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Choosing a Twin
Gregory Pardlo
The legendary minstrel
performer, Bert Williams, was
born in Nassau, Bahamas,
in 1874. It may seem odd
to begin my comments on
translation with a reference to
Bert Williams (or minstrelsy in
general), but there is an analogy
here that I think is instructive. Despite being racially black,
Williams not only applied burnt cork to his face, but also had to
bridge cultural differences to produce a compelling (however
insulting) stage version of the “American Negro.” The character
he produced was mostly a product of popular imagination.
In other words, Williams was successful at taking “genuine”
black expression and translating it into a version that popular
audiences wanted to believe was real. He was celebrated not so
much because his imitation of African-American speech—which
was initially foreign to him—was convincingly “accurate” to
his fans, but because he made their illusions come alive. He
enlivened the one-dimensional stock character with his own
creative force. I may be reaching with this analogy in some ways,
but minstrelsy magnifies for us one kind of dramatic illusion
that I think literary translation relies upon. When I translate
poetry, I have to make the poet whose work I am translating
into a character I hope to embody, a character that may not
actually exist in English or to English-only readers. And I have to
present that character in a way my reader will find full of human
complexity without making the character just another version of
myself. Yet, if I focus on the language alone—that is, if I focus on
translating each word “correctly” as if the poem were a language
exam—I risk producing a one-dimensional stereotype of the
poet’s native culture. All this is to say “accuracy,” particularly
when translating poetry, is not necessarily a desirable outcome.
When I have difficulty getting my writing day started, I google
poems written in a language I can no sooner translate than
tea leaves. I pull a translating dictionary from my shelf in that
language if I have one (I’m an avid collector), and attempt
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The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation
5