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My attention was caught by a line in quite another poem; and a few minutes later, with something of the terror which a person must feel who realizes that he has undoubtedly been bitten by a mosquito and that he is in a notoriously malarial climate, I found that I had translated the line! I was breathing hard. . .I had entirely forgotten what I was looking up. . .Fatally in my mind was the sickening conviction that I was in for it, that I had caught the fever, and that neither quinine nor wise counsel could save me.--Edna St. Vincent Millay on translating Les Fleurs du Mal.
Any poet will recognize the impulse Millay describes. Maybe people don't choose to translate, any more than they choose to write. They have to.
Even with fluency in the other language; other translations of the same poem under your nose; two dictionaries at each elbow; and a biography of the poet at your bedside, translating poetry is heavy lifting. You are carrying someone else's idiosyncratic expression-- someone else's baby-- across and through barriers of language, country, often continent, culture, and sometimes century. And the better the poem, the heavier the baby. Poets who translate poets tend to translate the poets they love best-- the ones they want to do best by.
Translators agree that while you've got to have the dictionaries at the elbows, they don't help too much. Word for word doesn't work. Galway Kinnell translated Francois Villon for an edition published in 1965. Seven years later, he did it all over again, and said of his earlier edition, "I often proceeded word by word and phrase by phrase. But one can be impeccably accurate verbally and yet miss the point or blur the tone quite badly. In this new translation I wanted to be "literal" in another sense. I wanted to be more faithful than before to the complexities of the poetry, both to its shades of meaning and its tone."
The translator's aspiration is often described with words like faithful and fidelity. The problem is, faithful to what? Strict fidelity to rhyme compromises meaning; fidelity to sound or rhythm may give short shrift to tone. And the headaches attendant to syllabic and accentual considerations do not bear description. You cannot achieve anything without giving up something else. As Alistair Reid observes in the Translator's Note to Pablo Neruda's Extravagario, "Translation [is] a process of moving closer and closer to the original, yet of never arriving. It is for the reader to cross the page."
Most translators agree that fidelity, paradoxically, requires freedom, and the courage to depart, to omit, to add. Every word has associations and connotations based on usage in slang, fable, religion, nursery rhymes, literature, advertising. Word for word can fail to convey a meaning intended in the mother tongue; or, conversely, it can skew the poem with the unintended baggage of the language seeking to become the adoptive mother.
So the dedicated translator immerses her/himself in more than basic fluency and dictionaries. When Baudelaire took on his soulmate, Edgar Allen Poe, he hung out at a Paris winebar frequented by the servants of English-speaking tourists, to eavesdrop and drink in colloquialisms and nuances of usage.
Some poems cooperate, begrudgingly. Others are recalcitrant, and have to be wrestled from the mother tongue kicking and screaming. Alistair Reid says, "Translation is a mysterious alchemy-- some poems survive it to become poems in another language, but others refuse to live in any language but their own, in which case the translator can manage no better that a reproduction, an effigy of the original."
Kinnell, a fine poet and innovative yet faithful translator, expresses the same notion. What he calls the aural poets, such as Mallarme and Dylan Thomas, lose much in the journey, as the power of their work is so grounded in sound. But with other poets, ". . .generally the very greatest-- one may think of poetry differently, and conceive of it in a way that would explain how readers can be moved almost beyond telling by the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, or The Duino Elegies, even though they read these works in translations that are sometimes splendid but sometimes appallingly clumsy."
BP spoke briefly with Kinnell who offered a tip for novice translators. After you've done your best at taking the poem from the original to the new language, reverse it. Pretend your translation is the original and translate it back; try to do it as if you'd never seen the original. Then compare the original with the twice translated version. The closer they are, the more faithful you've been. Of course, fidelity is the primary but not the only value to be honored.
While writers largely concur on many points, they can disagree wildly on specific translations. To anyone who undertakes the task, or anyone who appreciates the poem in the original, it is not a trivial issue. |
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson were friends and colleagues for twenty-five years. They worked together, partied together, and corresponded extensively, engaging in polite arguments about translation. Then in 1965, Nabokov published his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Wilson--with a lukewarm apology to his friend for whom he felt a "warm affection, sometimes chilled by exasperation"-- wrote a blistering review in the New York Review of Books. It led to a public literary brouhaha, one of the bloodiest of the century. The two former bosom buddies were estranged over something that most people would view as the insignificant matter of how to take words from one place to another. Six years later, having learned that Wilson was ill, Nabokov wrote a detente-initiating letter, but could not resist adding, "Please believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin."
It appears that even if Nabokov had gotten over the grudge, he still had a gripe. More important is that he referred to it as Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin. It is not hubris on Nabokov's part to bill himself as a collaborator. If it reflects pride in his translation, it also reflects a humble acknowledgment that he had not done a perfect job; the baby has changed on the journey; some of Nabokov's blood flowed in the translated Onegin's veins. ("What beauties I lose in some places I give to others which had them not originally."-- Dryden, Preface to The Fables, 1700).
So if translation is such a difficult task, why do people chose to do it? Because you can establish a level of intimacy with the poem and the poet you would never get after 50 readings. Poets who have translated describe the process in physical, almost sexual terms. such as wrestle, grope, penetrate; you have to crawl inside the poem. Keith Bosley, in his introduction to Mallarme; The Poems, quotes a fellow poet translator: "A translation is one language making love to another."
Below is the first stanza of the first poem, "Lethe" in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal. The first translation is by Miss Millay. The second is my translation, then several translations by BP, from imagined imagists.
Viens sur mon coeur, ame cruelle et sourde, Tigre adore, monstre aux airs indolents;
Je veux lontemps plonger mes doigts tremblants
Dans l'eppaisseur de ta criniere lourde
Lethe by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Come to my arms, cruel and sullen thing;
Indolent beast, come to my arms again,
For I would plunge my fingers in your mane
And be a long time unremembering--
Lethe by Jaclyn McKenney
Come lie by me, callous chilly creature.
Beloved predator, you pretend to be lazy.
I want to take my sweet time, combing nerved fingers
Through the heft of your unruleable tangles.
Forget by a Postmodern Minimalist
Cruel and deaf adorable tigress
My fingers tremble in your heavy mane.
River of Forgetfulness by an unknown 19th century English clergyman whose only vice was reading Baudelaire
Embrace my heart, oh unkind beloved;
Thou art as a tigress, at rest, slaked
How I long to caress thy tumbling tresses
Ah, how my unworthy hands do quake!
The River Also Washes by Papa Hemingway
She could be touchy. I asked her to meet me.
She didn't go out much.
She reminded me of the tigress I shot in '39.
I wanted to mount her head as a trophy.
black me out by beat-cool-daddy
say, tiger chick, why are
you so Beat?
you're. . . . . . . .faking your Kharmic peace
i dig
dipping
my
spastic fingers
into the
heavy
blues of
your hair
Blow it Off by Rappin' Rapid and the Boyz
Get your rag ass here; talk to me, girl!
You're a lazy bitch, cheap-- mean besides
Your 'do needs doing. Gonna dis your curls
Take you girl, for a bumpy ride? |
