Tag Archives: Translation Issues

Translating Shez’s “in the nights”

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Translating, round two, after help from Ann Ellen Dichter and Eugene Sotirescu. This is complex stuff, translating. Which I knew, but I just keep knowing more and more. In theory, I’ll have an entire manuscript of at least 48 poems by next year. In theory…

First, the Hebrew original:

בַּלֵּילוֹת הָאַיָּלָה חוֹלֶמֶת עַל
נִמְרֹד גִּבּוֹר צַיִד
שֶׁתָּבוֹא כְּבָר לִתְקֹעַ חֵץ
בִּקְרָבַי
שֶׁתַּעֲמֹד פְּשׂוּק רַגְלַיִם מֵעַל
גּוּפָתִי הַדּוֹמֶמֶת
שֶׁתַּעֲרִיץ אֶת הַבָּשָׂר הַזֶה

Eugene’s translation:

at night the doe dreams of
nimrod the hunter hero
let him come already to stick an arrow
into my insides
let him stand with spread legs over
my still corpse
let him admire this flesh

Here’s my revised translation, based on his literal translation.

In the nights, the fawn dreams
of Nimrod, the mighty hunter
Let him come, press an arrow
into and into me
Let him stand, legs spread,
over my unmoving body
Let him lord over this flesh

a few notes about my translation:

I chose “fawn” rather than “doe” because in the Hebrew the word ayalah is both a girl’s name and the word for “doe.” I think the sense of human and animal intertwined is essential to the poem, so I chose “fawn,” which can be a woman’s name in English. It’s not common, and I’m not sure the double meanings carry anything close to the same strength of the Hebrew, but it’s a start.

I chose “press” rather than “stick” because the word in Hebrew can also mean the meteorological term “bar” as a measure of pressure. Press also, I think, carries an intimacy that I think is there in the poem.

I chose “into and into” rather than “to my insides” because of how Marcia Falk uses “b’kirbi” in her morning blessing and translates as “heart of hearts” or “innermost being.” I’m not sure “into and into” captures the sense of being in the deepest part of oneself, although the sense of the act being repeated night after night is important.

And I chose “lord over” rather than “admire” because the Hebrew root carries a sense of being a despot or tyrant and thus a strong sense of control. “Lord over” in English carries both the sense of being the lord of the manor and of the slang “to lord it over someone,” both of which meanings are relevant here.

Or at least that’s what I’m thinking today. When I hear from some of my other Hebrew speakers, words and emotional meanings could shift again radically.

Let The Translating Begin!

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So, having finished my MFA in poetry, and taken a semester to rest, I’ll be going back to school in late June to work on the poetry in translation track of Drew’s MFA program. Yes, me, translating, even though I’ve pretty much utterly failed to succeed in learning any other language, ever, and the thought of coming up against things I can’t read makes me feel more than a little shaky. So why do it? Because the translators I’ve met through Drew are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, because what they have to say about poetry pushes my thinking to the limit, because what I’ll learn about language will increase exponentially in the process. Because I’m a slut for being in over my head.

I’m searching for a poet or project, and on the recommendation of a friend found the Israeli Jewish poet Jean Shez, who describes herself as a lesbian writing about lesbian love and child abuse from a feminist perspective. Instantly intriguing me, of course. I’ve found a few of her poems on the web, and am trying to slog through a couple to get a sense of her as a writer. Here’s my first attempt, still missing a couple key words that my usual go-to folks for Hebrew questions couldn’t answer. First in Hebrew, then my working translation. Stay tuned, as I’ll be posting updates every time I manage to make a little more sense of her poem.

בַּלֵּילוֹת הָאַיָּלָה חוֹלֶמֶת עַל
נִמְרֹד גִּבּוֹר צַיִד
שֶׁתָּבוֹא כְּבָר לִתְקֹעַ חֵץ
בִּקְרָבַי
שֶׁתַּעֲמֹד פְּשׂוּק רַגְלַיִם מֵעַל
גּוּפָתִי הַדּוֹמֶמֶת
שֶׁתַּעֲרִיץ אֶת הַבָּשָׂר הַזֶה

In the evenings the fawn dreams
of Nimrad, the mighty hunter,
who will come to press an arrow
inside me
to straddle my unmoving body,
to lord over this meat

Drew, Second Residency, Translation

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More and more and more thinking about translating poetry, the impossibility and necessity of it. These are rough notes as I’m gathering them; when it all jells into something more solid (solid-ish?) I’ll post that too.

Notes from a lecture by Mihaela Moscaliue: “Translation: Poetics and Politics, Theory and Practice”

A.Burgess—Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

F. Schleiermacher—The best translator is one who is never fully at home in the foreign language, and seeks to evoke in the reader an experience like his [sic] own, that is, the experience of someone for whom the foreighn language is simultaneously legible and alien.

K. Mattawa—A translator’s job is to provide a dancing partner for the original poem

J.L.Borges—Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

G.Borrow—Translation is at best an echo.

Seamus Heaney described two different approaches to translating, based on how Vikings treated Ireland and England:
—raiding, where poets go in and raid other cultures and languages and take all the booty they can, such as Lowell’s “imitations” which take and own and change at will
—settlement, in which you enter and colonize, but also stay, allowing yourself to be changed by the conquered culture even as you impose change on it

We don’t have a clear language to description translation its various forms. Faithful, literary, free, approximate, literal, formal, informal, intralingual, intersemiotic, intersystemic, transtexualization, transillumination, transformation, transmigration, transplantation, and on and on. German has three different words for three distinct concepts: umdichtun (a poem modeled on another); nachdichtung (free translation); ubersetzung (translation).

What does one translate in a poem? It’s content? It’s type of vocabulary (formal, literary, slang)? It’s music, sound patterns, rhyme? When I was still working with children’s books, I got an order once for “classic alphabet books translated into Spanish.” Big sigh, then a long explanation of how Spanish and English are not the same alphabet, so there is no such thing as an English alphabet book “translated” into Spanish, with the suggestion that I buy them some SPANISH alphabet books.

“A translation is never a duplicate, but a seduction, a precise awareness that there is no finished, complete translation.”

“Poetry may be untranslatable, yet wants itself to be translated.”

“Translation is an intensification of the writing process.”

“Translators are not ventriloquists for the original writers.”

“A translator is a lover made better by unfaithfulness, by what is learned when rules are broken and experiments are done.”

Robert Haas: “recalcitrant strangeness and accuracy” (said about some translation he was doing from a Polish poem of a French concept that doesn’t exist in English, but I simply love the phrase itself)


From Jean Valentine’s talk on her work translating Maria Tsvetaeva

Jean Valentine: translating is a certain kind of chaos

from a translation of a 1929 Tsvetaeva essay on Rilke:

And today I want Rilke to speak—through me. In the vernacular, this is known as translation. (How much better the Germans put it—nachdicten: Following in the poet’s path, paving anew the entire road which he paved. For let nach be—(to follow after), but—dichten: is that which is always anew.) Nachdicten—to pave anew the road along instantaneously vanishing traces. But translation has another meaning. To translate not only into (the Russian language, for example), but also across (a river). I translate Rilke into the Russian tongue, as he will some day translate me to the other world.
By the hand—across the river

from Peter Cole’s talk “Risks and Rewards of Translation”

Peter Cole began by describing his own slow movement towards translating (for which, fyi, he has won a Macarthur Genius Award). He said that initially he was taught, and had the sense, that translation was a threat to him as a young poet, that it was an inhibitor to development of poetic voice. He also described the effect of reading most translations, ground out of “the great gray zone of the homogenized” from which all poems came out sounding the same, a kind of translation-ese which was not really any language at all. But his own writing and life pulled him toward the Hebrew bible, and a decision to learn Hebrew as an American poet.

Translation, he said, is the source of deep discomfort for everyone involved in it. It is an ongoing series of crises. Bialyk, he said, described translations as kissing through a veil, adding, though, that such a kiss is a way to get started. Other descriptions of translating he has encountered:
-chicory for coffee
-counterfeit currency
-like looking at a tapestry from the wrong side
-reproduction vs. procreation
-colonialist appropriation
-adultery, desecration, related for the Italian term for translate which grows from the root for traitor or betrayal
-“poetry is what is lost in translation” Robert Frost
-voice envy
-“the spirit that creates prosody dies in translation; you cannot translate the intimacies of sound form; the body’s pleasures will not translate” Donald Hall

So then why translate when translating is impossible? Because, Cole said, all poems seem impossible before they are written. Translation is the art of approximation, but so is poetry itself. Every poem is an imitation of nature; every poem, no matter how great, is leaving something out. Great poetry may be exactly what is present in translation.

The function of art is estrangement, to make the familiar new, Cole said, describing how his encounter with learning Hebrew made English seem utterly new.

In response to Hall’s assertion that the primary pleasure of poetry is in the mouth, that the forming of sounds is an early erotic experience, Cole asserted that translations make sense and make sense—how they make real the sensory dimension of the poem. In translating, you feel the poem as a sensual, verbal object that immerses you in a world that is utterly sensual. Nothing is better for a poet, nothing can expand and realign the poetic muscle as translation of poets you respect and love. The engagement changes your poetic anatomy, remakes you.

Translating also effects us on the aesthetic and moral levels, for when you seek to do justice to work you respect, you are driven to know, to learn, to take action in the world.

Gershem Sholem—translation is one of the greatest miracles, bringing us into the heart of the sacred order from which it springs.

So how then can we understand translation from this perspective? Cole offered a stunning list of possibilities:
-akin to musical transposition, changing the same work to a different key
-restoration of a painting
-erotic sexual congress, sensual dance
-reincarnation
-avatar
-redemption of lost poetry
-transcendence
-opening a window, breaking a shell, removing a veil, removing a well cover
-moving across
-like shrines taken from one holy place to a new holy place in order to consecrate the new place
-hospitality
-poetry, since all poetry is translation

Abraham Cowley: I am not so enamored of the name of translator that I don’t with for something better, though I don’t know what that should be called.

And also, from Peter Cole, a few dangers of translating to avoid:
-translating is the extraordinary nourishment of oxygen, but could end up suffocating the poet
-the translator could become only a technician
-psychological release could go awry; translation is a kind of fiction, always trying on other lives, but you could get trapped in the delusion that these lives are your own
-the intense and complicated pleasure and texture of translating could make the poet’s own voice extinct

Psapfo, Latinization, and voiceless bilabial fricative f

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from Willis Barnstone’s translation of Sappho’s poems, a footnote on the intricacies of the pronunciation of her name.

I leave the hardest part of this essay to a footnote, still pondering on phi and eta, whether Greek phi = English ph or f, and whether Greek eta = e or i, and a few other enigma. My reasonable premise is that a literary translation is not a chart for imitating ancient phonemes. While it is fun to have an approximate knowledge of ancient Greek phonology, such knowledge is marginal in our pact with the original poet to be a poet in English faithful to song.

McCulloh correctly notes that the phi in ancient Greek was not a voiceless bilabial fricative f but an aspirated plosive p, like the p in pot.

Our traditional preference for the Latin ph misleads us as a good emissary for a Greek utterance. Roman Latin construed the double consonant ph to represent the Greek aspirated p. It worked until approximately the fourth century b.c.e., when the aspirated Greek p evolved into a fricative f. In Latin the ph evolved into a fricative f, which is how it remains today. In English the initial ph reveals only that etymologically the word came to us through Latin from Greek, a nice trophy, but offering just f. No more.

How can we hear an ancient Greek voice, since for most of us Latin ph fails? No way. English is not Greek. In modern tongues and by international phonetic convention, phi is not a plosive p but the voiceless bilabial fricative f. Hence, when the English name is not too sacred to change, I like to render phi as f rather than the Latin ph, keeping us close to Greek and escaping a Latin presence.

To be loyal to an ancient aspirated phi we should write pilosopy. Then, then initial p would be a plosive p and a bit closer to the classical and archaic phi. No one offers this nutty solution. Latin tongues don’t bother. Spanish gives us filosophia. Why are we loyal to a sign that no longer signifies an original sound in Greek? The strong tradition of shuffling Greek words through an adoptive Latin gives us Alcaeus, not Alkaios, for Sappho’s contemporary poet friend in Lesbos. I find the preponderance and authority of Latinization tough to swallow. As Greece becomes a vivid entity, it is easy to switch to Alkaios. Plato remains Plato, not Platon, the “broad-shouldered.” And when writing about Sappho, it is Sappho. But in her poems, she is Psapfo and, for all the reasons given above, not the mixed signal of Psappho.

the war between grammarians and libertines

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from Willis Barnstone’s introduction to his translation of Sappho

While the ancient Alexandrian scholars preserved and fashioned Sappho, ordering and editing her poetry, since Horace and Quintilian there has been war between “grammarians” and “libertines” over the nature of translation itself, between fidus interpres, which the Latin writers mocked, and literary re-creation and imitation. In modern times the soft war goes on between translation as a literary art or a classroom language test, which is revealed in spelling. The combatants regularly have seats in the academy, and victory depends on which audience and publisher receives and acclaims them. […] As for the transcription of names, there is no single rule book for regulating transliteration. This free-for-all mode reflects language flux, which is always with us, no matter who is emperor.

The main lesson from all of this is that whatever one does will make a lot of people furious. One cannot be consistent, therefore one is incompetent and worse. Any linguistic change troubles like new currency and stamps.