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Translation Review Number Sixty-Three ¥ 2002 The University of Texas at Dallas Translation Review The University of Texas at Dallas Editors Rainer Schulte Dennis Kratz Managing Editor Eileen Rice Tollett Copy Editor Sandra Smith Art Director Ann Broadaway Production Staff Jessie Dickey International Editorial Board John Biguenet Ronald Christ Samuel Hazo Edmund Keeley Elizabeth Gamble Miller Margaret Sayers Peden Marilyn Gaddis Rose James P. White Miller Williams A. Leslie Willson All correspondence and inquiries should be directed to Translation Review The University of Texas at Dallas Box 830688 - MC35 Richardson, TX 75083-0688 Telephone: (972) 883-2092 or 883-2093 Fax: (972) 883-6303, email: [email protected] Translation Review is the official publication of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). The journal is published twice yearly and is supported in part by The University of Texas at Dallas. Subscriptions and Back Issues Subscriptions to individuals are included with membership in ALTA. Special institutional and library subscriptions are available. Back issues may be ordered. ISSN 0737-4836 Copyright© 2002 by Translation Review The University of Texas at Dallas is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. TRANSLATION REVIEW No. 63, 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS Editorial: The Use and Abuse of the Word “Translation” Rainer Schulte Interview with David Unger Patricia Schoch The Modern Tradition: Reading Taiwan’s Third Generation of Poets John Balcom Translating at the Foot of the Cross: Ambivalent Figures in a Sixteenth-Century Polish Resurrection Play Rob Sulewski Partners in Crime Daniel Jaffe Ravishing Marie: Eugene Mason’s Translation of Marie de France’s Breton Lai of Lanval Peggy Maddox On Teaching Translation at the Introductory Level Stuart Friebert “Where’s the Velvet?” Jáchym Topol’s Sestra and the Reception of Alex Zucker’s Translation City, Sister, Silver Howell, Yvonne Multiple Translations of Giacomo Leopardi’s L Infinito Giuseppe Natale SPECIAL SECTION: THE DYNAMICS OF RE-TRANSLATION Interview between Manfred Heid, Director of the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes Chicago and Philip Boehm. Philip Boehm Re-Translation William H. Gass A Case for Re-Translation Susanne Höebel Re: Re-Translation Helmut Frielinghaus Re-Translating: The Example of Musil Burton Pike The Dynamics of Re-Translation: Two Stories Reinhard Kaiser A Matter of Voice John Woods Cover Art: Ann Broadway White Narcisus pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist EDITORIAL: THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE WORD TRANSLATION By Rainer Schulte T he words Translation and Translating have been resurrected by the American Comparative Literature Association. The 2002 program of the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association reveals a plethora of panel titles in which translation or translating is prominently displayed. The examples speak for themselves: Self Translation; Translation with No Original; Authenticity and Betrayal: Dramas of Translation, Genre and Style; Image as Allegory: Modernist Translations of the Chinese Underworld; Translating Female Gender and Sexuality; Translation Issues and Challenges; Translation and the Celluloid Navel: Picturing Dreams at Work; Poetry into Prose: Translation as Mourning; Translation in the Trans-national and Trans-generation Space of Taipei; Narrative Translations of Identity; Translation in Les Nouvelles Orientales by Marguerite Yourcenar; and finally Translating Being. It is certainly intriguing to observe that the term translation can be applied not only to the theory and practice of translation but also to the investigation of specific topics within the context of the arts and humanities. There can be no doubt that the translator has become the most important mediator between cultures and languages in our contemporary global society. Furthermore, the thinking about the fundamental aspects of the act of translation has largely contributed to the revitalization of the act of reading. Hans Georg Gadamer had already promoted the idea that reading is translation. And Octavio Paz reminds us that when we read a text, we must translate it into the sensibility of our present moment. If we then look at some of the ways that translation and translating have been used in the larger context of humanistic and philosophical thinking, we need to reflect on the basic function of translation as, first of all, the transplantation of written texts from one language into another and all the problems that are connected with that activity. That perspective should be the guiding principle when we practice the art of translation and when we talk about the process of translation. For that very reason, it might be appropriate to delineate the boundaries within which literary and humanistic translations come to flourish and what our commitment, as literary translators, should be with respect to the craft Translation Review of translation. The German word for translation clearly illustrates the basic function of what translation is all about. Namely, ber-setzen (carry across: generally understood to be across a river or a lake) visualizes what translators do. They carry something across the river. The situation on the other side of the river is not the same as the one on this side of the river. They have to make sure that what they try to deliver on the other side is in a form that it can be received. Because they carry a text from one language into another, the transformation that the text undergoes in the process of translation has to do justice to the original source-language work and the new environment of the receptor language. Thus, the translator must explore all the linguistic, cultural, and historical layers of the original text and then re-create the text in the pulse of the new language. It could therefore be said that translation is neither the source-language text nor the receptor language text, but rather the activity of transformation that takes place between the two. All the tools that make this transformation possible belong to the realm of translation in its most fundamental sense, something that we should always keep in mind when we speak about translation. The act of carrying across implies a multitude of ideas. The translator must be very familiar with the original language, must develop research methodologies that will do full justice to a comprehensive understanding of the original work, must be a good writer in the receptor language and be tuned to the pulse of that language in its contemporary power, and finally, should display a certain level of creativity to enact a successful voyage across the river. In order for any translation to take place, translators must have access to a variety of tools that assist them with their work. It is here that the act of translation generates the necessity for a wide range of research. Translating a text cannot be separated from the most intense form of research. Every word, every object, every expression becomes the subject of intense research. In other words, the research is guided by the immediate needs of a moment in a text. If we then see the act of translation in the larger context of the field of translation studies, it becomes clear that translation research is still in its infancy. Translators continuously 1 experience frustration, because they cannot find answers for the questions raised by the text they are translating. I refer to just one of these problems. The Spanish-speaking world comprises about 22 different Spanish languages on several continents. Expressions that have one specific meaning in Argentina can connote something entirely different in Mexican Spanish. There are no specialized dictionaries for the different countries in which Spanish is spoken. The same could be said for the multiple Arabic languages. If I look back at the various titles of the panels that were presented at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, there are not many that focus on the actual translation process, on the reconstruction of how specific texts were carried across from one language to another, on the methodologies that translators used to give a new life to a work in the receptor language. Quite a few of the titles, e.g., Translation and the Celluloid Navel: Picturing Dreams at Work, Poetry into Prose: Translation as Mourning, and Narrative Translations of Identity, to name only a few, begin to stretch what a word like translation can actually hold. It has taken literary translation and literary translators several decades to emerge from the realm of invisi- 2 bility. Many literary and humanistic departments in universities are still hesitant to recognize the art and craft of translation as a respectable critical and scholarly activity. Thus, it would be unfortunate and certainly undesirable if translation and translation studies were to be molded into some kind of fashionable academic canon that comes to perpetuate the inaccessible jargon that can be attributed to a great extent to the various scholarly branches initiated by Derridian deconstructionism. The act of translation and the thinking about translation together with the methodologies that can be derived from the art and craft of translation have largely contributed to the revitalization of the reading, understanding, and pleasure of works of literature. However translation might be stretched into other areas of scholarly pursuits, let us not forget that translation is meant to open up channels of communication between languages and cultures and also between readers and works of world literature. When we speak about translation, we should always keep in mind that the basic function of translation is to carry the work from one side of the river to the other, so that the dialogue between nations can flourish in our global world. Translation Review INTERVIEW WITH DAVID UNGER By Patricia Schoch Patricia Schoch: How do you choose the material you translate? David Unger: I began translating nearly 30 years ago, when I was a graduate student at Columbia University. From the start, I have always had the good fortune to translate the writers or the books that I ve wanted to translate. I can honestly say that I have never had to translate a book because of some financial exigency or need to fulfill an academic requirement. And very rarely have I tried to snag translation projects; generally, the books that I ve translated have come looking for me, in one way or another what Andr Breton calls the mercy of chance. I first began translating the work of Chileans Enrique Lihn and Nicanor Parra, on the recommendation of Frank MacShane, then director of Columbia s MFA Writing Division and a translator in his own right. I was, at the time, a very serious poet (scarf, whiskey breath, bloodshot eyes) and found that translating deepened my own work, even more so than simply reading Spanish-language poetry. At about that time, Hardie St. Martin a great translator of Latin American and Spanish poetry was a featured guest in the Columbia translation workshop. Hardie and I hit it off immediately and he very generously introduced me to the poetry of Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, and Vicente Huidobro, poets whose Bavid Unger Translation Review work I later translated on my own. Then poet and critic Lewis Hyde asked me to cotranslate Vicente Aleixandre s World Alone. Along the way, I translated individual pieces by diverse writers such as Luisa Valenzuela, Roque Dalton, Mercedes Roff , and Mario Benedetti. In the early 1990s, I became very interested in the work of female Mexican writers, probably as a consequence of working as the U.S. representative for the Guadalajara International Book Fair. I read B rbara Jacobs Dead Leaves, a gem of a book, which Curbstone decided to publish. Elena Garro s two novellas, First Love and Look For My Obituary, won the 1996 Sor Juana In s de la Cruz Prize, and Curbstone was willing to let me translate it. Silvia Molina s The Love You Promised Me also won the Sor Juana Prize in 1998, and I asked Curbstone for permission to translate it. Every book found me, to an extent: I was born in Guatemala, so how could I not accept Groundwood s offer to translate Victor Montejo s wonderful young adult version of the Popol Vuh? PS: How closely do you collaborate with the author on each project? What impact does he or she have on your translation? DU: A living author is a great, great resource. I owe so much to those authors who were willing to help me. Let s face it we can only know so much by ourselves, and it would be a serious failure not to bring a living writer into the process. In poetry, the translator can often know the poem more deeply than the poet who wrote it can. Cynthia Ozick, in a masterful essay entitled A Translator s Monologue, implies that the translator is the best reader of the poem and that he/she must dare to be equal master of the poem together with the poet. This tells me that the discovery of the poem s meaning, in its multifaceted form (linguistic, musical, metrical, imagistic, and symbolic levels), is a kind of Orphic task. The writing of a poem requires both conscious and unconscious elements the poet can help the translator with those conscious or strategic questions but is often at a loss to provide the keys for the unconscious elements. The poets that I ve worked with have always made suggestions but have allowed me to make final decisions. With fiction, the process has been somewhat different: I 3 query the author and also ask him/her to read over my translation or give it to someone who can read it. B rbara Jacobs is fully bilingual, so her suggestions were quite specific, and I was more than happy to accept them. Silvia Molina, whose English is not as strong, provided me with directionals a set of keys and bingo! Always the right one to open the door. For Cuba s Ediciones Vigia, I translated my wife Anne Gilman s Frayed Edges; Anne clarified some lines, and Silvia Molina was kind enough to look over my Spanish version to offer some timely suggestions. In translating the Popol Vuh, I worked with Montejo (a Jacaltec Mayan who is also a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis) and with Patricia Aldana, Groundwood s Guatemalan-born publisher; for both Victor and Patricia, the Popol Vuh is not simply a book, but a sacred text deeply related to their identity as Guatemalans. If the author is dead as was the case with translating Cernuda and Huidobro I depended much more on my own reading of the texts within the author s oeuvre and on the good advice of friends like Hardie, Paul Pines, and Jonathan Cohen, all of whom have been very helpful to me. I don t fool myself for a minute into believing that because my name is on the book jacket, I am the sole translator of a particular book. PS: In your opinion, what would be the ideal relationship between the author of a work and the translator? DU: To start, I believe that the author must cede full control to the translator. By this I mean that the author must, as an act of faith, release his work to the translator and trust his/her ability to do justice to the original work. I have been fortunate to work with writers who were willing to trust me. Authors have questioned lines, phrases, even whole paragraphs, but in the end, they have trusted me to respect the form and fire of their own originals. This trust is wonderful, because it makes the translator more comfortable and, at the same time, free to come up with a faithful, yet parallel, text. As the translator, I cannot judge whether I have been successful or not, but I was extremely pleased that my translation of The Love You Promised Me was one of six finalists for the 2000 IMPAC prize for the best novel in English or English translation. In editing Nicanor Parra s Antipoems: New and Selected (New York, New Directions, 1985), I had to deal with an author who felt that Alan Ginsberg (who barely spoke Spanish) should have edited and translated his book. Parra set up lots of roadblocks (Am I revealing 4 dirty laundry? Might this confession help other incipient translators?), including the sending of individual poems to several reputable translators, unbeknownst to me and to them, to see which one would come up with the best translation. And there were other such stratagems. I had to ask Parra not to do these things, but he didn t like being scolded by an unknown poet 36 years younger. Parra did all he could to kill my book, even though I had worked very successfully with other Parra translators, including W.S. Merwin, Edith Grossman, and Miller Williams. The relationship was less than ideal both from the translator s and, I m sure, the poet s viewpoint. PS: Do you see the translator as an insider in the creation of the work, or as an outsider, looking in? DU: Most definitely as an insider. The translator must, almost by definition, be able to get into the skin of the original. This is most true in translating poetry. The poet/translator has to understand the poem in all its dimensions, apparent and hidden, to come up with a translation that a monolingual reader might believe is authoritative. The act of translation then is the carrying over of the fullest poetic experience from one language to another. The translation becomes an act of reconstruction for which inspiration, poetic inspiration, is the most vital element. As a translator, you can never capture all the registers of the original, but if you are lucky, creative, or extremely inspired, you will be able to bring across as much of the original as possible, always aware that the act of translation vacillates between utter failure and partial success. Umberto Eco said in Experiences in Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) that the perfect translation is an impossible dream. Sometimes, you are able to come up with a felicitous line that reveals some unconscious elements of the original and makes them apparent in the English, without necessarily being reductive. I don t want to sound theoretical. But this is what we find in Waylim Yip s Cathay, in particular his examination of Pound s translation of Li Bai s The River Merchant s Wife: A Letter. Pound was such a master at making sure that his translations brought across as many registers of the original poem as possible. There is nothing monaural about his versions. Too often, critics and reviewers choose to favor a rendition that is literal over one that is faithful : faithful to the poetic spirit that created the text in the first place. PS: One of your recently translated works, the novel The Love You Promised Me by Mexican author Silvia Translation Review Molina, seems to be exploding stereotypes of the central importance of the idea of “family” in Mexican culture. In fact, the family of her central character seems to be as fractured and dysfunctional as many in the U.S. Also, the women in Molina’s book — women who abandon their families and initiate extramarital affairs — hardly fit the stereotypical role of the matriarchal hub of Mexican family life. How does translating a work that so explodes stereotypes fit into the idea of the translator’s role in advancing understanding between cultures? DU: Women having affairs has been amply portrayed in contemporary American fiction and is seen by feminists as giving women the option to explore sexuality and individuation outside of marriage, especially if the marriage has gone dead. In Mexico, as in most Latin America countries, married women do have affairs, but it is all so much more circumspect and certainly not talked about. What makes Silvia s book so special is not that Marcela, a married woman, has an affair with an older married man, but rather how this affair is combined with her search for her ancestors after the affair goes bust to help her discover her next step live alone or go back to her husband. Moreover, Silvia writes delicately and with what I would call searing honesty. Marcela begins her affair lightly, but with a full understanding of how it might affect her marriage and her children. Silvia plumbed the depths of Marcela s feelings and contradictions without the slightest hint of sentimentality. And by relating Marcela s deception with that of her own ancestors in the small fictitious Caribbean town of San L zaro, she has written a novel that has both personal and cultural significance. But let me clarify: I did not translate The Love You Promised Me because it explodes stereotypes; I translated it because it was beautifully written and because it was a profoundly human story. And there was a coincidence: early in the novel Marcela hears a song, Nature Boy, whose romantic lyrics reverberate deeply in her mind and form the leitmotif of the novel. Coincidentally, this is one of my favorite jazz ballads, particularly in a recent rendition by the great jazz vocalist Abby Lincoln. So again, in Breton s words, Silvia s book found me. PS: One of the most engaging characteristics of The Love You Promised Me, one that seems to build bridges from Mexican to U.S. culture — is its inclusion of a number of English phrases. You, in turn, include several Spanish and French phrases in your translation. What was your thought process in your decision to use Translation Review this technique, which seems to blur the lines between cultures? Did Molina have a part in these translation decisions? DU: Ezra Pound was asked why he included lines in Proven al, Chinese, andItalian in his Cantos, without translating them. Pound said that when something has been expressed so perfectly in the original, that the reader should learn these languages and read them in the original. Of course, if we take Pound s dictum to its logical extreme, there would be no translation and we would all be required to learn upward of 200 major languages. This is impossible. Personally, I try to translate those Spanish phrases for which I can find verbal equivalencies in English even if there is great loss [the phrase por si las moscas (literally, in case there are flies) becomes just in case]. I don t believe that reading fiction should be a chore; however, it is not unreasonable to expect English readers to translate certain Spanish words or a stanza of a Baudelaire poem....I believe Silvia was pleased by my decision to leave certain phrases, fruits, etc. in the original tongue. PS: Verb tense differences between English and Spanish, as well as the treatment of verbs as contractions in English, can pose special translating challenges. How did you address these challenges? DU: I think that most translators are interested in creating texts that have a certain readability and flow, especially if their translations are contemporary works. Using contractions sparingly and using the active, instead of the passive voice, would be choices translators might make. Certain writers, however, will assume a more formal narrative voice; for example, Carmen Boullosa often has her novels taking place in centuries passed. I don t think that modernizing such writing is in order, because it flies in the face of the author s intent. Several years ago, I translated Victor Montejo s young adult version of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan sacred book. Victor maintained the formality and decorum of the original Spanish at the same time that he relaxed some of the language and eliminated certain repetitions. My own version followed his decisions closely I certainly didn t feel it was incumbent upon me as the translator to be more faithful to the original than Victor, a Jacaltec Mayan and a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, had been. PS: Can you describe your processes for deciding issues of tone, language level, and idiom? 5 DU: Basically, I let the original text make these decisions for me. Since I am fully bilingual and feel perfectly happy reading in either Spanish or English, I feel that I have a good sense of the pulse of the original work. I know when the choice of words in Spanish is archaic, allusionary, and ironic. I do not believe that it is the translator s business to impose his/her own poetics or theories of language and culture on the original text. More important is to hear the distinct voices of characters and to be able to render them successfully in translation. PS: What in your language background led you to become a literary translator? DU: I was four when my parents left Guatemala for Hialeah, Florida. In one fell swoop, I lost not only my mother tongue but also all the sensory referents of growing up in a Central American country. Gone were the mountains and the volcanoes, the taste of zapotes, chilacayotes; the smell of copal and eucalyptus, etc., of my childhood, and I was forced to negotiate in an all-English environment. It was brutal. I believe that my first efforts at speaking English were acts of translation, and although I cannot remember specific instances, I am sure that I committed dozens of acts of treachery as I tried to express myself in English. Later, when I was in graduate school at Columbia, I felt that I had an obligation to translate; and when I teach Translation at City College, I try to impress upon my students that they, too, have an obligation to use their language skills to bring to monolingual readers the richness of world literature. PS: Can you describe some of your initial experiences as a translator? DU: The first poem I ever translated was Parra s Ultimo brindis. It was workshopped at Columbia, and I sent off a final version to the Massachusetts Review. About two weeks later, I received a letter back from Jules Chametzky, the editor, in which he said that not only did they want to publish my translation The Final Toast but that they also wanted it for the back cover of their Autumn issue which was just going to press! And they would pay me fifteen 1973 smackers! I was thrilled. All serious translators should be treated so kindly. That experience was an enormous ego boost. Then I met Hardie St. Martin at Columbia, and he was so incredibly generous to me; I would say I apprenticed with him. More than that, he in his typically selfless way put me in 6 touch with different editors and writers who asked me to contribute translations. Also, MacShane was then the director of the Translation Center at Columbia, and the Center was quite active in supporting translators with small grants and, in general, creating an environment in which translation was not only important, but necessary. Those were heady days . PS: How did your career as a translator develop from then on? DU: In 1975, the Chilean poet Enrique Lihn spent a few weeks in New York. Together with Patricio Lerzundi and Jonathan Cohen, we decided to prepare a volume of Enrique s work for New Directions. Apparently J. Laughlin had read some of Enrique s poems in other publications and seemed keen on doing a whole book. We elicited the support of the then Center for InterAmerican Relations (now the Americas Society), which in those years helped subsidize translation projects. John Felstiner was also translating Enrique at the time, and he joined the project. I kept meeting lots of writers Luisa Valenzuela, Isaac Goldemberg, Jos Kozer, Reina Roff and I would translate individual work until the next project appeared. PS: Among the many works you have translated, both poetry and prose, which one presented the greatest translating challenge? DU: I think translating Vicente Aleixandre s World Alone/Mundo a solas with Lewis Hyde was the greatest challenge, in that we were trying to bring to the 1980 poetry audience the work of one of Spain s best Generation of 1927 poets. I can t speak for Lewis, but I often felt at loggerheads at not being able to render into English some of Aleixandre s more opaque surrealist lines or those in which his Romantic flourishes and rapture seemed hopelessly stilted in English. As a translator, I ve always wanted to know exactly what the poet meant or better, what I thought he meant; often I think we came up with lines that lacked transparency. This project taught me to avoid translating poets with whom I did not share a linguistic or stylistic affinity. PS: How do you go about the translation task? Do you make a rough draft first, or do you translate one line at a time? DU: If it s a novel, I first read it cover to cover. Translation Review Somewhere early in my reading of it, I find myself translating certain lines in my head. That s when I know I have decided that I would like to translate it. I translate the novel from start to finish, then I begin to edit the printout. Once I think I have finished this second version, I give it to Hardie, Paul Pines, or Asa Zatz, who are more than happy to go over this version and show me what a bad translator I am! I rework my version with their suggestions. I then query the authors; B rbara Jacobs and Silvia Molina have been especially helpful. And then, of course, the editors of the publishing houses have a go at it. I ve been fortunate to have as editors Sandy Taylor of Curbstone and Patricia Aldana, both of whom are excellent readers and writers. PS: How many drafts do you prepare to get a translation into final shape? DU: Usually three drafts are enough. PS: Would it be possible for you to describe the actual work process as you go from one sentence to the next? If you translate one word, and you have several alternatives, do you put these alternatives in during the first draft, or do you make a fairly clear decision with respect to what is going to go in? DU: I usually come up with one version, which I then put away in a drawer for several weeks. Very rarely do I put two alternative translations down on the page. When I reread that first draft, I change quite a bit, and it is at this point that I come up with my changes. consider to be better? DU: It is hard to answer this question honestly without sounding pompous or arrogant. There are certainly many arrogant translators around; I remember one, in particular, who said: I speak for Borges. Borges, a master of the mirror, probably did not even speak for himself . But yes, I have come up with better lines only insofar as I have been able to create several levels of meaning that were implicit in the text but not necessarily in the specific phrase I translated. I would call these lucky hits and try and leave my ego out of it. PS: Could you tell us what you’re working on now? DU: I just recently finished translating Ana Mar a Machado s Me in the Middle/Bisa Bea Bisa Bel and about 16 children s poems, both for Groundwood Press. With my novel Life in the Damn Tropics coming out this April from Syracuse University Press, I am putting most of my energy into completing a collection of short stories, some set in Guatemala and others in the U.S. There are books that I would love to translate Carlos Franz s El lugar donde estuvo el paraíso and Silvia Molina s Muchacha en azul but these projects would pull me further away from my own writing. I have reached a point in my life where I am acutely aware of the passage of time, and if I don t work on my stuff now, it will never happen. I am not closing the door to translation, but after nearly 30 years at it, I m taking a well-deserved break. Translations PS: Gregory Rabassa has made the comment that the more he translates, the more he uses the dictionary. Would this apply to your translation work? DU: Not really. Of course, my head is always in dictionaries, but I find that very often I can get bogged down in dictionaries and they become more traps than sources of elucidation. If I get truly stuck, I prefer to e-mail the writer. More important to me is establishing the proper relation between words, sentences, and paragraphs so that my final version has consistency. As a novelist and short story writer, I am very concerned with the total experience. PS: Have you ever encountered a translation situation in which you feel that a line in the original is rather weak and you come up with a line in your translation that you Translation Review Books Me in the Middle by Ana Mar a Machado. Toronto: Groundwood Press, 2002. Bordes deshilachados/Frayed Edges by Anne Gilman. Matanzas, Cuba: Ediciones Vigia. 2001. To Be What I Will Be by Silvia Molina. Madrid: Ediciones Everest, 2001. The Love You Promised Me by Silvia Molina. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1999. Winner of the Sor Juana In s de la Cruz Prize in fiction, 1999. The Popol Vuh version by Victor Montejo. Toronto: Groundwood Press, 1999. First Love and Look for my Obituary by Elena Garro. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997. Winner of the Sor Juana In s de la Cruz Prize in fiction, 1996. 7 The Dead Leaves by B rbara Jacobs. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1993. Antipoems: New and Selected by Nicanor Parra. New York: New Directions, 1985 (editor and co-translator). World Alone by Vicente Aleixandre. Boston: Penmaen Press, 1981 (co-translated with Lewis Hyde). Just Passing Through by Isaac Goldemberg. Hanover, NH: Point of Contact/Ediciones del Norte co-edition, 1981 (translated with the author). The Dark Room and Other Poems by Enrique Lihn. New York: New Directions, 1978 (co-translated with Jonathan Cohen and John Felstiner). Selected Translations in Book Collections Other translations Translations of Luis Cernuda, Mempo Giardinelli, Isaac Goldemberg, Vicente Huidobro, B rbara Jacobs, Jos Kozer, Enrique Lihn, Manuel Ramos Otero, Carlos Oquendo de Amat, Nicanor Parra, Reina Roffe, Ilan Stavans, Luisa Valenzuela, and others, published in The American Voice, Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Literature, City, Discurso Literario, Echad: An Anthology of Latin American Jewish Writers, The Literary Review, Lumen/Avenue A, Massachusetts Review, New Directions 44, Nimrod, Nuestro, Poetry Now, Practices of the Wind, Present Tense, Poetry Now, River Styx, Street, Sun, Translation, Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (New York: Avon, 1980), and Weid. The Jews in Hell by Isaac Goldemberg in the Norton Book of Jewish Literature (New York: W. W. Norton), 2000. The Fat Man From La Paz by Gonzalo Lemos in The Fat Man From La Paz: Contemporary Short Stories from Bolivia, New York: Seven Stories, 2000. The Centerfielder by Sergio Ram rez in The Picador Book of Latin American Short Stories, ed. by Carlos Fuentes, London: Picador, 1999. Three Mario Benedetti short stories in Blood Pact. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997. Seven Roque Dalton poems in The Small Hours of the Night. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1996. Three Ilan Stavan short stories in The One-Handed Pianist. Las Cruces, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Apaches in La Granja, in Pyramids of Glass. San Antonio, TX: Corona Press, 1994. The Censors by Luisa Valenzuela in Short Shorts, (Godine Press, 1982). Reprinted in Open Doors (North Point Press, 1988), The Censors (Curbstone Press, 1992), Many Worlds of Literature (Macmillan, 1993), Global Reading Safari (Nelson, 1993) Global Voices (Simon & Schuster, 1994, Prentice Hall Literature, Platinum (Prentice Hall, 1998). Translations of Vicente Aleixandre in: A Longing for the Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1979, reprinted by Copper Canyon Press, 1985) and Paris Review. 8 Translation Review THE MODERN TRADITION: READING TAIWAN’S THIRD GENERATION OF POETS By John Balcom T hings get lost in translation. Every translator is painfully aware of this fact. Yet, some of what is lost in translation has nothing to do with the words of a text. What gets lost is the larger cultural context from which a text is generated, a context that can also supply meaning. As a translator of Chinese poetry, I have had to grapple constantly with the problem of how a translation will be received by a readership that might have little or no knowledge of Chinese culture. Taiwan s third generation of poets have been problematic, because many of them have consciously worked to reassert the local and the traditional to balance what they perceived to be the increasing Americanization, or globalization, of Chinese poetry. This article, then, is an attempt, an exercise if you will, to recover some of the missing context for readers of modern Taiwan literature in translation, to explain what has been lost in translation. The political and cultural history of Taiwan over the last century or so has proved to be extremely complex. Colonial, postcolonial, agricultural, industrial, postindustrial, traditional, modern, postmodern: Taiwan has experienced them all in a matter of a few decades. Modernity and its more recent manifestation of globalization have been powerful forces influencing the local culture of Taiwan over the past hundred years. Modernity, as Anthony Giddens has pointed out, is inherently globalizing. Giddens says that globalization can be defined as the intensification of worldwide relations that link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by distant events. These days, globalization is often conceptualized as a circle, in which power is concentrated in the center and emanates outward toward less powerful peripheral regions. In other words, the centers of power, be they economic, political, or cultural, dictate what the periphery will do.1 But globalization also possesses a dialectical nature a push and pull between tendencies toward centralization and uniformity on the one hand and the sovereignty of particular locales on the other; i.e., that many times, peripheral areas, when threatened with centralizing uniformity, often will react against the trend and reassert their own local identity. That search for identity is carried out under the competing claims of the Translation Review global/center and the local/peripheral. This has certainly affected the cultural sphere as well as any contemporary notion of a national literature. Taiwan s third generation of poets can serve as a case study of the impact of globalization on local culture. Taiwan s third generation of poets is a loose term used to identify the poets who emerged in the 1970s. The second generation of poets are those associated with China s second wave of modernist writing that evolved after the Second World War. Most of the second generation of poets arrived in Taiwan as part of the Nationalist exodus after the founding of the People s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The Nationalist retreat to Taiwan had profound implications for the island in cultural terms. The Kuomintang government forbade the use of Japanese Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for 50 years, and most of the island s intellectuals wrote in Japanese, but not necessarily in Chinese thus effectively silencing the island s first generation of modernist poets. The government also proscribed much of China s early modernist literary heritage as potentially subversive. Furthermore, certain topics, the foremost being politics, were also strictly off limits in the new Free China. Taiwan s second generation of poets, politically conservative and faithful to the ruling party, stepped in to fill the void. Many of the poets of this generation grew up with earlier modernist experiments on the China mainland. After a brief period of anticommunist writing, mainland writers sought inspiration in western writing and adopted western models. Calls were made to horizontally transplant all western schools of writing since Baudelaire. Chinese modernism had begun during the May 4th period (1919) as a rebellion against the classical tradition and had first looked to the West; in Taiwan, now that most of the modern Chinese literary heritage had been proscribed, writers once again looked for inspiration to the West. During the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan s second generation debated the merits of Modernism versus Romanticism, dabbled in Surrealism, Existentialism, and nihilism, and made them the fashions of the day. At its best, the poetry of this period was powerful and original but, it can be said, profoundly influenced by the West. 9 This is not to say that everything Chinese was rejected in favor of everything western; generally, it was more a matter of perceived degree of westernization among generations. But for the second generation, the classical tradition and local traditions tended to take a back seat, at least in the early days. At its worst, the poetry was imitative, mannered, and intentionally obscure. What distinguishes the third generation from their immediate predecessors is a distinct and heightened concern for local and cultural traditions, as well as a more colloquial diction. By the 1970s, when the third generation of poets was coming of age, the reading public and the critical establishment were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the situation of poetry on the island. Propelled by internal and external factors associated with globalization, critics and young poets alike began calling for a return to Chinese traditions and culture. Among the external historical factors was Taiwan s declining status in the world and diplomatic isolation the US had recognized the PRC, and Taiwan had lost its seat in a number of important international organizations, including the UN, GATT, IMF, and the World Bank, to name a few. Feeling slighted by the West, Taiwan was forced to look inward. This enforced cultural introspection resulted in a reassertion of political and cultural nationalism. This combination of internal and external factors merged. The third generation, in their attempts to define themselves against their immediate predecessors, naturally felt justified rejecting the westernization of their predecessors as a means of finding a way beyond their creative agon. A return to tradition is what was called for. But they were caught in a creative bind as modern poets, they were restricted to using the modern vernacular language while trying to adapt aspects of tradition. What form would that return to tradition take, since the classical language had been discarded as a medium for poetry a half century before? This was the quandary of the third generation of poets. They developed a number of strategies for adapting many aspects of tradition while hewing to the modern vernacular as a poetic idiom. Therefore, on the lexical level, the poems of the third generation are often quite easy to translate; but for the reader of the translation lacking knowledge of the larger cultural context, meaning, in the fullest sense of the word, can and will be elusive. It is the extralinguistic features of the poems the intertextuality, traditional poetic form and structure, forms of word-play peculiar to the Chinese language, and in some cases the interplay between text and other art forms such as painting, to name just a few that often are foregrounded and 10 become critical to the reading, understanding, and ultimately to the enjoyment of these poems. One of the duties of a translator, therefore, can be to contextualize this situation, alerting the reader through explanatory devices such as commentary and notes. In other words, the translator can provide the reader of the translated text with the missing lexical and nonlexical paradigms that govern the generation and reception of a particular text in the source-language culture and thereby enhance the reading experience. This article seeks to perform just such a task with regard to a selection of poems by Taiwan s third-generation poets. Du Ye ( ) (b. 1953) is from Jiayi in west-central Taiwan. He attended the Chinese Culture University, first as a physics major, then as a Chinese major. Eventually, he earned his MA and PhD in Chinese. His poem Americanized Breasts ( aaaaaaaaa ) is one of his signature works. The poem is also a delightfully humorous commentary of the dialectical push and pull of globalization as it was experienced in Taiwan in the 1970s. The poem: Tonight, you again left your bra In the girl s dorm of the English department You arrived with a fiery western song On your lips Your breasts bouncing inside your T-shirt, keeping time It looked as if They were struggling to jump out Tonight, as you bent over to pick up a copy of the Book of Rites you had dropped on the floor Your breasts looked out at me from Your wide, generous collar And the Book of Rites looked up at your breasts At that moment I quickly used 5,000 years of morality To resist two hundred years of America Displayed by your body I admit your thought and behavior Have all become American Your dyed hair matches the color of your skin Even Confucius would have to nod his head In acknowledgement But your breasts, released from their bra Are still Chinese Classical They must feel Translation Review Bad, the way small American papayas do When they don t get enough water If you must flaunt your breasts tonight Then I, a student in the Chinese department Know of a breast far bigger than yours My 5,000 years of Chinese literature is a volup tuous breast Are you aware of that? ??????????????? ???????????????? ????????????? ????? ????????? ??????????????? ??????????????? ?????????? ??? ????????? ??????????? ?????????? ?????? ??????????? ???????????? ??????????? ????? ??? ?????? ??????????? ???????????? ???????????? ????? ?????????????????? ????? Du Ye s poem Americanized Breasts was included in his collection of love poems titled Glove and Love ( ), published in 1980. The poem is an excellent statement of the dilemmas facing Taiwan s third generation of poets: the conflicts between the traditional and the modern, the Chinese and the western, and one generation s artistic identity vis- -vis another s. The very odd collocation of the adjectival Americanized (??? ) and breasts (?? ) in the title would have been quite provocative for any reader of the poem when it first appeared. But the violence done to the language through this novel collocation is Translation Review itself deeply indicative of the problems confronting the third generation of Taiwan poets. The nexus of conflict is neatly represented in the relationship between the speaker, a male college student in the Chinese department, and his girlfriend, an English major who is au courant when it comes to all the latest fashions from America. We learn that she is studying English (indicating that she is smart and did well on her college entrance exams and that she is in a department lots of people want to enter but for which few are chosen), sings western songs, dyes her hair, and, most significantly, she doesn t wear a bra. All of these characteristics are decidedly un-Chinese. In fact, the male speaker acknowledges that her thought and behavior have all become American. The male speaker of the poem, by contrast, is in the Chinese department (indicating that he didn t have to do very well on entrance exams), and the possessor, protector, and purveyor of a traditional sense of morality and culture. In general, he comes across as quite dull by comparison to the young lady. For the speaker of the poem, the girl is unquestionably a vibrant young woman. Her apparent rejection of things Chinese and things traditional seems to both intrigue and upset him. She embodies all the latest fads and fashions and all the changes taking place in Taiwan. But still he still finds her to be classically Chinese; it is just the packaging (or lack thereof) that has changed. In other words, there appears to be an artificial, if not imposed, domination of what is American over what is naturally Chinese. In this regard, the young woman can be said to represent the latest poetry of Taiwan, which was heavily influenced by Anglo-American modernism the poetry written by Taiwan s second generation. However, the young man, who can be said to symbolize Taiwan s third generation of poets, insists upon looking elsewhere for his muse and literary inspiration: to his 5,000 years of Chinese literary tradition. He compares that tradition to a voluptuous and colossal breast that provides him with nutritive sustenance, and he seems to console himself with the thought that the breast of tradition is bigger than what his girlfriend has to offer. He rejects the contemporary, which he considers superficial and foreign, opting for the classical. But although Du Ye s poem seems to pinpoint the conflict in a cleverly symbolic way, it is also generated by that very conflict. If we take a closer look at the breast analogy, we find it somewhat troubling. The solitary breast has been excised and isolated from the organic whole of the feminine body. We must ask ourselves how a breast detached from the living organism can provide nourishment of any kind? It cannot. The idea is monstrous, an impossible abstraction. Thus, we can say that traditional culture has become nothing more than a 11 collection of lifeless fragments and artifacts. The actual living culture, represented by the speaker s girlfriend, is a hybrid culture of sorts, a global cultural configuration, a combination of East and West. Cultural displacement is a preoccupation of Du Ye s. Culture and language can be conceived of as organic wholes, but not impervious to external influence. Du Ye takes great delight in examining the effects of globalization (Americanization) on Chinese culture. Another of his poems on this theme is Universal Love, Not War ( ). I was studying the philosophy of universal love And putting it into practice Peaches stood at the border of my heart Crying so that Mo Tzu was helpless She accused Orchid of snatching her territory Of stealing my heart Orchid scratched Peaches Later Little Plum joined The fray In my tiny heart They created A Warring States period of love Together they destroyed Mo Tzu s system I seemed to hear Mo Tzu in a sweat, shouting: Not war, not war ????????? ???????? ???????????? ???????? ???????????? ?????? ????????????? ???????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ???? ?????????????? ????? ???????? ???? Ostensibly this is yet another love poem by Du Ye, 12 but this text, like the previous poem, also deals with cultural conflict. The key to appreciating this poem is being aware of a misreading of Chinese tradition by the speaker, more specifically in being attuned to a semantic displacement of the poetic sign universal love ( ). The doctrine of universal love was advocated by the philosopher Mo Tzu (?? ) (fl. 479—438 B.C.). The doctrine perhaps is most closely akin to the Christian golden rule of love thy neighbor. The semantic displacement to which I have referred first rears its head in the juxtaposition of the title of the poem with the narrated content of the poem. The title of the poem, ???? , is composed of the titles of two books of the Mo Tzu text: book four, titled universal love and book five, titled against [offensive] war. Therefore, the reader comes to the text with the expectation of encountering something related to Mo Tzu s doctrines, and perhaps something dry and classical. However, the reader soon finds that something is amiss. The semantic displacement that generates the text is apparent almost immediately. The speaker tells us that he has been studying Mo Tzu s theories as well as putting them into practice. But this simple assertion devolves into a conflict between several of his lady friends. Clearly the speaker has confused Mo Tzu s notion of universal love with the more recent notion from the West of free love. For anyone who lived through the Vietnam era, the title immediately suggests the popular phrase: make love, not war as well as the entire free-love ethos of the period. Once again, we see a juxtaposition of the Chinese with the western. The semantic displacement gives rise to the speaker s predicament as well as to the irony in the text. The words of a philosopher from the Warring States period (475-222 B.C.) are reinterpreted through a filter of contemporary western notions imported to Taiwan. For the speaker, Chinese tradition is more foreign and more removed from his existence than contemporary western ideas. Humorous as the speaker s situation appears, it belies the vast gap that separates him from his own cultural traditions. If, as this poem suggests, Du Ye takes this gap as axiomatic for contemporary culture, what does it mean for the third-generation poet in his or her attempts to return to tradition as a means to rescue Chinese culture and pull it back from the brink of total westernization? Clearly, given the situation of the speaker, the prospects are not encouraging. How have some third-generation poets adapted aspects of tradition? Wu Sheng ( ? ? ) (b. 1944) was Translation Review born in rural Xizhou in Zhanghua county, west-central Taiwan. He grew up on a farm and attended Pingdong Agricultural college, majoring in animal husbandry. Upon graduation, he returned home to work the family farm and to teach biology in the Xizhou Middle School. He is perhaps the best known exponent of nativism dealing with rural themes in literature in Taiwan. His poem Rainy Season (?? ) is a good example of this sort of writing: Have a smoke Have a drink Damn this miserable weather Shoot the bull Flirtin with somebody else s girl Damn this miserable day Bitch and grumble Figure your pay and what things cost Damn this miserable life When it ought to rain it don t When it ain t supposed to It rains without lettin up Does as it pleases Pourin down rain Damn, just gotta go on livin ???? ????? ?? — ???? ????? ?????????? ?? — ???? ???????? ?????????? ?? — ???? ????, ??? ???????? ??????????? ?? — ?????? There are several things that are immediately apparent with even a cursory glance at Wu Sheng s poem: it is Translation Review written in the local Southern Min dialect; the diction is colloquial and of a very low register; and repetitive patterns of phonetic reduplicatives occur throughout: line one: chou chou; line two: he he; line four: kaijiang kaijiang; line five: dou dou; line seven: fa fa, ma ma; line eight: pansuan pansuan; line eleven: pian pian, as well as the refrain at the end of each stanza, yi niang, which I have rendered simply as damn, but which literally means something more like yo mama. The phonetic repetition within the poem mirrors the tedium of a rainy day. But, given the surface simplicity and the low-register diction, the reader will ask, is this a poem? Within the larger context of Chinese literary history, the answer is an unqualified yes. If we look at Wu Sheng s poem in terms of the Chinese literary tradition of rural poetry (? ??) and poems by, say, a famous poet like Tao Qian (? ?) (365-427), the poem takes on a deeper significance. Tao Qian is the archetypal rural poet and the father of the genre. His famous sequence, Returning to the Farm ( ?????? ) is a measure of his artistry. Here is the first poem of the sequence: I ve always been out of step with the world It s always been my nature to love the hills and mountains. By mistake, I fell into the world s snares, I left and stayed away for thirteen years. Birds long for their old woods, The pond fish thinks of the deep water of old. I opened fields in the south, A bungler, I ve returned to the farm. My farm is a little more than ten mu in size I have a thatched roof over my head. Elm and willow trees shade the back, Peach and plum grow in front of the house. Far off in the distance is the village, Smoke drifting from kitchen fires. A dog barks in the lanes, A cock crows from the mulberry tree. No dust or clutter here, There s plenty of leisure in my empty rooms. After being caged for so long, I have returned to nature. ?????, ?????. ?????, ?????. ?????, 13 ?????. ?????, ?????. ?????, ?????. ?????, ?????. ?????, ?????. ?????, ?????. ?????, ?????. poem in two quintets as his favored form. His 1976 poem Little Station ( ? ?) is a good example: ?????, ?????. ???????? ?????????? ???????, ?? ???????????? ???, ??? The reader will notice the formal regularity of Tao Qian s poem; also that he is very conscious about creating a literary persona. The speakers in his poems, this one included, tell us how to interpret their motives and thoughts and their way of life. He presents us with an idealized image of himself. Generally, his speakers are educated, world-weary souls who have returned to the countryside to live a life of simplicity away from the corrupting distractions of the court. Tao Qian set the standards for this type of poem. Wu Sheng is no less a conscious artist than Tao Qian. He too provides us with a slice of life, albeit minus the idealization. What Wu Sheng gives us is unmistakably 20th-century rural Taiwan, embodied in the diction of the day. His is a realistic portrait, very consciously created out of words. His persona is a simple farmer, but one who lives the boredom and the difficulties of rural life in contemporary Taiwan. In other words, Wu Sheng s poem can be read as the latest variation on a very old literary tradition. Another poet of Taiwan s third generation who looked to tradition for inspiration is Xiang Yang ( ?? ) (b. 1955). Xiang Yang was born Lin Chi-yang in Nantou, central Taiwan. He attended the Chinese Culture University, where he majored in Japanese. After graduation, he worked as a journalist. As a young poet, he too grew dissatisfied with what he perceived to be the excessive westernization of modern poetry. He decided that one of the things missing from contemporary poetry was the sense of form that is so strongly associated with the classical tradition. In 1974, he embarked upon a series of formalistic experiments before deciding upon a 10-line 14 Isn t it like last autumn Standing timidly in the deep gloom Under the golden gingko grove of home Soaked in rain That small red flower? Away from home this spring, from the train at dusk I see an egret Flap its ash-white wings Soar among crimson clouds And disappear! ??????????? ??: ???? ???????? ???????, ?? ??! In the first quintet, the speaker recalls his home, specifically, a small, solitary red flower seen the previous autumn. In the second quintet, the focus changes to what the speaker is seeing now from a train window the following spring. Between time remembered and time present, the speaker has left home. Now, sitting in a train, he sees an egret take flight. Here, the egret can stand as an expression or objective correlative of the speaker s own feelings of aloneness in the vast world. Structurally, this poem follows the traditional thematic progression of a classical poem as outlined by Yuan dynasty scholars for discussing Tang dynasty regulated verse. This partitions the poem into four parts qi ( ? ), cheng ( ?), zhuan (? ), and he ( ? ), or beginning, development, turn, and conclusion. The poem begins with the vast and, as it develops, narrows down to focus upon the little red flower, giving the reader a sense of insignificance in the presence of the vastness of the universe. The second quintet initiates a turn in this case, a change in time and place. The poem concludes by fusing time present and time past and the small flower and the egret as manifestations of the mood of the speaker. In his 10-line poems, Xiang Yang frequently resorts Translation Review to the three traditional compositional techniques that developed out of the exegesis of the Book of Songs, China s first poetry anthology: fu (? ), or narrative display; bi (? ), or metaphor, and xing ( ? ), or motif. In the poem quoted above, the motifs of flower and egret can stand as the correlatives to the speaker s own mood. And much like a traditional nature poem, the speaker s experience is manifested in an inherent antithetical structure in which for a particular scene there must be a subjective consciousness to respond to it.2 Thus, although Xiang Yang uses the modern vernacular in his poetry, his verse tends to obey many of the rules of classical poetry. Another poet of note is Luo Qing (?? ) (b. 1948). Luo Qing was born Luo Qing-zhe in Shandong province and moved to Taiwan with his parents in 1949. His initial art interest was painting, not poetry. It wasn t until he attended Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan as an English major that he really began writing verse. As a teenager, he studied Chinese painting with a series of teachers, and some critics like to point out that the highly visual nature of his writing perhaps stems from his interest in painting. Luo Qing is both a poet and a painter, and he has integrated both arts within the tradition of literati painting.3 Aside from his integration of painting and poetry along traditional lines, Luo Qing adopted other aspects of tradition for structuring his poems, including some of the formal aspects used by Xiang Yang, mentioned above. He also used traditional forms of Chinese word games to structure poems. A good example is his poem Writing the Character Tree ( ?? ?? ), which was published in 1971: Raising a ruckus, arguing, my younger brother and sister Ran up to me and asked: How do you write the character tree ? How many strokes? How many strokes? Is it hard? Is it hard? Looking at my younger sister s little round mouth In her round face I arranged her shining pigtails beside her mouth I took the wooden pencil that was handed to me Thinking I d say: First let s find a piece of good wood Carefully saw and sand it inch by inch Translation Review Cut it square, sand smooth Build a small village Don t forget to sprinkle ten cute little beans In the middle I patted my younger brother s chubby little legs Stroked his black hair Looked into his big, bright eyes Thinking I d say: One straight stroke But then I thought I d say: Ten thousand that way And then I d say: A big round dot will be fine I thought and thought, finally I looked in the textbook on the desk I looked and looked, finally I carefully wrote the character tree I said: It s easy, it s easy Just write it slowly and patiently, stroke by stroke Like writing the characters for little brother and little sister Sixteen strokes altogether ???????? ??????: ????, ???? ??? ???? ???? ?????????????? ????????????? ???????????? ??, ?????? ????, ???????? ??????, ?????? ????????? ????, ?????? . ???????? ?????????? ????????? ??????????????? ??, ????? ???, ????? ???, ????? ?? ????, ?? ???????????? ????, ?? ??????, ??? ????? 15 ?: ???? ???????????? ??????????? ??, ???????? Upon first glance, portions of the translated poem may look somewhat like nonsense verse. The organizing principle of this poem is the classical chaizige ( ??? ), or dissected character verse in which a poem is written by dissecting and combining characters in a poem. This is related to chaizifa ( ?? ? ), or the same process used in creating riddles, including lantern riddles. The origin of this tradition probably goes back to archaic glyphomancy, cezi (? ? ). A simple example of this sort of riddle would be: ???? , liang xiao liang xiao, ???? . toushang zhang cao. tribute to the meaning. Such features are often untranslatable but necessary adjuncts to a full understanding of a text. How then is the reader of a translation who has no knowledge or a minimal knowledge of the source-language culture to understand these features? The most obvious approach would be the addition of commentary, as I have attempted to provide in this article. Remarks explaining a poem certainly can detract from the reading experience, but they can also add to that experience. For a translator, such notes can stand as honest and humbling testimony to what she or he has lost in the process of translation. NOTES Anthony Giddens The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press: 1990, pp. 63-78. 2Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World. Madison: University of Wisconsin P, 1985, p. 15. 3See Joseph Roe Allen III, Lo Ch ing s Poetics of Integration: New Configurations of the Literati Tradition, in Modern Chinese Literature, vol 2 no 2 (Fall 1986), pp. 143-169. 1See Literally: two small, two small/grass growing on [its] head. To solve the riddle, one would combine the character for two (? ) with the character for small ( ? ) to produce the character?, which would be done twice: ?? . Finally, a grass radical ( ? ) would be added above the glyph to produce ( ? ), or the character for garlic, the solution to the riddle. In Luo Qing s poem, the same principle is operative. In this poem, an older brother teaches his younger brother and sister how to write the character tree (? ). This involves telling a story about writing the character using the various components of the word. The speaker tells them that they have to find a piece of good wood (? ), which they will cut and sand, inch by inch (? ). After the wood is ready, they will build a village ? and in the middle of the village they will plant ten (? ) beans ( ? ). At the end of the poem, the speaker reminds them that writing the character tree is the requires the same number of strokes as writing younger brother ( ? ? ) and younger sister ( ? ? ), a total of 16. This poem is cleverly built around the process of writing Chinese characters. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that understanding a poem can go far beyond the words that make up the text, that extralinguistic features such as formal qualities and the larger cultural context also con- 16 Translation Review TRANSLATING AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS: AMBIVALENT FIGURES IN A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY POLISH RESURRECTION PLAY By Rob Sulewski F or a number of years now, many scholars of translation studies have been decreasingly interested in the evaluation of translations. Instead, translations are viewed rather as subject to different extraliterary contextual factors. To this way of thinking, different translations privilege, and therefore preserve in the translation, different properties and meanings at the expense of others. A correct translation ceases to be a real possibility, in this light. (Parenthetically, the questions remain as to whether or not translators do indeed privilege the aspects they intend to privilege, and how well they do so, but these are questions for another occasion.) Exactly what aspects are privileged and preserved in a translation is generally determined by, as Mary SnellHornby puts it, a web of relationships, the importance of individual items being decided by their relevance in the larger context of text, situation, and culture. 1 Translation thus conceived is embedded in several systems: linguistic, to be sure, but literary, historical, and cultural as well. This line of inquiry has been to take the manipulation overt manipulation of literature via translation not as something odious, but rather as inevitable and simply necessitated by the act of translation itself.2 Such manipulation of literature (and this is even the title of Hermans collection of essays on the topic) can be fruitfully considered as integrally related to and determined by how the translation functions in the target language and indeed target culture itself.3 The original text has a particular function in its original language of course this may involve, for example, didacticism or proselytism and may or may not be changed in the target culture and language. The translation reflects this difference when it exists. But even if the function of the text is similar in both languages, changes are still likely because of the historical changes that have taken place in the interim. Viewed from the standpoint of translation, we may see medieval European mystery plays as translations of their respective Biblical texts on at least three different levels: linguistically (Latin to the vernaculars), generically from the literary standpoint (narrative to drama), and historicoculturally (ancient Palestine to medieval Western Europe). Now, there is a pervasive anachronism in medieval Translation Review European mystery plays, in that we are presented with a cultural image of moral and social life in the Middle Ages, even though these are Biblical stories being portrayed. V. A. Kolve4 has described these portrayals as the past played as an image of present time. The enterprise of incorporating the anachronistic has as its goal the reinforcement if not basic education in the religious stories and dogmata of the medieval church. Rosemary Woolf5 has noted that medieval plays were defended by their contemporaries precisely on such didactic grounds. They were linguistic translations to the vernaculars for that purpose. They were books for the unlearned, but more than that: dramatic images can often be more easily recalled to memory and possess a stronger emotive power than narrative alone. Part of the reason for the difference is that drama is enacted live by people (a strength not lost on medieval preachers), but it also is because of the kinds of details selected for portrayal in the plays. Meg Twycross6 notes that these are typically homely details selected to produce the fullest emotional response possible. Like the original Biblical texts, therefore, these plays are meant to proselytize. The problem is that some details in the original Biblical narratives from which the plays are constructed are not very homely at all, but alien to the target culture. What medieval person knows what a procurator is? And how to portray his guards? To achieve a didactic goal for that new target audience, you have to translate and indeed manipulate some of these details into things more recognizable, more local. And pace Nabokov; you cannot use footnotes on stage or distribute programs to the medieval peasants in the audience. Thus, the translated procurator becomes a different kind of local government official, and the guards become European soldiers in these plays. Such is the case of the Historyja o chwalebnym Zmartwychwstaniu Pańskim (The History of the Glorious Resurrection of the Lord), a play based on the Gospel narratives from the stationing of the guards to the appearances of Jesus after the Resurrection. This play is unique and has an important place in early Polish literature, although it remains virtually unknown outside of Poland. It is the only known mystery play written in 17 Polish that would take less than one day to perform and the first Polish play to contain stage directions. Although other, earlier Resurrection plays were probably written in Poland, the Historyja is also the earliest play of the Resurrection to survive intact in the Polish language. Poet and literary historian Czesław Miłosz believes it was undoubtedly... the best of the mystery plays in Polish. Miłosz7 praises its construction and what he calls its conciseness and realistic vigor. Its most recent editor, Jan Okoń,8 praises this lively play as equal to the achievements of its Western European counterparts. This is a unique play in other ways. We know its putative author: Mikołaj z Wilkowiecka, a monk of the Jasna G ra monastery at Częstochowa, and significantly, a native of the peasant villages not far from the monastery. The play was written at a comparatively late date, between roughly 1570 and 1580, and for our present purposes, we note that the author himself informs us in his prologue that he intends his play to instruct us (proselytize) in what he calls the true history (ista prawie historyją , line 59) of the Resurrection, illustrate the way it is (tak jest, line 106) in his 16th-century world, for our amusement (ku naszemu pocieszeniu, line 62). These intended functions would seem to be at odds: how can this text claim both a versimilitude to 16th-century Poland and Biblical fidelity? Mikołaj z Wilkowiecka negotiates these claims via his act of translating the Biblical story to a 16th-century Polish context, linguistically, of course, but also culturally. Any cultural modification or manipulation in the text changes the play, of course. The situation is perhaps most interesting, however, where these modifications occur at places where the original text is ambivalent; that is, where elements in the text seem both to assert and to contradict the ideology or theology in the text more generally. Here, I examine the cultural implications of that kind of manipulation of characters who are ambivalent from the standpoint of the 16th-century Church. Reading Ambivalent Figures in 16th-Century Poland Pilate is one such ambivalent figure in the Gospel narratives, in which while presiding over Jesus trial, he nevertheless tries (however ineffectively) to set him free. This ambivalence is reflected in the European medieval mystery plays, in which he is sometimes portrayed as a rather sympathetic figure and other times as a less savory one. Here are some examples.9 In the York cycle (viz., the Dream of Pilate’s Wife), he actually seeks justice for 18 Jesus. His relation to the guards is one of a supportive commander in Chester and Wakefield, at least initially, and in the liturgical dramas from Tours (the 13th-century Ludus paschalis) and Klosterneuberg (the 13th-century Ordo paschalis), in which he endorses their abilities before they are stationed at the tomb. He expresses remorse for Jesus execution in the Italian Rappresentazione della rezurrezione of the 16th century. Yet in many instances, often in the same plays, he is not a consistently benevolent figure. In York, N-Town, and Wakefield, all English cycles, Pilate assigns the commission of the guards but threatens them with death should they fail to guard the tomb adequately. In Chester, he rages at the report of the soldiers after the Resurrection, threatening yet again to kill them. He also orchestrates the bribery of the soldiers to keep their silence about the Resurrection in this play. In all the English cycle plays, he is the one asking the high priests for advice in the context of the play not what we would call the consultants of choice regarding the report of the guards. He is often a worried figure, especially in the 15th-century French Gr ban Passion, at the news of the Resurrection. It is the portents surrounding the crucifixion that scare him in the Chester cycle. In Christ’s Resurrection, an early 16th-century English Protestant play, Pilate chastises the high priests for not thinking of guarding the tomb earlier than they do, but then fearing an insurrection (although not a resurrection), agrees to post the soldiers. Sometimes Pilate s ambivalence is manifested in other ways. His name appears in the Christmas Christigeburtspiel from Oberufer, but in this case, he is a priest whom Herod consults regarding the report of the three kings. (Significantly, the other priests in this play are called Jonas and Caiaphas, again reflecting a certain ambivalence.) Faced with Pilate s ambivalence, some medieval playwrights even reduced his role. In a few instances, Pilate s role in the Resurrection plays is very small. In the French 15th-century Semur and 14th-century Palatinus Passions, Pilate does not deal at all with the guards, but tells the Pharisees to do as they think best. In the Passion from Auvergne (possibly 15th century), Pilate has no hand at all in the commission of the guards. In the Historyja, Pilate s portrayal is very much like that of Matthew 27:65, where he simply presents his guards (and does so by name here in the play) and tells the Pharisees to do as they think best. In the Biblical narrative, we recall that Pilate is a Roman procurator, an official appointed by a distant, coercive, foreign authority. Linguistically, he does not Translation Review seem to need a translator to address any of the native inhabitants, but nonetheless his questioning of Jesus establishes his difference, at least ethnically and religiously, from Jesus and his accusers. This status has been translated culturally and historically in the Historyja. First of all, Pilate is not a procurator, but a starosta. The starostowie were officials appointed by the Polish king to secure his interests on the local level, frequently in the face of opposition from the local nobility.10 (The struggle of local authority against the encroaching central royal power was, of course, a common feature of Western Europe as well during this period.) Like the Biblical Pilate, the Pilate of the Historyja is an official appointed by a distant, coercive authority. But this latter Pilate is also not a foreigner: not ethnically, and certainly not linguistically either. Yet the association of what was a foreign representative in the original text with the starosta underscores the ambivalence of Pilate, and indeed of the starostowie in general: they are both Polish and also foreign. In addition, however, the antagonism between the nobility and the crown was also religious: the 16th-century kings Zygmunt I (ruled 1506—1548) and ZygmuntAugust (Zygmunt II, ruled 1548—1572) were Catholic and remained so, in contrast to many of the nobles, who quickly turned toward Calvinist doctrine during the middle years of the 16th century. To counter the power of the nobility, the king made grants of huge estates to his starostowie, making them as influential as any member of the traditional, noble magnate class.11 The success or failure of the Reformation in specific Polish towns was dependent on the starosta who influenced that town s affairs. But to call Pilate a starosta is also to make him an antagonist to Protestant consensus. He is thus on the right side of Trent, despite his role in the crucifixion, and he lives right on the ethnic border: both Polish and non-Polish. Pilate is not the only ambivalent figure to be translated in this way in the Historyja. The soldiers are, too. But whereas Pilate does have at least a few lines in the Gospel narratives, the soldiers have none. Yet, as we shall see, it is largely in their language that the translation the cultural manipulation of the first-century soldiers becomes apparent. As in the case of Pilate, the soldiers are portrayed in a variety of ways in the mystery plays. Sometimes there is no dialogue from the soldiers at the tomb, as in the Italian Rappresentazione, in the Tours play, the Chester cycle, and the Auvergne Passion. When the soldiers do speak, sometimes they are serious. In the Semur Passion Translation Review they are all business at the tomb, stalwart in their intention to do their duty. Sometimes they have other things to say, as in Christ’s Resurrection, in which they talk about how crazy the High Priests must be to think Jesus could rise from the dead. Frequently, however, the plays portray the soldiers in starkly humorous ways. Their bluster consists of oaths (to Mohammed) in Palatinus, N-Town, and Wakefield and threats to hypothetical foes (as in Palatinus, Gr ban, and York). Gr ban has the soldiers try to impute fear to one another. In the original Biblical texts, the soldiers are apparently Roman (and therefore foreign) and apparently credible and serious as soldiers. As we have seen, however, the absence of Biblical dialogue occasioned a fair amount of creativity in devising personalities and personal histories for the soldiers in medieval drama. The Historyja is no exception. Here they are Pilate s own guards he calls them all by name and thus already ambivalent by their association with him. In analyzing the linguistically ambivalent position of the guards, we note that they do speak Polish for much of the dialogue. They also sing a hejnał known from another Polish source during their watch at the tomb. (The hejnał was a call to arms, perhaps most familiar to tourists to modern-day Krak w, where it is still played hourly to commemorate a legendary trumpeter slain by a Tartar arrow in the 12th century.) As early a drama as Klosterneuberg also has the soldiers sing stanzaic verses at the tomb, but the use of the hejnał per se is unique and reinforces the identity of the Polish soldiers as such. But the soldiers are not linguistically purely Polish, either. Just as Pilate represents an ambivalent political position reflecting the status of the Polish starosta, so the soldiers reflect the ambivalent status of the 16th-century Polish army. The constitution of the army at the time was largely a consequence of the unusual status of the monarchy. The Polish monarchy was elective, and until the accession of Zygmunt-August, it was also hereditary, with the candidate confirmed by the Senate on the death of his predecessor. At the end of the 15th century, the king was invested with supreme executive power, including the shaping of internal and foreign policy, command of the army, supreme jurisdiction of law, nominations of officials, and the summoning of the Sejm (including the establishing of agenda and the concluding of debates).12 Poland was far from being an absolute monarchy, however, and the king was relatively weak by Western standards. Lacking a regular army, for example, the king at times had to rely on mercenary troops. These troops were 19 obtained largely from neighboring territories that were not ethnically Polish. Now, the soldiers in the Historyja are objects of laughter because of their defects: bombast, cowardice, and foreignness. Posted at the tomb, their speech is colloquial: line 1.84: Wierz mi, ż e by rzadu doszedł! ; Believe me, I ll straighten him out! for example, and consists of a series of bombastic claims and threats against notably weaker adversaries. For example,13 TEORON And you, Peter, with the bald head, Watch out, or I ll tear your gray beard out. Watch it, so you don t get the club! (lines 1.97—99) or, PHILEMON And you, charlatan, laying in the tomb, Keep quiet in there! (HE lifts his battle ax.) So you don t get an ax in your head! (lines 1.105—107) Notice whom they are threatening: old men and a corpse: hardly a danger to armed soldiers. But these soldiers are also humorous because of their peculiar language. Much of what they say is Polish, as I have mentioned, but some of it is not. To Polish ears the foreign words they say are nonsense. The use of nonsense words to portray otherness is fairly common, of course. Plutus and Nimrod both speak Italian nonsense in Dante s Inferno, (Inferno, VII.1, and XXXI.67), and Jews are often given nonsense to say in medieval Passion plays, as, for example, in the 1488 Semur Passion, lines 3125—3126, 3250—3253, 5682—5684, and 5843—5848. However, the language of the soldiers is also humorous, because although their strange words are meaningless in Polish (uram gazda [3.5], hej, beszcie [3.8], pro boha [3.11], and wos ist dos [3.23], for example), they nonetheless consist of sounds common in the Polish language. The result is that they are very amusing in the original language in a way hard to convey in English. Here foreignness i.e., non-Polishness is therefore equated with the ridiculous. 20 We have therefore an especially pronounced difference here. The soldiers are hires of the high priests, and as such in the play are on the wrong side of history. They are also on the wrong side of the linguistic border for the play s first audience. Not only do they speak other languages besides Polish, their language also sounds funny to that audience. They are ridiculous, in fact, in great measure because they are not Polish. Pilate, in contrast, is never laughed at. Indeed, for the Historyja’s first audience, he speaks our language. In both cases, Pilate and the soldiers, the figures have undergone a kind of manipulation to satisfy the didactic purpose of the play. It simply would not do to present a procurator to the largely peasant audience, and making the soldiers into the kinds of soldiers that audience would be used to helps to bridge the cultural gap as well. But these changes allow, for example, a contemporary reading of the starosta as a semiforeign official of a distant, often coercive force and the soldiers (and not just Pilate s) as ridiculous precisely because they are linguistically foreign. When we read these figures in this way, we do so as the original audience, the 16th-century Polish peasantry, very likely did. Rendering the Historyja for a Contemporary Audience The translator of the Historyja into modern English faces challenges of his own. Of course, the translator is still confronted with problems associated with the audience. In my own translation of the Historyja, I conceived of the translation from the outset as a text to be performed. Susan Bassnett-McGuire insists quite correctly that the written and performed texts are coexistent and inseparable. The translator must treat the written text that is part of a larger complex of sign systems, involving paralinguistic and kinesic features, as if it were a literary text, created solely for the page, to be read off that page. 14 It is, of course, important to conceive of the translation this way, no matter what kind of play one has, but some guidelines are more useful in this regard than others. Bassnett-McGuire seems skeptical about the concept of performability, but she includes some criteria regarding translation that have less to do with acting and more to do with reception.15 Substituting regional accents in the S[ource] L[anguage] with regional accents in the T[arget] L[anguage] and omitting passages deemed to be too closely bound to the S[ource] L[anguage] cultural and linguistic context may help the audience approximate the original sense of the original, Translation Review but it has nothing to do with performability (lightening the demands on the actor). Yet her concern about performance is extremely valid. Actors know that some performance texts in the original language are in fact more difficult to memorize and to speak than others. Audiences and readers may delight in the language of As You Like It and The Taming of the Shrew and find no appreciable difference in the difficulty of the texts, but whether because of the more counterintuitive syntax or for other reasons, Shrew is harder to memorize and perform. In some plays, passages are also challenging from the standpoint of pronunciation. American actors who play Andy in Harold Pinter s Moonlight with a British accent sometimes find difficulty with the line, I saw her, I heard her order for you. (Pinter s experience as an actor doubtless makes him more apt to minimize these kinds of problems.) Perhaps the best guideline in this regard for translators comes from Phyllis Zatlin,16 who recommends translators to inwardly hear the various voices in a play. This hearing is made easier if one is used to that process as a director or actor: this kind of inner hearing is a necessary first step in approaching a new text in order to conceptualize a prospective production or work on an unfamiliar character. I stress that stage experience is not essential to the translation process, but it helps. Many problems of translation involve the difficult 16th-century Polish idiom, with linguistic idiosyncrasies so unusual as to confuse modern native speakers of Polish.17 First, the original Polish is in verse consisting of eight-syllable lines in rhyming couplets, typically with no enjambment. After several attempts to preserve a form similar to the original, my final rendering chose to privilege the sense of the line and approximate sentence order over the verse-form. Retaining the sense of the lines also had the effect of retaining the brevity of the sentences, and therefore some of the liveliness of the original. But even once the sense of the language is ascertained, translating a 16th-century mystery play also presents the unique problem of how to render that sense. The play often consists of expansions and paraphrases of the Biblical source-texts in archaic Polish vocabulary and phrases. To preserve the sense as a modern Polish audience would encounter the original would mean translating the archaic Polish into archaic English. My goal was rather to render the text as its original audience would have understood it. There is a danger here, however. Rendering such a text into a readily understandable, even colloquial English paradoxically makes the Biblical sto- Translation Review ries sound satirized. This effect is amplified as the translation becomes more colloquial. Consequently, whereas a translation of a modern Polish play (for example, Polish playwright Sławomir Mrożek) may use a very colloquial idiom in the target language with felicity, such an idiom introduces an element of humor that works against a medieval mystery play and makes it into a lampoon of the original. Hence, to allow it to operate on its own terms, a translation of a mystery play into modern English must possess some degree of formality. To some extent, this means that the translated play is somewhat more formal in tone and expression than the original. Still, I was able to retain some of the liveliness of the original (again, largely by retaining the brevity of the original sentences). I reproduce below two examples related to the ambivalent figures I brought up earlier to illustrate how I dealt with the more prominent problems of translation here, namely, those related to register, foreign terms, and humor in the original. The first example is from Part 1 of the play, where the high priests approach Pilate with a request for guards at the tomb. Annas speaks first. The original Polish reads thus: Pokłona nasza starosćie, Najwyższemu w tym tu mieście, Piłatowi ślachetnemu, A nam panu łaskawemu, Danemu z państwa rzymskiego, Do tego miasta sławnego. 5 Pilate grants the clergymen an audience, and Caiaphas comes directly to the point. Łaskawy panie starosta, Rządzicielu tego miasta. Ja, Kaifasz, i z Annaszem, Z tym drugim Faryzeuszem, Tochmy sobie dziś spomnieli, Cochmy przedtym słychawali, Iż więc on zwodziciel m wił, Gdy sięmiędzy ludźmi bawił, Jeszcze za swego żywota, Pierwej, niż zszedł z tego świata: Po trzech dniach z martwych powstane I zasiękr lować będę. O t ż go już z krzyż a zjęto, Iż jutro zachodzi święto; 10 15 20 21 W ogrodzie w grobie włoż ono I kamieniem założ ono. The directness of the speech (Jesus is not mentioned at all by name) gives the impression, and correctly so, of a prior conversation continued here. As he does so typically in the play, the playwright expands the passage from the Gospels (in this case, Matthew), adding a few points of his own: for example, the implication that Jesus is now in another world, which does not occur at all in the Biblical account, and the implication of the existence of paradise to which Jesus will send the Patriarchs at the end of Part 4. Annas next speech further places the dialogue as before the stationing of the guards. Przeto was barzo prosimy I odsługować będziemy, Każ Waszmość strzec grobu jego, Aż e do dnia do trzeciego, By snadź jego zwolennicy I też inszy weń wierzący Na gr b gwałtem nie przypadli, Ciała jego nie ukradli, A ludziom by powiadali I tak wszędy rozsławiali, Iż mocą swoją zmartwychwstał, Jako więc przedtem powiadał. 25 30 Pilate s response is prosaic. Wszytko u mnie otrzymacie, O co tu teraz ż ądacie. A to macie me ż ołnierze, Z kt rych bedziecie mieć str że... Pilate then introduces his soldiers. The relevant passage in Matthew 27:64 simply asks for the tomb to be secured (custodiri), but in the Polish version the request is a more specific one for guards. Annas also makes the request urgently, addressing Pilate with the noble Waszmość. This is a contraction of Wasza Miłość, a term used to address the nobility of the period.18 The rationale of Annas follows Matthew closely, in that both mention the scenario of Jesus followers stealing the body and then lying about it. But there are other circumstances mentioned here that expand the Gospel narrative: for example, the theft is ascribed to other followers of Jesus, in addition to the disciples (line 1.28). Even to those unfamiliar with Polish, the brevity and 22 lack of enjambment in the Polish lines should be obvious in these passages. Those familiar with the language will also attest to the liveliness and the opaqueness of the archaic idiom. My goals, as I mentioned before, were to preserve that liveliness and approximate sentence order at the expense of the rhyme and meter and to produce a neutral if somewhat formal English translation. Here is my rendering of the passages above: CAIAPHAS Gracious lord starosta, Governor of this city. I, Caiaphas, with Annas, And this other Pharisee, Remembered today What we heard before: What that charlatan used to say When he was still among the people During his lifetime, Before he left this world: After three days I will rise from the dead And then I will be king. Since a holiday is coming tomorrow, He has been taken from the cross, Placed in a tomb And sealed inside with a stone. 10 15 20 ANNAS So we urgently ask you, your lordship, And we will pay for this: Give the order to guard his tomb Until the third day, So that his disciples Or those other believers of his Don t get into the tomb by force, Steal his body, Then talk to the people And spread it around everywhere That he rose by his own power, Just as he said he would. 25 30 PILATE You ll get everything You ask for. Here are my soldiers, They ll be your guards... 50 Translation Review First of all, the formality of the speech preserves the sense of each line of the original, but it also prevents too colloquial a rendering. One could easily imagine the conniving Annas lines rendered in a very informal way that would make him sound too much like a humorous parody of a stock gangster character, promising money to get to the guards posted. This kind of anachronistic humor is not in the original and would work against the kind of humor that is deliberately evolved in other sections of the play, such as that of the guards themselves, about which shortly. This formality also helps to underscore the very prosaic nature of Pilate s lines. He is clearly an official here, and his involvement in the Pharisees plans, or indeed in the concerns of the disciples, is strictly neutral. Second, the playwright chose to introduce Pilate s peculiar political position in the first line, and I have retained the term, starosta, knowing that some of the audience would know the term, and that others would likely be tolerant of a few foreign terms. This underscores the unique status of the play as a Polish artifact, to differentiate it from plays of the genre from other parts of Europe. I did not attempt to find an English equivalent for the starosta, not only because the political situation is not precisely analogous to that of 16th-century Poland, and even using a clumsy alternative like Federal official would draw the play into contemporary political polemics, a situation I sought to avoid. I did not retain the Polish formal address at line 25, WaszmoÀść, and rendered it simply as your lordship. I felt that another Polish term appearing so soon after starosta would confuse the audience unnecessarily, particularly because a suitable equivalent exists in English. Use of this equivalent retains the formality I sought and preserves the politeness of the original. Similar problems are associated with the speeches of the guards. When the guards are posted at the tomb, for example, the high priests leave them, and the guards, uninhibited by their masters, are free to behave as foolishly as they wish, without fear of jeopardizing their promised wages. Here is the original of the lines I have rendered in English in my above discussion: TEORON A ty, Pietrze, z łysą gową, Wara wąsa z siwą brodą Byś nie wziął maczugą ową! Translation Review FILEMON A ty, zwodź ca, leź ąc w grobie, Miej tam pok j dobry sobie. Byś nie wziął bartą po glowie! 105 TEORON And you, Peter, with the bald head, Watch out, or I ll tear your gray beard out. Watch it, so you don t get the club! (lines 1.97—99) or, PHILEMON And you, charlatan, laying in the tomb, Keep quiet in there! (HE lifts his battle ax.) So you don t get an ax in your head! (lines 1.105—107) I have rendered these lines somewhat more loosely than the previous example. Teoron s line is more specifically a warning to Peter to watch his beard and mustache, implying that Teoron intends to do something untoward to them. My rendering makes that more explicit for a modern audience by making a specific threat to Peter s facial hair. Though the translation is still formal, the crudeness of the threat serves to characterize the soldiers as base and, of course, cowardly. Philemon s line contains a very colloquial use of the reflexive pronoun sobie in the order to keep silence. My rendering here is the brief Keep quiet in there: a fairly colloquial expression in its own right, yet brief enough so as not to radically disrupt the general formal tone of the overall translation. The dramatic success of these lines and others like them depends to some extent on the ability of the actors themselves to portray the soldiers as bombastic cowards, yet even a relatively formal translation style does not destroy that characterization in the original. When the soldiers speak their foreign gibberish, the original has: 23 TEORON Uram gazda! Rata! Przeb g! Już ci lecę, nie czujęn g! PILAX 5 Pro Boha! What are we doing here?! We re shouting as if we re being attacked by bandits!.. PROKLUS TEORON Strach, przeb g, strach mięzejmuje! Hej, beszcie! C ż sięwż dy dzieje?!.... Was ist das, mein herr Pilax; Unt why you calling him like zat? Has Christ risen from ze dead? Devil take him! Tell me ze troos, Soon as you have luked inside. PILAKS Pro Boha! C ż wż dy działamy?! By na gwałcie, tak wołamy!.... TEORON Wos ist dos, mayn herr Pilaksie, Czemu go wy tak wołacie? Abo go Krystus zmartwychwstał? Toć by go nam dyjabli dał! 25 We note that these statements amount to an amalgam of several languages. Teoron s interjections are Hungarian, as are those of Proklus. Pilax, on the other hand, becomes Ukrainian for a moment, and reprimands his men in Polish for the kind of fear he himself exhibited at the beginning of the scene. He begins with a shout and a general question as to what the soldiers are doing, but his own answer, shouting out of fear as if attacked by thieves, is ridiculous, coming as it does from a professional soldier. Finally, Teoron acquires a thick German accent at line 3.23. He assumes an air of calm, asking Pilax, in effect, why he is so excited. My rendering retains the non-Polish words: TEORON Oh! Uram gazda! Rata! By God! I m falling, I can t feel my legs! PROKLUS I m scared! Oh, God! I m scared! Hej, beszte! What s happening now?!.... 24 25 I have not translated the Hungarian or Ukrainian at all because I wanted, as with starosta, to underscore the unique provenance of the play, but also, and more importantly, because these words would be as nonsensical as the original was to the original audience, though perhaps less ludicrous-sounding to English ears. Rendering the terms into English-sounding foreign words (from Dutch, for example) would not be an adequate substitute: they would not sound as ludicrous to an English ear as the original words sound to Poles, and it would certainly not be an adequate historical equivalent (we do not currently employ mercenaries from the Netherlands). I have retained Teoron s thick German accent but given him English to speak. This is in keeping with my substitution of English for Polish in almost all instances, but it also retains Teoron s foreignness, since German is also foreign to English speakers. By simply retaining the foreign terms from Eastern Europe, I retain the foreignness of the soldiers for us, just as for the original Polish audience, and simultaneously emphasize the text itself as Eastern European. That the play does have this unique provenance does not detract from the broader problems of translation it occasions (linguistic, to be sure, but cultural as well). I offer my suggestions as one possible approach to them. 5 Notes Mary. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach, rev. ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995, 35. 2Theo Hermans. Introduction: Translation Studies and a New Paradigm, in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, Theo Hermans, ed. Croon Helm: Beckenham, Kent, U.K., 1985, 11. 1Snell-Hornby, Translation Review 3Ibid., 13. Kolve. The Play Called Corpus Christ. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966, 110. 5Rosemary Woolf. The English Mystery Plays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, 90. 6Meg Twycross. Books for the Unlearned, in Themes in Drama 5: Drama and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 72. 7Czesław Miłosz. The History of Polish Literature, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 96. 8Jan Okoń. Wstęp [Introduction] to Historyja o Chwalebnym Zmartwychwstaniu Panskim, Jan Okoń, ed. Wroc?aw: Ossol., 1971, iv. 9In the following discussion, I examine a number of medieval plays that treat the same Biblical material as the Historyja. While certainly not a comprehensive list, it is nonetheless representative of the other plays of the genre. These plays include the Klosterneuberg Ordo paschalis, Stiftsbibl., MS 574, Miscellanea from the 13th century, fol. 142v-144v, as edited in Karl Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961, I: 421-429; the Oberuferer Christigeburtspiel, in K.J. Schr er, Deutche Weichnachtsspiele aus Ungarn (1858), 61-123; Christ’s Resurrection (ca. 1530-1560), Bertram Dobell, and John Dover Wilson, eds. Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1912; The Chester Mystery Cycle, R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds. (EETS, SS 3), Vol. 1: Text, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, play XVIII: Skynners Playe (The Resurrection), pp 339356; N-Town play, or Ludus Coventriae or, The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, Cotton MS. Vespasian D. VIII, K.S. Block, ed. (EETS, ES 120) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922, play 34 (Guarding of the Sepulchre), pp 312-318, lines 1176-1343; and play 35 (Resurrection), pp 320-327, lines 1415-1647; The Towneley Plays, George England, with an Introduction and side-notes by Alfred W. Pollard (EETS, ES 71) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897, play XXVI. Resurrection of the Lord, pp 306-325; The York Plays, Richard Beadle, ed. London: Edward Arnold, 1982, Carpenters (The Resurrection), pp 344-355; the Ludus Paschalis from Tours, Bibl. de la Ville, MS 927, Miscellanea Turonensia, 13th century, fol 1r - 8v, in Young, Drama, I: 438-447; the 14th-century La Passion de Palatinus: Mystere du XIVe siecle, Grace Frank, ed., Jacques Ribard, tr. Paris: Champion, 1992, pp 212-239, lines 1620-1996; The Passion de Semur, text by P.T.Durbin, Lynette Muir, ed. Leeds: University of Leeds: 1981, pp 230-268, lines 8178-9572; the 15th-cen4V.A. Translation Review tury Parisian Arnoul Gr ban (Mystere de la Passion, Omer Jodogne, ed. Bruxelles: Palais de Academies, 1965, pp 362-418, lines 27084-31446); the extant fragments from La Passion d’Auvergne, Graham Runnalls, ed. Paris: Droz, 1982 this is a critical edition of Bibliotheque Nationale n.a.f. 462, whose relevant section encompasses pp 224-280, lines 3197-4588); and the Italian Rappresentazione della resurrezione di Gesu Cristo, Alessandro d Ancona, ed. in Sacre Rappresentazione dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI, Alessandro d Ancona, ed. Firenze: Successori Le Monnier, 1872, I:329-356. 10Maria Bogucka. The Towns of East-Central Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century, in Ma zak, Samsonowicz, and Burke, eds. East-Central Europe, p 67; and Andrzej Wyczański, The System of Power in Poland, 1370-1648, in East-Central Europe in Transition, from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century, Antoni Mączak, Henryk Samsonowicz, and Peter Burke, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 144. 11Bogucka 67 and Wyczański 144. 12Wyczański 141. 13All the translations here are from my translation of the Historyja, Robert Michael Sulewski, Historyja o chwalebnym Zmartwychwstaniu Pańskim by Mikolaj z Wilkowiecka: An Annotation, Contextualization, and Translation, diss. University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, UMI, 1999, 28549, pp 487-604. 14Susan Bassnett-McGuire. Ways through the Labyrinth: Strategies and Methods for Translating Theatre Texts, in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, Theo Hermans, ed. Croon Helm: Beckenham, Kent, U.K., 1985, 87. 15Ibid., 90. 16Phyllis Zatlin. Observations on Theatrical Translation, Translation Review 46 (1994): 15. 17Piotr Cieplak. Personal interview, 2 Apr. 1996. Cieplak directed his own production of the play in Poland in the mid-1990s. 18Okoń xiv. 25 PARTNERS IN CRIME? By Daniel M. Jaffe ostoevsky s Crime and Punishment has been translated into English numerous times over the past 115 years. A comparison of three such translations the first, the most recent, and the one perhaps most widely read demonstrates that different translation choices at specific moments can alter the way a reader understands not only specific moments but a novel as a whole. Crime and Punishment is the story of Raskolnikov, a St. Petersburg student who, after murdering an old woman moneylender, is haunted by guilt. Initially, translations of the novel were not well received in the West (R. May, 28). Robert Louis Stevenson, one of Dostoevsky s few British supporters, wrote the following about Crime and Punishment: D Raskolnikov is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; . . . Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it; all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikov was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of today, which prevents them from living in a book or character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet-show. (Quoted in R. May 28) Stevenson and James based their opinions on the French translation the first English translation was not yet out, and reportedly, the French version was more racy than the later English one (R. May, 171, n. 34), thereby presumably exaggerating those qualities of subjectivity that Stevenson loved and James hated. The first English translation, by Frederick Whishaw, a British novelist, appeared in 1886. The first sentence of Whishaw s translation states: One sultry evening early in July a young man emerged from the small furnished lodging he occupied in a large five-storied house in the Pereoulok S , and turned slowly, with an air of indecision, towards the K bridge (5). This is a smooth, flowing, graceful English sentence. The most recent English-language translation, that done by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, opens 26 somewhat differently: At the beginning of July, during an extremely hot spell, towards evening, a young man left the closet he rented from tenants in S y Lane, walked out to the street, and slowly, as if indecisively, headed for the K n Bridge (3). This is not so smooth, it is choppier, and mirrors the choppiness of the Russian sentence (125). The choppiness is not mere arbitrary choice on Dostoevsky s part but rather is reflective of Raskolnikov s nervous state of mind: he is near delirium while contemplating murder. Whishaw eliminates from the novel s first page a sentence retained by Pevear-Volokhonsky: His closet was located just under the roof of a tall, five-storied house, and was more like a cupboard than a room (3). By omitting this sentence, Whishaw eliminates the claustrophobic description of the room, thereby undermining Dostoevsky s use of physical setting as a reflection of the character s inner state, one of being boxed in. From the outset, Whishaw is keeping the reader at a distance from the text and character, lending credence to Robert Louis Stevenson s concern about the existence of a certain impotence in many minds , which prevents them from living in a book or character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet-show. One more example from Whishaw: a few pages into the novel, Raskolnikov visits the old-woman moneylender, whom he s contemplating murdering, and enters her apartment: The young man entered a gloomy ante-chamber, divided by a partition, behind which was a small kitchen. The old woman stood silently in front of him, eyeing him keenly. She was a thin little creature of sixty, with a small sharp nose, and eyes sparkling with malice. Her head was uncovered, and her grizzled locks shone like grease. A strip of flannel was wound round her long thin neck, and, in spite of the heat, she wore a shabby yellow fur-tippet on her shoulders. She coughed incessantly. The young man was probably eyeing her strangely, for the look of mistrust suddenly reappeared on her face. The Student Raskolnikoff. I called on you a month ago, said the visitor, hurriedly, with a slight bow. He had suddenly remembered that Translation Review he must make himself more agreeable. I remember, batuchka, I remember it well, returned the old woman, still fixing her eyes on him suspiciously. (Italics added) (8) The Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of the same passage generally follows Dostoevsky s language more closely: The young man stepped across the threshold into the dark entryway, divided by a partition, behind which was a tiny kitchen. The old woman stood silently before him, looking at him inquiringly. She was a tiny, dried-up old crone, about sixty, with sharp, spiteful little eyes and a small, sharp nose. She was bareheaded, and her colorless and only slightly graying hair was thickly greased. Her long, thin neck, which resembled a chicken’s leg, was wrapped in some flannel rags, and, despite the heat, a fur-trimmed jacket, completely worn out and yellow with age, hung loosely from her shoulders. The little old woman coughed and groaned all the time. The young man must have glanced at her with some peculiar glance, because the earlier mistrust suddenly flashed in her eyes again. Raskolnikov, a student, I was here a month ago, the young man hastened to mutter with a half bow, recalling that he should be more courteous. I remember, dearie, I remember very well that you were, the old woman said distinctly, still without taking her inquiring eyes from his face. (Italics added) (9) A comparison of the first italicized phrases in these excerpts shows that whereas Whishaw uses entered, Pevear-Volokhonsky use stepped across the threshold, a more vivid and more accurate translation. And here, their accuracy reflects awareness on their part of an image pattern in the Russian that s difficult to preserve in English: Stepped across. In Russian, the word is perestupil (128). The first word of the novel s title, Crime, is, in Russian, Prestuplenie. Perestupil/Prestuplenie. Perestup/Prestup. The relationship between these Russian words is visible and audible. The actual meaning of Dostoevsky s title is closer to Transgression and Punishment than to Crime and Punishment. The Russian word in the title Prestuplenie has both the Translation Review legal meaning of crime and the religious/moral meaning of transgression. Throughout the novel, Dostoevsky plays with the image of transgressing or moving across (Kozhikov 20-21). English does not have a contemporary word meaning both violation of law and violation of religious/moral value we separate Church and State; Russia before the Revolution of 1917 did not separate them. So we cannot do in English exactly what Dostoevsky does in Russian. But PevearVolokhonsky retain the notion when they can. Their phrase, stepping across the threshold, does not resonate with the word Crime in the novel s title, but it retains the concept the trans-gression concept, the image of moving across a barrier, a boundary and gives the English reader at least a chance of appreciating Dostoevsky s image pattern. Whishaw s substitution of the word entered eliminates all sense of crossing over and eliminates all chance of a reader noting the pattern and thereby appreciating one of the novel s central thematic echoes, a dimension of the original s richness. The two descriptions of the old-woman moneylender vary in other ways as well: Whishaw s a thin little creature versus Pevear-Volokhonsky s a tiny, dried-up old crone ; Whishaw s eyes sparkling with malice versus Pevear-Volokhonsky s sharp, spiteful little eyes. In both instances, Pevear-Volokhonsky s translation is less romantic and more realistic as Dostoevsky s prose is here. Whishaw describes her as wearing a shabby yellow fur-tippet, whereas Pevear-Volokhonsky translate it as a fur-trimmed jacket, completely worn out. Completely worn out, a phrase Dostoevsky uses, one that foreshadows that this old woman s life is nearly over, that she s going to be murdered, a foreshadowing eliminated by Whishaw s omission of the phrase. And Whishaw omits completely the description of the old woman s neck as one that resembled a chicken s leg. This image reminds the Russian reader, at least subliminally, of the Russian folktale witch, Baba Yaga, who lived in a hut that stood on chicken legs.1 This association is omitted from Whishaw s translation. He makes the description more genteel than Dostoevsky does. In addition to sanitizing the text, blandifying it, Whishaw dilutes a technique that is one of Dostoevsky s major contributions to literature the overlapping of voices. In this cited passage, the narrator is at first hovering over both characters, describing the young man stepping across the threshold. Whishaw s watered-down description of the old woman could be read as being pre- 27 sented by the consciousness of the narrator, a neutral, graceful voice. But, in Pevear-Volokhonsky s, it can be read as also reflecting Raskolnikov’s perceptions of the old woman. With phrases like dried-up old crone, sharp, spiteful little eyes, neck that resembled a chicken s leg (with its folktale association to a character whom children find frightening) we can feel the description as coming from Raskolnikov, this nervous, anxious, feverish young man, this character who is trying, in his own mind, to justify the old woman s worthlessness, to justify his murder of her. Another way of thinking about this is that the narrator s objective description of her is permeated with Raskolnikov s highly agitated, emotional, subjective point of view, his consciousness. This overlapping of narrator s and character s perspectives which is a hallmark of Dostoevsky s style is so diluted by Whishaw as almost to be absent, whereas Pevear-Volokhonsky retain it. Looking at the end of the passage in the Whishaw translation, in the character s dialogue, the old woman addresses Raskolnikov as batuchka. Whishaw doesn t even translate the term, so from his translation, the reader obtains no information as to what her attitude toward Raskolnikov is is she cursing at him, calling him you idiot? is she praising him, calling him my lord and master? The English reader doesn t know. PevearVolokhonsky translate it as dearie, an ambiguous form of address, which, although perhaps polite, could be read as somewhat patronizing, condescending. Actually, the Russian word batyushka (129) was used in the 19th century as a rather respectful term and in this context demonstrates the old woman s awareness that Raskolnikov, a student who hobnobs with aristocracy, is of a higher social class than she, a petty merchant.2 Batyushka, which literally means little papa, was actually an affectionate term used by the Russian common folk in reference to the Czar Little Papa a term that would bring him into their families and hearts. A close translation might be that done by Constance Garnett (who will be the object of criticism in a moment), who uses the phrase my good sir (5), which captures the respectful tones of the original. Is there overall significance to these discrepancies in translation Whishaw diluting the nasty aura of this old woman and Pevear-Volokhonsky, perhaps, slightly intensifying it? One can argue that the characterization of this old woman Dostoevsky s precision in choosing adjectives, images associated with her, and her own choice of words when speaking affects how the reader reads the entire novel. This is the story of a protagonist who com- 28 mits murder. The way we regard the victim affects our sympathies for him. The less vicious the victim seems, the more innocent and likable she is, the more morally offensive becomes Raskolnikov s crime, and the harder it is for readers to sympathize with his agonizing struggle over whether or not to confess. However, the more vicious and witch-like she is, the more easily we can agree with an excuse Raskolnikov makes later in the novel once he confesses the murder to his girlfriend: I only killed a louse, Sonya, a useless, nasty, pernicious louse (Pevear and Volokhonsky, 416). Dostoevsky balances this victim s characterization yes, she has spiteful little eyes and a neck like a chicken leg, she s a penny-pinching money-lender suspicious of everyone, but at least she addresses Raskolnikov with appropriate respect. We don t like her, but we can t dismiss her as an expendable victim. If we could, then Raskolnikov s angst over the murder the entire rest of the novel would be a pointless journey. Dostoevsky purposely makes her a somewhat rounded character, and translations that shade her one way or the other are modifying the balance Dostoevsky achieves, are affecting the way we read the novel as a whole. No discussion of 19th-century Russian literature in English translation would be complete without considering Constance Garnett. In the first half of this century, she was arguably the most famous and influential of all English translators of Russian literature, having translated, as she did, 72 volumes (R. May, 37). How does her translation, compared with the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, handle the texture of Dostoevsky s prose? Let s look at a moment in the life of the character Katerina Ivanovna. She is the wife of a drunkard, a dirtpoor woman who feels guilty for having permitted her step-daughter, Sonya, to become a prostitute so that Katerina could have some money for her own three little children. After Katerina s husband is run over and killed by a carriage, she gradually goes mad. At one moment, Katerina Ivanovna is speaking to her 10-year-old daughter, Polenka, who is undressing her little brother, taking off his shirt: You wouldn t believe, you can t even imagine, Polenka, she was saying, pacing the room, how great was the gaiety and splendor of our life in papa s house, and how this drunkard has ruined me and will ruin you all! Father had the state rank of colonel and was nearly a governor by then, he only had one more step to go, so that everyone that called on Translation Review him used to say, Even now, Ivan Mikhailovich, we already regard you as our governor! When I . . . hem! . . . when I . . . hem, hem, hem . . . oh, curse this life! she exclaimed, coughing up phlegm and clutching her chest. When I . . . ah, at the marshal s last ball . . . when Princess Bezzemelny saw me the one who blessed me afterwards when I was marrying your father, Polya she asked at once: ‘Isn’t this that nice young lady who danced with a shawl at the graduation? . . . That rip should be mended; why don t you take the needle and darn it now, the way I taught you, otherwise tomorrow . . . hem, hem, hem! . . . it’ll tear wo-o-orse!” she cried, straining herself. (Italics and boldface added) (Pevear and Volokhonsky, 177) This, the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, follows the original extremely closely, retains the halting nature of Katerina s phrasing, some redundancy, the free associations Katerina is making and her coughing important for the reader to hear now in Part II of the novel as foreshadowing her later death from consumption in Part V. Hem is used to indicate her coughing an approximate sound of the cough that is close to the actual sound of a person s cough, close the way Dostoevsky s w o r d khe i s . Khe, khe, khe, states the Russian (289). Also, near the end of the passage, Pevear-Volokhonsky string out and hyphenate the word wo-o-orse in order to approximate the sound of Katerina straining herself. Dostoevsky does the same thing, although with a different word [with the word for tear ( razo-rvet”)] (289). They retain Dostoevsky s re-creation of the actual sounds that this consumptive woman is making. Dostoevsky does not describe them in the text, he makes them, lets the reader hear the character making these sounds. Immediacy. Here is Garnett s translation of this same passage: You wouldn t believe, you can t imagine, Polenka, she said, walking about the room, what a happy luxurious life we had in my papa’s house and how this drunkard has brought me and will bring you all, to ruin! Papa was a civil colonel and only a step from being a governor; so that everyone who came to see him said: We look upon you, Ivan Mihailovitch, as our governor! When I . . . when . . . she coughed violently, oh, cursed life, she cried, clearing her throat and press- Translation Review ing her hand to her breast, when I . . . when at the last ball . . . at the marshal s . . . Princess Bezzemelny saw me who gave me the blessing when your father and I were married, Polenka she asked at once: Isn’t that the pretty girl who danced the shawl dance at the breaking-up? ( You must mend that tear, you must take your needle and darn it as I showed you, or tomorrow cough, cough, cough — he will make the hole bigger,” she articulated with effort.) (Italics, underlining, and boldface added) (156) The underlined language illustrates how Garnett omits some of the coughing references Pevear-Volokhonsky retain. Not only that Garnett eliminates all approximation of the actual coughing sound. In fact, she actually disrupts the character s monologue and inserts the narrator to explain, she coughed violently. Dostoevsky does not do that. Garnett explains what Dostoevsky shows, thereby diluting the vividness and actually distancing the reader. Next, she has the character clearing her throat, when actually, Katerina is coughing up phlegm, as Pevear-Volokhonsky say in a more graphic translation. Again, Garnett dilutes the vividness of the original, sanitizes the text. This is one paragraph. One can imagine the cumulative effect of a translator s dilution of an entire novel. Again, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, many readers of Dostoevsky are uncomfortable moving into the text and prefer to remain outside it; some translators help them do just that. There is a moment in the novel when Raskolnikov returns to the scene of the crime, the murder, to the apartment building where he killed the old woman money-lender. The Pevear-Volokhonsky passage reads: Raskolnikov immediately went through the gateway, but the tradesman was no longer in the courtyard. That meant he had gone straight up the first stairway. Raskolnikov rushed after him. He could indeed hear someone s steady, unhurried steps two flights above. Strangely, the stairway seemed familiar! Here was the first-floor window; moonlight shone sadly and mysteriously through the glass; here was the second floor. Hah! It was the same apartment where the painters had been working . . . . (Italics added) (276) 29 Here, Pevear-Volokhonsky keep everything consistently in the past tense; however, in the Russian original, some verbs are in present tense (those in italics, above) while others are in past tense (381). If translated following the Russian language tense shifts, the second half of this passage would read: Strangely, the stairway seemed familiar! Here s the first-floor window; moonlight shone sadly and mysteriously through the glass; here’s the second floor. Hah! It’s the same apartment where the painters had been working. If Dostoevsky s present tense is retained, the text s movement between past and present sounds somewhat odd in English, yet there is greater immediacy at those moments of recognition of familiar objects and places. These are moments in the original when it is not the narrator s consciousness relating Raskolnikov s perceptions to us, but Raskolnikov s own consciousness; we hear him think these thoughts directly in the present moment, without mediation or filter of narrator or time. Puncture holes in the narrative past tense, as it were. But this is not the norm in Englishlanguage narrative, where movement between tenses within a passage is frowned upon because it sounds strange in a formal context, sounds more conversational. The technique is much more ordinary in Russian literature, more natural.3 Should translators violate their own culture s conventions of story-telling in order to preserve the story-telling culture represented by the original text? A translator who privileges the narrative conventions of the target culture might well be creating a smooth text that an audience will find comfortable to read. But might the translator be preventing readers from fully appreciating the source culture s way of telling stories? Might the translator be perpetuating cultural differences, actually maintaining barriers to appreciation of different worldviews, those reflected in varying cultural approaches to narrative? In 1912, The New York Times Book Review contained a review of Garnett s translation of Dostoevsky s The Brothers Karamazov . The reviewer states: Consider: would Russia, its writers, and its fictional characters have been better understood in the West, would they have seemed less mad, had their early translators strived to create in readers minds the same vivid, immediate, and complex visions as those created by the original texts? Notes 1I am grateful to Professor Leo F. Cabranes-Grant of the University of California, Santa Barbara, for bringing this association to my attention. 2 I am grateful to Professor Inna Broude of Brandeis University for elaborating upon this meaning and implication of the word. 3 Garnett retains the shift to the present (240). Works Cited Dostoevsky, F.M. Prestuplenie I Nakazanie [Crime and Punishment]. Moskva: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1992. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Bantam, 1988. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1992. Trans. Frederick Whishaw. Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1926. Kozhikov, Vadim V. The First Sentence in Crime and Punishment, The Word Crime, and Other Matters. Trans. Robert Louis Jackson. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment. Ed. Robert Louis Jackson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 17-25. May, Rachel. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994. Review of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Trans. Constance Garnett. 30 June 1912. Reprinted in New York Times Book Review. 6 October 1996. The reader . . . who has a smattering of Tolstoy or Turgeniev, or both, may already have got lodged in his head a sort of notion that Russian novels are inhabited chiefly by escaped lunatics and uncaught candidates for Bedlam. If he has, the history of the brothers Karamazov is admirably fitted to encourage that harmless presumption that Russia is little better than a vast mad-house in which the keepers share the affliction of the kept. (13) 30 Translation Review RAVISHING MARIE: EUGENE MASON’S TRANSLATION OF MARIE DE FRANCE’S BRETON LAI OF LANVAL By Peggy Maddox R eaders interested in medieval English literature eventually find it necessary and desirable to acquire some acquaintance with the poems of Marie de France. For example, the reader who wishes to compare Thomas Chestre s Middle English romance of Sir Launfal with its literary sources will want to read Lanval by Marie de France. Without a mastery of Old French, however, the reader will have to rely on a translation of the original.1 Although there are now excellent translations of Marie s lais, notably that by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante, the one by Eugene Mason is still being used.2 First published more than 90 years ago for a general readership and reprinted numerous times since then, Mason s translation has found its way into scholarly bibliographies and into at least one representative college anthology of Middle English literature. A note in the anthology edited by Thomas Garb ty even invites the reader to compare the versions of Chestre and Marie (340). Unfortunately, the reader who compares Sir Launfal with Mason s version of Lanval will come away with a false impression not only of Marie s story but also of the extent to which Chestre was influenced by it. The problem with the Mason text does not result from the inherent difficulty of translating poetry. Apart from intricacies of style and diction, a narrative poem contains specific details of plot and character that, if altered or omitted, will have the effect of creating a different story. To Mason, all details were open to alteration; he did not approach his work in the spirit of a modern translator intent on fidelity to the text: of a Victorian male. He thought that women should be modest and submissive; he saw the Middle Ages as quaint, and he seemed to find any mention of sexual matters distasteful and in need of refining and softening. He began by couching his translation in a convoluted, sentimental, pseudo-medieval English and proceeded to rewrite Marie s story in a manner congenial to the social and moral attitudes of his own day. Thus, Mason s rendering of Lanval becomes as interesting in its own right as either of the Middle English variants Sir Launfal and Sir Landevale or the various Old French versions such as Graelent, from which Marie is thought to have derived her own work. However, as long as Mason s Lanval is presented as a translation of Marie s lai and not as a variation of it, it needs to be examined for its fidelity to the original. Mason worked from the 1820 de Roquefort en face edition of Marie s lais. If he was insecure with Old French, he was most likely hindered by the fact that in this edition, the original is usually a page behind the corresponding lines in the prose translation. Another disadvantage is that sometimes de Roquefort s translation is vague, embroidered, or inaccurate. Nevertheless, Mason was not a slave to de Roquefort s interpretations; sometimes he reproduces that translator s errors, but sometimes he repudiates them. Although he did not claim to be a scholar, Mason was in command of his source material; when he changed details of plot or characterization, he was probably aware of what he was doing. Plot and Variations Found in the Four Versions Not being a scholar myself, I have no pretension to write for scholars. My object is more modest. I have tried to bring together a little garland for the pleasure of the amateurs of beautiful tales. To me these mediaeval stories are beautiful, and I have striven to decant them from one language into another with as little loss as may be. To this end I have refined a phrase, or, perhaps, softened an incident here and there. (Aucassin and Nicolette, xvii) Not only was Mason unconcerned with producing a scholarly translation of his original, his mind-set was that Translation Review The basic plot shared by Graelent, Lanval, Sir Landevale, and Sir Launfal is this: A knight attached to a king’s court encounters a beautiful woman from fairyland who agrees to love him and make him wealthy on the condition that he keep their love a secret. The knight agrees, but later, in a moment of anger, he alienates his king by insulting the queen and loses his lover by breaking the oath of secrecy. To save the knight from being executed, the fairy lover comes to the king’s court; acquitted, the knight is reinstated with his lover and departs with her to fairyland. Ten main variations in the four versions are as fol- 31 lows: 1. The name of the knight is a form of Lanval in all but Graelent. 2. In Lanval, the knight is of royal birth; in the others, he is only of gentle birth. 3. The king of the story is identified as Arthur in Lanval, Launfal, and Landevale, but in Graelent he is an unnamed king of Brittany. 4. In Sir Launfal, the queen is called Gwennere (l. 42). In Landevale, she is Gaynour (l. 353.) In Graelent and Lanval she is just the queen. 5. In Graelent, the knight refuses the queen s advances before he has met the woman in the woods. 6. In all the versions except Graelent, the queen becomes enamored of the knight at a feast and immediately offers herself to him; in Graelent, she falls in love with him because of his reputation and sends a messenger to bring him to her. 7. The motif of Potiphar s wife is not completely played out in Graelent: the queen does attempt to seduce Graelent, but when he rejects her, she does not retaliate by accusing him of having tried to seduce her; she gets her revenge by having the king withhold his wages. 8. In all the versions except Graelent, the knight reveals his secret love when the queen attempts to seduce him; Graelent, who rejected the queen before he had a lover, is provoked into breaking his oath at a feast when the king demands that everyone praise the queen s beauty. 9. In all the versions except Graelent, the fairy lover sends her maidens to fetch the knight and offers to love him. In Graelent the knight discovers the fairy bathing naked in a pool, and it is he who offers himself to her.3 10. Only in Sir Launfal does the fairy give the knight a magic purse. In his study of the Launfal manuscripts, George Kittredge says that the Graelent is, in story, much more primitive than the Lanval, and doubtless nearer the original Breton lay, which perhaps had nothing at all to do with King Arthur (17). He says that the Middle English Launfal, by which he means both Chestre s poem and Landevale, is well known to be a translation of the Lai de Lanval of Marie de France (2). After comparing Chestre s Sir Launfal with Landevale and other Middle English variants, Kittredge concluded that all came from a common source: This identity, extending as it often does to the 32 minutest points of expressing, and that too not only in lines translated from the French, but in many others not to be found in Marie at all shows conclusively that we have not here to do with the work of two independent translators one for Chestre and another [for the short works], but with a single Middle English version of the Lai de Lanval. (5) Although Kittredge thought that the Chestre followed Marie s narrative pretty closely in its essentials (5), he observed that where differences exist, the short version, Landevale, is much closer to Marie s original than is Chestre s poem: In places where Chestre has abandoned the Lai de Lanval to follow the Lai de Graelent, the Short Version [Landevale] follows the Lai de Lanval. 2. Passages occur in Marie and in the Short Version [Landevale] which are not found in Chestre at all. 3. In some places the Short Version [Landevale] shows a closer translation of Marie than is found in the corresponding places in Chester. (6—7) Kittredge concluded that Landevale was not an abridgement of Chestre s poem but rather, together with Graelent, one of the sources. Mason s translation of Marie s Lanval follows the general story line that is shared by all these works, but whether or not it follows it in its essentials is a matter of opinion. Just as all the works differ in certain significant details, Mason s Lanval, although it purports to be a translation, also differs from Marie s Lanval. Mason’s Ponderous Style and Invented English Mason was not unique in his notions of how to reproduce medieval English. At first blush his style might remind the reader of Malory s, but a closer examination suggests that his model was drawn from modern English writers who created a medieval idiom. For example, Tennyson s Idylls of the King is crammed full of lightly’s, lo’s, wont’s, and made-them-ready’s. Sir Walter Scott had Ivanhoe and his fellow knights speak with an elevated, archaic diction. Earlier than Tennyson or Scott, Sir Richard F. Burton had created an archaic English idiom for his translation of the Arabian Nights; indeed, Mason s style resembles that of Burton more than it does that of Malory. An example of a medieval- Translation Review ism that Malory would not have used but that Burton certainly did is that of goodly as an adjective. Observe Mason s adjectival use of goodly in the following examples: (1) mantles of a goodly purple hue; (2) If you are prudent and discreet, as you are goodly to the view...; (3) there seemed no goodlier varlet under heaven...; (4) Beneath the sky was no goodlier steed. Of some 100 or more examples in the O.E.D. of the use of goodly from the time of King Alfred until well past the Renaissance, not one shows the word used to describe a noun; every example is adverbial. Another of Mason s favorite medievalisms is the use of right as an adverb modifying an adjective. This use does occur occasionally in Malory, but not nearly to the extent that Mason uses it: (1) Right heavy was Sir Lanval ; (2) Right glad was the knight...; (3) Right merry was the pilgrim...; (4) Right loath was Lanval to depart...; (5) Right joyous was Lanval to hear this thing; (6) Right evil counsel gave they to my lord...; (7) Right wrathful and heavy was she...; (8) Right wrathful was the king at Lanval s words...; (9) Right sorrowful were they because of his plight...; (10) Two ladies are near at hand, right dainty of dress. Mason seemed to think that an -en past participle was more medieval than the -ed and he includes some strange verb forms: (1) These two maidens were richly dressed in kirtles closely laced and shapen to their persons...; (2) When Lanval heard these words he rejoiced greatly, for his heart was litten by another s torch. Long, tortuous sentences in which verbs are added to verbs and simple statements are encumbered by trains of prepositional phrases and clusters of unneeded verbiage typify Mason s medieval idiom, completely misrepresenting Marie s clean, direct style. When the two maidens come to invite Lanval to the tent of their mistress, all that they say in Marie s Lanval is that their lady has sent them for him and that they will lead him safely to her pavilion, which is nearby. Sire Lanval, ma dameisele, / Que tant est pruz e sage e bele,/ Ele nus enveie pur vus; / Kar i venez ensemble od nus!/ Sauvement vus i cundurums. / Veez, pres est li paveilluns! [Sir Lanval, my lady, / who is worthy and wise and beautiful, / sent us for you. / Come with us now. / We shall guide you there safely. / See, her pavilion is nearby!] (ll. 71—76) Translation Review What Marie says in 32 words Mason says in 58, changing sauvement (safely) to swiftly in the process. Sir Lanval, my demoiselle, as gracious as she is fair, prays that you will follow us, her messengers, as she has a certain word to speak to you. We will lead you swiftly to her pavilion, for our lady is very near at hand. If you but lift your eyes you may see where her tent is spread. (341) When the queen tells Arthur that Lanval has asked for her love and insulted her, Marie says: Li reis s en curu at forment, / Jur en ad sun serement: / S il ne s en peot en curt defendre, / Il le ferat arder u pendre. [The king got very angry; / he swore an oath: / if Lanval could not defend himself in court / he would have him burned or hanged.] (ll. 325—328) Mason manages to add another 12 words to Marie s 23. Thereat the King waxed marvelously wrathful and swore a great oath that he would set Lanval within a fire, or hang him from a tree, if he could not deny this thing, before his peers. When, at the end of the story, the barons scrutinize the lady, they agree that Lanval spoke the truth about her beauty, and acquit him; the lady gets back on her horse and leaves. Marie says Delivrez est par lur esgart; / E la pucele s en depart [He was set free by their decision / And the girl departed] (ll.629—630). Mason says: Since then Lanval had not spoken in malice against his lady, the lords of the household gave him again his sword. When the trial had come thus to an end the Maiden took her leave of the King, and made her ready to depart. (Garb ty 348) Mason has inflated the 10 words of the original to 44. In matters of the most insignificant description, Mason embellishes existing details. Where Marie specifies that the maiden emissaries are wearing blians de purpre bis (dark purple mantles). Mason gives them kirtles as well, echoing the parallel description in Sir Launfal: 33 Har kerteles wer of Inde-sandel (Garbaty 372). Whereas the towel that Marie s maiden carries is simply une tuaile (a towel) (l. 64), that of Mason s lady is of soft white linen (341), which could be another echo of Sir Launfal: a towayle whyt and fyn (l. 245), although in Chestre, the towel is of selk. Where Marie has Lanval come to un pr (a meadow) and dismount by une ewe curaunt (a running stream), Mason s Lanval comes to a green mead and stands by a river of clear running water. Sometimes Mason s embellishments echo familiar Bible passages. When Marie s Lanval tells the lady that he wants to stay with her, he says: Pur vus guerpirai tutes genz. / Jam s ne queor de vus partir; / Ceo est la rien que plus desir. [for you I shall abandon everyone. / I want never to leave you. / That is what I most desire.] (ll.128—130) Mason s wording is not only wordier (33 to 18 in the original), it also echoes Orpah begging Ruth to let her go with her: For you I renounce my father and my father s house. This only I pray, that I may dwell with you in your lodging, and that you will never send me from your side. (342) In the account of Lanval s generosity with his new wealth, Marie tells us that Lanval vesteit les jugle rs (Lanval clothed minstrels) (l.211), but Mason says he clothed them in scarlet (343). Beside borrowing phrasing, Mason also borrows a folk motif that was not originally in Marie s story, that of the Fortunatus purse that is never empty. When the lady tells Lanval that he will no longer have to worry about money, Marie says Mut est Lanval bien herbergez: / Cum plus despendra richement, / [E] plus avrat or e argent. [Now Lanval is well cared for. / The more lavishly he spends, / the more gold and silver he will have.] (141—142) Mason s wording suggests that she gives him a literal purse: To her bounty she added another gift besides ... He might waste and spend at will and pleasure, but in his purse ever there was to spare ... the 34 more pennies he bestowed, the more silver and gold were in his pouch. (342) Garb ty reinforces the impression that the lady has given him a magic purse by footnoting this passage: This is the purse of Fortunatus which is never empty (342 fn 11). There is no mention of a purse in Marie s Lanval; of the four versions being discussed, only Chestre s includes a magic purse I wyll the geve an alner (purse, wallet) / Imad of sylk and of gold clere (ll. 319—320). Some of Mason s words are ugly or inappropriate in their context. For example, he describes Lanval as heavy of hand. The usual connotation of having a heavy hand is that a man hits hard, but Mason uses it in the sense of generous. Where Marie says that Lanval took the saddle off his horse, Mason tells us that Lanval unbitted his steed and left him at his provand in the meadow. As Lanval enters the magical pavilion, Mason s beautiful fairy is lying upon a bed spread with napery, a word more evocative of a restaurant than a love bower. His description of the lady when she comes to the court at the end of the story is spoiled by badly chosen words that make her sound sickly, evil, and possibly suffering from a head wound: ...her eyes were like flowers in the pallor of her face. She had a witching mouth, a dainty nose, and an open brow. (347) Mason uses genuine medieval words like seisin, dolent, varlet, and guild, but with problematic effect. Dolent, although strangely archaic, can still pass; it looks enough like doleful, and it is clear from the context that Lanval is sad. Varlet would seem to be appropriate enough, because it derives from an Old French word that Marie would have known; however, Mason uses it where Marie could have used it but chose not to, and with good reason.4 With seisin (or rather Garb ty s gloss on it), Mason s diction begins to affect details of plot and characterization. The cumulative effect of Mason s linguistic choices is to alter the relationship between Lanval and his lover, thereby changing his original to such a degree that a reader reading the Mason translation would never realize what an unusual departure from the conventional male-written romance is represented by the Lanval of Marie de France. Misrepresentation of Character Marie s Lanval is a foreigner in Arthur s court. He is poor and friendless; the other knights envy him and Translation Review would like to see something bad happen to him. Mason s hero, on the other hand, is loved and admired by the other knights. When the hero forsakes the town, Marie has him lying on the ground mulling over his problems when the mysterious maidens appear; Mason s Lanval is trying to go to sleep to forget his troubles, but cannot get comfortable.5 Marie has the knight follow the fairy messengers without editorializing on his state of mind. That he is shaken to the extreme by this otherworldly event is clear from the fact that he forgets all about his horse, leaving it unsaddled and untended in the meadow. A knight who was thinking clearly would not do that. Mason, on the other hand, dispels the sense that the knight is about to embark on a strange, possibly dangerous adventure by heartily assuring us that Lanval was right glad to do the bidding of the maidens and that all his desire was to go with the damsels (341).6 Mason seems to want to portray Lanval as being hearty and manly, even when to do so is contrary to Marie s characterization. When Mason s Lanval is suffering because his lady will not come to him after he breaks his oath, he does not faint outright like Marie s knight, but only comes nigh to swoon ; where Marie s Lanval abjectly begs the lady to speak a sun ami (to her friend), Mason s knight asks her to speak to him friend to friend, suggesting a conversation between equals. Despite his efforts to depict Lanval as unfailingly masculine, Mason only succeeds in making him prissier than Marie s knight by editing the erotic passages. In the pavilion scene, where Marie deluges us with carnal images, Mason gives us echoes of the story of Ruth. In the garden scene just before the queen makes her offer, Marie s Lanval is engaging in mental stimulation with thoughts of kissing, touching, embracing, and having his pleasure; Mason s Lanval simply thinks of the time when he might have clasp and greeting of his friend. All this is not to say that just because Marie s Lanval is preoccupied with sex that he is manly. Indeed, the most curious aspect of this lai is the way Marie makes use of gender reversal. Marie s Lanval is not a knight at all; he is a kept woman. His lover, whom he swears to obey, right or wrong, gives him clothing and money. She visits him in secret, for only one purpose. When he reveals their relationship, she drops him. When that happens, he weeps and faints and begs like an abandoned woman and has to be tended by the other knights. After a great deal of humiliation and abasement, he is at last rescued by a lady on a white horse. Mason s editing also alters the queen s character. She is not nearly so frank in Mason as in Marie. In Marie, the Translation Review queen plainly offers sex: Ma dr erie vus otrei (267). Drüerie always carries the meaning of physical love. The queen uses the word again when she maligns Lanval to her husband and wants to make him angry enough to take action: E dit que Lanval l ad huni / De dr erie la requist (317). Lanval uses it when he is mourning the loss of his lover (336). Graelent uses this word just after he has raped the lady in the wood to tell her the kind of relationship he wants to have with her (Weingartner l.301). Mason s queen is not so clear about what she is offering: You may receive a queen s whole love, if such be your care (344). Marie s queen is to all appearances remorseless. She becomes impatient with the interruptions in the trial because she wants to see Lanval executed. According to one reading, she is just tired of waiting; in another, she is impatient because the trial is interfering with her next meal.7 Mason s queen, however, seems to have a conscience: the Queen was growing wrathful, because of the blame that was hers (347). Mason even manages to tone down Marie s sex-goddess fairy. Both Chestre and the Landevale poet make the most of the lady s nakedness. In Landevale we read that she was Almost nakyde and that Al her clothes by-side her lay (Kittredge 23; 96—97). Chestre writes For hete her clothes down sche dede / Almest to her gerdyl-stede, / Than lay sche uncovert (289—291). Mason s diction shrouds the nakedness of the lady in words touched with sanctity and innocence: she is whiter than any altar lily ; she is like the new born rose ; she wears a vesture of spotless linen ; the rondure of her bosom is more untouched than hawthorn (emphasis added). Embellishment of Incidents With Effect of Changing Interpretation In the detail of the trembling horse, Mason departs both from Marie and from de Roquefort. He does not seem to associate the stream with the other world from which the fairy lover has come. Such a river is featured in Graelent, and that hero must cross it at the end of the story. The obvious explanation of the trembling of Lanval s horse on a hot day is that it senses the presence of magic. De Roquefort has Lanval cross the river and then dismount. He says that the horse is trembling because of the cold (207). Mason says that Lanval wanted to cross the river, but that the actions of the horse prevented him: Sir Lanval would have crossed this stream, without thought of pass or ford, but he might 35 not do so, for reason that his horse was all fearful and trembling. Seeing that he was hindered in this fashion, Lanval unbitted his steed, and let him pasture in that fair meadow, where they had come. (341) This embellishment suggests that Lanval was on his way somewhere but allowed himself to be deterred from his unknown purpose because he couldn t control his horse. Avoidance of Sexual Allusions Mason s reluctance to translate Marie s explicit sexual allusions results in delicate and ambiguous circumlocutions. It has already been shown how he obscures the nudity of the lady in the pavilion scene. He also does his best to soften the suggestion that the lovers consummate their newly made contract. Marie clearly has the lovers go to bed, Delez li s est al lit cuchiez (l. 153), where they entertain each other until evening and then get up for supper. Mason follows Marie in limiting whatever goes on between the new lovers to the daylight hours; but he keeps them out of bed: the Maiden granted him her kiss and her embrace, and very sweetly in that fair lodging [they] passed the day till evensong was come (342). Both Chestre and the Landevale poet rescheduled supper so that the lovers could enjoy an entire night together. Here is the interlude in Landevale: After soper the day was gone, / To bedde they went both anone. Alle that nyght they ley yn fere / And did what thir wille were. For pley they slepyde litille that nyght. (Kittredge 24;146—149) people have often told me that you have no interest in women. You have fine-looking boys with whom you enjoy yourself. Mason is not alone in wanting to avoid this unbecoming charge against the hero. In Sir Launfal, the queen calls the knight a coward and says only Thou lovyst no woman, no woman the (689). In Landevale, which is usually fairly close to Marie s wording, the queen calls the knight a coward and an harlot ribawde and says Thou lovyst no woman ne no woman the. In the Middle English of the period, harlot was a masculine noun; it was an insult equivalent to knave or scurvy fellow, but it did not seem to have the connotation of homosexual. The feminine, promiscuous meaning for the word came later. Both Mason and Garb ty skirt the fact that the queen is accusing Lanval of pederasty. Mason gives us this: Lanval, she cried, well I know that you think little of woman and her love. There are sins more black that a man may have upon his soul... Garb ty footnotes the passage: The queen accuses Lanval of misogyny, if not more. This was a serious matter in a courtly, chivalric society based on the code d’amour, but evidently especially repugnant to a woman of her passionate temperament. The accusation is poignant enough for Lanval to break his vow of silence. (344 fn 21) Poignant does not seem quite the word to describe the effect of the queen s accusation on a man who just a few lines back was fantasizing about a woman s body: Here it is in Sir Launfal: Whan they had sowped, and the day was gon, / They wente to bedde, and that anoon, / Launfal and sche yn fere. / For play lytyll they sclepte that nyght, / Tyll on morn hyt was daylyght. (Chestre ll. 346—350) The scene in which the queen accuses Lanval of having homosexual preferences is definitely one that Mason judged to be in need of refining. Even Chestre and the author of Landevale were loath to follow Marie on this one. In Marie s Lanval the queen s insult is explicit: 36 Lanval s en vait a une part,/Mut luin des autres; ceo l est tart/Que s amie pu st tenir,/Baiser acoler e sentir;/L autrui joie prise petit, Si il nen ad le suen delit. ([Lanval] was impatient to hold his love, to kiss and embrace and touch her; he thought little of others joys if he could not have his pleasure.) The reader who had only Mason s translation to go by, however, would not be aware of Lanval s erotic imaginings. Here is what he is thinking according to Mason: Translation Review [Lanval could hardly wait] till he might have clasp and greeting of his friend. The ladies of the Queen s fellowship seemed by kitchen wenches to his sight, in comparison with the loveliness of the Maiden.8 At the end of the story, when Lanval s lady finally arrives, Marie recapitulates the semi-nude scene of the pavilion: She was dressed...in a white linen shift that revealed both her sides since the lacing was along the side. Her body was elegant, her hips slim, her neck whiter than snow on a branch, her eyes bright, her face white, a beautiful mouth, a well-set nose, dark eyebrows and an elegant forehead, her hair curly and rather blond; golden wire does not shine like her hair in the light. (author s translation) Mason avoids the hips and the naked sides: Passing slim was the lady, sweet of bodice and slender of girdle. Her throat was whiter than snow on branch, and her eyes were like flowers in the pallor of her face. She had a witching mouth, a dainty nose, and an open brow. Her eyebrows were brown, and her golden hair parted in two soft waves upon her head. (347) In Marie, to make sure that everyone can see her gorgeous body, the lady drops her cloak: Sun mantel ad laissi chaeir, / Que meuz la pu ssent veer. She let her mantel fall so that they might see her better. (605-606) Mason makes the gesture less blatantly sensuous by making it ambiguous: She loosed the clasp of her mantle, so that men might the more easily perceive the grace of her person. (347) 9 The Ultimate “Immasculation” of Marie’s Female Text Mason s attempt to subordinate Marie s strong female character to the hero begins with the word seisin. Translation Review The fairy is warning the knight what will happen if he reveals their love affair: Never again will you have seisin of that body, which is now so tender in your eyes. This is the word that Marie uses, but in modern English it is so unfamiliar that it must be glossed. Garb ty does so in a footnote: I.e., possession, a feudal term usually referring to property, specifically land (342). This word seisin can in ordinary usage merely refer to possession in the sense of having; i.e., if Lanval wishes to keep touching her, he needs to keep the love a secret. The effect of the footnote is to distract the reader from the fact that it is the woman who is placing conditions on the knight, not giving him control over her. The lady is laying down conditions in this scene, not offering herself as chattel. In Marie s story, it is the knight who is weak and submissive, not the woman. The woman, not the man, sets the geis and dictates the terms. She leaves Lanval without a word when he breaks the contract. He swoons and weeps and must be cared for by others. No matter how he abases himself, she turns a deaf ear to his suffering and refuses to come to him. Whatever the conventions of courtly love, in terms of the reality of a woman s life in 1150, Lanval s predicament is that of a woman; he is not in charge of the situation. Mason does the greatest violence to Marie s original in his rewriting of the final scene. Marie s treatment of the departure from the king s court differs considerably from Graelent. In all the versions being compared, Graelent, Landevale, and Sir Launfal, the hero rides away from the king s court in the company of his fairy lover. In Graelent, which precedes Lanval, and Sir Launfal, which derives from Lanval, the knight is mounted on a horse of his own. Marie s innovation was to put the knight on foot, to deprive Lanval of the very thing that makes a knight a knight: his horse. The Landevale poet follows Marie in that his knight jumps onto the back of the lady s horse, but he tropes the action in such a way as to neutralize the effect that it has in Marie s story, suggesting that women are moody and that the fairy will get over her pique. Although the lady has come to save Lanval from execution, it is not at all clear that she is willing to take him back as her lover. In Graelent, the lady specifically tells the knight that she has only come to save his life and is not interested in having him back. He follows her to the river, where he falls off his horse and nearly drowns before she pulls him out and takes him to fairyland with her. In Sir Launfal, the fairy groom Gyfre brings Blaunchard to Launfal, who mounts and rides away with the fairy: 37 The knyght to horse began to sprynge, Anoon, wythout any lettynge, Wyth hys lemman away to ryde. (Chestre 1015—17) In Landevale, the knight jumps onto the back of the lady s horse; at first she is angry, but he talks his way back into her favor; the writer leaves us with an image that obscures the fact that the knight is riding behind his lover on the same horse: So they rodyn euyn ryghte, / The lady, the maydyns, and the knyghte (Kittredge 32; 22—23). He further weakens the image of a submissive man with an implied wink and a nudge: Loo, howe love is lefe to wyn/Of wemen that arn of gentylle kyn!/The same way haue they nomyn/Ryghte as before she was commyn. The implication is that women can be managed and that everything is just as it was before Landevale broke his oath. In both of the Middle English versions, the knight departs with his dignity intact. Marie s final scene, however, emphasizes the submission of the man to the woman. It is clear that the lady does not intend to take Lanval with her. She only came back to save him from being executed. She is in a hurry. She rejects the king s offer of hospitality, even after preparations for a visit have been made on her behalf by her maidens. The line and the girl departed incorporates the idea that in taking leave of the king, she has remounted her horse. While the lady is mounting her palfrey at the palace door, Lanval is scrambling up onto a mounting block which is in the yard for the use of heavy men. As the lady rides past the block, Lanval takes a flying leap and lands on the rear of the horse. Not a word is spoken by either, and the noble knight goes off to fairyland riding pillion behind his lady. Perhaps this undignified, submissive image of the knight offended Mason s masculine Victorian sensibilities. Perhaps he just misread the original.10 In any case, he completely reverses the image that Marie intended to leave us with. Here is Mason s picture: Now without the hall stood a great stone of dull marble, where it was the wont of lords, departing from the Court, to climb into the saddle, and Lanval by the stone.11 The Maiden came forth from the doors of the palace, and mounting on the stone, seated herself on the palfrey, behind her friend. (348) This is what Marie intended for us to see: 38 Outside the hall stood/a great stone of dark marble where heavy men mounted/when they left the king s court; Lanval climbed on it./When the girl came through the gate Lanval leapt, in one bound,/onto the pal frey, behind her. (633-640) A medieval listener or reader as familiar with the types of horse as we are with the difference between a sports coupe and an SUV would not miss the significance of the fact that the knight who rode into the story on a destrer (war-horse) rides away on a palefrei (saddle horse). Considering his aversion to words with sexual connotations, it is surprising that Mason uses the word ravished in his translation of the final lines: The Bretons tell that the knight was ravished by his lady to an island (348), particularly since both Chestre and the Landevale poet avoided the word. Sir Launfal was take ynto fayrye. Landevale was broughte. Marie uses ravi to put the crowning touch on her picture of the feminized knight making his final submission: La fu ravi li dameiseaus (644). Like seisin in the earlier scene, ravi has more than one connotation. Kathryn Gravdal traces the development of the word in her discussion of rape in French literature and law: The classical Latin rapere bears the seeds of an ambiguousness that will be fully developed in Old French. Some of the more common meanings of rapere are to carry off or seize; to snatch, pluck, or drag off; to hurry, impel, hasten; to rob, plunder; and, finally, to abduct (a virgin). The key semes are those of movement or transportation, appropriation or theft, and speed or haste. From rapere is derived the popular Latin *rapire, which gives the Old French ravir. By the end of the twelfth century, ravir can mean to run at great speed; to carry off by force; or to be carried off at great speed. Ravissant designates, in the twelfth century, some one or thing that carries others off by force. But as early as 1155, the Latin raptus in the sense of abduction brings about the shift toward a sexual meaning: rap (c. 1155) or rat (c. 1235) designates abduction by violence or by seduction, for the purposes of forced coitus. The connotation of swiftness is coupled with that of force. (4) Translation Review From beginning to end, Lanval is the story of a man who is dominated by a woman in the manner that medieval women were dominated by men. In trying to make Lanval conform to his idea of what the relationship of a knight and a lady should be, Mason altered the central theme of the original. Mason s translation gives us the story of knight meets lady; knight suffers a little for lady; knight rides off with lady clinging to his manly back. Marie de France s Lanval is the story of lady summons knight; lady ravishes knight; knight is carried off clinging submissively to lady’s back. In decanting Marie s story from Old French into English, Mason seems to have left the original story in the bottle. Works Cited Brians, Paul. The Lais of Marie de France Study Guide (12th Century) online http://www.wsu.edu:8000~brians/love-in-thearts/marie.html Chestre, Sir Thomas. Sir Launfal. Medieval English Literature. Garb ty, Thomas J., Waveland Press Inc., Prospect Heights, IL (1984), 1997. De Roquefort, B., ed. tr. Poésies de Marie De France, poète Anglo-Normand du XIIIe siècle, ou récueil de lais, fables et autres productions de cette femme célèbre, Tome Premier. Chasseriau, Paris, 1820. This is the en face edition to which Mason refers his readers, so I conclude that it was his source. Ewert, A., ed. Lanval. Marie de France LAIS, Blackwell s French Texts, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1969, Lanval 58—74. This contains the original text only. There are minor variations between this text and the one in de Roquefort that was Mason s source. Garb ty, Thomas J., ed. Middle English Literature. Waveland Press Inc., Prospect Heights, IL (1984), 1997. Gollancz, Sir Israel. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Early English Text Society (1940). OUP, London, 1964. Gravdal, Kathryn. Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, c 1991. New cultural studies series. Hanning, Robert and Ferrante, Joan. Lanval. The Lais of Marie de France. Durham, NC, Labyrinth Press, 1978. This is a good line-by-line English translation. Kittredge, G. L. Launfal (Rawlinson Version), American Journal of Philology, X,,I (1889) 1—33. Translation Review This article contains the complete text of the Middle English Sir Landevale, which Kittredge calls the Shorter Version of Sir Launfal. Laskaya, Anne and Salisbury, Eve, ed. The Middle English Breton Lays. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University for TEAMS 1995 online http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/salisbr.ht m Mason, Eugene. French Mediaeval Romances. (1911). London, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1932. This is the volume that contains both The Lay of Sir Launfal and Graelent. The introduction, which treats chiefly of Marie de France and her work, is noticeably more pompous and condescending than the introduction to the other volume. Mason, Eugene. Aucassin & Nicolette and other Mediaeval Romances and Legends. (1910). London, J. M. Dent, 1925. Shoaf, Judith P., tr. Lanval online www.clas.ufl.edu/english/exemplaria/lan.html. This is an English verse translation that I think captures the tone and style of the original. Tuffrau, Paul, tr. Lanval. (adapt e) Littérature Française, Texts et Contexts. Tome I. R.-J. Berg, Holt, 1994. 76—82. This is the modern French version that I read before coming to Mason s translation in Garb ty. The image of a knight riding submissively behind a woman as she rides away is striking; Mason s different ending sent me to the Old French to see which version corresponded to the original. Weingartner, Russell, ed., tr. Graelent. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Vol. 37, Series A. New York, Garland, 1985. This is an en face edition. Notes Unless otherwise specified, the OF text of Lanval cited is Ewert; the line-by-line English translation is that of Hanning and Ferrante. Citations indicate line numbers. Mason s Lanval is cited from Garb ty. 2 Competent translations by Paul Brians, Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, and Judith P. Shoaf can be found on line. See bibliography for URLs. 3 Mason s reluctance to translate overtly sexual scenes can be seen in his translation of Graelent. In this anonymous lai, which Marie is thought to have used as a source for Lanval, the knight not only propositions the lady; when she rejects him because of difference in rank, he rapes her: en l espoisse de la forest / A fet de li ce 1 39 qu il li plest (Weingartner ll, 295—6). Mason completely suppresses the rape (which de Roquefort did not) by making the transition between the lady s refusal and her capitulation with this passage: Sir Graelent was not abashed by the dame s proud spirit, but wooed and prayed her gently and sweetly, promising that if she granted him her love he would serve her in all loyalty, and never depart therefrom all the days of his life. The demoiselle hearkened to the words of Graelent... (Aucassin & Nicolette 150). 4 Before sending him away, the lady gives Lanval new clothes and Marie says Suz ciel nen ot plus bel dancel (Ewert 176) (there was no more handsome young man under the sky (Maddox). Mason translates the word dancel ( deimosel is the reading in his source, but it is probably a scribal error) as varlet (343). Hanning and Ferrante render it youth. Garb ty gives a measure of authority to Mason s choice of varlet by footnoting it as a young man of gentility. (343). However, it is not clear that the English word varlet ever had that meaning. Elsewhere in Lanval, Marie uses the word vallez to mean servant boys (281). The word and the related English words varlet and valet seem always to have had the connotation of servility. Marie could have used the singular form of vallez to describe Lanval in the clothing scene, but did not. When Marie does use the word, she is referring to Lanval s supposed petits amis; all the more reason not to use it to describe the hero. 5 Compare Lanval, who cannot get comfortable enough to nap outside on a sunny day with a knight like Sir Gawain on his journey to the Green Chapel in the dead of winter Ner slayn wyth the slete, he sleped in his yrnes (Gollancz 27; 1729). 6 Mason could have been influenced by the Landevale poet, who describes the hero as assenting to the summons blythely and going with them hendly (23). 7 Warnke and Rychner give je not (fasted); Ewert, atendeit, waited, which is not quite as callously selfish (Hanning and Ferrante, fn 120). 8 Mason made up the bit about the queen and the kitchen wenches. The wenches don t come in until later, when he is insulting the queen. 9 In Graelent, it is the queen who removes her cloak so that everyone can get a good look at her body: He [Arthur] had the queen mount/Onto a high bench and remove her cloak (Weingartner 23; 433—434). Mason s rendering of this scene in Graelent gives the impression that the queen is simply removing her overcoat: the King commanded the Queen to put off her royal robes, 40 and to stand forth upon the da s (Aucassin & Nicolette, 152—153). It is at this point in Graelent that the hero discloses the existence of his much more beautiful lover. 10 De Roquefort s translation is more accurate than Mason s, but he left out the word derrière, so the image is ambiguous; Lanval could be in front. 11 Garb ty s footnotes this phrase: i.e., mounted by the stone (348). Translation Review ON TEACHING TRANSLATION AT THE INTRODUCTORY LEVEL By Stuart Friebert O nce upon a Bucharest moon, sitting at Marin Sorescu s kitchen table he was drawing me while I was interviewing him for a volume of Selected Sorescu in English I thought for a fleeting moment that it might be useful to assemble a text for teaching translation to beginners. We had been using translation as an entry-level creative writing course at Oberlin, to give young writers a chance to practice fundamentals while working on various masterpieces from other languages. Hah , Sorescu said, passing me his take on my face in red ink, when I asked him if he d review a draft of such a text, Let s better tell a few jokes, drink a little local cognac, but definitely not to Ceausescu s health, and let it go at that. He was whispering now. Well, returning to teach translation yet once more, after having retired in 1997, I am perhaps foolishly emboldened to suggest some things I ve tried while teaching this marvelous subject for over 25 years, because Sorescu is no longer alive (alas!) to warn me off again. Sparing the reader a long account of all the approaches I ve used (larded with the injunctions, exhortations, and the requisite anecdotes), I ll just list some basic ingredients of what has proved to be reliable recipe, eaten by large numbers of students, some of whom have gone on to become fellow cooks: of some 400 books I have of former students, fully 40 are volumes of translations. So here is what has worked pretty well, in case you re of a mind to start teaching translation, or even just beginning to practice it yourself alongside other writing projects. If you have already been teaching it, you ll find opportunities to disagree, perhaps even strongly. I certainly hope so! Theory s important, but resist the urge, as Seamus Heaney once noted at Oberlin, to deconstruct rather than construct. In other words, pay some attention to the many views about the nature and substance of the craft, of course, by assigning, say, reading that ranges from George Steiner s After Babel, at one end of the spectrum, to Robert Bly s The Eight Stages of Translation at the other. One way to do so is to put a substantial bibliography on reserve and allow students to choose whatever appeals to them, so long as they read around a few hours weekly in this critical literature and log in a journal their responses to what engages them. Provide some opportunities in class for sharing their entries and taking com- Translation Review ments from others. At mid-term, I ask for some samples of their reading notes and let the theory aspects go at that, for now. Later, of course, one must start arguing with experts to develop one s own essential aesthetic and methodology. Now on to the nature of the two main parts to my course. Part I: The Exercise Portfolio Over the first two-thirds of the term assuming a semester-long schedule line up a series of presentations (around 7 or 8 I would recommend) in whatever languages/literatures you can persuade colleagues and visitors from farther afield to present to challenge your class. If you are fortunate enough to have a decent budget, invite visitors to offer a master-class separate from your structure, even give a reading, and the like. This particular time around, I have invited writer-translators to present texts from classical Chinese, ancient and modern Japanese, French, Spanish, Turkish, and modern Vietnamese. It helps to have people in town like David Young and Jiann Lin, to present Du Mu (the subject of their current collaboration); Ana Cara, who brought her friend and mentor Borges to Oberlin some years ago and is working on his milongas; G neli G n, the TurkishAmerican writer and award-winning translator; Janice Zinser to discuss Ponge; and Bruce Weigl and his daughter, Hanh, to present current Vietnamese poems. Bruce is the well-known poet, translator, and memoirist. Besides making any remarks they wish to about the craft, and about the language and literature surrounding the writer they introduce us to, including any tips from their own experience, guests are asked to provide us with barebones literals of the text(s) they want students to translate and walk us through, taking questions and comments as they go. I strongly urge guests to bring hithertountranslated texts, which adds considerable excitement and raises the energy level. Comparative studies of others versions, though instructive and helpful, seem to crowd beginners, I ve found, and they give up more easily, don t discover hidden resources in themselves. Fairly brief texts, hence mainly poems or short prose, bring out the best in beginners as well, not to mention texts guests really love and have struggled with themselves. I beg guests for their own versions but show them to students 41 only after the exercise portfolio is due. One last note: since I m fluent in German, I like to take a turn presenting an assignment myself. If I begin the parade of presentations, I spend some time reviewing what I call the manners and morals of translating anyone s work from anywhere, from securing rights to honoring the work itself. I urge contacting writers one wants to translate. Writers have often, in my experience, delighted in knowing someone is interested in introducing their work in English, even if the translator is a beginner. In some instances, former students have established life-long working relationships with writers they initially began translating for this class. Some logistics: if you do two 75-minute classes weekly, say Tuesday/Thursday, as I do, schedule guests for the Thursdays so students will have a weekend to work on their initial drafts. Since I am currently working with 21 students, and there are 7 exercise-presentations, I ask 3 students to volunteer each time to put their solutions on the worksheet. Each then has about 25 minutes to read her version, talk about her sense of the piece, her general approach, frustrations and delights, then take questions and comments. The class in turn is encouraged to leave any comments for the presenters to collect that could not be addressed in class because of time constraints. I also encourage students to make use of anyone else s superior solution, just footnote the borrowing and briefly mention why it s being lifted. I myself enter class discussions as little as possible, passing my comments along in private, because I like students to forge partnerships with fellow students via in-class exchanges; via sharing other, written comments that might carry over to joint projects at a later date. I introduce my own written comments gingerly: you might try this, I m just one reader, so , and most often, please see me right away if my comments aren t clear or, worse, are not going down well. Everyone who has ever taught knows how crucial it is to sense what a student can and cannot hear particularly beginners. Here s a beneficial, parallel assignment to the weekly exercises: students are required to try their hand at what I call companion pieces, inspired, shall we say, by interacting with the foreign texts. I don t grade these pieces but do give them careful review. Students say writing these companions gets them to raise their sights and often results in their strongest work to date. Not surprising, of course. Working on masterpieces will make a difference in how one thinks about one s work. These are only guidelines, and I happily confess that some guests have found other, productive ways to 42 engage the class. Let me repeat that when the guests introduce hitherto untranslated material, students respond with their strongest instincts and attention, which can result in misses, even misrepresentations, and downright messes, but often yeasty, so to foster an initial, pullout-all-stops approach, I recount what Miroslav Holub said when I first showed him some pretty mangled attempts to come to grips with his remarkable poems. He pointed to an outrageous mistranslation, that night in Prague, slapped his thigh and laughed, I like it, we keep it! When the poem in question was eventually allowed to appear in Czech (back from my translation), there was my mistake ! Working with such a generous soul as Holub, one could eventually make one s way through Purgatory. Okay, all your guests have come and gone, and midterm is upon you. So here is what I look for in the exercise portfolio: two versions of each piece guests have left with us to work on, an early attempt and a final-for-now version; five journal entries of responses to a range of reading in the references on reserve; one entry on a critical source students have located on their own, outside the course s reading list; a companion piece to each translation; and a brief introductory statement (say 3—5 pages) under this rubric: Some Things I ve Learned on the Way to These Translations. Part II: The Final-Project Portfolio Early in the course, I announce that for a final project, to occupy us after the exercises are completed, students will be expected to work together in small groups three is a good number, one to break a tie vote, I joke; two is a minimum; no one may work alone, even given sufficient outside help or personal expertise, for reasons I hope are transparent, but note Ezra Pound s famous dictum, It takes two to translate, one who knows the language out of which, one who knows the language into w h i c h . The mission is to identify a writer or writers whose work cries out for translation into English and whom students want to translate with all their heart and soul. To facilitate matching up well in teams, I compile a list based on students responses to (1) languages and/or literatures I am fluent in; (2) languages and/or literatures I would be interested in working on, even with little or no expertise in this regard I love to tell the tale of Christine Molinari, with deep Italian roots, who nonetheless confessed she would really rather work on Hungarian, for unknown reasons. Long story short: she eventually mastered the language so well that she moved Translation Review to Budapest, met among other writers the poet Csoori, and he himself told me he couldn t hope for a better translator than Christine. The list mentioned above quickly gives students ideas for connecting with other students they don t already know or might not have suspected share similar interests. Turning in their responses, students often mention books by writers they would love to entice others to work on with them; writers they ve met while studying abroad; even writers in their family from other lands, you name it! So, using anything and everything, from foreign students on campus, to alumni living abroad, to contacts with foreign writers, to gramma s uncle s book of Swedish poems, the groups embark on a journey to narrow their specific choices of texts to render, divvy up responsibilities who does what and how much on the way to preparing a seminar-style report to the class in the remaining sessions, during which they supply us with samples of their work together, highlighting why this writer, why this work? Other general discussion topics might include, for instance, how we approached the task, our ways with particular solutions, even our fights! And finally to take questions and comments that may be helpful to the presenting group as it prepares a manuscript to turn in at term s end. Let me add that I give each student two grades for this final effort: one that all group members receive for the project as a whole; and one individually, based on a personal statement each student also submits, about his or her specific contributions to the group project. We end the course with a class reading: everyone reads a favorite translation, as well as a favorite companion piece. Finally, I urge everyone to continue translating next semester, perhaps on a one-to-one basis with a sponsoring faculty member. Announcing ALTA 2002 Conference 25th Anniversary October 16-19, 2002 Embassy Suites, Downtown Chicago, Illinois For information, click on the following links at ALTA Website: (http://www.literarytranslators.org) Keynote Speaker: Clare Cavanagh Current Panel Proposals Current Workshop Proposals Bilingual Readings Fellowships for Beginning Translators Accommodation Information Translation Review 43 ANNA KARENINA SELECTED POEMS LEO TOLSTOY VICTOR HUGO Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky “Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English, and their superb rendering allows us, as perhaps never before, to grasp the palpability of Tolstoy’s ‘characters, acts, situations.’” —James Wood, The New Yorker Translated by Brooks Haxton Penguin Penguin Classic 864 pp. 0-14-200027-2 $16.00 Penguin Classic 80 pp. 0-14-243703-4 $12.00 SELECTED WRITINGS J O S É M A RT Í Translated by Esther Allen with an Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría 400 pp. 0-14-243704-2 $15.00 PINOCCHIO A LITERARY REVIEW CARLO COLLODI SØREN KIERKEGAARD Original Translation by M.A. Murray, revised by S. Tassinan, with an Introduction by Jack Zipes, and Illustrations by Charles Folkard Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Alastair Hannay Penguin Classic 224 pp. 0-14-243706-9 Penguin Classic 160 pp. 0-14-044801-2 $13.00 $10.00 THE SHAPE OF WATER A SALVO MONTALBANO MYSTERY ANDREA CAMILLERI AU BONHEUR DES DAMES Translated by Stephen Sartelli (THE LADIES’ DELIGHT) ÉMILE ZOL A Viking 176 pp. 0-670-03092-9 $20.95 Translated and Edited by Robin Buss Penguin Classic 464 pp. 0-14-044783-0 $12.00 CHRONICLE OF THE NARVÁEZ EXPEDITION THE DAMNED A LVA R N Ú Ñ E Z C A B E Z A VA C A (LÀ-BAS) J.-K. HUYSMANS Introduction by Ilan Stavans Revised and Annotated Translation by Harold Augenbraum Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Terry Hale Penguin Classic 320 pp. 0-14-044767-9 Penguin Classic $8.00 Translated and Edited by Robert Cook Penguin Classic AND OTHER WORKS Translated with an Introduction and Notes by A.C. Spearing 208 pp. 0-14-044762-8 Translated by Andrew Bromfield “A simmering ragout of modern satire, Buddhism, and Egyptology.” —The Guardian P E N G U I N $14.00 AND OTHER WRITINGS MAX WEBER VICTOR PELE VIN 256 pp. 0-670-03066-X 384 pp. 0-14-044769-5 THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM $13.00 HOMO ZAPIENS Viking $12.00 NJAL’S SAGA THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING Penguin Classic 160 pp. 0-14-243707-7 Translated and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells Penguin Classic 384 pp. 0-14-043921-8 $16.00 $24.95 P U T N A M I N C. ACA D E M I C M A R K E T I N G D E PA RT M E N T • 3 7 5 H U D S O N S T R E E T • N E W YO R K , N E W YO R K 1 0 0 1 4 - 3 6 5 7 • w w w. p e n g u i n p u t n a m . c o m / a c a d e m i c 44 Translation Review “WHERE’S THE VELVET?” JÁCHYM TOPOL’S SESTRA AND THE RECEPTION OF ALEX ZUCKER’S TRANSLATION CITY, SISTER, SILVER By Yvonne Howell O ver a decade ago, the European and North American reception of the Latin American boom writers alerted some translators and translation theorists to thorny problems of acknowledgement in reviews of translated literature. Some of the most serious issues they raised were the tendency to [focus] almost exclusively on a translation s potential role in English, comparing it to other similar works in North American literature (Maier, 248), and a paradoxical urge to promote literature from other cultures at the expense of that literature s source identity.1 There has been no systematic study of the Western reception of translations of post-Soviet literature from Russia and Eastern Europe, although one can expect such a study to provoke a fruitful discussion of political and cultural assumptions behind American perceptions of the other Europe, potential NATO allies who are judged through the prism of our expectations and fears. J chym Topol s novel City, Sister, Silver (Sestra) was an immediate critical sensation when it arrived on the Czech literary scene in 1994. It won the Egon Hostovsk? Prize for the best Czech book of the year and was the only post—Velvet Revolution book included in the writers and critics list of the 100 Greatest Czech Prose Works of the Century (ahead of all but one of Kundera s novels on the list). It was recognized as a landmark literary achievement, destined to be read, studied, and talked about as the point of departure for a new era in the development of Czech prose. What Czech critics saw in this epic novel (the original is 488 pages) was a stunningly new and serious attempt to transform the literary and artistic resources of the Czech language, to make it express the profoundly different spiritual and social reality of the post-Communist Czech Republic. The basic structure of the novel follows the picaresque adventures of the protagonist, Potok, as he makes his way through the new reality of post-Communist Czechoslovakia and Central Europe. Potok s name implies flow, which is precisely what Time has ceased to do in the central metaphor of this novel. Time has exploded, so that suddenly the city (Prague) and even sleepy Czech villages have been catapulted into the post-present, Translation Review sprayed with time s explosive colors (81). The consistent pattern of imagery that associates a fabled city, the explosion of time, and the acceleration of social change is sharply reminiscent of Andrei Bely s apocalyptic vision of Petersburg at the turn of the previous century. The novel is divided into three parts, whose headings have become the title of the novel in English (the title of the Czech original is simply Sestra [Sister]). The hero is a young man of Topol s generation; i.e., he grew up in the decaying ideological and social torpor of the old regime and came of age just as the Berlin Wall came down and his country entered a new era of chaotic freedoms. Potok is a part-time actor, until the gaping holes in post—Cold War economic and social regulations prompt him and his friends to engage in various types of business, gang intrigues, and unregulated travel throughout Central Europe. The hero s first-person narration renders a world that is fast-paced, full of drugs and sex, often phantasmagoric, and lived among the underground and marginal layers of society. Potok is a splendid eyewitness guide to this new world, because he, too, is sucked into the vortex of global capitalism, which propels people across formerly rigid national and social boundaries. The various subplots and digressions in the hero s saga are ultimately all subordinate to the novel s overarching concern with language, time, freedom, and morality. I asked Catbird Press s editor for copies of every North American review of Alex Zucker s translation City, Sister, Silver.2 Originally, I was interested in seeing how the theme of translation would be handled in these reviews. Topol presents the explosion of the old political and social order as an explosion of the Czech language, and therefore Alex Zucker was faced with the task of rendering into English a novel that is self-consciously about the Czech language. How would the particular although certainly not unique problems of this type of translation be confronted by the reviewers? The short answer is that they were not. The longer answer, which forms the substance of this article, is that issues of cultural translation, or even what one might call geopolitical translation, coalesced to form a striking pattern in the underlying narrative structuring the North American 45 reviews of Topol s novel. I found that most of the issues cultural critics raised in the reception of Third World literary texts in English translation (Spivak, 253) were newly provoked by the reviews of City, Sister, Silver. In this article, I demonstrate that the North American reviews of Sestra all follow a strikingly similar pattern. In conclusion, I suggest one possible alternative reading of Sestra, one that sheds a different light on Topol s novel and Zucker s translation than the one unanimously forwarded by the eight North American reviews. The American reviews of Topol s novel all follow a master narrative. This narrative begins with utopia lost (fall of communism) but quickly reminds us that the previous (communist) utopia was a false one and was challenged by a generation of writers who were, in their own way, also utopian visionaries. Both utopias are now discredited, and the novel under review can be best understood as an only partially successful attempt to give voice to the dystopian specter of an imploded society, in which there is no common language, ethnicity, legal structure, or ideological agenda. In short, the reviews assume a false utopia replaced by confusion, violence, and mutual incomprehension. Within the confines of this set of assumptions, the reviewers are insightful and cogent in both their praise and their critique of the novel.3 An analysis of the reviews, taken together, suggests that a set of underlying strategies for approaching new translations from Eastern Europe has formed the discourse of Western reception of these works. The Review Titles Reviewers think of catchy titles for their pieces, and in the case under consideration, the titles reveal a discourse of post—Velvet Revolution disillusionment and alienation. The Bummer of Freedom, Life is Elsewhere, Changelings in a Czech Land, Schemes, Scams and Rackets, and Reality Czech all evoke a vision of failed hopes, bungled opportunity, and the failure of Western-style democracy (which is supposed to guarantee personal freedom as well as an uncorrupted legal and political system). Ironically, the code words for contemporary alienation are taken from the underground dissident vocabulary of the previous era of socialism, e.g., Kundera s Life is Elsewhere and Heinlein s Stranger in a Strange Land. Situating East European Literature The American reviews of Topol s novel all follow a 46 master narrative. This narrative begins by emphasizing the dark aesthetic response to the fall of communism. Post-Soviet literature is characterized as an exploration of the dark, apocalyptic, sinister, and surreal; it depicts a violent, fragmented, incomprehensible reality. The opening topos of each of the more substantial reviews invokes a Western literary tradition of the dark side to set the stage for the consideration of Topol s novel to follow. In the consistent discourse of the reviews, the literary responses to the fall of communism (and the strictures of socialist realism) can be best situated in a tradition that stretches from de Sade to Dostoevsky to the Decadents to postmodernism. Not surprisingly, almost every review includes a mention of Kafka at the beginning as well. This situates the translation under discussion within a Central European tradition of metaphysical uncertainty, without engaging one of Topol s primary motifs, which is the expulsion (literally and figuratively) of the German presence in the literary construction of Prague. The Dissident Legacy All but the shortest reviews invoke the previous generation of well-known Czech dissident writers after situating the novel in a literary tradition but before they begin to discuss Topol himself, or his novel. We might note here that whereas Topol s novel will be described as a daunting challenge to any translator, the tacit assumption is that writers like Kundera and Havel did not pose particularly insurmountable problems for translators. Their Czech language could be rendered into something that sounded normal, even noble, to North American readers. A few of the reviewers point out the previous generation of Czech writers had a clearly defined evil, the false utopia of socialism, to write against. The difficulty that faces the translator of the new literature is that he or she must give a sense of the relationship between language and ideology that forms the linguistic backdrop of the original. As long as there was a literary Czech language that described reality as dictated by (communist) ideology, there was an eloquent, ironic undermining of this language in the writings of moral and political dissidents like Kundera, Klima, Havel, etc. Topol s generation has no more use for either. The new reality Topol describes is a heady mixture of freedom and chaos; the focus of his critique is no longer communism, but capitalism, as it is manifested in most of the emerging world. Some of Topol s most striking use of language is motivated by his need to attack the familiar ills of capitalism yawning income gaps, global drug trafficking, Translation Review environmental destruction without resorting to the Czech language the communist media used to attack these same things. Topol’s Ideological Credentials The third topos of what I discern as the master narrative underlying this set of reviews is an account of Topol s personal and political profile. A premium is placed on the humanistic Western credentials: from Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Havel s Charter 77, this young man has Western values flowing in his veins. Depending on the length of the review, the following autobiographical facts are invoked at this point: his grandfather was Catholic scholar who wrote on Michelangelo; his father was a dissident who translated Shakespeare, at age 15, J chym Topol was youngest signer of Charter 77; and Topol was denied a university education in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. Instead, he did manual work and an underground publication (the Revolver Revue). One reviewer s elaboration of Topol s biography points explicitly to the Cold War images these facts rely on for their power: Topol s early dissident activities, in the 1980s, are described in the language of a spy novel. He made several clandestine trips to Poland and organized a cloak and dagger meeting between Polish and Czech dissidents. The Novel Each of the reviews moves from a consideration of Topol s real-life credentials to a discussion of the novel s characters, plot (or lack thereof), and imagery. The reviewers despair over divining any order or hope in Topol s narrative chaos. Much is made of the fragmentation, chaos, violence, and hallucinatory quality of his vision. The elements of the plot that are most frequently mentioned are the initial scene of Germans fleeing Prague; Potok s participation in gang activities; and confusion over the role of the title s sister, who is the protagonist s love interest and the motivation for his picaresque wanderings. The Quality of Translation Toward the end of the reviews, there is an assessment of the English translation. This is an instructive breakdown, with three reviews concluding that something is certainly lost in translation, while two reviewers suggest that the English translation is a net gain over the Translation Review nominally coherent original. On both sides, the reviewers go beyond a facile smoother is better approach, but their comments point to the enduring problems of reception when literature in translated from a culture that assumes a primal connection between language and reality. One reviewer praises the translation by comparing it to A Clockwork Orange but still assumes a loss of comprehension in the English translation. One reviewer makes an insightful objection to Zucker s decision to use certain contractions an, kina, dunno across the board as a way to approximate the frequency of Topol s morphological and orthographic deviations from Standard Literary Czech. She notes that the faux slang template makes the English prose more predictable (even in its substandard variant) than the strikingly unpredictably idiomatic Czech in the original. Conversely, one reviewer enthusiastically claims that without any knowledge of the Czech original, he nevertheless received an amphetamine rush from the hum that comes off of each page of Zucker s English prose. The remaining reviews all note that the language of the novel is difficult and assume that something is lost in the translation. In conclusion, an analysis of the American reviews of Topol s novel reveals an underlying template. This template helps shape a possible reading of the novel as post-Velvet dystopia. I do not wish to make the claim that this template is fundamentally wrong or that it leads inevitably to a false reading pf the novel. Like all such patternings, it probably reveals more about the desires and fears of observing culture than about the true nature of the culture observed. In what follows, I make a case that if we instead read Topol s novel against the narrative of translation the story of the Tower of Babel then many of the vexing questions of comprehension raised by the old template are resolved. *** Topol writes as if he believed that one s language structures one s perception of reality. In fact, I would argue that the Czech language is the true heroine of his novel. Topol s language is a living, moving, developing consciousness that has the power to shape reality, as well as respond to it. Like the protagonist in Boris Pasternak s book of poems My Sister — Life (both feminine nouns in Russian: moiia sestra — zhizn’) Potok s enigmatic spiritual sister is both a woman (Černa, the bar floozy, the replacement of She-dog and his final love, his spiritual sister) and the Czech language: Čern is Česk ř eč. From this point of view, it makes sense that in the open- 47 ing scene the German language the language in which the Czech writer Kafka still wrote is finally leaving Prague. The novel opens as the narrator and his lover/sister, his language, watch the Germans, and presumably the literary influence of Kafka s language, bail out of the city.4 There is a lot of violence and eroticism in his relationship to this girl/woman/language. He spends the rest of the novel trying to make amends, to get his language back or to birth a new language into existence. Insofar as he is successful, Čern cum česk řeč is his to keep by the end of the novel. The picaresque and hallucinatory adventures along the way add up to a series of linguistic experiments, while the pockets of order one finds in Topol s narrative chaos consistently make an equation between the fate of language and the fate of humanity. To review this dimension of the novel, I propose that we refer back to another master narrative, one I think may be more appropriate than the outdated narrative of the Cold War. What is the master narrative of translation itself? How do we structure our thoughts on translation as necessity, as impossibility, as an inevitability of the human condition? The master narrative of the fact of translation is, of course, chapter eleven of Genesis, the story of Babel. In this story, a still united humanity speaks a common language and builds civilization together, brick by brick, in perfect communicative harmony. In their utopian unity of language and purpose, they come close to reaching the gods. In what is perhaps a symbolic statement of the irreconcilability of human nature and utopian society, God scatters the builders of Babel and destroys their linguistic unity. From now on, different tribes will communicate, at best, through translation. Utopia is no longer possible, although the cultural memory and cultural longing for the pre-Babylonian state continues to inspire to this day. It is a master narrative, as Walter Benjamin suggested in The Task of the Translator, of a lost utopia that might be regained, or at least glimpsed, in the effort of translation.5 Is it possible, in fact, to read Topol s novel as a journey toward the lost harmony of pre-Babel, instead of as a journey ever further into post-Babylonian difference and dissent? I think it is. First of all, Topol provides the reader with a hint of how we might read his novel in the inverted Tower of Babel parable of chapter 13, titled That Time in Berlun. The Kingdom of the Kanaks. The Dark Lady. I Find a Queen, and Lose Her. (Tehdy v Berlunu. Království Kanak?. Ta Temná. Najdu Královnu. A Ztrácim.) The opening scene in this chapter is a humorous recounting of how the narrator and his pal, Kopic, are 48 nearly caught by the ticket checker while riding on the Berlin metro. The reader knows that not only do they not have subway tickets, they have no valid identification documents of any sort. The narration of this situation is humorous because it deftly parodies the first line of Genesis 11 : And all the earth was one language, one set of words. As the narrator, Potok, tells it, all the earth does seem to speak a single language consisting of American brand names and a kind of eurotrash slang of German and Slavic words: They ride under the štr se and encounter the kontrola, who is not fooled by Kopic s faked heart attack and Potok s sobs. They wonder why even though their odezhda” (Russian for the Czech oblečeni ) is super, consisting of pepita saka, trojeans and even a cap with Phi Beta Kappa on it, they always get singled out for the look on their ksicht. As in Genesis 11: 2-4, they have journeyed from the East and joined a kind of construction project. In Genesis, of course, the construction will be of bricks and bitumen (mortar) and will be a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. In Topol s fable, Potok his friend pull the brake and smash out a window to escape the next ticket control, and encounter a subterranean construction project. A multitude of little black guys are digging up dirt and carting it off in wheelbarrows ( spousta malejch černejch mrštnejch. Kopou a hl nu vodv žej na kolečk ch.) The leader, a small, very black man with a tusk through his nose, explains that they are Kanaks, and they are tunneling their way to Kanakland.6 In other words, in Topol s inverted parable, they are tunneling downward through the globe, rather than upward to the heavens, to reach their homeland on the other side but this time loaded with stolen goods from German supermarkets. Potok even briefly envisions joining their team, because certainly Kanakland is a kind of heaven: could be nice in Kanakland palm wine, beaches . In Genesis, the tower to heaven is never completed, because God intervenes, saying As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, nothing they plot will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language so that they will not understand each other s language. Babel, which is both the name of the city (meaning gateway to God ) and a pun on the word for confusion (the Hebrew balal) is thus both the manifestation of a utopian aspiration and the origin of confusion on earth. It is a master narrative, as Derrida has shown, of a utopia that must at once be urgently hoped for (complete mutual understanding) and urgently avoided (linguistic Translation Review imperialism of the one ruling language), a narrative of eternal longing (which makes translation necessary) and eternal frustration (translation turns out to be impossible).7 This master narrative would structure reviews of a different kind of novel, one in which the hero s journey is simultaneously a fight against the imposition of a single world language and a struggle to revive the highest aspiration of human culture the urge toward harmony, communal building, unity. In Topol s parable, there is no need for divine intervention to create confusion and difference among the motley population of refugees who inhabit Europe s underground: Melonesian Kanaks, Japanese lesbians, Slavic drifters, British and Dutch losers are all included in Potok s list of honorary kanaks the megarace of the tunnel. The inverted moral of the story is Potok s revelation that actually, we are all Kanaks, and that a single secret and open tongue comes into being among this disenfranchised eurotrash. Topol pursues this point in chapter 13 by inserting one of his characteristic philosophical riffs one of several passages scattered throughout the novel that connect the fate of language to the fate of humanity: And as I stood around, picking up all sorts of words and expressions as the tribes mixed together in byznys to survive . Stealing cash and words from each other . Experiences and words it struck me maybe something was happening here, maybe this mixing was giving rise to a new mother tongue a Kanak one and maybe it was a tongue of peace, a preBabylonian one I mean they re poor, they gotta communicate till everything s tremendous again and we all look like the billboards and pitch in to rebuild .. (233) Topol s meditation in chapter 13 harkens back to the Benjaminian notion that in our collective human consciousness, there is a common language of truth, a certain utopian intention that all languages may point to but no single human language can capture in its entirety. The practical corollary of this utopian vision, for Benjamin, is the desirability of a word-for-word approach to translation: Rather, the significance of fidelity as ensured by literalness is that the work reflects the great longing for linguistic complementation. A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the Translation Review original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. ( The Task of the Translator, p. 79.) Topol s self-consciously experimental Czech and disrupted syntax takes the word, not the sentence, as its primary unit of meaning. He writes this way not so much to defy translation (although that may be the immediate result) but rather to direct our thoughts to the gap between language, translation, and utopian societies. If every language contains within itself a linguistic worldview, or mode of perceiving the world, then the only way to translate smoothly into another language is to betray the mode of perception dictated by the original. If, on the other hand, the translation takes the intention, or perceptual mode of the original, literally and manages to convey this intention, then although the result will be a strange and bumpy read, it will faithfully reflect the worldview of the original. In Des Tours de Babel, Derrida takes Benjamin s call for a word-oriented translation at least one step further.8 His deconstruction of the Tower of Babel reveals both the utopian impulse we have spoken of, in which the desire for a peaceful transparency of the human community reigns eternal, and the colonizing, imperial premise behind the narrative, in which a single languageworldview is to be imposed upon all peoples. ( Inversely, when God imposes and opposes his name [Babel-babble], he ruptures the rational transparency but interrupts also the colonial violence or the linguistic imperialism ([Derrida, 226]). This theme is tantalizingly present throughout Topol s novel: his Czech and even his half-drawn human characters are doing battle against American-English—dominated global capitalism. In conclusion, the master narrative that structures American reviews of Topol s novel in translation is based on a set of assumptions that seeks to close the gap between the literary ideologies of the Cold War ( bad official literature vs. good dissident literature ) and the anti-ideology of postmodernism ( if it s dark, maybe it is intellectually therapeutic, but it won t sell ). Topol s novel is not adequately served by this template, whereas the fundamental questions of language and ethics laid 49 bare by the master narrative of translation the Tower of Babel can show movement and light in the otherwise chaotic darkness of Topol s novel. Notes See Carol S. Maier, “Questions of Review,” in Translation Perspectives IX, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ed., Center for Research in Translation: Binghamton University, 243–265. Of the many cultural critics and translation theorists who contributed to this discussion, of particular relevance here are Asad, Talal, and John Dixon. “Translating Europe’s Others,” Europe and Its Others. Proc. of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984. Francis Baker, et. al., eds. Vol. 2. Colchester: U Essex, 1985. 170–77. Bhabha, Homi. “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, postcolonial Times, and the Trials of Cultural Translation,” The Location of Culture. New York: Rouledge, 1994. 212–35. Hermans, Theo, ed. The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. Spivak, Gaytri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Andre Lefevere, “Translation: Who Is Doing What For/Against Whom and Why?” Translation Perspectives IX, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ed. Center for Research in Translation: Binghamton University, 45–55. 2 I received copies of the following reviews from The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Washington Post, Philadelphia City Paper, Rain Taxi, Publishers Weekly, St. Louis Magazine: Bookmarks. In no way do I mean to criticize the work of the authors of these reviews or imply that their reviews are somehow less valid. On the contrary, I learned much from these reviews, which were written by people with great literary insight. By noticing a structural similarity to all the nonCzech reviews, I was able to entertain the notion of an alternative structure for a review of a translation, one that accounts for a different one of the novel’s many tonalities. Neil Bermel’s review in The New York Times Book Review came out only after I had completed this study; in fact, Bermel’s review is the exception to the reviewing pattern described above. My own review of Topol’s book appeared in the journal Slavic and East European Review. 3 If, however, we are going to get answers to all the questions the reviewers fail to resolve, we have to move beyond this rather outdated master narrative. Is there really no development in this novel, only the illusion of movement? Who is the sister, and what is her role? Is 1 50 there any relation between the initial scene of Germans fleeing Prague and the final scene of the “sister’s” reappearance, presumably for good? 4 The bizarre name he gives to the female lover in the first chapter — “She-dog” — makes sense when one recalls the primary metaphor he uses for the Czech language in this same chapter — it is a “dog’s tongue.” 5 “The Task of the Translator” (1923) was originally written by Benjamin as an introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s “Tableaux Parisiens.” Reprinted in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968, 69–82. 6 Kanaks are one of the Melonesian ethnic groups, socially looked down upon by almost all the other peoples of Polynesia. 7 Jacques Derrida, from “Des Tours de Babel,” translated by Joseph F. Graham. In Theories of Translation, ed. Schulte and Biguenet. University of Chicago Press, 1992, 218–227. 8 He points out that the city of Babel receives its proper name as the name of God, i.e. “it is a tower or city that receives its name from an event during which YHWH ‘proclaims his name.’” This name is not translated when we translate the Bible into various languages. But in the original language of the story, “bavel” also serves as a common noun, meaning confusion. This word we translate as “babble,” or something else in other languages. So, there is already a fatal problem of translation encoded in the Tower of Babel story: how do we translate a text written already in several languages at a time, to render the effect of plurality? Topol’s novel begs this question, because his frequent use of English words cannot jar in the English-language translation as they do in their original position within Czech. Translation Review MULTIPLE TRANSLATIONS OF GIACOMO LEOPARDI’S “L’INFINITO” By Giuseppe Natale L Infinito Sempre caro mi fu quest ermo colle*, E questa siepe, che da tanta parte Dell ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude*. 4 Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati Spazi di l da quella, e sovrumani Silenzi, e profondissima qu ete Io nel pensier mi fingo*; ove per poco 8 Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento Odo stormir* tra queste piante, io quello Infinito silenzio a questa voce Vo comparando*: e mi sovvien l eterno, 12 E le morte stagioni, e la presente E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa Immensit s annega il pensier mio*: E il naufragar m dolce* in questo mare. Giacomo Leopardi (1819)1 eorge Steiner, in After Babel,2 outlines a process of reading that develops like a double spiral: departing from the text, it moves externally toward literature at large and internally toward the author s mind. This dual hermeneutic motion is particularly suitable to L’Infinito because of the intrinsic dual nature of the poem itself: L’Infinito is at the same time a poetic creation and a reflection on poetic creation. On the one hand, a textual study that develops externally can enable the translator to identify the syntactical, lexical, and phonetic elements of this finely engineered poem and to place it meaningfully in the literary framework that generated it. On the other hand, a textual study that develops internally toward the author s mind, toward the referential framework in which the act of creating L’Infinito took place, can indirectly shed some light on the mechanics of creation described in the poem. L’Infinito belongs to the first series of idylls that Giacomo Leopardi composed between 1819 and 1821, and that were later included in his collection of poems titled Canti (1831). Leopardi defined his idylls as canti that portray situazioni, affezioni, avventure storiche : idylls take form when a place permeated with old mem- G Translation Review ories stirs certain sensations in the poet s mind. The description that Leopardi gives of idyll deviates substantially from its accepted definition in the ancient and classical tradition. In ancient times, eidullion, the diminutive of the Greek term eidos, broadly referred to a short lyric, in contrast with the lengthier eide, used to describe grand lyrical poems like the Pindaric odes. In the classical tradition, the acceptation of the term changed. Idyll now indicated a short poem evoking the serene atmosphere of country life, as ideally opposed to the disorderly city life. In its later evolution, during the Renaissance, idyllic poetry ceased to be a separate literary entity and flowed into the greater body of bucolic poetry. The term idyllic thus came to describe mainly the tone of an artistic creation rather than a category of composition. By the 19th century, when L’Infinito was composed, idyll as a lyric form had undergone a further change, brought about by the Romantic revolution. Idyllic poetry now did not simply refer to the contemplation of a tranquil scene or episode of rustic life but also entailed the emotional participation of the poet. In the Romantic idyll, the poet s musings did not necessarily resolve into the bucolic and the picturesque but could be instead the prelude to the narration of a tragic theme. Margaret Brose, in her essay Leopardi and the Romantic sublime, links L’Infinito to the greater Romantic lyric, as that form, identified by Abrams, that replaced the greater ode, the elevated Pindaric. The idyll, says Abrams, usually depicts a determinate speaker in a particularized outdoor setting, who carries on a soliloquy with himself or the outer scene, or an absent or silent human auditor. The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; ...an aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling ...In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. 3 According to Abrams tripartite scheme, Romantic idylls are built on the interplay of the poet s mind and nature, on a repeated out-in-out process. In Leopardi s poem, this process finds expression in the dichotomous opposition of definite and indefinite, where the former represents reality and the latter the 51 poet s imagination. This interpretation finds a direct confirmation in a comment by Leopardi recorded in his Zibaldone, two years after he composed the idyll: In regard to the sensations which are pleasing by virtue of the indefinite alone, see my idyll on L’Infinito, and picture to yourself a country terrain dipping so sharply that at a certain distance the eye cannot reach the valley; and a row of trees, whose ending is lost to sight, either because of the length of the row, or because it is running down hill, etc. A factory, a tower, etc., seen so that it seems to stand alone above the horizon, which is out of sight, produces a most effective and sublime contrast between the finite and the indefinite, etc.4 If the contrast of infinite and indefinite produces a series of sensations in the poet s mind, the contrast of finite and indefinite, of physical landscape as opposed to immensity, is the spark for poetic creation. In Leopardi, finite and indefinite are opposite, complementary entities, antipoetic and poetic matter. This contrast is reflected in the idyll s lexicon. Leopardi, as Brose remarks, divides lexicon into two basic categories, termini and parole, a distinction that reflects the dual nature of language. Scientific and philosophical languages deal in terms which present a univocal idea of a given object or concept: these termini fix meaning and delimit semantic flexibility. Parole, conversely, do not present a precise idea of an object, but are polysemic and call up clusters of images that, by virtue of their indefiniteness, suggest the infinite. In L’Infinito, a lexical dichotomy is perceivable between precise, referential terms, like colle and siepe, opposed to vague, poetic words, like pensier and eterno. The terms describing a physical reality are not important in themselves but only as antitheses to words, as boundaries to be transcended through the action of imagination.5 As a result of this dialectical process, terms describing natural reality are belittled, divested of their referential value; conversely, words that convey an idea of limitless indeterminacy, like spazio and silenzio, are amplified, semantically pluralized into spazi and silenzi. Whereas the formal structure of L’Infinito faithfully conforms to the greater Romantic lyric identified by Abrams, the philosophical conclusions of the idyll move away from Romanticism. In the synthesis of the 52 dialectic process that closes L’Infinito the thought disappearing in the infinite there is no suggestion of that mystical fusion with the universe that can be found in many Romantic poets and philosophers. There is no echo of that unity of universe that was at the basis, for instance, of Schelling s transcendental philosophy. For Schelling, spirit is nature come to the stage of clarity and consciousness, and nature is spirit still in its visible, undeveloped stage. Mind and nature thus have a common origin, and their identity can be found in the Absolute, where all antitheses disappear. In L’Infinito, this synthesis does not occur at the meeting point of nature and mind but only in the poet s mind, not at the hedge but on this side of the hedge, not in nature but in imagination. The central point in the idyll where the synthesizing process begins is also its quasisymmetrical center, the first part of the seventh line, io nel pensier mi fingo. In Leopardi s lexicon, fingere is not simulation but rather invention through poetic meditation: it is through the act of fiction that all antitheses in the end disappear. As many critics have remarked, however, the closing of L’Infinito should not be read according to the philosophy of idealism. It does not suggest a fusion with the object of external perception: the ideas. It is instead imbued with sensationalism, more specifically with the Lockean psychology6: the drowning of thought into the immensity is a merging of feeling into spirituality. In this final image, as De Sanctis has remarked, one should not see a denial of life but rather the supreme value of sensation. Structure of L Infinito Leopardi s idyll has been defined as an itinerarium mentis in infinitum, in which the mind, after going through a progression of contrasts and binary oppositions past/present, subject/object, silence/sound, proximity/distance reaches its final liberation through the faculty of imagination. Its structure can be described as symmetrical or specularly symmetrical, depending on which element is being emphasized. The idyll opens with an indefinite temporal marker, sempre, a nonspatial continuum in which events can occur in succession from the present to the past or in a reversed succession, from the past to the present. What follows on the same line, however, the other temporal marker fu and the deictic questo, make clear that the direction of narration is from past to present. The time progression is further defined by the present tense esclude and by the two presents progressive seden- Translation Review do and mirando. Another present progressive appears in the 11th line, vo comparando, which introduces a reversal in the interplay of past/present: le morte stagioni are brought back to the present by means of memory. The following qualifying adjective presente, the deictic questa, and the present tense s annega, reestablish the previous temporal direction, from past to present. The final time marker in the poem is the present infinitive naufragare, a verb form that functions as a substantive while retaining its verbal characteristic: naufragare concludes emblematically all the previous time shifts by mirroring the undetermined temporal dimension of the initial sempre. The contrastive structure of the idyll is also visible in the relationship of subject and object. In the first two lines, the narrating I and the natural landscape represented by the nouns colle and siepe, are conjoined by the pronoun mi and by the adjective caro, both qualifying the object in terms of its relation to the subject. Object and subject seem to depart in the third line, when the description moves from the hill to the farthest horizon; however, the complementarity of narrating I and nature is immediately reinstated: l ultimo orizzonte is in fact defined in terms of the poet s vision, il guardo. Nonetheless, this time the sequential order of subject/object is inverted, a reversal that is a prelude to the greater semantic inversion introduced in the fourth line by the adversative conjunction ma. Here, the object is reflected in the poet s mind, as in an endless series of mirrors: the outer horizon, internalized and multiplied, becomes an endless succession of spazi. The adjacency of subject and object is enhanced in line 11 by the medial diathesis of the intransitive verb sovvenire, introduced by the first-person indirect object pronoun: mi sovvien l eterno is halfway between I remember and it comes to my mind. The process of internalization of the object is completed in the last two lines, when the thought flows into the sea of immensity: as in the first line, subject and object, the doer and the receiver of the action, are combined. The same contrastive structure is applicable to those nouns and adjectives in the idyll that refer to silence and sound. The first allusion to sound, or rather to the absence of it, occurs in lines 5 and 6, in the enjambement sovrumani silenzi, an expression that contains in itself both subject ( human ) and object ( silence ). Profondissima quiete could be considered a useless pleonasm, since quiete indicates absence of noise as well as absence of movement, except for the Translation Review fact that its image contains an inverted symmetry of sovrumani silenzi : the prefix super- works in contrast to the superlative suffix - issimo : sovrumani silenzi and quiete profondissima describe silence extending far upward and far downward. Sound reappears in line 8. The rustling of il vento is in conjunction with the narrating I, implicit in the verb odo. This is the sound that activates the imaginative process in the poet s mind. Sound is again contrasted to silence in the next line, through the comparison of infinito silenzio to questa voce. In the last line, the two elements finally merge: the lively sound of the present season disappears, flowing into the eternal sea of silence. The spatial contrast in L’Infinito is determined by the several demonstrative adjectives questo and quello, expressing proximity and distance, respectively, and strategically positioned in the idyll. The initial deictics quest ermo colle and questa siepe in lines 1 and 2 are set in opposition to di l da quella in line 5, a feminine demonstrative adjective probably referring to the feminine noun siepe. The poet s eye focuses first on the hill, then on the hedge, and then his vision converges on the interminati spazi beyond them. This alternate sequence of proximity and distance anticipates the other series of deictics in lines 9 and 10, where queste piante and questa voce are set in opposition to quello infinito silenzio. Here the deictics provide a metaleptic substitution of the visual field with the aural field, as the rustling wind calls forth the reaction of the poet s imagination.7 In the final section, the metalepsis is reversed: questa immensit and questo mare entail a shift from the aural field to the spatial field. In the last line, proximity finally prevails over distance, as imagination prevails over reality. Symmetries and inversions in L’Infinito are reflected in the phonetic structure of some of its lexemes. Margaret Brose maintains that L’Infinito is built upon a chiastic pattern, and that all the inversions converge upon a central axis located in lines 7 and 8. A double phonetic chiasmus, Brose says, can be seen between the first and last lines, caro / mare, and colle / dolce : The phonetic chiasmus is intensified by the euphonic recurrence of ar in the last line, naufragar/mare ; as well as its inversion in the virtual center of the poem s central line: spaura. It recurs again (in an extended form conflating ar+ra) in the key verb denoting the poem s structure: comparando. 8 In L’Infinito, all these tightly controlled patterns of symmetries and inversions are encapsulated in a loose 53 syntactic and prosodic frame. Some critics have suggested that Leopardi used this laxness of formal structure intentionally to imitate the free flow of thoughts and mental associations. L’Infinito is in blank hendecasyllables, a form that frees the poet from the restraints of rhyme. Even in its most canonic configuration, regular hendecasyllable is still the most varied and free metrical form in Italian verse. The rhythm of the hendecasyllable is predominantly iambic, and its stresses fall on the even syllables. Other than a required stress on the 10th syllable, however, there is no specific rule requiring stresses to be in a certain position. The rhythmic effects that can be created by this accentual elasticity are extremely varied. Common usage has the rhythmic accents placed on the fourth and the sixth syllable, although these two stresses do not occur at the same time but in alternation.9 The prosodic variability in L’Infinito can be exemplified through the pivotal lines 4 through 6, pivotal in the sense that they introduce the stream of thoughts of the poet: (4) Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati/ (5) spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani /(6) silenzi, e profondissima qu ete. In all three lines, the sixth syllable is stressed, but their rhythm in the initial part is quite different. In the fourth line, the stress on the third syllable and the main stress on the sixth produce an anapest; in the fifth line, the stress falls on the first and on the fourth syllable, creating a dactyltrochaic rhythm; in the sixth line, there is a strong stress on the second syllable and another one on the sixth, so that only by emphasizing the light stress on the first syllable of profondissima it is possible to create an iambic rhythm. In the final part of all three lines, there are no marked stresses between the sixth and the 10th syllables. Furthermore, because of the use of enjambement, the stresses on the last syllables are hardly noticeable. The prosodic flexibility in these lines, as in the rest of the poem, is also made possible by the careful alternation of bisyllabic and multisyllabic words.10 In addition to metric flexibility, L’Infinito is also characterized by the lack of a rigid syntactic structure and by the presence of ambiguous connective nexuses. Both factors contribute to enhancing the sense of indeterminacy that the poem conveys, because syntactic flexibility brings semantic ambiguity: ove, for instance, is a polisyntactical conjunction, in the sense that it can be interpreted as a locative as well as a consecutive conjunction ( where or whereas ); come is a conjunction expressing time ( when ), but it could also be interpreted as causative ( as, since ). The 54 second part of the idyll is instead characterized by polysyndeton. The repeated use of the conjunction e in such close succession is not just a rhetorical device but rather is clearly evocative of the mental poetic process: the use of coordinating conjunctions expresses a continuous stream of images as opposed to a discrete series of events. As Brose remarks, all the prosodic elements in L’Infinito (rhythm, polysyndeton, enjambements) combine with the phonic elements (dieresis, synaloepha, and assonance) to create a continuous melodic flow.11 The analysis of the internal structure of this idyll, in fact, would not be complete without at least mentioning the precision of its phonetic system, meticulously dissected by various critics,12 like the melodious succession of sounds obtained through the balance of open and closed vowels in bisyllabic words ( qui te, qu sto, qu llo, v nto, v ce, m rte, d lce, m re ); or like the careful avoidance of perfect rhymes in favor of assonances and consonances, obtained through the recurrence of certain vowels and consonants (9 p s, 12 s s, and 14 r s in the first eight verses; 14 e s in the first three verses). The terseness of the phonetic system, the paucity of dependent clauses, the ordinariness of lexicon, all combine to create an apparent effect of naturalness and simplicity, resulting, to use Momigliano s definition, in a sublime poverty of style.13 L Infinito: Its Translatability and Untranslatability The apparent stylistic simplicity of L’Infinito hides, in reality, an extremely refined poetic structure, polished to the most infinitesimal detail, as an examination of the original manuscripts proves. With its total coherence of design among all its elements, L’Infinito exemplifies what Croce called the indivisibility of the aesthetic expression, the identity of form and substance on which he based his notion of untranslatability. The first English translators and critics at once recognized the virtual impossibility of properly rendering L’Infinito into a different language. As Ghan Singh points out in his study on Leopardi and England, however, the early commentators were unable to separate general problems of language from specific problems caused by Leopardi s style and lexicon. H.F. Brown, in his review of the first translation of L’Infinito by Townsend, attributed part of the infelicities in the English version to the difficulty of rendering Italian polysyllables into English monosyllables. Another set of difficulties, in Brown s Translation Review view, arose from the content: Leopardi s poetry, Brown contends, is immense in scope, while at the same time lacking in detail, probably referring to Leopardi s preference for vague words. As to style, the reviewer says that Leopardi is a rhetorical poet, in the sense that the rhythms of his poetry are dictated by the reciting voice and the listening ear. All these factors, combined with his disposition to deviate from regular metric patterns, make Leopardi a perplexing author to render into English.14 Also for the anonymous reviewer of The Poems of Leopardi translated by Morrison, the arbitrary adaptation of meter is one of the main difficulties in rendering Leopardi s poetry into English. According to the reviewer, to translate the free structure of Leopardi s modern ode requires a greater mastery than to render more rigid forms, like the ancient sonnet or the madrigal. The reviewer casts his doubts about the possibility of ever having a perfect translation of Leopardi into English.15 His comment was prophetic. As the poet Vernon Watkins remarked years later, many have translated L’Infinito, but no one has ever succeeded in rendering it into English, so elusive is its cadence. Most of the English translators of L’Infinito have tried to solve the problem of its irregular prosody by exploiting the affinity of blank verse with free hendecasyllable. Blank verse is basically iambic pentameter, an unrhymed decasyllable that imitates the caesuras and enjambements of classical hexameter.16 The fact that the two types of verse are built on a similar measure does not mean that they can be substituted one for the other. The imperfect correspondence of Italian free hendecasyllable and pentameter has been highlighted by Lascelles Abercrombie, in his Principles of English Prosody. Abercrombie quotes Leopardi s Canti as an example of irregular versification, in which meter is the result of variable patterns in a nonregular order. Leopardi s Canti are here described as part-rhymed verse and are compared to the irregular versification in Milton s Samson Agonistes. The verse of Leopardi, Abercrombie maintains, has nothing in common with the varied irregularity of Milton s poetry. English verse, for Abercrombie, can bear a greater irregularity without ceasing to be metrical, whereas a slight divergence from the regular pattern is sufficient to create an anomalous prosody in Italian verse.17 Therefore, it is not possible, despite the claims of a scholar like Postgate, to base poetry translation on a set of mathematically established correspondences between metrical forms.18 Imitation from one language to another, says Figueroa, has to be sua operatione: what /s/s do in Translation Review one language, we have no reason to believe is what /s/s do in another; what dactylic hexameter did for Homer it does not do for modern English. 19 Even if a perfect correspondence of the two systems of versification existed a dovetail match between hendecasyllable and pentameter it would not be a guarantee of correct metrical transposition. The translated text must be independent from the movement of the original phrasing and find its own natural movement, according to the inborn rhythm and musicality of the target language.20 As Mounin remarks, if all the difficulty of translating consisted in establishing a counterpart between forms, the problem of translation would have long since been solved. The exterior faithfulness to the exterior musicality of a poetic work produces ineffective translations. Fidelity to form is inadvisable, except in those rare cases of intentionally imitative musicality, for instance in the translation of a poem like Verlaine s Chanson d’automne. This prescription can be extended to all the grammatical and syntactical aspects of the poem. In L’Infinito, Mounin says, there is an inversion in the first verse, two gerunds in the fourth, a durative in the 11th, an infinitive used as a noun in the last. In the name of grammatical faithfulness, some French translations say Toujours il me fut cher ce coteau solitaire, an inversion that is a rhythmic nonsense; assis l et regardant, which is pseudo-French; je m en vais comparant, an archaism already obsolete in 18th-century French; il m est doux de naufrager, so unusual that is almost unintelligible, mainly because naufrager improperly acquires a transitive meaning.21 Like metrical form, syntactic and grammatical forms also are deeply rooted in the language structure and cannot be transferred from one language to another. The Italian sentence structure derives from Latin, and like Latin it is characterized by parataxis (albeit in a lesser degree). As the studies by Auerbach on Latin have shown, given the centrality and flexibility of syntax in language structure, style acquires a strategic importance in composition. Syntactic articulation not only offers the possibility to build complex subordinate clauses but also allows a greater suppleness in reasoning. A different word order in two languages might therefore be the external sign of a deeper difference in conceptualization. Unlike Italian, English syntax is quite simple, and it favors coordinate clauses and a quite rigid sentence structure. The distortion caused by retaining the word order of L’Infinito is even greater in an English translation than in a French translation, because English is more divergent from Italian syntax than French is. Always dear to me was 55 this lonely hill the syntactic calque of Sempre caro mi fu quest ermo colle is not only rhythmically off-balance, but its eccentric displacement of words also diffracts semantic transmission. In short, using Popovič s definition of equivalence, it can be said that a linguistic equivalence of L’Infinito is only partially possible, given the limited homogeneity of the two languages. The same can be said for a paradigmatic equivalence, because the two linguistic systems have a limited grammatical and syntactic affinity. What can instead be attempted in an English translation is a stylistic equivalence (that is, a functional equivalence of elements in both original and translation aiming at an expressive identity with an invariant of identical meaning ) and a textual equivalence (that is, the equivalence of the syntagmatic structure of a text). The translator of L’Infinito, Buffoni maintains, must aim for a rendition not dictated by original metrics or syntax, a rendition halfway between the poetic license of Lowell: That hill pushed off by itself was always dear/to me, and the hedges near/it that cut away the final horizon and the prosaic rendering of Kay: It was always dear to me, this solitary hill, and this hedge which shuts off the gaze from so large a part of the uttermost horizon. 22 This translation should serve as a bridge connecting the reader to the original and should carry all the elements contained in the idyll with propriety and restraint. What is needed, Buffoni concludes, is not faithfulness to the original but loyalty. 23 To convey all the elements of L’Infinito is obviously impossible, given the proven inseparability of its form and content. What a translation respectful of the original should instead try to convey is its essential element, or in Popovič s terminology, to provide an invariant of identical meaning. The essence of this idyll, as Leopardi said in the Zibaldone, lies in the contrast between infinito and indefinito. This contrast, as seen before, is obtained through a set of symmetries and inverted symmetries that can be summarized thus: (1) finite vs. infinite; (2) parole vs. termini; (3) subject vs. object; (4) silence vs. sound; (5) proximity vs. distance; (6) past vs. present; (7) bisyllables vs. multisyllables; (8) singular vs. plural; and (9) coordinating conjunctions vs. subordinate conjunctions. These are, to use William Frost s definition, the pillar symbols of Leopardi s idyll. The contrast between these elements is the axis on which a respectful translation of L’Infinito must revolve, the yardstick by which its effectiveness can be measured. The poetic success or failure of the various translations of L’Infinito can be determined by 56 how effectively, semantically and stylistically, the translator is able to convey these pillar symbols compatibly with the resources and limitations of the target language. The Infinite The contrast between finite and indefinite is implicit in the idyll s title. Infinito, which derives from the Latin infinitus, is in fact a compound formed by the prefix in- (not) + finitus (finite). The title also contains an insoluble grammatical ambiguity, because infinito is both a noun and an adjective used as a noun. The same ambiguity was contained in the original title, Sopra l infinito, eventually discarded by Leopardi. Sopra means above in this case the title Sopra l infinito would refer to the location of the hill overlooking an invisible valley as well as on, about in this case the title would suggest a meditation on boundlessness. In either case, infinito could still be intended both as a noun and as an adjective. Although in Italian this grammatical distinction is mainly academic, the question of whether infinito is a noun or an adjective used as a noun is of some relevance for the translator when the target language differentiates between the two forms. Rilke, for instance, facing in his German version the insoluble dilemma noun or adjective, Unendliche or Unendlichkeit, decided to leave the title untranslated.24 In English, infinite as an adjective and as a noun have the same form, although infinite is more commonly used as an adjective than as a noun. In the American Heritage Dictionary, infinite as an adjective is defined as 1. Having no boundaries or limits, and 2. Immeasurably great, as in duration or extent. Infinite as a noun is defined as something infinite. With the only exception of Barricelli, who leaves his translation untitled, in 11 of the 12 English versions here analyzed the translator renders the title as The Infinite, thus leaving the ambiguity unsolved. However, what most translators disregard is that l infinito in the title is in strict correlation to l eterno in line 11, which can also be an adjective or a noun. If L infinito indicates the absence of limits in space, then l eterno indicates the absence of limits in time; if L Infinito is rendered as The Infinite, then out of consistency l eterno should be rendered as the eternal. Only three translators establish a connection between the two terms (Lowell, Flores, and Nichols). Townsend translates l eterno as the eternal things, so opting for the adjective form, Translation Review and Smith translates it as the eternity of time, opting for the noun form. All the others (Morrison, Cliffe, Trevelyan, Heath-Stubbs, Casale, Barricelli, Fowler) translate it as eternity, choosing to use a noun without the definite article. Eternity points indirectly at what could be a different and perhaps more accurate solution for the title: Infinity. Although it is a noun, infinity carries the senses of both adjective and noun, quality and object: again, according to the definition in The American Heritage Dictionary, infinity indicates the quality or condition of being infinite and also unbounded space, time, or quantity. If the distinction between noun and adjective is basically of little or no consequence for the English translator, to establish the function of the article l before infinito is instead important, because here the usage of English and Italian differs. Whereas in Italian the definite article is required before specific nouns and also before nouns used in a general or abstract sense, in English it is required only in the first case. The English translator has then to determine whether the l before infinito is used strictly as a deictic, pointing at a specific infinite, in which case the article should be retained, or whether it is used in a general or abstract sense, in which case it should be omitted. Not even the analysis of the original title can be helpful in solving the dilemma. Sopra l infinito suggests separation: of the poet from the surrounding space, and of the poem from its content. Leopardi willfully eliminated this idea of separation with the new title L Infinito. 25 The last line in the idyll, with the dispersion of thought into immensity, also dispels any suggestion of separation. According to this interpretation, the title should refer to infinity in an abstract sense. If this is the case, the definite article should be omitted in the English translation, because its use would delimit what is instead boundless. Other images in the idyll: quello infinito silenzio, questa immensit , questo mare, however, seem to suggest that the poet is indeed referring to a specific infinity: in this case, the definite article should be retained. The contrast between definite and indefinite also finds expression through the opposition of parole and termini. As discussed before, parole in Leopardi convey indeterminate ideas and are poetic; termini, on the contrary, indicate precise objects and are antipoetic. In L’Infinito, vague words like pensier and eterno can be regarded as parole, and well-defined natural objects like colle and siepe as termini. To retain this lexical distinction in an English translation is Translation Review particularly important, in consideration of the fact that English tends to emphasize the effect of clarity, and it can potentially turn parole into termini. Nonetheless, the English terms adopted by most translators, thought and eternal on the one side, and hill and hedge on the other, can be considered adequate equivalents. In Leopardi, poeticalness is also expressed through the use of synonyms. Using a word that has a meaning similar but not identical to the meaning of another word amplifies its semantic field. The conceptual reverberation so created also produces an effect of indeterminacy comparable to that of parole. In L’Infinito, there are two pairs of near synonyms, silenzio / quiete, and annegare / naufragare. Silenzio implies absence of noise, whereas quiete implies both the absence of noise and of movement. Again, finding adequate synonyms in English should not be a problem, also considering its richness in lexicon. All the English translations examined differentiate between the two terms, although the equivalents they use are not always accurate. Townsend and Morrison resort to the pair silence and rest. In this coupling, the original semantic affinity between silenzio and quiete is partly lost, because rest describes only inactivity, without any specific reference to movement or silence. The same thing can be said for the pair silence and calm (Trevelyan, Barricelli, Fowler). The main senses of calm are nearly or completely motionless and not agitated. Calm is a closer semantic match compared with rest ; it too is slightly out of focus, because it does not explicitly convey the idea of silence. The same can be said for silence and peace in Casale s translation: the primary sense of peace is serenity, rather than absence of movement or sound. Silence and quiet (Cliffe, Stubbs, Flores, Nichols) and silence and quietude (Smith) are semantically closer to the original, because quiet can refer to something both making no noise, and/or not moving. Curiously, no translator resorts to still or stillness, which carry exactly the same spatial and aural meanings as implied in the original. The other pair of near synonyms in L’Infinito is s annega and naufragar. S annega is the middle intransitive form of annegare, whose literal meaning is to drown. Here Leopardi uses it in a figurative sense as to dissolve : my thought is dissolving into immensity. Naufragare, literally to be wrecked or shipwrecked, is also intransitive, and also it is used figuratively as to sink or to lose oneself. Also in this case, all the English translations differentiate between 57 the two terms, and also in this case, the equivalents found are not always semantically accurate. One solution is the pair drowned and shipwreck (Townsend, Smith, Trevelyan), or also drowning and wreck (Morrison). The English to drown and to shipwreck both convey a stronger physical and metaphorical sense than the Italian annegarsi and naufragare. To drown in the intransitive form is to die by suffocating in water or another liquid. The verb to drown can be used figuratively only in the transitive form, as to deaden one s awareness of, as by immersion, for instance in the sentence to drown one s cares in drink. To shipwreck, for its part, is only transitive, and it means literally to cause a ship or its passengers to suffer shipwreck, and figuratively to ruin utterly. This latter sense distorts the meaning of the original: il naufragar m dolce in questo mare does not suggest destruction, but rather willful surrender. The other pairs, go down and wreck (Lowell), drifted on and wreck (Cliffe), suffer from the opposite defect, because both to go down and to drift on are too generic and do not carry the physical quality of s annega. The same can be said for drowned and sinking (Nichols) and drown and lose (Flores). The strength and beauty of the two verbs s annega and naufragar, as critics have noted, lie in the images they convey, in the fact that their literal meaning does not overshadow the figurative sense. The other pairs drowned and foundering (Stubbs, Casale, Barricelli) and founders and shipwreck (Fowlers) retain better the original balance of figurative and literal. Founder, in particular, is more closely semantically related to the original: to founder is an intransitive verb coming from the Latin fundus, meaning bottom, and it evokes the image of a sinking ship. This semantic comparative study can also be applied to the other binary oppositions identified as coming from the Latin fundus, meaning bottom, and originally referred to a ship s sinking in L’Infinito (subject/object, silence/sound, etc.). This analysis, however, cannot abstract from the other formal components of the poem. The effectiveness by which these binary oppositions are rendered in translation must be set against the form the translators have elected to use. According to the classification proposed by Lefevere, the 12 translations here analyzed can be divided into the following categories: rhymed translation: Morrison; poetry into prose: Smith; blank verse: Townsend, Cliffe, Trevelyan, Heath-Stubbs, Casale, Barricelli, Nichols; interpretation: (imitation) Lowell, (version) Flores, Fowler. 58 Translations In the introduction to his Masterpieces of Giacomo Leopardi, a selection of poems rendered in prose, William Fletcher Smith acknowledges that prose translation cannot convey the artistry of the original verse. The obvious disadvantage of prose rendition is that it cannot reproduce all those connotative effects created by verse through the position of words in the line or through their organization in more lines. William Ellery Leonard has thus summarized the advantages of verse compared with prose: (1) verse permits a wider and more apposite choice of syntactical constructions than the more conventional idioms of prose; (2) verse gives to the many repetitions of ideas, words, phrases, and clauses, which in a prose translation often seem mere jejune verbosity, their proper relevance and copiousness...; (3) verse, by its very cadences, by its metrical emphases, possesses, for driving home the central meanings and for distinguishing the nicer contrasts and other relations of the ideas, an instrument scarcely available in the more pedestrian rhythms of prose.26 For its part, prose has the advantage compared with verse of allowing a choice of words that are semantically closer to the original, because words can be selected for their denotative value rather than for their formal value (like length or stress pattern).27 A prose rendition of verse usually aims at giving semantic rather than aesthetic information, because it cannot carry some of the unforeseeable qualities of verse: a possible surprising sign or a surprising order in which signs are arranged.28 The advantage of prose rendition is also stylistic. Because prose can avoid the restrictions of meter, it is usually more adherent to the structure of the target language. This results in a natural, flowing style that shuns the phonetic and syntactic syncopation characteristic of many verse translations. Because of the contrasting demands of source language and target language, however, no translator can keep entirely to his preestablished parameters. Translations of poetry into prose, as Lefevere says, are usually fairly elegant in language, avoiding the distortions and verbal antics one finds in verse translations. They are accurate, closer to the source text than a verse translation could ever be. On closer investigation, however, prose translation Translation Review turns out to be less respectable than tradition would have us believe. It results in an uneasy, hybrid structure, forever groping towards a precarious equilibrium between verse and prose and never really achieving it. 29 The analysis of Smith s version reveals in fact fluctuations in both directions. The first sentence, Always dear to me was this lonely hill and this hedge that from so great a space of the horizon shuts off my sight, follows the syntactic order of the original so closely that it is actually closer to a literal translation than to prose. The inversion dear to me was in the first sentence ( caro mi fu ), and I go comparing in the third sentence ( vo comparando) are both grammatical calques of the original forms. These obviously are not oversights on the part of the translator but rather a deliberate search for stylistic effect. As Lefevere remarks, the prose translator has much looser control over the rhythm of the text because he has abandoned the verse form. Therefore, to compensate for this loss, he has to look for other ways in which to achieve an effect similar to that of the source text. One option available to him is to model the syntax of his target text closely on that of the source text, even though this process might lead to sentences that sound very contorted. 30 The prose translator also has to compensate for the loss of emphasis that the original poet might have placed on certain words, because he cannot direct the attention of the reader to specific terms or images the way poetry can. The visual leveling of words is particularly detrimental in L’Infinito, a poem whose communicative value lies to a large extent in the visual arrangement of words. This can be seen in the many complementary terms strategically positioned in the line or connecting distant lines and in the several enjambements that create a tension between a line and the other. The prose translator must therefore try to make up for these losses in communicative value. To make a word stand out in prose, one option available to the translator is to charge that word with connotative values, even if it means to deviate from its strict semantic meaning. In other words, the translator can give a poetic touch to his prose. In doing so, however, he implicitly moves away from prose and toward verse, thus contradicting his own premises. In Smith s version, a trace of poetic embellishment can be seen in the term supernal, used to render sovrumani. Sovrumani stands out in the verse because it is part of an enjambement and also because, like interminati, its syllabic length slows down the enunciation, so drawing the reader s attention. Supernal carries a slight semantic shift from sovru- Translation Review mani : whereas sovrumani/Silenzi refers to silence considered from a human perspective and has no mystical implication, the poetic adjective supernal transports it to a celestial, heavenly altitude. Smith s version deviates from the poem s communicative value in another instance as well. The translator disregards reproducing the vital symmetrical relation connecting the end of line 1, quest ermo colle, to the last line, questo mare. Although he translates correctly the first unit of the dyad as This lonely hill, he chooses for the sake of elegance to render the second with such a sea. His choices basically reflect the fact that there is not a clear dividing line separating poetry and prose. The prose translator, whenever he sees the opportunity, has to trespass his self-imposed boundaries to take full advantage of subtleties of style and musicality. In the introduction to his translations, Smith says he chose prose over verse because prose served him better in his attempt to convey the spirit of Leopardi through the images of his poems. The visual component of poetry, which Pound called Phanopoeia, that is the casting of images upon the visual imagination, is in fact one of the elements that can be more easily transferred from one language to another.31 The success of a transferred image, the American translator Jay Smith says, can be regarded as a sign of good poetry. For instance, in any translation of Dante, you would know immediately that he was a great poet, because, even in the abstract passages there re always these marvelous concrete, visual images which can t be destroyed in translation. 32 The transfer of images, however, is not totally successful in this version of L’Infinito, and for that matter in all the other English versions as well. However, one cannot infer from this that Leopardi is not a great poet. The problem with L’Infinito is not its lack of images on the contrary, it could be said that the poem relies almost entirely on visual imagination but that its images are not always concrete. This is once again a result of Leopardi s contiguous use of parole and termini. Images of nature, like colle, siepe, and piante, obviously transfer well, whereas the same cannot be said for the other nouns and verbs that express indeterminacy. Images in Leopardi are precise, and at the same time their outlines are blurred. The final sentence in Smith s version: Thus in this immensity my thought is drowned; and sweet to me is shipwreck in such a sea, although it gains in exactitude, does not have the same visual power as the original. This reveals what is perhaps the greatest danger inherent in prose translation. Because prose places its 59 emphasis upon semantic communication, it tends to clarify those elements of vagueness, mystery, and silence that the original poet had deftly embedded in his words. In short, the danger in prose translation is to shed light on what should instead be an écriture d’ombres.33 Morrison s rhymed version obtains the opposite effect, creating more shadows than those already contained in the original. In the introductory preamble to his translations of Leopardi s Canti, Morrison starts by saying he has kept clear of paraphrasing. Here, Morrison is probably referring to Dryden s well-known definition of paraphrase as translation with latitude, that is, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense; and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not altered. Morrison s stated goal is to provide a rendition that is faithful and at the same time not slavish. However, what strikes the reader immediately in collating the original and the translation is the evident divergence from the original in both form and content. Morrison s version mirrors the fascination with end rhyming by the Victorian translators. His version is in pentameter stanzas, and its verses are organized in quatrains, in alternate rhymes (ABBA). A coherent patterned division like this creates, as Stauffer says, a feeling that the thought, too, must be coherent : rhymes and stanzas hold the thought together. 34 The main problem with applying such a rigid structure to L’Infinito is that thought is forced to progress in suspended sequences, whereas in the original its progression is almost uninterrupted. John Heath-Stubbs, a blank-verse translator of L’Infinito, remarks that what distinguishes Leopardi from other contemporary Romantic poets is precisely the role of imagination, that is, imagination is an instrument that produces, simultaneously or in rapid succession, the most disparate images, keeping the mind in a state of continuous activity.35 As previously stated, in L’Infinito, thought overrides the line division through enjambement: in run-on lines, the metrical pause does not coincide with the conceptual pause, and the thread of logic continues to the next line. Unlike run-on lines, end-stopped lines are self-contained, and suggest a sense of conclusion. Even though Morrison also uses enjambements, these do not connect the same terms as the original, and their power is somehow limited by rhyme-links. The artificial caging of thought in Morrison s translation is evident, for instance, in the passage from the third to the fourth 60 stanza: I hear surge through the rustling leaves that sway / I aye compare its whispers with that all / Pervading silence deep, and I recall / Eternity, and ages passed away!// The present lives... Here, the English version introduces a stoppage after away, emphasized by the exclamation mark, absent in the original ( e le morte stagioni/e la presente . Furthermore, Morrison distorts the meaning of the whole following line, first by rendering la presente [stagione] as the present lives ; second, by introducing a foreign body into the line, and all its stress with me. This Tennysonian lament, totally absent in the original, is used to fulfill the metrical expectations of the line, which is a perfect iambic pentameter. The rhyming translator, Lefevere says, does not tie himself to the metre of the source text, as the purely metrical translator usually does, but he soon finds out that the restrictions of a self-imposed metre are just as severe. Unlike his metrical colleague he must always be on the look-out for the right rhyme-word, and he is therefore even more restricted in his freedom of choice. 36 In case he does not find the right rhyme-word, Lefevere adds, he might decide to settle for a poor rhyme or assonance. In Morrison s version, this shows in the last stanza, in the imperfect rhyming of infinite and sight. When even these rhyme-saving devices fail, Lefevere adds, the translator might be forced to distort not just a word, but an entire line to achieve his aim : this is the ultimate and worst subterfuge the rhyming translator is forced to use if he is to preserve his rhyme. 37 In Morrison, distortions are visible, for instance, in the first line in the third stanza, I hear surge through the rustling leaves that sway. To create the rhyme away/sway, Morrison once more introduces an image absent in the original, that of the swaying leaves (not to mention the noun leaves itself, which is a synecdoche of piante ). The same can be said for breast, in the third line of the second stanza, which replaces the original cor, here used, one suspects, for its rhyming with rest. Finding the right rhymes, Lefevere says, solves only half of the problem. Ending a line is one thing, and filling it with the right number of stresses is another. One very often finds that, precisely because he is so concerned with ending the line in the prescribed way, the rhymer does not have enough material to put into it. To procure the necessary number of words or stresses, says Lefevere, the translator can obviate with superfluous modifiers (either expanding words or through tautology) and unconnected stopgaps (an improvised substitute for something lacking), which sometimes Translation Review makes the lines into which they are inserted much more contorted than they need to be. 38 The use of fillers is obvious in Morrison s rhymed version: although English is a more synthetic language than Italian, Morrison expands Leopardi s poem from the original 15 lines to 16. A superfluous modifier can be seen here in the pleonastic use of two adjectives, unbroke, and unfathomed, to render the five syllable of profondissima; a case of stopgap is the adverb Howe er, clearly inserted as a filler: also the synalepha reveals that its main function is to accommodate the required number of syllables. Several balances and oppositions are lost in the translation a result of the superimposition of a stanzaic form. In the original, for instance, the relationship of subject and object finds an equilibrium in the medial verbs, those constructions in which the poetic subject is not the grammatical subject but meets the object halfway: Io nel pensier mi fingo, e mi sovvien l eterno. In Morrison, the two are rendered as my thoughts at will do summon scenes of boundless space behind and I recall/eternity, respectively. In the former, the use of the possessive adjective my is an adequate substitute for the medial form, in the latter the syntactic construction is subject—verb—direct object, which implies a separation of subject and object. A rendition for the latter could have been, for instance, to my mind eternity occurs (Cliffe), which contains a possessive adjective and so would have saved the symmetrical relationship. In this case, very likely the choice of the transitive recall has been dictated by its rhyming with all. This is not the only case of disregarded symmetry. The contrast silence/sound ( quello infinito silenzio and questa voce ) is rendered by Morrison as I aye compare its [the wind s] whispers with that all / Pervading silence. His translation contains an unjustified shift from the singular ( voce ) to the plural ( whispers ). Conversely, in the opposition singular/plural silenzio and silenzi, for syllabic reasons there is a shift from the plural to the singular, silence and not silences, space and not spaces. Another case of missed symmetry, this time not ascribable to metrics but simply to misinterpretation, regards the fundamental opposition of proximity and distance, conveyed through the deictics questo and quello. This opposition could be easily duplicable in the target language: English makes a similar distinction between the demonstrative adjectives this and that, the latter being the farther removed. Instead of this hedge, and this hill, as properly rendered in many other transla- Translation Review tions, in Morrison we have that hedge, and that hill. Spazi di l da quella, where quella refers to siepe and is therefore an important spatial marker, is elliptically rendered as the space behind. The analysis of Morrison s version of L’Infinito evinces that the unfaithfulness to the original form inevitably brings about an unfaithfulness to its content. If to this one adds the fact that Morrison also distorts the crystalline style of Leopardi with his artificially archaizing Victorian diction, it can be concluded that his version, despite his claims of fidelity, is very close to Dryden s definition of imitation: that is, where the translator assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion. As Lefevere points out, not unlike his prose counterpart, also the rhyming translator fights a losing battle against the limitations he imposes on himself. 39 In this particular version, the search for rhyming has caused a distortion in its basic communicative value. By superimposing an alien form on the original, the rhyming translator has ended up, to paraphrase McLuhan, by transmitting the medium rather than the content. The problem of poetic form is partially eluded with the use of blank verse, a more cognate form of the original than rhyming pentameter. Blank verse translations are the great bulk of all the existing English translations of L’Infinito, whether in the traditional iambic pentameter of Townsend and Cliffe or in the freer form of Barricelli and Nichols. The predilection of so many translators for this form can be explained in two ways. On the one hand, the use of blank verse can facilitate a mimetic imitation of poetic imagination: blank verse, as Heath-Stubbs rightly sensed, is more functional than other forms in reproducing the progression of thought. On the other hand, blank verse can be used to attain an equivalent effect, precisely a textual equivalence (in Popovič s definition, the equivalence of form and shape). A similarity in form and structure allows the translator to adhere more closely to the pillar symbols of L’Infinito, those symmetries and correspondences distributed throughout the poem with quasi-geometrical precision. As Lefevere says, the advantages of blank verse over rhyme and the other forms in general are twofold: a greater accuracy and a higher degree of literariness. 40 A closer investigation, however, reveals that blank verse can be more restrictive than one might expect. Blank verse writers, Lefevere says, have (i) the obligation to adhere, as closely as possible, to the met- 61 rical scheme, whether traditional or self-imposed, and (ii) the no less strict obligation to try to escape from the deadening regularity which that same metrical system tends to impose on the poem as a whole. Even though some variations on the metrical scheme are allowed, these are limited in number and can be applied only a limited number of times, because otherwise they tend to reinforce what they are supposed to weaken. 41 The analysis of the different blank verse translations of L’Infinito confirms Lefevere s claim. All these versions are definitely more exact than Morrison s version. Nonetheless, like Morrison s rhymed translation, they also contain a series of semantic distortions as a result of the requirements of form. Cliffe, for instance, introduces a filler in line 2, the adjective green attributed to hedge : an unjustified addition, except that this verbal trick allows him to create a perfect pentameter line, from both a syllabic and an accentual point of view. Cliffe is evidently aware of the pivotal function of symmetries in L’Infinito, because he uses green as a filler again in line 9, before the second term of the dyad siepe / piante ( Amid the green leaves rustling ). Variations caused by metrical requirements also affect the syntactic structure of the poem, specifically the opposition coordinate/subordinate clauses, respectively governed by the conjunctions ma, ove, come, cos , and e. In Cliffe s translation, two of the four subordinate clauses are introduced by the coordinating conjunction and : ove per poco / il cor non si spaura becomes and as with terror is my heart o ercast ; Cos tra questa/immensit becomes And so in this/Immensity. The insertion of the two coordinating conjunctions is certainly justified from a poetic point of view, because it provides the extra syllable needed and it is also in agreement with English syntax, which favors coordination over subordination. However, the presence of the coordinating and dulls the syntactic contrast coordinate/subordinate and eliminates what in the original is a pause in the continuum of thought. The use of and is also caused by Cliffe s attempt to artificially introduce antique wording with o ercast. It would therefore be sufficient to restore the normal spelling of the adjective, overcast and to eliminate the conjunction and to have the same required number of syllables. Despite this and other minor flaws, the blank verse translation by Cliffe is overall more effective than all the translations so far analyzed, both in retaining the layout of pillar symbols and in imitating the progression of thought. This is basically true of the other blank verse translations as well, as an analysis of 62 their texts would prove. If it can be theorized that blank verse is an effective instrument in conveying the structure and the dynamic tension of the original, conversely it can also be hypothesized that the less structured modes of rendition are detrimental. This is the case, for instance, with interpretation, according to its definition given by Lefevere. In interpretation, Lefevere says, the writer basically keeps the substance of the source text but changes its form. The theoretical advantage of interpretation over rhymed translation and blank verse, freeing the writer from any formal limitation, in the translation of L’Infinito becomes a liability. In fact, as we have repeatedly seen, in L’Infinito form is not only the poem s involucrum, or its supporting framework, but also its substance: the dissolution of the original form inevitably brings about the dissolution of its content. This proves to be true also for the three interpretations of L’Infinito here examined, although in different degrees. The translations by Flores, Fowler, and Lowell cover different areas of the interpretative spectrum, ranging from quasi-fidelity (Flores) to almost total reinvention (Lowell), with Fowler s translation in an intermediate position. In Flores version, there is no metrical or rhythmical correspondence to the original, but other correspondences are retained. By collating the structures of original and version, it can be seen that conformities prevail over discrepancies. Images develop more or less in parallel, enjambements are on the same lines (even though they emphasize different words), syntactic cruxes are located in similar positions, and finally also the various symmetries basically correspond. Where Flores version diverges is mainly at the denotative level. Natural images, for instance, present all sorts of geological and botanical variations. In line 1, colle is rendered as hidden knoll, a hillock instead of a hill (not to mention the adjective hidden as a free addition); in line 2, siepe is rendered as shrubbery, a bush instead of a hedge; in line 9, piante is rendered as greenery, verdure instead of trees. In Leopardi, as mentioned before, idylls take form when a place permeated with old memories stirs particular sensations in the poet s mind. His definition bears a striking resemblance to that of Eliot s objective correlative: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative , in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion. Now, what stirred Leopardi s poetic emotion Translation Review was a certain set of objects and no other: a hill and not a hillock, a hedge and not some shrubbery. Compared with the distortions in the rhymed and blank verse translations, these semantic shifts seem particularly unjustified because they are not dictated by requisites of rhyme and meter. The version, says Lefevere, strikes the reader as possessing a greater communicative value than the source text itself. The emphasis seems to lie in the shock value of words and images, rather than on a balanced whole : a description that perfectly fits Flores version.42 Even though in this translation there is no clear departure from the original pillar symbols, the semantic variations introduced here produce the same result: colle and siepe are part of the dyadic relationship subject/object: by altering the latter, the translator affects also the former. In Fowler s version, the departure from the pillar symbols is more pronounced, and distortions occur both at the semantic and the structural levels. The first two and last two lines are revelatory in this respect. The first lines of Fowler s version read: They were always friends, this hill where no one comes/And this hedge here. Compared with the original, Fowler describes the images of nature from a slightly different angle. He removes the indirect object pronoun mi, crucial in establishing the connection object/subject, and replaces ermo with the oblique where no one comes. In the last two lines, however, Fowler retains the indirect object and gratuitously creates a new image with the adjective pacific : and it seems to me a gentle thing/To suffer shipwreck in this pacific ocean. Therefore, this version also fails to reproduce the symmetrical relationship of subject/object linking the first and the last lines. Finally, Lowell s imitation is the translation that formally distances itself the most from the original, as even a simple cursory look at its structure would reveal. Using once again the symmetry subject/object as a paradigm, we can see that what is synthetically contained in the original in two lines is now distributed over six lines. The opening and the end of the poem are shaped as follows: That hill pushed off by itself was always dear/ to me and the hedges near/it...; It s sweet to destroy my mind/ and go down / and wreck in this sea. The relation subject/object is basically retained, but not the symmetry between the two indirect objects mi. Also, to save the rhyming couplet dear/near, Lowell disregards another case of symmetry, questo colle and questa siepe, rendered as that hill and the hedge. 43 The semantic and structural shifts are too Translation Review numerous to be listed here. However, this translation should not be judged by the same yardstick as used for the other translations. As Lowell states in the introduction to his book of Imitations, his translations are partly self-sufficient and separate from their sources and are not inspired by faithfulness or literalness: Boris Pasternak had said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry the tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. 44 As a precaution against any possible criticism, Lowell sets the parameters according to which his versions should be viewed, by saying: I have been almost as free as the authors themselves finding ways to make them ring right for me. 45 An analysis aimed at determining how effectively the original structure is carried over into English is clearly inapplicable here, since Lowell programmatically sets himself to restructure the source poem. In creating his own tone, Lowell abandons the rhythmic and metric framework of the original, built on free hendecasyllables, and constructs a new framework based on free verse. He creates a new set of rhymes, assonances, symmetries, and syntactic nexuses, in a natural style that reflects the musicality of modern language. In his imitation, all these elements have become the new pillar symbols, and the original images are compressed or expanded to fit the new structure.46 In this light, one can explain the redundancy by which Lowell renders the series of adjectives sovrumani, profondissima, and interminati : When I would sit there lost in deliberation, / I reasoned most on interminable spaces / beyond all hills, on their antediluvian resignation / and silence that passes beyond s man s possibility. Leaving aside the questionable semantic value of the newly created concept antediluvian resignation, one cannot fail to notice the musicality inherent in the passage and its carefully built net of rhymes and assonances. A certain amount of compensation is unavoidable in any translation, as even the most fervent literalists, such as the Romantics, admit.47 As proven here, however, in imitation compensation techniques inevitably lead to overcompensation. The danger inherent in this method is that by additions of new words and images, the character of the original author progressively disappears. This danger was already perceived by Dryden, who in his comparison of the imitations of Ovid and Virgil stated: ... not only the thoughts, but the style and 63 versification of Virgil and Ovid are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets, who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and, by endeavouring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them both so much alike, that, if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies which was Virgil, and which was Ovid ... In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet, yet there is a great distinction to be made in sweetness, as in that of sugar and that of honey.48 The uniformity of rendition is easily verifiable in Lowell s Imitations, a selection of poems from different authors and periods, ranging from Homer to Pasternak. In one instance, for example, Lowell uses the same image for two different poets, Leopardi and Montale. The opening of Lowell s Infinite is That hill pushed off by itself. This is a quite incomprehensible image, unless one examines it in parallel to a similar image in Montale s Dora Markus: Fu dove il ponte di legno/ mette a Porto Corsini sul mare alto, which is rendered by Lowell as It was a plank pier/ pushed from Porto Corsini into the open sea. In Lowell s poetic idiolect, one can infer, something pushed is something jutting or protruding. The hill, being of natural formation, is pushed off by itself, whereas the plank pier, being manmade, is simply pushed. What matters here is not so much the strangeness of the concept, but the fact that the past participle pushed creates an image used in two totally different contexts, regardless of what could be the style or lexicon of the original authors. Allen Tate has likened Lowell s book of Imitations to Pope s translation of Homer: Of [Lowell s] passage from Homer ... one may say what Bentley said to Alexander Pope: A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but it is not Homer. This is true of Lowell, but it is irrelevant. What is wrong with Lowell s fragment of Homer is something quite different. It is not good Lowell. 49 Likewise, one may say of this imitation of L’Infinito that it is not Leopardi, and furthermore that it is not good Lowell. The problem with his imitation is not the liberties he takes with Leopardi s original, but the fact that he stops halfway. The contrivance of certain images, like that of 64 the silence that passes / beyond man s possibility, suggest in fact that his imitation is not free from the bonds of its source. I have been almost as free as the authors themselves, Lowell says. And perhaps the key to this unsatisfactory translation lies in that almost. Although Lowell questions the status of the original by declaring himself more a creator than a re-creator, the relationship of dependency has not been completely reversed. Imitation, like all the previous forms analyzed, fails to provide an adequate rendition of L’Infinito. To quote Lefevere once again, the reasons why most translations, versions, and imitations are unsatisfactory renderings of the source text is simply this: they all concentrate exclusively on one aspect of that source text only, rather than its totality. 50 As we have repeatedly seen, however, to render the totality of L’Infinito is practically impossible. The translator of L’Infinito must choose an approach between the two extremes theorized by Schleiermacher: either he moves the reader toward the writer or he moves the writer toward the reader. The two extremes correspond to literal translation and imitation, respectively. The first option is represented here by Smith s prose version, which exhibits a certain elegance but serves mainly as a bridge to the original; the second option is that of imitation, represented here by Lowell s version, which attempts to naturalize and modernize Leopardi s poem. In between are the rhymed translation by Morrison and the various blank verse versions by Cliffe and many others, which attempt to reach a balance of form and content. Each one of these translations, as we have seen, is both loyal and disloyal to the original, in the sense that each one retains certain pillar symbols and fails to reproduce others. The concentration on a particular pillar symbol can be a result of the translator s conscious desire to highlight certain aspects of the poem; or it can be a consequence of his failure (either programmatic or fortuitous) to complete one or more of the eight stages identified by Bly. Smith, for instance, certainly reached stage three, in which the literal version is rephrased according to the genius of the target language, but did not go beyond that. Morrison never completed stage four, in which the poem is rendered according to the spoken language. Fowler never went through stage seven, in which unjustified deviations or misappropriations on behalf of the translator are corrected. The lack of correspondence between translation and original, as we have seen, reveals itself in various forms of distortion: rhythmic, phonetic, syntactic, semantic, Translation Review and stylistic. And yet, behind all the possible distortions, lies, to use Popovič s definition, the invariant core of L’Infinito.51 In spite of all possible shortcomings, none of these translations can be rejected, because each of them contains a key to the core of the text. Also, for all of these translations, a comment made by Sell s could be used, based on the comparative analysis of three English translations of Lorca s Romancero Gitano: In the study of the elements analyzed, it is clear that for one translation problem several solutions are possible and that the overall solutions offered by each translator can be considered a creation which, in a sense, reproduces the original and is at the same time a new work.52 The house of fiction, as Henry James said, has not one window, but a million pierced, pierceable. Each translation of L’Infinito is a window opened by each translator, to which the reader can go and look at the core of the original from a particular angle. And given the tantalizing difficulty of this idyll, many new windows will be opened. Notes Legend: enjambement; * lines containing prolepsis or inverted order; bold face, connectives. The notation system is adapted from Blanca Maria de las Nieves Mu iz Mu iz, Tradurre L’Infinito (intorno ad alcune versioni spagnole dei Canti leopardiani), in La Corrispondenza Imperfetta, ed. Anna Dolfi and Adriana Mitescu (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1990). 2 George Steiner, After Babel (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975). 3M. H. Abrams, Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric, in : Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1970) 201—202, quoted in Margaret Brose, Leopardi and the Romantic Sublyme, in Poetics Today vol. 4, 1, 1983, 49. 4 Circa le sensazioni che piacciono pel solo indefinito puoi vedere il mio idillio sull Infinito, e richiamar l idea di una campagna arditamente declive in guisa che la vista in certa lontananza non arrivi alla valle; e quella di un filare d alberi, la cui fine si perda di vista, o per lunghezza del filare, o perch esso sia pure posto in declivio, ec. ec. ec. Una fabbrica una torre ecc. veduta in modo ch ella paia innalzarsi sola sopra l orizzonte, e 1 Translation Review questo non si veda, produce un contrasto efficacissimo e sublimissimo fra l infinito e l indefinito, ec. ecc. ecc. Zibaldone, 1429–1431 [1¡ agosto 1821], trans. Renato Poggioli, in The Poem Itself, ed. Stanley Burnshaw (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1960), 276. 5Zibaldone, I: 135—137, April 1820, quoted in Brose, op. cit., 54. 6 For Locke, Brose points out, the idea of infinity is actually derived from sensation: the mind extrapolates from empirical experience the sensation of space, duration, and number, and then reconceptualizes these in terms of an endless repetition. John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II, 17, quoted in Brose, 56. 7As Brose points out, the contrastive structure of L’Infinito involves two other kinds of metalepsis, a substitution of the visual field with the imaginative field, and of the temporal field with the spatial field. Brose, op. cit., p. 59. Cf. also Poggioli, who in these lines sees a shift from the intuition of infinity to that of eternity. Poggioli, op. cit., 277. 8Another pattern of phonetic chiasmus is the acrostic alliteration in vento and eterno. The chiastic reversal voov can be seen in voce and vo comparando, as opposed to mi sovvien. Brose, op. cit., 65—66. 9Example of accents on second and sixth syllables: Le donne, i cavalier, l arme, gli amori... (L. Ariosto); accents on fourth and eighth syllables: Le cortesie, le audaci imprese io canto... (L. Ariosto); accents on fourth and seventh syllables: E un incalzar di cavalli accorrenti... (U. Foscolo). 10As Mandelbaum remarks in reference to Divine Comedy s tercets, the hendecasyllable often has ... an internal balancing needle. Around that needle, when the obligatory stress on the tenth syllable is complemented by an initial iamb and consequent stress on the second syllable, we can generate not only homeopodic (or superimposed) symmetry, but antipodic (mirror) symmetry... Allen Mandelbaum, Introduction to Dante s Inferno (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), xxi. Cf. also Giuseppe Sansone, La struttura ritmica dell Infinito, Forum Italicum 4, 331—337. 11Brose, op. cit., 67. 12Cf. for instance Mario Fubini in Metrica e Poesia (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1962), 66—69. 13As Francesco Flora points out, Leopardi s lexicon is, from a literary point of view, very ordinary, formed almost solely of trite words and expressions from academic language and Arcadia. In Leopardi s poetic lan- 65 guage ... il fato acerbo o duro; la vita il viver, anzi il viver mio; il tempo l et , l etade, la stagion... In questa lingua che pare fissata una volta per sempre da Francesco Petrarca, e ripresa da Metastasio, l anima l alma; il cuore quasi sempre cor... Ebbene, proprio con queste parole, nei loro giri pi letterariamente tradizionali, e che a prenderli staccati paion consunti e perfin ridicoli, proprio con queste voci sollevate in una musica che le fa risuonare sotto un nuovo arco, ove par che sian dette per la prima volta, Giacomo Leopardi ha creato i suoi pi originali incanti. Quel vieto frasario il poeta rinnova con un semplice tocco e da letterario lo trasforma in poetico. Tutta l Arcadia si riscatta in poesia. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, con una scelta di prose, ed. Francesco Flora (Milano: Mondadori, 1963), 7—8. 14H.F. Brown, MacMillan’s magazine, vol. LVI, May—October, no. 798, 1887, pp. 88—105. By Brown, see also S.A. Symonds: A Biography (1903). Quoted in G. Singh, Leopardi e l’Inghilterra (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1968), 68—69. 15The ideal translator of Leopardi, the review suggests, to be the most successful should first imbue his mind with the works of three English poets: Cowper, Wordsworth and Shelley. Athenaeum, 3838, May 1901, quoted in G. Singh, op. cit., 94—95. 16Introduced in the XVI century by H.H. Surrey in his translation of books II and IV of Virgil s Aeneid, blank verse was used in theater for the first time by Th. Norton and Th. Sackville in Gorboduc (1560). Perfected by Marlowe, blank verse will become the reference point in the complex evolution of Elizabethan theater, the meter of English dramatic poetry from Shakespeare s time onward. It will be as important in epic poetry, from Milton to Keats and Tennyson. 17Lascelles Abercrombie, Principles of English Prosody (1923), quoted in G. Singh, op. cit., 105. 18 Some classical scholars, for example, notably Professors J.P. Postgate and A.E. Housman, apparently have convinced themselves that for certain Latin or Greek meters there are analogous optimum English meters into which any translation should be made. Thus if the original is in hexameters, the translation should be in blank verse; if in elegiac couplets, in pentameter couplets; and so forth. Postgate invokes mathematics in his consideration of poetic forms, and extends his arithmetic, by unimpeccable logic, to the number of lines permissible in a translation of a given Latin original. W. Frost, op. cit., 20. Cf. Postgate, Translation and Translations (Bell, 1922), 65 ff., 74, 83, 91 f. The line is so obvious and so basic an organizing 66 agent in poetry generally that upon some translators it has exerted an irrational, almost hypnotic influence, causing the production of those line-for-line versions which still occasionally appear. W. Frost, op. cit., 49. 19Figueroa, Problems in translation, 96. 20Cf. Giuseppe Sansone, Traduzione ritmica e traduzione metrica, in la Traduzione del testo Poetico, F. Buffoni ed., 18. 21Mounin, op. cit., 142—144. 22Robert Lowell, Imitations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965, 4th ed.), 25.; George R. Kay, ed. The Penguin Book of Italian Verse (Harmondsworth 1958, 1962). 272. 23Buffoni then cites as an example of respectful translation this version by Brose: Always dear to me was this solitary hill,/ And this hedge, which from so great a part / Of the farthest horizon excludes the gaze./ But sitting and gazing, boundless / Spaces beyond that, and superhuman / Silences, and profoundest quiet / I in my mind create. This translation is in a way in contradiction to his prescriptions: while it is true that this version is more respectful of the original than Lowell s, it is also true that it adheres to the original word order even more closely than Kay s. F. Buffoni, Leopardi in lingua inglese come paradigma della simbolicit del compito di un poeta traduttore, in La Traduzione del Testo Poetico, op. cit., 109, 111. 24Cf. Buffoni, 107. 25Cf. Mu iz, 131. 26William Ellery Leonard, preface to his translation of Lucretius (Dutton, 1921), xi, quoted in W. Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 19. 27Cf. W. Frost, op. cit., 18—19. 28Cf. Max Bense, in Augenblick, n. 1/58. An application of the semantical informative function of translation can be found in Longfellow s rendition of the Divina Commedia. The only merit my book has is that it is exactly what Dante says, and not what the translator imagines he might have said if he had been an Englishman. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, quoted in William J. De Sua, Dante into English (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 65. 29A. Lefevere, Translating Poetry, op. cit., 42. 30Lefevere, op. cit., 47. 31Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, op. cit., 25. 32The Translation of Poetry, op. cit., 31. 33The concept of écriture d’ombres and of the missing word in modern literature is discussed in G. Steiner, After Babel, op. cit., 183. Translation Review 34Cf. Stauffer s comment on structure in Arnold s poem Isolation. D. Stauffer, The Nature of Poetry, op. cit., 233. 35John Heath-Stubbs, Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1946), and Irigo Jones and J. Heath-Stubbs, Giacomo Leopardi: Selected Prose and Poetry, (1966), quoted in G. Singh, Leopardi e l’Inghilterra, op. cit., 141. 36Lefevere, 49. 37Lefevere, 51. 38Lefevere, 52—54. 39Lefevere, 61. 40Lefevere, op. cit., 76. The superiority of blank verse over rhyme as a more accurate instrument of reproduction was emphasized by Longfellow. In discussing his translation of Dante s Divine Comedy, he said: ... while making it rhythmic, I have endeavoured to make it also as literal as a prose translation... In translating Dante, something must be relinquished. Shall it be the beautiful rhyme that blossoms all along the line like a honeysuckle on the hedge? It must be, in order to retain something more precious than rhyme, namely, fidelity, truth, the life of the hedge itself... Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, quoted in William J. De Sua, Dante into English (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 65. 41Lefevere, op. cit., 61. 42Lefevere, op. cit., 76. 43Cf. Buffoni, op. cit., 109. 44Robert Lowell, Imitations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965, 4th ed.), xi. 45Lowell, op. cit., xiii. 46 As to structure, various features of the source text are compressed, others expanded . Lefevere, op. cit., 78. 47 Wordsworth, writing to the editors of the Philological Museum about a specimen of his translations from the Aeneid, said, Having been displeased in modern translations with the addition of incongrous matter, I began to translate with a resolve to keep clear of that fault, by adding nothing; but I became aware that a spirited translation can scarcely be accomplished in the English language without admitting a principle of compensation. Quoted in C. Day-Lewis, On Translating Poetry, 16. 48Dryden, preface to Sylvae: Or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (1685), in Theories of Translation, op. cit., 24. 49The Translation of Poetry, op. cit., 5. 50Lefevere, 99. 51 It is an established fact in Translation Studies that if a dozen translators tackle the same poem, they will Translation Review produce a dozen different versions. And yet somewhere in those dozen versions there will be what Popovi calls the invariant core of the original poem. This invariant core, he claims, is represented by stable, basic and constant semantic elements in the text, whose existence can be proved by experimental semantic condensation. Transformations, or variants, are those changes which do not modify the core of meaning but influence the expressive form. In short, the invariant can be defined as that which exists in common between all existing translations of a single work. Bassnett-McGuire, op. cit., 26—27. 52Nivea E. Aponte Sell s, Problemas de la Traducci n Po tica Ilustrados por Tres Traducciones del Romance Son mbulo, trans. Kathleen Kelly, in Problems in Translation, 166—168. Appendix The Infinite This lonely hill to me was ever dear, This hedge, which shuts from view so large a part Of the remote horizon. As I sit And gaze, absorbed, I in my thought conceive The boundless spaces that beyond it range, The silence supernatural, and rest Profound; and for a moment I am calm. And as I listen to the wind, that through These trees is murmuring, its plaintive voice I with that infinite compare; And things eternal I recall, and all The seasons dead, and this, that round me lives, And utters its complaint. Thus wandering My thought in this immensity is drowned; And sweet to me is shipwreck on this sea. Frederick Townsend, 1887 This lonely knoll was ever dear to me and this hedgerow that hides from view so large a part of the remote horizon. But as I sit and gaze my thought conceives interminable spaces lying beyond and supernatural silences and profoundest calm, until my heart almost becomes dismayed. And as I hear the wind come rustling through these leaves, I find myself comparing to this voice that infinite silence: and I recall eternity 67 and all the ages that are dead and the living present and its sounds. And so in this immensity my thought is drowned: and in this sea is foundering sweet to me. Gian Piero Barricelli, 1986 The Infinite I always did value this lonely hill, And this hedgerow also, where so wide a stretch Of the extreme horizon s out of sight. But sitting here and gazing, I find that endless Spaces beyond that hedge, and more-than-human Silences, and the deepest peace and quiet Are fashioned in my thought; so much that almost My heart fills up with fear. And as I hear The wind rustle among the leaves, I set That infinite silence up against this voice, Comparing them; and I recall the eternal, And the dead seasons, and the present one Alive, and all the sound of it. And so In this immensity my thought is drowned: And I enjoy my sinking in this sea. J.G. Nichols, 1994 The Infinite They were always friends, this hill where no one comes And this hedge here, that from so large a part Of the ultimate horizon shuts out the eye. Sitting in contemplation, I form unbounded Distances on the other side, silences Past man, and deepest calm. Then my heart comes Close to taking fright; and, as the breeze Rustles among the leaves, I keep comparing That infinite silence to this small voice: recall Eternity, and the seasons that are gone, And the living present one, the sound of it. And so my thought founders, lost in this Immensity; and it seems to me a gentle thing To suffer shipwreck in this pacific ocean. Alastair Fowler, 1987 The Infinite This lonely hill has always been so dear 68 To me, and dear the hedge which hides away The reaches of the sky. But sitting here And wondering, I fashion in my mind The endless spaces far beyond, the more Than human silences, and deepest peace, So that the heart is on the edge of fear. And when I hear the wind come blowing through The trees, I pit its voice against that boundless Silence and summon up eternity And the dead seasons, and the present one, Alive with all its sound. And thus it is In this immensity my thought is drowned: And sweet to me the foundering in this sea. O. Mark Casale, 1984 The Infinite Dear to me always was this lonely hill, And this hedge that excludes so large a part Of the ultimate horizon from my view. But as I sit and gaze, my thought conceives Interminable vastnesses of space Beyond it, and unearthly silences, And profoundest calm; whereat my heart almost Becomes dismayed. And as I hear the wind Blustering through these branches, I find myself Comparing with this sound that infinite silence; And then I call to mind eternity, And the ages that are dead, and this that now Is living, and the noise of it. And so In this immensity my thought sinks drowned: And sweet it seems to shipwreck in this sea. R.C. Trevelyan, 1941 The Infinite This lonely hill was always dear to me, And this hedgerow, that hides so large a part Of the far sky-line from my view. Sitting and gazing, I fashion in my mind what lie beyond Unearthly silences, and endless space, And very deepest quiet; then for a while The heart is not afraid. And when I hear The wind come blustering among the trees I set that voice against this infinite silence: And then I call to mind Eternity, The ages that are dead, and the living present Translation Review And all the noise of it. And thus it is In that immensity my thought is drowned: And sweet to me the foundering in that sea. John Heath-Stubbs, 1966 The Infinite Dear ever to my heart that lonely hill Hath been, that hedge, too, which extending wide The view of farthest horizon doth hide. Here as I sit and muse, my thoughts at will The Infinite That hill pushed off by itself was always dear to me and the hedges near it that cut away so much of the final horizon. When I would sit there lost in deliberation, I reasoned most on the interminable spaces beyond all hills, on their antediluvian resignation and silence that passes beyond man s possibility. Here for a while my heart is quiet inside me; and when the wind lifts roughing through the trees, I set about comparing my silence to those voices, and I think about the eternal, the dead seasons, things here at hand and alive, and all their reasons and choices. It s sweet to destroy my mind and go down and wreck in this sea where I drown. Robert Lowell, 1958 The Infinite This hidden knoll has been always dear to me, And this shrubbery, that keeps obscure So much of the ultimate horizon. But sitting now and gazing, illimitable Spaces yonder, and superhuman Silences, and profoundest quiet Come to mind; where still the heart Knows scarcely fear. And listening to the wind Rustling in this greenery, to That infinite silence I compare This voice: and I ponder the eternal, And the dead seasons, and the present And living, and its sound. Thus in this immensity My meditations drown: And it is sweet to lose myself in this sea. Do summon scenes of boundless space behind, Of silence passing human ken, and rest Unbroke, unfathomed, whereat the breast In awe doth well-nigh sink! And when the wind I hear surge through the rustling leaves that sway, I aye compare its whispers with that all Pervading silence deep, and I recall Eternity, and ages passed away! The present lives, and all its stress with me, Howe er. Thus in the boundless Infinite My fancy sinks, like drowning man from sight How sweet to suffer wreck on such a sea! J.M. Morrison, 1900 The Infinite I always loved this solitary hill And this green hedge that hides on every side The last and dim horizon from our view. But as I sit and gaze, a never-ending Space far beyond it and unearthly silence And deepest quiet to my thought I picture, And as with terror is my heart o ercast With wondrous awe. And while I hear the wind Amid the green leaves rustling, I compare That silence infinite unto this sound, And to my mind eternity occurs, And all the vanished ages, and the present Whose sound doth meet mine ear. And so in this Immensity my thought is drifted on, And to be wrecked on such a sea is sweet. Francis Henry Cliffe, 1903. Kate Flores, 1966. Translation Review 69 The Infinite Always dear to me was this lonely hill and this hedge that from so great a space the horizon shuts off my sight. But sitting and gazing I fashion in my thought the interminable spaces there beyond the hedge and the supernal silences and the profound quietude; wherein my heart becomes almost bewildered. And as I hear the wind sounding in these trees, I go comparing that infinite silence with this voice of the wind; and I become aware of the eternity of time and the extinct ages and the age present and living and the sound of it. Thus in this immensity my thought is drowned: and sweet to me is shipwreck in such a sea. [(1) Always dear to me was this solitary hill, (2) And this hedge, which from so great a part (3) Of the farthest horizon excludes the gaze. (4) But sitting and gazing, boundless (5) Spaces beyond that, and superhuman (6) Silences, and profoundest quiet (7) I in my imagine (create); wherefore (8) The heart is almost filled with fear. And as (9) I hear the wind rustle through these plants, that (10) Infinite silence to this voice (11) I go on comparing: and I recall to mind the eternal, (12) And the dead seasons, and the present (13) And living one, and the sound of it. So in this (14) Immensity my thought is drowned: (15) And the shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea.] Margaret Brose Fletcher Smith, 1939 The Infinite It was always dear to me, this solitary hill, and this hedge which shuts off the gaze from so large a part of the uttermost horizon. But sitting and looking out, in thought I fashion for myself endless spaces beyond, more-than-human silences, and deepest quiet; where the heart is all but terrified. And as I hear the wind rustling among these plants, I go on and compare this voice to that infinite silence: and I recall the eternal, and the dead seasons, and the present, living one and her sound. So in this immensity my thoughts drown: and shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea. George R. Kay 70 Translation Review SPECIAL SECTION: THE DYNAMICS OF RE-TRANSLATION M anfred Heid, the director of the Goethe Institute in Chicago, has made a major contribution to the field of literary translation. From 1996 on, he has organized an annual symposium on the translation of contemporary German authors into English. These symposia take place in conjunction with the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, a recognition for the best English translation of a German work published during the previous year. The topic for the 2001 Helen and Kurt Wolff Symposium was The Dynamics of Re-translation. The panelists and speakers included well-known American translators of German and German translators of English. The conceptual frame for the conference was outlined in the program s opening statement: Works in the original never change. Language changes, however, and translations follow the rhythm of generations. With every generation, the need arises to carry a translated text into the pulse of the present language. The Symposium presents the multiple incentives that moved the translators to recreate the power of the original text and to forge new interpretive perspectives for literary works through the art and craft of translation. In the following pages, the panelists express their insights into the art and craft of re-translation seen through the eyes of two different languages, English and German. Manfred Heid Translation Review 71 INTERVIEW BETWEEN MANFRED HEID, DIRECTOR OF THE GOETHE-INSTITUTE INTER NATIONES CHICAGO AND PHILIP BOEHM By Philip Boehm Philip Boehm: As I understand it, the central office of the Goethe Institute has long followed a decentralized policy of assigning each branch a “specialty,” and that the particular focus of the Chicago institute has been on literary translation. Manfred Heid: That s not quite exactly right. The central office of the Goethe Institute in Munich doesn t interfere with the program work of the individual branches. Each institute first conducts its own analysis of the specific cultural milieu and then designs a program in dialogue with its local partners. Beyond that, there are agreements on the regional level; in other words, among institutes in the US and Canada and since 2002 the region also includes Mexico to avoid any redundancies or overlaps. The fact that literary translation wound up becoming a Chicago specialty is something of an anomaly: after all, the city is everything but a major center for the publishing industry. It has to do with the book fair of the American Booksellers Association, which for many years was held here in Chicago. My predecessor, Hans-Georg Knopp, had the brilliant idea of making the fair the occasion for presenting a prize to help foster literary translation from the German The Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Translators. The first prize was awarded in 1996, the year I was transferred to Chicago. After that, we slowly added some other events on contemporary literature and literary translation. And suddenly the Goethe Institute in Chicago had its special focus. So it wasn t something that was ordained; rather, it evolved. PB: I see. And the actual “mission” of the Institute in Chicago? MH: The institute s official mission is the promotion of cultural cooperation among people and institutions of our two countries. What I personally consider important is the chance to create long-lasting relationships among individuals and institutions relationships that will outlive any one event. Bringing in a German band to give a 72 concert is ultimately less important than the chance for musicians or composers to rehearse with their peers day in and day out, in a way that all parties can really get to know and appreciate one another as people. The Chicago music scene is full of such examples. With literary translation, we re trying to help set up a similar human network with the help of various translation associations. PB: In your six years as director of the Chicago Goethe Institute, you’ve established a number of ongoing events, such as the symposium held in tandem with the Wolff Prize presentation, the “Literary Spring,” and the translation workshops featuring a German author and the author’s English translator — as well as numerous single encounters featuring writers and translators. Did you establish similar events at your previous posts? MH: The Chicago program grew organically out of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator s Prize; the other events are merely new branches on the same tree. At my previous post, in Singapore, contemporary literature and translation didn t even figure into the equation, because there was simply no demand. Programs involving contemporary design, for example, were more important there. That was fun too. PB: One result of these events in Chicago is increased contact and activity among the translators themselves, in ventures not directly sponsored by the Goethe Institute — visits with German publishers, symposia in Berlin and Straelen, etc. MH: The success of our work always depends on working with the right partners. Here, too, the magic word is network. In Germany, our most important partners are the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, the European Translators Collegium in Straelen (whose spiritual father is the Becket translator Elmar Tophoven), and the Verband deutschsprachiger bersetzer. In the United States, they include ALTA and the German Book Office, as well as a number of very personal contacts with indi- Translation Review vidual translators, authors, critics, and editors in the publishing houses, all of whom we can turn to for advice when needed. Right now, Breon Mitchell is laying the groundwork for an American Center for Translation that would serve translators in the United States as a place to work and as a clearinghouse for information. We hope that will not be too long in coming. different systems and ways of thinking. It s extreme in the case of Berlin, where mirror institutions had existed that now must be dismantled or reconstructed without the unnecessary doubling. A task of that order would have been difficult even in the good old days of bigger budgets. PB: Have you yourself ever translated literary texts? PB: What’s astounding is that this increased activity has happened despite a steady decrease of funding. MH: Naturally we re sad to see the budget cuts of the last few years. But, after all, we re not alone. All of our translation projects are joint ventures with German and American partners. And in the meantime, they ve developed enough dynamic of their own so that they can continue with fewer means of support. PB: On the subject of support: state subsidy of culture has been a political prerogative for German governments since Adenauer, and despite the recent cuts in subsidy, Germany continues to fund the arts both on a federal and local level far beyond what we know here in the United States. Are you willing to risk a prognostication for the near future? MH: I doubt the Europeans will ever see our public subsidy of culture decrease to the level in the United States, but the American example is frequently discussed there as well, in these times of tight budgets. The fat years are over. We too will have to turn to private donors. We ve never learned how to do that. And this is an area in which we can learn a lot from our American friends. PB: Before 1989, certain Eastern European governments subsidized culture beyond their financial means, and in so doing may have inculcated an unrealistic sense of “entitlement” among artists who are now grappling with the new marketplace reality. Might a similar phenomenon occur in Germany? MH: That was an extreme byproduct of the former socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Money could only come from the state, and the state imposed its conditions. In Western Europe, we had the good fortune that the responsibility for how the allocated public funds were implemented rested almost entirely with the individual recipient, without strict interference from the state. Of course, with the unification of East and West Germany, we now have different realities in one culture, Translation Review MH: Never professionally. As a young student, I once translated a French journalist s exciting account of a hitchhiking trip around the world. It was never published, but it did spark my interest in translation and comparative linguistics. In T bingen, when I was studying Romance languages and literature, I became fascinated by the scholarly work of Mario Wandruszka, who later became my dissertation advisor. His approach involved using a comparative analysis of translations as a lens to highlight qualities specific to particular living languages. Later, when the Goethe Institute sent me to Paris to provide support for German teachers and Germanisten, I set up a translator s circle in which a group collaborated on rendering a specific literary text. I considered this a great way to expand and deepen one s linguistic proficiency. By a happy coincidence, at about the same time I happened to meet Elmar Tophoven, the Becket translator I mentioned earlier, who suggested that our circle focus on a text he was working on. So once a month, we compared the proposals of the group with those of the great master Tophoven. And now and then it happened that the groups suggestions were considered better. These encounters with Mario Wandruszka, and especially with Elmar Tophoven, had a tremendous influence on how I view the art and craft of translation. PB: Perhaps it should be noted that, as a native speaker of Alemannic, you have lived in what might be called a “translated” space ever since childhood. MH: My first language was the Alemannic dialect of the central Black Forest. I didn t learn High German my second language until I started school at the age of six. To this day, I remember vividly how difficult it was for me to think mir sin gsi and have to write wir sind gewesen. That s why I have so much sympathy for my Swiss German friends when they occasionally point out that German is for them a foreign language. Later on, when I was in school, I once botched an assignment we had been given in French class, to translate a passage into German. My French teacher came to me and said: 73 Well, you do speak the local dialect don t you? You people never learn proper German anyway. Needless to say, this was not exactly sound pedagogy. PB: So what do you speak at home now? Your wife Patricia is English; are you all fully bilingual, or have you developed your own lingua franca, a “heidische Haushaltsprache” so to speak … perhaps even an outpost of Alemannic? MH: Definitely not Alemannic. That would be difficult for my wife, and it would be too much for me to expect my children to speak German, English, and Alemannic all at the same time. When I m at home, we speak German. But when my wife is alone with the children, they only speak English. As a result, the children are fully bilingual in German and English but they don t speak Alemannic. PB: Has the presence of German in the schools in and around Chicago changed much in the last few years? MH: It hasn t changed very much at all, but unfortunately the trend is a declining one. This has less to do with German, though, and more to do with the fact that the American school system assigns such a low priority to foreign languages. PB: And what about German studies at the high school and college level? MH: German Studies programs and departments of Germanistik are still trying to adapt to the circumstances, because the programs abroad can t follow the same paths they do in Germany. They need to have other accents and directions. The only question is: Which ones? If we only knew that, we d be one step closer to finding the right solution. MH: Of course, it s regrettable that the larger houses no longer have as many people who know German, or other languages, for that matter. This is why we have been working with the Frankfurt Book Fair and the German Book Office to develop other, less direct ways of getting publishers to look at works by new authors for example by commissioning sample translations or by supporting ventures such as the London-based journal New Books in German. PB: It’s also true that you at the Goethe Institute in Chicago have consistently taken the lead in recognizing translators, always giving them equal billing as the authors of the original texts — while many U.S. publishers still prefer to market books in such a way that deliberately veils the fact that the book was translated at all. MH: Translators have always received too little recognition for their efforts and achievements. By the same token, however, good publishers have long known that a good original requires a good translator. Just think about the colloquia regularly scheduled between G nter Grass and his translators from all over the world which are promoted by his publisher. The Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize administered by the Goethe Institute is similarly intended to call attention to the quality of translations and to encourage publishers to engage only the best translators. Here at the Chicago Goethe Institute, whenever we host bilingual literary events we place authors and their translators on the same footing, in the hope that this will help make authors and publishers more keenly aware what a vital role the translator plays in re-creating a given work in a foreign language. My only remaining wish might be that the literary critics would pay more attention to the quality of translations than they have up to now. But of course, for that, you need critics who can read books in the original. Which brings us right back where we started. PB: We’ve often talked about the difficulty finding U.S. publishers for books translated from German or other languages. Many see this as being related to a decline in the number of editors able to read in other languages. Although basic language proficiency is central to so many cultural enterprises, it seems essential in the book industry. Apart from its long-range work goal of providing support for German programs in the schools, the Goethe Institute has recently been working with German publishers to help remedy this trend. 74 Translation Review RE-TRANSLATION By William H. Gass I am reformulating the brief remarks I made at the Goethe Institute Conference in Chicago about my own efforts at re-translating. I began by observing that I had about as much business in this business as a weevil in a biscuit. I have studied French and German, but my grasp of any other language than my own is feeble. I slipped into this activity gradually, over a long time, the way one unconsciously forms bad habits; and had the ultimate consequences of my efforts been put to me bluntly at any early time, I would have laughed. For many years I taught a course called Philosophy and Literature. I varied my materials constantly and particularly liked to choose texts that would be unfamiliar to my students. On the whole, that meant selecting relatively avant-garde writers like Stine and Beckett, or foreign writers of any kind, because Americans are so provincial. Rainer Maria Rilke was the one choice that tended to show up each semester, even though I sometimes assigned the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, rather than the Elegies. Over the years, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the translations of the Elegies I was using because, in my classes, it was the philosophical material I tended to stress epistemology, ontology, aesthetic theory and I felt that the renderings I had been working with did not bring Rilke s ideas out with sufficient clarity. I began to try my hand. I am talking of a period of 30 or 35 years, during which I fiddled with this elegy or that, finally adding some of my versions to the syllabus. So where there were multiple meanings, I forwarded the philosophical; where there was unclarity or confusion, I tidied it up or explained it away; where there seemed too much intellectual softness, I hardened it about the way sliced bread feels when dried. Of course, I warned my students of the biases in my versions, but in class they naturally still held the whip hand. Meanwhile, as I grew more familiar with the insides of these poems, the problems of translation itself became more evident, as well as more interesting. Issues of synonymity not only with regard to different languages, but within one language began to intrigue me. And offered the class further philosophical problems. My experience with English dictionaries encouraged me to acquire numerous German ones. I obtained every Translation Review version of Rilke s work in English I could. And I began to study the many renderings of the Elegies. Over and over, I found more of the translator in the translations than the translated. With all my ponies in place, and decades of spare time, although these moments came in bits and pieces, my amateur efforts proceeded. At last I felt bold enough to publish two elegies in a major poetry magazine, and I received unsolicited encouragement from several German scholars. In Germany, I was asked to read some of them, and to my surprise they were more than politely received. It became clear that the Elegies were the ultimate expression of ideas that Rilke had worked and reworked in poem after poem over his entire career. That is: he had already re-translated them himself. When I decided (a bit of hubris) to combine my readings of the Elegies with some of my classroom commentary to make a book, and aware of the inadequacies of my German when measured by Rilke s, I turned to my good friend, Professor Heide Ziegler, and accepted the assistance she had often offered. At that time, she was a distinguished Americanist and former president of the University of Stuttgart. Since then, she has become the chancellor of the International University at Bruchsal, an institution she founded herself: an extraordinary achievement, especially for a female academic in Germany who had to push her program along in the teeth of opposition from the educational hierarchies. I am somewhat ashamed to say that I allowed her to work with me on the Elegies daily for nearly two months. During this time, during which my ego was squeezed of its juice, I continued to believe that I understood my poet better than any other translator had. So I also continued to feel that my book might have something to offer, although it hadn t been written yet. Heide provided me with line-by-line commentaries on the poems, but she was careful (knowing my aversion to advice regarding my own work) to avoid suggesting any translations herself. She was a pitiless critic, however, and when I rewrote lines to meet her objections, you think this is an improvement? was a frequent response. She was particularly helpful, as a highly educated native speaker would be, with historical, cultural, and other shadowy meanings that Rilke s upfront sense might cast. 75 In the body of the book, there are about 40 other poems, including the great Requiem for a Friend, that I could not in all conscience ask her to help me with. I had already taken up too much of her valuable time. I was merely writing a book, she was founding a university. I was led, by my method of comparison shopping, to understand that translating was a way a very superior way of reading, because it, in effect, surveyed the poet s choices and uncovered his otherwise hidden reasoning for them. I was also comforted by the conviction that it was more important for the translator (of poetry like Rilke s) to possess skills with his own language that might match those of the author in his than to be fluent in the poem s own tongue alone. My ideal was represented by Rilke s translations of Paul Val ry, because Rilke was a wonderful poet in both languages. The German tendency toward sappy abstraction and a weakness for sentimentality was always a problem, especially in expostulations that began Oh land, Oh mother, and Oh God. Worse, and more illuminating for me, was the impatience I felt with Rilke s own piety toward poetry, his sense of the decorum due to it that bordered on church. I was better suited, I quickly learned, for the Elegies than I was for the Sonnets to Orpheus. They have a swiftness, a delicacy, a concision, a depth, that I can understand and appreciate but cannot render. 76 Translation Review SINCLAIR LEWIS, BABBITT: A CASE FOR RE-TRANSLATION? By Susanne Höbel H aving been involved in recurrent discussions on retranslation, both in Germany and in the United States, I am still not convinced of the validity of the claim that works of literature require frequent re-translations. The reason for this argument is usually that translations age quickly and need to be modernized and adjusted to the language of the present day, so as not to lose touch with the modern reader. In the collection of essays by John Updike More Matter, which I translated into German last year, there is a review of the Library of America edition of two novels by Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt. As I was looking at the Lewis novels in search of the quotations used by Updike in his essay on Lewis, I started to consider them from the point of view of the translation. Main Street, first published in New York in 1920, is available in a relatively new German translation, a retranslation, by Christa Seibicke that came out in 1996, whereas Babbitt, originally published in 1922, was translated into German by Daisy Brody in 1953. It is this second novel that I shall focus my attention on. The German reader is struck by the novel s depiction of modern life. Set in the early 20th century, the novel takes place in Zenith, a city built of sober towers of cement, steel and stone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. Highways cut across the city, limousines with slender bonnets and noiseless engines race along the streets and across concrete bridges. The well-to-do live in elegant neighborhoods where the houses are fitted with central heating, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners and have tiled kitchens. Cinemas provide family entertainment, and young girls wear short skirts and rolled down stockings and show a bit of leg when leaping about. There is a sense of money-making energy, of speed and nervousness, of people shaping a society that they are proud of and creating a value system that is worth protecting. How does the German version handle this description of modern life in the early 20th century? I shall look at a few passages and give some examples of the German translation. Babbit wants to explain to his wife that he needs to have a break from it all and says, Ich kann s nicht mehr aushalten! Muss mich schonen und pflegen! Ich sag dir, ich muss unbedingt alles und jeder w chst mir zum Hals heraus! Ich muss unbedingt Translation Review . Apart from the fact that the idiom zum Hals herauswachsen does not exist, the feeling of the passage is ponderous and quaint. The ambitious and powerful industrialist, who admittedly is held up to ridicule by the author, is here reduced to a whining, weak individual. When Babbitt tries to convince his young son that he should go to the university and study law, the German voice of the 17-year-old Ted sounds like this: Ach jemine! Kannst mir s glauben, ne Menge Kerls, die durch die Universit t gegangen sind, verdienen bei weitem nicht soviel wie solche, die fr h praktisch gearbeitet haben . ja, der arme Schlucker macht nicht mehr als 1800 Dollar im Jahr, und kein Reisender oder Agent lie§e sich s gefallen daf r zu arbeiten. This is not the voice of a young man eager to embark on the adventure of life and rebellious of his father s plans for him; rather, he sounds like an old-fashioned, middle-aged man with no gumption at all. At the end of a vacation that Babbitt spends away from his family with his friend Paul, he complains: Paul ist frisch und munter wie ein junges F llen, aber ich glaube wahrhaftig, ich bin abgetakelter und nerv ser, als ich zuerst war. The awkward sentence structure lets the English sentence shine through, and again Babbitt strikes us as a pathetic, ineffectual man who is bumbling along. The use of hendiadys favored by the translator, whether they are called for by the English original or not, make the German text sound awkward and quaint. In the above quote, for example, Paul is frisch und munter, some minor surgery will help Mrs. Babbitt to get back on her feet auf ja und nein, for at present she is schwach und matt ; when Ted gets himself an old car, his driving is described as Er raste und schlitterte um alle Ecken. Sometimes we are even reminded of German nursery rhymes of the Wilhelminian era. Eunice, the one with the ankle socks and short skirts, flies after Ted ber Stock und Stein. Although I started off from the position that I do not fully subscribe to the notion of re-translations, I had to admit that this particular translation struck me as less than adequate. The sound of it seemed not only outdated for our time but also unsuitable for the time at which the novel was written. What happened? Did the translator think she had to use antiquated language because the book was already 30 77 years old when she translated it? Or is this an example of language of the postwar era being numbed by the stultifying experience of the Nazi era? This is impossible to decide, yet the impression remains that the present translation does less than justice to the original novel of an American writer who was, after all, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In the meantime, projects of re-translations of major literary works are either in progress (Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger) or have been accomplished (Moby Dick by Herman Melville), and I think the time has come to reconsider and eventually to re-translate the novels by Sinclair Lewis. s n o i cat i n mu m co l a r u ult C ss o r C ad e ag p f hal 78 Translation Review RE: RE-TRANSLATION By Helmut Frielinghaus T here is always need for re-translations, and we all can list plenty of reasons for this. Yet to my mind, the demand for re-translation should be considered carefully, and each case should be looked at individually. Although listening to the radical proponents of re-translation is stimulating, some skepticism may also be helpful. Is it in fact true that all translations age (whereas the original is said not to)? I don t wholeheartedly agree. In Germany, we have two famous examples: Luther s translation of the bible and the translation of Shakespeare s plays by the two romantic poets, Schlegel and Tieck, which is used in theatre performances to this day. Luther s bible translation has been partially revised every now and again especially in the second half of the 20th century, when it was fashionable to adjust everything to a simple use of language. Had it not been tampered with, it is possible (who knows?) that the German language would not have taken a turn to the vulgar so quickly and would have proved more resistant toward American language influences. (The French language, as we all know, is far more stable in that respect and more resistant than German.) One aspect people in favor of re-translation often fail to take into account is the sound of the times that all translations preserve, sometimes even those that are deficient in some way. Translators know that Annemarie Horschitz-Horst s German translations of Hemingway s work are riddled with mistakes, yet these translations carry the special sound of the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s. Annemarie Horschitz-Horst met Hemingway and had an affair with him, and he gave her the exclusive right to translate his work into German. There is no denying it: she was a contemporary of the author, she was living when he wrote his books, and she translated his works soon after their completion. The particular sound of these bad Hemingway translations had a strong influence on well-known German authors after World War II. Something is always lost in re-translation. What is this something ? It is difficult to pin down: The unmistakable sound of a certain period, a particular characteristic of the author s voice, the music, the sound related to the circumstances under which the work, and often also the translation, was produced just think of the Translation Review language of the people of the 1960s and 1970s, the poignant atmosphere of certain periods that we have lived through, the circumstances, the ambience that influences language, the slang and special idiom of subcultures. In the last few years, while translating and in part retranslating Raymond Carver s short stories, I was often surprised to discover how much the atmosphere, the tone, and the pitch in many of these stories from the West Coast reminded me (as someone who is of the same generation as Carver) of the languages of the 1960s and 1970s in Germany. There seems to be something that we could call the sound of a particular time, and it seems that this tone can be international, a peculiarity that we can recognize only in retrospect and from a great distance. Therefore, before we embark on a re-translation and there will always be cases in which this is necessary we should be very clear about what can get lost in this delicate process. Just as there are splendid re-translations of (to name but three classical examples) Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Musil in the United States, new translations have also been published in Germany, whenever this seemed necessary, and with impressive results. I am thinking of the works of (and again a few examples will have to suffice) Malcolm Lowry, Jean-Paul Sartre, Italo Svevo, Thomas Wolf, Virginia Woolf, and a large part of Nabokov s work that was written in English and Russian. Immediately after the Second World War, after German readers had been isolated from virtually all international literature during the Nazi period, many works of literature were translated quickly and hurriedly, often by translators who were very enthusiastic about their work but did not possess the skills to carry it out. Today translators in Germany work more professionally, and translations of literary works are of a higher quality than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. 79 RE–TRANSLATING: THE EXAMPLE OF MUSIL By Burton Pike O ne of the enduring mysteries of translation is why literature has to be re-translated every half-century or so. Somehow the original works are good for centuries, but even translations considered classic in their time need to be replaced periodically. Tastes and values change, and Constance Garnett s translations of the Russian classics, or Helen Lowe-Porter s translations of Thomas Mann, for all their virtues, have come to seem old-fashioned and, to the linguistically attuned minds of later translators, inaccurate. But many considerations and factors are involved in re-translating a classical literary work. Robert Musil s The Man without Qualities, written between 1924 and 1942, is a special case. A re-translation into English was published in 1995, only some 35 years after the initial translation. This re-translation came about as the result of pragmatic circumstances that will almost always be found to lurk behind the apparently simple decision that a work needs to be re-translated: edition, publisher, and market. The initial translation of The Man without Qualities in the 1950s was based on a preliminary, inadequate, and incomplete German edition; a vastly improved and expanded German edition although still not complete was published in 1978. Aside from having a betterestablished text, the 1978 German edition contained much material that had not been in the earlier one. Also, the earlier translation, commissioned in England, was only fitfully and partially available in the United States: at the time, publishers in both countries were unenthusiastic about Musil. Translating Musil was a hard sell, and only slowly and with difficulty were publishers convinced that Musil should be made available in English. To this day, every work of Musil that has appeared in English has been brought out by a different publisher. On textual and editorial grounds, then, as well as because of some general dissatisfaction with the earlier translation, a new translation of The Man without Qualities was called for, and ultimately the project was initiated and strongly supported by an American publisher with deep pockets, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, and by the editor in charge of the project, Carol Janeway. Aside from the edition question, the first translation of The Man without Qualities, although expert, was gen- 80 erally felt to be insufficient. I say insufficient and not inadequate, and to my translator s mind there is an important difference. The first translators, Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, had done excellent work in translating Musil s earlier prose fiction, but by the time they took up The Man without Qualities, they seemed to have lost not their accuracy but their energy. Musil s sharply incisive prose and scintillating wit did not come across in their translation, ingenious as many of their solutions were to the difficult problems posed by the high-wire act of Musil s prose. Because everything connected with Musil becomes complicated and tangled as was true for Musil too, even during his lifetime it was only to be expected that the new translation of The Man without Qualities would not be a straightforward undertaking. The first retranslator, Sophie Wilkins (no relation to Eithne Wilkins, the first cotranslator), had begun the project, and I was subsequently called in as editor. When Ms. Wilkins growing vision problems led to her deciding not to continue, I was engaged to complete the work myself, translating the posthumous fragments. So this re-translation was not a collaboration in the usual sense: Sophie Wilkins and I worked on this project sequentially. Our editor at Knopf, Carol Janeway, herself a translator from German, provided valuable input to both of us. I believe that every translation and re-translation is an individual undertaking that establishes its own rules and guidelines. Although I have taught courses in translation theory and practice for a number of years, I remain skeptical about the notion that translation has a theory, at least a theory that can be of use in guiding translators. Translation theory in the abstract is properly part of language theory and belongs to other kinds of critical discourse. More pragmatically oriented theories of translation over the past 300 years, from Dryden to Nabokov, have kept repeating the same three alternative premises: that translation should be lexical, or that it should maintain a foreign flavor in the second language, or that it should read as if originally written in the second language. The fact is that the process of translating literary works from one language to another is not amenable to theory. Each language, each work, presents its own problems that call for solution with the tools available and the Translation Review skill of the individual translator. In 1987, I attended a translation conference in Straelen, Germany, that was endlessly fascinating: gathered together for five days in this small village were translators from 17 countries, all of whom were translating Musil s works into their respective tongues. Just listening to the 17 different sets of problems faced by these translators was an exercise in humility. Some languages dispense with gender markings, some with personal pronouns. Verb moods proliferate or shrink. The expressivity of vocabularies in different languages and cultures varies wildly. The word love in oriental cultures carries quite different connotations than it does in Western Judeo-Christian culture. A basic and intractable problem in translating Musil into English is that English is a ruthlessly concrete language, with a vast vocabulary in which every thing has its own name. But English is poor in dealing with abstract categories and is deficient on the level on which discrete objects are grouped. For instance, English has no word for Dichtung but must specify novel, short story, play, lyric poem, or epic poem. English, and later American, science and philosophy have for centuries been pragmatic rather than theoretical. It is difficult in English to group categories or to speak or write abstractly, as recent American literary theory abundantly demonstrates. Musil played as a virtuoso on all the language registers available to him, and of course Austrian German offers a hall of mirrors to such a writer. It is important to note that Musil, who was cosmopolitan in outlook and lived for some time in Germany, used Austrian German not as his primary vehicle in The Man without Qualities but rather as a marker for his themes and characters. He does not generally write Austrian, but he gives an Austrian twist to his idiom when it is called for in the novel. He does this very deliberately, even commenting on it in the novel, at the end of the chapter called Kakania (his name for the old Austro-Hungarian Empire): Events that might be regarded as momentous elsewhere were here [in Austria] introduced with a casual Es ist passiert a peculiar form of it happened unknown elsewhere in German or any other language, whose breath could transform facts and blows of fate into something as light as thistledown or thought. 1 Musil makes every character speak in his or her own idiom, a combination of his or her personality, background, social class, caste, profession, and education. Diotima talks like a hazy soul on a misty pilgrimage, her husband Tuzzi like a wizened diplomat, Count Leinsdorf like a feudal lord gazing in considerable surprise at the Translation Review 20th century. General Stumm von Bordwehr speaks like an army general. The sex-murderer Moosbrugger thinks and speaks in an insane language all his own. Musil demonstrates how the characters, each speaking his or her individual language, are always talking past each other instead of communicating with each other. This is also what happens in the novel on the level of the great Parallel Campaign and with the uprising of the non—German-speaking Austrian national minorities: on every level, the language of Kakania is the language of Babel. English prose style wants to be clean and direct. To write otherwise in English is to write against the grain. We in America do not have even England does not have the infinite linguistic or social gradations of the old Hapsburg Empire with which Musil has so much fun. So do what one may, and however he may be translated or re-translated, on both linguistic and cultural grounds Musil is always going to sound more straightforward and more concrete in English than he does in German. When The Man without Qualities is re-translated 50 years from now, this problem will still be there. In my own translations of Musil, I have rejected as a guiding principle that the translation should be lexical, because with Musil, as with most great writers, it is the rhythm of the sentence and not the isolated individual word that is the basis of his style. I also rejected making the translation sound foreign to constantly remind the English-speaking audience that the novel was not written in English. That approach would simply make the novel sound like bad English. Several years ago the English writer Penelope Fitzgerald wrote a splendid novel about the young Novalis called The Blue Flower, which won the Booker Prize. She wrote it in English, but to give it period and place flavor, she made the English sound like an awkward translation from somewhat archaic German. As a native speaker of English she knew what she was doing, and the result is splendid and fresh. But if her work had been an actual translation from a German original, we would surely judge it harshly and would certainly not consider it for a translation prize. Instead of following the lexical and foreign-sounding paradigms, I preferred to follow as my basic guiding principle in my translation: if Musil had written his novel in English, what would he have written? A particular problem was that Musil was trained as a scientist, not as a literary person. His style is unique in German; it does not come out of a literary tradition, like Kafka s or Thomas Mann s. Musil created his own style, which somehow had to be captured in English in all its brilliant 81 incisiveness, metaphorical richness, and urgency. In such a case, the translator or re-translator usually looks to his or her own language for a model that approximates the original. Much of the success of the Leishman-Spender translation of Rilke s Duino Elegies was that they normalized Rilke to the long and elegant poetic tradition of the English elegy even though this did some violence to Rilke s granitic, experimental language. The closest equivalent in English to Musil would seem to be the English social novel, as practiced in Musil s time by Anthony Powell. But Powell s portrait of English society in decline is pale indeed beside the stunning energy of The Man without Qualities. So for translators and retranslators, there was no model to follow: Musil s novel is a unique case. Let me spell out a few other points that will, I think I can say with confidence, bedevil future translators of this work: Most basically, The Man without Qualities, long as it is, is unfinished. Even the 1978 German edition was not intended to be definitive, aside from the question of whether an unfinished work, in the absence of authorial indications, can ever have a definitive edition. The Man without Qualities continues to present numerous editorial problems and questions beyond those that had to be addressed in the 1995 translation. Some decades from now, a new German edition will call for a new English translation on editorial grounds alone. Then too, future re-translators will have to pay close attention to the idiosyncratic narrative technique Musil developed for this novel, a technique he called essayism, An outside voice intersperses general thoughts linked to those given to the characters but expands the perspective beyond the characters limited viewpoint. As I mentioned, each character is imprisoned within the language of his or her own world. However, Musil s essayism is not sprinkled through the novel in isolated blocks separated from the narrative, as is the case with Hermann Broch s The Sleepwalkers, for instance, but itself forms an integrated matrix of narration. The characters are embedded in the essays. This essayistic technique, which Musil derived from Emerson and Nietzsche, had to be presented in English in all its sparkling originality. Let me give you two brief examples: In Goethe s world the clattering of looms was still considered a disturbing noise. In Ulrich s time people were just beginning to discover the music of machine shops, steam hammers, and factory sirens. [Yet] even today those who want to make 82 an impression will mount not a skyscraper but a high horse; they are swift like the wind and sharpsighted, not like a giant refractor but like an eagle. Their feelings have not yet learned to make use of their intellect; the difference in development between these two faculties is almost as great as that between the vermiform appendix and the cerebral cortex.2 Notice the expression In Ulrich s time. Musil does not write: In our time. Later in the novel it strikes Ulrich that the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: First this happened and then that happened. It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated thread of the story, which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say when, before, and a f t e r ! This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account [It makes] the reader feel a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, this tried and true foreshortening of the mind s perspective, were not already part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers, and the impression that their life has a course is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.3 Notice here that Ulrich is a mathematician by profession, and that the last sentence also ties the essay to the character. Another factor future re-translators of Musil will need to take into account is the vitality and rhythm of the prose, a speaking rhythm for all the complexity of the style. This rhythm seems to me something that the original translators missed, and it is something that many translators working now seem to miss: they are fixated on words as discrete lexical units and do not pay enough attention to sentences as rhythmic units. This narrow focus on lexicality seems to me to have been a bad habit Translation Review of the word-besotted 20th century, when all uses of language were cut into slices in the microtome and put under the microscope, when words were either assumed not to mean what they say or to demonstrate the impossibility of saying anything. Even Freud, a major sinner in this regard, remarked that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. Often a free translation can get much closer to recapturing the original than would a strictly lexical translation. I think literary translation benefits when the translator steps back a little and sees beyond the individual words. Today s English will not be tomorrow s. What words mean today is not what they will mean tomorrow. What constitutes speaking rhythm in today s English will not hold true for the future. Those looking for a cautionary tale about the fate of language should read Russell Hoban s novel Riddley Walker,4 written ostensibly 500 years in the future in a crude, barely comprehensible English as reconstructed by a few survivors after the annihilation of England by an atomic bomb. The retranslating mind shudders at the prospect of having to translate The Man without Qualities into Hoban s vision Translation Review of the English language of the future. Notes The Man without Qualities, transl. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), I, 31. 2 The Man without Qualities, I, 33. 3 The Man without Qualities, I, 708-709. 4 Expanded edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998 <1980>). 1 83 THE DYNAMICS OF RE-TRANSLATION: TWO STORIES By Reinhard Kaiser E ven if it were possible, we wouldn t be very happy to go to a theater and see there nothing but historical, original, contemporary productions: Goethe produced by Goethe, Shakespeare by the actors of the Globe, and so on. As interesting as they might be, they certainly would not satisfy us completely. It would be very engaging to see Goethe s Faust in an outstanding production from the past, featuring great actors like Gustav Gr ndgens or Bruno Ganz; but it would be very boring and unjust to declare these productions to be the definitive ones and to cut the whole story at this point. Movies and video recordings of productions from the past are always welcome, but not least because they might thus be compared with new interpretations, new productions of the wellknown pieces. The same is true for music, and for all forms of art that are valuable (and available) only through interpretation and actualization. (This is true although perhaps less visible even for an old painting or a literary text that is not enacted but only read or seen silently and directly.) There is always an element of staging and of reinterpretation, which may be more or less apparent but is always present. In theater or for Mozarts s music, it is quite clear, but it exists even in the case of the Nibelungenlied or Beowulf: a new, inviting edition, typeset in a way that makes it more accessible than the original or mere copies of the original manuscript would be. This kind of editorial and publishing work is also a sort of staging . Even literary critics sometimes seem to be surprised when told what kind of work a translator really does: not merely linguistic slave or servant work but rather something artistic, more comparable to a musician who brings a partita to hearing, or to an actor who performs a role, or to a director or producer who brings a play to the stage, be it a new one or a classic. All those performing artists are free in their approach to the works they deal with. Degrees of freedom may vary, but there is at least some freedom. And if they do not grasp the chances offered by this freedom, they don t do their job as they should. I think the same is true for translators, who seemingly are so closely bound by a contract that obliges them to be true to the text. In my time as a reader, editing translations, I have often heard the phrase: What shall I do, it s like this in the original! but only as an excuse for bad translation. People reduce themselves to 84 slaves of the text and duck away behind their self-inflicted nonsignificance. The degree of freedom for a translator is certainly smaller than for a theater producer who easily makes the characters of a Greek tragedy smoke cigarettes. Perhaps it is more like the freedom a pianist has in interpreting a classical sonata. But one thing is important: freedom is there; it has to be recognized and it has to be grasped. On an individual level for the pianist or the translator this does not mean that one is entirely free to choose between a whole gamut of possible interpretations. Unless one is a genius in taking on different disguises or emulating different styles, everyone has to find his or her unique vision, his ideal, and to follow it. But on a general level, this kind of freedom means that there is not one ideal solution for all those who are trying to find one. At any given moment, there may be different solutions, different valuable, good interpretations or translations that may coexist. In playing the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven in his own way, a pianist does not hinder other people from playing that piece in their way; he may even invite them to do so. And if he is a little wise or at least aware of what he is doing, the message accompanying his interpretation is not: That is the one and only way to do this job, but rather: That s the only way I am able to do it. My stories concern two authors who, at first glance, have little in common, except that both are women, each with her own sense of humor; one is British, the other American: Nancy Mitford and Sylvia Plath. The point of comparison is the re-translation part of each story. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the German poet, essayist, and editor of the very respectable, very high-brow Andere Bibliothek, which has published one book every month since 1985 fiction, nonfiction, all kinds of surprising things once phoned me and asked what I thought of the idea of publishing a book belonging to that rather dubious genre of society novel ? Since the beginnings of the Andere Bibliothek, I had worked as a freelance coeditor with him, but until that moment I did not know anything about Nancy Mitford and her novels. Well, there is something in them˙, Enzensberger told me. But you should read the original, there are translations, made in the fifties, but you know. I was curious, read the first of Mitford s novels, was very amused, Translation Review and proposed to Enzensberger to do the translation myself. He agreed. And because up to that point, I had translated only nonfiction, I was happy about my first novel: In Pursuit of Love. It was the beginning of a long re-translation process involving all four novels that Nancy Mitford had published after the Second World War all of them previously translated into German. They had found their readers in the 1950s and 1960s, but then they were forgotten; and, as far as I know, no genuine literary respect had ever been attached to them. They belonged to the large field of Unterhaltungsliteratur: printed for the market, sold out and that was it. I tried to do my best in re-translating the four novels of Nancy Mitford; and after a certain time, while they appeared, one after another, over several years, I got the impression (from newspapers reviews, from lectures I gave in bookstores, from what people told or wrote me on the subject) that, by my doing so, respect for Nancy Mitford s books was growing in Germany. People and even literary critics understood that there was something new to be detected in them. It was as if Nancy Mitford had moved to a higher level but, mind you, only partly because of my work; also because of her appearance in the catalogue of the highly respected Andere Bibliothek. And it must not be forgotten: even my translation work was in a certain sense inspired by the thought that Hans Magnus Enzensberger (by merely asking me to make a new translation) wanted me to find the real literature in Nancy Mitford s novels, something that, in its own right, would allow them to be placed beside, say, the books of Evelyn Waugh. Unlike the preceding translators, whose job it had been to translate amusing novels for one season and who had done just that, I was called upon to regard Nancy Mitford s fancy and wittiness as something serious. It did not mean that the wit lost a part of its wittiness or became pompous. On the contrary... I hope. But the attention paid to the book not only my own attention, but primarily that of the editor and later that of the producer and the whole publishing house made something new out of the book. A society novel was staged as a classic of comic literature, and was recognized and accepted as such by the reading public. The other story of a re-translation project that I would like to tell you is also about restaging a book in this case, one that had long been accepted as a kind of classic of modern literature, even in Germany: The Bell Jar / Die Glasglocke by Sylvia Plath. A literary editor for Suhrkamp, the German publishing house that had sold the first translation of Sylvia Plath s novel for almost 30 Translation Review years, approached me: We want to publish a new translation of The Bell Jar and you are the one who should do it for us. Me? Why me? You have a feeling for comic effects and wit. You ve translated Nancy Mitford, haven t you? But The Bell Jar is such a sad story. Not in all respects, it s also very funny. I was surprised. Are we talking about the same book? I read the Suhrkamp translation 20 years ago; I don t remember too much of it, but what I do remember is a black, sad, depressing, suicidal thing... That s why we are asking you to re-translate it . So you see, there was the publisher s idea as to what should be stressed in a new translation. The idea was not to remodel the whole book into something that it wasn t, but rather to make visible (or readable) certain facets that until then had gone more or less unremarked. I read the English book and found that there was indeed something new to detect, something that could perhaps be made more recognizable by introducing a sarcastic or comic note. It was a demanding and interesting experience for the translator to confront the sarcastic and the depressing elements. What I hope emerged in the end was a colorful, very bright, and garish picture of the United States in the 1950s, written with an intrepid sense of humor and self-irony, despite a most depressing psychic and psychiatric background a courageous piece of literature in which the author in a way succeeds in salvaging herself one more time if not for ever. 85 A MATTER OF VOICE By John E. Woods I effectively scare off competitors once the copyright runs out in another decade or so. In that case, you hire a translator to re-translate. And so why do I re-translate? The answer is obvious: I get hired by a publisher prompted by just such mundane considerations. And how do I go about it? The same way I tackle any translation. I read the book in the original German, I listen to its voice. And it is my task ultimately an impossible one, as any translator will admit to recreate that voice (or the many voices controlled by that voice) on as many levels as possible in English. Of course my own reading ear conditions what I hear; of course my own native tongue conditions what that voice can say; of course contemporary American readers will hear things neither the author nor I intended and miss others. A translation is always a new text for new readers in a new context. Let me rephrase question four, Why re-translate Thomas Mann?, as a series of other questions. What voice do I hear when I read Thomas Mann in the original? What voice do German speakers both Mann s contemporaries and ours hear? What voice do English-speaking readers hear when they read Helen Lowe-Porter s standard translations? What voice did she hear? How great are the discrepancies between these various voices? It is my judgment that the Lowe-Porter voice is often quirky, occasionally inaccurate, and ultimately too far from the voice of Thomas Mann that I hear and I would contend that the vast majority of Mann s German readers hear. Let me come right out and say it: I m afraid the voice Helen Lowe-Porter heard was far too much her own. Hers was a monumental task, and she carried it off with considerable dignity. There are several generations of English-speaking Mann readers who are devoted to her purplish prose, and I do not wish to deprive them of their joy in it. But the voice of Thomas Mann that American readers have heard until now is that of a prude, a man with a Teutonically challenged sense of humor, a writer given to flights of odd diction and turgid, occasionally sloppy syntax. Although Lowe-Porter s accuracy and felicity improved over time I regard Doctor Faustus as her best work, but that may be because she and Serenus Zeitblom were soul mates she nevertheless fudges far too often, omitting words, phrases, or 86 Translation Review have merely a few random comments to offer on the subject of re-translation chiefly, I suppose, because it has been my experience that translation does not lend itself to grand theory. In trying to organize my thoughts into a somewhat less haphazard form, I decided to move from the general to the particular. The result is simply a series of four questions: Why is any work of literature retranslated? Why do publishers pay for re-translation? Why do I do the work? Why re-translate Thomas Mann? The clich answer to the first question is that every generation deserves its own translation or something to that effect. Hogwash! That is merely a bit of generational solipsism. Great translations, like great literature, abide. There is no denying, however, that language is a temporal and social phenomenon. Sooner or later every text ends up being written in Old Church Slavonic. At some point, sad to say, Shakespeare will have to be translated into whatever becomes of our beloved English. The tides of linguistic history and the undertow of mass culture have not brought us to that point just yet, but they will. Assuming, however, that a text is still comprehensible, why should an older translation from the German or Italian or Chinese be less readable, less definitive, than an older original text a novel by Defoe, for example, or an essay by Swift? Indeed, because an older translation is of necessity rooted in the language of its period, is it not to be preferred? Yes, it is. But not if and it s a big if it fails egregiously, or semiegregiously, in terms of either accuracy or felicity or both, those being, after all, the norms by which every translation lives and dies. And if an older translation is found truly wanting in that regard, then a re-translation may well be in order. But that does not mean that we readers will get one. That is up to the publishers. Why, then, do publishers pay someone to re-translate one text and not another? The answer is obvious: because there s a buck to be made. And there s money to be had because of the laws of copyright. If the copyright has run out, a new translation even one that is no real improvement on a fine old standard that has stood for 50 years or more may yield a profit. There is also money to be had by ensuring that a title on your backlist gets a solid new translation to replace a questionable old one. If the new one establishes itself in the marketplace, you can whole sentences that she evidently thought defied solution. She paid little attention to Mann s leitmotifs, which can range from a recurring adjective or phrase attached to a character, to whole paragraphs that reemerge restyled for a new context. She had a tin ear for irony. And all too often, she broke the majestic periods of Mann s dense and dancing syntax into smaller units, when it is their very grandeur that mirrors the scope and balance of his mind. The voice of each great Mannian period is, to my ear, like the voice of a movement from a Mozart sonata. Why retranslate Thomas Mann? Why do I even attempt it? First, because I know I hear a great voice when I read Thomas Mann. Second, because I hope that on the basis of what I hear, I am able to provide a translation for new readers who will hear echoes of that splendid voice. Here, then, are three voices Mann s, Lowe-Porter s, and my own speaking the opening paragraph of Part One, Book One ( The Stories of Jacob ) from Mann s magnum opus, Joseph and His Brothers. Thomas Mann: Es war jenseits der H gel im Norden von Hebron, ein wenig stlich der Stra§e, die von Urusalim kam, im Monat Adar, an einem Fr hlingsabend, so mondhell, da§ man Geschriebenes h tte lesen k nnen und das Laubwerk des ziemlich kurzst mmigen, aber mit starkem Gezweige auslandend Baumes, einer bejahrten und m chtigen Terebinthe, die hier einzeln stand, nebst ihren traubenf rmigen Bl ten vom Lichte kleinlich ausgearbeitet erschien, schimmernd versponnen und h chst genau zugleich. Der sch ne Baum war heilig: Unterweisung war in seinem Schatten verschiedentlich zu gewinnen, sowohl aus Menschenmund (denn wer ber das G ttliche aus Erfahrung etwas mitzuteilen hatte, versammelte Zuh rer unter seinen Zweigen) als auch auf h here Weise. Wiederholt n mlich war Personen, die, das Haupt an den Stamm gelehnt, einen Schlaf getan hatten, im Traume Verk ndingung und Bescheid zuteil geworden, und auch bei Brandopfern, von deren Gebr uchlichkeit an dieser Stelle ein steinerner Schlachtisch mit geschw rzter Platte Zeugnis gab, auf dem eine kleine, leicht rauchende Flamme lebte, war oft in Laufe der Zeit durch Translation Review das Verhalten des Rauches, durch bedeutsamen Vogelflug und selbst durch Himmelszeichen eine besondere Aufmerksamkeit erh rtet worden, deren solche fromme Handlungen zu F §en des Baumes sich erfreuten. Helen Lowe-Porter: It was beyond the hills north of Hebron, a little east of the Jerusalem road, in the month Adar; a spring evening, so brightly moonlit that one could have seen to read, and the leaves of the single tree there standing, an ancient and mighty terebinth, short-trunked, with strong and spreading branches, stood out fine and sharp against the light, beside their clusters of blossom highly distinct, yet shimmering in a web of moonlight. This beautiful tree was sacred. In more than one way enlightenment was to be had within its shadow: from the mouth of man, for whoever through personal experience had aught to communicate of the divine would gather hearers together under its branches; but likewise in more inspired manner. For persons who slept leaning their heads against the trunk had repeatedly been vouchsafed dispensations and commands in a dream; and at the offering of burnt sacrifices, the frequency of which was witnessed by the stone slaughtering table, where a low fire burned on the blackened slab, the behaviour of the smoke, the flight of birds, or even a sign from heaven itself had often, in the course of the years, proved that a peculiar efficacy lay in these pious doings at the foot of the tree. John E. Woods: It was beyond the hills to the north of Hebron, a little to the east of the road from Urusalim, in the month of Adar, on a spring evening flooded by moonlight bright enough to render writing legible and to reveal in precise tracery yet shimmering like gossamer the smallest detail of the leaves and clustered blossoms of a solitary tree, an aged and mighty terebinth, which despite a rather short trunk flung its sturdy branches wide. This beautiful tree was sacred. Beneath its shade counsel 87 might be obtained in various ways, both from the mouths of men because those who were moved to share their experience of the divine would gather listeners beneath its branches and by higher means. For those who had slept with their heads leaning against its trunk had, in fact, repeatedly received instruction and prophecy, and during the many years of burnt sacrifices offered at this spot as attested by the blackened surface of a stone slaughtering table where a slightly sooty flame guttered the behavior of the smoke, a telling flight of a bird, or even some sign in the heavens had often reinforced the particular fascination that such pious acts at the foot of the tree enjoyed. The standard answer for why re-translation: Every age needs its translation, etc. 88 Translation Review CONTRIBUTORS John Balcom is an Assistant Professor in the Chinese Program of the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at the Moneterey Institute of International Studies. Recent publications include Frontier Taiwan (contributor) and Wintry Night, a novel by Li Qiao (cotranslator), both published by Columbia University. Philip Boehm has translated numerous works from Polish and German, by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Christoph Hein. His rendering of Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann won the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation, and that of Traces by Ida Fink was a finalist for the 1997 National Jewish Book Award. Forthcoming with Metropolitan Books is his translation of Words to Outlive Us: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto. He is also a playwright and theater director. Stuart Friebert, founder and director of The Writing Program at Oberlin for many years, retired in l997. He has published a dozen volumes of poetry (most recently, Funeral Pie/co-winner of The Four Way Book Award), and seven volumes of translations (most recently, Judita Vaiciunaite, Fire Put Out By Fire: Selected Poems/with Viktoria Skrupskelis). Helmut Frielinghaus, born 1931 in Germany, editor and publisher, from 1995 to 2001 free-lance journalist (Theater heute, Neue Zürcher Zeitung), editor (of G nter Grass) and translator (Raymond Carver, John Updike) in New York, lives now in Hamburg, Germany. William H. Gass’s most recent book is a study of Rainer Maria Rilke entitled Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. He has received many major awards, among them the Lannan Foundation Life-Time Achievement Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Susanne Höbel, born in 1953 and living in Hamburg, Germany. Freelance literary translator since 1990, translator of, among others, two books by Nadine Gordimer and two volumes of essays by John Updike. In 2001and 2002 member of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize Jury. Member in ALTA and Vd (Verband deutschsprachiger bersetzer). Yvonne Howell went to Prague in 1984 to study the Translation Review political and cultural significance of Czech science fiction, and ended up staying for a full 16 months, with a somewhat expanded research agenda. She subsequently received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, as well as several articles and chapters devoted to Russian and Czech literature, and translation studies. She is currently an Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Richmond, VA. Daniel M. Jaffe is the translator of Dina Rubina s Russian-Israeli novel, Here Comes the Messiah! (Zephyr Press, 2000). Daniel s own novel, The Limits of Pleasure (Harrington Park Press, 2001) is a finalist for ForeWord Magazine s Book of the Year Award. Reinhard Kaiser, born 1950, is a translator (from English and French into German) and writer. He lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Margaret (Peggy) Joan Maddox currently teaches World Literature at the University of Arkansas where she is completing work on the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. The subject of her dissertation is the image of Joan of Arc in popular culture. Giuseppe Natale was born and raised in Turin, Italy. He graduated cum laude from the University of Turin with his thesis on the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen. He then moved to the United States, to continue his studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he obtained his M.A in Italian with a thesis on Dante s Divine Comedy, and his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature with a dissertation on poetry and translation. Natale has translated into Italian several major American novels, such as Toni Morrison s Beloved, Alice Walker s The Temple of My Familiar and Thomas Pynchon s V. and Gravity’ s Rainbow. He currently holds an Assistant Professor position at UNLV, where he teaches Italian literature and culture, and graduate seminars in Translation Studies. Natale has also worked as a consultant for various publishing companies, contributing his expertise in Italian literature, American literature, and the fine arts. Burton Pike is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and German at the Graduate School, City University of New York. He edited and co-translated Robert Musil s The Man without Qualities and a volume of Musil s essays, and has translated work by 89 Proust, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Alissa Walser. recently his School for Atheists, and the works of contemporary authors such as Ingo Schulze and Christoph Ransmayr. He has also retranslated three Thomas Mann novels, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, and is currently working on Mann s Joseph and His Brothers. He lives in San Diego. Patricia Schoch is a doctoral candidate in the School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Additionally, she is managing editor of Management Magazine, a publication of the UTD School of Management. Rob Sulewski teaches at the University of Michigan. He has translated medieval drama from both Polish and Italian, and drama by modern Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek. John Woods is the translator of many books, including much of the fictional prose of Arno Schmidt, most A new vision of literature emerges as an extension of World Literature Today . . . WLT MAGAZINE ity IN G er’s real se writ – a Japane Oe on FE AT UR In addition to the seventy-five-year tradition of our WORL ER D LIT ATUR A E TOD GA Y MA ZINE professional journal, now there is also WLT Magazine. 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