from Vol. #6, Fall 2015

The Translation of Poetry:
A Panel Discussion (1970)

Panel discussion participants in the order of their first speaking are as follows: William Jay Smith, Consultant in Poetry, Louis Untermeyer, Allen Tate, Zulfikar Ghose, Serge Gavronsky, Miller Williams, Yehuda Amichai, Donald Finkel, Harold P. Wright, John Malcolm Brinnin.

SMITH: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm happy to welcome you to this panel on the translation of poetry. Before I ask Mr. Untermeyer to begin, I'll tell you something about him. I'm sure you all know of his great and long career in the service of poetry.

Louis Untermeyer, born in 1885 in New York City, remained in the jewelry manufacturing business, which he entered at the age of 17, for more than 20 years. In 1923 he resigned to give his full time to writing and to editorial work. The next years saw a rapid succession of volumes of poetry, parody, fiction, and translation which established his reputation as a gifted and versatile man of letters. From 1934 to 1937, he was poetry editor of The American Mercury, and in 1937 he gave the Henry Ward Beecher lectures at Amherst College. He served as poet-in-residence at the University of Kansas City, 1939, the University of Michigan, 1939 to '40, and Iowa State College, 1940; since then he has been a guest lecturer at many other colleges and universities. In 1955, he was Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard University, and in 1956 he received the Gold Medal of the Poetry Society of America for distinguished services to poetry. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1961 to '63.

In addition to his anthologies, which are widely known (Mr. Carrera Andrade of Ecuador, one of the participants in this conference, mentions having read those anthologies many, many years ago), Mr. Untermeyer has produced eight volumes of original poetry, including Food and Drink, Burning Bush, Selected Poems and Parodies, and Long Feud: Selected Poems; books for young readers, including Stars to Steer By and The Magic Circle; and such titles as Lives of the Poets, Makers of the Modern World, and (in two volumes) Britannica Library of Great American Writing. Of the anthologies, new and enlarged editions of his Modern American Poetry and Modern British Poetry were issued in 1962. In 1963 The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer was published. Some of his more recent books include The Paths of Poetry: Twenty-five Poets and Their Poems (1966) and The Pursuit of Poetry (1969). It is a great pleasure to introduce Mr. Louis Untermeyer.

UNTERMEYER: Thank you very much, Mr. Smith. I'm sure that was all very well intentioned. I would like to spend the rest of the hour or two rebutting all the statements which have been previously made. All I can promise the audience, however, is that it won't be as dull as what we've just heard in the last few minutes. It makes me feel like a somewhat senile institution, one which should have been exhumed some years ago, or maybe allowed to rest in peace. I'm really not quite as bad as all that. But that isn't what I was brought here at enormous expense to talk about. I am going to start what I hope will be a discussion with a few controversial questions.

To begin with, there is that old Italian platitude Traduttore, Traditore and does that mean that the translator is bound to be a traitor? Should he be true to the difficulties and the possible obscurities of the original or should he try to simplify them or, as Ezra Pound said, "Make it new"? Is it impossible to bring over both the meaning and the music from one language to another? And if it is impossible, should music be sacrificed for the sake of the meaning? Or should meaning be emphasized at the expense of the music? What happens to the poetry of the poem when one vowel after another is substituted for a completely different sound? What happens to that? For that matter, do the liquid two syllables or one syllable of one language have any validity when taken over to another? For instance, the simple, lovely German word lieben with its liquid two syllables: what happens when it becomes the curt, one-syllable English love, which is, in spite of its subject matter, a rather dull and ugly syllable? How can one suggest a flow of an unaccented poem in French or Japanese-languages which have no strong beat-when it is turned into the long and short accents of English? Instead of continuing these rather puzzling queries, which I hope of course may be answered, let me read a few sentences from an extremely good lead article in a recent issue of the London Times Literary Supplement. I'm going to read about two or three minutes' worth as a kind of prod or a nudge to our col-uh, compet-uh, colleagues! I knew it wasn't competit-compatriots-that was the word. But then a compatriot usually turns into a competitor, doesn't he? [TATE: Always. (laughter)] I am now quoting:

Of all the various forms of communication which mankind has attempted, the translation of poetry is the most intricate and the most controversial, the form of literature which constantly invites and eludes linguistic exchange. Our age has developed an appetite for translation which leaves even the voracious Elizabethans far behind. Translation has become a substitute for a first-hand knowledge of the classics, and in the case of modern languages an essential part of our eclectic and polyglot culture, which flourishes and spreads as the world's distances and boundaries shrink.

At the same time there has grown up a far wider range of different kinds of translation. At the one end of the spectrum is the trot, the close prosaic rendering which has no claim to literary or stylistic distinction, and indeed virtually obliterates the poetic characteristics of the original. At the other is the imitation, the creation of a poet who may or may not be acquainted with the language of the original, but who performs a double transformation: his own style is powerfully affected, while the original, if it is a classic, is transported into the context of another century, and takes on a new life for the reader. The interest lies in the encounter, sometimes the clash, of two independent creative forces. . . . Between the trot and the imitation come the far more numerous translations of the scholars and amateurs of literature. These are often more sensitive than the first and more accurate than the second. But they are usually the work of writers whose powers of expression in verse are limited by the fact that they rarely compose it except at second-hand. The danger of this type of translation is often that of blurring the outlines of the original by throwing over it a pastiche of contemporary poetic fashion . . . ^[3]

As I say, I've announced several rather controversial differences. I hope that there will be some attempt to grapple with these hazards and difficulties-and sometimes rewards-of translation. Bill, will you call upon one of our com-one of the people at this table?

SMITH: Since Mr. Tate yesterday began this discussion in his opening address, perhaps he would care to follow.

TATE: I'm not sure I have anything to add. I'd read this article that Mr. Untermeyer has quoted from. It would be interesting to compare certain translations of the Odyssey that we've had. Going back to the 19th century, Andrew Lang's prose translation. Compare that with E. V. Rieu's [UNTERMEYER: or T. Rouse's]. Yes. But Rieu's translation of the Odyssey has a kind of self-conscious colloquial style; reminds you of a sort of sportive Oxford don talking down to Homer. And then we get Mr. Fitzgerald's beautiful, simple translation, elevated style without the Victorian rhetoric. Which of these three translations is nearest Homer? I should think none of them. All three would have in common the narrative line-that is, all three translators would tell us: Nausicaä and her handmaidens discovered Odysseus lying on the beach, exhausted. We could get that from any of them, but that would be merely synoptic information about the story in the Odyssey. It's a little difficult to decide which one of these three translations one would prefer-I prefer Fitzgerald's. If I'd been living a hundred years ago or 70, 75 years ago, I might have preferred Lang's, I would be a Victorian. So it seems to me translations have to be redone all the time.

SMITH: What about Mr. Lattimore's?

TATE: I don't like that much. I like his translation of the Agamemnon tremendously. I don't like his Homer too much.

UNTERMEYER: Allen, I think one of the questions inherent in what you're saying is: for whom is the translation intended?

TATE: Exactly.

UNTERMEYER: Is it for the reader? Is it to make it easier? Is it to adapt the poets to our times? Or us to their times? How much of Homer are you going to keep in the 20th century? How much of the 20th century are you going to impose on Homer? [TATE: Yes.] This is always the moot question which has to be decided by the translator, and it's a matter of taste, I think, more than anything else.

TATE: It seems to me that, going back to the Elizabethan age and to George Chapman's "Homer," most of the people who read Chapman's translation could also read Greek. So there was always that challenge to the reader; there was a little parlor game they could play; they could compare Chapman with the Greek. And there was a great deal of argument about it going on at that time.

UNTERMEYER: Of course, today we have an illiterate rather than a literate age.

TATE: Precisely.

UNTERMEYER: We have no Greek.

TATE: No Greek at all, or very little. That's about all that I have to say at the moment. Let's have another competitor, Mr. Untermeyer.

GHOSE: Can I change the subject slightly and make a few fundamental statements? I have many doubts about translation. And I think this will probably be more controversial. First of all, I must say that I'm aware that Pound has said something like this-I haven't got the exact quotation; I was only asked yesterday to do this, so I quickly summoned up my various resources-and I remember Pound saying somewhere that all great periods of literature have been periods of translation or have followed periods of translation. And I'm also aware that I'm in company where people are translators, and I'm also aware that I wouldn't have met several of the distinguished foreign poets had it not been originally for the translators who have done their work, made their work accessible here, and aroused our curiosity; we want to see them, I'm delighted to meet them. But I have certain doubts, and my principal doubt is that I wonder if poetry can be translated at all. Now, as was said here earlier by Mr. Tate of so many translations of Homer, which one do we prefer? And Mr. Tate prefers Fitzgerald. I think I prefer Fitzgerald, too, but I don't know any Greek, and so I don't know any Homer. But what Mr. Tate's statement really implies is that each age needs to translate the classics anew. And I find it curious that Homer remains Homer for all time. But each of his translators is doomed to become out of date. And I find it very curious that we can still read Alexander Pope with great pleasure, but very few of us read his translations with any pleasure. You know, it seems to me that these questions suggest that translation is something very transient, something which is there to help the student along-it isn't there to enrich the person's knowledge-for whatever reasons he reads poetry.

Another fundamental point, it seems to me, is that before a translation can be acceptable, it must be a good poem in English. I find reading a lot of modern translations of many people-especially people from Eastern European countries (modern poets in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and so on)-I find in the translation that the works are almost the same; the way in which the poet goes about talking, goes about translating the work of the Polish, of the Czech, poet, makes the English seem very similar; and I'm sure the Polish and the Czech languages are not all that similar. And also I believe that before a poet can be a translator, he's first got to show me that he's a very good poet in the English language. And I find too many people are translating before they are even poets. I find-I teach at a university here in America-and I find, you know, students of twenty come and start translating Rimbaud. I say to them, "Look, you haven't any business to be translating Rimbaud, you don't know who you are yet yourself." But it seems to me that by doing so, the 20-year-old is seeking an easy identity with a poet. A man of 20 wants to be a poet before anything else, and so if he goes on doing his own work, nobody's going to recognize him; if he translates Rimbaud, he says, look, here is Rimbaud and here is me and there's an equation between us. And I think that is nonsense. But even at the higher level, a lot of that is happening; there seems to be a certain amount of pressure in the American universities for people to be translating. I wonder why that is.

My next point is that I believe that a culture, any culture, is greatly conditioned by the language in which it functions. And a thought of that culture is rooted in its language. Thought and idea are not the same thing. It is possible to translate ideas; it's not possible to translate thought. And I worry about this because my own background is in Pakistan, where the languages are Urdu and Bengali. I know Urdu so far as I can just about speak it and understand it. I can't read it, but I know enough Urdu to be able to listen to a poem by Ghalib^[i] who is very popular nowadays-his ghazals, lots of people have translated them. I can respond to Ghalib because my racial background and my knowledge of the language give me an intuitive grasp of certain things which Ghalib is talking about. And then I look at the translation-or I try and convert the thought of Ghalib into the English and it is nonsensical. It just doesn't work. The idea can be translated, but the thought cannot. Also, if one looks at European languages like French and Italian, you translate them into English and if one has even a slight knowledge of these languages, there are areas where the two cultures just do not mix. There's a breakdown. And if it is so within European cultures, it's far worse, it seems to me, with cultures which are much more alien, than the Western European ones.

And the final point that I have to make here emerges from I what Mr. Untermeyer and Mr. Tate were saying, that translation, it seems to me, is making the English language more and more dominant. We have a great variety of translations of the same original works and also a great number of translations of more and more new works; new poets emerge all over the world, and we translate them into English as soon as possible. There's a great competition among translators. But the result of this is that the English language is becoming more and more dominant. It's already dominant for political reasons, and it's probably going to gradually wipe out all the other languages very quickly. Which may have very good political consequences. But is seems to me that it's taking away from us the urge, the stimulus, to study the classics for what they're worth, what they still are. We are lazy now about reading the original. I was taking a course recently, last semester, at my university, and the professor who is in charge decided that we simply had to read the classics. And so within two weeks we had read Homer and Virgil and Euripides-all in quick, capsule-size translations. And now the students who read them will go and spend the rest of their lives saying, "Oh, we know the classics." But they don't. All they've seen is a few words in a translation. And I don't agree with that.

GAVRONSKY: Sort of a blistering attack. It's also a very scattered attack, and I am very touched by many of the things you say. I think perhaps one of the ways we can begin is with 16th-century France, where translation played an extraordinarily important role in enriching the language, which is perhaps a parallel that we could make with the phenomenal attraction of contemporary American poets to translation. Amyot, for example, when he translated Plutarch's Lives, did much more than a translation; he actually formulated the French language.^[ii] He is in point responsible for the creation of the language of the 16th century.

This is one element; he translated into French, but into a French which he had to construct, and he created a masterpiece of the French language, which is still read and appreciated. The other example is Ronsard. Ronsard's poems frequently contain exact translations of Horace's lines. You can just go back to Horace and see the way Ronsard fed himself, lived off Horace, and in a sense succeeded, as did the 16th century in France, in enormously enriching that language by living the examples, by living the metrics, and there is a difference between Latin and French, undoubtedly, as there was then, as there is even more now. So in that case I think it worked out very well. It's therapeutic for the poet; it's terribly enriching for the readers.

Perfect translation, I think, as you say, is probably absolutely impossible; however, there is something which I have come across in my own slight experience-and using a word Mr. Tate used yesterday, there's a sort of "pragmatic" approach that's involved here. If I know that in a published book my English will be confronted by the French, then I have to assume a particular stance, and I have to diminish my presence as much as possible; I have to become almost transparent. I assume a stance at that moment as far from my own personal aesthetic interest in the translation, and as faithful a literal translation, as possible, and as good an English version as possible. But I'm much more interested, if it's the facing translation, in having as close as possible a one-to-one relationship, in all its complexities-I mean rhythmically, I mean the vowel counts, if that will establish the rhythm, as in the case of, ay, Francis Ponge. Francis Ponge happens to depend enormously on a heavy Latin base for his poems. Now if you translate that into English, and you get the Anglo-Saxon, you are being very unfair in a sense; I think one of the kicks of translation is this extraordinary discipline that's imposed upon you by the person you have decided to translate. So that's one thing-whether the translation is going to stand alone, or whether the foreign language is going to be next to it.

Secondly, there is the whole problem of strategy. I think a translator must confront not the line, but the poem or the poet, perhaps in the most absolute way, which goes back to the Rimbaud illustration. I think you have to discover the tactical disposition of a poem, not just the way it moves maybe from one line to the other, but the way the idea is structured-the actual curves involved, the inflections. You must insinuate yourself within the structure of the poem. And at that moment, I think you can become infinitely freer, because you become far more certain of your capacity of being honest, and this is, of course, where I most violently oppose Lowell's translation that Mr. Tate read yesterday. I find that abhorrent. I find Lowell translating an extraordinarily "nuanced" poet, Baudelaire, into New England terms. And that does not work; it may be great Lowell, but it's awful Baudelaire. This is again the abyss between the French and the English language, which is not a question of language, which is a question of-of blood, of experience of Latin and Greek and of other literatures. When I read, for example, "La Servante" in Lowell's translation, I see that all the images have been accelerated in their intensity, all the colors are harsher; everything which is subtle, everything which is in a pastel in Baudelaire becomes part of this rocky cemetery of a New England town-which may be very good for Lowell, but if you were to think of Baudelaire in those terms, you'd be most unhappy. So I think there again, if poets are vain, translators should be equally vain, but in a sense by washing themselves out, by simply forgetting about themselves, not playing around, even with imitations, or else, saying, "d'après" Baudelaire, "after"-not even imitations. Because even in the imitations very frequently they will be extremely faithful, as are some of the Rimbaud imitations by Lowell, where you have, let's say, 15 lines which are marvelous Rimbaud, and the last three which are Lowell.

GHOSE: But Lowell at least makes the attempt to make a poem of his own, for which I admire him. But in all these imitations there is not one poem as good as anything in my studies. And that again indicates to me that this task is beyond a poet; he just can't do it. And I think you're probably very right, in the case of the 16th-century French poets and translators, that translation played a great role in formulating the French language. That is probably very true; I just don't know enough French literature to be able to agree or disagree. And I'll also say that many great poets have learned a great deal from translation, in a very superficial way-Shakespeare taking notes on Plutarch and converting that into his dramas. But, I doubt if anybody can answer my question, why is it that we read Pope and not his translations. Can you?

GAVRONSKY: I won't speak much more, I'll just say that it's only a question of authenticity. There is something extraordinarily priceless in any original, which by its nature cannot be duplicated. A translation is already a step away, and if language itself is a metaphor, then you are retracting, you're just going back one further step; and at that moment, since the poet is no longer totally in control, since he is in a sense imitating language, there is a degree of inauthenticity which strikes, and that's why many poets in their own right are immortal, and, as translators, fade away.

UNTERMEYER: Could I answer Mr. Gavronsky by saying that if this is pushed to its actual limit, then for sheer purity, there should be no translation. Any translation is therefore either an imitation-a trot-or a bad approximation. It is almost always taken for granted that a good translation is another poem-it isn't that poem at all; it is a simulation, prompted by the original, but becomes a new poem. As Allen said yesterday, only a poet has a right to translate any other poet, and what you achieve there is something quite different, the things that we admire most. It's been said again and again that Edgar Allan Poe sounds much better in French than he does in English. I doubt that it becomes completely Poe, but it doesn't matter. Your area has been enlarged, your vocabulary has been enriched, and your mind has been teased by an approximation. That's all we can hope for in a translation. You cannot hope for a purity of the original because if you want that, there's the original-if you can read it, fine; if you can' t, then you get the second best; and at the best, a translation is a second best, I think. I don't think, I know.

WILLIAMS: It seems to me that if we carry this to its logical limits, we have to dispense with translation entirely. Even if we were all linguists, if we all knew Russian, English, French, Spanish, German-as a person who wants to live in the world of letters, I would still be interested in what is going on, as well as I could know it, have a hint of it, in Yugoslavia. One can't learn all the languages; besides, I don't think, as was suggested, that translations dampen our interests in learning other languages. I learned Spanish because I was excited reading Lorca and Neruda and Cervantes in translation and was left unsatisfied, but it was, if I can become vulgar, it was the carrot hanging before me, and I had to get to it somehow. Learning the language was the way to do it, and it was a tremendous spur to me to learn the language because I had the translations. I think without the translations, I would simply have heard that these were good writers and wouldn't have known any more.

SMITH: Mr. Amichai, would you care to comment? Your language is one which is inaccessible to many of us, and you depend so much on English, I think.

AMICHAI: Yes, and I want to refer to Mr. Tate's remark about having several translations. That would be an ideal translation. To read three or four translations done by different people would be like-I think that the police have a way to find out suspects by drawing pictures of them, so by the end you have an image of them. So it's as legends have it, I think-Jewish legends-when the Bible was to be translated into Greek about 2,000 years ago, they had 70 wise people sit in 70 different rooms and translate it. And it was called the Septuagint, and then of course, a miracle happened-it's always a miracle-happened 2,000 years ago, and they were all just the same version. Well, I don't think a thing like that could happen, but the trial is worthwhile. I think at universities you could do trials like that, sit down 10 or 20 scholars and then you can find some way in between. In Hebrew the translation of the Bible was always a kind of explanation of the Bible, an Aramaic translation which tried to explain things. Although people knew Hebrew, they still used Aramaic, which was the spoken language, to explain things; so by trying to explain, to be didactic, they changed things sometimes, and I must say a thing like that happened to one of my poems in which it says that my mother wants to measure the length of God's finger. God's finger in the Bible has a meaning, it's the power of God; it's the power of God in His finger. But to translate it into Spanish the translator didn't translate God's finger, but God's power. So now the poem is without power, after he translated it, after he tried to. But, of course, there's another thing, I think you were right when you said that translation gives back to the language its original metaphoric value. For instance, it's also sometimes a very naive and funny thing, because a word like school, which is a very common word in Hebrew, if you translate it exactly, would mean "the house of the book," which is a poem itself. A child goes to the house of the book; but if anyone would translate it in an ordinary poem, "children go to the house of the book," it's almost like a Dylan Thomas poem.

And the last point I would like to make is about what every translator chooses. First of all, he wants to translate the things which are the most difficult-and I've translated myself-and the most difficult poems to translate are those based on language-place, and the language itself. Images-poetry of images-is much easier to translate. And there is another point which has been made, about the danger for the translator if he's a poet himself. He might be swallowed up by the one whom he translates, and he'll never be able to get rid of the influence, which is sometimes a very, very dangerous thing for translators.

SMITH: Don't you think though, Mr. Amichai, it can be dangerous, but it can also be very valuable-as in the case of T. S. Eliot, who swallowed up so much of Laforgue?

AMICHAI: Yes, I once heard the saying that to translate is-I don't know who said it-like kissing a woman through a veil.

UNTERMEYER: Well, that's something!

SMITH: I think you touched on a very interesting point, that is, which poem a translator chooses. Very often American poets today, especially young ones, choose absolutely the wrong poets to translate, because, as Mr. Ghose pointed out, the poet has not discovered any identity himself-so he doesn't know what somebody else's work is like. And I think that a good translator must always choose only those poets for whom he feels a special affinity, whose poems he feels he might have written himself. There are many, many poems I know in other languages which I greatly admire, but I'd certainly never attempt to translate them because I could never feel, I would never, as much as I admire them, ever have been able to write those poems myself.

UNTERMEYER: Bill, let me mention one point Mr. Amichai brought up. The two words with which we seem to be fencing or trying somehow to ameliorate: how much meaning? how much music? Mr. Amichai has just said when you come to metaphors, similes, comparisons, that's fairly easy: that 's the meaning; that can be translated. The music itself is inherent. For instance, a couple of poems read by Mr. Amichai were very good English, but they were without any rhythm whatsoever; and yet a sense of the flow of the Hebrew rhythm, the parallelism which substitutes for our English rhyme-when Mr. Amichai read them, although he read them in much too low a voice, being much too modest a person-did come through, and with it, to use the one word which we have not used, nobody's used so far, which certainly is inherent in poetry, a sense of magic. And magic again is something which cannot be translated, transmuted-it is always half felt-but which is partly inherent in the music, partly inherent in these indefinable things. We must be willing to say: All right, we will get another poem, maybe as good a poem or, as Allen implied, maybe a better poem. But it cannot be the same poem.

TATE: The last few minutes I've been thinking of a small point Mr. Ghose made. I believe he told us that some of his students wanted to translate Rimbaud, prematurely. Now in the case of Hart Crane, that's exactly what he tried to do, but Crane happened to be a man of genius. I don't think he ever understood Rimbaud at all, but that made no difference. And he identified himself with Rimbaud in a certain way. So there the misunderstanding resulted in something quite remarkable.

FINKEL: I hope what we're doing here won 't seem like an attempt to hammer out one single form, one single set of criteria for the perfect translation. There are as many reasons for moving into the act of translation as there are reasons for moving into the act of poetry, and reasons for moving into the act of reading both the translation and the original poem. You go to poetry for different reasons, at different times; you go to different poets for different reasons. It seems to me, for instance, that Pound had no one single reason for translating. At one time he wanted to carry certain literatures to people that he felt were illiterate. At other times he suggested that what he was doing was experiencing a kind of problem which poets, I think, experience very often. As he looked at his own experience and attempted to capture it, he discovered that it drifted away from him very quickly; the harder he looked at it, like Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle," the further away it went, the more it got distorted. He discovered, however, that a poem in a foreign language, a poem already written, was always there, like an unwobbling pivot, and no matter how much he swung around it, it stayed where it was, and he could keep coming back to it. And he would not only do one translation of it, he would very often publish two or three translations of the same poem-and it's possible to read two or three translations by the same poet of a Chinese poem-in an attempt to get to it. If what you want to do, then, when you come to a translation is to read it as a poem, you may be terribly disappointed because it's a bad poem. At that point you ought to be wise enough to know whether there's a glimpse of the original behind it, or something that seems to you to be the original. And if you decide that it would be worth reading other translations, if only there are some, or finding a tape of the reading of the poet, if that is available, or finding other little clues that might give you the original poem-then you are going at these translations for another reason, in the same way the translator would have, for a different reason. And I think that Mr. Gavronsky was right in suggesting that when a translator knows that his translations are going to appear en face with the original, he translates in a slightly different way from the way he translates when he knows it's going to be presented without any original. He knows the experience of the reader is going to be different.

SMITH: May I question that? Do you think it should be very different? After all, it's got to be a poem in English, or else it isn't a translation, it's just a trot. Perhaps today it may be one of the worst things to have the en face translations, because it leads people to think that the translation should be a trot. If they don't know enough of the original language, then they say the translator has gone wrong, he's taken liberties, this is cockeyed-and it's simply their own ignorance.

FINKEL: You recognize this immediately when you see reviews of books of translations. Always by another translator who always picks holes, because he can always find places which are deviant.

SMITH: I feel sometimes that this en face business is like standing with your feet one in one puddle and one in the other. You ought to be one place or the other; you can't be in both languages at once.

UNTERMEYER: Mr. Amichai has been making controversial notes. Will you read them?

AMICHAI: I was wondering-if a poet translates, when does he? I was wondering about myself because I have done some translations. Why do I do it, I'm always asking myself. Do I do it, say, in periods in which I don't have something of my own, and use another poet as a source for my Inspiration? To fill out an empty gap, and carry me on to my next poetry? It's more a psychological question for a poet, I think. It's how much inspiration am I ready to pour, how much of my really powerful inspiration, which I sometimes feel I could measure, am I ready to put into another poet? Am I like a vampire sucking the blood of another?

SMITH: I wonder if we might call on Mr. Wright, who is concerned with Japanese, which so few people know in the Western world; we are absolutely dependent on translators there. And I think that Mr. Tanikawa and he have had long conferences about this.^[iii]

WRIGHT: Fortunately, perhaps since I am translating from one of the rare languages, or least known languages, I don't have the problem of being checked on every page. This leads to problems. If I'd known how difficult the Japanese language was, I'd probably never have started. But I did begin my interest in Japanese poetry through translations. And I favor translations. I think it is possible; whether that's the correct word or not, I don't know. But in Japan, I know that the whole modern poetry world has begun through translations from the West. I've been told that there are probably more books translated into the Japanese language than any other language in the world. And I believe this. There are bookstores everywhere. And the Japanese read just all the time. I'm interested primarily in the modern poets, poets of the 20th century, so I don' t have this problem of imposing the 20th century upon the classics, or the classics upon the 20th century. I'm very much involved now with Tanikawa, who is approximately my age, and he drives around Tokyo in a car, and has all sorts of modern thoughts; I consider him more a citizen of the world than a citizen of Tokyo. Citizen of the universe, I think we were saying the other clay. And somebody said also that you have to love a person, a poet, to be able to translate him properly. And when I first read his poems, I said this is beautiful, I have to really get into this. And so I'm still working on it. I think translations are possible. Somewhere between the very literal translation and the sort of literary kind of thing, somewhere in between, I believe it should be a poem in English. I enjoy doing it, I get as much satisfaction out of translating a poem by someone like Tanikawa as writing one myself.

GAVRONSKY: I have a question I'd like to ask you about the Japanese. I once talked to Donald Keene, and I had read a translation of Chikamatzu^[iv] that he had put out in 1951 and read another version of the same play that he put out a few years later; and in the '51 version one speech was attributed to the chorus; a few years later, it was attributed to the lady; and I was rather mystified-you know, this is a phenomenal change, from the anonymous chorus to one individual. How do you do such a thing? He said, well, in the Noh drama, since it was written in a single voice, it requires an enormous amount of reflection through the uses of the various levels of the language to find out exactly who is saying what, and for whom. The reader is saying things. And then he noted something which I wonder if you could answer. He said the Chinese and Japanese have such a difficult capacity of being translated because a poem may be a bird on a branch, it may be the birds on a branch, it may be the birds on the branches. So that, in a sense, you are much more the creator than we are. A good translation from the Japanese really turns out to be your poem.

WRIGHT: Yes. Fortunately, this week I've been finishing some of my translations and Tanikawa's living down the hall in the same hotel; and so I'm always running down knocking on his door saying, "Do you want this birds, or bird?" Out in Ohio I have to make these decisions myself, but I've had great help here. It's true. It's a very flexible language. Usually the subject of the sentence, or the subject of the thing, is missing. They write in a passive tense very much. You have no idea what. And so when I was studying under Donald Keene at Columbia, he would always say, "Change it into the active and assume a subject." So this is the idea of what he was doing-assuming the subject, the chorus said this, or the lady said that. It's not there. It's simply said.

SMITH: I wonder if Mr. Brinnin would comment on the necessity of knowing the language from which one translates, because I think that I'm not taking any liberty in revealing that you don't really know Spanish but have done some brilliant translations of Mr. Carrera Andrade.

BRINNIN: I'm the silent member; in a way, I'm temperamentally much more one of the audience than one of this panel, since I have no language beyond my own. And I suppose my reasons for daring to translate are so simple as to approach the pathetic; but years ago through a translation I came upon a new poet-it was like a planet swimming into my ken; I loved it; it stayed with me, and it never occurred to me that I would translate. But just by accident years later I forget what foundation asked a number of American poets if they'd like to translate, even if they needed an intermediate helper. And so I leaped at the chance and said of course, I'd like to translate Carrera Andrade. And by luck I had very good people who gave me literal translations, and I found myself fascinated. The only thing I wanted to do was to share my joy in this man, and I just wanted to say, "Look, look, look," and if I could make it possible to give them something to look at, this was it. And the question of magic that Mr. Untermeyer brought up-it seems to me that in the case of a man like Carrera Andrade, the magic is in the exactitude; if you can follow sometimes the incredible development of his images, there is a kind of subliminal onomatopoetic music that comes along-you don't install it; it's simply there, and it's a kind of exactitude of observation that you have caught and brought into the English language. And that supplies this quotient of magic without which the poem would still be inert on the page.

FINKEL: I think that what you suggest is that, depending on the particular poet you're translating, there are certain possibilities in the language you're translating into. There are certain possibilities and certain losses. For instance, I discovered-I'm sorry Mr. Voznesensky was not able to come, I can't read Russian^[v]-that I had the feeling that Voznesensky would come through in even the most terrible translation. I would know something of what the power was. There are some other poets who depend so much on their language and not on their metaphor that they would not have come through in the same way, and I would have lost, and that would demand another kind of translator, but also another kind of response from me as I read the translation. I would have to read it in a different way. I would have to be going through a creative act of my own to try to recreate what was not really there, but only just suggested.

UNTERMEYER: Bill should comment on that. As translator of Voznesensky, he should have some cogent remarks to make.

FINKEL: Somebody whose translations I admire tremendously. . . .

SMITH: I was hoping that I might have just a moment, since Mr. Voznesensky isn't here, as he had expected to be, to read one poem of his. He feels very strongly that only poets should translate poets. And he quotes Pasternak, who said on admiring a translation Auden had done of a poem of Voznesenky's that one madman had understood another. The English translations which have been done of Voznesensky have been greatly admired by Russian scholars, and they've almost all been done by people who know no Russian at all, or very little. All of us have, of course, worked with Max Hayward, a very distinguished Russian linguist, and with Mr. Voznesensky himself. And Auden, in his preface to the volume, points out that, just as Mr. Finkel said, Voznesensky's a poet who would immediately come through even in a bad translation, because so much of his work is made up of very strong visual imagery, of the sort John Brinnin was mentioning. And he said this is true also of Dante, that in any translation you would know immediately that he was a great poet, because, even in the abstract passages there're always these marvelous concrete, visual images which can't be destroyed in translation. If you take another modern Soviet poet, Yevtushenko, his work is much more difficult to translate because most of the poems are poems of statement, and these depend so much on the nature of the language that they simply seem completely diminished in English. And, of course, we have the prime example of the untranslatable Russian of Pushkin, and we just have to accept it on faith that he is, as the Russians say, their greatest poet, because I don't think there's ever been a truly satisfactory translation into English to convince us of that. I would like to read this little poem in my translation; it's one that Mr. Voznesensky likes very much himself, a short lyric which is part of the longer poem Oza. I don't present mine as a great translation, but one that, at least, I think makes the poem identifiable as the work of a fine poet: ^[4]

When I walk in the park or swim in the sea,
A pair of her shoes waits there on the floor.

The left one leaning on the right,
Not enough time to set them straight.

The world is pitch-black, cold and desolate,
But they are still warm, right off her feet.

The soles of her feet left the insides dark,
The gold of the trademark has rubbed off.

A pair of red doves pecking seed,
They make me dizzy, rob me of sleep.

I see the shoes when I go to the beach
Like those of a bather drowned in the sea.

Where are you, bather? The beaches are clean.
Where are you dancing? With whom do you swim?

In a world of metal, on a planet of black,
Those silly shoes look to me like

Doves perched in the path of a tank, frail
And dainty, as delicate as eggshell.

Another translation of this poem was done by a prominent Russian scholar, but in trying to keep too close to the original, he produced a poem with the exact rhyme scheme but in a jog-trot rhythm which made it sound like perfect nonsense in English. His translation ends somewhat like this:

Egg-white thin sneakers, I give you my thanks!

to rhyme, of course, with "tanks." The translator in this case not only got the shoe on the wrong foot; he got the wrong shoe on the wrong foot. He made the shoes sneakers, which is nonsense; Voznesensky is talking about delicate high-heeled shoes.

WILLIAMS: Sort of like Cinderella losing her sneaker.

SMITH: Yes, that's right.

WILLIAMS: I think I've scribbled it down right: we've mentioned two or three times the difficulty of translating poetry that depends heavily upon the nature of its original language, as opposed to one that lives through the images. I'm reminded of a couple of translations I did, which in turn reminds me that sometimes our most successful translations were the least challenging to us. They seem the most successful because they almost translated themselves. Once in a while there's a fortunate instance in which virtually a transliteration gives you poetry. And, of course, you very proudly accept the praise for it when you publish it, and it was almost automatic. Those things you wish you could do right are sometimes too much of a challenge. The first instance is a poem I remember in Spanish about a grandmother who died and was put in a coffin, and the coffin sailed away with bright candles, or sails, because vela means both candle and sail. And it works in such a lovely way in the Spanish; there's no way to do that in the English. Then on the other hand-I'm going to read just the lines in Spanish: "aulla como un hereje en la hoguem de sus plumas y es un cuerno gigante que sopla la negrura al caer al infierno." It's about a rooster waking a man from his holy sleep-on his windowsill screaming and cock-a-doodle-dooing or whatever they do. Almost transliterating, because it lives through the image, gives you this: "He howls like a heretic in the bonfire of his feathers. He is a gigantic horn blowing the darkness to hell." Now, people have read that and said "What a nice job you did with that" but I didn't do any job with it at all; and the image of the rooster as a heretic howling in the bonfire of his feathers would be remarkable no matter what language it were put into, and it was not my ability to translate it that did it. I would much rather have been able to do something with the sail-candle. But I can't. I give this just as an example of the kind of problem we've been talking about.

BRINNIN: Could I say something about the general problem? We have Mr. Ghose's attack somewhat hanging over us, and I'm sure if I knew as much about translation as he does, I might agree that it is ultimately impossible, too. But isn't it that all poems are translations?

TATE: Isn't it true, also, that when we read a poem in our own language we're translating it?

BRINNIN: Of course, and in that sense I don't see how we can deny the uses of translation.

SMITH: I think Paul Valery in one place says something like this: he starts out by questioning translation, just as we have today, and then he ends up by saying of course, any poem is a translation-it's a translation of experience

WILLIAMS: I would also suggest that, if it's true, then I would have to agree that every translation, finally, is a failure. So is every poem, to start with.

UNTERMEYER: That's good, that's a very good explanation. I'd like to add, without attempting to sum up in the usual, simple, and completely false manner, I'd like to say this-that in spite of all the hazards, all the limitations of any translation, we should be grateful for the attempt-the attempt to communicate, to bring over from one community, one language, one place, one people to another, the widening of our horizons, the enrichment not only of a vocabulary, but even of our techniques. It's only in the last few years that Japan, which was someplace over there in the Orient, a place that we invaded (I shouldn't use that word)-

TATE: But we did, though.

UNTERMEYER: Suddenly, every high school kid begins writing haikus, or hokus, and the haiku now is part of the training of the young, to write more and more bad poetry. Nevertheless, the fact is that we are reaching out, and that translation, no matter how limited, no matter how untrue and impure, does bring [Japan] over, as it does today, in this microcosm. If there were more of it, no matter how much we are at fault with this thing, the idea that we are reaching out, that we are learning about other things, other people, other languages, to me is the great benefit of translation, and our academic attitude of trying to make it pure or new is rather a footling thing. The chief thing is that we are doing it, and it's being done for us, if not by us.

SMITH: Shall we conclude then, Mr. Untermeyer?

UNTERMEYER: Me? Am I through? I was through 15 minutes ago. Does one call for an adjournment, before the audience walks out?

SMITH: There's a question from the audience. (Gentlemen, will you please discuss the use of rhyme? Are you all disassociating yourselves from it?)

UNTERMEYER: I think that rhyme is simply another attribute which should be used carefully, like pepper in the salad; it should be. used at the right time, at the right moment for certain poems. I think where rhyme is indicated as a necessary adjunct, it should be attempted. In many cases, in most cases today, rhyme is a luxury. Rhyme is even an irrelevance. I happen to be a rhymester myself, and I prefer the use of this musical punctuation.

SMITH: I certainly didn't want to seem to disassociate myself from it. I actually did use rhyme in the translation I read, and I followed the rhyme scheme exactly, but I used assonance rather than full rhyme in certain cases. Many translators of modern Russian poets do dispense with rhyme and assonance, and it's a great mistake, because the Russian language is very rich in these, just as English is, hard to translate some of the poets who make use of them into free verse in English is simply losing very, very much.

UNTERMEYER: Or an easy way out.

SMITH: Yes, Mr. Wright?

WRIGHT: Fortunate again that rhyme is never used in Japanese, so I'm not faced with this problem at all.

SMITH: Yes, but Japanese, being a syllabic language, does have its rhythms which you have to convey in English somehow. Don't you find that you use, you have to turn to rhyme at times to get that kind of rhythmic pattern?

WRIGHT: Occasionally, accidental rhyme. I'm surprised to find it there after I finish a translation.

UNTERMEYER: Mr. Amichai, isn't that also true of Hebrew? You don't have any set rhyme.

AMICHAI: There are rhymes-European influences.

WRIGHT: I would like to say something about form in Japanese poetry. The haiku, which was mentioned, the 17 syllables; the older kind of traditional Japanese poetry is the tanka, 31 syllables. When translating this kind of poetry-it's a very rigid form-I believe somehow that form should be shown in the translation. Sometimes it's very difficult. There are excellent translations that are appearing of both haiku and tanka, but sometimes you can't tell from the translation what the original was-was it 17 syllables in the original, or 31? It's very important in Japanese. However, people like Mr. Tanikawa write in free verse as all major modern poets do today. So I'm not faced with form when I translate modern Japanese poetry. I was doing a collection of 8th-century Japanese love poems, and I was faced with this problem of form. I tried to imitate in my English something of 31 syllables. That's fairly close.

GAVRONSKY: There's a problem there-that each language has its own intensity, its own electric vibrancy. In the French alexandrine, for example, if you're going to mimic that in English, it would be rather catastrophic. The best translations of Racine, for example, have tried to discover an analogous rhyming sequence. You might find that it's the heroic couplet, depending on your feeling. That's where the analogy really works in translation. If you were going to be terribly faithful to the 12-syllabic and to that sort of a rhyming order, which I've seen for Molière at times, you might turn out the equivalent of what has happened with Pushkin, and which is still true about Racine, I mean for American students, when they're told that Racine is the equivalent of Shakespeare, on the basis of translations. Except some of them. Wilbur's translations are excellent, some of Lowell's translations are excellent, but, on the whole, they're terribly disappointing. One of the reasons for the student's great disappointment is a totally alien culture.

UNTERMEYER: I'd like to argue there, about Wilbur. Both the Wilbur plays, both the translations from Molière, to me are not only highly successful theater but highly successful wit; the way in which the rhyme is used as an extra little fillip to the verse itself is not only, as far as I know Molière, which is very little, a successful translation but a successful readaptation to the stage itself, and it works. And I guess it always comes down to that simple American expression "Does it work?" And in the case of both the Wilbur translations, God knows, it works.

SMITH: And yet I've heard a great director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, say that it doesn't work, that the rhymes stand out too much on the stage; I think he's completely wrong.

UNTERMEYER: Then he's a bad director because you've heard it too, and it works beautifully. It doesn't stop, end stop, to pronounce the rhyme. Don' t you agree?

SMITH: I agree.

WILLIAMS: I think I'll accept the director's word on many things, but whether or not the rhymes stand out too much on the stage is as much up to an astute member of the audience as it is to the director. And I'm with you. I disagree with him.

SMITH: I do too, but I think it's also that we've lost, the actors have lost, the ability to speak in rhyming couplets.

FINKEL: And the audience has also lost the sense of pleasure in listening to fairly formalized reading on a stage; they can handle it if one man stands alone on a stage and reads a formal poem, but they simply find it difficult, and the directors respond to this-and, of course, the directors also create it by refusing to let their actors do it-so that the formal patterned reading on a stage is alien to us.

UNTERMEYER: Once more, I call for adjournment.

SMITH: Mr. Untermeyer calls for adjournment. Thank you all very much.

Notes [numbered as in the original pamphlet publication, consecutive to notes in the Tate address]

• 3. "Problems of Poetic Translation in Modern Greek[:] The Variants Considered: From the Trot to the Imitation," The Times Literary Supplement 3553:349-350 (April 2, 1970). /back
• 4. William Jay Smith, translator, in Patricia Blake and Max Hayward, editors, Antiworlds, and The Fifth Ace; Poetry, by Andrei Voznesensky (New York, 1967), p. 26-27. /back

Editor's Notes

• i. The poet Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797-1869), who used the pen-names Ghalib and Asad. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, "the preeminent Indian poet of his time writing in Persian, equally renowned for poems, letters, and prose pieces in Urdu." /back
• ii. Jacques Amyot (1513-1593), French Renaissance writer, translator, and church official. /back
• iii. Shuntaro Tanikawa (b. 1931), a participant in the festival though not a member of this roundtable discussion. Over his long career, Tanikawa has become one of the most well known of living Japanese poets. Outside of the usual activities of an unusually prolific poet-he has published more than 60 books of poetry-he has translated Charles Schulz's Peanuts into Japanese, and wrote the lyrics to the theme song for the animated film Howl's Moving Castle. /back
• iv. Chikamatsu Monzaemon, pen name of Japanese dramatist Sugimori Nobumori (1653-1725). /back
• v. Andrei Voznesensky (1933-2010), Soviet and then Russian poet. /back

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