Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

source, calling in. But the translator can and
must be on the inside of his or her translation,
must inhabit the echo chamber of its formal
variables and designs, its rhythms, pauses, the
meanings of its silences. In such sounding, the
translator may begin to hear certain things in
the original not previously perceivable from
the outside.
Pound intuitively corrected mistakes in the
Fenollosa manuscript. For the rest of us, it is
impossible to translate from a language one
doesn’t know. To translate through an
“informant” is to paint by numbers: it’s their
design, you merely add some color.
11) And then Pound wrote in his own
mistakes, of course, over those of his first
“informant,” Fenollosa. And thank goodness
for many of the mistakes. Strange how
misunderstandings, errant guesses, and
inaccuracies can enable great translations —
great “inaccurate” translations that in turn
change everything about a nation’s poetry.
And the poetry of other nations, too, in the
case of Pound. In fact, Pound’s translation of
Chinese poetry profoundly changed 20thcentury
Chinese poetry. Go figure.
Now, for the rest of us, it may be impossible
to make translations that change everything,
but it is certainly possible to translate from a
language one doesn’t know well, so long as
one approaches the poem, humbly, as a poet,
and has a good informant. Here, then, I would
disagree with Weinberger: All translators
should have informants, of one kind or
another. Someone, yes, will do a first design,
but designs can be, and should be, redesigned.
Just make it new.
No, collaboration is a good thing,
especially in translation, which is always a
collaboration, and all the way down. Plus,
collaboration doubles the chances of felicitous
mistakes.
Everything can be translated. That which is
“untranslatable” hasn’t yet found its translator.
12) On a certain level, this is true. But certainly
great poetry often points (can this still be said?) to
the untranslatable conditions of being, those that
shimmer and hint just beyond the reach of
language. Sometimes, it’s those moments of
“pointing” that most seem beyond satisfactory
translation. And here, in thinking about the
“untranslatable,” I’ve sometimes pictured that
well-known optical paradox: the figure of
translation and the figure of the poem it faces as
efflorescing into two illusory silhouettes, fixed, in
turn, by a central illusory vase. Only when the
silhouettes vanish does the vase appear; only
when the vase vanishes, do the silhouettes appear.
But it’s just a hunch. When it comes to the
untranslatable, I have no problem saying that I
really don’t know what I’m talking about.
The original is never better than the translation.
The translation is worse than another translation,
written or not yet written, of the same original.
13) This would be so because the translation, as
previously proposed, is something wholly other
from the original, in the end. There is the mother
and there is the daughter. And we don’t usually
say that the mother is “better” or more “original”
than the daughter. Yet even most translators feel
that what they create is a lesser, secondary thing, a
shadow-copy of a “true” original. It’s time to get
over this. There is no correspondence without
difference; there is no poetry without translation.
And we still don’t know, in any case, what either
one is, or where the activity of one stops and the
other begins.
Translation is not duplication. Every reading is a
new reading: why should we expect a translation
to be identical?
14) It is because we can’t expect this that
translation practice, in the end, lacks true
epistemic boundary or location. It is a spectrum,
and translations will mark their distances and
velocities along different spectral points of its redshift
range. To be sure, “faithfulness” is the
normative ideal of our practice. But I’d propose
that freer, imitative gestures — those speeding
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