Chapter 3
3. Poetic Translation Then and Now
3.A Poetics between modernism and post-modernism
3.1 Whilst I was grappling with my thesis, the field of poetics was basking in a cordial alliance between linguistics and literary studies.[Note 1] The titles or labels of the field varied, among them “formalism”, “structuralism”, and (later) “modernism”; but the consistently guiding aspiration was that a close analysis of “poetic language”, however construed, could uncover hitherto unplumbed layers of literary and aesthetic significance. I produced several such analyses myself and found the aspiration solidly confirmed to my own satisfaction.[Note 2]
3.2 Now that “post-modernism” portends to have engulfed “modernism” -- pied-piping along a covey of trendy converts -- the academic whereabouts of “poetics” and indeed “language” in general is rather befogged. My book-length study of “critical discourse” in the 1980s displayed an abstruse though magisterially self-assured waxworks of gestures to turn language back upon itself and upon the problematics it has serenely endured for so long, until one feels amazed that anybody can say or mean anything, much less translate it.[Note 3] Thus, for Paul de Man “all language is figural"; a “text” may make its “statement" in "an indirect, figural way that knows it will be misunderstood by being taken literally”; moreover, the "fundamental ambiguity” “constitutive of all poetry” generates an “infinity of valid readings" -- the ultimate cause being “the deep division of Being itself”. [Note 4] For Harold Bloom, “poetry is misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance”. [Note 5]. Geoffrey Hartman “put poems up against interpretations different in their verbal decorum that the disjunction becomes alarming.” [Note 6]
3.3 Among this astral mega-triad of erstwhile Yale-ites, only de Man even used the term “poetics”, and just to push it “outside”: “since it is assumedly scientific, the language of a structuralist poetics would itself be definitely ‘outside’ literature [and] prescribe (in deliberate opposition to describe) a generalized and ideal model of a discourse that defines itself without having to refer to anything beyond its own boundaries”.[Note 7] Poetic language is precisely about poetic language, full stop.
3.4 The trendiness of “post-modernism” has by now self-aggrandised until we are edified that, for instance:
there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing depending on the author, and this multi-referential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions [...] reinforce us [sic!] in our dismissal of the ontological binarism.[Note 8]
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.[Note 9]
3.5 How long this murky tsunami of “post-modernism” may flood our mental and academic coasts I of course cannot predict, though who may be slogging through its obscurantist lucubrations is a mystery beyond my reach. I can, however, aver with some conviction that such have (to put it mildly) limited value for the theory and practice of translation, general or poetic. Ironically, Rilke himself in his own ways prefigured post-modernism as practice more than as theory, and without allocating peacocked homilies about its ineluctability being built into language in general and poetry in particular. The poetic translator must find solutions and not mystify the problems in tinselled clouds of glories floating between the earth and heaven, like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun (to raid the effusive Bulwer-Lytton).
3.6 Undeniably, a project for combining poetics with translation may seem forbiddingly problematic, if not intransigent. Poetry thrives upon challenging language, ferreting out and scrutinising alternatives, revising, reversing, inverting; and this “alternativity”, which I hold in fact to be the basic and defining trait of poetry, might well defy “systematic formal theories” (cf. 3.11). But then such theories might be better supplanted with strategic maps expounding and demonstrating the concepts and methods that promote quality control in competent poetic translating (cf. Chapter 6). Even if pressing for “perfection” in translating poetry is utopian, like navigating aslant the vertiginous margins of your own creativity, well, that is the special risk and the special challenge.
3.7 We would be deeply if the study of literary texts were already a settled field we could incorporate into our own work. Yet although literary texts have luxuriated in the most extensive and minute cogitation among language professionals within the academic and educational institutions, what I have persistently descried has been a potpourri of opinions and contentions regarding the "object about which insights are formulated, the methods used therein, and the guiding epistemological interests". [Note 10]
3.8 At times, I went so far as to question if “literature” can or should be subjected to “study” – as distinct, say, from enjoyment, insight, reflection, inspiration, resonance, and recreation of our social and cultural history -- and by what methods or to what ends. Nearly all the literary authors whom I read or heard raising this conundrum at “conferences”, “symposia”, “readings”, and so on – among whom I might name, just for illustration, Paul Celan, Martin Walser, Günter Grass, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Richard Eberhart, Nikki Giovanni, Ken Kesey, and James Baldwin – evoked a similar scepticism in varying terms. Celan himself, whom I regarded (and he once intimated to me he regarded himself) as the lineal successor of Rilke, confessed shortly before his tragic and voluntary departure into the River Seine in 1970, that he languished acutely from being “studied”, and asked me if he could not somehow forbid it. I still cannot bear to recall his voice and his face as he asked, nor my foreboding abnegation that nothing could be prevented.
3.9 Still, the primeval yet disputatious question of “what is literature?”, which returned 36,900 hits on the Internet in August 2007, remains far from a consensus. My own contention has always been that “literature” is controlled by a principle called alternativity: literature is a mode of discourse authorised to conceive and represent alternative worlds, including whatever is accepted by some society and culture as the “real world”, provided it too is treated as one alternative among others. “Literature” is therefore not just about “what is“, full stop, but what could be or what, if it “is” indeed, could be otherwise.
3.10 Literature thereby complements and enriches what officiates in some society or group as the “real world”, through navigating, by virtue of its own untrammelled freedoms, within the unbounded spaces such a “reality” overlooks, marginalises, conceals, denies…and thus offers to share or loan out some of its freedoms to authors and audiences, without dictating or pre-empting the means or consequences. Literary authors need not kowtow to cognitive obligations to “tell the truth and nothing but the truth”, nor to social sanctions for not doing so, despite periodic and wilful abrogations of this liberty. Rather, they strive to represent something that is true of the human situation in some larger or deeper sense, and deploy language to empower them for that purpose.
3.11 “Poetry” focuses the principle of “alternativity” upon language as a system of resources, both for its own materials (say, combinations of sounds) and for its significations (say, metaphors). This definition might help to elucidate why poetry has been more consciously (or self- consciously) set apart from other modes of discourse, whereas literature has genially shaded over into the discourses of philosophy, history, folklore, religion, and so on, where the distinctions are more focused upon intent and effect (e.g., to impose one sole or “true” alternative) than upon language as such.
3.12 Much of literary studies seems to have been designed, though I would hope not consciously, to iron out or strip away alternativity and to tame or recapture literature and poetry inside corrals of its own manufacture. Vast prolix ingenuity has been expended upon edifying society in general and education in particular about what some author or work “really meant” and how we can reassuringly fit it back into the cognitive and social realities sponsored by responsible institutions. Literary and poetic authors are, as it were, to be studied out of their minds and re-accommodated as eccentric but salvageable players in anodyne and “scholarly” language games.
3.13 The question I had to adjudicate – though I didn’t say so in just those terms – was whether literary and poetic translating would either promote or else resist this restorative dissolution of the crucial process that justifies literature and poetry in the first place. Making my decision to resist was far simpler than making it work in theory and practice, insofar as translation studies had not posed it along these lines, and the evidence I would require could be subtle.
3.14 Poets are understandably inclined to veil their “meanings”, and translators instinctively sense ambitions to prematurely finalise those “meanings” (cf. #). I too had to contend with this ambition, which at time goaded me into unseemly complacency. Sleepless one night, I abruptly realised that my previous opening of Rilke’s Eighth Elegy had been foreclosed without adequate quality control [1a] and I arose to restart the process [1b] (crucial choices underlined).
[1] 1 Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur
2 das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind
3 wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt
4 als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.
1977 [1a] 1 With all their eyes, living creatures see
2 the open world. Only our eyes are
3 as if reversed and placed all round ourselves
4 like traps around our free emergence. (1977 version)
2007 [1b] 1 With all its eyes, the animal sees
2 openness. Only our eyes are
3 as if reversed and placed all round it
4 as traps around its free emergence. (2007 version)
I now recognised the pronoun “sie” in line 3 co-referring with “Kreatur” in line 1, which in this context turns out to inaugurate a sustained contrast between the ‘“animal” versus “us” (so my older “living creatures” was far too broad).
3.15 I would like to imagine I had been guilty of honest inattention, but in fact, I recall struggling stressfully with this very passage thirty years ago, and now feel properly embarrassed. Maybe such lapses are to be expected in such work, but that is no alibi for me purporting to do both theory and practice: I had not yet fully grasped the implications of quality control.
3.B Quality Control in Preview
3.16 If “poetic language” is defined as I proposed, then the translator has no right to dissipate precisely those features that set it apart, such as rhyme and metre (2.8). As a preview, here is one of the most haunting sonnets of my tragically ill-fated fellow-Austrian Georg Trakl.
1 Verhallend eines Sterbeglöckchens Klänge —
2 Ein Liebender erwacht in schwarzen Zimmern
3 die Wang’ an Sterne, die in Fenster flimmern.
4 Am Strome blitzen Segel, Masten, Stränge.
5 Ein Mönch, ein schwangres Weib dort im Gedränge.
6 Gitarren klimpern, rote Kittel schimmern.
7 Kastanien schwül im goldnen Glanz verkümmern;
8 schwarz ragt der Kirchen trauriges Gepränge.
9 Aus bleichen Masken schaut der Geist des Bösen.
10 Ein Platz verdämmert grauenvoll und düster;
11 am Abend regt auf Inseln sich Geflüster.
12 Des Vogelfluges wirren Zeichen lesen
13 Aussätzige, die zur Nacht vielleicht verwesen.
14 Im Park erblicken zitternd sich Geschwister
And here is a translation boldly posted on the Internet without little detectable hint of quality control leading toward convergence:
Restricting myself to the more obvious points, the title probably refers to “The Evil One”, not just “evil” in the abstract. “Glocke” cannot mean “gong”, and in any case, gongs, “brown-golden” or otherwise, have never been used at any Austrian funerals I know of. “Sterne” cannot mean “fire”; “verkümmern” cannot mean “roast” (the reference is to the trees anyway); “Geflüster” does not signify merely “voices”; and I have yet to see anybody’s “eyes trembling” inside the head. Moreover, the faces do not “look like masks”, they are masks. The text does not situate a crowd along any “docks”. And so forth.
3.17 My own version underwent multiple stages of quality control, most recently at this very moment. The last previous version (circa 1973) read like this:
1 The tolling tone of fading death-knell wanes —
2 in pitch-black rooms a lover just awoke;
3 the stars gleam on his cheek through window panes.
4 Sails, masts, and hawsers, flash upon the brook.
5 A monk, a pregnant woman there on crowded way.
6 Reddish aprons shimmer and guitarists play.
7 In murky golden glow the chestnut trees decay;
8 the churches loom in blackened sad array
9 Behind pale masks, the Evil Spirit stares.
10 The ghastly twilight fades in public squares.
11 Whispers stir on islands after dark.
12 Bewildering symbols birds sketch out in flight
13 Are read by lepers who may rot tonight.
14 Trembling siblings meet inside the park (ca. 1973)
After the present quality control (2007), it reads (changes underlined)
[2b] The Dream of the Evil One
1 The tolling tone of fading death-knell wanes —
2 Within black rooms a lover comes awake;
3 the stars gleam on his cheek through window panes.
4 Sails, masts, and hawsers, flash upon the lake.
5 A monk, a pregnant woman there on crowded walks.
6 Guitars are strummed amid red-glowing smocks
7 In golden glow the sweating chestnut trees decay;
8 the churches loom in black and sad array.
9 Behind pale masks, the Evil Spirit stares.
10 The ghastly twilight fades in public squares.
11 Whispers stir on islands after dark.
12 Chaotic symbols birds sketch out in flight
13 Are read by lepers who may rot tonight.
14 Trembling siblings espy inside the park.
The quality control largely dealt with non-convergences due to (1) filling out lines (“pitch-black”, “just awoke”); (2) convenient dilutions (“crowded way”, “guitarists play”, “siblings meet”); or (3) expressions somewhat off target in meaning (“aprons”, “blackened”, ”murky”, ”bewildering”).
3.18 In Chapter 6, we will be seeing in some detail how I applied these and other strategies for quality control in between my 1997 and 2007 versions of the Duineser Elegien. The translator should keep readers’ responses clearly in view even when they are totally monolingual and hence quite unlikely to detect non-convergences. The compelling issues are methodological discipline, and literary and especially poetic responsibility.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. See for example. Samuel Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1962); Jens Ihwe [ed.] Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971); and Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
2. For example, “Information, expectations, and processing: On classifying poetic texts”, Poetics 7/2 (1978), 3-44; “Semantic evaluation of grammar in poetry” PTL — A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 3/2 (1978), 315-325.
3. Critical Discourse: A Survey of Contemporary Literary Theorists (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1988).
4. Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 136, 232, 236f.
5. Harold Bloom, Anxiety and Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 93ff.
6. Geoffrey. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, 61.
7. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 107.
8. Felix Guattari, in le Figaro, quoted in translation from Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York, Picador, 1998).
9. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Londn: Routledge, 1994). The journal Philosophy and Literature, awarded Bhabha second prize in its “Bad Writing Competition”, which “celebrates bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles”. Compare Siegfried J. Schmidt , Empirical Foundations for the Study of Literature (Hamburg: Buske, 1982).
10. Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Volker Sinemus (eds.), Grundzüge der Literatur-und Sprachwissenschaft (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1974), 8, my translation.
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