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

[highlyeccentric]

Interesting. I am *not* under the impression that Armitage's SGGK is highly regarded by people who are intimately familiar with the original as well as having opinions on modern poetry. The response I recall (and with which I concur) is that it is a pretty weak translation and artistically wishy-washy, neither matching up to Heaney's Beowful in artistic quality nor giving a reliable translation or really doing the alliterative structure any justice (in order to write alliterative-syllabic prose he has opted to vary wildly in formality and register, which IMHO is adorable but not either artistically impressive as a piece of modern poetry nor a good tribute to the original).

[highlyeccentric]

I mean, I applaud Armitage's methodology, although I can understand why Heaney did not go that way (translating into blank verse = into a form of similar respectability and tradition to modern audience). But I don't think he pulled it off well. I think I would prefer an alliterative *prose* translation, and I do generally prefer prose translations of narrative poetry.

Although it *is* possible to write alliterative verse which doesn't fly wildly about the register of language. This piece of SGGK fanfiction does it reasonably well. I would pay good money for an SGGK translation by that author...

ed: and the first verse quoted there is from the Gardner translation, 1965. His rendering of the wirral stanza is at least as good as Armitage's. I'd have to examine more closely to say if it was better by my priorities, but the other thing that bugs me about Armitage's translation is the literary world acting like he was "Heaney for Gawain", saving a piece of lost poetry, doing something no one else had done... Pfft.

[lnhammer]

Uh, flabbergasted here. But I will say that to do SGGK justice, I would have to seriously level up my Middle English, beyond reading Chaucer in regularized spelling. It took forever to pick though a couple stanzas of Pearl, even with annotations.

I cannot say Gardner does the best translation, but of all those I've poked at, his reads the best aloud in Modern English. Which is why I had it on hand to pillage.

---L.

[highlyeccentric]

I must say, I liked Armitage's translation when it came out and was shocked to find that my teachers, and the medievalist academic blogosphere, did not. So I may have over-corrected in my opinion - it's possible academic opinion has mellowed a bit.

I don't think an accurate verse translation of SGGK is possible. Chaucer one could do, but that would be very light work indeed, more 'modernisation' than translation proper. If you want a *poetic rendering* you have to sacrifice a lot of accuracy and a lot of the richness of allusion and repetition in the original.

Oh *I* remember the one I like. The Oxford World's Classics translation, which is in verse and alliterated but doesn't observe such a rigid form as Armitage's, to much better effect. I've never actually owned a copy, though...

[lnhammer]

Glancing at the opening stanzas of the OWC edition, it certainly isn't bad poetry. A similar flexibility of line to what I was trying for, at any rate.

---L.

[highlyeccentric]

And I'd pay good money and then probably criticise it to hell and back, because that's my job... the other yuletider i thought of was irisbleufic, and I know she *does* have an extensive knowledge of Middle English. But probably better things to do with her time...

[lnhammer]

irisbleufic could indeed do the dirty deed well ...

[lnhammer]

And you'd better criticize it to hell and back, if I ever do something like that. That's the right and proper response to a poetic translation.

("If ever" is very unlikely, I should say, because right now I'm concentrating on translating Japanese. And feeling the need for criticism.)

---L.

[kaberett]

I am entirely willing to defer to your actual expertise on the topic! I just remember the broadsheets being generally positive when it was published, which combined with my previous favourable impression of the guy's stuff...