CHAPTER 30

The Music of Translation (1971)

Mr. Flood, Mr. Payne, translators, writers, poets: yes, it cannot be done, and yes we will go on doing it.1

The matter of music and the matter of meaning—I think they are not opposed. I don’t think the dualities are really opposed and I think the music here has a great deal to do with the meaning as it moves.

The movement of the meaning of what we are doing.

As children, it seems to me we have all come to translations in the same way that we came to the writings in English. Knowing indeed that the French works were against the French background. Feeling our way into something that had happened in France, knowing that the Asian languages were far outside and the collision of the strokes of meaning made as if pictures. All of these are “as if” because the physicality of what we are coming to is perhaps not a physicality as if we are coming to the work entire, to ourselves entire, and to something that is named. We have the “translator-traitor” name-throwing always behind us. And I think we might very well come to it openly.

Perhaps it is not so bad to be called traitors. Many of us have become used to this. We have to translate news; as the government says, to kill is to save, to go in to pull out, and so on.2 We have been translating all the time. And we are called traitors: many of us are called traitors for being against wars and so forth, because what treason is it to translate? It is some kind of mandarin thing to which we are traitors, but underneath that and I think—to get to the music here—one must dive far underneath into a place where we share experience.

I know in writing poems, the poems that I very often thought of not showing to anybody become the poems that are taken hold of later on. They are not, in another dirty word, they are not the obscure ones that don’t go deep enough. For when you dive deep enough into experience you come to a place where we share our lives. And so in language there is something underneath our languages which is shared and this is curious, this is subtle, this is a secret, and also this is known to all of us.

There is something under that. We make mistakes with it all the time. We work for perfection and we fall flat every three minutes. There is no perfection here and we want it.

We want to bring that over. Treason and resurrection and bringing over, these are translations. It is a mythological effort to bring a music over into another life. And it involves one’s own lost languages. As if we knew all languages. For example, I do not know Hebrew and when I hear the cantillation of the beginning of the Song of Songs and it says Shim ha-shirim I know that means Song of Songs, there’s something in me as if it were a lost language of my own. Well, is it? German was the private language of my parents and I flunked German in college because the taboo of not knowing what my parents were saying, that they wanted me not to know, was very strong. And it was not theirs. It was third generation. And you know what happens in this country. We’re all translators.

We are the translated people.

And if we are third generation as I am, we know the second generation tried terribly hard to be everything they were not and bleached out all language, all poetry, all jokes back there, all cooking of back there, not to talk with your hands, Muriel, only Mediterranean people do that. And the mistakes go back the other way. You can get awfully pretentious—sound awfully pretentious. I can sound awfully pretentious in France if Alain Bousquet does as he did translate a title of mine which was called U.S. 1 which is a little too much of a national—it’s a road, you know, it means a coastline to me. It means our conflict, it means my conflict, it means what happens on the Atlantic Coast; but when this comes out in France as U.S. moi, U.S. 1 which came out as U.S. I and so on, that makes something one is not exactly.3 These things can all happen. All these mistakes, terrible mistakes.

A man cannot be translated, but it is possible through how you say a translator to have a child and certain things can be brought through. Again, every mistake, every ignorance, every falling flat on one’s face comes through. It comes through in language. And here we are trying to bring over a significant music, signifying to someone unknown, to you my reader, unknown to me, that perhaps I’m born now, but what makes it significant. In the work entire, one modulated “curve of emotion,” as Lawrence said; curve of music in which the last word of the poem can sometimes show you where the tonic is, what lattice as in crystal structure this lives on.4

What the poem climbs up to. Oh, take Milton’s sonnet on his blindness which has all the waiting and losing and burying and hiding and finally comes to the one word, “wait”: not what they tell us in school, it isn’t that at all.5 You come to the word “wait,” and on the word “wait” the marvelous structure of the sonnet is there, the fact that he is writing poems again is there, the whole thing comes through, absolutely before you. Well, it is that movement, that music, that has to be brought over. And it’s a marvelous and terrible game. It can be done at times at which one is unable to write one’s own poems and has something one cares for very much. Something marvelous there can be set out before one and worked with. Not spun out of one . . . but in front of one.

And Nelly Sachs, tormented, pursued for the chimneys and the people like sand and the sand itself sharp and abrasive and beautiful and many-colored in her poems. And she believed, in Sweden, that the German police were after her. She asked to translate her poems and a publisher here said I must translate the whole book or none.6

All these questions of the quests, one’s absolute wish, they say it’s going to be presented and then as I was saying before, the people to whom this is going to be significant. The one person, one’s listener, to whom this is going to be significant. It doesn’t happen often in bringing works entire through. It doesn’t happen in bringing a word through. The example that Jespersen uses is “uncle,” the Latin word avunculus—the root he says generally comes through.7 People remember the saying and bring this part of the word through. Not here, they remember the “dear little” as if it were a Russian “dear little uncle.” We don’t get avus except in the adjective. We get “uncle,” part of “dear little.” Our dear littles are the dead writers in this. My pleasure, my joy, and my torture has been working with living poets so one has the frightfulness and blowups and marvelous letters and roses coming from other countries and a frightful letter from Paz came yesterday saying, “what do you mean you’re going to print a page of my afterthoughts in the paper edition of my selected poems?” (It’s a book we did ten years ago that was to come out in a paper edition.) “I have no afterthoughts and by the way, could you rewrite the book completely and could we change the name of the book from Selected Poems to something else?”8

But this thing of a living voice brought over where one possibly can make a music, and one does not want a faulty music, one wants the clear music, not of clarity, it was said yesterday when the thing is not clear, it must not be translated as clear.9 But something of the work entire, the word, each word, in itself whatever that is, and with it suggestion, with it silence, with it potential, because it is the thing at its potential.

What it gives us.

What we have in our early reading, this warming of an unknown life present and entire as it all is. As these works in unknown languages are. I think of what must be a frightful translation of the Vietnamese epic Kim Vân Kièu and I puzzle that with a script I can’t read on one side of the page and a kind of awful prose which cannot possibly be what it is, and now Cambodian poetry.10 I don’t know that I know a single Cambodian poem, and they will be telling us all kinds of things about the Cambodians, and we will not know a thing—could we have a project to translate Cambodian poetry? Could that be made now?

And other translations. I found a box, while in my nerves before speaking I was pacing up and down and drinking water. At the water cooler outside there is this, as an example of the kind of translation that we have. Here’s a box with a sign on it—Coffee Stir Sticks. It sounds like a bad translation from the Chinese. Well, what is it? Coffee Stir Sticks. I know what it is. It says, “300 count.” You know, maybe it was made in Hong Kong, I don’t know. But here is the kind of translation that we have and all our headlines say this all the time. But when you go to each word—I think of the story about Hans Christian Andersen who took an awful lot of beating about everything he wrote and he liked to go to houses and he liked to read the stories and he wanted grownups there and children there and there was a critic there once—there often is a critic, and this one did his job on the story and a little girl looking at the work while the critic was going at it said, “Here’s one little word you didn’t scold.” The word was and. You can do that. But there is the work entire. In the translations of Hans Christian Andersen, Rumer Godden speaking about them said they don’t come over clear.11 They have to be transparent, they have to be wonderful translations, and she said something, I don’t know how you would translate this. She said they come over as pawky. Now I suppose there’s a word in every language that we have for pawky, but I don’t know how to translate that. And yesterday when Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing that and we laughed and we clapped and he was doing all the words for poor in Yiddish and I thought of what we do.12 “I’m going where the climate fits my clothes,” and “My pockets think I’m dead.” We all have our ways of saying poor. But what he was saying was that the killed, the six million, his audience, had been killed.13 His language has been killed. He didn’t say that. He made jokes. That’s the way he works. We laugh our heads off and yet an hour later . . . But this is a curious refreshment. This is visiting another culture. Boas used to say the only way to have a holiday really is to go to another culture.14 This is a holiday that brings something to us as translators, not us as readers because again, one is the twelve-year-old finding the things of the world and realizing in a curious way, a floating way, that these come from other people and other languages. Rilke said, “I believe that no poem in the Sonnets to Orpheus means anything that is not fully written out there, often, it is true, with its most secret name. All ‘allusion’ I am convinced would be contradictory to the indescribable ‘being-there’ of the poem.”15 That “being-there” is what we are trying to bring over.

It can only be done by the things. It is working through the flesh. With all its mistakes, it’s like bringing up a child. You know, one knows one’s own howlers in doing the work and sees the howlers all around one very easily, more easily than one sees one’s own often. But, it must be done, it can be done. There is only one poem in the world that I know that can really be translated. And it’s the only abstract poem; when I was teaching, students would ask, would speak very often about abstract poetry, concrete poetry (what I think of as poured poems); but there is one abstract poem. It’s Christian Morgenstern’s “Fish’s Night Song”:

That can be translated, yes, you can do it by opening and shutting your mouth or anything else you have. But that is it. And there are these things that move from sound to the meaningless words. We have them, we know what they are. We got them in the old days, a few years ago a woman was not supposed to say it, but well, in the early centuries and the nineteenth, you had O for a meaningless space-holder or something to give it sound and exaltation, and then you had ah—“Ah, what avails the sceptred race.”17 That kind of thing. We have something else now. Here is one example which Frances Keene was good enough to show me in the translation that Eshleman did of Vallejo.18 The line in the poem is “Pero me busca y busca. ¡Es una historia!” and Eshleman has had the generosity to translate it. “But she looks and looks for me. What a fucking story!”19 Well, that doesn’t exist in the original, and it’s a dishonor to the word which is dishonored anyway as a kind of monkey insult or superiority sign, but it is used as a placeholder, and we get an awful lot of that. This in translation seems to me an abomination. And when you’re translating poems you long for something to solve your torment, every few breaths. Because with almost any other language, you need something for this place, and if it exists, it exists only by turning it and putting in something which generally is not a good idea.

The things that one finds as solvings are generally not good ideas. And you have to think how to bring over something that depends on breathing, throwing against one’s heartbeat, thrown against all the muscles in one’s body and this is only a way of speaking. What we are talking about is something entire. One’s self entire. Jespersen speaking of languages says, you have to remember that it’s the mouth and the air passages and the lungs and the abdomen and the body cavity.20 It’s more than that. That’s just a beginning. Collingwood says it about painting.21 We say painting is seen through the eye and done with the hand—nonsense. A painting is made by a man walking up and down in space before another space and working on it and turning his back on it and walking away and sleeping and doing all these other things, and it’s seen in the same way. These are entire. The movement in the Translation Bill of Rights from unit to unity is the true movement here.22 And it is the movement in the translation of poetry, and this is not to exclude prose. This is the total thing, and it depends on every breath we take, and that is a figure of speech. So, there is the thing of an equivalent music, and what is that? Do we try to pull through the tradition in the translations of Emily Dickinson in Italian? The attempt is made to offer a hymn music because Emily Dickinson’s poems are based on a hymn music familiar to New Englanders of a certain religion and a certain time. What is that in Italy? What does that bring through? Is the Italian reader like the general average man who forgot the stem of avunculus and everybody knows the stem will be the part that’s kept? But we have received the word. The stem is the part that has been lost, thrown away. We have to be willing to lose in this. We have to be willing to see a great deal die. We have to trust our forgetting as we all trust our forgetting. We know that these things are in us, somewhere. I can’t say that the tradition of China is in us somewhere, it has to be shown to us. But there are correspondences and the work to bring the music through counts on these correspondences and counts on—I’ve heard people say instinct and intuition but I really don’t think there’s any such thing. I think it’s noticing, noticing very much the thingy quality of poetry, these are physical things. We are physical beings dealing with each other. Suzuki in answering the question about the Buddha offering the lotus was asked, “Isn’t that fragile?” And he said, “I speak to you, you speak to me, is that fragile?”23

And these things have the tensile strength of a single life.

Now, Isaac Singer speaking yesterday was talking about his lost language. His lost people. And when he said in a charming, hostly manner, “I will translate you, you will translate me,” this is a deep, deep urgent cry.24 I want to end with a poem called “The Writer.”25 I wrote it, actually, for him, whom I don’t know at all, really. But I read that New Yorker review tearing him apart—his lost language and his lost people—and I thought of all of us and what music we are trying to carry through and out of what and how we have been willing to risk our terrible mistakes and our terrible failures all the time, and go on making it and make it, knowing it is about perfection, knowing that we cannot hope for it, it is impossible, but we will go on doing it.26

(The World of Translation, 1971)