Art Beck

THE IMPERTINENT DUET:
TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#3: FINDING YET ANOTHER WAY TO SAY WHAT CAN’T BE SAID

The American Literary Translators Association is a loosely knit, unique organization where academics and professional linguists interact with an eclectic mix of creative writers and poets. (A number of its members wear all the above hats.) A perennial topic at annual conferences is the question of translating poetic form. What follows is adapted from my notes for a 2003 panel talk on translating form in poetry. “Reading papers” is strictly forbidden at ALTA panels, and hopefully this piece retains some of the conversational dynamic of an ALTA conference.

Let me preface by saying that I plan to talk about some specific Rilke poems—some of which I translated in “free-form” in the late ’70s. And re-translated more formally in the last several years. But before getting specific, I’d like to talk about what I think are some of the general questions inherent in translating form into similar form. Some of these have to do with something as basic as positing a definition of poetry.

I don’t know if my experience is similar to yours, but for years I happily wrote poetry without giving much of a thought to poetics. It wasn’t until I started translating that questions of theory began to get insistent.

Until then, I have to confess I never asked myself what constituted a poem. But when you take on the task of translating someone else’s poem in someone else’s language into a poem in your language—you do have to ask yourself—just what is a poem?

I began translating poetry in the early ’70s—a time when hardly anyone thought of writing in anything but free verse. This made defining a poem harder than, say, in the 19th or early 20th century when end line rhyme schemes dominated. Then a poem either rhymed or—it wasn’t a poem.

Along these lines, a 19th century American translator of Horace, William Peterfield Trent wrote:

When the translator makes up his mind to attempt a close approximation to the Horatian meter, it would seem that he should eschew the use of rhyme as likely to operate against that effect of likeness to the original which he is striving to secure. But, since the use of rhyme in lyric poetry appears … to be essential at present if the English version is to be acceptable as poetry, this close approximation can be desirable in a few special cases, only.

From the 18th through the 19th century, Horace was almost universally cast in strictly rhymed translations. Of course, this kind of thing grates today. Horace wrote in formal meters, but rhyme was only an incidental embellishment in his poetry. Why artificially impose a rhyme scheme that isn’t there? But can’t the same objection be made to ignoring a rhyme scheme in the original?

What Trent said is also good to keep in mind if anyone is inclined to question why the modernists felt the need for liberation from rhyme schemes. But, now we’re liberated and we face the other side of the coin.

There’s a 1948 entry in the Greek Nobelist George Seferis’ (mid 20th century) diary that contrasts formal and informal ages and implicitly points up one of the problems inherent when an “in-formalist” tries to mimic a formalist. To quote Seferis:

In Byzantine art everything is traditional, predetermined by tradition … It is a “god-given” art … it issues from the “Sacred Scarf,” the icons are miraculous because they are god-given; its basis is imitation. And yet, in spite of what people say, it has lived, with intermittent reflowering, for so many centuries. In this art the excellent artist excels by a minute deviation from the traditional …  The ultimate evil of the Byzantines is ossification, the ultimate evil for us is dissolution.

In other words, in formal periods the craft may lie in the constraints—but the art is always a jailbreak. The in-formalist trying to imitate the formalist needs to remember that breaking into jail isn’t very exciting.

Of course, informal poetry, as Seferis says, has its own danger—dissolution. The danger of becoming mere “words on paper.” For me, one working definition of a poem—formal or informal—is: an arrangement of words that has reached the point of becoming something that can’t be said in any other way—the point where language talks back to you.

But this is of course hopefully the case with the poem you’re translating. So how do you find another way of saying what can’t be said any other way?

I’m going to offer the opinion that one way you can’t do it is simply by imitation. From the time Robert Lowell used Imitations as a title for his collection of loose translations, I’ve always disliked calling translations “imitations.” And I think Lowell’s translations are the opposite of what I perceive as “imitation.” For me, imitation is akin to a slavish art forgery.

Conversely, I think a successful poetic translation reaches into the original, and draws as much directly from the landscape that’s portrayed as from the original poem’s portrayal. The object of the translation is, ideally, not the “portrait,” but the subject of the portrait: A new poem that attempts to tap the same source the original poem tapped.

That, of course, is what Lowell was doing and, while his caveat not to expect a literal translation was appropriate, I wish he had used a different word. I’d have preferred “performance.”

What I think is essential to a “performance” is—for want of a better word—what I characterize as the “internalization” process. The long, slow taking in of the original until you reach a point where you’re no longer working with the energy of words in the source language, but in your own. So that like a fledging swimmer plucked from a pool and tossed into a river, the poem and its images either sink or swim on its own in English. (Or whatever language you’re writing in.)

The implication with any performance is that the performer won’t be invisible. But that presence may be more or less noticeable. For example, you can’t listen to John Lewis’ adaptations of Bach without being aware that Lewis is a jazz pianist having a dialogue with Bach. What he’s playing isn’t quite jazz, isn’t quite Bach—but there’s a distinct sense that Bach might tap his foot and smile. Glenn Gould is a pure classical pianist, but are his renditions of the Goldberg Variations—music originally written for a plucked keyboard and reborn with all the dynamic nuances of the pianoforte and Gould’s rich ear—any more “pure Bach” than John Lewis’ syncopated renditions?

Which brings us back to breaking in and out of jail. What happens with Gould and Lewis—with any performer worth listening to—is that they’re enraptured—arrested if you will—by the piece they’re performing. They’re already in jail and free to plot their break.

ORPHEUS

In poetry, the “jailbreak” is the difference between writing into a form or out of a form. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that Rilke whipped out the 55 Sonnets to Orpheus in what he claimed was a two week space in 1922. It’s obvious he wasn’t writing into but out of the form—the way Charlie Parker might roll out chorus after chorus of the blues. I use Parker as an example, rather than someone more traditional, say Jimmy Rushing, because in the Orpheus sequence I think Rilke stood the traditional sonnet on its head.

The sonnet form often takes on an almost geometric progression leading to a “closed conclusion.” The Sonnets to Orpheus, and even some earlier Rilke sonnets such as Archaic Torso, tend instead to take flight and end with harmonic ambiguities and open statements. It’s worth noting, I think, that when Rilke returned to the sonnet form for this late in life sequence, he said he wanted an “open,” “conjugated” sonnet, i.e. something both akin to and yet not a traditional sonnet.

One of the problems in translating these poems formally is that I don’t think we have any precedent for them in the traditional closed iambic logic of the English sonnet. They almost require a new sense of form in English. I’ve always felt that Rilke stands with one foot in the 19th and century with the other firmly planted in 21st. So for me, the main danger in translating these essentially modern—maybe even still emergent—poems is that in chasing form we may risk pushing back into the 19th century rather than to following to where the poem is pulling us.

But conversely, how can you ignore the question of form in a poem like #5 Volume 1 of the Sonnets to Orpheus. My translation is still in an early draft, but far enough along I think to demonstrate a point.

As an aside, one reason I’m tentative about the quality of my translation attempt is that Rilke’s poem has such big historic echoes—Shakespeare’s sonnet #55: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme … ”

And Horace’s Ode #30, book 3, which Shakespeare probably drew on for his sonnet #55. The Horace ode opens (in Burton Raffel’s translation): “The monument I’ve made for myself will outlast/ brass, reaches higher than Egyptian/ kings and their pyramids … ”

Rilke, in his sonnet, focuses not on his own mastery, but on the prototypical mythic poet, Orpheus, who serves throughout the sequence as a persona for Rilke, the poet and man. And distinct from its predecessors, Rilke’s sonnet speaks to the vulnerability as well as durability of poetry. It begins:

Errichtet keinen Denkstein. Laßt die Rose
nur jedes Jahr zu seinen Gunsten blühn.
Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose
in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn …

Don’t erect memorials of stone. Just let the rose
bloom every spring as his token. Because this
too is Orpheus—another of his metamorphoses
into one thing or another. Why stress ourselves

deciphering all his names? If there’s singing,
now and forever, it’s Orpheus as he comes and goes.
Isn’t it enough that every so often he lingers
a few days with the rose petals in the bowl?

So much of him has to wither so you can know.
That frightens him too, as he fades. But just as his
word goes beyond what’s here, what’s now—

he’s already there: alone where you can’t be.
The bars of the lyre strings don’t cramp his
fingers. Even transgressing he obeys.

A poem, I think, not only about the coexistence of life and death in poetry, but, incidentally, about form and the jailbreak of art.

SOME SAMPLES—FREE VS. “COPY” FORM

Below are samples of my old and more recent translations of two of the Sonnets to Orpheus. The first versions date from a volume I published in the early ’80s and obviously the translations aren’t in sonnet form.

Let me tell you a little of what I was trying to do. At the time Rilke wasn’t the icon in America he’s since become. The only translations I was aware of were Mrs. Norton’s and Mac Intyre’s and a few others dating from the ’30s and ’40s. But this was also the time that David Young’s iconoclastic translations of the Duino Elegies started coming out in Field. They bowled me over. Young recast the Elegies in William Carlos William-like triplets that seemed to energize and focus the rambling poems. This was a poet I didn’t recognize in Norton or Mac Intyre. So I started playing with translating Rilke on my own—not the Elegies but the New Poems and Orpheus sonnets. Above all. I wanted to hang onto that “21st century leg.” Not only, sad to say, did I not have the slightest interest in the sonnet form, I couldn’t have written one if I wanted to. I was a child of my time.

I still like some of those old translations although I wouldn’t do them this way again. I imagine some of you may like them, and others will grit your teeth. But—I think—for reasons other than formal vs. informal. It’s interesting that the editor of the chapbook series these first appeared in was a budding formalist and I got surprisingly warm feedback on my 1983 volume from other dedicated formalists. But for a lot of people, these won’t sound like the Rilke they’ve come to love. It’s the voice not the form—and that voice was intentional on my part.

I’m also including my recent, more “formalist” translations. The new versions were prompted by a challenge from someone I respected, but the re-translation went far beyond a re-casting as “faux sonnets.” In revisiting the Sonnets to Orpheus, I found that in my young enthusiasm I’d often left half the poem on the table. But what didn’t change much, I think, was the voice—for me Rilke’s “voice” seems to live in the harmonic, half elusive images—not especially the rhyme or meter. Rather in a more subtle underlying music that resonates with what might be said as much as with what’s said.

I should note that I use the term faux-sonnet because none of these use full rhyme. Some of it may be a continued lack of skill on my part, but over time I’ve also come to feel that English has come from being the language of a small island to being a planetary language. There’s no longer any one correct way to speak it. It’s too dynamic and fluid. And for me at least, it likes assonance and corresponding words and hints of rhyme. When I find myself using full rhyme, it’s usually in a comic mode.

For readers accustomed to a “different” Rilke voice, I can only offer that as with any performance, the choices are personal and will vary between performers. I think it’s wonderful that America is rich enough to have dozens of versions of the Sonnets to Orpheus—the Germans can only have one. But, of course, they’ve kept the best for themselves.

—from Rattle e.8, Spring 2010 (PDF)

___________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). His chapbook, Summer with all its Clothes Off, is reviewed by Ellaraine Lockie  in Rattle E-Reviews. His article on Rilke, And Yet Another Archaic Torso– Why? can be accessed in the Australian online journal Jacket at: www.jacketmagazine.com

Art Beck

A DESULTORY LEAP: DOES WORLD LITERATURE EXIST
AND HOW DOES IT GET THAT WAY? (Part 2)

Note: Part 1 of this essay appeared on October 9th and can be read here.

IV. Colonialism, language and love.

For the sake of argument, let’s presume that poetry mutates and germinates as it migrates. And that the translator’s ability to create literature in the target culture is at least equally important as foreign language literacy. Even so there’s still an implicit question Parks didn’t get into that seems worth exploring: Why or how would anyone get interested in translating from a language in which they’re not fluent? Is it a kind of cultural colonialism, akin, say, to mining diamonds?

Exploitation is an obvious factor, but poetry translators aren’t crass commercialists. Rather, I think they’re trying to transplant a heartbeat, to scoop a living fish from one stream and set it free in another.

Might the imperfectly schooled translator’s motivation be better described as “inspired opportunism”? Consider the proverb about lovers: “One kisses, the other offers the cheek.”  The unworthy bumpkin translator receives the barest lip of a kiss on the cheek and wants to explore?

There are, of course, translators who translate out of a deep regard for the source language and its literature. Francophiles, Russophiles, Sinophiles, etc. etc. They’re like lovers who study and absorb the object of their affections. Lovers who labor to make themselves worthy. Because the “one who kisses” is a devotee, sensitive to the nuances of the beloved. Are they the ideal translators? Sometimes it works like heaven on earth. But, alas,  “the one who kisses” is just as often spurned and even more often pained. Conversely in life, that careless ignoramus, who “offers the cheek,” is always rewarded and never suffers.

Until of course, as sometimes happens to the most brazen of cheek-offerers, the trap is quietly sprung and they’re astonished at how quickly they fall and dangle in love. If “world literature” indeed exists, it’s a kind of fertility–so love should be no surprise.

V: Exophonic authors: the opposite of dark, the most attentive kiss

Let’s wander out of the dark for awhile into the ultimate brilliance of fluency: where translation turns inside out and one goes beyond translating a language to translating oneself. Most everyone who’s ever tried to learn a foreign language experiences a quantum degree of difficulty between reading and comprehending and trying to speak, much less write, in that language.

Even so, throughout history, untold millions, maybe billions or more, of immigrants have become fluent in new languages in the process of making new lives. The fluency of immigrants comes in degrees, of course. My grandparents on both sides were minimally educated Poles who emigrated in the teens of the last century. They spoke well enough to get along–work, shop, listen to the radio and, later, watch television in English. But they read only Polish newspapers and their ability to write in English probably never exceeded the most rudimentary post card message.

That’s a far cry from the not-unusual immigrant in the corporate or business world, whose English skills, accented or not, may be several cuts above that of the native born clerical staff. But over the ages, how many of this great migrating horde have written classic literature in their new language? Out of the billions or trillions, are we talking in the thousands? In any case, some number infinitely more infinitesimal than 1%. If World Literature exists anywhere, it’s certainly present here, at the extremes of cosmopolitanism.

There’s a February, 2011, article in the Guardian by Dan Vyleta (who’s described as a “Czech-German-English-Canadian” novelist) listing Vyleta’s pick for the top ten “exophonic” books. For me there’s something too academically trendy about the term “exophonic,” but, lacking a better word, it will have to do. Among Vyleta’s authors is Joseph Conrad who Vyleta characterize as “the patron saint of exophonic authors.”  And, of course, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Brodsky (a poet in Russian and essaysist in English). And the non-Eastern Europeans Ha Jin and Samuel Beckett.

Beckett switched to writing primarily in French the second half of his life, to the extent that when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969, the New York Times noted: “It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Beckett should be regarded as an Irish or a French winner.” The subsequent official award presentation speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow doesn’t much clarify the matter:

Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum, and the result will be either a paradox or an Irishman. If it is an Irishman, you will get the paradox into the bargain. Even the Nobel Prize in Literature is sometimes divided. Paradoxically, this has happened in 1969, a single award being addressed to one man, two languages and a third nation, itself divided…

VI. The divided dynamics of transformation.

One exophonic writer who Vyleta misses is Apuleius whose 2^nd century novel Asinus Aureas (“The Golden Ass,” originally entitled “Metamorphoses”) remains an often-translated classic. The rambling story of Lucius who was magically turned into a jackass and after many adventures restored to humanity is still read as much for pleasure as scholarship today. And the last lines of its short prologue seem particularly apropos to this discussion: Iam haec equidem ipsa vocis immutatio desultoriae scientiae stil quem accessimus respondet. Fabulam Graqceanicam incipimus. Lector intende: laetaberis.

Roughly in English:  “But then, for my part, I’d respond that this desultory interchange of language is precisely the literary discipline required. It’s a Greek story we’re commencing: Reader, pay attention. You’ll be glad.”

There’s a practical  translation challenge in these lines that I think is very difficult to solve–an essential image that didn’t come across in my translation above. An image perhaps central to the exophone experience and to that ephemeral concept, “world literature.”

To put the lines in context, we need to back up into the Prologue. The first-person narrator describes himself as a non-native Latin speaker, formally educated in Greece, who later came to practice law in the Roman courts and taught himself workplace Latin with great difficulty. The speaker’s path somewhat resembles Apuleius’s.

You’d expect Apuleius–who before going to Greece grew up as a child in Roman North Africa–to have been exposed to Latin well before he arrived in Rome to practice law. However, Jack Lindsay, a late-Latin scholar and translator of the work, notes in his 1932 introduction that Punic and Greek were also widely spoken in the North African provinces. So no one really knows what language or dialect prevailed in Apuleius’s childhood home and neighborhood. And the first-person narrator who introduces himself in the Prologue might well be taken as somewhat of a proxy for Apuleius, just as the protagonist’s later conversion to the Isis cult is identified with Apuleius’ religious beliefs.

In the Prologue, the narrator apologizes and begs indulgence for mistakes he may make as a foreigner attempting literary Latin. But then he realizes that since it’s a Greek story he’s telling, his Greek accent is just the thing. It’s as if Andre Codrescu declared himself uniquely qualified to write a new version of Dracula.

What’s hard to bring across, however, is the imagery Apuleius uses to describe the switch in languages: vocis immutatio desutloriae.  “Desultory” in English derives from the Latin “desultor.” But it’s forgotten its roots. The English word means to sort of idly wander back and forth. The Latin root denotes an acrobat in the circus (the horse races), a trick rider who vaults back and forth between horses and chariots.

If that image could be conveyed, all kinds of things might come to life. The galloping power of two languages (and their underlying cultures). The discipline and grace of the artist as acrobat–and outsider. The “scientiae” of Greek studied in the academy and Latin learned in the school of hard knocks. The serious play and risk of the work at hand. The ringmaster announcing a spectacle well worth the reader’s attention.

Apuleius knew full well he was a master of Latin. He may have been educated in Greece, but he chose to write in Latin. The enrichment of Latin with Greek was nothing new. Some 200 years earlier, Horace staked his claim to fame on being “the first to bring Greek meter into Latin verse.” Similarly, Apuleius, re-inventing the Greek novel in Latin was, like Horace, creating not an imitation but a new Latin genre.

It’s easier to describe than translate the image. But a description loses the compressed energy of the Latin. The following is no more than a stab. “But then I tell myself that like an acrobat leaping between horses, this is just the accent and experience the story needs. It is, after all, a Greek tale we’re commencing. Reader, pay attention: you’ll be glad.”

VII: A Polish Novelist?And so, no Nobel.

On December 3, 2009 a friend forwarded Garrison Keilor’s Writer’s Almanac  post for the day. It included this note:

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote: “It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence–that which makes its truth, its meaning–its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream–alone.” That’s the Polish writer Joseph Conrad…born in Berdichev, Ukraine (1857). By the time Joseph was twelve, both his parents had died of tuberculosis.

So he went to live with an uncle, got a good education, and then went off to sea with the French merchant navy at age 17, and a few years later, joined the British (mercantile) marines…

I found myself crankily emailing back:

John–I was glad you noted Conrad’s birthday. A chance to think about him again and realize what a giant he was. The anti-Kipling, etc. I think he pretty well defines the underside of colonialism and also – in Nostromo, for instance – sniffs out the fascism lurking in the young century. A hundred years later, he doesn’t seem a bit dated. His world still inhabits ours. But sometimes I find that Garrison Keillor–in his literati pose–annoys me no end. … “The Polish writer, Joseph Conrad…” ??  Someone who’d never heard of Conrad (and we probably both know more than a few people who haven’t) would never realize reading Keillor that Conrad wrote in English. Conrad is about as much of a “Polish writer” as Tom Kryss and I are Polish poets.

I should first of all apologize to Garrison Keillor. Browsing The Writer’s Almanac, I find he’s done other posts on Conrad that both more than clarify the issue and very intelligently comment on Conrad’s work as a master of English prose. Apart from wondering if the “Polish writer” soubriquet wasn’t the work of an intern that slipped past, my response was also driven by the memory of a Conrad biography I’d read some years earlier. Again, I find myself unable to properly cite because I’ve forgotten the name of the work, but stuck in my memory is the biographer’s description of Conrad’s quiet elation at hearing he was shortlisted for the 1907 Nobel Prize which was going to be awarded to a British writer. And his later dejection at the whisper that he’d been ultimately rejected in favor of Kipling because the committee had doubts about whether a foreigner writing in English could be an “English author.”

The official 1907 Nobel presentation included the following:

In the cycle entitled The Seven Seas (1896) Kipling reveals himself as an imperialist, a citizen of a world-wide empire. He has undoubtedly done more than any other writer of pure literature to draw tighter the bonds of union between England and her colonies.

In 1899, Conrad published Heart of Darkness in a three part magazine serial. The novella is a still widely read meditation on the mad underside of colonialism. Early on in the work, Conrad’s recurring alter-ego narrator,  Charlie Marlow, offers: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

In 1899, Kipling published a poem dedicated to “The United States and the Philippine Islands.”  Posterity, obviously, hasn’t viewed Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” kindly. But it’s striking that the 1907 Nobel committee used the term “imperialist” as a compliment not the pejorative it’s become. Reading the Nobel presentation, you get the sense that “The White Man’s Burden” was a reflection of the prevailing culture, and Heart of Darkness an outlier. If Conrad was, indeed, short listed, it would be instructive to read the minority argument.

Although it’s not all that simple. Kipling’s literary scope far exceeded his imperialist jingoism. And Conrad has been notably criticized by the acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, who found reading Heart of Darkness to be a painfully racist experience. Achebe’s view has, of course, in turn been criticized. But when I read his response to Heart of Darkness, I find myself empathizing–not that Conrad’s novel is racist, but that its portrayal of Africa is sharply Eurocentric. From what other perspective was Conrad qualified to write? It’s Kurtz, who’s “gone native” and lives among the severed heads of his conquests stuck on poles, who’s the subject of the story. Not the Congolese natives who cherish Kurtz like a demi-god, a “simple people” with a predeliction for cannibalism, who quail at the screech of the steamboat whistle.

From the standpoint of the colonized, this may be a technical quibble. Most of Conrad’s Europeans are real, the Congo is real, but his “natives” today seem no less symbolic than Kurtz, whose darkness we also never really fathom. Like a poet groping for metaphors among the savage myths of antiquity, he appropriates their alienness. Is the dark pulse of his narrative any less vital for this?

And after reading Conrad’s 1912 memoir A Personal Record,  I recently found myself more in sympathy with someone else: Garrison Keillor (or perhaps the intern?) who dubbed Conrad a “Polish writer.”  A Personal Record opens with some literary philosophizing, but it’s not a writing career memoir. From a narrative standpoint, it begins and effectively ends at the point in Conrad’s life when he decides he can become a novelist. Like most of Conrad’s narratives, it circles awhile – before bringing us to his childhood in Eastern Europe and tales of his grandparents, granduncles, parents and other relatives. All “citizens” of a country that hadn’t officially existed for generations before Conrad’s birth. Orphaned at an early age, Conrad’s ancestral and personal early memories seem tangled; interwoven with clotted pain and futility. And the unquestioned need to look elsewhere for any sense of home.

Presumably, as with every human, Conrad’s first years imposed their indelible imprint on his psyche. But with Conrad it’s as if that inescapable inner-child could never risk expression in the language of his broken childhood. Or even in French, a language he was reportedly fluent in since boyhood. He needed workplace, seafaring English, and, ultimately, England to, finally in his 30s, begin to speak from the heart.

James Joyce could only fully flower as an Irish writer in self imposed exile, but he still wrote in his childhood tongue. Conrad seems to have been born an exile. In a 1919 “author’s note” to a re-issued edition of A Personal Record, he again revisits the alienation of his childhood, the death of his parents and “the fact of my not writing in my native language.” Something he himself acknowledges as “freakish.”  After some discussion, he concludes that it wasn’t he who “adopted” English, but that the English language adopted him. And that: “All I can claim after all those years of devoted practice, with the accumulated anguish of its doubts, imperfections and falterings in my heart, is the right to be believed when I say that if I had not written in English, I would not have written at all.”

I believe him. And I also agree with him that the phenomenon is “too mysterious to explain…as impossible as trying to explain love at first sight.” Implicit in Conrad’s description is a sense that language is elusively, but no less powerfully, alive. And that culture is born to travel. Conrad has described what English brought to him. But what did Conrad bring to English? An outsider’s loner sensibility, a refreshment, a slightly strange lilt, the energy of a man suddenly changed by falling in love with a tongue entirely new to him–all those things that translation brings? And like a translated poem coming alive in a new language, his energy seems stirred more by some still-forming future than either English or Polish tradition. The kind of art that wants to go where it’s going, not where it’s been.

Conrad and Apuleius weren’t translators per se, but what they have to say about language dynamics seems to me to bear out my–wholly personal–inclination to dismiss the arguments both for and against “domestication” and “foreignization.” I think the two exophones would consider both to be false choices. Apuleius galloped his Greek tale into Rome in masterful workaday Latin. And Conrad’s rich English–Captain Charlie Marlow’s everyday language painstakingly acquired like a sea bag full of gold–became the ransom that finally released his choked-back, childhood voice.

VIII: Imagine a deep freeze and whirled peas.

But enough theorizing, let’s get to the supernatural and dead poets.  And in case you’re getting tired of all this wandering among the novelists, I’ll play the part of  the  typical poet unwilling to relinquish the stage at a reading and beg your indulgence for just one last “world literature” segment, beginning with yet another novelist.

I find that I most enjoy the prolific Japanese maestro, Haruki Murakami’s intricate novels in audiobook format. There’s something about his quiet wormholes and the hyper-reality of his plot twists in endlessly wandering stories like The Wind Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore that makes them perfect aural scenery for walks in the Pacific summer fog. His latest, 1Q84 is no exception.

The title has no English equivalent and poses an immediate translation issue. The reference is to 1984, both Orwell’s 1984 and also the year in which Murakami’s book is set. The letter “Q” in Japanese is a sometimes slangily substituted homonym for the number “9.” Something similar might be  “2” for “to” in English. Murakami’s story takes place, not in a dystopian or nostalgic 1984, but an alternate “1Q84” in which time’s shifted onto another track to a world with two moons and strange happenings.

Its heroine is a hip, 30-ish fitness trainer with the unusual surname, “Aomame.” A name the translated text tells us is

…written with exactly the same characters as the word for “green peas” and pronounced with the same four syllables. Ah-oh-mah-meh… Telling people her name was always a bother. As soon as the name left her lips, the other person looked puzzled or confused. “Miss Aomame?” “Yes, just like ‘green peas’” … Some people would get the name of the plant wrong and call her “Edamame” or “Soromame,” whereupon she would gently correct them. “No, I’m not soybeans or fava beans, just green peas…”

I don’t know if any of the above was expanded in translation for non-Japanese readers, but I do know that Murakami, who lived in the United States for a number of  years and who’s translated many American writers into Japanese, is not above playing language games. Miss Aomame, besides being an environmentally conscious young woman, is also a professional assassin in the service of social causes. Not that Greenpeace employs assassins, but if the novel’s title is a Japanese pun, might Murakami be also punning a bit with “Miss Greenpeas” for his American readers? Something similar began to stir at the back of my mind when I reached chapter 25, near the end of the book. A chapter entitled: “Cold or not, God is Present.”

The chapter setting is a vacant Tokyo apartment where a sleazy private investigator, Ushikawa, has been photographing the building’s tenants in the hope they’ll lead him to Aomame. She’s in hiding after assassinating “Leader,”  the charismatic head of a sinister new-age religious cult, at the behest of “The Dowager,” a powerful woman with a safe house for battered women. Leader’s offense was the ritual abuse of pre-pubescent girls in a sort of sacrfifice intended to invoke the “little people.” Engimatic beings who tunnel their way from an alternate reality and who first appear out of the mouth of a dead goat, then later from the mouths of the brutalized children. Before dying, Leader told Aomame that in ancient times the “little people” may have been perceived as the gods.  Now, in 1Q84, they resemble Goldilocks’s dwarves.

The alien indifference of the spirit world will be a familiar theme to Murakami readers. In The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Lieutenant Mamiya is thrown into a dried up well by Mongolian soldiers and left to die. The sun passing over once a day at noon suddenly envelops him in “overwhelming light” that, despite his misery, imparts “a marvelous sense of oneoness… of unity…. the true meaning of life resided in that light…” That celestial light reconciled Mamiya to his death, but was also a harbinger of his miraculous survival.

An uncertain blessing, because Mamiya, the only one of his unit who managed to return to Japan, lived out his long postwar life in menial work, without family, lovers or friends, regretting the miracle in the well. “… at a time when I should have died, I had been unable to die. It was not that I would not die: I could not die. Do you understand what I am saying? Whatever heavenly grace I may have enjoyed until that moment was lost forever.”

In Kafka on the Shore, “Johnnie Walker,” a paranormal character come to life from the whiskey label, systematically kills cats in order to make a flute from their tortured souls. Murakami’s mystical imagery can be reminiscent of Conrad’s Charlie Marlow  equating cannibal drums with English church bells in Heart of Darkness. And to stretch the metaphor, Ushikawa–who’s working for Leader’s unholy sect–finds himself suddenly a sort of missionary simmering in the pot.

Tamaru, The Dowager’s security chief, has crept up on Ushikawa in his sleeping bag on the floor of the empty apartment and trussed and blindfolded him before he can stir. He’s left like that for a long time, unable to move, helplessly urinating down his legs. Then Tamaru begins to calmly and professionally interrogate him. Ushikawa is cagey. He is, after all, a former lawyer come down in the world. But it was slippery dealing that brought him down, and Tamaru is up to the task. He slips a plastic freezer bag over Ushikawa’s head, tapes it close under his chin and sends him for a walk on “the bottom the sea.”

Plastic bag suffocation, as described from Ushikawa’s perspective, is quite painful, a sort of dry waterboarding. Tamaru methodically finds out everything he needs to know and in the process becomes somewhat empathetic to his unfortunate captive. Ushikawa, he learns, isn’t a member of the sect or aware of its secret rituals. He’s just an independent contractor trying to eke out a living after a long run of bad luck.

Tamaru understands tough times. He’s a WWII displaced Korean orphan smuggled into Japan as a child from Manchuria. Unwanted anywhere, he lived by his wits in the shadows until The Dowager took him in. He’s also a quirkily erudite auto-didact who, for no particular character or plot reason, happens to be gay. Deadly and intelligent, but not unfeeling, Tamaru might be Jean Genet turned enforcer rather than poet. He sincerely ponders the human thing to do with Ushikawa. He’d like to let him live, but the risk is high and the situation murky. Finally, he asks Ushikawa: “By the way, have you ever heard of Carl Jung?”  Ushikawa “instinctively frowns” under his blindfold and responds “Carl Jung the psychologist?” “Exactly.”

They converse a bit about Jung who Ushikawa has no real interest in. Tamaru leisurely describes Jung’s lakeside villa near Zurich and, then, the stone tower Jung constructed with his own hands at Bollingen and how it grew from its simple conception.  “As time went on, he found it necessary to build partititions and divisions…and a second floor… He created paintings on the wall. These were suggestive of the development and split in individual consciousness. The whole house functioned as sort of a three-dimensional mandala. It took him twelve years. For Jungian researchers, it’s …extremely intriguing. Have you heard of this before?”

Ushikawa, of course, hadn’t. Tamaru goes on to say that “rumor has it …that at the entrance ….is a stone into which Jung carved some words with his own hand. Cold or Not, God is Present. That’s what he carved into the stone himslf.”

After repeating the phrase he asks Ushikawa “Do you know what this means?” Ushikawa doesn’t, and Tamaru confesses…

I’m not sure myself…there’s some kind of deep allusion…something difficult to interpret…I don’t know why but I’ve been drawn to these words for a long time…the difficulty in understanding makes it all the more profound. I don’t know much about God. I was raised in a Catholic orphanage and had some awful experiences there so I don’t have a good impression of God. And it was always cold there, even in the summer… If there is a God, I can’t say he treated me very well. Despite all that, those words of Jung’s quietly sunk deep into the folds of my soul. Sometimes I close my eyes and repeat them, over and over, and they make me strangely calm. “Cold or Not, God is Present.” Sorry, but could you say that out loud?

Ushikawa does; first “in a weak voice,” and again at Tamaru’s request, more distinctly. Tamaru whispers “I’m sorry about this” and slips the plastic bag over Ushikawa’s head again. Ushikawa’s last living thought as he suffocates is of the scroungy family dog he never liked and who never liked him, in better times before his divorce.

IX: What the hell does it mean, in Japanese or English or somewhere in between?

In a later chapter, the “little people” climb out of Ushikawa’s dead open mouth “over the greenish mossy tongue, clambering over the dirty, irregular teeth.” But that’s just a morbid detail I can’t resist throwing in.  The actual purpose of all my meandering is the enigmatic phrase “Cold or not, God is Present.”  Listening to the audiobook, I kept wondering: Did Jung really say, or rather carve, that? And if so: like Tamaru and Ushikawa, I wondered–what the hell does it mean?

My first thought was whether there might be some disconnect between the original (was it in German?) phrase, and the Japanese translation. The phrase was vaguely familiar. There was a time when I avidly read Jung , why couldn’t I remember it? With the help of Google, it didn’t take long to find that Jung’s phrase was actually in Latin. Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit. A rather well known phrase to any serious Jungian. It’s carved , not in the Bollingen tower, but over the  entrance to his main Zurich home. And also, on his tombstone.

The Latin words can be variously rendered, but a very common translation of Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit is “Called or not, God is present.” A slight mis-translation as it turns out, but we’ll get to that in a bit. My immediate response was that, of course, Murakami is punning and intentionally misquoting. The substitution  of “cold” for “called” is just what the episode needed, and the confusion is well within character for the eclectically self educated Tamaru. But, if so, is Murakami punning in Japanese as well as English? And if so, how serendipitous that the American translator could find such an apt equivalent?

I decided to query the American Literary Translators Association members at the ALTALK chat group. Surely, someone would know Japanese well enough to shed light on the question of what the pun was in Japanese. But there doesn’t seem to be one! Professor Juliet Winters Carpenter, who teaches in a Japanese college researched Murakami’s original text and noted it reads: Tsumetakutemo, tumetakunakutemo, kami wa iru. Which straightforwardly translates to “Cold or not, God is present.”

Conversely, she notes, “called or not” in Japanese would be either: Yondemo, yobanakutemo . Or yobaretemo, yobarenakutemo. As Juliet reports :

There is no play of words comparable to the one in English. You have to suspect Murakami wrote the line in Japanese based on his knowledge of the English quote (also a translation, of course). It would take a mighty astute reader to penetrate all those layers and find it!

But if ALTALK  chat-groupers are anything they’re astute. And curious. It was at this point that Jim Kates, of  Zephyr Press, a venerable publisher of  poetry in translation, noted that the English “God is present” is itself somewhat of a misquote of deus aderit.  Properly, the phrase is either “God will be present” or “the god will be present,”  depending on whether or not you infer a mono or poly theistic context. In any case, the saying didn’t originate with Jung and the group began to research its source. (And at this point, I should mention that Jim Kates is himself at work on an essay on this exchange. So some of what follows may or may not appear plagiarized, but is actually simultaneous reportage.)

X: From Thuycidides to Erasmus, to Jung, to Murakami with a detour through Horace

“Cold or not cold” vs. “Called or not” seems to be language-play in the work of an quirkily erudite Japanese author whose novels are set in Japan, but who draws from world culture and who’s been an international best seller almost from the beginning. It’s easy to imagine Murakami, say in his Princeton or Tufts years, hearing the pun at some waggish faculty gathering. Or it may be original English wordplay on Murakami’s part. Given the detail and length of the chapter’s discussion of Jung, the least likely explanation is that the “mistranslation” was unintentional.

For Jung, as for Ushikawa, the deus in question was also not particularly a solace. In 1960, he wrote to his mentee Aniela Jaffe:

It says: yes, the god will be on the spot, but in what form and to what purpose? I have put the inscription there to remind my patients and myself: Timor dei initium sapiente  (The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom). Here another…road begins, not the approach to “Christianity” but to God himself and this seems to be the ultimate question.

So Jung’s divinity isn’t anthropomorphic–or even necessarily compassionate, except on its own enigmatic terms. Jung found the phrase in Erasmus’s Adagia, a 16^th century compilation of old Latin sayings  he acquired in an antique 1563 edition. In the letter, he acknowledged Jaffe’s citation of the earliest known origin of the phrase. There the pertinent god is Apollo. As Jaffe noted: “It is the answer the Delphic Oracle gave the Lacedemonians when they were planning a war against Athens.”

In our ALTALK thread, it was Jim Kates who located the phrase in Thuycidides history of the Peloponesian War. It was also Jim who researched Thuycidides’ original Greek and noted that the repetitiveness of the Latin isn’t present in the Greek. Thuycidides uses two different words where the Latin uses only vocatus. Perhaps, it’s this repetition that preserves it as a Latin, rather than Greek adage. The repetition of vocatus imparts a certain irony that stresses divinity has it’s own agenda, invoked or uninvoked.

And presuming the old adage is more or less accurately noted in Erasmus, Murakami wasn’t the first to bend it. In the 1^st century b.c.e., Horace used a variant of vocatus atque non vocatus… as the final image of his Ode #XVIII, Book II. Horace’s ode is a meditation on the vanity of wealthy pride; the misery of impoverishment–and the divine power of death. It begins chattily, as is Horace’s wont:

Non ebur neque aureum
mea renidet in domo lacunar
non trabes Hymettiae
premunt columnas ultima recisas
Africa…

 

Neither ivory nor inlaid gold
glisten from the ceiling of my home,
no Greek marble beams
rest on columns quarried in farthest
Africa…

Reading Horace’s poem, we don’t need Charlie Marlow to remind us that the Romans, too, were colonialists. In the poem, Horace doesn’t particularly begrudge the rich their wealth, but knows he’s not one of them. No long lost relative is going to leave him a palatial villa; enterprising noblewomen won’t come flirting, full of hope. Still, he’s content in his self-respect and his “blessed” little Sabine farm. While acknowledging that his modest contentment relies on the protection of friends in power. And, of course, the forbearance of the gods.

Horace’s poem is addressed, not directly to the reader but to a powerful acquaintance, vaguely a neighbor, obsessed by greed and ostentation.

…truditor dies die,
novaeque pergunt interire lunae,

tu secanda marmore
locas sub ipsum funus et sepulcri
immemor struis domos,
marisque Bais obstrepentis urges…

 

…tomorrow drives out yesterday.
new moons wax and die,

and you, on the verge
of the sepulcher, quarry
marble for your beach house
on the crowded coast…

This wealth don’t exist in a vacuum. In his greed, Horace’s addressee, tears down the boundary markers of his farm and evicts his client-tenants. In the C.E. Bennett, Loeb Library trot: “Man and wife are driven forth bearing in their arms their household gods and ragged children.” This is how the rich get richer.

It’s in the next lines that we graduate from humble household gods to the divinity invoked by Horace’s vocatus.  In Thuycidides, the god was Apollo, for Jung, The Creator. For Horace–Orcus. Originally a god of the underworld and the dead, similar to Hades or Pluto. But by Horace’s time–death and the underworld personified. As much a dark force and process as a god. But no less a divinity for the abstraction. The Loeb prose translation proceeds:

And yet no hall more certainly awaits the wealthy lord than greedy Orcus’ destined bourne. Why strive for more and more? For all alike doth earth unlock her bosom–for the poor man and the prince’s sons.

For Horace, Orcus is implacable, the great leveler. His uncorruptible attendant, Charon, has never been bribed, even by “crafty Prometheus,” to ferry anyone back.  And then Horace ends the poem with another personification: the image of Tantalus, not only greedy and avaricious in myth, but the founder of the great overweening house of Atreus. (The “he” in the loose translation below is Orcus.)

…hic superbum
Tantalum atque Tantali
genus coercet, hic levare functum
pauperem laboribus
vocatus atque non vocatus audit.

 ….He traps the proud and
all their arrogant descendants.
He senses the impoverished
praying for release from their toil.
Called or not called, he hears.

Cold or not, called or uncalled, invoked or uninvoked. Ushikawa down on his luck. The tenant farmers with their shivering kids and helpless good-luck statues. The anxious Spartans and the anxiety doctor, Jung. All pondering an enigmatic divinity. From Greek to Latin, through Rotterdam and Switzerland, to English to Japanese over two millenia “World literature” just won’t stay put. What does it all mean? Tamaru says it well:

…there’s some kind of deep allusion…something difficult to interpret… I don’t know why but I’ve been drawn to these words for a long time…the difficulty in understanding makes it all the more profound.

The phrase began with the Delphic Oracle after all, where the Pythia utters revelations that belong to everyone and no one, in a dark, sinuous tongue.

__________

Art Beck was a regular contributor to Rattle e-issues with a continuing series of essays on translating poetry. He has published several collections of poetry and poetry translations, most recently Luxorius, Opera Omnia or a Duet for Sitar and Trombone, published by Otis College, Seismicity Editions. His poetry and essays have appeared in a wide range of literary journals including Alaska Quarterly, Artful Dodge, OR, Sequoia, Translation Review and in anthologies such as Heyday Books’ California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present and Painted Bride Quarterly’s 20 year retrospective.

Art Beck

AN ESSENTIAL WILDNESS: DOES WORLD LITERATURE EXIST
AND HOW DOES IT GET THAT WAY? (Part 1)

I: A visionary myopia, or how bilingual do you need to be to translate poetry?

Late last year, Tim Parks posted a provocative essay entitled “Translating in the Dark” on The New York Review of Books blog. It can be accessed here.

Parks, a regular NYRB contributor, is a British novelist, translator and essayist who’s lived and taught at the university level in Italy for some time. Beyond being fluent in Italian, he seems to be more than a bit of an Italophile. I’m not quite sure if his article draws any final conclusion, which makes it all the more fertile. But his thrust is to challenge the fairly well-accepted convention that (with the help of various resources) poetry can be successfully translated without a thorough grounding in the source language and culture–so long as the translator is a good enough poet.  Or, as a quote in the article from the British poet Jamie McKendrick puts it: “The translator’s knowledge of language is more important than their knowledge of languages.”

Parks opens by quoting last year’s poetry Nobelist, Tomas Tranströmer: “We must believe in poetry translation if we want to believe in world literature.” And Parks gives due credit to all the poets, bi-lingually challenged or not, who’ve attempted to contribute to literature by translating. But Parks wonders if it’s all that easy, and over the course of the essay, he almost seems to question whether such a thing as a “world literature” can or should exist. As Parks puts it:

I have no quarrel with the aspiration, or all the intriguing translation/imitation processes it encourages. My sole objection would be that it is unwise to lose sight of the reality that cultures are immensely complex and different and that this belief in World Literature could actually create a situation where we become more parochial and bound in our own culture, bringing other work into it in a process of mere assimilation and deluding ourselves that, because it sounds attractive in our own language, we are close to the foreign experience.

This statement, perhaps unintentionally, seems to echo an ongoing “domestication vs. foreignization” debate among translation theorists. “Domesticated” translated texts ideally read as if they were originally written in the new language. By artfully presenting the illusion of clarity rather than a smudged window, the translator brings you an interesting visitor who’s learned to speak your language well.

Proponents of “foreignization,” conversely, advocate subordinating the target language to the unique otherness of the translated culture. Rather than straining for equivalent images and idioms that can distort as much as clarify, the “foreignizing” translator takes you on a trip abroad. If clarity is possible, that’s great, but the illusion of transparency is a falsifying mirror.

Parks seems to frame that debate when he goes on to quote Tranströmer again: “I perceived, during the first enthusiastic poetry years, all poetry as Swedish. Eliot, Trakl, Éluard—they were all Swedish writers, as they appeared in priceless, imperfect, translations…”

No one would quarrel with Parks’ general argument that a deeper knowledge of the source language can only improve a translation, and I find myself agreeing with him insofar as prose translation (at which Parks excels). But I’m not so sure about lyric poetry where I find I’m more in sympathy with McKendrick. My quibbles are the practical concerns of a practicing poetry translator, wondering whether “imperfection” may not be the unavoidable price of translating poetry. Whether accuracy, as opposed, say, to resonance, should even be the primary goal. An awful lot of what passes as translated poetry is prosaic, vapid, and published only because of the reputation of the original. But I’d argue that the deficiency of these renderings isn’t usually their accuracy. Rather, it’s a lack of creative vitality.

I’m guessing Parks would disagree. He’s particularly dismissive of Dante’s Inferno, a 1998 collection edited by Daniel Halpern of various renditions and imitations of Dante by 20 contemporary English language poets as diverse as Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, W.S. Merwin, Carolyn Forche, etc.  For Parks:

The result is inevitably extremely uneven as in each case we feel the Italian poet’s voice being dragged this way and that according to each translator’s assumptions of what he might or might not have sounded like. Sometimes it is Heaney’s Inferno, sometimes it is Carolyn Forche’s, sometimes it is W.S. Merwin’s but it is never Dante’s.

These kind of exercises will, of course, not be to everyone’s taste and results are bound to be mixed. However, I think Parks is critical of Halperin’s project, not for what it is–essentially a response to Dante from within another time and culture. But for what it’s not: a serious attempt to replicate Dante.

As an alternative to the creative re-renderings in Halpern’s Inferno, Parks offers Robert and Jean Hollanders’ 2002  “unrhymed verse”  “reworking” of John Sinclair’s 1939 prose translation as a “serious approximation and a fine read.” Fair enough. The three translators are Dante scholars with a deep respect for the original and this is the kind of version that should merit the respect of anyone who wants to go beyond just being entertained.

But, insofar as bringing us “close to the foreign experience,” a serious reader might also bear in mind that Dante died in 1321, roughly a couple of generations before Chaucer. The Hollanders’ translation is presented in mannered, but contemporary English. Perhaps Italian has developed less dynamically than English, but Dante’s Italian isn’t modern Italian and from the start any Dante translator has to decide which Dante to bring over: The antique Dante that a modern Italian reader encounters; a Dante who speaks a modern tongue; or some combination.

And is there any technique that might bring us anywhere even close to what must have been the almost revolutionary experience of the 14^th century reader discovering the birth of a suddenly eloquent language in Dante’s vernacular? These are translation issues that the light of scholarship and linguistics can’t solve. I’d argue that the only responses lie in creativity.

In the back of my mind, there’s some vague, still forming, stretched metaphor of a large immigrant family where some of the children assimilate and others remain faithfully in the barrio. If translations are emigrating children, how fertile has The Divine Comedy been these many generations later? And how can you expect all those great, great, great grandkids to remain home, still making the sign of the cross?

Parks also doesn’t address what, to me, seems a core question: whether poetry translation involves an essential added step akin to the elusive but real difference between poetry and prose. The question comes to mind because there are times his meditation almost abuts the Robert Frost “poetry is what gets lost in translation” bromide. Parks, not un-similarly, quotes Celan: “Poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language.”

But why is it only in poetry translation, not prose, that the tradition of foreign language challenged translators is respectable, even honored? Is this just a quirk, or are there reasons that have as much to do with the nature of poetry as with the vagaries of translators?

Many commentators thoughtfully discuss the difficulties of translating prose across cultures.  But it’s usually only when discussing poetry that “difficult” sometimes segues to “uncaptureable.”  Is there some correlation worth exploring here?  There’s a lot of crossover and both are equally “literature,”  but I wonder if beyond their many commonalities, the translation of, at least shorter lyric, poems doesn’t involve different practicalities than, say, translating novels or stories.

II: Reverberation and Re-Creation, Poetry at Play

Translation involves the interaction of both reading and writing skills in various admixture. At the writing extreme, we can find poets interested primarily in writing their own poem, using the foreign language original only as a touchstone. Yeats’ great poem which begins “When you are old and grey and full of sleep/ And nodding by the fire, take down this book…” is really a variation on a famous 16^th century French sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard. Its opening,  Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,/Assise auprès du feu… might be rendered: “When you are very old at evening, by candlelight beside the fire…”

The Ronsard poem is as iconic as Yeats’ is, but would anyone seriously wish Yeats had stuck to Rostand’s text and forewent what amounts to a rich ancestral conversation, a “continuation” rather than translation of Ronsard. Yeats doesn’t pretend to be translating and makes no reference to Ronsard.  Is it translation? Yes; no; maybe? Would Yeats’ poem have existed without Ronsard’s? And of course this comes down to a matter of intent. Or, rather, the degree one might value the translator’s or appropriator’s intent versus the intent of the original poet. Still,  if poetry in translation aspires to rise to the level of poetry, it has to do so in the target not the source language.  In a sense, Yeats begins by exploring Ronsard like a bat in a treasure cave, but then discovers a larger poem echoing in himself.

Among practicing poets, there’s an often-noted dynamic: A successful poem achieves poetry only at the point that it imposes its own sudden intent on whatever intent the poet began with. Let’s posit that this spark is what can’t help but be “lost in translation.” And can only be re-captured by a similar spontaneous combustion in the target language.  If you buy into this, poetic license is not only a privilege, but the essence of a poem.  And the la belle infidele mot, which implicitly wonders whether a translation has to choose between beauty and fidelity, becomes the obverse of Celan’s “fatal uniqueness of language.” Even if for some theorists, the translated poem should ideally retain a foreign accent, it’s an accent in the new, not the old language. This is at least one argument for “dark translation”:  Skill follows temperament. There just aren’t that many good poet-scholars. No matter how formal or mannered on the surface, poetry cultivates an essential wildness.

III. Crutches,  Night Vision and Germination

Implicit in Jamie McKendrick’s observation, which values language skill over “knowledge of languages,” is the acknowledgement that there are many available compensations. A poet with limited foreign language fluency can access dictionaries, trots, other translations and commentaries. The practice of consultation or collaboration with linguistic scholars or native speakers is common. In some cases, the translator can correspond with living authors. Taking this a step further, the University of Iowa has an International Writing Program that sponsors visiting foreign authors who collaborate with graduate writing students in translating their work, sometimes for publication.

Last fall there was a long American Literary Translators ATALK chat group thread triggered by Parks’ essay. In the course of it, I asked Russell Valentino, who edits The Iowa Review and has some exposure to these workshops, if the collaborative authors get fussy about “mutations” in the poetry translation process. He responded:

Some are quite willing to allow their English works to become something quite different from their “originals.” And sometimes they go back and change things in their originals as a result of being translated in this way, which puts their texts under a kind of scrutiny that they may not have ever enjoyed before.

So a linguistics-challenged translator-poet can enlist a lot of help. But there are really no compensations for poetic weaknesses. There are many examples of literature being created by good writers translating (often with even suspect help) from languages they weren’t fluent in. There are no examples of literature created by inept writers.

Still, Parks’ essay raises a valid question. When translated poetry rises to that indefinable but recognizable level of “literature,” is it “world literature”? Or simply literature in the new language? For me–and it’s only my personal temperament talking–does it matter? If the translated poem achieves poetry, something’s come alive and I’m not going to complain just because that life is new.

Browsing an old journal entry, I found I’d noted two quotes from George Seferis, another poetry Nobelist, with an indication to myself that they were from different periods of his life. I’d like to be able to cite their sources, but maybe it’s more fitting for the direction of this piece just to pull them out of the air and hope they’re accurate. “All art/poetry is blind.” And “No poem is ever alone.” Those statements, taken together, might as well be comments on the organic nature of translated poetry. Rather than “translating dark,” maybe the issue is whether the translated poem, similar to the original poem, requires a leap in the dark.

Why not accept that when poems move as poems between languages they don’t/can’t replicate; but rather mutate and germinate? And if so, it’s not clarity but fertility that’s at stake. Tranströmer’s youthful reading of Eliot, Trakl, Eluard etc. as Swedish poets seems, after all, to have had the effect of inspiring a great new Swedish poet.

To revisit the 16^th century, Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an English masterpiece. But its rhymed couplet scheme and earthy Anglo-Saxon energy present a stark contrast to Ovid’s 1^st century sophisticate’s subtle Latin voice. Ovid, it might be argued, was writing, if not at the end, at least at the peak of an era. Golding, conversely, wrote at the fountainhead.  And he created an English rather than Latinate work that seemed to insistently captivate the greatest English poet of his age.

Golding’s Ovid is difficult to read now, its language and accent as olde as its quirky aesthetic. But scratch Shakespeare almost anywhere, from Romeo and Juliet to The Tempest and you’ll find Golding’s Ovid speaking to you. Most well educated Elizabethans could read Latin; a literal replication would have served little purpose beyond a trot, similar to those in the Loeb Classical Library. Golding was a skilled Latinist among many other Latinists, but those skills were secondary to the elan–the poetry–of his personal re-creation. It was Golding’s command of English, not Latin, that enriched Renaissance English.

Thinking about the Iowa collaborative translation program and Golding, it occurs that it would be nice if translators were able to similarly interact with dead poets. So, maybe it’s time for me to interject that like most of the essays in this series, this one will soon start to wander. And my plan in “part two” is to ultimately wander to a place somewhere supernaturally close to a dead poet interaction.

Note: Click here to read part 2 of this essay.

 __________

Art Beck was a regular contributor to Rattle e-issues with a continuing series of essays on translating poetry. He has published several collections of poetry and poetry translations, most recently Luxorius, Opera Omnia or a Duet for Sitar and Trombone, published by Otis College, Seismicity Editions. His poetry and essays have appeared in a wide range of literary journals including Alaska Quarterly, Artful Dodge, OR, Sequoia, Translation Review and in anthologies such as Heyday Books’ California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present and Painted Bride Quarterly’s 20 year retrospective.

Art Beck

THE IMPERTINENT DUET::
TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#2: ODI ET AMO – HATE AND LOVE AND THE POET’S SOUP

I.

For those who’d rather avoid reading a treatise on the Latin classics—relax. That’s not where this is going, at least not where I intend it to go. This is going to be an exploration of echoes, rather than antiquity. But that said, let’s start with Catullus. And with a two-line poem of Catullus that, as much as it’s poetry, could as well be graffiti on an ancient wall. His “carmen (song) 85” written in the 1st century BC.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior.

This is a much translated poem, but also a “much adapted” piece, both in poetry and music, as it resonates down the years. It’s a love poem of sorts, but also a poem that sticks in the throat of Catullus’ love poems. The two lines combine complex emotions with a simplicity of expression—and that very simplicity, I think, makes it more difficult to directly translate its poetry out of the Latin. Because of this, odi et amo tends to migrate into as many adaptations and variations as translations.

Before even approaching a translation of this poem, maybe it’s helpful to talk a little about Catullus. Saint Jerome, compiling his chronological tables some 400 years later, notes Catullus’ birth in 87 BC and later, notes that “Catullus died in Rome at the age of thirty” in 57 BC. (And why does it seem more than ironic that the name of the great ascetic scholar should be forever linked to Catullus this way?)

Modern scholarship tends to use the dates 84 BC to 54 BC. Still making Catullus thirty at his death. He traveled in high Roman circles, was acquainted with Julius Caesar, and was a friend of Cicero. Readers of this piece are probably either going to already know an awful lot about him, or not enough. I don’t have the qualifications to say much that’s meaningful to the former, and there’s not enough space in this article to address the latter. So, for the sake of moving forward, let me just generalize that Catullus wrote some of the most bittersweet love poetry of his, or any other, epoch.

According to legend—and I’m of the mind that research at this distance isn’t much more than legend—his inamorata was a married woman some ten years his senior, named Clodia. She was the sister of a notorious libertine, Clodius Pulcher. Sexually notorious in her own right, she was rumored to have poisoned her husband, Metellus, who died in 59 BC—either two or four years before Catullus’s death.

But by that time, Catullus had been supplanted as her lover. Catullus may have been the romantic poet every sentimental woman wants. And Clodia, the goddess slut every romantic poet craves. But she had priorities beyond poetry. Clodia was accused of many things, but never sentimentality.

No one knows how long Catullus’ affair with Clodia lasted, but it was intense. Evoking Saphho, he called her “Lesbia”; wrote famous poems to her sparrow. And other poems whose translated lines are common currency still. One of the most read is song #5:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimenus assis.

Let’s live, my Lesbia—and love:
the stern opinions of the old
aren’t worth a cent to us.

Soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda…

Suns set and rise again: For
us, once our brief light sets,
there’s only night and an endless sleep.

From there the poem goes on to talk about a thousand kisses, then a hundred, and another thousand, alternating between hundreds and thousands into the unquantifiable.

Catullus’ thousand desperate kisses continue to multiply. The poem has exploded into translations and imitations from the Renaissance to today. The first stanza was beautifully translated by Sir Walter Raleigh. And there’s Andrew Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress.” A poem that seems hugely indebted to Catullus V. Except Marvell’s “the grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace” seems coldly cerebral next to Catullus’ nox est perpetua una dormienda. And embrace, a tepid substitute for a thousand kisses.

A present day poet, Joseph Campana (in his Book of Faces, a volume whose poems revolve around Audrey Hepburn) also bends Catullus V to his purpose:

Let us live, let us love—Audrey!
The old men talk but they’re
not a copper to your gold (this
I know) you’re gold rising
and falling you are daytime.
You’re brevity and light and
I am the sleeping darkness…

And let’s not forget Raymond Chandler, who’s said to have adapted his title, The Big Sleep from Catullus V.

___

II. That’s the Sweet, but now for the Bitter

A friend recently observed that when it comes down to it, sweet love poems really aren’t that interesting. “When I go to readings,” she said, “to open mics… It’s when they start shouting about their exes, that p…., or that c…. That’s when you hear the applause.” A good many of Catullus’ poems are nasty epigrams, some as prurient as Martial’s. In fact, Martial, that consumate bad boy of Roman poetry, writing a few generations later, cites Catullus as a mentor.

Catullus could rant as well as—well actually, much better than—any open mic poet. But sometimes the rancor of his great love turning sour is a quiet scalpel that slices deeper than any rant. And that helpless wound comes down to us, almost clinically, in Odi et Amo.

Here’s the Loeb Classical Library prose rendering. A simple statement: “I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask? I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.”

But too simple? Too prosaic. Sounding out the original, even if you can’t read Latin, the words seem resonant, charged, vital.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior.

The first sentence seems to offer only one translation choice—I hate and love. But hate may not be the most productive translation choice. Hate in English tends to have an active component of anger. Odi is often used more passively, the way you’d hate the taste of headcheese. Not especially the way you’d hate a mortal enemy. When Horace says: Persicos odi, puer, apparatus—“I hate Persian trappings, boy”—he’s not talking about going to war against Persia. Rather, a sense of aesthetic distaste. Softened to something more reactive than active, Catullus’ odi takes on more nuance, less self certainty.

And in choosing just how to interpret odi, I think you also have to consider the word order—in which odi comes before amo. Latin is an inflected language and word order is often flexible. But in this case you have one verb preceding the other, one image preceding the other. If odi is intended to be an active, aggressive emotion you’d think it would, more often, be preceded by love troubles—rather than precede love.

Trying to think of examples where aggression becomes love, you can come up with some dark, extreme images. A sated sadist fondling her prey. Maria Goretti’s assailant turned suddenly remorseful. Othello’s too late epiphany.

On the other hand, if odi is interpreted as something more passive, an instinctive dislike or aversion—then the helplessness of amo in this poem seems underscored. One falls in love, the way we always fall in love, despite ourselves. Stumbling into an unwanted, yet deeply wanted wound.

Or as another friend once observed: Lovers, meeting for the first time, often feel initially annoyed with each other. And that annoyance is just the heart’s immune system struggling to avoid the pain to come.

But in any case, one of the reasons these two lines of poetic graffiti have endured is that they resonate in every direction like a stone dropped in a pool. There’s no one right way of reading the poem. It speaks to the dark extreme fringe as well as to the myriad varieties of commonplace heartbreak. Catullus’ odi and amo co-exist like yin and yang, constantly circling and constantly nourishing each other.

Going forward into the line, the identity of the “you” in the second sentence also offers some possibilities if you imagine a real rather than rhetorical “you” who’s asking “why?”. Maybe the speaker’s lover? Maybe Catullus is really talking to Clodia, not the reader? Maybe he’s even being nagged to explain himself. Cast this way, the first line could validly be interpreted as: I’m repelled and I love. Why that’s so, maybe you do need to know.

___

III. The Rosy Crucifixion?

The second line opens unequivocally enough. Nescio—“I don’t know”—sed fieri sentio—“but I feel it happening”—et excrucior.

And with et excrucior we get into the question of “false friends” in translation. Words that strongly resemble words in another language, but in fact mean something else. Crucio in Latin, and crucifigo derive from the same root, but crucio means to torture, and crucifigo to crucify. A subtle distinction, but one doesn’t necessarily kill you—the other does.

So the speaker in Odi et Amo is tortured not crucified. Probably the better equivalent would be “racked.”

The Nobel winning Greek poet, and sometimes translator, George Seferis remarked in one his journals that it’s impossible for us to read Homer except through the experience and patina of intervening history. So that the great classic works take on shades of meaning that were only potentially there in the original.

I couldn’t agree more. The best poems (especially in translation) acquire a life of their own beyond their original intent and mutate in their dialogue with succeeding generations of readers. They speak to us through a phone line interwoven with the fiber optics of our past and their future.

For us, some 2,100 years after Catullus, crucifixion (false friend or not) can never escape the weight of the sacramental—an energy of life as well as death. This was hardly the case when Catullus wrote. But that historic/cultural patina seems to—not add to—but actually draw weight out of Catullus’ poem. It’s where the poem wants to go now.

I don’t know exactly what inspired the title of Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion. My guess is it had more to do with the Rosicrucians than Catullus. But Odi et Amo would make a perfect epigraph for the relationships in those novels. And, for me, it’s almost impossible to not read crucifixion into excrucior. And to not finally translate the poem as something like:

I’m repelled and I love. Maybe you do have to know why.
I don’t know, but I feel it happening and I’m crucified.

___

IV. Echoes

As with song #5, Catullus #85 has echoed down the centuries. When I queried an American Literary Translators chat group for examples, one person responded: “I thought of Racine’s Andromaque, the sentence that used to be taught in all the lycees classiques in France: Ah! Ne puis-je savoir si j’aime ou si je hais? Alas, am I incapable to know whether I love, whether I hate?”

The speaker, in this case, is a woman, Hermione, but the emotion is universal, certainly not just male.
And Odi et Amo has always for some reason brought to mind some lines from Paul Schmidt’s very loose, very lyrical translation of Rimbaud’s Drunken Morning:

It began with a certain disgust, and it ended—
Since we could not immediately seize upon eternity—
It ended in a scattering of perfumes.

A not particularly torturous ending. But in my memory those lines are always mixed up with lines that occur a little later in the translated poem:

It began in utter boorishness, and now it ends
In angels of fire and ice.

Not explicitly Catullus, but lines Catullus would certainly understand. And Henry Miller as well, since he adapted the poem’s last line—Voici le temps des Assassins—as the title for his study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins.

In the early twentieth century, Louis Zukofsky did a homophonic “translation” of Odi et Amo that makes “sound” if not imagistic sense. Not everyone’s cup of tea. But still an echo:

O th’hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am, for that’s so re queries.
Nescience, say th’ fiery scent I owe whets crookeder.

Jospeh Campana also uses an adaptation of Odi et Amo in his Audrey Hepburn-centric Book of Faces:

I hate, I love (Audrey….
…
I know nothing,
I feel it happening:
the torment (mine).

But two of the most interesting and lyrical contemporary adaptations come from Frank Bidart. In both cases, he begins with a simple “I hate and love.” And he omits the second line of the original, managing to compress a compressed Latin poem even more. The last line in his first version, from his volume The Sacrifice reads: “Ignorant fish who even wants the fly while writhing.”

The second variant of that last line appears in his later collection, Desire, with the Bidart poem now entitled “Catullus Excrucior”: “The sleepless body hammering a nail nails/ itself hanging crucified.”

With Bidart, you get the sense that it’s not the lover, but love itself that’s odious. Love, itself that you can’t live with, or without. Then you realize the original Catullus can also be read this way. Realize just how protean the deceptively simple Latin is.

___

V. Catullus and Old Helmut Soik

Catullus was a young poet, and he’s still a poet for the young. There’s a sense of trespass when the old read Catullus that Yeats famously caught in his poem “The Scholars”:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men tossing on their beds
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
…
Lord what would they say
Did their Catullus walk their way?

I’m no longer young and I’m going to sidetrack here to someone even older: Helmut Soik, a poet who for some reason has been on my mind lately. We’ll wander a bit, but soon be back to Catullus. In fact, re-reading Soik was one of the catalysts that started me re-reading Catullus and it seems appropriate to give Helmut the last word.

Indulge me, if you will, as I backtrack to somewhere around 1978. That was when Soik, a German poet my father’s age came to visit. We were both enjoying a pretty good year. I’d just published a book length poem based on Casanova’s memoirs that had gotten some nice buzz. And Helmut’s first (bilingual) volume of poems in English translation was recently out. We shared the same small, but hot at the time, California publisher.

Helmut came to San Francisco to read, and we spent a few great days together. We wandered the neighborhoods—North Beach, the Castro, the old and new Chinatowns, and pondered the tombstones at Mission Dolores. His conversational English was only a little better than my stumbling German, but his fluent half sister Tanya accompanied us and our dialogue moved along as easily as a movie with subtitles.

And Helmut’s life could have made a movie. Born in 1914, he belonged to what, for Germans, was definitely not their “greatest generation.” In his youth he was a prodigy, publishing his first volume of poetry at 16. And his second, five years later, along with critical studies of Rimbaud and others. He was a pacifist, active in avant-garde circles and had little interest in anything but literature and the arts. The sort of life the young Catullus may have led. And he had a sweetheart, the young love of his life.

But then, of course, he was drafted. And ended up at the Eastern Front. War stories are notoriously unreliable. But the way Helmut told it, he was exhumed unconscious from under a pile of corpses after the battle of Stalingrad by a band of Russians. He was a cherub, then, he said. Despite being nearly thirty. A lost kid, through and through, and some angel must have touched his captors. Rather than shoot him or send him off with the other POWs, they adopted him as sort of a mascot and just put him to camp work. He looked back with genuine nostalgia at that interval. I’m not sure how long it lasted, because somehow the dates seem as out of whack as the concept. Although it all seemed quite logical when he was telling it.

Then, as the story goes, when the war was finally over the Russians just shook hands and sent Helmut walking home. This is what I don’t understand. Were they the Red Army or a band of irregulars? Or just a disillusioned unit improvising their own rules. Helmut was never really clear about anything except how fond he was of those Russians. In any event, he somehow made his way across shattered East Europe to what he thought was a German town.

But war had redrawn the borders and he found himself in newly Soviet Poland, conscripted to hard labor in the salt mines. He was finally repatriated in 1950. And spent the rest of his aesthetic (and personal) life practicing a sort of discipline of alienation. His mature poems dissect both the Hitler years and the postwar “German miracle” with a deeply humane cynicism. He settled, miraculously back into life with his old sweetheart, but avoided any non-menial pursuit except poetry—content to be “useless” to society. You come away from reading Soik with the sense that Nazism isn’t just an era that ran from 1933 to 1945, but rather a nasty strain woven into humanity from which Helmut had taken permanent leave. The title of his American volume, Rimbaud under the Steel Helmet[1] is apt.

But the poems are wide ranging, and Soik’s volume begins with poems in honor of other poets: Tu Fu, Lorca, Rimbaud, Belli, and, yes… Catullus.

Von Catull las ich in der stunde der dämmerung
daß er in seinem dreißigsten jahr starb
in der todesstunde alleingelassen
in einem dreckigen hinterhaus
der großstadt Rom.
Die sexbombe Claudia Pulcher mied sein
bett von toten küssen und schweigen….

I read about Catullus in the twilight hour,
the way he died in his thirtieth year,
left alone at the hour of his death
in a filthy back alley tenement
in the metropolis of Rome.
Sexpot Claudia Pulcher wanted nothing
to do with his bed of dead kisses and silence…

Later in the poem:

…Was nützte es ihm
daß der pontifex maximus
seinetwegen staatstrauer trug
daß die zehntausend luxusnutten
in den heiligen straßen
schluchzten
die jeunesse doree absichtlich schmutzige anzüge trug…

…What use was it to him
that the Pontifex Maximus declared
official mourning on his behalf,
that ten thousand exquisite whores
sobbed
in the sacred streets, that
the gilded young all changed into soiled robes…

But at the end, Helmut’s question and his old man’s answer:

Und trotzdem
was blieb erspart ihm?
Schon sein früher tod
trug zur geniebildung bei.
Die demonstrieung weiblichen verfalls
an seiner angebeteten geliebten
vielleicht fünfzehn jahre später
blieb erspart ihm
Und das heißt doch wirklich
corriger la fortune!

And for all that
what, if anything, was he spared?
His early death, for one thing, solidified
his image as a genius. And it spared
him as well from watching his heartthrob’s
menopausal decay some fifteen years
later. You could say dying was really
the ace up his sleeve!

Helmut died a few years back. The story may be embellished a bit, passed from his sister to our mutual editor. But as I heard it, he was hiking up a not too strenuous mountain trail in a popular resort. And happened to be trudging behind a woman who caught his practiced eye. “What a nice ass you have,” he said.

She stopped, turned, looked him over, smiled and said: “Coming from an old goat like you, even a compliment is an insult.”

A couple of days later, peacefully watching television in his cabin, he died. Helmut wasn’t spared much in his long life. But if the account of his last days is to be believed—even at eighty-something, that ache still glowed.

___

VI: The Poet’s Soup

Catullus died famous and young—Soik, old and obscure. Googling Helmut Maria Soik, the only recent references I could find were to the bilingual collection I mentioned above and a German volume of poems published in 1980 whose title translates to Ramblings about the Possible Existence of Hell.

His obscurity wouldn’t surprise Helmut who, in a long, somewhat Brechtian, poem titled “Night and Nothing” (Die Nacht und das Nichts[2]) said:

A man went to bed
with a bundle of poems,
wrote on his knees
despite the cold in the room.
He knew:
for industrial society
for competitive society
he was useless.

Later in that poem he asks the big question:

Teach me comrade!
Teach me in my ignorance!
Give me the answer!
Who gives the poet
his soup?

Wer gibt dem dichter die süppe? Who nourishes a poet? In one sense, it’s our poetic ancestors. Soik was nourished by Catullus, as Catullus was nourished by Sappho. But this can only go so far, provide only part of the calories a poet needs.

Süppe is the daily ration of the humble and misfortunate, of mendicants, internees, conscripts, and labor camps. From the threads running through Helmut’s work, I’ve always felt his poetry was nourished forever after by his captor-saviors in the Russian forest. Whatever the real story, I’ve come to imagine them as a band of survivors whose priorities had probably come down to avoiding the twin grinding jaws of Hitler and Stalin.

And would Catullus’ insistent songs still be nourishing us if Catullus hadn’t been nourished by Clodia? Not Lesbia/Clodia—the eternal muse, the eternal ideal. But Clodia the woman who lived, aged, grew, faltered and plotted to survive. Who bemused and captured and spooned out the stony, prisoner’s soup of poetry to Catullus.

Notes:

[1] Rimbaud under the Steel Helmet is still in stock at SPD books. www.spdbooks.org

[2] The excerpts from Soik’s Die Nacht und das nichts are as translated by Georg Gugelberger and Lydia Perera in the original 1976 Red Hill Press edition. The excerpts from his Catullus poem were retranslated for this article by Art Beck.

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). His recent articles on Horace and Rilke in John Traintor’s magazine Jacket can be accessed online at: www.jacketmagazine.com

 

Art Beck

THE IMPERTINENT DUET:
TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#1: SPANISH DANCING ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH
(in collaboration with Silvia Kofler)

I. A Small Question of He or It

At this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference, Silvia Kofler, an old friend and colleague, showed me a translation of Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer” that she’d come across in an anthology. “Look how they translated this line! Why?” And so began a conversation. While I take full blame for the vagaries of the translation at the end
of this piece, this essay is really a joint endeavor, a record of the dialogue between Silvia and myself.

Silvia is a native Austrian who emigrated to the United States in her twenties. She’s a published poet in both English and German. Rilke is, of course, a poet she’s known since her school days, but it’s worth noting that Rilke is not, for contemporary German readers, the ubiquitously read icon he is in America. A German speaking poetry reader might delve into Rilke as often as contemporary Americans read, say, Wallace Stevens.

And as for us with Stevens, the German reader often has to slow down and mull over just what it is that Rilke is saying. But in this case, Silvia seemed emphatic.

Silvia’s issue was a line in Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer.” Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar. The line comes immediately after the first stanza and is, in fact, a stanza unto itself. “Spanish Dancer,” an extended metaphor set in a Paris nightclub, is one of Rilke’s least opaque poems. Most, if not all, Englishspeaking translators have roughly followed Herter Norton’s 1938 translation. Norton’s reading of the first stanza and the stand-alone line that follows is:

Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss,
eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten
zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis
naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss
ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten.
Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar.

…

As in one’s hand a sulfur match, whitely,
before it comes aflame, to every side
darts twitching tongues – : within the circle
of close watchers hasty, bright and hot
her round dance begins twitching to spread itself.
And suddenly it is altogether flame.

Why, Silvia asked, did they translate er as it when it should be he?

The answer that Rilke’s myriad translators would uniformly give her is that in German, unlike English, inanimate nouns are gender specific. Either masculine or feminine. Der Tanz is masculine. And so in German, the pronoun for dance is “he.” And er, in this case, refers to the dance.

It’s logical. There’s no “he” mentioned anywhere else in the poem. And, as I said above, I’m not aware of any English or American translator who’s treated the line otherwise.

But, no, no—Silvia said. Sure that’s “logical,” but it’s not the way a native speaker would read this poem—at least at first. This, after all, is a very erotic piece and it’s as much about a man watching as a woman dancing.

Which got me thinking. Grammar has rules that seem logical, but poetry has it’s own linguistic logic. And Rilke, especially, has his own poetics. His imagery can be as musical as his metrics—often fugue-like and ambiguous with interchangeable melody and harmonic lines as it were. In this context, it may well be that another native speaker might read this line differently than Silvia has always read it. But why does she read (and want to read) er as a he rather than a gendered dance? What happens when you interject a specific man into the poem?

First, to me, the effect is reminiscent of a film director zooming in on a face in the crowd. It crystallizes and personalizes the eroticism of the dance. And second, it stops you (at least in German) because you have to ask yourself—did Rilke really mean “he”? And so that image might (for another German reader) flash and disappear if you finally settle on “it.” But the image is there, at least subliminally.

And one shouldn’t overlook the poem’s line structure. Rilke has set one stand-alone line between two five line stanzas. He’s making us stop; the standalone line doesn’t flow smoothly from the Tanz in the previous stanza. Read by itself, without referring to the previous stanza, er is just as readily he as it.

It’s hard for an English speaker to connect with this, because we have so few gender specific inanimate nouns. What’s happening in the German, seems to me, to be similar to what happens if you come across something like:

The queen boarded the Queen Elizabeth
then she promptly set out to sea.

Is the “she” that sets out to sea the queen or the ship? You stop to think, and may say, what’s the difference because both, in fact, set out to sea. But you stop to think. And the image of the queen and the Queen both come to mind.

__________

II. But How in the World Can You Translate Something Like That?

I’m not sure, but I think it’s a good example of why poems as resonant as Rilke’s benefit from regular re-translation. It’s a commonplace observation that Rilke has become overdone in English. There are commercial reasons for this—he’s in the public domain, and most of the selections sell. Sadly, most of the selections read like workshopped versions of each other. So the only reason to do another version is to try to bring something across that hasn’t been attempted. And I think that’s a good enough reason here.

__________

III. So Here’s the Attempt

Some tricks just can’t be duplicated. I can’t think of a masculine English noun remotely equivalent to “dance.” My first thought was to just choose “he”—as Silvia seems to have done. Say something like and suddenly he’s utterly on fire.

That’s consistent, it adds a close-up of a face in the crowd that instantly focuses the poem, makes the dance as much a dialogue as a performance. I can understand why Silvia was so incensed at losing this aspect in the translation she read.

But then, is that too onedimensional? Does it lose the resonance implicit in choosing
between images? You could also dodge the issue entirely and say: and suddenly, completely, helplessly: -fire. Leaving out both “he” or “it.”

If you took that approach, you could stretch Beschauer—spectators, watchers—into something more gender specific and overtly erotic, like voyeurs.

But then you lose that wonderful effect of a close-up, zoom in.

And—as Silvia pointed out to me as our dialogue progressed—there’s another subtlety in the way Beschauer is used. This is another masculine noun, but also one that in German normally takes its singular or plural form from whether it’s prefaced by the masculine der (singular) or the feminine article die. In this case, it’s not prefaced by a definite article, because the plural is inferred from Kreis—the circle of spectators.

Even so, Silvia observed—the lack of the usual definite article might subtly nudge the German reader into the ambiguity of er in the standalone line.

Most of this isn’t possible in English. So finally, the best approach may be to try to find the tangled resonance of “he/it” elsewhere in the poem. And just overtly go with what seems Rilke’s intent.

__________

Rainer Maria Rilke

SPANISCHE TÄNZERIN

Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss,
eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten
zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis
naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss
ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten.

Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar.

Mit Ihren Blick entzündet sie ihr Haar
und dreht auf einmal mit gewagter Kunst,
ihr ganzes Kleid in diese Feursbrunst,
aus welcher sich, wie Schlangen, die erschrecken,
die nackte Arme wach und klappernd strecken.

Und dann: als wurde ihr das Feuer knapp,
nimmt sie es ganz zusamm und wirft es ab
sehr herrisch, mit hochmütiger Gebärde
und schaut: da liegt es resend auf der Erde
und flammt noch immer ergibt sich nicht -,
Doch sieghaft, sicher und mit einem süssen
grüssenden Lächeln hebt sie ihr Gesicht
und stampft es aus mit kleinen festen Füssen.

…

Rainer Maria Rilke
—tr. Art Beck

SPANISH DANCER

The way a sulfur match, cupped in the hand, whitens
before it flames, licks out in every direction: –
within the intent ring of watching eyes,
the quick, bright heat of her circling
feet shivers until it flares.

And suddenly he and the dance are altogether fire.

With a blink, she ignites her hair,
then instantly with seductive mastery,
whirls her entire dress into the bonfire
from which her naked arms rear
up like startled rattlesnakes.

As the fire finally clings to her like a slip,
she strips it off completely, aristocratically tosses
it aside with a haughty shrug. And watches:
There it lies, smoldering on the ground, still
burning and unwilling to surrender. And with
a smile on her face and a sweet “hello,” she
stamps it out with small, sure steps.

—from Rattle e.6, Spring 2009 (PDF)

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Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). He’s currently trying to atone for some of his earlier Rilke versions by retranslating the Sonnets to Orpheus.

Silvia Kofler teaches at Rockhurst University and is editor/publisher of the poetry magazine, Thorny Locust. Her latest poetry collection, Radioactive Musings, was included in the Kansas City Star’s Top 100 books of 2007 by local authors.