Okay, this is embarrassing. I mistakenly sent the original of this in html
format. Then I thought I resent it in plain text, but it got sent as a blank
message. So here it is again in plain text that I hope is more readable than
the first one I sent.

Rich Newman

Hi All,

I joined this list only recently—though I recognize some names from the
Buffalo Poetics list—and I have been enjoying the conversations. I wanted to
share something interesting that I came across while doing some background
reading for some literary translations I am working on, specifically of the
13th century Persian poet Saadi. I was reading Coleman Barks’
translations/adaptations of Rumi because Rumi and Saadi lived around the
same time as Saadi, and they are—as I understand it—from different schools
of Sufi thought. Rumi is the more charismatic, while Saadi is the more
scholarly and intellectually based. (There is an at least partial parallel,
I think, in Jewish tradition, in the difference between the Chasidic
movement and the Mitnagdim; and I am sure there are similar splits in all
religious traditions.) Anyway, in the introduction to his Essential Rumi,
Barks writes the following:

        Mystical poetry can be a subject for study, but in its essential
nature it is not something to locate or describe within a cultural context.
It is a way to open the heart, as a Sufi master, or any enlightened
being, is a door to the radiant depth of the self.

        I obviously am not trying to place Rumi in his thirteenth century
locus. That is fine work, and I am grateful for those who do it. My more
grandiose project is to free his text into its essence.

Then, in the same day, I was reading Hayden Carruth’s essay, ”Three Notes on
the Versewriting of Alexander Pope,”—also as background reading for these
translations, which I will explain in a moment—and Carruth has this to say
about Pope’s use of the couplet form:

        ...the couplet was regarded as a plain, ordinary kind of verse, in
contrast to the stanzaic forms used so commonly for long narratives and to
blank verse, which was best suited for tragedy and epic. The couplet was
"nearest prose"; which is to say, our own view of it as artificial and
hifalutin is exactly contrary to the view held by those who practiced it and
who were trying to do the same thing, roughly speaking, for the
poetry of their time that Pound and Williams did for the poetry of theirs.

I am reading Pope as partial and ongoing preparation for translating Saadi
primarily because the kind of ethical verse that Pope, along with Dryden and
others, wrote is probably the closest parallel we have in English to the
kind of verse that Saadi wrote, and it has been useful for helping me to
think about tone and form. (I have chosen to translate Saadi’s poetry in
blank verse, though, not couplets; I have a contract and deadlines and I am
afraid that hunting for rhymes, even slant and half and off-rhymes, would be
too time consuming; but also, I suspect that couplets these days would have
precisely the opposite effect of the one Carruth suggests Pope was after.)

So what interests me about these two quotes by two very different poets is
how they stand at the poles between which it seems to me a translator has to
work: On the one hand, you have concern with the essence of a text, with
being true to its spirit, while on the other hand you have the necessity of
paying attention to the time and place and form—and the relationship between
and among them—in which a poet lived and wrote her or his poetry. And
another way of talking about these two poles, and I suppose this is the way
of putting it that really intrigues me, is as the distance between the
hubris one must have in order to think one can free into anything other than
itself the essence of any text—and Barks’ Rumi, wonderful and compelling as
he is, I should add, is absolutely Barks’ creation, bearing little
resemblance to the original—and the humility of submitting oneself to the
context of the original.

Not a particularly original insight, perhaps, but it was interesting to see
it embodied so starkly in and by two such disparate writers—even though
Carruth was not, technically speaking, talking about translation.

Richard Newman

_________________________
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Associate Professor, English
Nassau Community College
One Education Drive
Garden City, NY 11530
O: (516) 572-7612
F: (516) 572-8134
[log in to unmask]
www.ncc.edu
richardjeffreynewman.blogspot.com

_________________________
Richard Jeffrey Newman 
Associate Professor, English
Nassau Community College
One Education Drive
Garden City, NY 11530
O: (516) 572-7612
F: (516) 572-8134
[log in to unmask]
www.ncc.edu
richardjeffreynewman.blogspot.com