Translation as Praxis

I have often wondered whether being a translator might be the worst possible way to finance my writing addiction. Not only is the income earned through freelance translation highly unpredictable, but also, spending all day immersed in the (re)writing of other people’s work can suck up the very creative energy that might otherwise be used for one’s own writing. After translating all day, it often feels inconceivable to sit down at the computer again and start composing sentences. Surely, any other day job would be better?

And yet, while it can be difficult to strike the right balance, there are certain aspects of translation that unquestionably feed into and support my own work as a poet.

Translation as subversion

In order to translate we often need to peel back multiple layers of meaning and semantics in order to get at the heart of what is being said, and to be able to write it again in another language. And sometimes what we find underneath all those layers is far from pretty. When it comes to translating non-literary texts, it is easy to see how official discourse can function as a tool for denial and is about creating a vocabulary that can be utilized to justify certain actions, which may otherwise be unthinkable. Jargon can be used to wage war or to destroy the planet, and this often puts the translator in the position of having to make an ethical choice, and to ask herself where her loyalties reside. In such situations, I turn to poetry as the space where I can subvert the official narrative. Especially when translating repetitive, jargon-heavy material, I have had times when I had to pause because a poem seemed to leap out from the lines, and I needed to write it down.

In her book The Sabotage Manual, Swedish poet Ida Börjel writes of sabotage among 20^th century unionized workers who would disrupt or damage the machinery being used if other tactics were not producing the desired outcome, if their demands were not being met. If we think of official narratives as essential to the imperial war machine, then sabotage through poetry can be a form of political activism.

Translation as exercise

Translating a wide variety of texts affords one the opportunity to try out many different voices, registers, tones, and forms. It’s a perfect way to exercise those writing muscles. Translation might even be used as a warmup for writing: if you can’t face the blank page, why not start your writing session by translating somebody else’s work? The content is already there, and this frees up space to focus on the craft, or what, to me, is the most exciting part: choosing the right word, composing a sentence.

Translation also requires that you enter the very mechanism of a text. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion speaks of her husband John re-reading certain scenes in novels “to see how they worked.” Such re-reading is fundamental to our craft as writers in any genre.

When I first encountered Laura Wittner’s “Why it shouldn’t rain on Sunday nights,” I did not really understand how it worked. My first reading is done entirely for my own enjoyment, without a conscious awareness of how the technical elements interact with each other and create a structure within which the emotional scene becomes something I can connect to. It is only by attempting to make a poem work in English that I discover what is going on beneath the surface.

Why it shouldn't rain on Sunday nights

Thunder roars and my children are at their other house.
First a crack of thunder far away,
then another nearer by,
finally an earth-shattering groan
tearing through every empty room
and the only lit room, where
I'm at work late in the night.
There's thunder and
I don't have anyone to comfort.
which for a second feels like
not having anyone to comfort me. But no.
A mother recomposes herself quickly
even if her children are at their other house.

 

There is a cinematic quality to the way that sound and light travel through the apartment, and the poem, and it’s only by doing the kind of close-reading that translation entails that I feel I fully understand the poem. Not only does translation require, at a minimum, the kind of in-depth literary analysis one might write essays about as a student, but also, it requires that we recreate what the text is doing in the original. I had never before thought of making light and sound travel in a poem by enclosing them within an architectural space, and it now feels as if this is one more technique I can add to my own poetry toolkit.

Wittner is a translator as well, which has led to some very interesting conversations about how her early work in journalism and the work of the authors she has translated have influenced her poetry, and how this influence might be conveyed in an English translation.

Translation as conversation

Whether one is translating living or dead authors, translation is a kind of conversation, and is thus quite unlike the very solitary process of writing. If the author is alive, we have the luxury of being able to ask them directly about a specific, puzzling word choice, or the placement of a comma, but also to inquire about the writers who inspired their own work, about the voice they hope to cultivate, about their favorite translation of Homer—and the dialogue can open up from there to explore other ideas that might offer inspiration for our own work.

If the author is no longer with us, we may turn to scholars who have studied their work, and the conversation can expand further. We may discover multiple versions of a single poem, in the original, and in translation, and we enter into dialogue with the instability of the “original.” To me there is also an element of a séance and the supernatural: translation as setting aside my ego in order to channel something that is bigger than me. The search for rough equivalences in a target language can lead us to unexpected places.

Translating oneself

When I write my own work, the sensation is usually that writing is in itself an act of translating myself from another language—I write in English by translating myself from Spanish, or vice versa. As if I were not fully fluent in either, and were constantly re-learning how to speak. Or as if I had a third, innermost language intelligible only to me, and a patchy Spanglish were its closest approximation. Code-switching is often the norm in my notebooks, but when writing for others, I feel I must choose a language that is more homogenous. There are certain things I know I do better in Spanish: counting, swearing, writing down dreams. In English I am better at picking apart my emotions and laying bare all their different components, as if they were machinery. It’s where I feel a gap in my ability to communicate (and don’t most poets feel inarticulate? Isn’t much writing born out of the inability to express something?), that the other language seeps through.

Writing as self-translation can make the process rather slow. Because I am the author of the original, the original is fundamentally changeable. The act of translation often reveals to me what isn’t working, and I need to rewrite the original. It is easy to get lost. And after the rewrite is complete, then the process of translation begins again.

There are often multiple phases in a draft, where a poem migrates from English to Spanish, then back again, in search of its form and its tone. Each time it crosses the gulf between it loses and regains parts, until it’s either finished or it’s time to deliver, whichever comes first.