Poetry in translation/reading in other languages

[Benny Bunter]

@woops idea, thought I'd start it for him though. Fascinating topic in general

Not just a thread to post poems you like, though that's fine, but also to discuss the issues - what translators should be aiming for, good and bad examples, what is lost and what is gained.

Apart from English I only know Spanish and read a bit of Lorca in the original, and I really hate the translations I've got in a bilingual collection I've got by him. Maybe I wouldn't hate them so much if I couldn't understand the originals (not that I do understand them all that well cos so many cultural references etc go over my head)

But I'll start it off with a Prynne quote (natch) which I think nicely sums up the pros and cons.

"In his 2007 notes on ‘Some aspects of poems and translations’ Jeremy Prynne suggested that ‘Teachers of a foreign language often say to their students, if you can read and understand poems written in the foreign language, then you will have insights into the very heart of another culture; but the tasks are often very hard, and also frustrating, because it is mostly not possible to know whether an attempted understanding of a poem has been successful or not.’
He also suggested that translation is a noble art’ making bridges for readers who want to cross the divide between their own culture and those cultures which are situated in other parts of the world.’"

I'd be interested to know what @woops thinks as a Francophile London poet. And I want to know what the best translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud are, for example, but maybe he'd turn his nose up at all of them?

We've touched upon this topic a few times here before with Pound but it's endless fascinating to me.

 

[Benny Bunter]

And if you're not particularly into poetry, maybe you'll have something to say about prose or just translation in general, it's all good by me

 

[Benny Bunter]

I agree with Prynne that translation of literature is a noble art, but it's the most difficult, tortuous thing, absolutely fraught with technical/linguistic and ethical problems

 

[Benny Bunter]

I also want to read the Greeks and Romans but have no idea where to start. I want something beautiful to read but don't like the idea of the translators taking liberties too much with meaning. It seems like an impossible tightrope to walk.

 

[version]

I read something the other day about translations of Musil and a commenter underneath said they felt the big issue with translations was that translators run out of time or just slip into a groove so you'll often end up with something that really fizzes toward the start then fades as it progresses.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah I can imagine, it's massively time consuming and involved,and also badly paid. Hardly anyone makes a living out of quality literary translation

 

[Benny Bunter]

Look at woops being awesome in the short poems thread

Beckett wrote some interesting short ones in French which are tricky to translate. He called them mirlitonnades

for example

en face
le pire
jusqu'a ce
qu'il fasse rire

roughly,

opposite
the worst
until
it makes [one] laugh

although you might substitute "facing" for "opposite" with a change of sense, or perhaps "across from" which is not very elegant.
also beckett splits the french construction that means until over two lines which is impossible to capture in english
"it makes laugh"is not english though it is a word-for-word translation of the french so i don't know how you'd deal with that
and, as always, the music is completely destroyed in translation
but the french is compact and effective

here's another good one

fous qui disiez
jamais plus
vite
redites

again roughly

you madmen who said
never again
quick
say it again

impossible to translate the play on fous (madmen) / vous (you) although the verb ending on disiez makes it clear he means you, ie it is an address to certain madmen, not just any old madmen

H'm what's this looks like Beckett also did translations of Eluard just like I was doing elsewhere on this forum not long ago, looks like I am a Beckett-league genius, sweet

Not particularly short but as this is where I'm talking about translation here's my version of Rimbaud's Bottom. NB the French title is also "Bottom", making it clear this is a reference to the Shakespeare character; there are other Rimbaud poems about the bottoms we sit on, though.

BOTTOM

Reality being too full of difficulties for my great character; - I found myself nevertheless at my lady's house, in the form of a big grey-blue bird shaking itself dry towards the ornaments of the ceiling and dragging a wing through the shadows of the evening.
I was, at the foot of the rug bearing its beloved jewels and physical masterpieces, a fat bear with violet gums and fur gone grey with sadness, eyes of crystal and the silver of sideboards.
All was shadow and burning aquariums. In the morning - dawn of a warlike June - I ran to the fields, an ass, trumpeting and brandishing my grief, until the Sabine women of the suburbs came to throw themselves at my chest.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I suppose, ultimately, if you don't know the source language (or even if you do, really, cos you likely don't have the same depth of understanding as a native speaker) and you think it's a good poem in English it doesn't matter so much cos you'll never know anyway.

I saw another Prynne quote somewhere where he says the important thing is to create a good new poem rather than worry too much about what's inevitably lost.

 

[version]

Yeah I can imagine, it's massively time consuming and involved,and also badly paid. Hardly anyone makes a living out of quality literary translation

There's a guy called John E. Woods who does a lot of German stuff and his output is pretty staggering when you consider the stuff he's translating, e.g. Schmidt's Bottom's Dream, must be a nightmare to translate something like that and the readership must be tiny. Hats off to him.

There's a Chinese woman who's spent over a decade translating Finnegans Wake into Chinese too. One of the most mindboggling things I've ever heard.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

There's a guy called John E. Woods who does a lot of German stuff and his output is pretty staggering when you consider the stuff he's translating, e.g. Schmidt's Bottom's Dream, must be a nightmare to translate something like that and the readership must be tiny. Hats off to him.

There's a Chinese woman who's spent over a decade translating Finnegans Wake into Chinese too. One of the most mindboggling things I've ever heard.

No need to translate it into anything: just present the Chinese reader with the original and it will make just as little sense.

 

[Benny Bunter]

This is how how you do it iyam

The Seafarer​

BY EZRA POUND
May I for my own self song's truth reckon,
Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care's hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet's clamour,
Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
The mews' singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.
Not any protector
May make merry man faring needy.
This he little believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business,
Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
Must bide above brine.
Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,
Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then
Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now
The heart's thought that I on high streams
The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.
Moaneth alway my mind's lust
That I fare forth, that I afar hence
Seek out a foreign fastness.
For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst,
Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful
But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare
Whatever his lord will.
He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having
Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight
Nor any whit else save the wave's slash,
Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing.
Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,
He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,
The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not —
He the prosperous man — what some perform
Where wandering them widest draweth.
So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,
My mood 'mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale's acre, would wander wide.
On earth's shelter cometh oft to me,
Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,
Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,
O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow
My lord deems to me this dead life
On loan and on land, I believe not
That any earth-weal eternal standeth
Save there be somewhat calamitous
That, ere a man's tide go, turn it to twain.
Disease or oldness or sword-hate
Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.
And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after —
Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,
That he will work ere he pass onward,
Frame on the fair earth 'gainst foes his malice,
Daring ado, ...
So that all men shall honour him after
And his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English,
Aye, for ever, a lasting life's-blast,
Delight mid the doughty.
Days little durable,
And all arrogance of earthen riches,
There come now no kings nor Cæsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe'er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
Earthly glory ageth and seareth.
No man at all going the earth's gait,
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,
Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,
Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,
Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,
Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,
And though he strew the grave with gold,
His born brothers, their buried bodies
Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Apparently that's pretty loose and misses out a few lines from the Anglo-Saxon original but it's absolutely magnificent

 

[sufi]

SONG
Ne param var,
ne pulum var
Haven’t got no money,
haven’t got a bean.
Ne karim var
ama dostlarim var.
Haven’t got a wife,
but I have friends
ends will meet in the end.


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/15/richard-mckane-obituary rip

 

[version]

"The history of the kleptomaniac translator: all the jewels, chandeliers and other objects of value disappear from the text he is translating."

Baudrillard, Fragments : Cool Memories III, 1990 - 1995

 

[version]

COLASANTI: Speaking of translation, that’s another one of those parallel activities of yours. You translate, quite a lot.

LISPECTOR: I discovered a way to make it less annoying. What I do is I never read the book before I translate it. I go along sentence by sentence, because that way you’re carried along by curiosity to know what happens next, and time passes. Whereas if you’ve already read it it’s a chore. It scares me when I see it that way, three hundred pages to go.

COLASANTI: I always start with the second chapter, because I always think that if you start with the first, which is where the reader enters, I still don’t have a grasp of the author’s language, so I start with the second, and when I finish I do the first.

A Lost Interview with Clarice Lispector

The longest and most wide-ranging interview that the great Brazilian author gave, here translated and published for the first time.

www.newyorker.com

 

[Corpsey]

It is sad to think of all the poetry and literature I miss out on by only speaking English, but OTOH I speak English, so I get Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, Yeats, (some of) Joyce etc.

I made a veerry short lived effort to read Baudelaire in French (with a parallel English text). Hopeless, of course. I listened to some recordings of the poems in French and my inner pronunciation was way off, as way off as Marseilles, if not wayer.

But it was interesting to observe just how much stuff the translator had to shift around and change in order to wrench things into a poetic English form.

It made me wish I did know French. The more words you have the richer your conception of the world, of the linguistic world at least. Also even with my ham brained attempt on it I could see how another language is another world of rhythm, inflection, rhyme, etc.

If I rubbed a linguistic lamp and was granted one other language, no learning required, I wonder what it'd be? French? Italian? (Dare I say it) Greek?

 

[okzharp]

The early bird catches the worm - el pájaro temprano coje el gusano

Dios ayude el que madrugue - God helps they who rise early

 

[okzharp]

thread here on 'translating' Joyce... apparently Finnegans Wake contains 70+ languages

 

[version]

It is sad to think of all the poetry and literature I miss out on by only speaking English, but OTOH I speak English, so I get Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, Yeats, (some of) Joyce etc.

I made a veerry short lived effort to read Baudelaire in French (with a parallel English text). Hopeless, of course. I listened to some recordings of the poems in French and my inner pronunciation was way off, as way off as Marseilles, if not wayer.

But it was interesting to observe just how much stuff the translator had to shift around and change in order to wrench things into a poetic English form.

It made me wish I did know French. The more words you have the richer your conception of the world, of the linguistic world at least. Also even with my ham brained attempt on it I could see how another language is another world of rhythm, inflection, rhyme, etc.

If I rubbed a linguistic lamp and was granted one other language, no learning required, I wonder what it'd be? French? Italian? (Dare I say it) Greek?

I looked at some poetry collections the other night and a few had the original and the translation side by side. Still not ideal, mind you, as it's not going to be word for word so you can't just line the two up and assume you've cracked it.

 

[Corpsey]

It can certainly give you a great deal of respect for translators to see how they've ingeniously moved words around to preserve a metre or rhyme scheme.

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

rendered in my translation (James McGowan) as

Often, when bored, the sailors of the crew
Trap albatross, the great birds of the seas,
Mild travellers escorting in the blue
Ships gliding on the ocean's mysteries