John Taylor: « Lightness Moved Things: Opening the Windows of the Translator’s Identity » / Hopscotch Translation

• Post By: johntaylor
• Date: 10 décembre 2022
• Category: News

John Taylor’s essay « Lightness Moved Things: Opening the Windows of the Translator’s Identity » has appeared in the journal Hopscotch Translation. The essay focuses on how translating the poetry of Lorenzo Calogero affected his own writing. The opening paragraph:

« 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

The Italian version of this essay can be found in the special issue on Lorenzo Calogero in the No. 11 issue of Sud i poeti, published by Macabor Editore: