Two Impressions of Africa

We've recently gotten copies of the next TWO LINES--titled Counterfeits--in the office, and I took the opportunity to have a look at co-editor Luc Sante's introductory notes. He briefly talks about his first experiences with translation, which weren't particularly nice:

Although I've been bilingual for most of my life, I only came ot translation pretty recently. In part this is because the late Kenneth Koch, among my greatest teachers, threw me into the deep end when I was a college freshman. Just because French is my native language and I was a poet at the time, he assigned me to translate Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa, a plainly impossible task. Since it was an assignment, though I thought I was incompetent.

As luck would have it, there are currently new translations of both Roussel's New Impressions of Africa and his Impressions of Africa. Have a look at these reviews of each book to see how the translators accomplished what was certainly a daunting task.

Let me begin with a story from my own experience, one that came to mind when I read Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa. A group of young poets, mostly students, met weekly at a Borders in downtown Boston to discuss one another’s work and offer feedback. One week, a poem up for discussion described a bucolic riverside setting and the doings of villagers who lived nearby. “Children wade, women chide,” read one line.

The all-too-familiar motif of incessantly-nagging women raised a few questions with me: Why are they chiding? Who are they chiding? Is their disapproval warranted, or are they scolding simply because they are women and it is to be expected? The poem presupposed that we would accept this image without further elaboration, dismissing the women’s actual complaints.

When I called attention to this, someone else in the group countered that to change this line would be to sacrifice the alliteration of the initial consonants and the chiasmus suggesting a contradiction or parallel between the children wading and the women chiding. As a woman poet, I felt my presence in the group somehow diminished by the intrusion of the stock figure into our midst, as if I, too, were being reduced to a cliché. What good is aesthetic beauty in a poem if it fails to tell the truth about human beings? And yet, it was undeniable that the sound play was skillful, and that the poem would lose something without it. I put the quandary out of my mind, taking comfort in the fact that in any case, the poem would never make it beyond the confines of our modest circle — in spite of one well-wrought line, it was a mediocre poem, written by an unknown poet, that in all likelihood would never see the light of day.

But upon reading New Impressions of Africa, lo and behold, the same question resurfaced, with vastly more at stake. Raymond Roussel is widely read and acclaimed, admired by the likes of Michel Leiris, Marcel Duchamp, and John Ashbery. Questions of aesthetics and ethics become more problematic when reading poets of Roussel’s fame and caliber. How do we weigh the benefits that can be reaped when reading a master of the form against the great damage that can be done through his images that fail to tell the whole truth — about human beings on the whole; about certain groups in particular?