A trick worthy of Houdini

January 18, 2006 Why translate poetry when, in the same amount of time or less, you can write a poem yourself? “Because the best way to get to the bottom of a poem is to translate it,” Austrian writer, poet and translator Raoul Schrott asserts. During the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, last June, Schrott talked about the translatability of poetry with two editors of PIW: Croatian poet and translator Sibila Petlevski, and American-Israeli Lisa Katz, who translates Hebrew poetry into English.

"Translating is the best way to read," said Sibila Petlevski. "It's also an adventure, not a job. I have a passionate relationship with the poets I translate." Lisa Katz added that, "sometimes it feels like you're the poet's analyst." "Translating is also a way to practise writing poetry," Raoul Schrott continued, "and it's good to get a lot of practise before you get started on your own work."

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, the Dutch poet and critic who chaired the discussion, asked what had been the most difficult poetry translation for each of the three. "For me it was the epic of Gilgamesh," Schrott replied. This epic poem, the earliest fragments of which date back to approximately 2000 before Christ, was not translated from the Assyrian until a hundred and fifty years ago. The problem with translating Gilgamesh, Schrott said, is that the idiom of the original language is difficult to understand. Not only that, but parts of the text are missing. "If you compare all the translations of Gilgamesh, you'll notice that there is not one sentence that is the same; there is no philological basis for 'the right translation'."

With this extreme example, Schrott appeared to be a proponent of the argument that poetry is untranslatable. Yet that proved not the case. Although Schrott believes that most translations are poor reflections of the original, luckily, there are also poets who have dared to undertake a poetic translation. In such translations, the poem is recreated rather than paraphrased. But isn't a lot of the original lost in such a translation?

"The most difficult part of translating," answered Petlevski, "is recreating the semantic aura surrounding the lines of poetry." That is why she believes that the translator must find a solution that compensates in some way for that loss of aura. What at first glance may seem to be a translation error, might also be a brilliant solution, as long as it works. Petlevski herself has seen how a translator misread a word in her own text, yet the result of the mistranslation added something to the original. Irish poet Matthew Sweeney, who attended the discussion, had a very different story. While staying in Latvia, he discovered that the title poem of his collection The Bridal Suite had been translated as if it were about a 'bridal suit': the translator did not know the word 'suite'. The result was an utterly absurdistic poem that had ruined the entire translated collection for him, even though he could not judge the quality of the rest.

How, in fact, can we tell whether a particular translation is good or even accurate, if we do not know the source language? Every reader, faced with multiple translations of the same poem, feels he knows which one is best, even without knowing a word of the original. What is that judgement based on?

According to Schrott, every poem has its own particular poetic 'formula'. The translator's duty is to discover that formula, and to work with it in his own language. A successful translation can always be recognized as such because the 'formula' makes it a unified whole in which all the component parts fit, he argued.

Katz mentioned that she has a tendency to make her translations more 'natural' when the original poem contained oddities or anomalies in its grammar or other elements. The other participants, however, argued this might lead to a 'smoothing out' of the poem. "There is no poem that cannot be translated,"Katz explained. "In Israel, there is this idea that Hebrew cannot be translated properly into English. Israelis think that their culture is incomprehensible to outsiders. I don't agree with that attitude. Culture, as well as poetry, can be translated; although you lose certain qualities of the language in the translation. You can transmit anything if you try hard enough."

"That's very reassuring," Pfeijffer responded, "but aren't the qualities of the language what poetry is all about?" Schrott agreed, and went on to talk about certain assumptions that can stand in the way of a good translation. For example, if an hexameter is used in a Greek poem, many translators believe that it should also be used in the translation. "But that's stupid," Schrott said, "because every language has its own speed. English, for example, is much shorter than Greek. So instead of using the hexameter no matter what, it is better to find your own rhythm in order to convey the speed and feeling of the original."

Another misconception, in his view, is that translators are best off choosing a safe compromise between an academic translation and a poetic one. Schrott: "But poetry is not denotative or philosophical. It is a choreography of words, with which the poet evokes a suggestion within the reader. You cannot separate content and form; one implies the other. In translation, it's the effect that matters. A good translation is a translation that has effect; that works." Katz agreed: "Translations are not intended for people who know the source text. Therefore, the goal - the translation - is more important than an exact representation of the source." Schrott: "Basically, it comes down to a Houdini escape-from-the-original trick, a kind of conjurer's magic. And that is why in 99 per cent of the cases it takes a poet to translate poetry well." Open handcuffs image via Shutterstock