THE ACCIDENTAL MAGIC OF POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Vittor Alevato (21 de agosto de 2013)
As I wrote the article “Palavras e experiências: a mágica acidental da poesia” (“Words and Experiences: the Accidental Magic of Poetry”), I asked myself the question “is there, as a result of the translator’s work, any accidental magic of poetry in translation?” Then I promised in a footnote to write a sequel to that article, the result being the present text1. I opened the first text with a thought by Virginia Woolf in “Craftsmanship” (1937), and would like to reproduce it now:
Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories,
and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word "incarnadine," for example – who can use that without remembering "multitudinous seas"? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy
enough to invent ne w words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and
separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word "incarnadine" belongs to multitudinous seas." (WOOLF, 2008: 88).
If it is true, as Virginia Woolf affirmed, that only the great poet knows that those three words belong together, it is not less of a true statement to say that even the great poet cannot discover this magical attractive force but by means of the poetical work. It leads us to the phrase “accidental magic” I chose to the title of this paper. It comes from the following statement by Dylan Thomas in 1954:
The magic in a poem is always accidental. No poet would labour intensively upon the intricate craft of poetry unless he hoped that, suddenly, the accident of magic would occur. [...] And the best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of
magical accident (THOMAS, 1968: 121-122).
1 A previous version of the present text was read to a group of Creative Writing students at Bath Spa University on March 21st, 2012.
In other words, it is the unmagical work with words that originates the magical accident of poetry in the shape of a poem. Let us go back to the words Virginia Woolf singled out in the work of Shakespeare. “Multitudinous seas” and “incarnadine” are found in the second scene of the second act of Macbeth, right after the murder of Duncan, king of Scotland:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
(SHAKESPEARE, 2005: 977)
Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968), one of the main poets of Brazilian Modernism, translated the play. Let us see (or hear) the lines:
(...) Lavaria o grande oceano
De Netuno esta mão ensanguentada?
Não! Esta minha mão é que faria
Vermelho o verde mar de pólo a pólo!
(SHAKESPEARE, 1993: 39)
Bandeira wrote (19…) to a fellow poet that his Complete Poems would finally be really “complete” because the poems he had translated would be included (BANDEIRA, 1974: 137). If we accept Shakespeare’s lines, that is, the result of Shakespeare’s writing, made the magic of poetry, accidentally, possible, can’t we accept also that Bandeira’s writing created another moment of magic, a moment that would never have been possible had he not taken the pains to translate Macbeth? First it is necessary to efface any difference between writing and translating. To translate IS to write. The common and easy distinction made between the two activities is for me, unconceivable; it only tries to separate what can’t be severed. Translators are writers. When you sit before a computer or grab a pen to translate a poem, what are you doing if not writing? Ives Bonnefoy, the French translator of Shakespeare, talks about “le faire texte”, in English “text doing”; he believes translators write texts which are their own, and that denying it would the same as denying that any translation is the result of a subjective reading, in other words, of an interpretation. Digression: there is usually a mistake here, translations are not only interpretations, theya re also the result of an interpretation. It means that when I translate Joyce I don’t give my readers my interpretations, but that I translate according to my interpretation. I prefer to say translators are a kind of writers, just like poets, novelists and laywrights. After all, they write. The following questions by Edith Grossman provide food for thought: The question that lurks in the corner of my mind as I work and revise and mutter curses at any fool who thinks the second version of a text is not an orginal, too, is this: what exactly am I writing when I write a translation? Is it an imitation, a reflection, a transposition or something else entirely?(74)
And In what language soes the text really exist, and what is my connection to it? I do not mean to suggest that a translation is created with no reference to an original – that it is not actually a version of another text
– but it seems clear that a translated work does have an existence separate from and different from the first text, if only because it is written in another language (74-75). Let us go back to Bandeira’s case. Bandeira wanted his translated poems to be incorporated in his Complete Poems because he felt his translations of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Browning etc as his own creations. It was his texts that rendered his choice of Emily Dickinson’s and Elizabeth Barret’s poetry in Portuguese. Bandeira was conscious that his translations were the result of his writing, therefore they were his poems. Let us simply stick to one idea, at least for now: that to translate is to write, that is, to work upon the lines and passages that will, eventually, become a text; a text we will call poem, novel, play etc., according to its form. If the magic of poetry comes from the work of
the writer, then the magic of poetry can spring, also accidentally, from the work of the translator inasmuch as it is nothing less than a faire texte (text doing). It is common to hear that only a poet can translate another poet. What does it mean? One possible answer is that if someone is a poet, therefore he or she can translate poems, which, in my opinion, is a mistake even if we consider translating as creative writing. To create through writing a poem is not the same as to create through writing a translation – or a translated poem.
The other possible answer is that in order to translate one should be a poet. It means that not every poet is a translator, but that every translator of a poem is a poet. Avoiding any trace of essentialism, no one is a poet unless they write poems. Retrieving the question I have already posed, can’t they write poems by means of translating? Moreover, if translators can do it, aren’t they poets, too? We usually mention the poets who are also translators – the poet-translators, like Ezra Pound. Less remembered are the translators who are also poets – the translator-poets. By a translator who is also a poet I don’t mean the great translator who plays the role of minor poet, but the translator who becomes a poet exactly because translating, the translator being the dominant part in him, just as the poet acquires the strongest presence in the poet who also translates poetry. Poet-translators are poets who also write texts that are primarily translations of poems. Translator-poets are translators who always write texts that are primarily translations. By translating, the poet becomes a translator, even if it is not his major role; by translating poems, the translator becomes a poet, even if it is not his major role. The explanation is simple and has been already given: translators write, poets write too; translators create, poets create too. The difference is that the poet writes before the translator, but, as Linda Hutcheon says about adaptations, to be second does not mean to be secondary”. Let me quote two people who express thoughts about the translator-poet, the American Poet and translator Willis Barnstone and the Italian critic Antonio Prete. During an interview, Willis Barnstone is asked the following question: “You place great emphasis on the translator being a poet at the moment of translation. Is it possible for a translator to be effective if he or she is not a poet outside the act of translation?” His answer was
Without question. Those translators I admire most in our century have not been remarkable poets. I think that a translator may be a Pasternak or Lowell, a modest poet, or no poet at all outside of translation. If one
has devoted one's poetic talents only to translation, this need not be a handicap. What is signal is the devotion. Just as a poet develops skills over a lifetime, so the translator quickens his skills.
According to Antonio Prete,
Only the exercise of poetry [...] can guarantee some proximity of hearing, comprehending, deeply perceiving the original text. And to this I add that anyone who translates a poet poetically is, during the course of that translation experience, necessarily, a poet – even if that person have never published his or her own poems before (2011: 26). In other words, you can be a poet without being a translator, but you can’t translate a poem unless you are a poet, too. When I affirm it, I am excluding from my reasoning the of quality. Of course a pedestrian translation of a very creative poem will not make anyone a poet, at least not more than a bureaucratic poet. Robert Frost was wrong in saying that poetry is what gets lost in translation. Poetry, its magic, can be found in translation. There is one last thing I would like to say. When I call translators poets it does not imply any upgrade for the translator, just as calling poets translators does not entail any depreciation. Translators should not aspire to the condition of poets or resort to expedients such as calling translations re-creations, when they are creations. Not only is it useless but also understates the inferior position occupied by translators vis à vis the poets. Translators and poets practice the same art, the art of writing, only in different ways. Translations give oxygen to poetry if only because English poetry, for instance, would not be more than illegible scribble for so many.
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