The utter irrelevance of 5-7-5
Camille Scaysbrook (the_globe@hotmail.com)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 05:38:58 -0700 (PDT)
Sonny wrote:
>And, yes, Matt, what a shame about poetry translators.
Well, yes and no. I remember studying at school two poems which were
completely different in everything but subject matter - and even that was
pretty abstract. It was only after we had studied them that we found out
that they were actually translations of the same poem. This fascinated me;
two new pieces of art had been created from this one poem. It brings a
whole lot of new factors into play - who is in fact the `author' of the
translated poem? Is the job of the translator to transmute the atmosphere
and feeling of the original poem or is this an impossible task? How much is
`lost' in translation, but how much is gained?
Then Will wrote:
>>I like Robert Bly's _8 Stages of Translation_ because he thinks
translating is art-making and suggests poets do the translating work by
being poets first and language mavens next.
In some ways, I want to lay down an imaginary trump card here and suggest
all literature is translation...the non-language of emotion to language,
from experience to language, from language to language, we are always
translating...<<
Which is pretty much exactly what I'm saying; that translation is creation
or at least consolidation rather than a mathematical process; an art rather
than a craft.
In a show of utter indulgence (hey, it's my birthday (: ) I'm ending with a
story I wrote on exactly this subject.
Camille
verona_beach@hotpop.com
----------
TRANSLATION
by Camille Scaysbrook
Careful. So careful. The pages pasted together by the dry saliva of
decades had to be peeled apart with rubber-tipped silver tweezers. Like the
tulle wings of a thousand patterned butterflies sewn together, it was a
fragile, grotesque masterpiece. But the tiny things that fell from its
pages!
A perfectly veined autumn leaf mottled like a baby's fist, the clipping,
unintelligibly, of a woman's hand and newsprint halftone diamond ring, the
small miracle of a crushed hundred year old mosquito splayed in flying
position in a top left hand corner margin. And most excitingly, handwritten
notes in spindly, highly sharpened pencil skipped excitedly amongst the
margins in some place, tiptoed around paragraphs in others, before grinding
to a halt altogether at page 63. She half believed that they too may slide
from the page and into her lap where she may hold them to the light and
twirl them in her fingers before replacing them neatly in the pages that
had
housed them.
With ceremony she unfurled a new page in a new exercise book,
smoothed it twice with one hand. Sharpened a new pencil - no, a pen, a
fountain pen, only fitting for the great man. Just think, the mosquito's
last
meal was probably his blood. She opened the book, not too quickly for the
paper was fragile. Books. Old books, she loved them like old lovers with
wrinkled faces, crumbling spines and dark grey dusty savours. She believed
she could come up to the library at night and cover herself with these gilt
edged, Victorian-titled beauties, clothe her naked body in them until only
her pale face was showing. But old books that belonged to famous people?
To Douglas S. Byrd, no less! She stroked the page again, her pen hovered
above the page as she read the first poem.
Se quierma dol Muravo
De miaca so duavaro
Sil no bava to ceveno
Tel baka ti bavero.
She scanned this line with filtered eyes, as one would read the
writing of a child who could not yet spell and whose meaning came along
in drifts and sudden phonetic realisations. Well. In a simple matter this
translated as:
`You, Darling, sweet (tasting) pain (to ache) From my (mine?) so
duavaro (this presented a mistake? A wilful puzzle? She sometimes got
irritated with Byrd's wilful puzzle-weaving. `So' was unintelligible. Durar
was modern `last, continue, withstand' Varo? What could that be? Vano
`vano - vain, futile'? `vara - bar or shaft?' `vaso' - glass vessel or
tumbler'? The meaning were spiralling outward like the branches of a
tree!). Silno (Indicate) Berry (referring to? Possibly his wife, who grew
up
at an orchard). Cough, (severo - strict? Or perhaps `si venir' - yes,
come')
You (or, in the same way that bear means both an animal and to carry, tea)
baka (another odd one, baculo - staff or stick - banca, to bank - no, that
couldn't be right - or barsar - to found or settle?' you ... bavero. What
the
hell was Bavero. Bavaria? Well, it could be that. `Barbero. My barber.'?
So, what was all that in a loose way? It had come unstuck from its
narrative moorings. Loosely, she discerned:
You, my sweet darling (`My sugar sweet darling' she amended, taking into
account the meaning of `quierma' as a feminine of `to taste sweet'). So, to
start again -
You my sugar-sweet darling, my pain,
>From my everlasting toil.
Show me, my (sugary, she decided to add here) Show me my sugary berry!
Cough! Yes, come (or `strict mistress', two possibilities there.)
You, foundling (or founder?), Bavarian (???) You, my founder, my butcher.
Yes, that was a much more satisfactory conclusion, well justifying
Byrd's reputation as `The Spanish Baudelaire', dashes of masochism,
sweetness juxtaposed with disease and so forth. All quite familiar. Byrd
had annotated this poem `nuestro, vestro!' Both mine and yours, modern
Spanish. She guessed he had written this during his honeymoon with
renown (fading) Italian beauty, alleged callgirl and thoroughgoing bad
piece of work, Della Vecchio. She would have to remember to look up the
newlyweds' honeymoon itinerary, to check if it, or Vecchio's very
multifarious ancestry included Bavaria.
The theory was that Byrd was writing in an obscure Spanish
dialect, an Olde Spanishe long since lost. She had spent years, grants,
thoughts on figuring out the semantics of this apparently undiscovered
language (exhaustive research had revealed no trace, no Rosetta stone, no
toothless but revelatory old woman-seer offering the key in exchange for a
few buckets of rice), and although meaning sometimes leapt from the poem
like a salmon from a river, it tended to fall back into the impenetrable
deep
and drift away with the current in the wrong direction. Words meant things
they shouldn't mean. Like Bavaria. Was it a reference to Donne? `Oh my
America, my new-found land'? Possibly. Obscure, though. Byrd appeared
to pride himself on his ability to perplex, although this may easily be her
own conjecture. He seemed to have an extraordinary awareness of the
slippery delight in mating one word with
another to produce a progeny meaning. He delighted, as she did, in
watching the resulting child's hair change from red to blonde as it grew
up.
But her head had begun to ache. Words had begun to resist
meaning; to reconfigure themselves as aimless, baffling sounds. Maybe he
was making all this up. Maybe he just clothed his meanings in lousy
Spanish. Nonsense, perhaps. She realised that what she hated most in the
world was bad art, lazy art, lousy art. Was Byrd being lazy, or arch? Or
simply having a good laugh? He couldn't possibly be. Or if he was, she
couldn't allow herself or the world to believe so. She must now arrange
everything into an acceptable poetical form. Here was the true editor's job
- the true translator's job. She felt proud with the knowledge that she
would always be there, playing hide and seek between the margins and
pages, darting from paragraph to paragraph so swiftly that the reader could
not spot the dusty droplets of her fingerprints.
You, my Darling, my candied torment,
>From continual agony in vain,
Tell me, my juicy globe, unyielding mistress
You, my foundling, my sugared cake.
Bavaria was substituted once more at the last minute when she thought of
it in terms of cheesecake (although when confirming this in her
encyclopaedia she learned that an Italian village called Baveno existed -
whether or not near the home of Della Vecchio she hadn't time to research
right now. It would all go in the footnotes). As she read over the
resulting
work, another poem nagged at her, suggested itself to her slyly through her
other speculations.
You, sweet sap and delicious pain
>From my still-upstanding shaft
Show me your juices, yes, come!
You, my rod, my sweet confection.
A shaft, she noted with interest, could be both a protuberance or a cavity.
But Bavero was still unsatisfactory. She glanced at the clock. Twelve
o'five. She could work on this tomorrow, yet the unfinished product
demanded a curtailing, a conclusion. Hurriedly, she wrote (reverting, she
noted, to the more prudish reading of the poem) :
You, my foundling, my exquisite conundrum.
There. That was what the word meant. As she noted it down into
a small book reserved for this very purpose, she caught sight of the
swarthy, moustachioed Byrd, glancing sideward from an early Manet
portrait, daring the viewer to seek his averting gaze, flitting like his
name from branch to branch. It would be a secret between he and I, she
thought.
Nuestro Vestro.
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