Madeleine Stratford : part one

Madeleine Stratford is a poet, a literary translator and a professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including PØST and carte blanche, and Corresponding Voices. Her first poetry book, Des mots dans la neige (anagrammes, 2009) was awarded the 2009 Orpheus Poetry Prize in France. Her literary translations were shortlisted twice for a Governor General award (2016 and 2019).

How did you first engage with poetry?

I understand, speak and write in four languages: French, English, German and Spanish. I studied all of them and in all of them. Writing poetry has been my way to unearth language’s potential: that of my own mother tongue, at first, but also of the other languages I came to learn and love along the way. In my life, poetry emerged as a form of salvation, because it enabled me to break free from established grammar and rules. When I first started to write poetry, I felt I could be creatively deviant and subversive: I could write everything in lower-case, decide to leave out punctuation marks and put words all over the page – or not. I first wrote in French, but also a little in German, and quite a lot in Spanish at some point. Most people don’t know it, but a few of the poems I included in my first poetry book were actually first written in Spanish.

Curiously, I didn’t feel comfortable writing poetry in English for a long time. For me, it had always been an academic language. One day, a publisher asked me to translate a selection of my own poems into English. I panicked. I had translated poems from French and Spanish before, and that had felt right. But translating my own poems into English? That felt daunting. I had never been scared of betrayal before. When I translated a poem, as long as I was translating it from a place of love and respect, and thorough understanding, the result would always be faithful in one way or another, no matter how different it might sound or look on paper. I felt very differently about my own work. The temptation to rewrite everything was very strong, because my poems had not wanted to be written in English. Yet this very experience of self-translation is what led me to write poems in English. It is as though translating my own words opened up a box. I was never be able to put the lid back on, because English is now also a poetic language. I can play with it, have fun with it, and feel free.