July 06, 2006
walk, drift, etc.
Last week, the estimable Lisa Robertson happened upon the recent reissue of Michele Bernstein's Tous les chevaux du roi and, by way of her temporary online journal, translated a couple passages just for fun and our good fortune, starting with this three-way chat:
—What do you do anyways? I don’t really know .
—Reification, Gilles replied.
—It’s serious work, I added.
—Yes, he said.
—I see, Carole said with admiration. It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of papers on a big table.
—No, Gilles said. I walk. Principally I walk.
Bernstein's roman a clef of early Situationist history, mostly of her relationship with Guy Debord (to whom she was funder, wife, and procuress), has never been translated — in English, on par with funeral orations of Bossuet, the book is notable for its absence.
And yet the book contains one of the most-famous and most-translated passages in French literature since Baudelaire. In 1966, students at the University of Strasbourg put out two pamphlets that would play a substantial role of the chain of history leading directly to the events of May '68. The latter was called "On the Poverty of Student Life." The former, "The Return of the Durutti Column," was a celebrated early example of what would eventually make Jim Behrle's blog possible: comic strips with new text written into the bubbles, blanks and balloons.
Somewhere in the middle of the comic, two cowboys (Pancho and Cisco) have a conversation on horseback — the very conversation from Bernstein that Lisa Robertson first translates. In the intervening forty years, the passage has appeared in English over and over, every time the Debord or the SI program is up for discussion (most notably the Greil Marcus article for Artforum, "The Cowboy Philosopher" and his following book, Lipstick Traces). Rod Smith quotes it in this interview. It's the last line of the bilingual French/English poem mentioned in this note by Juliana Spahr. And so on — the language is everywhere, including in the name of the Factory records band Durutti Column.
But what language? Robertston, in her translation, has made a quite peculiar (if not entirely unprecedented) choice to translate the celebrated punchline, Non, je me promène. Principalement je me promène, as "I walk. Principally I walk." This gets much of the line's self-ironizing tenor just right, after the big build-up about reification and the weightiness of theory — its deflationary quality, and its reminder that philosophy must be lived in the quotidian, not applied from above.
Still, it's an oddly flatfooted choice. This phrase is not meant simply to deflate theory, but to redirect it. Se promener is not the easy way to say "to walk," after all (marcher), though it does have that secondary meaning. It also has the flippant sense one hears in English when telling someone to buzz off, "go take a walk." Still, the choice by Bernstein is surely meant to invoke the Surrealist tradition ("the perpetual promenade in the midst of forbidden zones," as Breton decribed it in 1930). It must also have to do with SI practices — and, as surely as they recommended détournement of comic strips, their other program was the dérive, the drift through the city as a critical act. Given that there's no verb form of dérive, se promener is often taken as such. Indeed, the most-common translation of the last line, by far, is "I drift. Mainly I drift."
But that isn't quite perfect either — there are only imperfect translations. Robertson's version is useful because it makes this clear (in addition to looping the passage back to her own title). What does it mean to propose, as a fundamental activity, an action for which there is no verb? To what extent does the historical pressure of this passage — the way in which it exists un- and overtranslated at the same time, celebrated and unknown, presabsent — index the extent to which a new language is needed, not for infinitely subtle parsing, but for the most basic considerations? It is here that poetry and philosophy pass closest to each other...
Posted by jane at July 6, 2006 09:33 AM | TrackBack