TREASON IN TRANSLATING POETRY AND ITS ILL-EFFECTS (6)
(01-10-2011)
I will present a simple instance of the inadequacy of translating a poem.
I have always liked the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, the famous and tragic Spanish poet of the 20th century. His poems are written in basic Spanish imagery that appears accessible to English speakers. The sense of his poems is easily gotten at. But the poetry of them is extremely difficult, and in fact is impossible to access in English.
I have admired Lorca’s great poem Romance Sonambulo for many years. The 24th line of this poem is”: …soñando en la mar amarga.” It translates literally into English as “…dreaming on the bitter sea.” There is no question as to its meaning. But if you look closely at the line in Spanish, you will see that the word for “sea,” (mar) is contained within the word for “bitter,” (amarga). The word “sea” in English cannot be contained within the word “bitter” in English. The Creator Himself cannot make the word “sea” appear within the word “bitter.” This is exactly the poetry of the line. That is, the word in Spanish for “sea” (“mar”) appearing within the word for “bitter” (“amarga”).
Further, if you again examine the line of Lorca’s poem in Spanish, you will see that six of the nine vowels of it are “a” and two are “o.” In the time long past when prosody was meaningful in poetry, the vowels “a” and “o” had the ambience of warmth, openness and expansiveness, while the vowels “i” and “e” shared the ambience of severity and restrictiveness, as indeed in English the two words I just used demonstrate. The reason is that Lorca’s perception and reference was of the Mediterranean and southern parts of the Atlantic, to less of an extent, while the English words “sea” and “bitter” have the locale of the grey, cold North Atlantic. It is something else that is impossible to translate for the simple reason that you cannot spell “sea” and “bitter” with the more than one “a” that they contain. (Nor, for that matter, is the word “sea” pronounced with an “a” sound but with the “e” sound, as in its homophone “see.”)
Therefore, the translation of the line of Lorca as “… dreaming on the bitter sea…” is inadequate and corrupt. It has the sense but not the poetry.
What, then, is the significance of my explication?
First, you might complain that by my criteria it is impossible to access poems in a foreign language. That is correct. You have to become fluent in another language in order to understand its poems.
Lacking that, what have we had? We have had translations of poems that are imperfect and imprecise and that have had ill-effects on poetry in English. Over the past two generations, the translation industry has been in full sway. The literary and intellectual magazines have been filled with translations of foreigners, especially of Eastern Europeans. I mention Akhmatova, Voznesensky, Milosz, and Szymborska. This is to say nothing of the translations of other foreigners, older and younger, from Tagore to Neruda to Fu, Issa, Cavafy, Borges, Eluard, Pushkin, Qing, Rumi and even to the ancient Sappho.
I intentionally did not list the French poets of the last century, Symbolist or not. If anyone thinks he understands Baudelaire, Verlaine, Laforgue, Rimbaud and especially Mallarmé after a few years of college French, he is a buffoon. Even the French are unsure if they understand Mallarmé. A poem is utterly local to its language.
Some poems of foreigners have been translated by English speakers with the assistance of their authors. However, as mentioned above in my initial example, not even Lorca could make the word “sea” be contained with the word “bitter.” So such translations are ineffective, and possibly as much a marketing tool of the publishers with scholars in the academy as an attempt to translate adequately.
I must make a disclaimer, at this point in my essay. I do not know the ultimate value of the poets I mentioned above because I am not fluent in any of the languages in which they wrote. (I know Spanish better than the others, but I am not fluent in it. I know scraps of French.) I am inclined to accept the value of their verse from the writings of some critics, --- though I do not know it for certain. There are reasons other than aesthetics for praising someone’s poems, and ideology is one of them.
What, then, has been the effect of reading all the inaccurate and inadequate-by-definition poems of the poets listed above? Since the sense of these poems are universally humane sentiments, and not in meter because of course the original meter of translated poems is rarely even attempted,--- That is what people have come to accept poetry consists of: humane and sentimental emotional gush. Prosody has been rejected with nothing put into its place except formless blobs of sentiment, --- at most the beginnings of a poem. This is an exact description of modern poetry as bruited by the literary-cum-academic café society. Further, its successful practitioners have been selected because of their status in the academy and not by independent expertise, whatever that might be,
What I have written will not stop the translation industry, ---nor should it, actually. It is important to know what some foreigners have said in their works, and how he or she might have said it, even though the replication of the style is impossible.
Therefore, the degeneracy of English poetry has been explicated.
Caveats
Ezra Pound
While writing my essay, I had been reading the book by Jeannette Lander, Ezra Pound. Ms Lander states that Pound was castigated by scholars for the inaccuracy of what he presented as translations, especially regarding Propertius in his Homage to Sextus Propertius. However, Ezra Pound did not translate. His works in the relevant genre were original poems in English based on their various foreign sources. Nor would Pound explain what he did, as he thought it was utterly obvious what he would do as a poet. He fooled the scholars at their own game. The scholars failed, and still fail, to distinguish between what is proper to a poet and what to scholarship. Their translations are worse in any measure since they lack passion and imagination and are presented as the researched truth, which is a melancholy proposition at best.
San Juan De La Cruz
While I would not retreat from my statement that it is impossible to translate the poetry of a poem other than its sense, some poems come close. I invite you to read a plain prose translation of “Coplas Del Alma Que Pena Por Ver A Dios,” by the Spanish poet San Juan De La Cruz. The first stanza is,
Vivo sin vivir en mí,
y de tal manera espero
que muero porque no muero.”
It has been translated as,
“I live and do not live in myself, and so strong are my hopes that I am dying of not dying.”
This translation, especially of the refrain of …que muero porque no muero, as “…I am dying of not dying,” in repetition, is one of the best translations of the rhetorical movement of the poem as it is possible to get. And I am not a believer in the Christian religion, or any other religion.
Seamus Heaney
I would propose that at least some of the early poems of Seamus Heaney be considered for translation. The accessibility of them into the English vocabulary and milieu of American speakers of English is doubtful. Few Americans share that milieu of rustic Irish experience, even in the 1960s and 1970s when they were written ,---and in such words as “flax-dam,” “frogspawn,” “two-lugged sacks,” “muddler,” dandered,” “clabber,” “stooks” “bleyberries,” “currachs,” “scollops,” “torcs,” “boortrees,” “whinged,” “bullaum,” “measling,” “bleb,” “pampooties,” “crannog,” “graiping,” “lambeg’ to mention many of them. Of course these words are found in the O.E.D., but I have never read them in American books.
But this is literary heresy. Heaney is worth some work to uncover the full poetry of his early poems. Besides, the English love him and have blessed him and rewarded him. And it is their language, after all, from whatever other linguistic sources derived.
T.R. CATANZARITE
