Performative Translations, Intimate Dialogues and Political Transformations: Contemporary Experiments on Translating the Classics

Abstract

In this article I bring together three different textual practices that set up intimate dialogues with the works of variously canonical authors (Dante, Petrarch and César Vallejo). William Rowe and Helen Dimos present a new bilingual version of Vallejo’s Trilce with glosses, Tim Atkins answers Il Canzionere with 366 “sonnets” that not only enter into a dialogue with Petrarch but also with previous translations of his work, and Caroline Bergvall performs an experimental engagement with translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. These exercises in translation challenge notions of fidelity and break phantasmagorical hierarchies built by the canon. Instead of fidelity, there is intimacy in their dialogues, since they each open up particular, personal approaches to the oeuvre, its author, its translators, its history, and the audience or reader. I argue that these works understand translation as an intimate performative and political action, and their reading provokes a reconfiguration of both the source text and its previous translations.