Transforming Ritual: Unconventional Translation and the Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy
Creators: name: Keeler, Breanna
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2022
Subjects: Canadian Literature
Poetry
Translation
Canadian Poetry
Elegy
21st Century
Mourning

description: This study explores the ways contemporary English-Canadian elegists transform rituals of mourning in order to accommodate a broader set of losses than has been permitted by the conventions of elegiac tradition. Focusing on the poetry of Jordan Abel, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Anne Simpson, and Souvankham Thammavongsa, I explore the ways these elegists make use of unconventional translation practices — that is, translation practices that privilege creativity, process, and transformation rather than mimetic transfers of information — to capture the incommensurability of grief. By exploiting the transformative power of translation, these elegists use unconventional translation practices to create a version of elegy that shifts attention from elegy as product to elegy as enactment. These works find value in the ongoing process of lamentation rather than in the cessation of mourning that characterized pastoral elegy and has become understood as paradigmatic of elegy more broadly. For the elegiac works I discuss in this dissertation, translation functions as both a metaphor and a tool to deal with the dilemmas presented by mourning in the context of a new global reality characterized by unbridgeable geo-temporal distances and community fragmentation. Each chapter of this dissertation explores the way that the transformation of elegiac ritual occurs in the context of a particular kind of loss by analyzing one or two representative texts. Chapter One reads Anne Carson’s Nox as an example of the familial elegy in the context of community fragmentation, examining the ways that Carson’s abundant, amplificatory translation of Catullus’s “Poem 101” allows for the creation of an elegy that grapples with geo-temporal distances through the creation of an elegiac ritual that acts as a stand in for the funeral. Chapter Two considers Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found as an example of the postmemorial elegy, arguing that the combination of found poetry and ekphrasis allows for the creation of an elegiac ritual that facilitates acceptance but is limited by a desire to protect both the elegist’s own privacy and the privacy of her father. Chapter Three analyzes Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps, arguing that the use of erasure in this text allows for the creation of an elegy that politicizes grief by challenging the subjects that are considered worthy of elegy and actively working toward the reclamation of identity through a rewriting of accepted colonial collective myths. Chapter Four pairs Anne Simpson’s “Seven Paintings by Brueghel” and Stephanie Bolster’s Long Exposure in order to consider the ways that the contemporary phenomenon of mediatized trauma can be mourned through ekphrastic elegies as well as the ways these works push the contemporary elegy to its limits by exploring the ethics of witnessing. By reading this group of elegies in the context of the history of the English elegy and through the lens of translation, I argue that these elegists open the field of elegy to voices that have frequently been excluded and challenge our understanding of readers as participants in elegiac community.