On Translating Time Installs Mirrors by Nicole Brossard
Anne-Marie Wheeler
7
a single phrase and we could
fall several times
underneath the words
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8
centuries of space upside down
and right inside our mouths
centuries without piercing the sky and obscurity
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9
the night embed
in what was said
our legs bent
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10
the slow time of erosion
hands, bones, nuances
the whole being disquieted
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11
i watch our highly exaggerated death
from dawn
i am without argument
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12
let run the words
from the source to the after of cells
silence alone creates time
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13
little slit hewn in the future
face well-framed
camera that reignites the fight
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14
i advance in reverse in the phrases
the light barks
too much noise under the tongue trot of dread
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15
we who so easily handle
the beginning of dying
our carnal presence puzzled out
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16
various bodies of a vast emotion
to the point of abstraction, our matter
fractured silence of origin and cosmos
In a synesthetic response to the theme for this issue, I imagined invisibility as silence and thought of all the ways Nicole Brossard has sought to make translation visible and give voice to her translators. Of course, silence is not to sound what invisibility is to sight. Invisibility does not call into question the existence of what is unseen; rather, invisibility questions our ability to perceive and appreciate it. In this sense, the invisibility of translators — and women — is a cultural and socialized silence, not to be confused with the silence that is allied to poetry and what Brossard calls the white page. That silence opposes itself not to sound but to noise.
In her essay “The most precious things in the future will be water, silence, and a human voice,” Brossard distinguishes muteness (the silence of anguish, fear, and panic) and being silenced (censorship) from the silence that envelops “beautiful, moving, tragic moments, before and after love, before and after a storm. Before and after a concerto, before and after a firework.”(1) Cautioning against thickening layers of parasitical noise – the surface upon which we surf(2) in an increasingly virtual world – Brossard describes herself as “speak[ing] from a place, difficult to designate, but from which the words would organize themselves in such a way that their staging on the page would leave an impression of silence, a lowering of the volume of ambient noises.”(3) The visual components of the printed word (black ink, white page) artfully represent the aural components of the spoken word (sound, silence). As always in Brossard’s poetry, there is ample room for the latter half of each component’s pair: white page, silence. Brossard writes, “The whites that one calls white spaces are in fact so filled with thoughts, with words, with sensations, with hesitation and with chances to be taken that it is only possible to translate that by a tautology, that is by another white, this one visual.”(4) Embedded within much of Brossard’s writing is the apparent paradox of working with words to cultivate silence, so any number of her poems could find a place within this issue. I offer my translation of the first ten pages of Temps qui installe les miroirs (Montréal: Éditions du Noroît, 2015).
In Temps, Brossard writes of too much presence among the screens that amplify worry and exaggerate death: “la lumière jappe / trop de bruit sous la langue trot d’effroi.”(5) By contrast, the first two pages of this poem carefully situate select words within centuries and vast space. Then Brossard invokes the peaceful, intimate silence that envelops us in sleep: “la nuit couchée / dans un même énoncé / nos jambes pliées.”(6) Because Brossard’s words seek never to eclipse an essential silence, their meanings and usage can never be complete, exclusive, exhaustive. This is both her challenge and her gift to readers and translators alike. For instance, as one translates the aforementioned stanza into English, one is left to wonder whether the silent e at the end of the adjective couchée is referring to Brossard, any woman, or the night itself; translating la nuit as the night instead of a more fluent at night maintains some of this ambiguity. Rather than add more (English) words — explanations, reductive meanings — I adopted a translation strategy that allowed ambiguities to linger and questions to stand. I hoped for words to resonate, indeed, stretch out and luxuriate in the silent spaces between French and English. Therefore, in English, I saw “the night embed / in what was said” to invoke both in bed and the même énoncé.
In another example, I translated “des siècles d’espace à l’envers / puis à l’endroit de nos bouches”(7) as “centuries of space upside down / and right inside our mouths,” thereby pulling à l’endroit away from its antonymic relationship with à l’envers and privileging the sense of words sitting right in our bodies. I chose to remain sans argument and cultivate the silence that “gently fills the room, reducing all sources of stress for the benefit of a perfect listening,”(8) not as a silenced translator listening to an author but as both a translator and an author listening together, with deference, to the silence their words stand to disrupt.
1 Nicole Brossard, “The most precious things in the future will be water, silence, and a human voice,” in Fluid Arguments (Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2005), 46.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid, 43.
4 Ibid, 46.
5 Nicole Brossard, Temps qui installe les miroirs (Montréal: Éditions du Noroît, 2015), 14.
6 Ibid, 9.
7 Ibid, 8.
8 Nicole Brossard, “The most precious things in the future will be water, silence, and a human voice,” in Fluid Arguments (Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2005), 44.
Par Nicole Brossard
7
une seule phrase et nous pouvions
tomber plusieurs fois
en-dessous des mots
_________________
8
des siècles d’espace à l’envers
puis à l’endroit de nos bouches
des siècles sans perforer le ciel et l’obscurité
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9
la nuit couchée
dans un même énoncé
nos jambes pliées
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10
temps long d’érosion
les mains les os les nuances
tout l’être inquiet
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11
je regarde notre mort très exagérée
dès l’aube
je suis sans argument
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12
laisse courir les mots
de la source à l’après des cellules
seul le silence crée du temps
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13
petite fente taillée dans le futur
visage bien cadré
caméra qui ravive le combat
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14
j’avance à reculons dans les phrases
la lumière jappe
trop de bruit sous la langue trot d’effroi
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15
nous qui manions si bien
le commencement de mourir
notre charnelle présence élucidée
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16
corps variés d’un vaste émoi
jusqu’où l’abstraction, notre matière
silence fracturé d’origine et de cosmos
Date
October 7, 2023