Haiti, Césaire, Translation, & The New Yorker
by Pierre Joris
The New Yorker, as we well know, has a house style and is proud of it. That this may be a natural thing to aspire to for such a venerable old publication isn’t too problematic as long as it applies to its journalistic pieces, from “Talk of the Town” to the various in depth investigative pieces The New Yorker is justly famous for. But this gets problematic when the same stylistic gauge is applied to its choice of literary artifacts, the translations of poems, for example. Now, we also know that in its stance for ethical correctness and good liberal relevancy, the magazine will speak its mind on current problems & disasters, natural or manmade. These two preoccupations came together in the recent issue that speaks to the earthquake in Haiti: the editors must have decided that the traditional light fare of its poetry department, which has usually been intellectually somewhat less demanding than its cartoons, needed to be upgraded for the occasion.
Thus they printed a poem by Aimé Césaire entitled “Earthquake,” translated (for the occasion, and therefore all too hurriedly?) by Paul Muldoon, the current poetry editor. Césaire is of course from Martinique, but I guess that is close enough to Haiti, or could even be the same speck somewhere off to the left of the page, if checked on that old map of America as seen from Manhattan looking out across the Hudson once published as a cover by The New Yorker. And given the poem’s title, “Earthquake,” it is possible to assume that it has something to do with a natural disaster in the Caribbean. Of course if one checks closer, one realizes that Césaire’s poem was first published in his book Ferraments in 1960, and may refer to some temblor in the Caribbean, though who knows? Well, if we go to the little Seghers Poètes d’aujourdui: Aimé Césaire volume, its editor, Lilyan Kesteloot, a Belgian scholar close to the poet from early on, makes it clear (cf, pp. 74-75) that the temblor in question is symbolic and that Césaire is referring to the political situation in Martinique during the fifties and describes — as Gregson Davis, another Césaire translator, writes — “events that culminated in Césaire’s disenchantment with and resignation from the French Communist Party.” So, using this poem to make a point about the current natural disaster in Haiti is sloppy literary adequatio, and disingenuous at best.
Worse than that, however, is the translation: Paul Muldoon must obviously have done this one rapidly to get the poem in under deadline and in basic New Yorker style, for it is a flat, bland, workshoppy version that loses all the power of Césaire’s language. Muldoon should have stayed with another of his magazine’s time-honored policies, namely never to print a poem that has been translated and published before — or, if willing to breach such a time-honored if somewhat non-sensical habit, he should have used one of the two extant translations of the poem that are way better than his quickie version (he may of course invoke the excuse of the deadline). The poem was first published in English in Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith’s version in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (U of Cal Press, 1983) as well as by Gregson Davis’ translation, in Non-Vicious Circle /Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire (Stanford U Press, 1984).
Read the Full Essay @ Nomadics
by Pierre Joris
The New Yorker, as we well know, has a house style and is proud of it. That this may be a natural thing to aspire to for such a venerable old publication isn’t too problematic as long as it applies to its journalistic pieces, from “Talk of the Town” to the various in depth investigative pieces The New Yorker is justly famous for. But this gets problematic when the same stylistic gauge is applied to its choice of literary artifacts, the translations of poems, for example. Now, we also know that in its stance for ethical correctness and good liberal relevancy, the magazine will speak its mind on current problems & disasters, natural or manmade. These two preoccupations came together in the recent issue that speaks to the earthquake in Haiti: the editors must have decided that the traditional light fare of its poetry department, which has usually been intellectually somewhat less demanding than its cartoons, needed to be upgraded for the occasion.
Thus they printed a poem by Aimé Césaire entitled “Earthquake,” translated (for the occasion, and therefore all too hurriedly?) by Paul Muldoon, the current poetry editor. Césaire is of course from Martinique, but I guess that is close enough to Haiti, or could even be the same speck somewhere off to the left of the page, if checked on that old map of America as seen from Manhattan looking out across the Hudson once published as a cover by The New Yorker. And given the poem’s title, “Earthquake,” it is possible to assume that it has something to do with a natural disaster in the Caribbean. Of course if one checks closer, one realizes that Césaire’s poem was first published in his book Ferraments in 1960, and may refer to some temblor in the Caribbean, though who knows? Well, if we go to the little Seghers Poètes d’aujourdui: Aimé Césaire volume, its editor, Lilyan Kesteloot, a Belgian scholar close to the poet from early on, makes it clear (cf, pp. 74-75) that the temblor in question is symbolic and that Césaire is referring to the political situation in Martinique during the fifties and describes — as Gregson Davis, another Césaire translator, writes — “events that culminated in Césaire’s disenchantment with and resignation from the French Communist Party.” So, using this poem to make a point about the current natural disaster in Haiti is sloppy literary adequatio, and disingenuous at best.
Worse than that, however, is the translation: Paul Muldoon must obviously have done this one rapidly to get the poem in under deadline and in basic New Yorker style, for it is a flat, bland, workshoppy version that loses all the power of Césaire’s language. Muldoon should have stayed with another of his magazine’s time-honored policies, namely never to print a poem that has been translated and published before — or, if willing to breach such a time-honored if somewhat non-sensical habit, he should have used one of the two extant translations of the poem that are way better than his quickie version (he may of course invoke the excuse of the deadline). The poem was first published in English in Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith’s version in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (U of Cal Press, 1983) as well as by Gregson Davis’ translation, in Non-Vicious Circle /Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire (Stanford U Press, 1984).
Read the Full Essay @ Nomadics
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