Poetry International Poetry International
Artikel
with Susan Wicks

The life of a translator

Miguel Ugalde (sxc.hu)
29 mei 2012
Though I have a background in languages, I came to translation by accident. I’d occasionally tried my hand at translating French poems I loved, for the pure pleasure and stimulus of the activity itself, and I was lucky enough for a couple of my attempts at short poems by Apollinaire to be seen by a friend and subsequently published in Robert Chandler’s Everyman edition. But it was a surprise to be asked, in 2004, to take part in the Festival franco-anglais de poésie in Paris. The core activity of that festival was the mutual translation workshops which took place every morning. Each poet had been asked to submit a short poem in advance for translation by all those writing in the other language.
So for the first time I was able to see and compare a number of different French translations of my work, and for the first time I was able formally to put my own language skills to the test with others against some extremely challenging poetic material. It was the best possible introduction: we were all translators, all pitting ourselves against the same small set of impossibilities, and the discussion that followed was hugely stimulating. I think that was when I truly became a translator. It was in that series of workshops that I first met the French poet Valérie Rouzeau and fell in love with her work. Since then I haven’t looked back, translating first her early collection Pas Revoir as Cold Spring in Winter (Arc, 2010), and now new poems from her two most recent collections, Quand Je Me Deux and Vrouz.

In that workshop I was surprised to find out something about myself: I was and am more possessive about my translations than I tend to be about my own poems. As poets, we are used to letting our poems loose in the world to find hearers and readers – or not! – and be heard or misheard, as the case may be. I have learned, I think, to do this – though the skill is hard-won. But my instinct as a translator was to defend every decision quite fiercely. Hadn’t I thought about this very problem? Hadn’t I weighed up the relative importance of two mutually exclusive requirements to the poem’s overall meaning? I had, of course. But so had my poet-translator-colleagues – and they had come to different conclusions. It seems obvious, but if I believed in souls I’d say that the work I’ve had to do as a translator since that first workshop was mainly on my own soul! A poet doesn’t have to be modest. In fact, he or she is often called upon to be bold, flamboyant even, confident in the quirkiness of his or her unique vision, his or her own language. But a translator is called on to be modest – not vis-à-vis the poet he or she is translating, but vis-à-vis the poem. He or she is implicitly required to listen to the poem and work out its scale of values – not so much what it means as how it means, and re-create that as well as he or she can.

In a poem everything is capable of bearing a meaning. When I was an undergraduate reading French Literature in the early 1970s we would be expected to study and talk about a single sonnet, virtually unprompted, for the duration of an hour’s tutorial. Then, as now, poetry wasn’t a popular option, and there were only three of us in the group. At least two of us were afraid of the professor who taught us. It was torture. We’d sit on our hard plastic chairs and writhe! But for me it was a profound learning experience. It wasn’t just French Literature we were studying; it was a French way of looking at French Literature, and it was a way that made you realise that in poetry the dictionary meanings of individual words were only half the story. Everything was meaningful, if you looked at it properly – the connotations, the register of speech, the sound patterns, the syntax and punctuation, the shape on the page . . . Which is why it’s probably helpful to be a poet when you translate poetry: you’re used not just to finding linguistic near-equivalents, but to manipulating language. What you’re trying to do is translate the poem, not translate the word. And there’s no dilemma implied in that. It’s not a choice between translating ‘faithfully’ or ‘unfaithfully’: you can’t, however hard you try, be faithful to everything. So you try and  listen to the poem and work out where its own deepest loyalties are.

And your attempts are always incomplete, of course. There are always some things you have to let go of in favour of others which are in the end more important. Sometimes, too, you are working to a deadline, and without the freedom to choose which poems will work best in the target language. The translations I’ve done for Rotterdam, both this year and last, are, I know, ‘incomplete’ in this sense. But Umar Timol’s poems moved me, and I hope at least to have translated them in a way that allows the new reader that experience. Incompleteness surely has a lot going for it – in translation as in poetry itself? It is surely ‘better than the alternative’, as a friend of mine would say.

© Susan Wicks
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