Nichita Stanescu, or the impossibility of translation

Every once in a while, I attempt to translate something that just won’t translate. It will stubbornly cling to its Romanianness, or whatever it is, like a leech to the skin; peeling it off inexpertly will possibly infect the skin beneath and it certainly won’t stop the bleeding. Detaching the lyrical essence of the poem and depositing safely into another language often proves costly, as it comes at the expense at the original: what was once gloriously tender and juicy becomes battered, bruised, and bitter. And nobody wants a piece of that.

So is the case with Nichita’s beautiful poem "Emotie de toamna" (also an Alifantis song, which keeps ringing in my head, to remind me that I can’t satisfactorily provide a translation that will fit its melodic line). It’s one of my favorite fall poems, always gives me the shivers, always pregnant with meaning, although I’ve heard it or read it hundreds of times by now.

Here goes–but hey, I couldn’t do a proper translation, so yeah, this is a proper and thorough failure, and I’ll discuss some of the reasons why.

Emotie de toamna de Nichita Stanescu A venit toamna, acopera-mi inima cu ceva, cu umbra unui copac sau mai bine cu umbra ta. Mă tem că n-am să te mai văd, uneori, că or să-mi crească aripi ascuţite până la nori, că ai să te ascunzi într-un ochi străin, şi el o să se-nchidă cu o frunză de pelin. Şi-atunci mă apropii de pietre şi tac, iau cuvintele şi le-nec în mare. Şuier luna şi o răsar şi o prefac într-o dragoste mare.

Autumn emotion by Nichita Stanescu Autumn came so please cover my heart with the Tree shade—or yours so it won’t wither. I fear that perhaps I won’t see you sometimes That I’ll grow sharp wings up to the skies That you’ll hide within a foreign eye Which will close with a bitter good-bye. And then I go near the rocks and shut up. Take the words and drown them in the sea. I whistle the moon and rise it and turn it Into a big love.

1) The first stanza–the two lines–are so perfectly simple and pure and have this beautiful open rhyme in "-a"; literally, they mean:

Autumn came, cover my heart with something,
The shadow of a tree, or better yet, your shadow.

There’s something very melodic in the Romanian "A venit toamna" (Autumn arrived/came/has come/is here); it’s an anapest and a trochee (_ _ / / _ ), in succession, sounding a little bit like a rise and fall of waves. That effect cannot be achieved in English. First of all, I probably should translate "toamna" by "autumn" rather than "fall"–they are Latinate words, whereas "fall" is Germanic, I think. Either way, though, the stress is on the first syllable, so the anapest is impossible to replicate–so is the entire rhythm of the first stanza. I cannot easily reverse the order of words, like I could in Romanian, either. And because Alifantis’s song plays on that rising sound in its opening notes, I could never translate it in a way that would preserve that melody. Damn!

It all goes downhill from there. I’ll just tackle a few particularly frustrating instances:

2) "frunza de pelin" = "wormwood leaf." Now, that’s a perfectly acceptable translation (well, apart from the fact that I can’t find a rhyme suitable for the context). HOWEVER, any reasonably literate Romanian you ask will tell you, if you ask them what "pelin" evokes, that it’s "bitter." (It is.) That would NOT happen with any reasonable literate English-speaker you interview Wormwood has stopped being culturally relevant (plus, I don’t think it’s a plant native to the US), and so, when I asked several cultivated, intelligent Americans what the word "wormwood" evokes for them, none of them thought of "bitter" (the general consensus, actually, was that it was "wood riddled by worms").

Still, in Nichita’s text, it is essential that you understand the connotation of "pelin" as "bitter"–which is why I skipped the "wormwood" in the translation. But then, I fundamentally altered the meaning, I believe, plus I omitted "leaf" in order to get my goddamn rhyme. Gah!

3) "tac" = "(I) shut up/keep silent". The translation of "tac" (from the Latin "tacere") is obviously deficient since it needs a phrasal verb, and one that rather denies or negates an action, by opposition with the almost active  meaning of "tac," in which the action of keeping silent is almost as meaningful and positive as speaking. There is no proper verb in English for this, one that would have the same powerful impact–as it is meant to have here.

4) Then there’s the business of "Suier luna si-o rasar si-o prefac…" – "I whistle the moon and I rise it and I turn it into…" It’s as weird in Romanian, believe me. The only ambiguous term is "rasar" which can be either "rise" (as in moonrise), or it may have to do with "spring" or "appear"–as in anything plant-related. Both "whistle" and "rise" don’t really take a direct object of this nature (you whistle a tune, not a celestial object; and it’s certainly not you that "rises" the sun or the moon–they do it themselves), and this is true of their Romanian counterparts. But that’s a Nichita specialty, playing with the syntax and bending it to conform to his own cosmology.

5) Finally, the last verse is "Intr-o dragoste mare"–8 syllables, trochee, dactyl, trochee. "Into a big love" is a literal translation, only 5 syllables, no discernable rhythm; but there’s only so many ways to translate "dragoste"–and only "love" is the best translation for it. "Big" could probably be tweaked with, but it would alter the simplicity of the verse. You see my dilemma? To say nothing that "mare" meaning "big" is rhymed with "mare" meaning "sea" (yep, perfect homonyms in Romanian)–and there is no way that I could render the same pattern in English.

So there  you have it…spectacular failure; Nichita is just too…dare I say, good? living inside these words like a ghost and refusing to be moved into a different language? Dunno. Or rather, I should just accept the fact that I’m just not that good a translator.  But hey, practice makes perfect!

Why I write

I found this quote from Georges Bernanos and suddenly it all became clear to me:

"I don’t know who I write for, but I know why I write. I write in order to justify myself. In whose eyes? I’ve said it already, but I will face the ridicule to say it once more: in the eyes of the child I used to be."

Life in translation

I’m starting this in the hopes that it will help me figure out exactly what translation is, and if it really exists. My life is a life in translation as it is: I moved from Romania to the US nine years ago, in 1998, and have more or less carved a life for myself here. I’ve come to inhabit English more comfortably at times than Romanian, and I find that there’s nothing I can do about it. At the same time, I’m constantly learning this language, its small histories that I didn’t grow up with. There are little catch phrases from children’s shows that everybody here knows about that  but that I don’t, and couldn’t have known, given that I came here as an adult and TV in Romania at the time  I grew up was a pathetic excuse for entertainment or education for that matter. There are names and personalities that were famous enough in the US but not at all known where I was (Mr. Rogers? Elmo? Sesame Street? In Living Color? etc.), and so pop-culture references often pass by me.

All this time, though, I try to continuously improve and learn and figure out where things came from–what everything means (a futile attempt, I know, but without which I would have no raison d’etre). My own cultural references, embedded in my native Romanian, are in the meantime getting farther and farther away from me. My mother tongue doesn’t even guest stars in my dreams anymore. I dream almost exclusively in English now.

But I don’t necessarily like that–all this forgetting business. To better reclaim that part of me that is, and forever will be Romanian, I’m starting this translation blog. I started doing literary translations a while ago, as a challenge, almost, to myself. About 3 or 4 years ago I found it impossible to rhyme in English–it seemed so difficult, an advanced topic more suited to native speakers, it seemed. And then I challenged myself to translate a full poem with rhymes and everything. To my surprise, I didn’t completely fail–on the contrary, I found it liberating. I do use a variety of dictionaries (see the sidebar) in my work, and some poems just pour out of me, and some others–I’m stumped in their translation forever. This blog is meant to document both translation successes and failures, and question the possibility of translation, as in a full equivalent of the original in another language. I’ve come to realize that’s just not possible; the most I can do is an interpretation. The same will go for Romanian>English and English>Romanian translations. The latter will be more scarce, but nevertheless–I will attempt it, especially in prose.

In the process, I hope my native language will be kept alive and flourishing inside me, and hopefully I can show some of its beauty to a non-Romanian speaking audience.