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FIFTEEN TRANSlATION: LITERATURE AND LETTERS 153 0CTAVIO p {\Z the vast array of customs and societies, man began to find it difficult Translation: Literature and Letters to recognize himself in other men. Until that time, the heathen had been a deviant to be suppressed through conversion ot extermina Translated by Irene del Corral tion, baptism or the sword, but the heathen presented in eighteenth-century salons was· a new creature who, although he might speak his hosts' language to perfection, nevertheless embod ied an inexorable foreignness. He was not subjected to conversion but to controversy and ·criticism; the originality of his views, the simplicity of his customs, and even the violence of his passions verified the absurdity and futility, to say nothing of the infamy, of baptism and conversion. A new course was raken: the religious quest for spiritual universality was superseded by an intellectual curiosity intent upon unearthing equally universal differences. For When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate; the child who eignness was no longer the e.xception, but the rule. This shift in asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to trans - perception is· both paradoxical and revealing. The savage repre late the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows. sented civilized man's nostalgia, his alter ego, his lost half And In this sense, translation within the same language is not essentially translation reflected this shift: ·no longer was it an effort to illustrate different from translation berween rwo tongues, and the histories the ultimate sameness of men; it became a vehicle to expose their of all peoples parallel the child's experience. Even the most isolated individualities·. Translation had once served to reveal the prepon tribe, sooner or later, comes into contact with other people who derance of similarities over differences; from this time forward speak a foreign language. The sounds of a tongue we do not know translation would serve to illustrate the irreconcilability of differ may cause us to react with astonislunent, annoyance, indignation, ences, whether these stem from the foreignness of the savage or of or amused perplexity, but these sensations are soon replaced by our neighbor. · . · uncertainties about our own language. We become aware that lan During his travels, Dr. Johnson once made an observation that guage is not universal; rather, there is a plurality oflangliages, each expressed the new attitude very aptly: "A blade of grass is always a one alien and unintelligible to the others. In the past, translation blade of grass, whether in one country or another. . . . Men and dispelled the uncertaintieS. Although language is not universal, lan women are my subjects of inquiry; let us see how these differ from guages nevertheless form part of a universal society in which, once those we have left behind." Dr. Johnson's words convey rwo some difficulties have been overcome, all people can communicate thoughts, and both foretell the dual road the modern age was to with and understand each other. And they can do so because in any follow. The first refers to the separation of man from nature, a sepa language men always say the same things. Universality of the spirit ration that would be transformed into confrontation and conflict: was the response to the confusion of Babel: many languages, one man's mission was no longer his own salvation but the mastery of substance. It was through the plurality of religions that Pascal be nature. The second refers to the separation of man from man. The · came convinced of the truth of Christianity; translation responded world is no longer a world, an indivisible whole; there is a split to the diversity of languages with the concept()f universal intelli berween nature and ~ivilization, a split compounded by further gibility. Thus, translation was not only a confirmation but also a subdivisions into separate cultures. A plurality of languages and guarantee of the existence of spiritual bonds. societies: each_ language is a view of the world, each civilization is The modern age destroyed that assurance. As he rediscovered a world. ·The sun praised in an Aztec poem is not the_sun of the the infinite variety of temperaments and passions, as he observed Egyptian hymn, although both speak of the same star. For more than rwo centuries, philosophers and historians, and more recently From Octavio Paz, TraduaiOn: Literatura y L(teralidad (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1971 ). anthropologists and linguists as well, have been accumulating ex-
152 154 0CTAVIOPAZ TRANSLATION: LITERATURE AND LETI'ERS 155
I arnples of the insurmountable differences between individuals, so according to Roman Jalcobson, all literary procedures are reduced: cieties, and eras. The greatest schism, scarcely less profound than metonym and metaphor. The original text never reappears in the that between narure and culrure, separates primitives from the civ new language (this would be impossible); yet it is ever present be ilized; further divisions arise from the variety and diversity of civi cause the. translation, without saying it, expresses it constantly, or lizations. Within each civilization, more differences emerge: the· else convens it into a verbal object that, although different, repro language that enables us to communicate with one another also duces it: metonym or metaphor. Both, unlike explicative transla encloses us in an invisible web of sounds and meanings, so that tions and paraphrase, are rigorous forms that are in no way incon ea~~_:>.a~Qiljs in;lp_risoned by its language, a langu~gef~rrt:ll~r frag sistent with accuracy. The metonym is an indirect description, and 'inented by historical eras, by social classes, by ge11"ratiggs. As for the metaphor a verbal equation. the intercourse among individuals belonging to the same commu The greatest pes.simism about the feas. ibility of tran. slation has nity, each one is hemmed in by his own self-concern. een concentrated on poetry, a remarkable posrure since many of With all this, one would have expected translators to accept e best poems in every Western language are translations, and defeat, but this has not been the case; instead, there has been a any of those translations were written by great poets. Some years · contradictory and complementary trend to translate even more. ago the critic and linguist Georges Mounin wrote a book about This is paradoxical because, while translation overcomes the differ translation .. He pointed our that it is generally, albeit reluctantly, ences between one language and another, it also reveals them more conceded that it is possible to translate the denotative meanings of fully. Tjl,anks __:o translaficm, we become aware that o."': 11e_igl_ll:x>_rs a text but that the consensus is almost unanimous that the transla do not speak anatliink as we do. On the one lianif, the world is tion of connotative meanings is impossible. Woven of echoes, re- . presented to rui'as'a collection of similarities; on the other, as a flections, and the interaction of soURd with meaning, poetry is a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that fabric of connotations and, consequently, untranslatable. I must carne before it: translations of translations of translations. Each text confess that I find this idea offensive, not only because it conflicts is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of allOaler text. with my personal conviction that poetry is universal, but also J:>e No text can be completely original because 1an:g;;.;g.; ~~if, i;, its cause it is based on an erroneous conception of what translation is. V~t:L~Ssence, is already a translation-first from the nonverbal Not everyone shares my view, and many modem poets insist that world, anci' then,because each sign and each phrase iS atranslation poetry is untranslatable. Perhaps their opinion comes from their of another sign, another phrase. However, the inverse of this rea inordinate attachment ·to verbal matter, or perhaps they have be- : soning is also entirely valid. All texts are· orlgln.als becall'se-each come ensnared in the trap of subjectivity. A morral trap, as Que, translation has its own distinctive character. Up to a point, each vedo warns: "the waters of the abyss I where I carne to love myself!' translation is a creation and thus constirutes a uniq_ue text. Unarnuno, in one of his lyric-patriotic outbursts, provides an ex The discoveries of anthropology and lingUistics do not im ample of this kind of verbal infaruation: peach translation itself, but a cenain ingenuous notion of transla tion, the word-for-word translation suggestively called scrvil (ser Avila, Malaga, Ciceres, vile)' in Spanish. I do not mean to imply that literal translation is Jitiva, Merida, C6rdoba, impossible; what I am saying is that it is not translation. It is a Cuidad Rodrigo, SepUlveda, mechanism, a string of words that helps us read the text· in its orig Ubeda, Arevalo, Fr6misca, inallanguage. It is a glossary ratherthm_a !I::lllS! 156 0CTAVIOPAZ TRANSLATION: LITERATURE AND LETtERS 157 "The untranslatable marrow I of our Spanish tongue" is an outra A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life, geous metaphor (marrow and tongue?), but a perfectly translatable The invention of a. nation in a phrase . ... one since its image is universal. Many poets have utilized Unamu· no's srylistic device in other languages: the lists of words differ, but Here language has become a landscape, and that landscape, in the context, the emotion, and the meaning are comparable. It is turn, is a creation, the metaphor of a nation or of an individual remarkable that the untranslatable essence of Spain should consist a verbal topography that communicates fully, that translates fully. j of a succession of Roman, Arabic, Celtiberian and Basque names. Phrases form a chain of mountains, and the mountains are the char It is equally remarkable that Unamuno should have translated the acters, the ideograms of a civilization. But not only is the interac name of the Catalonian city Lleida into Castilian (Lerida). And tion between echoes and words overwhelming; it holds an inescap what is perhaps most surprising of all is that he quoted the follow able threat. The moment comes when, surrounded by words on all ing lines by Victor Hugo as an epigraph to his poem, apparently sides, we feel intimidated by the distressing bewilderment of living not realizing that by doing so he was contradicting his own asser among names and not among things, the bewilderment of even tion that the names were untranslatable: having a name: Et tout tremble, Irun, Coiinbre, Santander, Almodovar, Amid the reeds and the late afternoon, sitOt qu'on entend le timbre how strange that I am named Federico! des cymbals de Bivar. And everytbing trembles, !run, Cofmbra, In this case, too, the experience is universal: Garcia Lorca Santander, Almod6var, would have felt the same uneasiness if he had been called Tom, once we hear the timbre Jean, or Chuang Tzu. To l95e our name is like losing our shadow; of the cymbals of Bivar. to be only our name is to be reduced to a shadow. The absence of any correlation between things and their names is doubly intoler In both Spanish and French, the meanings and the emotions able: either the meanings evaporate or the things vanish. A world are the same. Since, strictly ·speaking, the proper nouns cannot be of pure- meanings is as inhospitable as a world of things without translated, Hugo merely recites them in Spanish, making no at meaning-without names. It is language that mai(es the world tempt to gallicize them. The recitation is effective because the · habitable. The instant of perplexity at the oddness of being called words, stripped of precise meaning and converted into verbal cas Federico or So Ji is immediately followed by the invention of an tanets, true mantras, echo through the French text even more ex other name, a name that is, in a way, a translation of the first: the otically than in the Spanish .... Translation is very difficult-no metaphor or metonyrn that, without saying ir, says it. less difficult than writing so-called original texts-but it is not im In recent years, perhaps because of the increasing primacy of possible. The poems of Hugo and Unamuno illustrate that con linguistics, there has been a tendency to deemphasize the decideclly notative. meanings can be preserved if the poet-translator success literary nature of translation. There is no such thing-nor can there fully reproduces the verbal situation, the poetic context, into which be-as a science of translation, although translation can and should they are mounted. Wallace Stevens has given us a sort of model be studied scientifically. Just as literature is a specialized function of image of that situation in a fine passage: language, so translation is a specialized function of literature. And what, we might ask, of the machines that translate? If they ever ... the hard hidalgo really translate, they roo will perform a literary operation, and they Lives in the mountainous character of his speech; roo will produce what translators now do: literature. Translation is And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires an exercise in which what is decisive, given the necessary.liiigwstic The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo's hat- proficieni:y, is the translator's initiative, whether that translator be ) ~j: 158 OcrAVIOPAZ TRANSLATION' LITERATURE AND LETIERS 159 ( a machine programmed by man or a living human being sur tention to this disturbing peculiarity of poetry, but they have dis, rounded by dictionaries. Arthur Waley has put it well: regarded the equally fascinating peculiariry that corresponds to this kind of mobiliry and arnbiguiry of meanings: the immobility of A French scholar wrote recently with regard to translators: "Qu)ils signs. Poetry radically transforms language, and it does_ so in a di ! ' s'effacent derriere les textes et ceux-ci, s'ils ont fte -praiment cmnpris, parle ront d'eux-memes." [They should make themselves invisible behind the rection opposite to that of prose. In one case, the mobility of char texts and, if fully understood, the texts will speak for themselves.] acters tends to fix a single meaning; in the other, the plurality of I Except in the rather rare case of plain concrete statemen~ such as meanings tends to fix the characters. LangtJ;~ge, of course, is a sys "The cat chases the mouse," there are seldom sentences that have exact tem of mobile signs that may be interchangeable to some degree; II, word-to-word equivalents in another language. It becomes a question one word can be replaced by another, and each phrase can be ex of choosing between various approximations . ... I have always found pressed (translated) by another. To paraphrase· Peirce, we might say that it was I, not the texts, that had to do the talking. that the meaning of a word is always another word. Whenever we ask, "What does this phrase mean?" the reply is another phrase. Yet0 It would be difficult to improve upon this statement. once we move into the terrain of poetry, we find that words have/' In theory, only poets should translate poetry; in practice, poets lost their mobility and their interchangeabiliry. The meanings of a. are rarely good translators. They almost invariably use the foreign poem are mu.ltip~e and changeable; the words of that pciem ate poem as a point of departure toward their own. A good translator iiflique_aiid irreplaceable. To change them would be to destroy the moves in the opposite direction: his intended destination is a poem. poem. Poetry is expressed in language, but it goes beyond lan- analogous although not identical to the original poem. He moves guage. . away from the poem only to follow it more closdy. The good trans The poet, immersed in the movement of language, m constant lator of poetry is a translator who is also a poet-like ArthUP verbal preoccupation, chooses a few words-or is chosen by them. Waley-or a poet who is also a good translator-like Nerval when As he combines them, he constructs hi; poem: a verbal object made he translated the first Faust. Nerval also wrote some fine, truly orig of irreplaceable and immovable characters. The translator's starting inal imitations of Goethe, Jean Paul, and other German poets. The p<:>int is not the language in movement that provides the poet's raw "imitation" is the twin sister of translation: they are similar, but we m:ii:erlafl)tii-the li:Xoo language of the poem. A language congealed, should not mistake one for the other. They are like Justine and ·yet living." Hj~Qrocedure is the inverse of the poet's: he is not co~ Juliette, the two sisters in Sade's novels .... The re~Oil!ll@J'_po_ets sttuctin__g_ an unalterable teXt from mobile characters; mstead, he IS . are unable to translate poetry is not purely psyChological, although dlsmantliflgi:he(;lements ofthc: text, fteeing the signs into circula egoism has a pan in it, but functional: poetic translation, as I in _iion, then returning diem to language. In its first phase, the trans tend to demonstrate, is a procedure analogous to poetic creation, l~tor's activ!ty is no different ftom that of a reader or critic: each but it unfolds in the opposite direction. reading is atr:u1Sla5i_on, _and each criticism is, or begins as, an inter Every word holds a cenain number of implicit meanings; prei:aiion:.But reading is translation within the same language_, and when a word is combined with others to make up a phrase, one of criticism is a free version of the poem or, to be more precise, a those meanings is activated and becomes predominant. In prose transposition. For the critic, the poem is the starting point toward there tends to be a single meaning, while, ~ has often been noted, another text, his own, while the translator, m another language and one of the characteristics of poetry, and perhaps its distinguishing with different characters, must compose a poem analogous to the trait, is the preservation of a pluraliry of meanings. What we are original. The second phase of the translator's activiry is parallel to seeing here is actually a general propeny oflanguage; poetry accen the poet's, with this essential difference: as he wntes, the poet does tuates it, but, to a lesser degree, it is also present in common speech not know where his poem will lead him; as he translates, the trans and eveu in prose. (This circumstance confirms that prose, in the lator knows that his completed effon must reproduce the poem he strictest sense of the term, has no real existence: it is a concept has before him. Th!' two phases ()f translation, therefore, are an--' required by the intellect.) Critics have devoted a good deal of at- ~'-'_el"ted parallel of poetic creation. The result is a reproduction of .. ' ) 160 0CTAVIOPAZ TRANSLATION: LITERATURE AND LETIERS 161 the original poem in another poem that is, as I have previously ments, following neither conductor nor score, are in the process of mentioned, less a copy than a transmutation. The ideal of poetic collectively composing a symphony in which improvisation is in · translation, as Valery once superbly defined it, consists ot'produc separable from translation and creation is indistinguishable from ' irig .afiaiogous-effects with (!]jfi:rent implements. imitation. At times, one of the musicians will break out into an ' - TgQ~ati.on.ari.d creation are twin. processes. On one hand, as inspired solo; soon the others pick it up, each introducing his own the works of Baudelaire and Pound have proveu, translation is variations that make the original motif unrecognizable. At the end ofteu indistinguishable from creation; on the other, there is con of the last cenrury, French poetry amazed and ·scandalized Europe srant interaction between the two, a continuous, mutual enrich with the solo begun by Baudelaire and brought to a close by Mal ment. The greatest creative periods of Western poetry, from its ori larme. Hispano-American "modernist" poets were among the first gins in Provence to our own day, have been preceded or to develop an ear for this new music; in imirating it, they made it accompanied by intercrossings between different poetic traditions. their own, they changed it, and they serit it on to Spain where it At times these intercrossings have taken the form of imiration, and was once again re-created. A little later the.English-language poets at others they have taken the form of translation. In this respect, performed somerhing similar but on different instruments in a dif the history of European poetry might be viewed as a chronicle of ferent key and tempo: a more sober and critical version in which the convergences of the various traditions that compose what is Laforgue, not Verlaine, occupied the central position. Laforgue's known as Western literature, not to mention the presence of the special stat\)S helps explain the character of Anglo-American mod Arabic tradition in Proven~al poetry, or the presence of haiku, and ernism, a movement that was simulraneously symbolist and anti~ the Chinese tradition in modem poetry. Critics study "influences," symbolist. Pound and Eliot, following Laforgue's lead, introduced but the term is not exact. It would be more sensible to consider criticism of symbolism into symbolism itself, in ridicule of what Western literature as an integral whole in which the ~ntral protag Pound termed the "funny symbolist trappings." This critical per onists are not national traditions-English, French, Portuguese, ception set the framework for their writing, and a little later they German poetry-but styles and trends. No trend, no style has ever produced poetry that was not modernist but modem, and thus they been national, not even the so-called artistic nationalism. Styles initiated, together with Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, have invariably been translinguistic: Donne is closer to Quevedo and others, a new solo-the solo of contemporary Anglo than to Wordsworth; there is an evident affinity between Gongora American poetry. and Marino while nothing, save their common language, unites Lafurgue's legacy to English and Spanish poetry is a prime Gongora with Juan Ruiz, the archpriest of Rita, who, in tum, is example of the interdependence between creation and imiration, sometimes reminiscent of Chaucer. Styles are coalescent and pass tr_anslaJion and original work. The French poet's influence on Eliot from one language to another; the works, each rooted in its own and Pound ts a matter of common knowledge, but what is less verbal soil, are unique ... unique, but not isolated: each is born often appreciated is his influence on Hispano-American poets. In and lives in relation to other works composed in different lan 1905, the Argentinian Leopoldo Lugones, a great poet whose guages. Thus, the plurality of languages and the singularity of the work has not attracted the critical attention it deserves, published works produce neither complete diversity nor disorder, but quite a volume of poems, Los crepmcuws del jardin, in which some Lafor the opposite: a world of interrelationships made up of contradic guean features appeared for the first time in Spanish: irony, the tions and harmonies, unions and digressions. clash of colloquial with literary language, violent images that jux Throughout the ages, European poets-and now those of taposed urban absurdity with nature depicted as a grotesque ma both halves of the American continent as well-have been writing tron. Some of his poems seem to have been written on one of those the same poem in different languages. And each version is an orig dimanches bannis de l'Injini, the fin-de-siecle Sundays of the inal and distinct poem. True, the synchronization is not perfect, Hispano-American bourgeoisie. In 1909 Lugones published Lu but if we take a step backward, we can understand that we are nario sentimental. Although it imitated Laforgue, this volume was hearing a concert, and that the musicians, playing different instru- one of the most original of its time, and even today can be read 162 OcrAVIOPAZ SIXTEEN with admiration and delight. Lunari Celan's translation of this sonnet concludes with the verses: "SchOn, gut und treu" so oft getreiU1t, geschieden. In Einem will 'ich drei zusanunenschmieden. 1 Beauty, goodness, and fidelity are the three virtues that the poet ascribes to his friend in the preceding quatrains, and it is to their expression that he wishes to confine his writing, indeed, even its vocabulary. Whereas in these strophes Shakespeare speaks not only of his friend but also of his own love and of his own songs, the final couplet is devoted entirely to the three virtues, which are granted an independent life through the device of personification. Yet this independent life is accorded to beauty, goodness, and fi- C?riginally published as "Poetry of Constancy-Poetik. der Bestand.igkeit: Cdans Ubertragung von Shakespeares Sonett 105," Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 37 ( 1971): 9-25. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Theory and History of Literature, vol. 15: Peter Szondi, On Textual Undemanding and Other Essays (Minneapoliso University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 161-78. © 1986 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. L William Shakespeare, Einund=anzig Sonette, trans. Paul Ce!an (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), p. 35. (This is book no. 898 in the series Inscl·Bfrcherei.) 163