LITUANUS

LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Volume 28, No. 4 - Winter 1982
Editor of this issue: Jonas Zdanys, Yale University
ISSN 0024-5089
Copyright 1982 LITUANUS Foundation, Inc.
Lituanus
SOME THOUGHTS ON TRANSLATING POETRY
JONAS ZDANYS
Yale University
In the past several months, a number of articles in both English and
Lithuanian have appeared which have discussed poetic translations into
and from Lithuanian. Essays in /Aidai, Akiraiai, /the /Journal of
Baltic Studies, /and Metmenys have examined at times fiercely
questions surrounding the role of the translator and the viability of
offered translations. Those discussions have focused on and have grown
from deliberations of the propriety of various approaches to translation
and from the line-by-line and even word-byword! comparisons of
original poems and their renderings in the new language.
While I usually hesitate to join the ideological fray because of the too
frequent resulting posturings participants are forced to assume, because
of the heightening of contradictions polemics requires, and because of a
general distrust of "position papers" written by poets to define their
own work, I am moved enough by what seems to be a closed network and
attendant pronouncements of artistic acceptability to venture forth a
few observations, ideas which have evolved during the course of some
twelve years of translation making.
Perhaps the most visible aspect of the current discussion is the
preponderance of things theoretical. Though trained as a literary
scholar and groomed to understand and often cultivate the theoretical in
all discussions of the literary process, I have nonetheless come to
believe that most literary theories are best suited to some ideal
Platonic realm, where purity is palpable. Here, in the world of pen and
paper and ink, the theoretical is in too many ways only intellectual
game-playing, a distortion of the process of the creative, a posturing
and a prancing around the periphery of what the thing we call a literary
work in fact is. It takes little subtlety of mind to understand that
multiplicity and subjectivity are always key issues in any consideration
of a literary work, that connotation is fast at play, and that theories
which exist as predetermined entities out there when applied are
impositions and that with such impositions come limitation and
distortion. This is especially true in the case of the judging of a
translation by applying the tenets of an existing theory and pronouncing
the translation as at best "a gloss" of the original because it does not
adhere to the tenets of that applied theory.
For these reasons, and for others, I hope to shun the framing in these
pages of a theory which seeks once and for all to propose the "correct"
vision of what poetic translation can and ought to be. Such a proposal
and perhaps even a belief that there is in art such a truth seems to
me to limit too severely the definition of "creativity" and, worse
still, posits the dimensions of the artistically acceptable. That such
an urge exists in most of us engaged in literary work perhaps in all
of us is certainly clear: one need only look at anything polemical to
see the existence of a subjectivity which posits itself squarely at the
center of things and which defines itself, irrevocably, as ultimate and
true. On a scale closer to this discussion, one need only look at the
tenets of Social Realism to see the effects of the imposition of a
prevailing theory which purports to be truth.
I prefer to assert that questions of art, by definition, are subjective,
relative, and personal; that they touch greatly and closely on issues of
undefinable and often undefendable "taste"; that they are not readily or
easily open to pronouncements or dismissals; and that in many ways the
analytical faculty which seeks to understand the artistic is simply not
the faculty most suited to understand or to articulate the artistic
impulse.* <#ref> The distance between the affective the level on which
the artistic operates and the analytical is great; theories, I think,
are too often inadequate to bridge the gap, and intellectual constructs
alone are not necessarily best suited to explain it.
It is necessary, though, to discuss some existing theories before
positing a preliminary explanation of what the process of
translation-making may entail. One current theory of translation-making
postulates a difference between opposing "schools" of translation: the
"Western" school as practiced, say, in the United States and the
"Eastern" school as practiced within the Soviet Union, the source of
current literary tradition for those schooled in the techniques of
translation-making in Lithuania. Briefly stated, according to this
theory the "Western" school of poetic translation seeks to recreate in
one language only the words of the original poem; the translation
process, in this view, becomes little else than transliteration, a task
most easily performed, it seems, through a dispassionate program of
dictionary equivalents of words, phrases, and occasional metaphors and
images. The description of the "Western" poetic school is one which
compares the translator skilled in the "Western" approach to the
solitary horn player whose task it is to convey alone the richness
of a major symphony; the lesson, of course, is that the lone player
cannot recreate the symphony and, by implication, the "Western"
translator cannot convey adequately a sense of the richness of the poem
he attempts to translate.
That is probably true. The process of translation-making should not
necessarily be a process of discovering linguistic equivalents across
the gulf which divides structurally distinct languages (although, it
seems to me, the syntactical-analytical structure of English encourages,
almost demands, that). That is a task best left to those writers who are
happiest when, dictionary in hand, eyes glistening with the discovered
joy of denotation, they search for words which "mean the same" in both
languages. Those who demand such imagined precision demonstrate an
understanding of poetry and art and translation-making which verges on
the myopic. The process of translation-making is far more complex; there
is much more at work than a single-minded rooting for truffles, and the
translator is involved in much more than the search for equivalent words
locked in the pages of the newest bilingual dictionary.
Translation, it seems to me, ought to involve a search for and, when
necessary, a substitution not of linguistic equivalents but of
"affective equivalents," images which, like Eliot's "objective
correlatives," capture emotion and as many of the cognitive
/implications /of the original as possible. If this search entails
changing the "literal" meaning as defined by some compiled listing of
linguistic "equivalents" then that change ought to be made. This, of
course, is not something to be undertaken gratuitously or haphazardly;
change is never made for the sake of change; unmotivated rearrangement
in the search for "affective equivalents" should not be applauded. That
change should be undertaken in the search to create a poem which reads
like and shares the tonal inflections and qualitites of the prevailing
poetic tradition of the new language. That is, poetry translated into
contemporary American English becomes part of a tradition or
prevailing literary condition in which rhythms are easy and in which
there is no sense of linguistic stress or forced collocation of image.
The reader of the translation must feel that he is reading an original
contemporary American poem. To encourage that sense, the language cannot
be stilted or forced; to ensure that, changes of words and phrases or
images ought to be made during the translation-making process so the
translation is, indeed, a new poem and an integral part of the
contemporary, vivid, poetic scene of the new language, imbued with the
same sort of idiom which defines the contemporary poetic thrust.
The issue arises, of course, of fidelity to the original. If I can use
my own work as an example, I can offer some sense of a response to that
demand. While making a translation, I work through various versions of a
translation and through various approaches to the translation process,
always beginning with a literal rendering, a version drafted with the
aid of dictionaries and native speakers (myself included). To avoid
contortions of language, I change those literals, substituting what I
consider to /be /more appropriate phrases and images "affective
equivalents" which capture what I feel and envision is the essence of
the poem and which make the new poem a part of the American poetic
scene. The process, I think, is artistically acceptable and does not
violate academic and scholarly bounds. The leap of faith is not great or
overbearing.
It seems to me that this idea, this search for "affective equivalents,"
borders in some ways on the line which encircles the "Eastern" school of
poetic translation, but that, for me, it happily does not cross it. That
school defines its own process of translation as a kind of fuller and
hence better rendering of the symphony which is a poem. That
rendering, though, has a profound preoccupation with things formal:
metrics, rhymes, and other patterns. The "Eastern" school, in its
efforts, focuses too much, it seems to me, on the poem's (and on the
translation's) exoskeleton and not enough on the generation of
particulars which, if not directly recreating content and image, engage
the imagination by generating "affective equivalents." Those "affective
equivalents," as I mentioned above, ought to be framed within a poetic
structure which does not duplicate that of the original but which fits
squarely into the poetic idiom of the language of the translation. Some
of the literal and much of the formal can be surrendered to make a good
American English poem which consists of literal renderings and of
selected "affective equivalents". The "Eastern" school instead
sacrifices the literal, often ignores the powerful distinct image, and
makes substitutions to ensure the adequate replication, first and
foremost, of the poem's patterns.
Both theories of translation "Western" and "Eastern" seem
incomplete, and not only because each demands some activity on the part
of the translation maker which is predetermined. The "Western" school of
translation is too mechanical. As such, though, it is surely the perfect
product of its age, where hand-held computers at the touch of a button
provide word equivalents in two or three languages. This school, and its
strict adherents, it seems to me ignore the notion of a shaping and
reordering artistic consciousness which exists apart from and which
transcends the mechanism of word-for-word transliteration, the computer
programmer's answer to translation. Here there is a relinquishing or,
worse still, an ignoring of linguistic connotation, and the wrong-headed
move toward the limited and ever-limiting demand for the denotative. The
"Eastern" school, with its rigid concern for patterns and its
preoccupation with form with the skin of the poem too often ends up
creating poetry which is stilted and forced and often only as beautiful
as stuffed birds perched on ledges in forgotten display cases. Too many
translations of poems into or from the Lithuanian sound as if they had
been given shape by those whose knowledge of a language comes through
reading and not through hearing and speaking, from apprentices in a
"form" workshop whose knowledge of the new language is academic and not
alive. The "Eastern" school's tenets and artistic suppositions concern
me on a different level, too: What sort of mindset is it that requires
primary adherence to form over content? What sort of society is it in
which is stressed the precedence of structure? Where is artistic freedom
when the bounds of creativity even in the exacting practice of
translation are prescribed?
Makers of translations should adhere to neither theory and to no other
predetermined theory. What is important is the necessary organic
unfolding of each translation and the associated search for "affective
equivalents" which shape the translation by playing off against the
original and against the contemporary tradition. Still, having
undertaken the task of writing this essay about what I think
translation-making may entail, and trying to give shape to some thoughts
I have about the process, I would like to try to articulate and give
some measure of analytical coherence to a process which is, in essence,
subjective and which involves a sphere of mental activity as the
newly-vogue psychobiologists tell us which is not readily or easily
quantifiable. How does one "translate" the motivations of creativity,
the internal rhythms of the artistic process in essence the
nonrational and the noncognitive into rational, cognitive, analytical
terms? To do so, I think, would require an attempt to define and explain
the "creative," something I am neither willing to venture forth to try
to do nor which I am capable of doing. I can at best offer a sort of
summary of what I think is the process with which translators are
involved as they make a translation. To wit:
(1) The translator's primary responsibility is to make a poem which,
although it is a translation of a poem existing in a different language,
exists and takes an unobtrusive place in the contemporary poetic
tradition of the new language. The translator, in this sense, crosses
linguistic and cultural barriers and involves himself, in a leap of
adaptation, in the formulation of a parallel though freely-existing poem.
(2) To accomplish this, the translator, as he makes his translation,
searches for literal equivalents which "work" to ensure that the
translation is "true" to the original. In those instances in which the
effect of the literal is not adequate to the translator's eye and ear,
or if the literal seems actually to detract from the new poem,
"affective equivalents" must be found which, when substituted for the
literal, work to ensure that the new poem is self-sustaining and does
not "sound like a translation".
(3) All changes of image or word or phrase must be motivated. That
is, they must be true to the translation-maker's artistic sensibility;
they must, for the translation-maker, help make the translation a good
poem in the new language. The translation-maker's duty is to the
original, yes; but his primary duty is to the new poem which, through
the process of translation, "becomes" the translator's poem and not just
a transliteration of the original poet's work. In this view, the
translator is active and not passive; an originator and not a
transporter; a transformer and creator and not just some drudge who,
dictionary in hand, roots for and writes down linguistic equivalents.
(4) The translation-maker's voice in the process of translation-making
is as important as the voice of the original poet. The translator is
modulator and interpreter of text, a shaper, a sound giver. The
translation in some ways, thus, borders on being a kind of paralanguage.
It is not just a "translation" but the translator's poem, an artifact to
be considered separately as a product of artistic creation and not
compared as a word-for-word rendering or some sort of recreated
exoskeleton or linguistic mold. The translator, in this view, is an
artist equal to the original poet.
These four points, I hope, will generate further discussion. Some
products of the process have already attracted divergent commentary; I'm
certain this, too, will find similar response. I would like to say,
though, before I am upbraided for a tunneling of vision, that it is
indeed my sense that these four points are not radical or new. They seem
to me to be a framed reiteration of some fundamental artistic principles
which illuminate for me what that thing we call the creative process is.
I would like to affirm, too, that this is not an unchangeable manifesto;
ideas, like translations, evolve organically and like any living thing
are always open to stimulus and to resulting rearrangement and
refinement. Toward that end, I welcome response from those currently
engaged in translation-making and hope that we can begin a discussion
and a valuable exchange which focuses on issues which transcend that
which we too often have seen passing as learned discussion.

* I talk here about "art" and not about "kitsch"; I assume that we all
understand that there is, indeed, "good" and "bad" art, and do not here
wish to defend the "bad" in the name of any of these four categories.