Translating myself

We walked together through the Olympic Park in east London, about a month ago, on a bright October morning, talking, as we often do, about the books we had recently read.   In my case, Another Country, a James Baldwin novel from the early 1960s which I had greatly enjoyed.  In his case the plays of Bertolt Brecht.  He was also reading some secondary literature on the German author and he mentioned that some critics consider Brecht’s best work to be his poetry.  Like many people who read only in English, I think of him primarily as a dramatist, one of the best from the previous century.  However, our conversation prompted me to recall a review of the new English translation of his Collected Poems, which came out a couple of years ago, which stressed the centrality of poetry to his oeuvre.  At well over one thousand pages, it is an intimidatingly large body of work, which I have yet to engage with, although I know that I have a shorter selection of his poems on one of my many bookshelves, awaiting my attention. 

My friend observed that poetry is the most difficult literary form to translate, even from languages that share many words and grammatical structures in common.  There is something about the rhythms of speech, and the cultural context of specific words and phrases, that make it difficult for a reader in one language to replicate the exact experience of a reader in a different language; likewise listeners, when the poetry is spoken.  Sometimes – rarely perhaps –translations might be better than the original, just because there is a way of saying something in one language that is unavailable, or less elegant, in another.  In general, however, the sense that something has been lost in translation pervades the reading of poetry.  It is not hard to imagine that one’s favourite novelist might be someone whose work one has only ever read in translation; it is hard to imagine the same for one’s favourite poet. 

The language problem is not the only challenge that the reader faces.  Differences in how the author saw the world and made sense of life – differences in worldview – are less easy to communicate in the translation of poetry than in prose formats, whether fictional or not.  Herodotus’s Histories might not meet current scholarly standards of historiography, but his text is mostly clear and comprehensible, if not wholly believable.  The same cannot be said of Heraclitus’s fragments, which are aphoristic in form, nor Hesiod’s long-form poetry.  There are sections which either make no sense to us at all; or they make no sense in the form in which they were first written, requiring lengthy explanation from the translator.  Nothing spoils the impact of a short, punchy epigram, or a clever rhyming couplet, that a ten-line footnote that must be studied carefully before the meaning of the original text is grasped. 

One of the reasons why poetry is rewarding to read is that from time to time, the oddities of language and grammar, and the historical resonance of particular words or names, match perfectly with the oddities of the world and with the shared understanding of that world, which users of a shared language hold in common.  To offer one example, here are the opening two stanza of the poem “The Drinker” (1964) by Robert Lowell:

                             The man is killing time – there is nothing else.
                             No help now from the fifth of Bourbon
                             chucked helter-skelter into the river,
                             even its cork sucked under.
 
                             Stubbed before-breakfast cigarettes
                             Burn bull’s eyes on the bedside table;
                             a plastic tumbler of alka seltzer 
                             champagnes in the bathroom.

There have been many poems written about the pleasures of drinking, some too about the risks, and, no doubt, a few that discuss the phenomenology of the hangover.  Other poets, writing in other languages – although, I suspect, no-one who wrote in French – might also have employed “champagne” as a verb rather than a noun.  But the effect achieved through the combination of “helter-skelter” and “alka seltzer” will only make sense for readers of a particular language in a particular moment: the rhyme and the resonance are tied to a specific time and place, which English language readers of a certain age will enjoy in a way that readers in other languages, or at other times, will be less able to. 

It is worth noting that our own culture – our lifeworld – can also be perplexing and hard to fathom even when the language through which it is represented seems familiar.  We can be strangers in our own land, puzzled by words we recognise but which no longer make sense.  It is enjoyable to poke fun at the earnest, credulous individual, trying their best to navigate the mysterious waters of the present zeitgeist but finding themselves continually lost at sea.  Here, for example, is a stanza from Bob Dylan’s “Ballard of a Thin Man” (1965):  

                             Ah, you’ve been with the professors and they’ve all liked your looks
                             With great lawyers you have discussed beggars and crooks
                             You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
                             You’re very well-read, it’s well-known
                             But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is
                             Do you, Mr Jones?

In the introduction to his own translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens, Walter Benjamin says that, “The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same.  It is owing to these modes that the word Brot means something different to a German than the word pain to a Frenchman, that these words are not interchangeable for them, that, in fact, they strive to exclude each other” (‘The Task of the Translator’, 1923).   He goes on to say that “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages.”  It is because poetry captures the foreignness of life, resisting a simple migration from one language to another, that it translates problematically. 

I have been trying to buy a copy of an English translation of some Chinese poetry, but the book appears only to be available in the US, at least for the moment.  The translator has chosen a selection of nineteen poems by Tu Fu, a Chinese classical poet (712 -770 CE) who wrote in the Taoist tradition. The book includes images of his work, in traditional Chinese script, together with English versions of the poems, followed by short essays that explain the philosophical principles behind the verses.  The difficulty of translation in this case is significant: the ideas are distant by more than a millennium, the Tao worldview they describe is unfamiliar to most Westerners, and the script is ideographic, carrying meanings and allusions in more complex ways that English words do.  Why would I bother trying to read something that is inherently difficult and alien?  Why not stick to Robert Lowell and Bob Dylan and enjoy the great pleasures of the familiar?

In Benjamin’s essay, cited above, he quotes at length from Rudolf Pannwitz’s book, Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur (1917): “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise.  They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English.  Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works … The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.  Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, tone, and image converge.  He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language.” 

I have no first-hand experience of the practice of literary translation, being, to my shame, monoglot.  The last sentence in the quotation from Pannwitz struck me, nonetheless, as true not just writing but for the much wider realm of human interaction.  When engaging with another person, whether face to face or by reading text from those far away in time or place, instead of transforming the other person into someone who fits closely with me, instead I should transform myself better to fit with the other person.  Rather than preserving myself and forcing the other to be translated into my terms, I should translate myself, to allow myself to be powerfully affected by the other.   The richness and value of our engagement comes not just from what the other brings, but the changes I make to myself such that I am able to accommodate all that is offered.    

According to Terence, the African playwright and former slave, homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, I am human and consider that nothing human is alien to me.  I share this belief, that all human experience is, potentially, accessible to us; however, we are only able to overcome the sense of alienness, not by forcing the experiences of others into forms that we are familiar with, but by forcing ourselves to think and feel differently from our normal routines.  Reading Chinese poetry from the eighth century is therefore worth the effort, because of the work I will have to do to my understanding, my receptivity, my sense of the way that language functions in the conveyance of meaning, in short to translate myself into a position of openness to Tu Fu’s words, as presented in English format.  His voice is calling from far away, I will take myself to meet him, so I can listen to what he had to say. The greater the distance the greater the challenge, the more change is required of me, to make myself receptive. 

Poetry is but one form of human communication, albeit a special one.  Our need to switch from our default mode of ‘transmit’ to the more demanding mode of ‘receive’ is not limited to reading verse; it is an ever present need, in our meetings and interactions with those close to us, in time, space and culture; and, more especially, in our meetings and interactions with those who are further away.  There are times when we will opt for the comfortable, easy pleasures of the familiar – I will continue to read Lowell and listen to Dylan, and I will continue to enjoy them both – but there are also times when we need to stretch ourselves, to travel the hard, unfamiliar yards that lead away from our places of security, to those people and voices that are harder to listen to, and whose messages are more challenging to hear.   In my previous text on this site, I wrote about the need to reduce our social distancing from others.  Translating myself into another’s lifeworld is a necessary part of that process. 

I end where I started, with the poetry of Brecht.  Written at the end of his life, disillusioned by the absence of more radical social change, but trusting in the power of his poetry to alert us – repeatedly, urgently – to the need for such change, here is “Und ich dachte immer” (1955): 

                             And I always thought the very simplest words
                             Would be enough.  If I say what is
                             Every heart will surely be lacerated.
                             That you will go under if you don’t fight back
                             Surely you must see that?

The critics are right: his poems are good, even when read in English.