Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation

NINE: Poetry As Knowing

[413] Poetry As Knowing chapter nine Poetry As Knowing The answers to all the great questions lie in the grain of the world. —hans blumenberg The everyday is always the hardest to explain. —hubert reeves Le sujet va aussi loin exactement que la vérité qu’il peut atteindre. —jacques lacan like the pure sciences, poetry is first and foremost a cognitive undertaking , one of the most stringent modes of knowing that exist. Everything about it is shaped by the search for insight, or even truth.And the truth of a poem is, of course, something that goes far beyond paraphrasable propositional content: truth in poetry would seem to be propositional content made available as direct experience, amplified into directly felt insight.Yeats’s elegy “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” revolves around a proposition that has been around as long as humanity, but infinitely exceeds formulations like “all men are mortal” or even the beautiful, but already-said,“all flesh is as grass”: I. 1. The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both 4. Beautiful, one a gazelle. 5. But a raving autumn shears Blossom from the summer’s wreath; The older is condemned to death Pardoned, drags out lonely years 9. Conspiring among the ignorant. I know not what the younger dreams— Some vague Utopia—and she seems When withered old and skeleton-gaunt 13.An image of such politics. Many a time I think to seek One or the other out and speak Of that old Georgian mansion, mix 17.Pictures of the mind, recall That table and the talk of youth, Two girls in silk kimonos, both 20.Beautiful, one a gazelle. II. 21.Dear shadows, now you know it all, All the folly of a fight With a common wrong or right. 24.The innocent and the beautiful 25.Have no enemy but time; Arise and bid me strike a match And strike another till time catch; 28.Should the conflagration climb, Run till all the sages know. We the great gazebo built, They convicted us of guilt; Bid me strike a match and blow. (Yeats 1940, 475–476) The irreducible truth of a poem is a direct outgrowth of its flesh—its imagery, sound-play, rhythms. It’s the music of Yeats’s elegy that makes us feel the mortality of the two lovely girls in silk kimonos:the end-words of lines 21 and 24 (all: beautiful), echoing the fundamental rhyme of the first and fifth quatrains (Lissadell: gazelle: recall: gazelle), juxtapose the recollection of young beauty with the fact of withering and death (see Tom Paulin’s remarks [1998, 3]). It is the reprised music of the opening rhyme [414] [chapte r nine] scheme that makes us feel mortality, feel it directly, and so come to know it—precisely as we all of a sudden feel and know, in certain excruciating moments of real life.The poem, here, is doing the work of the epiphanyinstants that come to all of us at mercifully rare intervals. It is grotesque, I think, to set the esthetic up as an airy-fairy category on its own,and then make hard and fast distinctions between the esthetic and the cognitive. It is absurd to set the threshold of cognition so high that it excludes all but the rational,linear-logicked forms of mental activity : cognition, as the neuroscientists will tell you, is often downright illogical.And it is hugely erroneous to try and seal the cognitive and the emotional off from one another in leak-proof compartments.What gets called “the esthetic”is merely a special,high-intensity case of“the cognitive .” Poetic cognition involves affect and body as well as the more disembodied kind of knowing that neuroscientists refer to as declarative intelligence. A great poem, like a great theory in physics, is an inexhaustible inscape.1 The truth of such a poem takes reams and reams of exegesis to unpack, eluding and exceeding endless series of more or less propositional paraphrases. Translation, of course, is one way of unpacking a poem.Translations of poetry (as opposed to translations that succeed in being poems) are little more than successive approximations; it takes an unending series of translations, from the crib to the verse rendering, to even begin to approximate the poem, which remains an asymptote they will never quite reach (the...