Madeleine Stratford : coda

Every single poet I translated throughout the years has changed the way I think about writing. In a way, both writing and translating poetry is about stretching the limits of the medium, but also the limits of my world. As a poetry translator, I must jump head first into the cracks of my poet’s language, sometimes completely blind. And I am always taking a big risk: that of not being able to crawl back out of a poem’s cracks or, worse still, that of filling the cracks. Alejandra Pizarnik declared once that writing a poem was about perpetually trying to heal a fundamental wound. For me, you have a great poetry translation when the wound and the balm coexist, because the translator penetrated the poet’s language, understood it from the inside, but did not try to explain it: poetry translation is about letting the poem speak for itself. But that process always changes you as a writer, or indeed as a person. You cannot dig that deep into someone else’s intimate relationship with language and remain untouched.

Madeleine Stratford : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

My current pet project is Mestizo Skies, an English translation of Ciels métissés, by Quebecois writer Louise Desjardins (Écrits des Forges, 2014). A few of my translations came out in TransLit, a journal of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta and in carte blanche, literary e-journal of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Some new excerpts are upcoming in Inventory, translation journal based in Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature.

One thing that makes Ciels métissés particularly interesting to me is that many poems contain English and Spanish words, as well as Quebec French, a language close to my heart that is quite difficult to transpose into English. The poems speak about the endless, lonely, wintry landscape of Northern Quebec, where Louise is from, but they also speak of her travels to Europe and to Latin America, where I too have travelled countless times.

Something in Louise’s work speaks to me on an intimate level. It’s as though she were writing things that I already had in my head or in my heart. It’s like an intense déjà-vu feeling that makes you wonder if you haven’t already written this poem yourself. Because as you translate it, it still belongs to the author, but it feels like it could have been your own. This kind of communion with the authors I choose to translate (whatever the genre) is important to my creative process, but it is essential when I translate poetry.

Madeleine Stratford : part four

How does a poem begin?

As I speak and write in four languages, even now, it is as though I had multiple personalities, worlds colliding and merging within me. My poems have a life of their own. They are the ones that decide to be written in a given language, or to be written at all. I have never chosen what comes out when I write, and am often surprised with the result.

Madeleine Stratford : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

In my view, what defines a poem comes from a particularly rich and intense use of language’s threefold nature as a semantic, phonic and graphic medium. First, there is a conceptual aspect: words have meanings, and they always convey a message, tell a story, even when it may be difficult to grasp. Then, there is a sound aspect: poets use words, syllables, and letters, to make language sing. Anyone will tell you that poetry and music have a lot in common, and many will argue that poetry is often for the ear; it needs to be read aloud. Finally, there is a spatial aspect: as soon as the poem has been written, it becomes something concrete, a visible object. We often come to realize we are in front of a poem just by looking at it. In many ways, this spatiality of language is more important to me than “music,” though the two are definitely related. I guess for me, a poem’s unique “poetic nature” revolves around the treatment of three aspects: sense, sound and space. In my poetry, I strive to harness the particular relationship between those three components.

Madeleine Stratford : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

When you love poetry, you quickly realize that a poem, by nature, demands to be heard, felt, but first and foremost: interpreted. Poetry is perhaps the most concentrated, hermetic, and intense, of all literary genres. Out of context, a given word can mean a variety of things, and even in context sometimes, it can have at once more than one, or even more than two meanings. This is precisely what Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik was trying to express at the end of a poem called “La palabra que sana” in El infierno musical: “[…] cada palabra dice lo que dice y además más y otra cosa” or, in Yvette Siegert’s translation, “each word says what it says – and beyond that, something more and something else.” Because meaning is complex in poetry, because it is never straightforward, a poem needs to be interpreted. It will inevitably generate more than one possible reading, produced consecutively or simultaneously. Language is intrinsically polysemic, and this is precisely what poetry taps into. I don’t think any other genre can afford to embrace ambiguity this freely.

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.