Séminaire Aliénation/Émancipation : Samuel Trainor

Presentation

A “contrapuntal” translation is not necessarily antagonistic to its source. Its defining attribute is a playful polyphony: the attempt to create syncopations of rhythm and reference in a simultaneous performance. Its antithesis is the instrumentalist notion of textual replacement, and its main focus is dynamic complementarity. Put in musical terms, contrapuntal translating seeks to ‘jam with’ a text, rather than to ‘stand in’ for it. However, a critical function is an obvious avenue of expansion. Syncopation can also be ideological. Translation’s raison d’être – whether it seeks to replace, explain or open out – can be found in the need to reach new readerships. When the implied or ‘target’ readership of a poetry translation is at odds with the ideology of a canonical composition, an iconoclastic approach to translating can, as it were, emancipate the poem from its alienating ideological strictures, dragging its thematic objects into new political and communicative spaces. This kind of deconstructive approach has been a key feature of feminist translation, for example, since the late twentieth century. However, contrapuntal translation theory seeks to describe a structurally interactive model in which these kinds of emancipatory gestures can be ‘musically’ enacted, in the presence of the original, as syncopempancipations, rather than acts of distortion, appropriation or damage. This presentation will examine various examples of syncopemancipation in the translation of politically problematic canonical poetry, including Gottfried Benn’s proto-nazi expressionism, Pierre de Ronsard’s decorative portrayal of rape, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Rudyard Kipling’s imperialist moral verse, and Homer’s ableist portrayals of Hephaestus and Thersites.

Bio

Sam Trainor is a poet, translator and senior lecturer at the University of Lille. He is originally from Birmingham. He has published several articles on various aspects of his contrapuntal translation theory and on contemporary British poetry. He has also translated books and articles on Art History, Sociology and Food Studies. He was recently co-editor of the essay collection Traduire le culinaire, which will be released by Artois Presses Université in summer 2025, and has published a number of poetry translations, including an iconoclastic version of ‘La défloration de Lède’ by Pierre de Ronsard, in PN Review n° 262.

Respondent: Claire Hélie (Université de Lille)