Roger Pulvers

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Roger Pulvers

TRANSLATION: THE ART OF MOVING OTHERS

I would like you to think of literary translation as a kind of theatre.

To translate is to perform; to translate is to interpret immutable words set on a page by an author of fiction, poetry, or drama. The words of the original are set in stone: The author, the mason, carved the letters; and they are extant for all to see in the years and decades, or in rare cases, centuries that follow.

You, the translator, cannot remove these words from the stone. But it makes no sense to anyone—and is surely no service to the masons who originally carved them in their own language—to stand in front of the monument that is the book and just read them aloud by rendering the words “faithfully” in your own language if such faith is seen as a mechanical process based on false notions of equivalency. Let’s leave that variety of “faithful” translation to the capable robots. If you do translate literary works in this mechanical way, no one will be able to imagine, let alone picture, the awesome qualities of the original monument.

You must build a monument yourself and carve the words in your own language. People—readers, or audiences at a play—will stand in front of it and hopefully fall in love with its beauty thanks to your words. If they were able to read the words in the original monumental work they wouldn’t need your translation. Everything they derive from the original—every pleasure, every delight, every laugh, every lament—comes thanks to you.

So you must be an artist yourself, a performer of ability and style in your own language. That is the primary prerequisite for becoming a great translator. You must have a profound knowledge of the varied literary styles in your own language. If you do not acquire that through a vast reading of the literature written originally in your own language, for God’s sake don’t become a translator.

Let’s go back to the metaphor of the theatre.

All of the elements that are considered basic to good literary translation are equally relevant to theatre in the direction or performance of a play: voice, rhythm, nuance, impact.

These are, to my mind, the prerequisites of both translation and theatre.

Voice. This is what the work sounds like. Who is speaking? What register are they speaking in? And by “speaking” I mean the sound of the prose, not just the dialogue in a work. What is the right tone for this sentence, this expression, this passage, this chapter or scene? (In theatre dialogue has to have actability, that is, the quality of natural speech in all its eccentricities.)

Rhythm. How does the passage flow? Is it smooth or choppy, naturally seamless or purposely disjointed? How does each line “sit” between the line that comes before it and the line that succeeds it? This is an especially essential quality in the translation of poetry, the most difficult of the translation arts.

Nuance. Are there other meanings contained in the words and images besides those normally denoted? Should an expression be taken at face value, or is irony ensconced in it? The value of suggestiveness cannot be underestimated here, especially in translating lyrical or poetic turns of phrase. (In Japanese literature, suggestiveness, sometimes mistakenly identified as aimaisa, or ambiguity, is a prime quality.) Dialogue in a prose piece, a poem, or in a play is particularly subject to the vagaries of nuance.

Finally … Impact. Do the words that you use in your translation resonate with the heart? Do they rebound against the walls of the brain and create an echo that can’t be ignored? Do readers feel that once they have finished reading a translated novel or poem, or after having seen a play, that this work is going to remain with them for a long time? The Japanese word yoin (余韻) comes to mind. Literally (and please don’t take this as a translation!) it comes from the characters for “remaining, lingering” and “rhyme,” and connotes a kind of “emotional echo.” Yoin means “reverberation” or “resonance.” To have impact, a translation must have this yoin.

A theatre director or actor bears these four elements in mind when they approach the printed word. The printed word is like the notes of a score. You can’t show the notes of Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” to someone, unless they are a professional musician, and say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” The score has to be interpreted.

The same is true for the words of a drama. Every director and actor knows that any word at all, even the simplest and most commonplace, can transport a multitude of meanings to an audience, depending on intonation (voice), delivery (rhythm), intent (nuance), and depth (impact). If actors do not come to grips with their own interpretation of a role, these elements will be lacking in their performance and it will fall dead in the air between the stage and the seats of the theatre.

I have been translating literary works from Russian, Polish, and Japanese for 50 years, and I have always thought of translation as a form of theatre. I have believed that I needed to “direct” a translation by deciding, at every step, beside every little word and pause, what the original author was wishing to convey and how best to interpret that wish into English.

I was lucky to have been taught at Harvard Graduate School, way back in the academic year 1964-65, by the brilliant Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Prof. Jakobson’s seminar on Russian prosody was inspiring. He constantly emphasized the sonority of words in a poem. Some years later, when I began to write and translate, I pictured the words in a poem as water in a clear stream. The water in the stream bumps up against little rocks, creating ripples and bubbles and foam, before continuing its flow. My reading of Russian poetry—I devoured the entire canon, both pre- and post-revolutionary—opened my eyes to the depth of sound in words. Sound caused ripples and bubbles and foam stirred by words. These may have been, in the first instance, words with Russian sounds—Prof. Jakobson’s seminar was conducted in Russian—but the principles nevertheless apply to English or any other language. Even today, when I write my own works of prose or drama, I read everything out loud in front of the screen of my computer. The words in a work of prose have to stir up the right sounds. If literature were just about meaning, Softbank’s Pepper would get a Nobel Prize.

I went on to Poland for postgraduate studies in the autumn of 1966 and discovered the wonders of Polish theatre, particularly as they are revealed in the plays of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, also known as Witkacy, Poland’s greatest playwright. I subsequently translated some of his plays and directed them in Australia and Japan. (In the 1970s and ‘80s I directed the first productions of Witkacy’s plays in the two countries, in Japan using such wonderful actors as Kishida Kyoko and Hashizume Isao.)

Witkacy’s characters speak directly through their psyches. This means that they say things that are incongruous and paradoxical, often contradicting themselves or their better interests. They are like Donald Trump on speed … or maybe Donald Trump just as he is.

Translators of Witkacy’s dialogues have to render into their own language the nuance and impact created by the subconscious as it weaves its way through the mind of the character. The translator has to turn the character’s mind inside out and display it to the other characters in the drama and to the audience. The first director of a Witkacy play in a foreign language is the translator; the second, the person who creates the mise-en-scène. In this sense, every play—not only those by Witkacy—performed in translation has two directors.

In 1967, 50 years ago now, I arrived in Japan not knowing a word of the language. With great luck I landed a job teaching Russian and Polish at Kyoto Sangyo University, then a young university that had not yet graduated its first class of students.

I learned to speak, read, and write Japanese, and began to translate works from the language, beginning with the wonderful stories of an author whose prose and poetry I have now studied and translated for nearly five decades: Miyazawa Kenji.

Kenji’s poems in particular are fiendishly difficult to translate. First you have to understand them. This is no easy task! He combines esoteric scientific terms with similarly esoteric Buddhist references, couching the whole in a kind of song. The poems run along not like those gentle flowing streams I mentioned but like torrents. Then suddenly there are twists and turns, and eddies and whirlpools. Not to give these their due in the translation is to deprive the poem of its awesome force.

Kenji’s works are riddled with mimetic words and expressions. These words and expressions not only sound like what they represent; they conjure up a visual atmosphere or mood by virtue of their rich sonorousness. Some of his onomatopoeia he created himself.

Now, I cannot tell you how many times I have been told by Japanese “experts” on language that the Japanese language has more mimetic words and expressions “than any other language.” Since there are at least six thousand living languages on our planet today, such claims presume a rather miraculous grasp of the linguistic universe. Some of these experts have assured me that the English language has little onomatopoeia.

I have written chapters in a number of books about such words and expressions and how English is just as rich in them as Japanese. This is what I meant when I wrote at the beginning that you need a vast knowledge and appreciation of your own language. If you are going to interpret the texture of, for example, Miyazawa Kenji’s mimetic neologisms into your own language, you need to be aware of all of the latter’s tools and possibilities.

Another form of interpretation of Japanese words—this one as a live performance—was taken up when I started commuting, in 1970, from my little rented house near Midorogaike in the north of Kyoto way down to Kawachi Amami south of Osaka. (The commute took two hours each way.) Tsukuba Musashi, one of the icons of Kansai Rokyoku, lived there, and he had been kind enough to accept me as his first “blue-eyed” deshi, or disciple. (In those days all Westerners were called “blue-eyed,” despite the fact that some of us have dark-brown eyes. I called myself, in those days, kuroi hitomi no wakamono—“young man with black eyes.”)

Rokyoku, also called Naniwabushi, is a form of balladry that became popular in the early Meiji Era. One person, a man or woman (Rokyoku was traditionally, and still is, a gender-free performance art), chants the fushi, or melody, and performs all the spoken parts of a drama. “Chants” here is a bit of a euphemism. Rokyoku fushi are actually “groaned out” (unaru, meaning “groan” or “growl,” is the word used) in a rather raspy voice.

It was the rhythm of the Rokyoku melodies and dialogue, which I eventually was able to perform, however amateurishly, that taught me the essence of flow in the Japanese language: where pauses come and why; where subtle humour is intended within a seemingly serious phrase; how what is left unsaid can carry a message as impactful as a statement.

Rokyoku is considered one of the “low” arts of Japan and it now enjoys little popularity. But I am as thankful to this low art as I am to the high culture of Japanese letters for my love for and appreciation of the richness of the Japanese language.

I don’t translate now nearly as much as I used to. I spend most of my time writing my own books. But the experience of writing my novel Star Sand and 『星砂物語』 in English and Japanese was, I suppose, a journey into the very depths of translation. I have been told that this is the first novel published by major publishers ever written in both English and Japanese by one author. Neither is a translation: It is a novel with two originals.

The two versions differ in places. Ah, this is the kind of freedom every translator wishes they had! Wouldn’t it be nice to “fix up” the original in a translation, to change things here and there at will? This is what I did with my two originals. When I felt that a phrase would sound better in one language as opposed to the other, I just stuck it in. There was no original author there to chastise me. I could be unfaithful and faithful at the same time. That, I tell you, is a luxury … though please be aware that I am talking here only about translation and not about the affairs of the heart and the body.

In the early months of 2016, between trips from Sydney to Iejima in Okinawa, the location for the filming of Star Sand and 『星砂物語』, that I directed, I sat down and translated 100 poems, some of them rather long, by my favorite Russian poet, Sergei Esenin, adding notes and lengthy commentaries on his use of language, his stormy life, and even more stormy times. (Esenin, who was born in 1895 and died in 1925, straddled the revolution and suffered for it.)

Esenin is the Dylan Thomas of Russia, the poet of the unique lightscape and eerie darkness of his country. His works are equal in their richness of flamboyant imagery to Thomas’, with soaring flights of fanciful lyrics and remarkable neologisms. The cadences of Esenin’s verse are also a bit similar to those of Thomas’. His sounds in Russian are like the ringing of bells in the worn-down wooden churches of old Russia.

I was in a trance for six weeks throughout February and March 2016, sitting at home in Sydney while waiting for the time to come to return to Okinawa together with my director of photography for location reconnaissance on the little island. The totality of that trance was dictated and dominated by the spirit of Sergei Esenin, who transported me to the Russia of his age, and to the sonorous sounds of Russian, the first foreign language that I learned. It was to Russia that I had gone in the summer of 1964, having just turned 20, making my first trip outside of the country of my birth and childhood, the United States; and for those six weeks in 2016, thanks to Esenin, I was transported back to the discoveries of the beauties of the Russian language and the Russian landscape that I saw as a young man. I was creating, alone in my study in Sydney, Australia, where it was summer and swelteringly hot, a performance in English of his exquisite poems, hoping that someday readers of my translations will come to love them as much as I do.

I suppose that’s the prime mover: Translators wish more than anything for others to feel the overwhelming love for the original works that they feel.

Translating, like performing, is about moving others. If you wish to have that sublime experience, then by all means do become a translator.

Roger Pulvers’ film, STAR SAND, will be released in Japan this summer.