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Translating Korean-ness: Thoughts
on Korean Poetry in Translation An Sonjae (Brother Anthony) A paper presented at an International
Comparative Literature Symposium held in Keimyung
University, Daegu, on May 27, 2016.
The essential “Koreanness” of Korean poetry
is also its most certainly untranslateable feature. What
gets lost in translation is, inevitably, its
specifically “Korean” quality, much more than any
abstract “poetic” quality it might have. This is at the
most superficial level quite obvious. Korean poetry is
(almost by definition) written in Korean language.
Translated Korean poetry is not. When poetry originally
written in Korean is translated into English, it loses
one primary aspect of its Korean identity, its Korean
language. Whatever is considered “poetic” about the
original poem by its original readers is thereby
strongly compromised, indeed it is utterly “lost in
translation.” It is not so easy to say in what sense a
Korean poem, once it has been translated into English,
is still a “Korean poem.” In indealistic terms, of
course, a poem is a poem universally, it has no national
identity. But Koreans are intensely aware of national
identity issues, perhaps precisely because Korean
identity is so hard to define. At the immediate level, it is not only the
vocabulary and the grammar which have changed in the
process of translation; no matter how hard the version
may strive to be “conservative” or “faithful,” almost
always there will have been radical changes in the
sequence of words and phrases in the attempt to create a
“poem” in the target language, to say nothing of rhythms
and sounds. Moreover, certain vital words in the
original may have been found to have no equivalent in
the target language. Languages and cultures are
sometimes so very different. After all, the translation
of poetry as poetry is inevitably a struggle to provide
a completely new poetic quality in place of the lost
original poetic features; the nearest we can come to
satisfaction will be if we feel we have managed to
produce what Paul Ricoeur called an “adequate
equivalent.” As a translation, it must still be
recognizably “the same poem,” yet it can never in any
real sense be “the same poem.” Now the Korean language is certainly not
all that is meant by the “Koreanness” of a Korean poem.
The life-experience or “culture” embodied in a Korean
poem is usually very specifically Korean, in often
really untranslateable ways. I will start with 2
examples so that we can see what this means. Here is a
commented translation of a poem by Lee Si-Young,
designed to explore as fully as possible the full range
of difficulties confronting the translator. 뚜
부네 Ttubu-ne For a Korean the title probably feels
homely, it being an old-style, rural, woman’s nickname
with implications of low status, possible lack of a
husband, and an (unclear) relationship with tofu. As a
proper name, it demands to remain unchanged in
translation, but none of these implications will be
apparent to a non-Korean, who will not recognize that
“Ttubu-ne” is a person’s name. 달
착지근하고
포
실포실한 기장떡을만들어 파는 뚜
부네는
굴
속 같은
외
침읫들에 살았다 Ttubu-ne, who sold the succulent, spongy
millet cakes she made, lived in Oechimeuitteul, a god-forsaken
hole. The poem begins with two pieces of
biographical information, telling us something of what
this unknown person, “Ttubu-ne,” did and where she
lived. The past tense in line 2 suggests that these are
memories from the past. The translation of Korean food
names is always immensely problematic and gijang-tteok (tteok being
usually translated as “rice-cake” but that is not a
western-style cake baked in an oven, and this one is
made using millet) is unfamilar even probably to many
urban Koreans; there is clearly no English word that
could evoke an equivalent food; this is the realm of
Proust’s “madeleines” and yet more. The poet focuses
mainly on the taste and texture of the gijang-tteok
but it also indicates something of Ttubu-ne’s social and
economic poverty, suggesting that making and selling it
(on the streetside or house-to-house, perhaps) is her
sole source of income. The two adjectives chosen to
characterize the ‘cake’ could not be more Korean and
untranslateable. The first, 달
착지근하다
‘dalchakjigeun(hada)’ is one of a set
of characteristic, pseudo-onomatopoeic words
indicating degrees of ‘somewhat sweetish’—달차근- (dalchageun-), 달
짝지근하다’- (daljjakjigeun-) being variants. The
second, 포실포실하다 (posilposil-hada, also written as
bosilboshil), is likewise a purely Korean word (with no
Chinese root) using onomatopoeic sound quality to
suggest a feeling of spongy softness. Here the standard
dictionary is of no help; it defines the word 포
실포실하다
either as referring to something
over-dry and hard to crumble, or light rain / snow
falling, or puffs of smoke rising . . . Neither of the
two Korean words is quite usual and neither have any
possible direct English equivalent.
The second line centers on the (clearly very
small and remote) rural locality where Ttubu-ne lives,
called Oechimeuitteul, described as being “like the
inside of a cave,” an existing Korean idiom (ie not a
new image created by the poet) usually applied to a
dark, pokey, gloomy room, but here perhaps better
translated as “god-forsaken.” Again, the feeling
conveyed by the name of the place will not be apparent
to the non-Korean reader. 키
가
장
대한 그
아
들은 일찌기
집
을 나가 역
전과
읍
내 사이를
오
가며 태
비를
받
고 짐을
실
어 나르는
말
몰이꾼이었고 이
름이
생
각나지 않는그 손녀는썩은새 무너져내리는추녀 밑에서 손
한
번 써보지
못
하고 밑이
빠
져 죽었다고도
한
다 Her towering son, a pack-horse driver, left home early on, earned a few pennies
transporting loads between station forecourt and township
center; her grand-daughter, I forget her name, died
under a sagging roof of rotten straw , helpless, suffering from a chronic
prolapse. The poem passes on from Ttubu-ne to her son
without any more information about her. This unnamed son
“left home” early in his life, perhaps (we imagine)
because there was no work for him there. The father of
the son remains unmentioned. The son, we are told, moved
all the way to the nearby township, almost two miles
away, where he could earn some money. It is might be
helpful for the reader to know that the railway station
of the township of Gurye, where Lee Si-Young grew up,
was built by the Japanese a couple of miles away on the
far side of the town, meaning that on market days
transport of loads of goods being brought in for sale
would be essential. An indication that Ttubu-ne is
already elderly is given by the fact of her having had a
grand-daughter who was no longer a child when she died;
there is no information about the son’s wife. Another challenge for the translator or
non-Korean reader comes with the description of the
house where the grand-daughter lived and died. The roof
is made of “sseogeun-sae”
and has “sagging, drooping, about-to-collapse eaves.”
The reader has to be familiar with the appearance of
poor housing in the rural Korea of times gone by. The
roofs were covered with a thatch of rice-straw which
projected beyond the low mud-walls to provide shelter
(the eaves). Rice-straw rots easily and these roofs had
to be re-covered virtually every year if they were to
remain bright and waterproof; poor people could not
afford the cost of the straw and therefore their roofs
grew black in summer rains and winter snow, the rotting
thatch would sag and droop toward the ground.
The speaker recalls only the grand-daughter’s
life and death, not her name, in two ways. First, her
helplessness, there was nothing she could do (“she could
not once use her hands” he says), and her physical
suffering. The “prolapse” (a rather awkward medical term
in the English, there being no colloquial term
corresponding to 밑
이 빠져, “bottom-fallen”) she endured was, the
poet says, common among poor rural women who were never
able to eat properly and suffered severe constipation
from their poor diet, which might include tree bark.
Traditionally women could only eat whatever was left
over after the men of the family had finished. So the
story of Ttubu-ne’s family’s life is one of extreme
poverty. Yet she has somehow survived and the poem’s
main story, for it is a narrative, then develops as a
childhood memory. 오
릿길
학
교에서 돌아와다리가 아프다고하면 어
머니는
사
람을 놓아
뚜
부네를 불러잔밥을 메기게했다 If I said my leg was hurting after walking
the mile home from school, Mother would summon Ttubu-ne and have her
offer food to the spirits. Here the poem’s speaker turns to his own
direct memory of childhood, in which Ttubu-ne figures.
He recalls his schooldays; from his home to the school
was, he says, using traditional measurement, “five ri” (about 2
kilometers). “Kilometers” is not a word that works well
in poetry, compared with “miles.” By the time the poem’s
memory-persona came walking back home from school, he
would not (we might think) be very eager to go out and
work in the fields, so he might complain (falsely?) that
his legs were hurting (children do that). The
translator’s (and the reader’s) problem comes with his
mother’s response. Instead of scolding or threatening
the child, she would send a servant to fetch Ttubu-ne,
to “have her feed hulled rice.” The poem does not
explain, the reader just has to understand that Ttubu-ne
was considered a kind of shaman or healing-woman, who
knew the traditional spells. In the south-western region
especially, the simplest kind of spell for relieving
pain consisted in filling a bowl with hulled rice and
wrapping it in a cloth. The wise-woman / shaman would
recite a prayer to a spirit, either the family / house
spirit or one coming from outside to cause trouble, then
rub the affected place with the wrapped rice. This
Ttubu-ne does in what follows. 얼
굴이
까
무잡잡하니 빡빡얽은 뚜부네가 공
기에
입
쌀을 잔뜩
넣
고 청베에
감
아 다리를
쓱
쓱 문지르면 거
짓말처럼
아
파던 다리가
낫
고 대
신
탱
탱하던 공기에쌀이 줄어있었다 Ttubu-ne, her face swarthy, pock-marked, would fill a bowl to the brim with hulled
rice, wrap it in a blue hemp cloth and rub my leg
hard with it, at which, like a lie, the leg that was
hurting would get better. Instead, in the bowl that had been packed
full, the rice would grow less. At the start of this passage, we are given
a glimpse of Ttubu-ne’s face, looming over the little
boy with the aching leg; she is not simply dark-skinned,
the poem uses another couple of intensely Korean
pseudo-onomatopoeic words, ‘까
무잡잡하니 kkamujapjip(-hada)’ expressing her
swarthy, dark complexion from constant outdoor labor,
and ‘빡
빡 얽은 ppakppak eoggeun’ a conventional
combination used to evoke the pits and scars left by
smallpox. For a child, this might have made a strong and
frightening impression, a face from the remote Korean
past. The rest of the process is fairly simple, and the
pain vanished, the poet says, “like a lie,” words which
might suggest that his leg had not really been hurting
to begin with. The child that he was seems impressed to
see that the rice, which had been heaped up under the
cloth, seems to be diminishing, as though being eaten by
a spirit, or (of course) being shaken out of the bowl
into the folds of the cloth. 참
새때
줄
줄이 내려와
을
씨년스런 석양빛쪼는 저녁 뚜
부네는
마
당네 코를
휑 풀며
재
잘거리는 참새떼들은탁 내쫓고는 치
맛자락에
잔
밥 메기던
쌀
을 싸
안
고 울
바자
너
머로 돌아가는
것
이었다 At evening, when flocks of sparrows came
flying down, pecked in the bleak sunset glow , Ttubu-ne would blow her nose noisily in the
yard as she drove away the chattering sparrows, then she would head homeward beyond the
fence, holding the rice she’d offered wrapped in
the hem of her skirt. The poem ends with a kind of epilogue of a
peaceful rural evening, Ttubu-ne performing the usual
service of driving away the sparrows that would eat
anything they could find, before heading home, carrying
the rice from the ceremony she had been given as a
payment for the exorcism. The “Koreanness” of this poem exists in
part, then, at the level of its very specifically Korean
vocabulary, with vivid, expressive words from colloquial
popular speech which have no equivalent in boring
literary English. The Koreanness equally exists at the
level of the millet cakes, the appearance of the house,
the social realities. Above all, though, it exists in
the folk religion of magic spells and simple exorcisms,
which is aready in contrast to the modern world in which
children go to school to study. Over all, the poet
recalls a rural childhood surrounded by a Korean culture
that very largely no longer exists, in even the most
remote village, while he is no longer a child but an
elderly poet, and lives in Seoul. He does not idealize
or expect nostalgia for the poverty and the ignorance,
yet he invites the readers to share his fond memory of
childhood evenings full of chattering sparrows, and
celebrates the memory of a special woman, the like of
whom one cannot find today. Many modern Korean poets exploit memory, as
Lee Si-Young does, and their memories are also set in
specifically Korean contexts of various kinds. Some
other aspects of Koreanness appear in the poem
“Masan-po” by Kim Soo-Bok: 마
산포 Masan-po Here, too, the title is problematic. This
is a real, sea-side place name (-po means harbor) on the
west coast of Korea just south of Incheon, but of such
obscurity that few Koreans have heard of it. It lies in
Songnan-myeon, Gopo-ri, and was used as an alternative
landing-place to Jemul-po (Incheon) by the Chinese in
the later 19th century. The ending –po means
“harbor” but if we translate the title as “Masan Harbor”
that will cause confusion with the large and well-known
city and port of Masan on the south-eastern coast near
Busan. The challenge in translating this poem lies
in the very great difference between Korean and English
grammar and word-order. Especially the first stanza, if
seen in its Korean word order, seems incoherent: 마
산포에는
이
제 바다가
없
습니다 그풍성한 젖가슴까지드러내 놓고누워 있던저녁바다로 가는길 안개는걷히고 길안으로 온몸을밀고 들어서던선창집 마당발목을 적셔주던저녁바다는 없습니다 “In Masan-po now sea is not. / That ample
breast exposed used to lie / to the evening sea going
path / fog clearing / into the path whole body thrusting
/ used to enter / wharf tavern yard / ankles used to
soak / evening sea is not. This is a particularly vivid example of the
way in which Korean word-order and grammar do not at all
correspond to standard English word-order and grammar.
It is only after much pondering that a possibly
acceptabl, more coherent phrasing emerges in English: “There is no sea now in Masan-po. The path
leading to the evening sea, which used to lie with its
ample breast exposed and then, as the fog cleared, come
surging boldly up the path to the wharfside tavern yard
and there soak my ankles, that evening sea is no more.”
The poet has explained that in the 1970s, when he
was teaching in a rural school, he used to go there and
watch the tide come flooding in till he was up to his
ankles in water. The poem begins with an unexplained
elegaic note of loss: there is now no sea in Masanpo.
There, as in many places along the west coast of Korea,
reclamation of wetlands and other large-scale works have
cut former harbors off from the sea. But there is also a
wider sense of lost youth, lost vigor which does not
require any very clear explanation. The rest of the poem
requires less of a struggle but the poem as a whole has
an overall Koreanness which distinguishes it clearly
from any kind of English poetry I can think of. It is a
fine example of a Korean poem in which the words are not
being used in a poetic manner, not exactly the standard
way. I consider it my task to reproduce the oddness,
without necessarily thinking that I “understand” exactly
what is being said. 저
녁
불
빛으로 먼섬들을 밝히고섬들의 마음까지나누어주던 마산포저녁바다, 사람들은밀물이 들던저녁까지 파도의젖은 노래에젖었다가 바다를안고 내륙의몸으로 돌아갔으나이제는 아무도돌아오지 않습니다 The evening sea at Masan-po used to shine
on distant islands with an evening glow, sharing the
islands' very hearts, and people, after bathing in the
waves' soaking songs until evening, when the tide came
in, would return as inland bodies embracing the sea, but
now no-one returns. 바
람에
흔
들리는 發船의등 뒤갈대숲 사이로안개 새들이발목을 적시는마산포 바다, 사
람들이 바다를가슴에 안고돌아갔다가 돌려주지않아도 분노하지않는 마산포바다, 수줍어하던가슴도 잃어버린메마른 젖무덤만갖고 있는마산포 바다, The Masan-po sea where fog-birds used to
soak their ankles between the reed beds behind the backs
of departing boats rocking in the wind, the Masan-po sea
that was never angry though people who had embraced the
sea returned then failed to return, the Masan-po sea
that now has only dry teats, having lost those breasts
that were once so bashful. 먼
파
도와 초승달에게
이
제 젖을
물
릴 수도
없
는 마산포
바
다, 마른바람의 얼굴을만지며 갈대숲사이로 새들은저녁바다의 젖무덤속으로 쓰러져들어가 죽었다가저녁 노을로번지는 마산포바다, The Masan-po sea that cannot now suckle
distant waves and the new moon, the Masan-po sea where
between the reed beds, stroking the dry wind's face,
birds used to go falling into the evening sea's breast
and die, then spread as a twilight glow, 하
혈로
빈 몸이
되
어 일어서지도
못
하는 바다
하
나 누워
있
습니다 One sea lies there, its body drained of
blood, unable to rise again. In both these examples, my final English
version is obviously working very hard to be as
“faithful” and “literal” as I can make it, but the
second example remains even more distinct from the
Korean original than the Ttubu-ne poem. It has to try to
be “close,” first, because that is the pressure I am
constantly under from Koreans, whether they be the poets
or the general public. “That is not exactly what the
Korean says,” usually means “this is no good.” As it
happens, I am more than happy with this because I simply
have no idea at all what else I might do. The general
public has recently been invited by Modern Poetry in
Translation to create “versions” in English of a
Spanish poem about olives on a plate; that is one thing,
perhaps. A Korean poem about feeding spirits with rice
to cure sore legs is quite another. But you might
disagree. I do not consider in any case consider a
translation I have made to be “my poem;” I want it still
to be “the Korean poet’s poem” even if the poet cannot
speak English very well. That is what I am troubled by
in very freely rendered versions which are still called
“translations” of a “poem by xxx.” There is, surely, no one “correct’ way of
translating anything, and especially poetry. There is no
one right way, even, of comparing one translation with
another and declaring that one is “better” than the
other, assuming that the versions are not full of basic
grammatical errors, I suppose. Everyone does as they
like when they translate, and then they tend to
formulate “translation theories” to prove that their
approach is the only correct one and everyone else is
wrong. However, generally speaking, I would be inclined
to say that often people who are native Korean-speakers
or almost bilingual Korean-English often seem to be much
less careful to be “accurate” when translating from
Korean into English than those who, like me, look up
almost every word in the dictionary. This will be
because they reckon they know at a glance what a Korean
text is basically saying; as a result, almost-bilingual
translators tend, I think, not to look very hard at just
how it is saying it, at the precise weight and rhythm
and nuance given by each of the words and phrases used.
Instead, they rapidly formulate an approximate
equivalent in the English side of their brain. The
approximation is then justified as being the way an
English speaker might say more or less the same thing.
This usually becomes even more rapid and even less
precise when the translating mind is strongly
native-speaking Korean, because Koreans tend to assume
that they understand anything written in Korean (which
is not true, of course) but since they are not fully
bilingual, the English side of the equation is then
usually far from equal to the task of finding adequate
equivalents. “I know what it means, so I can translate
it” is the source of more bad translations than anyone
could count. I am struck to see how many Koreans who
have lived for many years overseas write what is really
rather poor English, without apparently realizing it.
My own pet “theory” of translation is that the
process of literary translation involves an ongoing
“close reading” of the source text, with intense respect
for each of the words that the poet has decided to use.
The difference between the Korean and English languages
is such that “word for word” is not a useful term for
the translating process, but still I believe that a
translator is not allowed to go skipping blithely over
words, ignoring them or replacing them as if they do not
matter. There are, of course, those who even insist that
a “good” translation should reproduce precisely the
rythms and sounds of the original; the Russian
poet-in-exile Josef Brodsky is the prime example of
that, in the translations he insisted on making of his
own Russian poems. In Old Testament translation, too,
there have been those who insist that the grammar of the
translation should be the grammar of the sacred Hebrew
text, not the natural grammar of the target language.
This is not, I think, a good idea, but it should be
mentioned once, if only to be rejected, because in
poetry translation there are compelling reasons for not
being bound by the rythms and sounds and grammar of the
original; they are normally secondary and essentially
“untranslateable.” I want to comment here on a very important
aspect of the process of poetry translation. Poems are
often very unlike fiction in the way they use words and
grammar. Modern Korean poetry is often extremely
difficult to understand, even for Koreans. This is
especially the case with younger poets’ work. I myself
certainly do not have a total Korean dictionary in my
head, and there is no really complete dictionary of
colloquial Korean in the bookstores. That means that no
matter how hard I try, I will either fail to understand
things or (worse still) misunderstand things that I
think I understand. Even if I see there is a problem,
what am I to do? If I ask an “ordinary” Korean to
explain a really difficult poem or line or word, s/he
will often not be able to. I cannot be phoning to the
poet every 5 minutes, and poets are really not good at
explaining things either. That is why I am immensely
grateful to the rare skilled Koreans whom agree to read
through my translations, comparing them with the
original, pinpointing mistakes and suggesting
corrections. They need to have a high level of literary
English, and at the same time to be very experienced
readers of modern Korean poetry. Without them I would be
lost. And for translators into English whose native
language is Korean, well, the need is the opposite. No
matter how hard they have studied English or how long
they have lived overseas, English is not their first,
native language. Some are really very good, but they are
rare, and usually the challenge of translating from
Korean steers their English away from what is natural,
the Korean exercises a strong “interference” and the
result is in “translationese.” So my message is that we
should try not to have to work alone. Translation should
always involve working as a community. And my basic
message is that one can only really translate well into
one’s native language
The “foreign-ness” of Korean poetry is thus well
assured, despite its historic rootedness in European
Symbolism or Modernism. The subjects of the poems in Ko
Un’s Maninbo,
of Shin Kyong-Nim’s Nongmu, of many
of Lee Si-Young’s poems, and a host of others, derive
from specifically Korean experiences of life and
history, loss and humiliation, joys and relationships.
The Korean poet confronting experiences of human life
after Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, division,
dictatorship, social transformation, does not stand on
the same ground as a British or American poet, just as
an Irish poet does not, even though writing in the same
language. Korean poetry has a totally different
tradition and offers a totally different canon, it does
not have the same audience or readership in mind, does
not speak in the same way. Recent Korean feminist
“confessional poetry” may claim to look to Anne Sexton
and Sylvia Plath but that does not mean it is doing the
same thing as they did, or that the Korean female poets
are expressing the same responses to the same
experiences. I should perhaps add here that the
translation of fiction is not at all the same kind of
exercise as the translation of a poem. The scale is
different, and so is the focus of the writer’s
endeavors. Fiction tells stories and fills many pages;
the reader’s attention is not focussed on each
individual word in the same way as with poetry.
Moreover, fiction is far more of a commercial product
than poetry; it is published in the hope of being sold
in large quantities. Therefore good publishers are going
to insist on editing any comparatively “faithful”
translation in order to make it more easily “readable.”
A well-known example is the considerable rewriting
undertaken before the publication of the Korean novel
“Please Look After Mom.” It is my opinion that a
translator should not be expected to act as editor, and
should certainly not be editing at the same time as
translating. The stylistic editing of a novel will
always be best done by someone who cannot refer back to
the original.
Another way of evoking the specific task of the
translator is to stress that a poem is written by an
individual poet; it is the result of a creative process
which happens in the mind of a particular individual
using a particular language and set of literary
conventions. The resulting poem is inevitably composed
of words and meaning, sound and sense, which are bound
to be a unity since nobody can produce meaning without
words, while the words of a poem are normally chosen for
considerations of both sense and sound, insofar as
poetry in most cultures, as in Korean, retains an oral,
spoken character, with links to song in many cases.
There are, of course, many ways in which the relative
importance of sound and sense can vary, since there are
different kinds of poetry in most or all cultures. Lyric
poems usually depend more on the harmonious sounds of
the words and their flow, while satirical or
philosophical poems, as well as narrative poems, rely
more heavily on the meaning of the words chosen. The
skill of a poet is revealed by the way in which a poem
is made, no matter whether it emerged complete directly
from the poet’s mind / imagination in a flash or was the
result of long polishing and revision. We must always
remember that the word “poet” originally meant “maker.”
Now that is the essential difference between an
original poem and a translation of it. The words of a
translation cannot emerge in the same free, creative
flow; instead, they are bound to be the result of a more
or less laborious negociation as we read and re-read,
attempt to understand, imitate and re-create the poem
(at the semantic level, first of all, almost inevitably)
using the words and grammar of another language. The
translator is not the original poet, and calling the
resulting poem a “version” instead of a “translation”
still does not justify betraying the poet and hijacking
his work. Great poets are Great Poets, in a way that
talented translators can never be “great” translators, I
think. The translator does not dispose of total creative
freedom, not even when he is called Ezra Pound or John
Dryden and is, like them, consciously refusing to be
“faithful.” We are always, inevitably, under the shadow
of the original, struggling with the demand to recreate
it “exactly” as it was, yet knowing that, no matter what
we do, we are going to produce a radically new poem,
which will have totally different sounds and rhythms,
words and grammar; yet we also know that it should still
be somehow identical with the original, knowing that the
published text will be attributed first and foremost to
the original poet, not the translator. There is a sense
in which the work of translation is closer to pastiche
and parody than to “creative writing.” I suppose I should find comfort in a dictum
by Vladimir Nabokov: “The clumsiest literal translation
is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest
paraphrase.” He and Joseph Brodsky are the great enemies
of the free recreations of Russian poetry and fiction
sometimes justified as “versions” or “adaptations.”
Nabokov was scathing: “Adapted to what? To the needs of
an idiot audience? To the demands of good taste? To the
level of one’s own genius?” Nabokov strongly advocated
what he termed “literal” translation (as opposed to “the
paraphrastic” and “the lexical”) “rendering as closely
as the associative and syntactical capacities of another
language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the
original. Only this is true translation.” We should
recall that whenever we are tempted to “improve” on what
a close, faithful translation yields in the name of
“readability.” The results of Nabokov’s and Brodsky’s
wish to see the original Russian language still
perfectly embodied and embedded in their English
translations have provoked furious debate, but it is
important not to reject their challenge too readily. The dichotomy between “faithful” and
“readable” in translation cannot, in fact, be finally
resolved. Fitzgerald’s 19th-century version
of the Persian poem Rubaiyat of
Omar Kayam is probably the most famous or notorious
example of “free translation,” of what today is known as
“domestication.” It is also the most enduring and
successful single translation ever published in English,
after the Bible, with Amazon listing some 20 editions
currently in print, even after 140 years. “Everyone”
knows the famous quatrain 12 (from the 5th edition,
1889): A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness— Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! Yet the same text, translated in 1988 by an
outstanding Persian translator, Karim Emami, with a
desire to be faithful to the original reads: In spring if a houri-like sweetheart Gives me a cup of wine on the edge of a
green cornfield, Though to the vulgar this would be
blasphemy, If I mentioned any other Paradise, I'd be
worse than a dog. Few readers of English are going to prefer
that second, “faithful” version on esthetic grounds,
although it is certainly interesting to be able to
glimpse the extent of Fitzgerald’s creative freedom. He
himself clearly expressed the options he took in letters
written to a friend: "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). And, "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). There, I believe, we can find our
consolation. If our translations do not set out to soar
like eagles in their own right but humbly flutter as
sparrow-signposts indicating the existence of another
kind of poetry in another kind of culture and language,
we should be happy. It does not matter what we do, there
will always be nasty people who will find fault and
criticize. We must not let that afflict us. Sparrows do
not worry about not being able to soar like eagles,
because they know that at least nobody will be out
trying to shoot them down to have them stuffed as
trophies on the mantelpiece. If a translator simply
says, “Translation is an impossible project but I have
done all that I could to produce something worthy of my
original,” that’s enough. Translation is not
self-promotion but a humble service. Chapman had to wait
centuries for Keats to wax ecstatic over his version of
Homer, and so make him immortal. Who wants to be a
stuffed eagle, gathering the dust, after all? We should
simply let our live sparrows chirp as they can, and not
look for any other reward. So long as the poems we have
translated live! |