Contemporary Poetry

dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 185

He argues for translations to be read as ‘texts in their own right
permitting transparency to be demystifi ed, seen as one discursive
effect among others’.^40 Venuti emphasises the destabilising element
in the translation practice – the contingency of signifi cation: ‘the
chain of signifi ers that constitutes the foreign text is replaced by a
chain of signifi ers in the translating language’ (p. 13 ). He alerts us
to multiple valences of interpretation:

Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences

among signifi ers along a potentially endless chain (polyse-

mous, intertextual, subject to infi nite linkages), it is always

differential and deferred, never presents as an original unity.

Both foreign text and translation are derivative; both consist

of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the

foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabi-

lize the work of signifi cation, inevitably exceeding and pos-

sibly confl icting with their intentions... Meaning is a plural

and contingent relation, not an unchanging unifi ed essence.

(p. 13 )

Three poets – Gwyneth Lewis, Li-Young Lee and Lorna Dee
Cervantes – perform different acts of translation in their poetry.
Their work dramatises a keen awareness of the erotic, authoritarian
and often homogenising characteristics of English. An exploration
of how bilingualism is performed in their work provides insights
into the cultural confl icts which arise in multiple language use – an
experience which Li-Young Lee describes as ‘You live / a while in
two worlds / at once’.^41

‘MY GLOSSOLALIA SHALL BE MY PASSPORT’:
GWYNETH LEWIS

As a poet writing both in Welsh and English, often translating her
own poetry, Lewis emphasises that her translations must be read as
departures from the original, if not new explorations. In consider-
ing the inter-relationship between both languages, Lewis refl ects in
one of her essays that: