Where I'm Reading From

by Tim Parks

  In any event, this global mingling of cultures works against nuance and in favor of the loud, clamorous, highly stylized, and idiosyncratic voice that can stand out in the cosmopolitan crowd. It will be a world in which the need for an editor to mediate and clarify the position of the individual writer in relation to some hypothetical standard will be seriously challenged, but, in the general disorientation, all the more necessary. Indeed, it may well be that as the Internet era matures and more authors self-publish online without any editorial assistance, we will begin to grow nostalgic for those finicky copy editors who at least gave us something well-defined to kick against.

  TRANSLATING IN THE DARK

  “WE MUST BELIEVE in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature.” Thus Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish poet and winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, quoted in a recent essay by Robin Robertson, one of his translators. Robertson goes on to describe the difficulties of capturing Tranströmer’s spare voice and masterful evocation of Swedish landscape in English, particularly if you don’t know Swedish well. Robert Lowell, Robertson tells us, translated Tranströmer with only a “passing knowledge” of the language. Robertson himself describes a process wherein his Swedish girlfriend gives him a literal line-by-line translation into English, then reads the Swedish to him to give him “the cadences,” after which he creates “relatively free” versions in English.

  This approach to translation is not uncommon among poets (W.H. Auden gave us his versions of Icelandic sagas in much the same way). Nevertheless, Robertson feels the need to call on various authorities to sanction a translation process that assumes that poetry is made up of a literal semantic sense, which can easily be transmitted separately from the verse, and a tone, or music, which only a poet is sufficiently sensitive to reconstruct. Thus Robertson observes:

  In his introduction to Imitations (1962), Robert Lowell writes that “Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything.”

  Here the “of course” skates over the fact that tone is always in relation to content: if the content were altered while diction and register remained the same, the tone would inevitably shift. One notes in passing the disparagement of the “usual reliable translator”—the fellow knows his foreign language, but doesn’t understand poetry.

  T.S. Eliot is then cited as having warned Lowell not to present his “imitations” of Tranströmer and others as “translations”:

  If you use the word translation in the subtitle it will attract all those meticulous little critics who delight in finding what seem to them mis-translations. You will remember all the fuss about Ezra Pound’s Propertius.

  Here collocating meticulous with little does the job that Lowell/Pasternak achieved with “usual reliable”: there are always people who interfere but don’t understand.

  Robertson also calls on the British poet Jamie McKendrick, who, he feels, is “surely right” when he says “The translator’s knowledge of language is more important than their knowledge of languages.” How vague this remark is! Does it mean that the translator has one kind of knowledge of how language in general achieves its effects, and another of the nuts and bolts of the different languages he knows, the first kind being “more important” than the second? If that is the case, then to what degree more important? Wouldn’t the two, rather, be interdependent and mutually sustaining? These perplexities apart, the thrust of McKendrick’s argument is clear enough: we are sweeping aside the objection that a profound knowledge of a foreign language might be required to translate its poetry, or prose for that matter, thus clearing the path for a translation by someone who is an expert in the area that counts: our own language.

  I really do not wish to nitpick. I enjoy Lowell’s and Robertson’s translations of Tranströmer, and Pound’s Propertius. I am glad these people did the work they did, giving us many fine poems along the way. As a writer myself who has also done a number of translations I might be expected to have a vested interest in the idea that what skill I have in English sets me apart from the “usual reliable” translator. However, and quite regardless of whether we want to call such work translation or imitation, it does seem that a serious issue is being dispatched with indecent haste here.

  Let us remember our most intense experiences of poetry in our mother tongue, reading Eliot and Pound as adolescents perhaps, Frost and Wallace Stevens, Auden and Geoffrey Hill, then coming back to them after many years, discovering how much more was there than we had imagined, picking up echoes of other literature we have read since, seeing how the poet shifted the sense of this or that word slightly, and how this alters the tone and feeling of the whole. And then let’s also recall some of the finest poetry criticism we have read—by William Empson, Christopher Ricks, or Eliot himself—the ability of these men to fill in linguistic and literary contexts in such a way that the text takes on a deeper meaning, or to tease out relations inside a poem that had been obscure, but once mentioned are suddenly obvious and enrich our experience of the work.

  Now imagine that, having a poet friend who wishes to translate these authors, you offer a literal translation of their poems in your second language, perhaps French, perhaps German, perhaps Spanish. Maybe you read The Four Quartets out loud, line by line, to give him the cadence. But does our translator friend, who doesn’t know our language well, hear what we hear when we read aloud? The onomatopoeia, perhaps. But a dying fall in one tongue may not be the same in another, not to mention the echoes of other texts, or simply of voices in the air in our language. During my thirty years in Italy I have often been told by uninitiated English friends what a beautiful and harmonious language Italian is; but that is Italian as heard by an ear accustomed to English sound patterns. To the Italian ear, and to mine these days, much of what is said in Italian grates. One hears the language differently when one knows it.

  Why do those “usual reliable translators” often give us work that we feel is wooden or lackluster, thus inviting the poets to get involved? Teaching translation, I frequently deal with students who write well in their mother tongue, but whose translations into that tongue lack fluency. This brings us to a paradox at the heart of translation: the text we take as inspiration is also the greatest obstacle to expression. Our own language prompts us in one direction, but the text we are trying to respect says something else, or says the same thing in a way that feels very different. All the same, what often frees the student to offer better translations is a deeper knowledge of the language he is working from: a better grasp of the original allows the translator to detach from formal structures and find a new expression for the tone he is learning to feel: in this case, however, every departure from strict transposition is inspired by an intimate and direct experience of the original.

  All this to arrive at the obvious conclusion that while expression and creativity in one’s own language is crucial, a long experience in the language we are working from can only improve the translations we make. But the really interesting question is: Why are such intelligent writers as Eliot, Lowell, Pasternak, Robertson, and McKendrick unwilling to consider the matter more carefully? Is it because, to return to Tranströmer, “We must believe in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature”? There is no point, that is, in examining what we do too closely if we’ve already decided what we want our conclusion to be.

  But why is it imperative that we believe in World Literature? It seems we must imagine that no literary expression or experience is ultimately unavailable to us; the single individual is not so conditioned by his own language, culture, and literature as not to be able to experience all other literatures; and the individual author likewise can be appreciated all over the globe. It is on this premise that all international literary prizes, of which there are now so many, depend. The zeitgeist demands that we gloss over everything that makes a local or national culture rich and deep, in order to believe in global tran
smission. There must be no limitation.

  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. Tranströmer remarks:

  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.

  Try this experiment: pick up a copy of a book mis-titled Dante’s Inferno. It offers twenty celebrated poets, few of whom had more than a passing knowledge of Italian, each translating a canto of the Inferno. Inevitably, the result is 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 Seamus Heaney’s Inferno, sometimes it is Carolyn Forché’s, sometimes it is W. S. Merwin’s, but it is never Dante’s. Then dip into the 1939 prose translation by the scholar John Sinclair. There is immediately a homogeneity and fluency here, a lack of showiness and a semantic cohesion over scores of pages that give quite a different experience. To wind up, look at Robert and Jean Hollander’s 2002 reworking of Sinclair. Robert Hollander is a Dante scholar and has cleared up Sinclair’s few errors. His wife, Jean, is a poet who, while respecting to a very large degree Sinclair’s phrasing, has made some adjustments, under her husband’s meticulous eye, allowing the translation to fit into unrhymed verse. It is still a long way from reading Dante in the original, but now we do feel that we have a very serious approximation and a fine read.

  LISTENING FOR THE JABBERWOCK

  WHAT IS THE status of translated works of literature? Are they essentially different from texts in their original form? One of the arguments I have put forward is that there is a natural tendency toward rhythm, alliteration, and assonance when one writes even the most ordinary prose, and that editing to conform to the linguistic conventions of a different culture can interfere with this. The translator gives priority to the semantic sense, but that sense was also partly guided in the original by what one might call the acoustic inertia of the language.

  Naturally, an alert and resourceful translator can sometimes come up with the goods. Here for example is a sentence from Joyce’s “The Dead”:

  It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life.

  A monosyllabic onslaught of p’s and h’s—the husband is the bisyllabic odd man out—falls into a melancholic, mostly iambic rhythm. A masterful Italian translation by Marco Papi and Emilio Tadini gives:

  Ora non gli dava quasi più pena pensare a quanta poca parte lui, suo marito, aveva avuto nella sua vita.

  The Italian inevitably settles for bisyllables but finds a host of p’s and a quiet, even rhythm to match the resigned tone of the English.

  Such combinations of luck and achievement are rare, however, and mainly come in literary texts, poetry in particular, where the translator is prepared for the writer’s evident and strategic use of poetic devices. All too often, the generous attempt to match such devices—one thinks of Pinsky’s translation of the Inferno—only alert us to the strain and effort the translator has to make to force the language of translation into the desired sound patterns, patterns which in the original sounded easy and even natural. Meantime in novels, even the most evident poetic effects are often simply ignored. Here is D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love describing the combative Gudrun’s encounter with an equally combative rabbit, Bismark:

  They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back.

  None of the translations I have looked at match Lawrence’s repetition of thrust to suggest a parallel between the woman and the rabbit, the way the violence of the one provokes the response of the other and puts both on the same level. Nor do they capture the nice way the word lusty ties the two thrusts together soundwise: none of them begins to recover the stubbornness and economy of “set its four feet flat.” It is not a question of poor translation; the text was created in English and that is that. This is what Paul Celan, despairing of translating Baudelaire, called “the fatal uniqueness of language,” when the creative mind, deeply integrated within a set of native sound patterns, produces something that can exist exclusively in that language.

  Another way of approaching the question of what is different about translation might be to look at a text where the usual relation between semantics and acoustic effects is radically altered. Everybody knows the opening of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  The comedy of the poem is its reproduction of a range of acoustic and rhythmic strategies that the reader immediately recognizes as typical of a certain kind of poetry, but with nonsense words. The suggestion is that all such poetry is driven to a degree by the inertia of style and convention, that the sound is as decisive as the sense in determining what gets said; indeed, when we “run out of sense,” the sound trundles on of its own accord. But how could one begin to translate “mome raths outgrabe”? We have no idea what it means. The only strategy would be to find an equally hackneyed poetic form in the translator’s language and play with it in a similar way.

  Liberated by the fact that many of the words don’t have any precise meaning, the translator should not find this impossible, though whether strictly speaking it is now a translation is another issue. Here is a heroic Italian version by Milli Graffi:

  Era cerfuoso e i viviscidi tuoppi,

  Ghiarivan foracchiando nel pedano

  Stavano tutti mifri i vilosnuoppi,

  Mentre squoltian i momi radi invano.

  In general, however, what we find is a reproduction of the sense, but with a much diluted intensity of the Jabberwock effect. Developing Frost’s notion that “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” we might say that what we won’t find in translation is this lively, often undiscriminating pattern of sounds, an ancient enchantment, which the best writers can integrate with their creativity and the worst simply allow to take over the show, as in the marvelously poor poetry of William McGonagall:

  Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

  Alas! I am very sorry to say

  That ninety lives have been taken away

  On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

  Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

  Translated texts, then, and there are ever more of them in the world today, tend to be cooler, a little less fluid—they will operate more on the rational intellect than on the rhythm-wired senses. They will deceive you less and charm you less. Of course there are notable exceptions, texts that were translated with the seduction of the reader and the beauty of the language very much in mind. Where these are old and central to our culture—the Bible, most obviously—they can become canonical on a par with our homegrown writing. But there are remarkably few of them.

  I have often wondered if that is why, in certain countries, translations now even seem to be preferred to works written in the native language. A large study carried out at my university on four corpuses of texts—Italian novels before 1960, English novels translated into Italian before 1960, Italian novels after 1990, and English novels translated into Italian after 1990—suggests that while the national language in Italy is changing fast, with Italian novelists ever more open to stylistic influence from the cinema or from abroad, translations into Italian
keep alive a hypercorrect literary Italian that has otherwise lapsed into disuse. Even the most disturbing texts can, at least linguistically, deprived of the Jabberwock effect, prove calm and reassuring.

  IN THE WILDS OF LEOPARDI

  I’M STARTING A translation, my first for many years, and at once I’m faced with the fatal, all-determining decision: What voice do I translate this in?

  Usually one would say: the same voice as the original’s, as you hear it in the Italian and imagine it in English. This would be along the line of Dryden’s famous injunction to translators to write as the author would write if he were English—a rather comical idea since we are interested in the author largely because he comes from elsewhere and does not write like an Englishman. In any event, this text is a special case.

  I’m translating a selection of entries from Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone. This is a book all Italians know from school though almost nobody has read it in its entirety. The word zibaldone comes from the same root as zabaione and originally had the disparaging sense of a hotchpotch of food, or any mixture of heterogeneous elements, then a random collection of notes, a sort of diary, but of disconnected thoughts and reflections rather than accounts of events. Leopardi, born in 1798 and chiefly remembered for his lyric poetry, kept his Zibaldone from 1817 to 1832, putting together a total of 4,526 handwritten pages. Printed editions come in at something over two thousand pages, before the editor’s notes, which are usually many. There is general agreement that the Zibaldone is one of the richest mines of reflection on the modern human condition ever written. Schopenhauer in particular referred to Leopardi as “my spiritual brother” and saw much of his own thinking foreshadowed in Leopardi’s writings, though he had never seen the Zibaldone, which at the time was still unpublished. The selection I’m translating, put together by an Italian publisher, is made up of all the entries that Leopardi himself had flagged as having to do with feelings and emotions.