Translating Women

Re-vision and/as Translation: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich

re-Vision anD/as TranslaTion: The PoeTry of aDrienne riCh1 Sandra Bermann, Princeton University “Poetry is not a resting on the given, but a questing toward what might otherwise be.” —Adrienne Rich Though “re-vision” may well be the term most often associated with the long and distinguished career of Adrienne Rich, “translation” is one of its most important leitmotifs, evident from its beginning, and continuing over the years. As I will try to show by examining aspects of her poetry and essays—and two poems in particular—translation has contributed in various ways to a poetry dedicated to personal and political change. In her more recent writing, Rich has herself drawn attention to the role of translation and re-vised its significance as she has broadened and deepened its place in her work. This re-vision is, I believe, fundamental for an understanding of Rich’s later poetry as well as for more general reflections on translation—as practice and as metaphor. It is to the traditional, gendered metaphors of translation I turn in the last section of my essay, noting their powerful transformation in the course of Rich’s poetry and prose. I. Translation in the writing of Adrienne Rich Rich is a poet primarily associated with the Anglo-American tradition. Yet she makes no secret about her longstanding interest in other literatures—and in translation. In The Arts of the Possible she speaks of having read from early on a range of French poets in the original: Musset, Hugo, as well as Baudelaire, Valéry, Apollinaire, René Char, Aimé Césaire, Racine too, with his alexandrines. Other European 98 Sandra Bermann poets—including Rilke, Brecht, Montale, Ungaretti, Ekelöf, Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan—entered her repertoire in this post-World War II era, and often through the translations of others. She eagerly read Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Tsvetayeva, Yevtushenko and Voznezhensky too, as well as the Spanish and Latin Americans Lorca, Neruda, Rosario Castellanos, Juan Gelman, Vallejo (Rich 2001: 132–34). In addition to reading widely—when possible, in the original—she also wrote her own translations. In the early 1960s, she completed translations of Dutch poems by Hendrick de Vries, Gerrit Achterberg, Jan Emmens, Leo Vroman, Judith Herzberg and Chr. J. van Geel, whose poems deeply influenced her own “Sleepwalking Next to Death.”2 She then used her Dutch to read transliterated texts from the Yiddish for a project later in the 60s edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. Here, she translated poems by Kadya Molodowsky (whose “White Night” left a lasting impression), Rachel Korn and Celia Dropkin (Howe and Greenberg 1969). The year 1968 brought a different translation project. Rich was one of a group of American poets chosen to translate the 19th -century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. In this effort, the Anglophone writers were aided by recordings of the original language texts in ghazal form, as well as by historical, cultural and lexical notes, and literal translations by editor Aijaz Ahmad (Ahmad 1971). Of all her reading and translation of non-English texts, she writes, “I can’t emphasize enough how much my poetry has been stretched, enlarged, strengthened, fortified by the non-American poetries I have read, tangled with, tried to hear and speak in their original syllables, over the years” (Rich 2001: 134). Intense though it has always been, Rich’s relationship to non-English texts, and to translation itself, has, in fact, also changed over the past fifty years. We might mark three phases. First, her writing of the 50s, which, while aware of other traditions engages with non-English language texts—and translation—least overtly. For the most part, her poetic references stay close to the modernists and the tradition with which they were identified—such poets as Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats. Auden, who wrote the “Foreword” to her first, prize-winning collection of poems, A Change of World, published when she was twenty-one, spoke Re-vision and/as Translation 99 of such modernists comprising her “family tree” (Auden 1984: 126). This is also the period when gender is least explored, addressed only obliquely rather than brought to the surface as would occur later. Translation comes to play a more prominent role in two later phases of her writing that I will discuss here. In the 60s and 70s, translation and poetic imitation contribute markedly...