retranslating a translation

Shakespeare's Sonnet 105 – retranslated
(translated from Sonetot Shekspir: Tirgum Ephraim Broyde)
(I chose to rhyme this retranslation. It's... well, pretty amazingly far from the original. I feel like someone playing "Broken Telephone," that old party game.)


My love, in truth, is not idol-worship
as it is called, nor my beloved a false god,
whose name’s praised in my songs and on my lips;
I sing for him, of him, chanson, ballade.
My love is good tomorrow, and good today,
practiced in wondrous heights of full finesse:
my songs, that never waver, yield, or sway
will, saying one thing, of a second thought dispense;
‘pleasant, good, and faithful’ are my refrain,
‘pleasant, good, faithful,’ – versions abound—
Exchanging's swallowed up my fevered brain,
All three in one—a sight on wondrous ground.
Pleasant, good, and faithful are frequently alone;
‘Tis only here they’ve sought to sit as one.

the original:
Let not my love be call'd idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
'Fair, kind and true' is all my argument,
'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
'Fair, kind, and true,' have often lived alone,
Which three till now never kept seat in one.

a truly beautiful translated poem

Robert Lowell's translation of the poem "Spleen" from Baudelaire's Fleurs De Mal stands out to me as an exceptional translation -- alive with all the antic joy and formal crispness of the original:

Spleen

I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes his tutor's monologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.

— Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)


I love Lowell. So much.

translating poetry

I was excited to read about poetry translation this week, since it so directly bears on my own translation of Tschernichovsky’s wild, brittle poetics. In general, my own philosophy of translation is conflicted: I am on the one hand drawn to acculturating translations (closest to Lefevre’s ‘versions’ or ‘imitations’), such as the charming translation of Catullus provided by Frank Copley, cited in Susan Basnett’s text—I find the effort of recreating literature so that it is accessible to a new culture and, often, a new time, a worthwhile and valiant one—some of my favorite movies and songs are reworkings of previous narratives, breathing new life and new language into a literature that would lie dormant and inaccessible were it to be literally rendered. On the other hand, since the work I am translating does not bend itself to acculturating translation (among other factors, it is a historical drama set in a very specific time period and already laden with potent political meaning for Tschernichovsky’s peers), I find myself concentrating more on questions of poetic sound and sibilance. I took objection, however, to Edith Grossman’s unilateral focus on rhythm in her poetry translations. I myself have elected to keep rhyme insofar as it’s possible, believing that the authoritative –click- into place of a rhymed couplet is irreplaceable and must be preserved unless it’s completely impossible to create a line that isn’t thick and awkward. I’ll close this little reflection with some lines that I attempted to recreate in rhyme--not without its own tortuousness, but, I think, with a surviving sense of finality and certainty that preserves the original.

THE FIRST GROUP
O youth, cast your eyes upon my beauty, my comeliness!
Money is false, fortune is vain,
what pleases the eye forever is gained.
Locusts plague the threshing-floor, moths devour cloth,
what pleases the eye is an eternal troth.

SECOND GROUP
Youth, cast your eyes toward family!
Beauty is false, grace is vain,
What a woman of valor builds never shall wane,
You shall not fear hunger, nor dread persecution,
A woman of valor is a timeless institution.

response paper on venuti

In considering Laurence Venuti’s fascinating notion of the translator’s invisibility, it’s worth taking into account the compelling socioeconomic and political ideas he puts forward in the essay. Venuti makes a case for the translator into English as a de facto disadvantaged figure, legally deprived of his intellectual labors, underpaid and severely circumscribed by cultural prejudices. These cultural prejudices towards the standardization and ‘Englishization’ of foreign texts, in addition to proscribing the self-differentiation of the translator, also amount, in Venuti’s eyes, to an ethnocentric cultural violence. As a translator attempting to render a text whose linguistic innovation—indeed, very choice of language—is charged with political meaning, I find myself troubled by the notion that a translator’s goal must always be linguistic transparency. Although I find myself unable to fully carry over the array of neologisms and the complex web of Biblical and Talmudic allusions that characterize Tschernichovsky’s remarkable text, I am certain that I would be doing an unthinkable disservice to his intent were I to attempt to create a smooth, glossy translation. While I don’t want to necessarily draw undue attention to myself, there is also a considerable amount of research and labor that translating such a complex text demands—not to mention interpretation (in the case of more abstruse formations) and a certain measure of art in choosing between English synonyms. I routinely attempt to reproduce alliteration, consonance, dissonance and other sonic textual effects in my translation—not necessarily the most conducive to characterless translation. All told, I find my text so lumpy, new, and linguistically innovative—itself a hapax legomenon in the history of Hebrew literature—that to translate it without attention to the non-instrumental dimensions of language seems to me essential.

favorite passage so far :)

YOUTHS
Sing, O vineyard, sing out to it,
the vineyard of Ein Gedi, in the sun:
a garden tilled by songs,
cleared of stones by a noble nation,
in a ray born of the sun, they planted its choice vines:
the time of pruning has ended,
the summer is past, it has passed on,
and our grapevine is laden,
its tendrils have become numerous,
its branches have grown long:
its twigs have lengthened,
its shoots have abandoned and passed the furrow,
on its limbs, glorious clusters,
it shall bow with the weight of its clusters:
their grapes are drunk with wine,
emeralds, amber, and jacinth:
let comrades arise, let harvesters of grapes approach:
our sister, lovely grapevine,
slaking her thirst with the sun and the night-dews;
her nectar is filled with pips
in the first fruits of your grapes:
and your hair is like to a tree’s crown,
under which your eyes lie waiting;
and your breasts like clusters of grapes
taut with stopped juices:
come, lovers, let us gaze upon the vine,
let us harvest with our baskets...

soliciting alliterative advice

Friends! I am at a beautiful and exciting part of my translation! This is the scene where a group of youths, playing music, comes up and attempts to poetically seduce a group of maidens, or at any rate afford them vaguely sexualized entertainment. They approach and begin to sing in this really harmonious and beautiful way, heavily alliterative and uniquely tight in that delightful Hebraic syntax. And it means that, like most poetry, it's very hard to render meaningfully into English.

Any advice?

The specific line I am having the most trouble with is the very first line of the scene:
הנה הן, הנה הן,
בנות החן ביהודה!

Heinah hein, heinah hein
Bnot ha-chein be-yehudah!

Literal translation:
Here they [female pronoun] are, here they are,
The daughters of beauty/grace of Judah!

Obviously this cannot stand. And I really want to incorporate the beautiful alliteration of sounds, the multiplicity of "hei" (h) sounds.

A clumsy attempt:
Hark, they are here! Hark, they are here!
The gracious girls of Judah!



Any other advice/sallies/attempts?

Love,
T

blarrrrrr

I am having so much trouble translating. I wish I had a more sophisticated post about this, and I don't know how much of a space this is for rather simply personal reflection, but boy oh boy is this turning out to be harder than I even imagined. Tschernichovsky's prose is so obtuse and awkward, and his usage is so strange!! Reading a short story by Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, the beautiful short story "Kayitz Vachoref" (Winter and Summer), in Hebrew from much the same period [ie long before Hebrew was a regularly and organically spoken language] just drove this home to me. One of the glories of that story: sure, I had to look stuff up, but I generally understood it once I did.

With Tschernichovsky, that is certainly not always the case - and even when I do understand the logistics of a line, carrying that over into non-awkward English is just insanely difficult. For one thing, the ordinarily super-adequate online dictionary Milon Morfix (http://morfix.mako.co.il/) for whose existence I thank the good Lord every day, is almost totally useless when it comes to Tschernichovsky's stranger/more innovative word choices. I have had to shlep out my five-volume Alkalai, and my digitally-spoiled self is unaccustomed to the tedium of such work. However, it's generally almost meditative... and sometimes I have to resort to Hebrew Wikipedia, Google searches, Encyclopedia Judaica and other detective work that can actually be pretty exciting [if it even proves fruitful in the end.] I think a big difference between the two works, Kayitz Vachoref and Bar Kochba, is that Berdichevsky wasn't writing dialogue; Tschernichovsky set himself a very daunting task writing dialogue in a language that hadn't been spoken for a thousand years, but I'm becoming less and less convinced that it was an entirely successful one. So I am feeling a little gloomy about the project right now. However, later on in the scene I'm translating are some longer poetic speeches, and I have high hopes for them, because I really love T's sonnets and other poetic works [although they are, to put it mildly, not simple]. So I will be posting snatches of those this weekend, dear readers - bli neder [no promises]!

I FINISHED THE FIRST SCENE!!

Sooooo excited.
I know this sounds pathetic - what a tiny milestone. But 2 things of joy:
1) The first scene is half the first act.
2) I managed to work out some issues with my own perfectionism / figure out some register issues / experiment with the comparatively plastic idioms of English.
3) I figured out that I have an extensive network of Hebrew experts (OK, like, four, but still) readily accessible through Facebook, who are willing to answer questions like the one I had about the very first line, namely, whether the plural possessive of a certain word ("eglei") referred to wagons ("agalot") or cows ("agalim"). Yay for resources in unlikely places!

first scene failures

Two things happened this week:

-my dad kindly brought up my five-volume Alkalai Hebrew-English English-Hebrew dictionary, which is marvelous, and without which I would be utterly crippled;
-I subsequently sat down to some real grappling with the first scene. With ... decidedly mixed results. I cannot possibly overstate the awkwardness of this play; I can hardly comprehend it. It's marvelous and strange. Here's what I have so far in terms of dialogue [without the copious footnotes I am including in all] ... prepare for the awkward:


First Act

First Scene (ma’amad???)

[a village in the mountains, evening. men and women, the elderly and children. the sound of a trumpet: a sign for the Roman soldiers to enter their barracks, soldiers hurrying to the camp]


ONE OF THE JEWS
Have you seen the cows of Edom?

SECOND JEW
They are fattened!

THIRD JEW
Real oak trees.

WOMAN
Like lions! No?

FIRST JEW
But I saw them, and not just thus:
They abated like rabbits then!
Have you forgotten the war of Quietus?

FOURTH JEW
No!
I remember the days of Papus and Lulinus.

SECOND JEW
For his sake the javelins were silent: “Don’t forget!”

FOURTH JEW
In Latakiah we cleaved unto them once:
and they fled to the mountain recess – one Turmah.
Trajan, may his bones be pounded ere he comes!

schleiermacher and awkwardness

Every human being is, on the one hand, in the power of the language he speaks; he and his whole thinking are a product of it. He cannot, with complete certainty, think of anything that lies outside the limits of language.. . . On the other hand, however, every freethinking and intellectually spontaneous human being also forms the language himself. (p. 38, Theories of Translation)

My response to this quote, like many of my feelings about translation, may get a bit rambly and out of hand... but I like Shleiermacher’s use of the word ‘power’ in the context of an essay on translation and language. This might be a slight diversion from the original topic of the quote, but the question of translation and power is one that greatly interests me. I think the statement that he makes here about language in general can be adapted to fit a discussion of translation: the notion of a “freethinking and intellectually spontaneous [translator] forming language himself.”

There’s often a conflict in translation between an idea of translating with audience in mind, or less so—in other words, how much work you want your readers to have to do. Listening to a student’s presentation of his work translating a Japanese novel the other day, I found myself thinking, “well, instead of going into a whole explanation about the Japanese system of honorifics and the role it plays in terms of addressing teachers there, he could easily translate it in a slightly fudged way that plays into sensitivities already present in the American idiom.” Later in the same lesson, I again found myself thinking – it would be so easy to translate this into an American equivalent ... and that way, in the case of this mystery novel, the audience wouldn’t be drawn out of the comfortable rhythm of the story, suspense and atmosphere could be more easily created, and the whole thing would unfold without jarring, stilted, educational asides.

This impulse, I think, is the one that leads to more freeform translation, the “imitations” of Abraham Cowley, plus adaptations such as, for example, a Bible in modern “teen” English, or the transformation of The Taming of the Shrew into a romantic comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You: an idea of making source material accessible and easy. Although a lot of people might resent this idea as corruptive or unfaithful to source materials, I do think there’s something to it both in terms of creating receptivity to the ideas of the original and in terms of creating a version of the original that’s exciting to readers of the receiving culture. Sometimes I read overly annotated or didactic translations [such as the Norton Critical Edition of Turgenev I am currently reading, which is a bit slow to say the least] and I’m more struck by the seemingly unbridgeable abyss between my own culture and 19th-century Russian culture than by the universal, human commonalities literature often brings out. This may be, in part, a fault of language or pacing, but check out these two passages, so alien, and meant to convey the main character’s uncle as a total dandy:
“Pavel Petrovich hadn’t gotten undressed; he’d only exchanged his patent leather shoes for some red Chinese slippers without heels. In his hands he held the latest issue of Galignani, but he wasn’t reading ... [2] He was wearing an elegant morning suit in the English style; his head was graced with a small fez... the stiff collars of his shirt stood up as inexorably as ever against his well-shaved chin.”

--all this is marvelous but doesn’t quite pass into an American reader’s consciousness with ease... it’s quite an effort to insert ourselves into the narrative here. What if it was translated as:

“Pavel Petrovich hadn’t gotten undressed; he’d only exchanged his loafers for a pair of red slippers. In his hands he held the latest issue of The New Yorker, but he wasn’t reading... he was wearing a Brooks Brothers morning suit, and a small golfer’s cap... the stiff collars of his Abercrombie shirt stood up as inexorably as ever against his shaved chin.”

--I recognize that many might think this is a travesty, but to me it makes a lot of sense in terms of what it immediately conveys to an American reader: luxury, comfort, money...something that can’t help but be stilted in another cultural framework.

So I think there is definitely a case to be made for translations that attempt to bridge that gap with culturally familiar references—both linguistic (on the level of idiom and word) and conceptual (e.g., saying “Mr.” with your teacher, versus using an honorific, in the case of the Japanese novel).

On the other hand, more prevalent in the literature about translation we’ve read and also in a lot of people’s instinctual views is the idea of faithfulness to a source text as a way of expanding cultural horizons. I think this is a marvelous idea too—one of the maddening things about discussing translation is how “right-seeming” and generally compelling both sides of an argument can be. Walter Benjamin, in his extremely famous essay “The Task of the Translator,” writes about translation as innovation on a linguistic level: his essay argues that by trying to find “the intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original,” the translator is actually actively expanding and changing the dynamic of his language (and rather mystically, language in general) for the good. I think this is a very compelling argument and works on the phraseological level as well; some of the magnificent Russian idioms I’ve learned would make English incalculably richer if transplanted whole. My favorite is from Dead Souls: “ ‘You’re drunk as a cobbler!’ cried Chichikov...” –it might completely change our national view of cobblers were this to make it into our everyday speech. But on a more serious note, I can think of a few translations that have changed our daily speech: The King James Bible, for one, with such notable idioms as “the apple of my eye” and “like a camel through the eye of a needle” etc., etc. The process of changing a national idiom or a language is, like most change, an uncomfortable one, and sometimes the price of a translation that changes your idiom is a certain stiltedness, a cultural gap that requires real emotional and intellectual effort on the part of the audience to grasp. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that that very emotional and intellectual effort is a valuable one, and one that can be offset by skilled use of language and good pacing, by that rare translator that tries to toe the border between real faithfulness and real readability. The trouble with replacing “honorific” with “Mr.” in your translation? Then your audience misses out on the chance to learn what an honorific is—and the degrees of politeness that play such a fundamental role in the world-understanding of the Japanese people. So it’s a question of ease versus knowledge.

I was less able to bring my own translation into this discussion simply because, well, the question of stiltedness is kind of ineluctable in terms of my translation. It’s kind of an extension of last week’s post about register, but maybe more of a poke at the intellectual underpinnings of that question.

Expect more posts soon with more updates now that I have actually started the meaty process of extracting some English out of Tschernichovsky—and adventures in learning just how well you have to understand your source text in order to translate it with some measure of confidence. [Which brings me to another discussion about translators, power, and moral obligation... but more for that later – rest, weary reader.]

a response to some theories of translation

For my class tomorrow, I've read some early modern theories of translation presented by Cowley, Dryden, Goethe and von Humboldt. As befits the Renaissance period, most of the authors are discussing translation of classical antiquities--sources like Pindar, Virgil, Homer and Aeschylus. All four of the readings deal with the eternal question of the translator: to what extent does literal faithfulness to the words of the author actually damage fidelity to the text? When (if ever) is a translator permitted to add or omit? How much or how little may a translator make his presence felt?

Cowley faults translators for not making up for the lost excellencies of a translated language with new excellencies of their own; Humboldt advocates translation rooted in a "simple and modest" love of the original, albeit inspiration on the part of the translator is ineluctable; and Goethe makes a fascinating case for the need for coexistent--though not necessarily codependent--forms of translation in order to fully express the potential of the original in another language. All of these ideas, while often contradictory, are deeply compelling; however, the quote that most struck me in terms of my own rather daunting translation project was Dryden's: he expresses his aim "to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age."

Here Dryden provides an emphatic answer to a question that has been dogging even my first cursory attempts to translate Tschernichovsky: the question of register. Rendering speech is a central question in any translated text that contains dialogue, and obviously the problem is front and center when one is translating a play. But the difficulty in deciding what sort of register to render Tschernichovsky in is made more difficult by the linguistic oddity of the text itself. Tschernichovsky's play is no more and no less than an attempt to create lifelike speech in a language that hadn't been spoken in a thousand years. This idea is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he chose to set the play in ancient Israel (Roman Palestine); given the already-stilted quality of the play and its frequent quotation of Biblical and Talmudic texts, I cannot help but wonder what lengths Tschernichovsky would have had to go to to recreate the speech of, say, Odessan fish merchants (something his contemporaries in Hebrew literature attempted - with mixed success, needless to say). The first act of Bar Kochba attempts to depict ancient Israelite life in the tense environs of the Roman occupation; we see a number of Jews (referred to as 'Jew number one,' 'Jew number two,' etc) discussing military matters and then dispersed by Roman soldiers, and in the following scene, we are treated to a whimsical gathering of young virgins atop a mountain, picking flowers in a manner highly reminiscent of the Song of Songs. The dialogue is pure Biblical pastoral; the girls are eventually joined and wooed by Jewish shephers, who recite a long erotic poem that's a fine example of Tschernichovsky's idyllic-erotic verse (among his most famous poems is the very sexy 'Ashtarti Li,' 'My Astarte,' an ode to a Canaanite sex goddess). The scene culminates in an attempted rape of a Jewish girl by a Roman soldier, and the violent response of the Jewish men, who murder the officer and are forced into hiding. (All of which could result in a fascinating discussion of Haskalah writers' attempts to subvert traditional images of Jewish masculinity or lack thereof--but that's for another post.)

How to transmit all this dialogue into English? Is it fair to Tschernichovsky to strip his writing of its intricate tissue of quotations, often no more than two words long? As a speaker of Modern Hebrew, I find myself often amused and perplexed by his word choices--for example, using the archaic חדל(chadal) instead of the more modern עצר(atsor) for 'to stop', and countless such examples. Shall I express this disjunct by using, for example, 'to cease' instead of 'to stop'? --On the other hand, Tschernichovsky was playing fast and loose and inventing as he went along: he had no idea that the Biblical "chadal" would sound tinny to modern Hebrew readers, as he had no guarantee that modern Hebrew would ever develop in the first place as it has -- is it fair to me to archaize his prose, when that wasn't necessarily his intention? And what of the playful dialogue of the shepherds? It seems a shame to render the sexy flirtation of these young men into wooden, stiff, archaic meter, but at the same time it feels dishonest to strip it of its strong association with the Song of Songs. This is an erotic scene whose pulsating eroticism must be transmitted into English - but at the same time the eroticism is uniquely Israelite, and uniquely Hebrew in character. Part of me wants to create a smooth read in English, to make Tschernichovsky speak English like I do,--but the read isn't smooth in Hebrew, and the linguistic project is so odd that a smooth read must have been the last thing on his mind!! I find myself leaning towards von Humboldt's fascinating idea that a translator ought to make his audience feel "the foreign" without "foreignness" (which I presume to mean that stilted clumsiness that often dogs translated works) but Tschernichovsky is a foreigner in his own tongue, a paradoxical, clumsy exile, and I feel like my work as a translator is incomplete unless I convey that as well.

What to do, readers?!
T

blog begins!

This blog will chronicle my journey through the play Bar-Kochba, by Shaul Tschernichovsky, as I try to unravel the strange and exciting threads of his early and highly innovative (and often frustrating and awkward) modern Hebrew.