Outrunning the Bear

There's that old joke about two guys running away from the grizzly bear in the woods. One says, why are we running, there's no way we can outrun this bear! The other guy says, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.

***

So it is. Your book doesn't have to be the perfect book about its subject matter. You don't have to out-Lorca Lorca, just compete with other equally imperfect scholars.

To do that, you just have to see what needs to be done. What is the task that you need to accomplish? What do you need to do to accomplish it? What steps are needed?

I know I'm making it seem easier than it is. The point is that the talent and intelligence in scholarship is in figuring out what needs to be done and how you're going to do it. After that, it's just sitting down to do that.

Knowing what you're talking about

In the shower today I was thinking: I don't know Arabic, have never travelled to the Middle East or North Africa.

I am an American, with a pretty fine-toothed knowledge of American poetry, culture, and jazz.

So when I talk about Lorca's influence in the US, I still miss things if I don't research well enough, or if something simply never comes to my attention.

If I find in 20 minutes on the internet that Lorca is a big deal in modern Arabic poetry, and gather a few references, I pretty much don't know what I'm talking about. Everything comes to me in translation, and even someone with an in-depth knowledge of those milieus could miss a lot, the same way I might in my own milieu.

Jorge Riechmann, the Spanish poet who translates Char, says that you should know the exact way in which Char uses a certain word in order to translate. So "humidité" might have a particular connotation for Char that is particular to him. The language within the language, or idiolect of a poet, Riechmann calls it. A lot of French readers of Char don't probably have that level of intimacy with his language, so it goes deep than "native speaker" knowledge.

I think it is important to simply say: you have to know what you're talking about. These are just examples of that.

***

Where I am going with this is a talk about Celan I have to give in Spain in May. I guess I am going after that "translation as deep reading" theory that I found implicit (and explicit) in the book of translation essays I am reading. I have to start my talk by saying I'm not a Germanist, but that Celan is a poet that can only be approached from a Comparative Literature perspective. I might look a bit at his Rumanian poems.

***

The deep knowledge goes both ways. You have to know the literary language & traditions into which you're translating as well as the literary language and traditions of the source. Just like, to write my books on Lorca that deal with American culture, I have to know both Lorca and American culture.

Goosebumps

I was reading a book by Spanish poet-translators talking about their work, editing by my friend Jordi Doce. I was profoundly moved by their devotion to the poets they translated and toward translation itself. Jorge Riechmann toward René Char, for example. Andrés Sánchez Robayna with Wallace Stevens. Many statements in this book moved me almost to tears or made the hairs on my forearms stand on end. What gives me this response usually is not a great poem by itself, but a moment in which I become conscious once again of the depth and beauty of the poetic tradition itself. I always know this, but having it become so clear to me again is very moving.

It was very humbling to see how these poets saw translation as a deep part of their own art form. I gathered many quotes and observations that I will use somewhere, somehow.

(One of the scholars who contributed to this book (not a translator or poet, afaik, but a scholar) noted that poets who saw the avant-garde as a living tradition translated more than those who saw it as a historical period that had come to an end.)

I remember the first two poems I tried to translate from Spanish when I was 17 or 18: "Mariposa de luz" by Juan Ramón Jiménez and "Casida de la rosa" by Lorca. I'm amazed that I still remember this. I also remember, somewhat earlier, trying to translate William Blake's poem "The Fly" into French and attempting to get the right number of syllables in each line. I couldn't make it work! It's even more amazing that I remember that, since I'm not in French nor a Blake scholar, and I was attempting this in High School. "Petite mouche..."

If I am sometimes critical of translation (and translators, and their translations) it is not for lack of respect. It is more from an excess of respect. A guy on Facebook I don't know objected to my judgment that Robert Bly was a disastrous translator. This is not just my "opinion." I actually know what I'm talking about and could quote you chapter and verse. I've been studying this since 1975 or so, in a serious way.

Themebait

After finishing my conclusion (yeah!) and while I was writing a poem I invented a new word: themebait. This must refer to the gravitational pull (to mix a metaphor) of certain subject matters.

Seminar

My seminar was in a cavernous room, with about 35 students; I was happy to have so many; I asked a question and got several responses simultaneously; the answers reverberated through the room so I couldn't hear anything; I got the room quieted, finally, but the same thing happened with the next question; I stood up on my chair and clapped my hands to get people to be quiet; finally, I thought it was fine for everyone to discuss Lorca loudly with people in their area of the room. Wasn't this the best kind of class participation?

Highbrow Monroe

Aside from a few gardening, travel and cookbooks, and odds and ends like a biography of herself, Marilyn's library had mostly serious literature (novels, plays, poetry) & and intellectually serious essays: Plato & Aristotle, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Wilson, Einstein; some popular science books. I'm gratified by not surprised. Despite worries in the 50s about the spread of middle-brow culture, even the middle-brow literary culture of then seems much more high-brow than our present day's, when some people with PhDs read mostly Young Adult fiction & detective novels. Leaving out the fact that it is Marilyn Monroe's library, and thus belies dumb "dumb blonde" clichés, it provides a glimpse into the cultural history of a particular time and place. Of course, she was married to one of the best-known playwrights of the period.

I hate voice-overs

Just saying. I hate voice-overs because they are insulting to your intelligence. Some voice off-screen telling you what you are seeing and adding superfluous narration and explanation. While at least one film I like, "Goodfellas," uses voice-over, this does not make the film any better than it would be without it.

There are these other gangster films that rip Scorsese's film. Those are doubly worse, because they are voice-overs and they are lame imitations of "Goodfellas." One of these lame imitations, I think, is by Scorsese himself. He should have used it only once.