4 May 2021

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation

Der Übersetzer - ready at any moment 
to shed their skin and become-other
 
I. 
 
What is the role of the translator? It's an old question: but it remains a fascinating and important question. 
 
And it's a question that the poet and playwright Síomón Solomon has clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about, as evidenced by the Introduction to his translation - and extended remix - of Stephen Hermlin's radio play, Scardanelli (1970), in a newly published text celebrating the life and work of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin [1].
 
I'm hoping to discuss Solomon's bold adapatation of Hermlin's audio drama in a later post. Here, however, I wish only to examine his theory of translation [2] which, in a nutshell, posits the translator as an artist in their own right; one who (paradoxically) shows fidelity to a text not by staying as close as possible to it, but by daring to deviate. 
 
Solomon's theory of translation is, therefore, ultimately rooted in a perverse aesthetic; one that queers the text and allows for the birth of an illegitimate (sometimes monstrous) new literary offspring [3]; one that hears strange voices and intertextual murmurings [4] ...  
 
II.
 
Now, of course, there will be many critics who will loathe and despise this model of translation; who will loathe and despise Solomon for what he does with Hermlin's work and for his schizopoetic reading (and re-creation between the lines) of Hölderlin. But I'm not one of them. 
 
In fact, I'm happy to endorse this model which acts "'as a preventative against cultural atrophy and homogenisation'" [5]. And if, as Solomon acknowledges, the translator's cruelty of style results in an inevitable giving and taking of offence, well, that's too bad - can there be art without somebody being disturbed or having their nose put out of joint?  
 
Solomon nails his colours to the mast in the following superb passage:
 
"What we wish to affirm is that [...] the infidelity of [every translation] is not merely an occupational hazard but its transcendental sickness. On this basis, we propose recalibrating the translator's 'success' according to the boldness of [their] betrayals. [...] What is by definition commemorated and celebrated by the translator's Janus-faced remakings is the insufficiency of the source to itself, whose rewriting represents a wager on the literary future. In the necessary corruption of practice, to translate means to return to the origin/al to reimagine it, to complicate and regenerate it, and to recompose its music - even and especially in the teeth of 'misreading' it - through the rash passion for metamorphosis." [6]     
 
Later, Solomon reduces things down to just one (memorable) line that invites readers to imagine translators as a breed of reptilian shape-shifters living and working in a domain in which : "There is no tongue [...] that is not forked" [7].
    
  
Notes
 
[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020).
      Solomon explains what he means by the term remix to describe his adaptation of Hermlin's play on pp. 13-14 of his Introduction; "we are calling this work a 'remix', aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix [...] influenced by Kenneth Goldsmith's modish conception of translation as renovatory displacement". 
      Readers interested in knowing more about Solomon's reading of Goldsmith can find his three-part post on this topic on Torpedo the Ark: click here. And those who may wish to check out Goldsmith's work for themselves should see Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).  
 
[2] It should be noted that at no time does Solomon refer to his writings on translation as his theory of such and I'm fairly certain he'd wince at the idea, probably insisting that it's more a delirious shared fantasy of translation (of what it might become if pushed to its external limit). Whilst I understand his postmodern concerns and desire to move beyond theory (towards play, performance, and poetry), I'm using the word here for the sake of convenience. However, I have substituted the term fantasia in the title of this post in the hope that this is one that he will very much approve of.    
 
[3] Solomon recalls and transposes Deleuze's self-styled relationship to the history of philosophy as a form of buggery via which he sought to engender monsters; see pp. 9-10 of his 'Translator's Introduction' to Hölderlin's Poltergeists. 
      I have to say, it's a little odd to find Deleuze posing as a sodomite and delighting in fantasies of anal rape (or bum banditry, as Solomon refers to it). Perhaps it betrays the influence of his friend Michel Foucault on his thinking; or maybe he was thinking of D. H. Lawrence, who argued that the power of inspiration always comes from outside and enters us from behind and below.
 
[4] There's a very good reason that Solomon uses the following from Roland Barthes as an epigraph to his work: "Do I hear voices within the voice? But isn't it the truth of the voice that it be hallucinated? Isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite spaciousness?" 
      If, as I do, you accept Kristeva's idea of intertextualité (and/or Bakhtin's dialogism), then the question of translation is made all the more complex; arguably, every text is already a translation at some level and the author a multiple personality who speaks with many tongues masquerading as a unified subject. 
      Clearly Solomon also (more or less) accepts this line of thinking; see footnote 20 in his Introduction where he quotes from Susan Bernofsky's Foreign Words (2005). Bernofsky has also explored the significance of Barthes's work on intertextuality and the death of the author for contemporary theories of translation.   
 
[5] Mark Polizzotti, quoted by Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, footnote 1, p. 2. 
 
[6] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, p. 7. 
 
[7] Ibid., p. 12. 
 
 
For a related post to this one - on Stephan Hermlin's short text 'Hölderlin 1944', trans. Síomón Solomon, click here  
 
 

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