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.