Rosmarie Waldrop on Translation: 'The destruction is serious'
A new issue of OmniVerse is out, and features (among much else) an essay by Rosmarie Waldrop on translation, "The Joy of the Demiurge." Originally published in 2005's Dissonance (if you are interested), the piece explores how translation work might be beneficial to poetry-writing. "Renato Poggioli holds that 'like the original poet, the translator is a Narcissus who in this case chooses to contemplate his own likeness not in the spring of nature but in the pool of art.' This simile amuses me because it makes me, who claims to be both poet and translator, a veritable nymphomaniac of narcissism contemplating my own likeness in anything at all!" More:
...But Poggioli is right. Only, he does not go far enough in his indictment. As I read the original work I admire it. I am overwhelmed. I would like to have written it. Clearly, I am envious—envious enough to make it mine at all cost — at the cost of destroying it. Worse, I take pleasure in destroying the work exactly because it means making it mine. And I assuage what guilt I might feel by promising that I will make reparation, that I will labor to restore the destroyed beauty in my language — also, of course, by the knowledge that I do not actually touch the original within its own language.
The destruction is serious. Translating is not pouring wine from one bottle into another. Substance and form cannot be separated easily. (I hope we do not have to go again over the false dichotomy of “les belles infidèles,” which assumes that one could be “faithful” to a poem by rendering ugly or dull what it “says.”) Translating is more like wrenching a soul from its body and luring it into a different one. It means killing. “We grow old through the word. We die of translation,” says Jabès in Retour au Livre.3 His words are not an author’s facetious despair at bad translation, but part of a more serious meditation on time and the word, on the book of flesh. Death, it is true, is more certain than resurrection or transmigration. There is no body ready to receive the bleeding soul. I have to make it, and with less freedom than in the case of the most formal poem on a given subject. I have to shape it with regard to this soul created by somebody else, by a different, though not alien, aesthetic personality.
Let me stay with the analogy to metempsychosis for a moment. It does not hold very far. In translation, the progress of the “soul” is not toward greater perfection. Alas, the new body will never fit altogether. Nor is the goal Nirvana, although Walter Benjamin, arch-Hegelian in spite of himself, envisages the afterlife of the original work as a progress through translation into “a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were,”4 a step farther toward “pure language” stripped of all the characteristics of particular languages. This concept of a “pure language,” of a central relationship between languages through “what they want to express,” is indeed confirmed by the fact that translation is possible at all. But the progress of the work through translation is not toward this abstraction, but, on the contrary, toward another embodiment in a concrete, particular language. Or we might say that the work moves through “pure language” understood as translatability into another concrete embodiment. Here “pure language” would function as a kind of black box like Eugene A. Nida’s “transfer mechanism,” which I will talk about later.
Keep reading at OmniVerse.