High-quality literary translation seems to me one of the most important legacies – or outcomes – of the Poetry Revival of the 1970s. This isn’t just because that Revival was led, in Britain, by poetries imported from the US – a culture which, as Ruth Fainlight has said, is itself relatively more at ease with the idea of poetry in translation because more of its writers are close to the experience of immigration and of having “other mother” tongues. No: I make this link for a much more craft-y reason.
The Poetry Revival, whatever else it was good for, produced a normative shift towards free verse: whose ensuing hegemony has, arguably, fallen away to some extent in recent years. Still: free verse is now universally accepted (even if not everywhere embraced) as a legitimate poetic form. No-one working seriously at poetry today thinks, with the Review’s barmier correspondents, that free verse is simply chopped-up prose: even if particular failed attempts at it undoubtedly are. What this means for international poetry is that it’s possible to produce a translation which is recognisably a poem, and which we allow all the load-bearing functions of a poem, without having to squeeze it into the pint-pot of rhyme.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I’m unseduced by rhyme. I certainly don’t imagine it’s intrinsically trivialising. On the contrary, in our intractably polymorphous language, with its multiple linguistic roots (and routes) and which is therefore so difficult to rhyme or even assonate with semantic precision and subtlety, rhyme is all the more sudden a delight. In fact, as every poet knows, it’s the very unlikelihood of available rhymes that can steer an emerging poem into places we couldn’t otherwise have arrived at. But that’s the thing: rhyme in English, arguably even more than in many other more mono-cultural languages, is often the driver of thought. A translated poem, on the other hand, needs to be faithful to a thought which already exists, in the original – in all its subtlety and richness. The actual quality, and the structure (think of Rilke’s escalators of dependent images), of what is said are key to a poet’s importance and they – rather than, as is often assumed, diction – are the characteristics most easily traduced by his or her translators. This is particularly the case if that translator tries to be the servant of two masters. The stricter the demands of the host form, the more the temptation to let its commands over-ride those of the original. For an illustration of this, just look at the way rhyme dates many translations of, say Dante. In short, I’m with Nabokov: if you’re going to let your own formal decisions have priority over the true-speaking of the original, you’d better be extraordinarily sure that you’re as fine or finer a poet than the original author. (Though if that’s the case, why would you even want to translate them: the pleasure, after all, being in the intimate cohabitation?) Those original formal pleasures which are lost in this process will be lost along with every other quality if you try to reproduce a fine sonnet in Portuguese, say, by a mediocre one in English. It’s for such original pleasures that parallel text editions, CDs and pod-cast downloads exist.
Free verse, on the other hand, practices discretion. At best, it can exercise the kind of courtesy that gets you to your table and the wine in your glass without your noticing quite how. It is also, like the best of waiters, flexible and seamlessly able to accommodate the strangest of special requests (such as peculiarly long phrases or the need to reproduce an outbreak of onomatopoeia). None of this means – to pursue the analogy to its conclusion – that such attendance isn’t hard work. On the contrary, the more the effort the greater the appearance of ease. Free verse reads as necessary, as non-arbitrary, when it has been most carefully disciplined: following phrasal intonation, “chiming” repeated or related vowel sounds and clusters of slant rhyme, or deploying a degree of consistency about such things as lineation.
Nevertheless, in allowing such formal coherences to be transferable, or denying them such a high degree of precedence, free verse does create space for semantic complexity. The particularly exacting semantic complexity of poetry from another culture – one where, for example, non-Anglophone concepts may be encapsulated in such locally-familiar terms as saudade or hiraeth, say, or in symbolic associations with such long cultural freight as, well, plum-blossom in Japan – tends to take up more space in English. English is also relatively cumbersome in its reliance on prepositions, its lack of grammatical indicators incorporated as pre- and suffixes, its gender-voided pronouns… These problems will be familiar to everyone who’s tried their hand at translation. Still: they combine to turn pints into quarts. And free verse, or at least forms which makes softer demands – syllabics rather than metrics, say – can afford a complex poem relatively-greater hospitality in English.
Of course, there are exceptions. Don Paterson’s Orpheus and Alan Jenkins’s Drunken Boat are both extraordinary feats of formal translation in which nothing appears to have been lost, and a magical linguistic transmutation to have occurred. But these are exceptions, by the two poets who, whatever their differences, happen to be our contemporary masters of strict form. I rest my case.
Fiona Sampson’s latest books are Common Prayer (2007), short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and A Century of Poetry Review (2009), PBS Special Commendation. In 2009 she received a Cholmondeley Award. She is the editor of Poetry Review.
7 Comments
November 4, 2009 at 5:56 am
Hello Fiona.
Thank you very much for being first up on Frances’ new forum: where ‘I’ very much josh, but sincerely hope will become a place of accomodation, understanding and tolerance for those whose poetic education extends only to what common-place learning and rag-bag accumulation of the ciphers and codes that load us at the rim; with insight into the minds and lives of others less fortunate then we who found on a classical premise. Democracy and the polis; the Classical ideal on which our long and noble realm of real English Letters, draws back to via two millenia and more, through many a tongue and mix of various European tradition – to the Mother mind of Socrates, Plato and Arostotle.
And whilst remembering this strand within our collective historical poetic psyche: reach and remember still the earliest Brythonic bards and druidical enchanters who knew the ogham of a crane Thoth made into the mystical code of unknowable logic so beyond the here and now realm; forgotten almost it is by all but we who know, Fionn and the thumb stuck in after fish-fat splashed gifted him the Annwn, Sampson.
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Forgive me please, ‘I’ am being translated from ineffable to English, Language try out in the new chat gaffe badly needed if the dream of everyone in, all speaking English freely – is to occur online between the people who really care about self-improvement via the noble art of intellectualizing into Letters, who we are: as both individual and protaganist within we all share as English speakers seeking to spin at the rim of heaven with the wits and wags who dare to make their Dream believable off and on stage, in our theatres of print where ‘I’s – spurred on by imbas, splurge within without and get gassy.
Sir Andrew is focus of the week at your primary rival space for most readers your worship Ms Sampson. Please can you fix it for me, to be a double issue feature in the Review, next summer when my first book is out, and which I hope will be feted and win every single significant monetary prize for Poetry in the world and beyond into cyberspace where the new actors gathering to translate our stares into what is is poetry’s jolly well supposed to make happen.
Me being next on as top bore in the mental space that is THE palace of verse, on wordpress, with very few readers at present, because Frances has only just started to change the criticial topography of po-biz Britain.
November 4, 2009 at 6:00 am
Hello Leviston.
Please take no notice of my first failure.
‘I’ am an experimental Non MS in the changing room, as Ms Ben from the poetry constabulary, imagining ‘I’ am not me; but the worst Irish non-speaker on an island, getting on everyone’s wick as the language liar imperonating Lyr: when the ‘I’ gets into deeper reaches of one’s research area of ogham via the English language.
Cutting out the need for learning about what gives within the realm of cyberville Frances.
November 4, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Dear Fiona
I found this a very interesting article. When I translated ‘The Tiny Hunchbacked Horse’ (Franglo.com) from the Russian, I began by trying to be very faithful to the original. Half-way through, I more or less gave up and transferred to a far freer version. As a natural linguist, what makes me laugh is poets who solemnly pontificate about what is ‘lost in translation’ when they don’t have a clue about the original language. To extend your metaphor of quart and pint pots, the one thing you don’t want to end up with is ‘two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.’
Best wishes from Simon R. Gladdish
November 5, 2009 at 12:30 am
I’m not sure the fact that is easier to be semantically complex and precise without rhyme is an advertisement for free verse or the opposite. The fact that is more difficult would make those poems that acheive it more amazing, I would have thought. And the same for metrics as well. Free verse is easier to write, yes, that is why there is so much of it about.
November 5, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Hello everyone. Thanks for your thoughts so far, and apologies for their delayed appearance, a hiccup now sorted.
One thing I wanted to throw into the mix is the idea of translating formal verse into a different verse form from the original. To give an example, Paul Batchelor’s ‘The Damned’, which won the Times Stephen Spender Prize this year, is taken from The Inferno (terza rima) but rendered into a 6-line rhyming stanza – so it’s not faithful as such, but still gives a ‘formal feeling’ to the poem, which is an interesting approach.
November 6, 2009 at 1:04 am
Re Paul Batchelor’s 6-line stanza, it would be interesting to see how that would work over the entire length of the Inferno. Personally, I see translation as a chance for my egotism to shine through, so I tend to take the ’spirit’ of the thing and make it my own.
This is simply common sense. If you want a good translation, write prose. But if you want a poem, you need to be writing as yourself to produce anything worthwhile, not as somebody else.
November 6, 2009 at 2:50 am
There are several potential points for departure Fiona’s thoughts on Translation allow the Critic to posit from here at the Palace.
One could begin by endevouring to steer the focus of our exchange, toward concentrating on the historical trajectory of Rhyme in the English language, for example. Muse from a starting technical or, craft-y point, pertaining to the scholarly consensus that alliteration was the primary prosodic staple for effecting a mnemonic jointing-of-lines, when the ditty-makers and Makkers of yore were forging continuous singular objects of performative air in, what then was, an extremely fatalist and highly Feudal England, where Religion was the social glue and mono-spiritual carrot and execution block, with which a Monarch – via the agency of their Lords – connected existentially with his subjects-as-property, or the ‘us’ whose lot in life was, potentially, far less jolly the lower down the feudal scale one was born.
Prior to the seismic shift in Letters Gutenberg initiated, when a (historically speaking) sudden and swift freighting in of poetic influence from early Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch (rediscovering ancient Greek and Roman authors in Middle Ages Europe) displaced what had been an Anglo-Saxon, North European English normative purview that reached its apex in courtly late-Norman England with bards like Langland: alliterative verse had been the poetic Tradition for six and more hundred years.
Rhyme in Irish poetry, of course, reached its formal zenith in the Middle Ages with the myriad of bardic form and meters, whose number anecdotally, is put at 350: though only a handful of these were used when writing the stock-in-trade praise and satirical pieces that constituted an important and highly lucrative component of the file, or poet’s practice in the non-saudade, authentic bardic tradition.
One that ran for 1200 years in print, from 5-6 C SW Britain and Ireland – whose earliest printed utterances where made in the runic type Ogham ‘alphabet’, of 20 (and later 25) Letters – to its sudden and swift century long cultural collapse, cotermuinous with the cultural flowering of Tudor England.
Ogham, unlike any other and – though a specialist area of poetic knowledge – is a fascinating writing system for anyone possessing more than a casual interest and/or acquaintence with ditty making; because it was used (mainly for short inscriptions) during the penumbral crossover period between pre- and literate Ireland and SW Britain, and is the closest we can get to the druidic intelligence. This is because Ogham was invented by the poets of Celtic pre-Romanised Britian and Gual, who segued into the bards and later the filidh (poets) who onyl dissapeared from these shores 16 generations ago, when the modern English language poetry tradition, betgan with the Tudor courtiers.
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Please forgive me boring you on this small part of poetic history. My research area has been banging my head against this sort of lark and it’s a life-long pursuit which can never be got right in any meaningful sense of translating the truth of the druidic mind: but as an agent propelling one to Eloquence and Elegance in Letters, it has its uses as a lame ploy to spin-up oneself in polite company where the civilzed gas is.
I wanted to talk about the three poets that would have been alive and writing at the same time in 14C England, Ireland and Italy, William Langland, Petrarch and Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, of the Munster filidh family, who was considered to be one of the top three poets in the entire 1200 year spread.
They all represent the changing flux of new and old in uniquely informative ways: perhaps. I dunno, just trying to translate within to without.
Don’t mind me.
Thanks very much everyone.