SUMS

 Another Vitale poem:

SUMS

One plus one, we say. And think:

one apple plus one apple,

one glass plus one glass.

Always the same things. 

What a change it will be when

one plus one is a puritan 

plus a gamelan, 

a jasmine plus an Arab,

a nun plus a cliff,

a song plus a mask. 

a garrison plus a damsel (again)

one person's hope

plus another's dream. 

The epigraph is "horse and horseman are now two animals" JD García Bacca. 

The reference to garrisons and damsels is to Pablo Neruda's "Arte poético": Entre sueño y espacio, / entre guarniciones y doncellas."    

Sparrow

 Here's another one:

Three absurd sparrows

sing in the fog 

smelling like lemons.

The afternoon is empty 

of the sad human hustle

and bustle. 

Alone, the birdlike glory 

gives meaning, 

against everything, 

to the world.  

Sun (FGL)

Sun!
Who called you
sun?

Nobody would be surprised
(I would say)
seeing in the sky three letters
in place of your face
of gold

Memento (FGL)

When we die
we'll take away
a series of visions
of the sky

(daybreak skies
nocturnal skies)

though they've told me
that dead
the only memory
is summer sky
a black sky
shuddering
in the wind

Canción morena (FGL)

I want to get lost
in the dark landscape
of your hair, María del Carmen

I want to get lost
in your eyes of nobody
playing the keyboard
of your unkissable lips

In your endless embrace
the air would have dark hair
and the breeze would have
the fuzz on your arms!

I want to get lost
in the dark landscape
of your hair, María del Carmen

Another argument for "belletrism"

Here's another argument: a translation of a novel is a novel. A translation of poem, if it is in verse, is a poem. Translated literature, then, is, in fact, "belles lettres." A reader of a novel in translation is reading a novel, and does what a reader of an untranslated novel does: she follows the plot of the story and keeps the characters straight in her head. The spectator at a play in translation does what other theater spectators do. A reader of poetry-in-translation is a poetry reader. Translation is meant for such purposes.

Are translations a separate category of text? Yes. Should a reader know that he is reading a translation. Yes. But translations are written for translation theorists, but for readers. Readers need to feel that the version they are reading has real autonomy.

***

I could still accommodate a few more people in my workshop. It started yesterday but there is still time. The students really hit home runs on the first assignment. Don't you want to be part of this?

Noche oscura (Atencia)

The one who squeezes the night under the sheets once again
denies me as a guest of his everyday love,
and the word--the tenuous whisper of the breath
that barely signifies--with the first lark
weaves the fragile plot of despair:
against himself debates the one who battles by himself.

The most difficult lover, whom I pursue until dawn:
in your void my poem finds its making.

D-

***

That would be a very rough version. Here's a second attempt:

He who bunches up the night in tangled sheets once again
denies me as a guest of his ordinary love,
and the word--a faint whisper of breath
signifying almost nothing--at the first lark
intertwines the fragile weave of despair:
the solitary combatant debates only against himself.

That most difficult lover, whom I chase until dawn:
in your void my poem finds its handicraft.

D

***

Still not very good, is it? Lines two, six, and seven, are very bad. The whole thing lacks any kind of satisfying rhythm. I discovered that "trama" means "weave" as a noun. It is also a plot (conspiracy) a plot (in a story). "Hechura" is the "confection" of a piece of clothing. I came up with "handicraft." I could come up with a C- version with a little more effort. It is lacking precision and musicality. It is not yet a poem. Only a few lines might survive:

and the word--a faint whisper of breath
signifying almost nothing--at the first lark
intertwines the fragile weave of despair

***

The next version would try to evoke some of the resonance some of the words have in English:

"Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate." "Full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing." "Oh what a subtle web we weave..."


He who hoards night under the fold of the sheet once again
denies me as a guest of his habitual love,
and the word--a faint whisper of breath
signifying almost nothing--at the first lark
weaves the fragile web of despair:
he argues only with himself who combats alone.

That most difficult lover, whom I chase until break of day:
in your void my poem finds its handiwork.

D+

A good poem cannot have a hideous first line. tbc

Roberta Quance, a while back, sent me her fine version of María Victoria Atencia's poems. This is her translation of one poem:

The hermits of Saint Jerome

The wounding light of the South, unkind to acanthuses,
comes to a halt as daylight reaches the door.
For an instant I am blinded as I step through the dark;
then the cool order of silence accepts me.
Beneath the ancient stone, of prayerful inscription,
a rumour of ashes quickens at my feet.

Here is my version:

Stretching through the day, the South's piercing light, contrary to the acanthus, halts at the door


I go blind an instant in the dark transit and the order of silence welcomes me with its cold


Beneath the ancient stone, praying in inscriptions, a murmur of ashes heartens with my steps

The original goes like this:

Los jerónimos

Por el día extendido hasta la puerta cesa
la hiriente luz del sur, contraria a los acantos.
Enceguezco un instante en el tránsito oscuro
y el orden del silencio me acoge con su frío.
Bajo la piedra oscura, orante en inscripciones,
un rumor de cenizas alienta con mis pasos.

Melissa Dinverno has spoken of "versioning" in the textual editing of Lorca. The idea is not to present one definitive text, but several, with a less fixed idea of what the text should be. In my first Lorca book I spoke of this in relation to translation. I would rather have more than one translation of a text: that is the advantage of translation: in German we can have only one version of a Rilke poem (unless he left us different versions himself), but in English we can have multiple Rilkes.

Here are some of the things I thought I needed for my translation:

There are places where Quance's version seems unnecessarily wordy. She has light and daylight, and a passive voice "I am blinded." She has "comes to a halt."

Preserve the paradox of "welcomes me with its cold." We think of welcomes as warm, not cold. Keep the parallelism of "con su frío / con mis pasos."

Quance in her introduction talks about the importance of the concept of transience / the transitory in Atencia's poetry. I thought it valuable to translate this concept with a cognate. I also thought the sound of acanthuses is ugly in English, but I wanted to keep the cognate of "contrario."

I thought the fluidity of the lines would be better served by less punctuation, and by three lines rather than six.

I used a present participle because "orante" is a word derived from a Latin particle.

I am not happy with the last line of my translation. Alentar is a transitive verb, but it is not clear who the subject or object is in the Spanish original. I've reproduced that effect, but a reader might think that this is translationese. Quance's line "a rumour of ashes quickens at my feet" is quite beautiful. Alentar means encourage. I looked in a thesaurus and found the verb hearten. Alentar comes from aliento (breath) and I like the fact that hearten derives from heart.

Neither of us is rigid about preserving the number of nouns, since I don't like the sound of acanthuses.

Exercise

Here's an exercise. Take this poem by Frost:

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Now come up with a linguistically rigorous explanation, for each noun, crow, dust, snow, tree, change, mood, day... of why you have either: indefinite article, definite article, no article at all. You can skip my heart and some part. In absence of that, just explain in non-technical terms what is going on. For example, you can't say "the crow" at the beginning, because that assumes the interlocutor knows what you're talking about already, but you can say "the dust" because ... why? This is difficult... You have to say "The way" because that's always followed by some specification. I love you "just the way you look tonight." You can never say "I like a way that you say things..."

Now translate the poem into a language you know well enough that you have an intuitive or technically precise enough knowledge of its use of articles. Maybe it's Chinese and the poem would be crow, me, snow-dust, hemlock, heart... whatever, without any articles at all.

Now translate it back into English, but make it not a Frost-ish poem at all. Use the style of a different poet, one as unlike that one as you dare. It should be recognizable, but not parodic.

Now translate it into your own poetic style. This should be as different from Frost as Frost is from Pound.

I see translators all the time who don't understand that articles work differently in different languages. If you think this is easy then you aren't paying attention.

Golden Rooster

Me

Little golden rooster,
tell me your secret

The Rooster

Lift up with your cry
the tombstone of night

[FGL]

Translation Workshop

I will offer a virtual translation workshop, beginning on the first of April and ending on the final day of that month. (Virtual workshop, not virtual translation.) If you are interested, please send me a note by email. To qualify for this, you must know a language from which to translate into English, well enough in your own judgment, and have a project in mind. I will accept the first 10 people that write me.

I will accept, in payment, the amount you think this is worth to you. Maybe you think it's worth $20, or $200. I will work with you on a few poems and give you readings to read. I'll have a private blog set up for it.

We will cover some prosody, some translation theory, some poetics. If this works out it will be a regular thing.

Some Things I Don't Like

I don't like, in translation, the "domestic residue." That's the idea of putting in some references that only have meaning to the target audience, like a Lorca poem alluding to an American Blues tune.

I don't like translationese: the use of an unidiomatic construction that is the result of the translator reflecting the source language too directly.

I don't like stuff that's "stuffing" or explanatory. Don't say "full of wood" when the original says "of wood."

I don't particularly like archaism.

I don't like added punctuation that wants to clarify but ends up blocking rhythms.

I don't like inappropriate registers, either too high or low.

I don't like anything that makes the translation blander. If there's a pine don't make it "tree."

I don't like enjambments that are gratuitous: having nothing to do with anything in the original.

y así sucesivamente....


There's a lot I don't like that puts me sorely at odds with contemporary translation theories and practices. I think I can articulate why I don't like all this, and justify my own preferences. Some of it is "common sense." The rest is simply a fact about myself: I happen to like limpid purity. It is the same reason I like classic prose style rather than signposting my readers to death.

So my guilty pleasure is beauty itself, I guess. I think that's a word you won't find in all of Lawrence Venuti's translation theory. I give priority to poetics over translation theory, but then I must also say that my poetics is my own. It's pretty much "some don'ts for imagists." You know, direct treatment of the thing, the rhythm of the musical phrase, no "dim lands of peace."

Ethos

What a translation needs to do is not just translate in a way that's semantically correct (that's what translation means, essentially), but to look at the relation between expression and meaning in the original. It is not translating form, but translating a ratio or relationship between two elements.

Two more things about translation

There are two objections I have to certain kinds of translation theory and practice:

1) Very sophisticated translation theory often leads to (or justifies) translation that is at the opposite pole from my own aesthetics. All the emphasis on translation that contains a "domestic residue" and the like, or that transforms the target language in a certain way, all of that ends up producing poetry that is not good poetry. I approach the translation of poetry in a radical way: I think that, without mistranslating in any way, the main criterion should be the aesthetic quality of the translation. So I approach translation through poetics, rather than subordinating poetics to translation theory. Sorry.


2) Secondly, atheoretical translation does the same thing: it justifies questionable translation decisions, but now based on the translator's ad hoc decisions.

Now you will say that of course my aesthetics and poetics are mine alone. They are not compelling for other people. The proof of that is eminent translators translate in ways I find odious, and others accept these translations as valid. Rothenberg, for example, when translating Lorca: if Lorca says "a river of gold" then he will say something like "a river made of gold." Or Lorca's "oro" will be "pure gold." Extra words added to rationalize Lorca; little touches to make him sound cuter; added punctuation that interrupts the flow of the lines; enjambments in a poem that imitates a folk style where enjambments are rare; the destruction of syntactic parallelisms; the use of weaker, more abstract words where Lorca's words are concrete. I could go on and on. I have gone on and on.

It would be cheating to say that this Lorca's poetics as well? Ok, then I will cheat. The original text has an aesthetic integrity. The translation should not only be a good poem in its own right (to cite the cliché) but be a good poem in the same way that the original was good. So a good translation of Quevedo (a different aesthetic from Lorca's) should be verbally witty. Góngora should be baroque, not plain-spoken.

Lorca was a modernist: his best early poetry exemplifies Pound's ideas in "some don'ts for imagists": use no extra words, don't follow the metronome, direct treatment of the object, don't say "dim lands of peace." All that good stuff. Secondly, Lorca follows the best of the anonymous lyric tradition, which derives its aesthetic value from extreme simplicity. No words are wasted there either. There are some childish and kitsch-like things going on there, too, some impurities that might lend themselves to a more varied approach, but not to the degree that would introduce extra words when Lorca is being austere.

Once again, I feel that mine is a minority position. The ungenerous alternative would be to think that those who don't translate as I'd like them to have no talent. I think that they could have talent, but simply don't share my aesthetic preferences.

Go literal first

I've formulated the Hippocratic oath of translators: first, do no harm. (Self-explanatory.)

A second rule might be to try the obvious solution first. The unnecessary embellishment, the explanatory extra word, the more abstract word where concrete word is available (tree instead of elm), the word that's unrelated etymologically to the word your translating (vault for cripta instead of crypt). All this is permitted but not recommended. Try to avoid doing obvious harm to the poem. Is that too much to ask?

By literal I mean something more like close to the letter, not the metaphorical sense of literal, meaning literal meaning. Something close to the original precision of the poem.

I should add that a few of Rothenberg's translations of the Suites are wonderful, almost perfect. Some are ok, but not what I would have done, and some are just not that good.

What I miss is a dedication to Lorca as craftsman, that hard precision.

So I am announcing here for the first time: I will translate Lorca's Suites in its entirety. You heard it here first. Leslie's pointed out to me that JR's translation was 25 years ago. My sense of the passage of time is defective, since I think of the nineties as very recent. Please try to contain your excitement.

The Translation Book

There is a section of my translation book that will talk about melopeia. Basically, prosody meets translation.

Then there is will be a section about logopeia. The idea here, what happens to it in translation. How the prevalence of non-logopedic translation affects our perception of language.

The idea starts with Appiah ("Thick Translation.") He suggests a translation that would useful in the teaching of literature. That is a very basic idea, too basic, in some sense. But once we examine it, we realize that many standard practices of translation are not useful for the teaching of literature. For example, a translation of a very verbal poet like Quevedo or Vallejo that almost completely erases the verbalness, the languageness of the original. Call it what you want.

Even people very much into poetry do not perceive language as language. Logopeia is often a mystery to them.

There are those two sections, then, and the book will be more or less one seamless argument (with myself.) The idea is to see what an academically adequate translation would look like, and what a poetically adequate translation would look like, if we took both academia and poetry seriously enough.

The two ideals (academic and poetic) are not as far away as one might think, although they are not identical either. The first is

--translation useful in the teaching of literature

--translation that works as poetry for the reader of poetry, without any excuses

What makes Vallejo Vallejo

One idea for translation is that the translation should convey "what makes x x." In other words, if a poet has a certain number of distinguishing characteristics, and these are on display in the source text, then these same characteristics should be on play in the translation.

Me moriré en París con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en París —y no me corro—
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos...

So, without even translating this, let's look for some characteristics.

The name of a specific bone (húmeros), where most poets would talk about bones or limbs in general. Vallejo liked very precise scientific names for things.

There's a colloquialism running through the poem, but it's not simply an imitation of how people talk, but a sort of "twisting motion." The reflexive verb of "me corro" for example. It means not, "I run" but "I accelerate." It can also mean ejaculate. "I'm in no hurry to shoot my load." ??

The grammar we taught in school would prescribe "le pegagan / todos sin que él les hiciera nada." He's mixing up the verbal tenses. (The poet already has memory of the future, in the second line.) The syntax is deliberately "roughed up."

There is a linguistic patterning: a use of six reflexive verbs in the quatrains.

The deictic situation, the here and now, is very front-and-center in this poem. The particular kind of staging of the poetic "I."

The rhythms scan, but are jerky. Enjambment is prominent. There are many pauses within a verse. It is a sonnet, but the rhymes are assonantal and irregular: AABB BAAB CCD EDD.

There is neologism and verbal play: "I prose / these verses." Soga is a rope, but also a whip and a noose. There's a verbal parallelism with two redundant noun modifiers: "los días jueves y los huesos húmeros" the Thursday days and the humeri bones.

So those are some features of this poem that make it Vallejo-like. We don't even know this unless we've read other poems by him. A good rule to follow is if there is a figure of diction, like asyndeton in the final line, that the poet has used it not accidentally.

Eshleman gets most of it right. He keeps the roughness but misses a lot of small details:

I will die in Paris, with hard dirty rain [with downpour]
one day I now remember. [why not already? That's the whole point]
I will die in Paris — and I don't run — [difference in meaning with reflexive verb?]
maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

Thurday, because today, Thursday, when I prose
these lines, I have forced my humeri on [by saying "these lines" you miss the prose / verse antithesis. Why not "I prose / this verse"?]
unwillingly and, never like today have I again, [unwillingly for "a la mala": not as direct or foreful]
with all my road, seen myself alone. [missing parallelism between "me he puesto" / "me he vuelto"]

Cesar Vallejo is dead, they beat him [has died; the perfective aspect. Don't you think Vallejo used a particular aspect of the verb deliberately? Also, "they used to beat him"]
everyone, without him doing anything to them;
they hit him hard with a stick and hard

likewise with a rope; witnesses are [noose?]
the Thursdays and the humerus bones, [the Thursday days...]
the loneliness, the rain, the roads...


Is this too picky? There is no such thing, unless you think that what gives x its characteristic xness doesn't matter.

Whitman / Borges

WHEN I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life;
Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;
Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,
I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)

Borges's translation

Cuando leí el libro, la biografía famosa,
Y esto es entonces (dije yo), lo que el escritor llama la vida de un hombre,
¿Y así piensa escribir alguno de mi cuando yo esté muerto?
(Como si alguien pudiera saber algo de mi vida;
yo mismo suelo pensar que sé poco o nada sobre mi vida real.
Sólo unas cuantas señas, unas cuantas borrosas claves e indicaciones
Intento, para mi propia información, resolver aquí.)

Borges says there are two Whitmans: "el 'amistoso y elocuente salvaje' de Leaves of Grass y el pobre literato que lo inventó." [the friendly and eloquent savage of LOG and the meager man of letters who invented him.]

Poetry in Transit

When will the grown-ups come home?
The flesh is tired and I've read all the books,
Fleeing, rushing down--how steady the gait of the mule down the abyss!
And who, if I screamed, could hear me from those angelic
orders? At five o'clock in the afternoon.
At five o'clock on the dot in the afternoon?

The sound of water... Sing, muse, the wrath--
Hypocrite reader, among twenty snowy mountains.
I will go to Santiago de Cuba,
With "Romeo y Julieta,"
with ashes, with self-populating seas,
At five in the afternoon.

From rivers north of intention,
In the middle of the the road of my life,
I will go to Santiago--
Exhausted by talk / of the only happy life.
This hill was always so dear to me
At five in the afternoon.

I never winked back at fireflies,
Drinking with disgust the water of prostitution.
The barbarians are due here today.
You must change your life.
I will go to Santiago!
At five in the afternoon.

Meeting of the Minds

Let us consider, further, the "meeting of the minds" theory of translation.* As I suggested in a post below, a good or great poet translating another good or great poet might lead to a happy synthesis of poetic talent, or a meeting of the poetic minds. So we might welcome a translation by Celan on Dickinson because we are interested in Dickinson, or Celan, or in the meeting between them.

This seems plausible on its face. One idea would be that the poet-translator could produce a remarkable poem in the target language, using his own poetic talent. A second, that the poet-translator has some special insight into the poetic art of Emily herself, and can "translate" that understanding into the German poem he is writing.

The second theory, then, is based on a kind of Bloomian notion that poets have special insight into other poets, even (or especially) when this insight is based on error. We can see this in some literary criticism by literary geniuses, like Beckett on Proust. Beckett's insight is extraordinary, but it might end up telling us more about Beckett than about Proust himself.

Another parallel might the idea that we might want to hear a great performer playing the music of a great composer. We get great music twice over, and we get to also consider what particular aspects of the great music come out in that particular performance, with that added intellectual pleasure of the analysis. This is a richer experience than simply reading the score on the page or listening to an indifferent performance to remind ourselves of how the music goes. This analogy is inexact.

To translate poetry, one must be a poet. In the first place, one able to produce the poetic utterance in the target language. Translation is a decoding, yes, but it is also a re-encoding. Secondly, there must be a meeting of the minds, a relation between two poetics (assuming the two poets never share the exact same poetics).

Defenders of translations undermine translation by being less exigent with the second poem, the translation. People will say, well, "that's difficult to translate so give him / her a break." My position ends up being extreme but based on very sensible reasons as well. In other words, it is perfectly reasonable to say that translations should be good poems in the target language, and almost everyone agrees with that. But if you actually have that expectation with real translations you will come off sounding extreme and intransigeant.

___

*That came out sounding stuffy. Sorry! My prose is off-kilter today.