Speech at book launch of Giorgos Christodoulides Selected Poems 1996-2021, Roes, Nicosia, 22.06.2022
*Academic professor, poet, translator, critic, ethnographer, documentary film maker
I am honoured and delighted at the invitation
to speak at the launch of this book of poems by Giorgos Christodoulides in the
English translation of Despina Pirketti.
The book commemorates twenty-five years of Giorgos’ poetry (1996-2021) and
my life has crossed with Despina and Giorgos for most of those years – the
beginning of our friendship was when Despina was in my MA Seminar in Comparative
Literature around the beginning of the 21st century. The beginning of our di
alogue and friendship focused
largely on questions and debates of what is World Literature? and What is
Translation?
At that time, Despina also shared with me one
of Giorgos’ poetry book (I believe it was his second – then newly published). It was the beginning of a long-lasting and strong
literary kinship among the three of us and Despina as the translator of both
our works, played a significant role in mediating this literary kinship. A powerful role to play and only possible
through the agency of someone who understands translation as a powerful
literary mode or genre in its own right.
I would like to suggest that the ‘world’ in
‘world literature’ cannot be taken as given, since it is the performative
outcome of our own interventions that makes a world. Whether as writers or translators we perform
language in a way that enables our claims on our embodied memory through the
multiple mediations of the imagination. Translation is one such performative
intervention whose impact and outcome might inject literature with a new energy. Despina – as a writer for theatre and
television – is very much aware that translation is like taking a script from
one place and space, and making it perform in another.
It is noteworthy that in Middle English the
word ‘autor’ and ‘actor’ were often confused.
She knows only too well that she needs to put aside the tired concepts
of fidelity and equivalence, and give her attention to kinship –like Walter
Benjamin asserts in The Task of the Translator – translatability is in kinship
not in mimesis – a kinship that catches fire on the ‘magical moments’, fan the
sparks and gives new life. Translation
has to allow unpredictable movements and affective allegiances that can open up
new spaces through translation.
As Despina says in her introduction: ‘translation as bold intervention prompted by
informed reading is a dynamic process of endorsing the polyphony of the
cosmos;’ this indeed is the only way to
translate Christodoulides she says, because his poetry “nurtures decentralises
notions and gestures; he has affinities
with disruptive irreverent thinkers and is in awe of disjunctive episodes that
only pretend to be whole.” This is
illustrated by the lines in the opening poem:
In the moment
When the cup falls to the floor
And smashes into a hundred shards
You realize the value of wholeness
Despina rightly notes in her Ιntroduction that
Giorgos expresses hesitations about the
possibility of poetic language to effect change. Yet we could also say that
this impossibility is counterbalanced by the commitment to writing itself, which
holds promise for fulfillment. Even though the promise may never be fulfilled,
the promise gives new life in a quest for a language we want to inhabit. The
poet is haunted and shell shocked with the fractured reality of history yet
poetry serves as an affirmation and antidote to apathy through the experience
of felt life and of love. The path of the poet is radical indeterminacy with a
fractured consciousness whose perspective is vibrant yet uncertain. Yet both the poet and the translator write on
the edges of language in continuous experimentation.
In the cramped space of islands such as our
own, lost in a labyrinth of of time/space compressions we bring dissimilarities
next to each other, and modes of noncomprehension, a charged speechlessness
with osmotic moments that re-imagine what has been denied or excluded. As Despina says: the Cypriot landscape is defined by what it
lacks. And as an island we are surrounded by the permeability of the sea – where
one may escape, crossing ‘the line of no return’ as in ‘Sea of Happiness’. And:
Drenched, you return,
Distant and uncanny,
The sea allows us to shift the boundaries by
redistributing tensions and affective connections of language in personal and
cultural memory, by exploring the edges of language in the cosmopolitan and the
vernacular, the national and the mythical, attempting to be here, there,
elsewhere at the same time, and taking real or imaginative lines of flight
beyond.
As Despina notes, wings take on significant
metaphoric value in Giorgos’ work as ‘symbols of divine dexterity and refined
humanity.’ In the poem the ‘Adventure of
Poetry’ he says:
“Trainee butterflies/
elevate me up to the mountains of Troodos
in the curves of the blooming almond trees.
human twigs welcome me.
They want to show me
that beauty is defeated
without love
And that’s why
the ending to a story like mine
might be ambiguous.
Let
me read Giorgos’ poem A magical moment.
His voice is subdued and minimalist yet looking for moments to burst out
– the moment of poetry hovering and haunting – suspended.
In thinking about writing and translation
practice, I think of a tetra-lingual model for the spatiotemporal categories:
vernacular (here), vehicular (everywhere), referential (over there), and
mythical (beyond), and how the interaction of these work to imaginatively and
creatively construct the languages we inhabit and our sense of being in the
world both spatially and temporally. Kafka (in a letter to Max Brod of June
1921) speaks of his predicament of writing as a choice among the impossibilities
of writing in Czech, or in Yiddish or in German, the impossibility of not
writing, the impossibility of writing. This
suggests a condition of intimate estrangement in the language in which one
writes, making other voices vibrate within through the neural correlates of
consciousness and our affective relationship to different languages. Giorgos
states:
A large part of me is made of others;
Their remnants fray
Rubbing off one me
like the dry scales of an African cobra.
And in the Clang of Words (for his son Orestes)
he says:
I give him words each morning,
Words of love,
To take with him
To have and to hold
When the clang of foreign words
Closes in on him,
I would therefore place myself in the camp of poets
like Josef Brodsky (among many others) who say that ‘poetry is found in
translation’ rather than Frost’s statement that ‘poetry is what is lost in
translation.’ Many writers of world
literature are often in the vanguard in these debates, bringing new challenges
to myths and stories of origin, and translation is often used
(metaphorically or otherwise) as a foundational practice rather than a derivative
practice. Jorge Luis Borges irreverently
and ironically states in one of his essays: “the original is unfaithful to the translation
(1999, 106),” (with
reference to Henley’s English translation of Beckford’s “Vathek” written in
French.)
Translation may give new life to the text as
counterpoint by probing through the gaps of language and perceiving the difference. In this way, translation refracts, disperses and
bends sound, like a prism does with light. It creates a third space. Borges
brings translation to the centre of literary practice in a number of essays by
emphasizing that
texts (translation or writing) are only versions or drafts that create
transformations and a repertoire of possibilities, in other words literariness
itself, and the idea that translations are inferior is our superstition (or
founded in theology such as in the story of the Septuagint, and the translation
of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek).
Writers and
translators embody an impossible desire to find a pre- or post-Babelian
condition, while in our worldly condition we live in a ‘Poétique de la relation’
as Edouard Glissant would have it. Our experience
has been shaped by personal and affective immersion in felt life, in the
specificity of places where we have lived, and the claims that places have made
on our embodied memory and the multiple mediations of the imagination across
distance and dispersion, a movement and process that requires mediation.
As writers we probe differences
in the play of literary language, and this is repeated/doubled in translation while
sharpening awareness of the literary and linguistic economies of exchange. In this
constant and unpredictable movement, translation like poetry opens up new
spaces:
In Giorgos’ words:
I drill a hole into
the lining of the day
And my years spill out
Like change of an
unraveled pocket
I expand the
soundscape of my space
By tossing furniture
out the window
My house empties with pleasing echoes