Claire Bisdorff (University of Cambridge)
The translations of Édouard Glisssant’s poetry into English and of Derek Walcott’s verse into French highlight many of the linguistic issues in Caribbean literature today. Glissant’s and Walcott’s poetry, written in the medium of the respective colonisers, has already undergone a cultural transition, making the transformation into English and French a ‘second’ translation and highlighting Derrida’s notion of traduction perpétuelle[2] in a plurilingual and multicultural Caribbean environment. Édouard Glissant’s and Derek Walcott’s innovative approach to language and their poetic ambitions to create a new Caribbean voice by subverting the coloniser’s language mark them out as defining Caribbean writers of our time. While the medium of their poetry is European, the language is highly personalised and creolised, their craft feeding off the historically pluralistic linguistic tradition of the Caribbean.
In this paper, I will compare excerpts of two published translations of Glissant’s poetry into English[3] with those of Walcott’s poetry into French[4], paying particular attention to Glissant’s theoretical framework and to Walcott’s ‘Adamic’ language project through a comparative analysis of the physical landscape imagery in their poetry. Creolising influences (lexicology/syntax/rhythm), as well as the accumulatory or fragmentary nature of the poems, force the reader to construct new meaning and new readings, a process which is essential to a new hybrid and heteroglot Caribbean poetry. The translation of this poetic process of reinvention unleashes numerous questions of translatability, of the dominated/dominating linguistic relationship in translation, and of the universal relevance of a regionalised domain of experience, thus inscribing the practice of translation into a larger web of interconnected transnational influences. Current models of translation theory are tested to their limits by these translations of Glissant’s and Walcott’s poetry, opening the theoretical debate to the linguistically challenging environment of the Caribbean.
[1] Edouard Glissant, from the poem ‘Un champ d’îles’ (1965)
[2] Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’ in Difference in Translation (Cornell University Press, 1985)
[3] Betsy Wing’s 1999 translation of Le Sel noir (1960) and Jeff Humphries’ 2005 translation of Poèmes complets (1994)
[4] Claire Malroux’s 2002 translation of Another Life (1972) and Thierry Gillyboeuf’s 2005 translation of Arkansas Testament (1987)
