Why do I do what I do & why I love it

July 23, 2013 The following was posted on the POETICS Archives by Charles Bernstein a day after 9/11: “I am simply translating the text. Not a single word of my own is there”. – Zeyar Lynn

I am afraid some poetry translator aspirants from Burma might read this note in Burmese, posted on Zeyar Lynn’s blog as a preface to his translation of Charles Bernstein’s response to 9/11, as Zeyar Lynn encouraging them to do literals. After all Zeyar Lynn, whose work I love and much of which I have translated, is in my opinion the most influential Burmese poet and translator of his generation, and the head honcho of a well-known L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E / language school in Rangoon/Yangon.

Don’t we use our ‘own words’ in the target language in all translations? For Bernstein [written in an email], “poetry translation depends on ways of reading and requires interpretation, even more than reading or writing the source text. Such interpretation means the translator must be creative and take all necessary liberties to make a new poem work in the new language. The relation of the original to the translation is neither faithfulness nor literality: the two become echoes of one another in a play of call and response, recall and responsibility.”

When I heard various German translations of the seemingly impenetrable ‘Johnny Cake Hollow’ by Bernstein at Jacket, it spurred me to render the poem into Burmese. I simply borrowed the concept and created a text of my own, a transliteration of the sound in gibberish ancient-looking Burmese in my translation of the poem. Of course what a Burmese reader (and a German reader who reads the German translation of ‘Johnny Cake Hollow’) may be missing is Bernstein’s Dadaistic mockery of meter in traditional English verses, but the blaring that the piece is a stiff jab in the face of established notions of what poetry is (and who we are to judge it) is not missed.

Several theories on literary translation abound. The common belief is that literary translation requires scholarship and rigorous research in preparation, and a stretch of imagination and creativity in recreating the text or the concept in the target language. A translator who is supposed to know the target language like Molly the fish knows her tank also has to equip herself with the context and the historicism of the poem. As I translate mainly contemporary and living poets I am in the habit of getting the feedback on my translations from the poets I translate. Nothing pleases me as much as getting a ‘Wow!’ from a poet whose work I have translated. Not all poets, especially the Burmese bards, are as generous as Professor Bernstein. This might explain why most of the English translations of Burmese poetry published inside the country have been rigid, remaining loyal to the word-for-word, line-for-line tradition.

Scholarship aside, I here would like to stress the infinitely large room for ‘ways of reading’ poetry translations. Following are three different readings of a celebrated Burmese haiku by the great modernist Tin Moe:
In translating ‘Rangoon’ by Moe Way, many readers might have thought I overdid it when I wrote “I hear the bells and all is well” when the opening line literally reads: “I hear someone ringing the hour bells” which to me does not sound good. In British Navy terminology “eight bells and all is well” means a watchman has completed his watch with nothing particular to report. Bell ringing by vigilantes has not gone extinct in many parts of Burma/Myanmar, which remains a security-intensive state. The practice is not just meant to tell time but to assuage the insecurity and fear of the rulers and denizens of a city or a village that their night watchmen were doing their job. As such the yell “all is well,” a phrase often heard routinely in Burmese jails, often follows the ringing of hour bells, and the chime of hour bells also implies that all is well. Hence my translation “I hear the bells and all is well.”

Sometimes translation calls for the calquing of the original if the calquing sounds ‘sexier’ than the translated text. Now, the somewhat-known phrase ‘bones will crow’ has been calqued from a Burmese idiom whose closet English counterpart might be the phrase ‘chickens come home to roost,’ as used by eminent translator Maung Tha Noe in Moe Zaw’s poem ‘Moonless Night’. I thought the title ‘Bones will Crow’ would fit the anthology I was co-editing with James Byrne as most Burmese poets are skin and bones, literally and figuratively. My hope was that the book might provide, at least to some of them, a wider international platform from which they can ‘crow.’ The phrase ‘bones will crow’ in the sense of ‘chickens come home to roost’ could also be a caveat to the Burmese authorities who have ruined countless Burmese lives.

Sometimes translators have little room for imagination when a Burmese poet uses transliterated English – as with the phrase “pencil heel” in Eaindra’s celebrated poem ‘Lily’. James Byrne suggested to me a more sophisticated-sounding “stiletto heel” but I stood my ground and insisted. It is written “pencil heel” in Burmese, and all pencil heels may be stiletto heels but not all stiletto heels are pencil heels. Sometimes you might want to turn onomatopoeic hyperbole into the sort of hyperbole as found in a line of my recent translation of Eaindra’s poem ‘Cashier’, where she compares her irrepressible urges for cash or cashier surging inside her to the sound of great waves. I have simply turned the sounds of the waves into “tsunami”, and I am glad Eaindra likes it. Some culture-specific concepts such as dukkha or metta may be untranslatable or only under-translatable. It is up to the translator to decide what to do with them.

In Lynnzinyaw’s piece ‘The Resource-Rich Country’, I went to extreme lengths when I translated the longish name of a Burmese cartoon character, Khin Maung Thein Tun Win, as the Monty Python character: Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter Crasscrenbon Fried Digger Dangle Dungle Burstein von Knacker Thrasher Apple Banger Horowitz Ticolensic Grander Knotty Spelltinkle Grandlich Grumblemeyer Spelterwasser Kürstlich Himbleeisen Bahnwagen Gutenabend Bitte Eine Nürnburger Bratwustle Gerspurten mit Zweimache Luber Hundsfut Gumberaber Shönendanker Kalbsfleisch Mittler Raucher von Hautkopft of Ulm.

Have I gone too far? I hope not. Khin Maung Thein Tun Win is extraordinarily lengthy for a Burmese moniker. For impact and irony, under the spell of ‘Johnny Cake Hollow’ I couldn’t help but rechristen Khin Maung Thein Tun Win, who represents the underclass of the Burmese society, as the utterly unknown Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter Crasscrenbon Fried Digger Dangle Dungle Burstein von Knacker Thrasher Apple Banger Horowitz Ticolensic Grander Knotty Spelltinkle Grandlich Grumblemeyer Spelterwasser Kürstlich Himbleeisen Bahnwagen Gutenabend Bitte Eine Nürnburger Bratwustle Gerspurten mit Zweimache Luber Hundsfut Gumberaber Shönendanker Kalbsfleisch Mittler Raucher von Hautkopft of Ulm.