A Tale of Three Roberts: Sound, Subversion, and Acts of Passage

 

A Tale of Three Roberts: Sound, Subversion, and Acts of Passage

by Meghan Miraglia

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was most intrigued by Suzanne Jill Levine’s “Translation as (Sub) Version: On Translating Infante’s Inferno.” Levine refers to herself as Infante’s “faithfully unfaithful translator” (85). Throughout the article, she focuses on four key concepts that arose during her work with Infante: word play, marginality, speaking versus talking versus chatting, and “traduttora traditora” (92).

The concepts presented by Levine were not unfamiliar to me, as I had seen them before in other works of feminist theory – the difference being, of course, their context. Up until this point, I had not yet encountered feminist theory being applied/linked to translation; I'd love to read more, as I think it would help frame the introduction to my final project. I really, really love Levine’s points about woman’s absence and silence versus men’s speech; her interrogation of the mother-tongue as a screen for patriarchy is bananas-good. I agree with that “it is at the level of language that the translator can be most creative, inventive, even subversive” (88); this feels in contrast to Nabokov’s stance, which is that the translator’s single job is to produce “with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text” (Nabokov 119). Where Nabokov wishes for pure and complete fidelity, Levine sees opportunity to challenge, expand, and re-fashion the original via translation. She makes the point that “a translation must subvert the original” (Levine 92) because of the language barrier, which results both immense losses and gains. Where Nabokov sees translation as a means to an end, Levine sees translation as “a route, a voyage…through which a writer/translator may seek to reconcile fragments…of texts, of language, of oneself…[T]ranslation is an act of passage” (Levine 94).

Bly, I think, also sees translation as an “act of passage” (Levine 94). I was struck by his stages of translation: in particular, his emphasis on meaning-making, close reading, and analyzing as part of translation. As Bly writes, “[j]ust knowing a poem is not enough” (73) to translate it – the translator must relate to the emotions and the concepts presented within the poem, and “[i]f they are not, [the translator] should stop” (73). A la Levine’s passage metaphor, it is here that the translator decides “whether to turn back or go on” (73). Learning a poem by heart is one way to capture its “body rhythm” (Bly 82-3).

Levine’s emphasis on alliteration parallels Bly’s sentiments regarding “the energy of spoken language” (75). Alliteration, according to Levine, “expresses, frees the impulsive, rhythmic nature of language as music” (87); because poetry aims to be music, we must not lose focus on the sounds of our translations. I can relate these ideas to Robert Pinsky’s poetry ethos – in so many words, he argues for the importance of reading poems aloud and finding their music through intuition. Naturally, we are able to identify accents in a poem; in much the same way, we are able to identify “the desperate living tone or fragrance that tells [us] a person now alive could have said the phrase” (Bly 75) that we are attempting to translate. It’s no surprise that Robert Bly invoked Robert Frost in his article; Robert Pinsky is a Frost fan, too. All three Roberts place special emphasis on the ear.