lost in the original

I've been thinking a lot about translation lately: not from the vantage point of doing it; as a reader. I can see what would be in it for the translator, and I can hardly imagine another task that seems as difficult and stretching.

I've never read as much in translation as I think I should, as I would like to. Certainly there are writers I love whom I know only in translation, which feels kind of like not knowing them - especially in poetry. God knows it's hard enough even in English! I tend only to buy a book in translation if it has a parallel text (unless there isn't one available), and then reading it takes ages as I pick through the original. Let me just state that there is not another language besides English that I can read really adequately, so this is probably just silly! And if I like something I will seek out every known translation, so I can take a sort of median reading.

This approach makes me suspicious of poems published as "versions" of other, foreign poems. When you read a version you don't know what you're reading: neither fish nor fowl, as it occurs to me that Andrew Shields might have it.

Don Paterson famously (actually, maybe it's not famous; it's famous to me because I blogged on it) did this with his Rilke versions - in which, beautifully muscular and meaty as his language may be, he changed words which bore the whole meanings of their poems - load-bearing words, as it were. This analogy is apt: quoted by Adam Philips in the Guardian, Paterson says: "Versions are trying to be poems in their own right; while they have the original to serve as detailed ground-plan and elevation, they are trying to build themselves a robust home in a new country, in its vernacular architecture." This statement is illuminating amd comfirms one's suspicion that in buying a book of "versions" one if buying more a book by the translator than a book by the original, non-English poet.

I know of a case where some poems have been "translated," with input from the originating poet, and then published as "versions" by the "translator" (please excuse the scare quotes) - so that the originating poet now does not have access to the English versions of his poems because they are "versions" and have been published in the translator's name!

Phew! Ms B is not an expert in international copyright law - thank God, otherwise her head might explode - but this does seem rather unnecessarily complicated, not least for readers of the poems.

The issue is one of trust, I think, or maybe it's a question of identification. In a new city you have to rely on the driver to take you to the right place. Or, if you've read the guidebook, when you arrive in the city you want to be able to recognise it.

Andrew Shields was one of the two translators, along with Michael Hofmann (who got the contract), to be considered by Faber for a translation of Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast. (My Farrar, Strauss & Girous edition is copyright 2005, and the Faber came out last autumn - so I'm not sure how the contractual aspects worked: I'm basing my remarks on what Andrew has written. And it seems that the Faber paperback, which costs as much as I paid for the Farrar Strauss hardback - admittedly off Abebooks - does not have a parallel text, which mine does.) Anyway, Andrew has translated Grünbein too, though not in book form I think, and while he says he has deeply enjoyed Hofmann's translations, he points up some aspects of the rationale of a translation which constitute the very reason I like parallel texts. (Still with me?) Don't worry about the references to the poems, in his post he gives two translations of the poem with the line in question:

"Leaving aside all the other differences between the two translations... I immediately noticed that Grünbein's 'green plastic fish' had become Hofmann's 'yellow plastic duck.' In part, I noticed this because a comic version of the thesis of my unwritten essay was that Grünbein is a (green) fish, and my thesis does not make sense if the English poem turns the fish into a (yellow) duck. (The serious issue the essay would have addressed is the near-absence of the first-person singular in Grünbein's first three books and its partial appearance in his fourth.)

But more seriously, the shift from fish to duck raises two concerns for me: first, I do not understand the motivation for the altering of the image, and it seems to change the metaphorical implications of the poem quite considerably. The toy may be plastic, but a fish floating on the water is dead, while a duck floating on the water is not.

Secondly, and more generally, it makes me wonder whether Hofmann has altered Grünbein's imagery elsewhere in the book as well. Is this move from fish to fowl an isolated case? Or is it a symbol of Hofmann's translation procedure in general? If so, then those who discover Grünbein through this book might wonder whether the scaly Grünbein of the original German has become feathery instead. Or to put it another way, Hofmann has produced a wonderful collection of poems that are a great pleasure to read, but they might be more 'yellow' than 'green' (as in Grünbein)."

George Szirtes, meanwhile, currently apparently at a book fair in Budapest, gives a vivid account of a conversation with his editor regarding some conundrums in a translation he's doing, which actually addresses, I think, some of the issues in a way that feels trustworthy to me. He writes:

"In the morning, editor Zs calls to discuss the translation of the Márai piece of which I have already put up an extract... The chief issue is whether 'Western Patrol' is the best translation of the title: Napnyugati őrjárat.

The joys of translation! Napnyugati does not mean simply 'western', though it means that too. It is a slightly archaic term meaning 'the west of the sunset', the romanticism partly straight and partly ironical.* The other word is indeed 'patrol' though Zs thinks the allusion is to Rembrandt's 'Night Watch'. I mention the potential association with 'Watch on the Rhine' and we drop that. So now it is still western patrol but with a colon followed by 'In the Lands of the Setting Sun', and, underneath, following Márai's subtitle as closely as we can, 'A travelogue novel'.

...it is precisely these balances of tone that matter most to me. That has taken some half an hour already and we haven't even started on the text,** wherein the same romantic term for the West keeps reappearing.

Constantly to reiterate it seems a bad solution to me, tiresome, heavy, dull. So I draw on one of those semi-improvised personal theories of translation that may be worth exploring. The theory - far more instinct than theory if truth be told - is that translation might work zonally rather than lexicographically. When a complicated concept appears without a direct equivalent we distribute the various shades of its meaning through the text. I think this works, so I say it works. Zs thinks it might work. It is decided: it works.

It is in fact what I have always done, particularly in poetry: keeping form while gently redistributing image and diction to locate tone. I don't know how else it is possible. Furthermore it resembles the way poems seem to get written: a kind of hovering above magnetic territory, always seeking the centre of meaning."***


* My God! Can you imagine writing poetry in a language like that? I want that word.

** I'll point out here that editorial meetings at work - where I'm going back today! - are just as tortuous, and there is no poetry to show at the end of it! Editing someone else's policy report is kind of like translating, & requires a similar nimbleness with vocabulary and tone - only I hide it under the various bushels of "identifying your reader," "house style" and "best practice"...

*** I think this phrase is really worth remembering: "a kind of hovering over magnetic territory, always seeking the centre of meaning."