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Living With Translation
Howard Norman
I want here to write very
personally about translation.
About living with translation.
In my Vermont village,
my nearest neighbors
are translators: poet Jody
Gladding translates French
prose and David Hinton
translates ancient Chinese
poetry. Same village but
further away, lives Ron
Padgett, eminent translator of
Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and conversations with
Marcel Duchamp. My “mentors”—an insufficient word—are
two of the most estimable translators in our literature, Jerome
Rothenberg and William Merwin. (W.S. Merwin originally
looked at my fledgling translations of Inuit poems and folktales
during a snow blizzard in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in l974). My
first teaching position at UCLA was advocated by the brilliant
translator, Michael Henry Heim; during that semester, he had
begun to translate Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the
Advanced in Age.
One of the most succinct and poignant meditations on the
art of translation can be found in the scholar-translator Clarence
Brown’s introduction to The Selected Poems of Osip Mandlestam,
where he writes, “(Robert) Lowell does not translate into
English, but into Lowell; Nabokov can be said to translate into
literal English only by those who will accept his definition of
literal English: in reality, it is Nabokov. Merwin has translated
Mandelstam into Merwin. When one is speaking of writers of the
staure of Lowell, Nabokov, and Merwin, this strikes me as being
the happiest of situations. We have tried to translate Mandelstam
into the English that works as an instrument of poetry in our
own time, and we have accepted the responsibility entailed in
the fact that to translate is to change. Those of my colleagues
in the academy who are sent up the wall by ‘mistakes’ in the
translation of poetry, those who are happy to maintain that
poetry is untranslatable here on earth, and the arbiters of their
own brand of literalism everywhere, have probably by now read
far enough in this book.”
The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation
13