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Poetics of Relation,
Betsy Wing's 1997 translation of Edouard Glissant's 1990 Gallimard edition of Poétique de la relation will prove, no doubt, most useful to the academic community. Anyone familiar with Glissant's extraordinary brand of French knows what an arduous task translating any of his works must be, even for an experienced translator. In several translation seminars, I and my graduate students have had the opportunity to examine excerpts from Michael Dash's meritorious English rendition of Le discours antillais. In all honesty, I must admit that whenever some criticism has come up regarding the translator's rendition of one particular word or section, most of the time, the choice of another, better solution has been quite problematic.
First, let me rapidly situate the original work within the general context of Glissant's productions. Poétique de la relation has been preceded by three other books of essays, namely, Soleil de la conscience (1956), L'intention poétique (1969), and Le discours antillais (1981). To Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (1966) and Traité du Tout-Monde, Poétique IV (1997), I would like to add the gorgeous Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), although some readers might not include this book in the same category as the aforementioned works (incidentally, Glissant's own subtitle to Traité: Poétique IV suggests that he had mentally excluded two of the preceding works (?) from the Poetics series). In any case, any good reader of Glissant's writings should know that all of them demonstrate the author's practice of creative repetition -- a leitmotif of his -- and therefore, any well-trained eye will detect in them many a page closely related to another, and this, in more ways than one. All of Glissant's texts, to use some of his seminal expressions, are indeed related: linked, relinked (relayed), told and retold. Of course, these few remarks could be extended to his other "types" of writing: poetry,...