Then Joseph Brodsky, sometime later in the eighties, in the Tufnell Park flat of a friend of his. Espresso and Vecchio Romano in a somewhat redundant, spotless kitchen. (He wrote about Auden’s “real library of a kitchen” in Kirchstetten, but I guess that for him and in his life, most of the action will have been in, so to speak, the real kitchen of this or that library. As he said, “freedom is a library”; it isn’t a kitchen.) “Circumcised” cigarettes. The practiced fingers pull out the sponge, pull out the fluff, discard the fluff, return the sponge. Only then is it safe to smoke. He is translating Cavafy, whom he loves. The classicism, the history, the anonymity. Into Russian. He has brought with him from New York a Russian portable typewriter. Greek into Cyrillic. In bourgeois north London. A bizarre, Conradian phenomenon. The translator as bacillus.
Maybe one more. A rare (for me) gathering of translators in New York City, perhaps some awards ceremony, I don’t remember. We fill the front rows of a theater somewhere, feeling unusually effervescent, like a gathering of missionaries, or spies on day release. Optimistic. Righteous. Both full of ourselves and among ourselves, unter uns. Ourselves alone—Sinn Féin. The charabanc effect. To make things better/worse, Paul Auster is brought on to address us. Then someone announces that Gregory Rabassa is of the company, somewhere right and in front of us. A slight, stooped figure rises, bows. From the stage, a beam tries to pick him out, to try to somehow give him some plasticity. I don’t think I would recognize him on the street. The first translator I was aware of, I read his García Márquez when I was twenty and doorstepped his London publishers. (Remember García Márquez’s praise for him as “the best Latin American writer in the English language”?) A little pencil mustache, maybe? An imperial? I doubt myself, and think probably I’m making it up, extrapolating, literarizing. We applaud frantically. Such are the heroes of a secret business, a guilty business, even.
* * *
I translate to try to amount to something. When I first held my first book of poems in my hands (the least extent acceptable to the British Library, forty-eight pages including prelims), I thought it would fly away. To repair a deficit of literature in my life. My ill-advised version of Cartesianism: traduco, ergo sum. Ill-advised because the translator has no being, should neither be seen nor heard, should be (yawn) faithful, should be (double yawn) a plate of glass. Well, Kerrang!!!
* * *
Many, if not most, translators operate with an acquired language, or languages, and their own, which is the one, according to Christopher Logue, they have to be really good at. (I never trust people who translate both into and out of a language: isn’t there something unsanitary about that, like drinking the bathwater?) That brings a certain dispassion to their proceedings, a lab coat, tweezers, a fume cupboard. But both my languages are “my own”: German, my so-called mother tongue, and English, which I have no memory of learning at the age of four and was the language I first read and wrote in. Both are lived languages, primal languages: the one of family and first namings and, now, of companionship and love; the other of decades of, I hope, undetectable and successful assimilation in England. Which should I be without?
I was happily bilingual till my midtwenties, when I began, by economic necessity, to translate. The matching of my two languages is an inner process, the setting of a broken bone, a graft, the healing of a wound. Perhaps it can even be claimed that in me German is in some way an open wound, which is soothed and brought to healing by the application of English. Translation as a psychostatic necessity. Look, there is no break in my life, no loss of Eden, no loss of childhood certainties, no discontinuity, no breach, no rupture, no expulsion. English, then, as a bandage, a splint, a salve.
* * *
Late in my translation of my father’s novel of small town Germany in the thirties and forties, The Film Explainer, about his grandfather, my great-grandfather, you may read: “Anyone who now saw Grandfather on the street, under his artist’s hat, with which ‘he shields his thick skull from others’ ideas’ (Grandmother) no longer said: Hello, Herr Hofmann! He said: Heil Hitler! Or: Another scorcher!”
Yes, this one is ontologically and humorously important to me, it’s a family book, the hero’s name is Hofmann, and I identify with everyone in it because they’re all a part of me: the vainglorious oldster (like me, a wearer of hats), the acerbic grandmother, the anxious-to-please small boy—but even beyond that, the expressing of that history, its domestication in English, gives me immense satisfaction. Where is the rift, the breach, if it is a matter of chance whether you say the Terry-Thomas “Another scorcher!” or the truly villainous “Heil Hitler!”? It could just as well have happened to you, it implies, and: look, I am making a joke of it, and: how can you think I am different? I am putting together something in myself, and in my history.
Hence—though of course no one likes a bad review—the way I react unusually badly (it seems to me) to mistakes (I do make them) and to readers’ or reviewers’ rebukes. It interferes with my healing, my knitting together, my convalescence. It tears off a bandage and scrapes open my hurt, or my heart. Don’t disturb my zigzags, I think.
* * *
Translation is the production of words, hundreds of thousands of words, by now many millions of words. I prefer short books, I am lazy, I am a poet, one page is usually plenty for me. But even so, the long books have snuck up on me, and passed through me. The Radetzky March perhaps 140,000 words. Two long Falladas, two hundred thousand apiece. Fallada short stories, another hundred thousand. Ernst Jünger 130,000, and with a bunch of other war books—how did I get into that?—comfortably four hundred thousand. Seventy books, millions and millions of words, like millions and millions of numbers, like π, an unreal number. If I notice myself starting to repeat (3 point 141592…), I promise myself, then I will stop.
* * *
This is all distraction on an industrial scale, the “still small voice” of poetry decibeled over, my puny resources vastly overstretched, the ninety-eight-pound weakling unhappily running amok with a chest expander. In the Nietzsche/Jünger way, it will either kill me or make me strong. Again, how did it happen? Out of fealty to my novelist father: prose. Out of my German nature: Tüchtigkeit, energetic production, industry, diligence. Out of dissatisfaction with my own slow, woolgathering, window-gazing methods: all-consuming tasks in unbroken sequence. Out of a desire to make more—and heavier—books: translation. Given his druthers, what does moony Narcissus take upon himself? Why, the labors of Hercules!
* * *
If you want someone to look after your sentences for you, who or what better than a poet? If you want someone to regulate—enterprisingly regulate—your diction, cadence your prose, hook a beginning to an ending, jam an ending up against a beginning, drive a green fuse through the gray limbs of clauses—a poet. If you’re looking for prose with dignity, with surprise, with order, with attention to detail. That’s why the first item in Tom Paulin’s book of electric free translations, The Road to Inver, is his version of the opening of Camus’s The Plague. Prose. Well, up to a point.
* * *
And the resources, the tools? Well, they can be anything at all. Sometimes, when I’ve liked certain expressions in German—most especially when they weren’t things I knew and therefore gave me the sense that not everyone would know them in German—I let them stand. Uncommon in German, why not new in English? In Every Man Dies Alone, there’s this: “The actor Max Harteisen had, as his friend and attorney Toll liked to remind him, plenty of butter on his head from pre-Nazi times.” There is a footnote to this, but it’s none of my making: I’d have let it go without. Butter on the head—isn’t it an adorable expression?! Or this, from the novel Seven Years by Peter Stamm, a scene in which two architects are exchanging career advice: “Berlin is an El Dorado, he said, if you’re half-presentable, then you can earn yourself a golden nose.” Nothing easier than to have said “really fill your boots” or “earn silly money” or “a shedload of money,” but I didn’t want to: the golden nos
e—what a perfect expression of the wealth gap: such a futile, practically syphilitic protuberance!—had wowed me too much.
So, things let stand from German—but also the opposite. Things fetched from every corner of English. Someone told me a phrase in my Wassermann translation is Australian (I spent hours looking but couldn’t find the reference, though I do remember once trying to use “Esky,” from “Eskimo,” the Australian term for a cooler, and not being allowed to). Another expression—“a kick in the slats”—is from a Dublin-born civil servant I used to know. This is translation not quite as autobiography but maybe as “autography”: turning out my pockets, Schwitters-style, a bus ticket, a scrap of newspaper, a fag packet, a page torn out of a diary. The words are not just words; they are words that I’ve knocked around with; they reflect my continuing engagement with Lowell, with Brodsky, with Bishop, with Malcolm Lowry, words that have had some wear and tear, there is fade in them, and softness, and history, maybe not visibly so for every reader, but palpably, to some.
I use English and American more or less as they come to hand; it used to be I thought I knew the difference, and even imagined I could deliberately switch between them, but I’m no longer sure. Is it the hood or the bonnet? The boot or the trunk? Does something take the biscuit or the cake? Is it the shoe that drops or the penny? Am I pernickety or more persnickety? Inevitably, and increasingly—it’s a function of my life and reading, as well as of having employers in London and New York—things in me will come out mixed, in a style you could call “universal-provincial.” A molten, mongrel English (which I happen to believe is the genius and proclivity of the language anyway). What I find most resistant (and least simpatico) is the authentic and the limited and the local (but what translation is going to sit happily with those qualities: they are each the antithesis of translation). Everything expressive is possible. I fight hard for British expressions in my US translations (“on the never-never” is one that comes to mind—surely the American economy would be in a different shape if that jolly warning of the dangers of excessive credit had been understood!), and I like introducing British readers to American expressions as well. Eight boyhood years in Edinburgh—I thought they had left no trace—find a belated upsurge in a welter of Scottish-isms: “postie,” “wee,” “agley,” “first-footing.” (The main beneficiary/sufferer was Durs Grünbein; if I thought anything by it [by no means sure], perhaps that I was mapping provincialisms, Saxon onto Scottish, eighteenth-century capital onto eighteenth-century capital, his Dresden childhood onto mine in the self-styled “Athens of the North.”) Words I’ve used in poems myself, “bimble” and others, get in on the act. It’s not just that translation takes away all your words, it’s more insidious than that, more neutron-bomb-like: it takes away all my words. Again, once I find myself repeating myself, or see a certain predictability and mannerism in the use—without much sanction from the original—of a slightly dandyish, comical, rueful register, say .888888 recurring, it’ll be time for me to stop.
* * *
But that’s the problem: Whose words are you going to use, if not your own? Reprising Buffon, Wallace Stevens said: “A man has no choice about his style.” Why shouldn’t it be just as true of a translator as of John Doe, author? Is it imagined that you take a dictionary to an original, and make fifty or hundred thousand hermetically separate transactions, translating, in effect, blind, and into a language not yours and no one else’s? Is that a book? Every word taken out of its association-proof shrink-wrapping? I don’t see how a personal vocabulary and personal grammar and a personal rhythm—at least where they exist, in anyone evolved enough to have them—are to be excluded. Chocolates carry warnings that they may have been manufactured using equipment that has hosted peanuts; why not translations too? But then not just “has written the occasional modern poem” but also “likes punk” or “early familiarity with the works of Dickens” or even “reads the Guardian” or “follows the Dow” or “fan of P. G. Wodehouse.” (Yes, dear reader, these are all me.) But we are all contaminated. I have awe but not much respect for people who translate with a contemporary lexicon to hand, so that a translation of an old book is “guaranteed” to contain no words that weren’t in existence—albeit in the other language—at the time of writing. It is ingenious, yes; disciplined, aha; plausible, sure; but it’s entirely too mechanistic. Even if you use eighteenth-century vocabulary, chances are you won’t manage a single sentence that would have passed muster in the eighteenth century. (There’s a difference between a pianist and a piano tuner.) Meanwhile, your twenty-first-century reader reads you with what—his eighteenth-century parson’s soul? On his Nook?
* * *
I want a translation to provide an experience, and I want, as a translator, to make a difference. I concede that both aims may be felt to be somewhat unusual, even inadmissible. I can see that the idea of me as writer leans into, or even blurs, the idea of me as translator (after all, I don’t need someone else’s book to break my silence: I am, if you like, a ventriloquist’s ventriloquist). Translating a book is for me an alternative to or an extension (a multiplier!) of writing an essay or poem. A publisher friend did me the kindness of dreaming of a world where books were thought of not by author but by translator (who is after all the one who comes up with the words on the page): so, a Pevear/Volokhonsky, not a Tolstoy; a Mitchell, not a Rilke; a Lydia Davis, not a Proust.
But where is the fidelity, you may say, where is the accuracy, the self-effacement, the service? For me the service comes in writing as well and as interestingly as possible. It comes from using the full range of Englishes, the different registers, the half-forgotten words, the tricks of voice, the unexpected tightenings and loosenings of grammar. (I serve my originals, as I see it, but I am also there to serve English, hence the importations, the “finds,” the dandyisms, and the collisions.) I am impatient with null or duff passages of writing, clichés, inexactitudes, even, actually, the ordinary inert. (I don’t know that I would find anything more challenging than a book where the characters only ever “went” to places, and only ever “said” things: I’d find it stifling—and have done.) In his sweet-mannered but still thought-provoking Is That a Fish in Your Ear? David Bellos characterizes translation as liable to produce a sort of moyen language, clipping the extremes of an original, tending toward the accepted and the established and the center, the unexceptional and the unexceptionable. I don’t mind much where my extremes come from—whether they are mine, or my authors’, but I want them to be there. Extra pixels. The high resolution of a fourth or fifth decimal place, I once put it. It’s the expectation of poetry: brevity, pitch, drama. The right word, or phrase, or sentence—and thereby, too, something you mightn’t have got from someone else. Yes, a translator is a passenger, riding in relative safety (and deserved penury) in a vehicle that has already been built, but I would still rather he were a passenger of the bobsled kind—a converted sprinter, someone who at least puts his own bones and balance and reactions into his work.
* * *
And so one ungrateful reader sees fit to complain: “He uses words not commonly seen in books and occasionally his grammar is clumsy” (which only seems to get more hilarious the more I look at it: the wonderfully aggrieved, positively denunciatory tone; the gorgeous—imitatively clumsy—hitch, a kind of commaless splice; the absurd implication that more words may be used in speech [that written English operates a rather French system of vocabulary restraint]; the rather gray little sentence that flaunts its two mealy adverbs). A reviewer describes me as “the usually reliable” (which in some moods I would see as a slur), and goes on to grumble about my use of “inelegant nonwords” like “chuntering” (to talk in a low, inarticulate way) and “squinny” (from “squint,” obviously)—both of them seem to me not just perfect but perfectly good (and since when is there a universal edict on elegance, or on frequency of use?)—and intimates he would rather (sight unseen) read eighty-year-old versions by my predecessors, the wonderfully named Cedar and E
den Paul, who sound like the grandsire and grandam of the Tea Party: perhaps I should counter by denying him any of my other, “usually reliable,” translations? The novelist A. S. Byatt drew up a little list of words she thought ought not to have appeared in my translation of Joseph Roth’s novel, The Emperor’s Tomb (first published in 1938): “a ways,” “gussied up,” “sprog,” “sharp cookie,” “gobsmacked,” and (rather ruthlessly, I thought) “pinkie.” The action of the book straddles World War I; only the first of Byatt’s terms comes from “before,” the others are all “after the deluge,” which I think matters. Four times I shrugged my shoulders. I inclined my head a little at “sharp cookie”—if English had offered “sharp biscuit” I might indeed have used that—but the only one that had me scrambling was “gobsmacked,” which is a vulgarism not in my repertoire in speech, never mind books, or so I thought. When I looked it up in Roth, I saw it was spoken by a character called von Stettenheim, a con man—von man—who is described as a “Prussian vulgarian.” Even that, then—reaching for a word I don’t use—doesn’t seem wrong to me.
Where Have You Been? Page 22
