How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Translating Poetry
by Stephen Komarnyckyj
I began translating poetry over thirty years ago. Translating poetry can feel like trying to play a piano wearing boxing gloves. The original poem shines from the page with all its nuance as if it were a musical score written in holographic ink. But the instrument you are trying to play and your own clumsy hands are unable to capture the spirit of the original text. This perhaps silly metaphor is a way of trying to explain how the differences between languages and cultures make translating poetry a task you are bound to fail. Oh yes you will. But failure here is simply a different kind of success. Mark Musa’s translations of Dante discard the terza rima structure of the original in favour of iambic blank verse, because that is the natural medium for epic poems in English. He betrays the Italian poet to keep faith with his English language reader.
Ukrainian has a flexible word order and numerous cases that are difficult to reproduce in English. Trying to duplicate the grammar is futile and would betray the quality of the original, producing a text that would seem as alien in the target language as a grounded fish suffocating in the air. A translator has to balance faith to the original with a betrayal in the target language, and vice versa. It is partly an intuitive process, and the poem you produce must possess its own qualities as an English poem. Similarly it must reach its audience where they are and that may take you far from the original text.
But every text is an act of translation. Auden described poetry as “memorable speech” but the very act of speaking or writing poetry is an attempt to convey your own voice or the voice of the speaker of the poem. To translate a real or imagined event into words for a reader who will simultaneously interpret and recreate the poem’s voice is itself a double act of translation. There is a blurred boundary between retelling a tale in another language and translating a text which reaches back to the very origins of European literature. The Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BC) retold the tale of the siege of Troy in his epic The Aeneid reworking the story of a character from his Greek predecessor Homer’s epic, The Iliad. Virgil would himself would be reimagined as a character in The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. The great Ukrainian poet Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769-1838) retold The Aeneid as a comic Ukrainian Cossack epic in his poem Eneida. The poem’s exuberant rhythm and comic treatment of serious themes is a challenge for any translator More recently two Nobel Prize Winning poets, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) and Derek Walcott (1930-2017) have drawn on their epic predecessors to inspire their own work. Heaney’s poem Ugolino published in Field Work (1979) is to use his own phrase an “impure translation” of a passage from Dante’s Inferno which betrays the original to create a harsher text exploring the theme of betrayal as it is experienced in an Irish context. So Heaney’s poem „betrays” the original to maintain faith with his dominant theme of Irish history. Walcott’s poem Omeros recasts some of Homer’s heroes as Caribbean natives but uses a loose version of Dante’s terza rima- he “betrays” the original sources for his work to create his own poem which maintains faith with his Caribbean roots. Leda and The Swan by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) shows us how a poet can adapt mythic material for an original work in their own style, while The Word is Not An Apple by the Ukrainian poet Ihor Pavlyuk freely adapts pagan and Christian mythology. Yeats, of course, produced an anthology of Irish fairy tales translated into English and conveyed many Celtic myths into English via his poetry and plays, developing a uniquely Irish style within the English language.
“Fake” translations, like adaptations of source material from other languages to create original work, have had a huge influence on the development of literature as evidenced by The Poems of Ossian (published under various titles and in various sections from 1760). The poet James MacPherson claimed that the work was translated from Gaelic but it would appear there was no original text. The poems were nevertheless wildly popular across Europe and influenced authors in numerous languages. MacPherson betrayed the poetic tradition he conveyed into English perhaps in word but arguably captured its spirit. This is slightly different to the transparent “fake” translations of an imaginary Spanish poet by Geoffrey Hill The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz. The fictitious poet supposedly lived from 1868 to 1922 and creating this voice gave Hill scope to explore intimate themes he often eschewed in his highly stylised work. Numerous English language poets too have imported elements from other poetic traditions into their writing. T.S. Eliot translated the French Nobel Laureate Saint-J. Perse’s poem Anabasis into English and the act of engaging with another literature allowed him to remake the tradition.
The writing or translation of poetry is always an act of translation in its widest sense an attempt to convey meaning to the reader, even if as with certain poems the meaning is partly the evasion of meaning, for a poem “should not mean but be.” But why should we engage with literature outside the English tradition and adopt styles that might be uncomfortable and indeed unsuccessful? Eliot himself noted that every artistic “attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.” However, engaging with a tradition remote from English poetry allows a kind of cross fertilisation to occur as our own language grapples with new concepts and modes of writing.
The three poets I have translated here are unknown in the English speaking world. It’s particularly important, at a time when Russia is facing its third imperial collapse in just over a century, that Ukrainian voices are heard. The world has largely seen Russia through Russian writers who were all in varying degrees supportive of an ethnically tiered empire and whose work erased or marginalised the voices of the colonised nations. So listen to these poets now. Only by studying Ukrainian literature can you begin to see Russia, which has abused translated literature to mask the ugly reality of its imperialism, clearly. And that, like poetry, is a matter of life and death.
Raisa Troyanker (1908–1945)
Raisa Troyanker was born into the family of a Synagogue janitor in Uman, Ukraine, but ran away with the circus when she was thirteen and literally put her head in a tiger's mouth as part of the performance. She survived the mass executions and repressions of Ukrainian authors in the thirties which were part of a series of genocidal actions including a famine known as the Holodomor which claimed approximately four million lives. Her poetry is not always easy to translate and I have chosen a landscape poem.
The corpse of Autumn rots in the valley
The corpse of Autumn rots in the valley
It will be covered by the first snow,
The full moon at its fragrant rim.
The snow, a white guest, smiles
In its cold fashion
Is cotton wool falling on the fields
Is the confused white swarm of thoughts.
Jackals come from distant mountains
And a slender, solitary leopard
Whose presence will terrify
People cattle and birds.
The childish lament of emaciated jackals echoes
And then the grey watchdog Kalma will whine
Guarding our quiet home.
Swarthy Vassa will not go to the mountain forest
To gather dogwood cherries
And we will no longer sleep on the terrace,
Because even the goat feels the cold.
Young Spiro is already building
A small shack. Oh, winter
How she brings us wisdom
With the familiar confusion of a bad dream.
The corpse of Autumn has rotted in the valley
It was covered with white, tender snow,
A leopard shot through the back
Rigidly guards the cold night.
Труп осени в долині дотліває
Труп осени в долині дотліває.
Його покриє скоро перший сніг.
І повний місяць — запашний окраєць
У довгу ніч світитиме над ним.
А білий гість почне сміятись
Холодним посміхом своїм.
І на лани впаде як вата,
Як дум розгублених рої.
З далеких гір прийдуть шакали,
Прийде стрункий самітний барс
Його поява налякає
Людей, худобу і собак.
Дитячий плач худих шакалів
Піде луною, і тоді
Вночі заскиглить сива Кальма,
Що стереже наш тихий дім.
В гірські ліси смаглява Васса
Вже не піде збирать кізіл,
І спать не можна на терасі.
Бо навіть холодно й козі.
І юний Спіро вже майструє
Хлівок маленький. О, зима.
Вона прийде і замудрує
В знайомім мареві примар.
Труп осени догнив уже в долині.
Його засипав білий, ніжний сніг,
Самітний барс, прострелений у спину,
Застигло стереже холодну ніч.
Lada Mohylianska (1899–1937)
Lada Mohylianska was born into a literary family and was developing a career as a poet when she was arrested for campaigning against the Soviet regime's policies in Ukraine in 1929. She was sentenced to death initially but the punishment was lessened to ten years in labour camp but she was ultimately subject to judicial murder by the authorities.
I Won't Go To The Bar With Anyone
I won't go to the bar with anyone
Where the bottles are like the eyes of jellyfish
And no one will dream in the smoky room
Of the cruel smile on painted lips.
And no one, no one will pour in my glass
The amber minutes of memories
My happy voice will reach no one
Nor will my burning…
And when every lantern swings
Within the meditation of dusk
Shadows will flicker chaotically
Like the shades of deformed ghosts
I will pass between them entranced,
A chimerical shadow
And my weariness, a gold light
No one will greet.
Я ні з ким не піду до пивниці
Я ні з ким не піду до пивниці,
Де пляшки наче очі медуз,
І нікому в диму не присниться
Хижий усміх фарбованих уст.
І ніхто, і ніхто у мій келих
Бурштинових хвилин не наллє,
І нікому мій голос веселий
І нікому горіння моє…
А коли у задумі вечірній
Розгойдається кожний ліхтар, —
Замаячать у хаосі тіні,
Наче тіні потворних примар…
І між ними химерною тінню
Промайну зачарована я,
І нікому привіту не кине
Золотая утома моя.
Lyutsiana Piontek (1899–1937)
Lyutsiana Piontek was an ethnic German and committed Communist who firmly believed in the revolution but would ultimately be murdered by the Soviet authorities, along with her husband the poet Ivan Kulyk (1897–1937), albeit after the pretext of a judicial protest. Her relatively small body of poetry is rather beautiful.
A zither plays somewhere
A zither plays somewhere.
The pines are frozen in a half dream
The tranquil lake breathes slowly, gently
And there is snow on the mountains.
It is quiet.
A zither plays somewhere.
The window of the building opposite
Cuts my wall with a ray of reflected light.
The Chinese terracotta house
Is wrapped in shadows.
A zither plays somewhere.
Gently. A lullaby,
The night has smeared all the colours above the earth.
I rest only so that I will burn again.
A zither plays somewhere.
Десь грає цитра
Десь грає цитра…
Застигли сосни у півсні.
Спокійне озеро поволі мляво диха.
На горах сніг.
Тихо.
Десь грає цитра…
Вікно будинку, що навпроти,
Порізало промінням мої стіни.
Вгорнули китайчатко з теракоти
Тіні.
Десь грає цитра…
Ніжна. Колискова.
Ніч змазала всі фарби угорі.
Я тільки відпочину, щоб знову
Горіть.
Десь грає цитра…
