Poets on Translation: The (Alter)native Speaker

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

“Birds don’t actually sit perched in a tree, do they? They can perch on a branch of a tree.”

If you have sat in (through?) a literary translation workshop—or, for that matter, a creative writing workshop more generally—you might recognize this kind of feedback. It seems like a minor point, a little pedantic, not too difficult to fix, but therein lies how easily it gets under your skin. 

Let’s say you were born in South Korea but moved to the United States when you were three; you went through all your primary, secondary, university, and postgraduate education in the United States. You spent most of your childhood in the local public library, rather than on playdates; most of your teen years in the high school newspaper room, rather than at parties; and most of your adult years training to become a scholar of English-language poetry. You might not be a native speaker of English, but you have probably spent a lot more time studying, thinking, working in (on? about? with?) it than most native speakers. Maybe it’s not your mother tongue, but now it’s your first language. It’s where your tongue fits best. 

Or, let’s say you were born in South Korea and only moved to the United States when you were three; throughout your education in the United States, you might not ever have felt you didn’t understand or couldn’t communicate properly in English, but you would have been reminded, periodically, by a classmate, instructor, fellow writer, or translator, that you aren’t a native speaker. After all, you don’t appear native to the language (alongside the cultures and, let’s be honest, race, singular, it invokes). But do you have the right to be indignant? The truth is that you aren’t a native speaker. 

In Not Like a Native Speaker, Rey Chow writes, “Because the native speaker is thought to occupy an uncorrupted origin point, learning a language as a nonnative speaker can only be an exercise in woeful approximation.” So you’ve been left feeling you don’t quite fit, will never quite fit, just like the preposition you supposedly misused. 

A girl in your middle school drama class once claimed she couldn’t understand your lines, because of your “accent.” A lecturer at Oxford, who translates poetry from French to English, once told to you, “I don’t doubt that you have become very fluent in English, but still, that is different from being a native speaker.” You still feel ashamed of how you bluffed in reply, “Why do you assume I’m not?” 

In an advanced-level workshop on translation, you were told, gently but decisively, that you were mistaken in your choice of preposition in English. As if, having reached age 27 and enrolled in a PhD program in English literature, you had nevertheless not yet learned the language to proficiency. 

Or, let’s say you did misuse the preposition, but it wasn’t a mistake. The preposition (and you) might not be what the conventional English-language reader expects, however one defines “conventional,” but you know, even love, your first language, English, and you are confident it is capacious and flexible enough for it (and you) to fit. 

Let’s say you were treating English akin to the way the author of the novel Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee, once described his own way of relating to the language: 

As a writer, I’m constantly trying to stretch my English. I sometimes wonder whether English is my language, though it is of course, and I have virtually no other. I quarrel with English a lot and test it a lot. I think that has defined me as a writer. 

So, let’s say you were translating a poem from Korean to English, and the poem described birds sitting in a tree: it wasn’t clear if they were at the top of the tree, at the bottom branches, visible from outside the tree, or hiding amid the branches and leaves of the tree. The ambiguity, that air of mystery, the capacity of the poem to hold in (with, against, around, before) it a sense of not-knowing, is exactly what you’d like to transmit into the English language. You don’t see why you have to spell out what’s happening with these birds just for the sake of (someone’s) conventional English grammar. You also don’t want readers to start humming, “Bird and Bird sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” You think that the way you’ve rendered the line, combining “perched” with “in,” puts just enough pressure on syntax to feel, possibly, a little off, but also to be accepted as plausible to most anglophone readers. You also want to keep this line a certain length, because you think the visual manifestation of a poem on a page is part of its composition, even or perhaps especially if the poem is written in free verse, and if the original poem doesn’t have a stray line sticking out much further than the others, why should the English translation?

In other words, let’s say you gave a lot of thought to this one preposition, “in,” and how you used it wasn’t an error. This wasn’t about how proficient you are in English and its rules. And this wasn’t about how native you are to the language. 

Who belongs to a language? To whom does a language belong? Lee says that English is his language, as it is one of yours, but still, you are sure that no one can own or have a greater right to a language —especially this unwieldy, fluid, sticky one—which means no one has the right to dictate how you use it. After all, you know that being a native speaker of a language doesn’t guarantee being a great (or good, or even sufficient) writer and reader in it. You also know there is no way of measuring whether you are “good enough” in a language to translate into it, to make speeches in it, to write poetry with it. You just do it. You’ve always just done it. You do it, and you hope someone will understand what you’re doing. You are sure William Shakespeare felt the same way. As Chinua Achebe once wrote: “There is no other choice. I have been given this language, and I intend to use it.”  

Then let’s say you find yourself, in your thirties, moving from the United States to the Netherlands. The longer you live outside the United States, the more you experience firsthand the various ways that English is being used both communicatively and creatively by so many non-native speakers. You come to realize that no language has one, universal, set “grammar” that is inalienable. You learn that the grammar of a language is contextual, situational, an attunement between a particular speaker and their particular audience. You finally give up the academic ideal of having to attune your grammar to an Imaginary (white U.S./U.K.) Anglophone Grammar Patriarch, especially because this patriarch turns out to represent only a fraction of anglophones around the world. As sociolinguist David Crystal observed, close to the beginning of this century: 

the center of gravity of the English language has moved from the native to the non-native speaker […] And as the non-native group is the primary force fostering the emergence of “new Englishes,” there are going to be implications for the future character of the language.

Similarly, Chow wrote about the global spread of English (or Englishes):

by making it possible only for some people to impose their native tongue (say, English) on others, for whom this tongue exists more or less as an external graft, the colonial situation has, if unwittingly, conferred upon the colonized the privilege of a certain prescience—the grasp of how artificially and artifactually, rather than naturally, language works and can work in the first place. 

So you decide to attune the English of your translations against the idea of a native speaker and to the speakers who take in and bear the language as an external graft. In other words: the speakers of what Don Mee Choi calls, “My pretend English. My scribble English. My hardly English.” The English of possibility. The English in the imagination. The English reclaimed and reinvented by the (neo-)colonized speaker. You find a way to stretch the language to fit you and your stray prepositions.

Let’s say you are translating a poem into English, and you get the feedback, “Birds don’t actually sit perched in a tree, do they? They can perch on a branch of a tree.” You could try to explain your reasoning for the words you chose, and maybe you should, but you’re not sure if the point is to get you to develop a better translation or, rather, to cast doubt on your capacity for (in? against?) English. 

Instead, you reply with a line from Gertrude Stein. After all, you wrote your dissertation in (against? for?) English literature on her:

Prepositions can live one long life being really being nothing but absolutely nothing but mistaken and that makes them irritating if you feel that way about mistakes but certainly something that you can be continuously using and everlastingly enjoying. I like prepositions the best of all.

Like you, Stein was a child of immigrants; her mother tongue was German. Later, when she became a poet in Paris, she also became an expat from the center of native speakers. Her answer always has been right on the tip of your tongue.