After Gelman

Cadence

Anyone can get warm
wearing the hide of a wild boar

but to satisfy a real hunger
nothing like a mother's soup.

At the table nobody imposed conditions--
bread, sometimes beer, bright-red

tomatoes, oil, the salt
that makes forgetting easy to eat.

What a spoon for the rice!
How it sang against the bowl!

What am I supposed to do with this
appetite for what was and what wasn't?

At five in the morning
streets of poverty

and language slipping by,
the sun giving grammars of peace

to the plants in the courtyard,
glimmers that left too soon.

This is more of an interpretation than a faithful rendering, so i won't quote the original. I felt it had to sing in English, that I had to establish different line-breaks, stanza structure, and syntactical relations, and posit a plausible speaking voice that would be saying all this. It would be better if it were even more free, because then I would worry even less. Right now it's in that awkward place between translation and complete re-interpretation.

I'm interested in the concept of "ida y vuelta" or "round trip." For example, Lorca writes gypsy ballads, and gypsies in turn convert these into popular songs. Or Julio Cortázar writes a story in Spanish about Charlie Parker ("The Pursuer"), and Paul Blackburn translates it "back" into the American vernacular. Ida y vuelta is a translation or any other type of cultural interchange in two directions, not a single one. Can you think of any other examples?

Here's an example I like to use. Vallejo, like Quevedo, uses a lot of word play. The phrase "proso estos versos" plays on the antithesis "prose / verse." Literally, "I prose these verses." When a translator writes something like this, "I set down these lines," or "I write these verses," the trope of antithesis is erased. I really don't see a defense for this kind of translation. "First, do no harm" should be the beginning of the Hippocratic oath for translators.

Two other instances of dilution in the Bly translation: "aguacero," which is a sudden downpour, becomes "a rainy day." "Soga" should be noose instead of merely rope. It is true that if you look up "soga" you will get rope as a possible translation, but culturally and idiomatically, proverbially, the soga is a noose.

Constraint in Translation

An original text might be subjected to certain constraints. Rhyme schemes, metrical rules, Oulipean constraints, etc... The English translation of Perec's La disparition leaves out the letter e, respecting that constraint. Usually, however, translators simply ignore the degree of constraint in a text. The complicated rules of classical Chinese verse, or the alternation of feminine and masculine rhymes in French. The classic case is using approximate or half rhyme as an equivalent to a rather intensely constrained variety of rhyme.

What about a theory of poetic translation that was tropological, that aimed for the preservation of every antithesis, metonymy, litotes, catachresis, etc... in the poem? If we take the rhetorical, tropological structure of the poem seriously, what would that mean for translation? (Assuming prosody is pretty much a lost cause in translation.)

In my MLA talk I'm making the argument that Venuti's notion that "translation today bears little sign of these [modernist] developments" (The Translator's Invisibility [2nd ed.] 164) has to be questioned. Yes, there is a whole swath of mainstream translation that receives little influence from more radical Poundian principles. What Venuti unwittingly minimizes, however, is the entire phenomenon of the postmodernist poet-translator from Spicer to Rosmarie Waldrop. It is true that he mentions some of these significant names in passing, but he prefers to see translation as marginal and victimized rather than as central to modern poetics as a whole. Take away translation, and we have a mutilated modern/postmodern poetics. Maybe this modernist poetic practice of translation is marginal within the total universe of translations, but it is central to American poetry itself. Poet-translators employ a huge range of techniques, from Richard Wilbur on one end of the spectrum to Rothenberg on the other.

If we take "translation" as our area of concern, then modernist translation (as defined by Venuti) is a small part of the whole. Yet if we take "modernist / postmodernist poetics" as our area, then translation becomes absolutely central. You have to be able to see the duck as well as the rabbit.

Venuti's emphasis on the binary opposition between fluency and its discontents also has the practical effect of putting all "fluent" translations in the same category. Yet surely all "fluent" translation are not created equal, and there is a huge continuum of practices between the fluent and the obtrusive. Venuti's deep distrust of theories that make the translator invisible has the paradoxical effect of making certain kinds of translation less visible. Maybe interesting things are happening in Marianne Moore's LaFontaine, for example. Someone should look at that. Isn't that another variety of "modernist" translation?

A new post on Arcade where I talk a bit about my response to Venuti's review.

As readers of translation we (and I include myself here) are too often like parents who alternately over-indulge and abuse our children. We are usually far too complacent, yet at times given to irrational rages. We forgive many big transgressions while harshly punishing trivial infractions of arbitrary rules. We are over-attentive, over-bearing, yet distracted by comparisons to the original. Either we forget we are reading a translation, or we can't stop thinking we are reading only a translation. We rely too much or too little on our own aesthetic compass; we are over- or underinvested in translation theory. The search for a happy medium leads only to incoherence. There is no possible "balance."

Here is a rubric for evaluating a translation, that I used before in my translation course for undergrads.

(a) Evaluate the "target language."
(b) The" domestic residue."
(c) Compare the translation to the original.
(d) To what degree is "translation" itself visible.
(e) Compare to other translations of the same text.
(f) What is the overall strategy?

¿Cómo leer una traducción?

a) Evaluar la "lengua de llegada" de la traducción. ¿Qué tipo de inglés (o español) es? [Puede ser, por ejemplo, americano o británico, mexicano o argentino-- o "neutro," sin señas de identidad.] ¿En qué registro está? [formal, informal, coloquial, académico, literario...] ¿De qué época es? ¿Hay un lenguaje homogéneo o una mezla de discursos? ¿Se preservan palabras o topónimos en el idioma de origen? (Por ejemplo, ¿se dice "Sevilla" or "Seville"?) ("take a siesta" or "take a nap.")

b) ¿Cuál es el "residuo doméstico" de la traducción? ¿Hasta qué punto es visible (o invisible)? ¿Hay un intento de llegar a un público determinado? ¿Cómo se pone de manifiesto este intento? Ubicar la traducción en el ambiente cultural donde se ha producido. ¿Hay otras traducciones de la misma autora en la misma época? ¿Es frecuente traducir de este idioma de origen en la época en cuestión? ¿Qué información al respecto nos es disponible, aun sin haber visto el texto en su cultura y lengua de origen?

c) Comparar la traducción con la versión original. ¿Qué elementos problemáticos existen en el texto? ¿Qué solución ha encontrado la traductora (el traductor)? ¿Hay errores de comprensión? ¿Hay momentos de extrañeza en la versión traducida que suenen perfectamente normales en el original, o vice-versa? ¿Se puede decir que el efecto es "igual" para un lector original y un lector que lo lee solo en la lengua de llegada?

d) ¿Encontramos un esfuerzo por normalizar el texto, ajustarlo a normas domésticas? ¿Vemos señas obvias de la traducción, o perdemos de vista fácilmente el carácter traducido del texto? ¿Cuál es la estrategia global de la traductora? ¿Es más bien domesticadora o extranjerizante? ¿Hay factores ideológicos? ¿Hay distorsiones obvias?

e) Comparar la traducción de otras versiones, si existen. ¿Estas traducciones desempeñan funciones semejantes, o hay diferencias de estrategia, de público? ¿Cómo se justifica, en este caso particular, una traducción más de una obra ya traducida muchas veces?

f) Llegar a una conclusión global sobre la traducción en su contexto histórico. Se puede ver que la evaluación de la fidelidad de la traducción forma solo una parte pequeña de la lectura y evaluación. Interesa saber más la fuente de la distorsión que decir simplemente que la traducción no es correcta.

There is an interesting slippage in Jakobson's theory. If we remember his terminology we have context (referential function), addressor (emotive), addressee (conative), contact (phatic; gotta love that word), code (metalingual), and message (poetic).

In other words, he identifies the message not with referential content but with the phonetic and prosodic characteristics of that particle piece of language used to communicate. So my post below is wrong: in a translation the message will be totally transformed. What will remain constant is the contextual or referential function of language.

So here are two problems: context does not (necessarily) equal "referential." There is the context of communication, say 19th century French realism with Balzac and his French readers of the time. And there is the referential aspect of this same communication: the imagined world of the comédie humaine.

Secondly, there are two meanings of message: the message as a particular piece of language, with its phonetics, its prosody, its morphology, etc... and the message as understood as semantic content extractable for the purposes of translation. RJ clearly means the first with "message" because he defines it as poetic and not, say, as the "ideological function" of language. I don't mean to over think this, but there is a sort of murkiness in definition. A need for a few new terms, maybe.

Somewhat less vividly, I remember a paper I wrote also in my first semester in grad school, for a theory course taught by a pleasant but spacey Heideggerian named Halliburton. My paper had the dull title "Some Aspects of Translation." My argument was that the idea that translation was a paradigm for understanding was faulty, because translation presupposes understanding. At some point, you had to assume a level of direct understanding prior to the conversion of a message into some other, secondary language, or you would be stuck in a mise en abyme.

Halliburton liked my paper. Maria Damon was in that course, which was a disaster as far as the actual course itself. The professor didn't really do anything except sit there, so the inmates were running the asylum.

(Note: I just found my folder of these papers so I won't have to rely completely on memory. I'll probably find my 21-year old self both smarter and dumber than I expected.)

(65)

*Menchu Gutiérrez. La mano muerta cuenta el dinero de la vida. 1997. 84 pp.

I was hungry.
A coin fell to the ground
and I didn't stoop to pick it up.
In the street the music of hell was heard
and I followed it
as you might keep drinking out of empty glasses.

(46)

*Vicente Gerbasi. Edades perdidas. 1981. 61 pp.

Un instante
con ojos de rana
en hojas de agua.
Reflejo
que hunde
mi rostro
en los astros.
De la noche
quedan
gotas de rocío
en violetas
acostumbradas a mi memoria.

An instant
with eyes of frog
in leaves of water.
A reflection
that sinks
my face
in the stars.
From night
there remain
drops of dew
on violets
accustomed to my memory.

Venezuelan poet Gerbasi is very, very good, probably superior to his younger compatriot Montejo. "Lost Ages" is a series of fewer then 30 short poems about primordial reality, of the cosmos itself and human civilization.

This poem should be understandable to anyone with a year of high school Spanish.

I had planned to mark the best books with an asterisk, but I am reading mostly very good books.

(25)

María Victoria Atencia. El hueco. 2003. 141 pp.

The page numbering here is a little deceptive: this publisher (Tusquets) will not start a new poem on a verso (even-numbered page). Since all of these poems are very short, every even numbered page is blank. So it's really more like the standard 70 page book.

María Victoria is not that similar to Bronk, but if you translate this poem just so you get a Bronk poem:

THE DAY

It comes without warning. Maybe a tenuous
green thread in the distance. With no urgency
or pause in a process that naturally
returns us to the daily grind
and its fictions of glories and condemnations.

While at Aaron Belz's reading this evening, it occured to me that this was a great poem. It had nothing to do with Aaron, it was just a random triggering. The greatness of the poem struck me not when I was reading it, but at a totally irrelevant moment several weeks after I had read it. I had to rush home to translate it for you.

LUIS FERIA

TO BE GOD [TRANSLATION J.M.]

Why should we be just children? We wanted to be everything: man, flower, fire, God...

It was easy to be a man: we spoke while wagging a stiff finger, slicked our hair down, without a single strand escaping, sat with our legs crossed.

Flower was a little harder. We poured cologne over ourselves, then the perfume our mother used in her cleavage and behind her ear, then aftershave lotion. With disastrous results. What a stink! Straight to the bath.

Fire: almost impossible. We sat out in the sun for the longest time, suffering through dizziness, headache, itches, nausea. But just when we were about to catch fire they brought us in, rubbed us down with vinegar and water, cream for our bruises, took our temperatures. If we'd continued, I'm sure we would have thrown off flames.

And the easiest of all: God. Not a beard or crown or mantle or sky: nothing like that. Just grow with the trees, be water with the sea, move in the dog's tail. In other words, be all things, but be children also and at the same time. Children, and more.

Four attempts at sympathetic magic or magical thinking.

Mimesis: imitate the adult manner completely, you are an adult. Cross your legs.

Metonymy: select one aspect of the flower, its smell. If you smell like a flower, you are one.

Another attempt at mimesis/metonymy/absorption. To become fire, set yourself on fire by getting sunstroke. Brilliant.

Of course, we expect being God to be the hardest, but it ends up being the easiest. The literalism of magical thinking gives way to something completely different. Not the white beard and the man in the sky, but the tail of the dog.

How can you avoid self-delusion in translation? It seems like translators fool themselves a lot, that they are not necessarily good readers of their own translations. Their justifications tend to be self-serving. My method is to give myself a grade for each translation, and then work over each poem that is at a "C" level or lower until it is at least a "B," then go on to make sure each is at least an "A-." Even then, I might be fooling myself.

There should be no justifications. If you have to give an explanation, it means something is amiss.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to look at the floor, the other, the ceiling.

On the floor level, you want to make sure there are no flaws caused by misunderstanding the original text. No line that sounds awful in English. If one of the poet's main tools is repetition, don't eliminate the repetitions. First, do no harm; that's the Hippocratic oath of translation.

By getting everything on the floor level, you are basically saying: nothing falls below this point. The translation might still be a C or C+, but all you're really doing is protecting yourself against the translation police, ensuring that nobody will find a howler.

To look at the ceiling provides a different perspective. Is the poem convincing, not as a translation of a putatively great original, but simply on its own terms. At this point it is not enough for a line to be not awful, or a reasonably good way of translating the original. If the floor is more or less fixed, the ceiling is infinite. There is no ceiling, only a sky.

A lot of the ways we think about translation don't make too much sense to me. Do we need a balance between floor and ceiling? No. Once the floor is achieved, we don't have to worry about it any more. Once a translation agrees 95% with what any competent translation would be, the semantic material of the original really doesn't need much more attention.

To translate poetry you must be a poet, because you are actually writing poetry. The activity of verse-translation is not a fundamentally different activity from that of writing poetry. That is one lesson I might draw from Eliot Weinberger's demolition of Robert Alter's Psalms.

Weinberger softens this precept a little by saying that the translator has to be at least a reader of poetry. That doesn't make too much sense to me, because translation involves the production of a text, not just an act of reception. There may be poet-translators with no work of their own, but they are still poets in the act of translating.

"On the evidence here, Alter seems to know very little about the last hundred years of English-language poetry."

Harsh, but Weinberger backs up this point with examples.

Preciosa throws away her tambourine
and runs off without stopping.
The stud-wind pursues her
with a hot sword.
The sea scowls up its roar
The olive trees grow pale.
Flutes of forest shade sing,
and the smooth gong of the snow.

That's Langston Hughes. His translation of the Gypsy Ballads is the best one out of all. Not only that, but I'm prepared to argue that this is some of the best poetry Hughes himself wrote. (Just as Cathay and the Seafarer belong to Pound's best work.)

It took me a while to be a connossieur of Lorca translations. It takes a special kind of bracketing off, of forgetfulness. I have to forget that I would use the word "chase" instead of "pursue" in this case, that "y el liso gong de la nieve" HAS to be "and the smooth gong of the snow." That's a gift from Lorca so why credit the translator? The translation dissolves in the analysis. You have to sit back and enjoy it as the particular performance that it is, not judge it against the one true performance that it will never be. You have to know you are reading a poem by Langston Hughes, not a poem by Lorca.

Hughes has a defined voice as a translator. What I like, though, is that it isn't intrusive. It's vernacular in tone, but there is no attempt to reproduce any particular American vernacular.

What does "literal translation" really mean? Is it a translation of literal meaning, or a kind mirroring of syntactical structure? Take reflexive constructions in Spanish. They are used in various ways:

The "true reflexive," in which the subject of the verb also is the direct object or indirect object.

Simply to make a verb intranstiive. Pierdo las llaves (I lose the keys transitive) vs. Me pierdo (I get lost). Depierto a los niños (I wake the children vs. "Me despierto" = I wake up.

To express the fact that one is eating or consuming all of something. Me comí todas las galletas = ( I ate all the cookies up.)

For an impersonal construction. "Se dice que..." (It is said that.)

As part of the lexical meaning of a verb, but without any reflexive connotation. "Me voy" (I'm leaving)

Reciprocal: Se quieren mucho (they love each other a lot)

etc...

Now in English, the reflexive structure is used mostly if not exclusively for the "true reflexive." So most of the time a "literal" translation of one of these other kinds of reflexive verbs will not involve a reflexive in English. "I go myself" is not a "literal" translation of "Me voy." Nor is "Spanish speaks itself" a "literal" translation of "se habla español." The phrase doesn't mean that in Spanish. So "word-for-word" translation or "syntax mirroring" is not "literal."

A "literal" translation of "voy entendiendo que.. " is not "I go understanding" but "I'm coming to the realization that..." In other words, that is what that phrase actually means. An overliteralistic, word by word, parsing of the syntax doesn't result in accurate translation at all and doesn't even deserve to be called "literal." Put in another way, so-called literal translation may require paraphrase.

Here's a literal version of a Lorca poem I just did.

Blackberry bush with gray trunk,
give me a cluster just for me.

Blood and thorns. Come closer.
If you love me, I will love you.

Leave your fruit of green and shadow
on my tongue, blackberry bush.

What a long embrace I would give you
in the penumbra of my thorns.

Blackberry bush, where are you going?
To look for loves that you are not giving me.

Now for the critique: C. rhythmically there's nothing going on here. This is essentially a folk song: it needs to be set to music, and it is not presently cantabile. The original rhymes, with one distinct rhyme per couplet. My version just kind of comes to a clunky stop at the end of each line.

There are a few phrases or lines that might be salvageable in a final version" "Blood and thorns," "in the penumbra of my thorns." The version is literal where it doesn't need to be. I don't like the verbs "leave" or "look for." Would the bush really say "What a long embrace I would give you?" So here's version 2:

Blackberry with your gray stalk,
give me some berries of my own.

Blood & thorns. Come near.
If you love me then I will love you.

Put your fruit of green & shade
onto my tongue, blackberry.

How long our embrace
in the penumbra of my thorns!

Where are you going, blackberry?
To find the love you won't give me.

The tone and the rhythm are still off. The third couplet is still weak. It needs to be recast somehow. Lorca uses two parts of speech, "verde y sombra," adjective and noun. Shade is probably better than shadow. The implication is of a plant that grows better in the shade.

It's a courtship song. The blackberry bush is a woman (zarzamora), maybe, then, a "mora"? (Moorish woman). It's a childlike but very erotic dialogue. The man approaching says, "give me some of those blackberries." She seems willing, but the juice of the berries is transposed into blood. Her embrace is dangerous, maybe even fatal--though this is in the "penumbra" of the poem's meaning. At the end, the approaching lover is too afraid, and the Mora is going to choose someone else.

So how much of that does my translation convey? I feel I'm still at the C+/ B- level, yet I don't quite know how to fix it either. I can't make it more sexualized because that has to be implicit. You can't say "But you / are rich / in savagery— / / Arab Indian / dark woman" as Williams once did. (How embarrasing!) Spanish folk songs about Moorish women are not that crude. Think of "Tres moras me enamoran en Jaén..."

UPDATE:

I looked at an early edition of Canciones today in the library and the exclamation point was there in the next to last stanza, as i had intuited in my translation. (It is left out in the version I was working from originally.) Of course it was syntactically an exclamation all along, so I can' claim that much insight: ¡Qué largo abrazo te daría / en la penumbra de mis espinas!"

There are popular songs with the figure of the zarzamora (blackberry), such as

"A la zarzamora
que en el campo se regaba sola
sola se regaba
con agua de la mar salada"

[The blackberry who in the wild watered herself alone, alone watered herself with water from the salty sea.)

In other words, she thinks she is self-sufficient, watering herself, but she is ultimately watering herself with tears.