when the definition of transformance he gave m,eincluded 'reading reading, writing writing, writing reading - thatflicker pan-linear, lured beyond equivalence: a new skin ...,' especiallywhen it was the author of 'TenderSkin MyMind'*i would betranslat-ing.When i first received the four pages of MA UVE with their fourelliptical poem-statements, i went into despair: how translate thesehermetic instances of poem / theorysounfamiliarin theirphiIosophicand perceptual concerns to anything in the English tradition? Mean-ing operates strangely in them, seeping from one phrase to othersaround it, leaking back and forth between fragments, definitely notprogressing in linear fashion. The last poem ends with the leap:fiction culture cortexMAUVEa spaced out mauve, a mauve ikept turning over in my mind, trying to* In the Feminine: Women and Words / Les Femmes et les mots. ConferenceProceedings 1983 (Edmonton: Longspoon Press,1985), pp. 180-183. This essayis included under a different title, 'Lesbians of Lore,' in Nicole Brossard'srecent collection of essays, The Aerial Letter, translated by Marlene Wildeman(Toronto: The Women's Press,1988).Translating MA UVE: Reading Writing . 29perceive its various verbal hues / clues. To what? Here was a marvel-lously untranslatable word, a truly bilingual word that transferrednothing but itself. Mauve is mauve and, likea rose in English, mauve isa flowering plant in French,a mauve is a mauve is a mauve. It's not thatthe spiral stops here but that it circles back and stains everything lead-ing up to it with its meaning.Throw the stone of an untranslatable word into the fluent drifts ofculture, into 'fiction culture cortex,' and it ripples out: roseblue or'bluer and paler than monsignor' (says Webster's dictionary), thecolour of rebellious women, of lesbians say Judy Grahn and DaleSpender (Mauve, eh? mauvais!t the colour of a bruise (connectedwith violence and vision in r;Amer, T Acte violent de I'oeil au mauveepris s'infiltre ravi deployant'), the smitten purple we seeby, convert-ing light into electrical impulses, into the language of the nervous sys-tem. Conversion, transmission, neural seepage, transgression ofboundaries, connection and communication.Talking about the poem after translating it, i seem to be workingbackwards through it, though translating it i worked forwards. Thisseems to me analogous with the working of the poem as a whole, itsend implicated in its beginning, in its relationship to its parts. A kindof doubling works throughout, and at the start most obviously withmouths, their relationship to another double, realityand the real, evenas they double each other. Curves of the mouth resembling theimages that surround in a reality that is not the reat 'La bouche aufeminin,' that mouth which speaks of another real and another (dor-sal) mouth - the slippage between the social medium and the subjec-tive one, like the displacement (the curve) of something going under-water. Nicole's lines make this curve, making leaps of displacementbetween the living body and its mental impress, the divergence of thevirtuat especially from the point of view of woman, much imaged: aparadigm for that difference between the writing and the written.There is the horizon line of language which represents the edgethought comes to, and then there is the leap beyond that borderline ofwords, beyond the edge of the page, which i came to see as a leapbeyond the separateness of two languages, two minds. Paradoxically- since it is through language that separates us that meaning flowers inthe brain, seeping like a bruise, a transgression of limits. TranslatingM A U V E became a remarkable illustration of this process, a readingof the depths of the drift, a writing running counter to it, so that i felt as30 . Tesseraif, in the process, my own cerebral cortex were being marked or writ-ten on. MA UVE stands as a commentary on the act of reading andespecially the act of translating.I came to see Nicole's lineofletters reading 'MA UVE,' then, as thehorizon line of thought, a horizon line of fluency indicating that pointwhere meaning curves. Taking liberties, i wrote a coda to honour thisexperience of reading M A U V E, the erotic transgression of borders,both cultural and linguistic, where meaning seeps through the poemfrom one brain to another. This is a fiction yes, but it has an element oftruth, like my etymological shift from malva (mallow) to maiwa (gull ormew riding that horizon line between two elements). So underNicole's ending M A U V E my M A U V E beginning the shift into ashared 'cortex fiction culture' which is the continuity of her 'fictionculture cortex,' the evidence of that stain her meaning leaves in myreader's brain-tissue / text (not forgetting her own play: corps / text).Perhaps this is the kind of reading tender minds make for each other,slipping the borderlines of skin and sense, playing with that subtledisplacement difference is - phonetic, syntactic, metonymic. In thiswe have the kind of transport translation can be.

Translating M A U V E: Reading Writing

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Translating M A U V E: Reading Writing

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