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.
Copyright Credit: Rebecca Seiferle, "Muse of Translation" from Wild Tongue. Copyright © 2007 by Rebecca Seiferle. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Wild Tongue (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)