Chasing Ghosts - Translation, Imitation, In Between and Beyond
Alexander Pope earned a fortune translating the classics into his characteristic couplets. It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer(1). He handled the Iliad in its entirety but secretly engaged two assistants for the Odyssey (and had his knuckles rapped when found out). In fairness, he titled later odes as “Imitations of Horace”. More recently, Dante has been translated into English thanks to “some knowledge of Latin and none of Italian”(2); Greek tragedies have been embellished with sexual swearwords; other poets-translators simply re-write other people's prose transliterations in poetic form. At the other extreme, it has been claimed(3) that Kant is easier to understand in English translation than in his original German – even for German speakers. Such interpretability certainly explains why classics are translated again and again.
In every other field, translation is required to be precise and faithful... the translator should leave nothing out nor put anything in, should be almost invisible. Except in poetry, it seems. This can be extremely unfair to the original author – dead or alive – and readers alike. There are, of course, more things in poetry that are almost impossible to translate than in other forms of writing (Ungaretti's “M'illumino / d'immenso”, for example – perhaps “Immensity / enlightens me”) and there might be a case for providing readers with multiple versions by multiple translators to cover this, but turning the exquisite into the vulgar (or vice versa) would be cause for legal action in other contexts. There is also the question of being or becoming bilingual, of active and passive language. The general rule is that translators should only translate into their mother tongues. Yet people naturally bi-or tri-lingual are very often not good translators: their languages come so easily to them that they make sloppy mistakes. Translators who have become bilingual are more likely to acknowledge their limits and continue learning the craft. And all the more so when daring to translate into their second/passive language.
Poets, like everyone else, have sets of ghosts that they reveal to us; translators have to accommodate such phantoms with their own demons. This makes translating poetry even more complicated. The fear of being literal often overwhelms common sense and translation consequently slips easily into interpretation and then into imitation -and even into something completely new and different. Yet literal translation of idiomatic expressions can be equally distorting and unfair. Hence the need, I feel, for awareness and clarification along the lines of the title of this piece.
TS Eliot was asked during a reading what he meant by “Three white leopards under a juniper tree” only to reply laconically “Precisely that, three white leopards under a juniper tree”. These “objects” can be unequivocally translated (into Italian, for example, as: Tre gattopardi bianchi sotto un albero di ginepro) but the deeper meanings will be different indifferent languages. Over and above the pure visual image, three suggests the Trinity, white a kind of purity; white leopards have unusually lost their spots; juniper is used to make gin but is also an ingredient in sauerkraut. This information is readily accessible to Europeans. Different cultural backgrounds presumably have different sets of ghosts (and scales of values) attached to these “objects”. Such hermeneutics and exegesis are especially involved in the translation process.
I was so astonished by the vigour of Michelangelo's Rime when I first discovered his poetry that I liberally translated half a dozen or so of his poems for pure pleasure. When it came to publishing my first collection (in English and Italian), I included these poems – that then had to be translated back into Italian. A task I took up myself. Where the rendering in English was very free, I opted for strict re-translations back into modern Italian (of course checked by my mother-tongue editor andothers). Hopefully, there is still some Michelangelo in there, in spirit if not in form.
It quickly became a habit to translate my own poems into Italian once I considered the original English to be final. On many occasions, the act of translating threw me back to my mother-tongue to tidy up imperfections. And sometimes, things work in Italian in a different and better way than in English. I write exclusively in English but Italian is my everyday working language so interchange and cross-fertilisation have inevitably developed. I can think (and dream) with two quite different mindsets now. Translating poetry, for me, could be summed up as the best words possible in the best order possible to keep faith with the author and the reader. Yet, in translating my own poems into Italian, I can make decisions that other translators would debate over forever. One of the nicest comments after a reading almost entirely in Italian of my latest two-language book “Weathering” recently was “I couldn't hear any English underlying the Italian, it didn't sound like a translation”. Inasmuch, my readers, whatever language version they prefer, are always assured of reading me. So perhaps this is the least harmful approach, to paraphrase Montale(4).
(1) Classical scholar Richard Bentley
(2) C.H. Sisson
(3) Iain Bamforth
(4) Montale's Nobel Prize speech
Page(s) 12-13
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