In Jacques Derrida’s What Is A ‘Relevant’ Translation the French philosopher claims that the primary role of the translator is not to command a “word-to-word” account of a primary source text but to “transmit” its underlying “idea,” “figure,” and “force.” While Derrida seems to have a soft spot for St. Jerome’s approach of translating “not word by word, but sense by sense,” he also emphasizes that a “relevant translation is a translation whose economy [is] the most appropriating and the most appropriate possible.” Thus, this kind of translation also appropriates a source text for one’s own, distinct use. Understood under this lens, translation is an exercise concerned with evoking the senses that innately exceed the likes of qualitative pigeonholing and also serves an individuated functionary or qualitative role for the reader herself.

A translation, then, is not a phenomenon that can be confined to what the essayist Gail Scott in Permanent Revolution refers to as “the parameters of the dominant language’s illusions and presumptions.” Rather, a relevant translation is deeply existential in nature; it is concerned with appropriating our own realities in relation to the source text at hand. In so doing, a translator and her chosen translation produces a “drift of meaning from one site to another” and composes “texts of incredible and complex beauty.”

Erin Moure’s incredibly complex and beautiful poetry collection, Theophylline: A Poetic Migration transmits, a la Derrida, the “idea[s],” “figure[s],” and “force[s]” of three American modernists—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké. Similar to the pharmaceutical of the same name, Theophylline employs a translation ethics to alleviate the innate force or breath contained within the poetic works of all three to open the valves of the past within the passageway(s) of the present.

The book takes place in Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room in 2017 where Moure, a “foreigner and translator of poetry,” begins to “think on beauty and space and migration” to reflect on the artistic “impulse to make a poem instead of something else.” The room is an expository site, laying bare the “contrasting shapes (what moves) in the poetry of Rukeyser, Bishop, and Grimké.” In return, Moure “expose[s] [her] being to their voices in the wood and light of the room.” Haunted by the room’s “patter,” Moure notes it is not a typical “breath making [the] voice[s]” but an “Articulation” from “a foreign English, and a foreign time.”

Moure apprehends the forces enlivening the unique breaths of the past, appropriating her own reality in relation to them. By doing so she remarkably engenders what Gail Scott might call “a drift of meaning from one site to another” (or, more precisely, of one century to the next). The Woodberry Reading Room and Theophylline serve as critical grounds; both are reminders that the creative impulse “to make a poem instead of… something else” is an impulse that intuitively recognizes a poem is already “something else” in and of itself. It is, to evoke Scott once more, a thing that exceeds “the parameters of the dominant language’s illusions and presumptions” or, rather, a translation in its own right. The uniqueness of the poem as something else that can open up or give life to varying meanings across time periods is what compels Moure to “believe in poetry” in the poem “Something Else.” Indeed, Moure’s work remarkably connects poetry to the “life of the spirit,” a unique Derridean force that can “transmit” ideas, figures, and forces across time into the complicated annals of the present day.