Translations, Refractions, Versions

Quite some time ago, as a student, I was introduced to the I Ching and the idea of casting coins to form a hexagram, the essential unit of divination. The mechanical process led into interpretation, in which the fixed pattern of lines was subject to change, realignment, and positions complementary to the opening meaning. For years I struggled to find a pattern in poetry which could be applied to the shifting perceptions of texts in their original languages, in which these shifts could be included as part of the translation. Very much like underpainting, I wanted the layers of work and reversals of thought included in the finished piece. This led to the idea of a ‘refraction’, a work presented in its original language, accompanied by a version or versions which carried the modulations of interpretation and perhaps acted as a commentary on the process.

Moving from the very strict, often prose, translation with which I begin, I sometimes gamble and lay it aside, and at some point hope to find the means to begin a version of my own. The original is a stimulus, and frequently the basic dictionary work reassembles into a strong semantic field somewhat independent of the original. The resulting work is a chapel of convenience, placed between a strict translation and an ‘original’ poem. Another way of saying this is that the poem in the first language not only carries a meaning, but also evokes a mood, and one can respond to either or both of these elements. An important rule is that I do not rework previous translations. With a poet like Rilke, whose texts provide considerable room for conjecture in meaning, key poems, when newly rendered into English by translators, still often retain at their core materials from the well-known earlier versions by J. B. Leishman. This is something I work hard to avoid.

Selections of verse always risk the charge of being miscellaneous, and one that stretches from classical times to the twentieth century necessitates an explanation. If I remember correctly, one of the early Leishman translations of Rilke’s Duino Elegies renders the phrase ‘Denn Bleiben ist nirgends’, from the First Elegy, as ‘to remain is to be nowhere’. This was the key that unlocked for me an intuitive understanding of life as process, and made it a concrete interest. Rilke’s fascination with the transformative power of deferred, or denied, love also lies behind the Petrarch sonnet, as well as the intoxication of satisfaction in Paz. Both extremes – of unyielding situation, or fluidity of circumstance – seem equal forms of testing and transformation, and have been the subject of some of my previous work. To take the unyielding situation first, I explored this in ‘Kassandra, a version of lines 1035-1330 of the Agamemnon’ (in Stand, 2005) and ‘Klytemnestra’ (Stand, 2006). Fluidity was central in ‘Das Nachtlied’ (Agenda, 2006), which is one small piece from an engagement with Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, which I hope soon to publish in its entirety.

Transformation abounds in Ovid, but the stoic calm of Horace, so long a source of fine English poetry, provides a middle path, and allows a broad conversation with the history of translation. Occasionally the conjunctions that occur in life due to the circumstances of the moment produce their own peculiar charge, as I found a little while ago reading Rilke’s Spanische Tänzlerin in a hotel room overlooking the newly reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden, which led to a brief symbiosis: ‘At the Frauenkirche, Dresden, a version of Rilke’s Spanische Tänzlerin’ (Agenda, 2007), where, for once, the experience of travel and the journey of poetry formed an intense dialogue of their own, to transform my perceptions of both.

Two Refractions after Rilke

Archaïscher Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener...