Translation and Poetry

I’m pleased and anxious to be writing on Translation and Poetry for Harriet. Pleased, because the theme unites two major preoccupations of mine, and anxious for the same reason, plus an uncertainty I did not expect. What is the meaning of and?

Always, I have thought of this word as the soul of parataxis, linking things without hierarchy or logical dependence between them. Now that it comes to Translation and Poetry, I find determined patterns in pairs yoked by and. Qualities conjoined this way seem always to harmonize, without being the same—big and tall, sick and tired, young and restless—except when preceded by a marker of alternation like “by turns.” In that case, the reader knows to expect qualities that are opposed: Enigmatic and obvious. Raucous and mellifluous. Insightful and misguided.

For nouns so joined, similarity and antithesis are equally indicated. On one hand: Frogs and toads. Beans and pulses. Socks and shoes. On the other, coincidentia oppositorum: Being and nothingness. Oil and water. Diamonds and rust. And then there is merism, a trope much beloved by me. Pairs that are yoked in merism make up totalities: Land and sea. High and low. Night and day. These have little to do with my theme, nor do concrete-abstract pairs, which abound in poetry (more of a maneuver than a trope—I don’t know a dedicated term for it, and would welcome one). Then there is the absurdist and, the surgery table making possible the umbrella’s encounter with the sewing machine. My point is that different charges run through and in all these sorts of pairs. So when the invitation to blog on Translation and Poetry came about, I had to think fast.

Is Translation as Poetry my real theme? That would be awkward, because I hardly know what to call as. Apparently this word is an adverb? In a title phrase like “Translation as Poetry” I see it as a theoretical copula, even though linguistic authorities reserve copula for the link (not always present) that turns a subject and its descriptor/identifier into a sentence. But as and is have much in common. They are grammatical markers of identity (provisional or essential) that in English are sequence-dependent. “Translation as Poetry” would be an invitation to consider the art of translation as a form of poetry, and not the other way around, which might be the more fruitful question.

So anyway, now that the question’s out there, what is the status of translation as poetic activity? Certainly it’s a form of “making,” and therefore poiesis if you want to go that route. Translation is poiesis of the target-language replica, and there is a poetics to it shared by court interpretation, medical, technical, and diplomatic translation, and literary translation considered as a fine art. And anything done wonderfully well can be called “poetry.”

In my view, the poetics of translation is an ethos that takes the form of a constraint. The translator is free to say anything at all, as long as it corresponds painstakingly to the source-language original. How to take those pains, and up to what threshold, and the amount of time available, and all the decisions that go into managing these questions are what make up the translator’s style. Translation is a constraint-based form of writing.

The language I work from does the coolest thing with and. I’m talking about the Arabic and of asseveration called wāw rubba—not a connective and, but an introductory one, as if the poet exclaimed, “And what a [thing in question]!” Syntactically, it’s like taking an oath upon the thing, as an expression of admiration at it, whether by reason of its rarity or its great regularity. Translating one of these can take all weekend. In search of an equivalent exclamation that sounds halfway natural in English, I fill pages with impassioned statements about the thing in question, and I regret not keeping a better archive of these early drafts because they’re pretty comical. And by “comical” I mean tragic, because the quest is doomed. There is no English-language equivalent for all that Arabic wa- might be conveying in one monosyllabic bump. In English-language verse, it takes more beats and syllables to simulate the effect. My strategy is to look for the precise aspect or quality of the thing that the poet is exclaiming over. On occasion I have swapped in this quality for the thing itself, as where ʿAdi b. al-Riqaʿ (d. after 715 CE) exclaims, Wa-ṣāḥibin (“What a companion!”), but I made it all about the soundness of the companion’s sleep:

Wa-ṣāḥibin ghayri niksin qad nashaʾtu bi-hi
    ʿan nawmatin wa-hwa fī-hā muhmadun aniqu
musāfirun farashat'hu l-arḍu manzilatan
    addā karāhu ilayhā n-naṣṣu wa-l-ʿunuqu*

I wonder at the stillness of my companion of the road,
    the one I roused from sleep: no middling trifler
but a worthy traveler, cradled by the earth
     where slumber felled him, on sloping ground below the hillside’s top.

The cause for the poet’s admiration is his companion’s ability to sleep through a thunderstorm in the Anti-Lebanon mountain range of Syria, where they are camped in the open. To get some of this across, at the risk of taking interpretive decisions away from the target-language reader, which I don’t like to do, some substitution had to be made. English and is just no match for Arabic wāw rubba.

Nor, in the end, does the and of Translation and Poetry work as as by my inner flow chart. So many practical decisions made during the work of translation are informed by poetry, including the decision to translate in the first place. And by poetry I don’t just mean habitually reading poems and writing them and hearing them read by their authors, but the existential lack that makes verse production necessary, and the linguistic ferment that makes it possible. The reverse path—to become a poet through translating poems—would be more instructive to read about. To me it seems the rougher road, because poetry is also a needed skill set, applicable in translation as elsewhere in and outside of the fine arts. It’s why poets work well as editors, tech writers, art critics, teachers, archivists, librarians, and at trades and crafts even more arcane. Poetry gives us an edge, and we should brag about it more, as long as we don’t conflate skill with wisdom, which I’m not qualified to blog about.

I do have an answer for my opening question. The meaning of and is that more is coming. In future posts, I’ll use it unselfconsciously. Translation of poetry is what I’m here for, and on that topic I aim to speak with a minimum of shoulds and oughts and precepts. The experience I have to share is positive experience, and I want to welcome as many to the art as possible. And to anyone who disagrees that and is an occasion for this much puzzling over, I understand. There are other issues in need of discussing that do not turn on such fine semantic points. Translation and Poetry are not those issues.