The Inherent Untranslatability of Poetry

what are you reading by lorca anyways ?

My french professor would tell us "to speak another language is to possess another soul" (google claims this is from Charlemagne, which I don't believe) when making us memorize french poems. That quote kind of strikes me as something that belongs on the "things only idiots find profound" thread. Anyway, if it's true, I really only posses a ordering coffee and sandwiches french soul these days. ; )

The Scots-English dichotomy is good for me because I can see how the translation deadens the poems (due to being able to follow the translation) - but Scots is a highly onomatopoeic and (I don't know the word) visually-onomatopoeic (ie the word sounds like what the thing looks like) - so to dead translate = loss of ALL magic, but you can still garner from it.

Edwin Morgan - "Marilyn Monroe" (single poem);
Wilfred Owen -"Dulce Et..." (sp);
Iain Chricton Smith - "Old Woman" (sp);
John Burnside - The Light Trap (half of) and The Asylum Dance (half of);
Janet Paisley - some of Breaking The Bones (?)
Robert Crawford - "Scotland" (sp);
Carol Ann Duffy - something shit;
Shakespeare - some of;
Lorca - The Cricket Sings.

That's it. ALL I've read re:poetry.

Oh, I also recall reading Updike on Proust: he claims that what we mean by "Proustian rhythms" are almost entirely due to the translator Scott Moncrieff, and are absent in the original - indeed, that Proust's prose isn't very Proustian.

My favourite comment on the subject is from a 1938 Borges
review called 'An English Version of the Oldest Songs in the World'.
He writes, of an English translation of some Chinese philosophy:

"..I came across this memorable passage: 'A man condemned to death
doesn't care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he
has already renounced life.' Here the translator attached an
asterisk, and his note informed me that his interpretation was
preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the
passage thus: 'The servants destroy the works of art, so that they
will not have to judge their beauties and defects.'"

Borges goes on to say that a "mysterious scepticism" slipped into his
soul, not unreasonably. I read the above review in English, so I
suppose I was reading a translation, of Borges's words anyway.

I don't think you can overstate how different poetry is in translation - it's like trying to play the same song on a different instrument, in a different key and with a different melody. (Even bilingual poets, eg Brodsky, have a surprisingly tin ear away from their mother tongue). Of all the reasons not to read something, mis-trusting translation seems to me the most noble. Not to say that translation isn't a fascinating topic... but I don't really think you can say you have read Lorca or Cavafy or Ahkmatova if all you know are the English versions.

Isn't that precisely part of the point being made. When something is translated, there are so many aspects to translate. The idea that there is a "core of meaning" which can be translated and that THAT aspect is enough, doesn't give enough wait to the experience of language, ESPECIALLY in the case of a poem, and is probably not even a coherent idea.

The meaning of poetry is not fixed -- as you acknowledge in being forced to appeal to some kind of common consensus. So we agree there. (And yes, 'a lot' isn't all, but then 'a lot' of people can also be wrong.) But your assumption that it is the SOUND of poetry that matters, ties poetry to a specific set of cultural conceptions, somewhere between two and two hundred and fifty years old (roughly) which link poetry, language, orality and nation / community in a complex mess. Now I disagree that poetry is primarily oral. So from there we get a different take on the importance of translation. I take the implication of your argument -- that without being able to pronounce something exactly, I cannot read it -- to mean that anyone with a regional accent will be unable to read something written in Standard English and vice versa. (In this case 'read' means 'read' in the wierd absolute sense that you seem to be taking it to mean -- of course we can make some sense of something written in a different dialect (ditto poetry in another language, I guess).) I find the sculptural analogy is unhelpful because it precisely misses the specificity of what I take poetry about i.e. words.

I don't think you have to consider reading something out-loud and bring in oral traditions to get a sense of the "music"/"prosody"/ whatever of a poem - just the way different words rub together in a phrase seems to me impossible to recreate across languages. You might get similar effects, but you won't have the same poem. To me - and to pretty much all the poets I've met - this is the most important thing about poetry. It's not paraphraseable because the way it's said is the most thing about what's said. This is true for most prose, I think, as well (can you 'understand' 'Ulysses' if you read the French translation?). In their way, analogies are a type of poetry, and after two attempt - music and sculpture - my inability to frame an appropriate one is perhaps suggestive of the difficulties.

I guess our difference on this issue is a view of language which sees it as always already belated, indeterminable, prone to slippage (always already lost in translation/enscription, if you like) vs a view of language that has some respect for the presence of a particular writer in a particular body of language.

But THE PREDOMINANT MODERN MISCONCEPTION about art is this: that art can be apprehended in terms of its meaning.

We are surrounded by people with no deep feeling for art but who think they do because they have read critical essays about its meaning. They have little interest in form because it can't be discussed in quite the same way. They are addicted to discourse about art but unwittingly alienated from art itself.

I'm not surprised to see people under the illusion that a translation of a poem is pretty much the same thing as the poem when so many people think that understanding a critical essay about a book, film or piece of music is the same thing as understanding the book, film or piece of music.

I'm not surprised to see people under the illusion that a translation of a poem is pretty much the same thing as the poem

These two points, made by Jerry and ArfArf, seem to be saying similar things. Neither seems to have much to do with the point I am trying to make. I am clearly not arguing that a translation is the "same" thing as the poem. What I want to know is whether there is ever a "same" thing as the original poem? I don't think so: not when I read it; not when someone else reads it; not when the same person reads it on a different occasion; not when the poet goes back to read it again.

Yes, a poem is embedded in and related to all kinds of poetic and extra-poetic linguistic effects and relations. As is my 'reading' of it or response to it. What does reading mean then? A complex negotiation between linguistic effects which does not, and cannot, reconstitute the 'same' poem in my head. The effect of translation seems to me an example of a more general problem of reading.

Why should the translation between two so-called languages be a privileged example of what reading already is: translation between someone else's language and my own? My suggestion was the privilege accorded to translation depends on factors which are themselves poetic, but part of other discursive formations (the idea of a mother tongue, the link between poetry and nationhood, the romantic idea of poetry as the expression of essence, the privileged relation between poetry and subjectivity).

And, in response to ArfArf, discussing the problem of language in relation to poetry is not necessarily to reduce poetry to the expression of a content or meaning: language *is* form when it comes to poetry. I'm not sure whether your idea of the lack of 'feeling' for art is meant in an eighteenth century or nineteenth century way: is this 'feeling' a bodily sentiment, in which art acts directly on the senses, without the mediation of the mental faculties, or do you mean something more like the romantic apostrophisation of imagination?

To conclude: to argue that a translation is not the same thing as the 'original' poem seems banal. But to claim that there is a difference of kind, rather than a difference of degree, between the appreciation of a poem in translation and a poem in its original language seems wrong.

you *could* make something small out of plasticene by which yr students came to know something about rodin but it is not likely to be a small model of the original: success in this endeavour wd of course make you a critic as well as an artist (success in grasping yr endeavour wd make yr students critics as well as artists)

it wd be excellent if no words were exchanged during this whole process, though perhaps unlikely

I hope everyone would agree with that, while also recognising that the severity of the degree of difference involved makes it a sufficiently important distinction.

i'm not sure if i'd call it "modern", but that's only because i don't know what the word means

(ie neither "most people" nor "cultural elite" but just a specific historical deformation of mediation)

My investment in the argument comes from having worked with poets for a long time, and trusting their feelings about their work more than I trust literature professors (the ones I studied with at university anyway). For me this whole argument is kind of tautological from the start, because my working def. of poetry is "language which is untranslateable/unparaphraseable".

(haha derrida hates journalism)

(also stevie surely gets JD's position upside down?) (ok let's not go down that road)

I think I'm largely with Alex here, though, who seems less to be rejecting the idea of poetry as untranslatable so much as arguing that that's a meaningless thing to say.

I realize the opening question accords a certain privilege to the original work as a given -- i.e., we're not asking what I'm about to ask -- but exactly how useful (or exactly how rockist) is it to do that? I don't mean to play the ever-practical philistine here, but (a) I don't anticipate learning Spanish anytime soon, and (b) someone has bothered to provide some simulacrum of notable Spanish-language poetry, so (c) why shouldn't this be viable as a "second text?" In other words, "why not?"

Doesn't it clearly say on the cover that it's not "Lorca" but "Lorca as translated by X?" Do you have to actually trust that it's really Lorca to enjoy it, or can you approach it as a possibly-meaningful text in and of itself? Is anyone claiming that it's "actually" Lorca? (Two of you agree that that perception exists; I'm not entirely certain.)

This is the question right before Alex's arguments: that the translation is a semblance of the work that's been filtered through a reader's perception/experience just as surely as it will filter through yours -- so "why not" squared? Or that historical and cultural context insert nearly as much instability into prose or even English works, so why poetry as the sudden line-drawing genre?

Well, yes, because it's been said that poetry is by definition the material that doesn't translate, the material that's language bound ("philosophy" being the stuff that does translate). What I perceive as the problem with poetry in translation is that it's stuck somewhere between being a second text and a third one. Depending upon how much faith we have in the entire enterprise of translating poetry, the translator can give us either a semblance ("second") or an interpretation ("third"), which as Mark points out with Rodin would have no reason to relate to the original.

At times I would almost prefer thirds: imagine a volume of Rilke tributes / imitations / equivalents by German-reading English poets, each set opposite an English original by the "translator" -- this sort of reading-as-triangulation is probably your best bet for getting at the "untranslatable" bits of "pure" poetry, and that's exactly what the whole concept of translation (and sorry Mark but "influence") winds up building around itself.

This is interesting. I generally start from the position that the "not-you" cannot be related to 'as such', only by reference to the 'you': so all forms of experience of the "not-you" (including the "not-you" within what is usually taken to be the self, the "not-you" within 'me') are mediated by the "you" and therefore are in some sense a betrayal / assimilation / falsification of the "you". But the danger with such loaded terms is that what becomes a constitutive and necessary process (of subjectivity, of existence, of relation as such , depending on whether we've been reading Hegel, Kojeve or Heidegger recently) is construed in heavily pathos-laden terms. So from my point of view, I don't see an *essential* difference between engaging with a work of art and any form of relation to the world. The attempt to relate to the other without reducing its alterity needn't be just a principle of approaching art, surely: there is an attempt at an ethics which starts from this principle, of course. But positing one realm of experience (art) where this falsification doesn't happen and one realm of experience (the world) where it can't be avoided seems to me to simply end up in a dualistic transcendentalism. I'm not sure translation is the best model for these problems of relationality, to be honest, but it was the one thrown up by the terms of the original question.

i don't think i'm suggesting anything about yr position's complexity, except that i didn't really understand it as announced — hence my question — and the true-or-false bit especially puzzles me (bcz it seems to me to reinsert the mores of translation exactly in the zone you were hoping to exclude them)

Isn't the other danger of taking the untranslatability thesis as absolute that translation (interaction with the "not-you") suddenly looks a bit pointless: so why bother to even find out about the other poetry if you're never going to be able to read it?

Ha Ha Ha

Also, not just poetry carrys things in places other than direct meaning. Also, plenty of translators CAN preserve the intangibles through skill and art.

Also, if we bring something to art anyway, what's worse about bringing it via a third party?

All people who think that poetry can't be translated think the author still exists/matters.

I don't know if the translations I've read are anything like the originals, but whatever they are, I've enjoyed them. Good enough?

What I am trying to say is much simpler. In trying to apprehend a work of art you can strive to respect it's "otherness" or treat it as a partially occupied space to be completed by your "interpretation". It's a continuum not a dichotomy. Even with linguistic art forms you can try to be as close as possible to the right end of the continuum.

(NB: that thing I said above rests in part on the assumption that poetry is not just poetry -- that there's non-poetic content to be translated across in a manner that's either much less vexed or, following Alex, "pretty much as vexed as anything, ever, so why split hairs.")

ArfArf: possibly I just zoned out as the argument came to this particular point, but how exactly does the translation of poetry necessarily insult the continuum of "respecting otherness" <==> "interpretation" you're setting up? You seem to be saying that the function of the translator (or the function of the art-galley headphones) intermediates between the art and the viewer and thus destroys the point of the whole thing. This is problematic with translation, though, insofar as there can be no such relationship between art and "viewer" without that mediation -- and, further, because the mediator doesn't necessarily claim to be offering you the art as such.

Complaining too much about it -- when every step of the process admits these problems and doesn't try to convince you otherwise -- strikes me as something like saying that Duchamp's mediation ruined the urinal: suddenly you couldn't piss in it anymore.

Of course I freely admit that clear apprehension of the "not you" may be impossible

It is a beautiful system of and I think not capable of logical disproof. However it fails the test of usefulness and we continue to live our lives on the basis that an objective universe exists.

It is a problem in this sort of debate because people can (wittingly or not) move to an increasingly skeptical position which, as I say, is not capable of being disproved and renders any discussion of what is subjective and what not meaningless.

I find it interestingly analagous to the frequent ILM argument that there is no such thing as objective aesthetic judgement and therefore we have no basis for defining things as good or bad. Similarly beautiful, logical, incapable of being disproved and uselessly beside the point.

1) Is the untranslatability of poetry real?
2) Is there any point in doing "translations" anyway, seeing as they're going to be fuzzy?

I think to 1) we might say yes (it pretty much means "is the untranslatability of the untranslatable real"? anyway)

I think we might say yes to question 2, also, providing we don't confuse it with any "real encounter" with yer actual poem, which seesm to be ArfArf's bugbear (because it's symptomatic of a culture that prefers commentary to experience). There are many reasons why you might want some kind of translation of foreign poem, eg lots of poets actually work from literal translations, done by non-literary translators, as starting points for their own versions - but these are always acknowledged as versions rather than translations (and yes, some of them compare this to popgroups doing cover versions).

In the end, not being able to encounter Rilke, Trakl, Celan, whoever, is a poignant aspect of the contingency of being housed in language. But as English speakers, we have plenty of thrilling poems we can encounter freshly.

Also, I guess this is why I prefer criticism to actual experience -- because criticism IS actual experience, and also I get to talk.

Not that I'm aware of: please clarify.

That's a VERY good point! I didn't see it like that. But maybe that still holds with what I was saying, ie, it is a difft version, ie not Lorca.

Duchamp's position is that the urinal becomes a work of art because chosen by the artist. Arguably it had some anterior claim to being a work of art(because, for example, its designer was himself an artist).

But for the spectator viewing it from the perspective of Duchamp's being the artist Duchamp doesn't mediate between the work of art and the spectator because it becomes that particular work of art only after Duchamp's mediation. From the perspective of the original designer, Duchamps involvement may be a falsification that needs to be stripped away so that the beauty of his creation can be perceived.

This happened some time in the nineteenth century and was not my idea.

ArfArf: I'm with you about skepticism, but I think I'm stuck on your argument at the same point Mark is. You don't seem to like skepticism. You say skepticism is "analagous" to the radical subjectivity of ILM. I think we're concluding from there that you think there's a measure of objective content to art, and Mark is saying that objective content is precisely what would make translation easiest. Isn't privileging and disintermediating the artist the way you want to basically a skeptical argument toward subjectivity -- i.e., that only from the artist's subjective perspective can his own meaning come? (And anyway how is that necessarily harmed by allowing the same privilege to the translator, assuming we're not big idiots who assume that the translation is exactly the same thing as the original?)

"You don't seem to like skepticism."

Not sure why you think this. Liking it or not seems beside the point. I find it interesting (or at least used to).

"You say skepticism is "analagous" to the radical subjectivity of ILM. I think we're concluding from there that you think there's a measure of objective content to art"

Well I don't particularly want to go into all this again. I had zero success the last time in even conveying what I thought never mind convincing anyone I was right.

Skepticism argues that there is no objective universe but its proponents seem to get out of the way of approaching cars all the same. In the same way as ILMers subscribe to a theory that suggest there is no basis for placing a value on art that is not purely subjective and then tell me Coldplay are shite. I merely observe that the analogy is an interesting one in that in both cases a belief is expressed and its consequences ignored for most practical purposes.

"Isn't privileging and disintermediating the artist the way you want to basically a skeptical argument toward subjectivity -- i.e., that only from the artist's subjective perspective can his own meaning come? (And anyway how is that necessarily harmed by allowing the same privilege to the translator, assuming we're not big idiots who assume that the translation is exactly the same thing as the original?)"

I'm not looking to privilege the artist. I am privileging the artefact by saying we should strive to apprehend it as clearly as possible, instead of seeing it as a partial construct that needs to be completed by our own "ingenuity".

A translation it seems to me is a separate work of art that must stand on its own merits. My references to Pound and The Bible above are clear enough I think.

I have an ill-defined interest in the idea of writing outside your first language - Nabokov is another important example, and there is the different instance of Conrad, who I think only ever wrote in English. Has Kundera switched too? I'd love to be able to understand what changes these wrought, because language does facilitate and limit ideas and their expression (see Delany's Babel-17 for a mega-illustration of this).

"arguing against 'objective knowledge' characterized by certain things (say, universal intersubjectivity between rational agents)"

(whatever that means) and the skeptical tradition in philosophy, which is what I happened talking about.

"most most serious philosophical criticisms of realism, or anything of the sort, seem to be criticisms of theories or philosophical explanations, not all knowledge. , seem to be criticisms of theories or philosophical explanations, not all knowledge."

Jesus, whose talking about "most serious philosophical criticisms of realism, or anything of the sort,"? Did I claim to be?

"not all knowledge" - au contraire. Epistemology and ontology is exactly what is being considered here.

= exclusive of readers AND writers

it always seemed to me that this was de facto exclusive. yet you say you agree with this, but also say this:

It becomes not enough to read poetry: it's only read 'properly' if it's read in the language. i.e. De facto exclusion of anyone who doesn't have the time / educational opportunity to learn another language from 'proper' reading.

= exclusive of readers.

i might be misunderstanding.