I found much of Clare Cavanagh’s “The Art of Losing” to be a profound meditation on poetry in translation—in particular, her reframing of the inevitable losses that happen along the way. There’s something very true about this; loss is inherent to the process of taking something that exists and making something new from it. To understand and appreciate the new thing fully, we must accept both the source it was born from and the act of loss itself as its origin story.
I really loved Milosz’s translation of Bialoszewski’s “And Even, Even if They Take Away the Stove,” which ends with the not-quite-repetition (maybe more like almost-repetition-but-new-each-time) of “grey naked hole,” or “szara naga jama,” and this idea that “the world’s inescapable losses generate not only pain but also the creative possibility…a new way of seeing and something new to see.”
I wonder how assessments and critiques of translations might be different if they took loss not as a sign of failure, but simply a sign that translation has happened. Rather, were those losses fruitful ones—generative? What new things would they help us to see? With Pierre Menard on the mind this week, too, change (and loss, and gain) is maybe inevitable with any kind of translation or reproduction of a text simply by virtue of who is holding the pen, and when, and where.
The metaphor of “Marty’s game,” of translating poetry as a kind of joyful failure, of running into a wall and laughing, reminded me of the New Yorker article I’d read about Han Kang and Deborah Smith's (post-Vegetarian) process earlier in the year. In the article, Han describes a dream she had about translation, where she saw someone lying on a bed. “Though the sleeping figure’s face was covered by a white sheet, she could hear what the person was saying… A good translation, Han’s subconscious seems to suggest, is a living, breathing thing, which must be understood on its own terms, discovered from beneath the great white sheet.”
I’m interested in the reemergence of this sheet metaphor, and of the translation being the thing beneath a sheet, or being generated from beneath a kind of veil. What exactly, I wonder, is the sheet here? Is it simply the rift or barrier that exists between two languages and cultures/geopolitical histories? Or two writers, two brains? Or is it simply learning to practice comfort with this not-knowing—understanding that our own subjectivity always hangs around us like a kind of sheet, and to communicate across difference always requires, first, acknowledging the sheet and all the failures and bumps that come with it?
No comments:
Post a Comment