More Thoughts on Translation

I had planned to post this as a reply in the comments section to Vivek Narayanan’s eloquent response to my posts on translation and my post on Paul Celan in particular, but I’ve decided that both the topic and my reply are substantive enough to warrant a new post. (One of the advantages of blogging is a much greater level of response than one usually receives to printed pieces, allowing a very timely opportunity to hone and refine one's thought.) The question of the nature, value, limits, and possibilities of translation is one that touches on the heart of what it means to read and write, indeed, what it means to communicate at all, since different individuals are at least as incommensurable as different languages are. For those who are interested in pursuing such matters further, I recommend George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. This post will not be quite so ambitious.

Viviek requested greater detail in my discussions of Celan and Mandelstam translations, in reply to which I would ask that one keep in mind the venue. These Harriet blog posts are and are meant to be relatively short and informal, though hopefully still remaining carefully thought-out. If I were to write a more formal essay on the topic, it would indeed be more detailed. In fact, one post on translation that I had originally intended for Harriet, on the French poet Andre du Bouchet, grew to such a length that I found it more appropriate for my own blog (which does feature such formal essays).
I would also add that many of my preferences are intuitive: I respond more to one translation than to another, in the same way that I would to poetry in English. The specific use of the language moves me more. I made this point in my original post, but I will make it more explicitly here: I read (and judge) translations first and foremost as poems in English.
With regard to the specific example of Michael Hamburger, I admire him almost boundlessly for his work in bringing Celan to the consciousness of Anglophone readers. Without his scholarship and translations, I doubt that Celan would occupy anything like the place he does in the awareness of English-language readers of poetry. At the same time, while his translations are always interesting and readable (a feature not to be taken lightly or for granted), I find them a bit prosaic; they often untangle and even flatten out Celan, as if trying to normalize him. This can be distinguished from some other translations that make Celan even more tangled, in diction and in syntax, sometimes to the point of awkwardness, than he seems to be in the original.
I also want to make clear that I never wrote that a translator must take liberties to succeed, though I did quote Clarence Brown's statement of the obvious fact that to translate is always to change. What I wrote is that "I’m willing to accept a degree of straying from the letter if it results in greater faithfulness to the spirit." That sense of faithfulness to the spirit is, for one who doesn't read the original, itself something of a leap of faith. But if I read a translation of a poet esteemed to be great in his or her original language by commentators I trust, and the language is flat or ungainly, as it so often is in translations, then I know that, even if the literal sense is offered, the poetry has been betrayed.
Obviously the ideal is to carry over both the letter and the spirit, but the nature of translation makes that an asymptote, to be approached more or less closely. The closer the approach, the better, but, like Zeno’s arrow, no translation will ever reach its target.
Vivek raises the issue of instinct and intuition in responding to a translation and, as I’ve written above, that’s a strong (and, for one who doesn’t read the original language, unavoidable) element. Actually, it’s an inextricable element of one’s response to any poem. But the more poetry one reads, the more one learns and thinks about poetry, the more informed and articulate that intuition becomes. Mine is, with regard to Celan and to Mandelstam, an informed intuition. That is to say, I have read all of the translations of Celan and most of those of Mandelstam, as well as a great deal about their work (and not just about their lives, compelling though those narratives are), which together give me a sense of how their poems work and what happens in them (“happens” in the sense of what the words and images are doing). Having read all the translations, I have compiled what might be called a composite sense of Celan’s work.
I have never read what I would consider a bad translation of Celan (though I’ve read several such Mandelstam translations), but there are some that produce a greater poetic (as distinct from conceptual or thematic) interest. I don’t know if this is the same as the search for the “authentic” Celan that Vivek mentions, but I do think that the sense of “aura” he brings up is translatable, not beyond language but in the particular language of a given translation.