Conversations with Paul Auster

Translation

3 Translation Stephen Rodefer/1985 Originally appearing in The Archive Newsletter (University of California, San Diego), this is reprinted from The Art of Hunger (1992) by permission of Paul Auster. STEPHEN RODEFER: When did you begin doing translations? PAUL AUSTER: Back when I was nineteen or twenty years old, as an undergraduate at Columbia. They gave us various poems to read in French class—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine—and I found them terribly exciting, even if I didn’t always understand them. The foreignness was daunting to me—as though works written in a foreign language were somehow not real—and it was only by trying to put them into English that I began to penetrate them. At that point, it was a strictly private activity for me, a method to help me understand what I was reading, and I had no thoughts about trying to publish what I did. I suppose you could say that I started doing translations because I was such a slow learner. I couldn’t imagine a linguistic reality other than English, and I was driven by a need to appropriate these works, to make them part of my own world. SR: Were you writing poetry of your own at that time, too? PA: Yes. But like most young people, I had no idea what I was doing. One’s ambitions at that stage are so enormous, but you don’t necessarily have the tools to carry them out. It leads to frustration, a deep sense of your own inadequacy. I struggled along during those years to find my own way, and in the process I discovered that translation was an extremely helpful exercise . Pound recommends translation for young poets, and I think that shows great understanding on his part. You have to begin slowly. Translation allows you to work on the nuts and bolts of your craft, to learn how to live intimately with words, to see more clearly what you are actually doing. That is the positive benefit, but there is also a negative one. Working on translations removes the pressure of composition. There is no need to be brilliant 4 CONVERSATIONS WITH PAUL AUSTER and original, no need to attempt things that you are finally not capable of doing. You learn how to feel more comfortable with yourself in the act of writing, and that is probably the most crucial thing for a young person. You submit yourself to someone else’s work—someone who is necessarily more accomplished than you are—and you begin to read more profoundly and intelligently than you ever have before. Scholarly analysis of poetry serves an important function, but this kind of practical experience is irreplaceable. A young poet will learn more about how Rilke wrote sonnets by trying to translate one than by writing an essay about it. SR: How does translation relate to your own work now? PA: At this point hardly at all. In the beginning, it occupied a central place for me, but then, as time went on, it became more and more marginal. My first translations years ago of modern French poets were real acts of discovery , labors of love. Then I went through a long period when I earned my living by doing translations. That was a completely different matter. I had nothing to do with choosing the texts. The publishers would tell me that they needed a translation of such and such a book, and I would do it. It was very draining work and had nothing to do with literature or my own writing . History books, anthropology books, art books. You grind out so many pages a day, and it puts bread on the table. Eventually, I stopped doing it to save my sanity. For the past five or six years, I’ve tried to limit myself to things that I am passionately interested in—works that I have discovered and want to share with other people. Joubert’s notebooks, for example, or the Anatole fragments by Mallarmé. I find both those works extraordinary, unlike anything I have ever read. The same with the book about high-wire walking by Philippe Petit, which was published last summer. I did it because Philippe is a friend and because he is one of the most remarkable artists I know. If those books are not exactly connected to my writing, they still belong to my inner world. But the act of translating in itself is no longer the adventure for...