FOUND IN TRANSLATION
by and published in Edition One of Pomegranate
I was at an interview recently where my interviewer asked me first for a list of my favourite poets (which includes Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca and János Pilinszky), then for a list of the World Literature texts I’d read for the English component of my International Baccalaureate, and then finally asked me if there was any point in studying works of literature in translation. Indeed, he went on, many of the country’s top universities do not see fit to study translations in their English Literature degrees.
My interviewer’s main argument here was that even such recognised classics as War & Peace, Crime & Punishment, Madame Bovary and The Outsider are not covered by the title of ‘English Literature’, being as they are, not originally written in English.
Well, so what? Neither’s Chaucer. Shakespeare needs a little bit of translating too, sometimes. And brilliant linguists have gone to the trouble of translating these fantastic worlds of literature simply to allow us Anglophones to enjoy them – whatever language they were originally written in, be it French, German, or even Swahili, they are now in English. And just as these universities and schools study Samuel Beckett’s translation of his own Waiting For Godot or Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, so too should they study David Johnston’s translation of Blood Wedding, or Stephen Tapscott’s translation of 100 Love Sonnets.
My interviewer did not seem impressed by my assertion that Chaucer was not English. He blinked at me rapidly for a couple of seconds and then said that, surely, by studying these works outside of their original language, we would inevitably be ‘missing something’.
But again – so what? If you go to see a play and sit in a seat with a restricted view, does that mean you haven’t really seen the play? And just because we can’t appreciate every single aspect of a work, does that mean we shouldn’t try at all?
It’s true that we cannot appreciate the rhymes or even just the sounds of words once they are taken out of their original language. For example, the original French of Jacques Prévert’s poem, Barbara, features absolutely delicious internal rhyme:
‘Rapelle-toi Barbara
Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest ce jour-là
Es tu marchais souriante
Épanouie ravie ruisselante
Sous la pluie’
The sounds in this poem are simply amazing, and when you hear this poem read out loud, it doesn’t really matter whether you understand French or not, frankly – it sounds that good. The rhymes of ‘toi’ and ‘Barbara’, ‘cesse’ and ‘Brest’ and ‘souriante’ and ‘ruisselante’ set up a fantastic rhythm and make the poem seem to spill off the tongue – I reckon this poem is at its best when it is read out loud, when the listener can feel the words flowing out in order and get the sense that every word is just meant to follow the one that came before. Admittedly, when these first few lines are translated into English:
‘Do you remember, Barbara
It rained without stopping over Brest that day
And you walked smiling
Lit up, delighted, drenched,
Under the rain’
we lose all those fantastic internal rhymes – but we still retain the poet’s sense of nostalgia in the poem, we keep the poem’s meaning. And, of course, we can still relate to the poem – as Brits, we certainly know what it’s like for it to rain without stopping.
Maybe it’s true that no matter how good a translation we have of, for example, Lorca’s play Blood Wedding (written in verse, so I’m counting it in with the poems), we cannot see how it resembles flamenco dancing – a comment often made of the work in its original Spanish. But we can still see how the poetry flows through the play, we can hear the fire of Lorca’s language, see the natural imagery woven through the verse and we can understand what he’s showing us. We can follow the story, and even in English the story unfolds stunningly in front of us. Even in translation, we can appreciate the richness and beauty of the lines. Blood Wedding deals with the true story of an young woman in Andalusia who elopes with her lover on her wedding day, and the whole essence of the play is summed up for me in the line:
‘I feel myself being dragged along
and I know I’m drowning, but I go anyway’
To me, Lorca’s poetry seems to say in a way that is so simple what is so difficult to define or explain, a quality that also seems to run through the poetry of Chilean Pablo Neruda (also writing in Spanish), for example in Tonight I Can Write (translated below by W.S. Merwin), where the poet tries to come to terms with no longer loving a woman, yet being unable to forget the intensity with which once he used to love her –
‘I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tries to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.’
There are too many things to say about these poets, too many lines to pick out and talk about – even out of their original Spanish, Lorca and Neruda’s poems are just charged with emotion; and the kind of emotions these poets describe are the emotions that just about every single person can relate to.
Works in translation are, in this way, relevant to us. Even works written tens, hundreds, thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away in another country, such as Sappho’s Blame Aphrodite, which characterises so perfectly the feeling of pining after someone so much that you can’t get anything done:
‘It’s no use
Mother dear, I
can’t finish my
weaving
You may
blame Aphrodite
soft as she is
she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy’
are still relevant to us today (who hasn’t felt like that?), and it’s readable to us today thanks to such brilliant translators as Mary Barnard, whose translation I’ve used above, so why, exactly, shouldn’t we read and study these poems? They are relevant to us, we can understand them, we can appreciate them – and more than that, so often, these translated poems are some of the most fantastic, shudderful lines in literature.
My favourite poet has been Vladimir Mayakovsky from the moment I read Past One O’clock some two and a half years ago. Mayakovsky was writing in Russia between 1909 and his death in 1930, and during this time he fell in love with a fair few unattainable women (including his publisher’s wife), made a career out of being tormented, spurned and miserable and was involved with communism and the Bolsheviks – so much so that he was eulogised by Stalin. But let’s not hold this against him – Mayakovsky is responsible for some of the most achingly beautiful lines in poetic history. When he shot himself in 1930 (an end he ‘[did] not recommend to others’ but insisted was ‘the only way out’ for him), his poem Past One O’clock (translated here by Max Hayward and George Reavey) formed part of his suicide note –
‘Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky War streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.’
You do have to wonder – with such unbearably gorgeous poems as these, why would we choose to deny ourselves the pleasure of reading them?
If we restrict ourselves to reading only works originally written in English, we are forbidding ourselves to enjoy Homer, Ovid, Prévert, Pilinszky, Virgil, Horace, Basho, Pessoa, Rilke, Heine, Baudelaire, Eluard, Pushkin, Braun, Kirsten, Dante, Wang Wei, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Goethe, Petrarch, Sappho and Mandelshtam. Why would we deliberately forbid ourselves to study some of the greatest poets in history? Why would we want to be so narrow-minded as that?
Needless to say, my interviewer was not impressed.
Isobel Norris
Isobel Norris is Welsh, and don’t you forget it, cwtch. She’s read at the Dylan Thomas centre and was specially commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition, and even once wrote a poem about a dead sheep, which is about as Welsh as you can get. She likes running, swimming, cycling, Auden and the word ’fantastic’, and dislikes Yeats and things with gluten in them (because they kill her). (Gluten kills her, not Yeats – Ed.) Izzy lives in Swansea, where the highest-quality rain is.