Chase Twichell’s poetry is a perfect example of the contemporary American lyric. It is brief, intimate, and sharp-edged. At once it is self-aware and self-effacing, muddling the human and natural landscapes, the emotional and physical worlds.
“I want to see things as they are / without me,” Twichell writes in “Roadkill.” Seeing one’s work translated may be one such version of seeing oneself without oneself, though in this case, this is not completely true. Claire Gacioch’s translations of Twichell’s work into French are a decade in the making, stemming from a love and appreciation of her poetry, as a reader, in English. The two have worked closely together, so that these translations are not “without” their original author.
Yet, in considering the wide gulfs that divide the French and English languages and the necessarily different approaches and backgrounds of author and translator to the work at hand, the following translations must also be considered as existing “without” their original author. Regardless of one’s grasp on the French language, there are immediately recognizable differences between the English poems and their French counterparts. Often, the lines in French are longer—quite a bit longer at times, as if the French language itself cannot help but to demand more of its own presence.
French does, indeed, tend to turn its face towards the poetic. This is perhaps why many find it an aesthetically pleasing language. Sometimes direct translations which one would think would be simple, cannot be. Take the aforementioned poem for example: there is no French term for roadkill, at least not one which reflects the directness of the English. Gacioch translates it as “Les animaux tués sur la route,” [“The animals killed on the road”]. The effect is startling in its difference. The French almost sounds, at least in relation to the English, like a poeticized phrase. It also draws far more attention to the aliveness of these now-dead creatures. “Roadkill” offers no such generosity. In combining the place of death and the killing itself, there is almost no space to remember the life and the creature that precede the term. And all of this is in regards to just one word.
Despite these drastic differences, Gacioch achieves a tonal uniformity in her translations of Twichell. Perhaps it is Gacioch’s own voice carrying through in the French, but the effect is of a new, French version of Twichell herself. This is the mark of excellent translation. Rather than marrying herself to just the words on the page, Gacioch seems to invent a new version of the original author, as she might have written in French if that had been her language from the first.
The following translations are part of a larger, forthcoming collection in French. May they be seen, “as they are.”