A Symposium on Translation

Author(s): Czeslaw Milosz, Chana Bloch, Anne Carson, Paul Bowles, Julia Mitric, Lisa Michaels,
Paul Duguid and Deborah Treisman
Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 70 (Summer, 1997), pp. 10-15
Published by: Threepenny Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384633 .
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A Symposiumon Translation
Editor's Note: As with all our symposia, this one resulted from our asking a num-
ber of different writers (mainly translators themselves, but also people who have
themselves been translated, or people who have thought about some unusual kinds
of translation) to consider the issues raised by the general topic of translation. Since
the ten writers wrote their pieces independently, the connections among them are
purely fortuitous and, we hope, illuminating.
T HEREAREthreemajorproblems
of translation: familiarity with the
language of the original; the skill in the
language into which we translate; limi-
tations imposed by our belonging to
our time.
Experience shows that some excellent
translations have been done by poets
possessing only a limited knowledge of
the language of the original or no
knowledge at all, while some bad trans-
lations are the work of accomplished
philologists whose perfect acquaintance
with the language they translate from is
unquestioned. Thus what really counts
is the sureness of touch in one's native
tongue. The late Kenneth Rexroth, to
whom I once showed my samples of
translation and complained of my diffi-
culties in translating my verse into
English, said, "Whoever has the ear for
one language has the ear for all of
them," but I am not sure of this. It is
true, however, that when translating
my poetry together with Robert Hass,
Robert Pinsky, and Leonard Nathan,
who do not know Polish, I try to
impose my own rhythm, leaving to
them some corrections of English
idioms. The qualities of their style pro-
vide an argument for the work done by
poets who certainly are not philolo-
gists. Kenneth himself may be invoked
as an example of a poet who gave us
excellent versions of Chinese and
Japanese poetry, though his acquain-
tance with those languages was doubt-
ful. He helped himself in various ways,
occasionally with French versions.
We live in a given moment in the his-
tory of the language, which means that
we share certain patterns of prosody. A
poet who translates his contemporary
has an easier task, for there is a paral-
lelism in the fates of languages. It is
less simple in the case of the originals
coming from the nineteenth century,
or, as in Russian poetry, continuing its
metrical and rhymed models. Because
of the different place of rhyme in
English, such poets as Akhmatova,
Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tzvetaeva
cannot be faithfully translated, and this
to a large extent applies to Joseph
Brodsky as well.
OldChinese
poetry written in a syl-
labic verse with rhyme has been adapt-
ed by translators, beginning with Ezra
Pound, to our twentieth-century free
verse, and it cannot be otherwrise.
New translators of the Bible are con-
fronted with a major question: how to
remain faithful to the original (Hebrew
of the Old Testament, Gbreekof the
New Testamenlt)while departing from
traditional renderings of the sacred
texts, today perceived as archaic and
often incomprehensible. The King
James Bible is beautiful, while the
efforts of the new translators are often
10
marked by a plague of our time, the
journalesestyle. The same happensin
the Polish languagewith its standard
Bibles, the Catholic of 1559 and the
Protestantof 1632. A translatorcannot
haverecourseto wordsand expressions
whichareno longerin use;on the other
hand,he mustcompetewith the strong
rhythmicmodulationof phrasingin the
old Bibles.In my translatingthe Book
of Psalmsinto Polish,I had to struggle
with two rivals:a powerfulmusiccom-
ing from the pen of an anonymous
monk of the fifteenthcentury,and the
faithfulbut less vigorouslines by Izaak
Cylkow,a rabbiof one of the Warsaw
synagogues,markedby the style from
the end of the nineteenthcentury.
-Czeslaw Milosz
A TASTE FOR language was my
inheritanceas the child of immi-
grants. My father, who had learned
English in night school, recalled one
homework assignment with relish: a
letter of condolence to President
Coolidgeon the deathof his son. "Dear
Mr. President, I share your bereave-
ment," he began. The teacher asked
him to copy his letter onto the black-
board for everyone to read-the first
publishedwork in our family."I really
went fishingfor that word," he confid-
ed to me in his heavily accented
English.
My parents came to this country
from small towns in the Ukraine. At
home they spoke English, not
Yiddish-they wanted to be "Amer-
ican," whatever that meant-though
they sent me to a Yiddish folkschule
every day after school. Not a Hebrew
school: Hebrew belonged to the men
and the boys. We lived in the South
Bronx, in the shadow of the Jerome
Avenue El, a neighborhood soon to
become loud with gang wars, but at
that time almost too quiet:my friends
and I referredto it with disdainas the
Bronx Bourgeoizoo. My parents had
settledinto a life of placidroutine,and
who could blame them? They'd already
endured their quota of violent uproot-
ings. The safety they plotted for me I
experienced mostly as a constraint. MIy
innocence about life, like my virginity,
was an embarrassment, and I was
impatientto lo)seit.
Yiddish and Hebrew literature
offered tastes, smells, pungencies of
experience I could only imagine. In
Yiddish poems by Jacob Glatstein and
stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer I sought
the life:of Eastern Europe that my par-
ents had escaped. The road to Palestine
that they hadn't taken, the wars, the
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continuing aftershocks, I discovered in
Yiddish poems by Abraham Sutzkever
and later in Hebrew poems by Dahlia
Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai.
Reading can bring you close, to the
very threshold, but the act of transla-
tion brings you inside. I began translat-
ing these Yiddish and Hebrew writers
in much the same spirit that I went to
Budapest, Prague, East Berlin, Warsaw,
and Auschwitz one summer to see and
hear what remained of Jewish life in
Eastern Europe.
For their part, the Yiddish and
Hebrew writers shared an urgency to
be heard that was different from any-
thing I'd encountered among writers of
English. For those who wrote in
Yiddish, especially, translation was a
necessary condition of survival. Who,
after all, was reading them in Yiddish?
Or who would be, in a couple of years?
As Irving Howe put it, "the potential
readers of Glatstein became the actual
readers of Eliot." In America, Yiddish
is preserved mostly in a debased form,
in the jokes of stand-up comics and the
handful of words that have made it into
Webster's:schlep, schmooze, schlock,
schmear, shtick (this is celebrated in
some quarters as a cultural achieve-
ment). Cynthia Ozick has a painful
story called "Envy; or, Yiddish in
America," about Ostrover the fiction
writer (a shrewd portrait of Singer) and
Edelshtein the poet (who in some
respects resembles Glatstein), the first
reaching a large audience through his
translators, the second desperate
because he has none. Behind both of
them stands the destruction of Jewish
life in Europe, the death of Yiddish:
"Of what other language can it be said
that it died a sudden and definite death,
in a given decade, on a given piece of
soil?"
It was not by chance that the first
poem I translated was Glatstein's
"Smoke," a Yiddish poem about the
Holocaust that ends, "God, wherever
you may be, /There all of us are also
not." The bitter irony in that voice
thrilled me; the poem gripped me and
would not let go until I'd turned it into
English. Never having done this thing
called translation before, I wasn't at all
sure I was doing it right. I sent my ver-
sion to Glatstein with a letter half-apol-
ogizing for the freedoms I had taken.
When he wrote back asking me to
translate more of his work, I under-
stood hiilS nvitation as an assignment. I
was longing for what I called real life,
the life of tragedy that lay beyond the
pale of my uneventful girlhood. I went
toward those poems with open arms,
happy to be bereaved.
--Chana Bloch
"Grievingis a patternthat is cut and
fittedaroundmy mind."
(Sophokles, Elektra)
T HE MIND of Sophokles'Elektrais a
1remarkable machinery (as I learned
when I translated the play for Oxford
University Press). It provides an unre-
lentingly lucid commentary on her
stuck situation from the first moment
she enters the stage. She begins the par-
odos, for example, by naming two
other stuck people as paradigms for
herself: Niobe, who is literally petrified
by grief for her dead children, and Itys,
who has been transformed into a
nightingale by remorse for her dead
son. But it is not their emotional paral-
ysis that Elektra venerates. For her,
Niobe and Itys represent a victory of
female sign language. They are women
who have left behind human form and
rational speech yet have not let go of
the making of meaning. The water that
pours perpetually down Niobe's rock
face, the twittering that pours perpetu-
ally from Itys' bird mouth, are analo-
gies for Elektra's private system of
sound. Each of these three women
manages to say what she means from
within an idiolect that is alien or
unknown to other people. Each of
them manages, although stuck in a
form of life that cuts her off from the
world of normal converse, to transect
and trouble and change that world by
her utterance. Elektra admires Niobe
and Itys because each of them has a sig-
nificatory power, as she does herself, to
sabotage the world of other people and
normal converse.
Now Elektra has a special verb for
this action of sabotage, which she has
come to regard as identical with her
own function. It is the verb lupein and
it figures in one of the strangest sen-
tences of the play. The Greek lexicon
defines lupein in the active as "to
grieve, vex, cause pain, do harm,
harass, distress, damage, violate" and
in the passive as "to be vexed, violated,
harassed," etcetera or "to grieve, feel
pain." The cognate noun lupe means
"pain of body" or "pain of mind" or
"sad plight." Elektra uses this verb to
assert her philosophy of action at
v. 355, where she says that public
lament is her whole function in life
because by this action she can lupein-
grieve, harass, distress, damage, violate
-her mother. In the following verses
she summarizes her philosophy of self
in a sentence formed around this same
verb lupein:
emoi gar esto toume me lupein monon
boskema (363-4 )
"For me yes let be not damaging me
the only food" (literally),or "4Forme be
it food enough that I do not wound
mine own conscience" (R. C. Jebb);
"For me let it be meat and drink not to
put my self out" (R. H. Mather); "All
the food I need is the quiet of my con-
science " (D. Grene ); "Keep my
self-respectanyhow" (E. Pound).
During the days and weeks when I
was working on this play, I used to
dream about translating. One night I
dreamed that the text of the play was a
big solid glass house. I floated above
the house trying to zero in on v. 363. I
was carrying in my hands wrapped in a
piece of black cloth the perfect English
equivalentfor lupein and I kept trying
to force myself down through the glass
atmosphere of the house to position
this word in its right place. But there
was an upward pressure as heavy as
water. I couldn't move down. I swam
helplessly back and forth on the surface
of the transparency, waving my black
object and staring hard at the text
through fathoms of glass. And I was
just about to remove the black cloth
and look at the word (so as to memo-
rize it for later when I awoke) when I
awoke.
THE THREEPENNY REVIEW
 I neverdid discover,asleepor awake,
what was under that black cloth. I
neverdid hit upon the righttranslation
for lupein.ButElektra'suse of this verb
(particularly at v. 363) continuesto dis-
turbme becauseof the way it sumsher
up. As VirginiaWoolf saysin herextra-
ordinary essay on Sophokles' play,
"The stable, the permanent,the origi-
nal humanbeingis to be found there."
When we look at the syntax of v. 363
we see a sentence formed around a
verb, the infinitivelupein,but the verb
is made into a negativeby the addition
of the adverbme ("to not vex, harm,
damage,etcetera...")and then the nega-
tived verb is made into a noun by the
addition of the article to ("the act of
not vexing, harming, damaging,
etc... "). So too in Elektra'slife is all
positiveactionnegativedby hatredand
then this negativecondition reified as
personaldestiny. Actionless,she feeds
on her own negativity."It is the only
Food that grows," as EmilyDickinson
says of anotherequallyprivatereligion
of pain. Her strange black food is
named again by Elektra,this time as a
noun, at v. 822, in its full suicidal
implication:
luped'eanzo:toubioud' oudeispothos
It is damage[pain,violationetc.]if I contin- odor of worked-over syntax, which can
ue to exist.
No desireforlifeis in me.
She expressesanotherdeath wish with
the participleof the verbat v. 1170:
tousgarthanontas oukhhorolupoumenous and you must manage to find the most
Forthedead,I see,feelnopain.
Elektrahas a talent for brutalantithe- tions, throughout the lowlands of
sis, but these statements are not, I
think, rhetoricallyformed.They touch bears visible inherited traits of the par-
a null point at the center of the
woman'ssoul.
Now, for the translatorthe problem Arabic is that the latter cannot be writ-
presentedby Elektra'sdiction (not just ten down or printed. It would be simple
with lupein but in general)is contextu- enough to devise an orthographical lex-
al. She uses fairly common verbs and
nouns, and Sophoklesgoes out of his
way to show us her X-ray utterances the Arabic alphabet have been sacral-
projected on the ordinary language
screen of other people. This creates an
especially jarring effect when we hear
them using her words. For example,
when Orestes, dismissing the notion
that lying and deceit are bad things,
tosses off the phrase:
ti gar me lupeitouth'...
Whatharmdoes thisdo me [to die in words
if I am savedin fact]? (59-60) native African tongues. Very recently
In Orestes' much more lightly main-
tained moral order, Elektra'sblack verb
lupei is little more than a synonymfor
"What's the problem?" A similar shock
effect is felt when we hear Clytemnestra
appropriate Elektra's noun lupe to
denote pain of childbirth (533-534).
Clytemnestra is referring to Agamem-
nonland Iphigeneia when she says,
ouk ison kamonemoi lupes,hos espeir',
hosperhe tiktous'ego
Did he havesomesharein the pain [lupes;
of herbirth?
No! I did it myself! (533-534)
This is one category of pain that the
resolutely asexual Elektra will never
SUMMER 1997
know, and furthermore, as she tells us
repeatedly throughout the play, the
very idea of genetic connection or geni-
tal analogy between herself and her
mother fills her with horror. "Mother
she is called but mother she is not,"
Elektra instructs her sister. And
although on one level Elektra can be
said to instantiate every girl's fear of
turning into her mother, it is also. true
that in this case both the girl and the
mother are prodigious-the mother for
her shamelessnes-s, the girl for her
shame. It is not until we hear Clytem-
nestra decline Elektra'sword lupe to its
most fleshly and female connotation
that we understand Elektra's shame in
its full human and sexual aspect. There
is something unnatural, something radi-
cal and alien, for Sophokles and his
audience, about the way female shame
has constructed around Elektra a sort
of life-size funeral urn which she inhab-
its as if it were a life.
-Anne Carson
IF YOU ARE translating from a lan-
guage that can be written or printed,
you are substituting the words of one
tongue for those of another. The princi-
pal problem there is the removal of all
cling tenaciously to the new text, mark-
ing it unmistakably as a result of trans-
lation. If, on the other hand, you are
working from a language which can't
be written or printed, you are not
working with words, but with ideas,
succinct and precise manner of han-
dling the concepts. Darija Arabic is
spoken, with wide regional modifica-
North Africa. Like demotic Greek, it
ent classical tongue. The difference
between spoken Greek and spoken
icon, but to the Muslims such a thing is
unthinkable, because the characters of
ized by forming the words of the
Koran, and thus cannot be used for any
other purpose. This prohibition places
an obstacle in the process of education.
The students do not know classical
Arabic, but all subjects must be taught
in that language. Thus the children
must learn Arabic before they can pur-
sue their studies. In many rural regions
the people do not know any form of
Arabic, even darija, but use their own
the King of Morocco lifted a ban on the
use of Moroccan languages in the
schools. (The Moroccans, like the
Americans, are inclined to forget that
they are colonizers, and not natives of
the land they inhabit.)
So, you are reduced to working from
an oral text, with nothing stable to sup-
port you when you come to a difficult
phrase. Nevertheless, the hazards met
with in the act of translation are
dwarfed by those inherent in publica-
tion and consequent remuneration.
Like the Mexicans, who never let pass
an opportunity to replace "'Estados
Unidos" with ";EstamosSumidos" for
the purpose of reminding the gringo
that he is not accepted as a peer and
that complete confidence is not to be
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thought of, the Moroccans, when deal-
ing with a European or an American,
cannot rid themselves of the conviction
that they will sooner or later be cheat- V.~~~~~~~V
ed. The three Moroccans of whose nov-
els I have made English versions have
shown continuous lack of trust in my
motives each time the question of
money arose. Publishers'advances were
minimal. This was accepted as a matter
of course, but later they began to ask
why no royalties were forthcoming.
Small sales, I explained. They found
this quite unsatisfactory. Eventually I
had to agree to pay Mrabet a thousand
dollars for each of his twelve books
published.
Larbi Layachi went to San Francisco
in 1963. From California I began to
receive minatory letters from two dif- talksand
~~Great -- readings,
-----------
n A v
ferent lawyers, saying that Layachi had ^nlw ~~~always
free
consulted them, accusing me of having
stolen not only his royalties, but also
the material for my own books. Mutual
friends in San Francisco explained that EXCELLENT
NEW, Avenue
1491Shattuck
Larbi was suffering from a brain tumor AND
USED, CA94709
Berkeley,
BOOKS5104860698
OFPRINT
OUT
which needed to be extracted. He con-
tinued to send money to me to be given
to his wife and children, but at the
same time he went on writing me
threatening letters. Eventually he had
the necessary surgery, which he with-
stood, but he died shortly afterwards.
The third Moroccan, Mohamed
Choukri, chose a more dramatic
method of denouncing me. Without
warning, an article in German
appeared in the Suddeutscher Zeitung
with the simple headline "Paul Bowles
Is An Exploiter." I thought it best to
overlook the piece. But then Shark el
1491-pae
ECLEtyNeW, Averue
vr shattuc
Aoussat, a daily Arabic paper published SAND: BaerkeleyCAl 94709e
USED
in London, financed by Saudis, began
to issue a series of articles, appearing
once a week, in which I was excoriated
as a spy in the pay of the CIA, a racist,
a neo-colonialist, a dangerous criminal
who ought not to be allowed to contin-
ue living in Morocco, and a robber
whose considerable fortune had been
amassed by depriving Moroccan writ- Noeme 1.StrWms eot
ers of their royalties. Simultaneously
with the publication of the twelfth
0 FictionAward
alyShort
installment, the text appeared in book Ist Place: $1,200
form. Then Choukri announced that he 2nd/3rd:$500/$300
would hold a meeting in the auditori-
um of the French Cultural Center in
Tangier, at which he would destroy my
VeryShortFictionAward
reputation. Friends tell me that the hall
was filled with Moroccans and $500/40
712SnMd/3d:
Algerians, including reporters sent by Mtax:s2,00 words
radio stations and journalists for news-
papers here and in Rabat. These last
continue to harass me, demanding my
"'point of view." I have already
explained in the local newspaper that I
Word cut, your nme addes an d
consider M. Choukri to be suffering phn us eon teFispaeofour
from schizophrenia. I'm careful not to tyed double-spaed ver shortestoray.
add that I should have known before- etno SASEmateral willnSno bencsc
hanld that something like this would frmrestaurnedn$1 reaingc fee. Beoureth
happen, and that I shall see to it that 1.riir
Noveme Sntorymusabnpst
there will be no repetition of such non-
make
onbsoribeforen July 31.si
sense because I shall not collaborate
issues to P Sen
to:i nera /
again with a Moroccan. Now I am a
true racist. 710e SWre Madison, 3504Hye
PoeetSa rtandic,OR 97205 .
- Paul Bowles
W HAT HAPPENS to the Serbo-
Croatian language now that
Yugoslavia has tornl itself apart? The
officialgovernment policies state thatin
1
Croatia Croatian will be spoken and
that in Serbia people will speak
Serbian. Meanwhile, for people living
in the region formerly known as
Bosnia-Hercegovina, the question of
language and, more immediately, co-
existence is still unresolved. Most
Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and
Slavic Muslims in Bosnia speak the
same dialect, but this does not mean
they necessarily feel they "belong"
together, at least not anymore. There is
a new Bosnian-English Dictionary,
published by Hippocrene in 1995; iron-
ically, in the back pages of this politi-
cally up-to-date reference book is an
advertisement for Serbo-Croatian lan-
guage tapes. And what about the
Montenegrians? For better or for worse
for the inhabitants of former Yugo-
slavia, soon there may be four lan-
guages where once there was only one.
I speak an ekavian dialect of Serbo-
Croatian, a signal to other speakers
that I probably learned the language in
Serbia proper. But I was protected from
the political implications (and later,
consequences) of this fact because I
grew up in the United States. I was also
insulated somewhat by my upbringing;
I was raised to think of myself as part-
Yugoslav, not just part-Serbian. Living
in Washington, D.C., where there was
a thriving Yugoslav community, my
family had much more in common with
our Slovene, Croat, Serb, Monte-
negrian, and Bosnian friends than not.
Anyhow, more than half of the mar-
riages were between Yugoslavs of dif-
ferent ethnic backgrounds. These some-
.......Cottonwoods
12ETHE
what bounded identities did not come
into question, in my life, until the sum-
mer of 1990.
It was July. My mother and father
had brought us to a town on the
Adriatic, near Dubrovnik, a place we
frequented every few summers from my
earliest days. My brother and I would
leave the house early in the morning
while the boats at the dock were still
calm and the shopkeepers were setting
out the day's goods. On our way to the
beach, we would walk along the water-
front to our favorite bakery. That
morning, as we entered the shop in our
tennis shoes, T-shirts, and shorts (no
doubt advertising all kinds of American
products), the woman working there
looked us over from behind the
counter. When she began to speak to us
in halting English-German, my first
impulse was to end her confusion as
quickly as I could. I blurted out,
"Molim vas, ne brinite, govorimo
Srpski" ("Please, don't worry, we speak
Serbian"). At the time, I did not under-
stand why this Croatian woman stared
me down as she tossed the two pastries
across the counter, then scowled after
us as we backed away. I was sixteen,
my brother eleven; I was hurt and did
not understand. When I asked my
father, he looked so melancholy I knew
the answer would not be a simple one.
At that age, in the back of my head,
I had a rough map of Yugoslavia based
upon our atlas at home. I knew that
when we were on the coast we were in
Croatia (Dalmatia, actually), and I
obviously knew we had flown in from
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Belgrade, but I didn't know, at that
age, what kinds of boundaries I had
crossed; nor could I possibly imagine
what was waiting for the inhabitants of
the quiet town on the sea in the months
that lay just ahead.
Julia Mitric
M Y MOTHER-IN-LAW,Fanny,moved
from Mexico City to Irvine,
California, in 1977, and for the last fif-
teen years she has been an interpreter
for Orange County Superior Court.
When court is in session and a defen-
dant needs translation, Fanny takes her
place alongside her client at the counsel
table, and, in a lowered voice, makes a
simultaneous oral translation of the
proceedings. An interpreter's work is
quite different from that of a translator
of poetry, who might ruminate over a
single word choice for weeks or
months. An oral translation is made on
the fly, a nearly unconscious process,
although of course it's a learned
process, which through practice
becomes intuitive.
"You shadow a couple of words
behind-it's called decollage-and after
a while it becomes second nature to
you. If you have to stop to think,
you're out of luck."
By now, Fanny is so accustomed to
serving as a funnel between languages
that she's had to give up listening to talk
radio while driving home from work. It
seems she can't stop rendering a run-
ning translation of the on-air debates. I
assumed, since Spanish is her first lan-
guage, that only English broadcasts had
been ruled out, that at least she could
relax in her mother tongue. But it isn't
so. "If it's in Spanish I translate it into
English. If it's in English I translate it
into Spanish. Sometimes you get tired.
All you want to do is listen."
Up in front of the judge and jury,
Fanny must make split-second judg-
ments about word choice-between
struck and punched, between left and
fled-all the while keeping her ear
cocked for the interpreter's bane: false
cognates. Spanish is full of genuine
English cognates: confidencia, predis-
posici6n, funeral. But sprinkled among
them are some red herrings, and it's
easy, when you've found your pace in
the middle of a long testimony, sliding
sentences from one language to anoth-
er, to make a false translation.
"It happened to me once in a trial.
The witness said, 'Entraron y me regis-
traron.' He was talking about the
police. He said, 'They came in and
searched me.' But when I translated it I
said, 'They came in and registeredme.'
I caught it immediately, but the attor-
ney started to shout, 'Your honor, the
interpretersaid he was registeredby the
police.' He wanted the original version
entered into the record because it
favored his client."
Besides paying attention to false cog-
nates, Fanny studies slang, an area of
THREEPENNY REVIEW
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language in which no interpreter can names for the components-the slide, something more than vocabulary, con- it forces us to make a cost-benefit
ever be completely versed. Slang the magazine-so I can translate for the centration, and a flexible voice. She analysis of the process. That translation
changes not only from country to coun- ballistics experts." understood how to strip a message of exacts a cost is surely the first lemma of
try, but from neighborhood to neigh- But on the infrequent occasions when its shells-of cultural nuance, contextu- translation studies-we might call it the
borhood, block to block. Today it she has had to stop court proceedings al meaning, personal inflection-how William Tyndale axiom, though the
means something; tomorrow it's forgot- to chase after a word, it's rarely the to strip it back to the pith, and then cost isn't always so extreme. The
ten. The Spanish witnesses and defen- arcane term that eludes her. find a way to wrap it up again in the humanities, compulsive hoarders
dants requiring interpreting services in "Sometimes-this is the scariest thing- best equivalents in English. It struck increasingly reluctant to leave anything
Orange County come from Mexico, you draw a blank. It can be the sim- me, when I heard his story, that there behind, often find the loss incommen-
Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, and plest word and suddenly it's not there. were probably only a few people in the surable. Hence Frost's gloomy apho-
beyond, and they speak as many differ- The other day, I couldn't think of the room who could appreciate her feats, rism that "poetry is what is lost in the
ent Spanishes. "La guagua, in Cuba, word flirting. The witness said which took place in real time: those translation." The poor translator some-
means the bus, but in Chile it means coquetear and my mind became a who could stand equally on either side times appears little better than the tor-
the baby. He took the bus. He took the desert. Everyone was looking at me. of the language divide. Even the defen- turer, inexcusably flaying the incarnate
baby. This could lead to some confu- The DA, the court reporter-they were dant, the beneficiary of her deftness in word.
sion." all waiting. The judge must have seen rendering his words, the one for whom Hurrying us all into the future, the
If, in the shifting river of a language, my desperation because he finally came her abilities might finally mean the most rugged digerati, by contrast, have
slang is the most dynamic current, drug up with the word. What could I say?" most, didn't know what he was getting. little time for such lugubrious views.
terms may well be the most changeable "What did you say?" I asked her. -Lisa Michaels They shrug off the loss as no more sig-
rivulet of slang. They are meant to "I said, Thank you, your honor." nificant than a snake's discarded skin.
serve as a kind of code, and once a She was grateful then, but having Their "technological gnosticism" tends
term is well-known then the code must bilingual judges and bilingual jury to view digitization as an act of almost
be changed. My mother-in-law has members-not uncommon in Orange $
spiritual liberation, the end of informa-
taken countless seminars on slang- County-brings an added pressure to tion's long process towards a disem-
gang slang, drug slang, slang for guns. the interpreter's task. By order of the bodied freedom.
Perhaps this would only seem strange if court, bilingual jurors are advised to IN MOSTCASES,it would probablybe Of course, not all in the computer
you knew her: an elegant woman, ignore testimony rendered in their easier to understand computers sciences possess the evangelical fervor
always smartly dressed, who likes to native tongue. Instead, they are without the ingratiating metaphors that of the digerati. Many do worry about
take long walks through the marsh instructed to listen only to the inter- come with them. Desktop, file, and the overeasy distinctions made between
beside her home, who likes the quiet preter's English version, so that all notebook don't really cause too much retained information and jettisoned
and orderliness of the suburbs. That's jurors deliberate on the same record. trouble, but memory, intelligence, noise. But more often than not these
perhaps a reductive portrait-how she But no doubt the jurors can't help lis- information, and communication bring worries are less concerned with issues
seems from the outside-but that's just tening in both languages, and in that with them immense scope for confu- of material loss specific to digitization
the point. From the outside, you'd regard they are the interpreter's one sion. And then there's language. Is this and more interested in the extension of
never imagine that this woman, who true audience, the only ones who can a metaphor, too? Is, for example, power that Max Weber saw inherent in
has never owned a gun and doesn't make assessments of her skill. putting conventional communication any type of formalization. Indeed, some
want to, would know the jargon for I remember my father-in-law, also an into digital form just a matter of trans- have reserved the term translation to
automatics, semiautomatics, and all interpreter,once telling me of a woman lation? describe the processes through which
species of handgun. "It's not enough to whose translations struck him as Metaphor or not, the notion of trans- computers, rather than promoting free-
know the make. I have to know the remarkable, their power derived from lation here may be quite useful, because dom, help extend bureaucraticcontrol.

SUMMER 199997

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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 It may be because of this special use puter program for translating from
that another image has replaced the English to Russian and Russian to
..
.. ........ -.W
...--....... .I
0.......
iv.
l | Wi general notion of digital translation just English. When the developers believed
:....:.:::.:s:::.::8i:,XB
... .. :.::.:.:
-::..:
:-
:x.::
.... as rising demand for digitization and that they had perfected their program,
.................
::::.......

i .... ,,
, .-,.,.,,,.,..
particularly redigitization make the they decided to test it by plugging in a
question of loss more worrying. The simple sentence: "The spirit is willing,
.. .....
......... ---.E
iS
.....-.....
;'"'.....SELECT.ED.
.......,..
>
Ix
AfiI . ....... demand for digitization reflects the but the flesh is weak." The computel
confident if occasionally naive desire to translated the phrase into Russian and
, ''-"WRITINGS translate the nondigital-books, films, then translated the Russian phrase back
.. ...10..9
..."......
....X.''........ . .. paintings, and so on-into digital form. into English. The result: "The liquor is
.. ......--5
f
00aVOLUMEl 1*::0 06 The demand for redigitization, a sort of good, but the meat is rotten."
retranslation, reflects a growing aware- Apocryphal or not, this story-and
.. .?|..... ness that digitization is not a one-step what it said about tone, inflection, and
process. Technology is changing so cultural context, the multiplicity and
rapidly that yesterday's digital transla- layering of meaning in seemingly
tions must be retranslated today in unambiguous words-was a cautionary
order to be read by tomorrow's tale for any translator. Equally caution-
machines, because by tomorrow, yes- ary was a cartoon I came across that
terday's data may be unreadable. depicted two men seated at a table, one
(Anyone who has had a computer for of whom was saying to the other: "Do
more than a couple of years probably you not be happy with me as the trans-
MarcusBullockand Michael WE
EditedbyM Jennin,gsl has accumulated some unreadable files. lator of the books of you?" I took this
W. ... Benjamin
/after ...I.. was one of the most originaland importantcriticalvoices of the l On the net, the half-life of digital forms as an object lesson against literal, syn-
\\/twentieth century,but until now only a few of his writings have been availablein | is even shorter.) tactical translation. At the time, I was
vEnglish. Harvard University Press has undertaken the publicationof a significant | This need for redigitization, as with trying to translate a book of French lit-
portion of his work, under the general editorship of MichaelW. Jennings.In more than sixty- | so much about computers, dramatically erary theory without using the term
five pieces-journal articles, reviews, extended essays, sketches, aphorisms, | amplifies the conventional problem to "the Other" more than once per page.
fragments Benjaminconsiders poetry and fiction, drama,philosophy,history,religion,love, | which it is compared. With convention- The result was a form of trans-edit-
violence, morality,mythology,painting,and much more. al translation, each generation has adaptation: an English book that I
A causefor excitement Benjamin'sscattered works are at last tended to translate its classics anew. So imperiously felt improved on the
................Water
U ~~~~~~being
translatedand collected in a carefullyedited edition....Most of his l today we read Reck's or Fitzgerald's French book.
_ ~~~writings-including some of his most extraordinary l Homer rather than Chapman's. And Reading an essay on translation by
| _ ~~~~accomplishments-havenever been translated...The overallqualityof for this, translators go back to an ur Milan Kundera, a few years later, I
translations is high...And in Benjamin'scase, this is no mean text of one sort or another, so though found the following passage: "If the
. .the
_- .accomplishment.. .Thisnew Benjaminset willbe the standardwork" each generation may lose something, word 'sadness' appears twice in the
.
_ ~~~~~~~~~-KIRKUS
REVIEWS losses are not cumulative. The new same paragraphof the original text, the
_ D Press * 512 pages * $35.00 cloth
~~~~Belknap demand for continuous translation, translator, offended by the repetition,
however, arises from the very fact that will be tempted to translate the second
800 448 2242
the ur digital text will itself be lost. occurrence as 'melancholy'... [He] must
www.hup.harvard.edu Consequently, the loss at each new be faithful to the author and at the
translation is cumulative. With digitiza- same time remain himself; what to do?
tion, we start a game of Chinese whis- He wants (consciously or unconscious-
pers without end and, after a couple of ly) to invest the text with his own cre-
moves, without beginning either. ativity; as if to give himself heart, he
To address this issue (or, possibly, to chooses a word that does not obviously
leave it unaddressed), the onward pas- betray the author, but still arises from
sage of data from one form to another his own initiative." As humbling as it
y MAudiotapeArchives is now described not as translation but
as migration. Perhaps someone hoped
was, Kundera's synonymizing reflex
identified the conflict at the root of my
*j athe first nineteentapesin our new audio poetryseries,featuringlive that this would conjure up reassuring impulse to translate.
trecordingsoftre b y ancel of the Academy,arenowavailable . images of well-planned journeys with -Deborah Treisman
neatly packed trunks. Given the speed
JOHN ASHBERY (1994)
of technological change and the grow-
E N
W.H. AUDEN (1964) ing volumes of data that have to move,
JOHN BERRYMAN & ROBERTLOWELL(1963) however, the process resembles more
the flight of whole populations driven
~~~~~~LOUISE BOGAN (1968)
relentlessly on as each new stopping
DS CLAMPITT(1987)
~~~~AMY place comes under attack and the
e HECHT (1987)
~~~~~ANTHONY bridges behind are burned.
e HOFFMAN (1981)
~~~~~DANIEL It's becoming apparent that the prob- A POWERFULTRANSLATION alertsus
* HOLLANDER(1992)
J~~~~OHN lem is colossal-and that it will not be to a vitamin deficiency in the body
RICHARD HOWARD (1994) solved, as some suggest, by automating literary. A craving is momentarily
RANDALLJARRELL* (1964) the migration process. It seems more assuaged; a new substance fortifies the
KIZER &F DAVID WAGONER(1995) likely that what we need are precisely imagination. Literature lives by such
4 ~~~~CAROLYN
not automatic processes. Perhaps we'll absorptions. Looking back on our own
~~~~~~STANLEY KUNITZ (1991)
have to recreate a modern equivalent of language, we recognize its bursts of
MEREDITH (1975)
~~~~WILLIAM energy as coincident with acts of trans-
e s Scott's Old Mortality, who roamed the
* MERRILL
J~~~~AMES (1992) Highlands to-refurbish headstones of lation: Wyatt and Surrey reinventing
W.S. MERWIN (1966) Scottish Covenanters to keep their English prosody through Petrarch(and,
MAYSWNSON (1985) memory alive. But materialists will in the case of Surrey, through Virgil);
MONA VANDUYN (1991 ) enjoy the more practical suggestion that Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of
RICHARD WILBUR (1989) we should create an ur text for digital Pembroke touching the tender stops of
documents in nondigital form-in, to Latin quantity in their English psalms;
1 WRIGHT (1964/1978)
J~~~~AMES
be precise, paper. Particularlyfor docu- ancient epic resurgent in the rhyming
E *Reading
his own and ElizabethBishop'spoems ments that never had a paper original, couplets of Dryden and Pope. More
this reincarnation may seem strange, recently, Pound taught English many a
Tapesare $10 each, plus $1 postage. and to the digerati sacrilegious. Yet, as subtle measure and clarity of purpose
To order please send a check to: the example of Homer reminds us, it in his versions of "The Seafarer,"
4i
has been successfully done before. Cavalcanti, Prospertius, Arnaut Daniel,
_ _ ~~~~THE
ACADEMY OP AMERICAN POETS
Rihaku. And what about the Bible, an
- _ TAPES PROGRAM -Paul Duguid
; - ~~~~~584
BROADWAY, SUITE 1208 inner voice demands. And Golding's
s ~~~~~~NEW
YORK, NY 10012-3250 Ovid? And Florio's Montaigne? And
Or call (212) 274-0343 to chargeor for information. just a moment ago, sub specie aeterni-
tatis, what about all that Spanish
i the postageon yourorder!
Mentionthis ad, andwe'l pay SOME ONE ONCE told me a story Surrealism flooding into Iowa? And
about a government-created com- Basho into California? The closer one

14 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW

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looks, the less our literatureresembles a
chart of isolated acts of translation, and
more a continuous recreation of vital
tissue through absorption.
Still, one can point to instances of
particular intensity. One is occurring
right now. After feverish seasons of
Ovid and Dante, a quieter spirit has
approached. This is Horace. A daimon
of limit; a wry, tender and knowing
soul building his privacy within the
imperial order; a musician whose ear
discerns in the rhythm of our living, the
cadences of our dying: Horace is a
proper guardian spirit for the close of
the century.
He steps before us in multiple guises.
Horace in English, just edited by
Donald Carne-Ross and Kenneth
Haynes for Penguin Classics, assembles
Horace's scattered English body into an
Osiris-like composite, with Carne-
Ross's gracefully instructive essay indi-
cating the unity of imagination frag-
mented through so many translations
over so many years. To take any one
poem and watch its recombinant career
is to experience both the scope of
Horace's donation to English and the
fecundity of English conventions
responding to the stimulus of the same
Latin poem. Ode I, 5, the famous Ode
to Pyrrha, is a fine example. The edi-
tors give seven versions, beginning with
Milton's accentual approximation of
Horace's Asclepiadean stanzas, a key
exhibit in any account of English
prosody: "What slender Youth
bedew'd with liquid odours/Courts
thee on Roses in some Pleasant Cave,/
Pyrrha for whom bindst thou/In
wreaths thy golden Hair//Plain in thy
neatness..." A few years later Aphra
Behn changes the main character from
female to male, though the hairdo
remains ambiguous: "What mean those
Amorous curles of Jet?/For what heart-
Ravisht Maid/Dost thou thy Hair in
order set,/Thy wanton Tresses Braid?"
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu contin-
ues the transvestism, while Christopher
Smart, with vernacular fluency, redi-
rects the poem to Pyrrha. The book
abounds in surprises (like John Quincy
Adams' imitation of Ode I, 22), lovely
affinities (Wordsworth's Ode III, 13 to
the Bandusian Spring), and master-
pieces (Housman's IV, 7: "The snows
are fled away, leaves on the shaws... ").
Through all of them glints something of
Horace, a pool of mysterious depths
and host to many reflections.
But Horace has found, also, a single
voice for our time. David Ferry'strans-
lations of the Odes have been appearing
in journals and are well represented in
the Penguin edition; his complete Odes
will be out soon as a book on their own
from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Ferry's
Horace is never the merely witty,
urbane, reasonable fellow who some-
times emerges in English. The key is
cadence: because Ferry'sear is as finely
tuned to English as Horace's to Latin,
we finally have an English Horace
whose rhythmical subtlety and variety
do justice to the Latin poet's own inven-
tiveness, in which emotion arises from
the motion of the verse and has little to
do with paraphrasablecontent.
To sense the achievement, one has to
read the collection as a whole. But sin-
gle poems have their own magnificent
shifts in scale, tempo, and tone, and
can take one's breath away even as they
continue breathing. In I, 37 Ferry'svig-
SUMMER 199799
orous pentameter and chain of verbs
carry the mind from the Roman cele-
bration of victory at Actium past the
pivot in sympathy to hand the triumph,
in the syntactic ambiguity reflected
from the Latin, to Cleopatra: "In
truth-no abject woman she-she
scorned/In triumph to be brought in
galleys unqueened//Across the seas to
Rome to be a show." In I, 9 Ferry'ster-
cets do the work of Horace's alcaics,
sweeping from the snow-laden, inhu-
man mountainscape past admonitions
of mortality to whispered erotic intima-
cy. Ferry has boldly sacrificed Horace's
concluding image of the ring slipped
from the finger in the hidden corner
where the lovers play; but he has paced
his enjambments, delays, and the
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expanding and contracting lengths of
clauses to play the swelling of youthful
hopes against the poem's darker
knowledge of ultimate diminishment:
".... While you're still young/And while
morose old age is far away,//There's
love, there are parties, there's dancing
and there's music,/There are young
people out in the city squares togeth-
er/As evening comes on, there are whis-
pers of lovers, there's laughter." In
poem after poem, Ferry's shapely stan-
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zas have caught the double motion of
Horace's insight: the forward mortal
rush, epitomized in the cascade of sea-
sons in IV, 7 in the Latin future partici-
ple "interitura" (about to die), against
the poet's retarding tactic, his holding
of time in the ephemeral form of a coif-
fure or a poised stanza: "Yet after a
time, and time and time again,/The
moon restores itself in the nighttime
sky.//But when it's time for us to go
down there /Where Aeneas went, the
pious, and Tullus the rich,/And old
king Ancus Martius, and all the
others, /Then we're nothing but dust,
we're nothing but shadows..."
In a myriad of ways, Ferry has
learned to catch Horace's words in
their flight, as in these lines from I, 11
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3 the question of where to be strict and
where rhyme and balanced phrases
detain the great commonplace, carpe
diem, that is always just slipping
through our fingers: "How as I say
these words,/Time has already
fled[Backwards away-Leuconoe-
Hold on to the day."
We have yet to outgrow death. While
we feel our way into that truth, we
could do worse than to set our measure
by Horace.
-Rosanna Warren
J AM A translator by profession-
born in Australia, resident in
Holland, and married to the Dutch
writer Henk Romijn Meijer. Shortly
after taking early retirement from
teaching at the Institute of Translation
Studies at the University of Amsterdam,
I started translating some of Henk's
more recent stories and essays, so as to
be able to show them to a number of
American and English friends who had
often expressed regret at not being able
to read anything he had written. One
day, one of them passed a story on to
Wendy Lesser, and so began our con-
nection with The ThreepennyReview.
The first story published in Three-
penny was called "No Kidding," and
the title itself can serve as an example
of what may go on when you are trans-
lating-that is to say, when straightfor-
ward translation of a word from the
source language into its equivalent in
the target language fails. In Dutch, the
original title of the story was Goed
gezind. The two words literally mean
"well-disposed," and taken by them-
selves are a perfectly acceptable title in
Dutch, whereas "Well-Disposed" does
not make a title at all in English. And
then into the bargain there is the word-
play, which the reader appreciates only
after he has read the story (which is
about having or not having children):
goed means "good" and gezin means
"family."
The problem of making such a
fusion of meanings seems insoluble.
That is the moment when the transla-
tor must break free and hope and pray
for a brainwave, which seem'st- have
the best chance of occurring when she
keeps the unsolved problem constantly
in mind, so that the mind eventually
offers the solution (often under the
shower) in order to get rid of the
problem.
..... Translators usually have no contact
at all with their authors and have to
make all the decisions unaided; or, as
sometimes happens, contact can be
extremely difficult, especially when the
author has limited knowledge of the
target language and insists on interfer-
_ i~~~~~~
ing, often with ludicrous suggestions.
Here Henk and I have two considerable
work, and his knowledge of English is
.: . ': " - - . '.
on a par with my own. This means that
we are in agreement about one of the
greatest issues in translation-namely,
as literal as possible, and where a mea-
sure of freedom is required.
Our way of working is that first I do
a complete draft translation of the
story. Where (as always happens) a
number of alternative readings present
themselves and I continue to find it dif-
ficult to choose between them, the
choice is up to Henk when he reads the
story. He pays a lot of attention to the
rhythm of the sentences, doing his first
reading without referring back to the
Dutch at all. He makes the choices
fairly easily, mostly by ear, and some-
times my three or four alternatives help
him find the solution we have both
been hoping for. When none of the
alternatives has been ideal and the real-
ly right one comes up, we both recog-
nize it at once.
-Elizabeth Mollison