Language in migration: multilingualism and exophonic writing in the new poetics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Walter Benjamin, ‘Translation For and Against’ in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Harvard: Belnkap Press, 2002), vol. 3: 1935–1938, pp. 249–252 (250). Yoko Tawada,‘“An der Spree“, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte‘ (Tübingen: Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007), pp. 11–23 (12). Translation of this and the other Tawada passages is mine unless indicated. Figure 1, Phoenician Alphabet, with names of the letters inserted, http://www.phoenician.org/alphabet.htm. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), pp. 37–55. Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 87. Not everyone, of course, has admired this ‘exoticism’: see Chapter 1 for Edgell Rickword's objections to the citational method of The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, III, lines 1–9; Complete Poems and Plays, p. 120. In ‘“Mature Poets Steal”: Eliot's Allusive Practice’, in A. David Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), James Longenbach points out that in the Quartets, the allusions no longer have a structural function; rather, Eliot adapts passages (without using quotation marks) when it suits his purpose. In East Coker, for example, lines 137–139 come from St John of the Cross (‘In order to arrive there, / To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy’), and lines 32–35 come from Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (‘Two and two, necessarye coniunction, / Holding eche other by the hand or the arm / Which betokeneth concorde’). The latter lines, Eliot explained to his friend John Hayward, give the passage in question an early Tudor setting (p. 185). Such allusions are, in any case, presented in English. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York, NY: New Directions, 1993), p. 41. All further references are to this edition. See Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1980), vol. 1, p. 48. I rely on the Companion throughout. Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C.E. Bennett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 178–179. Cf. Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See http://www.carolinebergvall.com. Bergvall's website, regularly updated, has links to most of her work. In this case, the Say Parsley project can be both heard and seen, the video documenting the Antwerp production where the English source words were given to Flemish/French speakers, who recorded what they heard or seemed to hear. See Perloff, ‘The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Caroline Bergvall and Christian Bok’, Textual Practice, 18.1 (2004), pp. 23–45; rpt. in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 205–226. By ‘differential’, I mean a text that exists in various states (e.g. print and digital or print and recorded voice) without any one variant being the authoritative text. See my Vocable Scriptsigns: Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget and John Kinsella's Kangaroo Virus, in Andrew Roberts and John Allison (eds), Poetry, Value, and Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 21–43. In its print version, the title is ‘Say: “Parsley”’. See Bergvall, Fig (London: Salt, 2005), pp. 50–59 (51). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engrish#cite_note-0. This and the next figure are stills from Say: Parsley, 2008, a data piece conceived for the siting of Bergvall's installation at MuHKA, Museum of Contemporary Arts (Antwerp, 28 May–17 August 2008), as presented on Bergvall's website, http://www.carolinebergvall.com/. Bergvall discusses the significance of typos, misspellings, and the like in the work of Mina Loy, Georges Perec, and Erin Mouré, in her ‘Typose Translove’, From Text to Textual Intervention (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), forthcoming. See Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Turgle. ‘Say Parsley’, [Image], [Sound], http://www.carolinebergvall.com/#downloads/. See entry on ‘Say Parsley’ under ‘Sound’, at http://www.carolinebergvall.com/. In a recent essay called ‘A Cat in the Throat: On Bilingual Occupants’, Jacket 37 (2009), http://jacketmagazine.com/37/bergvall-cat-throat.shtml/. Bergvall meditates on what it means to be, like herself, a bilingual writer: ‘it is not about having a “voice” (another difficult naturalizing concept), it is about siting “voice”, locating the spaces and actions through which it becomes possible to be in one's languages, to stay with languages, to effect one's speech and work at a point of traffic between them, like a constant transport that takes place in the exchange between one's body, the air, and the world’. In French, one must spit out ‘the cat in one's throat’; but in English, it's a frog – a distinction worth pondering. Yoko Tawada, Ekusophonii: bogo no soto e deru tabi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003), partially translated by Keijiro Suga in ‘Translation, Exophony, Omniphony’, in Doug Slaymaker (ed.), Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 21–33 (27–28). Bettina Brandt, ‘Artist Books and Migration, A Conversation with Yoko Tawada’, Comparative Literature Studies, 45.1 (2008), pp. 12–22 (19–20). Yoko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolygotte (Tübingen: Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007), p. 8. Sprachpolizei, 11. Translations here and elsewhere are mine, unless otherwise noted. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe (ed. and trans.) (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1958), p. 32 (15–16e). J.W. von Goethe, Werke: Erster Band. Gedichte. Faust (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1945), p. 174. The Wild Roses, sung by Herman Weng in Japanese; You Tube, Heidenr#3299C4. See, for example, David Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 225–233; Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Towards a Critical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 55–60. I have translated this essay, in slightly abridged form, for Lyric, 9 (2006), pp. 55–63, but the version used in the Jandl homage Volltext: Zeitung für Literatur, Sonderausgabe Nr. 1 (2005), pp. 14–15, is slightly different from the book version and hence I have retranslated the citations here. Eliot, Complete Poems, p. 140; Pound, ABC of Reading (New York, NY: New Directions, 1960), p. 32.