Translating Nicole Brossard’s

Le Dos indocile des mots

I first heard a few of these pieces spoken aloud by Nicole Brossard in Montréal in 2015, to the accompaniment of musical interludes arranged by Guy Cloutier. The poems were all about the sound, sounds making words, words making unexpected and delightful (non)sense in conversation with the music. Exuberance of words, tethered to their letters, twirling around their manifold meanings, singing their hearts out. I was entranced. Mesmerized by the unusual poetry of it and at the same time intrigued and seduced by the play of words across the alphabet.

Later when I saw the words on the page they were repeating in the realm of the visual what in that first performance they had realized in sound. Images and ideas were threaded together on strings of letters. All of this transported me back to my earliest encounters with language—singing the alphabet, tracing a single letter over and over on its dotted line.

As a translator who loves puzzles—as most translators do—I couldn’t resist entering into the play of it. And I discovered that what was already complex and “étrange[r]” (strange and foreign) in the French—due in part to the abecedarian constraints and in part to the distinctiveness of Brossard’s ways of seeing and thinking—became even more complex in the English (constraints piled upon constraints) while at the same time curiously somehow less foreign, less strange. There was comfort in kinship, the familiarity of letters and the seeming trustworthiness of shared alphabets.

A reader of Brossard cannot fail to appreciate her particular attention and personal attachment to certain words and their lexical networks. Words like vertige, civilisation, urbaine, délire, lèvres, corps, for instance, (pre)occupy her writings, carrying their distinctively Brossardian charge and signification. To read Brossard’s poetry is also always to experience the physicality of her words, how they taste and feel and sound in the mouth and ear. And as these carefully chosen words resonate together they express the poet’s intense engagement with bodies and desire, violence and tenderness, horizons, intimacy, and the world’s fragility. All this to say that for the translator of Brossard, word choice matters a very great deal. It is plein de conséquences.

Le Dos indocile des mots demonstrates what its title describes: language’s determination to put something in place (meaning, image, idea) and the words’ cheeky resistance to sitting still. An abecedarian, with its alphabetically enforced associations, lets us see how words may rub shoulders and cast each other in a different light. Brossard’s dalliance with the alphabet happens in the music of the repeated sounds and the visual effects of the repeated letters on the page, but also in these intimate encounters.

Enter the translator. It is the author who invites her in. The author’s language seduces, drawing the reader ever closer until she cannot help but whisper back. Nicole Brossard has often imagined this relationship, perhaps most explicitly in Le Désert mauve with its two striking metaphors for the Laure Angstelle/Maude Laures (author/translator) relationship. Each metaphor figures in its own way the intimacy and pleasures of that engagement. In the first, Maude Laures imagines herself in a tennis match with Laure Angstelle. Words and phrases are lobbed and parried back and forth across the net. At the end of an exhausting and exhilarating match, the two women meet at the net, smile at one another, and walk off the court together before going their separate ways. The other metaphor is of two bodies (languages/tongues) finally corps-à-corps between the sheets (the double entendre of sheets being a felicitous supplement in English). The translator readies herself for her task: “Le temps était venu du corps-à-corps avec le livre. [. . .] le temps était maintenant venu de se glisser anonyme et entière entre les pages.”

Translating Le Dos indocile des mots feels like this to me: both a challenging game requiring stamina and precision and an intimate encounter. Playful volleys back and forth across the net of our common languages. Shared pleasures of a mouthful of words. Sous la langue. Whose tongue(s)? Whose mouth?

As I venture into this wordscape, I know I must attend to the sense of each word and line, to assonance and alliteration, skeins of meaning, constellations of images, associative leaps and bounds. Yet always the letter. It is the letter that determines, guides, and constrains. Thus I find myself translating differently from my usual practice. If not for the rules of this game, I would surely have resorted to other choices for many of these words. A translator is always bound by and to the words of the source, but with a bountiful lexicon in the target language from which to draw. Here the letters would seem to be narrowing my options. But the gift to the translator of this abecedarian poem is that this narrowing forces me to look beyond the usual, to go rummaging at the back and underside of all these words, to push, when necessary, at sense and syntax, sound and rhythm, image and form while staying always within bounds. The repetition of first letters creates a musical line, a measurable shift in favor of the sonorous. Then the words come talking back and images and ideas impose themselves. In the constant push and pull between imposed constraints and tempting deviations, I strive to navigate the logjams, determining when to hold fast to some element that is clamoring for my attention and when to give myself permission to let it go. On occasion, the impossibility of finding an adequate “translation” has led me rather to repeat Brossard’s initial exercise for myself. But then, is this still a translation? Whose visions and associations are these? What does it mean when a tournesol becomes a trumpet vine or when humide comme une huître becomes humid as a heatwave? Some of Brossard’s words still trouble my sleep, hard little nuggets, peas under the mattress.

But this lexical entanglement was above all about pleasure. The joy of poring over the thesaurus and the dictionary, mining for certain letters and letter combinations. The thrill of sharing in the poet’s little love affair with each letter in turn. And this may explain why my transposition of Q and S felt like such a daring betrayal of a relationship. Nobody could have been more astonished than I to discover that what I had deemed to be the impossibility of translating Q might be resolved via S in the target language and then (oh my!) that S in the source could actually find some expression in Q in the target. What to make of this? It was clearly a travesty, and yet at the same time exciting, as the letters turned their backs on me—stubbornly indociles—and over their shoulders beckoned seductively toward different landscapes and lexicons. Not surprisingly the poems for S and Q venture much farther afield from their sources than the others in this sequence. As the two letters with their distinct auras began to play with one another across the alphabetic divide they became more and more foreign to themselves and changed the rules. Did I dare? Did I have the right to do this? Nicole and I met at the net and exchanged a smile. This was, she said, our adventure of Sharing and Questing.

Translating happens on so many different levels. Languages slip their bounds and whisper their secrets back and forth. Every letter contains galaxies of words. Something is always happening in the in-between. The letters know their limits—there are only twenty-six of them—, but our alphabet is infinite and generous.

KM