Translation (9.12.18)

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato—Translating Poems

We’ve established ourselves enough (I’m talking about trust here) that I think we can take on a more ambitious project: translating poems.  While translation is not easy, neither is it impossible.  My bookshelves are full of books of poetry translations whose introductions acknowledge that the translator has only a rudimentary understanding of the original language.  Sometimes these translators collaborate with fellow poets who are fluent in the original.  And customarily, they share their translations with colleagues, such as academics, practicing poets, or natives who speak the original language fluently.

But one thing all good translators of poetry have in common is that they are poets.  They have mastered the craft of poetry in their native tongue.  They know what makes a poem work: image, tone of voice, line, syntax, compression and expansion, rhythm and meter, onomatopoeia and so on.  That is, they know poetry technically.  But more importantly, the successful translators know how a poem moves emotionally and sonically. [1]  This is poetic knowledge.

Here are the tools you need to “translate” a poem from an original language into your native tongue:

• A fairly comprehensive bi-lingual dictionary (comprehensive enough to provide examples of usage, shaded or nuanced meanings, contextual meaning, idiomatic usage, and perhaps even slang usage).  I use a Cassel’s New French Dictionary with about 75,000 entries, which is now somewhat dated (sometimes useful for all that), and a more recently compiled Collins Robert French-English Dictionary that includes ample context usage examples.  And of course I use Google Translate.
• Experience writing poems in various formats, styles, themes.  After nearly a year of Wednesdays@One sessions, I think everybody has sampled the necessary smorgasbord! 
• Patience and a free imagination.  This last “tool” is critical, for translating a poem is not so far afield from writing a poem from scratch in your native language, even if you’re fluent in the original language.  It’s freedom of imagination—what you might also call fearless imagination—that helps you see the possibilities in converting a poem from one language to another.

That’s all you need, really.  But you will note that I enclosed the verb translate, above, in quotation marks.  That’s meant to suggest the question, What is a translation?  In my experience, “translation” is a loose term, loose as poetic composition itself.  Converting a poem from one language to another is often a matter of a sliding scale of effort and imagination, one that looks like this:

Transliteration     < >     Translation     < >     Rendering

At one end of the scale is mere word conversion: you Google each word of the original text for its English equivalent and simply write that down in the order it appears within each line of the original.  Now this is a mechanical way of translating that nets a clumsy result.  

Les Portraits      ─Jean Follain (1903-1971) Les portraits aux murs de nos villas montrent d’autoritaires enfants de dentelles et de velours vêtus; à dix ans déjà prêts pour la lutte leurs mères les embrassaient avec sauvagerie et quand la nuit tombe sur ces portraits pâlis tout est si morne que le monde nous semble à jamais mort à ses mythologies.	The Portraits      ─trans. Clark Holtzman The portraits on the walls of our villas display authoritative children of lace and of velvet clothes; at ten years already ready for the struggle their mothers kissed them with savagery and when night falls on these pale portraits all is so gloomy that the world appears to us ever dead to its mythologies.
	The Portraits      ─trans. John Ashbery The portraits on the walls of our villas are of authoritarian children dressed in lace and velvet; at the age of ten already prepared for the struggle their mothers kissed them savagely and when night falls on these faded portraits everything is so dismal that the world seems to us dead forever to its mythologies.

 Translation means the attempt to convert not just a word’s dictionary meaning but also its context, its syntactical value, its connotation; that is, its “color.”  Note the difference between my line-by-line transliteration above and John Ashbery’s translation.  A translation will attend to idiom, the colloquial usage, slang.  It will also “translate” proper word order or syntax: la blouse rose in French will be translated not as “the blouse pink” in English, but rather as “the pink blouse.”  This makes the translation a kind of “secondary” or dependent text, dependent, that is, on the original for its meaning and effect.[2]  Following is another Ashbery translation of a Follain poem.  Note his translation of the first two lines.  Then consider this transliteration: To place one evening one’s [literally: his or its] bare foot / on a nail.  The difference, you might agree, is entirely poetic, even considering that the original is written in the surreal mode.

Les Accidents      ─Jean Follain (1903-1971) Poser un soir son pied nu sur un clou tomber des branches boire à même une eau trop froide sont les accidents mortels qu’impose le vieux destin le monde alors n’a plus d’âge le ciel reste intact et bleu les murs sèchent inexorables.

The Accidents      ─trans. By John Ashbery To step barefoot on a nail one evening to fall from the branches to drink straight from the source water that is too cold these are the mortal accidents that ancient destiny imposes at these times the world has no more age the sky remains intact and blue the walls, inexorable, dry up.

Here is another translation from French to English . . . 

Chanson ─Jacques Prévert Quel jour sommes-nous Nous sommes tous les jours Mon amie Nous somme toute la vie Mon amour Nous nous aimons et nous vivons Nous vivons et nous nous aimons Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que la vie Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que le jour Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’amour.

Song ─trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti What day is it It’s everyday My friend It’s all of life My love We love each other and we live We live and love each other And do not know what this life is And do not know what this day is And do not know what this love is.

Again, the transliteration of the first two lines might read, “literally,” “What day are we / We are every day.”  Ferlinghetti’s translation works to preserve the sense of the original in its English version.  This, along with the Ashbery translations above, are basically preservative.  They mean to preserve the style, sense and progression of the text, of the poem’s meaning (as the translator understands it).  But they mean to capture that meaning in a new context—American English from a New York action writer’s point of view, or from a San Francisco beat poet’s sense of language play.

At the far end of the scale is rendering.  Rendering is more or less free-form translation of the kind that we will try for next week.[3]  Rendering a poem from one language to another simply means that you take a) a poem in an original language and b) YOUR EXPERIENCE OF the poem in the original language, and write a NEW POEM.  The finished product is no longer the first poet’s work but the second poet’s work (which could not have come into being without the first).

In a rendering, you might be less “faithful” to the original language or text of the poem, in favor of attempting to recreate (note: not necessarily to preserve) the spirit of it.  Here is one of my favorite examples of this admittedly violent rendering of a poem from French into American English:

De Profundis Clamavi
     ─ par Charles Baudelaire, dans Les fleurs du mal, 1857

J’implore ta pitié, Toio, l’unique que j’aime,

Du fond du gouffre obscure où mon cœur est tombé.

C’est un univers morne à l’horizon plombé,

Où nagent dans la nuit l’horreur et le balsphème;

Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois,

Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre;

C’est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire;

— Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois !

Or il n’est pas d’horreur au monde qui surpasse

La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace

Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos;

Je jalousie le sort des plus vils animaux

Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide,

Tant l’écheveau du temps lentement se dévide !

The Profound Clambake

     ─ rendered by Andrew Klimek, in The Flowers of Mel, 1990

I implore to pity, you, the unique queer jam,

With a fondness for obscure guff or my heart is entombed.

It’s a universe in the morning with a horizon of aplomb,

Or nagged about the night of horror and blasphemy;

A sun without shale planes without six mes,

And the six other mes of the night cover the earth;

It’s higher pay for a new queer polar earth;

— No beds, no Russians, no green, no trees!

Or ill nests passed in horror by the world surpassing

The cold cruelty of the icy sun

And set immense night resembling veiled Chaos;

I, jealous of the sort of more vile animals

Who prevent the plunger of a stupid waiter

Taunt the horse of time that slowly divides!

You don’t have to know much French to see that Klimek is having fun with the original, that he renders words and phrases as they sound to his ear in some cases, or as they appear to call to mind certain English words.  He tosses in just enough cognates to lend his rendering some basis in original sense, but basically ignores what most of the words mean.  As a result, his version feels a bit untethered.  But given that Klimek is working with an original Surrealist text, might we conclude that his rendering is actually truer to the spirit of the original than a more faithful textual translation would be? 

⥎ ⥐ ⥎

Well!  It’s time for our project for next Wednesday.  Translate or render the following poem.  Whether you attempt a translation or a “tethered” rendering, I recommend that you first complete a transliteration (that is, a word-for-word dictionary conversion) to serve as a foundation for further flights of fancy!  Alternatively, you can attempt a more untethered kind of rendering, as Andrew Klimek does with the Baudelaire poem, and translate by sound and apparent cognate.  Keep in mind, though, that this approach has its own complexities of composition.

You might also want to print out this poem first so that the text is easier to read.

Portrait du Soleil

     ─ par Daniel Maximin, dans L’invention des désirades et autres poèmes, 2000[4]

Dès l’aube

j’ai reconnu l’appel des flamboyants

ils m’ont donné force et courage de me relever

j’ai ouvert les persiennes pour habiller la vue

j’ai vu désaccorder les rêves et les réveils

les actes et les paroles

pleurer sur la sécheresse critiquer l’hivernage

j’ai déserté les terres d’inhumanité

et offert mon zenith aux pays de misère

sur mer, j’ai dessalé la soif

j’ai éclairé l’amour qui rayonnait ma nuit

j’ai goûté dans ses larmes la seuer des sentiments

le soir, j’ai fait semblant de me noyer

lorsque le fil des jours suit l’aiguille de l’espoir

je raccommode le destin

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[1] I have read many translations of poems done by non-poets.  These are never satisfying.  The translations are often technically—that is, denotatively—correct, but the results are almost always wooden, flat, unpoetic.

[2] In this sense, “The Dover Bitch” from last week’s project is a “translation” of “Dover Beach.”

[3] You are welcome to go for a bona fide translation, if you’re up to the challenge.

[4] Paris: Editions Points, 2009.