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I WOULD GIVE ALL METAPHORS FOR ONE WORD

AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT POETRY IN TRANSLATION

The effect of a succesful translation is like walking through the streets of a foreign city and finding that you can understand what is being said around you, though you also know the language is not your own. By Ariel Ramchandani ...

From our arts blog, MOREOVER

DAVID ORR'S article on Zbigniew Herbert in The New York Times Book Review got me thinking about translation. I believe--along, I imagine, with many other people-- that Poland's poets are among the best in the world. And yet, like many others, I do not experience these poets in Polish. As Mr Orr says: "Of course, for most of us, discovering ‘the Poland that is real’means reading works translated from Polish."

If you ask me, Polish sure sounds good in English. It is perhaps a conceit of an English speaker, as well as a testament to the skill of the poets and translators, that I feel this way. I have not read a single poem by a Polish poet in Polish--or in any language other than English, for that matter. But I do know that a good translation makes the reader aware of what a poem means, and at the same time makes the reader aware that it is not English she is reading. In this way a successful translation is like walking through the streets of a foreign city and realising that you can understand what everyone is saying around you, if only just barely.

In poetry, where every word is weighted, and nothing is usual or normal, these subtleties are often achieved by word choice, order and combination. The phrases must be resonant in English and yet convey the poet’s meaning in his original language. As Mr Orr points out: "The central difficulty for any translator lies in conveying words and concepts that lack true analogues in our language. In such cases, is the literal meaning best? Or what you think the poet might have said if he were an English speaker?"

This question gets to the heart of how one might assign a value-judgment to translation, but it also speaks to something exciting for an English reader (or the world reader). It is not only that the poet would have said something different if he were an English speaker; he may have thought about it in a different way and on different terms.

The different way of thinking, and the presence of a cognisant and “precise” mind, is what make Herbert’s poems so successful and exciting. An American reader is perhaps able to push her mind and her ear to a new place at the hands of a good foreign poet and an authentic translator. As Herbert says in the poem, “I Would Like To Describe”:

I would give all the metaphors
in return for one
word.

As a reader, I too am ready to give away all my metaphors in return for seeing what word Herbert would use, especially a word that I had never thought of before.

As a possible window into another way of thinking, a good translation is almost like a good poem about a painting; a transition from one art form to another, that maintains some of the nuances and stylistic interests of the first. Czeslaw Milosz, in his introduction to his compilation, "A Book of Luminous Things", opens by saying: "I have always felt that a poet participates in the estate of poetry, in his own language and also that of world poetry."

This statement is curiously echoed in the concern that Mr Orr has for marinating an authenticity of translation, and a pure way for English readers to encounter these poets. For this to work, the word-by-word attention that Orr takes up seems especially important. In the words of Szymborska, perhaps my favorite Polish poet:

The difference in dress--yes, this we know for sure.
The detail
is unyielding.