Artikel
Views on translation
In favor of difference
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18 januari 2006
Rather, when we read poetry, meaning unfolds in associative chains that begin with words and phrases. Because any poem’s chains of associations are culture-linked, original and translation must be different, the way poems allow for different readings even in the source language; they are alike only in the rather abstract way that cultures are. Perhaps cultures are like the imaginary planets in Star Trek, related by their sense of – or lack of – humanity. Perhaps the relationship between original and translation, so difficult to articulate, is encompassed by Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic statement that ‘the task of the translator [is] to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another’. The ‘pure language’ might be what is or seems to be shared, but what is not shared also creates effects.
Whatever the exact nature of its relationship to the original, translation creates a changed poem, because the target language evokes source language culture only partially, and also differently. In order to demonstrate how deeply cultural elements must necessarily change the effect of poetry in translation, and just how peripheral sound elements are, I would like to examine a few differences between the original poem and my translation of ‘Shaheeda’ (‘Woman Martyr’ in English) by the Israeli poet Agi Mishol. I would like to stress that I do not consider the changes that poems undergo in translation to be a problem; rather, I see these changes as part of life: filled with surprises and, if we are lucky, serendipitous.
With respect to this particular poem by Agi Mishol: although she writes in Hebrew, Mishol uses an Arabic word for the title. If we do not know that the word is Arabic and is used by some Arabic speakers to describe suicide bombers, as Hebrew speakers used to Arabic borrowings in their language do know, we lose out on an important multi-cultural moment: a Hebrew poem speaking in Arabic. Still, the word shaheeda literally translated into ‘woman martyr’ remains religiously resonant (and politically loaded, because seemingly more positive than ‘suicide bomber’) in English as in Arabic or Hebrew, and underscores the element of gender so important to the poem.
Interestingly enough, the very use of the Arabic word seemed to mean to some Israeli readers of the original Hebrew poem that Mishol approved of women martyrs and suicide bombers: angry letters were written to the newspaper in which the poem first appeared, and subscriptions were cancelled. A careful reading of the poem in fact reveals shock, horror, speechlessness (and seemingly inefficacious poetry writing) as responses to the act of the woman suicide bomber – feigning pregnancy, she is able to carry out her murderous mission in the crowded public market. In the original poem, using the ‘foreign’ word (in fact, Arabic is an official language in Israel and native, but this a subject for a different essay) does in some way retain the point of view of the culture within that language: using the Arabic word in the original Hebrew poem at least implies understanding of one word in that language, and an approach to, if not a dialogue with, Arabic-speaking Palestinians. A translator might choose to leave the title in Arabic-transliterated-into-English, shaheeda, but then its meaning would be lost, perhaps delegated to a footnote outside the framework of the poem itself, even as its original form (and sound!) seemed to be preserved. Preserving an Arabic word in English connotes lack of knowledge and understanding; instead of sympathy, it conveys blockage. I do not discount the possibility that one might want to preserve linguistic blockage, the way Michael Hamburger preserves some German phrases in Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue,’ but in the case of Mishol’s poem I am eager for intelligibility. Too eager? Perhaps.
Let us move on to an important cultural element – the poem’s epigraph, a quotation from a previous text – ‘Afternoon in the Market’ by Nathan Alterman. The quotation is: “The afternoon goes blind/ and you are only twenty.” Even if one has never heard of Alterman, the afternoon darkening is natural in autumn and winter but seems ominous; we know from experience that dusk is sometimes depressing. What is happening to this woman who is merely twenty? Has she already at such a young age lost her love (in a war? to personal betrayal?). Ah synecdoche!!
In the original poem, Mishol’s citation of two lines by Alterman sets off a chain of Israeli literary associations: the lines represent the entire poem which represents Alterman’s oeuvre which represents the canon of Israeli poetry in Hebrew up to Mishol’s generation (her first book was published two years after he died). Mishol’s citation of Alterman’s poetry represents a critical look back at the culture she has grown out of. The direct address to and concern for the woman in Alterman’s poem (in some sense representing an older, previous Israel) cannot help but be turned toward Mishol’s shaheeda, who is also directly addressed in the first line of her poem with the exact same words. Indeed, a major feature of contemporary Israeli political poetry (in some way representing a different if not an improved Israel) is this perhaps subversive conflation of Jews and Palestinians, an appeal to our common humanity even in the current desperate and violent situation. Whereas, in the older Israel, the forces of nature seem to have the upper hand (first the afternoon darkens, and only then is the young woman an object of consideration), in Israel today, in Mishol’s poem, the order is reversed: even a young woman can darken the day.
Dan Miron suggests in his afterword to Mishol’s recent volume of New and Selected Poems that despite the mechanical nature taken on by the woman in the poem (she becomes a bomb) and the way she has been used (she is likened to an automaton), she remains a human being ‘and a partner in dialogue’, in his words, when the poem is addressed to her. It may be that this undercurrent of dialogue – with extremists or those used by them – is the factor which led some readers of the original poem to be alarmed by it, thinking dialogue to be out of place in this situation.
Regarding sound, Mishol has said that she was moved to write the poem because the sound of the woman suicide bomber’s surname – Takatka – is like the Hebrew word for ticking, (leh-tak-tek, to tick), a word which is onomatopoeic in most languages and therefore translates well. Another Israeli poet, Gali-Dana Singer, has also said that she follows sound when she writes, and for this reason found it possible to switch the language of her poetry from her native Russian to Hebrew. These statements raise interesting issues about the relationship of sound to meaning and how poems come to be written but they do not really help us translate. More important, I believe, is the fact that the woman martyr is named, a humanizing element in any language. This element of the original poem seems to me to travel well in translation. Even suicide bombers start out as people given names by their families. And the focus on the suicide bomber’s name/humanity also echoes a previous Israeli text: the first lines of the much-quoted poem by the Israeli poet Zelda (who, interestingly, used only her first name professionally and did not sign her poems with her Russian surname, Mishkovsky): ‘Every person has a name/ given by God/and by a father and a mother’. In humanizing the inhuman, the poem is – in contradiction to what some Israeli readers thought – not expressing approval of Takatka’s act, but rather evincing, PIW editor Rami Saari says, a very ‘human intention to make the unbearable at least understandable and so to reduce the amount of horror’.
Another cultural blank in this poem may be the fact that the Hebrew name of the town of Bethlehem consists of two words – beit lechem – literally meaning ‘house (or home) of bread.’ The poem in Hebrew ironically notes that Takatka, even though (or actually, because – the Hebrew word davka allows for both interpretations) she came from Bethlehem , the home of bread, chose to detonate herself in a bakery – while she herself seems to embody bread rising, swelling with pregnancy. Furthermore, the word ‘bread’ in Hebrew (lechem) means ‘meat’ in Arabic (lakhm), as well as serving as the basis of the Hebrew word for fighting and war.
What does the original poem mean to one Israeli critic? Dan Miron calls ‘Woman Martyr’ ‘a public poem’ and offers a political interpretation, based on the literal meaning of the word Bethlehem in Hebrew: ‘in a way the young woman is destroying not only herself and her victims but her own home’. In his interpretation of the poem, Miron finds that terror works against the Palestinians. Perhaps some readers of a translation would want to puzzle out ‘even though you come from Bethlehem/ you chose a bakery’, but I decided to impose the meaning inherent in the Hebrew – ‘the Home of Bread’ – on the translation. I justify this because of the pervasiveness of naming in the poem and its significance: the woman bomber is named, as is her home town. Even the bread has names or types, and four of the victims and their places of birth are named as well.
The names and homelands of the victims convey the situation of foreignness that perhaps paradoxically pervades Israel; despite its official existence as a Jewish state, Israel is home to, in addition to Palestinians (some who are citizens and some who live under occupation), people from many places: Jewish or part-Jewish immigrants and foreign workers whose names reflect their multiple heritages. The poem cites three Moslem or partly Moslem countries or regions (Afghanistan, Iran and the Caucasus) from which, ironically, several victims of the suicide bomber emigrated. The trope of naming in this poem conveys the heterogeneous social fabric of Israel, whether the poem is read in Hebrew or English or German, to which it has also been translated.
Against the background of explicit naming, the ‘two Chinese’ who are not named may be understood to be so low on the social scale that they are nearly completely anonymous in Israel. In fact, the names of the two Chinese ‘foreign workers’ killed by the bomber were made known in the media, but the Chinese in the poem are not identified by name but rather as members of a foreign group, seemingly more Other, whether because of racism, stereotyping, language barriers, ignorance, or a combination of all of these. I asked Mishol why only the Chinese victims remained unnamed and she explained that she was referring to yet another previous text: the ‘two Chinese’ are also figures in a popular Israeli children’s nonsense song.
The song about “two Chinese” is in fact a child’s word game, in which vowels are transposed when one repeats the lines of the song, turning nonsense into unintelligibility (and yet a kind of familiar meaninglessness – a chant known by heart by most Israeli children). And, in the original poem, Mishol cites “two Chinese” as they appear in the children’s song/game – with a childlike deviation from the norms of Hebrew grammar. I did not try to imitate this deviation in English where I felt it would become meaningless. What is lost? According to poet Rami Saari, “this small deviation from the grammatical norm points out: 1. The foreignness of the Chinese is accentuated not only by their lack of names, but by the mistake in Hebrew, a linguistic mistake. 2. Their foreignness smashes the language the way the bomb smashes their bodies. 3. The nonsense of the song combines with the absurdity of a reality in which a suicide bomber who intends to kill Jews kills instead two Chinese who have nothing to do with the conflict.”
In the poem, the idyllic nonsense of that song (and of the older Israel) turns into a lament for the dead, and a lament for the end of what were perhaps premature dreams of a safe haven for Jews in Israel. There is no more safety; even the characters in children’s songs are ‘swept along to death’. The irony that Chinese foreign workers do belong to the Israel of the intifada, just as recent Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the near east, all of them shopping in the Jewish market on Friday afternoon when prices are lowest, and united in sudden death, is not lost in translation.
I rather hopefully believe we should be asking as Sam Hamill recently did: ‘What is gained by translation?’ Perhaps translations can lead us to ask questions about what puzzles us – Why ‘two Chinese’? What are they doing in the Jewish market in Jerusalem? Why don’t they have names? Even if the answers to these questions are a bit different in Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, and in Beijing, this poem’s ‘afterlife’ (to use another enigmatic and evocative phrase from Walter Benjamin) has an important role to play in our lives, to make us sensitive to the details of one particular political conflict out of many, so that we may move beyond the stereotypes that lead us to accept its murderous absurdity.
With regard to the fabric of language itself, true, people who read Mishol’s work in translation will not enjoy her word play, her sensitivity to the repetitious aspects of Hebrew, and its enormous potential for puns and other associative tricks which stems from the fact that words are based on roots comprised of several letters. In the poem under discussion, readers of the translation will not hear that the metal of the bomb shards (mah-tech-et) is a near-rhyme with the bomb-woman ticking (meh-tak-tek-et) in Hebrew. They probably will not have read the books on Mishol’s shelf, although they will have read others. They will not be Israelis reading the poem inside the reality she describes. The translated version of the poem will be different in many ways.
I am saying that the changes are fortuitous, in both the formal and informal senses of that word, which itself has undergone a transformation or translation – within English – from meaning merely ‘accidental’ to meaning ‘lucky’. The second, newer definition is one which not all language usage experts accept, perhaps because it differs from the original. Agi Mishol’s ‘Woman Martyr’ makes its way from Hebrew into other languages fortuitously: accompanied by the differences between languages that are the result of the seemingly accidental and culture-based ways that languages evolve; lucky for us, I say, that our respective cultures add new chains of meaning to her verse in translation.
Colourful umbrella image via Shutterstock
Something is gained rather than lost in translated poetry, argues Lisa Katz in this essay. Translations abound with fortuitous changes, which perhaps ‘can lead us to ask questions about what puzzles us’.
Every poem is its own world, and a translated poem . . . a different world. Just how these worlds are related is the subject of much discussion: we often ask how a translated poem is ‘like’ the original. I would like to ask the opposite question, and I will write here in favor of difference in translation. I do not believe that what makes translations like originals may be found in meter, rhyme or any aspect of sound, even though, paradoxically, poetry is an art that is inseparable from the qualities of language, especially sound. Target languages cannot wear the linguistic accessories, let us say, of the source languages; they will end up having flowers pinned to their bottoms. In the case of my work, English cannot be ‘like’ Hebrew – it cannot become guttural sounding, contain less verb tenses, move from right to left, or sit the Bible on its knee like a ventriloquist’s doll the way Hebrew does.Rather, when we read poetry, meaning unfolds in associative chains that begin with words and phrases. Because any poem’s chains of associations are culture-linked, original and translation must be different, the way poems allow for different readings even in the source language; they are alike only in the rather abstract way that cultures are. Perhaps cultures are like the imaginary planets in Star Trek, related by their sense of – or lack of – humanity. Perhaps the relationship between original and translation, so difficult to articulate, is encompassed by Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic statement that ‘the task of the translator [is] to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another’. The ‘pure language’ might be what is or seems to be shared, but what is not shared also creates effects.
Whatever the exact nature of its relationship to the original, translation creates a changed poem, because the target language evokes source language culture only partially, and also differently. In order to demonstrate how deeply cultural elements must necessarily change the effect of poetry in translation, and just how peripheral sound elements are, I would like to examine a few differences between the original poem and my translation of ‘Shaheeda’ (‘Woman Martyr’ in English) by the Israeli poet Agi Mishol. I would like to stress that I do not consider the changes that poems undergo in translation to be a problem; rather, I see these changes as part of life: filled with surprises and, if we are lucky, serendipitous.
With respect to this particular poem by Agi Mishol: although she writes in Hebrew, Mishol uses an Arabic word for the title. If we do not know that the word is Arabic and is used by some Arabic speakers to describe suicide bombers, as Hebrew speakers used to Arabic borrowings in their language do know, we lose out on an important multi-cultural moment: a Hebrew poem speaking in Arabic. Still, the word shaheeda literally translated into ‘woman martyr’ remains religiously resonant (and politically loaded, because seemingly more positive than ‘suicide bomber’) in English as in Arabic or Hebrew, and underscores the element of gender so important to the poem.
Interestingly enough, the very use of the Arabic word seemed to mean to some Israeli readers of the original Hebrew poem that Mishol approved of women martyrs and suicide bombers: angry letters were written to the newspaper in which the poem first appeared, and subscriptions were cancelled. A careful reading of the poem in fact reveals shock, horror, speechlessness (and seemingly inefficacious poetry writing) as responses to the act of the woman suicide bomber – feigning pregnancy, she is able to carry out her murderous mission in the crowded public market. In the original poem, using the ‘foreign’ word (in fact, Arabic is an official language in Israel and native, but this a subject for a different essay) does in some way retain the point of view of the culture within that language: using the Arabic word in the original Hebrew poem at least implies understanding of one word in that language, and an approach to, if not a dialogue with, Arabic-speaking Palestinians. A translator might choose to leave the title in Arabic-transliterated-into-English, shaheeda, but then its meaning would be lost, perhaps delegated to a footnote outside the framework of the poem itself, even as its original form (and sound!) seemed to be preserved. Preserving an Arabic word in English connotes lack of knowledge and understanding; instead of sympathy, it conveys blockage. I do not discount the possibility that one might want to preserve linguistic blockage, the way Michael Hamburger preserves some German phrases in Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue,’ but in the case of Mishol’s poem I am eager for intelligibility. Too eager? Perhaps.
Let us move on to an important cultural element – the poem’s epigraph, a quotation from a previous text – ‘Afternoon in the Market’ by Nathan Alterman. The quotation is: “The afternoon goes blind/ and you are only twenty.” Even if one has never heard of Alterman, the afternoon darkening is natural in autumn and winter but seems ominous; we know from experience that dusk is sometimes depressing. What is happening to this woman who is merely twenty? Has she already at such a young age lost her love (in a war? to personal betrayal?). Ah synecdoche!!
In the original poem, Mishol’s citation of two lines by Alterman sets off a chain of Israeli literary associations: the lines represent the entire poem which represents Alterman’s oeuvre which represents the canon of Israeli poetry in Hebrew up to Mishol’s generation (her first book was published two years after he died). Mishol’s citation of Alterman’s poetry represents a critical look back at the culture she has grown out of. The direct address to and concern for the woman in Alterman’s poem (in some sense representing an older, previous Israel) cannot help but be turned toward Mishol’s shaheeda, who is also directly addressed in the first line of her poem with the exact same words. Indeed, a major feature of contemporary Israeli political poetry (in some way representing a different if not an improved Israel) is this perhaps subversive conflation of Jews and Palestinians, an appeal to our common humanity even in the current desperate and violent situation. Whereas, in the older Israel, the forces of nature seem to have the upper hand (first the afternoon darkens, and only then is the young woman an object of consideration), in Israel today, in Mishol’s poem, the order is reversed: even a young woman can darken the day.
Dan Miron suggests in his afterword to Mishol’s recent volume of New and Selected Poems that despite the mechanical nature taken on by the woman in the poem (she becomes a bomb) and the way she has been used (she is likened to an automaton), she remains a human being ‘and a partner in dialogue’, in his words, when the poem is addressed to her. It may be that this undercurrent of dialogue – with extremists or those used by them – is the factor which led some readers of the original poem to be alarmed by it, thinking dialogue to be out of place in this situation.
Regarding sound, Mishol has said that she was moved to write the poem because the sound of the woman suicide bomber’s surname – Takatka – is like the Hebrew word for ticking, (leh-tak-tek, to tick), a word which is onomatopoeic in most languages and therefore translates well. Another Israeli poet, Gali-Dana Singer, has also said that she follows sound when she writes, and for this reason found it possible to switch the language of her poetry from her native Russian to Hebrew. These statements raise interesting issues about the relationship of sound to meaning and how poems come to be written but they do not really help us translate. More important, I believe, is the fact that the woman martyr is named, a humanizing element in any language. This element of the original poem seems to me to travel well in translation. Even suicide bombers start out as people given names by their families. And the focus on the suicide bomber’s name/humanity also echoes a previous Israeli text: the first lines of the much-quoted poem by the Israeli poet Zelda (who, interestingly, used only her first name professionally and did not sign her poems with her Russian surname, Mishkovsky): ‘Every person has a name/ given by God/and by a father and a mother’. In humanizing the inhuman, the poem is – in contradiction to what some Israeli readers thought – not expressing approval of Takatka’s act, but rather evincing, PIW editor Rami Saari says, a very ‘human intention to make the unbearable at least understandable and so to reduce the amount of horror’.
Another cultural blank in this poem may be the fact that the Hebrew name of the town of Bethlehem consists of two words – beit lechem – literally meaning ‘house (or home) of bread.’ The poem in Hebrew ironically notes that Takatka, even though (or actually, because – the Hebrew word davka allows for both interpretations) she came from Bethlehem , the home of bread, chose to detonate herself in a bakery – while she herself seems to embody bread rising, swelling with pregnancy. Furthermore, the word ‘bread’ in Hebrew (lechem) means ‘meat’ in Arabic (lakhm), as well as serving as the basis of the Hebrew word for fighting and war.
What does the original poem mean to one Israeli critic? Dan Miron calls ‘Woman Martyr’ ‘a public poem’ and offers a political interpretation, based on the literal meaning of the word Bethlehem in Hebrew: ‘in a way the young woman is destroying not only herself and her victims but her own home’. In his interpretation of the poem, Miron finds that terror works against the Palestinians. Perhaps some readers of a translation would want to puzzle out ‘even though you come from Bethlehem/ you chose a bakery’, but I decided to impose the meaning inherent in the Hebrew – ‘the Home of Bread’ – on the translation. I justify this because of the pervasiveness of naming in the poem and its significance: the woman bomber is named, as is her home town. Even the bread has names or types, and four of the victims and their places of birth are named as well.
The names and homelands of the victims convey the situation of foreignness that perhaps paradoxically pervades Israel; despite its official existence as a Jewish state, Israel is home to, in addition to Palestinians (some who are citizens and some who live under occupation), people from many places: Jewish or part-Jewish immigrants and foreign workers whose names reflect their multiple heritages. The poem cites three Moslem or partly Moslem countries or regions (Afghanistan, Iran and the Caucasus) from which, ironically, several victims of the suicide bomber emigrated. The trope of naming in this poem conveys the heterogeneous social fabric of Israel, whether the poem is read in Hebrew or English or German, to which it has also been translated.
Against the background of explicit naming, the ‘two Chinese’ who are not named may be understood to be so low on the social scale that they are nearly completely anonymous in Israel. In fact, the names of the two Chinese ‘foreign workers’ killed by the bomber were made known in the media, but the Chinese in the poem are not identified by name but rather as members of a foreign group, seemingly more Other, whether because of racism, stereotyping, language barriers, ignorance, or a combination of all of these. I asked Mishol why only the Chinese victims remained unnamed and she explained that she was referring to yet another previous text: the ‘two Chinese’ are also figures in a popular Israeli children’s nonsense song.
The song about “two Chinese” is in fact a child’s word game, in which vowels are transposed when one repeats the lines of the song, turning nonsense into unintelligibility (and yet a kind of familiar meaninglessness – a chant known by heart by most Israeli children). And, in the original poem, Mishol cites “two Chinese” as they appear in the children’s song/game – with a childlike deviation from the norms of Hebrew grammar. I did not try to imitate this deviation in English where I felt it would become meaningless. What is lost? According to poet Rami Saari, “this small deviation from the grammatical norm points out: 1. The foreignness of the Chinese is accentuated not only by their lack of names, but by the mistake in Hebrew, a linguistic mistake. 2. Their foreignness smashes the language the way the bomb smashes their bodies. 3. The nonsense of the song combines with the absurdity of a reality in which a suicide bomber who intends to kill Jews kills instead two Chinese who have nothing to do with the conflict.”
In the poem, the idyllic nonsense of that song (and of the older Israel) turns into a lament for the dead, and a lament for the end of what were perhaps premature dreams of a safe haven for Jews in Israel. There is no more safety; even the characters in children’s songs are ‘swept along to death’. The irony that Chinese foreign workers do belong to the Israel of the intifada, just as recent Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the near east, all of them shopping in the Jewish market on Friday afternoon when prices are lowest, and united in sudden death, is not lost in translation.
I rather hopefully believe we should be asking as Sam Hamill recently did: ‘What is gained by translation?’ Perhaps translations can lead us to ask questions about what puzzles us – Why ‘two Chinese’? What are they doing in the Jewish market in Jerusalem? Why don’t they have names? Even if the answers to these questions are a bit different in Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, and in Beijing, this poem’s ‘afterlife’ (to use another enigmatic and evocative phrase from Walter Benjamin) has an important role to play in our lives, to make us sensitive to the details of one particular political conflict out of many, so that we may move beyond the stereotypes that lead us to accept its murderous absurdity.
With regard to the fabric of language itself, true, people who read Mishol’s work in translation will not enjoy her word play, her sensitivity to the repetitious aspects of Hebrew, and its enormous potential for puns and other associative tricks which stems from the fact that words are based on roots comprised of several letters. In the poem under discussion, readers of the translation will not hear that the metal of the bomb shards (mah-tech-et) is a near-rhyme with the bomb-woman ticking (meh-tak-tek-et) in Hebrew. They probably will not have read the books on Mishol’s shelf, although they will have read others. They will not be Israelis reading the poem inside the reality she describes. The translated version of the poem will be different in many ways.
I am saying that the changes are fortuitous, in both the formal and informal senses of that word, which itself has undergone a transformation or translation – within English – from meaning merely ‘accidental’ to meaning ‘lucky’. The second, newer definition is one which not all language usage experts accept, perhaps because it differs from the original. Agi Mishol’s ‘Woman Martyr’ makes its way from Hebrew into other languages fortuitously: accompanied by the differences between languages that are the result of the seemingly accidental and culture-based ways that languages evolve; lucky for us, I say, that our respective cultures add new chains of meaning to her verse in translation.
Colourful umbrella image via Shutterstock
© Lisa Katz
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