Translation: Operations at the
heart (ache) of meaning
A talk with translator/poet ERIN MOURE
6pm February 15, 2012
EV6-735 (enter on
Mackay, elevator to 6th)
Concordia University
1555 Ste Catherine West
Montreal
All welcome
Drawing on examples from her
translation practice in poetry, Erín Moure discusses translation as an
operation that is not just linguistic, but social. It takes place in a social
field, and is a task accomplished through—and that bears traces of—the intervention
of one human body: that of the translator. In translation, the “thing” or
“meaning” that is “carried across” from one text to another is never purely a
representation of the work of the original author. The “new” meaning is part of
a social fabric in the target language and is not solely resident in the text
itself. What is meaning, after all, if it is not “our” meaning?
Moure, in her explorations of
the translation process, sheds conventional oppositions between
modern/postmodern, fragment/whole, subjective/objective to approach something
that is perhaps closer to some of Jacques Rancière’s thinking on the distribution of the sensible.
For Moure, explorations of
translation help lay bare some of the stakes of what art is, and what it is to
produce art.
Organized by the Artistic Production working group,
supported by
Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure lives with one foot in Montreal and one in Kelowna. In her recent O
Resplandor (2010) and—with
Oana Avasilichioaei—Expeditions of a Chimæra (2009)
poetry is hybrid, and emerges in translation and collaboration. Moure has
translated Nicole Brossard (with
Robert Majzels ) and Louise Dupré f rom French, Chus Pato and Rosalía de Castro from Galician, Andrés Ajens from Chilean Spanish, and
Fernando Pessoa from Portuguese. Her essays, My Beloved Wager (2009) are
a chronicle of 25 years of writing practice. She performs and speaks
internationally on poetry and translation, and her work has been honoured with
awards on several occasions. The Unmemntioable, an investigation into
subjectivity and experience in western Ukraine and
Alberta, will appear in February 2012.
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