Chapter 1
1. Preliminaries
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. […] And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and […] they began to speak with other tongues. The multitude came together, and were confounded, saying […] “how hear we every man in our own tongue?” (Acts 2:2-7)
1.A A not-so-modest proposal
1.1 The preceding version of this volume, published in 1978 as Factors in a Theory of Poetic Translating, originated in my PhD thesis project in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine, which, despite its prestigious "Comparative Literature" division, had no official “Programme in Translation” back then. Admittedly, my proposal met with some scepticism when I set about assembling an advisory committee. Perhaps the faculty doubted whether it would accord with prevailing notions of “academic research”, if indeed it succeeded at all. I had to argue that the distinctions between “convergent” versus “non-convergent” translations of poetry are sufficiently substantive to constitute a valid and engaging research topic which my own prior practice would support. Moreover, I (rather immodestly) proposed to act in both roles of theoretician and practitioner, and to work with one of the most challenging source texts I could adduce.
1.2 Predictably no doubt, I was fated to discover just how difficult it can be to co-ordinate those two roles upon such a sample. Over and over, I would turn from my theorising to my practicing only to find, with what seemed like gratuitously pungent irony, that I had not been translating as my own lines of reasoning prefigured. Translation of any kind can become a perilous and swashbuckling enterprise of reaching out for effects and striving to impress (at least oneself). Poetry redoubles these lures because they exert their powers upon poets as well. And if the translator happens to be a recognised, or anyway aspiring, poet, the circle is squared, so to speak (cf. I.25). Though I myself have never entertained such an aspiration, translating poetry by the highest standards I could muster has gratified some vicarious aspirations all along.
1.3 Eventually, the thesis was accepted in 1977, under the teutonically stuffy and ultimately inaccurate title (my director’s idea) of Eine Übersetzung der Duineser Elegien als Anwendung linguistischer Kriterien. I chose to write it in German because I was aiming at a contribution to German studies of translation, of which I had collected a fair range, witness my old Bibliography. Besides, writing in same language as the source text facilitated a more unmediated presentation and discussion of the data, particularly in the “difficult passages”.
1.4 But when the chances materialised for making the manuscript over into a published book in the new series at van Gorcum edited by the late James S. Holmes, such facilitations seemed less attractive. The fact that the audience would perforce be wider for a book in English was simple demographics. And I had given up canvassing German publishers who misunderstood my central point, and, wanting to allure an audience of academic Rilke scholars, disdained the book for not having dutifully saluted (“gewürdigt”) the immense “critical secondary literature” on the work, the man, and the legend.
1.5 At the Universities of Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, and Berlin I had in fact read Rilke’s complete works for my own interest, sensing some kinship with his marvellously understated and taciturn melancholy and mysticism. On that basis, I felt I could claim to have some grasp of his poetic language that would hardly be sharpened by the (sometimes embarrassingly adulatory or philosophising) commentaries by “critics” who tried to explain him away by reducing his meanings to commonplaces. [Note 1] For the project, I only read books and essays about the Elegies; and only a handful of them proved relevant for my work.[Note 2]
1.6 Whilst the English version was under way, I registered manifold problems which my thesis had delineated or attacked but could not properly resolve. I became steadily more convinced that translation of poetry is a far more “polysystemic” microcosm of subtleties and complexities than most published attempts I had read seemed to appreciate. This disquieting conviction found expression in the modest title Factors in a Theory of Poetic Translating. “Factors”. Not just A Theory of Translating Poetry, much less The Theory of Translating Poetry. I knew only too well that I still had far more left to do, and I promised myself to get on with it all if and when I could. Here you see my redoubled efforts.
1.B The “text” on the horizon
1.7 In the interim, I have focused my labours on developing and expounding some “foundations” for a “science” or “multi-science” of text and discourse.[Note 3] My PhD thesis may have nudged me into an improvising sally toward uniting (or at least reconciling) theory and practice within that broader scope. Poetic translation is, I had to confess, an adventure of epic dimensions and perils for a maiden voyage. Translation at large may well excel as the most complex of communicative activities; and its “poetic” sub-domain superposes the intercalated complexities of “poetry” as dispersed through its kaleidoscopic creations (cf. 3,6, 11).
1.8 And if translation is such as I have just maintained, it overreaches perforce any conventional “theory” or “method” that reduces or dilutes it. These reservations were probably the underlying gist of the (now much streamlined) opening of my older volume, analysing derivative ideas and models which then seemed to merit closer attention than they do now, at least in my purview. However uncivil I may sound for openly saying so, linguistics, philosophy, and logic have apparently undergone relative stagnation and eclipse after spending much of the 20th century trying to “describe” or “generate” “language” in self-created vacuums by exiling from it social life and communicative practices, translation included.[Note 4]. Today, focus has decisively shifted to “discourse analysis” and its “critical” offshoot.[Note 5]
1.9 In respect to “theory”, my own previous book focussed more upon problems, and in respect to “practice”, more upon solutions, which I after all had to put forth as my concrete results. The central problem, I now believe, lay in a general lack of a secured and consensual conception of text in context as the centripetal arena of translating and, beyond that, of language research at large. Instead, much concern was reserved for presumed “linguistic units of translation”, notably the “word”, “phrase”, and “sentence”,[Note 6] whilst the text was casually treated as derivative or assembled from those “units”.
1.10 My thesis made some cautious forays toward such a conception, but fell short of the “critical mass” I would reach out for in my later books. I consequently saw my next task in assembling the (then latest) research on the “text”, which eventuated in the Introduction to Text Linguistics in 1981, massively assisted by Wolfgang U. Dressler, whose Einführung in die Textlinguistik was a proven success. It was still a modest field in transition between “linguistics” proper and the “discourse analysis” that has now inherited from it. It was pursued at some institutions in Czechoslovakia , the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, and the two Germanys. To leap over the filibustered dawdling of publishing and printing in the age before personal computers, and of publishing outlets in “mainstream linguistics” who were uninterested or craven about a “paradigm shift” on the horizon, I visited as many active authors as I could manage, and collected a host of mimeographed or xeroxed writings and pre-prints.
1.11 As readers of my later works will, I would hope, confirm, the “paradigm shift” ensued nonetheless, though its impact may now seem reasonably foreseeable in retrospect. The turning point came, I think, in acknowledging that the text was not a “linguistic unit” in the dominant sense but rather a linguistic, cognitive, and social event engendering textuality.[Note 7] The “text” as it subsists as an ostensible unit in writing or recording is merely the preserved manifestation or record of the event – the “front end” or “access path”, as it were – so the myriad attempts to limit the conception to “just what is on the page” naturally blur or restrict the “standards of textuality”, especially the vital intentions, activities, and contributions of the text producer(s) and text receiver(s) – including of course the multiple participants in the event of “translation”.
1.12 In particular, I propose to portray the role of the translator in quality control. Translation is viewed a dual process of generating convergence (bringing two versions closer together) and coincidence (exploiting serendipitous similarities between languages). This process is in principle open-ended, and with poetry at least, the initial version should be seen as an object waiting to undergo quality control (6.1). In Chapter 6, I present of map of strategies for the process by applying it to my 1997 version of the Duino Elegies, which had in fact already passed through substantial controls upon versions I no longer possess.
1.C The vintage of our discontent
It is this constant search, this sacred discontent, which constitutes the leaven of the Western mind since the Renaissance and pervades our art no less than our science.
-- Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion
1.13 My personal engagement has long been nurtured by a burgeoning discontent with a sometimes astounding lack of quality control in translation on a worldwide scale. Instead, translators improvise from their schoolroom English, perhaps occasionally thumbing through “bilingual dictionaries”, themselves of untested quality, and leaving unresolved problems for your bewildered audience to confront. If there were a competition in the Olympic Games for these practices, China would no doubt take the gold medal (1.16), viz.:
Poetic justice it may be for a language disseminated by a “British Empire” with planetary megalomania, but English is surely the main attractor of overconfident amateurs and do-it-yourselfers.
1.14 The Internet fuels this clueless optimism with visions of a language anyone (with the cash) can absorb with little time or effort, viz.:
The School Made for You...Learn English in just 5 minutes a day.
You'll be amazed that after just one 30-minute lesson, you'll already be speaking English.
The English Maze is a great way to learn English fast.
Learning English has never been so easy with all the resources we have to offer.
Governments too breezily hope for a royal road:
A Taiwanese city has come up with a novel way of teaching its citizens to speak better English. The rubbish trucks in Tainan [will now] blare out the message “Let's talk in English”. Three hundred separate sentences have been recorded, [such as] “How are you? I am fine thank you,” [and] “How much does a pound of cabbage cost?” The mayor hopes that after a few months of putting out the rubbish even Tainan’s grandmothers and grandfathers will have a basic grasp of English. (BBC World News 01.09.2002)
1.15 Compounding this gormless ambitiousness is the delusion that English obeys a punctilious set of “correct rules” to be mastered, witness this infelicitous Internet aspirer:
I want to learn CORRECT GRAMMAR to fix it out. I want to writing skill as smooth than present. I want copy grammar in the world hear people to understand. (KEC’s English Forum)
English is more like a do-it-yourself language in the sense that, lacking comprehensive, reliable “rules”, it has to be mastered from large sets of instances of how it is being actually used before one can be a competent speaker or translator. Even when the clues of limited fluency are subtle, lapses in translation quality can be localised, viz. [1]:
[1] The Castle of Miramar is attainable with the car [can be reached by car]. Who [anyone who] drives on the panorama route will fast [soon] understand why the Italians use to [are accustomed to] call its [their] country “Il bel paese”. The coast of Trieste is well known for its indentedness [its curvature]. (Duino Sistiana)www.
1.16 Bilingual dictionaries are a plausible source of translated word-for-word “English”, as when Chinese restaurants offer “corrugated iron beef" (tinned beef), "burnt lion's head" (pork meatballs) and "government abuse chicken” (chicken slaughtered by government agents or inspectors). A road sign warns of a dangerous pavement: “To Take Notice of Safe: The Slippery are Very Crafty" (safety notice: slippery when very icy). Or again, when transposed from Spanish, as in this posted notice at a hotel in la Albufereta near Alicante:
[2] In regime from house rent of apartments, the payment is for anticipated. [plausibly => En regimen de alquilar de apartamentos el pago es por adelantado] [fluent translation: Rent regulations require that apartments be paid in advance.]
Yet apparently translators may not consult even these portentous tomes, foggily confiding instead in brute force:
[3] J1Z is a handle electric tool drived by series generation. Its features are small in volume, light in weight, convenient to catch. It can be used in places which is moist and narrow. It can be used in the workshop with good conduct electricity such as work high above the ground or metal frame etc. Read the explanation following before the tool got through power. (instructions for a power drill sold in Botswana; country of origin not indicated)
[3a] [my plausible quality control =>] J1Z is a handy electric tool driven by a serial generator. It is compact, light, and convenient to hold. It can be used not merely in workshops with well-secured electrical outlets but also in damp or cramped conditions or on high metal frames. Please read these instructions carefully before connecting the tool to a power source.
Even more clueless, not to say downright phantasmagorical, are some “automatic translation programmes” on the Internet:
[4] Sämtliche Zimmer sind durch hochgelegte, überdachte Holzstege miteinander verbunden um ein Nasswerden bei Regen, sowie die Rutschgefahr bei Matschbildung zu verringern. […] Das Mittagessen besteht aus importierten Fleischsorten begleitet von Salaten und mit Produkten hergestellt aus Mehlgerichten. (original text from Nature Reservation Palmari in the far west of Brazil )
[4a] All rooms are connected by high-put, considered wood bars around with rains to reduce as well as the slip hazard with gunk education. [...] The lunch consists of imported meat places accompanies salads and products manufactured by flour courts. [etc.] (Babel Fish “translation”)
[4b] [my plausible quality control =>] All rooms are linked by elevated, roofed wooden bridges and ramps to prevent getting wet during rains or slipping on mud. [...] The lunch consists of imported meat dishes garnished with salads and desserts prepared from pastries.
Among other problems, the programme was painfully bollixed about how German forms its compounds into new units of meaning, and so it dismantled them arbitrarily, producing some jaw-dropping nonsense.
1.17 Reliable estimates are hard to adduce, but all this feckless neglect of quality control in translation must cause billions in losses within worldwide communication each year, not to mention the woes of hapless workers suffering shocks from premature “through power”, and hotel guests treated to an all-too refreshing course in “gunk education”.
1.18 The situation is still more problematic (though less perilous) for poetic translation. By creating alternative (3.11) relations between language and meaning, poetry requires the translator to exercise exceptional creativity in search of convergence and coincidence, traditionally (if rather vaguely) called being “literal” or “faithful”. My private discontent was accordingly more intense, as was my search for less precarious methods, culminating first in a master’s dissertation and finally in a PhD thesis -- an officially academic interest propelled by a personally aesthetic one. Having read a deal of poetry in the originals and in other languages, I stumbled, with rising annoyance, across translations insolently devoid of secured quality control.
1.19 Among the first lapses was in a (then best-selling) English version of Goethe’s Faust – “assigned reading” for a “Humanities Course” on “great works” – in the memorable scene where Faust is being harried by Mephistopheles “in the core” of a fractious “poodle”:
[5] Einer von uns beiden
Muss die Zelle meiden.
[5a] One or the other of us must quit the cell.
Well?
“Well”?? Here, the balance among line lengths had been savaged for a bodged-up rhyme word with no correspondent in the original. Trying to do better, after some tinkering I set down:
[5b] Only one of us twain
The cell can contain.
The balance of lines was restored, but the grammar was still skewed, with the grammatical roles of subject and object exactly reversed. More scratching at my pad resolved the problem thus:
[5c] One of us two
This cell must eschew.
1.20 What aggravated me back then was not just the lax insensitivity in the “assigned” translation, but also the dismal (and probably lifelong) impression it was implanting of “great masterpieces” upon multitudes of future citizens. Here, I would submit, was a textbook case (pun intended) for a “power politics” of translation. On basic levels, the initiating power moves were to “require” a course for students of all faculties (not just literature) and to select the “great works” and their translations to represent them to a largely monolingual English audience. To judge from the results, the authorities calmly assumed that “greatness” of a “great work” must pass across into any translation.
1.21 The next level up, so to speak, would have been the power of a large publishing house to select translators and translations to print or reprint. Up to those times at least, many translators received disrespectful wages, and their names were not even displayed in print; or, if the house changed its plans in mid-course, perhaps no wages at all. (The latter indignity was inflicted upon some of my own translators in 1980 when the publisher decided the book was “getting too long”.)
1.22 The, erm, “finished product” could then be offered in bulk and in paperback to universities for their obligatory “canon” to be “taught”. Selections may have been collectively made at faculty meetings, but, to my knowledge, never in attentive consultations with students. What they usually endured was a rush-rush tour through centuries of works they had never read and did not especially need to, all the while grappling with a load of other “coursework” more relevant to their academic or professional careers.
1.23 Presumably near the top level, power may still inhere in a nostalgic humanistic concept of “high culture” dating back as far as the Renaissance. Its “rebirth” was celebrated in literary reworkings of European traditions, folktales, and myths in the (then) “modern” national languages, along with a deluge of translations from the “classical” languages Latin and Greek, and to a lesser extent, Hebrew and Arabic. Yet works like the old Faust – e.g., Das Faustbuch of 1587 and the Das Faustbuch des Christlich Meynenden nach dem Druck of 1725 were read for delight and wonder, not for and quick and dutiful recitative encounters in mass education.
1.24 The curious contradiction -- that the same “modern” societies holding “great works of literature” in exalted regard should now be content with translations which are certainly not great -- reflects the structure of this “power complex” whereby most factors or participants are expediently regarded as constants rather than variables. The students were assuredly constants: we had to buy the “assigned” translations and discuss them with reverence, or else. Teachers were hardly more powerful; the “canon” was relatively fixed – a situation which only later underwent epochal change. If they had relevant experience, they could comment on the real labours and quandaries of translation, and point out absurdities like [5a], but had little to gain by alerting the students about a diet of shoddy merchandise which they had no effective power to alter unless they created their own translations – a recourse I later adopted in my own teaching.
1.25 The power complex I have sketched patently neglected quality control on all levels, which deserves to be a principal variable and will be treated as such in the present volume (see especially Chapter 6). One might expect it to be a high-ranking priority for a powerful translator regarding the work of translation as an honourable association between two “great” authors, as when Alexander Pope translated the epics of Homer. But the aspiration (including Pope’s) to display one’s own “poetic powers” seems to lead such translators to veer away from the original instead. Here is one brief excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s famous sonnet Recueillement (1866) with my interlinear translation and the versions of three “noted English poets”.
[6] Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile
while that of-the mortals the multitude vile
Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci,
under the whip of-the pleasure, that executioner without mercy
Va cueillir des remords dans la fête servile
goes to-gather of-the remorse in the festival servile
[6a] Now while the heedless throng makes haste to press
Where pleasure drives them, ruthless charioteer,
To pluck the fruits of sick remorse and fear (Alfred Douglas, 1919)
[6b] Now while the common multitude strips bare,
feels pleasure’s cat o’ nine tails on its back,
and fights off anguish at the great bazaar (Robert Lowell, 1961)
[6c] Now while the rotten herds of mankind,
Flogged by pleasure, that lyncher without touch,
Go picking remorse in their filthy holidays (Robert Bly, 1961)
Douglas strove for the most ornate style (e.g., “heedless throng”, “ruthless charioteer”), Lowell for a lesser one (e.g., “common multitude”, “great bazaar”) and Bly for a defiantly anti-poetic one (“rotten herds”, “lyncher”, “without touch”, “filthy holidays”) stripped of rhyme and metre. Baudelaire’s “bourreau” in [6], which suggests a state-sponsored executioner equipped with a whip (“fouet”) like a torturer, became a “charioteer” [6a] (has a different profession but still brandishes a whip) or a “lyncher” [6c] (executes with a rope and illegally), or just disappears [6b] (leaving only the “cat o’ nine tails”, an especially vicious whip and erstwhile favourite of the British military). “Remorse” is transmuted into “fear” or “anguish”.
1.26 Such imperious interventions can spawn illogical implications. If “fruit-pluckers” were indeed “driven” by a “charioteer”, they would logically be riding inside and not running along under the whip in front – a most ignominious mode of produce transport. Unless the “great bazaar” was run by a nudist colony, “stripping bare” the whole “multitude” seems excessive, and chilly besides. “Lynching” is an impromptu crime; and how one can do it “without touching” the victims is hard to imagine.
1.27 Following my native spleen, I produced version [6d], which sought convergence and coincidence partly by deploying cognate lexical items like “mortal”, “multitudes”, “vile”, and “servile”, or French-seeming items like “revelments”; and partly by retaining the metaphors, which those three “noted poets” had dismantled.
[6d] While mortal multitudes with vile intents
By ruthless hangman Pleasure are whipped hence
To cull remorse in servile revelments
I well knew that Baudelaire sustained (indeed as I myself have done) a lifelong and agonising empathy with “l’homme terrassé qui rêve encore et souffre” (L'Aube spirituelle), and, for all his elegant talent with language, he had to stomach much public and judicial opprobrium for being one such man. In contrast, the translators in [6a-6c] sounded to me gloatingly content -- if not sadistically so with that “cat o’ nine tails” -- to leave “the heedless throng”, those “rotten herds of mankind”, justly mired down in their “sick remorse and fear”, or their “filthy holidays”, as the merited punishment for running mindlessly after “pleasure”. In my version, at least, the “multitudes” weigh their “intents” and “servility” against their “mortality” as “remorseful” victims of a “ruthless hangman” -- not of a “charioteer” nor a “lyncher”.
1.28 My own versions in those student years might be accounted gestures of resistance – liberating texts, as it were, from degrading travesty. Lonely gestures, though, as long as the travesties were locked inside an institutional power complex, as I was soon to ascertain when I circulated samples of my work among publishing houses. In effect, the variable role of translator had been made over into a further constant in the petrifying sense that every “great” German-speaking poet I had rendered (e.g., Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Georg Heym) had been devoured by an exclusive “copyright contract” for one “authorised translator” – yes, among them the toothachingly incompetent Robert Bly – some of whom manifested no profound grasp of the German language to begin with, yet whose work, I was haughtily told, was “better” than mine. And so I was “powered out” from wider audience impact, and bided my time for an opportunity to go public, bootlegging a bit until the Internet generated its massive free zones for creative anarchy.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. See now for example Monika Czernin, Duino, Rilke und die Duineser Elegien (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2004).
2. By far the most useful was Jacob Steiner, Rilkes Duineser Elegien (Bern: Francke, 1962).
3. Especially in Beaugrande 1980, 1997, and 2004.
4. Survey in Beaugrande 1991.
5. See now Beaugrande 2004.
6. Carried to strenuous extremes in J.C. Catford, A Linguistic Theory of Translation (London: Oxford, 1965).
7. See now Beaugrande 2004, 2007.
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