There are other questions about translation. Up to now it's been mainly
worry of the "What am I getting for my money?" kind (is this the "real
thing"? etc) (or if it's not the real thing is it still good value because
the translator makes a new real thing, and so on)...  There are at least
two other questions--

1) There are strong polemics against translating poetry (or anything),
especially in the bright-young-things sections of poetical USA and France.
There are theories. But basically they are just modernised rehearsals of a
very old insistence that poetry can't be translated.   And of course in a
sense it can't, that's obvious. Poets before this century didn't I think,
ever pretend that when they were "translating" they were replicating the
reading experience of the original poem, that would have seemed an absurd
assumption to them.

But what happens if you give in to those theories and those doubts, is that
you end up knowing nothing of the world's poetry. And this is more-or-less
the case in "Language' and similar-related poetico-academic zones in USA,
where nothing except a few "versions" of early fench modernist texts, as a
self-confirming ancestral homage, are every permitted. (Paris is the only
abroad there is).  So you produce an untranslatable poetry and you insist
that poetic quality is unique to the original text, and you end up knowing
nothing about what's going on in the world. This strikes me as
interestingly parallel to American foreign policy in general.

How many of us are going to learn Hungarian, or Arabic, or Hindustani, or
Swahili, or Korean? We depend on translation to have any idea of what's
going on in such language zones, which we ignore at our peril, it seems to
me. Is this a terrible problem because we then have to endure low-grade
texts in English produced by non-genius ("hack") writers? Is it even denied
that such translations will give us the minimal information we need?  Not
necessarily, I'd say.


2) I recently had a letter from Kelvin Corcoran in which he praised some
poems of WC Williams because  "the words suggest themselves and fall into
his hands." That's a pretty good description of an authentic poetical
writing. It could be analysed and made into a more technical account, but
I'm happy to leave it as it is.  I was surprise however, because I
recognised it as the experience I'd just had in reading some not
particularly distinguished translations of Akhmatova. Can it be that this
quality of writing is also evident in translation, including bad
translation?  If this is the case then perhaps there is a quality of good
poetical writing which far from being untranslatable, actually can't be
destroyed by translation. Or can only be destroyed by totally irresponsible
translation (I do acknowledge that there are some translators capable of
this; in my experience they are mostly routine or "professional"
translators of poetry).

Well if that's the case it's very odd, I can't explain that. It shouldn't
be like that by all the theories of the 20th Century. Could it be (dare I
say this?)  that primary meaning (as a version of "truth") is what does it?
That that is for instance, what Wyatt and Coleridge translated, that that
was what they wanted to bring into poetry in English from elsewhere,
because they found it lacking, rather than the jewel-like values of some
particular poems viewed as works-of-art?  This would mean then that some
form of primary content over-rides the linguistic details of poetry.  If I
go on like this for much longer I shall be excommunicated.

I don't think what Zukofsky did to Catullus is translation of any kind.  I
don't know what it is, or why it exists. But hey-nonny, we need boxes of
destroyed language to play with, enjoy yourselves kiddos.


/PR




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