Continued

Things to Translate

Things to Translate Afterlife A small cemetery in the area (South Hadley?), with quite a few —in fact, many —Polish names; the earliest graves from the 19205. Were it not for the names, it would be hard to guess that all these people came from the Catholic part of Europe: where has all the richness and fantasy of the graveyards gone? Only the spaces the graves take up are bigger than in Europe, and the spaces between the graves, also bigger. The place looks austere and bare, spacious and empty, barely peopled. Improper names Transposing names and the way they sound —an improper thing to do perhaps? Even when they happen to belong to the category of so-called meaningful names? But the telephone directory, the Great Equalizer itself, the book revealing, if not quite visualizing, a bit of the system we all know best, wants this done its own way. There are eight Marhefkas in it, all spelled with an "h" and an "f". All eight must be descendants of peasants who, at the turn of the century, came here from Poland, a place where they still spell the word with a "ch" and a "w", according to the rules of Polish spelling. "Marchewka " means carrot. But this in English would have to be pronounced [ma:'tju:k3], in Polish a meaningless sound. In the family tradition, it has been clearly impossible to sacrifice sense and sound to spelling: all Marhefkas in the book, the way they sound and are pronounced in EnI 19 glish, not the way they look on the page, still make sense, still mean carrots. Forefathers, our representatives A neighbor with a traceable Slavic name, this semester taking mainly math courses at UMass, half-French (the mother), half-Polish (the father), but born in America, where he is very likely to spend most of his life, going perhaps for holidays to France where he will feel French and where at his departure his French relatives will also treat him as their representative in America rather than an American. And he is likely to enjoy this doubleness, I suspect, even long after he stops being a math student. Meeting people Some ultimate criterion of translatability: "Had we met over there, would we be friends too?" Among ourselves A famous Polish writer I am being introduced to, in New York, just before a reading the three of us, Poles, are going to give there. He has been living in the States for nearly thirty years, but has not been read much, until recently , when he got that famous prize whose name people have generally heard. The other writer has been liv120 ing in America for six years and has not yet received any prize that people in this country could have heard of. There are three of us, Poles, in the room, but the host of the reading series is American, so our small talk happens in the lingua franca of today. The famous writer turns toward me and asks kindly in English: "Do you reside in Warsaw?" "Yes," I answer slowly, trying to gain time to understand what the problem could be —almost forty years away from Poland? a certain old-fashionedness of diction? a difficulty in visualizing those ugly cheap blocks of small flats most of us now live in, if we have been lucky enough to get them? my own inability to abstract from the somewhat different notion of "residing" and "residence " that for some reason sticks in my mind? —and then, still unable to decide, I quickly add: "But I like the verb you used." He laughs and —apparently feeling this is one of those misunderstandings that can be easilyfixed— explains: "You live in Warsaw, so it is the place of your residence." The zoo as text One of the most amusingly innocent attitudes to translation —especially to poetry translations, perhaps —is trying to add explanatory words or phrases to what is being translated, an attempt to incorporate footnotes into the text of the original. This is frequently accompanied by the implied notion that nothing has really been violated. After all, is this not being done with good intentions? for the benefit of the reader? so that the reader could understand better? As, clearly, otherwise the reader would not have the slightest idea what to think. Therefore every spot of the text demanding on the part of the reader a little...