Losing One’s Way: Poet as Nomadic Translator in Caroline Bergvall’s “Via” and 'Drift'

Abstract

The process of translation generates exciting new possibilities through deep and prolonged engagement with the material of the source text; yet, as Lawrence Venuti has demonstrated, the creative agency that translators bring to the text has often been overlooked. The poet Caroline Bergvall explores translation’s crucial role in shaping literature, and this article links her practice to wider questions stemming from new materialist approaches to language. Two of her works are discussed here: “Via” (2004) consists of 47 different English translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Divina Commedia; Drift (2014), on the other hand, incorporates loose translations and rewritings of the Old English poem “The Seafarer”, the Norse poem “Hávamál” and the Icelandic Vinland Sagas. The resulting poems are not translations in the traditional sense, but they use their respective source materials as the basis of a citational and translingual mode of expression, thereby drawing attention to the importance of translation in the dissemination of languages and literatures. Nor do these works exist solely in one form; they have been published as text on the page, displayed visually and audibly in contemporary art spaces, and performed live by the poet herself. Drawing on both Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity and Michael Cronin’s work – inspired by Braidotti’s ideas – towards a nomadic theory of translation, this article will demonstrate how Bergvall’s creative (re)writing practice stages a nomadic encounter with a multiplicity of languages and media. Ever since Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari took nomadism as a model of thinking about the multiplicity of subjecthood, reformulating and revitalizing the poetic subject has often been associated with the minoritizing and deterritorializing effects of experimental writing practices. With these effects in mind, we shall see how “Via” and Drift effectively perform a nomadic encounter through Bergvall’s translingual approach to writing. By analysing her poetic practice alongside both Braidotti’s feminist philosophy and the cultural turn in translation theory, this article proposes that Bergvall’s hybrid approach to translation, writing and performance advances the ethical implications of contemporary translingual poetic practice.