András Ferenc Kovács: Jack Cole's Songbook

MÉSZÁROS MÁRTON: ANDRÁS FERENC KOVÁCS: JACK COLE’S SONGBOOK

 

Absztrakt

A tanulmány Kovács András Ferenc Jack Cole daloskönyve című kötetét a pszeudofordítás és a posztmodern fordításelmélet összefüggésében vizsgálja. A kötet egy nem létező amerikai költő, Jack Cole verseinek „fordításaként” jelenik meg, miközben különböző poétikai, tipográfiai és paratextuális eljárások révén egyszerre teremti meg és számolja fel az eredeti szöveg létezésének illúzióját. A tanulmány abból indul ki, hogy a fordítás nem pusztán két nyelv közötti ekvivalencia létrehozása, hanem értelmezés, újraírás és intertextuális párbeszéd. Ebből a perspektívából a pszeudofordítás nem a fordítás periférikus vagy játékos változataként, hanem annak alapvető kérdéseit láthatóvá tevő poétikai eljárásként értelmezhető. Az elemzés bemutatja, miként tartja fenn a kötet párhuzamosan a fordításként és pszeudofordításként való olvasás lehetőségét, illetve hogyan válik Jack Cole és John Coleman egymást kölcsönösen értelmező, hierarchikusan nem rendezhető alakpárja a dialogikus fordítás metaforájává. A kötet így a forrás- és célszöveg, eredeti és másolat, igaz és hamis hagyományos oppozícióit is problematizálja, és a fordítást a posztmodern identitás- és nyelvfelfogás egyik modelljeként mutatja fel. 

Különös jelentőséget ad a tanulmány angol nyelvű erdélyi megjelenésének, hogy Kovács András Ferenc költészete egyszerre része az erdélyi és romániai magyar irodalomnak, valamint a kortárs magyar líra egészének, miközben a Jack Cole daloskönyve poétikája eleve különböző nyelvek, kulturális hagyományok és irodalmi identitások közötti átjárásokra épül. Az angol nyelvű közlés ezért nem csupán a tanulmány nemzetközi hozzáférhetőségét növeli, hanem sajátos módon meg is ismétli annak tárgyát: egy romániai magyar szerző pszeudofordításokra épülő költészetének értelmezését maga is egy újabb nyelvi és kulturális közegbe helyezi át. A romániai, többnyelvű kulturális térben az angol közvetítő nyelvként a magyar és a román irodalmi kultúra közötti párbeszéd számára is új lehetőséget teremthet, miközben az életművet bekapcsolja a nemzetközi fordításelméleti, intertextualitás- és posztmodernkutatások diskurzusába.

Márton Mészáros

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary

meszaros.marton@kre.hu

Key words: translation, pseudotranslation, hungarian poetry

 

‘There are two maxims in translation: one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought across to us in such a way that we can look on him as ours; the other requires that we should go across to what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its use of language, its peculiarities. The advantages of both are sufficiently known to educated people through perfect examples. Our friend [Christoph Martin Wieland – MM], who looked for the middle way in this, too, tried to reconcile both, but as a man of feeling and taste, he preferred the first maxim when in doubt. Nobody, perhaps, understood better than he did what a complicated thing literary translation is. How deep was his conviction that it is the spirit that brings a text to life, rather than the words!’

Goethe’s conception of translation presumes that thought or spirit (which is both independent of language and also bridges languages) can actually be transformed. It is logical, therefore that he should determine that the task of translation is precisely this ‘transformation’ along with its possible variants (erasing foreignness versus confronting it). It is just this paradigm, in essence, that Mihály Babits’s conception of translation takes as its starting point, and, which has gone on to become the basis of the modernist concept of translation most widely accepted in Hungary to this day. It is a presumption which positions the source text and the target text in a sort of pre-ordained hierarchy in which the source text holds a higher position than the target text and is, of necessity, considered ‘more authentic’ than the target text. It is more authentic by virtue of being (as opposed to the target text) the original. It is logical then, to conclude that the task of the translation (and the translator), is none other than to conform in the most faithful way possible to the source text: the closer the translation can come to the original, to the ‘real’ text, the closer it brings itself to the foreign, the more successful the translation.

‘Literary translation, therefore,’ says Babits, ‘an activity which obliges language to bend in order to follow thought, is pretty much the only tool we have for attaining a finer intellectual union of nations. Naturally, however, the only type of translation capable of truly connecting the spiritual life of two nations is one that faithfully reproduces metre.’ On the one hand, rather than allowing for the possibility of competing translations or other re-creations, this ideal suggests an opposition between what is faithful and faithless; on the other, it is an example of the pre-Humboldtian concept of languuage as no more than a tool for expressing thought, a tool which (at least in the case of poetry) is capable of fulfilling this function to perfection. Thanks to Babits and György Rába, this view came to dominate the practice and theory of Hungarian literary translation; it was, in fact, taken as self-evident (both in educational establishments and popular opinion).

While Babits’s conception of translation is concerned with a form of cultural transmission, with making the foreign (text) one’s own, Kosztolányi directs his attention towards the relationship and dialogue between two cultures, two languages and two texts . Babits says:

A real riddle has only one solution. I can imagine there being more than one good translation of other masterpieces, but I feel some of Dante’s tercets to be riddles of a kind that can have only one perfect solution in any language.

Kosztolányi meanwhile says:

A literary translation is a work of art, a series of compromises, a resolution of those many compromises in the most ingenious manner possible – a brilliant trick, if you like. A poem, however, may no more be translated with the faithfulness of the certified legal interpreter, than a play on words may be. Instead, a new poem must be written, a different one, with the same spirit, the same music, and the same form: a fake, which is nevertheless true.

Kosztolányi acknowledges the fact that translation, of necessity, is an act of interpretation, and in this sense, is kissing cousin to a reading of the original text. He shifts the emphasis away from what is meant and towards the creator of that meaning; in his way of thinking the target text becomes the primary one: ‘I want more than anything to provide a beautiful Hungarian poem which comes as close as possible to the original.’ By these lights a translation may be considered successful when the target text is capable of fitting into its own language’s literary canon. 

While Babits was working on the ‘reconciliation’ of the two cultures, in Kosztolányi’s view – expounded in detail by Ernő Kulcsár Szabó – the translation, recognising that it cannot break with its mother tongue, must take precisely those qualities of the foreign tongue capable of doing what its own language cannot and make them part of its own experience. The enrichment of what is its (its language, its culture) thus takes place not by a transfer of the foreign as such, but through experiencing the foreign way of thinking.

If we concede that the source and target texts, that the alien and one’s own are in part irreconcilable with each other, in part inseparable from one another, and that translation creates a ‘fake, which is nevertheless true’ this raises the question, and rightly so, of whether translation should be discussed as an instance of – to use Genette’s concept – transtextuality. In Genette’s conceptual system we must think of translation primarily in terms of ‘paratext’ and ‘architextuality’. The phenomenon Genette named ‘transtextuality’ equates to what Riffaterre termed ‘intertextuality’ : ‘[intertextuality is] the perception, by the reader, of the relationship between a work and others that have either preceded or followed it.’ Interpreting literary translation in terms of an intertextual relationship must also, however, mean that ideas about pseudotranslation can also be discussed within the same framework used to make valid statements about translation itself. It follows, then, that a reading of a pseudotranslation will be directed by ‘intertextual presuppositions’ in just the same way as the reading of an actual translation is. (‘Directed’, because the circumstances of publication, the name of the writer attached to a text defining it/itself as the original and the ‘original’ titles do, in any event, imply some sort of intertextual relationship.) Besides intertextual presuppositions, Riffaterre also identifies something he calls ‘obligatory intertextuality’: ‘the intertext (…) is not the object of citation, but a presupposed object. The intertext itself (…) can remain unknown.’ In this case, the source text will be the presupposed object; the reader, while reading a text in her mother tongue that has been (already) translated from another language is continually aware of the existence of a previous text, despite the fact that, in most cases, she will be unacquainted with the source text itself. 

If, on the other hand, the translation under discussion is a pseudotranslation, it will necessarily be the absence rather than the presence of the source text that will be the focus. The absence of the source text does not, however mean ‘absence of context’ . It means, in fact, a multiple context of sorts. (We can understand context as being both the context of the source text and of the target text, and the source and target texts may also be thought of as forming a context for each other.) The reader’s ‘prior’ awareness that the given text is a translation is, in itself, sufficient to introduce into the reader’s field of play – intertextually or not – presuppositions formed about the given culture or literature. This may happen in such a way too, as to make the reader capable of recognising the conflicts arising from these linguistic, cultural and temporal differences.

Naturally, all these points about her awareness remain true, even if what she is aware of is that the text she is reading is a pseudotranslation. Familiarity with the source text is not, therefore, an (essential) prerequisite to the delineation of this kind of intertextual web. Moreover, it is precisely this absence of knowledge of the source text that translation, as a genre, presumes: for the consumer of translations, the target text replaces the source text, the source text being present meanwhile as a real context (directing, even, the interpretation of the target text). Pseudotranslation, therefore is just as capable of conjuring up the (presumed) context of a (fictitious) source text as actual translation is. In addition to all this, however, (and resulting from just this absence of source text), the role of the cultural-linguistic context of the target text will be much more dominant in a pseudotranslation.

Clearly the relationship of source text to target text is a key factor in any consideration of translation. Moreover, it is in the way translation theories assess just this relationship that their fundamental differences tend to be revealed. If, however, we understand the relationship between the source and target texts as a dialogue between competing utterances, (leaving aside the idea of the source text being the ‘more original’ of the two) we are obliged to radically extend the concept of translation in the everyday sense: ultimately, translation becomes a synonym of interpretation. It follows then, that the kind of reinterpretation and rewriting we see articulated in KAF’s work (these initials denote András Ferenc Kovács in Hungarian academic writing) (for example in a text such as ‘Póz, a homály homálya’ [‘Pose, Vagueness of Vaguenesses’] in which, line by line, almost word by word, he rewrites a poem by Attila József that begins ’Only those should read my verse,’), corresponds just as well to the concept of translation outlined above as pseudotranslation does. Looked at from the perspective of dialogue and intertextuality, however, any text can ultimately be read as a translation of another (even possibly fictitious) text.

Jack Cole’s Songbook is, however, is at a disadvantage compared to a translation: it must legitimate itself, and do so, what’s more, as a translation, and – in a move both counter to this and in parallel with it – it must also deconstruct its own legitimation. It must simultaneously and continually maintain two latitudes of reception which take the reader in opposite directions: reading the text as a translation, and a reading it as a pseudotranslation. After all, the fact that a text is a pseudotranslation does, paradoxically, draw attention to translation itself and the question of translatability. (This is similar to what happens when familar objects are moved away from their usual places: we notice their absence immediately, though – exactly because we have become accustomed to them – if they had remained in their usual positions, they might very well not have caught our eye.) Jack Cole’s Songbook, therefore (being a pseudotranslation) makes clear to its reader the impossibility of interpreting the concept of equivalence-orientated (pragmatical) translation.

In order for all this to take place, however, the ’appearance of translation’ must absolutely (and continually) be maintained. Continually, as the game depends on the reader’s being (made) (continually) aware that there is no source text, and on there being a recognition of it (as something lacking) (at all).

Even at first glance, certain features of András Ferenc Kovács’s book such as the title ’Jack Cole daloskönyve’ (Jack Cole’s Songbook), typographical features and the book’s cover act as coded messages which encourage the reader to approach the work as a translation. The title of ‘Songbook’ can really only be found in the possessive in everyday speech. (At least in Hungarian, ‘Petrarch’s Songbook’ would, for example, be an unusual title, possessives being usually avoided in this context. The title of the text is Il Canzoniere (Songbook) and Petrarch is only the author of it.) If, therefore, we find ’songbook’ used in the possessive form – elevated, moreover, to the level of the book’s title – we have a right to expect, socialised as we are in the equivalence-orientated tradition, that the possessor will be a biographically documentable writer: a writer called Jack Cole, must exist if we are holding his ’songbook’ in our hands. (So much so, that almost every source that can be seen on the internet mentions Jack Cole as a real contemporary American poet.) The (’characteristically American’) font employed, reminiscent of that used in the main titles of Westerns, the ’characteristically American’ portrait of the author on the cover in ’characteristically American’ sunglasses, and a baseball cap (with the letters USA) conjuring up as they do current (visual) clichés about America in the mind of the reader, all serve to increase, just as the title does, the likelihood of the text being read as a translation.

The text continually exploits the power of these current clichés about America to create a context, from McDonald’s through Jim Morrison all the way to Allen Ginsberg. (This works in reverse too, of course. In ’Ó Trenszi, Trenszi, Trenszi!’ (Oh, Transi, Transi, Transi!) we see what Americans imagine Transylvania to be, or rather what we imagine they think of us.) The fact is, that the corpus we (several generations of ordinary readers?) think of as ’American culture’ entered the canon expressly via so-called pop culture: via, for example, Kerouack’s Dean Moriarty (among others), Jim Morrison and The Doors, and Hobó’s renderings of (among others) Ginsberg. The reader understands that she has only a superficial knowledge of the given culture (it would, of course, be problematic to presuppose an ’ideally ignorant reader’, or a level of total ’cultural deficiency’, but it can, nevertheless, be useful to do so) and that, with this (necessarily) modest level of knowledge, she will have to wrestle with a huge amount of information. As well as encountering cultural clichés already familiar to her, the reader will also encounter many elements she cannot identify (the number of these will be dependent on the scale of her deficiency), elements that fit into the given culture’s code system, or are a ’continuation’ of it, so to say. Insofar as it is the role of these codes to draw attention to the foreign nature of the source text’s context and to legitimate that context, from the reader’s point of view the verifiability of the opposition between ficititious and real, or true and false becomes irrelevant.

The structure of the book can also contribute to the illusion that the reader is holding a translated book. In the translator’s afterword (The Translator’s Epilogue), the translator himself, identified by the initials KAF, speaks about the structure of the book and how it came about:

This book does, in fact, contain the latter work, the ’Songbook’ of a certain Jack Cole around which a scandal has developed in the meantime. It also contains the longer, ’Damnation of John Coleman’, understood to be partly biographical. (...)

At this stage, I would like to suggest that while the sections of the book which are clearly differentiated from the rest may be understood as translations (interpretations, expositions) of the quotations (statements of thesis) found at the beginning of certain parts of the book - ‘Biciklirodeo’ (Bike Rodeo) can be seen as a ‘translation’ of a work by Walther von der Vogelweide and ‘The Damnation of John Coleman’ as a ‘translation’ of the Emily Dickinson quotation. (The Translator’s Epilogue is an exception in this respect) - taken together they can actually be read as ‘translations’ of each other. (‘The Damnation of John Coleman’ elucidates ‘Bike Rodeo’ and vice versa, while the ‘Translator’s Epilogue’ explicates the whole book.) In Jack Cole’s Songbook, then, we can easily find proof of Ernő Kulcsár Szabó’s suggestion that ‘though any text and its translation may also be understood as two independent points of view, (…) only together do they tell us what the message is.’

The codes mentioned thus far have been unambiguous in encouraging the reader to read the text as a translation. In order to maintain this game, however, (in order to sustain the two potential latitudes of reception - reading the text as a translation, and the possibility of reading it as a pseudotranslation – at the same time and alongside each other, in other words, allowing the reader to ‘see-saw’ between these two readings throughout) it is necessary to bring fictions which are obviously, or less obviously ‘untrue’ into the game. The text, in actual fact, exploits the reader’s desire to separate a (consistently blurred) fiction from what can be referenced. At the very end of the book, the translator says about John Coleman:

I have been compared at the same time to Robert Frost and Gregory Corso, to Whitman and Ezra Pound, to Emily Dickinson and Allen Ginsberg.

If Jack Cole/John Coleman resembles significantly different writers simultaneously, this must call his identity into question, the unique nature of the speaker being traditionally decided precisely by differentiating him or her from other speakers. I will now examine three comparisons which appear in a curious relationship to each other:

The names Jack Kerouack, Neal Cassady and Dean Moriarty (…) also came up in connection with the poetry of John Coleman, however (…).

Dean Moriarty is the hero of a novel, and though he does play the part of a writer in that novel, it would be difficult, given not a single line of his is known, (he is a fictitious poet, after all!) to compare Jack Cole’s poetry to his. (Or perhaps the point is that this is a very fitting comparison indeed?) The situation becomes more complicated if we consider that Kerouack modelled the figure of Dean Moriarty on the very Neal Cassady whose name appears immediately before that of Dean Moriarty in the list quoted above. Thus, Jack Cole/John Coleman (a fictitious poet) resembles at one and the same time a ‘real’ writer, a hero created by that ‘real’ writer who plays the role of a writer in his novel, and a ‘real’ writer, on whom the ‘real’ writer modelled his writer-hero. The comparisons, therefore, in their relation to ‘reality’, form a three-level hierarchy, in which – depending on whether the text is read as a translation or a pseudotranslation – either Jack Kerouack or Dean Moriarty becomes the more defining element. (If we read the text as a pseudotranslation, the Dean Moriarty comparison is apposite. If, however, we read it as a translation, treating what is claimed as verifiable ‘fact’, that comparison cannot be made.) As, however, a comparison presumes by its very nature a difference (between the resembler and the resembled) and is based, in fact, on the tension between difference and similarity (between what is alien and what is one’s own), is based, moreover on the resolution of that tension, these comparisons ultimately become a model for translation. (The relationship between source text and target text, it is suggested, can be described in terms of resembler and resembled.) If, however, the translator releases his hold on the (only) truth that can be expected of a comparison by saying ‘I don’t know, it’s all so mixed-up. It seems, at least to me, so obscure it’s practically chaotic’ and ‘Damn it, if not even the whatchamacallit can find his bearings, then no-one can, in any way, not ever, in anything. Me neither’, then he denies the conventional (Babitsian) understanding of what translation is on every count.

If, then we accept that Jack Cole’s Songbook makes (among other things) translation and translatability its theme, we can see that the book creates a self-reflexive field which, in essence, presumes a specific attitude on the part of the reader (namely, that we read the text as a translation while (!) we are ‘probably’ aware that it is not). This self-reflexivity is not, however, merely an important organisational element at the level of the reader’s attitude or the codes which direct the reader, but also in certain poetic pieces. The ‘Proud King of Navarra’ is, as can be read in the dedication a pseudotranslation of a (fictitious?) Old French ballad. The title, however, is also provided in English, as is customary. This implies that an English (pseudo-) translation of the ‘original’ (fictitious) Old French (?) (Provençal?) text ’exists’, which the (pseudo-)translator (indicated by the letters KAF) has translated into Hungarian. The fact that, in its own time, the Provençal language was used ’Europe-wide’ as the language of poetry and the specific language of certain poetical genres, just complicates the picture further. The Provençal language, and, in this way the text itself becomes, in this context, an allegory of universal culture, of a kind of existence beyond language, presenting an idyllic (and idealised) state in which (given the ’universality’ of culture) translation was (or could have been) unnecessary. The decline of the universal (hence existing above languages) poetic language was, however irreversible, something illustrated with precision by the ’Proud King of Navarra’s bewilderingly complicated (linguistic) textual antecedents. 

The topic of translation is also explored through poetic text in the Walther von der Vogelweide quotation mentioned above.

This quotation appears in a prominent position, coming immediately after the dedication of ’Bike Rodeo’. It seems to be a motto of sorts, having no title and being printed on an unnumbered page. The fact is that these words of Walther von der Vogelweide’s, taken from the (best known) poem of the (best known) German Minnesänger, without, what’s more, a title being provided, can seem, to the reader, to be representative of ’troubadour poetry, as such.’ If, however, we take account of the special status accorded to these words (thanks to their position in the book), it will become possible for the reader to interpret the ’Bike Rodeo’ texts – also when read as a single text – as a translation of Walther von der Vogelweide’s words. Jack Cole the American vagabond-poet can, in the light of this, be defined as a kind of “postmodern troubadour”.’ 

The quotation is identified by just a single caption: Walther von der Vogelweide in Radnóti’s translation.

To be absolutely precise:

 (Walther von der Vogelweide – in Miklós Radnóti’s translation.)

It is important to note the adverbial structure; the dash is doing much more here than expressing modality. Framed like this, the quotation can be read as meaning: ‘Walther von der Vogelweide here in Miklós Radnóti’s translation, but other translations would render it differently.’ (The emphasis, thus falls on ‘in Miklós Radnóti’s translation’.) It is possible that the lack of a title reinforces this reading, suggesting this is one example of how Radnóti translates (interprets) Walther von der Vogelweide. (Here too, we see ‘translation’ being used as a synonym of ‘interpretation.’) In fact, many ‘translations’ or re-interpretations of this untitled Walther von der Weide quotation can be found in ‘Bike Rodeo’. These mimic its form, eg., ‘Üdvözlet Oregonból’ (‘Greetings from Oregon’) and ‘Monticello’ which both recall the fragmented nature of the Walther von der Weide lines, or its theme, eg., ‘Sziú éjszakák, navahó nappalok’ (Sioux Nights, Navajo Days’) and ‘Wadnyugat wégwidéke’ (‘The Far Regions of the Wild West’), both of which focus on the experience of being lost. (These, then, are texts which are able easily to enter into a dialogue with the translation of Walther von der Vogelweide.) It is the case that – at a certain level – the whole of ‘Bike Rodeo’ (if the cycle is read as one text) may be read as a translation of von der Vogelweide quotation. Both texts take as their subject some sort of ‘loss of identity’, whether it be the inseparability of reality and dreams, truth and falsehood, or the postmodern experience of ‘being beyond something.’ The latter then becomes a metaphor for translation (or re-writing):

 Whoever re-writes, has broken through and cut through every dream,

every province and every state. He is, then, through and beyond: further on than something, 

or at least in its borderlands. I don’t know. What is the difference, I wonder, between re-writing and (fake) translation?

The expression ‘re-writing’ appears, not independently, but along with ‘breaking through’ as part of a rhyming pair (‘átkölt, áttört’ in the Hungarian original). ‘Breaking through’ is related in meaning to ‘cutting across’, so that ‘re-writing’ emphasises the motif of cutting through, which can be interpreted as the postmodern experience of ‘being beyond something.’

The ‘something’ that ‘we are beyond’ is the focus of the Emily Dickinson translation, which is, similarly to the Walther von der Vogelweide translation, set apart but unnamed. (Here the English original is provided, in lieu of a back translation of the Hungarian.) 

 

Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music—

Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—

(...)

Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—

Gush after Gush, reserved for you—

Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!

Now, do you doubt that your Bird was True?

 

Here, the inseparability of the lark and the lark’s song stands for the modernist principle of the inseparability of the word and the spirit. If, therefore, the lark is art, the poetic topos, ‘split the lark’ challenges the reader to perform a linguistic act. ‘You’ll find the Music’ (inside it) implies the separate positions of what is contained and the container (poetry holds a promise that its ‘point’ can be accessed). Performing the linguistic act of ‘splitting it open’, will, however, be self-destructive. The ‘reality’ criterium is unfulfillable despite the fact that the goal of the act is to learn about precisely this ‘reality’. The splitting of the lark ( language) takes place, but instead of discovering the spirit as ‘something existing independently of language’ (‘you’ll find the Music’), the act can only be apostrophised as a ‘Scarlet (bloody) Experiment’. In fact, language brings with it the breakdown of the bird’s reality, the bird’s unified nature. (In ‘your Bird was True’ the verb ‘to be’ is used in the past tense). (The impossibility of splitting the lark casts doubt on the existence of a spirit that exists independently of or outside language, thus bringing us to another modernist concept of translation.) If the translation of ‘Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—/Gush after Gush, reserved for you—’, is read together with the line ’Cheeky J.C. retches’ from the poem positioned at the book’s golden mean, ’Be hírhedt hely ma Oakland’ (Oakland Has Such a Bad Name These Days), all this can be interpreted as meaning that this splitting is actually being carried out (somewhere) in Jack Cole’s Songbook itself (and the product of this splitting is the ’Gush after Gush’, is J.C’s vomiting across the bridge, is ultimately, the text itself.) 

This splitting, which begins formally in the Walther von der Vogelweide ’translation’ and ends thematically in the Emily Dickinson ’quotation’ is fulfilled in the split nature of the speaker denoted as J.C..

In Jack Cole’s Songbook, it is necessary to differentiate at least two, but more properly three speakers (indivisible from each other, but irreconcilable.)

In the beginning was the Word, then once upon a time there was a John Coleman and a Jack Cole. For years and years the two of them lay about together on the sand which was sometimes cool, sometimes too hot (...)

Jack Cole and John Coleman obviously differ from each other in terms of their function: Jack Cole is the writer of ’Bike Rodeo’ while John Coleman is the writer of ’The Damnation of John Coleman’. The explanation offered by the translator , that Jack Cole is merely John Coleman’s nom de plume, naturally, in the light of what has gone before, does nothing to resolve this duality. The fact that their monograms are identical cannot escape the reader’s notice: John Coleman and Jack Cole’s monograms are both J.C. If we treat the texts as a text to be read aloud (song lyrics), (something hinted at fairly emphatically by codes such as ’rhythm, ’blues’ and particularly the ’songbook’ genre designation, which applies to the whole book) a Hungarian listener, on hearing J.C. (phonetically ’jay see’) might associate it with Zhuangzi, who has become paradigmatic with regard to recent developments in Hungarian poetic criticism. This is confirmed in any case, by the text:

hey, Jack, okay John, tell me what the deal is. Let’s get this thing clear once and for all, did Zhuangzi dream the butterfly, or did the butterfly dream that wiseass Zhuangzi?

This suggests that Jack Cole and John Coleman’s (J.C. and J.C.’s) relationship (while upholding the translator’s explanation) can be much better described in terms of (or at least in parallel with) the relationship between Zhuangzi and the butterfly: ’When John Coleman woke up one morning from an uneasy sleep, he found himself transformed into a horrible Jack Cole.’ And: ‘When Jack Cole woke up one morning from an uneasy sleep, he found himself transformed into a horrible John Coleman.’ There is more, however: ’When J.C. woke up one morning from an uneasy sleep, he found himself transformed into a horrible J. C.’. The emphatic presence of the Kafta intertext creates possible additional cross-references: read with an English pronunciation, Gregor Samsa’s monogram G.S. is ’Jee Ess’, which we can associate once again only with J.C., pronounced ’Jay See.’ On the basis of the two names, the ’writers’ connected with them, the interchangeability of the texts and the way they can be read onto each other, Gregor Samsa’s transformation may, in a similar way, be seen as a kind of translation. Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, however, is not ’transformation’ in the sense that what he becomes is no longer identical to his own origin and vice versa. If the different readings of J.C. are structured in such a way that the various forms of substitution present in many places in the text can be understood as acts of interpretation, transformability is thwarted in the very act of transforming. (Read from this point of view, the monogram KAF can be read as an abbreviated version or re-writing of the letters that make up Kafka.)

The dilemma of Zhuangzi and the butterfly, ’Zsuangzi dreams the butterfly, the butterfly [dreams] him’ is resolved by using the logic of a kind of ’mutual embodiment’ paradox. Zhuangzi dreaming the butterfly cannot be separated from the butterfly dreaming him. Nor is possible to draw a line between Jack Cole talking about John Coleman or vice versa: the hierarchy disintegrates. Looked at this way, the relationship between Jack Cole and John Coleman becomes in fact a metaphor for the postmodern concept of translation:

John Coleman and Jack Cole lay outside (...) and as they were blessed with diametrically opposed and completely (or just very) different habits, levels of education, tastes, experiences, lifestyles and the rest, well, what can I say? They wiled away the time in pretty desultory conversation, spent long years in laid-back discussion (...)

We have come, then, to the concept of postmodern dialogic translation. Jack Cole and John Coleman can be read as translations of each other. We cannot construct any kind of hierarchy around them; what’s more, even they themselves are unable to perceive their own identities. If the consequence of the knowledge (the separability) of good and evil (true and false) is expulsion from Paradise, the stories of Zhuangzi and J.C. can be interpreted as a type of second Fall: damnation results precisely from the inseparability of true and false.

I don’t know – says John Coleman – which of us is writing these lines, J.C. or J.C.? This is the question. Lift up your hearts! We’re damned. We’re all going to Hell together. At the same time as the butterflies and the larks. I’m telling you. J.C.

 

The appearance of damnation and salvation, one of the fundamental questions of the New Testament, in such a prominent position (the final paragraph of ‘The Damnation of John Coleman’) offers another solution to the mystery of the J.C. monogram: J.C., in this case, could be read as Jesus Christ. This solution is without a doubt the last chance of ‘salvation’, given that it holds out the promise of the unity of the Trinity (three in one) with regard to Jack Cole, John Coleman and the translator. In the contradiction between the Saviour’s announcement (‘we’re damned’) and his being the one who saves and in the way the unverifiable identifier J.C. found at the end of the text casts doubt on the separability and the reconcilability of those others who, while identified with the same identifier, are different, this last sentence posits a new model for the postmodern dialogic concept of translation.

Bibliography:

Monograph:

BABITS Mihály: Dante fordítás. Műhelytanulmányok. In: BABITS Mihály: Esszék, tanulmányok. Szépirodalmi, 1978. I.

FISH, Stanley: Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1980. 

FÓNAGY Iván: A költői nyelvről. Budapest: Corvina, 1998. 

GENETTE, Gérard: The Architext: an Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

KOSZTOLÁNYI Dezső: Nyelv és lélek. Budapest: Osiris, 1999.

KOVÁCS András Ferenc: (Az átköltő epilógja). In: Jack Cole Daloskönyve. Pécs: Jelenkor, 1996. 

KULCSÁR Szabó Ernő: A megértés alakzatai. Debrecen: Csokonai, 1998. 

Journal:

GENETTE, Gérárd: Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, University of Nebraska Press; 8th ed. (October 1, 1997) transl. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky

RIFFATERE, Michael: Az intertextus nyoma. Helikon 1996/1-2.

Paper in an anthology:

JÓZAN Ildikó: Műfordítás és intertextualitás. In: A fordítás és intertextualitás alakzatai. eds. KABDEBÓ Lóránt, KULCSÁR Szabó Ernő, KULCSÁR-SZABÓ Zoltán, MENYHÉRT Anna. Budapest: Anonymus, 1998. 

SZEGEDY-MASZÁK Mihály: Fordítás és Kánon. In: A fordítás és intertextualitás alakzatai. eds. KABDEBÓ Lóránt, KULCSÁR Szabó Ernő, KULCSÁR-SZABÓ Zoltán, MENYHÉRT Anna. Anonymus, 1998. 

Résumé:

Jack Cole’s Songbook is a ‘pseudotranslation’, a ‘collection of translations’ of the non-existent poetry of Jack Cole, a non-existent American poet. Jack Cole is one of András Ferenc Kovács’s most well-known poetic alter-egos. This study seeks to answer the question of how we can translate in the absence of an ’original’ text, and how, with what poetic and typographic tools Kovács’s book is able, despite this absence, to create the illusion of it being a ’collection of translations.’ To what extent do we read something differently if we read it as a translation or a pseudotranslation?