John Taylor: « Lightness Moved Things: Opening the Windows of the Translator’s Identity » / Hopscotch Translation
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L’essai de John Taylor, « Lightness Moved Things: Opening the Windows of the Translator’s Identity », se trouve sur le site de la revue Hopscotch Translation. John Taylor examine comme ses traductions de la poésie de Lorenzo Calogero ont affecté sa propre écriture. Le début de l’essai:
« The labor of translation sometimes leaves traces in my own writing or in my thinking about questions related to writing. For some of the poets and writers whom I have translated (Elias Papadimitrakopoulos, Philippe Jaccottet, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Pierre Chappuis, José-Flore Tappy and, recently, Franca Mancinelli), I can detect in my writing the benefits of an implicit or explicit dialogue. At the beginning of my work on foreign texts for which I usually feel immediate affinities yet which necessarily remain “other” because I am not the author, I might not be entirely aware of this phenomenon of “permeability,” of this “welcome” that takes place inside me and goes beyond the act of opening a door to a stranger. Later, sometimes years after I have moved onto other projects, I find myself adopting in my own writing a literary form with which I had never experimented, or delving once again into a theme which I had not sufficiently pursued, or daring to take a syntactic liberty that is unusual in English, or employing words that were not in my active vocabulary until I had used them to render terms in the foreign language. Translation enables the translator to open the windows of his identity, to unlock his identity — and an “open identity” is, by the way, a concept about which I have begun to think often because of my discussions with Franca Mancinelli while I translate her poems. And Lorenzo Calogero? »
—© John Taylor
La version italienne de cet essai se trouve dans le numéro 11 de la revue Sud i poeti, un numéro spécial sur Lorenzo Calogero édité par Macabor Editore:
« Sud i poeti », volume 11, special issue on Lorenzo Calogero, Macabore Editore, 2022
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