Translating André Breton

Translating André Breton Bill Zavatsky Dedicated to the memory of LeRoy C. Breunig HERE'S A THUMBNAIL SKETCH of me, the translator: with a page of text before me like a strange landscape, I stagger and lurch along, propped by my crutch of a dictionary, inching my verb wheel wheelchair through the undergrowth. Sometimes I leap up and run flat out for two or three lines only to smack head-on into the tree of a noun that I didn't see coming. I operate like a blind surveyor, an explorer without a map except the one that, full of holes burned by the blind spots in my own eyes, I can almost read, though of course I've left my glasses at home. I feel utterly humbled at the feet of the French poets whose work I love (though, as with Breton, I reserve the right to be annoyed for personal reasons which only sometimes have to do with translation per se). Perhaps that is why I put myself through the often excruciating act of translation—to whittle away the ego with the knife of what I don't know, faced by a poet whose importance I know too well. At least part of the truth as to why I haven't properly learned French is that I never conceived of the French language as other than a vehicle for poetry. Just as one wouldn't presume to write anything but the ode, the elegy, or the epic in Latin or ancient Greek, one certainly wouldn't use French for lesser purposes—which is why my dinner had to be Surrealist . Sure, I know that the French language comes out of the gleam of the cutlery on the tablecloths, and the wind that bumps over the gravel in the park promenades; I know that Apollinaire found half of what he wrote in the streets, his big ears tuned to everything that everybody around him was whispering; and I know that the Surrealists roamed Paris endlessly, taking all the stuff in the flea markets that they couldn't carry home in their heads. But Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarmé as instructors of a utilitarian medium of communication? I didn't think so, even if Mallarmé was a teacher of English. AU of his students must have talked like Edgar Allan Poe. I began to translate in the first college that I attended, in Latin class, when our Jesuit instructor brought in a version of one of the Horace odes VOL. XXXVI, NO. 4 87 L'Esprit Créateur that we were working on. Around the same time I began to scribble versions of Baudelaire in my French notebook; they weren't very good, but it was the only way that I could make sense of the poems. Later, after I had learned a little more French and a lot more about poetry (at least American and English poetry) and was trying hard to write poems of my own, and after I had made the leap from the Jesuit college to Columbia University, I began to get interested in the work of the French Surrealists . What attracted me to them was metaphor. In my own attempts at writing I seemed to exhibit some gift, or at least a taste, for striking upon provocative connections. From what I could decipher in the 1964 anthology called La Poésie surréaliste of J.-L. Bédouin—about the only anthology of Surrealist poetry that one could find in the mid- to late '60s—this writing was my cup of flame. Early on I was also keenly aware that to translate meant to understand my own language more precisely as it sparked against the grindstone of the original—or vice versa. But "understand" is only a part of the process. To "feel" my own language as I groped my way through the French texts was also essential. The French made me feel the American language more deeply—and vice versa. To navigate French poetry into an American port, you had to be pretty good at sounding the local waters, savvy about the poetic currents that could lift you into berth or crash you right through the...