Translation and its Discontents, Part 3 (reading Blake backwards)

The last major twentieth century poet to have included William Blake in his gallery of crucial ancestors was Allen Ginsberg. Lately, we hear less and less about Blake, not to mention Ginsberg. This is perhaps a shame, but as shames go, not a great shame. They’ll be back; first to return will be, I imagine, Blake of the Songs. In fact, he continues to fascinate scholars and art historians. I’m sure poets will come around to him once again, as Jim Jarmusch did in his film Dead Man.

I recently read William Blake backwards, that is in my adopted language, Portuguese. I use the term “backwards”, since, for the most part, Portuguese sits in the front of my brain. It is the language my wife and I speak together, and the one I use in my daily commerce. I speak English with a few English-speaking friends, like Richard Zenith (our preeminent translator and scholar of Fernando Pessoa). But often even Richard and I will speak in Portuguese together among our friends at dinners and in the bars of Lisbon’s Bairro Alto. Besides this, since I make most of my living as a translator, I tend to spend my days shuttling between the two languages. I move from Portuguese back into English; hence the notion of “backwards”.
In Real Presences, George Steiner tells us: “...our lives depend on our capacity to speak hope, to entrust to if-clauses and futures our active dreams of change, of progress, of deliverance. To such dreams, the concept of resurrection, as it is both central to myth and religion, is a natural grammatical argument. And it may be, as I have sought to show elsewhere, that the fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigma, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.” (University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 56-57)
And yet, to that freedom accrues a certain responsibility, which is to not sever discourse from its natural contexts, to not deracinate either the cultural or the incantatory properties of original tongues spoken out of their proprietary relation to the culture they grammatically, lexically and semantically embody. Since translation is a kind of resurrection, the “natural grammatical argument” as Steiner calls it, is ongoing. The translator is naturally the chief guardian and the chief culprit in this dynamic of resurrection. Translating into a hegemonic language (English) tends more often than not to end up being a process of linguistic colonization, or something similar to converting a great novel into a profit driven film. And yet the history of translation is as old as the history of literature, religion and commerce, and those histories are imbued with a movement from the vulgates into the official language of the conquerors. Steiner seems to be saying that the more languages we know the more likely we are to understand this paradigm, and the less likely we are to fall victim to it. The polyglot is free essentially because he has a truer picture of the world, seeing it from the bottom up, and not the top down. Likewise, the best translators work from the bottom up. Theirs is a process of releasing one means into another rather than imposing one means upon another.
In 2008, Manuel Portela, a Portuguese poet, translator and university professor (and, I’d add, a good friend) brought out Cantigas da Inocência e da Experiência a revised version of his translations of William Blake’s most important poems, with the Portuguese publisher Antígona. The book is subtitled (a fact which I’d totally forgotten) Mostrando os dois estados contrários da alma humana. It is a gorgeous edition, which includes not only high quality reproduction of the original plates, which are disposed en face, but a full scholarly apparatus and an appendix with the original English versions set in type, unadorned as we are in accustomed to reading them today. Though Blake himself only once in his life brought out a typeset volume, the 1783 Poetical Sketches, which is an indication that for him there was no dissonance between the poem and its incunabula-like “illumination”. This original effect, that of the illuminated manuscript, is strongly reproduced in Portela’s new edition, since as we are reading the Portuguese versions we hold the brightly colored plates before us as well. Of course we could read the plates, but the tendency is to read the Portuguese and to look at the plates, the two operations seeming to merge in the mind’s eye. It is a kind of double translation that is occurring, since we are not used to reading Blake from the plates, and we are certainly not used to reading him in Portuguese; the result is a form of etrangément, a defamiliarization which is both a “making it new” and a “making it old.” The normal contemporary experience of reading Blake is replaced by something that might approximate a mimesis of the experience of Blake’s original readers, reading illuminated manuscripts instead of typeset poetry, which even they had been long accustomed to. For myself, this experience of defamiliarization, I think, is the result of two things: the visual stimulation of having the plates before me, and the way a kind of linguistic echo which occurs as my essentially English ear takes the poems in through Portela’s beautifully attuned renditions is created in the mind’s eye (or the ear’s mind). Music, rhythm and rhyme are at work, but the music is other and the lexical is passed through the transformative filter of the second language, creating a kind of synaptic gap between what I have in me (my memory of Blake in the original) and what I have before me (the poems rendered in Portuguese and the plates). One is both reading and seeing something new, in the present), but also traveling back towards the original or a remembrance of the original, a process which is sometimes completed, or only partially completed, whether for individual words or for the whole poem in which they are found. Tigre, Tigre, brilho ardente,/ Lá nas florestras da noite;/ Que olho, que mão traçaria / Tua feroz simetria?
This process of completion, of the signal crossing the synapse, is nearly complete with the title, even, I would suggest for a non-Portuguese speaker. The only word that might offer difficulty is Canitga. Inocência and Experiência are both directly cognate with their English equivalents. But even Cantiga is recognizable in the English word “canticle”, from the Latin canticulum, “little song”, which, as it happens, is even more precise than Blake’s “songs”, a word which doesn’t really carry over from the Latin a sense of the diminutive, which is so fiercely employed by Blake, especially in the Songs of Experience.
The subtitle, will offer more difficulties to the non-Portuguese speaker, but it was delightful for me in the way it allowed me to hear a trace of the subtitle in English, which I’d wholly forgotten. Mostrando os dois estados contrários da alma humana, or: “Shewing The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”
Reading the poems amplifies this trace music, the echoes of the originals sounding through the new versions, but sounding newly, nonnatively…sounding like apparitions of themselves, rhythmic shadows of their new versions, as though the question of origins had somehow been inverted. I would say much of this has to do with the skill of the translator. These poems are not flattened play versions of the original as so much translation into English of foreign poetry can be. Instead they are legitimate re-soundings.
Portela embodies this “natural grammatical argument”, as Steiner would have it, in his introduction when he explains his need to retranslate the poems. “Even though I was aware of the importance of favoring rhythm over rhyme, producing the phonic shifting which allowed me, as synthetically as possible, to preserve a maximum of meaning with a minimum of syllables, I was not able, in fact, to maintain this criterion in very many passages. The attempt to produce symmetries and standards of equivalent rhymes overrode at times the criterion of phonic shifting and semantic conservation as it was subordinated to rhythm. I couldn’t achieve the degree of asymmetry with rhythmic regularity, which seemed necessary to the recreation that, at the time, I was trying to produce. Respecting the restrictions of my self-imposed criteria proved to be too difficult a task. Many semantic and rhythmic correlations were lost – by either attempting to pack the line or to economize, or to simply skirt the problem. I was unable to reconstruct them in the asymmetrical regularity that I had established as a guide. Each time I reread the earlier translation, the larger the weakness seemed. Perhaps this is why, as time passed, I felt the need to revise them. Even though translating Cantigas da Inocência e da Experiência once again would simply mean a reiteration of the same weakness.”*
For Yeats, poetry was an argument with the self. Portela’s attempt to improve upon his earlier translation of Blake, even though he realized it was to a certain degree futile, is an expression of what Steiner would call the freedom of the polyglot, or of Yeats’s argument played out through the revisioning argument of translation.
Let me leave you with two versions of A Rosa Doente. First the Portuguese. Try reading Blake backwards.
A ROSA DOENTE
Rosa, estás doente.
O verme invisível,
Que voa de noite
No temporal terrível:
Encontrou teu leito
De rubro prazer:
Negro oculto amor
Te devora o ser.

* (Antígona, 2007, pp. 42-43, my translation)