© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

1456 TRANSLATION

Yoder, Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America (); the iambs and trochees of anglophone verse would be Th e Transcendentalists, ed. J. Myerson ()—esp. unrecognizable to those who fi rst used the terms. essays by R. E. Burkholder and Myerson (Emerson), Th e form Keats employs, moreover, likewise derives F. C. Dahlstrand (Alcott), F. B. Dedmond (Chan- from foreign sources, as its Italianate name suggests: ning), R. N. Hudspeth (Fuller), M. Meyer (Th oreau), without the th-c. Petrarchan sonetto , there would D. Robinson (Cranch and Very); L. Buell, “Th e be no th-c. Eng. *sonnet celebrating a th-c. trans. American Transcendentalist Poets,” Columbia History from the ancient Gr. Indeed, the plethora of prosodic of American Poetry, ed. J. Parini (); Encyclopedia terms, in Eng. and other langs., that owe their existence of American Poetry: Th e Nineteenth Century, ed. E. L. to trans., ancient and mod., points to the constant Haralson ()—esp. H. R. Deese (Very), L. Hon- “crossbreeding and hybridization” (Osip Mandelstam) aker (Cranch), P. T. Kane (Emerson), J. Steele (Fuller), that shape the Western poetic trad. Trans. not only sus- K. Walter (Channing), E. H. Witherell (Th oreau), G. R. tain the cultural “afterlife” of poetic works, as Walter Woodall (Alcott); S. Morris, “ ‘Metre-Making’ Argu- Benjamin states in “Th e Task of the Translator”; they ments: Emerson’s Poems,” Cambridge Companion to generate future incarnations: “I want Ovid . . . and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. J. Porte and S. Morris (); Catullus to live once more and I am not satisfi ed with B. Packer, “Th e Transcendentalists,” Cambridge History the historical Ovid . . and Catullus,” Mandelstam in- of American Literature , ed. S. Bercovitch, v.  (); sists in “Th e Word and Culture.” Th e Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism , ed. J. My- Translating poetry is, the adage runs, impossible. It erson, S. H. Petrulionis, and L. D. Walls (), esp. S. is also, so Keats’s sonnet suggests, imperative. Keats’s Morris, “Twentieth-Century Poetry.” mod. poem springs from a work available to him only Websites : Th e Emerson Society: http://www.cas. through the ling. mediation of others, and such media- sc.edu/engl/emerson/; Th e Margaret Fuller Society: tion, when successful, provides the immediate shock http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~jasteele/index. of the new that catalyzes further poetic creation. Th is html/; Th e Ralph Waldo Emerson Institute: http:// paradox is key not just to the hist. of verse trans. but to www.rwe.org/; Th e Th oreau Society: http://www.tho its analysis and reception. Various theorists and prac- reausociety.org/; Th e Web of American Transcendental- titioners have seen poetic trans. as dominated by one ism: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/. of three guiding principles. Th e translator may aspire S. Morris to () semantic accuracy or () prosodic accuracy; or he or she may aim instead for the kind of () “creative TRANSLATION . “Till I heard Homer speak out transposition” (Jakobson), “raid” (Heaney), or “imita- loud and bold”: many readers know that the eighth tion” (Lowell) that relies on “the muse of translation” line of John Keats’s famous sonnet “On First Look- (Young) to generate new inspiration. ing into Chapman’s Homer” () does not read this “Th e clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times way. Why not? Th e legendary Gr. name fi ts the iambic more useful than the prettiest paraphrase,” Vladimir beat as neatly as the less venerable “Chapman” that Nabokov insists in the intro. to his notoriously clunky takes its place. Th rough this unexpected substitution, trans. of Alexander Pushkin’s Evgenij Onegin. His fellow Keats calls attention to the key role that trans. plays exile and self-translator Joseph Brodsky was equally in the transmission and creation of poetic culture. By adamant on the need for “prosodic verisimilitude”: the relying on a trans., Keats admits that he cannot read translator must endeavor to reproduce, above all, the the original Gr., as his university-educated precursors rhyme and meter of the original poem. Robert Low- and contemporaries might have. He also fl aunts his ell, whose Rus. “imitations” Nabokov abhorred, freely unorthodox taste by spurning Alexander Pope’s then- “dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas and altered standard trans. in favor of George Chapman’s less meter and intent” in his eff orts to avoid translatorly favored Ren. version. He raises, moreover, the vexed “taxidermy.” Which approach is correct? None, or all issue of the translator’s relationship to his or her poetic of the above. Poetic trans. can be no more “pure” than source: the poem’s climactic moment comes when the the various trads. it shapes and is shaped by: “Th ere speaker hears not Homer’s voice but that of his latter- is no answer, there are only the choices people make,” day translator. Heaney remarks pragmatically. Much discussion of po- Th e two Homers Keats presumably knew suggest etic trans. focuses on the problems inherent in each of other questions of poetic trans. Both Pope and Chap- these three emphases and on the continuous negotia- man employ *rhyme and *meter in transmitting the tion among them that constitutes so much translatorly Gr. text. Chapman uses the epic *fourteener, while practice. Pope draws on a tidier iambic *pentameter with tightly What is a literal trans.? Nabokov curtails all debates rhymed neoclassical *couplets: neither aims to repro- with brusque effi ciency: “Th e term ‘literal translation’ duce the dactylic *hexameter of the original. Would is tautological since anything but that is not truly a the results have been more faithful if they had? Th ough translation.” Poets from Pope to Paul Valéry have seen Eng.-lang. *versifi cation derives from cl. sources, the things diff erently. Pope deplores “servile, dull adher- ling. structure of Eng. can only approximate, through ence to the letter” (“Preface to the Iliad of Homer”), *accents, the long- and short-vowel alternation that while Valéry upends the old cliché (itself translated shapes ancient Gr. *prosody. Th e very verse structure from the It.) about translators as traitors: “Where po- of Eng. is, thus, an imperfect trans. of its early model: etry is concerned, fi delity to meaning alone is a kind of © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

TRANSLATION 1457 betrayal” (“Variations on the Eclogues ”). In “Th e Poetry erning the individual poetic work. Th e Polish poet of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry,” Jakobson and translator Stanisław Barańczak suggests something insists on the inseparability of meaning and form—in similar in his notion of the “semantic dominant”: “Th e both its ling. and prosodic embodiments—that marks translator’s decision process can be described precisely poetic speech. “Sense in its poetic signifi cance is not as the process of realizing what in the ‘poetry’ of the limited to meaning,” as Benjamin comments. Poetic original is the most characteristic, important and ir- lang. transforms the very notion of literal meaning by replaceable; in other words, it is the process of forming activating semantic possibilities in places we do not or- for oneself a system of priorities, one valid solely within dinarily think to look for them. If one goal of poetic the precincts of this and not another poem.” lang. is to shake the reader loose from the fetters of Barańczak’s own practice as translator and poet sug- literal mindedness, then a literal rendering of a poetic gests ways in which creative fi delity to the forms of text, such as Nabokov’s Onegin , runs the risk of violat- meaning and the meaning of forms can lead in turn to ing more than just the spirit in its fi delity to the letter. the “form creation” that Mandelstam sees as activating What is poetic lang. deprived of poetry? poetic speech. Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “One It follows from Jakobson’s argument that too Art” () marks a creative revision of yet another strict a reverence for poetic form poses its own dan- poetic transplant, the *villanelle. Barańczak’s Polish gers. Brodsky’s insistently structured trans. of his own version retains both the original’s intricate structure poems often do violence not just to the virtuosic forms and, to a startling degree, the sense that this structure he borrowed in many cases from adoptive Eng. fore- embodies. He cannot salvage the seemingly crucial bears from John Donne to W. H. Auden but also to rhyme of “master” / “disaster”; nor can he duplicate the the extraordinary Rus. originals. Moreover, metrical eloquent series of rhymes and half rhymes that Bishop structures carry diff erent semantic charges from lang. builds around this pairing. And it is a loss, but it is to lang. and culture to culture. Czesław Miłosz takes not a disaster. Even the literal meaning of the mov- his inspiration, metrical and otherwise, from Auden’s ingly imperfect rhymes he employs in the stanzas’ sec- New Year Letter for his own—still untranslated— ond lines shows how closely he keeps to the original “Traktat moralny” (Treatise on Morals, ). But the poem’s sense: “foreboding,” “keys,” “to fl ee,” “pang,” familiar rhythms of Auden’s iambic *tetrameter come “won’t return,” “in art.” Most important, he sustains as a shock when translated into a lang. where fi xed pen- the villanelle’s structuring patterns of continuity and ultimate stress lends itself far more readily to trochees. slippage, repetition and change: the perfect analogue Miłosz’s acerbic take on postwar Polish intellec- to its concern with what is lost through time and what tual life gains an additional measure of ironic distance survives. through his use of a borrowed metrical structure, esp. Barańczak later took inspiration from Bishop’s when combined with his wittily polonized revamp- poem and his own trans. to create one of the most ing of Auden’s couplets and slant rhymes. Miłosz’s moving love lyrics in the Polish trad. In “Płakała w prosodic virtuosity in his native Polish goes virtually nocy” (She Cried at Night), he follows Bishop’s lead unseen in the Eng. trans. he shepherded into being in psychologizing the villanelle form, as repetition, with the help of various cotranslators, though. Here he recognition, and resistance intertwine to dramatize the stood opposed to Brodsky: “good enough” was “good psyche’s eff orts both to evade and to accept knowledge enough for him,” since, as he told his long-time col- almost past bearing. Th e poem’s power was perceived laborator Robert Hass, “it is after all a poem in Polish, immediately by Polish critics and readers. But they not a poem in English.” His most metrically intricate took the form to be Barańczak’s own invention: there work—often inspired by Anglo-Am. models—remains is no villanelle trad. in Poland. Or rather, there was largely untranslated or has been translated, at Miłosz’s no such trad. before Barańczak’s poem: the form has insistence, into *free verse. subsequently been taken up by a number of younger Are all poetic trans. either doomed to marginal suc- Polish writers. cess at best or destined for the dubious distinction of “Poetry is what is lost in translation,” Robert Frost becoming “stand-alone” poems that make only passing infamously—and perhaps apocryphally—proclaimed. reference to their purported originals? Are we left only Bishop’s villanelle suggests ways in which poetry itself with multiple embalmments, desecrations, and “Low- may be conceived as “the art of losing,” a mode clearly ellizations”? Of course not. Every poem, as many critics akin to “the art of loss” (Felstiner) that is poetic trans. have noted, is a complex, shifting system participating “You can’t translate a poem,” Yves Bonnefoy insists in in numerous other systems—literary, ling., social, his- “Translating Poetry.” Yet there is likewise “no poetry torical, political, and so on. Poetic trans. must likewise but that which is impossible,” he comments in the remain in constant motion if it is to do justice to each same essay, and this is its bond with trans., which is poem’s distinctive “mode of signifi cation” (Benjamin). “merely poetry re-begun.” “Translation and creation When Valéry speaks of “the labor of approximation, are twin processes,” Octavio Paz observes (“Transla- with its little successes, its regrets, its conquests, and its tion: Literature and Letters”). resignations,” he describes both poetic creation and its Loss, impossibility, trans., and new creation: let subsequent trans. us return in this context to mod. imaginings of an- Holmes describes the translator as a decoder and cient epics. “We have no satisfactory translation of reencoder of the “hierarchy of correspondences” gov- any Greek author,” Ezra Pound proclaims in “How to © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

1458 TRIBRACH

Read”: “Chapman and Pope have left Iliads that are of (); S. Heaney and R. Hass, Sounding Lines: Th e interest [only] to specialists.” Keats may celebrate trans. Art of Translating Poetry (); Translation Stud- as immediate discovery, but Pound takes his reader on ies Reader, ed. L. Venuti (); D. Davis, “All My a diff erent kind of voyage some hundred years later, as Soul Is Th ere: Verse Translation and the Rhetoric of he journeys through layers of lang. and hist. in a work English Poetry,” Yale Review  (); C. Cavanagh, that is simultaneously a trans., a meditation on trans., “Th e Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation,” and the magnifi cent poem that launches his lifework, Partisan Review  (); Oxford History of Liter- the Cantos : ary Translation in English, Volume : –, ed. S. Gillespie and D. Hopkins, (); Translation: Th e- And then went down to the ship, ory and Practice: A Historical Reader, ed. D. Weissbort Set keel on the swart breakers, forth on the godly and A. Eysteinson (); V. Nabokov, Verses and Ver- sea, and sions: Th ree Centuries of Russian Poetry , ed. B. Boyd and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, S. Shvabrin (); Oxford History of Literary Transla- Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also tion in English, Volume : To , ed. R. Ellis (); Heavy with weeping. . . . L. Venuti, Th e Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Trans- Pound’s trans. from book  of the Odyssey comes lation (); S. Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities (); mediated through his own earlier rendition of the Eng. P. Robinson, Poetry and Translation: Th e Art of the med. poem “Th e Seafarer”; Anglo-Saxon *alliteration Impossible (); Oxford History of Literary Transla- and monosyllables shape the story of the ancient Gr. tion in English, Volume : –, ed. G. Braden, wayfarer. Pound tips his hand still further as the canto R. Cummings, S. Gillespie (); E. M. Young, Th e concludes: Mediated Muse: Catullan Lyricism and Roman Transla- tion (). Lie quiet Divus. I mean that is Andreas Divus, C. Cavanagh; Y. Lorman In offi cina Wecheli, , out of Homer. Pound’s Lat. was stronger than his Gr., and he relied TRIBRACH . In Gr. and Lat. verse, a sequence of on Andreas Divus’s th-c. Lat. Odyssey in composing three short syllables, almost always a resolved iamb or his own trans. cum poem. Th is poem does not open trochee rather than an independent *foot (see reso- to the unexplored expanses uncovered by Keats’s Cor- lution ). Th e *ictus falls on the second syllable if it re- tez; nor does it lead him home, with the wandering places an iamb and on the fi rst if it replaces a trochee. Odysseus. It draws him instead into the dense, interlin- Koster; West. gual web of culture and hist. represented in the poem P. S. Costas by trans. Th e romantic Keats converts mediation into immediacy, while the modernist Pound makes a virtue TRILOGY . In Gr. drama, a group of three *tragedies of inescapable mediation. Both poets point, though, to that treat a single myth. At the annual Great Dionysia the symbiotic relationship between those two “impos- in Athens, three poets competed, each off ering three sibilities,” poetry and poetic trans., that has shaped the tragedies plus a satyr play, a *parody of the tragic form Western trad. that employed a *chorus of satyrs; if this satyr play also E. Pound, ABC of Reading (); E. Pound, “How deals with the same myth, then the whole is called a te- to Read” [], Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. tralogy . Th e origin of the custom requiring three trage- T. S. Eliot (); R. Lowell, Introduction, Imitations dies is unknown; the addition of the satyr play occurred (); J. Holmes, “Describing Literary Translations: around  bce . Aeschylus is believed to have been the Models and Methods,” Literature and Translation , fi rst playwright to connect the plays in one year’s off er- ed. J. Holmes, J. Lambert, R. van den Broek (); ing into a trilogy or tetralogy. In the Oresteia, the only R. Jakobson, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of extant trilogy, Aeschylus traces the problem of blood- Poetry,” Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. R. Ja- guilt through successive generations of Agamemnon’s kobson, K. Pomorska, S. Rudy (); S. Heaney, “Th e family; Seven against Th ebes, the fi nal tragedy in a tril- Impact of Translation,” Th e Government of the Tongue ogy on the House of Laius, exhibits a similar concern (); B. Raff el, Th e Art of Translating Poetry (); with a family curse. Yet the outcomes are very diff er- Th e Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, ed. R. War- ent: the Th eban trilogy ends in the ruin of the royal ren (); Translating Poetry: Th e Double Labyrinth , house, while Eumenides, which concludes the Oresteia , ed. D. Weissbort (); S. Barańczak, Ocalone w dramatizes a resolution of the guilt and the foundation tlumaczeniu (), and “Saved in Translation . . . : of a new order of justice. Th e Danaid trilogy, of which Well, Part of It,” Harvard Review  (); Th eories of the fi rst play, Suppliant Women , survives, evidently cli- Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Der- maxed in a similar celebration of the sanctity of mar- rida , ed. R. Schulte and J. Biguenet ()—essays by riage. Yet this trilogy diff ers in that its three tragedies Benjamin, Mandelstam, Nabokov, Valéry, Bonnefoy, dramatized a single, tightly knit event spanning only a Paz; J. Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (); few days rather than events separated by many years. M. Friedberg, Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural Th e fragmentary evidence of other Aeschylean trilogies History (); S. Bassnett, “Transplanting the Seed: suggests that such *unity of plot was not uncommon. Poetry and Translation,” Constructing Cultures: Essays After Aeschylus, the trilogy as a genre fell into disuse. on Literary Translation , ed. S. Bassnett and A. Lefevre Sophocles abandoned it (the composition of his three