Category: News

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Head of Emotional State

It’s always a surprise when presidents or kings or prime ministers or otherwise powerful heads of state reveal a poetic side. Sometimes it’s laughable, but other times — considering they were probably busy dealing with things like the defeat of the Spanish Armada or mending the wartorn homeland — the poetry’s not so bad. Here are two of my favorite examples from English:

 

The Suicide’s Soliloquy
by Abraham Lincoln

Here, where the lonely hooting owl
Sends forth his midnight moans,
Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl,
Or buzzards pick my bones.
No fellow-man shall learn my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,
Or by the ravens’ cry.
Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,
Though I in hell should rue it!
Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never know;
By friends consigned to misery,
By hope deserted too?
To ease me of this power to think,
That through my bosom raves,
I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink,
And wallow in its waves.
Though devils yell, and burning chains
May waken long regret;
Their frightful screams, and piercing pains,
Will help me to forget.
Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night,
To take that fiery berth!
Think not with tales of hell to fright
Me, who am damn’d on earth!
Sweet steel! come forth from our your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!
I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last—my only friend!

 

Pretty dramatic. But since he’s Abraham Lincoln, we’ll let it slide. Another, which, taken with the title, really strikes me:

Written with a Diamond on her Window at Woodstock
by Queen Elizabeth I

Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.

 

That titular image — the avian Queen scratching a royal jewel across the window — sets a particular lonely and ridiculous mood before we even reach the poem.

 

The closest we’ve come to presidential poetry in this century are, shockingly, from George W. Bush. His bizarre self-portrait paintings leaked onto the internet some time ago, and, as arts blogger Greg Allen so astutely observed:

The amazing thing is not just that they literally show Bush’s own perspective—but that Bush is using the process of painting to show his own perspective. It’s a level of self-reflection, even self-awareness, that seems completely at odds with his approach to governing.

They may not send ripples through the contemporary art world, but they do seem to speak to the emotional life of a public political figure, a rarity. And in this case, to eerie effect.

Well done, rulers.

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Translating the Internet: A Collaboration

Luis von Ahn, inventor of the security feature CAPTCHA and the project Duolingo, proposes a mass translation of the internet, via outsourcing:

Okay, so there’s a lot of things to say about this question. First of all, translating the Web. So right now the Web is partitioned into multiple languages. A large fraction of it is in English.If you don’t know any English, you can’t access it. But there’s large fractions in other different languages, and if you don’t know those languages, you can’t access it. So I would like to translate all of the Web, or at least most of the Web, into every major language. So that’s what I would like to do.

Now some of you may say, why can’t we use computers to translate? Why can’t we use machine translation? Machine translation nowadays is starting to translate some sentences here and there.Why can’t we use it to translate the whole Web? Well the problem with that is that it’s not yet good enough and it probably won’t be for the next 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of mistakes.Even when it doesn’t make a mistake, since it makes so many mistakes, you don’t know whether to trust it or not.

 

His solution not only translates the Internet, but also teaches a foreign language to users. The service works both ways!

 

Check out the TED talk here, with his Duolingo discussion starting around 9:00.

 

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Calvin Bedient on Conceptualism in Boston Review

Illuminating and sharp article from Calvin Bedient in the Boston Review against conceptualism in poetry:

Poetry is accustomed to being berated for having too much of this or too little of that, come back when you are classical, baroque, romantic, avant-garde, or postmodern, you just aren’t there yet, you fairly engaging thing. But who could have foreseen that poetry would finally be attacked for being poetry?

 

And elsewhere:

But this cerebral poetry does its work in a period when the old assumption that culture could be progressive is dead. It is thus devoted to ruins. It is reactionary at the same time that its alliance with digital technologies—technologies that facilitate copying, sampling, and remixing; that “float” documents and make them seem up for grabs—gives it the lure of being very “now.” As an effort to form an avant-garde, “head” poetry thus diverges sharply from the disruptive-to-revolutionary aesthetic and political aims that characterized the early 20th century avant-gardes.

 

Regardless of your views on the subject, I think it’s safe to say we could do with a few more critical writers of Bedient’s caliber. There are too few authors writing about the politics of poetics in such an intelligent manner.

 

Read the full article here.

 

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Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” – Part III

Benjamin-sm

 

A final look at Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” If you haven’t already, check out Part I & Part II.

For the great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language is at work. This language is one in which the independent sentences, works of literature, critical judgments, will never communicate–for they remain dependent on translation; but in it the languages themselves, supplemented and reconciled in their mode of signification, harmonize. If there is such a thing as a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate truth which all thought strives for, then this language of truth is–the true language. And this very language, whose divination and description is the only perfection a philosopher can hope for, is concealed in concentrated fashion in translation.

The original text — Benjamin seems to be saying — is itself an approximation of Truth. And so, each translation is a further triangulation around an epicenter of true meaning. Of course, this may call into question the authority of the author, but Benjamin separates the two tasks by designating translation as a “mode.”

 

He clarifies this difference further, comparing a translator to a philosopher like himself:

There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation. But despite the claims of sentimental artists, these two are not banausic. For there is a philosophical genius that is characterized by a yearning for that language which manifests itself in translations…[T]ranslation…is midway between poetry and doctrine. Its products are less sharply defined, but it leaves no less of a mark on history.

 

We should hope that translation — especially the translation of literature — should strike somewhere boldly between poetry and philosophy.

 

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Comparing Cavafy’s "The City"

my-cavafy-21_display[  from Stahis Orphanos’s MY CAVAFY which pairs Cavafy’s poems with contemporary portraits ]

I just came across this article about comparing translations of Constantin Cavafy’s “The City”, and thought I would throw a few more ideas and translations of the last stanza into the mix.

First, a translation from our own Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Princeton University Press, 1992).

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

The directness, here, electrifies the voice of Cavafy. The tone feels cavernous and cold, which lets the idea of an inescapable reputation ring and echo throughout. They chose to include contractions. The poem seems to beg to be spoken, something which I tend to  like, and the intimacy helps the drive till the end.

Next, Rae Delven’s 1948 translation lauded by, among others, W.H. Auden:

You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
and you will grow gray in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other–
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.

I love the inversion of “Always you will arrive in this city.” The emphasis of “always,” rather than feeling archaic, seems to hammer home the point. Interesting how the next line — “There is no ship for you, there is no road” is exactly the same as Keeley/Sherrard’s. “Destroyed” certainly adds a much different texture than “wasted.”

And, finally, Daniel Mendelsohn’s recent 2009 translation:

You’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you’ll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you’ll grow old.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist.
Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this
small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.

The most colloquial of the three, Mendelsohn’s translation hits the point in a different way, like the hurtful rant of a drunken uncle you admire. For some reason — maybe it’s the relentless commas instead of periods — this translation feels more disparaging. The speaker not only advises against hope, but says “Don’t bother to hope…” Things seem already to have been decided. A life is already “wasted…through all the world.”

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Cortazar on Play

Julio-Cortazar-playing-trumpet-274x300

For me, literature is a form of play. But I’ve always added that there are two forms of play: football, for example, which is basically a game, and then games that are very profound and serious. When children play, though they’re amusing themselves, they take it very seriously. It’s important. It’s just as serious for them now as love will be ten years from now. I remember when I was little and my parents used to say, ‘Okay, you’ve played enough, come take a bath now.’ I found that completely idiotic, because, for me, the bath was a silly matter. It had no importance whatsoever, while playing with my friends was something serious. Literature is like that—it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do everything for that game.
– Julio Cortázar, Argentine novelist (1914-1984), in an interview with The Paris Review

Check out Cortázar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute or the brilliant Hopscotch.

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Translation: The Facts

Indo-European

A few facts about translation through the ages, from our intern Alison Silver:

 

The word “translation”

  • Derives from the Latin for “the carrying from one place to another.”

 

Classical:

  • 300-200 B.C.E. First major translation in Classical World was Septuagint (pre-Christian translation of Hebrew Bible/Jewish Scriptures into Koine Greek). Septuagint means seventy in Latin and is the name of the Bible because of the believed seventy translators who completed it.

Septuagint[ image courtesy of truthnet.org ]

  • Cicero said of his translation of Demosthenes that the translator must reproduce the original work in adherence to the conventions of Latin usage.

 

Early English

  • The first high quality English translations were from the great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, called “grant translateur” by contemporary French poet Eustache Deschamps.
  • Medieval literature centered on Chaucer’s tradition of free adaptation.
  •  The first major English translation was the Wyclif (Wycliffe) Bible c. 1382, and English prose translation began a century later with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, a free adaptation of Arthurian romances.
  • 1412 Archbishop Arundel wrote to the pope that Wycliffe was a “wretched and pestilent fellow of damnable memory, … the very herald and child of anti-Christ, who crowned his wickedness by translating the Scriptures into the mother tongue.”
  • Shortly after, a provincial council at Oxford issued a decree stating that “no one shall in future translate on his own authority any text of holy scriptures into the English tongue—nor shall any man read this kind of book, booklet or treatise, now recently composed in the time of the said John Wycliffe or later, or any that shall be composed in future, in whole or part, publicly or secretly, under penalty of the greater excommunication.”  This decree lasted until 1453 with the fall of Constantinople when scholars brought Greek texts to the West.

 

Renaissance

  • In Italy, Petrarch had collected Greek manuscripts to translate, and Marsilio Ficino undertook a Latin translation of Plato’s works. Along with Desiderius Erasmus’ Latin translation of the New Testament, these works introduced a new approach to translation that emphasized exactness, particularly in preserving the exact wording of religions and philosophical figures like Jesus, Plato, and Aristotle.
  • More freedom of poetic interpretation arose from The Pléiade (a group of Renaissance poets in France) and Tudor poets’ translations of works by Horace, Ovid, and Petrarch, after a growth in the middle class and the development of printing technology created the desire to translate original writing into contemporary language to entertain the public.
  • 1611 translation of the King James Bible, resulting from collaboration of almost 50 translators
  • 1612 Thomas Shelton completes the first part of an expanded version of Don Quixote, followed by Cervantes’ publishing of the second part.

Restoration and 18th and 19th Centuries

  • Translation was becoming an industry, in which writers were paid little but nonetheless made a living on translation projects, including collaborations with their contemporaries.
  • 1683-1686 John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives
  • 1697 John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid
  • 1715-1720 Alexander Pope’s translations of the Iliad
  • 1725-1726 Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey
  • Standards for translation heightened in the 19th century regarding style and accuracy. Victorian efforts, like Thomas Carlyle’s translations of Goethe’s writings, Sir Richard Francis Burton’s Arabian Nights (1885-1888), and William Morris’ translation of Beowolf (1895) strived for literal translation in order to preserve the classic quality of the original text, even at the expense of modern-day comprehensibility.
  • 1813 Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote a treatise in German entitled “On the Different Methods of Translating,” in which he advocated that “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.”

 

20th Century

Notable translations of the era include:

  • 1871 Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato alters convention by reproducing the work in plain, understandable terms and not the archaic language of the original.
  • 1922-1931 C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
  • 1925-1933 Arthur Waley’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji

 

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Rodin on the Artist in Nature

klimt-bauernhaus-mit-birken-1900.thumb.333x0x0x0x100x0x0x0

Gustav Klimt, Bauernhaus mit Birken, 1900

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

– Auguste Rodin, French sculptor (1840-1917)

 

Check out Rainer Maria Rilke’s Auguste Rodin, translated from the German by Daniel Slager, with an exquisite introduction by William H. Gass and stunning photographs by Michael Eastman.

 

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Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” – Part II

Continuing our series on Walter Benjamin, Eric selects certain passages from “The Task of the Translator” and relates them to our work at Archipelago:

Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

 

Here, Benjamin emphasizes the dynamic quality of translation. Whereas the original text remains static over centuries, new translations continue to appear with generations, reviving the text, such as Scott Montcrieff’s original English translation (and subsequent revisions/edits) of Proust and Lydia Davis’s recent English translation.

 

Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much form its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life.

 

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James Baldwin on Film Adaptations

decasia[scene from “Decasia” ; image courtesy of University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections/Icarus Films]

Now, obviously, the only way to translate the written word to the cinema involves doing considerable violence to the written word, to the extent, indeed, of forgetting the written word. A film is meant to be seen, and, ideally, the less a film talks, the better. The cinematic translation, nevertheless, however great and necessary the violence it is compelled to us on the original form, is obliged to remain faithful to the intention, and the vision, of the original form. The necessary violence of the translation involves making very subtle and difficult choices. The root motive of the choices made can be gauged by the effect of these choices: and the effect of these deliberate choices, deliberately made, must be considered as resulting in a willed and deliberate act—that is, the film which we are seeing is the film we are intended to see.

— James Baldwin, on the film adaptation of Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (from The Devil Finds Work)

 

Enlightening, given a continued flow of tepid films adapted from searing books.

 

What is the most successful — and not necessarily faithful! — film translation of an extraordinary book? Write your thoughts in the comment below.