Echolation as Modulation: A Case Study of Chus Pato and Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, Accompanied by a Fan Fiction of Moure’s Work More Generally

ABSTRACT

This article takes a creative-critical approach to reading Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, a translation and echolation of Chus Pato Secesión, originally written in Galician. It subversively adopts the different species of Jean Vinay and Jean-Paul Darbelnet’s procedure of modulation from their 1958 comparative treatise Stylistique Comparée du français et de l’anglais to look at the way translator’s voice, somatic experience and political situation are shifted in Moure’s translation and creative rewriting. Across the different species of modulation, it charts the way that Moure’s echolation is a metacommentary as well as an archive of her translational experience and upon translation itself, modulating author with translator, writing with translation, but also modulating time and space between Pato’s realities and her own. Woven throughout these readings are connections to Moure’s work as a whole, in particular to the provocative heteronymic figure of Elisa Sampedrín, her intertextuality and translation techniques, and how they tell another story for translation. Finally, the body of the article is interrupted with prose-poetical passages in French that carry this reflection into the fan-fictional.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation studies
• Erín Moure
• Chus Pato
• experimental literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘The translational paratext thus functions as a kind of instruction for use, saying “the absent Spanish text translates as … ”, thus necessarily excluding the possibility that it is itself a TT. If the indicator of equivalence is to function, it must itself be a non-translation. That is why the discursive person who says ‘I am translating’ cannot be translating at the moment of utterance.’ (2010, 56) Of course Pym’s point in this discussion is to critique and push at the threshold of this, rather than to prove the truth value of ‘The utterance “I am translating” is necessarily false’, which is the title of the subsection (2010, 55).

2 Experimental Translation : The Work of Translation in the Age of Algorithmic Production is forthcoming from Goldsmiths Press. A supplementary PDF, The Handbook of Translation Procedures containing practice-based research experimental translation procedures (including several falling under the rubric of modulation) will also be made available online for free download at the time of publication.

3 ‘I shall argue in this book that rhetoric, in essence is a form of mental and emotional energy’ (Kennedy 1998, 3); ‘rhetoric is a natural phenomenon: the potential for it exists in all life forms that can give signals, it is practiced in limited forms by nonhuman animals, and it contributed to the evolution of human speech and language from animal communication’ (Kennedy 4).

4 In these tables, I have quoted the passages as they pertain to Pato’s (2009) Secesión or to Moure’s translation (Secession) or echolation (Insecession) with the titles, Secesión, Secession and Insecession rather than author names and publication dates so it will be more immediately evident to readers where the citations are coming from.

5 http://www.outranspo.com/classification-of-translation-constraints-procedures/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lily Robert-Foley

Lily Robert-Foley is Associate Professor in the English department at the Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3. She is the author of Experimental Translation: The Work of Translation in the Age of Algorithmic Production (forthcoming from Goldsmiths Press 2024). She is also the author of four books of poetry including m, a book of poetry-critique-collage (Corrupt Press, 2013), graphemachine, a chapbook of visual poetry (Xerolage, 2013), Jiji, a novel in prose poems and conceptual writing (Omnia Vanitas Press, 2016), and The Duty to Presence, a book of poetic autotheory, forthcoming from the To collection of the Presses Universitaires de Rouen, along with its translation by Anne-Laure Tissut. She has translated two books of poetry, by Claude Ber and Sophie Loizeau, and she is a member of the Outranspo, an international group of experimental translators.