FOUND IN TRANSLATION

posted by James Reel

    Join me on a journey into my archives, to save me the trouble of coming up with something new to write. Here's another of those essays I wrote for a literary e-zine nearly 10 years ago, so remember that anything I claim to be "current" or "recent" isn't anymore. But I think the basic argument holds up pretty well, and the essay involves both literature and music, albeit the wrong kind of music for a classical radio blog.

    "FAITHFUL WOMEN ARE ALL ALIKE," wrote Jean Giraudoux. "They think only of their fidelity and never of their husbands." The same holds true for translators. Absolute fidelity to the individual word won't help a translator convey the deepest meanings and true spirit of the original text.

   Of course, many husbands and translated authors are content for their helpmates to be obsessed with fidelity. The alternative, after all, can be so dangerous.

    For example, Milan Kundera, in his book-length essay Testaments Betrayed, complains bitterly that the works of certain aritsts--Kafka, Janácek, Hemingway--have been ruined by the incomprehension or hidden agendas of their champions and interpreters. Kundera considers at length how two passages from Kafka's The Castle have been misrepresented by French translators. Essentially, he damns the translations as impure--they trick up Kafka's vocabulary, eliminate his repetitions, alter the passages' character. One technique that particularly offends Kundera is "systematic synonymizing":

We concede with no irony whatever: the tranlator's situation is extremely delicate: he must keep faith with the author and at the same time remain himself; what to do? He wants (consciously or unconsciously) to invest the text with his own creativity; as if to give himself heart, he chooses a word that does not obviously betray the author but still arises from his own initiative. ... Kafka says 'go,' the translators, 'walk.' Kafka says 'no element,' the translators: 'none of the elements,' 'no longer anything,' 'not a single element.' This practice of synonymization seems innocent, but its systematic quality inevitably smudges the original idea. ... O ye translators, do not sodonymize us!

    A translator's tendency to enrich the author's vocabulary, Kundera admits, is understandable: "What can the translator get credit for? For fidelity to the author's style? That's exactly what the readers in the translator's country have no way of judging. On the other hand, the public will automatically see richness of vocabulary as a value, as a performance, a proof of the translator's mastery and competence."

    All this is just a part of Kundera's more general plea for authors' rights. Yet in condemning the worst offenses of publishers, stage directors and translators, he misses the point that much art is collaborative. Music needs to be played, plays must be acted and directed. Translation is as much an act of collaboration as playing a Beethoven sonata or performing Hamlet, and, in those two cases, few members of the audience would have it any other way. Yes, we want a faithful presentation of Beethoven's or Shakespeare's ideas, we want to understand an aesthetic that is by now rather alien to us yet still compelling. But we also savor the performers' own individual contributions, the injection of their own personalities, into the work at hand. It's like the difference between reading a novel, and discussing that novel with informed friends. An actor like Kenneth Branaugh has, effectively, already "read" Hamlet, and when he takes to the stage or screen he is engaging the audience in an argument about the work.

    Kundera has a valid point, though. The translator has a particular responsibility to maintain fidelity to the text, because readers of the translation are not likely to know the original in the way that they know Beethoven or Shakespeare. Still, must fidelity to the text be as strict as Kundera maintains? Aren't there instances when the author's tone or general aesthetic can be conveyed most effectively when the translator becomes an imaginative collaborator?

    Novelist Banana Yoshimoto is gaining a strong following among young adults in Japan and America. Her style is naive, even immature and mechanical--her translators can't save her from herself--yet Yoshimoto is capable of some provocative insights. In her novel NP, a mother discusses with her daughter their mutual trade, translation:

I don't think you're really cut out for translation, you know that? ... You're weak, not really weak, but too kind. You think that you have to be faithful to the structure of the original sentences. ... Once you get involved with a text, it's difficult to let go of it or create it in another language. ... You become so involved with the writer's style that it starts to feel like your own. You spend hours every day with it, and then you end up feeling that you alone had created it in the first place, and then your thoughts fall into sync with the author's and that's very peculiar. Why sometimes I get so far into the author's thought processes that I feel no resistance at all. I become unable to distinguish my thoughts from hers, and sometimes I find myself thinking the way she would, not just about the book, but about my own life, even when I'm not translating.

    Yoshimoto may merely be talking about how an author comes to possess a translator, but when one person is so fully integrated with another, how can we tell which is really in control?

    In his youth, poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen fell under the spell of Federico García Lorca, the surrealist poet assassinated by Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Asked in a 1995 CBC interview if it was García Lorca who helped him find his voice, Cohen waffled:

Well, I don't know how he helped me find my own voice. Since he seemed exotic and far away, he allowed me to steal or borrow a lot of his voice. It's like anything that you fall in love with is going to give you a certain kind of blindness. I think you are blinded to your own imperfections and limitations. It allows you to kind of lurch forward on the path that you want to choose for yourself. ... With Lorca, when I stumbled on him, it was something that was terribly familiar, it seemed to be the way that things really were. The evocation of a landscape that you've really felt at home in, maybe more at home than anything you've been able to come up with yourself.

    However Cohen may have been influenced or groomed by the Spaniard's work, by 1988 he had assimilated the aesthetic so thoroughly that he was able to render one of García Lorca's poems into song with a sympathy and finesse unequalled by any other translator. Cohen, lacking Kundera's concern for absolute adherence to the author's every jot and squiggle, managed to achieve fidelity through freedom.

    Cohen claims to have spent 150 hours translating García Lorca's "Pequeño vals vienés," from the posthumous collection Poeta en Nueva York, even though other translations were available, and the Noonday Press edition of Poet in New York, translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White, was about to appear. The resulting song, which Cohen titled "Take This Waltz," employs a translation better than Simon and White's--and superior, in some ways, even to the Spanish original.

    It's a completely different work, of course. García Lorca wrote Poeta en Nueva York during the 1929-30 academic year, which he spent at Columbia University. Although his letters home were sunny enough, the rural Spaniard was appalled by the racism, soullessness and godlessness of New York City. His New York poems are full of alienation, death, sweet memories of childhood and, toward the end, a yearning for the "true" civilization of Europe. Indeed, "Little Viennese Waltz" comes from a section of the book called "Flight from New York (Two Waltzes Toward Civilization)."

    In Spanish, "Little Viennese Waltz" begins with an effort to imitate three-four time, but García Lorca doesn't bother to maintain this musical pretense. Cohen must, though. And somehow the poem benefits from a treatment that should cheapen it. Cohen must wrench the poem into waltz rhythm and develop a tight rhyme scheme; Lorca's loose rhyming isn't really suitable for Cohen's style of song, and Simon and White didn't even bother with rhyme. Along the way, Cohen manages to convey the original images with language that is slightly more compact, and with cadences far more attractive than Simon and White's.

    Consider the first two stanzas. Simon and White remain closely in step with the Spanish:

In Vienna there are ten little girls,
a shoulder for death to cry on,
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

    Cohen rearranges and rephrases the material slightly, to maintain better parallel structure and to end his first verse with the strongest image:

Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost.

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.

    Note the grace of Cohen's version of the second line (in Spanish, "un hombro donde solloza la muerte"). Like the original, it ends on a strong word, not a wimpy little preposition. It's clean, it's direct. Similarly, "Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws" is a far more powerful image than García Lorca's vague "Toma este vals con la boca cerrada."

    Of Cohen's several other departures here, the most interesting is "There's a piece that was torn from the morning." "Tomorrow" would scan just as well as "the morning," so why make so gratuitous a change? (And what does "morning" imply? You can't be sure with Cohen. He begins the song "Is This What You Wanted" with "You were the promise at dawn, I was the morning after." In this song, however, it's probably safe to assume the more romantic image.) Cohen makes this change because he has set about realigning the poem's intention, without really altering its nature.

    García Lorca had never visited Vienna, so in this poem it is merely a dream city, an imagined paradise that, in the context of the book, is set in contrast with New York. Vienna in 1930 was a city of decadence, a city of overripe music by composers as stylistically opposed as Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schmidt, a city of fevered paintings by Gustav Klimt. Vienna in 1988, the Vienna Cohen knew, at least by reputation, was a city not of decadence but of decay. It was a culture of rubble--an idea popularized among English speakers right after World War II by The Third Man. García Lorca might well visit his dream Vienna "tomorrow," but for Cohen, Vienna glitters only in the imagination. This he will make clear with his song's final line, which is wholly his own invention.

    The second way Cohen alters the poem's intention is by resexing it. "Little Viennese Waltz" follows "Ode to Walt Whitman," a celebration of noble homosexuality and a condemnation of the dirty little urban street faggots García Lorca encountered in New York. In this context, and in the context of the poet's own homosexuality, "Little Viennese Waltz" becomes a sort of gay idyll. Cohen will have none of that. His "Take This Waltz" is determinedly carnal, yet romantic, and unmistakably heterosexual.

    Consider the beginning of another stanza. In Spanish:

Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero,
con la butaca y el libro muerto

    In Simon and White:

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death

    According to Cohen:

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine

    Either "I love you" or "I want you" are valid translations of "Te quiero." Cohen's choice is more blatantly sexual, and makes more sense when paired with the following line. It also better establishes the sense of yearning and loss that will be so essential by the end of the song: "I want you" implies "I don't have you now."

    Simon and White, by the way, screw up a perfectly good surrealist image by translating "libro muerto" as "book of death" rather than "dead book." Cohen gets it right, changing "book" to "magazine" only to fill the line better and set up a rhyme two lines later with "been" (he's Canadian; he can do that).

    This stanza's last two lines, in Spanish, are:

en nuestra cama de la luna
y en la danza que sueña la tortuga.

    In Simon and White:

in our bed that was once the moon's bed,
and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.

    Cohen:

On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand.

    Simon and White's first line is clumsy, with its needless repetition of the word "bed." Cohen turns into a better surrealist than even García Lorca, with his idea of the moon sweating in bed--more incongruous, and more sensual--and his replacing a turtle-dreamed dance with a "cry filled with footsteps and sand." Cohen's changes unify the stanza through the continued sexual imagery: allusions to sweaty sheets and little orgasmic cries.

    Things continue in the same manner until Cohen reaches the poem's final stanza, and twists the whole work's tone. García Lorca's ending is strutting, forward-looking, ambiguous but basically hopeful; Cohen's is unbearably nostalgic and sad.

    Simon and White:

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with
a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons.

    Cohen:

And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
My mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
With the photographs there, and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross.
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist.
Oh my love, Oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz.
It's yours now. It's all that there is.

    How much more compact and effective is Cohen's "I'll be wearing a river's disguise / The hyacinth wild on my shoulder." And not only does Cohen shift the mouth-and-leg image from García Lorca's crass act of fellatio to a more demure intimation of heterosexual activity, but the "dew of your thighs" reference, however commonplace it may be, simultaneously evokes lost youth (dew forms at dawn, and soon evaporates) and continues the riverbank metaphor (as do Cohen's references to moss and pools, not in the original).

    Cohen's final line--"It's yours now. It's all that there is"--found nowhere in the original, makes it clear that this song has been a dream of a ruptured relationship's impossible reconciliation.

    So, given such changes, what does "Take This Waltz" really have to do with "Little Viennese Waltz"? The gay references have gone straight. The city of future delight has become, to borrow a line from Cohen's "Everybody Knows," a shining artifact of the past. A poem of anticipation has become a song of loss. Isn't this an extreme example of what Milan Kundera has been complaining about?

    "The public will automatically see richness of vocabulary as a value, as a performance, a proof of the translator's mastery," warns Kundera. And that's precisely Cohen's business. Translation is performance, as is singing. Poor translations bore us because they are clumsy and literal--true to the individual word rather than the overall sense. Great translations are transformations. Poet and translator morph, temporarily, into a single creative artist who produces a new work, one necessarily distinct from the original.

    "Pequeño vals vienés" is anticipatory, hopeful and vaguely homosexual; "Take This Waltz" is nostalgic, regretful and strongly heterosexual. Yet, for contemporary North American audiences, this metamorphosis has only strengthened the original's essence. "Pequeño vals vienés" and "Take This Waltz" are both dream poems about isolation and romantic yearning; in this respect they are identical. Through his liberties, Cohen has conveyed García Lorca's emotional intensity with an exactness no dictionary-translation could match.