Montague in translation

DETAILS
Wednesday 11th September 2024 at 4:30pm (AEST)
Dr Elizabeth R Pearce, University of Melbourne
Between Cork and France: Ireland’s First Chair of Poetry John Montague in French translation

ABSTRACT
John Montague (1929 – 2016) became Ireland’s First Chair of Poetry in 1998. The Dublin-based professorship was set up to celebrate Irish poetry following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney in 1995. Montague also received the University of Melbourne Australian Centre’s Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2000, which brought him to Melbourne and its leading poets, including Professor Peter Steele SJ and Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe, both leading lights in the University of Melbourne’s former Department of English. Wallace-Crabbe was instrumental too in the visit of Seamus Heaney to the Melbourne Writers Festival in 1994.

While living in Paris in the early 1960s Montague became friends with the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, as well as numerous French poets, writers and translators of the era, and in later years divided his time between Cork and Nice. As a lecturer at University College Cork in the 1970s, Montague’s positive influence on younger Cork poets has been well documented, strengthening Franco-Irish connections and a thriving interest in poetry translations and readings in Paris, particularly at the Université de la Sorbonne, continuing to this day.

This talk will explore Montague’s early poem ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, in which the poet creates a semi-concealed internal shape that counters the poem’s sense of external bleakness and chaos. It then explores the French translation, ‘Tous les obstacles légendaires’ by Claude Esteban, a contemporary of Montague in Paris. Might a comparable sense of underlying order be achieved by the translator, in a sea of turmoil? This talk reflects on the complex terrain of the poem, and its translation into French, illustrating how this poem is emblematic of the pervading themes in Montague’s work.

SPEAKER
Elizabeth Pearce is a researcher in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Her doctorate Rhythm, poetry and meaning: Seamus Heaney and Louis MacNeice in French translation was conferred at the University of Melbourne in 2019. Her research interests include contemporary Irish poetry in English and its translation into French, as well as translation of the sonnet form. In June 2023 she was invited to address the ‘John Montague Memorial Conference’ organised by Université Sorbonne Nouvelle with the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. She has recently also given conference papers on literary translation at Université de Rennes, Université d’Aix-Marseille, and Université de Nancy in France; at the ISAANZ Conference 2023, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne; and will present at the upcoming Australian Society for French Studies annual conference at the University of Melbourne in December 2024. She collaborates with TRACT (Traduction et communication transculturelle), Université de la Sorbonne, Paris 3, and is a member of the research group La Société ETC: Écrire, Traduire, Créer, Université d’Aix-Marseille. She is a co-organiser of the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA) Translation Awards 2024 (French).

LOCATION (In-Person and Online)
This free public seminar will be held in-person in the Jabiru Room at Newman College (enter via main gate and follow the signs), and streamed live online via Zoom. The Zoom room will be open 10 minutes before the scheduled start to give everyone time to connect. Please keep your microphone on mute for the duration of the talk. There will be time for questions at the end of the seminar. Please RSVP to Dianne.hall@vu.edu.au if you would like the zoom link.

RECORDING
A recording may be posted here after the seminar.