The SENTENCES quote from Beowulf: A Student Edition, ed. George Jack (1.1); Éric Suchère, “N° 52 (janvier 2002) La surface” (1.2); 2 Esdras 8 (1.3); Canticum canticorum 1 (2.1); Georges Bataille, “Bouche” (2.2); back cover, Félix Guattari, Chaosmose (3.1); Pauline Réage, Histoire d’O (3.2); Farid Tali, Prosopopée (3.3); Marguerite Duras, Écrire (4.1); Lydie Gordey, Mr Mme Mlle (4.2); Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, Passion érotique des étoffes chez la femme (5.1); Jean Orizet, Miroir oblique (5.2), Beowulf: A Student Edition, ed. George Jack (5.3), Hervé Guibert, Suzanne et Louise (Roman-Photo) (5.4) ; Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (6.1). All translations from the French, Old English, and Latin are mine.
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This is a work of translation – translation twice over. On the left, sentences from the French, Old English, and Latin have been translated into a Modern English of lexicographical equivalence. The syntax of these sentences aims to reproduce the syntactic qualities (take as: grammatical structure, sinuous movement, prosody) of the source text. Each sentence or numbered group of sentences has, on the right, been translated into a single sententia. The translation processes here involve, variously, compression, exegesis, and procedural constraints.
A sententia may be thought of as a forebear of the sentence. In Latin, it referred to an opinion, thought, or judgement. It may also be considered an antonym of the sentence, where the sentence is a modern invention (taking root in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, per Ian Robinson) that relies on the rules of syntax, and the sententia is more purely a unit of sense which, if it is grammatical, is so only incidentally. The sententia is shaped by rhetoric and the voice; it is prosodic, not syntactic. As spoken forms, the sententiae are meant to be wise “but a bit obtuse.” Robinson points out that the “Rhetorica ad Herennium [the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric], so far from supposing that all language consists of sentences, treats sententiae (pithy dicta) as figures of speech which should not be over-used.”
The problem remains for the contemporary writer of imagining a language structure for which syntax is irrelevant. To engage this impossibility is the desire of sentence(s)-to-sententia translation (translation as a means of discovering what a sententia is).
Aditi Machado is the author of two chapbooks, Route: Marienbad (Further Other Book Works, 2016) and The Robing of the Bride (Dzanc, 2013), and a forthcoming first book of poems, Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017). Her translation of Farid Tali's Prosopopoeia will appear from Action later in 2016. Excerpts from these projects have recently appeared in FOLDER Magazine, Volt, The Capilano Review, Poor Claudia, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Aditi is from Bangalore, India, but currently lives in Denver, USA, where she is working on her doctoral dissertation. She edits poetry-in-translation for Asymptote.