Rotate the foodstuffs!

I've been reading Malika Mokeddem's L'Interdite (Forbidden; Karen Melissa Marcus translates the title as The Forbidden Woman, which is both more accurate and less lovely).  It's a great book, and there's a fabulous passage toward the end that I thought I'd post up here, since it speaks to a lot of my fears of the decline of family and tradition in the modern world.  The French is Mokeddem's, of course; the translation is mine.

( Maintenant, les tribus sont éclatées... )

( Now, the tribes have scattered... )

*The fertile, mountainous region of Algeria.

I left out one of my reading materials in my last post, purposefully.  Who here has heard of Paul Celan?  Anybody?  Anybody?  As further proof that I am paradoxically out of touch with poetry as a discipline, I hadn't until very recently.  This, notwithstanding that Celan is apparently one of the foremost figures of European post-war lyric poetry.  I first heard of Celan when I was doing research for my thesis intro.  This research basically consisted of me re-reading texts I'd been assigned in Humphries' translation course, and reading for the first time other texts in the utilized anthologies, and one of those other texts was John Felstiner's meditation on translating Celan, "'Ziv, that light': Translation and Tradition in Paul Celan." *

I didn't have time to read the article in full.  I didn't have time to really dig in an get in Felstiner's head while he tried to get into Celan's.  I didn't have the time, but I did anyway.  The essay is a fantastic recounting of all the twists and turns in the translation process of a single poem, and it was one of the best introductions to a poet's work, ever.  There are more complete translations of Celan's oeuvre, but Felstiner has such a deep and abiding passion for the author and the rich tapestry of his words that I love his translations so much.  I'm reading through Felstiner's Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan right now, and even setting aside its inevitable effect on my own work, I think I'll be the better for having read it, just in a general sense.  Someday I'll read German well enough to go to the source texts, but for now I'll rely on Felstiner.

I'll leave you with the poem that brought me in, both in the original for, uh... well, basically Katie **, and in translation for everybody else.

( "Nah, im Aortenbogen" / "Near, in the aorta's arch" )***

* In Biguenet, John and Rainer Schulte.  The Craft of Translation.  Chicago: U Chicago P, 1989.  93-116.
** Well, and Melissa, if she ever looks at LJ anymore.
*** Celan, Paul.  Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.  Ed. and Trans. John Felstiner.  New York: Norton, 2000.  302-3.