The Weight of Words

Donald Winkler won a 2013 Governor General's Award for his translation of Pierre Nepveu's poetry collection The Major Verbs (Les verbes majeur). The following were his remarks at the awards ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on November 29, 2013:

Tonight, in this hall, we are honouring language and its practitioners who, however unlike they may be one from the other, are all intensely aware that this human attribute is a thing of great power and nobility, but also that beyond this precinct there are arenas, not far off, where it is systematically tarnished, degraded, and impoverished. Where words of insight, words of wonder, are recast as words of pretence, words of evasion, words of belligerence, words of contempt. 

It has ever been thus.  

As a translator, my responsibility is to treat every text as an offering, to be transformed, but hallowed, as it is shepherded from one tongue to another. And my accountability is not only to my words and to their readers, but to one whose words, in another language, were set down at great personal cost, perhaps, and whose endeavour and intent must be given their due. This can only heighten one’s sensitivity to the fact that in a world where much hangs in the balance, that balance may be tipped significantly by the weight of words, and how we choose to deploy them.

"We will anxiously monitor
the storms on the sun,
we will welcome its fiery tongues,
we will be nothing but spirit
when the cold centuries come." 

Pierre Nepveu. 

May language be not a smoke screen, but a beacon. 

Thank you very much.

Flash Interview #7: Donald Winkler

Filmmaker and translator, Donald Winkler won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 2011. His translation of Daniel Poliquin’s La Kermesse (A Secret Between Us) was a finalist for the 2007 Giller Prize. The Major Verbs—his translation of Pierre Nepveu's  Les Verbes Majeurs—appeared with Signal Editions in Spring 2012. He lives in Montreal.

Carmine Starnino: What drew you to Pierre Nepveu's book? 

Donald Winkler: I've been drawn to Pierre's poetry for a long time. I translated an earlier book, Romans-fleuves (Exile Editions, 1998), but I first translated a few of his poems way back in 1984 for the translation revue Ellipse. I felt an instant affinity. His poetry had—well, you would use the word "souffle" in French: a drive, a thrust, a muscularity and a concreteness that appealed to me greatly. And a capacity, out of its sheer momentum, to soar into surreal riffs without losing contact with reality. I can still remember trying to be true to that, wrestling with lines like "old archangel you know it all / you played the owl those canted nights / head trepanned with antennas and methanol / airs stirred up by sullen desire" (my version of it, of course). Translating him was a gladiatorial exercise. Still is. Pierre in person is gentle and almost self-deprecating, but something else kicks in when, as a poet, he puts pen to paper. I also like the way in which he feels his way into the characters in his poems. In The Major Verbs, one entire sequence, "The Woman Asleep on the Subway," imagines the life of an immigrant night worker in a high rise office building, her alienation, and her memories, or fantasies, of the land she left behind. Nothing formulaic or didactic, but a powerful, often dream-like evocation. The sequence in memory of his dead parents is a collage in verse that is both an affectionate tribute to them and an honest portrayal of lives that knew their share of disappointment, that were at times troubled. Between these two is a series of meditations on a small pile of pebbles on a table, a representation in miniature of the outside world's opacity in a time of anguish for the speaker. But the book ends with a long contemplative poem set in the Arizona desert, a coda imbued with grace. All in all, an impressive achievement. 

CS: If you had to nominate a Canadian poet as the anglo doppelganger for Nepveu in terms of shared subject and style, who would it be and why? 

DW: I'm afraid that any specific example I may come up with might be misleading. But let me say this. As a literary critic, Nepveu has taken as his field of study all of America, and has written eloquently about the continental landscape, and the contradictory urges to celebrate wide open spaces (Whitman) and to seek a protective nest when confronted by them (Dickinson), the latter impulse being less widely recognized, in his opinion, than it ought to be. His book Intérieurs d'un nouveau monde, which exists only in French, is a brilliant survey of Quebec, Canadian, American, and Haitian writers, as seen from this perspective. The book reflects his own travels (including a period when he lived in Vancouver), and deals knowledgeably with Canadian and American poets such as Dennis Lee, Atwood, Klein, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens. He is perhaps the most pan-American of Quebec poets. And I believe the influence shows in the diction and the vision and the psychology of his poetry, although this is more of an intuition on my part than anything else. 

CS: You've translated a number of Québécois authors, often working closely with them. Have you ever resisted their suggestion in order to keep a word choice or phrase that you thought was closer to the spirit of the poem or story? Do you have an example? 

DW: I haven't had to resist too energetically. The poets' understanding of English is often quite good, but at times they may not appreciate all the nuances of the English word, which is in fact closer to the intent of the original than they suspect. I consider myself a "situational" translator where poetry is concerned, in that my word choices are predicated on the degree to which the original word was selected on the basis of its meaning, its music or its rhythmic compatibility, so that on one occasion, when translating Roland Giguère, I used a word with a totally different meaning, because his own word choice was almost exclusively based on the word's sound. The original poem read: "tant de vie pour un mort / tant de mots pour un mur." So you had mort, mur. But it literally translates: "for one death so much life / so many words for one wall." I wrote: "for one death so much life / so many words for one breath." So I had Death, breath. I ran this past him, and he was okay with it. 

Sunday Poem

From "THE WOMAN ASLEEP ON THE SUBWAY" 

The woman asleep in the subway
conjures a hundred drawers that suddenly open
in metallic fury on screeching tracks,
she sees herself prone in one of them
deeper and longer than a woman’s body,
the way babies were at times laid down
during family gatherings low on beds—
she hears the nearby stirring
of files anxious to see the day,
she is lulled by the rocking
of laser printers and calculators,
a whole world of keyboards embraces
and enfolds her, she thinks of secretaries
who do entrechats in high heels
and young clerks whose creaseless shirts
speak to her softly of the smoothness of a cheek,
the touch of a fingernail ember red,
while deeper into the night she turns over,
jolted back still by the graceless ring
of a telephone blind to her presence,
she wonders if innocence
is enough protection, if to sleep during the day
was part of the world’s plan,
its violent and ambitious program,
its machinery for good and evil,
or if an invisible finger gently impels
the drawer to close back over her,
ushering in silence and eternal night.

*
The woman asleep in the subway dreams
of hundreds of closed doors
of drawers locked last night at five o’clock
but see, the night swelled
with the symphonic song of downloadings,
the exquisite chorale of RAMs
throwing off multihued showers of icons
and it was like the rustling of a world near at hand
the hypothesis of a prayer for a better life
the whole office an incandescent aleph
and she confessed to having sat for a moment
amid the magic of this place and its wisdom
wondering if midnight would sound,
savouring the happiness of not knowing.

*
In the coma of the machines, in the night time
of programs collating the universe,
she makes a wide swipe to sweep away the dust,
wipes the coffee ring left by a cup,
and suddenly the vibration brings a screen to life,
a half-naked woman’s smile seems to have pity on her,
then it’s the picture of a tropical beach,
the lace cathedral of a European city,
Monet’s water lilies, Corcovado’s Christ—
she pauses her hard-working hand for a moment,
breathes the dry air of the large office,
dumbfounded as by a comet’s passage,
her two sore feet lifted from earth,
her two feet afloat
on the heights of this tower
lighting up the night.

* 

Each night her soft skin yields
to the hubbub of machines,
the bristled brushes,
her head lit up by rainbows
in the toxic whiff of disinfectant,
while it’s a field where jasmine grew that she remembers,
and great cool shadows stitched by eucalyptus,
and it’s as though horses haunt her body,
and mournful donkeys,
and brute bones beneath their fur that she recalls,
and their huge orphan members—
then nothing but sea and fog,
and in her mind as childhood cooled
journeys already pledged,
that and accomplishment, but never
this barking of weary hours at eight in the morning,
when the great swell of wage earners,
bank tellers and clerks,
advances like a wave,
with herself the ocean’s quarry,
and the day dawns
with sand and clocks without hands.

From The Major Verbs (2012) by Pierre Nepveu, translated by Donald Winkler.

(Painting "Woman Sleeping" by Carola Moreno.)

The House That Books Built

Susan Glickman's opening remarks before her reading at the November 8, 2012 Signal Editions launch held at Drawn & Quarterly bookstore:

Before I read you a few poems from my new book, The Smooth Yarrow, I want to say a few words about a subject close to my heart and, I suspect, to the hearts of everybody in this room. In the wake of the recent bankruptcy of Douglas & McIntyre and the merger of two big multinationals into the even bigger House of the Random Penguin, we’ve heard a lot of dark prophesies about the inevitable death of independent publishing in this country. Well, being a poet whose language never fails her, I have only one thing to say to that: bollocks! I am only here tonight because of the vision, energy, dedication, and hard work of Simon Dardick and people like him. There are, in fact, 130 members of the Association of Canadian Publishers, so theoretically there are at least 129 other people like Simon out there. But I doubt there are many whose service to Canadian publishing has continued, unbroken, for 40 years. 

Simon has been with Véhicule Press since it began in 1973 on the premises of Véhicule Art Inc., one of Canada's first artist-run galleries at 61 Ste-Catherine St. West (a space that housed a famous jazz club, Café Montmarte, back in the 1930s). In 1975 the press became Coopérative d'Imprimerie Véhicule—Quebec's only cooperatively-owned printing and publishing company. It moved spaces twice more before the co-op was dissolved in the spring of 1981, and Simon Dardick and Nancy Marrelli continued operating Véhicule Press from Roy Street East, where they still live to this day: the house that books built, and one that might just come tumbling down if you move too many bookcases. 

Simon invited me to submit a manuscript after reading some poems of mine in The Canadian Forum that year. Michael Harris, the founding editor of Signal Editions, edited my first book, Complicity, which came out in 1983. When Carmine Starnino took over as Signal Editions editor in January 2001, he was kind enough to keep me on as one of his authors. So I have a lot to be grateful for, having been with Véhicule Press for thirty years. In fact, I have been married to Simon Dardick longer than I’ve been married to my husband. 

L’autre chose á laquelle je veux attirer votre attention est l’engagement de la presse, dès la commencement, á faire les traductions élegants de la poésie francaise á l’Anglais. Je suis très heureuse de partager la scène ce soir avec Pierre Nepveu et Donald Winkler. Pour tous, je tu remercie, Simon. Will you please join me in a round of applause for a man who has never given up on his commitment to make beautiful books by Canadian authors for Canadian readers?

Irving Layton's Last Poem?

"I found this in Box 31 of the Layton collection at Concordia University in Montreal. A clutch of pages stapled together; multiple drafts of a poem Irving Layton began, but never completed, towards the end of his writing. An invocation to the muse who was abandoning him. Twenty-five lines on lined paper, in the cramped handwriting of his old age; both neat, and, paradoxically, difficult to decipher. It was dated, with a question mark, early in 1989. Less than four years, then, after I had filmed him happily scribbling poems amid the ruins in his beloved Greece, for my film Poet: Irving Layton Observed. Now in 2001, I was trolling the archives seeking visual material for a new documentary on the poet's life. What struck me immediately was that the power was still there, even as the poet felt it slipping away: "my scribbles are as pale as a watermark." And the voice. This is no self-pitying plaint. It is the poet standing up to his muse and speaking his mind the way the Biblical prophets he so admired stood up to their God. Jocular, prodding, the poem, even in its uncertain state, gives forth the same wounded majesty as those ruins among which Layton paced, mouthing verse, almost 20 years ago."

—Donald Winkler

_________________________________________________________________

THE POET'S INVOCATION TO HIS MUSE

by Irving Layton

My alter ego, my diabolical other Self

where are you? A whole month goes by,

yet not a single peep from you.

Let me have it straight! Did you grow careless

from too long service? Or was it the tremors of old age

made you spiteful and prankish. You gone

invoking your attendance

my scribbles are as pale as a watermark.

No fire in them, no punch. Return, make my brain

boil again. Make it seethe with the blood

of electrified hitmen and of gallant warriors

dying in an odious cause. How many sheets

must I blacken before you [set?] a premonitory fire

to make my Self [shudder?] with familiar joy.

I'm serious, not even Coleridge's famous ode

on despondency cheers me, nor Shelley's moan,

marvellous and eloquent, while the bay's waters

around him sparkle and dance.

What hope for that mortal so lost to gloom even

another's misery fails to restore his self-esteem

[to rectitude?] with one of life's vital lies or illusions.

My case is desperate. Haul your ass over here

pronto. Abandoned, I'll sit here forever

like a paralytic, like a just-invented Frankenstein

waiting for that first charge to shock him back to life.

(Translated by Donald Winkler, with help from Anna Pottier. Photo by Terry Brynes. Originally published in Books in Canada, March 2003. )