every simple shewsay is either a yeasay or a naysay - Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft, 1601 & 1651 - The jokes are not always funny

The first chapter of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English is titled “1601: Philosophy Learns English.”  It is much about translation as philosophy.  For there to be philosophy in English there first must be words for it, and the 16th century is when a large number of them are translated, stolen, or invented.

Rée is going to end the book with Ludwig Wittgenstein, so he is setting up a theme that will lead straight to the end of the book, that in his view philosophy is less about ideas than about words.  Or that there is little distinction.

The easy, clumsy path was simply to absorb the Latin and half-baked Greek.  To opponents, these were “inkhorn terms,” existing only in the inkwell, not in real English.  We in English missed a sure thing by not adopting the 1573 suggestions of clergyman Ralph Lever, who wanted to expel the Latin completely:

Conclusiones became ‘endsays’, and propositiones conditionales were ‘ifsayes’.  Instead of the hideous half-Latin maxim ‘every proposition is either an affirmation or a negation’, we could now say that every simple shewsay… is either a yeasay or a naysay. (20)

And that logique “should be known by the self-explanatory term Witcraft, which also served as the title of his book” (21).  Rée, by pinching the title, suggests that it would work just as well in place of philosophy.*

The attention to language is one of a number of ways that Rée’s approach is what I think of as literary.  Another is that the personality around whom he builds this first chapter is Hamlet, who is fictional, but who was a philosophy student at university in Wittenberg, allowing Rée to look at the trivium and the quadrivium and generally use Hamlet’s fancy college-boy talk for examples.

“A sizable section of Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized his allusions to humanist philosophy, even if they had no Latin” (28).  This is because they were reading the new English translations of all sorts of books – Cicero, Thomas More, a mangled Diogenes Laertius that was “essentially a history of philosophy – the first in the English language” (30).  Plus the Italians – Giordano Bruno pops up – and the French – Michel de Montaigne – until finally Francis Bacon writes Of the Advancement of Learning (1605), “[m]ore or less absent-mindedly” the first original work of philosophy in English.

“1651: Puritans, philosophers, comedians.”  Thomas Hobbes is the star of the chapter, with the publication of Leviathan in 1651.  Other topics: the Puritan overhaul of university philosophy, the reception of Descartes, the beginnings of philosophy in America, including John Eliot’s 1672 publication of “a thousand copies of a miniature logic primer with a text in Algonquin and glosses in English,” the rise of chronology not just of the Bible but of philosophy (part of Thomas Stanley’s 1655 The History of Philosophy is below), magic and hermeticism, Sir Thomas Browne, Don Quixote, Thomas Urquhart’s Rabelais, Margaret Cavendish.  There is room for some of everything, whatever is interesting.

Hobbes is the first major English philosopher so far, so Rée spends more time working through the ideas in Leviathan, a little more like the usual history of philosophy.  This is a book about people who have ideas rather than ideas that have people (as labels, mostly).  Again, a more literary approach.  Hobbes disagrees:

Genuine philosophy, for Hobbes, ‘dependeth not on authors’, but on robust good sense, abetted by a lively sense of the ridiculous.  The jokes were not always funny, but philosophers were learning how to laugh.  (93)

* Full title: The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute.

Translation as amateurism - Roberto Arlt's The Flamethrowers - a cranny in his flesh where it could be safe from his horror

Caravana de Recuerdos is for some reason encouraging people to read some literature from Argentina this year – a “full year of “’the strain of doom’” that characterizes so much Argentinean literature from its beginnings.  What, now, who needs it, you might say, loudly.

Regardless, I took a run at doomy Roberto Arlt’s The Flamethrowers (1931), not really a novel on its own but rather part two of the perfectly titled Seven Madmen (1929).  A bunch of anarchists, nihilists, and lunatic gangsters jitterbug around Buenos Aires as part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government by means of poison gas, funded by and manufactured at a chain of brothels.  This plan somehow does not work, and the first part of the novel jerks to a halt with the shattering of the conspiracy.  Someone is murdered, maybe?  I find crazy stories hard to remember.

Seven Madmen is available in two good, professional translations, but for some reason no one published The Flamethrowers until 2017, when the tiny, deconstructionist River Boat Books released it.  The translator is either Larry Riley, who learned Spanish solely in order to read and then translate this book, or is possibly the oddball novelist Rick Harsch under a complexly-maintained pseudonym.  Please see Steve Holt on Twitter for the plausible evidence.  “Riley’s” translation is amateurish in both the better and worse ways.

The Astrologer’s hands remained in the pockets of his shirt.  He listened to Hipólita contemptuously scrutinizing her with a grimace that left his eyelids half closed, so as to filter through his eyes the possible intentions of his visitor. (22, the second page if you want to check the Spanish)

Some of the prose, especially in its more functional mode, has this kind of strain in the English, an awkwardness that a professional translator would relax.  Where exactly do the adverbs go in the sentence; “shirt pockets,” or just “pockets”; drop “so as”; do something with “filter through his eyes,” something.  The tone ought to be more informal.

Having said that, the entire novel, in conception, characters, incidents, meaning, and of course prose, is completely insane, written by the eighth madman.  The novel had better have some awkwardness, some pieces that just ain’t right, where there is no way to know who is to blame, the translator, the author, or the metaphysics.

Sometimes “Riley” gets the voice right, especially in sections that are more interior or extreme, like “The Death Agony of the Melancholy Ruffian” or “The Curtain of Anguish,” a piece of tormented late-night mad scientist existentialism:

The voice shrank and retracted.  Erdosain felt that it was searching for a cranny in his flesh where it could be safe from his horror.  It filled up his belly as if it wanted to make him explode.  And Erdosain’s body vibrated as if it had been placed upon a chassis supporting a supercharged motor.  (75)

Elegance and efficiency are beside the point in scenes like this.  And these are the best parts of the novel, easily, the important parts.

The good side of amateurism is that the translation is an act of love, and I am glad to have it.  I finally know how the dang story ends (in a bloodbath, as I could have guessed).  And parts of the translation are pretty good.  Someday someone will do a better one, but now I have this one.

I once thought that blogs and the like would lead to a lot more amateur translation.  On this very website there is a short piece by César Aira that as far as I know has still not been translated anywhere else.  My Spanish is a lot worse than “Larry Riley’s.”  Let’s get it all out there, then fix it up.

The ethics of the anti-smooth translation - to do right abroad, this translation practice must do wrong at home

The multiple translations of Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Hārabārta fall along a continuum of the domesticated and foreignized translation.  What makes both of these cases so interesting is that the same translator has created translations at different points on the continuum, which cannot be too common.

Joe at roughghosts, who pointed me to the Bhattacharya novel, notes that the practice or something like it in fact is common in translation from Afrikaans.  Here we see Leon de Kock, the translator of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994), describe what happened to them:

We’d been counting on a South African publisher only, so we were making a mixed language polyglot translation, and suddenly Marlene’s agent in London came up with a contract with Little, Brown, a major trans-national publisher. She phoned me up and said, “We have a big problem here. We can’t go on with this mixed, bastardized publication. We have to render it in straight English.”

The translator actually moved in with the author.  Together they squashed the “Afrikaans-isms” and “South African-isms.”  The result was two translations, one for the South African market and one for everyone else.  De Kock thinks that maybe today this would not be so necessary.  “[P]eople have begun to realize that it’s OK that not everything be in proper English anymore.”

He might be right.  The newer versions of The Foundation Pit and Hārabārta suggest he is.  Even with a more domesticated Harbart from New Directions and a wilder Herbert from Seagull, both are more linguistically out-there than previous translations.

I thought I would remind myself about what I meant by “domesticated” and “foreignized,” so I took a look at Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd ed., 2008).  I was surprised to see that the distinction was so old, going back at least to Friedrich Schleiermacher:

In an 1813 lecture on the different “methods” of translation, Schleiermacher argued that “there are only two.  Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him” (Lefevere 1977:74)*.  (p. 15 of Venuti)

The translator chooses, Venuti paraphrases, between domestication, “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiving cultural values, bringing the author back home,” and foreignizing, “register[ing] the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” (p. 15).

Schleiermacher and Venuti make an ethical case for the foreignized translation.  You should want more messiness and obscure references and endnotes explaining it all.  The last thing you should praise is the “smoothness” of the translation.  “Fluency” is the word Venuti finds in professional review.  We have been lectured that we should say something about the translation, so professionals say it is “fluent” and amateurs say it is “smooth.”  The hell with that, argues Venuti: “to do right abroad, this translation practice must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience” (16)

I don’t know.  On the one hand, yeah!  That’s what I like.  That’s what Joe argues for: “If you read literature from foreign cultures, don’t you want your equilibrium challenged a little along the way?”  But he is not quite willing to make an ethical argument, and – this is the other hand –  I am not either.  It is more an argument about taste.  It is too much like telling people what to read.  If you want smooth, read smooth; there is plenty of that.   But it is great to see translators and publishers who recognize that there is also an audience for foreignness.

* André Lefevere’s Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenweig (1977) is Venuti’s source for the quotation.

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Harbart - Bengali innovation becomes a translation theory case study

A review-like bit first.  The book at hand is Nabarun Bhattacharya’s short, crazy 1994 (or 1993?) Bengali novel Hārabārta in the New Directions edition, translated by Sunandini Banerjee.  Harbart is what they’re titling it.  Harbart is the hero.  He kills himself five pages into the time-scrambled first chapter.  The rest of the book is more conventionally structured: childhood, adolescence, a surprising career as a “Conversations with the Dead” mystic.  Suicide, eventually.  There are real ghosts, although his medium business is a con; there’s a blue fairy, like in Pinocchio; there are some other unusual things.

Harbart has some resemblance in tone and attitude to the novelinos of César Aira which I enjoy so much, so the book is a good fit at New Directions.  Aira would love the ending.

Bhattacharya’s conceptual purpose has nothing in common with Aira’s.  Bhattacharya was political, a left radical.  He was blowing up Bengali literature.  I get the idea that one of his innovations, one reason Hārabārta became a cult novel, is that it is full of swears.  “He introduced the street’s everyday crudity and idiom” – full of swears, I think that means.  That 2013 Shamik Bag article goes through the politics in much more detail than the novel itself.

The exciting thing in the novel is the language.  The Banerjee translation is the third English version – confusingly, also the fourth, but let’s save that idea.  I know nothing of the first version, but looked at the second (2011), by Arunava Sinha, on Indian Amazon.  Here he is, on the first page:

The mad old woman in rags was sitting there, her legs, splayed, splashing water.  Dogs with rotted flea-ridden skins were trembling in their sleep at the sound of screeching owls.  (Sinha)

Vivid, yes?  And here is Sunandini Banerjee, the new version:

A mumble-mad woman sitting there in rags, legs wide open, splashing the water.  Every now and then an owl letting out a screech and the skin-rotten dogs whimpering in their dreams. (Banerjee, 3)

The first page of the Banerjee also has “frothy-foaming light-dust,” “piss-cross games,” and “a Star-TV-signal-sucking satellite dish,” more compound neologisms.  The inventive compound words are a feature of the entire novel, a central device.  Great fun.  The novel is also full of languages – Hindi and English especially – which are translated or absorbed in the older translation but highlighted in Banerjee’s, the Hindi annotated and the English italicized.  This a noisy novel.

Looking back to that 2013 article, Sinha says that he “wants to retranslate Herbert (Sinha translated it as Harbart) in more creative ways.”  Banerjee has done it.

Harbart is now an outstanding case study in the domesticated (Sinha) versus foreignized (Banerjee) translation.  Better than I have suggested, even, because next week in England and elsewhere, yet another translation of Hārabārta will be published – also by Sunandini Banerjee!  Two translations appearing at roughly the same time by the same translator.  This cannot be common.  As Joe at roughghosts describes the books, the non-American version is even more foreignized, with more compound words and with Bengali in the translated text.  No reviewer of the American translation besides Joe has any idea that there are two versions.  I hope, once the texts are all available, that someone – ideally someone with Bengali – will knock the translations together and see what happens.

So interesting.  I want to pursue this idea tomorrow.

Notes on The Foundation Pit's strangeness - thoughtfulness among the general tempo of labor

France, this summer, was pleasant, but I did not want to write about it.  I do want to write about some French books, lots of them really, so I am going to organize my French reading from the last couple of years and see if I can make anything of it.

But I will freely interrupt that project.  I will begin by interrupting it, first with a couple of books with bold translations.  Books with multiple translations, weird and less weird.

Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (written 1929-30) is a nightmare in prose about recent and ongoing events in the Soviet Union, famines and forced collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks and so on.  The events of the novel are in a sense satirical or allegorical or satirical – I mean, one of the characters is a bear, who is also a blacksmith and is always hammering, when he is not liquidating kulaks.  That seems like it might be symbolic in some way.  But I am not sure that allegory or symbolism is the way to go.

Actual life, everything around Platonov, a civil engineer who had abandoned (public) literature, had become the equivalent of a nightmare.  What literary language is capable of representing the nightmare?  I think that is the problem Platonov was working on.

It is the problem the translators are working on.  I read the most recent translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson.  Robert Chandler had co-translated a previous version, too, but was dissatisfied.  It was not wrong enough.  He and his colleagues wanted this version to be as messed up as the original.  This is how I understand the problem.

I will stick to the first few pages.  Voshchev, the first character Platonov introduces, not a protagonist , exactly, is “removed from production” at the factory for “thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor” (1).  He wanders by “a large house where children with no family were being habituated to labor and use” (1) – an orphanage, I would call this, but not Platonov.   In the bar, he “listen[s] to various sad sounds, and feel[s] the torment of a heart surrounded by hard and stony bones” (2).  He and a creepy dude are watching a parade of Pioneer girls, and “he was glad that socialist children would always be beyond the reach of this freak of imperialism” (7).

There is something like this every few sentences, something odd, a slogan or awkwardness or peculiarity that in a more ordinary text would need to be fixed.

The Soviet regime has transformed, mutilated, and corrupted everything, including language, metaphor, and thought.  Even more than contemporary Soviet novels like We (1924) and Envy (1927), The Foundation Pit looks like a radical attempt to represent the destruction.  Or so these translators make it appear.  Maybe they are wrong.  How would I know.  I am convinced.  The apparatus in the NYRB edition, the notes and afterword and so on, are half as long as the novel and are superb.

The novel’s structure and characters are similarly broken.  But it is the language, and its problems for the translators, that really caught my attention.

The odd thing is that at my distance, in time, language, space, and trouble, the entire book becomes an exercise in “make it strange.”  Mere aesthetics.  But I know that is not the source of the strangeness, and my understanding is that for many post-Soviet authors Platonov looked like a way out, an escape from the Soviet novel.  His publication is complex, but for Russians he was effectively an author of the 1990s, his books appearing at just the right time.

Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights by Paulo Lemos Horta - as interesting as it sounds

Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) was pretty much what I hoped it would be – hard, really difficult.  Readers less interested in medieval conceptions of time might want to skip to Lecture IV, or V, except that one is mostly about Sartre, or VI.  I plan to look it over again and write something in early October.

Meanwhile, here’s an entirely different kind of literary criticism, Paulo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves: Secret Author of the Arabian Nights (2017), about the translation of The Arabian Nights into French, in the 18th century, and English, in the 19th.  Literary history.  Good stuff.

A chapter by chapter summary makes it clear what is in the book.

First, two chapters on Antoine Galland and Hanna Diyab, mostly about the latter.  Galland was the first translator of The Arabian Nights (1704-17) into French.  This was a landmark translation.  For a hundred years – more – Europe read The Arabian Nights in translations of French translations.  There was a puzzle about the so-called “orphan stories,” like “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” famous stories, that had no Arabic texts.  Galland acquired these stories from the Syrian traveller Diyab.  Arabic stories told in French by Diyab and then rewritten in French by Galland.  Complicated.

Diyab is interesting enough on his own to fill the chapters.  The discovery, only a decade ago, of his memoirs make the early chapters uniquely valuable.

Chapter 3 is about the first translation of The Arabian Nights into English from an Arabian manuscript.  It was done in India by Henry Torrens, a colonial administrator in India, in collaboration with an unknown number of now-anonymous Indian scholars.  Events in India made sure that this translation was never completed.  Too bad.  It was a real translation.

The ridiculous Egyptologist Edward Lane gets the next two chapters.  An odd bird, he translated The Arabian Nights in order to fill it with his insights about Egypt.  The book is as much notes as stories, notes about contemporary Egypt.  Large parts of the original are summarized, rearranged, pushed into the commentary.  Really strange.

The final two chapters cover the minor pre-Raphaelite poet John Payne and Victorian superstar Richard Burton, the authors of the next two English translations of The Arabian Nights, using the terms loosely.  Payne barely knew Arabic but at least his book was a real translation – from French and German versions!  Burton then openly plagiarized Torrens, Lane, and Payne, rewriting their texts in his own distinctive and bizarre style.  The style is his own, that is true.  “Stealing with Style,” that’s one of Horta’s chapter titles.  It is always great fun to read about Burton, but I do it with my jaw dropped.  He is an outrageous character.

Horta’s book, full of original material from the archives, has almost nothing to say about translation itself, nothing linguistic, for example, except in the way it demonstrates how the translations were inherently collaborative, often in complex and confusing ways.  Sometimes the translations were not translations at all.

He also take the value of The Arabian Nights for granted, as do I.  The greatest insights into the texts themselves are in the first two chapters, as Horta finds sources for pieces of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” and so on.  If a description of a palace feels more like Versailles than something in Persia, well, that’s right, Diyab was presented to Louis XIV.  This is true “world literature,” whatever that might be.

Horta’s books is as interesting as it sounds.

Now every day I eat them recklessly - Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poems

I read Arthur Waley’s first two books, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) and More Translations from the Chinese (1919) in some hope of getting more context for what contemporary Modernist poets like Ezra Pound and H. D. were doing, digging around in older poetic traditions – Classical Greek, medieval Provençal, a range of Chinese poetry – to juice up their own art.  What, “make it new,” no – a thousand years ago everyone was doing it this way.  Nothing new about any of this.

Pound’s Cathay (1915) precedes Waley, but that little book only has a few poems.  The bulk of Waley’s books must have been a shock, and the range (4th century BCE to 11th CE, plus a single 17th century poem for some reason).  Oh, Chinese poems are like this – and this – and also this.

The Other Side of the Valley

I am a prisoner in the hands of the enemy,
Enduring the shame of captivity.
My bones stick out and my strength is gone
Through not getting enough to eat.
My brother is Mandarin
And his horses are fed on maize.
Why can’t he spare a little money
To send and ransom me?  (1st C. BCE)

Familiar and exotic.  Not so different in content from a Spanish or Anglo-Saxon ballad.

The oddest aspect of Waley’s anthologies is the relative absence of T’ang poets, relative, I mean, to the attention they have been given by later translators.  Not a single Du Fu poem, for example, not that there is a shortage of Du Fu in English at this point.  Waley chose, for the second book, to translate a substantial amount of a single T’ang poet, Po Chü-i.  Long-lived and prolific, Waley’s Po Chü-i becomes an autobiography in verse, with plenty of narrative movement and lots of personality.

from Eating Bamboo-Shoots

My new province is a land of bamboo-groves:
Their shoots in spring fill the valleys and hills…
I put the shoots in a great earthen pot
And heat them up along with boiling rice.
The purple nodules broken, – like an old brocade;
The white skin opened, – like new pearls.
Now every day I eat them recklessly…

But all too soon he is transferred again, “relegated to deep seclusion / In a bottomless gorge,” in a province where the “inhabitants of Pa resemble wild apes; / Fierce and lusty,” and the poet is “pleased with anyone who is even remotely human” (“On Being Removed from Hsün-yang and Sent to Chung-chou”).  In the next poem, he plants flowers:

from Planting Flowers on the Embankment

… The people of Pa do not care for flowers;
All the spring no one has come to look.
But their Governor General [the poet], alone with his cup of wine
Sits till evening and will not move from the place!

His friends, illnesses, exiles, returns to favor, aging, fame, baldness (“On His Baldness: My tiresome comb for ever is laid aside”, and even his death, almost (“Last Poem: I lie back on my pillows and sleep with my face to the South”) – a life committed to seventeen volumes of poems, a version of it extracted by Waley.  This long section of Po Chü-i poems was a highlight for me, perhaps because it was more like a kind of book with which I was already familiar, but I think rather because the genial poet’s company was a pleasure.

I did not really learn too much about what other Modernist poets were doing, though.  Some similar books were written around the same time.

I actually read these poems as collected, rearranged, and revised in Translations from the Chinese (1941), so all quotations are from that text.

Crime and Punishment translations - comparing Ready and Garnett

How different is the new Oliver Ready translation of Crime and Punishment from other translations?  I don’t know!  It felt different.  Zippy.  I read Constance Garnett long ago.  Let’s take a look.

There was a momentary silence.  Pyotr Petrovich slowly took out a cambric handkerchief reeking of perfume and blew his nose with the air of a virtuous man who has suffered a wound to his pride and who, moreover, is determined to receive an explanation.  (IV.2, 277, Ready)

A moment’s silence followed.  Pyotr Petrovitch deliberately drew out a cambric handkerchief reeking of scent and blew his nose with an air of a benevolent man who felt himself slighted, and was firmly resolved to insist on an explanation.  (Garnett)

Both versions are hilarious.  What a nose-blowing.  Both are similar, as is typical with translations of novels.  Most of the different choices by Ready are in the same direction – “slowly” replaces “deliberately,” “perfume” replaces “scent,” “virtuous” replaces “benevolent,” and so on.  Case after case, Ready chooses the word more commonly used today.  It is just an update, the language of my time instead of that of a hundred years ago, and as a result I find, however accustomed I am to reading English from that time, that the book is lighter on its feet.

Whether Ready is correcting or introducing errors, I can’t say.  But I can see the modernizing.  I also find “virtuous” funnier than “benevolent,” but I will bet just because it is closer to my natural English.

A bit of Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya, a scene of great intensity that would likely stand up to some pretty incompetent translation.  Raskolnikov’s mention of a spider invokes his evil dream double Svidrigailov, who is often linked to spiders:

“Nonsense!  I just killed.  I killed for myself, for myself alone; and whether I’d become anyone’s benefactor or spend my entire life as a spider, catching everyone in my web and sucking out their vital juices, shouldn’t have mattered to me one jot at that moment!...”  (V.4, 393, Ready)

“Nonsense!  I simply did it; I did the murder for myself, for myself alone, and whether I became a benefactor to others, or spent my life like a spider catching men in my web and sucking the life out of men, I couldn’t have cared at that moment…”  (Garnett)

Is “did the murder” a little fussy?  Otherwise, the only issue in Garnett is the odd repetition of “men” when “them” would be unambiguous.  Is Garnett being a literalist here, reproducing a hiccup in the original?  Or is Ready thinking it’s normal Russian and should sound like normal English?

A little more of the spider, from Svidrigailov’s great chapter:

Waking up, flies attached themselves to the untouched portion of veal on the table next to him.  He looked at them for a long time and eventually began trying to catch one with his free right hand.  He tried and tried, but with no success.  Finally, catching himself at this peculiar task, he came to his senses, shuddered, got up and walked straight out of the room.  (VI.6, 479, Ready)

Some flies woke up and settled on the untouched veal, which was still on the table.  He stared at them and at last with his free right hand began trying to catch one.  He tried till he was tired, but could not catch it.  At last, realizing that he was engaged in this interesting pursuit, he started, got up and walked resolutely out of the room.  (Garnett)

The last line, in Garnett, is bizarre.  “Interesting pursuit” sounds like a sarcastic comment from the narrator.  I find Ready’s choices – “tried and tried,” “shuddered” – more frightening, a better fit with the nightmarish tone of the dreams (and reality) of the chapter.

Translation of novels are mostly quite similar.  The differences between Ready and Garnett are numerous but, choice by choice, small.  Taken together the differences somehow lift a bit of the weight off the novel, or add a little more energy.

I sincerely hope that Ready is encouraged by the success of this translation to translate not more Dostoevsky, of which we have plenty, but other old books that have never made it into English.

And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again - D. G. Rossetti translates

Mostly with older poets I ought to stick with some kind of Selected Poems.  That is what I used to do.  I began to feel, though, like I was missing something important about the context, about the books as such, so I have been reading more poetry books in their original form, or something like it.  All of the poems in order, at least, although I have come to appreciate the scanned copies of the  original books, stray thumbs and all.  Most of what I read recently were original texts.  In only one case was this a mistake, a waste of time.  That case was not Dante Gabriel Rossetti, even if his final 1881 book was second-rate by his own standards.

Rossetti is a funny case, though, because a Selected Poems is almost moot for him.  He wrote two perfect books, if you have any taste for his verse, the 1870 Poems and the books of translated Italian verse that I think of as Dante and His Circle (1874 – there is an 1861 version titled The Early Italian Poets).  I assume any Selected edition is mostly just going to choose from these two books, perhaps just from Poems, the home of “The Blessed Damozel” and “The Woodspurge” and the best “House of Life” sonnets.

And the Villon translations.  I do not have much of a taste for Rossetti’s painting, so I selfishly wish that he had sacrificed a few to create more translations. 

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
    Where are they gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword,-
  But where are the snows of yester-year?  (from “The Ballad of Dead Ladies”)

The Dante book, which includes the strange prose-poetry hybrid The New Life (1295) along with numerous poems written by Dante and others – many written to Dante by others – now seems to me like one of the greatest Victorian translations, alongside Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat and perhaps Longfellow’s Manrique.  Rossetti had a knack for capturing the voice of the pre-Raphaelite poet:

And I wrote this sonnet:-

I felt a spirit of love begin to stir
    Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;
    And saw Love coming towards me, fair and fain
(That I scarce knew him for his joyful cheer),
Saying, “Be now indeed my worshipper!”
    And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again
    Then, while it was his pleasure to remain,
I chanced to look the way he had drawn near…

And then there is some stuff about Beatrice, of course, but what I like here is the naturalness with which Rossetti understands the allegorical figure.  Rossetti has the properly archaic imagination to envision Dante and Love wandering around Florence, looking at girls, looking for one in particular.

I think one of Rossetti’s tricks is that he has studied and absorbed poets like Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the ones who brought the Italian sonnet into English in the early 16th century, so even if it is a two hundred year anachronism they feel right, not as fancied up as Shakespeare, but not antique, either.

I don’t know how he did it.

A Gautier translation worskhop - Salut, yeux bleus! bonsoir, flots verts!

I am going to look at the end of a Gautier poem from Enamels and Cameos titled “Sadness at Sea,” a combination of sea description and overwrought Romantic sentiment.  The poet, aboard a ship to England, thinks about hopping into the ocean as a cure for despair, but stops when he catches the attention of a potential sexual conquest.

These are the final two stanzas.  The last is actually an exact repetition of the beginning of the poem.

Dans ce regard, à ma détresse
La Sympathie aux bras ouverts
Parle et sourit, soeur ou maîtresse.
Salut, yeux bleus! bonsoir, flots verts!

Les mouettes volent et jouent;
Et les blancs coursiers de la mer,
Cabrés sur les vagues, secouent
Leurs crins échevelés dans l’air.

***

And in that glance, arms beckoning me,
A Kindred Soul speaks to my plight
And smiles…  Sister?  Or mistress, she?...
Blue eyes, good day!  Green waves, good night!

The seagulls, playing, fly about;
And the white stallions of the sea,
Backs arched over the waves, shake out
Their tousled, windswept manes, blown free.

I like this quite a bit, both in French and in English, but it is also a good passage to see what the translator, Norman Shapiro, is doing.

1.  Shapiro includes everything.  The 1903 translation omits and adds, which to me are great sins.  Shapiro moves the content over with some efficiency.   The entire package of the fine image of the waves is intact.

2.  “And the white stallions of the sea” is an exact translation.

3.  “The seagulls, playing, fly about” is not.  “The seagulls fly and play” is easy enough, and “play” is a promising word for later rhymes, but the line is two syllables short.

4.  Gautier rhymes two strong verbs, “jouent” and “secouent.”  Shapiro rhymes two weak prepositions, neither of which are strictly in the original.  They are there to add syllables and to supply a rhyme.

This is my only real criticism of Shapiro’s method.  He has chosen to rhyme when Gautier rhymes, but to forego slant rhymes, which means that in practice he too often uses conjunctions and prepositions as rhyme words, which Gautier does not do.  At its worst, the practice leads to distracting enjambments.  I will go to “Symphony in White Major” for an example:

Dove’s feathers, white down that appears
To snow on manor rooftops?  Or
The ice stalactite dripping tears
Of white on the dark cavern’s floor?

Gautier ends lines with nouns and verbs and vivid adjectives, so each line of the quatrain, or each pair, works as a unit, and there is never anything like that break in the middle after “Or.”

My preferred solution would be to allow slant rhymes, but Gautier does not use them, so my preference is really just to replace one violation with another.  If we are trying to judge what is truer to the tone of Gautier, it is important to remember that my French is terrible, while Shapiro’s is expert.

5.  Even an easy rhyme guarantees nothing.  I will bet Shapiro had “distress / mistress” (“détresse / maîtresse) in the first and many subsequent drafts before he felt he had to give it up to solve some other problem.

6.  No translation that keeps the sense will capture anything close to the music of “Salut, yeux bleus! bonsoir, flots verts!”  This is the kind of line that caught the attention of later poets like Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé.  Would it be possible to compose entire poems with this kind of music?  Yes, it is, but not without a lot more luck or work.

Miscellaneous Eugene Onegin: shandrydans, true Gibraltar pies, Toby Keith, or any other kind of nonsense

Ideas from the scrap heap, posts I thought about writing.  I mean, pick a stanza of Eugene Onegin at random.   There will be something interesting in it.  Or work through a chapter, not just the famous duel in Chapter 6, but any of them.

Or write about the dancing, or the furniture, or the food:

and in passing
I’ll just remark, my verses talk
as much of banquets and the cork
and eatables beyond all classing
as yours did, Homer, godlike lord,
whom thirty centuries have adored! (Five: XXXVI, Johnston)

But see One: XVI for a feast, including a “Strasbourg pie,” for which I need Nabokov’s note.  It is a goose-liver pie (not a terrine):

The pie was un vrai gibraltar (as Brillat-Savarin describes it somewhere) that had to be attacked and “cut into by a carving knife” (as Brummell says in a letter).  (Commentary Book I, p. 74)

Or if drink is preferred, try Four: XLVI, in which Pushkin renounces champagne for “sedate Bordeaux,” for his health of course:

But you, Bordeaux, are like a friend
who is, in grief and in calamity,
at all times, everywhere, a comrade,
ready to render us a service
or share our quiet leisure.
Long live Bordeaux, our friend! (Nabokov)

“Both this and the previous stanza, XLV, are very poor, bubbling with imported platitudes,” says Nabokov (Commentary, I, 483).  Similar language was used in Toby Keith’s 2011 smash “Red Solo Cup,” which I will forever after call Pushkinian.

Nabokov’s commentary eventually inspired Pale Fire, and by that standard it is disappointing, since it is not written by a madman, but still (VN is working on Onegin’s thirty brushes):

The boredom of reading through the English, German, Polish, etc. “translations” of our poem was much too great to even be contemplated, but I find in my files copies of the following atrocious, incredibly “expanded,” and abominably vulgar versions of this stanza.  [examples snipped]  (I, 102)

Or how about, in an evisceration of Babette Deutsch’s version:

The sins of omission are too simple to be noted; but there is one sin of commission that is typical of this particular version of EO, in which all kinds of images and details are bountifully added to Pushkin.  What, for instance, are those birds and trees doing here: “And wake the birds in beech and larch”?  Why this and not, for instance: “And take in words to bleach and starch” or any other kind of nonsense?  The charming point is that beeches and larches, not being endemic in west central Russia, are the very last trees that Pushkin would imagine growing in the Larins’ park.  (1, 286-7)

After that, you can bet there ain’t no birds or trees in Charles Johnston’s translation of 2: XXVIII.

Nabokov begins that stanza “On the balcony she liked \ to prevene Aurora’s rise,” and here we have another element that makes Nabokov’s translation something more than plain prose.  “To prevene,” huh?  The Russian is Preduprezdhát’, obsolete in Russian so fair game in English, says Nabokov (see Commentary I, 285).  I remember that Edmund Wilson particularly hated these archaic words, proof that immigrant Nabokov’s English was better than his.

I began the series of posts with “Where do you trample vernant blooms?”  Some more:

along the highway \ one heard their lonely shandrydans (Two: V)
with neglection \ harking their ringing voice (Three: XL)
a taboon of cast steeds \ the breeder from the steppes has driven (Onegin’s Journey IX)

Even a literal translation can have a personality.

Thanks again to Tanglewood for inspiring my return to Eugene Onegin.

this lacked conscience, that lacked sense; on all of them were different fetters - translating Eugene Onegin

Eugene Onegin, young and bored, attempts to stem his ennui with a desperate measure – reading books:

he put a troop of books upon a shelf,
read, read – and all without avail:
here there was dullness; there, deceit and raving;
this lacked conscience, that lacked sense;
on all of them were different fetters;
and the old had become old-fashioned,
and the new raved about the old.  (One: XLIV, tr. Nabokov)

I guess I first read Eugene Onegin twenty-five years ago, in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1964 translation, which is accompanied by about a thousand pages of commentary.  I read that, too, all of it.  Seven or eight years ago, sometime before the aborning of Wuthering Expectations, I read Charles Johnston’s 1977 version.

Recently I reread Nabokov’s version and immediately followed it with a return to Johnston’s, which I have not quite finished.  Both translations are super.  Each one presents about, let’s invent a figure, 30% of what is in Pushkin’s poem; read jointly, 40%; read with Nabokov’s commentary, 50%,  along with some choice Nabokov.  This is pretty good.  Readers with what they claim are principled objections to reading poetry in translation are fools.

I fear that on occasion in comments I have steered people away from Nabokov’s translations, succumbing in retrospect to the notion that it is – well, I do not remember what.  Dry, pedantic?  It is unpoetic, certainly, but nevertheless artistically effective and emotionally moving to the extent the ironies of the poem allow much emotion.  See, for example, Tatiana’s final speech (“Today it is my turn,” Eight: XLII) and thunderclap exit from the book.  Eugene Onegin is, among other things, a fine narrative with complex characters and interesting movement of plot.  An attentive prose translation has a lot to work with.

Several of the recent readalongers used James Falen’s 1990 translation, which I have only read in their excerpts.  It sounds good, too.  Both Johnston and Falen maintain Pushkin’s stanzaic form and rhyme scheme – it is a kind of modified sonnet, fourteen lines with a punchy closing couplet.  They both end up sounding something like a watery, domestic Lord Byron, an appropriate tone given Eugene Onegin’s period and frequent references to Byron.  Yet, to stick with the one I have read, Johnston, the fetters that squeeze arbitrary rhymes out of the substance of the story are balanced by a nimble sense of tone and sufficient cleverness.  The key scenes, Tatiana’s surreal prophetic dream in Chapter 5 or the duel in Chapter 6, are terrific.

A duelist has died.  The previous stanza ended with a list of trivial romantic clichés about young death (“the bloom has withered on the bough”).  This one is rather different.

He lay quite still, and strange as dreaming
was that calm brow of one who swooned.
Shot through below the chest – and streaming
the blood came smoking from the wound.
A moment earlier, inspiration
had filled his heart, and detestation
and hope and passion; life had glowed
and blood had bubbled as it flowed;
but now the mansion is forsaken;
shutters are up, and all is pale
and still within, behind the veil
of chalk the window-panes have taken.
The lady of the house has fled.
Where to, God knows.  The trail is dead.  (Six: XXXII, Johnston)

Not unsurpassable.  Pushkin presumably surpassed it.

Maurice Scève's Délie - Its deep, & divine excellence \ So stunned my Soul

The Góngora post went all right.  I’ll try another tough one, the Délie of Maurice Scève, a collection of poems published in 1544 in the most pleasant city in France, Lyon, then the innovative center of French publishing.  The poems are mostly dizains, ten lines of ten syllables each, little poetic boxes, 449 of the little suckers.  There exists an unpublished doctoral dissertation that translates them all, but otherwise, to remain sane, everyone picks out favorites.

My choice this time was Emblems of Desire, the 2003 translation by Richard Sieburth, reissued in 2007 by Archipelago Books.  The poems were originally accompanied by allegorical emblems, and Sieburth includes a number of them (please sample them at the Archipelago site – click “Extras”) along with the sixty or so poems he translates.  I will ignore those.  What is more tedious than early modern emblems.

Poems  aside, Scève is most famous as the discoverer of the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura, a phony publicity stunt, but relevant here since Délie is although not a sonnet sequence an imitation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.  Délie is Scève’s Laura, his poetic love object, but rearrange the letters to L’Idée, “the idea”, to get a better idea of what is going on.

I lived at liberty in the April of my life,
My youth exempt from every care,
When my eye, unschooled in strife,
Was caught by that presence fair
Which by its deep, & divine excellence
So stunned my Soul, & common sense
That the cruel archer of her eyes
Took my freedom as his prize:
And from that day on, without cease,
In her beauty lies my death, & life. (6)

And then this goes on for hundreds of poems, with minute variations in imagery and ironic effect, mostly lamenting the absence of this idea or possibly woman.  The poems are hardly as elaborate as Góngora, but that cruel archer is a buried classical reference, although an easy one, and “April of my life” is a clear reference to a Petrarch poem – clear once Sieburth points it out in a footnote, I mean.

One by one, they do not necessarily seem like much, and I would not argue for a cumulative effect, either.  Rather the art of Délie lies in the subtle emotional shifts as words and images are repeated and varied.  And this with a selection, and in translation!  But with Sieburth’s help I can piece it together.

Here is a dizain that does stand on its own.  Again, Scève is riffing on Petrarch, a poem where the poet says he is like a ship that is adrift.  Scève makes a big change:

Like a corpse adrift on the open Sea,
Plaything of Winds, & pastime of Waves,
I floated astray in this bitter Abyss,
Buoyed by the ground-swells of my woes.
    Then, O Hope, you who arise
From the vain mirages of my mind,
In the name of her, you wake me
From the deeps in which I died:
And my ears staggered by this sound,
I was at a loss to fathom who I was.  (164)

Sieburth includes the early modern French, which is something to see:

Commes corps mort vagant en haulte Mer,
Esbat des Ventz, & passetemps des Vndes,
I’errois flottant parmy ce Gouffre amer,
Ou mes soucys enflent vagues profondes.

And so on, easier to convert than early modern English, certainly.

So, more early modern puzzle poetry, but a different kind of puzzle, and one, for the poor sap stuck with English, missing eighty percent of its pieces.

Everything was making itself more beautiful, everything was making itself more than beautiful, like a rivalry - Beauty on Earth by C. F. Ramuz, or: something better than book blogging

How to move from book blogging to something better?  Michele Bailat-Jones has done it.  She started around the time I did, calling herself the Incurable Logophile, but soon enough, as we all had hoped, Swiss doctors found a cure, and she changed the blog’s name to pieces and got serious about literary translation.  Her first book was recently published, the 1927 Beauty on Earth by Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz.

Bailat-Jones has championed Ramuz at her blog.  I am not sure I would have heard of him otherwise (although Orthofer has him), which is a disgrace, as I can prove objectively using citation counts from the MLA International Bibliography.  Since 1990, there have been 125 articles, books, and so on about Ramuz, 158 about fellow Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and – guess how many about Robert Walser – have you guessed?  – 172 on Mister Bigshot Walser.  Of course the Ramuz scholarship is entirely French.  Disgraceful.  But Bailat-Jones has given us this corrective example.

In Beauty on Earth, a beautiful orphaned teenage girl moves to a small Swiss town to live with her uncle.  She is so very beautiful that she ruins the lives of many of the men she meets.  The story has some curious similarities to Max Beerbohm’s elegant, ludicrous Zuleika Dobson (1911), whatever differences in tone, technique, and purpose the books might have.  Juliette brings out the worst in men, even when they mean to help her; she does so not by any action or behavior but simply by existing.  Dorothy W. aka Rebecca H. at Of Books and Bicycles reviewed the book earlier today.  She fills out the plot.

This Ramuz passage is close to a statement of purpose:

Everything was making itself more beautiful, everything was making itself more than beautiful, like a rivalry.  All these things making themselves more beautiful, always more beautiful, the water, the mountain, the sky, all that is liquid, all that is neither solid nor liquid, but it all holds together; it was like an agreement, a continual exchange from one thing to another thing, and between everything that exists.  And around her and because of her – what he is thinking and telling himself up there.  There is a place for beauty…  (95, the ellipses belong to Ramuz)

The “he” who is “up there” is one (just one) of Juliette’s stalkers, at this point spying on her.  Is he really at the same time experiencing this transcendent vision of beauty on earth?  Ramuz portrays the town, on the shore of Lake Geneva, surrounded by the Alps, as the most beautiful place on earth.  Some of the descriptive writing is a great treat:

We saw the entire cavalry of waves jump into their saddles.  We watched the horsemen come with their white flags.  (179)

So there is a constant ironic interplay between the destructive beauty of the girl and the beauty of the landscape, to which most of the men are inured.  Or perhaps they are so deeply immersed in beauty that they experience some kind of allergic reaction when too much additional beauty enters their world.  Juliette herself turns out to be a devotee of beauty as well, but her allergen is music.

The strangest aspect of the book is the shifting point of view and pronouns.  “He” turns into “we” with ease, and the meaning of  “we” can shift suddenly.  Anyone struck by the “we” that narrates the beginning of Madame Bovary will recognize how Ramuz is playfully extending Flaubert’s idea.  Bailat-Jones writes about the challenges the technique presented to her translation in a little essay at NecessaryFiction.  Dorothy \ Rebecca discusses this as well, although I have to say I think every sentence with the word “reader” in it is wrong.  The shifts in point of view do not disorient but rather orient the reader.  This reader.  Me.

Bailat-Jones says she found it disorienting, too, but luckily she fought the “temptation” to “smooth this out.”  Thank you, well done, thank you.

The Stray Dog Cabaret - When fearful friends abandoned me music stayed

The Stray Dog Cabaret (2007) masquerades as an anthology of Silver Age Russian poets – Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, and six others, all of whom knew each other and were patrons to a greater or lesser extent of the bar in the book’s title.  It was a scene, as we might say now.

Paul Schmidt, the translator and anthologist, organizes the book so that the poets and poems comment on, respond to, and even directly address each other.  History progresses – the war, the revolution, the terror.  A series of biographical notes, presumably written by Catherine Ciepiela, with Honor Moore the book’s editor, are almost too depressing to read.  The headers are by themselves too depressing:  Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).  Let’s move back to 1913:

The Stray Dog Cabaret

All of us here are hookers and hustlers
We drink too much, and don’t care.
The walls are covered with birds and flowers
that have never seen sunshine or air.

You smoke too much.  There’s always a cloud
of nicotine over your head.
Do you like this skirt?  I wore it on purpose.
I wanted to show lots of leg.  (Anna Akhmatova)

Osip Mandelstam is not so sure:

This life of constant thrills will drive us crazy:
wine in the morning, hangover every night.
How can we get away from this sick excitement,
the awful flush of feverish delight?

But Blok sends her a drink:

I sent you a rose in a glass of champagne
while the gypsies played as the gypsies do.
Then you turned to the man you were with and said:
“You see his eyes? He’s in love with me too.”

Akhmatova rejects the offer – “You’re a very bad boy.”  And you’re crazy.”

Translation purists, a sad lot, will be horrified when they turn to the notes and discover that with the Blok poem the translator “has created a new poem from three stanzas of ‘In the Restaurant’” and that “[t]he poem actually was dedicated to Maria Nelidova.  “The original poem has no title.”  “The phrase ‘And it makes me cry’ does not appear in the original poem.”

As fine a translator as Schmidt was (his Rimbaud is sure good), to the bone he was a man of the theater.  The Stray Dog Cabaret is a theater piece in disguise.  The actors playing the poets step forward and read their poems to each other before returning to their drinks and dancing.  Before slipping off of the stage, one by one, until only Akhmatova is left, now old, the survivor:

Music
(for Dmitri Shostakovich)

Something miraculous burns in music;
as you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
when others turn away their eyes.

When fearful friends abandoned me
music stayed, even at my grave,
and sang like earth’s first shower of rain
or flowers suddenly everywhere alive.

A burst of Silver Age Russian reading would be enormous fun, I am now convinced of that.  Chekhov’s plays, Bely, Babel, and all of these amazingly alive doomed musical poets.

The Blue Lantern has improved The Stray Dog Cabaret by introducing two painters to the show.  

A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down, \ Speak of thee - Longfellow's Michelangelo

Longfellow translated eight Michelangelo Buonarroti poems – I do not know when – which are among my favorite Longfellow poems.  Longfellow’s achievement is not exactly unique since a number of poets have made good English poems out of Michelangelo.  Perhaps Michelangelo is easy to translate.  I doubt that.

This is what Longfellow’s Michelangelo sounds like.  Perhaps it is worth noting that the poems Longfellow worked on are (I think) all from late in the artist’s life, when he is in his sixties or older.

TO VITTORIA COLONNA

Lady, how can it chance – yet this we see
  In long experience – that will longer last
  A living image carved from quarries vast
  Than its own maker, who dies presently?

Cause yieldeth to effect if this so be,
  And even Nature is by Art surpassed;
  This know I, who to Art have given the past,
  But see that Time is breaking faith with me.

Perhaps on both of us long life can I
  Either in color or in stone bestow,
  By now portraying each in look and mien;
So that a thousand years after we die,
  How fair thou wast, and I how full of woe,
  And wherefore I so loved thee, may be seen.

Already by the sixteenth century the conceit that art can overcome mortality is an antique.  How much extra juice it gets when expressed by 1) an actual artist, who may at the moment of the poem’s composition be sculpting the woman’s form, and 2) an actual artist of the stature of Michelangelo who in fact can grant a sort of eternal fame to his subjects, I will leave to the individual reader.  The biggest jolts for me come in poems like the one about painting the Sistine Chapel (“I’ve already grown a goiter at this drudgery”*) and a few others that seem to refer to well-known sculptures.  Why deny the biographical pleasures of seeing the behind-the-scenes glimpses the artist chooses to represent?

More commonly Michelangelo uses his profession as a source of metaphors and images and themes.   Thus the old sculptor compares the fire he uses to “mould \ The iron of his preconceived design” to the “fortunate fire that burns \ Within me still” (“Fire”), or worries that art (“an idol and a king to me”) has lost its meaning (“Painting and sculpture satisfy no more”) as his death nears (“Old Age”).

That lament is universal, it seems.  Even Michelangelo feels that he has frittered away his life:

Ah me! ah me! when thinking of the years,
The vanished years, alas, I do not find
Among them all one day that was my own!  (“Canzone”)

I find this reassuring for some reason.

All right.  That’s Longfellow’s Michelangelo:

A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down,
  Speak of thee, nor to thee could Heaven convey,
  Except through death, a refuge and a crown.  (“To Vittoria Colonna,” but a different poem than the one above)

*  Translation by James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo (Yale UP, 1991), brilliant, essential.

Longfellow's translations - We shall have to pass through the dewy grass

Henry Longfellow was one of the greatest American translators of poetry.  I am browsing through a 1902 edition of his Complete Poems in order to see what I have missed, and the answer is a lot, obviously, but I have read enough to make a judgment.  He had a staggering gift with languages matched or exceeded his skill with versification, and the beauty of translation is that the poetic conceptions, the ideas, are mostly the other guy’s problem.

The great limit on Longfellow’s translations is that he did not do enough of the poets I wanted him to do.  He only seems to have translated two Goethe poems, for instance, the “Wanderer’s Night Song” and this one from 1780:

Night Song                                                   Ein Gleiches

O’er all the hill-tops                                      Über allen Gipfeln
    Is quiet now,                                               Ist Ruh,
In all the tree-tops                                        In allen Wipfeln
    Hearest thou                                               Spürest du
Hardly a breath;                                            Kaum einem Hauch;
    The birds are asleep in the trees:       Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
    Wait, soon like these                                Warte nur, balde
      Thou, too, shalt rest.                             Ruhest du auch.

Longfellow  finds a solution for every essential element, including the sentiment, the rhymes, and the rhythm, including the power of the short but variable line lengths.  I suppose he cannot completely  match the strange effect of the two syllable “Ist Ruh,” although he catches the way the stillness and pace are communicated to the reader.  Shhh, slow down.  Look at the way Goethe suggests his reader (the vocal reader) pause for breath on the word “breath.”  Showoff.

When I look at more of Longfellow’s German poems, I find Simon Dach and Gustav Ofizer and Johan Ludwig Uhland where I wish I could find Theodor Storm and Eduard Mörike, but unfortunately Longfellow had little interest in translating his contemporaries.  He was always drawn to medieval and early modern traditions, and to the side of the Romantic tradition that aped the Middle Ages, that wrote ballads to lyrics.  So his Dante is still, in a crowded field of Dante translations, still readable, and his version of the 15th century Las Coplas by Jorge Manrique, an elegy for his heroic father that is also a humanistic exploration of what makes a meaningful life, is an unsurpassed masterpiece.  I wrote about that one almost five years ago, and will just point the curious there for some samples.

And then there is Longfellow’s Michelangelo, but I want to save that for tomorrow.

The 1902 collection contains a single Portuguese poem, a good one by Gil Vicente, so from the late 16th or early 17th century.  I’ll end with it, eight lines that suggest a longer story.

Song

If thou art sleeping, maiden,
    Awake, and open thy door.
‘T is the break of day, and we must away
    O’er meadow, and mount, and moor.

Wait not to find thy slippers
    But come with thy naked feet:
We shall have to pass through the dewy grass,
    And waters wide and fleet.

We must embrace the author’s style - the infinite resources of language - Translation Is a Love Affair

We translators have a strange job.  Don’t think that all we have to do is find the words and phrases that best correspond with the source text.  We have to go further, pour ourselves into the other person’s writing  the way a cat curls up in a basket.  We must embrace the author’s style.  (40)

Who was recently asking for novels about translators?  Here is one from Quebec, Translation Is a Love Affair (2006) by Jacques Poulin, nimbly translated by Sheila Fischman.  A young translator, Marine, finds a stray cat which leads her and the crotchety author she is translating into a warm-hearted adventure.  Translation offers some metaphors for human connection.  I am just going to ignore all of that, the story and so on, although I appreciate the effort to correct the strange neglect of cats in fiction, to look at the short novel’s style.

The fictional author, in a fictional interview:

On what then should the contemporary novel be based? asked the interviewer [“the human soul” and “society” have been rejected as outmoded].  On the infinite resources of language! replied Monsieur Waterman in an impassioned voice…  he constructed a theory of the novel that I wasn’t sure I fully grasped.  He saw the novel as a house built with materials from the past (the dead ash) and from the future (fertile pollen).  To construct it, the most important tool was, of course, style.  (92-3)

How odd, then, or so it seemed at times, that Translation Is a Love Affair is an exemplar of the plain style:

The telephone was in the kitchen.  As soon as I set him down, the cat headed for Chaloupe’s bowls.  I gave him a big handful of dry food and a bowl of cold water, then I dialed the number on the collar.  (8)

Declarative sentences, little adornment, ordinary metaphors.  If the cat is “black as a stove” the narrator means it literally (“I am a translator, I love words”, 3).  Alternatively – this just came to me – Poulin deliberately throws the cliché right after that declaration of metaphorical principle in order to show that his narrator has trouble living up to her own standards.  Regardless, the novel is full of maddeningly plain-spoken passages.  “The grocer put our groceries in a plastic bag” (96)

Although her narration is mostly thin and compressed, Marine also plays with words in her ordinary life, testing out near synonyms, comparing French and English for shades of sound and meaning, looking up even common words in her Petit Robert. Marine is somehow matching her prose style to her life (see especially Chapter XIV, in which Marine temporarily abandons the plain style - the chapter's title is "A Night of Horror").  It is the fictional novelist’s style, too:

In the chapter I was translating, which was the last one, Monsieur Waterman had taken out every useless word, he’d punctuated carefully, and I was trying to be faithful to him.  Like Milena [Kafka’s Milena!], I wanted my words to hug the curves of his writing.”  (143, in the last chapter of Poulin’s novel, of course)

Marine also wants her words to hug the curves of her life.

Other readers may well enjoy the story of the stray cat and its consequences, one of those stories about how a family-substitute assembles, and wonder what all of this nonsense about style is doing in Poulin’s novel.

Oh! At least, take care of yourself, I implore you! - singing and translating Jules Laforgue

Much of the fun of writing about Jules Laforgue’s Derniers Vers just comes from leafing through the book, chancing upon fine, or peculiar, phrases and images.  The text itself is not even thirty pages, but each page has its flavor.  So one more day of indulgence.

The poems in Last Verses are among the founding texts of vers libre.  That is vague and passive enough, isn’t it, “are among”?  Like I know the history of free verse.  The rules of classical French prosody are, as I understand them, strict and peculiar, but the authority of the rules had been eroding for decades by the time Laforgue was writing, since the Romantic poetry of the 1820s, at least, and I do not know exactly which strictures Baudelaire and Rimbaud had left intact for Laforgue to violate.

Where I am going is:  what a surprise how often Laforgue rhymes and uses more or less standard, musical lyric forms.  He sounds like Walt Whitman in patches, but more often sounds like this (“VII.  Honeymoon Solo”):

Où est-elle à cette heure?  (Where is she now?)
Peut-être qu’elle pleure….  (Maybe she’s crying…)
Où est-elle à cette heure?  (Where is she now?)
Oh! Du moins, soigne-toi, je t’en conjure!  (Baby, take care!)

The long last line is sufficient to show that Laforgue’s form is loose, but not only are the rhymes clear enough, the internal music of “Du moins, soigne-toi” is spectacular.  The music of the entire stanza is pleasing.

An interruption:  however much I enjoyed Donald Revell’s English, I most strongly recommend his book, and Laforgue more generally, and 19th century French verse even more generally, to anyone with any French at all, even French as sparse and bad as mine.

Even someone with no French at all might well guess that whatever the last line might mean it does not translate as the not-particularly-musical “Baby, take care!”  No.  A nearly identical line, without the “Du moins,” appears later in the poem; Revell translates it as “Honey, take care of yourself, I’m begging you,” which is close.

I picked this stanza not just because I enjoy singing it, but because that last line demonstrates Revell’s method.  He is not trying to recreate the French but rather to move the book into a current American poetic idiom, as if it were 1990, the poem is not a translation, and Laforgue is familiar with Robert Creeley and John Ashbery.  The translation is the poem Laforgue would have written if all of the above were true.  Prof. Mayhew just posted a couple of paragraphs describing translation “as the place where two poetic traditions meet up.”  Revell is following Mayhew’s principles.

So Revell uses Laforgue’s slangy “Oh!” as license to be slangy himself.  “Baby” and “honey” are not from Laforgue’s French, but Revell finds them hidden behind the second-person pronouns and the “Oh!”  And these are hardly the largest liberties of the translator.

In the best of all possible worlds, I would like collections of translated poems to have the French on one page,  a pedantically footnoted, awkwardly literal English in the middle, and the translator’s best attempt at a good English poem on the right.  The world as it exists is not so bad, though.  Two out of three.

Weasel tea and the Quest for the Zaïmph - the bad taste of Salammbô

Next they uncovered a large bronze tub on a camel: it belonged to the Suffet, who had it for bathing in during his journey; for he had taken all manner of precautions, even going so far as to bring caged weasels from Hecatompylos, which were burnt alive to make his ptisan.

At this point, near the end of the second chapter of Salammbô, I set the book down.  A contemplative pause was in order.  Had I made a mistake?  I was reading an old translation, J. S. Chartres, 1886 – maybe it was a horrible botch.  I wanted to be fair to Gustave Flaubert – certainly a botch.  What did that sloppy translator do to Flaubert’s pain-staking mots justes?

Ensuite on découvrit sur un chameau une grande cuve de bronze : c'était au Suffète pour se donner des bains pendant la route ; car il avait pris toutes sortes de précautions, jusqu'à emporter, dans des cages, des belettes d'Hécatompyle que l'on brûlait vivantes pour faire sa tisane.

I’ve copied the passage from the curious mediterranees.net,* led there by French Wikipedia, and will not vouch for the transcription.  Any advice from readers of French is appreciated, but the weasels from Hecatompylos are right there.  Burnt alive, tisane, bronze tub, etc.  The archaic “ptisan” is an irritant, but perhaps it was not archaic in 1886.

Flaubert’s practice was not to read but to “bellow” his prose aloud to make sure it sounded exactly as it should (see Bookphilia on David Mitchell, search for “garden”).  Please, bellow that French sentence.  Ah, come on, do it!  In the same paragraph, I find more marvels – “brushes, perfumes, and antimony pencils for painting the eyes,” “fishes preserved in honey,” “melted goose-fat covered in snow and chopped straw.”

The fact is, and I love the irony, that Salammbô is in bad taste.  Gustave Flaubert – bad taste!  But what I really mean is that it is packed with signifiers of bad taste, elements that I have learned signal bad writing, particularly in historical or fantasy novels.  Over-indulged Orientalism.  Long lists of archaic proper names.  Pythons wrapped around semi-nude priestesses.  One of the leading characters, the leader of the rebellious mercenaries, Matho, is very much like, very very much like, Conan the Barbarian.

In Chapter V, Matho and his crafty Greek sidekick have infiltrated Carthage in order to steal the mystical zaïmph which will cause the downfall of the city.  Yes, the zaïmph, a jewel-encrusted veil.  Much of the plot of the novel as such hinges on who possesses the zaïmph.  The chapter ends with Matho, one of many super-strong characters in 19th century French novels, opening one of the massive gates to the city by pulling on its huge chain.

Then when he was outside he took the great zaïmph from his neck, and raised it as high as possible above his head. The material, upborne by the sea breeze, shone in the sunlight with its colours, its gems, and the figures of its gods. Matho bore it thus across the whole plain as far as the soldiers’ tents, and the people on the walls watched the fortune of Carthage depart.

If I came across the weasel tea and so on in a Surrealist novel, or in Lautréamont’s Maldoror, I’m not sure I would bat an eye, not more than two or three bats, anyway.  Weirdness among weirdness, nonsense among nonsense.  Wonderful, why I else would I read Maldoror?  Why, then, is Flaubert any different?  I need a conceptual framework for Salammbô.  I’ve got three days left to construct it.  Salammbô is a historical novel, but it is not, for example, Walter Scott but more beautifully written, Alessandro Manzoni aestheticized.**  On Scott’s terms, or Manzoni’s, Salammbô is a disaster.  Forget them.  Forget good taste.  They’re just impediments to Salammbô.  I need Baudelaire, Gautier, and, unfortunately, Sade.

* mediterranees.net houses several illustrated editions of Salammbô, from which I will liberally borrow.  Flaubert, whose art was so based on verbal representation of the visual, was adamantly, angrily opposed to illustrations.

** See Manzoni’s little book On the Historical Novel (1850), or, even better, read the enormously innovative yet conventionally successful The Betrothed (1827), one of the great novels of the 19th century.  It goes on the Books That Should Be Read More list.