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| Marilyn Hacker |
The prolific translator Marilyn Hacker talks with Erica Wright about
her work ethic, contemporary Morocco, and what connects poetry with journalism. : Being Poet
(Marilyn Hacker is a translator nothing short of
prodigious. In the past five years alone, she’s brought the work of Hedi
Kaddour, Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marie Etienne, and many more writers
into English, expanding the audiences of these international figures. Her
latest project, ‘Tales of a Severed Head’ by
Moroccan poet Rachida Madani, will be released this month by Yale University
Press. This book-length sequence recasts the story of Scheherazade and her
thousand and one nights, incorporating recent Moroccan history into the tales.
In her preface, Hacker calls it “a story of contemporary resistance—but once
again language provides the weapon.” – Erica Wright)
Erica Wright : How much
background information about Morocco, if any, do readers need in order to access
the text [Rachida Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head]?
Marilyn Hacker : Although I provided some
historical background in my preface to the book, I think the text is accessible
without very much additional information. The poems make it clear that the
trope of Scheherazade is being used to reflect on a contemporary situation of
political repression, which is by no means limited to Morocco. But knowing
about the Moroccan resistance and its repression—that brought intellectuals and
workers, women and men, together—gives a clarifying specificity to the
sequences.
Erica Wright : You often choose writing and translating projects with a
political undercurrent. What can poetry do that journalism can’t?
Marilyn Hacker :
Good journalism is preferable to bad poetry. Ezra Pound said that poetry was
“news that stays news,” and one would hope that poetry, but all good writing
really, transcends the specificity of its occasion even while, indeed by means
of, rendering it genuinely specific. As poets like Adrienne Rich, Louis
MacNeice, and Robert Hayden, among many others, have exemplified in their work,
individual experience and political observation are not separate; they exist on
a continuum, and it is a particular gift or responsibility of the poet, of the
imaginative writer, to observe and render that continuum.
Erica Wright : You studied Romance
Languages as a very young undergraduate at New York University. What was it
about foreign languages or literature that appealed to you at fifteen?
Marilyn Hacker : A
fascination with language in general. That included the heady joy of
discovering poetry in English, at first the poets that would delight an
adolescent like Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert
Frost, Hart Crane. A foreign language was a door onto branching corridors of
other histories, other ways of thinking, other linguistic echoes. American
education didn’t emphasize what was then called world history, as opposed to
the forefronted American history. And a second European language was also a way
to widen that perspective, necessarily—you cannot read Racine or Stendhal in an
historical vacuum. Even at fifteen I had read translations of Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, also of Sartre and Genet, and I wanted to be able to experience the
work directly. A paradox there about translation—that, at its best, one of the
things it does is inspire a desire to read the original. I’m very grateful to
Yale that Rachida Madani’s book/my translation is bilingual, and the reader can
fulfill that desire.
Erica Wright : I once heard Lydia
Davis say that she was done with translating after finishing her version of Madame Bovary. I’m paraphrasing, but
basically she said that she was exhausted. In the past five years alone, you’ve
translated Hedi Kaddour, Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Emmanuel Moses,
Marie Etienne, Gabrielle Althen, Madani, and probably a few more I missed. Where
do you find your motivation?
Marilyn Hacker : You
missed Amina Saïd and Habib Tengour! I can well understand Lydia Davis being
exhausted with translation. The plus side of it, for a writer, is the
engagement with language—the language of the original, but one’s own language
first and foremost. The possibility of working with it outside one’s own frames
of reference, connotations, formal or historical concerns—in that way it’s like
attempting to write within, and straining against or stretching out into, an
unfamiliar formal structure.
(Erica Wright is the
author of the poetry collection 'Instructions for Killing the
Jackal' and 'the
chapbook Silt'. Her poems have appeared in
many nice places such as Arion, Denver Quarterly, Pequod, and on From the
Fishouse. For up-to-date information,
check out her blog.)
(source : guernicamag.com)
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