Poets on Translation: Attuned to the Echoes

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

Dear Emerging Translator (or any poet considering translation):

I’m writing this to you because it makes me uncomfortable to give advice. So why do it? To place myself in a situation that challenges me to think in a different way. This has everything to do with translation, which is, after all, a process of transplanting habits of thought to a new context that reveals differences, nuances, assumptions, surprises. Having written elsewhere on questions of translatability, on the perennial conundrum of whether poetry can even be translated, and many times on the pleasures and dilemmas of wrestling poems into a new grammar—what Czesław Miłosz calls the translator’s zeal—I want to sit with what makes me uneasy, to see what might arise through the medium of advice.

First and foremost, I want to affirm that it’s okay for the process of translation to feel unnerving. You and I will both make mistakes. Truth be told, translation demands mistakes. Because of the simple fact you’re only human and because learning a language, even your native one, is a lifelong project that morphs and changes and deepens, of course you’ll make unintentional mistakes, such as when I assumed akacja in Polish was the same thing as an acacia tree, not knowing it was the common name for black locust (robinia pseudoacacia)—and even when I realized the error, it was painful to correct, as the sound and rhythm of the two names were so different. May you have as few of these kinds of mistakes as possible. May you build a community of those you can rely on for feedback and answers to your questions (and maybe a little commiseration and a communal chuckle when you blunder).

But there is also the more complex fact, the inescapable truth, as Edith Grossman says, “that poetry can seem completely localized, thoroughly contextualized, and absolutely inseparable from the language in which it is written in ways that prose is not,” which means you’ll make intentional mistakes, purposefully mistranslate a word or a phrase or a reference to dislocate the poem from its old linguistic context and relocate it to a new one. In the process, you not only can but must change and add things, as I did quite literally in the ending of the following poem by Małgorzata Lebda:

Fuchsia

The last house in the village emanates something luminous. A woman
sets the table, cracks a window, sits on the sill, lights up,
looks out, catches sight of my body in outline (it must be 
strong against the shiny road), raises a hand, as do I in reply.

Entering the woods, I wonder who she thought she recognized
in me. The night sharpens animal sounds and hornbeams
bow down, bow down. Coming back, I notice the lights are higher
where she moved them from the ground floor to the attic.

I know a good deal about her: she tilts her head when smoking
and leans on the frame, she cares about diffuse light
for the fuchsia, chose to hang it in an eastern facing spot.
She recognizes things. She eats alone.

Here’s the last line and my initial trot with options:

Potrafi rozpoznawać. Jada sama.

She can/is good at/knows how to recognize /identify/detect/discern. She eats alone.

My choice to supply a direct object, “things,” not there in the original might seem small, but it normalizes the odd use of the transitive verb “rozpoznawać.” The lack of a direct object in the original is important. It calls our attention to the verb, emphasizing the woman’s ability (she is able) to discern subtle nuances in the world around her, such as what the fuchsia needs.

Here are some other options I tried without a direct object:

She’s insightful.

She can be discerning.

She’s good at seeing.

She knows how to tell.

She’s adept at recognizing.

While I felt very proud of the word “insightful”—to have sight within—I was also aware of the fact that Lebda uses the same verb earlier in the poem, “I wonder who she thought she recognized in me,” so insight couldn’t work. The verbal echo is precisely what gives the ending significance. Perhaps “to see” in both instances: “what she saw in me” and “she’s good at seeing.” No, too vague, too weak. It doesn’t convey the ability to truly discern. Lebda writes out of an ecological awareness, and the book from which the poem comes explores the porous interconnectedness of the human and material realm of things, of objects, of animals and plants. When I added “things,” suddenly the emphasis I was sensing in the poem clicked into place. In making intentional changes, may you be like that woman who recognizes things, may you be informed by the nuances of the poem’s act of communication and the ecosystem of the collection from which it comes. May you be attuned to the echoes. 

And there it is! Rather than giving prescriptive advice, I feel myself trying to invite you into the echo. I want you to feel how translation keeps a poem alive. You are participating in the iterative process that is literature, passing it from one articulation to another, allowing the poem to reverberate based on the tuning fork of your interpretation. In this, choosing to translate is a great education akin to other kinds of close reading, only better for how deep you go while also being more infuriating because you must pin the poem down. From the wash of the readerly experience, you must choose. And there is always a different interpretation, always another solution to the conundrum of the poem’s inseparability from its source language.

But the same thing goes for the translation—your translation, one of the many translations, the translation only you can write. There is no such thing as a “correct” or “definitive” version. So, keep your frequency tuned to those moments when your translation does something that ties it to its new language. A line break, a turn of phrase only the new language in your mouth can produce that sets the strings of metaphoric resonance humming. Another example from Lebda, because I’m immersed in her work right now (let yourself become utterly, irrevocably immersed!), from a series that gives snapshots of her bodily experience running the entire length of the longest river in Poland, from its source in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea:

From the Body: Ten

Today it cut across the voice of a child calling
a lost dog. What range: it’s still possible to hold out
hope, but damp is rising in the throat.

The poem didn’t come alive for me until I wrote down that second line, isolating “it’s still possible to hold out” in the English. The Polish reads “jeszcze ma się,” more directly “one still has.” But in the context of a book centered on our climate disaster, in which the first poem starts with “the end of the world / that remains,” the idea of holding out takes on additional resonance in a phraseology distinct to English. The very process of translation revealed something not only about the poem itself but about my thinking as I interacted with it. In other words, the translation discovered something neither I nor the original knew when I sat down to work. And isn’t this why we write? To discover what we think? To hold out belief in the surprise of communication? To see what the language itself reveals, how it builds layers of meaning to get at the complexity of a thing?