Reviews and Features

D M Black Faithful or Free

PETER ROBINSON

Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible

Liverpool £65.00

 

HÉDI KADDOUR

Treason (translated by Marilyn Hacker)

Yale $26.00

 

MARTINUS NIJHOFF

Awater (edited by Thomas Möhlmann, translated by David Colmer, James S Hokmes and Daan van der Vat)

Anvil £8.95

 

ROBERT SAXTON

Hesiod’s Calendar

Carcanet £9.95

 

ADRIAN CLARKE

Eurochants

Shearsman £9.95

 

I was taken aback by the subtitle of Peter Robinson’s Poetry and Translation: the Art of the impossible. I wondered if this was going to be another disquisition on the impossibility of translating poetry, and the need for anyone tempted by the thought of doing so to settle instead for making ‘versions’ or ‘imitations’. Robinson’s position, however, is the opposite. The position for which he consistently argues throughout the book, with both scholarship and passion, is that translation is perfectly possible. This is in no way to deny that translation is difficult, and sometimes extremely difficult, that translation will never create a perfect replica of the original, and that the translation of poetry, in particular, is going to encounter peculiar difficulties because poetry depends crucially on so many of the auditory qualities of language. But a translation (of anything) is good or bad in proportion to the skill with which the translator is able to find equivalents for the significant qualities of the original, and this is exactly as true for the translation of poetry as it is for the translation of an insurance document. So, to translate poetry is certainly hard (but that is not the same as impossible), and it is open to varying degrees of success, which can be gauged intelligibly, though with lots of room for individual variations of judgment, by comparing the translation with the original. It’s possible, therefore, to say that all translations are inevitably ‘versions’, but the aspiration to translate is different from the aspiration to create a ‘version’. To translate puts the writer under a certain strain of responsibility to the original, which will undoubtedly help towards one of the goals that most readers are likely to bring, namely, their wish to get some access to the experience of reading a poet who happens to write in a language they don’t understand. If the translator tells himself that all he is doing is making a ‘version’ or ‘imitation’, then he doesn’t feel this responsibility, and he is likely to produce something that is puzzling and hard to assess. Robinson provides many very interesting readings of ‘versions’ in which he shows how the willingness of the writer to depart from the hard discipline of translating results in failures of tone or of meaning that impoverish the result.

The iconic figure who stands behind the current popularity of ‘versions’ is Robert Lowell. Robinson at one point speaks of his ‘revulsion’ at Lowell’s ‘imitations’ for ‘not being sufficiently imitative of their originals’. The strength of this reaction is important. It springs from a love of the original, and the revulsion is at seeing it pointlessly traduced. He looks in a little detail, for example, at what Lowell does to the final stanzas of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau Ivre’, ‘disastrously’ collapsing the extremely subtle meaning and rhythmical movement by which Rimbaud changes key after the
manic career of the drunken boat to the true sadness of the lonely little boy in a French provincial village who is dreaming of it (‘Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la flache / Noire et froide…’). In Lowell’s hands, this becomes the incomprehensible:

 

Shrunken and black against a twilight sky,

our Europe has no water.

 

Presumably Lowell has followed some associative train of his own, whereby desire implies lack, therefore absence, so if Rimbaud’s boy ‘desires’ water, that must be because there isn’t any. Having arrived at nonsense, Lowell destroys any possibility for the reader of glimpsing the poignancy and beauty of the original. Good reason for revulsion!

Robinson similarly in an interesting discussion compares three versions of Rimbaud’s ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ by Christopher Reid, Ciaran Carson and Lowell, in each case showing how disparities of tone, or outright failures of meaning, creep in when the attempt to translate slips over into the freedom of versioning. Reid is closest to Rimbaud but even in his version, playfully transposed from Charleroi to Hemel Hempstead, Robinson detects mismatches of situation and cultural tone. Rimbaud arrived at a classic quiet conclusion to the poem, when the attractive waitress finally fills his immense tankard with beer:

 

                                  …avec sa mousse

Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriéré.

 

In English this translates as ‘with its foam gilded by a ray of late sunlight’, which is supplemented, in Carson’s hands, by an entirely invented line:

 

I guzzled it all into me. Glug. Glug. Glug. Glug.

 

Robinson makes no comment. But it’s a good example, really, of the nature of versioning, which is that it almost invariably ‘lowers the tone’ and reduces the sensitivity of its original. This tendency to coarsening may perhaps be part of a more widespread phenomenon – it may reflect the wish of poets currently to use sensuality (so powerfully evoked and yet so delicately managed in Rimbaud’s wonderfully good-humoured sonnet) to achieve crude or cheap effects, as if the poet feels a need to compete with the techniques of advertising and the mass media.

Robinson’s main thesis here is a simple one, and so self-evidently correct that it hardly needs to be argued for. The interest of the book comes in its many specific examples, comparing different translations of the same text and discussing the possible reasons for the translators’ diverse decisions. Here Robinson is an excellent judge, and notably charitable. He finds merits in old-fashioned translations, such as Henry Carey’s 1814 Dante, or Dryden’s Virgil, which are often disparaged as belonging so obviously to their epoch. Along the way he takes considerable risks, comparing, for example, his own translation of Mallarmé’s ‘Brise Marine’ (‘La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres’) with those by the Blackmores and by Richard Wilbur. It’s a brave man who steps into the ring with Richard Wilbur! Robinson questions Wilbur’s decision to convert Mallarmé’s alexandrines into pentameters, ‘making his rhymes click’, and for his own rendering he devises an approximation to the French alexandrine with irregular stresses and eleven or twelve syllables to the line. He ends with a conspicuously non-clicking rhyme, of ‘fertile islands’ with ‘the sailor’s song resounds. ‘Et ni la jeune femme allaitant son enfant’ becomes in Wilbur, ‘Nor the young wife who gives the babe her teat’, and in Robinson, ‘Nor the young wife breast-feeding her little mite’. Opinions will differ, but it’s such decisions that translators have to make, and Robinson more than proves his point, that there’s a real value in looking at several honest attempts at translation, to capture different elements and viewpoints on the original.

Some years ago in Poetry London, I reviewed Don Paterson’s versions of Machado, The Eyes (for some reason regularly referenced by Robinson as The Eye). I commented then on the way in which Paterson, a gifted poet, recurrently confused his translations by turning them rather arbitrarily into ‘versions’ – sometimes by switching the sequence of the lines, or suddenly inserting a defiant and discordant sentence of his own. Robinson notices the same thing; he interestingly relates it to one of Paterson’s ‘Fourteen Notes on the Version’, in which Paterson asserts that there are ‘no ghosts, no gods, nothing secretly lurking in the temple of the poem whose vengeful wrath we will incur with our failure to honour it’. Robinson uses this striking fantasy, that there might be these vengeful gods or ghosts, to suggest that the cult of the ‘version’ may be because some versionists feel so guilty at failing to equal the excellence of the original that they repudiate the whole attempt at ‘translating’, i.e. at doing the best they can to transpose the poem into the new language.

It’s certainly true that to translate is to incur guilt, and the oddly moral tone that often enters into discussion of translation has to do with this. The translators of the King James Version of the Bible wrote in their 1611 Preface: ‘Most assuredly we were extremely careful. We made it a matter of conscience as was our responsibility’. Translators of lesser texts feel something of the same burden. James Greene, introducing his translations of Mandelstam, playfully asked, ‘Should translators, like husbands, be faithful or free?’ (Greene himself ended up being notably ‘free’, even on occasion crowding several entirely separate poems into one, but his use of the word ‘faithful’, and the link with marital fidelity, brings out vividly the sense of a moral dimension.) As far as poems are concerned, this element should not be overdone. We are ‘only’ talking about poems, not about sacred texts or human beings, so the fidelity involved is that of the craftsman to his materials – important enough, no doubt, but not like the love of wife and husband. Paterson’s versions, like Lowell’s, are troubling, not because they are versions, but because essentially they are translations, but with puzzling distortions, and unless you can read the original you don’t know where you are with them. Whole-hearted versionists are not troubling in this way because they work more like a caricaturist: you are in no doubt what they’re up to, because they make no pretence of translating. Examples would include Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, Anthony Hecht’s renderings of Horace, or what I always think of as the cartoon version of Goethe’s Das Tagebuch, John Frederick Nims’s ‘The Diary’, which he published first in Playboy.

 

Elizabeth Bishop disliked Lowell’s Imitations, and worked hard to get him to improve them, always by coming closer to the original. With her own translations, she tried to make them as literal as possible. Robinson discusses her translations of Drummond de Andrade’s poems, some of which she checked for accuracy with the poet himself. Bishop would have approved of Marilyn Hacker’s translations of the French-Tunisian poet Hédi Kaddour. Kaddour’s poems are direct, witty and compact descriptions of scenes and people seen in Paris, impersonally written but with a surprising charge of urgency. Hacker’s carefully poised English matches the French as exactly as possible. Those who still wish to say poetry is untranslatable, however, will point triumphantly to one passage. Hacker writes:

 

                            and why

bare your face to the vitriol of good intentions

when you’ve only to say cheese to seem

to go smiling toward some human being

who perhaps doesn’t ask for it but is still obliged

to come up that street where you are waiting for him…

 

The French equivalent for cheese there is not fromage but ouistiti sexe. It’s worth noticing what a difference that makes to the smiling approach.

 

T S Eliot said that if Martinus Nijhoff had written Awater in English instead of Dutch he would be world-famous. Well, maybe. Nijhoff wrote this quite long (ten-page) narrative poem in 1934. The present edition gives us the original along with three different translations of it, all perfectly readable, the best the most recent, by David Colmer. It’s a poem with high Modernist ambition, loosely comparable to Eliot’s in ‘The Waste Land’ or Joyce’s in Ulysses, to present the ordinary detail of modern daily life with profound mythic resonance. Nijhoff saw the world of the 1930s as morally and spiritually bankrupt; he was convinced, moreover, that this was not just a historical phase, but a permanent condition. In an essay included here he wrote: ‘It is out of the question that things such as religion, beauty, and nature will ever serve again as refuges for any but the introspective individual’. ‘Introspective individual’ is not a term of praise: ‘multitude and abstraction’, his ‘two sole sources of elation’, are what he aspires to combine, but he can’t do it in the current political language of nation, race or fatherland. He seeks some other terms, that ‘to the political terms would be as the forest to a formal garden’.

The poem that came out of this peculiarly ungraspable world-view is more intriguing than the theory. It’s an account of an unnamed man, the protagonist, trailing another man, Awater, an office-worker of no obvious distinction, through the streets of Utrecht, with the intention of determining if Awater would make a good ‘travelling companion’. The protagonist’s brother has recently died, so the wish to find a travelling companion is poignant, though the method chosen is bizarre and may be somewhat deranged. The protagonist follows Awater as he looks into the window of a department store, visits the barber for a hair-cut, and then goes to a restaurant where he does something altogether unexpected: he sings a perfectly translated and very beautiful sonnet by Petrarch, to applause and admiration, as if, at least in this restaurant, he is well-known. He then resumes his wandering through Utrecht, and stops to listen to an open-air sermon being preached by a young woman from the Salvation Army. At this point the protagonist abandons him, and goes on alone to the station, where the Orient Express is getting up steam to depart. The fact that the train is inanimate – ‘she doesn’t care’ – is described with the sort of incredulous outrage with which old-fashioned atheists upbraid the godless universe.

At this point the poem ends, with something of the air of a shaggy dog story. On reflection, however, it has a lot of resonances, none of them clearly adding up to or meaning anything. Eliot, and Brodsky too, rated it highly. I was not quite persuaded, but it does convey well the distinctive feeling of someone in Nijhoff’s position, who has lost a religious vision and finds himself torn between the ‘desolation of reality’ and moving intimations (beauty, religion) that his ‘science’ compels him to rubbish. To rubbish in favour of the machine, perhaps – the glamorous and meaningless ‘Orient Express’.

In Hesiod’s Calendar, Robert Saxton has translated Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days into very straightforward and readable English sonnets. To make this archaic text accessible is a considerable achievement, though the sonnet, with its genius for presenting complex states of mind and shades of feeling, comes across surprisingly when it’s used as a sort of stanza form for narrative and didactic poetry – ‘recruited to a job beneath its station’, as Saxton himself observes. Robert Garioch’s inspired choice of the medieval alliterative metre gives a much more convincing sense of the temperament and texture of Hesiod’s original, but Saxton’s versions have the merit of directness and clarity.

 

Lastly, Adrian Clarke’s Eurochants. These are a conundrum, to which I can’t pretend I have the key. One section consists of twenty excellent translations from the tender, clowning and tragic poet Max Jacob, famous as a friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, a Surrealist and devout Catholic, who died finally, a 68-year-old Jew, at the hands of the Nazis. These are translations, not versions, and convey very successfully Jacob’s unique and gentle vision.

The remainder of the book seems to have been swallowed up into the realm of some timeless avant-garde. The following gives you the feel of it:

 

cunt-lack upgrade

graduate lapse;

lip synch evidence demotic

encrypted

90 miles distant

dead on time

 

Max Jacob once invented a little family of words: hamletiser, to hamletize, and its siblings. Perhaps Clarke is demonstrating l’ hamletomanie.