What politics where breath fractures?: (in)translation and the poetics of difference

ABSTRACT

The book Secession/Insecession, published in 2014, consists of two texts that face each other in the style of conventional bilingual editions of poetry: a translation by Canadian poet Erín Moure of Secesión – originally written in Galician by Spanish poet Chus Pato – and Moure’s intranslation, her response to her own rendition of the original text. Secession/Insecession therefore diverges from the standard bilingual edition that it resembles; rather than a translation that faces an original text, it is a translation that faces a response, both written in the same language. In line with Paul Celan’s notion of Atemwende or breathturn, the book deploys various forms of interruption and difference: ruptured testimonies, fragmented quotations, broken dialogues, unanswered apostrophes, divided names, and intranslations. This article explores the sense of the political that can be traced in Secession/Insecession in view of the poetics of difference that shapes Moure’s (in)translation of Pato’s Secesión.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• poetry
• literary studies
• cultural politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) at Harvard University. Among his translations are works by John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats. He has published in journals such as Hispanic Review, 1611: A Journal of Translation History and Revista Hispánica Moderna. His second book, El canto de la desaparición: Memoria, historia y testimonio en la poesía de Antonio Gamoneda, appeared in 2015. His current book project is titled This Ghostly Poetry: Spanish Republican Exiles between Literary History and Poetic Memory

Notes

1 Hereafter, all unidentified page references are to Moure, Erín, and Chus Pato. 2014. Secession/Insecession.

2 Biographical notes at the beginning and end of Secession/Insecession (6–7, 178–179) provide detailed information about Moure and Pato, including their places of residence and birth. Pato’s second biographical note in Secession/Insecession reflects twentieth-century Spain’s history of violent conflicts about national identity:

Chus Pato (María Xesús Pato Díaz) was born in 1955, when Galicia was in the grip of the Franco dictatorship in Spain. Today a central and iconoclastic figure in Galician and European literature, Pato relentlessly continues to refashion the possibilities of poetic text of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. (179)

Moure’s second biographical note is similarly focused on political history: “Montreal poet Erín Moure was born in 1955 in a Canada governed by the liberals under Louis St. Laurent” (178).

3 For instance, Pato’s titles include: “This I is not a Murderer,” “The I That Writes is Not The I That Remembers” and “This I is Not Death.” Moure responds to these with the titles “This I is Not a Murderer,” “The I That Writes is … I Forget” and “This I is Hardly Death” (14–15).

4 The monolingual Spanish edition of Secesión describes Pato’s work as creating “espacios literarios dedicados  …  a su condición identitaria de mujer gallega” (Gorría 2012, 14–15).

5 See Moure (2016), See also Casado (2003, 47).

6 Miguel Casado has noted that in Pato’s poetry “la incertidumbre sobre un estar dentro o fuera, la contradicción de la palabra en su doble cara opresiva y liberadora … actúan como motores de búsqueda, como desencadenantes de una experiencia” (2003, 46, emphasis in the original).

7 The idea of community developed in Secession/Insecession recalls Roberto Esposito’s negative conceptualization:

The community isn’t a mode of being, much less a “making” of the individual subject. It isn’t the subject’s expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what interrupts the closing and turns it inside out: dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject. (2006, 8, emphasis in the original).

Along similarly disruptive lines, Gerald Bruns has drawn on Maurice Blanchot’s and Jean Luc Nancy’s idea of désoeuvrement, or inoperativity, to argue for a poetic community premised on “a sharing or division of voices,” where “only the singular ‘being-outside-oneself’” is received and transmitted:

Poetry opens a hole in being through which every totality drains away. So it is not merely that the poet is outside and uncontainable with any order of things; it is that poetry disrupts in advance … the possibility of any such order. (2006, 81)

Turning to the trope of the fissure, Casado identifies Pato’s utopian register as desire in the present of the poem:

una energía que actúa en el presente y discrepa en él de lo dado, una negación que lleva a moverse, la exigencia en presente de una fisura. Utopía es el nombre que podría darse a … una poética que se experimente como utopía. (2003, 49)

8 Ana Gorría’s Spanish translation also reads “por amor” (Pato 2012, 208).

9 Gorría explains that Secesión responds to “ese espacio de diálogo entre la diferencia representada en la particularidad del cuerpo y de la voz gallega y en la universalidad de la dicción poética” (2012, 14).

10 In this context, the strong discursive currency that transatlantic studies possessed in the early twenty-first century would have further facilitated such convergence.

11 In the back cover blurb to the monolingual Spanish edition of Secesión, Gorría also highlights the bridge between particularity and universality when she says that Pato creates “un espacio de pensamiento poético … capaz … de desarrollar puntos de enunciación capaces de convertir la particularidad en un universal que atraviesa a todos los seres humanos prestando especial atención a la caracterización de la diferencia (el ser gallego, el ser mujer).”

12 Pato encourages a specific political reading of the presumed identity between language and nation when she writes about “the amazing naturalness with which those who call themselves Spanish in language and nation can claim to be non-nationalist” and “the tiniest expression of identity by we citizens of the Spanish state who are of other nations and languages” (2014, 43).