Looking up from the work on my desk—the pleasing, illuminating but demanding scrutiny of draft translations by Spanish poet and translator Jordi Doce of some of my poems for a small bilingual edition to be published in Spain by Littera Libros—I see in the books around me so many extraneous attractions, distractions.  Projects as yet unfinished–that’s the connotation of the particular books nearest at hand, many from the university library. One in particular that I happen to find myself looking at (I would like to figure out what unconscious train of thought led me to look at it unaware, and then come to awareness that I was looking at it) makes me feel that it is an enormous privilege to be able to hold it in my own hands and make use of it.  It comes from very far away and long ago.

I hesitate even to name it, but really I shouldn’t worry that anyone who might read these words of mine would ever covet it, although surely it is rare. To me it seems far more precious than the money that would be required to replace it, if that were possible: Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1918, Volume XIV: Eskimo Songs, subtitled Songs of the Copper Eskimos, by Helen H. Roberts and D. Jenness, Southern Party—1913-16. Published in Ottawa by F. A. Acland, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1925. Yes, of course, already one thinks of it as the fruit of colonization within a country’s own borders–no matter how much one might be grateful for traces of the amazingly intrepid Copper Eskimos and, for that matter, the Euro-Canadians who trekked long and hard to get to Canadian Arctic in 1913!

And one knows that the collection of the songs must have been flawed, that at least some songs would never have been sung to them, and that others would only have been sung in a way that did not violate their special qualities, perhaps sacred or shamanistic, and that the relations between anthropologists and indigenous people must have been fraught with manipulation on both sides, power on one side, lack of it on the other. How accurate are the transcriptions and translations of the songs? And what particular preparations, circumstances, distractions, difficulties, of the Southern Party (on “the Arctic mainland and the adjacent islands”) might have made their findings more useful or less, to those who want, nearly a hundred years later, to ponder their document?  Producing this songbook, bigger in trim size than a hymnal and fully as thick, was a terribly complex project and must have required the most extraordinary meticulousness, patience, keenness, stamina, and seriousness, with its musical scores, charts presenting musical analysis, a beautiful hand-written transcription (in an alphabet evidently invented for a language with phonemes beyond those of English), of the verse running beneath the musical notes in each song.  And at the back, for each, there is an italicized transliteration of the verse and a translation into English.

I tracked this book down by following a lead in the work of Brian Swann, poet and long-time student and champion of Native American poetry.  Severed from the singers, from the time and world and life experience and cultural practices and thought of those singers, the songs are cryptic—and perhaps some of their mystery is the result of imperfect translation.   But I rather think that it comes from the prior fact that the anthropologists had little in their own lives that corresponded to that far northern world, experience, culture, thought, singing and perhaps–to use a phrase from classics–”song culture.”  Even what seems cryptic to us might have been well translated in some terms, but it came into a language and a culture that had no way to understand fully what it was encountering.  And I would think that the anthropologists themselves acknowledged that.

Sung by a girl from Prince Albert Sound, here is a song that begins with many repetitions of syllables that perhaps express at the least the presence and the emphatic effort of the singer: ye ye yai ye ya i ya ye yai ya and more. Such are the “prelude” and “refrain.” The verses are these:

1.1 Seeing that I was longing for it,

I gave it a name, this spirit.

1.2 Much blood pours from me [my nose] unexpectedly.

I gave it a name, seeing that I recognized it.

2.1 I have not finished it [my song] however.

Whither my little sister, my little Kaniraq [has she gone].

2.2 Much blood pours from me unexpectedly.

Whither my little sister–I have not finished it however.

There are ways of thinking about this, especially with the ways of reading poetry, that make it begin to signify obliquely and powerfully.  And Freud to one side, Jung to another, are looking on as we think.  As are scholars of oral culture and of ancient poetry in the west.

The collectors of the songs write in a footnote: “This is one of the songs that was taught by the Prince Albert sound Eskimos to the ******* [I cannot reproduce this word, which uses characters of a non-Roman alphabet invented to represent the indigenous] Eskimos during the summer of 1915. The words are said to have been taken from three separate songs.”

What, you may wonder, is my interest in this book? I admit that this celebration of it is for its own sake. But there is yet another project awaiting me in which I take up the search for a particular metaphor through a few disparate cultures, trying to think with that metaphor about writing.  Perhaps at some point I will report on what I was beginning to find when other duties intervened, many months ago, and other duties intervened upon those, and so on, preventing me from finishing my song.  Or rather, I seem to have invited my own self-preventing.  I think I felt it would take longer to think through this problem that I would be able to sustain my thinking.

Anyway, now I go back to translations that press me more urgently…

There are a number of interesting collections of essays on translation–theoretical and practical.  In my course I use the two edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation and The Craft of Translation (both published by the University of Chicago Press).  I supplement these with some individual essays by Kwame Anthony Appiah, George Steiner, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Yves Bonnefoy (who is marvelous on the subject in his volume, translated from French, Shakespeare and the French Poet (also published by Chicago), and Dick Davis’s marvelous essay on the effect of translation on the whole history of English poetry, “All My Soul Is There: Verse Translatioin and the Rhetoric of English Poetry” (published in the Yale Review some years ago).  Essays in Theories of Translation that I find particularly engaging–as a poet who translates–include those by John Dryden, Roman Jakobson, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Octavio Paz, and inevitably, Walter Benjamin (although a German graduate student told me long ago that having read Benjamin’s famous essay in both English and German, she could not say that the German was any clearer).

More of my introductory groundwork for the translation seminar I am teaching:

The acts of writing and translating are textual and contextual (and also intertextual, in that a translation exists only because of the existence of a prior text elsewhere.) Different approaches to translation arise because of the gaps–linguistic, literary, cultural and historical–between poet and translator.

Linguistic—not only because languages differ in what they can say, can’t say, and may or may not say (we’ll read an essay by Roman Jakobson on this subject), but also because idioms and idiomatic syntax in two different languages can be so different. Imagine a Chicago social club that includes “artist members”; how is this phrase different from “member artists”? What if in a particular phrase one language must specify the gender of a pronoun, and another cannot or need not use pronouns at all? Some languages specify or imply dimensions of time, experience, and action and agency that others do not communicate.

Literary—because any given literary work is composed in a context of artistic assumptions, constraints, permissions, and expectations that has been created by earlier works over time—or by particular audiences or even by dominant critics. And while in its language of origin a work might be very fresh in manner or statement, that same manner or statement might already be familiar in the target language, which makes it difficult for the translator to convey the original freshness. There is an opposite problem, too: what if a particular manner, familiar and even clichéd in the source language, is unfamiliar or even unprecedented in the target language? Should the translator bring this element into the target language as something very fresh? Or rather find an analogous cliché in the target language? (Does everything depend on figuring out the intentions of the source writer—even though artistic intentions are often nearly impossible to judge?) Should a translator make the translation seem completely idiomatic in the target language, as it it had been composed in the target language originally? Or rather translate so that the unfamiliar aspects of the source language and text will sound unidiomatic? (This might enlarge the possibilities of poetry in the target language.) (We will read essays by Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Walter Benjamin that take up this question.)

Or what if an impressive quality of the source text (which could have to do with style, with sound, with the movement of thought, etc.) is already known in the target language but is considered inappropriate or uninteresting or puerile or antiquated in the literary culture of that language? What if an earlier literary strategy or stance—such as High Modernist poetic devices like those of T. S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy–is considered antiquated, outmoded, in the source language, but would have the effect of a literary revolution in the target language in the present day?

I remember vividly arriving at a literary party in Mexico City and seeing Octavio Paz speaking with a small group of young men (literary culture is more patriarchal in Mexico than in the U. S.). I approached and Paz—whom I knew a little and regarded as a very great writer—welcomed me to his circle of admirers. “I was just telling them,” he explained to me (in Spanish, of course), “that three of the most influential American poets in all of Latin America were from Illinois. Isn’t this true?” I was taken aback by the idea that the influence in Latin America of three poets from Illinois could have rivaled Walt Whitman’s. “Sandburg,” I said. “Yes,” he answered, smiling and waiting. “Masters,” I said. And Paz turned to his group and said to them, “There are poets all over Latin America who are rewriting in their own locales the Spoon River Anthology without even knowing that that is what they are doing.” Then, to me: “And the third?” I made a gesture of not knowing—because I didn’t know, and because I wanted to see his enjoyment when he triumphantly announced the missing name. “Vachel Lindsay!” he said. So—three poets no longer at all in vogue in American literary culture can still be revelatory innovators to poets elsewhere. Another very well-known case is that of Edgar Allen Poe—whom Baudelaire, Mallarmé,Valéry, and other French poets considered one of the greatest of poets, and who, to their great annoyance, has never been regarded as such by poets and critics of America.

On the other hand—what if the target language and literature make possible certain effects that are partly limited by the source language itself and its literary traditions? Can translation liberate meanings as often as it loses them? Samuel Beckett, who late in his life wrote a few poems in French and also made English translations of them, allowed or spurred himself in effect to rewrite them in English; in English he did some things that French cannot do (for both linguistic and literary reasons). In English, Beckett sounds very English-language, not only because the two languages are different but also because modern literature in English has its own permissions and constraints. Almost any two languages offer the writer (and translator) different linguistic openings and opportunities, as well as different literary-historical contexts that sometimes can be liberating rather than constraining.

Cultural and historical—because literary culture is a part of a larger culture shaped and infused by historical events and epochs; attitudes toward those events and textures of those epochs may be understandable elsewhere, but probably can never be mapped clearly across cultures, and may even be scarcely apprehended in the target language and culture. In the target culture and language, other, quite different historical events and textures of historical experience may dominate, along with other associations, connotations, ideas, and what I suppose we could call feeling-sets of particular groups within cultures—missing in the source culture and language—may dominate. (For example, American narcissism; the cultural centralism of Mexico City; patriarchal attitudes of varying intensity in different cultures; Native American spiritualism of nature; “face” in East Asia; “la bella figura” in Italy; and so on.) Hence this kind of gap between source text and possible translation. In China, poets were persecuted, decades ago, for writing poems about flowers; their gesture was considered by those who ruled as a coded and criminal criticism of the communist regime, which insisted that all writers depict idealized lives of workers—which insisted, that is, that poems make certain political gestures and not others. Even a literarily excellent translation of such poems into English cannot bring with it their political gesture, which is entirely implicit. For many decades, similar constraints oppressed writers in the Soviet Union, who were all too often silenced or murdered. (To say nothing of Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and many other regimes on this planet.)

And of course there is highly effective “soft” political pressure, too, on art. In the U.S.A., one of the most volatile and contradictory subjects in literature (and even more so in the media) is the political dimension of social class. Two great American poets who can now be found in anthologies but who were long excluded, and who remain excluded from many classrooms, are Thomas McGrath and Muriel Rukeyser. They must present interesting problems of context to translators abroad. We may not be disturbed, but we are not surprised, that contemporary media, seems constantly to encompass more and more lurid and sensational material the political implications of which can be suppressed in favor of gossip; yet those political implications exist. Meanwhile, certain subjects are excluded from broadcasts—subjects that evidently not only to not interest the desired market segments but which also offend moralistic and demagogic groups aligned with corporate interests and existing social privilege based on religion, race, and so on. A prominent recent example is the exclusion of photos, video, or print reporting or commentary on brutal events involving the actions of American soldiers actively at war; in this case, the exclusion is from the media with largest audiences, but fortunately our culture permits such events to be described in print venues utilized by small audiences (above all, books). Books are not so dangerous in a social context of electronic media. What, amidst all this, might be the translator’s goal in translating a work of the ancient world, or a work from an oral culture?