the art of translation
Over the weekend I entered into a fascinating conversation with Laura and Shelby over the nature of translations. It all started when Laura posted a comment saying she felt I was doing Neruda a grave injustice by not translating more directly the word choices the Chilean poet had put down in Spanish.1This sparked a series of letters back and forth. We presented several different views and while they did not all conflict with one another it was evident that there are many ways to approach the art of giving life to a poem from one language to another.
There were questions as to the "responsibility" of a translator. How much "tampering" is permissible by a translator when attempting to make a poem sing in a new language? What impact does a bad translation have on the reading public? I give you the high lights to the conversation. You can go back and read the whole texts if you want.
Laura began with:
I feel in your “translations” you take far too much poetic license. Adaptations are one things, but in presenting poems to readers who don’t understand the original language as a “translate” you can not alter words … For example … llegar doesn’t mean wander. it means arrive. If Neruda wanted to say wander, he would have used a word like vagar. … You can’t put in your own poetry and call it a translation, now matter how poetic it is. … As a translator, you take on the responsibility of representing the original, part of what you are translating is the duende poetry of the poem, the beauty of the poem—turning a great poem into a bad poem just for the sake of translating is a crime—take Ben Bellit’s Neruda “translations”—consensually agreed as awful “interpretations” But thousands buy those books and think that that poetry is Pablo’s poetry. It is not.
To which I replied:
I am a student here, an amateur .. What is, exactly, a “translation”? What is an “adaptation,” for that matter? … I fall into the “Coleman Barks School of Translating” … Bark's translations speak to me in a way that other Rumi translations do not … It could be argued that Barks is not being literal to the originals. But for whatever reasons, the translations of Rumi’s work by others (yes, surely more faithful, literal, traditional) leave me cold. Why is that? Should I turn my back on Barks’ work because they are not as literal? … All translations, regardless of their “literalness,” are the work of another person, not the poet. Thus, to claim to “know” what the poet “meant” is a conceit.
Shelby then weighed in on the conversation and said:
I’m finding this absolutely fascinating, in the way that I find all such things that have no simple answers fascinating. I think translation is such a strange beast, a philosophical tangle…where aesthetics run and jump alongside ontology … a poem that sounds clunky fails as a poem, period, however faithful the translation. But then there is that matter of ontology – what about the poem is “real” and “knowable” … if the essence of a poem is much more than its literal meaning, something that transcends content alone, then we could say that the original poet is him/herself a translator of sorts … In lieu of being able to know, … there must be some sort of line that one can cross in which most people would agree that the spirit of the poem is violated, but what is it? Is it definable? … Similarly, I think a more interesting discussion is not, e.g., “La United Fruit Company (the original) is written in past tense, it is a historical poem, end of story” but rather: what does it mean for the poem to be shifted to present tense? In a sense, even knowing that the poem is written in past tense in the original, I find the present-tense version quite powerful. Maybe because it is now in present tense. Yes, Neruda wrote the poem in reaction to an event that happened in his time, now many years ago. And yet this poem could be written now. This poem didn’t happen: it is always happening.
Laura replied with:
As to Shelby’s interesting comments, yes, it is interesting reading United Fruit Co in the present, but that’s not translation. thats changing the poem … when someone labels a poem as a “translation” you have the responsibility not to be making radical changes, as interesting as they may be, unless you label it as such, and then its an “adaptation” not a translation.
I acknowledge that with:
[But] what about the difficulties of translating a formal or structured poem from one language to another? You say about changing tenses: “that’s not translation. thats changing the poem”—and Neruda’s Odas are in easy free verse—but how do you “translate” a sonnet or some other form of formal or structured verse? … if I was to take the argument that I was only to work with “direct translations of words” then the end result will no longer be a sonnet. The rhymes do not translate in English. However, with a little “tweaking” I can still keep the essence … and keep a it a traditional sonnet … I, personally, would rather read a good sonnet that might not be verbatim what the poet wrote but, in Emily Dickinson’s words, still “blew the top of my head off,” versus a bland translation that was faithful to the original but could not delight, sing, or rollick due to some fundamental dictum that prohibited us from doing justice to other’s words.
Laura responded and said:
You take on a huge responsibility by publishing it on the web and calling it a translation, for people will google for Neruda and those poems and read them with trust that its a faithful translation.
Today Shelby stumbled upon an article concerning a very bad translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The article runs as follows: "The translation of [The Second Sex] … was prepared in the 1950’s by a zoology professor … He knew nothing about existentialism, of which Beauvoir was a devout adherent, resulting in gross mistranslations: the author’s “person who exercises freedom of choice” became the translator’s “person who cannot be objective” … her famous quote, “One is not born, but becomes a woman,” apparently should be translated as “Woman is a becoming.” A subtle, but very important difference …"
Shelby writes:
Given the apparent damage that "commercial" translations can apparently do (it seems that publisher lucre and the bonds of "official" translation are the enemy here), I'm hard pressed to think that *any* transparently presented alternative translations put forth in the blogosphere can be a bad thing. After all, blog communication and other feedback-enabled and collaborative online technologies (e.g., wikis) at the very least allow anyone to publicly register their differences of opinion/proposed corrections, etc. and make them available in relative proximity to the ideas/text put forth. Poor Simone doesn't have that benefit!
I do not think we have answered many of the questions we raised. Does a translator have a "responsibility"? How much "tampering" is permissible? Will our "on-line community," this global village, allow us to warn each other about "bad" translations? Should the poetry police be called in to put a stop to translators who work outside the given "boundaries" of what is deemed acceptable? I still don't know but this has given me a lot to mull about. What I valued the most, however, was the conversation this generated. We need more discussions like this!
- The poem in question was United Fruit Co., where I did such things as change the tense of the poem from past to present and another in which I substituted the word "creek" for the word "river." [back]