Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  Attempts to render a poem in another language fall into three categories. (1) Paraphrastic: offering a free version of the original, with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of form, the conventions attributed to the consumer and the translator’s ignorance. (2) Lexical (or constructional): rendering the basic meaning of words (and their order). This a machine can do under the direction of an intelligent bilinguist. (3) Literal: rendering, as closely as the associative and syntactical capacities of another language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Only this is a true translation … Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin be truly translated with a retention of its rhymes? The answer is, of course, no. To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible.4

  This statement (mimicking and also reversing John Dryden’s much earlier distinction of imitation, paraphrase, and meta-phrase) introduces Nabokov’s own nonrhyming translation of Pushkin’s novel, accompanied by an immensely long and learned, line-by-line commentary on the meanings of Pushkin’s verses. The main work is not the translation at all but Nabokov’s appropriation of it through his inflated peritext. Master of style in two languages and a uniquely skillful crafter of translingual puns, Nabokov laid down his writer’s mantle on the altar of Pushkin and adopted what he called “the servile path.”5 There’s a profound reason for his frankly uncharacteristic modesty in this case. Who can rival Pushkin? No Russian can dream of doing such a thing—yet every Russian writer also dreams of unseating Pushkin from his throne. For the Russian writer that Nabokov still was twenty years after the adoption of English as his literary tongue, translating Pushkin was not a straightforward translation task.

  Let’s consider what the stakes were for Nabokov (but for no one else) in recasting Pushkin in English verse. It’s safe to assume that Nabokov could have done so like no other had he let himself dare. He would have set himself up as Pushkin’s rival. More than that: he would have written Eugene Onegin himself.

  At much the same time as Nabokov started his plain prose version of Pushkin, Georges Perec read Herman Melville’s story of a New York clerk, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” It seemed to him quite perfect, and he wished he had written it himself. But I can’t do that! he wailed in a letter to a friend, because Melville wrote it first.6 The same sense of having been already outwritten—of having been robbed in advance of a glory that could perhaps have been his—lies at the root of Nabokov’s strange operation with Pushkin’s sublime verse.

  In fact, Nabokov had done some stanzas of Onegin into English verse in the 1950s already—but then turned around in fright. He could see he was not Pushkin. Later on, he adopted his servile path of pseudo-literal translation not because it was relevant to the study or practice of literary translation but because it helped hide that embarrassing fact.

  Nabokov’s public lesson in poetry translation quoted above is threadbare and misleading. There are far more ways than three of translating fixed form. A “paraphrase” is not the only alternative to a “lexical” translation, and the latter can in no way even now be done directly by a machine. The “literal” style Nabokov proposes and claims to use is just what anyone else would call plain prose. Nabokov’s introduction to his exhaustive exploration of all the allusions and referential meanings of the words of Pushkin’s novel tells us many interesting things (about Nabokov, about Russia, about language and style) but nothing about the translation of form.

  Onegin has attracted many gifted translators, and there are several versions now available that give good approximations of Pushkin’s verse. A secondhand copy of one of these, by Charles Johnson, published in 1977, fell into the hands of a polyglot Indian postgrad at Stanford around 1982, who was charmed and entranced by a whole novel in fourteen-line stanzas with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes in ababccddeffegg order and frequent use of enjambment. Vikram Seth decided to make this form his own. He composed a story of his own life in the same regular form. The Golden Gate—“The Great California Novel” according to Gore Vidal—set Seth on the path to literary glory. Fifteen years later, The Golden Gate in its turn fell into the hands of an Israeli scholar, Maya Arad, who was entranced by the stanza form relayed to her by Seth from Charles Johnson’s version of Pushkin, whose Yevgeny Onegin she then read in the original. She appropriated the form for her own novel in verse, Another Place, a Foreign City, published to great acclaim in Hebrew in 2003. Here is one of Arad’s 355 stanzas translated into English by Adriana Jacobs. Though the rhymes have gone, old Onegin’s zest for St. Petersburg partying remains intact in twenty-first-century Tel Aviv:

  Faster! Faster! No dawdling! Eat up!

  Where will we go this time?

  Who knows! The opera? The cinema?

  The theater? Or a restaurant?

  The city’s riches seem endless

  Until it loses consciousness.

  Faster—draining every minute—

  Until the hour hand strikes midnight.

  Sleep? Too bad! We’re still running

  On full and the night is still young.

  Let’s go party! Let’s find a club!

  The night is tender and inviting.

  December’s here, can you believe?

  It feels like spring in Tel Aviv!

  If the formal constraints of Eugene Onegin can be used to tell stories of America and Israel, why can they not be used to equal poetic effect to tell the very story that Pushkin told? Nabokov claims this is “mathematically impossible.” Mathematics has nothing to do with it. What he meant was that he wasn’t going to try.

  Gilbert Adair was faced with a challenge of no lesser “mathematical impossibility” when he set out to translate Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written exclusively with French words and expressions that do not contain the letter e. Writing without the letter e is hard to do for more than a short paragraph because we are simply not accustomed to conceptualizing words in terms of the letters by which they are set down in writing. It takes time and effort to learn the trick—but once you have taught yourself to do it, you can say as much as Perec learned to say in French. And more! Adair decorated his translation, called A Void, with many quips and interpolations of his own, and replaced Perec’s e-less parodies of famous French poems with e-less versions of well-known English-language verse:

  “Sybil,” said I, “thing of loathing—Sybil, fury in bird’s clothing!

  By God’s radiant kingdom soothing all man’s purgatorial pain,

  Inform this soul laid low with sorrow if upon a distant morrow

  It shall find that symbol for—oh for its too long unjoin’d chain—

  Find that pictographic symbol, missing from its unjoin’d chain”

  Quoth that Black Bird, “Not Again.”

  And my Black Bird, still not quitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

  On that pallid bust—still flitting through my dolorous domain;

  But it cannot stop from gazing for it truly finds amazing

  That, by artful paraphrasing, I such rhyming can sustain—

  Notwithstanding my lost symbol I such rhyming still sustain—

  Though I shan’t try it again!

  Translators working in many languages in widely separated cultural fields—manga, subtitles, political jingles, experimental fiction, poetry, and popular verse—confront and overcome stringent formal constraints. Moreover, the forms themselves are often transported across historical, linguistic, and cultural space. These facts make it seem unwise to claim that anything is impossible. The only impossible things in translation are those that haven’t been done.

  A less prejudiced way of understanding the work that translators do is to look more closely at the effects of successful match-ings of strict form. Has Gilbert Adair improved Edgar Allan Poe? How come that the very diluted version of the Onegin stanza in Adriana Jacobs’s translation of Maya Arad’s imitation of Vikram Seth’s imitation of Charles Johnson’s verse translation of Pushkin resurrects s
omething of the lightness and joy of Onegin’s youth? How has Anthea Bell made Astérix even funnier in English than in French? And why did anyone ever think that translating verse by verse was a dead end? The truth is quite the opposite. When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance—when your mind is engaged in multilevel pattern-matching pursuits—you find resources in your language you never knew were there.

  Of course there’s never a match that is 100 percent, because that’s not the way of the world. Just as it would be silly to claim that high-quality tailoring is “mathematically impossible” because we’ve never had a suit that was an absolutely perfect fit, it would be unwise to deny the possibility of translating form just because we’ve not yet done so in a way that is utterly impeccable in every respect.

  THIRTEEN

  What Can’t Be Said Can’t Be Translated: The Axiom of Effability

  When the baggage carousel comes to a halt and his suitcase isn’t there, the weary traveler goes to the airline service desk and complains that his suitcase has been lost. The desk clerk quite reasonably asks for evidence—a baggage stub, for instance—and a detailed description of what has gone missing, so that it may more easily be found.

  People who claim that poetry is what gets lost in translation could be asked to follow a like routine. Granted, there’s no check-in desk for poetic effects, so the missing ticket stub can be excused. But it’s not unreasonable to request a description of the missing goods. If you can’t provide one, claiming that something called “poetry” has been lost is like telling an airline it has mislaid an item that has no identifiable characteristics at all. It doesn’t cut a lot of ice.

  A reader who says that poetry is what has been lost in translation is also claiming to be simultaneously in full possession of the original (which is poetry) and of the translation (which is not). Otherwise there would be no knowing if anything has been lost, let alone knowing that it was poetry.

  A good knowledge of the two languages involved isn’t sufficient to justify the claim that what has been lost in translation is poetry. You could make a convincing case only if you knew both languages and their poetic traditions sufficiently well to be able to experience the full scope of poetic effects in both of them. Not many people meet the standard, but there’s nothing unreasonable about the test.

  You would have to meet this entrance requirement to declare a loss of poetry in either direction—in a translation from a foreign language into your own (say, on reading George Chapman’s version of Homer) or from your own language into a foreign one (if, for example, you wanted to say that the French or Spanish or Japanese version of John Ashbery’s poem “Rivers and Mountains” just doesn’t move you as the English one does). Only if you have these skills in language and in poetry can you make a credible claim that something has been lost; but even if you do have them, you will find it hard to tell the desk clerk just what it is.

  It would not be relevant to your complaint to say that the relationship between sound and meaning is not the same in the translation as in the original. With the sounds changed because the language is different and the meaning preserved broadly if never precisely, the relationship between the two—a relationship all linguists since Ferdinand de Saussure insist is an arbitrary one—must perforce be other.

  The belief that the poeticalness of poetry is just that relationship between sound and sense is widespread in the teaching of English and other modern languages. However, it doesn’t follow from this at all that once a poem is translated it has lost its poeticalness. The new poem in the new language representing and re-creating the poem in the old also possesses a relationship between its sound and its meaning. It is not the same as the original, but that is no reason—no reason at all—to claim that it is devoid of poetry. Of course, the new poem may be awful when the original was sublime. Few poets write sublime verse every time. But it stands to reason that the quality of a poem in translation has no relation to its having been translated. It is the sole fruit of the poet’s skill as a poet, irrespective of whether he is also writing as a translator.

  You may not like the poem by Douglas Hofstadter quoted at the start of this book. You may like the poem by Clément Marot much more. But all that you could reasonably say about the difference is that Hofstadter is (in this instance) a less charming writer of poetry than Marot. If you didn’t know that Hofstadter’s trisyllabic verse transposes sentiments first expressed by someone else in a form that has a quite strict relationship to it, you might still not like it—but you wouldn’t think of justifying your disappointment by saying that poetry is what has been lost in translation. And since that is the case—as it is the case with many lines of poetry you undoubtedly know in your own language without knowing they have semantic and formal correspondences to lines or stanzas written in another language before them—you can’t justify your dislike of Hofstadter’s translation by saying that its less than perfect quality is related to the way that poetry gets lost in translation. Exactly the same argument applies if you like Hofstadter’s poem much more than you like Marot’s. Or if you had been led to believe that Marot’s French, far from being prior to it, had been inspired by “Gentle gem …” In fact, for the vast majority of poems, the ordinary reader has few reliable ways of establishing whether and to what degree it can be counted as a translation. Poets have been imitators, plagiarists, surreptitious importers, and translators since the beginning of time.

  Dante, Joachim du Bellay, Alexander Pope, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Jacques Roubaud, Robert Lowell, C. K. Williams—think of a great poet, and you’ve almost certainly thought of a translator, too. In the Western tradition there is no cutoff point between writing poems and writing translations or writing poems in translation. Poetic forms—the sonnet, the ballad, the rondeau, the pantoum, the ghazal—have migrated among languages as diverse as French, Italian, Russian, Persian, English, and Malay over the last eight hundred years. Poetic styles—Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Acmeist, Surrealist—are common European properties, as typical of German as of Polish poetry. Every so-called poetic tradition is made of other traditions. Against the dubious adage that poetry is what is lost in translation we have to set the more easily demonstrable fact that, from many points of view, the history of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation.

  Despite this, toward the end of 2007 there were 666 Web pages in English that quoted the adage “poetry is what is lost in translation”;1 and by April 2010, when I ran the search again, the tally had risen to 15,100. Even more stunning is that in all but a handful of cases this adage was attributed to the American poet Robert Frost. But nobody has ever been able to find Frost saying anything like it in his works, letters, interviews, or reported sayings. 2 Like so many other received ideas about translation, this one turns out to have no foundation in fact.

  All the same, it is true that poetry provides translators with a task that is not only difficult but in some senses beyond translation altogether. Like many people, I have a great fondness for poems that I learned in my youth. I’m attached to them in a special way and treasure the very sound as well as the sense that they have. As I was a student at the time, I read poetry in foreign languages—mostly in order to learn the language they were in. I struggled to understand them, and probably for that reason they have stuck in my mind ever since.

  Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.

  For me, no English translation can have the same weight or familiarity or perfection or mystery—nor can any paraphrase in German. I cherish these sounds and words of a language I wanted to master and which I learned in part through the unscrambling and memorization of just these lines. The emotion that for me and me alone is wrapped up in the opening of Rilke’s Duino Elegies derives from my past, and although I can tell you about it in this roundabo
ut way, you can’t share it directly with me. What can’t be shared can’t be translated—obviously enough. But that doesn’t make the poem untranslatable for anyone else:

  Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one would take me suddenly to his heart: I would die of his stronger existence.

  I might have translated the lines that way when I was learning German by learning Rilke. The English says pretty much what the German says. Is it poetry? That’s a judgment everyone makes independently, by criteria that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the translation. This one, in fact, wasn’t done by a poet or by a translator. It was done (with a little help from a friend) by a machine translation service available for free on the Internet.

  Personal, quasi-biographical reasons for valuing poems are probably very common. We may say that we treasure a line or a rhyme or a lyric “in and for itself,” but it’s easier to demonstrate that poems often get attached to us, or we get attached to poems, in contexts that endow the attachment with personal emotion. It does not matter whether the focus of such affective investment and aesthetic appreciation was first written in another language and then translated, or written in the language in which we read it. In any case, you can’t tell. A Russian reader may know that Pasternak’s — is a translation, but if she hasn’t been told, she has no way of assessing—and no reason to ask—whether it is more or less poetical than Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be, that is the question.”