Susan’s and Chad’s talk was eye-opening in that I left feeling both hopeful and hopeless. I appreciated their honesty about publishing being a “crapshoot” and was amazed by Susan’s statement that WWB publishes new content daily. I don’t agree with Chad’s philosophy on there being “no need to maintain foreignizations” in translation, but I understand that this is a contested topic in terms of readability and saleability. I went on the WWB website to read literature from a country I haven’t before, stumbling upon works from Mozambique. Mozambique’s official language is Portuguese but numerous indigenous languages are also spoken. I read a few poems by Hélder Faife and translated by Sandra Tamele and Eric M. B. Becker that dealt with childhood. The poetry was beautifully playful and imaginative: “‘Is growing up for real or make-believe?’ / Dot dot dot, I gasped. / A question mark is a fisherman’s hook.” I then read Tamele’s essay on publishing in Mozambique. Tamele explained terms like the “literary xenophile” and noted the country’s new indie publishers managed by young, Black writers. Tamele founded Editora Trinta Zero Nove (Editora 30.09), the first publishing house dedicated to literature in translation in Mozambique. The house currently publishes both Portuguese and translations into the country’s Bantu languages like Macua, Sena, and Changana. I am grateful to have found these pieces and am looking forward to seeing more become available.
I loved this week's readings and realized how little I know about Arabic poetry and its rich literary traditions, as well as how Eurocentric translation studies is. I was familiar with the Mu'allaqat before this week, but seeing it in translation alongside the Arabic was wonderful. I was amazed by how the script in the hemistichs transformed into tercets or quatrains in English. I am curious about how the qasida form is often translated into English given that terms like “free verse” and “prose poetry” in Arabic come from Western paradigms; even if Arabic poetry is described as “free,” it differs from the English in that it usually still follows some type of form and meter. “Rebellion and Philosophy of Life and Death” and “A Lesson in Insight” were lyrical and dream-like, and I loved the cadence of sounds incorporated in the poems like “dew drenched dune” (verse 8 in RPLD) or “followed by a sharp shrewd / swift skewering meat handler” (verse 25 of ALI). I felt like I was being transported through time as I read different revered names, locations, and animals. I also learned some Arabic words like jinn and akhbār. I liked this narrative poetry, especially in seeing how it differed from Jawdat Fakhreddine’s “simple and refined” poetic language (viii) and Salim Barakat’s “interrogation of poetic language and form” (xii). I thoroughly enjoyed reading Huda Fakhreddine’s and Jayson Iwen’s foreword, specifically where they noted using their initial misunderstandings and misreadings in translation as a way to “reveal dimensions of the text that initially eluded” them (xii). I agree with Huda’s view on poetry as a way of transcending time. She gives weight to the translation as a transformation in her article, describing the translated poem as a method of creating “roots” in the target language (48). This metaphor is beautiful but also quite daunting to me because of the permanence that comes with it, but I will keep it in mind as a way of viewing translation as growth and putting different languages and cultures in meaningful conversations with one another.
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