by Lily Robert-Foley
The poem “Traduire l’amour” (Translating Love) is a multilingual poem written collectively in 2022 by Hanane El Hadifi, Michèle Huguenin, Najat Ouali, Rajaa Taleb, Nawel Taleb Ben Diab, Fatima Zhora El Hachimi and myself during a session of a multilingual writing workshop that I initiated at the Maison pour Tous Marie Curie, a community center in my neighborhood, Celleneuve, where I live in Montpellier, France. I say ‘initiated’ instead of ‘lead’ or worse, ‘taught’, since I did nothing more than arrive with an idea, and the participants took the idea and ran with it, creating this polyvocal poem in Arabic, Berber, English and Italian. The idea was in fact a procedure that I refer to as the ‘infinite sense translation’ in the Handbook of Translation Procedures that accompanies my book, Experimental Translation: The Work of Translation in the Age of Algorithmic Production (Goldsmiths 2024).
An infinite sense translation, when I first hit upon the idea, involved departing from one single word and finding as many foreign language homophones as one can —or, in the terminology of the Outranspo (Ouvroir de translation potencial — a group of experimental translators modelled on the Oulipo, of which I am a member), hommeauxtranslations:
Hommeauxtranslation (span: hommeauxtraducción; fr: hommeauxtraduction): a translation that translates the homonyms or homophones of words of the source-text.
Example:
Source-text: “Il danse, rue puis se lance dans l’air […] — target-text: “He dances, he streets and spears in the aria […] “ (Outranspo, “Renga O”). “streets” translates “rue”, a French homonym of the original verb “ruer” (to kick); “spears” translates “lance”, a French homonym of the original verb “lancer” (to throw); “aria” translates “air”, a French homonym of the original “air” (the air).*
* See Outranspo. The diagrams were designed by me and made better by Delphine Presles.
The appellation ‘hommeauxtranslation’ follows the Outranspian logic of applying a prefix onto the word ‘translation’ (or its translation) in order to invent new constraints. In this case, a hommeaux-translation is called a hommeauxtranslation and not a homotranslation for two reasons. The first is because ‘homotranslation’ was already in use, referring to a translation written towards the same language as the source text. The other is that ‘hommeaux’, sounds like ‘homo’, but is not — not only because it is written differently, but also because it refers to something else, namely, the Château des Hommeaux where Outranspo has carried out most of its summer residencies. This idea, that ‘Hommeaux’ sounds like ‘homo’, but refers to something completely different, is the essence of the hommeauxtranslation.
One example of an ‘infinite sense translation’ can be found in Juliana Spahr’s introduction to Myung Mi Kim’s Dura:
There is dura as the dense, tough, outermost membranous envelope
of the brain and spinal cord, literally “hard mother” as it is from the Arabic, al-’umm al-jalīda or al-jāfiya “the hard mother” and durare, to last, endure, in Italian, and durer, to last, to run, to go on, in French and durar, to last, in Spanish and dura, the feminine hard, stale, tough, stiff in Spanish and Dura as an ancient city in Syria and dura, as the Romanised transcription of the phrase listen up in Korean and Dura
as the group of people who live on the hills of Dura Danda, Turlungkot, Kunchha Am Danda of Lamjung District and some adjacent villages of Tanahun District in Nepal and Dura as the language of the Dura and duras as a variety of sorghum of southern Asia and northern Africa
and…**
** It seems important here to quote Spahr’s footnote as well: “These resonances of ‘dura’ stolen from Josephine Nock-Hee Park’s ‘Composed of Many Lengths of Bone: Myung Mi Kim’s Reimagination of Sound and Epic’ and Zhou Xiaojing ‘‘What Story What Story What Sound’: the Nomadic Poetics of Myung Mi Kim’s Dura‘ and various dictionaries. I am sure this is just a beginning” . Juliana Spahr, ‘introduction’ to Myung Mi Kim, Dura. Nightboat Books, 1998, p.ix
In other words, an ‘infinite sense translation’ takes one word as a point not of the consolidation or the fixation of one singular meaning, but of the explosive proliferating multilingual potential of a word, its exquisite valencies.
During the session where ‘Traduire l’amour’ was produced, I began the workshop with an invitation to write down our favorite words, in any language that we wished. There was a gorgeous linguistic diversity all throughout the workshops that I lead at the Maison pour Tous, and in this case the poems spanned Berber, Arabic, French, Italian and English. I then invited participants to choose the word they thought would be the most difficult to translate, and we talked about what makes a word hard to translate.
M
a
n
o
u
Of the most difficult words to translate that everyone shared, the most difficult of the difficult, everyone agreed, was the word Manou, a term of endearment in Berber. Beginning from this word, participants decided to produce as many possible translations as they could – a variation on the ‘infinite sense translation’ procedure that I had not considered before collaborating with the people in the workshop. The result is the poem above.
The poem was also performed during the 2022 conference What’s the Matter in Translation/Traduction et matérialité, organized by Paola Artero, Marianne Drugeon, Julie Sauvage and myself. The conference was funded by the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, where it also took place about half of the time. The other half of the time, we sought to expand and turn outward, to look beyond the walls of University that can both keep some kinds of knowledge in and some kinds of knowledge out. To do so, the conference was organized at different places besides the University, at the Maison de la Poésie Jean Joubert (the poetry center of Montpellier), at o25rjj, an art space run out of the home of artist Pascale Ciapp located in Loupian, a village 25km outside of Montpellier, and also, at the Maison pour Tous Marie Curie. This was in the hopes that people accustomed to frequenting those places might come and mingle with the academics and new knowledges could be born of this mixing.***
*** here also see Harriet and Ricarda’s blog post of 27th June 22 for an account of their workshop with the multilingual community of Celleneuve which took place at the Maison pour Tous Marie Curie during the conference.
‘Traduire l’amour’ sprang from one of a series of workshops that I lead in anticipation of the day of the conference that would be held at the Maison pour Tous. The idea of housing a day of the conference at the Maison pour Tous was not merely to give the academic public a change of scenery. On the contrary, this was my greatest fear when we began planning the day. For me, holding an academic conference at a community centre only takes on meaning if different publics and different kinds of knowledge can be shared in an egalitarian kind of way. The workshops that I initiated leading up to the conference were thus a way for me to make encounters and create ties with people from the community in the hopes that they would come, participate, collaborate and share knowledges with the academic public.
Experiential Translation 