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Translation and its Discontents, Part 3 (reading Blake backwards)
The last major twentieth century poet to have included William Blake in his gallery of crucial ancestors was Allen Ginsberg. Lately, we hear less and less about Blake, not to mention Ginsberg. This is perhaps a shame, but as shames go, not a great shame. They’ll be back; first to return will be, I imagine, Blake of the Songs. In fact, he continues to fascinate scholars and art historians. I’m sure poets will come around to him once again, as Jim Jarmusch did in his film Dead Man.
I recently read William Blake backwards, that is in my adopted language, Portuguese. I use the term “backwards”, since, for the most part, Portuguese sits in the front of my brain. It is the language my wife and I speak together, and the one I use in my daily commerce. I speak English with a few English-speaking friends, like Richard Zenith (our preeminent translator and scholar of Fernando Pessoa). But often even Richard and I will speak in Portuguese together among our friends at dinners and in the bars of Lisbon’s Bairro Alto. Besides this, since I make most of my living as a translator, I tend to spend my days shuttling between the two languages. I move from Portuguese back into English; hence the notion of “backwards”.
In Real Presences, George Steiner tells us: “…our lives depend on our capacity to speak hope, to entrust to if-clauses and futures our active dreams of change, of progress, of deliverance. To such dreams, the concept of resurrection, as it is both central to myth and religion, is a natural grammatical argument. And it may be, as I have sought to show elsewhere, that the fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigma, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.” (University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 56-57)
And yet, to that freedom accrues a certain responsibility, which is to not sever discourse from its natural contexts, to not deracinate either the cultural or the incantatory properties of original tongues spoken out of their proprietary relation to the culture they grammatically, lexically and semantically embody. Since translation is a kind of resurrection, the “natural grammatical argument” as Steiner calls it, is ongoing. The translator is naturally the chief guardian and the chief culprit in this dynamic of resurrection. Translating into a hegemonic language (English) tends more often than not to end up being a process of linguistic colonization, or something similar to converting a great novel into a profit driven film. And yet the history of translation is as old as the history of literature, religion and commerce, and those histories are imbued with a movement from the vulgates into the official language of the conquerors. Steiner seems to be saying that the more languages we know the more likely we are to understand this paradigm, and the less likely we are to fall victim to it. The polyglot is free essentially because he has a truer picture of the world, seeing it from the bottom up, and not the top down. Likewise, the best translators work from the bottom up. Theirs is a process of releasing one means into another rather than imposing one means upon another.
In 2008, Manuel Portela, a Portuguese poet, translator and university professor (and, I’d add, a good friend) brought out Cantigas da Inocência e da Experiência a revised version of his translations of William Blake’s most important poems, with the Portuguese publisher Antígona. The book is subtitled (a fact which I’d totally forgotten) Mostrando os dois estados contrários da alma humana. It is a gorgeous edition, which includes not only high quality reproduction of the original plates, which are disposed en face, but a full scholarly apparatus and an appendix with the original English versions set in type, unadorned as we are in accustomed to reading them today. Though Blake himself only once in his life brought out a typeset volume, the 1783 Poetical Sketches, which is an indication that for him there was no dissonance between the poem and its incunabula-like “illumination”. This original effect, that of the illuminated manuscript, is strongly reproduced in Portela’s new edition, since as we are reading the Portuguese versions we hold the brightly colored plates before us as well. Of course we could read the plates, but the tendency is to read the Portuguese and to look at the plates, the two operations seeming to merge in the mind’s eye. It is a kind of double translation that is occurring, since we are not used to reading Blake from the plates, and we are certainly not used to reading him in Portuguese; the result is a form of etrangément, a defamiliarization which is both a “making it new” and a “making it old.” The normal contemporary experience of reading Blake is replaced by something that might approximate a mimesis of the experience of Blake’s original readers, reading illuminated manuscripts instead of typeset poetry, which even they had been long accustomed to. For myself, this experience of defamiliarization, I think, is the result of two things: the visual stimulation of having the plates before me, and the way a kind of linguistic echo which occurs as my essentially English ear takes the poems in through Portela’s beautifully attuned renditions is created in the mind’s eye (or the ear’s mind). Music, rhythm and rhyme are at work, but the music is other and the lexical is passed through the transformative filter of the second language, creating a kind of synaptic gap between what I have in me (my memory of Blake in the original) and what I have before me (the poems rendered in Portuguese and the plates). One is both reading and seeing something new, in the present), but also traveling back towards the original or a remembrance of the original, a process which is sometimes completed, or only partially completed, whether for individual words or for the whole poem in which they are found. Tigre, Tigre, brilho ardente,/ Lá nas florestras da noite;/ Que olho, que mão traçaria / Tua feroz simetria?
This process of completion, of the signal crossing the synapse, is nearly complete with the title, even, I would suggest for a non-Portuguese speaker. The only word that might offer difficulty is Canitga. Inocência and Experiência are both directly cognate with their English equivalents. But even Cantiga is recognizable in the English word “canticle”, from the Latin canticulum, “little song”, which, as it happens, is even more precise than Blake’s “songs”, a word which doesn’t really carry over from the Latin a sense of the diminutive, which is so fiercely employed by Blake, especially in the Songs of Experience.
The subtitle, will offer more difficulties to the non-Portuguese speaker, but it was delightful for me in the way it allowed me to hear a trace of the subtitle in English, which I’d wholly forgotten. Mostrando os dois estados contrários da alma humana, or: “Shewing The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”
Reading the poems amplifies this trace music, the echoes of the originals sounding through the new versions, but sounding newly, nonnatively…sounding like apparitions of themselves, rhythmic shadows of their new versions, as though the question of origins had somehow been inverted. I would say much of this has to do with the skill of the translator. These poems are not flattened play versions of the original as so much translation into English of foreign poetry can be. Instead they are legitimate re-soundings.
Portela embodies this “natural grammatical argument”, as Steiner would have it, in his introduction when he explains his need to retranslate the poems. “Even though I was aware of the importance of favoring rhythm over rhyme, producing the phonic shifting which allowed me, as synthetically as possible, to preserve a maximum of meaning with a minimum of syllables, I was not able, in fact, to maintain this criterion in very many passages. The attempt to produce symmetries and standards of equivalent rhymes overrode at times the criterion of phonic shifting and semantic conservation as it was subordinated to rhythm. I couldn’t achieve the degree of asymmetry with rhythmic regularity, which seemed necessary to the recreation that, at the time, I was trying to produce. Respecting the restrictions of my self-imposed criteria proved to be too difficult a task. Many semantic and rhythmic correlations were lost – by either attempting to pack the line or to economize, or to simply skirt the problem. I was unable to reconstruct them in the asymmetrical regularity that I had established as a guide. Each time I reread the earlier translation, the larger the weakness seemed. Perhaps this is why, as time passed, I felt the need to revise them. Even though translating Cantigas da Inocência e da Experiência once again would simply mean a reiteration of the same weakness.”*
For Yeats, poetry was an argument with the self. Portela’s attempt to improve upon his earlier translation of Blake, even though he realized it was to a certain degree futile, is an expression of what Steiner would call the freedom of the polyglot, or of Yeats’s argument played out through the revisioning argument of translation.
Let me leave you with two versions of A Rosa Doente. First the Portuguese. Try reading Blake backwards.
A ROSA DOENTE
Rosa, estás doente.
O verme invisível,
Que voa de noite
No temporal terrível:
Encontrou teu leito
De rubro prazer:
Negro oculto amor
Te devora o ser.
* (Antígona, 2007, pp. 42-43, my translation)
Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Monday, February 16th, 2009 by Martin Earl.
Comments (42)
“Lately, we hear less and less about Blake, not to mention Ginsberg.” Excuse me? What planet do you live on?
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sorry, but the sick rose caught me off guard–the metamorphosis of the famous ‘invisible worm’ into moth-flame in a poem by russian afanasy fet (b. 1827, right where blake left off) has always been one of the miracles of this polyglotic liberty you’re talking about here. here’s his poem, which always seemed to me to have blake’s ghost in it:
By the Fireplace (tr., from the Russian, by James Stotts)
The coals grow dim. In the twilight
a transparent flame’s twisting
like a moth dusting his powder-blue wings
o’er a crimson poppy.
A string of various visions
draws my drowsy easy glance.
Vaguely formed faces
stare out from the grey ash.
And tenderly, intimately
former joy and sorrow rise together—
and the heart lies, says it doesn’t need
any regrets whatsoever.
1856
thanks for this post, looking at the blake in portuguese was a revelation into the true importance of translation–a hundred times better than ‘the news from abroad.’ you really outdid yourself! i loved it.
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I think you are a bit out of touch with what has been happening in poetry since “Ginsberg.” In terms of the importance of Blake (& the Blake of the prophetic books rather than just the Songs) you could start by looking at the work of Clayton Eshleman in this country and into that of Allen Fisher in England.
I’ve come late to your posts on translation here on harriet (too busy writing & translating), and there is too much I would have liked to speak to — it will have to wait for some other occasion.
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I dunno…Ginsberg was a great self-promoter…we do hear less of him since he died. There was that recent ‘Howl’ anniversary, but I think it served to bring attention to the fact that the events surrounding “Howl” were really not that earth-shaking. Those who are footnotes to ‘important eras’ tend to get lost in the huge trail of footnotes as that era recedes from us.
Blake is a terrific children’s author, but those that strain to see him as much more than that always sound a bit wooly-headed and over-earnest and tend to ruin what they are seeking to promote. Blake will always live on his own terms, however, and he should be pleased with that.
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Much more than Ginsberg, Clayton Eshleman comes to mind as a recent poet who would list Blake as a “crucial ancestor”, though Eshleman works much more with the Blake of Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton, and Jerusalem, than with the Songs of Experience and Innocence. Charles Bernstein also comes to mind as a poet who has recently spoken on what his work owes to Blake, and I’m sure that list goes on. Not trying to start any shit or unfairly jump on a casually made statement, but if you’re looking for the Blake of the 20th century, Eshleman is a great place to start. I’d be interested to hear other lists of 20th century poets who credit Blake as a crucial ancestor.
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“Crucial ancestor” sounds pretentious to me. I’m sorry, do we really think that poets like Eshleman or Ginsberg would not exist as poets if it weren’t for Blake? I imagine most poets have been influenced by Blake on some level, but for any poet to claim another poet as a “crucial ancestor,” even if, like Ginsberg, they had a “vision” relating to a specific Blake poem, is 9/10 p.r. I would say. Baudelaire made a career of translating Poe–here one might be able to make something of a “crucial” case, but William Blake as “crucial ancestor” for a 20th century poet?..eh…I’m not buying it.
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Ginsberg is to footnote as The Godfather is to ‘B’ Movie.
Blake is to children’s author as David Ortiz is to right fielder.
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Martin, thanks for another fascinating post. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to suggest that we have been hearing less about Ginsberg but I suppose it depends on one’s context. Sometimes we do live on different ‘planets’ or, at least, continents. And that’s okay.
The NY poet Samuel Menashe is someone who cites Blake as a big influence (though his Blake is a different Blake than Ginsberg’s, I suspect). I’m not sure if Menashe qualifies as a major poet, for others, but he does for me. He’s certainly worth a look.
Marty Elwell’s brief, funny post has left me trying to imagine what it would be like if David Ortiz tried his hand at a poem. (And if A-Rod wrote one, would he rope in a ghost writer to translate his thoughts but then claim he didn’t know the ghost writer was a ghost writer?)
To return to Martin’s main post, for a second, I quite admire this: “The polyglot is free essentially because he has a truer picture of the world, seeing it from the bottom up, and not the top down. Likewise, the best translators work from the bottom up. Theirs is a process of releasing one means into another rather than imposing one means upon another.”
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Thank you for publishing Blake’s original poem with his painting. Printing his text separate from his artwork is the true mistranslation. At least it is to me.
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I notice that more of these comments here have focused on Blake’s place in the lineage of American poets & poetry than in the points made about translation. Or are Blake and Ginsberg and Eshleman essential to that discussion of translation (Eshleman is, no doubt, but usually through his discipleship to Césaire and Vallejo rather than through his discipleship to Blake)? Are we talking about Blake and Ginsberg and Eshleman because we can’t talk about translation, or are we talking about Blake and Ginsberg and Eshleman because we recognize their relationship to hold something essential about translation?
Or maybe too few of us can read Portuguese. Readers may be interested in seeing what American translator Burton Raffel did in turning Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger” into French: http://cipherjournal.com/html/tigre.html
in a different note…
Parallel to comments unsatisfied with the presentation of literary history & Blake’s heirs, I was struck by these throwaways: “Translating into a hegemonic language (English) tends more often than not to end up being a process of linguistic colonization, or something similar to converting a great novel into a profit driven film” & “These poems are not flattened play versions of the original as so much translation into English of foreign poetry can be. ”
I understand that these sentences are primarily rhetorical gestures, leading away from their blame of some translations to praise of another, but nevertheless, they seem to be more true in theory than in reality. Or has Martin Earl really read enough English translations that he can say, responsibly, anything about how they tend, “more often than not,” towards “flattened play versions”? I’ve read lots of bad translations, and I’ve read lots of good translations, too. I’ve read lots of good poetry, and I’ve read lots of bad poetry, too. So why is it that we’re so quick to assume that poetry holds an innate quality–how lofty Yeats’s “argument with the self” sounds!–whereas translation holds an innate deficiency? It’s just writing, either way: aren’t its chances towards goodness or badness pretty much the same regardless of its genre?
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Lucas,
Thanks for this comment, and for directing the conversation back towards translation (as Jason did above). You’re probably right about the “throwaways” as you call them, and I should take more care – though I have my reasons, and I’ll get back to them.
I’ve also just read your Jacket 34 article, Double Fidelity (too quickly…I’ll get back to it…I’m in the middle of my work day) – it’s fascinating stuff. (That is you, right?)
Tonight I’m going to try to tend to some unfinished business on the previous thread, and then I will get back to you and the others who have contributed to this one. I would hope people would look closely at your last two sentences here.
And also check out James Stotts translation (near the top of this thread) of an 1856 Russian poem. I thought it was very fine.
Thanks,
martin
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*afanasy fet–b. 1820 (ne 1827, as stated at the top)
fet himself was a prolific translator, including schopenhauer and virgil, a proponent of ‘pure art,’ and a contemporary of turgenev and tolstoy, with whom he had productive, but volatile relationships. mandelstam considered him to be russia’s greatest lyric poet, and his favorite poem was ‘snake’ (‘zmey’), an impressionistic scene of a widow’s tryst.
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A translation is never a translation.
For a glove to be effective, the glove’s shape must fit the hand, and this translation of glove-material depends on the fact that the glove fits the hand–but is not the hand.
A translation, however, is the hand. The better the translation, the more it is the hand itself, and not the glove.
Our brain is constantly translating natural experiences for us, and, thankfully, these translations are small and compact, and the translations by our senses are not the natural experiences themselves.
A translation, however, does not seek to translate the original text; it does not seek to be a model of the original text; it seeks to be the original text.
The English hand does not wish to wear a French glove.
The English hand wishes to be a French hand.
The hand wishes to be a hand.
A translation is never a translation—except where it fails.
The fact that a hand needs a glove is a failure of the hand.
Failure requires fashion, failure becomes fashion, and the fashion of translation will always be based on failure, just as writing is based on failure (of memory, trust, the senses, etc)
Practically, we ask, ‘Tell me the gist of what he said.’
Poetically, we add, ‘Tell me the gist of how he said it.’
A glove will do as a translation of the hand in the first instance, but in the second instance we are imitating a glove imitating a hand, an odd and abstract notion–which is why we say that poetry cannot be translated.
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Thomas Brady’s aphoristic observations above are somewhat reminiscent of my “Notes on Notes on Translation,” originally published in Translation Review and reprinted at the new issue of Jacket
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/kent-on-translation.shtml
The piece responds to Eliot Weinberger’s “minimalist,” classic “Notes on Translation,” which appeared years ago in Sulfur magazine. His aphorisms precede my comments, so it’s something of a call and response, two pieces in one.
I’d encourage everyone interested in issues of translation to check out Lucas Klein’s Cipher Journal (he provides a link above to one of the many articles there). Lucas is finishing up his doctorate in Translation Studies at Yale, and his journal is one of the very top web gatherings of essays in the field. Lucas is also one of the finest English-language translators of Chinese poetry.
Kent
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Thanks, Martin, for replying to my message (and yep, that was my review of the Victor Segalen translation in Jacket 34). And thanks, Kent, for the promo, though I’m not sure I’m one of the finer translators of Chinese poetry… some of my recent work has made me wonder if I’m even passable. Hopefully I’ll get there. (I will say that I think it’s important for anyone who both translates and critiques translation to acknowledge how many failed versions we’ve had to go through to get to something we can be proud of. And I think the same goes for all writing.)
My take on why we’re so much quicker to talk about the “problems” of translation than of other writing–poetry, say–is twofold: one, we can use our “dislike of the translation” as an excuse for why we didn’t like the writing (“oh, I don’t like XXX, but maybe that’s just because the translation wasn’t very good”), and two, the reasons to dislike a translation seem to outnumber the reasons to like any other piece of writing. I can dislike a poem, for instance, because its imagery doesn’t speak to me, or I find it dull, or incomprehensible, but I can dislike a translation because it’s too literal or not literal enough, or it’s too creative, or not creative enough. But I think that only seems to be the case: while translation requires a perfect balance of ingredients, so does any piece of writing. The ingredients may be different, and my taste or your taste for the balance may be different, but I don’t think they’re essentially different questions.
So here are some questions I ask of poetry and of translation: do I want to read a poem that keeps reminding me that it’s a poem or that makes me forget it’s a poem (as in, how much does the language draw attention to itself)? do I want to read a translation that keeps reminding me that it’s a translation or that makes me forget it’s a translation (as in, how much does the translatedness draw attention to itself)? Do I want to read something I understand immediately or do I want to have to go back to again & again? Do I want to read something that makes me feel comfortable or something that challenges me? Depending on my mood, I may lean to either side at any given moment. And of course these aren’t the only questions, either. But maybe someday I’ll find the perfect poem, which could fulfill all sides of these options, and find it in a perfect translation, likewise answering each side of these questions with a yes.
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Hey Lucas, sorry if I was overly enthusiastic there. I certainly should have qualified the remark in some way, making clear I don’t read Chinese! But a noted poet and translator who does read it well praised you similarly to me, so that was partly where I was coming from. Plus, I’ve been reading some of your new work, as you know, and am rather thrilled by it.
Anyway, a strong second here on the matter of “many failed versions.” There are so many ways to fail. Translation’s all about failed versions and then “final” successes here and there that imply failures elsewhere– successes enabled by failure, that is. Long live failure.
Kent
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Translation is a useful art, for its medium, language, is primarily for use, not pleasure.
Poetry is language at play; translation its dutiful version, and thus translation as an art form works at a great disadvantage.
Translation is a messenger, bereft of message; at best an ambassador, but never a spy or lover or statesman or king.
It may be useful to compare translation to music covers. A faster version of a song is a ‘translation’ of that song into a new ‘language,’ but because the medium is music rather than language, the act is pleasure-based, rather than duty-based.
A musician wants to translate a song into a new musical version for its own sake.
A translator, on the other hand, puts a Chinese poem into English because Chinese and English are different languages and most people who speak Chinese do not speak English and most people who speak English do not speak Chinese. Necessity drives the translator, not pleasure. The medium of music is a pleasure-based construct. The medium of language is a use-based construct.
Pope, possessed of a ‘musical instrument,’ could be said to have ‘covered’ Homer and thus, joy was his chief object, rather than ‘translation.’ But Homer lies hidden to those who do not know Greek, and even Pope cannot help them. Homer ‘inspired’ Pope, but such ‘inspiration’ occurs rarely, since Pope’s translation of Homer involved real mastery only in the sense that music was involved, since music, per se, gives pleasure, but language, per se, does not.
Christmas songs were ‘rocked up’ in the 1950s to please new audiences. The sensibility of the new sound transformed the old product into the new sensibility itself; but the transformative task in translation does not occur in the same way; the ‘new’ does not ‘draw out’ the old product to itself and make it a copy of itself; translation is rather driven by a desire to remove a veil from an old product so that others may experience it as it is, and if a new product results it is from an accident of language, and the ‘new’ translated result will always exist to some degree as an unsuccessful translation.
When I see a book of translations, I think: these translations do not exist for themselves as an expression of pleasure; they exist as an imperfect attempt to overcome an accidental barrier of language. Translation’s sole object is to pull out a plum hidden in a pie. If the plum were not hidden, translation would not exist, and the plum itself suffers because it would not exist (for its new audience) except for the translation and is deprived of its true self in the translation.
Translation teaches those who practice it, but its pedagogical nature is precisely that which makes it literature’s ugly sister, unhappy and alone. Translation is the moon–it gives no light, but only reflects the sun’s.
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Pierre Joris,
Thanks for your contribution to the thread and I (and I’m sure all of us who have been talking here) look forward to hearing from you again. Perhaps you are right to say that I am “a bit out of touch with what has been happening in poetry since Ginsberg”. It’s hard to keep up with everything, especially in my circumstances. Yet, in my defense, I did qualify what I was saying about Blake’s influence. I was referring to Ginsberg as “the last major twentieth century poet” to have come under Blake’s influence. I know and respect Eshleman’s work, especially his first – and presumably “imperfect” translation of Vallejo – since he’s spent a lifetime retranslating him. I wasn’t familiar with Fisher, but, at your prompting, have now read several things on-line, and will pursue this writer.
Martin
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Kent,
That’s a fascinating dialogue that you set up (Jacket 36) with Eliot Weinberger’s now historic set of aphorisms and I’m pleased you led us all there. (For those of you who haven’t yet followed the link in Kent’s comment, it would certainly be worth you’re while to do so – what you’ll find is a kind of master-class in both the praxis and the ethics of translation, a unique text which covers, it would seem, the twenty-five most important considerations about the translation of poetry. And I must say, one of the great reasons to read this piece is to see how Kent enters into a dialogue with a set of thoughts that Eliot Weinberger published in 1988, nearly two decades ago, in Sulfur. The immediacy and spontaneity of this exercise reads like a contemporary interview, totally up to date, totally engaged, with Weinberger’s original piece effortlessly fast-forwarded.)
To further the discussion, let me take provisional issue with you over a couple of points. In #11, Eliot Weinberger – in an aphorism that takes up the question of Ezra Pound’s Cathay – says it is impossible to translate from a language one doesn’t know. You disagree with him and offer the following refutation: “…but it is certainly possible to translate from a language one doesn’t know well, so long as one approaches the poem, humbly, as a poet, and has a good informant. Here, then, I would disagree with Weinberger: All translators should have informants, of one kind or another. Someone, yes, will do a first design, but designs can be, and should be, redesigned. Just make it new.”
My question, to be blunt, is how could this be the case: that it is “possible to translate from a language” that we don’t know well “as long as one approaches the poem, humbly, as a poet, and has a good informant.”
First of all, I’m curious as to why you italicize “poet”. Are you distinguishing between the figure of the poet and that of the translator? It would seem to me that an italicized poet is certainly not a humble poet.
James Stotts (in one of his comments in the thread to part 2 of this series of posts) actually refers to the opposite of humility, and describes a much different “poet/translator”:
“the violence of translation is partly in trying to strap a poem down, and make it a stable target–this is what all the slow, painstaking reading is for….a lot of violence occurs in the mind of the translator as well, as the poem is memorized (inspired) and then the mental work of turning it into english begins–a lot of people might have noticed this, but once you know and internalize a poem in a second language, the brain refuses to let it stay as it was and will start the process of translation all on its own, subconsciously, finding ways to conceptualize, paraphrase, rhyme, etc. in the translator’s mother tongue. that is, it is snuffing out the original language, making the original obsolete, which is the ultimate aim of a translation anyway: to have the poem without needing its language, to extract it from the foreign culture.”
It seems to me that Stotts gets the down-to-earth, almost physical struggle, which translation is.
Then there’s the question of the “informant”.
At the moment, I’m busily translating a book by a Portuguese anthropologist, an ethnographic study of the history of nationalist movements in Northwest Iberia. Anthropologists are always speaking about their “informants”, but I had never thought of this word in connection with translating poetry or film, philology or even anthropology. We often work with the author, the living ones at least, and we ask a lot of questions of a lot of people. But they are technical questions, usually, and don’t really have that much to do with our so-called knowledge of the language. In fact even the Portuguese themselves have problems answering some of my questions, since the problem is often not a linguistic one, but rather an issue of discourse or of the rhetoric (or jargon) employed in a specific field. Or at other times it is a question of dialect or variation. For instance, I might have a better solution than my Portuguese wife when confronting a dialogic problem in a film about people from a region that she has never visited.
Weinberger is putting Pound on a pedestal, putting his translations from the Chinese there as well – a separate case altogether (and I agree with him, not only for the wonder of this work, but for the fact that Pound was not really translating, he was “Chinese-ing” himself.) Weinberger goes on to say that for “the rest of us, it is impossible to translate from a language one doesn’t know. To translate through an “informant” is to paint by numbers: it’s their design, you merely add some color.”
At the center of this issue is what it means to “know” a language. The reason that anthropologists have informants is because they don’t yet “know” the culture, especially the local culture at that micro level which they are attempting to describe and to systematize. The language of the local peoples (which they’ve most likely learned in an academic setting, in a classroom as opposed to a rice paddy) does not necessarily give them access to the culture. They need informants to fill the gap. That’s a given. This is okay because theirs is an intellectual and empirical process, an attempt to rationalize an essentially irrational evolution, the formation of a culture, of which language is a part, but not always a trustworthy part, since it is inherently unstable, highly susceptible to manipulation and always changing. It is not, that is, a stove or a threshing pit.
But poetry (though it certainly contains rational, intellectual and critical energies) is functionally an emotional project, the materialization of a feeling or a range of them. Using informants to help us to translate poetry would be like using informants to tell us what we feel, so that we can attach a word to that feeling and thus build a poem.
To know a language, then, is to not only know its words, but to have become imbued with the culture of those words, to the extent that this culture begins to rival one’s own, the one you started out with. The adopted tongue tangles with the mother tongue. The translator (whether a poet, or not) moves back towards the target language only after having experienced a kind of catharsis with the original. The poem in the “foreign” language must have overwhelmed the mother tongue before it can be translated back into the mother tongue.
All twenty-five of the original aphorisms and your aphoristic commentary on them merit serious study.
Martin
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Thanks for the thoughtful comments on the Jacket piece, Martin. And thanks for the rich meditations in these posts.
Almost all the questions of translation are very complicated, of course, and the answers get stranger, less certain all the time. I think translation might be something like the quantum realm of literature, myself, though I’m no “physicist” in the matter. It would be interesting to hear some more from someone well-versed in the theory, like Lucas Klein.
On the issue of informants: You asked why I italicized “poet,” and the reason is that I agree with Weinberger that the best translators of poetry will be poets! The informant need not be a practicing poet, but there should always be a poet at the controls– and the better the poet, usually, the better the translation. That said, the best informants are the authors of the original, where that is possible, so on that we certainly agree.
I hear what you’re saying about the translator having insights a native speaker might not have– I say as much, I think, in one of my notes. But there are many things the translator may not pick up, most obviously in cases of cultural allusions, resonances, idioms, and so forth. Clayton Eshleman, maybe the greatest living U.S. translator of poetry, would be the first to tell you he couldn’t have done Vallejo (especially Trilce!) the way he did, without native informants. Forrest Gander and I were saved a dozen times or more by Bolivian poets in our two books of Jaime Saenz– which doesn’t mean their clarifications led us to more literally “faithful” choices, just the opposite, necessarily, in most cases.
Incidentally, readers may want to check out issue #1 of Tony Tost’s Fascicle magazine, which is largely made up of a massive translation section I edited with Tony a few years back. http://www.fascicle.com/issue01/main/contents.htm The contents include an essay by Weinberger, an elaborated version of his “Notes on Translation.” It’s an important text, I think.
Kent
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‘the best informants are the authors of the original’
kent,
i would agree as a rule–but here’s a strange thing i’ve noticed (and it first came to my attention through fascicle!) about author’s helping with their own work: aleksei parshchikov is a russian poet who knows english and sometimes helps his translators (brodsky did, too)–but i’ve seen three versions of one poem of his–’liman’ (which can mean floodplain or estuary)–and locked onto a single phrase that’s been translated a lot of ways that i can’t account for. ‘myortvaia khvatka’ translates pretty easily as deathgrip or stranglehold, nothing strange about it, but even with parshchikov looking over their shoulders the translators changed it to ‘the grasp of the inanimate’ in one instance and ‘their clutching is killing’ in another. the former example is especially strange, and leads me to believe that parshchikov maybe had a hand in mangling the english into his own interpretation of his poem. strange indeed.
i’ve seen this happen in other translations, too, where the author’s involvement actually leads the translators on tangents–umberto eco is storied to interfer with translations of his when he gets obsessed with certain phrases (e.g., technical jargon) he knows in english which he wants to insert inappropriately. the woman who translated officially for rene char made strange decisions with his impramatur, too (sorry, i used to have notes w/specific examples, because i met her once, but they’re all garbage now). poets have their own agendas and curious ideas about language and can try to transform their poems via translation. all this isn’t criticism, just a heads up that there are some fascinating phenomena shaping writers’ decisions, as unpredictable as the differences in languages themselves.
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James,
Good point. There we get into questions of management and control.
Octavio Paz would be example of the opposite case. Weinberger’s recounted that Paz would look over his translations, make a few causal remarks, then hand them back, giving Weinberger full rein, never demanding a correction.
It’s interesting you mention this about Parshchikov. I was with him in Leningrad, in 1989, when I was in process of assembling Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. And I can still remember him saying (lots of vodka flowing at a party, but I do remember), “Kent, make sure you find translator for me that make really new poems to English for me.”
Hejinian’s Dragomoshchenko translations are done somewhat in this spirit, too, with full blessing and collaboration of Dragomoshchenko.
So there you go. What do we say about “fidelity” when the *author* doesn’t want the translator to be accurate in the “formal”-translation sense of things?
Kent
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Kent,
Agreed, for sure. A committed translator of poetry who produces consistently excellent work is a practicing poet.
To add just a little bit to the discussion, it seems to me that different poets’ work demand different sorts of strategies and there are no hard rules, except you have to try to put yourself into another poet’s head, language, culture and you have to try to be aware of all the politics of that, all the pitfalls.
I don’t approach Álvaro de Campos the same way I approach Herberto Helder. I’m pretty sure that anybody familiar with Pessoa-Campos and Helder would have no problem at all understanding that.
Campos is fairly easy to translate — for me, anyway. Most of it is pretty straightforward. It’s more a matter of finding a way to distinguish Campos from Caeiro, Reis or Pessoa-himself. Not really such a big deal, in my experience.
Helder is another story. He can be feverishly baroque and you have to go there with him. This is not something that every translator is willing to do. I can’t imagine a “non-poet” being able to go where Helder goes.
Josely Vianna Baptista’s super-baroque poetry very often requires total remaking, a kind of hyper-traduction, translation almost in the physical sense of transporting from one site to another. It’s an almost violent process. I don’t know if a “non-poet” would feel willing to remake a poem so extensively, or if they even realize it’s allowed!, but Josely demands it of me. She has no interest in controlling any aspect of the work, though occasionally she’ll insist on a specific reading. We negotiate all the time. We work together closely and her husband is part of the process, too. She calls me “her other voice”, which is probably the most wonderful thing anybody’s ever said to me.
Yours,
Chris
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Wonderful to have Chris Daniels commenting here, one of THE top translators of Pessoa and Lusophone poetry in the U.S.
Chris, I know the Complete Caeiro is out from Shearsman Books and next comes de Campos, in two volumes, is that right? And does Reis follow?
Order Chris’s translation of Pessoa’s master, Alberto Caeiro, today!
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2007/pessoa_caeiro.html
Tour de force…
Kent
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another thing that translation does (and thinking of pessoa and daniels’ remarks reminded me of this) is force whoever’s doing it at least to consider various paradigms of author-ity. of course, on the one hand, in publishing of contemporary translation, copyrights are a dragnet that discourage much independent professional work–but a lot of us aren’t professionals, don’t mind auto-plagiary, and take the whole thing much more seriously (that is, we don’t take Ourselves so seriously).
a quote from the intro to a collection of new translations of boris ryzhii:
A poem is living in the sense that it has a history, that it leaves its trace or impression as it moves through time, and in the sense that a ghost is living when it maintains its ability to haunt us. A translation is part of that history, moving from its origin through various bodies, variously manifested. Translation is a transfer of heroes. The argument for authorship comes up as a corollary. In the most cynical interpretation, authorship is an invention of politics—ultimately histories do not need authors, and only weak minds require that Homer have a single grave somewhere in Greece in order to accept his legacy. But for the actual writer, authority can be a formulation of integrity. My translations did not write themselves, like chemical reactions, from the Russian. Nor could I have written them without the Russian, without slow yet essential guidance from Russian friends, without humility and, most of all, without the guiding line of Ryzhii’s verse and biography. But I think they are mine. And they belong to the history in which I was only a medium. I do not know how to reconcile the dual nature of authorship that is the task of the translator.
Translation is a plastic mode.
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Thanks for the plug, Kent! Yep, Collected Campos 1928-1935 is due out in the late spring and 1914-1927 will be out probably in late spring 2010. That’s almost all the poems. Only a few fragments and some doubtfully-attributed poems are left out.
I don’t think Reis would be well-served with a 200-page book — 40 of his odes would probably be enough, as they get WAY too samey after a while. For me, anyway. Someone else might want to do that, but not me. Even 40 of those odes would be too much for me!
What’s more, I want to go somewhere else after Campos is done: Brazilian poetry, 1500-present.
To take up something I meantion above, awareness of politics and pitfalls has got to involve some deep ethics. Brent C. and others have been writing about this and it’s something I take very seriously.
I’m not really the right person to translate Ricardo Reis because for various reasons I’m unable to follow Pessoa to the place he goes in those poems. Not now, perhaps never. I’m not going to translate poetry toward which I feel no deep connection. For me, that’s an ethical decision.
Yours,
Chris
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Wow, welcome, Chris! I should say that we’ve got some Álvaro de Campos forthcoming in the April “translation issue” of Poetry, thanks to another fine translator of Pessoa, Richard Zenith…. and additional previously unpublished FP to come after that! End of plug…
But Chris, I’d love to hear more about why you feel you’re unable to follow Pessoa to the place he goes in the Ricardo Reis poems.
I’ve buried my own past as a translator, but what fun it is to have this discussion. Thanks to you all!
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James, that’s beautifully said, truly so.
Humbleness is crucial.
To respond, I’ll quote myself, from an interview I did with Kent a couple of years ago and which was published in Jacket Magazine:
“In the past, I’ve imagined myself to be possessed by the work of another poet, but lately, more often I see it like this: when I translate, my labor is dependent upon the labor of another human being from another human culture. The social relationship is one of mutual dependence and is also driven by my commitment to a collective endeavor, which simultaneously unleashes into our poetic culture the labor of the translated poet and my labor as transcreator, to use Haroldo de Campos’ wonderful coinage. There’s a flowering of human potential on both sides, and in that sense, I think translation becomes a very high literary art, indeed.
“At the same time, there’s an agonic relationship in which our language is besieged, stormed and conquered by the language of another culture as wielded by a writer within that culture. What am I doing if I resist? Am I right to think that I know what Clarice Lispector meant to write more than she herself? Am I to suppose that ‘A vida se me é’ — a very strange, ‘untranslatable’ sentence characterized by a confusing, ungrammatical use of reflexive pronouns with a verb of being — should be translated as ‘Life is itself for me,’ which is a grossly exegetical domestication? ‘Life itselfs me’ or ‘life is itselfed for [or 'to'] me’; a pronoun becomes a verb; the disrupt exists in English and the reader is left wondering what the hell that means while understanding it perfectly. To paraphrase Benjamin, I could say that in this case the translation fits like a loose covering of transparent gauze, which allows the texture of Portuguese to show through the surface of English.
[...]
I have to be careful not to translate like some arrogant, patronizing philistine of a colonial grandee who thinks he knows better than both writer and reader. I have to assume equality.”
I asked every Brazilian I know to help me with that sentence from Clarice Lispector. I still don’t quite know what to do with it. But that’s the beauty of it for me: you work endlessly trying to find a way into another’s language and I can’t think of anything more right to do with my time and whatever talent I possess.
In the interview, Kent and I also discuss the question of authorship and some other things. Hope you’ll take a look:
http://jacketmagazine.com/29/kent-iv-daniels.html
Yours,
Chris
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Thanks for the welcome, Don, very kind of you. Thank you – and Martin – for providing this place for us to get together and share our ideas and convictions.
First of all, Richard Zenith, man, what can I say!? The guy’s a giant, end of story. He’s doing incredibly important work and all of his translations are models for my own work with Pessoa.
About Reis:
Reis’s odes are neo-Horatian and the Portuguese syntax is structured in a very Latinate way. That may sound like an odd thing to say about poems written in a Latinate language like Portuguese, but the Reis Portuguese syntax and structure is like Latin to such an extent that Portuguese readers stumble over the poems. For me to translate the poems in such a way that I feel good about myself and the work, I’d have to struggle endlessly toward an English syntax and structure which would somehow mirror or echo the effect in Portuguese and still come out as something similarly readable and musical. To satisfy myself and my sense of ethics, I’d have to find it in myself to do that.
Now, I love that endless struggle, I can enjoy reading Reis, and I’ve worked with some of those poems, but the Reis heteronym seems to me to be an unsubtle, vulgar Epicurean, a crabbed, pedantic, deeply conservative stick-in-the-mud of a poisonously nostalgic monarchist for whom I have little or no empathy, to say the least. That may change in time, but it’s been that way for about 15 years, so I sort of doubt it.
Empathy has to be there for me to translate, and when it is there, there’s no limit to the amount of thinking and working and agonizing over a syllable I’ll endure until I think I have it right.
I mentioned Josely Vianna Baptista, a complex, sophisticated, wildly baroque, utterly virtuosic poet from Brazil. She’s excruciatingly difficult to translate. But there is tremendous empathy, or affinity, that’s the better word, I guess it’s really just a matter of affinity experienced at a very deep level, somewhere in my life. I can’t work without it. When it’s there, I’ll spend weeks on a single phrase, 3 months on a 10-word poem, and, well, honestly, it’s just a hell of a lot of fun when that happens! That’s important too, the sheer enjoyment of it, maybe even the most important thing, in the end. For me, anyway!
Yours,
Chris
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I wish Chris would do Reis, myself. And Chris, isn’t Reis actually the heteronym who most approaches Pessoa’s politics, inflected as they are by monarchical and right-wing leanings? (I realize this gets complicated, since who Pessoa “is” is not a settled question!)
This is a good opportunity to mention Jose Saramago’s wonderful The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, one of the greatest novels about a poet ever written. Absolutely magical, moving, inspiring…
And please believe Chris on Josely Vianna Baptista.
http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/11152/on-the-shining-screen-of-the-eyelids.aspx
Kent
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About Reis again. It’s very possible that I misread Reis, or simply don’t have enough of a command of Portuguese. That’s very possible, perhaps even probable. It’s not comfortable.
I’m not a professional translator, not a native speaker. I’ve never been to Portugal. Dropped out of high school, never went to college. I’m totally self-taught.
Do I flatter myself when I think that I have good instincts, good poetic instincts? Sometimes I think I must be outrageously wrong-headed about everything and I’m overwhelmed with doubt, ready to give it all up. Sometimes it feels like a burden and I ask myself why I spend so much of my time doing this. Those moments can be pretty awful and they can last for days. I’m very lucky to have friends in Brazil who are always willing and able to help me. I keep going.
Yours,
Chris
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Kent,
That’s a good question. A really good question! Honestly, I don’t know. I vacillate. Pessoa was incredibly contradictory and had all kinds of things in his head. My vacillation is part of the heteronymic game. I play along with Pessoa all the time. Maybe I’m so unwilling to pin him down that I’m overlooking something important?
I’ve worked on some of the odes of Reis, about a half-dozen of them. I’m more or less satisfied with three or four of the translations I’ve done. I’ll probably end up translating 20 or so, despite everything.
Yours,
Chris
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Poetry and translation both fail due to an inability to translate.
An English-speaking poet mistranslates his experience to English-speaking readers, and thus fails on that count.
But this should not seduce us into thinking that translation’s task is the same as poetry’s.
Translation does not use experience, but an ‘experience already-translated-into-poetry-of-a-certain-language.’
How many ways, for instance, can Goethe’s 8-line poem, The Wanderer’s Night Song No. 2 be translated? If we keep Goethe’s rhyme scheme intact, there are probably less than a dozen solid English versions possible, even if we include Longfellow’s version which uses “thou.”
Compare this to the nearly infinite number of possible poems the poet Goethe could have written, and you have some idea of the gulf between poet and translator, despite seductive resemblances which might flatter the translator into thinking he is a poet by virtue of his work.
But, what if the translator glimpses the ‘real’ experience behind the words of the poem he is translating and presents a new set of words which captures the ‘real’ experience even more powerfully? Is the translator then a poet?
If there is a ‘real’ experience behind the words which the translator manages to bring to life in a manner more powerfully than in the original composition, the translator is still merely riffing off the words of the original composer.
It seems then, that those of us who are implying that the arrogance of the translator is the soul of the poet are not correct. The arrogance of the translator is bad news any way you look at it.
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Du mußt dein Leben ändern. (Rilke. Perfectly translatable.)
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Doodle,
Bingo!
Thanks,
Thomas
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OK, Thomas Brady! Translators are bad people. And translation is a minor, even unethical activity!
I, for one, accept the chastening.
I vow to change my life!
Kent
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I suppose some of us are arrogant, Thomas. I try not to be. I think I succeed more often than I fail.
Yours,
Chris
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Kent,
“Life” might be a bit drastic…!
Du musst change your speech.
Thomas
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Chris,
I was merely being aphoristic with my ‘the arrogance of the translator is the soul of the poet…”
I didn’t mean to imply anyone here specifically was being arrogant (perhaps only a little when drunk on vodka) but when guilds shop-talk they always sound…how shall I put this…? I was only trying to make it simpler for the simple, not rain on a parade…
Rilke’s German line, simple and alone, was a breath of fresh air, I’ll admit…
Thomas
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>”Life” might be a bit drastic…!
Don’t worry, Thomas, only kidding.
I was just poking some fun at your “Bingo,” there…
Kent
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You must come out from behind your fairly evident pseudonym, Thomas.
Yours,
Chris
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Are comments on these threads just shut down after a while? Does the host/author of a thread topic bring the discussion to a close and then no more posts show up?
Or can we just keep posting forever?
Thanks,
Thomas
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