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Poetry
in Translation: Live Sparrow or Stuffed Eagle? Brother Anthony
I think I have to begin
by explaining the title of this talk. In 1859 the Englishman Edward
Fitzgerald published the first edition of his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It was scarcely noticed at first, but
then became extremely popular, so that by the 1890s, more than two million
copies had been sold in two hundred editions, while by 1929 more than 300
editions had appeared, and countless more have been published since then, and
continue to be available on Amazon.com today. It is probably the most widely
read English translation of any work except the Bible. Wikipedia notes that
“FitzGerald's translation is rhyming and metrical, and rather free. Many of
the verses are paraphrased, and some of them cannot be confidently traced to
his source material at all. To a large extent, the Rubaiyat can be considered original poetry by FitzGerald loosely
based on Omar's quatrains rather than a ‘translation’ in the narrow sense.”
FitzGerald did not pretend otherwise. In a letter to a friend written before
the initial publication, he wrote: "My translation will interest you
from its form, and also in many respects in its detail: very un-literal as it
is. Many quatrains are mashed together: and something lost, I doubt, of
Omar's simplicity, which is so much a virtue in him" (letter to E. B.
Cowell, 9/3/58). In a second letter,
written soon after the first edition was published, he wrote to the same
friend: "I suppose very few People have ever taken such Pains in Translation
as I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Cost, a Thing must
live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one can’t retain the
Original’s better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle" (letter
to E. B. Cowell, 4/27/59). That is the origin of my title. The most important phrase here, in my opinion, is “A
Thing (ie a translated poem) must live.” My purpose today is to ask you to
reflect on what it is that makes a poem “live,” both in its original language
and in translation. A “stuffed eagle” evokes a wonderful bird, a symbol of
majestic energy, soaring high, something sublime, which has been mercilessly
brought low and killed by a hunter, emptied of its vital organs, filled with
sawdust, and placed on a fireplace or in a glass case, a totally lifeless,
immobile corpse, “decorating” some wealthy family’s dwelling or gathering
dust in a museum. A “live sparrow” may be less majestic but at least it can
still fly about and chirp and make love freely. It is undoubtedly “alive.” I
would add an extra explanation in parentheses: A “stuffed eagle” in our
context would be a translation of a work which only Koreans can admire, made
with the sole concern of reproducing as exactly as possible, without omission
or addition, the words and phrasing of the original, with no attempt to
render it comprehensible, poetic, attractive to readers who know nothing of
Korea, following the misguided notions of a former colleague of mine who
recently irritated many international experts by daring to write: “Any
assessment of a translation is bogus unless it has gone through a rigorous
comparison of the source and the translated texts.” The ways in which Fitzgerald made his poem “live” are
characteristic of his age, and differ totally from that colleague’s demand.
He has chosen to dress it up in words, poetic forms and rhythms which for him
and for many generation of British readers have seemed essentially “poetic”
and which have very little or nothing to do with the Persian original. The
style of the Rubaiyat is what one
might term very “Victorian,” recalling Wordsworth and Tennyson among many
others, and, perhaps unfortunately, many British poetry lovers have continued
to think that its style is the very embodiment of what is “poetic.” Even now
there are people in England who cannot understand why my translations (like a
lot of modern English-language poetry) do not employ regular metre
(preferably iambic pentameter), or rhyme, or traditional “poetic” diction.
They complain that I have even dared to give up capitalizing the first letter
of every line! To them, such dress is still required for a poem to be a
poetic, “living” poem. Given its enduring popularity, we can hardly claim
that the Rubaiyat does not “live,”
although I am not sure that many younger readers in 2019 would find it very
exciting, even very “poetic” or “lively.” Has it been translated into Korean,
I wonder? For us literary historians, the approach found in Fitzgerald’s work
is familiar from many other examples. Chaucer freely translated Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato as Troilus and Crisseyde in the 14th century, John
Harrington freely translated Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso in the late 16th century, George Chapman published the
freely translated Iliad and Odyssey in 1616. John Dryden freely
translated the complete works of Virgil in 1697. Alexander Pope produced his
free translations of Homer’s works in the 1720s. These are the most famous
translations of the British past (and there were many others, of course) and
what characterizes them all is their use of the stylistic conventions of
their period to produce works which were felt to “live,” together with a more
or less considerable disregard for the details of the original text they were
transforming into English verse. The most obvious example is the way the
transformation of classical texts composed in Greek or Latin into English
inevitably meant (in the 17th / 18th centuries) the use
of “heroic couplets,” a rigid framework of ryhming iambic pentameter couplets
which in no way resemble the meter of the original works. By contrast, though
with the same sense of authorized freedom, Christopher Logue composed his
“translations” of parts of Homer’s Illiad
by reading a close translation, closing that, and writing freely. As a
reviewer (Wyatt Mason) wrote: “This is not Homer: it’s Logue’s Homer. Like
all translations, it departs fundamentally from the language of the original.
Unlike many translations, it arrives at a version that, because of its
radical departures, gets us closer to the original than many more defensibly
'faithful' translations have ever managed . . . " The “Thing” that Fitzgerald insisted must “live” is what we call a “poem.” In his case, it was a translated poem and he insists that it is the translator’s responsibility to do all she can to ensure that the poem she is producing on the basis of some foreign original “lives” in its English incarnation. That has nothing to do, we should note, with any notion of verbal “faithfulness,” although certainly there is an implication that a poem would not be translated unless it is already felt to “live’ in its original language. Poems, whether original or translated, usually come to us burdened with a lot of superfluous information. We are so accustomed to teaching our students the name of the poet who first made a given poem, her dates of birth and death, her nationality and life history, even the position a given poem occupies in her personal history, whether early, mature or late, that we often forget the lesson of I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929), where poems were analyzed without any information about their authors, and the insistence of New Criticism as a whole that there is no author in any text. Nothing in this mass of biographical and historical information should play any role in our response to any given poem. But it too often does. The name of that game is usually “Pedantry” except when the poet led a particularly scandalous or exciting life, when it can be “Fun.”
Today, when there is much interest in “World Literature” and multiple publications (such as World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation and many others) regularly carry translations of poems from all over the world, poems approach us waving passports and visas from many exotic places. One quite small publisher in Britain (Arc Publications) proudly announces that it has published translations from over 40 languages: Arabic Armenian Basque Bulgarian Burmese Catalan Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Middle High German Old High German Old Norse Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovene Spanish Tamil Turkish. The latest issue of the great online resource of world literature in translation, Asymptote, includes poems translated from Bulgarian Turkish Spanish Portuguese Korean Arabic and French. This is all very admirable, but what difference does even knowing the nationality of a poet make, how does it help us better come to terms with a poem “as poem” and not as the product of a historical or geo-political context? The “New Historicism” is often very interesting because we love stories, but it cannot make a poem come alive in its own right as it lies before us on the page. Modern literary theory gained the high ground because many scholars, bored by “history of literature” classes, had given up all hope of finding poems or novels that were truly alive as poems or novels. Deconstruction is destruction expanded to the extremes of boredom by despair.The fact that a given English translation is of a poem that was originally written by an elderly woman with one arm called Maria living high up in the Andes speaking and writing only the Quechua language, is interesting information but it is completely unhelpful in deciding whether the translation comes alive for me as a poem. It is just as millions of people have enjoyed the Rubáiyát for a century and a half without really knowing anything about who Omar Khayyám was, when or where he lived and died, and whether he wrote anything else beside his Quatrains. We academics love to categorize and catalogue things. Making lists and gathering “data” gives us the impression that we know something, and “information” is the name of the modern game. It also helps us find things to tell our bored students during lectures. But information about the poet is of little or no help in discovering the life of a poem.
I
have stressed the word “life” so often that I expect most of you are
wondering when I am going to start quoting Walter Benjamin, so let me begin.
I am going to assume that you all know Benjamin’s great essay, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers [The Task
of the Translator], probably better than I do, and start straight in by
reminding you that there is a problem with the many English discussions of
the essay, which regularly say that Benjamin is refering to the “afterlife”
of a poem. In the December 2012 edition of the review Erudit, Caroline Disler published a fascinating and very helpful
article “Benjamin’s ‘Afterlife’: A Productive (?) Mistranslation.” I am going
to quote from that article quite extensively in what follows. For Koreans the
problem is perhaps obvious, because of course when you hear the word
“afterlife” you either think “후생” or “저승,” both of them being posthumous states occurring after
a person’s death, with or without reincarnation. But always after death.
Disler starts by pointing out that a similar (though different) problem arises
in French discussions of Benjamin, which often use the word “survie”
(survival) where the English talk of “afterlife,” while in fact there is only
one use by Benjamin of the German word for “survival” in the whole essay,
when he writes: “the translation issues forth from the original. Though not
from its life so much as from its ‘survival’ [Überleben].” So what was
Benjamin talking about, if not a posthumous state or a “survival”? It is very
important to note that he virtually created a new word to fit his meaning. He
coined the word “fortleben” and that is the word he regularly uses in his
essay which has been mistranslated as “afterlife.” In “fortleben” there is no
sense of any “after” because its closest English equivalent is the term
“on-going life” or “going on living.” We need not discuss here why he used
such a special word when he might have used “weiterleben” but we should note
Disler’s comment that “fortleben” suggests “progress (Fortschritt),
separation (Fortgehen), complementarity, supplementation, futurity, and
transformation.” We
might paraphrase the Bible and say “In the beginning was the Work.” Before
translation can occur, the original work, the poem must exist. It will not be
in any way affected by being translated and Disler points out that “Benjamin
places the concept of the “connection of life” between original and
translation within a time frame: “the translation is later than the original,
and yet for significant works, since they never find their chosen translators
at the time of their formation, [the translation] denotes the stage of [the
works’] Fortleben.” This is
Benjamin’s first use of the word. “In Benjamin’s thought system, literary
works have a life of their own, a life with “stages.” The relationship
between translation and original is a “natural one,” a “connection of life.”
When a literary work is translated, this indicates that it has reached a
certain stage of life, its Fortleben.
This “ongoing life” of literary works is to be understood neither
metaphorically nor spiritually, but purely objectively, not limited to
organic life, to the concept of soul or to sentience; he never implies that
the “soul” of a literary work lives on.” This
brings a clearer realization: “The history of great works of art realizes
their descent from sources, their formation in the era of the artist, and the
period of their fundamentally eternal Fortleben
in the following generations. This last [aspect] is called, where it becomes
apparent, fame. Translations, that
are more than mediations [of information], arise when in [its] Fortleben a work has reached the era
of its fame. [...] In them, the life of the original attains its ever
renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding. “Thus,
fame is Fortleben manifest. Fortleben continues, eternally,
whether or not “anyone” is ever aware of the work, whether or not the work is
ever translated. There is, again, no human agency implied. On the other hand,
awareness of a literary work in its Fortleben,
through translation, is called “fame.” When, during its Fortleben, a work of art has come into its own, has reached its
stage of fame, then translations arise that are more than mere transmissions
of information. Benjamin asserts quite boldly that no translation would be
possible if it aspired to similarity with the original. He justifies this by
claiming that the original changes in its Fortleben,
“which would not be allowed to be called that if it were not transformation
and renewal of the living.” This
brings me to a vital point I want to remind you of. A translated poem is
inevitably a totally different poem from the poem of which it is a
translation, by reason of its different vocabulary, sounds, rhythms, word
order and grammar. The difference between Korean and English is particularly
great, so that a translated Korean poem is necessarily extremely unlike its
‘original.’ The translation is a completely different poem in every respect
except for “what it says,” which will at least to some extent reproduce the
flow of meaning of the original. But only to some extent. The idea of
“accurate reproduction” is complete nonsense. The essay of Benjamin goes on
to remind us that “Fortleben
implies constant, dynamic change of the original. Weiterleben and Nachleben
are static continuations of what was. Through the concept of the Fortleben of the original, Benjamin
has dissociated translation from the original. He has taken the primacy of
resemblance, of similarity out of translating. . . . . the chronological
precedence of the original no longer presupposes superior status over its
translation. Translation has been emancipated from the chains of the
original.” We can even say that a translation is superior to its original
since it has continued to build, using that as a foundation. A building grows
on its foundation, is not fully defined by it. “Fortleben implies independent and elevated creative status for
translators.” So when you see a book with, on the cover or hidden inside, the
words “Poems by XXX Translated by YYY” you should always remember that
“translated by” can be paraphrased as meaning “transformed and improved by.”
In Benjamin’s view, the more significant name in the on-going life of a poem
is that of the translator, not that of the original author. Please remember
that and recognize the significance of us who translate. We are never “mere
translators,” unless of course we have surrendered our responsibility and
given priority to “faithful transmission of information” instead of the
“ongoing transmission of life.” As
a translator of poetry, at this point I am challenged. It is relatively easy
for me to find approximations in English which will say more or less
convincingly something similar to the Korean original. I view that as my duty
and responsibility to the text I translate and its author. I rather distrust
translators who claim the right to produce “creative translations” on the
grounds that they are themselves poets, and therefore are qualified to take
the translation away from its original. Disler helps me here: “Traditional
translation theory requires that the translator be invisible, that the
translation be totally transparent. Norman Shapiro exemplifies this attitude:
“I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it
does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass.
You only notice that it’s there when there are little
imperfections—scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should
never call attention to itself” (Venuti, 1995, p. 1). At first glance, Benjamin
might seem to express a similar sentiment: “True translation is translucent,
it doesn’t cover up the original, it doesn’t stand in its light, but rather
it allows the pure language, as strengthened through its own medium, to fall
all the more fully on the original.” Translation, however, Disler explains,
is no longer to be considered a passive textual transposition that merely
allows clear vision of the original. It is an active, dynamic process that
deals directly with the relationship of languages to each other,
supplementing, strengthening pure language. The liberation of this pure
language is the ultimate task of the translator.” At
this point Benjamin goes in a direction that is rather hard to follow, being
visionary: “Benjamin’s concept of messianism refers to a time when languages,
through the activity of translation, shall have complemented and completed
each other and evolved into pure language. He explicitly confirms
translation’s vital role in this messianic fulfillment of languages: ‘But if
[languages] grow like this until the messianic end of their history, then it
is translation that catches fire on the eternal Fortleben of works and on the endless revival of languages, in
order to test repeatedly that sacred growth of languages: [to determine] how
far what is hidden within them is distanced from revelation, how present it
may become with the knowledge of this distance’.” Enough
of Benjamin and theory. Returning to poetry, I would like to invite you to
reflect on the content of your teaching and research. Today we are gathered
in celebration, especially, of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats and they have now
been subsumed into the more general category of British and American Poetry,
though it would be better still if the name of the association were expanded
to “British, Irish, Australasian, Canadian and American poetry” or, better
still, simply “Poetries in English.” I assume that many of you have thought
about, studied, and taught, Longfellow, Auden, Frost, Geoffrey Hill, Langston
Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson and a very large
number of other famous British and American poets. Alas, they are all dead.
Of course, as we have just seen thanks to Walter Benjamin, that means nothing
at all, since there is no link between author and work, once the last proofs
of the final edition have been corrected by the author, at least. It
is in the nature of poets to die, even famous ones. Shakespeare died when he
was only 52, and he, in adddition to being really dead, is the prime example
of what Benjamin means by a work’s ongoing life, its Fortleben. The plays Shakespeare had written went on being acted
by the King’s Men after the funeral as before it, then were produced in a new
style in the new theatres that opened at the Restoration in London, survived
being rewritten by Dryden and others, blossomed with 18th-century
Bardolatry, grew international with the European Romantics’ discovery of
“natural genius Shakespeare,” became even more popular when live rabbits were
added to the forest in performances of A
Midsummer’s Night’s Dream in Victorian times, and more recently have
given rise to some really good movies, to say nothing of all the more or less
controversial theatrical productions that continue across the globe in many
languages. The works of Shakespeare have a remarkable Fortleben indeed! Now
none of that owes anything to the academic study and teaching of Shakepeare
in required or optional courses in universities. I venerate the memory of a
professor at SNU in decades past, a true Shakespeare scholar, whose main
interest was the way commas were used in the early folio and quarto editions
of Shakespeare’s works. Hardly an exciting manifestation of life! And what
about poetry? The study of “literature” in universities has a long history,
certainly, if by “literature” we mean Homer, Virgil and the other Greek and
Latin classics. The introduction of more modern literatures into the
university curriculum had to wait for the scientific age to begin, when
German universities felt obliged to invent the “science” of “Philologie” in
order to be modern and scientific, and to allow scholars of literature to
apply scientific “philological” methods to texts written in more modern
times. This discipline had very little, or nothing, to do with the Fortleben of literary works as such.
The main activities in those first Modern Languages Departments were the
scholarly editing of medieval texts, using multiple manuscripts to produce a
more “authentic” text by “textual criticism,” as had previously been done for
the Classics. Detailed studies of obscure words and linguistic features,
producing learned footnotes and commentaries was also acceptable. To
make a long story short, when I was studying in Oxford in the 1960s, the
curriculum of the School of English still did not include anything written
after 1900, because Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and suchlike “contemporary”
writers were not considered fit subjects for serious study, and there was a
grave risk that students might read them for pleasure. That has changed,
certainly, but I am still not sure that the university is the place where we
should hope to find people engaged creatively with living poetry as such.
Because at any university the main activity is what is known as “study and
teaching.” Professional academics produce books of sometimes profound
erudition; they give amazingly detailed lectures; students produce papers and
dissertations with countless references to previous research. But it hardly
seems possible for poetry to come alive in a university except as an
extracurricular, spare-time activity, like drinking. “Creative Writing”
courses and departments have proliferated, although they are still a
controversial novelty. The main problem is that truly creative writing is surely
not something that can easily be produced to order, submitted as an
assignment, discussed and analyzed in class discussions, and (oh horror!)
graded. Who will establish the basis for fair grading of submitted work when
the most important quality of creative writing is that it be new, different,
challenging of authority and unconventional? But above all, young people who
are beginning to write their own literary works, poems or fiction, cannot do
so on the basis of ready-made recipes or stereotyped conventions. The most
important input a young person needs if they wish to become a writer is
obtained by reading what others have written and (most important) are writing
now, reading freely, according to one’s own preferences, whims, and even
chance. And above all, reading in such a way that what is read comes alive
and feeds the inner poet who is still only just beginning to awaken within
them. “A
poet is born, not made,” they say. But if you hope that among your students
one or two might become “fit readers” and even creative writers, you will
have to ensure that they are exposed above all to what is being written and
published NOW, at this present moment, across the world. Nothing is more
important, for people “studying” literature. The other necessity is familiarity
with the literary giants of the past, whether the ancient classics, medieval
and renaissance French and Italian lyrics, the Russian novelists, the noted
poets and novelists of the 20th century, everything. But there is
a special challenge confronting you here in Korea. Young British writers have
normally been exposed from youth, if they are lucky at least, to the entire
Western Canon, whether originally written in English or translated from
French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin and Greek etc. In Korea
there is no obvious corresponding centuries-old Canon. Until the 1890s, the
Canon in Korea consisted of the Chinese Confucian Classics, with generation
after generation taking them as their models for writing. Certainly I know of
very few Korean works from earlier centuries that might inspire and enthuse a
young Korean writer today. One of your most important tasks, still, then, is
to translate the world’s canons (not only the western canon) into Korean in
such a way that Korean readers of all ages can find meaning and inspiration
in them. The production of excellent translations should be your main
priority. You
will tell me that you are prevented from doing so by the regulations of your
university, which refuses to give any credit for translation. That is an
ignorance you must fight! There is no other way. For a teacher of literature,
translation is the best possible way of communicating one’s knowledge and
love of the literature you teach. Translations that are to move and inspire
must be done by experts who are free to produce “creative” translations
without fear of nitpicking over every detail. What is required are texts
that, far from being compulsively “literal,” breathe and live in modern ways.
Korean is unlike any language except perhaps Japanese. So if you are to
produce living translations in Korean, you will also need to be reading works
by today’s best Korean writers who are, we must hope, engaged in developing
the Korean language in new and exciting ways. You must find out who they are,
encourage them, dialogue with them. How else will Korea’s literary culture
grow and develop? On
the other side, if you are teaching British and American poetry and fiction,
I have to stress the importance of focussing almost entirely in your teaching
on introducing students to writers who are living and writing NOW. Your
students do not need Elliot or
Yeats or Pound, Larkin or Auden, let alone Wordsworth or Pope; but they
should certainly be engaging with works written in today’s world, the global
village of the 21st century, where young people everywhere are
confronted with the same, enormous challenges. Established living writers are
easy to identify, and deserve full attention, but also your students should
be looking out for and encouraged to read poetry and fiction written by
beginners, people barely older than themselves, both Korean and not Korean.
But how will a Korean student who reads no contemporary Korean poetry be able
to respond well to the poetry written today in Vietnam or Namibia, Pakistan
or Cuba? How will a Korean poet who reads no (good) translations of poetry
written today in Vietnam or Namibia, Pakistan or Cuba be able to write
convincing Korean poetry for NOW? In recent years, I have seen a number of
“world-famous” poets and writers brought to Korea: Jane Hirshfield, Marilyn
Robinson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Sinead Morrisey,
Christopher Merrill, Michel Deguy, Gary Snyder, Andrew Motion, Barry Hill . .
. . I wonder how many of you here today recognized all those names, heard and
met them when they came? There are so many other poets I would love to
welcome here but my previous experience warns me. How many of you have read
and translated or written about works by any of them? Why was it that when
Korean poets were invited to meet those foreign writers, the Koreans did not
know who they were or what they should say to them, they had never heard of
them or read their work. Dialogue was impossible. Perhaps
the West is too far away for Korea? Certainly, the world of contemporary
British writing is known to very few of you, I am sure. Can I ask how many of
you have read poems by the current English Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy or
her succerssor Simon Armitage? By her Scottish counterpart, Jackie Kay? Who
is the current American Poet Laureate? Tracy K. Smith is her name. Of course,
the world is over-full of good poets, we can’t read them all. Last November I
was at the Asian Literature Festival in Gwangju, to which celebrated writers
were invited from Mongolia, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Palestine, Myanmar, the
Philippines, and Okinawa. One evening there was a public event where each
writer was paired with a Korean writer to give joint readings. It was open to
the general public but it was poorly attended. Few people seemed to be very
interested in discovering world literature. So sad!
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