Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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In his poem, "Strange Meeting," Wilfred Owen took the
Welsh half rhyme the proest and used it in English. In this rhyme
the final consonants of the word stay the same, while the vowels
change, as in "cat" and "kit."
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
Having rediscovered the proest in Owen I've now been using this
rhyme both in English and back in its native Welsh. But, filtered
through Owen's sensibility it's not the same sound, it's been
revivified and made vital again by translation. This is a form of
stylistic translation. But there's more to this question. Poets working
in a tradition are always "translating" the work of their predecessors
and moulding it to their modern-day needs. But what to translate?
Thorn Gunn, for example, in "The Unsettled Motorcyclist s Vision
of his Death" uses the metre and philosophical vocabulary of the
Metaphysical poets to describe a twentieth-century death. The
poem intrigues us because of the initial discrepancy between
subject and style—and this in itself becomes part of the subject of
the poem, a biker forced to contemplate his own mortality, despite
his very modern leathers.
WH. Auden's "Roman Wall Blues," on the other hand,
mimics the subject of a Roman lyric but without the style—old
subject, modern British speech—admittedly, to comic effect:
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.
If so inclined, a writer can easily exploit this latitude in his or
her choice of what to translate of a poem. Cynan, a popular
twentieth-century Welsh poet, gained a reputation as an original
The Snow Party
for Louis Asekoff
Basho, coming
To the city of Nagoya,
Is asked to a snow party.
There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.
Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.
Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond Irago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.
Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares
Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;
But there is silence
In the houses of Nagoya
And the hills of Ise.
—Derek Mahon
lyricist. I'm told, however,
that what he sometimes used
to do was translate parts of
modern English poems he
liked into Welsh, taking the
credit for their content himself.
One of my poems takes as its
starting point an old Welsh folk
song which is called "Bugeilio's
Gwenith Gwyn" ("Herding
the White Wheat"). I put my
own spin on the subject, of
course, making my wheat
shepherd a reluctant, resentful
servant. The rest of the poem
was suggested by a line in the
Oxford English Dictionary
which happened to catch my
eye. This smuggling of familiar
material from one language
into another seemed to me, on
reflection, too easy a way of
exploiting a Welsh subject
matter in English. I wanted to
be a full English-language poet when I wrote in English and not
just a translator of material which might not work in Welsh.
Translation is a form of travel. Far from just translating literal
rhyme, it can establish new sets of cultural consonances and
echoes, which resound at a broader level than the individual poem
translated. Derek Mahon's poem "The Snow Party" is a stylistic
tribute to the haiku of the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, as
well as a story about him.
The poem sets up an unexpected parallel between the
etiquette-ridden Japanese society and modern Northern Ireland.