De Babel au poème. Langues et traduction chez Lorand Gaspar

In the beginning were languages, whether native or learned, a central presence in Lorand Gaspar’s learning process of his youth in Eastern Transylvania (his native Hungarian, but also Romanian, German, and French) and later in adulthood (English, then Greek and Arabic). Some of his poetic works became outstanding: Rilke’s, read in German without the need for translation, then those of Seferis, Lawrence and contemporary Hungarian poets. Gaspar translated a considerable number of poems by these authors, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, most often in collaboration with Sarah Clair (Jacqueline Gaspar), and most often from her mother tongue, Hungarian. We are looking at the multiple heterolinguisms and recurrent citation practices in his poems, as well as the subject’s discourse (poetic and critical) on “language” and languages, what he called the “language of poetry”, and a highly singular trans-semiotic reverie (birds’ language) based on distant languages.