I really enjoyed reading these different takes on translation; put in conversation with one another (and with Damion Searls' talk on Friday), they feed and contradict one another in a number of interesting ways. Nabokov, for example, bristles at the idea of translating for legibility or poetization. “The clumsiest literal translation,” he writes, “is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” He warns against translations that gloss over important cultural context—or that give rise to egregious mistranslations—and argues for a literalism that is about exactitude of meaning. (It seems, to me, that most translators tend to agree here, that what is most important when translating is preserving “meaning,” but what “meaning” means seems to be what’s so highly contested from translator to translator.)
Robert Bly’s “eight stages” (which, in putting it in “stages,” makes me think more of the Kubler-Ross model of moving through grief rather than through a poem) offers a helpful step-by-step process of extracting a poem in (American) English from its source poem. I found Bly’s commitment to ‘sentence sound,’ and reproducing contemporary spoken American English, no matter the time the original was from, interesting. I like that he brings the ear into the process, encouraging the translator to ask him/herself, “have [I] ever heard this phrase spoken?” This seems to contrast directly with some of what Nabokov says—as transforming a piece into contemporary, spoken American English is a kind of shifting for legibility and poetization. I wonder if this focus on sentence sound is more common in poetry translation, which is more of a spoken form than the novel?
Something that surprised me in Bly’s essay was his advice on giving up. “I felt Vallejo’s feelings toward his own images enter the violet, or grief, range of the spectrum, where I could not follow him,” he writes. “At the age I was, the violet range was not accessible to me, and these feelings can’t be faked.” He then urges translators to abandon poems that are comprised of feelings that they cannot immediately access. This implies that not every poem is translatable to every translator. I find this really interesting; how can we judge if a work is ours to translate, or something we ought to abandon? Is it a feeling Bly can intuit, or understands based on his lived experiences? And how does this apply to barriers across time, space, and culture that feel too vast to cross without feeling like a “fake”?
I found Suzanne Jill Levine’s “Translation As (Sub)Version” fascinating, and one of the first essays we’ve read that really situates texts in translation as living, breathing, dynamic works that don’t exist in a vacuum, but are always interacting with individuals, cultures, and politics. That translating subversively, and sometimes unfaithfully, can in fact be faithful to the “spirit” of a text that was intended to question and disrupt (even if originally meant to disrupt something else). In understanding translation as an inherently disruptive process, she creates space in translation for play, creativity, and cultural interpretation and adaptation.
Abbey
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