Muse of Translation

“There is no muse of translation,” the translator reminds

as he struggles with Pindar’s victory odes, and what he means

is that the imagery is overwhelming: the hissing of snakes

as Medusa’s sisters mourn her death, the baby Iamos

“lying on a bed of yellow and purple violets,” Heracles

with his baby hands strangling the two serpents sent

“to devour him on the day of his birth” so every translator

must beware of “rank transplantation.” Just imagine,

if one were to translate the line as “Forge your tongue

on the anvil of truth.” How ridiculous that admonition

to a king. Better to transpose to the vague modern,

though Pindar “perversely, from our point of view—often

seems to relish... the concrete image,” and it’s just

there that I think perhaps all being is translation; the child

I was at the kitchen table, translating my mother into

my father, my father into my mother; each one’s

“inviolate honey” becoming the “blameless venom”

of the other. So now I too prefer the naked tongue,

even pained and writing, caught in hammer and tongs,

flexed and torqued upon the anvil, until the metal

turns mercurial, quick, spilling into and out of

the shape of everything that is. For all day, while that pair

of grey-eyed serpents feeds the abandoned

child on honey, and the e-mail box fills with a multitude

of voices debating the distinctions of the hoaxes

of authorship—the pseudonym, the heteronym, all the masks

we can put on—I have trembled

because of my tongue. Because it insisted

upon saying I love you. So it waits and waits for some word from you.

It’s late in the afternoon when you finally reply and then to the quote

I sent to a list. I read obliquely, wondering

if I should hope because you say you’re thinking

of Shakespeare’s sonnets (the beloved and the lover’s love)

or if I’m lost to the shadows you’re going off to dispel

with a cup of coffee, that “best” at the end

of your letter, my allotment from now on. Is it too much love

or too little that I have translated into being? Oh by now

I’m mistyping forget your tongue upon the anvil

that the tongue itself has made.

Source: Wild Tongue (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)