Loss in translation

[kaberett]

I'm bilingual in German and English, and I'm terrible at translation, and still I look at Der Vorleser being translated into English as The Reader and I cringe, because there probably isn't a way to do it better, but you're still losing important information: the German actually means The Reader-Out-Loud, and if you're familiar with the book or the film, well...

... and that's a two-word prose title. I also happen to live 30 minutes away from the Saison Poetry Library, and am working my way slowly through a subset of its contents. Most recently I acquired a volume of the selected works of Neruda, with choices and translations by Robert Bly, and I am now pretty certain I am never going to pick up anything he's translated ever again.

On the one hand is that he decided to make a selection of Neruda's early work that demonstrates that during his early twenties, the poet went through a phase of thinking that imagery like waterfalls of sperm and anemones were a good idea (from the complete absence of raining spermatozoa in his later output I deduce that he changed his mind on this subject).

On the other, which I consider far more damning, is the quality of translation. I don't speak Spanish; I have an A-level in Latin (with significant Latin-to-English poetry translation component), and I've just about got enough French to navigate public transport and buy vegetarian food. And yet.

There is the simple, the potentially arguable, as from Ode to Salt:

Y luego en cada mesa de este mundo, sal, tu substancia ágil espolvoreando la luz vital sobre los alimentos. ... Polvo del mar, la lengua de ti recibe un beso de la noche marina...

And then on every table on this earth, salt, your nimble body pouring out the vigorous light over our foods. ... Dust of the sea, the tongue receives a kiss of the night sea from you...

"Polvo" I would be inclined to translate as "powder" rather than "dust"; it's the same root found in a wide variety of Indo-European languages (e.g. German Pulver), and "powder" for me keeps more of the mouth-shape, the taste, of the word than "dust"; and I prefer the connotations and nuance suggested by powder. But, hey, this I recognise as personal preference, rather than technique.

But to render sal,/tu substancia/ágil as salt,/your nimble/body? No. I'd argue very strongly that Neruda chose to place ágil (nimble, agile) on a line of its own, separate from and following "your body", for reasons to do with poetry; I don't see any reason that Bly couldn't have rendered the English salt,/your body--/nimble-- or similar: preservation (... ha) of both the poetic and the literal.

That's a long-standing argument, of course -- whether translations should be faithful to the letter or the spirit. This is some of why Simon Armitage's parallel translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which he writes about in the Guardian; excerpts of praise are available on his website) is so highly regarded: he has attempted to preserve both in a new piece of poetry, recognising that poetry resides in alliteration and meter as much as in imagery.

I submit that Bly fails at both.

1 5 10 15 20 25

La Huelga Extraña era la fábrica inactiva. Un silencio en la planta, una distancia entre máquina y hombre, como un hilo cortado entre planetas, un vacío de las manos del hombre que consumen el tiempo construyendo, y las desnudas estancias sin trabajo y sin sonido. Cuando el hombre dejó las madrigueras de la turbina, cuando desprendió los brazos de la hoguera y decayeron las entrañas del horno, cuando sacó los ojos de la rueda y la luz vetiginosa se detuvo en su círculo invisible, de todos los poderes poderosos, de los círculos puros de potencia, de la energía sobrecogedora, quedó un montón de inútiles aceros y en las salas sin hombre, el aire viudo, el solitario aroma del aceite. Nada existía sin aquel fragmento golpeando, sin Ramírez, sin el hombre de ropa desgarrada. Allí estaba la piel de los motores, acumulada en muerto poderío, como negros cetáceos en el fondo pestilente de un mar sin oleaje, o montañas hundidas de repente bajo la soledad de los planetas.

The Strike The idle factory came to seem strange. A silence in the plant, a distance between machine and man, as if a thread had been cut between two planets, an absence of human hands that use up time making things, and the naked rooms without work and without noise. When man deserted the lairs of the turbine, when he tore off the arms of the fire, so that the inner organs of the furnace died, and pulled out the eyes of the wheel, so that the dizzy light paused in its invisible circle, the eyes of the great energies, of the pure circles of force, of the stupendous power, what remained was a heap of pointless pieces of steel, and in the shops without men a widowed air and the lonesome odour of oil. Nothing existed without that fragment hammering, without Ramirez, without the man in torn overalls. Nothing was left but the hides of the engines, heaps of power gone dead, like black whales in the polluted depths of a sluggish sea, or mountain ranges suddenly drowned under the loneliness of outer space.

I have an awful lot of feelings about the infelicities in this translation, starting with the first word. The entire balance of the first line is changed by moving "strange" from its place at the opening to the end: I don't understand why that piece, at least, of word order was destroyed. Or the final word of line 6, "desnudas", rendered by Bly as "naked": why not "denuded", with the sense of bleakness and violence? Or the repetition in line 14, los poderes poderosos? Or "oleaje", line 26, translated as "sluggish": why not "oleaginous", the sibling-word that contains both the sense of viscosity and the industrial metaphor of oils?

My absolute least favourite thing he's done with the poem, though, is how he's handled the word planetas. In line 4, he renders it a thread had been cut/between two planets; in the final line, bajo la soledad de los planetas, he renders it outer space.

I don't understand this decision. I don't understand it at all. Having brought in the superfluous specificity of two planets (Spanish does not have the dual form), why then cut the thread that runs through the poem - why divorce the planets from each other, why translate it differently and lose the recurring - the duplicate - image?

In sum: I have been reminded once again that I adore parallel translations for all sorts of reasons, even when I don't speak the source language; and I have convinced myself that Robert Bly is someone whose work I wish to actively avoid. And: for all the somewhat woeful and strident tone of this post, I would love for us to talk more about priorities in poetry translation - how we prioritise for ourselves, and how that shifts with context - and about favourite translators. Thoughts decidedly welcome!

Comments

[alexseanchai]

You are making me (again) want to go back to Ovid and Catullus and see what happens.* The hell did I do with those books?

Also: it has been forever since I saw this comm in action. I should probably ought to ask slash offer to host a theme week!

* ...probably the suck fairy, since someone else I know with Latin knowledge and experience of Ovid has recently been complaining that Ovid's poems keep going "tra la la I am a rapist".

[kaberett]

so I keep meaning to get my act together to read the Heroides, right, and then write a thing comparing it with Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, because the two can't not be in dialogue with one another!!! (The bits of the Ovid Amores I read weren't super-rapey but then they probably tried quite hard to avoid setting rapey ones as A-level set texts...)

Catullus -- I have a copy my mum gave me in my parental home; I should dig it out next I visit!