Lost and found in translation, Iowa City Public Library, September 28, 2005 |
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Lost and found in translation, Iowa City Public Library, September 28, 2005
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| Rating | |
| Title | Lost and found in translation, Iowa City Public Library, September 28, 2005 |
| Creator |
Strojan, Marjan Abduljabbar, Nadia Pék, Zoltán Wright, Wendy Ella |
| Creator - Nationality |
Slovenian Saudi Hungarian Australian |
| Contributor |
Durovicová, Nataša |
| Date Original | 2005-09-28 |
| Description | Beyond describing the necessary qualities in translating poetry--"honesty, musical ears, investigating for the right things behind things"--Nadia Abduljabbar's talk goes into the difficulties of translating cultural experiences and expectations between languages. Marjan Strojan dissects perspectives on translation from Martin Heidegger, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Robert Frost, John Dryden, and Seamus Heaney. Zoltán Pék deconstructs the "trance-lator" as craftsman, artist, and critic, describing the role as the "dubious yet essential" vehicle for getting from "here" and "somewhere else." Wendy Ella Wright discusses how exile lends itself to a rich translation experience. |
| Venue |
Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Nadia Abduljabbar (Saudi Arabia) First of all I’d like to say that I am a person who could rarely be lost in any sense except that of finding streets and locations—I was born with the gift, which some might consider a curse, of a kind of internal radar, of knowing my way and my target. I've had this sense since I was a child and before reading any Holy Book: the Qur’an or the Bible. Since I was a child I have hated lying so much, and reproached my eldest sister at the age of three for lying to me. I loved music as well. I cared for sincerity and honesty in whatever I felt and, hence, I demanded that I be treated in that manner; something made me closer to animals and birds rather than human beings. Poor teachers of mine, they suffered a lot to convince me that they were right. I am saying all of this to introduce you to the field of poetic translation, because these qualities are very necessary for a translator of poems, i.e. honesty, musical ears, investigating for the right things behind things. I never thought of translating my English poems into Arabic, though I taught translation at the primary and advanced levels for more than a decade. One of my students translated my poem “The Dreamy Shadow and the Eagle Sparrow” and I kept her translation, with slight changes, and it is in my first book of poetry. I did that out of respect and encouragement for her and for all of the other students who try to translate for me or any other poet. Then I was invited to read my poetry in a festival that was held when the capital Riyadh was chosen as the capital of culture for the year 2000. They asked me to translate at least six of my poems and I did not object since I already taught translation. Actually I was thrilled by the new experience that I was about to dive into. I am not a specialist in linguistic theories of translation, yet I have the ability to do the work since I speak and write well in both Arabic, my mother tongue, and English, my field of study. Saudi and non-Saudi writers have praised my Arabic and English articles in different Saudi Arabian and English newspapers. I enjoyed the process of translation and I felt like reliving the experience, but in a different mode. The accumulated experiences and feelings that made me write in the first place (but which ended years ago), were relived passionately in a way that suited my passionate Arabic veins. It was a fantastic experience, the likes of which I had never passed through before. The reliving of painful experiences caused sleepless nights that I passed translating and crying at the same time. Therefore, my true emotions reached my Arabic audience and some of them cried when I read the Arabic versions of my elegies about my mother and step-mother. My translation was not literal, for I was translating creatively. Creative writing, for me, could not be translated except creatively. I added phrases and sentences which elaborated the meaning of my poetry for my Arabic audience (who had a totally different background), as I did with the lines that display the effect of Shakespeare’s plays on my images. For example the lines in my poem about divorce: Facing you in wonder At the serpent under The petals of the flower which reflect the image Lady Macbeth used in her villainous advice to her husband, could not be translated exactly as they are. Yet the similarity between the man and the snake 1 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp echoed in another line in which the man���s voice was like a snake’s hissing. Another image: “full of the milk of human kindness” could not be translated literally because it would appear meaningless to the Arabic audience, few of whom are in touch with the Shakespearean play. Moreover, in the translation of my poem “Fired Fear & Firing Fruitful Feelings,” I added a few humorous lines which do not exist in the English poem, in order to make fun of literal translation, which is something the Arabs like to joke about. My amazement reached its peak when my poems that touch the supposedly taboo topic of the expression of female sexuality, such as “Taming the Wild Horse” and “Hide and Seek,” were accepted by the Arabic audience as well as the officials in the Ministry of Information. It seems that I fell into the trap of stereotyping which many people in the West and other parts of the world fall into when speaking about Arabia. I went well-equipped to the Ministry of Information to justify my poems about sexuality and to tell them that it is mentioned in my Arabic introduction that these feelings were expressed for a husband, or for a man who was about to be a husband, not in a religiously forbidden relation—but they did not even ask because it was art…or rather a kind of work of imagination. My book took only a few days to be read and to officially receive permission to be printed. I began to analyze the reasons for myself, saying: maybe they accepted it because in some poems I reminded the beloved that fear of committing “the forbidden” was killing me from within. But this was not the case of all the love poems; and in some of them I confessed in English as in Arabic that I was pondering guiltlessly over the “forbidden,” but did not proceed to action. I became content that they did not care whether my experience was lived or imagined. I also omitted some expressions, very few, which could not be understood easily by Arabic readers. I tried to create internal music through alliteration and assonance, as well as use a rhyme scheme, though not on a regular basis. I was not afraid of my free verse being rejected, though we prefer classical poetry in Saudi Arabia. I began to analyze people’s reactions to my words: what was the cause of the effect of my words, my non-classical poetry? I began to ask those who wept and to my astonishment they almost all answered in the same way: the amount of sincerity and honesty in describing your feelings, your daring attitude, your musical sense and your passionate reading drew tears from our eyes. We cried even for your son’s feelings when he lost his cat. They helped me to reach this conclusion: whether one’s poetry is classical or formal is not the main issue, even in the Arabic world now. What is important is the description of feeling. The Arabic equivalent for the word “poetry” is “she’r,” the noun that is taken from the verb “sha’ar,” “felt or to feel.” The idea of expressing one’s feeling in an honest way is the essence of poetry even for the Arabs who care so much for the music conveyed by poetry. The true expression of the feeling is the “essence,” even to the musical Arabic ear. 2 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Marjan Strojan (Slovenia) LOST AND FOUND IN TRANSLATION – A Panel ‘Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei’ Translation in its most basic form is a transfer (in a language) of one’s meaning into another language, retaining that same meaning in the new language. On another level it is (also) a transposition of the form and shape of the original into the forms of speech of the target language. It is therefore my honest opinion that all can be very easily lost and that nothing much (or as little as possible) ought to be found in translation—except for the thing translated, that is. I believe that the translator who is in the business of finding much besides that which has already been found by the author waves his or her credentials too high. These credentials are hard to gain (especially those in the poetry department), and whatever skills related to finding they include must eo ipso exclude as much secondary invention, poetic or otherwise, as is humanly possible. And according to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, poets have a special place and responsibility in this. In his essay on the Anaximander Fragment, a meditation on how to translate the Greek terms on and einai into German, he equates thinking with the act of poetry. To use language in a non-poetic way, he says (and I paraphrase), is to live in only one dimension of time: chronological time. But again and again in the history of translation, we run up against the fact that this process appears to unfold outside of time and space, where translation stands as the contact barrier between the text and myself—but a barrier that exists solely to facilitate contact. Remove the barrier, and contact would be impossible, for there would be no distinction between you and me. Not only would the essence of the thing not be defined, we too would have no edges. No subject would be preserved. But when it is preserved, then the work of art works on its translator, too; within him a certain self-transcendence takes place, bringing him out of his fixation with the self and bringing him into a relationship with the text (Die Holzwege, 1950). What strikes me in Heidegger’s description of the translation process is how close it comes to our experience of the act of reading. Do we not while we read forget all space and time, become self-absorbed, and by the necessity of the action, self-transcend and bring ourselves out of fixation with the self and into a relationship with the text? We do, and Heidegger is right in saying so, for this is precisely what all translation first and foremost is: our reading of a text to the zero point of self-oblivion. No one I know of puts it better than the Victorian poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ���The life-blood of rhymed translation is this—that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one. The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language,” continues Rossetti, “must be to endow a fresh nation, as far as possible, with one more possession of beauty. Poetry not being an exact science, literality of rendering is altogether secondary to this chief aim. I say literality,—not fidelity, which is by no means the same thing. The task of the translator (and with all humility be it spoken) is one of some selfdenial” (Preface to The Early Italian Poets in Poems and Translations, 1850-1880). Let me very briefly touch on just two of Rossetti’s main points. I certainly believe that whatever comes out of translating poetry should be a poem, a good one preferably. But this is the touchiest of subjects in any discussion of poetry, and knowing as we all do what sometimes passes for a translation of verse, we can hardly grudge Vladimir Nabokov for saying that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Hermaneutics teaches us Nabokov may well be right in his austere judgment, 3 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp for there is no substitute for our reading in the original, especially in the case of poetry—it is a loss on our part when we can’t. Or as Robert Frost famously remarked, “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” For a translator of Frost this is a challenging thought, which—although not made for this purpose—must certainly put some of Rosetti’s humility and, even more to the point, some of his sobriety into the translator’s head. It undoubtedly put some into mine. Opinions of great writers are always welcome, but the crucial point to make in relation to the two mentioned, is that the notion of a poem as a fully realized work of art excludes it from being its own paraphrase. And if so, it appears that Nabokov is not talking of poetry translation in the sense Rosetti, Heidegger and Frost do. And, fair to say, by talking of translation Frost does in fact talk of something else, too. He is defining poetry by means of translation. In order to get to “his” definition of translation one would have to reverse the argument of the sentence and take it a step further, asserting—a) that no translation of a poem is capable of being poetic in the sense the poem itself can be—which is wrong; and b) that no meaningful poetry of any author can be deduced from any translation of his or her poems whatsoever, which is clear nonsense. With Frost you can’t reverse the argument. Its hidden assertion is a firm disbelief in the transferability of poetry as such, and this is a cultural belief and one that is not easy to see to. Languages are never totally equivalent—information loss or the necessity of adding information is a well-known feature of translations. If one wants to translate a piece from Chinese (a language without verbal tenses) into English, the translator has to add verbal tenses in English, and, as I’m told, many other things beside. The students here can read into this in their prescribed reading of Weinberger’s and Paz’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (where a little poem called Deer Enclosure by the Chinese poet is translated nineteen times over by as many different translators) and see how it comes about for themselves. However, in the case of poetry, translation becomes even more difficult than that due to the importance of sound. Sound, and the specific meanings attached to it—on which Frost so insisted in his many other, and may I say, more apt definitions of poetry and writing—are for the good part almost impossible to translate. As the German philosopher Schopenhauer concluded: “Poems cannot be translated; they can only be transposed, and that is always awkward.” So, beware of transpositions that do not make for awkward reading!? It is interesting to note, that in this Frost was not very far from Schopenhauer, for what he says in one of his subsequent qualifications of the above statement is (and I quote him from memory) that all good translations are interpretations and that the reading of them should therefore always leave us a little sadder for the fact of not having been able to read the original ourselves (R. F. Letters to Louis Untermeyer, 1963). The final test, I suppose, must here lie with the author. Would the old master find it satisfying? Would he even approve of it? Probably not, but how are we to know? Why, in many ways—and they are more than nineteen, I can tell you—I don’t approve of translations of my poetry, and some of them are of my own making! Poets are jealous guardians of their word-hoard (to borrow an expression from Beowulf); they are the dragons of the translator’s realm (if, indeed, the translator is allowed to possess such a thing). George Steiner is aware of that, when he says: “[I have taken translation to include] the writing of a poem in which a poem in another language is the vitalizing, shaping presence; a poem which can be read and responded to independently but which is not ontologically complete, a previous poem being its occasion, begetter, and in the literal sense, raison d'être” (The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, 1966). So, here we have it! The “shaping presence”—a mere shadow of the solidity of a notion required for a satisfying definition—but this is what we are looking for in any 4 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp transposition of a piece, be it musical or otherwise. And if we find it—indeed, if we recognize it as such—the translator’s work is being done. And it so happens that this work comes (in my view, anyway) very close to the work of a poet. Poetry’s chief function—and I put this up as my underlying belief or, as the Greeks would say, the hypothesis of anything I may say on the subject—poetry’s chief function and its very purpose in life is one of protecting the thing it presents (thus making it—as much as it can—inaccessible to appropriation). But, mind you, I say close, and this is all I say. No touching is allowed. As writers, we are within our own potentials all citizens of the world, as translators we only belong to one country and to one language—our own. And even this only for a certain period of time, some say fifty years at the max. By then the text would have been done twice, three times over—or forgotten. Now, as we come to more practical matters of poetry translation, I cannot but mention Ezra Pound’s How to Read with his three partite classification of poetry. Within the first of his strange Greek categories, melopoeia as he calls it, the words “are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning”; the second, phanopoeia, he describes as “a casting of images upon the visual imagination”; and the third logopoeia, as “the dance of the intellect among words.” The first can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even if he doesn’t speak the language, yet it is practically impossible to transfer or translate “save by divine accident, and for half a line at a time.” The second can “be translated almost, or wholly, intact. When it is good enough, it is practically impossible for the translator to destroy it save by very crass bungling.” (You would have noticed that the Chinese poem I referred to falls into this category.) The translation of third rests with us. “Having determined the original author’s state of mind, you may or may not be able to find… an equivalent.” If I am to go back to Robert Frost’s original subject of what can or cannot be lost (or found) in translated poetry, I think that Ezra Pound here explains his friend and rival, too. This is made obvious from Frost’s later qualifications of the subject, especially the ones made in the letters to Korean and Japanese writers, accessible in the correspondence chapter in the American Library Edition of his Collected Works. There he makes the first and partially the third of Pound’s three aspects of poetry subjects to our cultural inheritance, and thus the subjects of mutually exclusive thought and speech traditions, where quid pro quo is neither given nor tolerated. Strictly speaking, I agree with this view on general and historic terms. My objection is that it doesn’t take into account two things that do take place in intercultural exchanges—not only in linguistic ones, thank God, but of almost any kind. 1. There exits among certain writers in any age or place, and across the barriers the two present, a form of human and artistic understanding, a certain rapport between them which is hard to describe and which I will not try to describe now. All I can say is that if it didn’t exist we wouldn’t be here today and neither would this fine library—at least not as we see it, but in a much poorer state, bereft of many of its finest possessions. 2. Words, especially when used in the sense of Steiner’s “shaping presence,” have their own powerful means of defending themselves against the transgressions of their shape and sense. For sooner or later they will make nonsense out of the work that attempts such transgressions. If distorted they fight back with a vengeance which no attempt on them survives. The poetic intelligence secretly working behind it all is sometimes of such 5 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp proportions that it scares me to even talk about it. I like to tell my friends how awfully lost and stupid I often felt when translating Milton’s Paradise Lost. And I felt this with Frost, too. I felt like I was playing chess with Capablanca or Bobby Fisher, never knowing from which way the next blow will come; all I knew was it would not take long in coming. But the scariest and the surest thing of them all is that such powerful words always win their battles. The original survives, it always does, and it is only our feeble attempts at it that are being relegated to dust and oblivion. No wonder then there are so few who still want to do it and with so little success. Perhaps John Dryden said it best: “the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable [is that] there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise and so small encouragement for so considerable a part of learning” (Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern, 1700). So, if you ask me, is it really so hard as to make it almost impossible, I would say that it is. I hasten to add however, that translators, too, possess powerful tools which may go a long way in their favour. Not least among such tools of trade are our very own past blunders, which inform us better than any scholarly notes we have studied might do. They incite us to do better the second, third, fourth time around… But the chief of them (if I am allowed another unruly paraphrase) is love. And the respect for the object of it that goes with it. We often forget that as translators, linguists, scholars or whatever else we may be in relation to great poetry, we only see darkly. Of course, we can be whoever we like, but only as long as we are readers first, and amateur readers at that—that is to say “lovers” of it. Thus not only will we stay true to it, as Heidegger says, but the text itself will stay true to us. Then, if we have the ear for it, we may even hear it speak to us, softly most of the time, in our own language. I am aware that all this (or some of it) may sound to you like a rerun of some overtly poetical gobbledegook, but here is the testimony to what I say from a very famous colleague of mine, a translator of Beowulf and the Nobel laureate, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. This is what he says: “It is one thing to find lexical meanings for the words and to have some feel for how the metre might go, but it is quite another thing to find the tuning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work. Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish translator’s right-of-way into and through the text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away…” (Beowulf, Norton, 2001). What can I say, some fortunate fellow, Seamus! And with this I conclude. 6 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Zoltán Pék (Hungary) PERCHANCE TO TRANSLATE God grant me The serenity to accept The things I cannot translate, Courage To translate the things I can, And wisdom always To tell the difference I. Of Time and Translation If we accept that there is a world of literature within our life-world, then within this world of literature, translation is considered a netherworld, the very existence of which is dubious yet essential. It is a vehicle desperately needed and disregarded, tacitly accepted and condemned; it is the means by which this world of literature (indeed, The World as such) can exist: in certain cases we can understand each other without words, but these speechless moments are the rare instances of surfacing in the continuous flow of Language. Yet translation is not visible, it is intentionally forced underground; it is the outcast of both Language and Literature. However, the reasons for its vicissitudes are lucid and understandable. Though for lack of something better we acknowledge that what we read in Hungarian under the title of Az időről és a folyóról is really what Thomas Wolfe wrote as Of Time and the River, we are all aware that this is not true, or just halftrue–– or not even that? Thus when reading a translated text, we grudgingly accept this notion, which is drawn with vague and indistinguishable lines, but without which we would be deprived of the majority of literary works. It is the necessary evil between “here” and “somewhere else,” and did we not accept its existence, we would be imprisoned in the body-shaped coffin of our immediate thoughts. II. Deconstructing the Trance-lator Just as the status of translation is problematic, so is that of the translator. In the eyes of the world, he appears to be a half-mythical creature, the cross-breed of a book-moth and a hermit, living off words and dust, in seclusion from real life, the sole purpose of his––actually, its––existence being the transplantation of texts. However, things said or written are not self-contained and finished objects that can be taken on a pin and examined at one’s discretion. Language permits speech a space to reverberate, to echo; an utterance has its halo of possible meanings or references which can be approached and deciphered from several ways. Language is a boundary that can and must be transgressed, and for a translator the practice of translation should not be a scientific, detached operation; it is an interaction with the text, a living experience; a vigilant, once-in-a-lifetime adventure in Cruci-Fiction. Strange as it may seem, to be a translator is a unique state of being—more properly, of mind. A translator is a professional schizophrenic, continuously wandering on the edge, risking his sanity in the crashing zone of two languages and two cultures. He is operating in an elevated state of mind, as 7 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp if in trance––indeed, it is a creative trance, a state of bipolarity, of being at two places simultaneously, moving parallel in two worlds. In this sense, he is an exotic stranger, an itinerant of the ever-growing literary world. Invisibly, condemned to solitude, he enters this atypical state of awareness, becomes a trance-later. Now let us take a closer look at what a translator should be. Translator as craftsman Translation, not unlike any other activity, has a set of rules, practical knacks underlying the operation, the so-called tricks of the trade. This does not only cover the knowledge of the source language; the proficiency in the given language in itself is neither enough, nor a precondition as it has been proved by some of our great translators whose command of the given language was inadequate. What is needed can be termed a language sensibility: capability to acquire the techniques of grammatical and lexical correlation, ability in composition, and patience for toiling with words for countless hours. So when I say craftsmanship, I understand exactly what it implies: to obtain a certain amount of practical knowledge that can come through experience and practice. Nonetheless, when we talk about the art of translation we mean something more, which is much more impalpable, a certain quality that distinguishes the given work, elevates it above the mere display of diligent craftsmanship. Translator as artist From the point of view of literary criticism this aspect must exist, otherwise how can we account for the fact that acknowledged translators, even outstanding artists, produce strikingly different versions of one original? Here I think of all the Shakespeare translations in Hungarian. For me, this substantiates the idea of translation as art, and within that belonging to the performing arts, since so far satisfactory explanations have not emerged for the so-called masterpiece translations––only if we acknowledge the existence of another “trans” element that has a role during translation, and this is the transcendental influence, also known as “inspiration.” Yet a translator is a special kind of performer, he is an applied artist. He does not, in the strictest sense, create something new, “only” a version of something already existing. Like a tightrope-dancer, his space to maneuver is predetermined, strongly limited; yet this does not mean that he only imitates. It takes time to translate a text––especially a novel––during which time he is the target of a variety of influences from the world. He does weave his own experiences into the text, but as an applied artist, a hired hand, he is supposed to execute this within certain limits. Translator as critic For a good translation this aspect is of utmost importance, though with translation degenerating into an industry, this is probably the first to vanish. Translation should be active criticism, and here both words are to be considered separately as well. Firstly, translation is criticism, since the translator should have a preconceived notion of the book as a whole and a hole: a “whole” as id-entity and a “hole” as a form to be filled in his language. Secondly, translation is more than literary criticism in the sense that it is done actively during translation, since one penetrates not just beyond the text or sentences but also beyond the words one by one, constantly mapping out the realms of possible meanings and references. It is the translator who decides where he narrows down or augments the meaning; he is the filter, responsible both towards the author and the reader; he is the negotiator in the eternal war of opposing languages. Here I seem to contradict my view about translation as art; however, this contradiction is precisely what makes all the difference—it is thanks to this that translation is not wholly identified with either 8 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp craft, or with art. Being a translator is more and less like being an artist: “more” in the sense that I need to be the artist and create a text, yet less in that during this creation I cannot let myself go amok as an artist can, I cannot just do anything I want, my hands are tied and I have to make the best out of it. At the same time, I have to extrapolate myself out of the process, and observe myself and the text (which, as it happens with the writer, gains its form in my mind, in my little black box), from outside, from a distance, as a critic does. By adding craft or skill to this, I would like to call it the (wholly, hole-y, unholy) “trinity of translation:” skill as practical knowledge gained by experience; inspiration achieved in moments of enlightenment; and a critical and self-critical stance maintained by constant self-reflexivity and self-control. We have, once more, wandered into a territory of metaphors, vague expressions, the gothic terra incognita of Language. And, as the pattern suggests, maybe not by chance, this is exactly what happens during translation: from an object (a book, a text) the translator’s mind creates a shadowy existence, a chimera of words, and then turns this into another object. III. As I Lay Translating From the very beginning, translation has been plagued by theories and premises regarding how it is—or supposed to be—working, and in the last thirty years translation studies have gained outstanding popularity all over the world. The assumptions range from equivalence (that one word or sentence of this language is in a one-to-one relationship with another of that language) through linguistics (when you try to solve the mystery of a text by reducing it to impotent nouns and verbs) to hermeneutics (where translation is first and foremost cultural transfer), and this is to name just a few. As a translator I found that these theories have little relevance during the actual labor; in themselves they are sterile parts, unproductive elements. It is the translator who is the vehicle of the process; it is in his mind that the cross-language transition can take place. While working, he is in a unique state of mind, experiencing cultural schizophrenia––it is a trance, an intensive awareness of language as a natural entity. It is impossible to dissect a text, a living organism into isolated parts. One can claim that grammar and vocabulary make up the bone-structure, and meanings and symbols are the flesh. Then the eternal question arises: Soul, where art thou? I chose “trance” as a central metaphor because it conveys the feeling of this being in between: entering a trance is to fall asunder; the body is left behind by the wandering mind. The very essence of translation is this bipolarity, being simultaneously here and there, constructing a fleeting gateway between two languages, two cultures, and two worlds. My point of departure was the impossibility of translation, and this barren wasteland where I have arrived seems to be the same place. Yet the journey was not wholly fruitless; we have covered great distances for lost meanings, seen orphaned verbs and nouns, and occasionally stumbled upon abandoned adjectives. I could go on detailing the process of literary translation in its actuality, in its both tempting and horrifying nudity: mapping the devious and roundabout ways I was forced to take in the no-man’s land between languages, describing the grammatical pitfalls, transporting the feeling of being ambushed by meaning. Alas, things are prone to come to an end, and translation is no exception. Once the work is done, once it is printed, it has an existence independent of me with all its—more properly, my—mistakes 9 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and lapses. Long have I desired this moment, imagining it glorious and rewarding; now I am left only with emptiness and discontent. The aftertaste of the trance is slowly draining out of me. I am at a loss for words. 10 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Wendy Ella Wright (Australia) This verse is easily translated from Japanese into English and visa versa because it contains no esoteric metaphor or reference difficult to make the inter-cultural transition. There is nothing unlockable to unlock by resorting to parenthesis. There is no cadence or rhythm through literary device that becomes lost when taken into the metier of either language. The vocabulary is colloquial and contains no obscurities. It is compact and does not convey any abstract or metaphysical concepts. Moreover, the original writer did not have to work with an interpreter or translator or use a second or third person to proofread the work to make sure the translated version was linguistically accurate and was as close as possible a reflection of the intended meaning. Regarding the psychological and technical process of translation as an art in itself, in the “Forward” of the Heian anthology Manyoshu (Ten Thousand Leaves), the prolific translator Donald Keene says: The first translations from the Manyoshu into a European language date back more than a century, well before Japan was opened to the West. One envoy (“hanka”) to a long poem was translated as early as 1834 by the celebrated German orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1734–1835). Klaproth, having journeyed to Siberia in pursuit of strange languages, encountered some illiterate Japanese castaways, fishermen, hardly ideal mentors for the study of eighth century poetry. Not surprisingly, his translation was anything but accurate. (Keene Manyoshu, iii.) However we cannot know for certain if any inaccuracies were due to misinterpretations by the “celebrated orientalist” Klaproth. Were the negotiations as to the meanings of various characters rendered into Roman letters taped and then cross-referenced? And is it irrefutable that Klaproth’s translations have remained unembellished since the time they were first written? In this sense translation is an unending progressional process. While reading the above work I remembered some people of a like description to “castaways, fishermen” appear as being the ideal interpreters for poetry in the famous Noh play Atsumori by Zeami Motokiyo. Atsumori is one of many classical plays being re-interpreted and re-translated for the new audiences of each generation. To set the scene of the play: the title, Atsumori, is the name of a beauteous young man who died fighting in the battle of Heike. The one who killed Atsumori in this legendary battle wanders as a Buddhist priest to atone his guilt. In his wanderings he encounters some reapers of seaweed and brushwood who are chanting in song together: 11 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp To the music of the reaper’s flute No song is sung But the sighing of wind in the fields. PRIEST: Hey, you reapers! I have a question to ask you. YOUNG REAPER: Is it to us you are speaking? What do you wish to know? PRIEST: Was it one of you who were playing on the flute just now? YOUNG REAPER: Yes, it was we who were playing. PRIEST: It was a pleasant sound, and all the pleasanter because one does not look for such music from men of your condition. YOUNG REAPER: Unlooked for from men of our condition you say! Have you not read? ‘Do not envy what is above you Nor despise what is below you?’ Moreover the songs of woodmen and the flute-playing of herdsmen, Flute playing even of reapers and songs of wood-fellers Through poet’s verses are known to all the world. Wonder not to hear among us The sound of a bamboo flute.”(Keene Anthology 287, 288) It transpires in the play that the reapers are actually the former regents who lost in the battle in which the protagonist Atsumori was slain. Later in the play they sing: We slept with fishers in their huts On pillows of sand. And when among the pine trees The evening smoke was rising, Brushwood, as they called it, Brushwood we gathered And spread for carpet. Sorrowful we lived On the wild shore Till the clan of Taira and all its princes Were but villagers…”(Keene Anthology 291) The princes of Taira were forced into exile and lived as fishermen, although the spirit of poetry within them never died. The exilic experience perforce produces the human instinct to transmit messages from afar and to express the feelings of alienation or reminiscence. Much of the world’s literature is an artistic product of this universal truth. Regarding the multi-faceted experience of creating literature while in exile from the “other” culture of one’s existence, often I have walked down the street alone, speaking or singing to myself in the language of the culture I was then separated from. There was nobody to speak in that language with me just then and nobody to hear me sing—so I just wanted to hear the sound of the words in my own voice. Maybe it was to see if I still remembered the words I loved so much. An experience in a library once took me back to Japan. This experience is an example of the process of translation from one language into another while living in a state of exile. Translating poetry in the library alone, I had to look in the dictionary to find the meaning of every character of a Japanese poem. In between the pages, where long ago I had marked the place of some now unfamiliar and forgotten character, there lay a pressed sprig of cherry-blossoms that smelt of a certain Tokyo street and time. The Japanese-English 12 International Writing Program Panel: “Lost—and Found—in Translation” September 28, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp dictionary led my memories to the shelves to find the “Tale of Genji.” I remembered the book having had a certain illustrated cover in another of its published editions. The new edition was now covered in an intense purple, velvety to the touch. The colour seemed to speak to me in a low evocative voice. To touch the soft purple cover of the book as my thoughts traveled to an old Kyoto, I was discovering a lost past. My memories arrived at Kyoto’s Nijo Palace where Murasaki Shikibu wrote the Tale of Genji inspired by her own life. The name of the main protagonist in this major Japanese classic is Murasaki. Before putting the book about Genji and Murasaki back, I knelt down with it in between the shelves to take a last look. My heart jumped—there was my own handwriting in pencil on a scrap of paper I had forgotten to remove before returning the book. The handwriting was from another chapter of “before going back to Japan from Adelaide…” In home-sickness for Japan I had quoted on the scrap of paper – “Were it not for these old romances, What would we do to pass the idle hours?” Still in the library, crouched in between the book-shelves, I stared at my own hand-writing, until the overhead lights had automatically been turned off. 13 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection |
International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
| Date Digital | 2005-09-28 |
Description
| Title | Lost and found in translation, Iowa City Public Library, September 28, 2005 |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:25:34 |
| Digitization Specifications | Retrieved as MEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_9-28-05.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_9-28-05.mpg |
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