Name: watch video on Caroline Bergvall's "VIA"
Uploaded: 2016-09-10T13:04:23.481Z
Duration: 12 min 14 s

Caroline Bergvall recorded,

performed a piece with accompaniment called Via.

Later she published it in Chain magazine.

But really it existed for a while as a performance.

Fortunately we have a recording of it,

which is now available the Caroline Bergvall handset page Via.

So what is Via?

Dave, what is it?

How did she make this?

>> She took the first line out of Dante's Inferno.

>> The first three.

>> The first three from 40 some different translations and

just read them stoically one after the other.

Just reading how the different interpretations sounded

one after the other.

>> Molly, what does the reading sound like?

>> It's very even keeled,

it's very, sort of, each translation is equal, very smooth.

>> Same voice for each.

Anything else about the sound of it?

Emily? >> Well it's just sort of solemn and

sober.

It's exactly the voice you should read the Inferno in.

>> [LAUGH] >> Anybody else?

So far solemn, sober, straight.

But it strikes me as haunting.

Anybody vote for haunting?

Anna. >> I'd go for haunting.

>> Tell us.

>> Well it's, what's haunting to me about it is kind of my experience of hearing it.

Is that the first couple of translations you hear you're kind of trying to pick

out exactly what the differences are.

You think about, this is this translation from this year.

This one's 96.

That one's 1897.

But gradually all that starts to kind of go away.

>> It's not in chronological order.

>> Mm-mm.

>> Why not?

>> I don't know, I don't think it would make sense for

it to be in chronological order.

>> It's in alphabetical order.

>> Alphabetical order, according to- >> I think the first word.

>> First word, whether it's a preposition or an article or not.

So, she organizes it alphabetically.

So that suppresses the chronology of the translations and the editors.

>> Why suppress it?

Because that way, you don't make one preferenced

over the other, it's not like- >> Same word,

this is very interesting, it's almost a scholarly thing.

Max, what's interesting about keeping it from going in the order of

the translations as they were made.

>> You're not tempted to detect some sort of progress or

the translation getting better over time?

>> Indeed >> This is not a history of the progress

of translators getting better and better at translating the,

not in the area of translation, Dante is hard.

He's not the hardest, but

still given that there's an infinite variety of possibilities.

What does that create in you?

When you hear, let me put it this way, when you hear this thing,

this ten minute recording, this completely alluring recording,

do you think of sameness or difference?

>> I kind of think of both.

>> Both.

Tell us about sameness and then difference.

>> Well, I'm not sure a lot of us have that much of experience of sitting

somewhere for 10 minutes, and having reiteration of the same ideas, again, and

again, and again.

But, it's stein, right?

And repetition shows difference.

Every repetition is at difference- >> Differences spreading.

Alec talk about difference?

>> I mean, you have kind of the same basic

words that crop up midways in almost all of them.

But you start to notice when there are deviations from the norm.

>> Or what is the norm?

>> Or what norm right?

>> Right.

>> We don't even know where we are in the norm.

>> Think about all the different ways we have in English to say the phrase,

dark wood.

Like how many different ways can you translate that or say that.

>> Let's talk about translation in general.

What is translation?

This is an existential question, almost.

Max, what' translation.

>> In a basic sense it's taking something written in one language and

finding the corresponding words in your own language.

>> And why can't it be done once and for all authoritatively and perfectly?

>> Because there's no one to one correspondence between words across

languages.

>> So it's kind of an exophonic version of the old story of English to English.

Or English to thing, right.

So we have a word, mug, thump, gets to mug.

But now we've got a word in one language trying to correlate directly

with a word in another, and there's that same success and circuit lies.

The success of the translation is finding a way that people think,

wow that's really getting close, getting close, but not there.

So translation, now let's be very theoretical about translation

>> Anybody want to give it a try, Anmrise

>> Well, what about it though?

>> In the largest theoretical sense,

what does translation have to do with this course, have to do with anything?

>> Well, I guess,

the point would not be then to create some sort of semantic accuracy between modes.

One would not be superior.

There would, you would blow out the idea of the original text and

then the sub-genre translated text.

There's no inferior text, they're both legitimate in their own way.

>> So good.

Now someone related to our course.

>> And also you can't actually translate words,

because so much of the word is the word itself.

As object, as visual image, that word in that language

is always just going to be that word in that language.

>> Good.

Your getting somewhere.

What in our course makes you think of this?

Let's not say that any one translation is authoritative.

Let's have Seamus Heaney, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Dorothy Sayers

sit alongside, unchronologically, a bunch of forgotten Victorians and

Edwardians who have done their translations.

And let's say again and again the translation of this one line,

we haven't gotten very far into Dante's Inferno here.

We are at the edge of hell.

We're just standing at the edge, and

we haven't gotten anywhere because we just keep trying to stumble over the right way.

What in our course make you?

>> It makes me think of authorship, this one kind of thorny problem.

Because Dante is the original writer, but then you have all of these translations,

you have Tennasen's translation, you have Robert.

>> Like so many poets in our course, suppresses the tendency,

the old fashioned pre-modern tendency to say, that's the author, and

that's where authority resides.

This is a very, very subtle way of spreading authority across all versions.

You've seen that in our course.

What else makes you think of this?

>> I was just going to say, it reminds me of a more,

a very differently toned Portrait of a Lady, by Williams.

>> Let's try to get it right.

No, let's try it this way.

No, I remember likening her this way.

Similes work.

No, no, no, similes don't work.

You can't do this.

Keep trying.

No, I won't.

Which?

Or, I don't know.

Yes, so it's a different toned version of the same.

And it's very much, when we were talking about Stein,

we were talking about Hemingway.

That cubistic, multi-perspectival fracturing.

I'm going to try it from this angle, no.

This, the new descends here, no.

We'll get there, no.

It's all everything happening all at once.

Trying it from every different angle.

And that's representing the process by which we understand meaning.

I'm going to read you a line from Brian Reed's terrific short essay about this

work, and you tell me what it means, or how does it help you.

The world is always joined media race, in the middle of things.

The divinely ordained right way forward has been lost,

but it will always remain so, and ever has it.

What do you do with that?

>> It brings me to the concept of when we read something we think, that's the way to

say it, and when we read a translation we just assume that this is the one way.

>> Seamus Heaney has done the translation, >> This is what it means.

>> It's been done, been there done that.

>> [LAUGH] >> Exactly how it is.

I think Portrait of a Lady is a great example because

there is no one way to say it.

>> Okay. >> Even in the original.

>> So a media race with respect to the poets that we've been studying?

Starting in the middle, anything?

Does this ring a bell at all?

>> The trinity at the beginning.

>> Also, it's interesting because it rejects narrative but at the same time,

you know, people are always born into a tradition.

>> And you have to, the same way that both Modernism and

Post-modernism kind of refers back, or

is some reaction to what has come before, or maybe premeditation of what is to come.

You know, when you're born in the middle of things,

you have to take into account the context.

That you're in in order to be- >> That's where the title I think is

so perfect.

Via, not only because it's got that kind of

pun of being a world we use in English and a word that's in Italian.

Italian or even Latin it means road or way.

>> Yes, yes.

go ahead, you're on the verge of something here.

>> And then in English it means kind of by means of.

>> So via is >> As would put it, the way, and

the way is the preposition, the glue, the syntax,

the thing that holds the language together.

The how, not the what.

Via is the how, so I'm going to ask you a question that I asked in chapter four,

way back when we dealt with and.

But I'm going to ask you about this poem.

>> Does the form of the poem, does the choice of the form of the poem enhance or

detract from the message?

I think I know your answer but I want to hear why.

Does the form of Caroline Bergvall's ten minute performance that turned

into a poem printed Does that form enhance or detract from the message, Emily?

>> Absolutely.

I was just talking, the line is the right way forward is lost,

the poem is lost in a sense it's not moving forward and

it shouldn't move forward maybe for those reasons.

>> Cool.

I'm getting goosebumps.

I really am.

>> Anybody else want to talk?

I sort of stopped the show by staying that.

>> [LAUGH] >> How are you going to follow that?

As we go along in this work, this work and Dante´s, getting nowhere,

we realize that we are lost in the dark wood of meaning.

That we have lost our way.

That there is no right way.

That we can try it 45 different ways and we're still stuck

trying to get started in medias res along the journey of our life, halfway.

I found myself again in a dark wood and not knowing where the straight road is

And along that journey I found myself again in the dark wood.

Where am I?

Where are we?

What does it mean?

Where are we going?

What is this hell this language, this meaning.

Such and eery and beautiful feeling, beautiful, eery and beautiful feeling.

I think this is what she reads it this way.

Of being lost, but of finding the way.

You haven't found the way in the sense of the path, but

you've found the importance of the way.

It's just a completely remarkable expression of that.

Whereas once we asked some of us said yes it enhances The form enhances,

the sonnet enhances, what McKay is trying to do, and some said detract.

There isn't anyone alive who would say that this form isn't commensurate

with the point that's being made about translation, or

about Dante for that matter.

watch video on Caroline Bergvall's "VIA"

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

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