Of Stichography

§  Aphoristic form is deceitfully simple. It’s a prose-poetic form with an air of philosophic certainty, in which particularities are supposed to open onto universals, even though connecting them with other particularities is often best practice.

§  Translation of poetry predates writing and therefore history. For almost all of antiquity, it was a matter of paraphrase and adaptation, with source-language content imitated in target-language forms, versified and un-. The earliest documented efforts to translate poetry line for line are in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible completed in the second century BCE by a committee at Alexandria, called the Septuagint. For verse productions like the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5), the line breaks indicated in Hebrew manuscript were reproduced in the Septuagint. This is my standard for verse translation: that it be line for line. It’s a formatting issue, basically. And format is everything.

§  There’s an old joke among poets: If you can’t come up with anything to say about someone’s poetry, you can always talk about their line breaks. For this, you don’t even need to see them written down. In order to hear where the break falls in relation to the sentence, or some other unit of sense, you just need to listen at poetry readings. Engagement with verse structure is something all poets have in common—including prose poets, whose renunciation of line breaks is an ascetic decision that never occurs to prose writers.

§  As someone who enjoys uncanny short fiction, I would like to read a dialogue among a group of travelers, one of whom claims to have a poor grasp on the language they are speaking flawlessly. “But everything you hear me say is a stock phrase, memorized for the occasion. I have no intuitive command of the idiom.” Pressed further: “This, too, that I am saying, right now—it was cribbed from a thought in my native tongue, and kept in reserve for the purpose of explaining myself to incredulous strangers such as yourselves. But your language is alien to me! I cannot express myself spontaneously in it.”  This could have a science-fictional setting, or be the opening of an eerie tale. I’m not a fiction writer, so it’s not my affair. But I would like to read a story with dialogue like this, and maybe some action, written by Linh Dinh in a language of his choosing.

§  Poetry is probably my favorite word. Translation is one of my least favorite. The word is heavy in the mouth and ear, an easy word to overhear—one of those trisyllabic words without a synonym which, if it’s your business, you’re forced to use constantly. (Manuscript is another.) In my prose writing, it’s almost a game to see how often I can avoid using it. In my poetry, the word never comes up. This might be construed as a mark of privilege or bad conscience. But I think it’s normal for language artists to develop word allergies. For one poet I know, the disliked word is crystal; for another, brain.

§  In the 1980s, there was a New Wave band called Translator. I read about them in Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll. Unkindly, the reviewer wished for their demise in a plane crash, or a fire. And that’s the last I heard of Translator.

§  A description of my methods would be a long answer to a question no one asked. I did however feel interpellated by the widely-tweeted title phrase of an interview with Huda Fakhreddine on Arablit.org: “All Our Translations Are Prose Poems.” “If you translate a mu‘allaqa,” she said, “and you are not one of these poets who are going to insist on recreating meter by replacing it with an English meter, ultimately the poem is in prose.” Now, without mentioning any English meters by name, I am totally one of those poets who count on their fingers and tap their toes when editing verse translations. It’s not that I believe in metrical equivalences, but I have developed a synesthetic appreciation for some of the classical Arabic meters over time, and this informs my poetic choices when turning out an English-language line. So what kind of outlier, from Fakhreddine’s perspective, did this make me? The back story here is that I have translated a mu‘allaqa, and was thrilled for it to appear in the same volume as two superb mu‘allaqa translations by Fakhreddine herself, which I didn't recognize as prose poetry. It’s true that “prose poem” (qaṣīdat al-nathr) in Arabic names a modern verse form with line breaks; in fact, Huda has written a whole book about this. Even so, by private communication I am assured that Huda doesn’t think of her own Arabic-to-English verse translations as prose poems, and that some nuance went missing from the interview at that juncture. Verse translators still have a lot to learn from prose poetry. But for smoothing the reception of early Arabic poems in English-language translation, a quasi-metrical line is useful, and line breaks are essential.

§  This brings me to some aspects of verse translation that have not been discussed in my hearing. It’s understood that translators aim to elicit responses in target-language readers similar to those elicited in source-language readers by the original text. There are emotional responses, like laughter, grief, and outrage, and there are aesthetic ones, including not only pleasure and delight but vexation, boredom, and the startle response. Emotional responses are predominantly triggered by content, and aesthetic responses answer to form. The latter are problems of art. Now let me tell you which arts. To imitate the tone and timing of the source text is a mimic’s job. To enchant the target language-hearer for the same interval as the source-language poem is a musician’s job. Add to these the job of relaying a source text’s meaning to a target-language reader, and you have the art of verse translation.

§  The scribal convention of separating verses of poetry with line breaks is called stichography. Line break is a fundamentally graphological term—a writing-culture term for verse boundary, which is something else that predates writing. In epigraphy as in manuscript, verse boundaries are not always marked. And there are other ways of marking them besides line breaks. The forward slash, for one. But stichography is the convention most of us are accustomed to—to the point that it’s legitimate to wonder if stichography might be an effective synonym for versecraft and hence poetry itself. Because when I say line breaks are essential, I don’t just mean they’re useful; I mean they're defining features of verse. Stichography names the material fact of writing verses down and editing them into poems, as well as writing poems in one go. The art of the line break, you might call it. And of the writing of those let there be no end.