No.35 - October 2024
Author's Note: As executive editor of a magazine, Caribbean Compass, I just got a phone call from one of our writers, who lives on Carriacou, an island that was completely laid to waste, including his home, by Hurricane Beryl. No electricity, no electronics - he was able to make his phone work by a solar battery charge. Brings close to home the consequences of climate change.
Technology of the Sounds of Language
T. S. Eliot recommended the reading of Dante in the original Italian, even if one didn’t happen to know Italian. That’s a demanding order – and even Eliot, reading the Commedia Divina in the original Italian which he did not understand, had a prose translation close at hand. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that Eliot’s example was the touchstone for the current vogue of side by side versions of a foreign-language poet’s work, with the original on the verso and the translation on the recto.
There is something to be said for understanding what you’re reading, even knowing a translation is never going to be an accurate representation of what the poet said in his own language. Pablo Neruda begins his poem “Walking Around” thus:
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sucede que entro en las sastrerías y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza.
Which was translated by his original translator, Ben Belitt, as:
It so happens I'm tired of just being a man.
I go to a movie, drop in at the tailor's--it so happens--
feeling wizened and numbed, like a big, wooly swan,
awash on an ocean of clinkers and causes.
Belitt did a great service by bringing Neruda’s poetry to the English speaking world, but many have found his translations unfulfilling, replacing the simplicity of Neruda’s diction with flowery excess. So there have been many subsequent translators, including Robert Bly, who rendered the first stanza of “Walking Around” as:
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
I used to teach “Walking Around” a lot, especially to intro to poetry classes, to students who were predisposed to assume they couldn’t understand poetry and would have nothing to say about it.
I gave them the two translations, and asked them, at what point do the translations start to get significantly different? And the response was always pretty quick: the first line. And they were right, of course. By the end of the first line, you have two different poems. “I’m tired of just being a man” is aspirational, hopeful – maybe I can be more. “I am sick of being a man” has a finality to it.
And then they started seeing the two different poems develop. The hopeful guy casually – almost jauntily -- goes to a movie, drops in at the tailor’s. The hopeless guy aimlessly walks into tailor shops and movie houses – does he even watch the movie?
And it goes on — El olor de las peluquerías me hace llorar a gritos. The hopeful guy says “A whiff from a barbershop does it; I yell bloody murder.” The hopeless guy doesn’t have it in him to yell – “The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.”
“Sólo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana” — the hopeful guy knows he’ll be OK – “All I ask is a little vacation from things: from boulders and woolens…” The hopeless guy knows better: “The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.”
And we would go on like that, through the poem. And by the time we finished, this class of unwilling conscripts to a required literature course had done a pretty sophisticated piece of literary analysis.
Which version did they like better? That, of course, would have been the wrong question. As we had decided, after the first line, they were two different poems. Which poem did they like better? There were adherents to both, but the consensus was generally the hopeful one, because it was hopeful. Does literature have to be positive, optimistic? I asked one class (this was the 1990s), “How many of you are Guns ‘n Roses fans?” Several hands went up. “What is the overall message of Guns ‘n Roses?” One student had a succinct and insightful answer: “Life is fucked, so let’s get fucked up.” I rested my case. I like the Bly version a lot better, personally.
Because it’s truer to Neruda?
Maybe I’d like to think that, to justify my personal taste, but the truth is, neither of them are like Neruda. They can’t be. They’re in the wrong language. Robert Pinsky, who translated Dante, and whose translation has been widely hailed by poets, scholars, and readers alike, had this to say about whether poetry is essentially untranslatable:
Yes. Poetry is basically a technology of the sounds of language, and one set of sounds is not another.
Bly uses a simple, unadorned language that’s closer to Neruda. Maybe. Big deal. Pinsky is right.
Belitt is, to my knowledge, the only person who’s translated Neruda’s marvelous elegy, “Alberto Rojas Jimenez Comes Flying,” and he has written a wonderful, high-flying tribute to Neruda’s friend Rojas Jimenez, to Neruda himself, to the elegiac form, and to the English language. Too flowery for Neruda? I’m not qualified to judge. Too flowery for the English-language poem that it is? Not for me. I don’t think I’d particularly want to see another translation.
All of this came to mind when I chanced across this pantoum by Charles Baudelaire:
Harmonie du soir
Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige...
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
My French is rudimentary, and I understood but little of this poem. But my response to it was powerful and visceral, and perhaps for the first time I understood what Eliot was saying. There was an English translation accompanying the poem on the website where I found it, which kept the repetition pattern of the pantoum but not the rhyme, and which left me cold. I couldn’t tell you what it said – the English words didn’t stay with me, and I haven’t gone back to them. But I cannot escape, nor would I ever want to, the vibrant sensuality of Baudelaire’s language. les temps où vibrant sur sa tige (I did look up “tige” – it means stem. Now – those you who, like me, are French-deficient – aren’t you sorry you know that? – the glum clumpdown of the bilabial “m" at the end, the dullness of the vowel sound. I am doing my best to forget it.)
My friend and mentor Noelle Gillmor, for whom I worked writing the English dialog for English language versions of two French films, Z and State of Siege, and who was completely bilingual, once picked up a volume of Baudelaire at a Paris flea market, with the cover half torn off. She started reading the poems. They were very good, she said. They were very French in style and feeling, very Baudelairian, but she thought she had read most of Baudelaire, and she was surprised that she had never read any of these poems before. And yet there was something strangely familiar about them, that she couldn’t quite place.
Finally she got it. They were Baudelaire’s translations of Poe.
Vive la compagnie!
©2024 Tad Richards
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