Barbara Folkart. Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation. Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 2007, 562 p.

The title of Barbara Folkart’s second academic monograph, Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation, is taken from Richard Wilbur’s poem The Beautiful Changes (1988) and displayed on the book’s cover in three experimental re-inscriptions, all set against a magnified, shadowy and gloriously tactile—goose-fleshed and pock-marked—surface of writing paper. These re-inscriptions speak directly to the impulses guiding her pen, I am convinced. The first appears to be a shadow cast deep in the background of the main title: this is an author with an academic career, a major book and numerous articles behind her; she could have chosen to rest on her laurels, fade quietly into the décor; instead, she produced this monograph that is fresh and contemporary (there are hundreds of newly minted pages here), pulling forward reflections from the past twenty years (she has re-worked and integrated a number of previously published pieces). The second re-inscription is in Folkart’s own elegant cursive: this is an intensely personal work that rejects the turgid opacity of so much academic writing in favor of a genial simplicity of style in the first person; she even rejects the pronouns “he,” “he/she,” or “they” when referring to the generic third person; if it is not “I” that she is using, it is “she,” the pronoun that speaks most intimately to her. The third re-inscription is in the scorched, bullet-wound typography—messy, ink-splattered from impact—of the antiquated manual typewriter: this is a confrontational book, often aggressively so; most of Folkart’s major insights emerge from an argument structured in the form of antagonistic contradistinction as she pits her own vision of the poetically viable translation against an astounding list of canonized poets and critics whom she treats at times with utmost deference and admiration, and at times with the scorn of a poet vexed by the second-rate efforts of cobblers who refuse to “get it right.” The book is driven by two objectives. The first is to provide insight into the process of creating “poetically competent translations,” to orient critical focus upon the translation act in its dynamic unfolding. Folkart’s approach is resolutely “ad rem,” rejects the tendency of theory to lose sight of the poet as “faber” (maker) and the poetic text as “facere” (process of making) in favor of “more or less extraneous constructs and discourses.” (xiii) Every chapter contains a component of rigorous contrastive analysis with a workshop feel, in which she compares multiple translations of canonical poets, including her own, while providing wonderfully detailed insights into process. The second objective, inextricably wound up with the first, emerges as a polemic leitmotiv throughout and gives the book its teeth. This is Folkart’s articulation of the standard by which she judges a translation to be “poetically competent” vs. “incompetent,” or “writerly” vs. “readerly.” This standard is re-iterated more or less comprehensively throughout. However, its most thorough and engaging explanations come nearly mid-way through and at the end of the game, in the third and ninth chapters respectively. Chapter 3, “The Valency of Poetic Imagery,” is a reprisal of an article published in 2000. A compelling piece on the poetic image as the intersection, both immediate and unmediated, of verb and flesh, where Ted Hugh’s and Robin Robertson’s “writerly” translations of Ovid (1994) are placed in contradistinction with the more “readerly” efforts of Amy Clampitt (1994) and Frank Justus Miller (1916), it sets the stage for the deeper reflections of chapter 9, entitled “Poetry as Knowing.” Here is a manifesto of Folkart’s philosophy of the poetic. Here is where she goes the furthest in defining the standard against which she judges the translational efforts and …