Abstract:
The poem-in-translation refuses to be pinpointed to a specific locality. If we want to think of it in spatial terms, we need to regard it as an encroachment. Influenced by the cognitive research on conceptual blending (conducted by Fauconnier and Turner) and inspired by Clive Scott’s suggestion that literary translation is designed to trace the original’s trajectory between its birthplace and the translator’s here and now (cf. Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations, 2006), I demonstrate how the poem-in-translation can be composed and read surrounded by expanding archival and bibliographical material. The understanding of the text as “an environment of words”, borrowed from genetic criticism (cf. Deppman, Ferrer and Groden 2004), allows me to consider the poem-in-translation not so much as a locality bounded by the translator’s native culture, but as a place expanding while the translator traverses the surrounding territories of the page, textual variants and readings in other cultures. To illustrate my argument I examine how Frank O’Hara’s spatial engagement with New York, reflected in the sprawl of his verse, has assisted my thinking about Marcin Swietlicki’s (non-)participation in the Polish urban culture and his projections of the city. My English translations of Marzanna Kielar’s poetry located conceptually in Poland’s north – the poet’s imaginary homeland – embrace other norths. The experimental work of Krystyna Milobedzka attempts to hint at the “between”, where language meets experience, page and silence. In my variants a Milobedzka poem has relocated itself to accommodate the spacing of Pascale Petit’s versions of the Chinese poet Yang Lian. My examples show the poem-in-translation as a manipulable array of mental spaces (see also Lefevere’s view of translation as manipulation).Key names and concepts: avant-texte, bilingual consciousness of a text, blend (multiple blend of the poem), cognitive (linguistics, poetics), conceptual integration (otherwise known as blending), generic space, genetic criticism, mental space, poem-in-translation, Polish (language, poetry), rewriting (translation as rewriting), variant (of a text), word environment (of a text), translator-writer(ProQuest: … denotes “strike-through” in the original text omitted.)The conceptual, linguistic, temporal and spatial placement of a poem via the process of translating relies on encroachment. Translators usurp for themselves the right to intrude and trespass on the territory outlined both by the original text and by its translation. They make gradual inroads upon words, images, thoughts, emotions and silences of the original poem and its variants: its multiple readings, drafts, annotated versions, re-drafts, renditions into another language, unpublished and published texts. As a translator-writer who moves in her work between English and Polish, I would like to contemplate this dynamic mental space which a poem – to be translated, being translated, after it has been translated – claims as its own. I call it “the poem-in-translation” to emphasize its processual character, its inbetweenness, its expansiveness.Mental Space of the Poem-in-translationAs a cognitive scholar, I use the term mental space advisedly, referring to the cognitive research on mental networks and conceptual integration (otherwise known as blending) which posits the existence ofsmall conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. [Mental spaces] are partial assemblies containing elements, structured by frames [long-term schematic knowledge] and cognitive models. (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 102)Following Fauconnier and Turner’s classification of mental spaces presented in The Way We Think (2002: Chapter 14), I have suggested that the poem can be seen as a multiple blend – an integration network with numerous input spaces that can be projected in parallel or successively into intermediate blends, which themselves can serve as inputs to further blends (Wojcik-Leese 2010).
