The work of joining

May 29, 2012

One feels inclined to begin with difficulties. But why? Is that what defines the work – labour, struggle, adversity? Is translating poetry hard? People say so, and they invariably begin with its difficulties – if not with banalities about translation’s impossibility. But why do it at all, if it can be done only in the “sweat of our faces”?

To be sure, translation of poetry (and that is: writing the poem) needs its thimbleful of inspiration. But it is also quest, bodily engagement, a work of joining, and we should not be surprised that the biblical story of the confusion of tongues is framed on either side by page-long lists of “begats”. The meaningless absence of bodies of difference in the pre-Babelian limbo of a-poesis – mere respite – only spurs the impulse to return to ground: to the daring, never obedient, sometimes refractory material, to the dark matter and energy of the poem, its elliptical sweep, its science and veiled activity. “Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him”: the operative words in Schleiermacher’s bridge-building lesson are surely “as much as possible”. Where linguistic truths and the full range of human sensuality join with world process, how can reader or author ever be “left in peace”?
Iain Galbraith translated Ulrike Draesner’s poems into English for the 2012 Poetry International Festival.

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