Poetry in a second language

As I maybe mentioned here before, I’m taking this Year of Writing course (online only); there’s a Google hangout created for the group in which we share some of our anxieties, writing, blogs, etc. I shared among others that one of my goals is to write more poetry, and that English was not my first language. One–ok, the only–commenter hastened to add that he wouldn’t be so “brave” as to do that, implying later that it might be an equally brave, equally foolish endeavor.

I’m sensitive on this issue so of course it got me thinking, why do it at all? If one cannot inhabit the mother tongue, as inevitably I or any other multilingual person doesn’t, how can one really be attuned to its nuances? Isn’t poetry the art of nuance by excellence? Searching the internets, I found this quote from an interview with Philip Larkin:

INTERVIEWER

In one early interview you stated that you were not interested in any period but the present, or in any poetry but that written in English. Did you mean that quite literally? Has your view changed?

LARKIN

It has not. I don’t see how one can ever know a foreign language well enough to make reading poems in it worthwhile. Foreigners’ ideas of good English poems are dreadfully crude: Byron and Poe and so on. The Russians liking Burns. But deep down I think foreign languages irrelevant. If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or afenêtre or whatever. Hautes Fenêtres, my God! A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.

Larkin comes across as an arse throughout the whole interview. His generalization to “writers” who can only have “one language” is deeply flawed–How about Nabokov? Joseph Conrad? to say nothing of, say, African writers, or writers of the Indian subcontinent, who must navigate tons of dialects in order to emerge with the preferred one–or, rather, English. That’s just ignorant. Oh, I’m not even touching the idea that foreigners are unsophisticated beasts fed a constant albeit meager diet of canonical poets, the only ones who they may hope to appreciate.

He might have had a (slight) point if he had limited himself to poetry–there’s something about poetry that, try as you might,  is not translatable. Concessions are made when one reads translations of poetry, somehow, Larkin be damned. People, however, are not entirely accepting of the idea that an ESL learner might truly write poetry. There is a stink of condescension to such statements, always (as it was in my YOW’s virtual comment), and it bothers me. While I accept that it’s hard, etc., I can’t accept that it’s impossible. And I’m not being “brave” (implied: reckless) when I tackle such task–I’m simply trying to express myself in the same language in which I conduct my daily routine and in which I dream.

Oh yes. The dreaming was a big deal – and it started happening about 8 years ago, exclusively in English. That’s when I knew that my conversion was complete. Is my English perfect? Debatable. Am I capable of writing poetry in English? Absolutely.

Plus, there seems to be a whole literature out there supporting this idea (this dude has made an academic career out of it). Some emphasize poetry writing as an effective step toward acquiring the language! And there is a growing number of poets who identify themselves as “second language poets.” Hey, I even found a lively LinkedIn thread on this very topic!

Even what I’m doing –translating Romanian poetry into English — would be blasphemous to some, since the target language is not my native language. Go on, however, ask me how much I care.

In the end, we write what we write from an inner impulse that begs to be codified in whatever idiom the writer is most at home in. And isn’t poetry really a second language in itself? With its own rules, transgressing the usual meanings of words CONSTANTLY? We, second-language writers, understand that in a visceral way. Writing in English when our mother tongue was different comes also viscerally, not from a need to show off or to stubbornly persist in a hobby that is bound to end in mediocrity – but from a need to voice snippets of our inner monologue, chipped off dreams, which may just happen to be, naturally and spontaneously, in English.

Me, in translation: Fragment with swallowed moon

I’ve been working on an epic poem for a while, in English, of course; it goes by leaps and bounds. I kinda like it (I think it’s sort of funny)–but I’m totally aware that it’s completely derivative of my beloved Cartarescu’s Levantul. In English, however, it’s not that derivative (right? right?) and every once in a while, I am able to create images I really really like. Is it wrong to like your own poetry? Given that I am dissatisfied with about 99% of it, I’ll just go ahead and say it’s ok to like at least 1%.

The fragment in question occurs right after the heroine of the epic manages to escape curious early 19-th century Prussian crowds in a narrow street in Berlin, a time and place she had been teleported for mysterious reasons (well, for you, the reader–not so much to me at this point!):

Dark the night and dark the alley, and the walls around felt
grimy,

The Teutonic clouds above her crept over the roofs like
slimy

And gigantic slugs who turn your dreams into black jelly–

A drunk cat howled sadly at the moon that’s hidden in their
belly.

There is something to be said about form: I am trying very hard to write this in 16-lines, 16-syllables, with an aabbcc etc. rhyme pattern. I’ve written about 14 "units" like this so far, and every time I start one, I have no idea how it’s going to end, what I’m going to say, etc.; the form I chose, however, often compels me to come up with twists I would have never otherwise dreamed of.

Since this is a translation site, here’s an obliging translation:

 

Neagră noaptea şi aleea, iară murii par slinoşi,

Teutonici nori deasupra se târăsc ca melci băloşi

Şi gigantici, ce transformă visurile în gel negru—

Urlă mâţe către luna’ascunsă în stomacul lor funebru.

I think I like it better in English.
___

Oh, note to self to discuss: Yesterday we watched Louis Malle’s Souffle au coeur (1971); in one of the scenes, boys at a camp reenact Goethe’s famous poem The Erlking–in French, of course. D. had not realized this was Goethe (he knew about the poem)–and wondered aloud why they did it, because, I quote approximately, "a poem in translation is useless." I let it go because that was not the time for that kind of discussion and because I wanted to see the movie, but it stuck with me. I wonder, is this the general sentiment? I know that, to a certain extent, he’s right–but on the other hand….. 

Translation or Re-writing: where do you draw the line?

I’ve recently joined ProZ, a wonderful translators’ web community, where I started to participate in some discussions and answer various translation questions (there is a forum where you can accumulate points for answering such questions, in hopes that a potential employer may use that to gauge your "real" expertise in a field). I continue to be amazed at how much I still have to learn, and the extent to which some of the questions asked stump me is almost comical ("remittance leveraging," anyone?). All in all, I’m learning a lot and I’m enjoying myself.

Some questions are in fields so specialized that there is no way even a normal native speaker would know the term in question. I am still amazed at how tough the translator’s job must be when he/she is translating concepts that have basically no equivalent in his/her native language, not to mention that in some fields the terminology is still fluid. All in all, juggling these terms is extremely complicated–hats off to those who do so on a regular basis.

Yesterday, I participated in answering a question that raised some interesting issues for me. The question was, how do you translate "Sorcova vesela" into English? (The whole thread is here.)

"Sorcova" is one of those ancient folk customs in which, on New Year’s
Day, kids go around with a little stick adorned with flowers and tap
someone’s shoulder to wish them all the best in the New Year. They also sing a cute little song. Sorcova means only that, the little flower-wrapped stick, so it’s a highly idiosyncratic word with no equivalent in English. Thus, the first answer that comes to mind is: you don’t translate it. No more than you’d translate "Greensleeves" through "mâneci verzi." Or "Auld Lang Syne" through…gee, I don’t know, really.

But then one of the respondents wrote hey, the whole thing has been translated already (the song and all), and copied the whole translation in there. Everybody agreed that that’s a very good translation, very sweet, very well done; it helped, I guess, that the translation apparently belongs to Ion Minulescu, one of our best-known poets. As an aside, I did not know he did this, I could find no reference to the fact that he translated anything into English, plus he died in the 1940s, so really, I’m not sold on that reference, plus I’m deeply mistrustful of Romanian web references, for reasons I won’t go into here. But let’s roll with it and say he did translate the "Sorcova" song. What I respectfully would like to say here is, it’s not really a translation. To illustrate, I will provide the original, a literal translation, then my (deeply flawed) attempt at translating it with the original rhyme pattenr; and then I’ll provide the alleged Minulescu translation. Ready? Here goes:

Sorcova, vesela, Să trăiţi, să-mbătrâniţi, Peste vară, primăvară, Ca un păr, ca un măr, Ca un fir de trandafir Tare ca piatra, Iute ca săgeata, Tare ca fierul, Iute ca oţelul. La anul şi la mulţi ani!

Sorcova, merry one, May you live long, may you grow old, Over summer, over spring, Like a pear tree, like an apple tree, Like a rose stem Tough like a rock Fast like an arrow Tough like iron, Fast like steel. Happy New Year!

Dogwood twig, merry sprig, May you live long, may you grow strong, And the spring will summer bring, Like a cherry tree so merry, Like a rose tuberose, Tough as a stone, Sharp as a bone, Tough like iron grip, Sharp as a steel tip. Happy New Year!

Now here’s the alleged Minulescu translation:

The Wishing Carol   May you look with merry eyes   at that little bunch I rise,   tiny flowers may they bring   you an everlasting spring !     All the fragrance, all the bloom,   shall a fairy on her loom   weave for you, and smile, and wait   to open the golden gate !     May your steps be quick and strong,   always right and never wrong !   May you always find the ‘clue’,   see your dearest dreams come true,   have it always as you like,   and each time a lucky strike !     Healthy,   wealthy,   spick-and-span,   and as merry as you can !

Pretty, isn’t it It gets the spirit of the song beautifully, no doubt; it expresses the same warm sentiments; it loosely follows and "translates" the ideas in the original folk songs. But a translation of the original? Hardly. The original is a simple folk song that accompanies an ancient tradition. I have researched this a little bit and "sorcova" comes from the bulgarian сурва̀кам, another super-idiosyncratic word which means, literally, "to wish a Happy New Year by tapping someone’s back with a decorated cornel twig"–which is exactly what the Romanian verb, "sorcovi," means. Cornel is a kind of dogwood, hence my translation. And the ancient tradition did require that "sorcova" be made of such dogwood twigs, artificially forced into bloom for that occasion (nowadays, the flowers are made of colored paper tied to a stick).

The folk song is formulaic, with internal rhymes and impenetrable similes ("tare ca piatra" etc.), hardened by usage into self-contained lexical units that don’t easily crack open to be translated or interpreted. While the "Minulescu" translation does a beautiful job of interpreting and unpacking some of those meanings, the quasi-hypnotic rhythm of the original is lost. Really, there is little left of it in that version. The version is very literate–which is to say, not folk-ish at all–in its choice of vocabulary, the use of a title, of stanzas, of complex syntactic units (just look at that second stanza) that do not echo the simplicity and cadence of the original. Plus, there are about extra 8 lines in there.

Of course, I am aware that any good translation is just a good interpretation or approximation of the original–just take a peek at my site’s title. But I think that, in order to qualify as a translation, a text has to strive to reproduce the intentions, format, meaning, and (very importantly!) sound of the original–not just its general direction. The "Minulescu" translation does not qualify as a translation–it does qualify as a poem in its own right, a pretty one at that, one that reinterprets in a modern manner the spirit of the original. But, in my opinion, it’s a re-writing at best, and hardly a translation.

What do you think? Where do you draw the line between a translation and a "new" work of art only loosely based in the original? Are there "degrees" of translation? Is there any way to define them? What are the points on the continuum that we’re looking at?

 

And don’t tell me that you prefer a beautiful reinterpretation to a flawed but more faithful translation. I get that already!

Me, in translation, again

I’m a very messy record-keeper. I know I have it in me to be super-organized (no, seriously!), but for some reason I’ve been putting it off and as a result the innards of my computer are a mess. There are all these old files and duplicates and jumbled ramblings and pieces of poetry and pieces of translation that pop out of nowhere and then I can never find again (ask me how often I’ve done the dreaded "search for a phrase in the document" thing in the past month, just go ahead and ask)–and as a result, I often feel lost when left alone with my best friend, my laptop.

You know what’s worse, though? When I try to make amends and start going through the files with a fine-tooth comb, deciding what’s there to keep, what to delete, etc.–and then I waste half a day on that, and never finish, and dread coming back to it, and as a result, the files continue to be, if possible, even more disorganized than before.

Especially when I get distracted by things I find and I can’t even remember writing. Like this little poem:

Dragă Şeherezada,
Vraja s-a risipit ca zăpada;
A rămas doar o şuviţă de fum,
Lipită cu scoci într-un album;
O amintire ciufulită de ploi,
Dar tivită cu soare—
Tu şi el, la plimbare,
Şi trei nu rimează cu doi.

At first I thought it belonged to someone else–the "Draga Seherezada" line is a famous Andries song–but no, I think it belongs to me (how sad is that, to forget your own creation? pretty sad, indeed!). So, in order to further postpone my organizational fervor, I’ve done a quick and dirty translation here:

Dear Scheherazade,
The magic has started to fade;
There’s only a thin strand of fume,
Locked in an album in a room;
A memory rain muddled through,
But hemmed with sunlight—
You and him, walking tight,
And three never does rhyme with two.

For all it’s worth, I like the original better. *Cough.* I think it’s inspired by the aftermath of my brief (but real!) email correspondence with Andries, which came to an abrupt halt when we actually crossed paths, however briefly, in Bucharest, about three years ago, in front of the Cărtureşti bookstore (from where I did, indeed, purchase an Andries concert DVD). Anyway, after that brief face-to-face, our correspondence ceased and desisted. Heh! And so, to commemorate that, I think I wrote this little poem.

Ok, now I know why it sounded so strange: I never write poetry in Romanian anymore. It’s been ages and ages since I’ve done it; all my current productions are, in fact, in English. So perhaps it wasn’t me who wrote this, after all? But then, who? Or was I sleep-rhyming? God, my so-called artistic life is more tenebrous than a postmodern theory opus.

Me, in translation

From what I hear, writers are not very fond of translating their own work. I can understand that with large novels (who wants to write in excess of 200 pages all over again? The impulse to re-write rather than translate would be overwhelming.) Poetry, however, seems to be more amenable to being translated by the author. Or so I think, after I played a little with this little nothing poem I wrote…mmm…a while ago. Not grand poetry by any and all measure, but on the plus side–it was kinda translatable. Well, it wasn’t very complicated or particularly deep, either, so that helped. I wrote it in English in the original–and just wanted to see how it feels to translate your own work.

Not half as bad as I thought! There are some linguistic treasons, which this time I felt fully entitled to undertake. It’s my damn poem, after all!

Just one small observation: I used a Romanian rhyme dictionary and was taken aback at the multitude of rhymes I could find for one word. I never realized, I guess, that Romanian was so full of rhymes! By comparison, English seems to be much tougher, rhyme-wise. My preliminary hypothesis is that’s due to the multitude of inflections, which creates ample opportunities for similar endings (think gender, declension, number, conjugation, you name it). I’ll have to look into it.

I want to love your every nook and cranny And softly reaching for you, I want to taste your lips, I want to be your lover, your friend, your wife, your nanny, I want to kiss your belly, and dive into your hips. I want to giggle with you when I caress your arms Through every pleasure bud I’ll filter all your fingers, I want to feel your skin under my hungry palms I want to twist your body as over me it lingers. I want to feel again the taste of dew and bread Your neck imparts so gently, until I’m satisfied, I want to feel your mouth, I want you in my bed, I want to be your ocean, and you, to swim inside.

Vreau să-ţi iubesc oricare şi orişice crevasă, Să-ţi gust sărutul fraged cu limbi nesăţioase, Vreau să îţi fiu iubită, prietenă, mireasă, Să te sărut pe şolduri, să îţi plonjez în coapse. Vreau să îţi gâdil braţul cu dulci atingeri blânde Şi degetele toate să-ţi cern prin noi plăceri, Vreau să-ţi simt pielea caldă sub palmele flămânde, Şi trupu-ţi să-ţi frământ în crunte mângâieri. Şi vreau să simt iar gustul de pâine şi de rouă Ce gâtul tău împarte, cu tandre ghilotine, Te vreau în pat alături şi când afară plouă, Vreau să îţi fiu ocean, şi tu—să înoţi în mine.