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Title: Translation as Oneself

Translation as Oneself

The Re-Creative Modernism in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Late Sonnets, T. S. Eliot’s "Poems</I>, and the Prose Poetry since Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

by Noriko Takeda (Author)
©2015 Monographs XII, 119 Pages
Science, Society & Culture
Series: Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, Volume 224

Summary

Translation encompasses the whole of humanness, and, as indicated by C. S. Peirce, translation is interpretation. It involves the cognitive process in its entirety, which is based on the unconscious life force shared globally through the species. Synonymous with «untranslatability» in the challenging ambiguity, the generic unit named modernist poetry represents the potential of human activities as incessant translations. The interactive cognateness of translation and modernist poetry is clarified through this book on the purported untranslatability of the poems by the avant-gardists, in particular, Stéphane Mallarmé and T. S. Eliot. Modernism also accelerated the reformation of Japanese poetry, as is exemplified by a new genre modeled on Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s poetry in prose. These inspiring texts direct the reader to re-create the world with their multidimensional growth of meanings. The translation of the verbal artifacts plays a key role to the sustainability of human beings, along with their conditions as a circular whole.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Chapter One. Translation as Re-Creative Acquisition: The Concurrence with Modernist Poetry in Interpretive Self-Reproduction
  • The Culture Builder
  • Translation and Modernist Poetry
  • Translation as Both Conscious and Unconscious
  • The Archetypal Story on “What Is Translation?“
  • L.F. Baum’s Intralingual Translation
  • Translation as a Divine Comedy
  • Translation as Incarnation
  • Translation as Illumination
  • An Overview of the Following Chapters
  • Chapter Two. Form or Meaning: Stéphane Mallarmé’s Quest for Oneness through Poetic Totalization
  • The Mallarmean Late Poems and Their Titles
  • The Poetic Overcoming of Death and Arbitrariness
  • The Summarizing Schema of the Developing Oneness
  • Mallarmé’s Late Poems in Intertextuality
  • The Mallarmean sonnets and the English nursery rhymes
  • The Mallarmean sonnets and the Shakespearean poems
  • The Mallarmean poems and paintings
  • The Interaction between Genres in Mallarmé’s Poetry
  • The Poetic Unity as All
  • Unity, Circulation, Interpretation, and Translation
  • Chapter Three. Revising a Civilization: T.S. Eliot’s SecretiveAmbition as Poems 1919/1920
  • The Collection in Chiasmus
  • The Intertextual Fixation
  • The Significance of “Gerontion,“ the First Poem
  • The Burial of Five Elements
  • The Literary Appropriation of Surrealism
  • Making a New Culture through Search of Others and Translations
  • Chapter Four. Poetic as Encyclopedic: The Prose Poetry in Reunifying Enlightenment
  • Mallarmé’s Prose Poetry
  • The early “Frisson“
  • The developing antagonism in “Plainte d’automne“
  • Theorizing the Prose Poetry
  • Baudelaire’s poem in prose
  • The expansion of the Baudelairean genre
  • The waste land as Prose Poem
  • The paradoxical volubility
  • Baudelaire’s archetypal Spleen
  • The Pound intervention
  • Chapter Five. What the Thrush Said: The Re-Creative Secondness as a Synthetic Thirdness
  • The Thrush’s Medley from/to Eliot’s Rosarium
  • The Eliot/Browning Thrush
  • Browning’s Poem for Revival
  • A Japanese Adaptation
  • Browning as Oedipus
  • The Cradled Fathers: Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats
  • Chapter Six. Salvation as Translation
  • Notes
  • Chapter One. Translation as Re-Creative Acquisition: The Concurrence with Modernist Poetry in Interpretive Self-Reproduction
  • Chapter Two. Form or Meaning: Stéphane Mallarmé’s Quest for Oneness through Poetic Totalization
  • Chapter Three. Revising a Civilization: T.S. Eliot’s Secretive Ambition as Poems 1919/1920
  • Chapter Four. Poetic as Encyclopedic: The Prose Poetry in Reunifying Enlightenment
  • Chapter Five. What the Thrush Said: The Re-Creative Secondness as a Synthetic Thirdness
  • Chapter Six. Salvation as Translation
  • Works Cited
  • Index
  • Series index

 

← VIII | IX → Preface

This work is a sequel to my previous books entitled A Flowering Word (Peter Lang, 2000) and The Modernist Human (Peter Lang, 2008).

In the present work, I try to unfold the creativeness of modernist poetry as an avant-gardist re-creation of cultural heritage. The legacy is conveyed through the history of literary genres and rooted in the mind of writers as a source for new products. Writing is, in short, translation.

Triggering a whole run of mental activities, translation directs the reader to remake the actual life which surrounds the written texts. Facing the danger of total destruction in an overdeveloped civilization, the human race is challenged by the pressing demand for sustainability.

I pay a special tribute to the Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures series of Peter Lang Publishing. This productive series motivates me to continue writing about literature, which may be qualified as an engaging symbol of human endeavor. ← IX | X →

 

← X | XI → Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce copyrighted material.

T.S. Eliot, Excerpts from “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” and “Little Gidding” from FOUR QUARTETS by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1936, 1940, 1942 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright © renewed 1964 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright © renewed 1968, 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “The Waste Land” from COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

T.S. Eliot, Excerpts from ‘Poems’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd as the publishers.

Allen Ginsberg, “On Neruda’s Death” [four line poem] from COLLECTED POEMS 1947–1997 by ALLEN GINSBERG. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Allen Ginsberg, LLC.

← XI | XII → Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University, for modified portions of “Revising a Civilization: T.S. Eliot’s Secretive Ambition as Poems 1919/1920 ” by Noriko Takeda in Studies in Cultural Sciences 4 (2009), “Form or Meaning: Stéphane Mallarmé’s Quest for Oneness through Poetic Totalization” by Noriko Takeda in Studies in Cultural Sciences 5 (2010), and “Poetic as Encyclopedic: The Prose Poetry in Reunifying Enlightenment” by Noriko Takeda in Studies in Cultural Sciences 6 (2011).

William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say,” By William Carlos Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Limited.

← XII | 1 → CHAPTER ONE

Translation as Re-Creative Acquisition

The Concurrence with Modernist Poetry in Interpretive Self-Reproduction

“what quietness in death!”

BY WORDSWORTH

The Culture Builder

In a current popular practice, translation exposes itself as a multifarious phenomenon. It presents a variety of contrasts such as creative/reproductive, writing/reading, public/private, physical/conceptual, figurative/literal, international/domestic, commercial/academic, concrete/abstract, and activities/theories. Fundamentally, the term “translation” indicates both the product (the reproduced text) and the act of producing (the translating process).

According to C.S. Peirce, translation is interpretation, that is, a process of thinking. In Peirce’s words, “There is no exception, therefore, to the law that every thought-sign is translated or interpreted in a subsequent one, unless it be that all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death” (170).

Concurrently, the terms “think,” “consider,” and “interpret” are synonymous, according to the Oxford Thesaurus of English (2nd ed.) (“Consider”).

In the Peircean schema, interpretation as translation is a continuous replacement of “interpretants,” i.e., various responses to the previous signs, whether it be ← 1 | 2 → mental or physical.1 The interpretants themselves are signs, producing and thereby demonstrating the newborn interpretants.

Following the definition of Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron (46), a sign is “anything—a word, a gesture, etc.—that stands for something other than itself (the referent).”

Translation as a temporary synthesis thus makes up civilization as a whole in process.

Details

Pages
XII, 119
Publication Year
2015
ISBN (PDF)
9781453912409
ISBN (MOBI)
9781454197294
ISBN (ePUB)
9781454197300
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433124525
DOI
10.3726/978-1-4539-1240-9
Language
English
Publication date
2015 (July)
Keywords
humanness interpretation modernist poetry
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2015. 119 pp.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Noriko Takeda (Author)

Noriko Takeda is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Hiroshima University. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Toronto. Her publications include A Flowering Word: The Modernist Expression in Stéphane Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, and Yosano Akiko (Lang, 2000) and The Modernist Human: The Configuration of Humanness in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Hérodiade, T. S. Eliot’s Cats, and Modernist Lyrical Poetry (Lang, 2008).

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