Review of In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems

C. Francis Fisher’s English translation of some of Joyce Mansour’s poems has the potential to expand scholarship on surrealist women, translation, and women’s poetry more generally. As the back cover of the book highlights, whereas extant translations of Mansour tend to focus on her early works, In the Glittering Maw draws from the latter part of Manour’s career.1 The selection of poems in this volume come from five of Mansour’s anthologies: Birds of Prey (Rapaces) (1960), White Square (Carré blanc) (1965), The Damnations (Les Damnations) (1967), Phallus and Mummy (Phallus et momies) (1969), and To Signal the Machinist (Faire signe au machiniste) (1977). The two long poems, Cosmos and Catastrophes (Astres et désastres) (1969) and The Great Never (Le Grand Jamais) (1981) likewise feature in the volume.2 In addition to building Mansour’s English-language corpus, In the Glittering Maw offers informative paratexts that make the poems accessible. There are, however, some errors in the French transcriptions that lead to faulty English translations and therefore interpretations.

One of In the Glittering Maw’s merits is the preface, “Mansour’s Violence of Vision,” by the prolific Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws. This introduction concisely situates Mansour in her historical-literary context. Caws then provides a glimpse at Fisher’s deft translations, which demonstrate an extraordinary “sensitivity to the reverberations of language in the smallest spaces.”3 In addition to the poetic voice Fisher successfully conveys, the volume fills a critical gap in Mansour’s translated works. These forty-four poems constitute a “substantial and representative selection,” as Caws indicates, of Mansour’s late poems,4 because they trace Mansour’s evolution as a poet and the metamorphosis of her themes, as Fisher intended.5

Neither the introduction nor the translator’s note, though, address the selection process. While reading, I wondered how many poems from Mansour’s late oeuvre were omitted? To answer this question, I counted the number of poems in each of the five anthologies, based on Joyce Mansour Prose & Poésie: Œuvre complète (Actes Sud, 1991), and found that the selection in In the Glittering Maw represented 30% of Mansour’s output. Of course, translating all 145 poems would have required significant labor far beyond the scope of this sample.6 As the “first English-language collection focused on the later works of Joyce Mansour,”7In the Glittering Maw could inspire more translations of late-Mansour poems. Including a discussion of the methodology employed in this initial project would perhaps have elucidated what remains to be translated and built a case for the need to complete Mansour’s English-language corpus.

Although Fisher does not explain why or how she selected these particular 44 poems, she clearly states her approach to translation: “to recreate the experience of reading these poems in French, of amazement at the poet’s ability to unite disparate images with seeming ease.”8 I then used these objectives—namely (1) maintaining a parallel to the French reading experience and (2) allowing the images to speak for themselves—to guide my review. Overall, the translations achieve these goals.

Starting with the second objective: juxtapositions indeed resound. The title, for example, In the Glittering Maw comes from the line “dans la gueule étincelante” in “La langue du caméléon” (The Chameleon’s tongue). Fisher’s translation captures the juxtaposition between the animalistic jaw and the glimmer of “étincelante.”9 Another fluid contrast appears in a line from “Le désir du désir sans fin” (Desire for Endless Desire): “Notre-Dame entrebâille ses savantes cuisses gothiques” / “Notre Dame parts her knowing gothic thighs.”10 Situating a revered cathedral in an erotically charged position shocks the reader, yet the line’s rhythm gives an allure of ease. This line likewise demonstrates Mansour’s preference for “relatively unpretentious language,”11 which Fisher translates with equivalently colloquial expressions in English.

The uncomplicated language allows images to surface, as exemplified in “Clarté au-delà du ressac” (Clarity beyond the surf). The English “little waves whisper and waddle” develops an alliteration absent in the French “des petites vagues chuchotent et se dandinent.”12 The repetition of the “w” sound mimics the come and go of the water.

In other instances, however, the translation loses the sonorous effects found in the original French. “Fragment d’un appel” (Fragment of a call) abounds with alliteration, yet the English version omits those stylistic elements. Notably the consistent “v” and “b” sounds transform into less rhythmic “t” and “v” or “c” and “w” sounds in the lines

Fisher does maintain the basic image in these lines, however, I find that the image is more vivid in the French because of the inter-line alliterations that form “boucles” (curls) in the way the consonants circle back onto each other. The side-by-side bilingual edition does facilitate these observations on sound and showcases the challenges translators face when attempting to maintain images, rhythms, and meaning.

The bilingual edition also facilitates verifying the translation. At times, my interpretation of the French poem differed from Fisher’s translation. In “Les yeux des amis” (Friends’ Eyes), for example, I interpreted the line “Je cherchais ton cœur sous un monceau de papiers gras” as “I was looking for your heart under greasy papers” because I was associating “gras” with “fat.”13 Fisher describes the papers as “gray,” which appeared to me as a misreading. Joyce Mansour Prose & Poésie does read “papiers gras,” which leaves me wondering about the substitution Fisher is enacting here or if there was a simple switching of the “i” in “gris” for the “a” in “gras.”

A similar instance evolved from an image in Mansour’s poetry not “speaking” as clearly as the others did. Consulting Prose & Poésie, I found that a line of “Astres et désastres” (Cosmos and catastrophes) had been incorrectly transcribed, which altered the English translation. On page 84 of In the Glittering Maw, “qu’une me / déserte” should be “qu’une rue / déserte.”14 Consequentially, the English reads “than a deserted / me” when the image is quite different and should be “than a deserted / street.”15

Of greater concern is the mistranscription of “partie” (part) for “patrie” (fatherland) in “The Great Never” (Le Grand Jamais).16 Fisher translated “Si le cheval est la partie du nomade” correctly as “If the horse is part of the nomad”; however, that image lacks sense and is inconsistent with Mansour’s imagery. Prose & Poésie clarifies this confusion, indicating that “le cheval est la patrie du nomade” (my translation: the horse is the fatherland of the nomad).17 In this verse, “patrie” is far more consistent with the patriotic, war-time motif.

Minor mistranscriptions occur elsewhere in the volume, usually due to a single-letter typo or a forgotten acute accent. These errors, although distracting, do not detract from the overall quality of the translations. They could even open conversations about the process of translation, starting from finding the source material to producing a suitable equivalent. I could imagine In the Glittering Maw serving as a book in courses on translation, as well as courses on Francophone poetry. As an invitation to explore Mansour’s work, the translation appeals to scholars of Surrealism and women poets globally but also to general poetry enthusiasts. Despite the occasional error, Fisher’s first published translation attests to her skill as a translator—for poetry is notoriously difficult to translate—and to her recognition of Mansour’s significance within the surrealist movement.