Alison Croggon wrote:

> Why let that stop us? Otherwise three thousand years of civilisation are
> down the chute...

Yes, indeed. Let's not duck the big issues only to complain that we are
preoccupied with the petty.
 
>Does it erase or highlight differences
> between languages? Probably both, but my feeling is, given the
> disappearance of languages around the world, that the weight is in favour

> of erasure. I hope I'm wrong.

A friend of mine published a book of poems in Gaelic. All around her knee
after knee jerked perfectly in step with "Who is doing the translation?"

In an odd way it can be easier to write about some things in a minority
language. The increase in the sense of being alone is one thing. It's also
a way of sidestepping issues like exploitation. To write in a postmodern
way about certain atrocities can feel like a kind of betrayal. The
impenetrable impersonal tone as a cop out. Mind you workshop blud-n-guts
is not necessarily any better, often just using the suffering of others as
insta-poetry. Silence is not really any cleaner as an alternative.
Writing in a language like Gaelic, while next door to silence, might work.
I don't know what I'm saying here. I should have flown with the duck.

On another tack, Harry Gilonis' paper: "Good Fruit and Sour: Trevor Joyce,
Seamus Heaney and the _Buile Suighne Geilt_" contrasts wonderfully two
translations of an old Irish text. I think it will appear in the next but
one issue of Angel Exhaust.

Here's an extract from an open letter on translation written by Martin
Luther in 1530:

For instance, Christ says: Ex abundatia cordis os loquitur. If I am to
follow these asses, they will lay the original before me
literally and translate it as: "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth
speaks." Is that speaking with a German tongue? What
German could understand something like that? What is this "abundance of the
heart?" No German can say that; unless, of
course, he was trying to say that someone was altogether too magnanimous,
or too courageous, though even that would not yet be
correct, as "abundance of the heart" is not German, not any more than
"abundance of the house, "abundance of the stove" or
"abundance of the bench" is German. But the mother in the home and the
common man say this: "What fills the heart overflows the
mouth." That is speaking with the proper German tongue of the kind I have
tried for, although unfortunately not always
successfully. The literal Latin is a great barrier to speaking proper
German.

Later in the letter he deal with the necessity, as he sees it, of literal
translation in passages of doctrinal import. His urgent desire to translate
colloquially, his fidelity to the vernacular is all the more moving in a
context where an incautious choice of preposition could lead to the death
penalty.

Translation is in some sense a movement in linguistic space, where by laws
of a different theory of relativity, some contraction or dilation is
inevitable. Even to read a text in one's native language involves
translation into one's own local lexicon. The thought that poetry should
only be read in the original would in the end allow us to read none at all.
 And wouldn't the world be a safer place altogether then.

best

Randolph Healy


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