Raluca Tanasescu

Beyond “informational” translation: Jerome Rothenberg and translational poetics

In a letter to Robert Creeley in 1960, Jerome Rothenberg confesses his lack of interest in what he called “informational” translation, that is, translation for the sake of conveying only meaning. His vision was animated from the very beginning by the possibility of re-creation in those areas where the exact equivalence in translation was not possible. Rothenberg admits he never knew where translation ended and where his own writing began. The goal of this presentation is to focus on Rothenberg and other poets – like George Economou with his notion of “transcomposition” and Haroldo de Campos with his idea of “transcreation” – to illustrate the ways in which poets cross boundaries and recover elements that might otherwise be lost in translation. Reference will be made to Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, which considers translational poetics to be among the most sophisticated and contemporary literary innovations.

Keywords: translational poetics, poetry translation, Jerome Rothenberg

Biography

Raluca Tanasescu is a Vanier Scholar (PhD Candidate) in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa (School of Translation and Interpretation), where she is working on her PhD thesis proposal titled “Songs of Globalization: Translating and the Power of Small Nations. The Case of US and Canadian Contemporary Poetry Translated into French and Romanian.” She is also the organizer of World Words: The Graduate Student Conference in Translation Studies at the same school and one of the two translators of Jerome Rothenberg’s Selected Poems into her native Romanian: Mystics, Thieves, and Madmen (Max Blecher Press, 2013).