Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation

THREE: The Valency of Poetic Imagery

[59] The Valency of Poetic Imagery chapter three TheValency of Poetic Imagery poems are essentially performative. Through their imagery, prosody,diction, and discursive tensions, they enact what they have to say: sound play, textures, rhythms, and images all contribute to making sense and generating insight.Valency, as I define it, is a measure of this performativity , a measure of the extent to which the materiality of the poem contributes to its truth-value. The notion of valency applies to every aspect of the poem’s materiality . Rhythmical valency is a measure of the way the poem “breathes,” overriding its metrical grid (the foot, the line, and even the stanza), phrasing what it is articulating.Consider,in Jon Stallworthy’s“The Fall of a Sparrow”—a poem about the anguish of learning that a newborn son suffers from Down’s Syndrome—the way a particularly beautiful stanza break forces the whole proposition to come to rest on the word no: The comforters speak of our windfall as the price of a poet’s licence– the necessary sacrifice, a pound of flesh no distance from the heart. But the heart answers no. . . (Stallworthy 1969, 38) In Latin poetry, the tight weave of desinence, through the “syntactic deferral” it makes possible, allows breathtakingly balanced spans of rhythm to arch out of the tensions of unresolved syntax—much as musical segments are felt by the listener as harmonic instabilities in search of a resolution: hic color aprica pendentibus arbore pomis aut ebori tincto est aut, sub candore rubenti, cum frustra resonant aera auxiliaria, lunae (Ovid 1994; Bk. IV, 331–333) The valency of rhyme is the extent to which phonetic overlap induces a semantic overlap that contributes to the construction of the poem’s truth-value. Decades ago, Roman Jakobson pointed out that in poetic discourse similarity at the level of sound induces similarities or dissimilarities at the level of sense—an empirical observation that is probably solidly grounded in neurology (similarity of sound between items stored in the working memory predisposes the reader to couple the items semantically as well). It is hard to pinpoint the exact content of such semantic overlaps without falling into the kind of theoretical overkill that can wind up giving ludicrously contrived results. More often than not, perhaps, the component of meaning induced by rhyme is a sort of “buzz”—neither fundamental nor harmonics. At the level of praxis, though, the semantic productivity of rhyme seems to be confirmed by the way a poet like Anne Sexton would plot out rhyme pathways, and then build around them, letting the rhyme-words suggest what would later come to be the poem. This pregnancy of rhyme and rhythm is indeed one of the things that so strongly distinguish poetry from light verse (which, of course, has valencies of its own, but valencies that have little to do with the construction of truth-value). In the Stallworthy poem just quoted, the intricacy of the stanza form precludes the sort of simple-minded foregrounding characteristic of light verse, where rhyme and metre are on display (end-stopped lines, metronomic metre) and phonetic overlaps generate negligeable or grotesque semantic overlaps. Stallworthy’s rhyme-words—phonetically subtle, semantically rich, less simple-mindedly spaced—build into a music that is entirely in the service of what the poem has to say: licence and distance echo the wrenching coupling of [60] [chapte r thre e] chance and providence in an earlier stanza.Stallworthy has seen to it that the truth of his poem prevails over its pattern. His prosody generates meaning . All this, of course, makes poems extraordinarily difficult to translate: the poetically viable translation is a re-enactment.It’s no good peeling away the music and teasing out denotations, then bemoaning the magic that has slipped through your fingers (the way translators so consistently do— as if their moaning was in itself enough to convey something of the magic). Denotative translation is fine for instrumental discourse. It is utterly unsuitable for the performative language of the poem. The poem, in short, is an act of ratio difficilis. In order to get as close as possible to the real—the felt real, the unsemiotized residue of experience that lurks in the crevices of the already-said—poetry discards the templates of ordinary language, the ready-made wordings and world views of the tribe (ratio facilis, the easy, pre-fabricated way of saying things...