Translation Study

Poetry, in my post of last month, was rather like a personified being than a branch of language art. “Poetry made me do this,” I came close to saying, “poetry made me do that.” It can’t be explained away, so let me “double down” with an allegory of Poetry patterned after Plato’s myth of Eros. The god of desire is no fresh beauty, we are told, but a homely, weathered vagabond, and this is why Eros inclines toward the beautiful in all things: out of lack. Poetry, in my allegory, is hardly otherwise. The deity lacks agency and insight, and its tongue is tied. That’s why Poetry wanders in quest of efficacy, community, and wisdom, and the capacity to bring about change and catharsis through language. It finds these powers at the edges of existence, at margins and limits and extremes of abandon and stress.*  There are, I’m sure, poetries of plenitude and contentment at decent hours, and poetic sources other than lack and peril and horrible vacuums making you grab a pen at 3:00 a.m., but I’m a little foggy on them right now. The deity in my bosom gets moving when ordinary language either falls short of existence or absolutely nails it.

Where does verse translation stand in relation to this, besides drawing on skills cultivated by poets? My prosaic answer is that Translation has obligations that Poetry does not, in accord with a conventional, pro-social ideal made somewhat new in an age of global English. The hopeful premise is that interlinguistic access to poetic materials is a general benefit, regardless of source and target languages, and something like a global good. The case of English is special, not because it is good but because it is everywhere. This neo-colonial fact demands that translators into English be mindful of readers for whom it is a foreign language.

In January, I promised a minimum of precepts and prescriptive language. In February, I take it back, because the global dominance of English confronts the translator of classical Arabic (whose invested readership might include much of the Muslim world) with a number of imperatives, beginning with: Don’t make it artfully hard to read. But don’t simplify it, either. Don’t chop poems freely into fragments. And don’t domesticate. This last imperative, carrying the loaded concept of “home,” is the most debatable (and “foreignization,” its opposite, is loaded too). Not all translators target the languages of their home, and neither is English the exclusive medium of anyone's homeland. What English has is hegemony without boundaries, and translators into English must find non-triumphalist ways of managing it. Otherwise, their work is creative appropriation (and to this point see Mona Kareem’s essay “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations” in Poetry Birmingham 7). I don’t have a program for this, only a personal motto in the form of yet another imperative: Don’t turn Arabic poems into American ones.

In January, I used the term replica to describe translation’s end-product, and here’s where I split it in two. A replica may on one hand be the simulacrum that tends by accident or design to supplant what it simulates. For literary theorists of 1968 and after this is a familiar paradigm, and for those translating into a colonial language it is a caution. The consequences of ignoring it are plain to see in two bestselling North American non-readers of Persian whose ad lib remodelings of prior translations have scrambled Hafez and Rumi's English-language reception in our time. I am in flight from replication in this detrimental sense. What I mean by replica in a positive sense is the re-creation of something precious out of materials like plaster, latex, and the English language. Or maybe printmaking offers a better analogy, like fine-point engravings made after oil paintings. With no hope of reproducing the original poem’s specific combination of space and tone and color, the most reasonable goal for translators is to outline the formal contours of the original, and relay its meanings in an idiom that doesn’t deceive the target-language reader. That is what I mean by verse translation as an art form whose ideal end-product is a tasteful replica.

You could also call the end-product a metapoem. My only objection to this term, which was developed by James S. Holmes (on a tip from Roland Barthes) is that it is so evocative. Any poem in the world might be “after” or “about” another poem. Holmes uses it in a restricted sense for the poem whose entire referent is “another linguistic object: the original poem.” The metapoetics of verse translation, he says, inheres in its being

a nexus of a complex bundle of relationships converging from two directions: from the original poem, in its language, and linked in a very specific way to the poetic tradition of that language; and from the poetic tradition of the target language, with its more or less stringent expectations regarding poetry which the metapoem, if it is to be successful as poetry, must in some measure meet.**

In other words, verse translation’s commitments are not exclusive to the source-language original. The poem’s reception in target-language tradition is also what verse translation is “about,” because achieving that reception is verse translation’s job.

There are many ways of attempting it. André Lefevere’s Translating Poetry (1975) gives seven strategies, each one exemplified with a different English-language translation of the same Catullus poem (no. 64). And for Catullus, that’s fine. With Catullus, there is room for experimental flair, because his poetry’s modern reception is well established. Treat Catullus like a toboggan run. Catullus will be okay.

Material that hasn’t been translated before calls for different handling, with non-arbitrary constraints on form, structure, sense, and tone. Translation requires sensitivity to all these things, plus a hundred other determinants, among which a hierarchy has to be established because the replica can only accommodate so many. It still has to work as a poem, and yet when scholarly translators skimp on this part I don’t fault them. If all they do is show flatly what the original poem is saying, it is still important work.

Verse translation is an art of analogies. Figuring out which ones to give up on is part of the process through which a translator’s style is cultivated. I consider myself a beginner at it still, and a relative newcomer to the discipline of Translation Studies. Becoming conversant with trends in the field will take years, and I am still reading up on the mid-1970s.

Folly takes many forms, and my allegory of Poetry is one of them. With regard to Translation, I hope I have more sense. Already there is Hermes, with his wand and sun hat. When he was a babe in diapers, Hermes stole Apollo’s cows and drove them backward, making the tracks impossible to follow. And that’s discouraging. Translation needs less mystification, not more.