Interview: Mary Ann Caws
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
The best translators bring the beautiful, subtle intricacies of a writer’s language to a forefront in their translations. They become poets of transition and unimaginable flexibility.
Mary Ann Caws is such a translator. Her work––translations of a myriad of french writers––breathes with the original intention of each primary piece. Her writing is superseded only by her passion for French, and those artists; a passion that informs and improves her wonderful renditions.
Mary Ann is currently a distinguished professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She has published too many impressive volumes to enumerate here, but her writing merits careful investigation.
The Interview:
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What interested you in translating, rather than, say, ‘selfish’ writing?
MARY ANN CAWS
I like to do both, but was a terrible poet, so I turned to translating poets I found great, and wrote about them, as well as translating them.
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In reading of any language, the reader is separated by some degree from the writer; no matter how faithfully an author’s words function, it is the reader who interprets the text. Is not all reading, then, an act of translation?
MARY ANN CAWS
Yes indeed, and I have always believed that.
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A common criticism of translated poetry—one that you’ve noted yourself—is that often rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and the delicate styling of poetic voice are lost. How does a translator alleviate these loses?
MARY ANN CAWS
Well, I never rhyme, except this summer, translating some poems of Proust, of all people. And what compensates for non-rhyme, etc? Perhaps some depth of meaning somehow seized despite that other loss. I want to think that anyway.
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One of my favorite works of yours is The Yale Anthology of 20th Century French Poets. Of course, you’ve translated many French authors. What initially attracted you to the literature of France?
MARY ANN CAWS
I found it the greatest literature, in all senses, I ever came across, in particular its poetry. And have been honored to translate it, and whatever else I have been commissioned or persuaded to do, or chosen to do.
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You also seem to have a special affinity for surrealism, and the early avant-garde. What attracted you to these stylistic outliers?
MARY ANN CAWS
I like the odd. My next book is on the strange: Strange Arts: Dada, surrealism, and the modern imagination (tentative title, forthcoming with Univ. of Nebraska.)
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In our generation of burgeoning technologies, has poetic innovation begun to slow?
MARY ANN CAWS
No indeed.
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How does one go about—in a foreign country, with few connections—finding an untranslated artist worthy?
MARY ANN CAWS
Well, I find writers I love. And then translate them.
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Do you often personally meet with the writers you translate?
MARY ANN CAWS
Yes, when I can. I loved Louis-Rene des Forets, for example, whose Ostinato I translated. And so on.
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You had a close relationship with Rene Char. He remains a figure of certain mysticism and genius. Was he as impressive in person as his poetry suggests?
MARY ANN CAWS
YES YES YES.
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Why do you feel that France has, for centuries, attracted such varied and immense artistic talent?
MARY ANN CAWS
Goodness, no idea do I have: it just has and does.
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What’re you reading now?
MARY ANN CAWS
A lot still again on Nicolas de Stael, and Paule du Bouchet’s “Emportee…” and the French author Jerome Combier’s work on Sebald’s Austerlitz, which we just saw in Aix.
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No. 1 — August 9th, 2011 at 10:04 pm
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