Variations on a theme
Years ago, after talking to the Catalán poet Joan Margarit, I wrote down in my notebook:
Form, metre, rhyme etc. are superficial elements of a poem. What gets translated is something more essential.
Since then, I’ve given a lot of thought to poetry translation, but I still don’t know what that “more essential” something is and I still don’t know when a translation is a translation, when it’s a transcreation, and when it’s a derivative work.
It’s clear — to me at least — that the complexity of poetry, its inherent weaving of different linguistic techniques, makes it impossible to translate everything: the only way to get an exactly equivalent poem would be to repeat the original. (At which point, it is probably relevant to mention the Borges short story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote)
So how does a translator decide which elements to focus on and retain, and which elements can be omitted? How close does a translation need to be to the original — however you define “close” — before it becomes a derivative work?
Of course I’m coming at this from the point of view of a writer, as well as translator, and I think it’s relevant to consider the writing process. Most poets don’t find poems come to them in a finished form, like Athena leaping fully armed from the forehead of Zeus; instead they go through a process of drafting and redrafting, and the final version can be very different from the first draft.
Sometimes, too, a single idea or image can develop into a number of different poems, which may be written independently or may be produced during redrafting. Can these different treatments of the same material be compared to translation?
So, let’s go back to a poem I wrote years ago, which I posted — also years ago — for commentary on an online newsgroup. This is the poem as it was back then, when I originally thought it was complete:
Childhood
Whispering secrets into an empty cocoa tin,
string, taut, measuring the distance between us;
I was squaw to your brave,
target for your cap-gunned cop and cowboy.We caught butterflies on the buddleia –
peacocks, tortoiseshells, red admirals –
and netted minnows (I caught mostly weed)
down in the brown brook in the park.Jumpers for wicket, you taught me
to hold the bat and strike out firm and strong.
Staunchly, I held back the tears:
the leather ball struck hard.Tins and pistols rusted into silence long ago;
nets rotted, bamboo handles split.
The butterflies have flown away;
their colours paint my dreams.
There were even a couple of editors who seem to have agreed that it was a finished poem, as it appeared in at least two magazines in around 2002.
But the other poets on the newsgroup thought the piece could be improved and there were sundry criticisms and suggestions about various details. One person suggested I experimented to find out what would happen if I changed the piece from free verse, and tried to rewrite it as a set form. Back then, I hadn’t written many formal pieces, and it was quite a while before I was ready to make the attempt.
When I did, the result was a sonnet, which won me a place at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School back in 2007 and appeared in Writing Magazine:
Hero worship
Do you remember how you used to tease,
kidnap my teddy, lock him in a drawer
or hang him from the banisters, ignore
my screams, my tears, my heartfelt ‘pretty please’?
You mocked me when I fell and scraped my knees;
mine was the losing side in every war
of cowboys, Indians, cops and robbers. Bored
you’d wander off and go and climb the trees
beyond my reach, and I’d be left alone.
Forgetting physical and mental pain
I’d wait impatiently beside the phone
until the next day, when we’d start again.
The years have passed but I still feel the same,
hoping against hope to join your games.
The competition adjudicator, Alison Chisholm, described this version as: “A beautifully crafted Petrarchan sonnet… its message is expressed simply and in understated terms.” So I don’t think there’s any doubt that it, too, stands up as an independent, publishable, poem.
I’m not sure whether it’s relevant to anyone other than me that the sonnet was in some way a redrafting of the earlier free verse poem rather than an independent creation. Even so, in my mind, these two — very different — poems are really one and the same: in a way, they are both translations into English of a single idea. That idea was the essence I was trying to express, and the form, metre and other details are incidental.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this idea, but working on the principle of “how can I know what I mean until I see what I’ve written?” it seemed a good idea to write something down. If anyone has any thoughts on the subject, I’d be interested in hearing them.
