The Art of Failure: Poetry in Translation

[The following article appeared in somewhat abbreviated form in Poet's Market 2010.]

“Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another.”—Paul Auster

Introduction

The historical importance of translation for English language poetry is undeniable. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Æneid in 1554, because the Latin original was unrhymed yet metered, and no equivalent existed in English. Blank verse, brought to us by a translator’s ingenuity, allowed for Shakespeare’s plays to be written as we know them. The sonnet (sonetto or “little song” in Italian) was created by Giacomo da Lentini and enjoyed a boom among Italian poets such as Calvalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch in the mid-13^th and early 14^th centuries. It was not until the 16^th century that sonnets began appearing in English, in translations from Italian and from French. And the list of gifts translators have brought English poetry goes on—couplets, villanelles, sestinas, and, some have argued, even free verse via attempts to translate Chinese poetry. The question now is: What is the cultural and artistic place of translation in the age of globalization?

According to a Center for Book Culture study on the number of books translated into English between 2000-2006, it’s a pretty dismal place. Most countries had fewer than one book per year translated into English, and literary heavyweights such as France, Italy, and Germany had fewer than ten books per year translated into English—and this includes novels and nonfiction as well as poetry. The percentage of books in translation tends to be estimated, by such organizations as the NEA and PEN, at about three percent of the total published in America. (Incidentally, there is an excellent blog about translation, out of the University of Rochester, called Three Percent.) Does this mean the effort of translation is hopeless or unimportant? Not necessarily.

Translation is very complex; the process, the need, and the market for it are not so easily summed up. To understand the landscape, we have to look at the differences between publishing translation as books or in journals, translating contemporary or older work, working alone or collaboratively. Likewise, the politics and ethics of translation play a role. And perhaps most importantly, the process and joys of translation need to be understood.

The Process of Translation

The primary goal of translation is to recreate the effect of the original poem in the target language (the language into which you are translating). The problem, of course, is that if the poet did her work properly in the original (or source) language, then she made use of every available trick and tactic, thus making the job of recreating the poem almost impossible. This is why Umberto Eco calls translation “the art of failure.” But while perfection is perhaps not possible, there are thousands of excellent translations in existence. So, how were they done?

You have to determine whether you want to transport the source text into the target language or transport the reader of your translation to the source culture. If you are translating, for example, a contemporary Mexican poet, and the word buñuelo appears, you have to decide whether to replace this very specific Mexican sweet bun made with orange juice with some American equivalent (a honeybun perhaps) or to simply leave the Spanish word in the English translation and hope the reader knows what a buñuelo is. A third option is to retain the Spanish word and footnote it, though footnotes can ruin the effect of a poem if there are too many of them. The general rule is to avoid them when possible. Of course, the problem with replacing a Mexican pastry with a traditional American pastry is that—forgive the pun—you damage the original flavor of the poem, though you do not run the risk of losing or confusing your reader. But both tactics lead to problems, as nearly everything in translation does. I don’t mean to suggest that a translation can’t do both. In fact, most good translations do, but each successful translation, in order to have its singular effect as the original had its singular effect, ought to privilege one effort over the other.

Depending on the source text, your level of mastery of the source language, and whether there are pre-existing translations, the first stages of working on a new translation of a poem will differ wildly. When translating Latin and Greek literature, David Slavitt uses pre-existing literal prose translations of the poems as well as his personal knowledge of Latin and Greek “to turn the prose translations back into poems.” Slavitt says, “When you translate prose, you are the original author’s clerk, but when you translate poetry, you are his partner.”

Frequently, translation is also done collaboratively. Likely the most famous contemporary duo is Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have redone many of the Russian prose masterpieces. A notable team in poetry translation is Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, who collaborate on translations of ancient literature. The make-up of the team is frequently a scholar of the source language/text and a poet who knows the tricks of English verse and who might have some knowledge of the source language.

But no matter your tactics or whether you work alone or with a collaborator, tough choices will have to be made. My translation of Jürgen Becker’s poem “Oderbruch,” which appeared in the Indiana Review, offers a simple example of the issues a translator runs into in nearly every line. I had translated “[g]elb graue Dämmerung” as “[g]old gray twilight” which caused the faculty member consulted about the accuracy of my translation to suggest that I change it to the more literal “[y]ellow gray twilight.” In one sense, he was right—“gelb” means “yellow.” But I felt that “gold” was close enough to the literal meaning, but it had the added poetic benefit of retaining the consonance and the number of syllables in the original. Ultimately, the poetry editors at Indiana Review agreed with me, but not because I was unquestionably right. We were both right about how to translate the line. It was simply that I was willing to make a small sacrifice in literalness to retain the music, whereas he was willing to make a small sacrifice of the music to retain a more exact meaning. Every poem will present a dozen or more moments where the translator must sacrifice one thing for another. Only rarely does a poem submit easily to transfer into a new language/culture. That, however, is also part of the joy. Nearly every translator speaks of the joy of finding an elegant solution to a seemingly insoluble problem.

Slavitt says, “I didn’t take a Hippocratic Oath when I signed on to be a writer. I feel no obligation to the literal meaning of the text whatsoever.” It’s the pleasure of the original he is after. Does that mean Twinkies show up in Ovid? Well, fine, let it be so. Or so Slavitt says. But the business of translation is a highly contentious one, and one where opinions are unusually strong and criticisms often bitter.

One of the joys of translation is what you can learn by doing it. Slavitt went to the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil in order to learn how to make a paragraph work in verse. Matthew Zapruder, author of The Pajamaist and translator of the Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu, reports, “I also had a sense right away that it would be a good thing for me, a poet just starting to find his way, to be inside the seriousness of the voice and the directness and implacable structure of the poems.”

Publishing Translations

The report on the market for poetry in translation is mixed. A recent New York Review of Books article points out that Iran publishes more literature in translation than the United States does—as do all European countries and most Latin American ones. That said, however, it has been my experience that original poetry and fiction are comparably hard to place in journals, whereas translation and nonfiction are much easier to place. This has, predictably, to do with the volume and quality of submissions in each genre, as well as current demand. Brett Fletcher Lauer, a poetry editor at A Public Space and an advisory editor at Columbia University’s Circumference, a journal dedicated entirely to poetry in translation, offers the following theory on why translations tend to be better and therefore more likely to be accepted: “A Public Space receives a relatively small number of submissions of poetry in translation compared with the thousands of submissions of English-language poetry. That being said, the overall quality of translations submitted is very high. I'm not sure how to account for this fact.” He goes on to speculate, “The process of translating and the dedication it requires makes it so that it cannot be casual work, but, instead, a sort of over-time, and what we receive reflects this.”

“Generally journals were happy to publish the poems,” says Zapruder of his translations of Jebeleanu. “I had more difficulty publishing the book; in fact, I finished the translations in 1998, and it took almost ten years for the book to eventually come out with Coffee House Press.”

Slavitt says, “If you translate a standard classic and are lucky enough to get it adopted as a text in enough courses, it will do much better than original poetry.” But he adds, “If you translate someone who needs translating—Ausonius for instance—it's about even [with sales of original collections of poetry].” Given the generally poor sales of poetry collections, this might not be very heartening, but it ought to be. Either a book of translation will sell about the same as an original collection or considerably better, especially if you can recast a classic poet in a new translation.

Some of the journals most supportive of poetry in translation are Absinthe, The Bitter Oleander, Circumference, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, Ninth Letter, Poetry International, and A Public Space. There are others, of course, but these are journals that are dedicated to translation solely or that publish some translation in nearly every issue. And presses that publish translation regularly include Northwestern University Press, Red Hen Press, Sheep Meadow Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse. If a new translator wants to discover what is happening in translation today, she would do well to peruse these publications.

Advice for Getting Started

If you’re a first-time translator, it is unlikely that you’ll get the rights to translate and publish the work of a major author whose work is still under copyright—e.g., Günter Grass or Pablo Neruda. Mark Smith-Soto, the editor of International Poetry Review and a poet/translator in his own right, advises that a new translator find an author who enjoys a good reputation in his/her home country but who hasn’t yet been translated into English. “If you ask a poet whether he’d like to be translated, the answer is generally going to be yes,” Smith-Soto says. And here is where the unfortunate state of literature in translation can actually be a plus. Since there is so much excellent literature that has yet to be translated, you’ll have plenty to choose from. But since you’ll be spending many hours living in the poet’s work, it’s important to find work you admire. Otherwise, what should be a joy will become a chore. Once you’ve established yourself, then the larger gigs will come.

It’s also worthwhile to have a working knowledge of translation theory, which sounds daunting but which in fact can be attained by reading two excellent books out from University of Chicago Press, The Craft of Translation and Theories of Translation, both edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte. These two reasonably sized volumes will bring you from Dryden’s thinking on translation through Goethe’s and up to Gregory Rabassa’s with excellent stops at Nietzsche’s, Benjamin’s, and others’.

So, read the journals that publish translations, read these two seminal texts on the theory and craft of translation, find poetry you admire, and get to work. It’s rewarding for both the translator and for the literary culture as a whole.

[Okla Elliott lives in Champaign-Urbana, where he is the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois. He received his MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University and holds a comparative MA in economics and politics from UNC-Greensboro. In addition to his American education he has studied at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and at language institutes in Mexico and Quebec. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation appear regularly in various literary journals, and he is the author of two chapbooks of poetry as well as the co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.]

European Poetry Translation Prize shortlist announced

The shortlist for the 2009 Popescu Prize has been announced! The Popescu Prize is awarded every two years for the best volume of European poetry translated into English.

Eight titles have made it on to this year's shortlist out of 86 submissions. These include translations of poetry from Spanish, French, Turkish, Irish, Italian and Greek!

See the shortlist here. This year's judges are Stephen Romer and Elaine Feinstein. The winner will be announced in November.

Librairie de France to Close Soon

Unfortunately, the French language bookstore Librairie de France is closing at the end of the month. The store has been a Rockefeller Center mainstay since 1935. Sad. More details in the story here.

New Words Without Borders

The September Words Without Borders is up and the theme is "Walking the World." Featured writers include Siegfried Kracauer, Alexei Ivanov, and Davide Sapienza.

Sarkozy and Sarcasms

“Ever since he married a flapper, he’s become not simply American, but Fitzgeraldian,” notes Roland Jaccard apropos the French president he finds almost Gatsbyesque. Jaccard the café nihilist, whose work appeared in Absinthe 11, reports that he elicits, when sympathizing with Sarkozy, the pity of friends less appalled by the president’s politics than his poor taste and flouting of French tradition.

Madame Bruni-Sarkozy, however, won Jaccard’s heart at a party by being able to recite Dorothy Parker. Jaccard never quite goes so far as to say in Sex and Sarcasms, his most recent collection of feuilletons, that her voice is full of money, but does provide examples of her blithe charm: “They all say that what happened between Nicolas and me was too fast, but they’re wrong: it wasn’t fast, it was instantaneous. So all in all, it was fairly slow for us.” Or “Are you always waiting, like I am, for the longest day of the year, only to miss it when it comes? Do you do that too?”

In another sketch Jaccard notes that we are, “in our heart of hearts, fascinated by swindlers and dictators, but shrink from admitting it. Only a scoundrel practices a realpolitik of feelings.” Jaccard would be honored, I think, to be considered such a scoundrel.

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN, THOMAS E. KENNEDY

DEAD MAN FALLING

Sudden inspiration strikes midway over the Atlantic in an SAS jumbo jet bound for Copenhagen, and I am hunched over the fold-down table in my aisle seat, scribbling away at a love story – I have just had the good fortune to spend some time with a lovely woman and such are my proclivities that I have to make a story out of it. At just the moment in the story when boy is about to get girl, something slams into my face and knocks off my glasses, stunning me. I think something must have fallen out of the overhead bin, but realize then it was another passenger, a man who had been walking along the aisle, got just abreast of me and collapsed like a ton of bricks.

After finding my glasses, not broken fortunately, and noting that a goose egg is growing out of my forehead, I look around and see a body lying in the aisle, looking quite dead. A man, in his forties perhaps.

Three men converge on the body from three different directions. I learn that they are Danish doctors who happened to be on the plane, and they set to work on him at once, lifting his legs to get the blood flow back in his head, taking his blood pressure, reviving him. Soon he is up on his elbows, telling that he had felt nauseated and was on his way to the toilet when suddenly he blacked out, next thing he knew he was on his back in the aisle. His blood pressure is 100 over 70, too low for comfort, and when he tries to rise he grows dizzy. The doctor nearest me – a man of forty perhaps, an oncologist I heard him say, tells the man to remain lying down. It is good to see how attentive the doctors are, how concerned to do what they can for the man. I know from experience in an earlier professional life that doctors who intervene in such aircraft incidents are not only rarely rewarded, but even risk legal suits. But the sue-your-ass-off mania has not yet hit Scandinavia.

A stewardess appears and tells the one doctor that the captain has made available his sleeping quarters, but because the patient is still not able to rise without dizziness, he must scuttle crablike on his bottom, propelling himself with the palms of his hands and bottoms of his feet to the front of the plane. I am given an ice pack for my goose egg and lean back in my seat, thinking about how suddenly and unexpectedly things sometimes happen, how vulnerable we are, how half the time we don’t even see it coming.

I recall an incident some forty-five years ago when I was working as a runner in the Wall Street area. In the crowded morning rush hour just as I got off the train at Bowling Green, a middle-aged couple walking beside me, the husband suddenly dropped like a stone. His wife looked with bewilderment at him. A transit cop materialized and for some reason blew his whistle – perhaps to summon colleagues.

He crouched beside the body, felt for a pulse, and said, “It’s all right, lady – he’s dead.”

“Dead?” she asked. “He can’t be. He just ate breakfast.”

And then, because the platform was crowded and people were pushing me from behind, I moved on. Yet that moment is etched in memory: It’s all right lady – he’s dead. He can’t be – he just ate breakfast.

But of course we all can be, from moment to moment, at any moment, even in the middle of a love story, even when boy is just about to get girl.

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com

Aleksandar Hermon--a shining example for all bilingual writers

Once in a while a bilingual writer comes along who puts us all to shame. Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett and Joseph Conrad come to mind. They managed to write forcefully in their second language. Following in their footsteps is the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hermon, the child of a Ukrainian father and a Bosnian-Serbian mother. When war erupted in his homeland in 1992 shortly after he came to the US, he found himself stranded here. This 44 year old journalist from Sarajewo, did not speak English. Three years later he published his first story and his first book (The Question of Bruno) in 2000 in English. He wrote for the New Yorker, The Paris Review, published three more books and won the Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant.”
Aleksandar Hermon gave himself five years to learn English, five years to write and publish his first story in English. He worked as a sandwich assembly-line worker, a bike messenger, as a bookstore clerk and as a door to door magazine subscriptions salesman. “He also read voraciously in English, storing words he didn’t know on note cards, and within three years had achieved his goal.” (Larry Rother: Twice-Told Tales, The New York Times, 5.15.09)
I cleaned the apartments of elderly Jewish ladies, sold nuts from a push cart, worked in the theater, as a Go-Go dancer and a school counselor. I too recorded the words that I didn’t understand, couldn’t remember or pronounce, into a notebook—schedule, issue, vicarious— but it took me more than 20 years to publish my first story in English. I did not become a voracious reader of English books like Aleksandar Hermon. Reading with a dictionary in hand was too much work and no pleasure at all. There was peace in my homeland; the wall had come down, and Germany won the Soccer World Cup. I was not in despair—a good writing motivator according to Hermon.
“I was cut off from my previous life, in despair … I had this horrible, pressing need to write because things were happening. I needed to do it the same way I needed to eat, but I just had no language to write in. I couldn’t do it, and so I thought I should enable myself to do it.” (ibid.)
I lacked the confidence to write in English. The belief that, aside from Beckett and Nabokov, no one could write in a second language, held me back. Then I discovered a new generation of writers: Turkish, Russian and Japanese writers who wrote in German, Dominican and Haitian writers who wrote in English. Some playfully integrated their first and second languages. Their example gave me the courage to try the same. Like Hermon and many other bilingual writers I found a new, welcoming home in the English language. Aleksandar Hermon recently discussed writing in a second language with Junot Díaz and had this to say (my translation):
“Everyone can declare the English language his home and no one can be banned from it…..Everyone can bring his experiences with a foreign language into American English without having to fear being expelled from it.” (Thomas David: Amerika auf dem Weg zur postnationalen Literatur?, Neue Züricher Zeitung, June 8, 2009.)
I am grateful to Aleksandar Hermon for being such a shining example and inspiration for bilingual writers everywhere.

InsideOut Literary Arts Project

We'll stray a bit from our usual subjects to encourage your participation in this important cause:

Support the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit by contributing to the challenge grant program through the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan. Beginning August 18th, the Foundation will donate a dollar for every two dollars donated to InsideOut.

Read what Peter Markus has to say about the great work of the InsideOut Project.

Literary Magazine as Mole

Over at the Goethe Institut website there's an interesting overview of Germany literary magazines:

Like moles, literary magazines burrow through the subsoil and often bring literary treasures to light. They live on self-exploitation, are sometimes short-lived and bizarre, and publish against the mainstream. And they sometimes feel out trends that later rock the literary scene with truly eruptive success.

Read the article in its entirety here.