{"id":6245,"date":"2020-11-02T15:55:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T20:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.attlc-ltac.org\/?p=6245"},"modified":"2020-11-02T15:55:12","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T20:55:12","slug":"en-face-with-oana-avasilichioaeis-limbinal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.attlc-ltac.org\/en\/en-face-with-oana-avasilichioaeis-limbinal\/","title":{"rendered":"En Face with Oana Avasilichioaei\u2019s Limbinal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I was reading poet and translator Oana Avasilichioaei<\/a>\u2019s 2015 book Limbinal<\/em><\/a>. For the most part, the collection consists of work that isn\u2019t translation. However, a little over halfway through there\u2019s a section called \u201cAncillary\u201d that, at first glance, seems like a straightforward collection of Avasilichioaei\u2019s translations of Paul Celan\u2019s Romanian-language poetry.<\/p>\n

The first page of that section is a poem in Romanian, \u201cReg\u01cesire,\u201d and the facing page contains a poem titled \u201cRegain.\u201d This standard en face arrangement lulled me into an automatic habit of reading, so after \u201cRegain,\u201d I skipped over the poem that immediately follows and read the next page on the right-hand side.<\/p>\n

To my mild embarrassment, I eventually realized that \u201cReg\u01cesire\u201d was the only Romanian-language poem there, so I had inadvertently overlooked what I had assumed to be the source text but was actually an English-language translation. This mistake seems even more obvious in retrospect, since the two poems after \u201cRegain\u201d\u2014\u201cLove Song\u201d and \u201cLast Night\u201d\u2014vary in length a fair amount, so they\u2019re hardly mirror images.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that I, as a non-speaker, would default to skipping over Celan\u2019s Romanian. However, what might this habit of reading cause me to miss along the way? Avasilichioaei\u2019s choice to include a single Romanian poem strikes me as a highly intentional artistic decision, and I suspect that she might be pleased at how it caught me off guard and made me reflect.<\/p>\n

Avasilichioaei brings even further tension to bear on the en face paradigm in the following section, \u201cRiverine,\u201d the first part of which contains several statements from Paul Celan (\u201cPC\u201d) and Nelly Sachs (\u201cNS\u201d) on the left, with statements from \u201cOA\u201d (presumably Avasilichioaei herself) on the right. The passages on the left- and right-hand pages are staggered, giving the impression of a dialogue. (Avasilichioaei notes that the Celan and Sachs quotes come from Correspondence<\/em> [Sheep Meadow Press, 1995; translated by Christopher Clark]). And, in the following part of \u201cRiverine,\u201d she mixes fragments of Celan\u2019s Romanian in with her own writing.<\/p>\n

In her 2017 book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals<\/em>, Karen Emmerich talks about the \u201cpossibilities\u201d of \u201ccollapsing the line between writing and translation\u201d (185). She also asks, \u201cWhat might it look like if we, as translators, gave ourselves the freedom to engage in forms of citational correspondence whose goal was not to reflect or represent but to grow, to mess around, to destroy the pieces, to magic poetry forward in excitingly non-original ways?\u201d (189). Avasilichiaoei certainly explores these possibilities and approaches \u201ccitational correspondence\u201d in a multifaceted manner, in which the source text, her own translations, and cited material from a book translated by someone else intermingle with her own non-translation writing.<\/p>\n

The passages from Emmerich\u2019s book are in a chapter about Jack Spicer, who, like Avasilichioaei, is both a poet and translator. Emmerich suggests that being perceived as a \u201cpoet-translator\u201d may mean others feel less resistance to one\u2019s unconventional translations (185). As luck would have it, I too am a poet-translator. In fact, my time as a poet far pre-dates my work in translation\u2014despite my longstanding love of language learning, I didn\u2019t seriously arrive at translation until I was already far into an English PhD program. However, does my poet-ness mean that I myself am an assertively experimental translator? No, at least not yet.<\/p>\n

I certainly appreciate the work both Avasilichioaei and Emmerich do in their books to challenge a conventional understanding of translation. And Limbinal<\/em> gave me a moment of genuine surprise as a reader, which I admire. Even so, in my poetry and my translation I\u2019ve maintained a fairly rigid boundary between the two. To be honest, the sense of taste I bring to my own writing is more conventionally aesthetic and not particularly avant-garde or insistently conceptual. But I am interested in this exploration of the boundaries of translation on an intellectual and scholarly level, even if I don\u2019t feel strongly called to it at the moment in my own artistic practice, and I suspect that more experimentation in this vein could benefit the worlds of both literary translation and poetry.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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Joe DeLong PhD in English, and he\u2019s currently working on an MFA in literary translation at the University of Iowa. His translations (with Noriko Hara) of contemporary Japanese poet Ken\u2019ichi Sas\u014d have appeared in journals such as Asymptote\u00b8 Two Lines, and Painted Bride Quarterly. His other publications include poems, visual poems (a combination of original illustrations and text), and a scholarly article on the memoirs of mathematicians. His recent research interests include multilingual literature and the poetry of Quebec.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>