Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime

Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime Charles Bernstein TRANSLATION IS ALWAYS A FORM OF COLLABORATION: between two (or more) poets and also between two (or more) languages . For me, the most important value is that the poem newly being written is engaging as a poem in its "own" "new" language, not a secondary representation ofthat which lives primarily elsewhere. Accuracy is the bogeyman of translation; for what can be accurately paraphrased is not the "poetic" content of the work. Translation can be a goad to invent new forms, structures, expressions, textures, and sounds in the (new) poem being written. This is to acknowledge, but also go beyond, Walter Benjamin's famous comment that the mark of the translator should not be made invisible, or inaudible, in the translation. A certain strangeness from the original must necessarily be embodied in the new poem. When I translate, I want to keep as much of the syntax of the original as possible, especially if it goes against colloquial English: this might mean, for example, translating all the articles and genders that you have in French but not English. I realize this is a kind of mania: it is delirium, in Jean-Jacques Lecercle's sense, induced by the ontological inscrutabilities of translation. The poet/translator should be free to intervene in the process, assert her or his poetic presence, to let the poem mutate into fruition. I always start with the idea of homophonic translations, which I take from Louis and Celia Zukofsky's translation of Catullus into English, translating the sound of the Latin over and above the lexical meaning. Letting the sound lead is crucial, or often crucial, for the sound may lead to the sense. Every translator knows that a translation requires doing an interpretation of the poem, for words or expressions ambiguous in the original need to be translated one way or another, while a reader need not make any such decisions. We must be wary of a translation that is less ambiguous than its original: the task of the translator is to maintain an economy of ambiguity or inscrutability, as well as of sonic dynamics, not devalue these features in the process. We have many examples of poems that are translated into a fluent or colloquial English that stands in sharp contrast to the marvelous influidities and resistances to assimilation of the original poem: a boring and reductive way to translate though I would have to say it is the "official" way, the authorized method. 64 Winter 1998 Bernstein Yes, of course these remarks suggest just one way to translate. Nor do I intend them to apply only to poetry: philosophy in translation suffers perhaps more greatly than poetry if only because its readers are often less conscious of the semiotic cost of translation (roughly 3.1459) and even less willing to cede significance to what is unrecoverable. And perhaps, too, my remarks reflect an American perspective. Because American English is such a capacious language, incorporating the accents, syntaxes, and manners of speech of both many other languages and many varieties of our own, many translations are unable to bring across the innovative force the originals have for their own language. The originals, often set against a very fixed pattern of poetic practice, have decisive meaning for readers or listeners precisely in the departures from this fixed, or relatively fixed background. In American English, we have no comparable grid upon which these innovations can play, and as a result many of the poems heralded in the introductions, when translated in the conventional manner, seem like weak versions of any of a number of American poetry styles: one can only imagine what might be interesting about them. Within this context, one might add a formal criterion to the evaluation of translation, taking translation as its own medium, not merely a genre of poetry: what is the translation doing that can't be done in any other medium? Perhaps this also suggests the need for new formats for translation, using the new electronic technologies such as CD-ROM to allow, for example, for listening to the work read in the original language while looking at a translation-and for...