Re: The flurry

Jim writes:
<< Translating poetry has to be one of the most difficult things to do. >>

Yes and no. It's easy to throw together an approximation. But to take
something beautiful and move it seamlessly into another language is often
not only difficult, but utterly impossible. One then needs to sacrifice its
beauty or else to make a new beauty, surely founded in the original but
itself new. Lies and cover-ups. And with some poems, of course, to do
either seems a heresy, so the translator must shake his head and throw up
his hands and just wish that everybody could see it as it is. (And we have
people like the late David Grene, whose many translations of classical Greek
literature were widely acclaimed, but who, despite years of prodding from
those around him, went to his grave refusing to translate Homer. And if you
can't read Homer -- and I mean really read Homer -- let this anecdote
explain what you're missing and what you are never likely to see.)

Of course, the intended audience for the translation rarely knows the
difference. That's the painful irony -- the translator with the task in
front of him can torture himself even while he knows that his audience
doesn't see or know the original. Jorge Luis Borges explains very well (in
The Homeric Versions) that each new translation of a great poem from a
language he doesn't know is a delight to him -- wholly familiar yet wholly
new. But the translator DOES know, and even if he's the only one in the
world, it is sometimes a crippling knowledge. Of course, some translators
DON'T seem to know -- but they're the ones we probably shouldn't bother to
read.

What most of us think of as translation -- what translation itself should be
(but what, alas, it is not) -- is not difficult, it is impossible. There
are English versions of Homer that miss much of his beauty and there are
English versions of Homer that supply their own at the expense of accuracy.
But a Real translation of Homer? Homer himself in English? Absurd.

Jim goes on to write:
<< I think "stretches" in relationship to a cat does make sense. When my
wife's cat isn't sleeping or eating, it usually stretches out on the floor
while anticipating its next move. >>

It does make sense -- I didn't like it as much when applied to a night, but
Scottie says that this was, in fact, what he was trying for. Maybe I didn't
like "stretches out" becasut it's uglier than "s'épand". (Of course, it
also results in too many syllables if this matters to anyone.) I was trying
to think of a word that had this very sense Scottie and Valérie have spoken
of, but which seemed to me more appropriate for cats AND nights -- and if it
were a one syllable word, all the better.

I thought of a cat doing this thing cats do -- lying on the ground,
stretching out and coming to relaxation again, then seemingly having all of
its bones crumble into a flesh-sack of purring, gelatinous, (and spread-out)
spoodge. What verb for this? "Melt," I thought. And it didn't seem
inappropriate for a night, either, especially when followed by "Silver on
the grass" and the image of a full moon -- and when thinking of a cat doing
this thing (I admit, thinking of ice quite spoils it), it seems to carry the
weight of "to stretch" or "to spread," or even of what I think is a rarer
and mostly literary use of "épandre," "to pour forth" or "to give
abundantly."

Perhaps the translation required a footnote warning not to think of ice, but
of melting cats.

-robbie
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Received on Sat Jun 21 14:52:15 2003