Literary Translation as a Form of Intercultural Dialogue. The Poetic World of Seymour Mayne

MARÍA LAURA SPOTURNO

Leeds, Inglaterra

Congreso; Languages in the Globalised World (LGW) International Conference; 2012

Leeds Metropolitan University

Often characterized as an increasingly interdisciplinary field of research and teaching which involves linguistics, foreign languages, comparative literature, and anthropology (Bassnett, 1991; Venuti, 1998, 2002), translation studies is definitely relevant for the creative communication across languages and cultures. More particularly, literary translation stands as an area of study and practice, which offers ideal room for experimentation and creativity across disciplines. The aim of this presentation is two-fold: on the one hand, we wish to present and explore the poetic work of Seymour Mayne (b. 1944), and, on the other, to assess the challenges and problems concerning its translation into Spanish from a perspective which considers translation as a form of intercultural dialogue. According to Roman Jakobson, poetry is untranslatable: ?only creative transposition is possible? (1959: 143), whether intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic transposition. Following Eco (2001), this presentation questions the contours of this theoretical statement as it explores the challenges of translating or transposing the enunciative complexity apparent in the poetry by Mayne. Born in Montreal to a Jewish family, Mayne has developed his fine poetry in English and today he stands as a key representative of the Jewish literary scene in Canada. His work has been translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Russian. In this paper, we will specifically focus on a poetic form Mayne has explored for the past fifteen years: the word sonnet. The word sonnet is an elegant fourteen line poem, with one word set for each line, which often condenses a visual and sudden image or thought. This particular concise form poses interesting challenges for literary translation, making us question or rather extend our knowledge of the very notion of translation. Our preliminary selection of texts for analysis includes a set of poems by Mayne taken from the collections Hail (2002), Ricochet (2004) and On the Cusp (2012).