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When Hermes handed over to Apollo his finest invention, the lyre,
in exchange for promotion to the status of messenger of the gods,
he relinquished the creativity that gave life to his words. The
trade-off proved frustrating: Hermes chafed under the obligation to
deliver the ideas and words of others and resorted to all manner of
ruses in order to assert his presence in the messages he
transmitted. His theorizing descendants, too, allow their
pretentions to creatorship to interfere with the actual business of
reinventing originals in another language. Just as the Hermes of
old delighted in leading the traveller astray, so his descendants
lead their acolytes, through thickets of jargon, into labyrinths of
eloquence without substance. Charles Le Blanc possesses the
philosophical tools to dismantle this empty eloquence: he exposes
the inconsistencies, internal contradictions, misreadings, and
misunderstandings rife in so much of the current academic discourse
en translation, and traces the failings of this discourse back to
its roots in the anguish of having traded authentic creativity for
mere status.
The translation of poetry has always fascinated the theorists, as
the chances of 'replicating' in another language the one-off
resonance of music, imagery, and truth values of a poem are
vanishingly small. Translation is often envisaged as a matter of
mapping over into the target language the surface features or
semiotic structures of the source poem. Little wonder, then, that
the vast majority of translations fail to be poetry in their own
right. These essays focus on the poetically viable translation -
the derived poem that, while resonating with the original, really
is a poem. They proceed from a writerly perspective, eschewing both
the theoretical overkill that spawns mice out of mountains and the
ideological misappropriation that uses poetry as a way to push
agendas. The emphasis throughout is on process and the
poem-to-come.
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