On Translating the Lyric Form

 

Through Clare Cavanagh’s article, “The Art of Losing,” I appreciated the chance to think about what it means to translate the form in poetry. Cavanagh offers that those who translate lyric poetry are driven by the same “form-creating” impulse as the poets. As such, she defends the effort to translate the form, even if it means making tradeoffs or losing other aspects of the poem because it will nonetheless be creatively generative, such as by offering new perspectives and insights. In addition, Cavanagh doesn’t only look at what is slipping through the cracks to make her case but also does so by considering the very role of the lyric form’s “built-in limitations” (242) in the workings of the poem. In other words, she sees the form as very much a part of the substance and the meaning of the poem, not only the aesthetics. Of the many examples she offers to demonstrate how form and substance interact and reinforce each other, one is the translation of Milosz’s poem about the fragility of form, both in mankind and in manmade, which “retains its pathos in English precisely because Milosz and Pinsky have managed to reproduce so movingly the stanzas and rhymes of the original” (240) – through it, she shows how the form itself (i.e. the stanzas and rhymes) must be retained to keep alive the essence of the poem. And while I think her many examples of Polish poetry beautifully exemplify this mirroring of form and substance, I also wondered about how the “form-creating” impulse of a translation could be generative in a very different way than the poem. In passing, Cavanagh mentions the critics, such as Eagleton and Bakhtin, and their accusations of “aesthetic isolationism” in the lyric form. It made me wonder whether because the translation is already positioned within context (i.e. of working from and to a certain language, of having to break or reconceptualize the existing form in one way or another, by little or almost entirely) it is not (or can’t be?) aesthetically isolationist almost by definition, while the lyric poem could be because it can operate outside of context (i.e. become the “refusal of life actually conducted in actual society”)?, although of course, the Polish tradition of “poetic creation from loss” (241) more than demonstrates that this is not the rule. But all in all and perhaps most pertinently, I think Cavanagh pretty much had me at not having to despair of failure.

-          - Lois