Barbadian poet Cyndi Celeste at the Marché de la poésie in Paris, France, June 2023: discovering how not to get (too) lost in translation. Photo Copyright © 2023 by Kamille John.
THE CONVERSATION between me and the Vincentian and Grenadian participants in the departure lounge of the Grantley Adams International Airport is a triadic harmony. This is our first meeting, and we are speaking in the same language.
The cause célèbre, ironically, is translation.
We are three of ten participants from the Caribbean who have been selected by UNESCO’s Transcultura program to showcase and market our work at the 40th edition of France’s Marché de la Poésie this June. While we wait for our flight to board, we share a chorused concern about how we will be received. I, in particular, am trying to anticipate how my Bajan nation language will be understood—if at all.
“Maybe what they should have done was to collate our works and translate them into a single French anthology,” offers Kamille (Grenadian).
I say: “That’s fine and all, until it gets to nation language. How much gets lost in translation when the intent of the nation language is constrained to standard French?”
If my work is to be translated, nation language must be translated to nation language, or its equivalent Creole.
Honour and misrepresentation
At the Marché, our market stall tent is adorned on its three walls with our faces, our names, our countries, and an excerpt of one of each of our poems translated into French. I feel both honoured and misrepresented by this, though I do not have the words to articulate it yet. Each day we alternate between running the stall and exploring the other offerings of the Marché. I stay close to Kamille, who is fluent in French.
Throughout the market, the mainly French audience hesitates to engage with us beyond pleasantries if we do not communicate in their language. Of the collections featured at our stall, the single closest one to French language is the French Creole work of our Haitian colleague. By comparison, his work receives more attention than the other English or Spanish offerings.
It becomes increasingly apparent that the hopes of selling non-French work to this audience is going to be an actual struggle. Our roams around the Marché become focused on finding those willing and able to translate our work to French so we can access a French audience base.
Transcending translation?
There are three encounters that give me pause during our interactions.
The first comes at the stall of a translator-publisher. Kamille is otherwise engaged in conversation with another professional, so I must venture into conversation alone, with my eight-years-rusted grasp of French.
I greet the stall’s owner to inquire about a bilingual publication she has on display. I understand enough to recognize when she greets me in return and asks how she can help but cannot coax my brain to remember how to respond. Defeated, I apologize and ask gently if she speaks any English. Her body language shifts as she responds: “A little.” When I ask my question, she reverts to French. I catch few words, mutter, “Merci,” and walk away.
The second comes when we are given a chance to do readings. The program has provided us with specialized translators who read our work after us. I am dismayed when I realize the poems they are reading in French translation do not correspond to what we are reading in the original English. It seems like they have a predetermined order from the selections of our work they were given, and that’s what they are following regardless of our playlist. The way they read our work unsettles me as well, though I accept that they can only read in the voice they know. It feels uniformly over-theatrical in what strikes me as a conservative and markedly Euro-thespian manner. Altogether, the experience is jarring.
By the penultimate day of the Marché, I am jaded. I fervently do not care if my work ever makes it in the French market. I do not want to have conversations about translating when all around me are examples of how much of me gets lost or is poorly received along the way.
To French readers—and beyond?
And then comes the third circumstance, a serendipitous conversation with the owner of a small startup publishing house based in Guadeloupe. Like so many of the Marché’s exhibitors, his company publishes bilingually. Unlike most of them, the idea of “bilingual publishing” includes Creole, and it is clear that he empathizes with our reservations about translation: its ability to convey and transcend.
This is the defining moment of my trip. I am reminded how much poetry both translates and transcends translation, and how as Caribbean writers in particular we are constantly tasked with the balancing act between translating ourselves to others and contending with the translations others assign to us. I was so fixated on what was potentially being lost in translation that I stopped bothering to speak in the first place.
The question I am left to ponder, then, is this:
As Caribbean writers, what do we owe ourselves, beyond the translation?
Cyndi Celeste was one of Barbados’ representatives at The Caribbean Inspiration in Europe: Poetry Across the Atlantic event. She launched Girl Before Country, which is part of ArtsEtc’s 20th Anniversary Chapbook Series, at the Marché de la poésie, which took place from June 7-11 in Paris, France.
