Interview

On April 2, 2019, the poet Ilya Kaminsky gave a reading as the Margolies Visiting Writer in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Afterward, he spoke with the poet Dora Malech, and this interview is an edited version of their conversation.

Dora Malech:

You're someone who has both translated and been translated a lot, and you've talked in the past about what is translatable—what remains versus what gets lost in translation. You've mentioned image as something that can survive in translation, and possibly metaphor and rhythm as elements that can come across in a translation. And I would perhaps add narrative and drama to that list. Music can get lost in translation, and cultural context can get lost in translation. In reading your new book, Deaf Republic, with its compelling narrative and imagery, I kept thinking about those elements as ones that might survive translation. I began to make much of this and wonder if you purposefully wrote a book with the ability to move beyond one language, but I'm happy to be corrected. Do you see these translatable elements as an inherent strength or even a moral imperative, or do you want to push back and say, "No, that wasn't my intention at all?"

Ilya Kaminsky:

Do you believe you have a soul? Can you tell me where in your body it is? Well, translation is the art form that thrives on that kind of certainty/uncertainty.

Translation is necessary: without it, in English, we wouldn't have the Bible, we wouldn't have Homer, we wouldn't have Dante. Or, in Russian: we wouldn't have Shakespeare, Milton, and so forth.

It's a necessary art.

But it is also impossible. Which is why every single year we get another Dante, or two or three Dantes, published.

It is an ongoing conversation, it is an attempt to summon the spirits via our very primitive tools, so to speak.

What tools?

I would argue that image is perhaps the most useful tool. It is far easier to translate poetry that is heavy with imagery. Tone is also easier to translate, which is why Mayakovsky, who is a far inferior poet to, say, somebody like Mandelstam, is far more accessible in English, because Mayakovsky is all about tone. I'm not saying he's a bad poet; he's a wonderful poet, but Mandelstam = tone + 55 other things. And that is much harder to bring across.

How are we to translate somebody like Hopkins—"The world is charged with the grandeur of God"—when so much depends on the alliteration and assonance. Think about Blake—"Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night"; people remember it from lullabies or from kids' books, but it is also a Metaphysical poem. "What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?" He's having a Metaphysical crisis in the middle of the poem. You translate the poem into Russian, and it will be a poem about a big cat. So much depends on the music of the poem—music that is very specific to the language in which it originates. Now, rhythm can be translated. I can go like this . . . [Walks around the room quickly and lightly]. Or I can walk like this . . . [Marches heavily and slowly]. You can imitate another human being's gait. You can feel rhythm. Syntax is a whole other category that is extremely helpful, and actually, that is where translation is very useful. I just mentioned Hopkins, and there are wonderful poets and critics who say that Hopkins became the great poet that he is because he tried to adapt Greek grammar to English, Greek syntax to English. Louise Bogan believed that, for instance. Or, here is another case: Paul Celan is an amazing poet, who according to every law we know, should not be available in translation at all. He is so rooted in his relationship to (and assault on) the German language of his time. And yet he is very moving to us in English. This is partly because of what he does to...