Translation of Poetry and Poetic Prose

The following sections are included:

• PREFACE

• CONTENTS

• OPENING ADDRESS

In his book published as long ago as 1963, Professor Efim Etkind enumerates what he calls "theoretical problems" of poetic, or maybe better to say, literary translation:

— does the translator participate in his national literary creativity, or does he not?

— what is the strong creative individuality of the translator: is it a blessing, or rather a curse?

— how do philology and poetry, science and art merge in the work of the translator? Is this merge possible?

— is the metre of an original to be kept at any cost, under any circumstances?

— etc…

I agree with you that the questions formulated by Efim Etkind in 1963 are not really theoretical ones. Your own question "Is literary translation possible?" is certainly much more in the nature of a theoretical question. But, if we were to ask questions which might lead us in the direction of a comprehensive theory of literary translation, I think they would have to be something like "What is literary translation?" or "What aspects of human cognition make translation possible?" I shall, if I may, return to the question of theory later…

Let me start with something that everyone knows: Not long ago, I was sitting at my computer, trying to find the last page of my article about female servants in literature at the turn of the century. Outside it was grey and dreary. The page had gone. As I set out to rewrite it I was aware that the weather matched with my subject: the situation of servants was grey and dreary as well around 1900 and there was little to be seen of the 'new woman' proclaimed by philologist Julius Wolf as the symbolic figure of 'Modernism'. Just fragments of what I had written the day before were swimming through my mind. I could feel the rain drop into my lines as I tried to re-translate my own thoughts into my own language. Reading the new passages I realized that they stressed different points and came to different conclusions. Even when I tried to adjust the two texts to each other after, surprisingly, the first one had shown up again, the greyish atmosphere was still present. The following day, almost the same thing happened. This time the page was gone for ever. But meanwhile it was getting brighter, though; for a minute there was even sunshine…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• The translator's impossibility?

• The view from the ivory tower

• Sholde wee archaize?

• But is it art?

• References

The following sections are included:

• The cultural levelling

• The stylistic levelling

• Idea-levelling

Françoise Wuilmart's essay eloquently argues that normalization is at the very heart of the problem of all literary translation; and no one, surely, would seriously disagree with her. On matters of principle there is little I can or need add to her well-illustrated attack on 'levelling' and her demonstration of how and why 'the translator-neutralizer' sins — culturally, stylistically and ideologically — in reducing the 'polysemic' text of a literary discourse to a 'normal' piece of writing. Nor, although I find it a daunting counsel of perfection, would I quarrel with her model of the ideal translator as one who has a natural empathy — an affinity of temperament and sensibility — with the writer s/he is translating, and who escapes the threat of normalization by being, at one and the same time, faithful to the culture and language of the source text and creative within the target language. So my response to her paper is of the nature of a 'yes, and…', with an occasional 'yes, but…'…

Traduttore traditore — that is a well-known Italian phrase, more or less identifying the translator with a traitor. It sounds like a harsh judgement, but many translators (and sometimes even good translators) have indeed demonstrated some treacherous or at least faithless tendencies. Françoise Wuilmart provides us with an excellent example of how one of the greatest French Romantic poets, Gérard de Nerval, interpreted a poem by Heinrich Heine in a rather unsatisfying way: "his translation is the result of a radical levelling process close to treason" And this "treason", we might add, is one of the worst sins that could occur in literary translation: the normalization and domestication of the original text, the careful elimination of its linguistic idiosyncrasies; in this case its neutralization into a strangely languid and, as it were, powerless French idiom…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Normalization and faithfulness

• Normalisation as a threat

• Faithfulness — a distant grail?

• Normalization as change

• Constant renewal

• References

Twenty-seven years ago this spring, when I was first setting up shop as a translator of Swedish poetry, I was moved to do so not from knowledge or love of my subject — those came later — but from a lifelong fascination with and delight in prosody. My qualifications for the work were otherwise pretty unimpressive. I'd spent a year and a half as American Lektor in the English Department at the University of Lund, and could speak and read the language after a fashion. But virtually everything I really knew about Swedish literature I'd learned years before — from the Astrid Lindgren shelf in the public library and, later, from a charming phonograph record (bought in Madison, Wisconsin in 1967, and still played occasionally) featuring Alice Babs and her daughter, Titti, singing the songs of Alice Tegnér…

Every language has formal properties — morphological and phonological. And these properties have semantic, as well as syntactic, significance; they convey meaning as well as sense.

The art form that foregrounds the formal properties of language is the one we call poetry (an observation, by the way, that is not meant to serve as a definition, since this is certainly not all that poetry entails and since certain prose works do the same). In foregrounding language's formal properties, poetry addresses itself primarily to semantic (rather than to syntactic) areas; the work will make sense but it will also call to our attention the fact that not only the sense but the making of that sense are meaningful. It is not just a sentiment, idea, or piece of information that is to be conveyed; it is also the palpable experience, indeed, the palpability of experience: its realness and the reality of its being meaningful to us…

What Judith Moffet is saying in her paper is, basically, that when translating poetry one should try to be as true as possible to the original, even — or especially — when this original is composed according to a strict prosodic pattern, including meter and rhyme. For some people — such as Robert Bly — this approach appears disastrous and leads to "massacre" To me it has always been a great challenge, and if I believed that the endeavour would inevitably result in a "massacre", it wouldn't be worth trying…

The problem or question, of course, is whether or not imitation of the source text's metre and rhyme in the target language is a sine quanon. Clearly mimetic formal translation is not the only option available to the translator. Other possibilities are as listed below — I shall avail myself of the categories supplied by the late James S Holmes (doyen of translation studies) in his exemplary essay, "Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse Form" (Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, Rodopi, 1988), which is still the most lucid treatment of this matter (see also, in the same book, his essays: "Poem and Metapoem", "the Cross-Temporal Factor in Verse Translation" and "On Matching and Making Maps: From a Translator's Notebook")…

A bilingual student of mine recently made the following observation. During a period of study in England, she had become an admirer of Milan Kundera, reading his work in English. Later, back in Italy, she had picked up an early novel of his, in Italian this time, that she didn't know. She remarked: 'It was only when I was three quarters of the way through that I realized it was the same novel I had read first of all in England. I knew the plot was the same of course, but the book was so completely, so utterly different I was convinced it couldn't be the one I had already read'…

The following sections are included:

• Is Translation Possible?

• The Author as His Own Translator

• Does Translation Mean a Levelling?

• Concluding Remarks

• References

It is my great pleasure to discuss Mr Parks's report at the Nobel Symposium of the Swedish Academy. Sweden is a starting point of an ancient business and cultural route from North to South, from Europe to Asia: the route from Norsemen to Greeks. The Crimea is at the other European end of this route. The route forms a kind of arch, a rainbow promising that the flood of confrontation will give way to cross-cultural harmony…

Participants, including the present writer, experienced a certain difficulty in getting to grips with the topic. The description stated: "This session will focus on the experience of poets writing in more than one language, and on the status of a poem that is extant in several languages". The discussion, it should be said, did not confine itself to the experience of poets…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Translation of Poetry

• Translation of Poetic Prose

• References

The following sections are included:

• Genji monogatari and poetic prose

• Modern poetic prose: Higuchi Ichiyo

• Poetry in the prose of Oe Kenzaburo

• In lieu of a conclusion

Professor Lindberg-Wada begins her paper with the question: "Does translation from non-Indo-European languages present special difficulties, and, if so, what are they?" The term "non-Indo-European" covers an enormous range of languages and language families with greatly differing grammatical structures, typological traits, phonological properties and prosodic features. Gunilla Lindberg-Wada has wisely chosen to limit her discussion to problems related to translation from Japanese into English and Swedish…

The topic of Session 5 was quite simply whether translation from non-Indo-European languages presented any special difficulties and if so, what these were. The source languages were Chinese and Japanese and the target languages were Swedish, German, English and French, as represented by the speaker Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, and the discussants Margaret Mitsutani, and Göran Malmqvist…

Pound told a translator to translate what he meant, not what he said. Neruda wanted his poems to be improved by the translator, and was disappointed that they weren't. Valéry said that he loved himself in Spanish. Borges asked his English translator to turn every polysyllable into a monosyllable, so that he could escape the mellifluousness of the Latinate and enter his ideal world of hard Anglo-Saxon consonants. Goethe preferred Nerval's Goethe to his own…

It is with great interest and many smiles of recognition that I have studied Eliot Weinberger's essay on The Role of the Author in Translation. Since Mr Weinberger combines the two roles of author and translator, he has of course an exceptional background and a wealth of experience on which to found his views…

Eliot Weinberger's paper is based on a distinction between living and dead authors. This is very workable. Both have advantages and drawbacks. Dead authors will leave you in peace and not interfere with your work — but also sometimes leave you alone with their heirs, something many translators are afraid of, because they are often more demanding as regards both financial matters and textual. Living writers can be a nuisance, if they don't understand that (as I once heard Vargas Llosa say on TV): "You must leave your translator a certain amount of freedom." But they are generally understandable and easy to deal with. Most of them know how difficult it is to introduce the work of a new artist into a foreign country — and that consequently the translator needs help — and they are well aware of what I call the relativity of language: they know that they would not write exactly in the same way if they wrote English, French or German instead of Swedish. The best proof of this seems to be the Scandinavian writer Karen Blixen. As she wrote (rewrote, as a matter of fact, it is hardly a case of translation) her works both in Danish and English, one can judge very easily and see the differences. They are at times rather important as regards her style but, as I once translated some of her early and late short stories that I had in both Danish and English, I was puzzled at finding that she changes not only personal names (which is already quite surprising) but even numbers, which is properly amazing, and I had to read the text over and over and ask a few persons around me if they really read the same thing as I did, before finally admitting that a writer can go to that extent in betraying herself. No translator would ever commit such "sins", all heirs can be confident on that point. And it has been a lesson I never forgot. I am now certain that the language we use partly dictates our thoughts and I know that I don't think quite the same way in Swedish as in French. Even more so since I had (just once) the very fruitful experience of being translated into Swedish and realised then what a different book I would have produced had I written directly in that language (although I had been very careful to write a short foreword in which I gave my translator the somewhat unusual advance permission to be "as unfaithful as he could"). Further, help from the writer is very important when translating from Swedish (or the other Scandinavian languages) because they are very "open" and the part of individual creativity in it is great — so great that I have at times the feeling that half of the words I meet are not to be found in the dictionary…

As an amateur in the field of translation, I was honoured by the Academy's invitation to chair the sessions on "The Role of the Author" and "Several Translations of the Same Text" and to report on the discussions…

The following sections are included:

• References

• Appendix A: King James Version and Its Antecedents

• Appendix B: Waley's and Seidensticker's Genji

• Appendix C: Waley's and Pound's Shijing

• Appendix D: Stephen Mitchell's Tao Te Ching and Its Antecedents

The preponderant majority of analyses of translation usually highlight the failures and the frustrations of translators in matching the literary and stylistic quality of the original. "Poetry," as Robert Frost has been quoted as saying, "is what gets lost in translation." It is axiomatic to believe that translations can never approach the original, much less exceed them. Yet, familiar as the misconception is, one wonders at the paradigm that assumes that the job of translation is to duplicate one work in another language. Indeed, given the uniqueness of outstanding works, it is a surprise that exact clones in another language would even beconsidered possible, much less normative. Underlying this "original as perfection" / "translation as imperfection" notion is an assumption, popular especially with the New Critics of half a century ago, that an original work has its own inviolable itegrity and its uncontested inevitability. However, despite our admiration for outstanding works of literature, and out tendency to deify their authors and to enshrine their compositions, we should not forget that we are dealign not only with the intractabilities of language, but also with the genius and the versatility of langualge. Translation is literary creation of a special kind: its difficulties — unlike those involved in "writer'block" — are not those of the blank page, the horrific challenge to creation from the void, but those of prompted challenge, palpable objectives embodied in what the author has already achieved. In one sense, the literary creation involved in translation is both easier and more difficult that the literary creation of original composition. Translation does not afford the freedom of original composition, which makes it more cofining; but that very restriction provides a focus, a point of concentration, that often prompts a more efficient imagination. In the first case, the objective is often obscure, and — tantalizingly — manifest only at the end; in the second case, the objective is all too annoyingly present, and declared at the beginning…

Eugene Eoyang's provocative and stimulating papers focus on two distinctive yet mutually conversant dimensions of translation: the déjà lu, which he perceives to govern the hierarchy between recurrence/imitation, influence and plagiarism, and the creative potential of enhancement of the original that translation can at all times, though arguably, achieve. Both dimensions entail a mediation, something (other existing texts, as well as potential new ones) comes between the original and the translation, ensuring that their relationship is neither direct nor confidently reliable. Borrowing, changing, improving, enhancing blur the edges of what translation actually carries over — confirming that we are in the presence of a specular act of creation, where the issue of originality remains crucial…

From the point of view of the contemporary author battling to survive as a "poet" (in the larger sense), and as a viable economic entity in the face of chill winds blowing from the ever-increasing cynicism of international publishing, many of this symposium's discussions, though both enlightening and fascinating, unavoidably leave the impression of highly cultured mind games played among a privileged few…

What this session made clear again and again was the essentially dialogic nature of translation and of literary activity in general. In fact, when it came to reporting on the substance of what had been said, I had recourse to a poem (in translation) by Miroslav Holub which is itself a dialogue called "Teacher". This turns very nimbly upon the question of authority and priority and all the problems inherent in what Professor Eugene Eoyang described as "the verbatim repetition of a text"…

In 1812, Marshal Ney, one of Napoleon's most outstanding generals, received the title of 'le prince de la Moskowa'. La Moskowa is the river 'Moskva-reka'. It is also the French name of the great battle called in Russian Borodino; the Russians were sure that they had won, the French that it was a French victory. Napoleon wrote to his wife Marie-Louise: 'Ma bonne amie, je t'écris sur le champ de bataille de Borodino. J'ai battu hier les Russes…' At the same time the Russian general Kutuzov wrote to his wife: 'Je me porte bien, mon amie, et je ne suis pas battu: J'ai gagné la bataille.' How can Ney's title be translated? Knyaz' Moskovskiy? (The Prince of Moscow). Knyaz' Borodinskiy? (The Prince of Borodino). Neither is acceptable…

The following sections are included:

• NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS