Renga-O

A collective piece by Santiago Artozqui, Jonathan Baillehache, Camille Bloomfield, Chris Clarke, Irène Gayraud, Pablo Martin Ruiz & Lily Robert-Foley
 

Introduction

The form of the Outranspian renga (“renga-O”) was inspired by the “renga-P” of Jacques Roubaud, Octavio Paz, Eduardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson’s, published in their collective book Renga (Gallimard, 1970). It is the outcome of a proposal I made to Outranspo during its summer residency in Combrée (Maine-et-Loire, France) in July 2015 – the texts were not allowed to be edited after the experiment. The medieval form of the Japanese renga was adapted to the Western context in which the project took place: the principle of a sequence of poems written in a chain was kept, but the primary unit – the tanka – was replaced by the very Western triplet. Seven sheets of paper (which became seven sequences of text) circulated for seven days between the seven participants. Each wrote a triplet per sequence. A consistent order of circulation (chosen randomly) was retained during the whole week, whatever the language of each participant. Some ended up translating from a language they didn’t know.

Order of circulation for each sequence

The choice of language for each written contribution was left entirely to the author, as was the meter and the rhyme scheme of the triplet. The result is a text written in French, English, Italian and Spanish.

The focus of the constraint was on the imperative of translation: each triplet had to offer a constrained translation of at least one line of the previous triplet. Among our repertoire of « prefix-translations », four types were chosen: soundtranslation (homophonic), microtranslation (that decomposes words of a source-text into smaller meaningful units, and then translates the meaning of these smaller units), exotranslation (that paraphrases extensively the source-text) and antotranslation (that translates the antonyms of words of the source-text).

It appears upon rereading that soundtranslation, the mother of all prefix-translations, has often unwittingly seduced the Outranspians more than the other procedures. It also seems that the Outranspians, proudly undisciplined, rarely respected the constraints strictly and favoured, in the spirit of the « ongoing party in the vertiginous rooms of the Tower of Babel », a joyful mix of all four types, sometimes in a single word, other times displayed throughout their lines. The triplet unit itself was occasionally abandoned. Finally, the theme initially suggested (my family house, where the residence took place) only makes an appearance in certain lines.

To encourage the reader to play with us, the prefixes indicating the constraint used have been added beneath each line, as tips to allow a slower and more interactive reading. That only happened with our four selected constraints though: many other procedures that have been used, such as the “hommeaux-translation”, have not been indicated – a little work has to be left to the reader, doesn’t it?

Adding the prefixes also helped to create the score for an oral and polyphonic version of the text, in which the main voice is enriched by four other voices saying the – happily bisyllabic – prefix-tip at the appropriate moment, in a very rhythmic pronunciation. Each of these four voices, which we can imagine located in four different corners of the room, thus adopts a different “colour”.

Camille Bloomfield

(French version)

La forme du renga outranspien (« renga-O ») s’inspire du « renga-P » développé par Jacques Roubaud, Octavio Paz, Eduardo Sanguineti et Charles Tomlinson et publiée dans l’ouvrage collectif Renga (Gallimard, 1970). Elle résulte d’une proposition que j’ai faite à l’Outranspo lors de la résidence d’été du groupe à Combrée (Maine-et-Loire) en juillet 2015 – les textes n’ont pas été retouchés après l’expérience. Si le principe d’une séquence de poèmes écrits à la chaîne par différents auteurs est calquée sur le modèle médiéval du renga japonais, la forme a toutefois été adaptée au contexte occidental dans lequel nous nous situons : l’unité de base du « tanka » a ainsi été remplacée par l’unité « tercet ». Sept feuilles de papier (devenues sept séquences de texte) ont ainsi circulé pendant sept jours entre les sept participants, qui ont chacun écrit un tercet par séquence. Le même ordre de circulation du texte (choisi aléatoirement) a été respecté durant toute la semaine, quelles qu’aient été les langues parlées par les différents participants, ce qui fait que certains se sont retrouvés à écrire & traduire à partir d’une langue qu’ils ne connaissaient pas.

Ordre de circulation de chaque séquence

Le choix de la langue d’écriture a été laissé entièrement libre à l’auteur, ainsi que le mètre et le schéma de rimes des tercets. Le résultat est un texte écrit en français, anglais, espagnol et italien.

La contrainte portait plutôt sur l’impératif de traduction : chaque tercet devait contenir la traduction à contrainte d’au moins un vers du tercet précédent. Les quatre procédés choisis parmi notre répertoire de « traductions à préfixe » furent : la sonotraduction (homophonique), la microtraduction (les mots du texte-source sont décomposés en unités minimales de sens et ce sont ces unités qui sont traduites), l’exotraduction (le texte-source est développé en traduction par la paraphrase), et l’antotraduction (ce sont les antonymes du texte-source qui sont traduits). Il apparaît a posteriori que la sonotraduction, mère de toutes les traductions à préfixe, a souvent rattrapé les outranspiens malgré eux. L’on constate également que, fièrement indisciplinés, les outranspiens ont rarement respecté rigoureusement les contraintes fixées, préférant, dans un esprit de « fête perpétuelle dans les pièces de la tour de Babel », mêler allègrement les quatre procédés entre eux, les fusionnant parfois au sein d’un même mot, ou les employant partout dans le tercet. L’unité tercet elle-même a parfois été abandonnée. Le thème suggéré initialement, écrire à partir du lieu où l’on se trouvait (la maison de famille de Camille), se retrouve parfois au détour d’un vers.

Pour inviter le lecteur à jouer avec nous, les préfixes signalant la contrainte employée ont été ajoutés en-dessous de chaque vers, comme autant d’indices permettant une lecture plus lente et plus interactive du texte. Mais gare ! Seules les quatre procédures sélectionnées ont été signalées dans le texte, et non les nombreuses autres qui ont surgi çà et là, telle « l’hommeaux-traduction » (fondée sur les homonymes) : il faut bien laisser le lecteur travailler un peu, n’est-ce pas ?

L’ajout des préfixes fonctionne en outre comme une partition pour une version orale et polyphonique du texte, où à la voix principale peuvent se superposer quatre voix énonçant, aux moments opportuns et sur un mode très rythmé, le préfixe-indice – heureusement bisyllabique. Chacune de ces quatre voix, que l’on peut imaginer situées aux quatre coins de l’endroit où a lieu la lecture, prend alors une « couleur » différente.

Camille Bloomfield

NB: The poem is also a visual one, so please open the PDF version to access it. / Le poème étant également visuel, merci de consulter le PDF pour y avoir accès.

 

Santiago Artozqui

Santiago Artozqui writes short stories, essays, poetry, and translates from Spanish and English into French. Former literary critic in La Quinzaine littéraire, he now writes in En attendant Nadeau, a web literary review. He teaches creative writing at the university Paris 7 Diderot, and is president of ATLAS, an organization for the promotion of literary translation. He’s also old and not funny, too bad for him.

Jonathan Baillehache

Jonathan Baillehache teaches French (electronic) literature, video games and translation studies at the University of Georgia, in Athens (home of R.E.M. and Bobby Prince). He, too, is a Tiphainito (a former doctoral student of Tiphaine Samoyault). He defended his dissertation on the translation of Russian “zaum” poetry in 2012. He translates occasionally from French to English, from Russian to French and English, and from English to French, but his hobbyhorse is to think about translation in the framework of philosophy and digital humanities.

Camille Bloomfield

Camille Bloomfield tries to do as many things as one possibly can, such as translating poetry (from Italian: Patrizia Valduga, Mariangela Gualtieri, & from English: Lily Robert-Foley, Yuyutsu Sharma, H. D. Thoreau); writing interface poems on Instagram & making short video-poems on Youtube; teaching literature and communication at Université Paris 13 & University of Geneva; conducting research on Oulipo, manifestoes, digitized heritage, and platforms for collaborative translation. On her free time, she makes lists, plays music and co-founds groups like Outranspo.

Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke was raised in Western Canada, and currently lives in Princeton, NJ.  His translations include work by Raymond Queneau (New Directions), Patrick Modiano (NYRB Classics), and Pierre Mac Orlan (Wakefield Press, forthcoming), among others. His recent Outranspo-related projects include organizing a many-handed translation of an excerpt from Queneau’s “Les Fleurs Bleues” that passes from Italo Calvino’s Italian translation through those of 37 other translators via 6 languages, as well as a collaborative translation of a simultaneous 5-act play by Olivier Salon & Jacques Jouet (w/Emma Ramadan). He was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2016 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives” (forthcoming, Wakefield Press).

Irène Gayraud

Irène Gayraud writes poetry, poetical-extremely-short-fictions, and currently a novel. She has published two books : à distance de souffle, l’air (Éditions du Petit Pois, 2014), and Voltes (Al Manar, 2016).  She translates from Italian, Spanish and German into French : she collaborated with Christophe Mileschi to translate the Dino Campana’s poetical work (Dino Campana, Chants Orphiques et autres poèmes, Paris, Points, coll. “Poésie”, 2016). In addition, she holds a doctorate from Paris IV-Sorbonne. 

Pablo Martin Ruiz

Pablo Martín Ruiz studied literature and linguistics at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and completed a PhD in comparative literature at Princeton University. He is associate professor of Latin American literature at Tufts University. In addition to academic articles, he has published travel pieces, translations, and palindromes. He wrote a book of literary criticism called Four Cold Chapters on the Possibility of Literature Leading Mostly to Borges and Oulipo, published by Dalkey Archive in 2014. He is a founding member of the Outranspo. He enjoys writing texts as different from each other as possible.

Lily Robert-Foley

Lily Robert-Foley is Maîtresse de Conférences at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, specializing in translation. She is currently self-translating her doctoral dissertation on the Third Texte, a creative reading device for deforming the space between translations. She is the author of m, a book of poetry-critique-collage (Corrupt Press, 2013), graphemachine, a chapbook of visual poetry (Xerolage, 2013), Jiji, a book of prose poems and conceptual writing (forthcoming Omnia Vanitas Press) and Money, Math and Measure (forthcoming, Essay Press chapbook series). She is currently writer in residence at the Gula Summer Institute in Maine where she is working on the figural alliances between translation and digestion, with a particular focus on lobster. 

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