Article
translating a festival poet
Strangeness becomes you
June 29, 2014
Gizzi chose this new poem because, in his opinion, it is quite simple as far as syntax goes; perfect for such a workshop. Nevertheless, translating the poem brought some unexpected difficulties. The poem’s title, for example, gave people trouble right away. How do you properly translate a sentence like ‘Strangeness Becomes You’ without losing the ambiguity it has in English? What if you cannot keep the ambiguity? Which interpretation do you then choose? And which word in Dutch (and in the other languages spoken in the workshop) captures the specific meaning of ‘strangeness’ the best?
Another interesting verse to translate: ‘Everyone’s got beer muscles / when they’re young’. Gizzi explained that the expression ‘beer muscles’ is used to describe the aggressive and tough attitude people sometimes get after drinking too many beers or other alcoholic beverages. We are probably all familiar with the phenomenon of ‘beer muscles’, but does our language also offer a suitable word or phrase to describe it? If not, should we invent one?
In the end the workshop not only proved to be fun, but also productive. Gizzi’s poem has now been translated into several new languages. Festival poet Charl-Pierre Naudé translated the poem into Afrikaans, and Lisa Katz, Poetry International’s Israeli website editor, made a translation in Hebrew. PI Ireland editor Billy Ramsell produced a Gaelic version. Samuel Vriezen finished his translation in Dutch after the second workshop, just in time for Gizzi’s main reading. During that event Gizzi read ‘Strangeness Becomes You’ aloud, and the Dutch audience could read along with the projections to experience the brand-new Dutch translation ‘Het vreemde wordt jou’.
Every year all the festival poets, web editors and other guests of the festival are invited to attend a translation workshop in which they translate the work of a single festival poet. It’s a fun and interesting festival tradition that leads to new translations in unexpected languages. For this year’s festival the poetry of Peter Gizzi (USA) was chosen for the workshop. Gizzi lead the discussion together with Samuel Vriezen, his Dutch translator.
And he chose to stir things up a bit.
Instead of choosing a poem from his festival collection that had already been translated by Vriezen, Gizzi chose one of his new poems for this workshop, ‘Strangeness Becomes You’. So except for Gizzi himself, all the participants were seeing this poem for the first time, and had to start without any preparation or foreknowledge.Gizzi chose this new poem because, in his opinion, it is quite simple as far as syntax goes; perfect for such a workshop. Nevertheless, translating the poem brought some unexpected difficulties. The poem’s title, for example, gave people trouble right away. How do you properly translate a sentence like ‘Strangeness Becomes You’ without losing the ambiguity it has in English? What if you cannot keep the ambiguity? Which interpretation do you then choose? And which word in Dutch (and in the other languages spoken in the workshop) captures the specific meaning of ‘strangeness’ the best?
Another interesting verse to translate: ‘Everyone’s got beer muscles / when they’re young’. Gizzi explained that the expression ‘beer muscles’ is used to describe the aggressive and tough attitude people sometimes get after drinking too many beers or other alcoholic beverages. We are probably all familiar with the phenomenon of ‘beer muscles’, but does our language also offer a suitable word or phrase to describe it? If not, should we invent one?
In the end the workshop not only proved to be fun, but also productive. Gizzi’s poem has now been translated into several new languages. Festival poet Charl-Pierre Naudé translated the poem into Afrikaans, and Lisa Katz, Poetry International’s Israeli website editor, made a translation in Hebrew. PI Ireland editor Billy Ramsell produced a Gaelic version. Samuel Vriezen finished his translation in Dutch after the second workshop, just in time for Gizzi’s main reading. During that event Gizzi read ‘Strangeness Becomes You’ aloud, and the Dutch audience could read along with the projections to experience the brand-new Dutch translation ‘Het vreemde wordt jou’.
© Feline Streekstra
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