Found in Translation

 

Behold some residents of the 2015 writers' conference at Napa Valley Community College. That was when I last attended, with my sweet husband before his diagnosis of lung cancer. We both had a good time; he always got on well with writers and hit it off particularly well with Brenda Hillman, whose mother was born in Brazil.

I'm looking forward immensely to taking part in a workshop given by Robert Hass (yes, that Robert Hass) on translating poetry. So far, the languages of the source material proposed by other attendees include Tagalog, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and my own German. I want to come up with an English translation of Schumann's setting of sixteen of the poems of Heinrich Heine, Dichterliebe--A Poet's Love. I have loved this piece of music ever since I was introduced to it 50 years ago, and I've been fooling around with translating Heine ever since I first read him. What I'm trying to say is that this is indeed my idea of a good time.

So, this year will be the first time I'm attending a writers' conference solo. I've never before attended one of these conferences without my husband. I'd attend the workshop in the morning and we'd get lunch and I'd tell him all about it and then go write and we'd get dinner and I'd tell him how I wasn't sure if what I'd written was even a poem and he'd support and encourage me through all of this and even claim to have had a good time reading or walking or lying out somewhere and looking at the sky.  I still expect to have a good time talking with other writers and attending events, but--I'll miss my sweetheart too.

AWP Seattle 2104, part 3: These 'translators' are traitors

 


One of the panel discussions I attended was given by people with university teaching jobs, presumably tenure-track, also terminal degrees, who asserted (aided by PowerPoint--I hate PowerPoint) that you did not need strong knowledge of the source language of a work to make a translation of it. While I was struggling with that one, asking myself how you would know if the trot you had started with had correctly dealt with the faux amis, someone else on the panel asserted that you could use the text as a starting point and perform erasures or riffs, and still call your result a translation.

This is waaay too po-mo for me. My big ethical dilemma with translating was more on the order of "should I re-write it so that it's better in English than it was in the original, or just let the author's clumsiness shine on its own?" This is of course regarding translations of technical articles, not poetry or plays. But, not even to know the source language well enough to work through it on your own--! and still to call it a translation--!! I mean, if you don't love the original enough to want to bring it across into another language, why even bother to call it a translation? Why not 'inspired by' or 'suggested by' or even 'provoked by'? It reminds me of a guy I met in my callow youth in the
Sixties, who maintained that it was wrongly narrow to insist that a sonnet have 14 lines and a given rhyme scheme. You could, he proclaimed, have a perfectly good two-line sonnet. No, you can't.