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Number
286
September October 2000
Forgery &
Possession:
The Poet
as Translator
STEPHEN KESSLER
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
"Some people think that translating poetry must
be difficult," W.S. Merwin remarked to a meeting of
the American Literary Translators Association in
the early 1980's in New Orleans. "But we know
that's not true. It's impossible." Only a virtuoso
poet/translator of Merwin's accomplishment would
have the authority and the humility to acknowledge
such a bedrock artistic truth while proceeding in
his work, time after time, to disprove it. And this
paradox is at the heart of any translator's
practice. For to bring a poem from one idiom (one
culture, one individual vision) into another is
literally to write a new poem. That's why no two
translations of the same poem are ever exactly
alike.
A number of skills and concepts must be
mobilized in this impossible but necessary
enterprise. Being bilingual helps, of course, but
is in itself far from sufficient. Familiarity with
the culture and history of the original is also
vitally useful. And a certain amount of scholarship
regarding biographical context, linguistic and
literary allusions, and the whole historic ambience
surrounding the text is helpful and important, up
to a point. Still, I would argue that the skills of
a poet are most instrumental in enabling a poem to
be moved successfully from one language to another,
new one---such skills and gifts as technical
control, a live imagination, a musical ear,
negative capability (Keats's poetic principle of
being able to speak from the point of view of other
identities than one's own), courage, humility, a
kind of presumptuousness, a keen intelligence, an
aptitude for unlikely associations, emotional
sensitivity, linguistic instinct, and an actor's
empathy and powers of impersonation.
When I first started translating, as a young
poet in the late 1960's and early '70s, it was as
much an exercise in reading as in writing. Most
existing translations that I could find, at the
time, of such Spanish-language poets as Machado,
García Lorca, Alberti and Neruda seemed
somehow slightly off---not necessarily 'inaccurate'
but out of tune---and I wanted to hear for myself
how some of those poems would sound in my own
American English, in the hope that that would help
me understand them. Academic scholars may scoff,
but translation of a foreign text into one's own
idiom is about the deepest reading one can do: in
the process of physically absorbing and
transforming the original into the new language you
may gain a far more profound understanding than
that afforded by the most rigorous critical
analysis. By the time you finish translating a poem
you know it as if you had written it yourself---and
in a very real sense, you have. (Not that the poet
always knows best what he or she has put into a
poem, but that's a subject for another
discussion.)
I soon discovered, in the course of translating
many Neruda poems, and then the more difficult
texts of Vicente Aleixandre, that translation was
also a tremendously helpful workshop in practical
prosody: I had to learn to mimic the verbal moves
of these masters, and in so doing was extending the
range of my own linguistic and poetic skills.
Imitating the long lines of Aleixandre's poems in
order to render them faithfully in a roughly
analogous English was as exacting, in its technical
demands, as my teenage efforts at mastering the
sonnet. By placing myself at the service of the
maestro I was at the same time developing habits
that would be of use in my original writing.
As, over the years, translation has become a
more and more integral part of my writing life,
I've found---especially in those periods when I
haven't had much to say in my own poetry---that
translating others not only keeps my technical
licks in tune but also enables me to write on
themes and inhabit sensibilities to which I might
not otherwise have access. And so the more
'selfless' or 'impersonal' act of translating ends
up enriching the more intimate effort to speak in a
distinctively personal voice. The dialectic is
vital to both sides of the exchange, and at best it
benefits the work of poet and translator alike.
Here's where the question of influence
inevitably arises. When you immerse yourself in the
work of another poet---even as a reader, but
especially as a translator charged with assuming
the other poet's persona---how much of that poet's
voice and vision end up infecting your own? And
conversely, how does your personal style and
linguistic signature color what you do with those
of another poet? While ideally a translator's style
should be transparent, letting the original shine
through undistorted, every poet who translates
does, to one degree or another, make the original
over in his or her own image. When the affinity
between both poets is a natural fit, this switch of
identities may be just what the poem calls for. At
other times the change can be disastrous. Robert
Bly is a good example of a translator who makes
every poet he translates sound like Robert Bly;
sometimes this works, as in certain versions of
Neruda and Kabir and some of the Nordic poets. In
other cases---most glaringly Rilke and
García Lorca---Bly's voice sounds all wrong.
There are countless other examples of
poet/translators (Clayton Eshleman, Nathaniel Tarn
and the notorious Ben Belitt come to mind) whose
own personalities interpose themselves between the
original poet and the reader in such a way that the
original is more obscured than illuminated. This
kind of translator-to-poet 'influence' is less than
edifying.
The other side of the question is even trickier.
I think the younger we are as writers the more
easily we are influenced by what we read (and
translate) and therefore the poets whose work we
engage in our formative years undoubtedly affect
our own. There is a danger, I think, in devoting
oneself exclusively to the translation of a single
poet before one has established an independent
style. But in my experience translating has been
much the same as reading, in terms of influence:
those writers whose work has most moved me, the
ones I've spent the most time with, the ones I've
engaged at the deepest levels of my being, are the
ones whose influence I hope I've absorbed---not in
the sense of stylistic imitation but more in a way
of apprehending the world, in ways of seeing and
listening and turning those perceptions into my own
music. Most of all, the examples of so many
distinctive individual voices saying things in
their poems in precisely their own ways have given
me courage to trust my deepest instincts to let my
voice be heard and felt from a faithful, intimate
place, regardless of how that may be received by
others.
Of course there's something to be said for
imitation, too. Like those painters I've seen in
European museums meticulously copying the works of
masters, mimicking great poems---either by
translating them or interpretively writing 'after'
them---can be a functional step on the road to
finding one's own style. Once one has mastered a
broad enough range of poetic techniques, one ought
to be equipped to do practically anything the muses
demand. Translation itself is at best a kind of
forgery, where the untrained eye or ear can't
distinguish between the copy and what it's modeled
on. The most deceptively effective translations are
those that sound so true and right that they give
the illusion, like all great poems, of arising from
silence through necessity into inevitability.
While some important poets have also been major
translators---Merwin, Pound and Rexroth, for
example---there are many poets of lesser
accomplishment in their own right whose
translations are exemplary, even classic: Arthur
Waley's Chinese, William Arrowsmith's Pavese,
Robert Fitzgerald's Homer, Mary Barnard's Sappho,
David Ferry's Horace and Alastair Reid's Borges,
among numerous others. This suggests that for some
of us, even if we're not destined for immortality,
the translation of greater writers than ourselves
can be a way to realize our own potential. The act
of translating can evoke in us creative powers we
might not otherwise know we had. We can make a
contribution to literature while enlarging our own
artistic accomplishment.
But as a poet/translator colleague of mine
observed, one ironic aspect of this opportunity to
make a self-transcending contribution is that in
putting our skills at the service of these larger
literary figures, our own independent achievement
may be overshadowed. Known primarily as the
translator of some eminent foreign poet, an
American writer, especially in the current
publishing climate, may find his or her original
work ignored, or at least diminished in comparison.
This speaks to the matter of one's so-called
career, a subject that everyone who writes thinks
about but which is considered unseemly to discuss
in public. I've never personally felt that conflict
of interest my colleague spoke of; I don't see how
whatever I've done as a translator, especially if
it's any good, could hurt my reputation as a poet.
If anything, the visibility one can attain as a
successful translator tends, I think, to increase
one's credibility as a writer, even if that doesn't
'translate' into book sales or critical acclaim.
People respect others who do things well, and to
achieve a certain level of artistry as a translator
(though that may mean making yourself invisible in
the work) can only enhance one's profile as a poet.
Your poems finally live or die on their own.
More inspiring to me than the career question is
the concept of an international fellowship of
poets, who extend the reach of each other's
writings by constantly turning them into new
languages, finding new readers, reviving the value
of the solitary labor that sooner or later may
reach kindred souls on some other side of the
world. Poetry and translation in this respect can
feel like an evangelical enterprise whose mission
may not exactly be one of espousing any particular
orthodoxy or saving souls but of amazing people or
setting off little verbal explosives in their
consciousness, enriching life all around through
the much-underestimated power of the word. Doing
translation can make one feel like a very urbane
guerrilla, undermining, transcending and generally
subverting conventional apprehensions of
reality.
Who hasn't felt, when reading Sappho or Tu Fu or
Rilke or Mandelstam or Borges in translation, an
unsettling sensation of having to rethink
everything, question your assumptions, pay more
attention to what's in front of you. As a
translator you are given the privilege of being an
instrument for this sort of revelation. Just
writing the new words of the other poem in English
is vigorous conditioning for whatever may follow on
your own time. What you learn in the process sooner
or later shows up, in one form or another, in
anything else you do, on or off paper. Writing
one's own poems, after all, is an act of
translation, taking unspoken dictation from some
other mysterious source and setting it down in
language sufficient to what it feels like it means.
So translation, again, as far as I can tell, is all
plus and no minus.
Except perhaps where time is concerned. Jobs and
family demands aside, some writers thrive on many
simultaneous projects, moving from one to another
the way a percussionist dances among his various
drums and chimes and rattles and mallets and
cymbals and brushes in the course of some extended
performance, each sound contributing its timing or
counterpoint or harmony to the others. But there
are also those who zero in on a single work with
intense focus until it's finished. For people who
find time to be finite, the question of how to
divide it among one's various loves and obligations
can mean that part of one's passion must be
sacrificed. With certain prolific exceptions,
there's only so much a person can do in a day. Even
so, in my experience the more I'm doing in one area
the more I seem to be inspired in the others, as if
writing and translating, poetry and prose, essays
and editing weren't mutually exclusive or even
separate but mutually reinforcing and all part of
the same creative continuum. As we discover
different voices in ourselves by way of poets in
other languages, we contain more multitudes from
which to draw the inspiration and vision that make
the work worthwhile. Translation can be a way of
finding voices for our own inarticulate obsessions.
We are plunged into mysteries we may not have known
were haunting us. As in writing our own poems, we
are forced to confront aspects of ourselves we may
not have wanted to acknowledge. Translation, both
doing it and reading its results, keeps pushing
back the boundaries, moving our lonesome little
expedition farther across the frontier, deeper into
the interior.
I would imagine that translators who don't write
poems themselves also feel this exploratory
sensation when bringing the foreign poet's lines
into their own idiom. Although they may not think
of themselves as poets, during the time they're
translating poems I don't see how they can escape
that identity. For the successful translator of
poetry, however modestly he or she proceeds with
that humble task, by some strange alchemy becomes a
poet in the process. They are possessed by the
other poet, channeling that voice, which originates
somewhere far beyond the page where the words are
printed. This sense of possession, which
biographers sometimes speak of, is one of the more
spooky and exciting aspects of the translator's
task; we have to remain open to being taken over by
forces we don't understand. I'm sure this happens
even to translators who wouldn't presume to call
themselves poets; if not, they may be in the wrong
line of work.
A poet of my acquaintance, tormented by the
compulsion to transcribe the voices in his head,
used to speak of poetry as a disease. After more
than thirty years of living with this disorder I
would amend his diagnosis to say that it's also a
treatment, if not a cure, whose healing powers
science has yet to explain. If translation is a
medium of transmission---the way songs played over
the radio are sometimes said to be
'infectious'---those of us who engage in such
high-risk behavior are assuming a grave and heady
responsibility. Poetry is contagious, and the
translator's job is to catch it and spread it
around.
Stephen Kessler's latest book of poems is
After Modigliani (Creative Arts). His recent
translations include Save Twilight, Selected
Poems of Julio Cortázar (City Lights), and a
substantial contribution to the Selected Poems
of Jorge Luis Borges (Viking/Penguin). His new
version of Pablo Neruda's Heights of Machu
Picchu with photographs by Barry Brukoff will be
published next year by Bulfinch, and his
Aphorisms of César Vallejo is
forthcoming from Green Integer. He also edits
The Redwood Coast Review.
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