Translating Amharic Poems

Before I venture to describe what proved to be an enthralling, challenging, and, in the end, a thoroughly satisfying adventure, I have to confess that I am a veritable novice at what I have attempted to do here: translating Amharic poems into English. I decided to tread treacherous ground that few of my fellow native Amharic speakers have dared to tread with an audacity that often seemed to me to border on foolhardiness.

I know there are many that with good reason argue poems are untranslatable. I also know that even those who do not go that far would admit to a host of peculiar difficulties associated with translating poems. At the same time, however, I could only despair at the thought of a literary experience limited to the confines of the creative and expressive reach of one's own language. I imagined how impoverished my own experience would have been had I not had the benefit of reading translated works. How else could I, or anyone else for that matter, have come to commune with great poets and literary figures such as Virgil, Dante, Rabelais, Khayyam, Pushkin, Akhmatova, Cervantes, Fuentes, Borges, and Basho, to name only a few, scattered across wide expanses of time and space.

There was another important consideration that was a motivating factor in my decision to try my hand at the translations. Having spent the better part of my years in the United States, I was keenly aware of how little is known by non-Ethiopians about the many rich and diverse aspects of Ethiopian life. What little is known, mostly garnered from scarce and fragmented media reports about hunger, poverty, social unrest, paleontology, Olympic medalists, and so on, has only been able to paint a poor caricature that falls far short of portraying a fascinating people, their country, and their history in their true likeness. It thus seemed to me that providing a small glimpse of an aspect of Ethiopian life that has had little, if any, external exposure-Amharic poetry-would prove to be a modest but worthy contribution towards ameliorating the situation.

Going into the translation work itself, the most fascinating discovery for me was the extraordinary degree of intimacy the work compels the translator to develop with each of the poems being translated. In my early college days I had come across a book called How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi that I used in the study of poetry. In it, Ciardi shows how a poem conveys the meaning it intends to impart in many ways, often at the same time-ranging from its physical and metric structure to its musicality, its adroit manipulation of a lexicon to its use of apt metaphors, its use of vivid imagery to its economy, and many more. The intimacy I spoke of above must come from the translator's reading and re-reading of each poem in an attempt to discover the many ways by which the poem means with the intention whenever possible of porting them whole to the translation. The difference between such reading and a more leisurely one, albeit as attentive, may be that the latter relegates the poem's ways to operate at the subliminal level whereas the former makes them explicit to the translator.

Earlier, I alluded to a longstanding debate about the translatability of poems and the challenges associated with translating them if and when one decides to do so. I would like to start with what I found in Amharic poetry to be virtually untranslatable.

There is a highly regarded genre in Amharic poetry referred to by many as qəne (though the term is also used as a generic term for poetry) that exploits the double meaning of many Amharic words and metaphors to convey two entirely different meanings in the same set of verses. Almost always, there is an obvious, readily accessible meaning, and a concealed one that the reader or listener has to work at to uncover. The two meanings are referred to as "wax" and "gold" (sämə and worək) where the obvious one is the wax and the hidden one...