Sociologies of Poetry Translation

Emerging Perspectives

Jacob Blakesley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350163829
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350043268
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

While the sociology of literary translation is well-established, and even flourishing, the same cannot be said for the sociology of poetry translation. Sociologies of Poetry Translation features scholars who address poetry translation from sociological perspectives in order to catalyze new methods of investigating poetry translation. This book makes the case for a move from the singular 'sociology of poetry translation' to the pluralist 'sociologies', in order to account for the rich variety of approaches that are currently emerging to deal with poetry translation. It also aims to bridge the gap between the 'cultural turn' and the 'sociological turn' in Translation Studies, with the range of contributions showcasing the rich diversity of approaches to analysing poetry translation from socio-cultural, socio-historical, socio-political and micro-social perspectives.

Contributors draw on theorists including Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann and assess poetry translation from and/or into Catalan, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish. A wide range of topics are featured in the book including: trends in poetry translation in the modern global book market; the commissioning and publishing of poetry translations in the United States of America; modern English-language translations of Dante; women poet-translators in mid-19th century Ireland; translations of Russian poetry anthologies into modern English; the translation of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets in post-colonial Tanzania and socialist Czechoslovakia; translations and translators of Italian poetry into 20th and 21st century Sweden; modern European poet-translators; and collaborative writing between prominent English and Spanish poet-translators.

PART ONE

Publishing Poetry Translations

1

Publishing Poetry in Translation: An Inquiry into the Margins of the World Book Market

Gisèle Sapiro

In the publishing field, just as in the literary field, poetry is representative of what Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1996) calls the pole of small-scale production and circulation. Given its poor sales, at least in the short term, investment in publishing poetry could be regarded as a disinterested act, were we to restrict the notion of interest to economic pursuits. Of course, as Bourdieu (1998) points out, interest cannot be reduced to its economic dimension, nor to its narrow definition in rational choice theory. According to Max Weber (1991), there are different sorts of social interest. In his typology of forms of action, Weber distinguishes four ideal types of actions: rationally purposeful action (with reference to goals), value rational action (with reference to values), affective action and traditional action. Values can indeed make people act in a way that would be considered irrational, a paradigmatic example being a captain who, following the code of honour of his occupation, decides to sink with his ship.

Publishers who invest in poetry know that this investment will not result in economic profit and more probably may even generate losses. How can their motivation be explained? Should we describe their action as irrational? Certainly not. Even in our capitalist societies there are many similar examples of disinterested actions, which are motivated by a belief in certain values, here the belief in poetry. In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu (1996) analyses the position of the avant-garde publisher, first incarnated by Baudelaire’s publisher, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, which would have many followers in the twentieth century. It is a position that can be valued in the literary field, or at least in poetic circles; thus, it is an investment that yields symbolic capital. One can find dozens of very small publishing houses which are entirely dedicated to poetry in June every year in Paris, when the Marché de la poésie [the Poetry Market], a book fair and poetry festival fills the Place Saint-Sulpice. In the United States, this type of micro-publishers also exists, such as Burning Deck¹ in Providence, Rhode Island or Ugly Duckling in Brooklyn, New York. The existence of these small firms is all the more significant given that since the 1970s poetry has been to a great extent marginalized in the world book market, due to tighter commercial constraints following the concentration of publishing in large conglomerates and the accelerated merging and selling of firms (Schiffrin 2000; Bourdieu 2008; Thompson 2010; on the careers of poets in France, see Dubois and François 2013).

This is all the more true for the translation of poetry. With the exception of worldwide bestsellers, the position of translations in the global book market has also become fragile (Sapiro 2008a, 2010, 2016a). Publishing literary works in translation requires more and more financial support, since the costs, which are higher than for original works due to the translator’s remuneration, are often not covered by the sales. For works under copyright, additional costs are incurred by the acquisition of translation rights. Investing in a translation is also risky because, contrary to the idea that globalization has unified the literary marketplace, success in one country does not guarantee that the experience will be the same in another. Translating poetry is also in and of itself a disinterested act by the translator, since it is often undertaken for free, as a labour of love, out of passion.

In this chapter, I will first develop a socio-historical perspective based on the French publishing field to demonstrate the marginalization of poetry in the world market of translation since the 1970s. I will then compare the position of translated poetry in the French and American publishing fields in the era of globalization. The quantitative data gathered for the two countries confirms that poetry in translation (especially by contemporary authors) has been confined to the pole of small-scale circulation. In the second part of the chapter, I will focus on two contemporary poetry publishers’ trajectories, motives and strategies, which, despite objective differences, share some characteristics due to their position at the pole of small-scale circulation: Bruno Doucey in France and Ugly Duckling in the United States.

The place of translated poetry in the publishing field

While it had been a dominant genre in the literary field during the nineteenth century, poetry started to be marginalized in France by the end of the century, as the book market expanded and other genres came to the fore, particularly the novel (Charle 1979). No longer the leading genre overall, poetry became the privileged genre of the avant-garde, from the Cubists to the Surrealists through the Futurists (Boschetti 2001; Bandier 1999). Avant-garde movements tended to be international from the outset and offered models which circulated in the transnational literary field across the world (Boschetti 2014; Ungureanu 2017).

This circulation intensified between the First and Second World Wars, a period characterized by a rise in translations. The increased circulation of literary works can be explained by three factors. First, the emergence of nation-states, which established canons of national literature and encouraged contemporary local authors to produce literary works in the language adopted as national (Thiesse 1998; Casanova 2004). Related to the first, the development of publishing in many countries is the second factor that should be taken into account, especially if we consider that translation was a way to establish a body of literary works in the newly adopted or created national languages (Even-Zohar 1990; on the role of publishing in the building of national identities, see Anderson 2006). The third factor is the ideology of internationalism institutionalized with the creation of the League of the Nations after the First World War, a movement that had immediate repercussions in the World Republic of Letters, as shown by the participation of famous writers like the poet Paul Valéry in the League’s International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation and more specifically by the creation of the PEN Club in 1921 in order to defend intellectual values against nationalism by bringing together writers who shared a devotion to peace and freedom (Sapiro 2009).

In France, literary magazines such as Le Mercure de France, La Nouvelle Revue française, La Revue européenne and Europe opened an intercultural dialogue thanks to the contributors’ linguistic skills and international networks. Publishers launched specific series of foreign literature and the number of anthologies dedicated to other national literatures multiplied (Sapiro forthcoming). However, poetry was underrepresented. Most of these series published novels, which had become, as already said, the dominant genre. In the 1936 catalogue of one of the most prestigious publishing houses of the time, the Editions de la Nouvelle Revue française (which became Gallimard after the Second World War), poetry represented only 2.4 per cent of the total number of translations (8 titles), whereas 50 per cent of the translations were novels (Sapiro 2015a).

However, some avant-garde publishers published anthologies entirely dedicated to poetry. They were usually edited by a poet who was also a translator, such as Yvan Goll (alias Isaac Lang), who edited in 1922 an anthology of contemporary poetry from across the world, entitled Les Cinq Continents [The Five Continents] published by La Renaissance du livre. Kra-Le Sagittaire, another avant-garde publisher, linked to the surrealist group (this was André Breton’s publisher), published an Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie américaine [Anthology of New American poetry] in 1928, edited and translated by the Franco-American poet Eugène Jolas, including poems by Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings, among others. Jolas had launched the literary avant-garde review Transition the previous year (Mansanti 2009). Kra-Le Sagittaire also started publishing the Revue européenne in 1923, edited by the surrealist writer Philippe Soupault, where poems by Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams appeared in translation, at a time when the French literary field was only discovering American literature (Jeanpierre 2010). Two other journals played a major role in introducing classical as well as contemporary foreign poetry in France, including John Donne, William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot, namely Commerce (1924–32) and Le Navire d’argent (The Silver Ship) (1925–6).

A key figure was Adrienne Monnier, the director and editor of Le Navire d’argent, who owned a well-known bookstore, and went on to publish the French translation of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1929, which had first been published in English seven years earlier in Paris by her friend Sylvia Beach (Murat 2003). In 1935, Monnier became the administrator of the journal Mesures, which replaced Commerce, and introduced innovative foreign authors there such as Franz Kafka, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Musil and Katherine Anne Porter.

After the Second World War, the French literary field experienced a new phase of internationalization, characterized by the opening of the geographic borders of the translation market to non-Western cultures, which had hardly been translated before the war (apart from very consecrated authors such as the Indian Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore). There were some isolated experiences such as Jean Paulhan’s translation of traditional Malagasy poetry, the Hain-Teny Merinas, but French interest in non-Western cultures in the broader literary marketplace was fostered after the war by a UNESCO programme in favour of ‘literary interpenetration’, which provided financial support for translation projects from Asian and Latin American literatures. This programme helped support some poetry translation projects, such as an anthology of Chinese poetry, published by Gallimard in 1962, and a similar anthology of Japanese poetry by the same publisher in 1971 (Sapiro 2015a).

However, the novel was the privileged genre in translation. Gallimard, for instance, thought that a new foreign author could be introduced only with a novel. It thus refused collections of translated poems or of short stories and would accept other genres only after the foreign author’s reputation was already established. Some exceptions could be made in certain cases such as that of Borges (Fictions was the first of its titles to appear in French translation in 1952; Sapiro 2017). However, this never happened with poetry.

Nevertheless, in 1966, Gallimard launched a specific series for translated poetry in bilingual editions, ‘Poésie du monde entier’ [Poetry from the Whole World]. Works by poets like Luis Cernuda, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, James Joyce, Octavio Paz, Cesare Pavese and Fernando Pessoa appeared there. This series lasted only three years. The authors were all European or Latin American. The print-runs were between 1,600 and 3,000 copies.²

Despite the modest sales, Gallimard did not stop publishing poetry in translation. The list’s database, including all series, numbered 145 titles in translation until 2010, only 9 of which were authored by a woman (Sappho, Gaspara Stampa, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva). Most of these titles were published in the pocket series ‘Poésie Gallimard’.

Looking at their distribution per language, one can observe five central languages in the importation of poetry by Gallimard (between 14 and 28 titles each), all of them being languages of Western culture: English, Spanish, Russian, Italian and German.

English is first, with its twenty-eight translations spread among British, American, Irish, Welsh and Scottish authors. The thirteen titles by British authors are mostly by canonical English poets, whether of the Renaissance, seventeenth or nineteenth century: Shakespeare (2), John Donne, Milton, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emily Brontë (2), Browning, Auden and Dylan Thomas. Another ten titles are by American authors, including two who started publishing after the Second World War, Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, besides Melville, Poe, Emily Dickinson (2), Walt Whitman and Faulkner. Marguerite Yourcenar also translated the ‘Negro Spirituals’ in 1964. There are two titles by Irish authors, Yeats and Joyce, but only one by a Scottish poet, Kenneth White, who has lived in France since 1962, and two titles by the Indian poet Tagore (one published in 1935 and the second in 1963).

Spanish comes close after English, with twenty-six titles, ten of which from Spain, by poets of the first half of the twentieth century: García Lorca, who is the leading figure with four titles, Antonio Machado and Cernuda; one classical author, De Quevedo who entered the list recently (in 2010); and two contemporary poets, José Angel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda, who were both published by small publishers such as Corti, La Différence and Unes before they arrived in Gallimard’s list in 1998 and 2010, respectively. Meanwhile, a plethora of Latin American poetry was translated as well. There were six titles by the Chilean Pablo Neruda, closely followed by two Mexican poets, Octavio Paz (4 titles) and the Spanish exile Tomás Segovia. The other three Spanish-speaking countries represented are Argentina, with two collections of Borges’s poetry (as well as one recent volume of tango songs); Columbia, with one volume by Álvaro Mutis; and Guatemala with one book by Miguel Asturias.

With seventeen titles, Russian is the third most popular source language in the Gallimard list, constituted by Pushkin, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva (3), Anna Akhmatova, Pasternak, Esenin and Voznesensky.

Italian, the fourth most popular language (15), is featured in translations by Dante, Petrarca, Gaspara Stampa, Leopardi, Montale, Ungaretti, Pavese (2), Pasolini (3) and Mario Luzi.

From German (14): Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Hofmannsthal, Hölderlin (2), Nietzsche, Rilke (2), Paul Celan, Enzensberger (2) and Trakl.

Five languages can be defined as semi-peripheral (3 to 8 translations): they include a classical language, Latin, but also Portuguese, Modern Greek, Arabic, Japanese. The Portuguese poets are Pessoa (2), Helder, Ramos Rosa, Eugénio De Andrade, with Carlos Drummond de Andrade the only Brazilian author. From Greek, Gallimard published translations by Cavafy (2), Ritsos, Seferis, Elytis, Dimoula, the first living female poet to enter the list. From Arabic, apart a Diwan of classic Arab poetry, there are two collections by the Syrian poet Adonis and one by the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish.

The peripheral languages (1–2 titles) are Czech (2), Finnish (2), Chinese (1), Marathi (1), Persian (1), Swedish (1), Turkish (1) and Yiddish (1) (to which 2 titles from Old French and 2 from multiple languages should be added).

At the national level, the relative share of poetry among books translated into French varies across languages. Analysing a database of literary titles translated from eleven languages into French between 1985 and 2002 per genre reveals variations across languages, from merely 2 per cent of poetry books translated from English, 8 per cent and 9 per cent from German and Italian respectively, and up to 14 per cent and 15 per cent from Hebrew and Spanish, respectively (Sapiro ed. 2008b; note that this database did not include Russian or Arabic). No poetry book was translated from Swedish. These variations indicate a difference in the symbolic capital accumulated by different languages in the poetic genre.

Who are the publishers who translate poetry into French in the era of globalization? As we saw, Gallimard introduced new poets until the end of the 1960s, but since the 1980s, this publisher has tended to take fewer risks and to invest in already established foreign authors, who have mostly published prose. This strategy was criticized by Bourdieu in his article on publishing (Bourdieu 2008). His findings are confirmed by the study of Gallimard’s strategy in translating poetry. The risks are now taken more and more by small publishers who devote a large part of their list to poetry. Such is the case for Corti and La Différence. They both publish bilingual editions. For instance, in its series ‘Ibériques’, Corti published bilingual collections of poems by Nobel Prize winners like Juan Ramón Jiménez as well as more contemporary poets like Amparo Amorós. La Différence was founded by a Portuguese immigrant and started with translations from Portuguese, illustrating the linguistic skills that are converted in literary translation and publishing, allowing a specialization and thus the creation of a ‘niche’. It went bankrupt in summer 2017.

A similar pattern can be observed when looking at the American publishers who translated poetry collections from French into English between 1990 and 2003 (Sapiro 2015b). While the large trade publishers are quite absent, apart from three titles by classic authors (La Fontaine, Baudelaire and Rimbaud) at Knopf, one quarter of the 142 title...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustration
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Publishing Poetry Translations
• Part Two: Translating Poetry into English
• Part Three: Ideological Debates on Poetry Translation
• Part Four: Quantitative Approaches to Poetry Translation
• Part Five: Microsocial Approaches to Poetry Translation
• Index
• Imprint