Translation: Better Than Never Kissing At All II

Our first workshop on Saturday morning is with Valzhyna Mort. She is a Belarusian poet living now in Washington DC. Her first collection will be published by Copper Canyon in 2008. She is young, brilliant, atrractive and has a wonderful sense of humor—self-deprecating, never precious. She does not wear “cute” well. She is shaped like a teenager—a compact gymnast’s body, with a tidily trimmed hair cut and a pixie-like sharpness of features. A woman this size and shape should be cute, but she defies cuteness withher sardonic wit and capacity for irony. As a child she played the accordion seriously practicing indoors, she laughed, while her friends played outside. But she is not cute, and does not try to do cute. It is refreshing.

I take notes as she takes us through the hardships of translating. I tell her my translation story, and I am glad I can tell her this story because she is rooted in the Russian language even as she is committed to the preservation of Belarusian. I tell her that whenever I find a Russian poem in translation that I enjoy, I will sometimes tell a Russian friend (usually a poet) how much I have enjoyed the piece. Always, without exception, they will sniff at the translation and say, “It is so bad, it is nothing like the Russian. You can’t really experience the poem except in Russia.” I want her to assure me that this is just not the case. These are all male poets and I am convinced that she will say that men can be chauvinistic about even more than gender. She says, “Most translations from Russian to English a horrible. They are. It is so hard.” She is smiling, but this is not a joke. “The problem is that Russian poetry, even the most contemporary poetry is shaped by rhythm and rhyme, and this is not seen as archaic or old-fashioned. There is such a melodious quality to the poems that when they are translated into English, the adventurous poets will attempt to use rhyme and meter. Unfortunately, the poems seem old and worn when this is done. They do not sound modern and the meter sounds forced in English. It is hard to achieve so much of the sonic quality in another language.” Then she offers as if as compensation. “But American poets translated into Russian are worse. They are horrendous. Walt Whitman translated sounds terrible. People wonder why everyone likes Walt Whitman. The translations do not use meter, and so people wonder why he is called a poet and not a prose writer. It is hard to capture the rhythm of Whitman in Russian translation. Robert Frost—it is quite bad. They do good translations of the Beatnix, but the masters? Well, those are just not well translated because it is so hard to replicate the achievement in the language.” So, I ask, why bother?
At the beginning of her workshop she makes a statement. It is one of many that she will make and that sound fresh and insightful but which I suspect are hold hat and cliché to serious translating people. “How,” she asks. “Would you like to be kissed through a curtain.” Someone quips, “Better than not kissing at all.” So translation is like kissing through a curtain. It is like the famous ritual of circumspect sensuality—a couple sitting at a table, one sips from a glass, and then the other takes the same glass and sips from the same spot that the first one used it. They do this back and forth all the time they are together. They are making love. It is as close as they can get. They are both married and this is a clandestine affair. Translation is like kissing a glass and having the other person kiss from the same glass. Somehow, she says, there is something more sensual about this act. The lovers will pay even more attention to the act of kissing because of their inability to actually touch each others lips. They will appreciate the sensuality of the act because of the limitations of circumstance. Val is trying to get us to understand that translating can make us pay far more attention to a poem than simply reading it. While translation involves reading, it is a peculiar kind of reading—a reading that demands that we enter fully into the mind of the poet and try to understand how that poem is shaped. But we have to do more than that. We have to somehow find the language in our own tongue to capture the spirit and meaning of the original. Only poets should translate poetry, she argues. Her positions are doctrinaire, assertive. They sound like the pontifications that she would have heard from her tutors. The story of her entry into translation is beautiful and so European.
A friend of hers in Belarus once asked her if she would like to visit Warsaw, all expense paid for two weeks. She leapt at the chance. In Warsaw she found out that she was part of a writers’ conference on translation. It was a two-week course on translation and she was invited to select any Polish poet and translate his or her work. She worked on someone who turned out to be the toughest poet. Her first efforts produced beautiful poems that her tutor, a masterful Polish translator, Adam Pomorski, who has translated Dante, much of Dostoevsky, Goethe and many other major world authors into Polish, declared as great poems by her which she should put her name to. He then suggested that if she still wanted to, she could go ahead work on the translations of the poet’s work. She did, jettisoning the poems she had done before. Mort is a wonderful teacher. Her passion for the translated poem is marked by her honesty about why she likes translating. It is because she finds it easier to immerse herself in the work of others; the discipline, the responsibility, the objective engagement is probably less pressured, less annoying, less self-engaged than the indulgence of making one’s own poems. More than that, with translation, you can always come to the desk and start working. The huge challenging of inventing one’s topic, one’s themes, and one’s artistic vision is suspended. You become a servant and there is a certain comfort to this role.
My favorite aphorism among the many she offered about translating is amusing: Translations are like men. When they are beautiful they are unfaithful. She said this when we were looking at some very faithful translations that were decidedly homely, slavish and studious. The lovely translations, on the other hand, were not always the most faithful translations, but they were the most entertaining. Of course, there is something deeply fatalistic and pessimistic about this statement, a kind of ironic acceptance of the inherent flawed nature of the translated poem—a healthy mistrust of the process. Poets must translate poetry, she says. Translators can help poets, but poets must do the translation because the making of the translated poem is an act of writing poetry.
At breakfast, while she scoops spoons full of pristine grits, I ask her about her own collection with Copper Canyon. She explains that the collection will not be bilingual, but she does have a translator. She is working closely with the translator to get the poems right. She then smiles and adds that she is the translator, and he is the poet. Her task here is to give him the translations and it is he, the poet of English, who will find a way to make them into poems that work in English. “I am just not sensitive enough to English yet,” she explains. Her English, of course, is splendid, but I understand what she means. The nuance of language needed to write poetry in a non-mother tongue takes time and takes a perceptiveness and immersion into the language a culture for it to work. In both her translated poems and in her speech, colloquialisms leap out—they sound very hip and contemporary. When she speaks them in normal conversation, there is a hint of irony in her voice—as if she is testing the boundaries of language. In her poems they sometimes sound like an effort at being contemporary, immediate. I wonder whether I will be saying things like, “Good translations, but the Belarusian versions are to die for.” It points to the idea of how language is inextricably connected with discourse and emotion. Poetry, at its best, seeks to excavate as much as it can from language.
There is, though, something extremely gratifying about the labor of translating. The pleasure comes from the effort more than the finished product which one will always be uncertain about. I plan to do even more translating. And yet I know that I can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the translation process, by the sensation of sitting in the middle of the poem, with multiple words strewn about, and choices to make, and yet feeling as if it is enough to simply get something that comes close to the meaning of the poem on the page—forget the art, forget the puns, forget the rhymes, forget the tone, forget the music. Of course, this only means that the translator has just begun the work. There is much more to be done. There is always so much more to be done. I keep coming back to the answer that was given by one of the students to the question, “What do you think about kissing through a kissing.” “Better than never kissing at all.” How true.