The Craft of Translation by John Biguenet & Rainer Schulte
The Craft of Translation by John Biguenet & Rainer Schulte
The Craft of Translation by John Biguenet & Rainer Schulte
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Introduction vii
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
tion of the personal and cultural layers that interact in this poem
can he engage in a successful translation. Edmund Keeley explores
the positive and negative points of collaborative translations by re¬
flecting on his own collaboration with various authors and trans¬
lators. Donald Frame’s concern centers on the reconstruction of a
writer’s tone and how he tried to do justice to the tone of such
writers as Moliere and Rabelais. Burton Raffel introduces consid¬
erations about the translation of medieval texts, texts that by their
content, linguistic features, and cultural context are quite removed
from contemporary ways of seeing and writing. Edward Seiden-
sticker explores the difficulties and impossibilities of transplanting
texts from an Eastern language (in his case Japanese) into the lin¬
guistic structures of a Western language. Any literal translation
from Japanese into English is not really possible, because of vast
language differences in semantic connotations and grammatical
structures. And Gregory Rabassa once again underlines the precar¬
iousness of the translator’s undertaking. A translation can never
equal the original, since the word is a metaphor for the object.
Many variants complicate the translator’s task: connotations vary
according to the magnetic field of words in other languages and
according to the reader’s experience. Translation can be called an
act of “transformation” that adapts a new metaphor to the original
metaphor. Thus, translation is a process of choice and, conse-
quendy, never a finished process.
In these essays, the translators have focused their attention on
the sequence of decisions that constitute translation. As they inves¬
tigate the workings that underlie the practice of translation, it be¬
comes more and more evident that the reconstruction of the trans¬
lation process leads to the formulation of methods that are
fundamental not only to the practice of translation but also to the
act of reading and interpreting. In different ways, similar concepts
about the nature of the craft of translation emerge from their es¬
says, concepts that are in the making and therefore have not yet
reached clearly defined directions and resolutions. These essays are
dialogues between the translators and the texts with which they
come in contact, and through that interaction the translators begin
to formulate concepts about the nature of the craft of translation.
They all echo Gregory Rabassa’s assessment of the translation pro¬
cess: “It is my feeling that a translation is never finished, that it is
open and could go on to infinity. . . . Translation is a disturbing
craft because there is precious litde certainty about what we are
doing, which makes it so difficult in this age of fervent belief and
INTRODUCTION IX
ideology, this age of greed and screed.” Even though this sense of
uncertainty haunts every translator, the topics and concerns dis¬
cussed in these essays are strikingly similar in tone and perception.
Certain questions continuously weigh upon the minds of these
translators: What kind of interpretive reading must the translator
engage in to do justice to a text before the actual translation can
take place? How can equivalencies be established between the se¬
mantic and cultural differences of two languages? What constitutes
a successful translation?
The translator will always reconnect us, the readers, scholars, and
critics, with the function of the word as an isolated phenomenon
INTRODUCTION xiii
to find out whether all the other translators ignored that nuance,
whether they failed to see it in the original German, or whether
they felt that it was not important enough for their overall interpre¬
tive view of the poem. The juxtaposition of these translations,
however, conveys an intriguing insight into the translation process
and shows how different perceptions or angles of approach shape
the overall direction of a translation. The next step of a comparative
examination of these translations should address how consistent
each translator was in his translation once a perspective had been
established.
The previous remarks begin to uncover the tremendously in¬
tricate mental procedures that translators must undertake in order
to gain interpretive insights into literary texts. Only after transla¬
tors have enacted the various steps of placing words in their seman¬
tic and cultural contexts can they hope to engage in the successful
transplantation of situations from another culture into English.
Burton Raffel gives succinct expression to the enormous responsi¬
bility that translators face in their conscientious efforts to commu¬
nicate perspectives of world views across language boundaries
when he writes toward the end of his essay that “the literary trans¬
lator is necessarily engaged with far more than words, far more
than techniques, far more than stories or characters or scenes. He
is engaged with world views, and with the passionately held inner
convictions of men and women. ... A large part of his task, and
perhaps the most interesting ... is the mining out and reconstruc¬
tion of those world views, those passionately held and beautifully
embodied inner convictions.” The following essays show how each
translator struggled with the transplantation of words through
which human emotions and passions become reality.
NO TWO SNOWFLAKES ARE ALIKE:
TRANSLATION AS METAPHOR
Gregory Rabassa
1
2 Gregory Rabassa
sible to render into any other language. It is the epigraph that fol¬
lows the tide of the Brazilian Joao Guimaraes Rosa’s novel Grande
Sertao: Veredas (absurdly translated into English as The Devil to Pay
in the Backlands, although I don’t know what else could have been
done with it). The epigraph states, “O diabo na rua no meio do
redemoinho” (The devil in the street in the middle of the whirl¬
wind). Rosa has put the devil not only in the middle of the whirl¬
wind in the street but also in the very word for whirlwind: re-demo-
inho; one of the words for devil (demon) in Portuguese is demo,
and there he is in the middle of the word as well. Thomas Colchie
has received a Guggenheim grant to produce a new and proper
version of this great novel and I do not envy him as he faces this
particular problem.
Another aspect of a deep knowledge of one’s own language is
a thoroughgoing familiarity with local expression and idiom on the
part of an author. In many cases this closeness to regional expres¬
sion makes translation difficult, sometimes impossible when it
comes to preserving the flavor of the original. An example of this
is the title of Juan Rulfo’s story in El llano en llamas, “Es que somos
muy pobres.” A very simple statement to read that becomes impos¬
sible to translate because of that es que. It precludes a translation as
“We’re very poor,” and “The fact is, we’re very poor” would re¬
move it from the mouth of the peasant girl who utters the phrase.
There are other cases where customs and manners play a strong
role in the formation of words and expressions. Probably the most
difficult aspect of translation is the necessary but often futile at¬
tempt to preserve or convey a cultural milieu and its concomitants
through words. Even within one language different regions pro¬
duce different nuances and meanings for the same words. A Puerto
Rican in Buenos Aires who innocendy announces that he is going
to catch a bus (Voy a coyer la yuayua) would be arrested as a child
molester. Bicha in Portugal is a line, a queue; in Brazil it is a drag
queen.
When a translator is faced with a work dealing with the pampa
and its gauchos, he must be wary of transporting the locale and its
inhabitants to the American West. Despite their similarities, the
gaucho and the cowboy are two completely different creatures, and
Martin Fierro must never sound like Trampas. John Wayne never
squatted to sip mate, so why should one who does sound like him?
I have found that the only solution for such situations, and it is a
difficult one to handle, is to invent, in this case, a kind of artificial
NO TWO SNOWFLAKES ARE ALIKE 11
A more serious title for this essay, which will address aspects of the
process of translation, would be “Reading Poem 145 of Sor Juana
Ines de la Cruz: Variation on a Sonnet.” Metaphorically speaking,
however, each of the ‘Variations” can be considered the product of
a builder in the reconstruction business.
For Walter Benjamin a translation had to fit itself into its own
language “with loving particularity . . . just as the broken pieces of
a vase, to be joined again, must fit at every point, though none may
be exacdy like the other.”1 One can understand why a translator
would not be thrilled with this figure—the marks of the patching
are all too readily observable, the translator’s work distressingly ex¬
posed. I like to think of the original work as an ice cube. During
the process of translation the cube is melted. While in its liquid
state, every molecule changes place; none remains in its original
relationship to the others. Then begins the process of forming the
work in a second language. Molecules escape, new molecules are
poured in to fill the spaces, but the lines of molding and mending
are virtually invisible. The work exists in the second language as a
new ice cube—different, but to all appearances the same.
The reference in the tide, the role of the translator as a builder
in the reconstruction business, derives not from reading on trans¬
lation but from the play “La mueca” by the Argentine psychiatrist-
dramatist Eduardo Pavlovsky. One of Pavlovsky’s characters, El
Sueco, voices his—and perhaps the author’s—aesthetic: “Hay que
violentar para embellecer; hay que destruir para crear.” One must
do violence before one can make beauty; one must destroy before
one can create. This is scarcely an original idea; rather, a recyclable
constant that arises periodically clad in the robes of a new aesthetic.
13
14 Margaret Sayers Peden
gins with the word este—the pronoun substituting for the word
“portrait,” which, interestingly, never appears in the sonnet. It is
the repetition of este as the first word in line 5 that leads the reader
to expect symmetry in the quatrains. (Peripherally, although the
first eight lines of an Italianate sonnet are thought of as an octave,
the abba, abba pattern of the rhyme scheme, as well as the inden¬
tation of line 5 in Sor Juana’s sonnet, as reproduced in her Obras
completas, tend to suggest two quatrains.)
The first quatrain is self-contained; every phrase refers to the
first word and could be read in this way: “este, que ves”; “este, que
es engano colorido”; “este, del arte ostentando los primores”; “este,
con falsos silogismos de colores”; “este es engano del sentido.” In
contrast to the first, closed quatrain, the second is open: now este
promises a closure that is not forthcoming. In lieu of the suggested,
but failed, symmetry with “este . . . es,” the second quatrain pre¬
sents a secondary structural parallelism in the two verb clauses de-
18 Margaret Sayers Peden
Samuel Beckett
John A. Crow
20 Margaret Sayers Peden
Kate Flores
Roderick Gill
BUILDING A TRANSLATION 21
Muna Lee
B.G.P.
G. W. Umphrey
iambic pentameter. This is not the case. For reasons that are unclear
to me, an hendecasyllabic line translated into English almost inevi¬
tably adjusts to four feet. Thus it becomes necessary for the trans¬
lator to “'pad” the lines, to add intrusive foreign materials, in order
to make the Spanish edifice conform to English style. No further
comment is necessary on the numerous pitfalls that await the un¬
wary translator in this endeavor.
Poetic figures in sonnet 145 are most notable in the sestet and
take the form of metaphor, not simile: este (the portrait) is “artificio
del cuidado,” “flor al viento” and, of course, “cadaver, polvo, som-
bra, nada.” When the metaphor is material, that is, an object like a
flower, or even a cadaver, the original figure is successfully paral¬
leled in the translations: “a fragile flower,” “a brittle blossom,” “a
cadaver,” or “a corpse.” When the metaphor is an abstraction we
find the translations much less precise. For example, “Un resguardo
inutil” becomes variously, and variandy, “a shield against a sure
Fate,” “a useless bribe,” “a ploy to counter destiny,” “a frail de¬
fence,” “a paltry sanctuary,” “a paltry refuge,” “against fate an un¬
availing wall,” and in Lee’s translation, something completely in¬
decipherable.
The questions proliferate. How do these translations conform
to the traditional classifications of translation: literal, approxima¬
tion, or adaptation/imitation? How much is lost if the English-
language reader does not hear—cannot, of course, hear—the al¬
lusions to Gongora in the sonnet’s last line? Did faint echoes of
Villon’s “ou sont les neiges d’antan” somehow suggest Gill’s “the
years’ advancing snows”? What would a concordance of cognates
reveal? Why does only one translator make use of the crutch of the
cognate slant rhyme of favors/colors/horrors/rigors (for primores/
colores I horrores Ingores) ? What is the effect of alliteration in the En¬
glish (as in “brittle blossom,” “discreet delusion”) ? Why do the re¬
constructions of the secondary parallelism in the second quatrain
range from perfect recreation to total disregard? Most important
of all, how is the key line of sonnet 145 translated? This last ques¬
tion is one we cannot ignore.
In my first comments on the poem’s structure I pointed out
how everything impels the reader toward that last line. As it is the
essential line, it is the line the translator must translate with greatest
care. Perversely, it is the most difficult, technically. Among the rea¬
sons are the fact that the words are stated so as to allow no inter¬
pretation, and when inflexibility of meaning is added to the de-
26 Margaret Sayers Peden
What may we have learned from this exercise? Facetiously, that the
moving and re-construction trade is not without its perils. More
seriously, to the serious critic of translation—not the reviewer who
crawls through a translation on his hands and knees, dictionary in
hand, nosing out words for which he does not find a hundred per¬
cent correspondence from language to language—I have offered a
formula. Thus the reader-critic may approach the reading of a son¬
net translation—and perhaps that of other formal poetry as well—
by measuring basic structure as well as evaluating ornamentation.
I remind the translator always to be alert to the total structure of
the sonnet. This is particlarly pertinent in sonnet 145, which con¬
sists of a single sentence. It is easy to think of this poem in terms
of units contained within the rhyme scheme (two quatrains of abba
rhyme, plus a sestet) or as units determined by typography. As she
conserves the integrity of the design, the translator must also mon¬
itor how rhyme and meter distort and stress the structure, how
words, rhetorical figures, even concepts, can be twisted out of
BUILDING A TRANSLATION 27
shape by the very effort to adorn the edifice with beauty and sym¬
metry.
Reading nine translations of sonnet 145, we have seen the
poem de-structed, and observed the failures and successes of its re¬
construction. Those failures and successes reveal to us the strengths
and weaknesses of the original poem as well.
We have isolated the techniques by which Sor Juana impels the
poem toward the last line; seen—though not every translator
judged it important—the imperious repetition that both postpones
and presses toward the didactic last line. What we might not have
seen, were it not for the magnifying lens the translations focus
upon the poem, are lines where the poem itself is “soft.” We have
noted that the metaphors of the sestet are laxly translated. With the
exception of the material figure of the flower, and the crutch of¬
fered by the cognate “artifice,” the translations of lines 9 through
13 bear virtually no resemblance to each other. To a degree the
discrepancies can be ascribed to the translators, but they are not
totally at fault. The imprecision lies in the original lines. Sor Juana,
too, was directed by rhyme: note, for example, the displacement of
the adjective delicada, the near redundancy of necia and errada. Sor
Juana’s eye is fixed on nada. She is marking time in the five lines
preceding the final line, letting rhyme and rhythm and repetition
bear her toward the culmination of the poem. The seemingly sound
architecture of the sestet is actually trompe 1’oeil. The sonnet, re¬
duced to its fundament, is contained in the first word and the last
line: “Este . . . es cadaver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.” Any fur¬
ther reduction would lead to a blank page.
All translations should be followed by a blank page. That blank
page awaits the ideal translation of poem 145, the reconstituted
vase, the re-formed ice cube, the perfectly re-constructed baroque
edifice.
TRANSLATING MEDIEVAL
EUROPEAN POETRY
Burton Raffel
28
TRANSLATING MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN POETRY 29
Horace did not share this confidence; neither did Catullus. But
then, they did not write epics, and Virgil did.
Thus the poem’s self-consciousness, which is what I want to
emphasize and the reason I have brought the Aeneid into this dis¬
cussion, is neither a defect nor an accident. It is an integral part of
what the Aeneid is all about. No matter that Virgil, too, surely had
doubts about “the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that
was Rome.” What is infinitely more significant is that he spent long
years laboring at the Aeneid, and felt it so unfinished that, at his
death, he tried to have the manuscript destroyed. The poem’s self-
conscious proclamations could not have been more deliberate
choices, nor could those choices have seemed more important to
the poet.
The scop (“showp,” bard, poet) who gave us Beowulf starts from a
far more defensive posture.
And this poem ends, unlike the Aeneid, in exacdy the same key:
If then the lesson is that the translator must listen to his origi¬
nal, must sympathize with (and of course must also understand)
what his original is trying to convey, it is equally important diat
the translation be a medium of literary transmission, not merelv an
empty echo trying to reproduce, more or less mechanicallv, the
original’s beat. The translator of medieval poetry cannot possibly
reproduce the exact sounds, the exact linguistic effects, of a linguis¬
tically long-dead original, any more than he can hope to find exact
verbal equivalences for long-dead turns of phrase. At the start of
Beowulf, for example, we are told that the hero being described
“Oft. . . sceathena threatum, / monegum maegthum medoseda of-
teah.” More or less literally (which is manifesdy no way ever to
translate anything): “Often . . . (he) took away (deprived) of their
mead-hall seats crowds of enemies, many tribes (peoples, nadons).”
Translating this brief passage into prose, rather than verse (another
road that should never be taken by the literary translator), William
Alfred comes up with “More than once, (he) pulled seats in the
mead-hall out from beneath troops of his foes, tribe after tribe.”
But is the hero no more than an aberrant practical joker? The ca¬
dence has necessarily vanished, when the translator employs prose.
But far more than cadence has vanished, here. I translate the pas¬
sage: “[He] made slaves of soldiers from every / Land, crowds of
TRANSLATING MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN POETRY 35
captives he’d beaten / Into terror.” Is this what the Old English
says? The answer, simply, is yes, it’s exactiy what it says—to the
Old English audience for whom it was intended. To deprive a free
warrior of his rightful seat in the mead-hall meant, for them, to
also deprive him of his freedom—that is, to turn him into a slave.
And how, in the Old English world, was this accomplished? In war:
men who were beaten and taken prisoner became slaves, denied
free access to any mead-hall, either their own or their captors’.
What the translator of medieval poetry must do—deeply
understanding and deeply sympathizing with his original—is con¬
vey to his audience not the bare words of his original text but the
meaning of those words. He must cast his own words in a tone,
and give them a verse movement, as close to that of the original as
he can devise. The translator of modem poetry does this too: of
course. But the task is obviously in many ways a great deal simpler,
in dealing with modem poetry, for the translator of medieval verse
is never translating only words, or even translating only emotions.
The translator of medieval verse is transmitting an entire culture, a
dead worldview, with all its dead customs and turns of phrase—
cast in molds of dead verse form and verse movement. Just as writ¬
ing is an act of hubris, so too is good translation. The translator
cannot afford to be any more modest than the original author
was—though he must necessarily be a great deal more careful. In¬
deed, it has been my experience that translators with an excess of
modesty are usually, perhaps even always, translators of poor qual¬
ity. The scholar is much more appropriately modest. The translator
is, to some extent like the original author, a risk-taker—and risk-
takers must not be modest, or the risks they take are not worth
troubling with.
wain. For that same seven-hundred-year span also ensures that Ga-
wain is necessarily a very different poem. We inevitably find
ourselves dealing with sharply changed language, with sharply al¬
tered verse forms, and reflections of a society which has been many
times transformed—not simply by the passage of hundreds of years
but also by the vast upheavals consequent on the Norman Con¬
quest. In the chronology of English literature, both Beowulf and
Gawain are medieval poems. But they come to us out of extraor¬
dinarily different literary, linguistic, and social worlds. And their
translators need, as intelligendy as they can, to confront those dif¬
ferences direcdy.
Specifically linguistic pressures, oddly enough, are much less
burdensome than they might at first seem. Gawain is an unusual
Middle English text (in this as in other respects). Geoffrey Chau¬
cer’s Middle English dialect was the direct antecedent of today’s
English. Chaucer can therefore be fairly readily understood by any¬
one familiar with Modern English; some adjustments, and some
specific vocabulary, are virtually all that is needed. But Gawain is
written in an obscure north-country dialect—so obscure, indeed,
that we do not know its exact nature or locadon. The manuscript
is plainly a scriptorium copy—that is, a commercially produced
version—rather than the author’s original. And it is equally plainly
the work of a second-rate, provincial scriptorium: even the illustra¬
tions are bad, both as art and as illustrations of this particular text.
The art work in the manuscript does not, for example, show the
green knight as green, nor are his hair and beard notably long,
though the text insists that they are. The obscurity of the poem’s
origin makes for some difficult linguistic moments. About as many
words occur uniquely in Gawain as occur in Beowulf and uniquely
used words are naturally very hard to pin down. But that same
difficulty also tends to relieve us of the “false friend” problem that
“translators” of Chaucer are obliged to deal with. If Chaucer writes
“A good felawe to have his concubyn,” the translator must be care¬
ful to turn Middle English “felawe” into Modern English “rascal.”
If' Chaucer writes, “He was a gentil harlot and a kynde,” the trans¬
lator must turn “gentil” into “worthy” and “harlot” into (once
more) “rascal.” And in the process the translator of Chaucer has
lost, in my view, too much, as well as too much that need not be
lost, given the essential similarity rather than difference between
the two forms of English. It is better (and not really very difficult)
for the modern reader to learn a bit of Chaucer’s Middle English
vocabulary and read the poet in the original.
TRANSLATING MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN POETRY 37
Were there any doubt about the unusual nature of Gawain, surely
this strange combination of formal features would put it to rest.
Although the poem was written about 1390, most of it is com¬
posed according to a thinned-out but recognizable version of Old
English prosody—dead, so far as written records tell us, for some¬
thing over three centuries. Plainly, the so-called alliterative revival
in Middle English, of which Gawain is a part, is better called an
alliterative survival. We have no information on what part of that
survival was oral, or what part was written. And translating oral
literature presents very special problems.3 But survive the allitera¬
tive verse form did, and produced not only this splendid poem but
also a masterpiece like Piers Plowman. Piers Plownmn, however,
makes no meter-and-rhyme concession to the new and dominant
verse forms so brilliantly employed by Chaucer, verse forms which
were already well on their way to literary dominance in England.
Gawain does make such a concession, in its consistent use of the
bob and wheel—-and thereby indicates that its author’s cultural
stance was at the same time both regressive and progressive.
But there is much more to that author’s peculiar stance, to the
extent we are able to make ourselves understand it. Beowulf surely
owes a huge debt to Old Germanic traditions, both in form and in
content. It may owe something to the Aeneid: I prefer to leave that
case as speculative, though some fine argument has been made.
Beowulf s Old Testament influences are clear, though not perhaps
overwhelmingly large. Gawain owes much to poems like Beowulf
(there may well have been other Old English epics, now lost to us;
we do not know, nor do we know if the author of Gawain knew of
Beowulf). But Gawain also owes a huge debt to the literature of
medieval France, whose stamp is all over the poem. The marks
of current Christian thinking and emotion are large, too—and if
the author of Gawain was also the author of other works bound in
the same codex, like Pearl (this case, too, is unproven and probably
improvable), his religious awareness, and training, were extensive.
A poet whose background includes Old English (oral? written?
both?), newfangled moderns like Chaucer, deep currents of
fourteenth-century mystical Christianity, and a wide reading in and
4. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Burton Raffel (New York:
Mentor/New American Library, 1970), p. 49.
40 Burton Raffel
four beats, sometimes with three, sometimes with two, but never
with four beats alliterating. The last beat, in particular, never allit¬
erates—as if to quickly, briefly shift gears and give the reader-
audience’s ear a moment of relief, of change. Nor do either allit¬
erative patterns or the sounds which are alliterated reproduce
themselves from line to line: the scop had a profound understanding
of the need for variety. The basic division of the individual line,
something (but not exacdy) like a caesura, occurs at the mid point,
that is, after the second beat. Enjambment is quite common. (A
small percentage of lines features six rather than four beats, though
under exacdy what circumstances we do not know. The line divi¬
sion then occurs after the third rather than the second beat. The
alliterative patterns are slightiy different, in this hyper-metrical line,
though again we are not sure just what rules are being applied.)5
Gownin’s alliteration is much more irregular. In these first
seven lines, for example, we have the following patterns:
Any self-respecting Old English scop would tear out his hair, seeing
workmanship of so fuzzy and unpredictable a kind. But alliteration
is of high importance to the Gawain poet, whether or not he uses
it exactly as his poetic ancestors did, and it must therefore be fea¬
tured in the translation. In my rendering, we have the following
patterns for these same opening lines:
In short, what I have done is reproduce much though not all of the
poem's alliteration, with occasional gaps for the relief of the mod¬
ern reader (who needs a good deal more relief than did the original
audience-reader). I have also followed the Gawain poet’s unpre¬
dictable patterning of alliteration, though of course diluting those
patterns as I have diluted the overall total of alliteration.
There are, to be sure, additional considerations involved in my
decision. Sesed, “ceased,” in line 1, is simply not a workable word
for the very first line of a modern English poem—and a poetic
translation published in our time must be a modem poem if it is to
be anything at all. That is, “ceased” has over the centuries taken on
a special, almost Latinate quality that it did not have in the four¬
teenth century. To automatically carry over sesed as “ceased” is
therefore to give the poem, from the start, a false flavor, for Gawain
is verbally (i.e., tonally and rhetorically) consistent. So, too, must
its translation be, even if that consistency—in Modern English—
requires modification of some individual words. “Ceased” would
of course offer a third opportunity for alliteration in line 1. One
balances each consideration against others, line by line, situation
by situation. In the end, verbal consistency seemed to me, here,
more important than alliteration.
There is no way to reproduce brittened, brent, brondez, for the
key word, brittened, “destroyed,” is no longer available. I therefore
borrowed the poet’s own regular reliance on rhyme, in the bob and
wheel, and momentarily deviated from alliteration into internal
rhyme, employing “smashed / ashes.” This internal rhyme is of
course entirely my responsibility, but it provides at least a marker
of craft-concern, something to alert the modern reader, accustomed
to poems for the most part in free verse metric, that the original of
this translation-poem works differently. One does what one can,
given the conditions and the audience with which one works—
both of which are givens, plainly, and not subject to anyone’s dic¬
tates.
In line 3, I could readily lay on the alliteration, to make it
obvious even to an untutored reader that alliteration mattered in
this poem. I seized the opportunity with relish.
In line 4, again, a key alliterative word, trewest, is not properly
available in Modern English. In Gawain it means “most certain,
42 Burton Raffei.
The vocabulary, here, and the treatment, are far closer to Old En¬
glish than to anything French. The use of the Old English word
for “God,” Dryghten, carries immense historical associations. Passez
is of course French, but words like derk and neghez, nyght and bid-
dez, thoroughly submerge any non-native influence in a thoroughly
English tide.
But in the poem’s second section, as Gawain armors himself
for his dangerous voyage in search of the green knight, things are
portrayed very differendy—both in vocabulary and in style:
So, too, with what was for me the hardest part of the translation,
creating an approximation of the original’s verse movement and,
especially, its wonderfully wrought but absolutely unique texture.
The brief passage in which Gawain hears a grindstone, whirring
away, sharpening a blade meant for his own neck, is typical:
Gawain and the Green Knight, was without question the hardest for
me to translate, and the longest, Tvain, was incomparably the eas¬
iest. (I suspect this would hold true for all of Chretien’s work, but
I have not yet attempted to prove the point.) It seems reasonably
clear that the closeness of Chretien’s inner world to our modern
inner world is one of the basic underlying factors, if not the single
most important factor, explaining these facts. We are not at all close
to the inner world of Beowulf, but it at least presents a unified, rock-
solid consistency. Gawain’s inner world is split in at least half a
dozen different directions, bifurcated, uncertain, always in transi¬
tion. The literarv effect of Gawain is consistent, to be sure, because
its author was a great poet. But the road to that consistency is a
fearfully tangled one for the translator, as in all probability it was
for the original poet, too.
If then there is any overarching lesson to be learned from my
remarks, it is, as I have argued many times before, that the literary
translator is necessarily engaged with far more than words, far
more than techniques, far more than stories or characters or scenes.
He is—and the literary translator of medieval works is even more
deeply so—engaged with worldviews and with the passionately
held inner convictions of men and women long dead and vanished
from the earth. A large part of his task, and perhaps the most in¬
teresting (once he acquires essential but merely preliminary tech¬
nical skills), is the mining out and reconstruction of those world¬
views, those passionately held and beautifully embodied inner
convictions. I am deeply convinced that it is precisely this that
keeps me, after something like twenty volumes of verse translation,
looking forward to more.
COLLABORATION, REVISION,
AND OTHER LESS FORGIVABLE
SINS IN TRANSLATION
Edmund Keeley
Edmund Keeley is a novelist and professor of English and creative writing at Prince¬
ton University. He has translated works by C. P. Cavafy, Angelos Sikehanos, George
Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, and Vassilis Vassilikos. He has also written
several critical studies of modem Greek poetry.
54
COLLABORATION, REVISION, AND OTHER SINS 55
heart lies buried like something dead” and, in the second instance,
where “the black ruin of my life” becomes “the black ruins of my
life” in order to provide a visual image of ruins in Cavafy’s desolate
city landscape, as in the original Greek.
The impulse in the case of the Collected Cavafy was less that
of contemporaneity and more that of accuracy in both substance
and tone, and this resulted in a somewhat less colloquial version
than that of the Selected Cavafy, but one that is perhaps more in
keeping with the mixed linguistic coloring, the play between for¬
mal and informal language, that one finds in Cavafy’s text. Yet it
became characteristic of our collaboration at this time not to regard
any of our versions as fixed and final. A later printing of the Col¬
lected Cavafy (1980) is labelled “with corrections,” and there were
a few further “corrections” a year later when Sherrard and I
brought out a new anthology to replace our old out-of-print Six
Poets volume. It is clear that we continued to be pursued by that
troublesome line in “The City,” which now reads “and my heart
lies buried as though it were something dead,” a bit more formal
yet. I doubt that it will stay that way. If one believes—as I think
Sherrard and I do—that translation is a movable feast that must
initially serve the taste of its particular day and then be prepared to
change in keeping with the taste of another day, and second, that
any single translation of a text is by definition an incomplete and
somewhat distorted image of the original, there must always be
room for retouching and sharpening that image as new taste and
new perception may indicate. And of course this carries with it the
danger of expanding rather than diminishing the degree of distor¬
tion.
Which brings me back to Seferis and the revision of our work
on his poetry. Seferis himself thought it sinful of a poet to alter his
own work once the text of a poem had been published and estab¬
lished as part of that poet’s canon. He once told me that he found
it “inexcusable” that Auden should decide to drop a whole stanza
of his “1 September 1939” when it was reprinted in his Collected
Shorter Poems, 1930-1944. “Even if your beliefs may change as you
grow older, the poem is a work of art that expresses you as you
were when you wrote it and therefore has no business changing.” I
wonder what he felt about the changes over time in the Keeley-
Sherrard version of his poetry. While he was alive, he had no com¬
ment on that matter or the translation of his poetry in general—
except to say at one point that of course our English version, any
64 Edmund Keeley
English version of his work, was the translator’s poetry, not his.
That, I suppose, is fair enough. In any case, our collaboration kept
producing a slightly different poem every time we had a chance to
go at the text anew, and that includes our most recent version,
reshaped in the same village on the Evian Gulf during the summer
of 1986.
A single example that I have discussed in part elsewhere and
that can now be updated will serve for an easily accessible case in
point: the opening lines of the opening poem in Seferis’s crucial
series of twenty-four poems called Mythistorima, the volume that
helped to bring new possibilities into Greek poetry during the dec¬
ade of the thirties, much as The Waste Land did for Anglo-
American poetry during the twenties. The context of the passage
in question is an Odyssean journey of discovery and return (or
nostos) that is never quite fulfilled satisfactorily, neither in this poem
nor in the series as a whole, but that begins with a search for “the
first seed” so that the contemporary protagonists can again find
what they have lost out of their ancient past that might bring new
life into their arid present. In this opening poem, “1,” they wait for
the new beginning through some kind of annunciation:
This is how we rendered the poem’s first stanza and part of the
second stanza in our earliest attempt, published in Six Poets as part
of the Seferis selection in that volume, third among the six. But
when we came to the 1967 Collected Seferis, the poem took on a
particular significance because we decided to begin the volume and
our own journey through Seferis’s collected work with this free
verse opening of the Mythistorima series rather than with Seferis’s
earlier rhymed poems, which we placed in an appendix along with
some later work that we also did not attempt to offer in rhymed
COLLABORATION, REVISION, AND OTHER SINS 65
versions. The poem CT” of Mythistorima would thus set the tone of
the volume and signal the character of our Seferis translation,
which is why this poem cost us more labor initially—and indeed
in the long run—than any other poem in the Collected Seferis.
The first problem we had to solve was that of the first line in
the Greek original, consisting of the noun (with its article) “tow
angelo,” which means “the angel” in contemporary usage, connot¬
ing first of all a thing good or beautiful or both, as in the phrase
“you’re an angel.” But the 3,000-year history of the Greek language
has loaded the word with other nuances out of both the pagan and
Christian traditions: the messenger of classical drama and the holy
angel of the Old and New Testaments. The protagonists in Seferis’s
poem are waiting for this image of the good and the beautiful be¬
cause it will presumably help them find what they are looking for
in order to initiate a rebirth of prospects, if not actually a return to
their lost paradise, their elusive Ithaca. The figure who appears at
the start of the poem is not merely a messenger bringing news of
what has happened off-stage; it is primarily an angel capable of
some sort of annunciation, a kind of herald. So that is how we
chose to name the figure in the Collected Seferis—largely under
Sherrard’s persuasion—this in contrast to the earlier renderings by
all hands, which uniformly favored the term “messenger”:
Three years
we waited intendy for the herald
closely watching
the pine the shore and the stars.
One with the plough’s blade or the keel of the ship,
we were searching to rediscover the first seed
so that the ancient drama could begin again.
The angel—
three years we waited intendy for him
closely watching
the pines the shore and the stars . . .
The only kind of translation I want to talk about is what I call “free
literary translation,” or translation of literature chosen freely by the
translator for this purpose. This is the only kind I have much inter¬
est in or knowledge of, and I think it is an art, though a very mod¬
est minor one, since it requires constant choice by the translator
among the author’s values and devices as he seeks to recapture them
in his own language and finds he can rarely if ever recapture them
all. Clearly it belongs far below good literary creation, and below
good literary analysis, but I think it demands much of the same
sensitivity as both of these, a sensitivity shared by many booklovers
whose gifts for good creation or analysis may be modest or non¬
existent.
I find it pleasant to see how much of a favorite author you can
bring across into your own language. As has been said, it offers
some of the joy of original creation without much of the travail.
There is pleasure in it whenever you are satisfied that, in your own
eyes at least, your version is more nearly right than anyone else’s,
and your ingenious devices in at least a respectable ratio to your
many inevitable frustrations and failures. Occasionally it can lead
to praise and even to a little money. And it is admirably adapted to
the busy life of the academic year, when all too often we simply
cannot in decency set aside much consecutive time for those enter¬
prises that require it. With translation, on the other hand, if you
get a few hours on it one day and then no more for perhaps several
weeks or a month or more, you can usually still pick it up whenever
you do have time almost exacdy where, and as, you left off. That,
in fact, is how I have worked on much of the translation—prob¬
ably most of it, indeed—that I have done.
I suppose most of us get into translation in about the same
way. We take a look at someone else’s translation of a work we love
and say, preferably to ourselves: “Good Lord, I think I could do
better than that!” It was that and nepotism that got me started, and
Montaigne.1
Donald Frame is best known for his translations of the complete works of Mon¬
taigne. He has also translated works by Voltaire, Prevost, and Moliere. His transla¬
tion of Francois Rabelais’s oeuvre is near completion.
1. Since my doctoral dissertation concerned Montaigne, my late aunt Louise
R. Loomis suggested my name to prepare a Classics Club edition of Montaigne’s
Selected Essays, which led to this being my first published translation (1943).
70
PLEASURES AND PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION 71
You can of course render the meaning of the French easily enough:
But when you do, what happens to the sound: the soft nasals
(ang, ong), liquids (l, r), mute <fs, long languid syllables? And for
that matter to the rhythm, muted but firm? All gone, no? And with
them, I should say, a good 80 percent of the beauty of the original;
Parenthetical references to Montaigne are to book and chapter, with page ref¬
erences to the Villey-Saulnier edition (VS) for the French and to my translation of
Complete Works and Complete Essays (same pagination for both), noted as S, for Stan¬
ford University Press. Moliere quotations are from my translation The Misanthrope
and Other Plays (1968); quotations from Voltaire are from my translation Candide,
Zadig, and Selected Stories (1961); and those from Prevost are from my translation
Manon Lescaut (1961, 1983), all published by New American Library.
72 Donald Frame
For beauty of cadence and sound, some critics rate this line
very high, among the loveliest in the language. Yet it is also brimful
of content, for here for the first time, after some 35 lines, Racine
has someone (appropriately, her beloved and future victim Hip-
polyte) allude to the ominous figure, and still more ominous back¬
ground, of the heroine, Phedre. The name Minos recalls not only
that king, her father, but also her monstrous half-brother, the Min¬
otaur; that of Pasiphae (her mother and its mother), the revolting
lust for the bull that Venus inflicted on the poor queen of Crete,
and hence the tainted blood that flows in Phedre’s veins; and they
recall this politely, decorously, with the power of a muffled explo¬
sion. If you render this, as I think you must, “Daughter of Minos
and Pasiphae,” for all the beauty of sound you lose, I think you still
keep around 40 percent or so of the original.
A third and last example—Hugo:
I say nothing about the style of this work. There is neither jargon,
nor affectation, nor sophistic reflections; it is Nature herself writing.
How pitiful a starched and rouged author appears in comparison!
This one does not go chasing after wit, or rather after that which is
so called. This is not a laconically constipated style, but a flowing,
full, and expressive one. This offers nothing save portraits and feel¬
ings, but they are true portraits and natural feelings. (P. cv)
La vieille reparut bientot; elle soutenait avec peine une femme trem-
blante . . . Otez ce voile, dit la vieille a Candide. Le jeune homme
approche; il leve le voile . . . il croit voir Mile Cunegonde, il la voyait
en effet, c’etait elle-meme. La force lui manque, il ne peut proferer
une parole, il tombe a ses pieds. Cunegonde tombe sur le canape.
The old woman soon reappeared; she was supporting with difficulty
a trembling woman . . . Remove that veil, said (or, says) the old
woman to Candide. The young man approaches, he lifts the veil . . .
He thinks he sees Mile Cunegonde, he did indeed see her, it was she
herself. His strength fails him, he cannot utter a word, he falls at her
feet. Cunegonde falls on the sofa. [No fool she.]
from for a given text, the Penguin, though rarely my last choice, is
almost never my first.
To my mind, in trying to capture all one can of Montaigne,
style as well as content, in English, the most persistent, often in¬
soluble, problem is his wordplay, nearly all of which has recendy
been more precisely defined by a fine Italian critic as annominatio,
the pairing (by close association, often juxtaposition) of words or
phrases of similar sound but different meaning. I shall illustrate this
copiously and conclude on this, for it is perhaps his most idiosyn¬
cratic trick of writing and permeates his essays, though not his let¬
ters, travel journal, and other writings that were not intended for
publication.
Let me illustrate, as I promised, with some of these that I think
I got more or less successfully and some I know I did not and about
which I do not know whether that can be done. One I rendered to
my satisfaction and much later was gratified to have noted with
high praise by an eminent and attentive critic is from “Of Hus¬
banding Your Will” (3:10, VS 1021-22, S 782). The passage that
precedes and introduces it is this: “Les corps raboteux se sentent,
les polis se manient imperceptiblement; la maladie se sent, la sante
peu ou point” (“Rough bodies are felt, smooth ones are handled
imperceptibly; sickness is felt, health little or not at all”); then
comes the part that I like and that was well received: “ny les choses
qui nous oignent, au pris de celles qui nous poignent,” which I
rendered thus: “nor do we feel the things that charm us, compared
with those that harm us.” That was an easy one, many are not, and
some are in my view impossible. Consider this: “Je donnerois aussi
volontiers mon sang que mon soing” (2:17, VS 642, S 417). (“I
would give as willingly my blood as my care”: to my mind, impos¬
sible.) A more complex one from near the end of “Vanity” (3:9,
VS 994, S 761) I did not even attempt to imitate: “Je m’esgare,
mais plustot par licence que par mesgarde.” All I could do there
was a fairly literal: “I go out of my way, but rather by license than
carelessness.” Another disturbing habit of Montaigne’s is that of
playing off against each other the third person singular present in¬
dicatives of fuir and suivre, as in “De la cruaute” (2:11, VS 429,
S 313): “Je suy quelques vices, mais j’en fuy d’autres, autant qu’un
sainct s^auroit faire.” Here I ventured this: “I ply some vices, but I
fly others as much as a saint could do.” I thought of “pursue-
eschew,” but decided to eschew it. I think the English language will
recover, and I think this is better here than just to say: “I follow
PLEASURES AND PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION 91
certain vices, but I flee (or, avoid) others. . . And just one book
later, in that lovely chapter “Of Cripples” (3:11, VS 1026, S 785),
Montaigne gives us a one-two and then follows with a crusher. He
was just now musing, he says, as he often does, on the vagueness
and freedom of our reason; for he ordinarily sees that men, “aux
faicts qu’on leur propose, s’amusent plus volontiers a en cercher la
raison qu’a en cercher la verite: ils laissent la les choses, et s’amusent
a traiter les causes.” On that I could come up, however lamely, with
this: “They leave aside the cases and amuse themselves treating the
causes”; which I consider at least a good try. But when Montaigne
(my friend! I thought) then lowered the boom with “Plaisants cau-
seurs,” which has still at least two meanings and then had in a sense
three, I could only throw up my hands and put in a footnote, as I
think any translator of a difficult author should sometimes do (not
put them in the text, as Jacques Leclercq does in his Rabelais),
much as an honest teacher must often tell students simply, “I don’t
know.” (I put it down as “Comical prattlers,” then took refuge at
the bottom of the page in finer print.)
This annominatio, which Signora Garavini has shown to be a
technique Montaigne learned from Seneca and may have been his
main debt to him, is everywhere in the Essais and part of the fun of
reading Montaigne. Strange as it seems (to me at least), none of
the six earlier translators or eminent revisers (Florio, Cotton, Haz-
litt [who revised Cotton], Ives, Trechmann, Zeitlin [a first-rate
Montaigne scholar]) even attempted, as far as their translations
show, to render this phenomenon. At least by attempting it I have
given later translators a new problem to solve, a challenging new
area to work on, and I am pleased to have done this and to have (I
hope) solved satisfactorily as many as I have. The farthest I have
strayed from the sense, at least in quest of one of these, is what I
shall make bold to call “my fly-ply ploy.” Most of those I attempted
to reproduce or imitate I think I got less oudandishly than that,
but the only one that I think back on with real pride and affection
is one that I got only on my second try. If I overdid it, at least I did
it. Let me close on that happy note. It comes late in that great
chapter “Of Repentance” (3:2, VS 816, S 620), just before he says
of his bodily life, “I have seen the grass, the flower, and the fruit;
now I see the dryness—happily, since it is naturally,” and immedi¬
ately after: “If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived.”
Here is the French: “ny je ne pleins le passe, ny je ne crains l’ad-
venir.” The sense is of course so rich that it does nicely without the
92 Donald Frame
rhyme, and when I first translated it, I settled, as I recall, for just
that: “I neither lament the past nor fear the future.” But coming
back to it about fifteen years later I had to try for something better,
and finally found what I hope is that: “I have neither tears for the
past nor fears for the future.”
In all these pages I have dealt almost solely with the problems
I have seen in my practice of translation and my attempts to solve
them or at least cope with them. But I trust my remarks have also
made clear that for me it has long been, and continues to be, a
pleasant undertaking that has given me many great pleasures.
uZIVy THAT LIGHT”: TRANSLATION
AND TRADITION IN PAUL CELAN
John Felstiner
inde wirt
erluchtet
kumi
ori.
and becum
yUumyned
kumi
ori.
Celan’s poem migrates back and forth between modem and medie¬
val German, the medieval being Meister Eckhart’s vernacular—
Stunt vp Jherosalem . . . inde wirt erluchtet—for Saint Jerome’s Vul¬
gate of Isaiah 60:1, Surge, illuminare, Jerusalem.5 Then this poem
closes by converting to the original Hebrew, the prophet’s kumi ori
(“Arise, shine”).
5. See Felstiner, “Translating Paul Celan’s ‘Du sei wie du,’” Prooftexts 3, 1
(1983): 91-108.
96 John Felstineb
6. For a biography of Celan, see Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan: Eine Biographic
seiner fugend (Frankfurt: Insel, 1979); Glenn, Paul Celan (New York: Twayne,
1973); Felstiner, “Paul Celan: The Strain of Jewishness,” Commentary 79, 4 (April
1985): 44-55; and the most complete bibliographies to date: Christine Heuline’s
in Text u. Kntik, 53-54, (2d ed., July 1984): 100-149, and Glenn’s in Studies in
Twentieth Century Literature 8, 1 (Fall 1983): 129-58.
7. “Ansprache anlasslich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der freien
Hansestadt Bremen” (1958; speech on receiving the Bremen Prize), in GIT 3:185.
“ZJV, THAT LIGHT” 97
of what is alien and into our own.”8 Paul Celan’s “Du sei wie du,”
within the compass of eleven lines, leads from “what is alien and
into our own,” from the choking mire of exile into earshot of Isa¬
iah’s messianic call, kumi ori. Whereas the medieval German stands
in a vernacular tradition and thus calls for an English equivalent,
those italics distinguishing kumi ori obviate the need to translate.
The Hebrew (and how many were left in Germany to recognize
Isaiah’s words, which also occur in the Sabbath hymn “Lekha
dodi,” summoning Israel to arise and shine?)—the Hebrew stands
as if at the beginning and the end of time, at the Babylonian exile
and the ultimate return to Zion, at once archaic and messianic.
Not many of Celan’s lyrics come to rest with so clear a voice.
More often he will speak as in “Psalm” {GW 1:225) about
Nah, im Aortenbogen,
im Hellblut:
das Hellwort.
Mutter Rahel
weint nicht mehr.
Riibergetragen
alles Geweinte.
Mother Rachel
weeps no more.
Carried across,
all that was wept.
Nab, “near,” “close” in space or time, not distant, not long to await:
the poem opens here and now on a single syllable, an adjective with
no noun or verb modifying the poise of the word. In a way, this
initial syllable countervails everything previous, everything about
us that until now has not been “nigh”—everything distant, dis¬
placed, sundered, estranged.
To unfold Paul Celan’s poem word by word, or say, moment
by moment, means releasing it into the dimension of time and thus
into a way of fulfillment. Yet before this poem moves on from its
first moment, Nab, it harks back (in my ears, at least) to something
Celan had written ten years before, a poem he called “Tenebrae”
(1957; GW 1:163), which began,
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are close,
wir sind nah. “Warped,” says the speaker, we went “To the water
trough” and found “It was blood, it was / what you shed. Lord.”
Possibly the desperate irony marking Christ’s blood here in
“Tenebrae” can be heard giving way to “bright blood” and a
“bright word” in the later poem, “Nah, im Aortenbogen.” There is
no doubt that in “Tenebrae,” in its opening lines themselves—
“Nah sind wir, Herr, nahe und greifbar”—Celan was summoning
a far earlier voice, Friedrich Holderlin and the opening of “Pat-
mos”:
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wachst
Das Rettende auch.
Close by
and hard to grasp is the God.
Yet where danger is, grows
What rescues as well.
After this, Holderlin’s hymn makes its way from Saint John, Christ,
and the disciples, to divine scripture, and finally to God the Fa¬
ther’s solicitude for “German song.” So, what made Holderlin a
tremendous presiding spirit for Paul Celan also made him an im¬
possible exemplar. No saving grace of a God “close by and hard to
grasp” was to fall upon those “close and claspable” Jews “clawed
into each other” at Sobibor, Chelmno, Maidanek, Treblinka, and
Auschwitz.
One would have to trace Germany’s Christian-Jewish history
as refracted in romantic through expressionist poetry in order to
spark the distance between “Patmos” and “Tenebrae,” between Nah
spoken by Holderlin and eventually by Celan. “In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. ... In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John
1:1—4). By the time this dispensation has descended two millennia
100 John Felstiner
im Hellblut:
das Hellwort.
in bright blood:
the bright word.
“ZIV, THAT LIGHT” 101
These fairly insipid lines now show how striking Celan has made
it:
Nah, im Aortenbogen,
im Hellblut:
das Hellwort.
And they show the need for an English version moved responsibly
by Celan’s turns of speech.
Mutter Rahel
weint nicht mehr.
Mother Rachel
weeps no more.
11. In Scholem, Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottbeit (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag,
1962), pp. 136-91. For this and subsequent material relating to Celan’s library and
reading, I am deeply grateful to Gisele Celan-Lestrange.
12. From Moyshe Leyb Halpem, “Night,” 11, in In New York (1919). I am
indebted to Robert Freedman and Kathryn Hellerstein for help in identifying these
lines, which I have transliterated.
104 John Felstiner
Mother Rachel
weeps no more.
Carried across,
all that was wept.
out and “R” put in to make Rub ergetreigen. That way Celan not
only prolongs the stanza’s basic tempo, stressing the first syllable in
each line:
Mutter Rahel
want nicht mehr.
Riibergetragen
alles Geweinte.
Riibergetragen
alles Geweinte.
Riibergetragen
alles Geweinte.
Nah, im Aortenbogen,
im Hellblut:
das Hellwort.
But his poem notes something else that happened as they sat look¬
ing over the Limmat River at Zurich’s great cathedral:
19. See Felstiner, “Paul Celan: The Strain of Jewishness” and “The Biography
of a Poem ” New Republic 2 (April 1984): 27-31.
20. A. Faller, Der Korper des Menschen: Einfubrung in Bau und Funktion (Stutt¬
gart: Georg Thieme, 1966).
“ZJV, THAT LIGHT” 111
21. To Scholem’s Von der mystischen Gestalt, where the Hebrew character zayin
is transliterated with Z, compare his Die judische Mystik in ihren Hauptstrimuntjen
(Frankfurt: Alfred Metzner, 1957), which transliterates zayin with S.
22. Joachim Neugroschel, trans., “Four Poems by Paul Celan,” Midstream 23,
8 (October 1977): 46.
112 John Felstiner
23. See Celan, Shoshanat Haayin, trans. Manfred Winkler, Afterword by Israel
Chalfen (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1983). “Die Schleuse” (“The Sluice”) is translated
there (see below), but not “Nah, im Aortenbogen ” See also Celan, Dvar-ma Tihyeh,
ed. Ben-Zion Orgad (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1987), which includes “Du sei wie
du.”
24. Quoted in Bianca Rosenthal, “Quellen zum fruhen Paul Celan: Der Alfred
Margul-Sperber-Nachlass in Bukarest,” Zeitschrift fur Kultumustauscb 3 (1982):
230.
25. See Chalfen, “Paul Celan in Jerusalem,” Die Stimme, November 1969, p.
5, and Gershom Schocken, “Paul Celan in Tel Aviv,” Neue Rundschau 91, 2:3
(1980): 256-59.
114 John Felstiner
26. See Felstiner, “Translating Paul Celan’s ‘Jerusalem’ Poems,” Religion and
Literature 16, 1 (Winter 1984): 37-47.
“ZIV, THAT LIGHT” 115
To
poly-goddedness
I lost a word that sought me:
Kaddish.
Through
the sluice I had to go,
to salvage the word back into
and out of and across the salt flood:
Yizkor.
With Kaddish, a prayer for the dead often recited by the surviving
son, and Yizkor, denoting the memorial service, Celan ends these
stanzas by remembering the Hebrew for remembering the dead.
In Tel Aviv in 1969, Celan told the Hebrew Writers Associa¬
tion, “I have come to you here in Israel because I needed to” (GW
3:203). And he commented deliberately on their revived tongue:
“I take joy in every newly won, self-feelingful, fulfilled word that
rushes up to strengthen those who are turned toward it.” A few of
Celan’s lyrics, such as “Nah, im Aortenbogen,” are turned toward
the Hebrew language in somewhat the way that Walter Benjamin
saw the “Angelus Novus” of Paul Klee, the angel of history, facing
the past but irresistibly drawn toward the future.27
I see the same meridian moving through Celan’s language of
memory as through Jewish messianic thinking itself. In Karl
Kraus’s phrase, cited by Benjamin: “Origin is the goal.”28 For a
people as for a person in exile, the old words count—having “re¬
mained true,” they are “become true,” in Celan’s formula (GW
1:220). And for the Kabbalists, as Scholem says, “Speech reaches
God because it comes from God.”29 Remembering, recognizing,
In the pages that follow I have tried to fix on paper the stages of
an elusive process: the translation of an Italian text into English.
For the operation I have chosen also an elusive author, Carlo Em¬
ilio Gadda, partly because his work is not well known to English-
language readers, but mostly because he is an author I am particu¬
larly fond of and enjoy translating. I have setded on the first para¬
graph of “Notte di luna,” the opening chapter (or story, as Gadda
would have us believe) in the volume L’Adalgisa, originally pub¬
lished in 1944. I have used the Einaudi edition of 1963.
I need hardly say that the description that follows is partial,
perhaps even somewhat misleading, because I have tried to make
conscious and logical something that is, most of the time, uncon¬
scious, instinctive. Faced with a choice between “perhaps” and
“maybe,” the translator does not put the words on trial and engage
attorneys to defend and accuse. Most probably, he hears the words
in some comer of his mind, and likes the sound of one better than
the other. Of course, his decision is only apparently instinctive. His
instinct will be guided by his knowledge of the author’s work, by
his reading in the period. It will almost certainly not be guided by
any rules, even self-made ones. On Thursday, translating Moravia,
he may write “maybe,” and on Friday, translating Manzoni, he may
write “perhaps.”
Because there are no rules, no laws, there cannot be an absolute
right or an absolute wrong. There can be errors (and even the most
experienced translator has an occasional mishap); there can be
lapses in tone. The worst mistake a translator can commit is to
reassure himself by saying, “that5s what it says in the original,” and
renouncing the struggle to do his best. The words of the original
are only the starting point; a translator must do more than convey
information (a literary translator, that is).
If someone asks me how I translate, I am hard put to find an
answer. I can describe the physical process: I make a very rapid first
draft, put it aside for a while, then go over it at a painfully slow
William Weaver is the author of several books about opera and a translator of mod¬
em Italian literature. He has translated works by Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia,
Carlo Emilio Gadda, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Umberto Eco.
117
118 William Weaver
also be ‘look.” But ‘■''look” in English, is too vague, can mean too
many things. Dacci uno sguardo can be “take a look,” but sguardo,
when it is more isolated—as here—probably has to be “gaze.” An¬
other word that always seems to cause me problems is sgommto. As
an adjective, it can sometimes be “aghast.” But here it is a noun.
“Alarm” does not satisfy me.
Gadda has appended two notes to this first paragraph. As
usual, they do not explain much, but rather extend the sentence he
is annotating. Here he is concerned that the alamo remain sexually
ambiguous. “Someone” will probably do perfecdy well. Similarly,
he glosses the nessuno in the same sentence: it refers to fathers,
police, firemen—those who can enforce prohibitions. And he lists,
among these, the governor of Maracaibo and tells of a youth who,
flouting a veto, tore up his sheets, tied them to make a rope, and
escaped from his room, to go off and join Garibaldi.
Notes to myself: avoid ironing out the rhythm, making the
sentence structure more normal or conventional; do not try to clar¬
ify the meaning when Gadda has deliberately made it murky (trans¬
lation is not exegesis); try to maintain Gadda’s balance between
ordinary words (sudore, lavoro, etc.) and more exotic words (zaffiro,
detersi). Find a suitably poetic and cadenced solution to the final,
short sentence of the paragraph.
Now a second draft: In the opening sentence, how to capture
the force and poetry of the initial repetition? Literally translated
(“An idea, an idea . . .”), it sounds wrong to me. How about shift¬
ing the negative from the verb to the subject? “No idea, no idea
. . .”? Here the repetition sounds even worse. But perhaps, instead
of repeating, I should simply enforce the noun. “No idea at all. . .”
“Not the least idea . . .” “No, no idea. . . .”
I like this last solution best, because it allows a repetition, even
if not the same repetition as Gadda’s. It is not the perfect solution,
but in translating—and especially in translating Gadda—there are
no perfect solutions. You simply do your best.
Sowiene means something like “come to the aid of.” In my
rapid first draft I even put down “recall,” because it can also have
the meaning and, when reflexive, can mean “remember.” But here
it is the verb related to “subvention,” not to “souvenir.”
Fatica: “effort,” but also “toil, labor.” There must be a sense of
expenditure of strength, a physical effort. Atti is more “deeds” than
“actions.” One of Gadda’s quirkish choices (rather than azioni).
Now try the first sentence. “No, no idea brings relief to the
120 William Weaver
that the verb vigilare was best turned into a predicate and adjective.
But, in a further revision, I may change my mind.
Battiti is tough. Heartbeats are called battiti in Italian, but
Gadda obviously wants the word also to suggest the banging and
pounding of the work site. “Pounding” will not do, because the
“poundings of life” sounds like grievous bodily harm. “Throbbing”
and “pulse” or “pulsation” rob the sentence of the work-site echo.
The sembm is also awkward, coming in the middle of the sentence
and rerouting its meaning. In a normal English sentence, the “It
seems” would come at the beginning, and the sentence would flow
smoothly, if boringly, thereafter.
Here’s a stab at the sentence: “The beating of life, it seems, can
be swept away by a sudden alarm as if in a headlong dash.”
I know, “beating” could raise the same objection as “pound¬
ing,” but—with luck—it may still suggest heartbeat to the reader,
and it retains the sense of work at the site. The “it seems” separated
necessarily by commas is a somewhat stronger interruption than
the sembm in Italian, but I think it can stay. And I had to add
“sudden” to “alarm” for sgomento, partly because the word “alarm”
by itself is weak, and also because it could be mistaken for “alarm
signal” or even for the work site’s siren. I like “headlong,” which
gives the sense of speed and confusion. In the Italian, corsa (“race”
or, here, “dash”) pre-echoes corso in the next sentence. I cannot
think of any way to avoid the loss here.
Next sentence: “The charity of the evening has cleansed us:
and we move toward someone waiting, that our future may take its
course, and no one shall hinder it.”
In the first part of the sentence, I reject, of course, the passive.
After the colon, I have to shift the Italian word order. “Toward
someone waiting we move” sounds poetical in the bad sense. Ven¬
tura is another word I prefer not to encounter. It means “fortune,”
in the sense of “soldier of fortune” (soldato di ventura), or good
luck (sventura is “bad luck”). But “fortune” seems too ambiguous
in English, and “destiny” or “fate” or even “lot” would be too pre¬
tentious and perhaps also too specific.
The meaning of the final sentence is easy enough to under¬
stand. It is, more or less: “Because we will later be able to rest.”
But in the Italian it has an almost biblical ring, and the trick is to
exalt the sentence without losing its simplicity, without making it
pompous.
I will use the conjunction “for” instead of “because.” It has, I
122 William Weaver
No, no idea brings relief to the labor of the work sites, as the
sibilant instruments of action transform things into other things, and
the toil is full of sweat and dirt. Then distant gold and a sapphire, in
the sky: like lashes quivering above a compassionate glance. The
glance which, if we cast it, will remain watchful. The beat of life, it
seems, can be swept away by a shock, as if in a headlong dash. The
charity of the evening has cleansed us: and we move toward the place
where someone is waiting, that our future may unfold, and no one
shall hinder it. For afterwards we can rest.
Gadda died some years ago; but, happily, I can consult Ros-
cioni. I send him my paragraph, with the pages above; he answers
by return mail and, as usual, comes to my aid. First he informs
me—what I should have known—that “Notte di luna” was origi¬
nally a fragment of an unpublished novel written in 1924 and pub¬
lished posthumously in 1983. Roscioni supplies me with a photo¬
copy of the first version of the difficult paragraph. And it is
immediately clear that, in the first sentence, sowiene does not have
the “subvention” meaning, but is closer to the Latin subvenit
(“comes up,” “appears,” “materializes”). Gadda, in Roscioni’s opin¬
ion—and in mine, now—is saying that no exceptional thought
materializes to relieve the labor of the work site.
More important, the pesky verb posare (“to cast,” as “cast a
glance”) is, in the original version, riposare, and so Gadda is saying
that when we rest (or are dead) a gaze keeps watch—the eye of
God—from the starred heavens.
Roscioni has some doubt about “shock,” which is, he thinks,
less subjective than sgomento. I will think about that, as I write out
yet another “final” version of the paragraph.
No, no Idea appears, in the labor of the work sites, as the sibilant
instruments of action transform things into things, and the toil is full
of sweat and dirt. Then a distant gold and sapphire in the sky, like
lashes quivering above a compassionate gaze. That, if we are at rest,
will remain vigilant. The beat of life, it seems, can be swept away by
fright, as if in a headlong race. The charity of the evening has cleansed
us: and we have moved toward the place where someone is waiting,
so that our future may unfold, and no one shall hinder our lot. For
afterwards we can rest.
125
126 Christopher Middleton
As for line 5, Kiefer means “pine tree,” but lacking specific gen¬
der or number here it might also mean “jawbone.” I was inclined
to think that a pun occurs here. Thinking of sending signals and
resolving to write the poem, the speaker begins to murmur words
in response, to “mix” jawbone into the “white” answer. So, after
“pine,” I hesitandy added “jawbone,” which in English is both
noun and verb. (Would the Kiefer pun be too coarse to be even
thinkable to a masterful German poet? I had doubts, but liked the
meatiness of the English line.) The Kz^r-as-jawbone aspect might,
I conjectured, be the first member in a gliding sequence of physi¬
ological cognates—flesh-words: “misery coughs with gold teeth,”
“toes,” “sputum,” “raw fish,” “prickly skin,” “breathing exercises,”
and “snores” (,Schnarchlauten = “nasals”). At the end of the second
paragraph of the poem Kiefer returns, but as die Kiefem, this time
in pots; the plural form with -n shows that in this second context
only the tree-sense counts. For that reason perhaps there’s a clearer
hint there of a greenness, which, even in the first context, would
be what is associatively “mixed” into the white and which certainly
contrasts with the “black” smoke and the dark (or gloomy) ideas
of sickness that follow it in paragraph 3.
“Ich mische Kiefer ein,” I later reflected, might be one of Eich’s
deceptively simple lines that seem to wriggle free from literal sense
without being “symbolic,” and that function in a poem as markers
in a dispersed sequence of perceptions. All dispersed sequences
configuring in a poem constitute the text as a “trigonometrical
point,” upon which certain coordinates, such as space, time, and
insight into the historical textures of a particular space, a particular
time, happen coolly to converge. His mixing “pine” into the
“white” here announces his participation, perhaps, in the space-
time continuum he beholds out there. The jawbone/Kzz^r (Kiefer;
meaning “jawbone” has no nominative plural form with -n) would
accent the vocal aspect of this participation. Either way, Kiefer
cryptically, but with a sure touch, offers a nuance of hope (green)
that the white (page) of the “answer” as poem might not come to
nought.
Hence, I suspected, the next phrase: “And now wall to wall /
with theories of language”—no sooner has the poem begun than,
from behind it, the theoretical reflection on language as such both
propels and suspends the thematic advance of the poem. The
speaker is walled in, perhaps, or feels that he is, by messages on
walls, notices, posters, and the like, which he disembowels, as it
were, to find—haruspication is foreshadowed in the earlier phrase
130 Christopher Middleton
bestenfalls und
schlimmstenfalls.
Ich halte nichts vom Feuer,
ich halte nichts vom Rauch
und nichts vom Atem.
Ich halte etwas vom Husten,
vom Auswurf,
von den finsteren Gedanken der Krankheit
vom Finsteren.
Mir sind auch Fotoapparate fremd
und die Kiefem im Blumentopf.
Die Kakifriichte verstehe ich besser
und das heulende Altjapanisch
und die Verbeugungen am Ende der Rolltreppe
und den rohen Fisch.
verraterisch herzzerreiltend,
ich begriifie dich, Herz,
begriifk die Zerreifienden,
vielleicht gabe es
Papierschiffe auf dem Kamo,
aus Bittschriften gefaltet,
das wars,
anvertraut der einflufilosen
viel besungenen Pfutze,
ankem sie und warten
auf den Untergang der Bittsteller
und abschliefiende Vermerke.
Abends
steigt das Fieber in den Klinikbetten,
manches erfahrt man da,
fur manches sind die Beweise
nicht giiltig,
im Papierkorb
rasseln die welken Blatter,
die Igel unter den Gebiischen,
fast stumm,
wohnen zuganglich
dem Stachelfell meiner Einsichten,
wir reiben sie aneinander,
hochstens Moos wird bewegt,
die Welt nicht.
Wir tauschen die Adressen,
wir tauschen
unsere personlichen Fiirworter aus,
Temperatures rise
evenings in the clinic beds,
you learn things there,
the proofs for some of them
are not valid,
wilted leaves rusde
in the waste paper basket,
the hedgehogs under bushes,
almost dumb,
live responsive
to the prickly hide of my insights,
we rub them against one another,
at most moss is moved,
the world is not.
We exchange addresses,
134 Christopher Middleton
we exchange our
personal recommendations,
To je muj stul,
to jsou me papuce,
to je ma sklenice,
to je muj cajrnk.
To je muj etazer,
to moje dymka,
to je ma cukrenka,
rodinny odkaz . . .
This is my table,
these are my slippers,
this is my glass,
this is my tea-maker.
To je ma zena.
To je muj obraz.
This is my wife.
This is my painting.
Konservenbiichse:
Mein Teller, mein Becher,
ich hab in das Weifiblech
den Namen geritzt. . .
This is my cap,
this is my coat,
this here is my razor
in a bag made of linen.
Tin can:
my dish, my cup,
into the metal
I’ve scratched my name . . .
This is my notebook,
this is my tarpaulin,
this is my towel,
this is my thread.
4. Michel Leiris, Langafle tankage (Paris: Ed. Gallimard, 1985). The passage
cited in James Clifford’s translation appeared in Sulfur, no. 15 (1986): 35-36.
5. Colette, My Mother’s House anil Sido (New York: Farrar, Straus, 8c Giroux,
1953; seventh printing 1981), pp. 30-32.
ON TRYING TO TRANSLATE JAPANESE
Edward Seidensticker
When the door had closed behind him, Mikuni said, spitting out
the words, “There’s a fine guy for you. That damned Official Business
has gotten scared. ‘Use whatever translation fits the context.’ That’s a
fine business. What nonsense!”
“Wait! That won’t do!” called Tojiro, throwing his arms around
the young man to stop him, and he called for help to people living
near the shrine. “Hey, there, Yu San of the Hashimotova, hev there,
come on over. Hey, there, Matsu no Ji of the Shintaku, come and
help me!”
142
ON TRYING TO TRANSLATE JAPANESE 143
“You didn’t!”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
“But why?”
“Can’t you guess?”
ries. Events which have been like salts in solution somehow be¬
come more tangible, assertive, out in the open, by having specific
English nouns assigned as subjects. “Floating prose” might de¬
scribe the effect of the Japanese and thereby free us from “misty.”
Or “foggy prose,” perhaps. Certainly a quick shift from the original
Tale of Genji to Dr. Waley’s translation can be like the moment in
the movies when the London fog lifts and the adversaries stand
face to face in the gaslight.
Because of Murasaki Shikibu’s reluctance to name names. Dr.
Waley is frequendy at odds with the Japanese commentators, and
the commentators are frequendy at odds with one another. Here,
in Dr. Waley’s translation, we find a young man from the capital
peeping in upon two secluded young ladies:
tence that must have caused the translator pain: “Even if the ideal
itself is just a life illusion, we cannot live without it.” The words
“life illusion” are English in the original. I was once asked, and
declined, to translate a symposium which came to the weighty con¬
clusion that literature must have, in English, “origin.”
In the late nineteenth century, Japanese prose style was revo¬
lutionized. Today it is fairly near the spoken language, though with
some tendency toward verb forms not used in ordinary speech.
Few of the old problems have been solved, however. When it is
most modern, it tends to become translatorese, cluttered with tran¬
scendental neo-Chinese nouns. And when it is conservative it still
floats along, content far more than any important European lan¬
guage to do without overt actors. Just to show that it could be
done, a well-known contemporary author once wrote a short story
without a single grammatical subject, and the remarkable thing was
that no one noticed.
Another problem in modem Japanese brings us to the ultimate
in the untranslatable. Japanese admirers of French or German or
English try to rewrite their own language as if it were one or an¬
other of them, and thus outrage it to the core. The cramped style
that results is an argument against “cultural exchange.” It is
unlovely in the original, and it quite defies rendition into En¬
glish. How is one to find an equivalent for a style whose most
conspicuous feature is, say, a straining to introduce relative pro¬
nouns?
It is not easy to think of similar problems in translating from
English, but one or two timid little analogies do suggest them¬
selves. Think of trying to translate into French Mark Twain’s par¬
ody of translation into French, or of trying to find Hebrew equiv¬
alents for all the Hebraisms Monsignor Knox found in the
Authorized Version. Or think of the twisted sentences that school
children have for centuries been required to write because the Ro¬
mans happened not to (and the French happen not to) end their
sentences in prepositions. Must a translator feel responsible for re¬
producing these last, twistedness and all, in Latin or French? Think
of trying to recapture in French the effect of Winston Churchill’s
reply to cavillers about final prepositions.
Woodhouselee had an answer. “The style and manner in a
Translation should be of the same character with that of the Orig¬
inal,” but if an author is sometimes uneasy, change him. If Homer
is occasionally beneath himself, bring him back up again. Wood¬
houselee lived in a day when important authors wrote well. In a
ON TRYING TO TRANSLATE JAPANESE 151
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GAYLORD
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