Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

TRANSLATION REVIEWNo. 66, 2003TABLE OF CONTENTSInterview with Breon Mitchell and Uwe Timm: Collaboration Between Translator and Author . . . . . . . . . . .1Rainer SchulteNot Getting it Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8David FerryFrom Dean to Deantrepreneur: The Academic Administrator as Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14Abby Kratz and Dennis KratzTranslating Diversity: The Distinct and Variegated Voice of Clifford Geertz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20Gregory ContiSad Tropics, or Tristes Tropiques? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27Liane GutmanRenditions: 30 Years of Bringing Chinese Literature to English Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30Audrey HeijnsWhispered Urgency: Translating Sound and Momentum in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34Raffaello Baldini’s “E’ Malan”Adria BernardiOn the Cathay Tour with Eliot Weinberger’s New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry . . . . .39Steve BradburyMethod or Maestri: Two Approaches to (Teaching) Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53Gregory ContiTranslating India: Enabling Tamil and Sanskrit Poems to be Heard in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58R. ParthasarathyThe Mexican Poet Homero Aridjis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69Rainer SchulteBOOK REVIEWThe Return of the River by Roberto Sosa, tr Jo Anne Engelbert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72Steven F. White, Reviewer

INTERVIEW WITH BREON MITCHELL AND UWE TIMM:COLLABORATION BETWEEN TRANSLATOR AND AUTHOR[An interview conducted with the German novelist Uwe Timm and his translator Breon Mitchell at Indiana University,May 2003]By Rainer SchulteRS: Breon, how did you develop your relationship withUwe Timm while you were working on the translation ofhis novel Morenga?BM: The first thing I think of when I translate is whatsort of questions I can ask that would be meaningful andnot simply make my job easier, a job that I should bedoing myself. So I try first to do as much work as I canto avoid unnecessary questions and leave only those thatI actually have real difficulty in figuring out. But I do tryto contact the author early.RS: Morenga is a novel that relies heavily on historicalfacts. Thus, what research did you initiate before youthought about contacting the author?BM: One of the specific questions for me was what partsof the novel might be factual material taken from historyor actual printed documents where I might find anEnglish equivalent translated at that period. That is thesort of thing that is sometimes difficult to know withoutasking the author.RS: At this point, we should ask Uwe to give us a shortintroduction to the background of his novel, Morenga, toget a sense of thehistorical events thatbuild the subjectmatter of the novel.Breon MitchellUT: To begin with,it’s a historicalnovel, based onfacts. I knew rightfrom the start that Ididn’t want to writea documentary,although that was aperiod when documentarieswerebeing written.Instead, I wanted towrite a book thatalso took a fictional approach to the material. It was preciselythe combination of fact and fiction that interestedme. The novel is about a rebellion in the former Germancolony of South West Africa between 1904 and 1907,when Germany was a colonial power, when the Hererosand the Hottentots rose up against the Germans. So thereare things in it that a writer would never have made up.If they had been invented, you would think the authorhad gone too far. For example, the vocabulary of punishment,when the Germans discuss techniques for floggingthe African natives. Those are things that are takendirectly from historical documents. There were othermatters, however, that seemed to me to demand fictionaltreatment. For example, the figure of Gottschalk, a veterinarian,who arrives in Africa and is changed by it;how he first experiences it, how it alters him, and howthose alterations are revealed in his character. That is allfictional; the protagonist of the novel, Gottschalk, is afictional character. And there are other straightforwardlyfictional elements dealing with the country’s history. Forexample, there are three tales that are, so to speak, borneby oxen, that tell us about the country.Uwe TimmRS: Breon, could youelaborate on how yourcollaboration with UweTimm came about andwhat you did when thetwo of you were workingtogether?BM: It was a great dealof fun to translate thisnovel, because Ilearned a lot from it. Iknew very little of theperiod, very little aboutGermany’s colonialhistory. So I readbooks, articles, andessays and tried tounderstand as much asTranslation Review 1

I could about the period. I tried to make sure as I translatedthat I stayed true, as far as I could, to the languageactually spoken at that time. I was able to take a tripthrough Germany with other translators around that time,sponsored by the Goethe Institut in Munich, that allowedus to meet with German publishers and authors. And thattrip started in Munich. The Goethe Institut arranged forme to meet Uwe Timm, to have breakfast with him, sothat we could get to know one another and say hello, andfor me to say that I was the translator. That was our firstmeeting. And we got along very well from the start. Uwewas kind enough to talk with me about the language ofthe novel and some of the things that he wanted to do,which gave me a better insight into the sort of details Ishould watch for, particularly the pleasure that he took inreproducing language, of the military Prussian officercaste, for example. I could see how much fun he had hadworking with that language, and it inspired me to try tosee whether I could reproduce it fairly accurately. Hetold me that if I came back to Munich to work on thetranslation, he would be happy to have me be a guest inhis home, and we could go over any questions I had. Sowe actually decided at that point that I would return inthe summer after doing a draft of the novel.RS: In turn, Uwe, what research methods did you pursuebefore you began to write the novel?UT: Yes, they corresponded exactly to those Breonmade, who as a good translator worked his way into thenovel. These were the things that preceded the novel:first, a knowledge I’d had since childhood. My fatherwas an officer, and I heard many stories at home of thiscompletely strange and different world, about Africa andits totally different customs, with a different civilizationand a totally different way of thinking. That stuck withme through childhood, adolescence, and my studentyears. And I always read about Africa and attended lecturesabout it, about ethnology. That all stayed with me.Later, as I began to work my way into the novel, I studiedthe documentary evidence in detail. I visited whatwas then still South West Africa, Namibia today, workedin the archives, and even interviewed people who hadtaken part in the uprising, very old people I met personally.I looked through photographic material, read lettersand diaries. In a sense, I constructed a room, a sort ofecho chamber you might say, that I realized was filledwith more material than I could ever use, and yet it wasnecessary to have it, to hear the echoes of something ofwhich little remained, of the things I had read andabsorbed. All that took place before I began to write,before I had selected a form, which could be called montage-like,where various sorts of texts are worked in.That was precisely what I was interested in. I was interestedin what sort of mentality was expressed in the language.How do officers talk, how do ordinary soldierstalk, how do people who want to be farmers talk? Whatsort of mentality lies behind a person’s desire to come toa foreign country, to oppress other human beings, to tortureor kill them? That’s what interested me, and then Iworked for four years on this novel, writing, working outvarious narrative strands that were constantly interruptedby the insertion of documentary material. That was thepreparatory work, and the way the novel was structured,a simple structure in itself.RS: Now let’s talk about the actual work you did whenthe two of you got together in Munich.BM: When I arrived at Uwe’s home in Munich, I hadcompleted a draft of the translation that I felt was prettygood. It was by no means finished, but I had gone completelythrough the novel, and I had marked every questionby putting a check mark in the margin of any pagewhere I wanted to ask something. I had some generalquestions that I needed to find out about too. Each morning,we would sit side by side and go through the novel.Uwe had the German in front of him and I had theEnglish, turning pages until we found something. Whathe looked for at first were things in the German, wherehe wondered what I had done. So he would read quickly— knowing the text very well — and then he would say:How did you handle this, this is something a little difficultI think. And I would find the passage. We wouldlook at it and see whether or not my version of it correspondedin some way to what he saw as a problem. Andthat was interesting, because there were some cases inwhich I had seen no problem at all in the German wherehe pointed out a certain difficulty. Sometimes I hadsolved the problem without thinking about it, almost bychance. And at other times, he alerted me to the problem,and we could work something out. I remember once hementioned the word “Harz,” for instance; he suggested Ishould say “Harz Mountains” so that it was clear what itwas, even though the word “mountains” was not in theGerman. But I had already done that, because I knew thereader would probably need it. That was a very smallpoint. So he would stop when he found something, and Iwould stop when I saw a checkmark in the margin andask him about it, and he would explain to me what the2 Translation Review

German meant, or whether it was the vocabulary thatwas important, or whether it came from an actual historicalsource. Often, he would turn to a map, to a book ofphotographs, or to a particular document he owned andsay, “you can find it in here.” And I would stop and findthings. I think one particularly interesting example wasMorenga’s diary. He had quoted from it, and it appearedto be actual passages from a diary originally written inEnglish. In the German text, it was in German. Therewas a reference to it as having survived only in photographsin a book published in 1910. And I had no ideawhether it had been totally invented by Uwe Timm orwhether it was a real book. So at that point I said, “whatis this? Is this real or have you made it up?” And Uwebrought out the book and said “here it is,” and skimmedthrough it to find the photos of the diary, with theGerman below it. And using the photographs of this realdiary, I was able to transcribe the English precisely, sothat the translation is a montage of the original Englishdiary of Morenga. And in that sense, a very satisfyingtranslation!RS: What you saw then was the photograph of theEnglish?BM: The English diary, handwritten by Morenga. Therewas a German translation in the footnotes, which wasquoted in Uwe’s text, including a question mark after oneof the words that the German transcriber couldn’t decipher.There is no question mark in the English, because Iwas able to figure out the word.UT: I have some personal experience with translations.My previous works have been translated into about 15languages. I just want to say I’ve really never had such apositive experience as I’ve had with Breon. That has todo with the exactitude with which he prepared his work.And it’s also related to the fact that we worked together.It’s a good rule of thumb that if a translator doesn’t haveany questions, there will inevitably be flaws. You findthem automatically. It simply can’t be the case that atranslator doesn’t have any questions about a novel.What was so amazing was that our work together wassuch a pleasure, that it was fun. The detailed preparationsBreon made, and all the things he had thought through,made me go through everything again and made methink about precisely what I had in mind when I wrotesomething. It was really a model collaboration, whichcould be seen even in the fact that we played tennis witheach other, and he’s a very good player and blew me offthe court. He was mean enough not to mention how goodhe was. He was a champion player. The more effortthat’s put into a translation, the more preparation, themore precise it is, the better it is too. I can only say I’venever worked more intensively and closely with a translatorthan with Breon.BM: And it was a great deal of fun.UT: And it’s a wonderful reward that this work results ina book lying here that I’m happy with, including the wayit looks, the paper, everything.BM: Of course the translator never knows every questionto be asked. So it’s important that Uwe also brought uphis own questions on the basis of the German text. Thatis really an interesting and effective approach. Therewere other questions that I asked that only he couldanswer. I’ll tell you one minor one. In Gottschalk’s diary— he keeps a diary — there was one entry that consistedof a single word, “Paddentraum.” I wondered whetherthis had something to do with Pfad, like a path, maybehe’s on the road, dreaming at night, he has a dream ofthe path. Should I translate it “dreampath” or Paddy likean Irishman’s name? I said to Uwe, “I don’t understandwhat this is, correct me if I’m wrong and we can changeit.” But as I remember, Uwe said: “This is more a privatematter: Padde is a nickname for my daughter. It wasreally a dream about my daughter.” Something no readercould know, of course. I finally translated it“Paddidream.” Someone who reads the translation willsay: What’s this? But someone who reads the Germanwill say the same thing. And the answer lies insideUwe’s head. But I know the answer now, as the translator,and what I find so interesting as a person who lovesliterature is the unique insight a translator gains into themind of the author. It’s the closest possible reading of atext. And if an author is open to helping the translator,then much is learned and revealed that would not normallybe discovered. For example, if an academic wereto come to an author and say: what do you mean by thatword, I don’t understand it, the author would normallyreply, you’re the reader, figure it out. But with the translator,the author says “I have to help this poor man someway. I’ll tell him what it actually is. He’s doing his best.”But now, if someone reads the English version and asksme, what is this, I can just say, you’re the reader, it is upto you to decide what it is. I wanted to say another thingabout mistakes. In a long novel, it’s inevitable that thereare going to be some mistakes. That’s what later print-Translation Review 3

ings are for. But there are also sometimes mistakes in theGerman. A German editor has missed something, there isan inconsistency, there is a date wrong, maybe a namemisspelled. There were three or four typographical errorswhere I asked Uwe: is this right? He said: Well, no, it’sincorrect in the German. It’s a typographical error. Theyjust didn’t catch it in proofreading. That is good to know,too. Sometimes it’s not so obvious, and it might changethe meaning. There is another thing I think is important.What a translator does not want is to have a glaring errorin the first paragraph or the last paragraph of a book or achapter. So after I was completely finished and we wereparting, I said to Uwe, I’ll send you the opening twopages and the closing two pages of every chapter. Justread those pages, if you have time, and see whether yousee anything. It’s just one further check so that the novelwon’t appear with a mistake in the very first paragraph.BM: When I was translating the military language, inparticular the description of the battles, I realized thatmany of the reports were documents that were actuallypublished at the time. I thought it might be possible tofind English equivalents to draw on. And so I went to theBritish Library and checked out several English-languagebooks about the Hottentot rebellion. And they describedthe battle scenes. Now none of the battle scenes in Uwe’snovel are simply a collage of actual documents, but thedescriptions are similar, so I spent a good deal of timenoting various vocabulary and phrases in a little notebook,phrases that referred to the horses, the way gunswere fired, the sounds they made, feelings and emotionsthat the soldiers had, in the tone and style of 1904 and1905. Then I worked those into my translation, so echoesof real phrases used in 1905 occur in the description ofthe battles in English.UT: I think that has added importance because it’s a matterof learning about states of consciousness. My workinghypothesis is that you can’t approach these mattersfrom our own point of view as a matter of course, ordescribe what happened back then with our contemporarylanguage. First of all I don’t have the experience towrite about Africans, there isn’t a single place in thenovel where an African is portrayed from within, throughsome sort of aesthetics of empathy. I would find thatinadmissible and naïve, it simply wouldn’t do. It’s a matterof learning something from the language of the time,of discovering how people came to humiliate others backthen, to hold them in such low esteem, to kill otherhuman beings. It truly resembles a plan for later genocide,one that finds its culmination in Auschwitz, thisdestruction of the Hereros. And investigating what happenedis only possible if you don’t approach the matternaively by describing it in today’s language. Thus, themajor effort and energy the translator expends on thetask, including even academic research, to put this allinto English so that we can at least approximate theexperience. And I think it’s also important for theEnglish reader to see the consciousness that lay behindwhat happened then.RS: And that comes precisely from the various levels ofspeech. Each of them, the military language, the languageof Morenga, and the language of Gottschalk.UT: Its various layers of language, or one might say, variousvoices that speak.BM: And in this case, the actual vocabulary that wasused at the time helps to create that voice. For example,how do we describe military action? I already mentionedgoing to the British Library and reading battle descriptions.Many technical terms changed between World WarI and World War II. And present-day dictionaries givedefinitions for modern warfare, not definitions from1905. And so I used a German-English military dictionaryfrom World War I put out by the British Government,showing the technical vocabulary of World War I inGerman and English. Another example was the bookMutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Kropotkin, animportant book in the novel, that influences the spiritualdevelopment of the characters. It is often quoted in thediaries, in paragraphs or lines. I could have just tried totranslate the German in the text into English, but insteadI found a translation of Kropotkin’s work published in1902. I found every passage and quoted it word forword, because it has that feel and flavor of 1902.Interestingly enough, that is the only translation that hasever been done of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, and it’s stillin print today.UT: And this feeling is maintained in the longer excursionsbuilt into the novel like short stories, leading intothe interior of the land, told by an ox. The first is in alanguage that is quite Biblical, since it’s about a missionaryentering South West Africa. And that too, it seems tome, is a totally different level of language, which probablyhas an equally Biblical flavor in English.BM: There I used the King James version, of course,4 Translation Review

ecause that was the version that English-speaking missionariesin Africa would have used. I found the equivalentpassage in the case of actual quotations, and simplyquoted the King James version, and that is a beautifultranslation, but there were also passages in which Africancharacters, for example one called The Prophet, write ina biblical language that is neither standard English norGerman, but a biblical language deformed in a way thatis very powerful and striking. To reproduce that language,I had to give it a Biblical flavor and yet makesure it didn’t sound simply like an English pastor or missionary.It had to sound like a native using the Englishlanguage in a Biblical way.RS: How was the book received in Germany when it wasfirst published?UT: It was reviewed very positively. It was very wellreceived. Very good reviews.RS: So far, there has only been one review published inthe The New York Times.UT: Yes, that is correct.BM: Morenga was first published in 1978, and it was abook ahead of its time, in terms of both its style and itssubject. Instead of becoming outmoded, it’s becomemore and more relevant as the years have passed. This isseen partly in the fact that it was reissued several times.This translation is based on a new edition that reflectssome authorial revisions, published in the year 2000. Soit is both an older novel in a sense and yet a new novel.What has happened in America is also quite interesting:most books that catch on in America in universities areread because they are translated into English. This is abook that first found acceptance in America in the universitiesamong students of German and was requiredreading in graduate courses here at Indiana University inpost-colonial literature. Two years before this Englishversion appeared, the MLA had a special session devotedin German to Morenga, and Uwe came to New York, andWashington University, St. Louis, and I think four differentprofessors gave papers on the novel. So in a sense,this is a case in which the English market and Englishreading public are catching up with a novel alreadyknown and already read in German departments here inthe United States. It is certainly important and relevanttoday. What I am hoping is that now English Departmentgraduate students, who are quite interested in post-colonialliterature, will begin to read it too.UT: Perhaps I might add a word here. Something thathas always pleased me is that when this novel appeared,Morenga was rediscovered in Namibia. He had beentotally forgotten. Only the victor’s story was known. Hehad been completely erased. And he was discoveredagain. Historians started studying his life, and his sonwas located, who had survived the massacre. There’s aGerman documentary film about this son. So Morengawas recovered for Namibia. We can only hope, now thatthere is an English version, that it will also be read morewidely in Namibia.RS: I would like to make another observation that mayor may not be related to your novel. Günter Grass hasjust published his novel Crabwalk and Jörg Friedriechhas published his book Der Brand (“The Fire”), both ofwhich have cause quite a stir in Germany and abroad,since both texts deal with what the British, theAmericans, and the Russians have inflicted on Germanyduring World War II. Has this something to do with thenotion that all of a sudden we are trying to show on theone hand what the British and the Americans and theRussians did to Germany and here what the Germans didto the indigenous Hottentots in West Africa?UT: Of course that was a part of Germany’s repressedhistory when the book first appeared twenty-five yearsago. Most people didn’t know there had been a rebellion,they knew that Germany had colonies, but not muchmore. The novel has always been in print, it’s gonethrough various editions, I should send them to you,Breon, because it’s very interesting. The editions varied.The book was always in print, but it also helped open upa discussion in Germany, to get it under way. That was aside effect, but my primary interest was simply to write anovel that manages, by means of language and withinlanguage itself, to describe something that’s quite difficultto grasp, the notion of the foreign. And to advance alittle our sense of the consequences it had, the foreign,the Other, always looked down upon and seen as inferior.Those are the roots buried in this novel. They’re buriedin all European nations, by the way. The cruelty in theBelgian Congo is indescribable. The French in Algeria,and the English, have acted with unbelievable brutality.These are deep roots that go back to an understandingthat permanently elevates itself and degrades others inforeign countries. And to extend that into language itself,we still see it today in everyday things, this standarddegradation of others simply because they are different,Translation Review 5

and we see how that is expressed in language, that what’sI was trying to do and that was a part of this work. That’swhy it’s important that Breon has given so much of histime, energy, and effort as a translator to bringing all thisout in the English language. It’s not just a matter of makingthings clear to the reader, not just translating themeaning, he could sit down and do that in a month, it’sthat he brought out the phenomenon of how languagedetermines emotions, shapes them and changes them,this historical phenomenon anchored in language itself,that’s what requires so much work.BM: There are so many levels on which this book isinteresting for American readers, even American readerswho know very little about German history. The novelmanages in a very complex but striking way to operatesimultaneously on at least three different levels. One ofthose levels is to recreate the history of the German colonialexperience in the war against the Hottentots in 1904,an extremely interesting historical level that Uwe openedup to the German people, and, as he said, to theNamibian people, who had forgotten Morenga. But thereis a second level that is unavoidable: the whole questionof genocide and the Konzentrationslager, the concentrationcamps. You cannot help but think of what happenedduring the Nazi period to the Jews, which seems foreshadowedby the sorts of things that were happening inAfrica. And there seems to me a third level as well: weknow there are Gastarbeiter, Turks and others, inGermany now, and that the country is having a great dealof difficulty in dealing with this. So to my mind, thenovel takes place in 1905, perhaps in 1936 or 1937, andin 1978, and in the year 2000 as well. And all of this ispresent simultaneously. This is not simply a Germanproblem, it’s a human problem, it’s about history andhow we treat others. In post-colonial literature, there isan interest in the historical relationship between a dominantpower and a people that has very little power. Andthis is what comes out so strongly in this novel. Thebook appears shortly after the war in Iraq and isreviewed as a novel about a dominant power that attacksa small defenseless nation, one that can’t possibly hopeto stand up against it.RS: I would like to have Uwe follow up on a questionthat Breon mentioned earlier. This is a revised version ofthe original novel. What prompted you to either rewritecertain passages or add certain passages? How was thenovel modified and why?UT: Not in any major way, but there were revisions, Ialtered a few things when I read through the novel again.The book was, after all, written over 25 years ago, andthere aren’t many books that are still being sold, read,and discussed after 25 years. I took the opportunity of anew edition with DTV to go through it again, and I thinkin two places I struck out passages that just seemed toolong. For example the report to the Prussian Academy ofSciences by Dr. Leonhard Brunkhorst. I based this on anactual document, but one that, given the academic styleof the time, was simply too long-winded. I found thisdocument interesting because the author was consideringvarious methods of rendering colonialism more modernand efficient. What was the modern form of colonialism,the present-day form if you will, how could it be mademore efficient. He objected to the tradition of flogging,to shooting people. He praised English colonial politics,which did in fact differ greatly from that of the Germans,the English were far less involved than the Germans,who thought they had to establish order by flogging andthe like. Well, that was one of the places where I found Icould cut passages without losing what I wanted to convey.As we grow older, we develop a different sense oftime, and I find that in general I have less patience. Ican’t say exactly, but I think I struck out some pages.Other than that I made only minor revisions. I can’t thinkof anywhere else that I rewrote longer passages. So theywere minor revisions, where I thought, oh, my god, thepast perfect, that bothers me now in this passage, I’ll justtake it out.BM: When the publishers at New Directions got mymanuscript, they saw that there were parts of it thatseemed to be official military reports and diary entriesand so forth and they were having difficulty as they readdistinguishing what was what. So they said, we want tosee the German, the designer wants to see the Germantext, and I sent them the German edition to look at. Well,it goes pretty much straight through, with breaks ofcourse, but with a single type size. The New Directionsdesigner decided to put some of the collage-like materialinto smaller type, thinking it would be easier to read. Iwonder whether you thought this was a good idea, Uwe.UT: I think it’s really a very good idea. I must say thatthe English edition is much better than the German one.That’s because of the typography. I think it’s very welldone, it’s an excellent solution, and if there’s a newGerman edition I would try to get them to do the samething. The text of Morenga is easier to read in the6 Translation Review

English version than it is in the German. The book isn’teasy for German readers either. It’s a relatively difficultbook to read. The second thing I would take over fromthe immense amount of work that Breon did is to leavethe text of Morenga’s diary in the original English. Ithink it’s important for the American reader of theEnglish version that I never tried to imagine in Germanhow a Nama or an Englishman would speak German. ANama appears, he speaks Nama of course, as you wouldimagine, and all at once I might be writing about it andhe’s speaking German. It just wouldn’t work. Or anEnglishman might appear who is suddenly speakingGerman, and the reader would surely think, come on, heshould actually be speaking English. The only way tohandle it is by indirect speech, by reporting that he saidsuch and such. But you musn’t write that an Englishman,Major Eliot, comes in and says “Wie geht es Ihnen?”That makes no sense at all. However, it’s often done inhistorical novels, in otherwise good novels, without eventhinking. It’s a way of dominating others, a double dominationin which you simply make people suddenly speakGerman.BM: One more thing about Morenga’s diary. What I findso wonderful about discovering the original text inEnglish is that it allowed a text to appear that wasauthentic and perfect and strong and powerful. As atranslator, I would never have dared to translate it intoEnglish like that. It would have been too hard for me toput myself inside Morenga and imagine how would hehave spoken. Uwe also avoids speaking from insideMorenga. In the diary you have to, and the translatorfaces the same problem: how to do it. We solved thatproblem because we have Morenga’s English — the perfect“translation.”The interview was conducted in both German andEnglish. The German comments by Uwe Timm weretranslated by Breon Mitchell.Breon Mitchell has received several national awards forliterary translation, including the ATA German LiteraryPrize, the ALTA Translation Prize, and the TheodoreChristian Hoepfner Award. In addition to Uwe Timm'sMorenga, his recent translations include a new version ofThe Trial by Franz Kafka, The Silent Angel by HeinrichBöll, and the collected short stories of Siegfried Lenz.Breon Mitchell is Professor of Germanic Studies andComparative Literature and Director of The Lilly Libraryat Indiana University, a repository of rare books andmanuscripts from all ages. He is also a past-president ofALTA.Uwe Timm’s novel Morenga was published in Germanby Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1985 and in English in2003 by New Directions. Timm has established himselfas one of the most important contemporary German novelists.The Invention of Curried Sausage (DieEntdeckung der Currywurst), translated by LeilaVennewitz and published in English by New Directionsin 1995, was a bestseller in Germany. Other novels byUwe Timm published in English include The Headhunter(Kopfjäger), Midsummer Night (Johannisnacht), andThe Snake Tree (Der Schlangenbaum). His most recentnovel, Am Beispiel meines Bruders, appeared inGermany in 2003.UT: That’s what’s so wonderful, books are living organismsafter all, texts are living organisms. As long as youwork on them they keep changing as you write, and Imake many, many revisions. There are six or seven differentversions that I incorporate, quite varied ones. Aslong as an author is still alive he can still make changes.And the great thing is that this organism lives on in thetranslation, that’s the exact situation, it’s truly a reanimation,a further opportunity for change. There are alwaysnew translations, and this reanimation, that is, the air, thebreath of language entering in, is something miraculous.Biographical Notes for Breon Mitchell and UweTimmTranslation Review 7

NOT GETTING IT RIGHTBy David Ferry[Keynote Address delivered at the ALTA Conferencein Boston, November 2003]The words “keynote” and “address” scare the life outof me, because in accepting the honor of giving oneof those things I might give the impression of pretendingthat I know more than I know or that I have the confidenceto go out on a boat on the open waters of generalization,believing that anything I have to say will somehowfind a right key signature for all the music of allthese learned people. And the word “address” is intimidatingto me because it seems to ask for a tone of voiceI’m not accustomed to. I can’t go out on these treacherouswaters of generalization about the art of translation,and I can’t speak for anybody’s experience other than myown. But I can talk about some of the things that give methe most pleasure when I’m engaged in translating somethingwonderful, and failing to get it right, and I can onlydo that with the help of examples. My subject is pleasure,the pleasure of hearing somebody else’s voice andthe play-acting pleasure of pretending for awhile, all thewhile knowing it’s your own voice, pretending. Selfdeluded,and yet not, you have the illusion, and yet youdon’t, that you’re in on how the wonderful thing happened,and you almost have the sense, until you wake upthe next morning, that you did it, right along with Horaceor Virgil or Sin-leqqi-unnini. But waking up the nextmorning, if it provided the experience of seeing how youfailed, supplied simultaneously — the other side of thesame coin — the pleasure of seeing more vividly thepoem you were trying to translate, of seeing more vividly,and with love and envy, how it was written. So in thissense, seeing how and where you didn’t get it, you are inon it with the writers you’re failing to translate.Sometimes this seeing allowed you to improve the translation,but often it demonstrated thrillingly how therewere things in the target poem that were unreachable.The translation is always in trouble because its fieldof work is always the complex organization of linguisticstructures appropriate to its own language and of minutechoices made within that foreign linguistic context, subjectalso to the limitations of the translator’s talent, thelimitations of his knowledge, the pressures of new (andperhaps to some degree irrelevant) understanding hebrings to bear because of his own biography and educationand because of what one might call his subsequentalityto the work he’s translating, and because of hisown agenda, the special and tendentious impure purposesof his own, maybe because of which he undertook thetranslation in the first place.Dryden says somewhere that a translation is alwayslike a speech from the gallows, confessing its crimes andpresenting the criminal evidence. All I can do, as I say, isto give a few examples of the troubles I’ve gotten intoand the compromises I’ve given in to in order to do thework; and I hope to show how my experience of doingthese has provided me with exhilarating experiences ofreading the originals. I want to keep saying it over andover: vivid experiences of failure to get it right are vividand exhilarating experiences of seeing what the rightthing was that you failed to get right. Translation is notonly an activity of writing; it’s an activity of reading, andthe values of that activity of reading have their ownauthority, sometimes distinct from the final results of theactivity of writing. I hope this resonates with the experienceof other translators of wonderful texts.The first poem I ever translated was Ronsard’sQuand vous serez bien vieille, and it was the experienceof working on this translation that showed me my limitationsand also, thank goodness, showed me that they’renot always all my fault.Quand vous serez bien vielle, au soir à la chandelle,Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,Direz chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant:Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.Lors vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,Qui au bruit do mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os,Pars les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos;Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain;Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.8 Translation Review

When you are very old, at night, by candlelight,Sitting up close to the fire, unwinding or winding thethread,Marvelling you will murmur, telling over the songsof the dead,“Ronsard praised this body, before it became thisfright.”Not one of your companions, dozing over herspinning,But hearing you say these things, in her old woman’sdream,Will be startled half-awake, to bless your famousnameFor the praise it had deserved of my immortalsinging.I will be under the earth, my body nothing at all,Taking its rest at last, under the dark myrtle;There you’ll be by the fire, a hunched-up old womanThat held off my love for a long look in the mirror.Listen to what I say, don’t wait for tomorrow:These flowers in their blossom go quickly out ofseason.I remember with such pleasure the quietly elaborate syntaxof Ronsard’s clauses, broken in on quite suddenly atthe end of the first quatrain, when she is imagined sayingto herself: Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étaisbelle, “Ronsard praised this body, before it became thisfright”; and I remember being proud of that line of thetranslation because of the way it ended with that rhymingword “fright,” with its two meanings, one the recognizablesocial idiom (“I look a fright”), the other looking forwardto the terrifying grave; and I now think, though Istill like it, that my solution to the line violated, to adegree, the tone of du temps que j’étais belle, or, youmight say, melodramatized what she is saying. “Before itbecame this fright” sounds more like the English metaphysicalor Cavalier poets I was then reading in a concentratedway, as a graduate student in the 1950s, andthere’s a smart-ass quality to the solution that’s at oddswith the noble regretfulness of du temps que j’étais belle.This is even more the case with another line that I wasalso proud of: “There you’ll be by the fire, a hunched-upold woman / That held off my love for a long look in themirror.” In fact, I was knocked out, callow self-praiserthat I was, because of the phrase “for a long look in themirror” that I found to express the meaning of votre fierdédain, and now when I reread the translation I see thatonce again, still more noticeably, I was readingRonsard’s poem as if he was an English poet of a somewhatlater period and that I had been reading that Englishpoet in graduate school. The line now seems to me toviolate the ordonnance, the decorum, of Ronsard’s poemand of the great line, stated with elegant abstractness,Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain, “Lookingback with regret at the time of my love and your prouddisdain.” There are so many more possibilities in theanalysis of her character, her situation, her culture, themanners of the social and erotic world of her youth inthat Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain than thesimple vindictively witty accusation attempted by “for along look in the mirror.” The accusation of vanity is inthe Ronsard line, but there’s a nobility in that proud disdainthat isn’t there in that long look in the mirror, thatdiagnosis of her problem as vanity. Still, I had my ownagenda, in this case also a formal one. I already had thesubsequent line, “Listen to what I say, don’t wait fortomorrow,” and I couldn’t find a rhyme that worked, notin “sorrow” or “borrow” or “furrow” or anything else,and the open-ended, vowel-ended “mirror” seemed towork with “tomorrow.” I was looking for and had to finda technical solution for a detail of the English poem, andI use this motive to say from the gallows that “for a longlook in the mirror” wasn’t all my fault.I could go on with the criminal evidence: “I will beunder the earth, my body nothing at all, / Taking its restat last, under the dark myrtle ….” There’s a power in thesudden declarative beginning the sestet of the poem, Jeserais sous la terre, that may be there, to a degree, in “Iwill be under the earth,” so directly rendered, but “mybody nothing at all” doesn’t get what there is in thespooky fantome sans os that so denies je prendrai monrepos. That boneless unanchored wraith-ghost must bereposeless, and indeed is, in a sense, proleptically thereposeless speaker of the poem. In my translation “I willbe under the earth, my body nothing at all, / Taking itsrest at last, under the dark myrtle,” “my body nothing atall, Taking its rest at last” misses this entirely. I shouldsay, though, that I had other fish to fry. I needed a rhymeor off-rhyme for “myrtle,” and “at all” supplied one, and“Taking its rest at last” pleased me because of the internalrhyme or off-rhyme of “rest” and “last.” The translatoris always writing his own poem, with its owndemands and exigencies.There are the wonderful sounds in the Direz chantantmes vers en vous émerveillant that I tried for in thesounds of “Marveling you will murmur, telling over theTranslation Review 9

songs of the dead,” but it’s not the same music, ofcourse, and it’s a thinner music, and the ambiguities inen vous émerveillant and the relation of this inward marveling,marveling at his songs, marveling inside her dozingherself (en vous) at her beautiful once-self and thepraise it had deserved, and the relation of the sounds ofthis to demi-sommeliant and ne saille reveillant in thenext quatrain — let me say them over again:Direz chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant:Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.Lors vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,Qui au bruit do mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle,— the rich sounds of this, create the environment inwhich she is at one with those other old women, her servants,around her, she marveling at the past, within herself,and they brought only half-awake by the noise,bruit, of the name “Ronsard.” And I got none of the comedyof bruit, the noise that woke them up, halfway, andthe way it undercuts, to a degree, though only to adegree, the superb arrogant claims of his louangeimmortelle.My point is two-fold: regret at how much I missed,but the knowledge of how I missed it, how I had to missit, through lesser talent (of course), and through theintrusions into the translation of another mode of poetry,provides me with an intensive and pleasurable reading ofwhat it is that I missed. Translation is, in my opinion, theclosest form of close reading, and the knowledge of itserrors is, so long as one has tried to do one’s best, amongits positive values.When I’m translating a poem like this, or a passagefrom Virgil’s Georgics, say, or a Horatian ode, there aremany things about the experience of doing so that feellike the experience of working on a poem of my own,though there’s the odd and in many ways misleadingsense, in the case of the translation work, that I can seewhat’s happening more clearly than I can see what’s happeningin the uncertain mole work of writing a poem ofmy own, inching forward in the dark, pawing at it andbutting my snout against it. Horace gave me the exampleof the sentiments, the narrative, the figures of speech, theexample of the tones of voice and of the shifting tones ofvoice, in his case the dazzling shifting tones of voice,and of course I didn’t get them right. I didn’t have thetalent to do so, and the exigencies of my language preventedme from using all the resources of his. But I knewwhere I was going and I didn’t have to go fearfully intomy own dark to try to find my way. Which of coursedoesn’t mean that I could successfully follow whereHorace was going, though I could always look ahead andsee him there ahead of me. It means, in fact, that becauseI had his poem there, brilliantly lit by its serial successes,line after line, it made my failures to get it right brilliantlyclear to me as well. And because his poem shone sucha light on its successes, and I could so clearly see whereI had failed, I could always feel disappointed with what Ihad done and exhilarated about what I had at any rate atleast tried to do, and because I could feel that the intenseexperience of reading his poem that the translation taskdemanded gave me some confidence that I could at anyrate show the reader something about the wonderfulthing I had not gotten right. My translation, for whateverit was worth, was the record of my experience of readingthe Horace and of trying to show the reader what was init. The locus of my embarrassment was also the locus ofmy exhilaration.When in Ode iv.13 Horace so cruelly addresses anddescribes Lycia,Lycia, the gods have given me what I asked for;Lycia, Lycia, yes, they have certainly done so:Lycia's getting old, and she wants to beStill beautiful, and still she goes to parties,And she drinks too much, and a little teary, singsA tremulous song that’s meant for the ears of Cupid.But Cupid's eyes are on Chia playing the lyre,For Cupid scorns the old. So tell me, Lycia,What is it you expect? Cupid scorns you.He scorns your graying hair and yellowing teeth.Old crow that watches from a dead oak treeAs wingèd Love flies by to another tree,Neither your purple gowns of silk from CosNor the costly jewels with which they are adornedCan ever bring you back the things that timeHas locked away for good in its well-known box,and then there’s one of those heartbreaking Horatianshifts of register:Where has your beauty gone, where has it gone,Where is your fair complexion, where, alas,The grace with which you walked? Lycia, you,Whose breath was the very breath of love itself,10 Translation Review

Who stole me from myself, oh, Lycia, youWho exulted so when beautiful Cynara died,Leaving your beauty unrivalled, where has it gone,What is there left? When Cynara died youngThe gods gave early death to her as a gift,And, Lycia, they gave all your years to youTo give the young men something for them to laughat,Old crow, old torch burned out, fallen away to ashes,I thought I’d got it, I thought we’d got it, Horace and I,and then the next morning, so to speak, I read once againthe Latin of the quatrain in which the wonderful shift ofregisters occurs, and heardQuo fugit venus, heu, quove color? decensquo motus? Quid habes illius, illius,quae spirabat amores,quae me surpuerat mihi,heard that quo … quove … quo, quid and quae and quae,and the pun, or whatever you call it, on venus, so thatQuo fugit venus means both where has your sexinessgone and where has your once-patroness goddess Venusgone to, abandoning you, just like her son Cupid flyingaway, and when I heard the rhymes on venus, motus,habes, and then the anguished, repeated illius, illius, socruelly and, one might say, tragically impersonal, Quidhabes illius, illius, “What do you have left of her, ofher?” and when I thus heard and saw and thus realizedthe intensity of the Horatian organization of what hesaid, I knew the game was up and how my translationhad gone its own way, partly of course because I’m sofar from being Horace, partly because the Latin linguisticresources were doing things my English linguisticresources couldn’t do or didn’t want to do. I wasn’ttranslating, if translating means bringing it over; I wasfollowing, as best I could, the example of what I wasreading, and of course I was missing quite a lot, missing,strictly speaking, all of it. This is, I think, what Frostmeant in his famously misunderstood “The poetry iswhat is lost in the translation.” The exhilaration of havingtried was still there, and of course the humiliation ofnot having gotten it, but also something else, because theact of translation isn’t only an activity of trying to bringit over, leaving the original for dead; it’s also an act ofreading, the most focused and vivid experience of readingthat there is, and that has its own value. Seeing whatthe translation couldn’t get is an intensely pleasurableexperience of coming to realize what the original did get.And that’s where, for me, the original survives.For another example, there’s this from Virgil’sSecond Georgic, which I translated as follows:Worse than winter’sHarshness and the tyranny of the sunAre the buffalo and the deer when they can getIn at the vines and make themselves free withthem;And sheep and hungry heifers feed on them too.The coldest frost, and the most oppressive heatThat weighs down on a thirsting landscape, don’tDo half as much harm as the beasts with theirvenomous teethAnd the scars of their gnawing on the helplessstems.This is the crime, no other, for which the goatIs sacrificed to Bacchus at all the altars,And old-time stage plays first began on suchOccasions, with, in rural villages,Or down at the crossroads near them, singingcontestsAnd dancing on oiled goatskins in the meadows.And indeed, even today, in country places,With lots of laughing, the peasants put on fearsomeMasks made out of hollowed cork, and chantTheir uncouth verses, and, Bacchus, sing theirjoyfulSongs to you, and on the pine-tree branchesHang little amulet faces that sway in the breeze,And so the vines grow ripe and lavishlyBring forth their fruit, and every vale and gladeIs full to overflowing, everywhereTo which the pleased god turns his beautifulface.So, as is right for us to do, we’ll singOur rustic songs in honor of the god,And, taking the goat by the horn, we’ll lead himupTo the sacrificial altar, and afterwards roastThe rich goat meat on spits of hazelwood.Here, in this lavishly anxiously joyful propitiation ofgods and weather and chance that can turn against youanytime at all, it’s knowing that you can’t possibly dowhat one word, oscilla, can do. When you see the lineTranslation Review 11

oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu, that I translated as“and on the pine-tree branches / Hang little amulet facesthat sway in the breeze,” I couldn’t get what’s in the singleword oscilla, “a little face,” for the Latin word isbased on the word from which we get “oscillate,” oscillum,“something that turns,” as if of its own accord, andtherefore I couldn’t get the full force of the relationbetween this line and, a little later, complentur vallesquecavae saltusque profundi / et quocumque deus circumcaput egit honestum, “and every vale and glade / Is fullto overflowing, everywhere / To which the pleased godturns his beautiful face.” This god whose amulet is hangingon the swaying branches of the pine tree may or maynot turn his pleased beneficent face toward you, andwhether he does or not is a matter for the breeze, but notonly for the breeze but because of his very nature, builtinto and expressed by the name of his mask, oscilla. Icould not get, not in a million years, the whole effect thatthe relation between these two lines establishes, and thatorganizes our whole experience of the great passageabout the uncertainties of the farmers’ situation, and allour situations, that are the cause of our propitiations andthe reason we have to make them look so much like joy.The anxiety is everywhere in the passage, to be sure, butit’s that word, oscilla, the self-shifting face of a god, inits relation to that other word quocumque, “wherever,whithersoever,” that I couldn’t possibly fully get.Sometimes, of course, the failures that a thrilledreading of the original provide one with the knowledgeof, are inevitable consequences not just of differences intalent, or time, or the resources that come, rightly orwrongly, from one’s other reading, but of what the syntaxof another language can do. I’ve used this examplebefore, in another recent talk, and in print, but it’s aninstructive one, I think, the 18th Ode of Book III ofHorace’s Odes, “To Faunus,” that, as a matter of fact, hasin mind this very passage from the Georgics:O Faunus, when, pursuing a nymph in flight,You come to the edge of the sunny fields of my farm,Be gentle as you pass across those fieldsAnd in your passing by propitious beTo the nurslings of my flock, I pray, for whenThe fullness of the year comes round againWe celebrate your day and on that dayA tender kid is offered up to youAnd in the mixing-bowl there’s plenty of wine,That’s love’s companion, and the incense smokePours out with many odors from the altar,And all the flocks and herds can play in the fields,And all the people, too, in holiday dress,Keep holiday among the idle creatures,Because it is your day; among the lambs,Who have no fear of him there is the wolf,On holiday too, taking a friendly walkIn honor of you; and in your honor, too,The trees have scattered their leaves upon the ground,And he whose daily toil it is to dig,Dances today, stamping his holiday feetIn triple rhythm on the enemy earth.There’s the final quatrain of the Latin,inter audacis lupus errat agnos;spargit agrestus tibi silva frondes;gaudet invisam pepulisse fossorter pede terram,the first line of it: inter audacis lupus errat agnos. I triedto get in some sense of how sinister it is by that gangster“taking a friendly walk.” But there’s really no way forEnglish syntax to do what the Latin does. That holidaywolf lupus, right in the middle of those for-the-momentaudaciouslambs, is exactly halfway along in his wanderingamong them, too close for comfort, the grammar ofthe line proleptically dismembering the lambs, comingbetween their adjective, audacis, and their noun, agnos,between their audacity and their bodies; the wolf is wanderingin there, he’s good at that, harmless today, thisholiday day, but watch out tomorrow, this is the way hehunts. And there are the last two lines of the final quatrain:gaudet invisam pepulisse fossor / ter pede terram:gaudet, “rejoices,” next to invisam, “the hated.” There’ssomething frantic in the joyful holiday dancing ofpepulisse, “striking, beating,” (it can also mean “drivingaway, rejecting”). The object of that adjective, “invisam,”hated, which is right in there, in the holiday line, and theadjective turns out to be attached to the earth the digger,fossor, has to dig in, on all those other days, but in theLatin the object is held off while all that joyfulness and12 Translation Review

frantic dancing is going on. Terram springs its surprise asthe last word of the poem. I think I did spring some ofthat surprise by holding off “enemy,” or, as I might havesaid it, “hated,” until the penultimate word, but I lostsome of the force of its adjective, invisam, as Horaceintroduces it in the preceding line, in there like the wolfin the context of that rejoicing and that dancing, makingus wait for its attachment to its noun. I had to spring thesurprise more bluntly, less insidiously, by coupling adjectiveand noun, “enemy earth,” as the last two words, sosome of that complex activity of the last two lines wasirretrievably lost. Here again, I don’t see how I couldhave done it differently, because English syntax can’t dosome of the things Latin syntax can do. I couldn’t get itright, but my point is that this failure isn’t simply anexperience of disappointment, it’s also an experience ofvivid close reading. The work of the translator (I’m sureyou feel that too, as fellow-translators), when dealingwith a wonderful text, is the most intense and vivid kindof reading that there is, and there’s joy in this that thenecessary failure makes even more vivid. Of course thiscompensatory joy in the reading occurs only when youcan feel that you’ve after all done your best and broughtyour translation to the point of its inevitable helplessness.I’m no good at big generalizations, so I can onlyhave tried to show by several examples this experienceof thrilled readings, of the attempt by translation to showsome qual the many things it misses.100 books: $5 eachQ: What is the aesthetic of Dalkey Archive Press? Avant-garde? Experimental? Innovative?A: The “aesthetic” of the Press has been identified with all of those adjectives, but I have never agreed with any of them.There is certainlyanSpecialaesthetic on whichSale:bothSelectthe Review andanythe Press100areBooksbased, but I may not be in the best position to say what it is because for me thereis no set agenda. I respond to the writers and books I like, rather than trying to fit both of these into a formula. There are many so-calledexperimental works I don’t like, ones that basically go through the motions, ones that almost defy a reader to find anything engaging infrom the Dalkey Archive catalog for $5 eachthem.Several years ago someone in an interview tried to get from me a one-word description for the kinds of books we publish, and she suggestedthe words that you have. I finally said that the correct word was “subversive,” which is still the word I would use, though I know it’srather useless in terms of trying to pigeonhole what it is we publish. My point was that the books, in some way or another, upset the applecart, STEIN that they - MATHEWS work against - what SHKLOVSKY is expected, - that HIGGINS they in - some CELA way - challenge DUCORNET received - GASS notions, - ELKIN whether - those GREEN are literary, - LOEWINSOHNsocial or political.And this is precisely the kind of fiction that I find interesting: it does things I haven’t seen before, or it requires me to be figuring outhow WOOLF in the hell - CÉLINE the writer - is QUIN doing what - MOSLEY he or she - is CREELEY doing. This - is BARNES of course - quite O’BRIEN removed - BARTH from the - idea REED of being - ROUBAUD a passive reader, - YOUNG that youare in the backseat of the car and the writer is taking you on a tour.COOVER - WHITE - SORRENTINO - HUXLEY - DAITCH - MOTTE - MARKSONfor more information and details aboutfree shipping or additional free books, visit:www.dalkeyarchive.comDalkey Archive PressTranslation Review 13

FROM DEAN TO DEANTREPRENEUR: THE ACADEMICADMINISTRATOR AS TRANSLATORBy Abby R. Kratz and Dennis M. KratzThe academic title dean derives ultimately from theLatin word decanus, which refers to someone incharge of a group of ten. It was most commonly aRoman military term for the leader of a squad of ten soldiers.Caught in the crossfire of the changes sweepingthrough higher education, many current deans may findthe military origin of their title uncomfortably appropriate.It is all too tempting to apply metaphors of war to allacademic administrators, to think of them as the leadersof mercenary soldiers engaged in a noble crusade againstignorance or, less romantically, as under-equipped leadersof learned but unruly soldiers. Many colleges arestruggling to establish their niches or “beachheads,” arecompeting for increasingly scarce resources, and are discoveringthat they need to form strategic alliances to survive.Without question, the position of dean standsdirectly in multiple lines of fire.The challenges facing academic deans and thechanging nature of the position have spawned a significantcorpus of criticism and commentary, with suchinstructive and intriguing recent titles as The Dilemma ofthe Deanship, “The Academic Dean: An ImperiledSpecies Searching for Balance,” and The ChangingNature of the Academic Deanship. This essay addressesthe role of the dean in an environment of change. Wewill view that role through the lens of our experience asadministrators in a rapidly growing component of a largeuniversity system first in light of a conceptual framedeveloped by Rosabeth Moss Kanter with regard to corporatemanagement in what she calls our “post-entrepreneurial”age. Second, we will posit the emergence of anew model of the deanship, the deantrepreneur, and suggestthe implications of this model for the recruitmentand preparation of the next generation of academic leaders.Third, we will argue that these changes make translationuniquely relevant to the practice of administrationand, by extension, the education of administrators.At first glance, linking academic administration andtranslation may seem fanciful, if not perverse. After all,translators have expressed the belief that they suffer alack of respect in many academic settings. Nonetheless,recent developments in the nature of administration andin the theory of academic leadership, coupled with theemergence of translation as a model for understanding awide range of cross-cultural communication, suggest thatadministrators are in fact “translating” much of the time.Therefore, practical acquaintance with the process oftranslation could make them better communicators andmore effective leaders.As apt as battle metaphor may be for the life of thecontemporary dean, it is even more apt to apply to thisenterprise imagery drawn from play and game theory,especially as developed by Johan Huizinga and his successors.Game imagery has been applied productively tonumerous areas of endeavor. In her influential bookWhen Giants Learn to Dance, Kanter made use of thesame metaphor when she urged corporate executives tothink of themselves as engaged not in war but in aworldwide fiscal Olympics. To be sure, academic administratorsoften think of themselves as engaged in gamesof a particularly challenging variety, games more likecartoonist Bill Watterson’s “Calvinball,” with its endlessimprovised variation, addition, and subtraction of rules,than pastimes like baseball or basketball. In a comparisonthat works equally well for education, Kanter likensthe “game” of business to the croquet match in Alice inWonderland, in which everything, including Alice’s mallet(a flamingo), and the ball (a hedgehog with a mind ofits own), keeps changing and shifting. The game of highereducation in Texas, where we work, includes such newand elusive challenges as the pressures of externallyimposed accountability, fiscal constraints allied with anidiosyncratic formula funding system, shifting demographics,diversity initiatives that are often linked withretention goals, and, of course, the far-reaching thrusts oftechnological advancement.Indeed, Kanter’s research on new approaches tomanagement and the images she uses to relate her findingsseem particularly applicable to higher education.Contemporary education at all levels is often likened to abusiness. Many changes, for better and worse, in currentpractice have resulted from the application, not excludingthe misapplication, of business principles.The parallels between universities and businesses intoday’s environment of global economy, diversity, andrapid technological change are striking. Kanter’s analysisof the situation of business at the start of the last decadeas operating in a highly competitive global environment14 Translation Review

in which traditional hierarchies and assumptions arebeing continually challenged effectively describes the situationof higher education now. As she noted about businessthen, we in education are in the midst of an excitingand dangerous era that is a “good time for dreamers andvisionaries” only if they are also “disciplined, frugalpragmatists” (Giants, 17-18). In Kanter’s prescientwords, “the future will belong to those who embrace thepotential of wider opportunities but recognize the realitiesof constrained resources” (Giants, 18).Another condition links business and education.Scholars in both worlds have been decrying the deleteriouseffects of fragmentation and extolling the value ofsystemic solutions and integrated approaches that promoteagility, flexibility, and responsiveness. Peter Sengedescribed the 1990s as the decade of “systems integration.”Writing of creativity in education, psychologistsRobert and Michele Root-Bernstein state that “there is nopoint in teaching a liberal arts and sciences curriculumthat continues to fragment knowledge and creates specialistswho cannot communicate across disciplinarylines. Education must focus on the trunk of the tree ofknowledge, revealing the ways in which the branches,twigs, and leaves all emerge from a common core” (317).Kanter, who emphasizes the importance of adaptablestructures in an era of rapid change, identified the followingfour characteristics of management that are outmodedand unsuited for the game now being played:elaborate hierarchies, slow decision-making processes,in-house rivalries, and risk-averse behavior (Giants, 344).We wonder how many of these four outmoded qualitiesstill characterize the world of public and higher education.Underlying all four of her undesirable qualities isthe assumption that slowness is a liability today, whenswift response to rapidly changing conditions is often arequisite for survival.Kanter and others have argued persuasively that thenew global environment requires not only new structuresthat foster innovation and adaptability but also a newkind of leadership. Writing more than a decade ago,Kanter based her proposal on the belief that business hadentered a new age characterized by global interaction, aninformation-based economy, cultural diversity, and rapidtechnological change. She described this era as “postentrepreneurial”because it requires incorporating entrepreneurship,previously associated with individuals actingindependently to create their own companies, into thelife of the organization. The key characteristic of theentrepreneurial mind is generally considered to be theability to recognize and seize opportunities and then convertthese opportunities to marketable ideas. Kanter suggestedthat businesses need to nurture such people andsuch thinking within their ranks. We need, she declared,the “intrapreneur,” or individual whose entrepreneurialactions take place within and for the company andreceive organizational sanction, resources, and rewards(see Kuratko, 96). Companies, she argued, had to find away to create a marriage between entrepreneurial creativityand corporate discipline, cooperation, and teamwork(Giants, 10-11). We suggest that higher education alsohas joined that era and is bound by its mandates for organizationalchange. Kanter’s analysis proved correct forthe world of commerce. It is time for universities to provideleadership and adopt new structures more suited tothe demands of the post-entrepreneurial world.Deans have begun to play an increasingly complexand pervasive role in this new environment. If we are tofoster intrapreneurship — the process of creating valuableinnovation within an organizational setting — thedean, as the primary liaison between the faculty andeveryone else, is a vital link. This new kind of dean, thedeantrepreneur, is the intrapreneur who understands theintricacies of the university and the world of education.The deantrepreneur knows how to involve faculty indeveloping appropriate and positive responses to the educationalchallenges facing colleges and universitiestoday. The deantrepreneur is a visionary who can raisefunds, realizing that vision without funding is hallucination.We suggest that in many universities, he and shealready exist. Indeed, a review of the history of the deanshipreveals an inexorable evolution of the role fromdean to deantrepreneur.The academic dean, the head of a discipline-specificcollege within a university, has a long and inconsistenthistory. It is a role that has never been standardized andis still evolving. Until the 1930s, the deanship tended tofocus on student concerns. By the mid-1940s, however,the emphasis had shifted from direct supervision of studentsto concern specifically with curricula, faculty, andbudgets. The addition of responsibility for budgets, alongwith increasing responsibility for hiring and promotingfaculty, raised the status of academic deans and signaledtheir evolution into a role more like that of business leaders.This business orientation continued to grow duringthe following decades. To the deans’ other considerableduties were added quasi-legal obligations related togrievance mediation, contract termination, and studentcomplaints. During the past decade, the deanship hasbecome increasingly managerial in nature, particularly aspresidents began shifting such external duties as alumniTranslation Review 15

elations and fundraising in part to the academic deans.Deans are now expected, in the words of a recent study,to take on administrative identities commonly associatedwith corporate business managers. These include “figurehead,leader, liaison, monitor, disseminator, spokesperson,entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator,and negotiator ” (Wolverton, 7-8).The lists of duties assigned to deans by universityhandbooks and the criteria by which they are evaluatedreflect the growing complexity of the position.Advertisements for academic deans today reveal andreflect this evolution. The position now inevitablyrequires a capacity that has been described as “the maintenanceof balance between the various external andinternal demands” on universities (Wolverton, 7). Thechanged nature of the deanship has even reached thepress. Consider the lead paragraph of an article thatappeared in the Cavalier Daily from the University ofVirginia on April 8, 1997: “University officials searchingfor two new important dean positions are beginning torealize the perfect recipe for a successful dean: a blendof academic background, mixed with leadership abilitiesand an essential dash of salesmanship ” (italics ours). Ofcourse, deans have always had to sell. They represent theagenda of the university to their faculty and persuade theuniversity to provide requisite resources for the researchand instruction needs of their College. Today’s deans,however, increasingly have to take on a new kind of selling— the activities of fund-raising and friend-raisingpreviously reserved for presidents and developmentoffices. This combination of friend- and fund-raising hasbecome an essential component of deaning. As the LawSchool Dean at Virginia succinctly declared in the samearticle: “There’s a big difference today versus twentyyears ago º [The dean’s role] now encompasses not onlyfund raising but [also] keeping faculty and students competitiveand being accountable to the public.” Observingthat the dean’s job often rides on his or her fund-raisingrecord, Ralph Lowenstein, dean emeritus of the Collegeof Journalism and Communications at the University ofFlorida, has stated, “deans are really graded on theirfund-raising ability. That wasn’t as true 18 years agowhen I became a dean. But today, fund raising is anabsolute necessity” (quoted in Mercer, 1).In sum, the new obligations of fund-raising, friendraising,and serving as a public ambassador have notmerely added components to the already full plate of thedean, they have transformed the position. In the new academicworld, the dean stands surrounded and buffeted bychanges, often changes mandated in response to the pressurescited earlier. The dean works to meet the challengesto institutional and curricular traditions with facultymembers who may not be overly fond of change.We posit a new model of the deanship: the deantrepreneur,who can function in the university much as theideal manager described by Kanter operates in the corporateworld. Kanter’s approach to success in the “globalOlympics” involves three essential strategies: (1) reshapethe organization to promote synergies; (2) createalliances within the organization and with external organizations;and (3) foster the development of “newstreams,”the new ideas and products that complementand extend the mainstream of the past (Giants, 344).The implementation of these strategies requires botheffective leadership and structural reorganization. Thefour characteristics of outmoded management that werecited earlier will hinder progress and could even cost victory.They must be replaced by the following integratedfabric of organizational characteristics: streamlined hierarchies,expeditious decision-making, and a collegialatmosphere that supports reasoned risk-taking (Giants,344-351). The deantrepreneur must acquire the skills andreceive training akin to that of his or her corporate counterpartto help bring about this environment in academicinstitutions.What are the skills needed to serve effectively as adean in the post-entrepreneurial academic world of the21st century? We would argue that the position of deanhas evolved, and the deanship now requires individualsadept at results-oriented communication with faculty,with potential supporters, and with the greater community.The dean must become a deantrepreneur and in thatrole must increasingly engage in activities related totranslation.We observe that academic administrators engage inactivity that can best be described as cross-cultural communicationa good deal of the time and that they canimprove their effectiveness when they engage in theseinteractions in the spirit of translation. Clearly, the deannow must communicate with a greater array of constituenciesthan ever before. Once relatively secure, or atleast insecure within generally familiar surroundings, thedean’s professional communication occurred primarilywith other academics: the president and provost on oneside, the faculty and students on the other. Now, deansfind themselves explaining academic policies to membersof the community and the business world who oftenare uneasy with intellectual, scientific, and artistic developmentsthat seem to threaten “traditional” Americanvalues. Frequently, they must seek funding from these16 Translation Review

same sectors. In sum, deans must find a language tobridge the gap, and occasionally the chasm, betweenacademe and the world at large.We take our inspiration to make the connectionbetween these acts of communication and the process oftranslation from George Steiner’s seminal work AfterBabel, in which the author makes the compelling pointthat all communication that must transcend boundaries oftime, place, and cultural assumption involves translation(28). If we think of the dean’s external constituents asculturally diverse nations, then we see that she or hemust translate not only the specialized language of anacademic discipline but also the attitudes of the scholaror artist.Even internal communication involves translation.As Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal have shown, individualsin any organization bring different “frames” of understandingto any discussion. Bolman and Deal identifyfour major frames of reference, which they characterizeas the structural, human resources, political, and symbolicframes. Although we find these categories enormouslyvaluable in providing insight into organizational behavior,at the level of communication we also are struck bythe realization that any question can be viewed throughdifferent frames and that any statement can provoke awide range of interpretations and responses. In thisregard, a policy question does not allow a definitiveanswer any more than a complex literary text allows adefinitive translation. Within each of the frames, therecan be responses that tend toward “literal” and those thattend toward “literary” readings.Moreover, American universities, like many sectorsof contemporary American society, are experiencing atime of constant, unsettling change. What to teach, whomto teach, how to teach, how to measure success: all arethe subject of an intense, necessary, and often contentiousdebate. Leadership in such a time of changeplaces additional demands on the dean. There is nolonger a position of neutrality: one is either promoting orresisting directions of change. In either role, the deanwill face opposition, and his or her ability to respondproductively to such opposition will influence themomentum of change as well as the outcome of eachspecific encounter.“Opposition response” has attracted much attentionin the literature of leadership. Michael Fullan, for example,argues that educational initiatives often “misfirebecause we fail to learn from those who disagree withus” (159). In turbulent times, he continues, “the key taskof leadership is not to arrive at early consensus, but tocreate opportunities for learning from dissonance” (159).One way to view the shifting membership of “the opposition”is to regard opposing groups as the equivalents offoreign nations, usually allies but currently engaged in apolicy difference. Convincing them requires more thanarguments that appeal to the dean. Convincing the“other” requires an understanding of both their positionsand the underlying attitudes they reflect. In BeyondMachiavelli: Tools for Coping With Conflict, RobertFisher emphasizes that “to be persuasive, we need tounderstand how others see the world, their motivations,emotions and aspirations” (21). The power to function asa leader, in Fisher’s words, “depends on our ability to putourselves in other people’s shoes and to see the worldfrom their point of view” (21). Fisher’s position is essentiallythat expressed by Bolman and Deal, who assert thatconfusion and conflict are the predictable results of anydiscussion that includes differing frames that are neitherrecognized nor reconciled. The leader who clings to oneperspective, disregarding or disrespecting the others, isless likely to bring about the cohesion necessary to promotepositive action.Taken together, all these developments have madecommunication skills across barriers essential to effectiveacademic administration. The deantrepreneur mustbuild coalitions within and beyond the confines of theacademic unit and, therefore, must be able to communicatethrough a wide range of “frames” of understanding.Deans must translate visions into programs and thenexpress them in language that convinces faculty, otheradministrators, and outside constituencies. These outsideconstituencies may include high-ranking business leadersand legislators.Other aspects of decanal responsibility can be profitablyviewed through the lens of translation. The curriculum,for example, represents an attempt to translatethe ideal educational mission of the institution into aninterrelated sequence of courses. Between the ideal andthe curriculum lie challenges analogous to those faced bythe literary translator. The translator must deal with thelimitations imposed by the language into which she or heis making the translation; the dean must take intoaccount the restrictions imposed by the nature of the particularuniversity, its traditions, mission, and faculty. Thetruism that there can be no definitively correct translationapplies equally to curricula. A faculty must make choicesof emphasis, each of which precludes other possibleemphases.The training of deans and other academic administratorsshould take into consideration the new context ofTranslation Review 17

academic leadership in the post-entrepreneurial world.Given the reality that deans and other administrators willconstantly engage in cross-cultural communication ofvarious kinds, we argue for the development of trainingprograms designed to nurture such skills. The practice ofliterary translation provides an obvious model for suchtraining, because translators have long recognized that“seeing the world from their author’s perspective” isessential to their art and craft.Since translation is based on the fusion of theorywith practice, its value as a model for the modern dean issuspect without specific examples of how to translate theinsight into action. We envision translation-based workshopsdesigned to help deans hone their interpretiveskills and gain the ability to listen to the “others” amongtheir faculties and other constituents within and outsidethe university . Numerous exercises associated withTranslation Workshops can be adapted to this task. Toillustrate the concept that communication across culturalor temporal gaps, even within the same apparent language,requires translation, participants in an “administrationas translation” workshop might be asked to translateEnglish texts from previous centuries into contemporarylanguage. In part, this exercise would be designed toshow how the changing language reflects changingframes through which issues are viewed. It is one thingto believe that one understands an issue from variousframes, quite another to create arguments for and againsta specific proposal from these perspectives.Such exercises will also improve the ability of participantsto improve their ability to “hear” opposing voices.Building on such exercises designed to demonstrate thevalue of regarding communication as translation, we thencan engage participants in translating academic ideas orprograms into language that expresses concepts understandableto various external constituents. Finally, wewould join with the participants to recall instances fromwhich case studies might be designed to illustrate the difficultiesthat can arise when participants in a discussionfail to recognize how radically different perspectivesinfluence communication.These are merely initial suggestions. The developmentand implementation of such workshops wouldserve, as befits translation, multiple purposes. It couldimprove the communication skills of administrators, thusimproving higher education. It could also, by demonstratingto deans and others the importance of translation,gain more support for translators, translation-basedcourses, and research in the application of translation toother academic fields. Instead of waging war to protectturf, administrators could devote more energy to buildingbridges that promote the transfer of ideas across barriersof language, culture, and frames of reference.Works CitedBolman, Lee G. and Deal, Terrence E. ReframingOrganizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership. 2nd ed.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997.Fisher, Roger, Kopelman, Elizabeth, and Schneider,Andrea Kupfer. Beyond Machiavelli: Tools for Copingwith Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1994.Fullan, Michael. “Leadership for the Twenty-FirstCentury: Breaking the Bonds of Dependency.” TheJosey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership. SanFrancisco: Josey-Bass, 2000. 156-163.Gmelch, Walter H, Wolverton, Mimi, Wolverton, MarvinL, and Sarros, James C. “The Academic Dean: AnImperiled Species Searching for Balance.” Research inHigher Education; 40, December 1999: 717-40.Griffiths, Daniel E. and McCarty, Donald J. TheDilemma of the Deanship. Danville, IL: InterstatePrinters & Publishers, 1980.Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: a Study of the Playelementin Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950.Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. The Change Masters:Innovations for Productivity in the AmericanCorporation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. When Giants Learn to Dance:Mastering the Challenge of Strategy, Management, andCareers in the 1990’s. New York: Simon and Schuster,1989.Kuratko, Donald F. and Hodgetts, Richard M.Entrepreneurship: a Contemporary Approach. 2nd ed.Fort Worth: Dryden Press, 1992.Mercer, Joye. “Fund Raising Has Become a JobRequirement for Many Deans.” Chronicle of HigherEducation, July 18, 1997. October 15, 2002.18 Translation Review

Root-Bernstein, Robert and Root-Bernstein, Michele.Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of theWorld’s Most Creative People. Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1999.Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practiceof the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday,c1990.Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language andTranslation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.Wolverton, Mimi. The Changing Nature of the AcademicDeanship. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.COMING SOON—Literary AmazoniaModern Writing by Amazonian AuthorsEdited by Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz“Literary Amazonia is unusual in its enlighteneddeparture from a geopolitical organizationof literary production. The quality ofthe works and their exceptional translationsare fitting tributes to a bold new view of animportant facet of Latin American literature,by and large unfamiliar to most readers.”—Leland Guyer, Macalester College, St. PaulThis remarkable selection of 20th-centuryAmazonian literature presents writing fromthe indigenous and mestizo people of theAmazon basin, recovering their forgottenvoices for the Latin American literarycanon. Most of these pieces—from 24 representativepoets and 12 prose writers—arecollected and translated into English herefor the first time.Amazonia typically has been regardedas a jungle environment—a source of folktales and the concern of anthropologists.This pioneering collection illustrates theextraordinary multiculturalism of the regionand its evolving contemporary culture.While turning notions of national literaturesupside down, the book will contribute to theconstruction of a new Amazonian identityand will position the region’s creative writingfirmly inside mainstream Latin Americanliterary history. What’s more, it evokesthe astonishing and marvelous beauty ofone of the world’s most important rivercultures.MAY. Cloth $39.95Order through full-service booksellers,our website at www.upf.com, or withVISA, American Express, or M/C tollfree: 1-800-226-3822UNIVERSITY PRESS OFGainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton,Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, Fort MyersTranslation Review 19

his ideas.” Schweder’s closing comment is one we’llhave to come back to, for it recalls Poggi’s comment inraising the crucial issue for Geertz’s translators: is it bestfor the translator, like the reviewer, to ignore Geertz’sstyle in the interest of “getting on” with his ideas?As a way of focusing my discussion of Geertz’s styleand its translation into Italian, I will focus on chapterfour of Available Light, entitled “The Uses of Diversity.”First presented in 1995 as a lecture at the University ofMichigan, the essay is a critique of two contemporaryspokesmen for ethnocentrism, Geertz’s fellow anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss and the American philosopherRichard Rorty. While acknowledging the differences inrhetorical style and intellectual stance of his two antagonists,Geertz argues that both are animated by a reactionto cultural relativism and by a shared view of culturaldiversity that sees its main importance as offering alternativesto ourselves rather than for ourselves. Levi-Strauss and Rorty, in Geertz’s view, seem to believe, ashe does, that feeling, thought, and judgment are groundedin a particular form of life (culture), but they carrythat notion to the extreme and mistaken conclusion thatcultures and the values that spring from them are somehowfixed and incommunicable. Such a notion, Geertzclaims, is based on a fundamental misinterpretation ofthe master, Wittgenstein: “The grounding of feeling,thought, and judgment in a form of life … is taken tomean that the limits of my world are the limits of mylanguage, which is not exactly what the man said. Whathe said, of course, was that the limits of my language arethe limits of my world,” which means that the more weare able to expand our language, to increase the “rangeof signs we can manage somehow to interpret,” the betterwe will understand not only others’ ways of life but ourown, and, in turn, the more able we will be to change ourway of life should we choose to do so.Perhaps the best way to get a flavor of Geertz’s styleand of the challenges it contains for translators is toexamine what I take to be a typical paragraph from the“Diversity” article. The paragraph follows Geertz’s initialpresentation and analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s thesis andserves as a segue into his discussion of Rorty and theclaim that both of them are representative of an intellectualclimate grown hostile to cultural diversity. Our concernhere, of course, is not with the merits of Geertz’sclaims but with the language he uses to make and arguefor them.Whatever one thinks of all this, or however surprisedone is to hear it coming from an anthropologist, itcertainly strikes a contemporary chord. The attractionsof “deafness to the appeal of other values” and of arelax-and-enjoy it approach to one’s imprisonment inone’s own cultural tradition are increasingly celebrated inrecent social thought. Unable to embrace either relativismor absolutism — the first because it disablesjudgement, the second because it removes it from history— our philosophers, historians, and social scientiststurn toward the sort of we-are-we and they-are-theyimpermeabilité Levi-Strauss recommends. Whether oneregards this as arrogance made easy, prejudice justified,or as the splendid, here-stand-I honesty ofFlannery O’Connor’s “when in Rome do as you donein Millidgeville,” it clearly puts the question of Futureof Ethnocentrism — and of cultural diversity — inrather a new light. Is drawing back, distancing elsewhere,the View from Afar, really the way to escape thedesperate tolerance of UNESCO cosmopolitanism? Is thealternative to moral entropy moral narcissism?Comunque si giudichino tali affermazioni, o perquanto sia sorprendente sentirle proferire da unantropologo, tutto questo tocca certamente un nervoscoperto della comtemporanietá. Nel recente pensierosociale le attrattive della “scordità alrichiamo di altri valori”e di un approccio rilassato e compiacente all’imprigionamentonella propria tradzione culturale sonosempe più celebrate. Incapace di abbracciare o il relativismoo l’assolutismo — il primo perchè non permetteil giudizio, il secodo perch’ lo rimuove dalla storia — inostril filosofi, storici e scienziati sociali si rivolgonoverso il tipo di impermeabilité dell’identità che Levi-Strauss caldamente raccomanda. Sia che lo si considericome segno di facile arroganza, di un pregiudiziogiustificato, di irremovabilità Luterana, la splendidafranchezzaespressa nel motto ‘quando sei a Roma fa’come se fossi a Milledgeville” di Flannery O’Connor,ciò pone chiaramente la questione del futuro dell’etnocentrismo(e della diversità culturale) in una lucealquanto nuova. Ritirarsi, distanziarsi dall’altrove,scegliere “lo sguardo da lontano”, è realmente il modoper sfuggire alla disperata tolleranza del cosmopolitismodell’UNESCO? Il narcisismo morale è davvero l’alternativaall’entropia morale?A preliminary reading of the original paragraphreveals a style that is quite different than one wouldexpect to find in an academic journal. It contains a mixtureof informal and formal tonal registers, frequent useof idiomatic or even idiosyncratic expressions, literaryallusion, and borrowing from the lexicon of high, low,and middle-brow American English. If we go throughone by one the pairs of highlighted phrases in the origi-Translation Review 21

nal and the translation, we get a better idea of the polyphonicnature of this style and of its only partially successfulreconstruction in Italian.The first two pairs show a change of register: therather offhand and dismissive “all this” “coming from”an anthropologist (that is, issuing forth almostautonomously) becomes the more formal and respectful“tali affermazioni” that we hear “proffered” by theirauthor. Then we have an idiomatic expression that getsturned on its head in the translation. Geertz uses “strikesa chord” to indicate that Lévi-Strauss is in harmony withthe current intellectual climate, while “tocca un nervoscoperto” (hit a raw nerve) conjures up images of painand consequent aggressive reaction. We’ve gone fromthe concert hall to the dentist’s office. Later on in theparagraph, there are some other instances of at leastquestionable interpretation and rendering, which, thoughnot of major importance, tend to take the edge off of theoriginal: “disables” judgment becomes “doesn’t allow”rather than “rende incapace” or “sopprime” il giudizioor something similar; the transitive verbal phrase “distancingelsewhere” is changed to the reflexive “distanziarsi”;the verb “scegliere” is introduced before “theView from Afar” which also loses, like “The Future ofEthnocentrism” its initial capital letters, reducing the specificreference to the Lévi-Strauss book title to an indicationof a generic point of view.The translation runs into some major stumblingblocks, however, in trying to handle Geertz’s newlycoined adjectives and his deft manipulation of idiomaticexpressions and allusion as he drives home his critiqueof Lévi-Strauss and shades it with moral overtones. Heaccuses Lévi-Strauss of adopting (and proposing) a“relax-and-enjoy-it” approach, making an adjective outof an imperative borrowed from the lexicon of pop psychology,originally coined to bring emotional comfort tothe already rich and comfortable and assure them thatthey need not feel guilty about their economic and socialprivilege — the nominal forms, roughly speaking,referred to by the pronoun “it.” The accusation is considerablysoftened in the Italian by the use of the more formaland standard phrase, “approccio rilassato e compiacente,”which certainly renders the substance but not thestyle. Much the same thing occurs in the transformationof “we-are-we and they-are-they impermeabilité” into “iltipo di impermeabilité di identità,” though here the translatorwas confronted with the added difficulty of tryingto preserve the humor in Geertz’s heptameter sing-songrhyme of “we are we and they are they” with “impermeabilité.”But one wonders if a bit more of Geertz’s ironyand lightness might have come across with “una speciedi impermeabilité alla ‘noi siamo noi e loro sono loro’,”or something a little more innovative, at any rate, withrespect to the generic “tipo di.”A similar standardization of the idiomatic happenswith the translation of “arrogance made easy” into“segno di facile arroganza.” Here again, the Englishexpression is borrowed from low-brow commercialEnglish, those advertising slogans for cook books orhow-to-do-it manuals that make it easy to perform someostensibly difficult task — a quick Google search, forexample, came up with dozens of site names like“Prophecy Made Easy” and “Medieval DemographicsMade Easy.” Of course, for American readers, Geertz’sinsertion of this kind of language into an academic or atleast serious essay will raise a smile, but there is more toit than entertainment. The choice of arrogance as thething made easy and the instrumental meaning of thephrase itself sharpens Geertz’s attack by giving it a moraledge: the implication is that “The View From Afar” presentsa thesis elaborated in the service of cultural arrogance;not so much a “sign” of “easy arrogance” but aninstrument for justifying it.Finally, we come to the literary allusion to theAmerican novelist, Flannery O’Connor. Here, the translatordoes well to catch the double allusion to MartinLuther in Geertz’s characterization of O’Connor’s quip— her “irremovabilità luterana,” but Geertz adds at leastone more twist to the allusion by maintaining andexpanding on O’Connor’s deliberate grammatical distortion:“do as you done” is a parody of the ungrammaticaldialect spoken in O’Connor’s hometown of Millidgeville,in southeastern Georgia; her own special version of theproverb, “When in Rome do as the Romans do.” Geertzadds his own twist to O’Connor’s by referring to its“here-stand-I” honesty, reversing the syntax of theEnglish version of Luther’s “Here I stand, I can do noother” speech at the Diet of Worms. The Italian textmakes explicit Geertz’s implicit reference to Luther andrenders O’Connor’s quip in grammatically correct Italian(in the subjunctive no less). The association of Lévi-Strauss with O’Connor’s reference to her ignorant fellowtownsmen, whether it be a send-up or a proud defense, istotally absent.And now for a word of caution. A lengthy, detailedcritique of the translation of a single paragraph in a 225-page text unavoidably gives the impression that the critiquerbelieves the translation is a disaster. Nothing couldbe more off the mark. On the whole, I think the Italiantranslation of Available Light is fairly well done, espe-22 Translation Review

cially in light of the considerable challenges offered byGeertz’s complex writing style. The main ideas and thesespresented in the text come across quite clearly; neitherthe author nor his Italian readers need be concernedabout that. What they could legitimately be concernedabout, however, is a loss of force in the target text, andmore importantly, a partial loss of its identity, or perhapsmore appropriately, of its diversity, effected by a paringback or a smoothing over of its special features into amore standard, genre-typical, academic prose. A loss, inother words, of style, which becomes quite visible, Ithink, when we translate the Italian text back intoEnglish.However one judges such affirmations, or as surprisingas it might be to hear them proffered by an anthropologist,all of this certainly touches a contemporary rawnerve. In recent social thought the attractions of a “deafnessto the appeal of other values” and of a relaxed andcomplacent approach to imprisonment in one’s own culturaltradition, are more and more celebrated. Incapableof embracing either relativism or absolutism — the firstbecause it doesn’t allow judgment, the second because itremoves it from history — our philosophers, historians,and social scientists turn toward the kind of impermeabilitéof identity that Lévi-Strauss warmly recommends.Whether one considers it as a sign of easy arrogance, ofa justified prejudice, of “Lutheran irremovability,” thesplendid frankness expressed in the motto “when you’rein Rome do as if you were in Millidgeville” of FlanneryO’Connor, this clearly poses the question of the future ofethnocentrism (and of cultural diversity) in a rather newlight. To withdraw, to distance oneself from the elsewhere,to choose the “view from afar,” is that really theway to escape from the desperate tolerance of the cosmopolitanismof UNESCO? Is moral narcissism reallythe alternative to moral entropy?What is at issue here is not the overall success orfailure of the translation (by and large it succeeds) butrather its tendency to homogenize Geertz’s complex andcontrapuntal style into drab academic Italian. The translatorseems to subscribe wholeheartedly to theliterary/nonliterary distinction and to follow all too energeticallyPoggi’s advice to move the text toward the(Italian academic) reader. This strategy, as I will presentlytry to demonstrate, seems particularly inappropriate inthe case of Available Light, and furthermore, its use herecalls into question, I think, the very distinction on whichit is based. Reading “The Uses of Diversity” makes mewonder if it is still useful, assuming it ever was, fortranslators to distinguish between literary and critical or“technical” texts, between texts in which style is importantand those in which it is not. Perhaps the more usefuldistinction is not between text-types but style-types,between source text styles that are closer to standard targetlanguage styles and that consequently are easier toimitate, and styles that are more distant, more expressiveof cultural diversity, and thus more difficult but alsomore important to reconstruct in the target language.As we have already seen in our sample paragraph,Geertz’s chapter article on diversity and its discontents ispeppered with allusion, invention, and manipulation ofpopular sayings or ways of speaking, and it is preciselythese deviations from standard academic style that createproblems for the translation. Over the course of the twenty-pagetext, there are about the same number ofinstances in which Geertz’s idiosyncratic style is notreflected in the Italian. Depending on the case, the translatorseems to have adopted one of three tactics: standardization,elimination, or literal transposition(calquing) without compensation. What follows is a listof examples taken from throughout the chapter alongwith some brief analysis and some suggestions of howthey might have been handled differently in order to provideItalian readers with better access to the style as wellas the substance of Geertz’s arguments.just to have something that sticks in the mind >Tanto per avere un punto di riferimentoThe translation changes the register from informal to formal,colloquial to academic, for no apparent reason. Analternative solution might have been “qualcosa cherimane in testa,” or “qualcosa che si appiccica in testa.”The failure of Third World countries to live up to thethousand-flowers hopes for them > La maggior partedei paesi del Terzo mondo non sono riusciti a tener fedealle speranze delle loro lotte per l’indipendenzaThis time the “thousand flowers” have been eliminatedand the hopes have been shifted from First Worldobservers and sympathizers back to the Third worldfighters for independence. In the process, the allusion tothe language in which those hopes were expressed at thetime — reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s 1957 declaration“Let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools ofthought contend” — and to their consequent fragility hasbeen lost.Translation Review 23

Other ways of going at life > altri modi di condurre lavitaHere again, a colloquial expression is formalized and thetone is modified. “Conducting” life is a structured, purposeful,and measured performance; “going at” it, on theother hand, implies an activity that is much more tentative,unsure, and irregular. There must be any number ofways to say this in Italian, but “tirare avanti” and “tirarea campare” are two that immediately come to mind.To-each-his-own morality > una moralità relativisticaThis instance of standardization verges on misinterpretation,since Geertz charges Lévi-Strauss and Rorty with amisguided anti-relativism, whereas here the translationimplies that they are guilty of relativism. A better renderingin Italian might be “una moralità a ciascuno la sua,”which would be both closer to the original and reminiscentof the title and spirit of Leonardo Sciascia’s Siciliancrime novel, A ciascuno il suo.punk is where it’s at > ormai siamo arrivati al punkHere Geertz is quoting philosopher and art critic ArthurDanto, who in turn is quoting the slang of the contemporarypopular music scene. Again, the standardizationturns the idiom on its head, a celebration of punkbecomes a begrudging acceptance. Current Italian slangoffers the alternative of “il punk è fico.”At what sort of angle...we stand to the world > in qualeangolo del mondo...noi stiamoThis is one of many deliberately imprecise expressionsused by Geertz to refer to “ways of living” or “ways ofbeing in the world.” The Italian misinterprets angle asangolo (corner instead of angolatura) and eliminates“sort of,” thus accentuating the misinterpretation by makingit more precise than the original. A related example isthe phrase “turn of mind,” which is translated on oneoccasion as the generic “modo di pensare” (way of thinking)and on another as the odd “giri di mente,” neither ofwhich captures the allusion to a special shape or attitudeas in “the turn of his chin” and similar expressions.like nostalgia, diversity is not what it used to be > alpari della nostalgia, la diversità non è ciò che solevaessereOnce again, Geertz dips into the language of popular culture,this time an old comic line sometimes attributed tothe American “Mr. Malaprop,” former baseball playerYogi Berra, as a way of branding Rorty and Lévi-Straussas nostalgics. But Geertz’s (or Yogi’s) oxymoron is lostin the Italian, which might have done better with “non èpiù quella di una volta.”They don’t make Umwelte like they used to > non costituivanoUmwelt come succedeva una voltaLike the previous example, this is another play on thenostalgia theme through manipulation of an old sayingby inserting the pretentious-sounding academic Germanexpression into the form of the popular adage. In Italian,we get the standard language of the academy. The playfulnessdisappears and so does the barb.It’s their ears and their funeral > gli orecchi sono i loroe sono affari loroAnother standardization of an American idiom, this timeinto a standard Italian idiom. But the expression “theirfuneral” is itself a play on the usual “their business,”which is all we get in the Italian, without the additionalironic twist. Admittedly, such twists are always difficultto translate, but one possibility might be to make a playon an Italian alternative to the standard Italian expression:gli orecchi sono i loro e anche i cavoli, per quantoamari.some bats are battier than others > alcuni pipistrelli sonopiù pipistrelli di altriGeertz uses Danto’s reference to bats several times tocreate a kind of leitmotiv. This time he takes advantageof the metaphorical connotation of mental illnessattached to the adjective “bats” or “batty” to make thepoint that even those we call different have differencesamong them. Since pipistrelli don’t carry the same connotationin Italian, it might have been better to changeanimals: alcuni cavalli sono più matti di altri.The foregoing examples show Geertz playing withpopular sayings, mixing registers, juxtaposing formal andinformal tone to broaden the appeal of his argument andto sharpen his critique of his adversaries. Another strategyhe employs for the same purposes is allusion, both literaryand otherwise. Here are two examples of nonliter-24 Translation Review

ary allusion, to slogans or key words from American historyand jurisprudence, that don’t make a perfect transitioninto the Italian.as someone has said of the writings of V.S. Naipaul …making the world safe for condescension > a fare delmondo un luogo tranquillamente adatto alla condiscendenzaGeertz, or the “someone” he cites, refers to WoodrowWilson’s claim that World War I would “make the worldsafe for democracy,” often used as an example of naïvetéor demagoguery and later spoofed during the Gulf Warwhen some critics accused the United States of trying to“make the world safe for Emirs.” The allusion doesn’tcome across at all in the translation, which does manage,nevertheless, to communicate the substance of the critique.a clear and present danger > un pericolo chiaro edattualeThe reference here is to Supreme Court Justice OliverWendell Holmes’ opinion in a case regarding the powerof the government to limit free speech: “words that createa clear and present danger that they will bring aboutsubstantive evils” may be restricted. The Italian translationleaves nothing to be desired except perhaps a footnotewith an explanation of the allusion. Left as is, itseems highly unlikely that Italian readers could appreciateor evaluate the aptness of the allusion to Geertz’sargument and the implication that it is the words of theethnocentrists rather than those of the cultural relativiststhat need to be defended against.Before he set out on his career as an ethnographer,Geertz’s dream was to become a novelist. His love ofand knowledge of literature are evident in the many literaryallusions in “The Uses of Diversity” and throughoutAvailable Light. In most cases, as we have seen withFlannery O’Connor, Geertz is careful to cite the authorand sometimes the title of the work. Such explicit allusionscreate few problems for the translator; thingsbecome more challenging, however, when the allusion isimplicit and neither author nor work is identified, as inthese two examples:Their different hobby-horses notwithstanding > nonostante… le lore differenti fissazioniAs in the “clear and present danger” example, the translationagain comes up with a perfectly adequate synonymfor “hobby-horse”: fissazione. But, of course, Geertz’schoice to use “hobby-horse” rather than “fixation” carrieswith it an allusion to Laurence Sterne’s seminalnovel Tristram Shandy, whose narrator’s sarcastic expositionof the use of “hobby-horses” by “the wisest men ofall ages, not excepting Solomon himself,” has foreverpainted the poor little toy animal in tones of ridicule that“fixation” has yet to acquire. Replacing “fissazione” withthe literal translation “cavalluccio di legno” would certainlybe even less adequate, but an explanatory footnotewould allow Italian readers access to the literary/philosophicalbackground shared by many if not most of theirAnglophone counterparts.It [anthropology] has stressed particularity, idiosyncrasy,incommensurability, cabbages and kings > Ha sottolineatola particolarità, l’idiosincrasia, l’incommensurabilità,cavoli e reThis is also an implicit allusion to a classic work ofEnglish literature, Lewis Carroll’s Through the LookingGlass, as well as a vintage Disney animated film, Alicein Wonderland. Carroll’s work is no doubt much betterknown in Italy than Sterne’s, and perhaps for this reason,the translator has decided to transpose Geertz’s allusionunchanged into Italian. But to appreciate Geertz’s use ofthis allusion and its communicative force with anEnglish-speaking readership, we might imagine an Italianauthor making a reference to “il gatto e la volpe,” twocharacters from Pinocchio who have by now becomealmost synonymous with deception and underhandedtrickery. The English translation of such an allusion as“the cat and the fox” would be correct but hardly satisfactory.Even readers, or movie-goers, familiar withPinocchio would be unlikely to appreciate the resonanceof the reference to Italian readers. In our case, anexplanatory note would seem to be doubly useful insofaras Geertz’s allusion to Carroll’s poem appears to serve asa description of and a further allusion to his ownapproach to cultural anthropology, namely empiricalstudy of the variety of human cultures rather than thesearch for underlying common structures:“ ‘The time has come’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of manythings:Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax —Of cabbages — and kingsAnd why the sea is boiling hot –And whether pigs have wings.’”Translation Review 25

To put it in the words of another, more recent Englishauthor of clever nonsense rhyme, Geertz appears to wanthis readers to understand him as saying “I am theWalrus.”By way of conclusion, I’d like to return to the questionraised by Richard Schweder as to whether it is betterfor the translator, like the reviewer, to ignore style, or inGoethe’s terms, whether translators of nonliterary textsshould attempt to move the text toward the reader.Perhaps the first thing to say about this is that thetext that is moved closer to the target-language readerbecomes a very different text from that read by thesource- language reader. In essence, translation consistsin the interpretation and reconstruction of signs, and“style” is best understood as the way in which the signsto be interpreted are arranged. As such, style is itself asign, and even the most important one, because it is stylethat puts the other signs in relation to one another andthus communicates to the reader impressions and indicationsabout the “turn of mind” of their author.Our analysis of Geertz’s style has concentrated onhis mixing of tone and register, his manipulation ofidiomatic expression and allusion. One might also examinemore closely his syntax, rhythm, and diction, buteven this brief analysis of one chapter from AvailableLight has been sufficient, I think, to demonstrate the contributionof style to the communication of his thesis. Atranslation that ignores style may well succeed in gettingacross the gist of the argument, but the argument will bemuch less forceful and convincing than the original version.Rather than neglect style or downplay it in theinterests of better serving the target-language reader,translators of nonliterary texts would do better toattempt, wherever possible, to reconstruct the style of thesource text. Where reconstruction is not possible, as inthe case of implicit literary allusion, or where it risks creatingobstacles to readability, as with the literal translationof idiomatic expressions, explanatory notes can beintroduced to provide target-language readers with backgroundinformation shared by their source-languagecounterparts. Academic texts, in which footnotes are acustomary feature of the genre, will certainly suffermuch less than fiction from the intrusion of additionalnotes from the translator.Finally, translators should remember that they, likeanthropologists, are laborers in the vineyard of culturaldiversity. Indeed, language, and especially languagecomposed into texts, as Geertz and his colleagues havetaught us, is the primary instrument with which culture isforged and expressed. In his preface to Available Light,Clifford Geertz provides this seemingly off-hand definitionof cultural anthropology: “going about the world tryingto discover how in the midst of talk people — groupsof people, individual people, people as a whole — put adistinct and variegated voice together.” Translators generallytravel less than anthropologists, but other than that,they are engaged in a similar kind of activity. It is truethat translators are concerned primarily with the voice ofa single author, but even single voices speak of theirroots in the culture in which they were formed, and thespecial features of each written voice, otherwise knownas style, give its readers a way of interpreting where andhow that voice stands with respect to others both insideand outside of its own group. This kind of “background”information, implicitly shared by the author’s readers, isessential to a translation if its readers are to be givenequal or nearly equal access to the distinctive voice ofthe text and to the cultural diversity of which, howeverindirectly, it speaks.26 Translation Review

SAD TROPICS, OR TRISTES TROPIQUES?By Liane GutmanThe great 19th-century German poet Novalis distinguishedbetween three modes of translation: grammatical,paraphrastic, and mythical. 1 Paraphrastic translationrequires the translator himself to become a “poetof the poet,” which leads directly to the translation fromthe French by the poets Doreen and John Weightman ofClaude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, published in1973. None but the translator cum poet can do justice toan ethnographer who writes in poetic prose.The Weightmans have since translated a substantialpart of Lévi-Strauss’ books, and Tristes Tropiques, nearingits silver anniversary, continues to grace today’sbookshelves.The first translation of Tristes Tropiques, by JohnRussell, appeared in 1961. Its title, AWorld on the Wane,conveys decline, whereas Tristes Tropiques does not: Akey sentence in this context reads: “The tropics are lessexotic than out of date.” (W, 87)Russell was hasty in translating this title. Only fromthe text can a process of decline can be inferred. Thealliteration in Tristes Tropiques and the author’s suggestionto preserve the French title prompted theWeightmans to conserve the original title. Quite possibly,John Russell thought of compensating for the alliterationin French and opted for AWorld on the Wane.Pensée Sauvage: Une autre casse-têtePensée Sauvage, the title of Lévi-Strauss’ bookpublished in 1962, another impasse, has a binary meaning:French pensée signifies thought as well as wildpansy — in Lévi-Strauss’ language, culture versusnature. In the English translation, Savage Mind, Frenchpensée had to forfeit one of its meanings, and only “culture”survived. Should the French title have been preserved?Further translation problems into English fromTristes Tropiques are labeled: (LS=Lévi-Strauss; R=JohnRussell; W=Weightmans).Title of Part OneFin des Voyages (LS)Destinations (R)End of Journeying (W)A patchy trio. The English gerund “journeying” best conveysthe conclusion of Lévi-Strauss’ odyssey that hewould eventually consign to writing. Russell opted for“destinations,” which may also signify the opposite.Title, Chapter VIComment on devient ethnographe (LS,54)How I became an anthropologist (R, 54)The Making of an Anthropologist (W,51)Lévi-Strauss opens his linguistic cabinet and opts forthe French indefinite pronoun “on” (lat. Homo, homme),designating one or more persons, feminine or masculine.“On” also indicates a course of action shared with one ormore participants, not reflected in Russell’s translation.The Weightmans solved the problem with “the makingof,” an ongoing process, hence closer to French “on.”There is of course, the English “one,” which soundsawkward. Does the English gerund replace the Frenchon? Not so, but a correspondence exists.Next emerges the thorny problem of Claude Lévi-Strauss calling himself an ethnographer, while bothtranslators use “anthropologist” in a rare moment ofmutual accord. In this instance, should not the translatormove closer to the author rather than the reader?Russell’s translation was published in 1961, a meresix years after Tristes Tropiques, a time span closeenough for the translator to opt for “ethnographer.”Shouldn’t the Weightmans have done likewise, even in1973?Lévi-Strauss writes that anthropology and ethnographyare basically two sides of the same coin, and theresearch is in essence a matter of choice.Etymologically, anthropo/logist=man+study;while ethno/grapher =people+writer. The most importantaspect of Lévi-Strauss’ work saw the light in his writingssome twenty years subsequent to his field work. Hence,many call him an “armchair anthropologist” to whom lemot juste is a dictum, in the good old French tradition.Where did the favellas go?Les miséreux vivaient perchés sur les mornes, dansles favellas où une population de noirs vêtus deTranslation Review 27

loques bien lessivées inventaient sur la guitare cesmélodies alertes, qui, au temps du carnaval,descendraient des hauteurs et envahiraient la villeavec eux (97).Poverty perched on the hill-tops, where the blackpopulation lived in rags; only at carnival-time wouldthey come swarming down into the city proper withthe tunes they had picked (R, 62).The poor were perched high up on the hillsides, in favellas,where a population of Negroes clad in well-washedrags composed lively guitar-melodies which, at carnivaltime, came down from the hills and invaded the town,together with their inventors (W, 87/88).To John Russell: One would assume that Lévi-Straussnever knew of the blatant omission of favellas, Rio’srenowned shantytowns. The poor Russell depicts a formlessmass living in rags (an image of dirt), unable toinvent their own music. The Weightmans, in turn,describe “Negroes clad in well-washed rags” (populationde noirs vêtus de loques bien lessivées, and faithfullytranslate while creatively interpreting Lévi-Strauss, withone alliteration credit going to Lévi-Strauss and a secondto the Weightmans. I have one problem: why did theWeightmans opt for “Negroes” in the early 70s instead of“Blacks,” which would have been more in tune with thetimes?Chapter XIUn esprit malicieux a défini l’Amérique comme unpays qui a passé de la barbarie à la décadence sansconnaître la civilisation. On pourrait, avec plus dejustice, appliquer la formule aux villes du nouveaumonde (LS, 106).The cities of the New World have one characteristicin common: that they pass from first youth todecrepitude with no intermediary stage. (R, 100).Some mischievous spirit has defined America as acountry which has moved from barbarism to decadencewithout enjoying any intermediary phase ofcivilization. The formula could be directly applied tothe towns of the new world. . . (W, 95).Here, Russell omits L.S.’s “mischievous spirit,”which adds a touch of biting wit to a far-reachinghypothesis. And why “first youth” instead of barbarism?And if the word civilization has an element of abstractionfor Lévi-Strauss, why do both translators pinpointthis hypothesis by inserting an intermediary stage, therebyexpressing an unsolicited point of view?Race et HistoireC’est une étrange chose que l’écriture. Il sembleraitque son apparition n’eut pu manquer de determinerdes changements profonds dans les conditions d’existencede l’humanité (LS, 342).Le monde a commencé sans l’homme et il s’acheverasans lui (LS,478).Writing is a strange thing. It would seem as if itsappearance could not have failed to wreak profoundchanges in the living conditions of our race (R, 291).The world began without the human race and it willend without it (R,397).Writing is a strange invention. One might supposethat its emergence could not fail to bring about profoundchanges in the conditions of human existence(W, 298).The world began without man and will end withouthim (W, 413).In 1952, Lévi-Strauss published Race et histoire, dealing,among others, with the diversity of cultures, the fallacyof ethnocentrism, i.e., considering one’s own cultureas being superior to all others. Race had long been anissue, and events such as the founding of the Sociétéd’anthropologie de Paris in 1859 was a mirror image ofan ongoing debate. Russell’s use of “race” has an exclusionaryovertone, no doubt anathema to Lévi-Strauss.The term has become free-floating. And the translator?As George Steiner expressed it so well, “On the personallevel, immersion in translation, the voyage out and back,can leave the translator unhoused.” 2On the Term “Anthropologizing”A São Paulo, on pouvait s’adonner a l’ethnographiedu dimanche (LS,101).There was a certain amount of Sunday-anthropologizingto be done in São Paulo (R,111).28 Translation Review

In São Paulo, it was possible to be a Sunday anthropologist(W, 109).To Lévi-Strauss: Is Sunday ethnography to be consideredless significant than during the six remainingweekdays? Aren’t field notes field notes per se, notwithstandingthe day of the week?John Russell: Sunday anthropologizing is a bittongue in cheek. If the term is legitimate, he might aswell use the British spelling, whereby zing becomes sing.Wenn schon, Denn schon (might as well), as the Germansaying goes.Weightmans: Their rendition is faithful to the originalFrench.Lévi-Strauss, GeologistJ’avais traversé un continent. Mais le terme, toutproche de mon voyage, m’était d’abord rendu sensiblepar cette remontée du fond des temps (LS, 430).I had crossed a whole continent. But the now-imminentend of my travels was first made manifest inthis return-journey from the depths of time (R, 369).BibliographyLévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Paris, LibrairiePlon, 1955.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. A World on the Wane. Translatedfrom the French by John Russell. Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.London 1962.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated fromthe French by John and Doreen Weightman, New York,Penguin Books, Ltd: 1974.Footnotes1Susanne Stark. “Behind Inverted Commas”:Translation and Anglo-German Cultural Relations inthe Nineteenth Century. Multilingual Matters Ltd.,Cleveland, England, 1999:48.2George Steiner, Errata. An Examined Life. YaleUniversity Press, 1998: 111.I had crossed a continent. But the rapidly approachingend of my journey was being brought home tome in the first place by this ascent through layers oftime (W, 372).Eh voilà! The Weightmans, translators, have outdoneauthor Lévi-Strauss, whose keen interest in geology predatedhis vocation in anthropology. The Weightmansused “layers,” a crucial term in geology, whereas French“fond” means depth.P.S. For some reason, John Russell omitted fourchapters in his translation, while the Weightmans translatedthe unabridged French original.The Weightmans emerge as poetic translators virtuallyin the author’s shoes, while preserving their Anglo linguisticheritage. John Russell emerges as just anothertranslator, lackluster, at times bound by diehard views.J’y suis, j’y reste. Here I am, and here I stay.Translation Review 29

RENDITIONS: 30 YEARS OF BRINGING CHINESE LITERATURE TOENGLISH READERSBy Audrey HeijnsRenditions, published by the Research Centre ofTranslation at the Chinese University of Hong Kongand commonly recognized as the leading journal ofChinese literature in English translation, celebrates its30th anniversary in 2003. Its sixty issues cover morethan 2000 years of Chinese literature, from classicalworks of poetry, prose, and fiction to their contemporarycounterparts, as well as articles on art, Chinese studies,and translation studies.In the commemorative booklet The RenditionsExperience 1973-2003 (June 2003), editor Eva Hungsays: “The long view tells us that to publish a journal iseasy — particularly in these days of desktop publishing— but to sustain one of recognized quality requires a lotmore than technology and funding. It calls for a dedicatedstaff as well as the long-term support of translators,writers, readers, teachers, well-wishers and critics.” Theessays in this booklet are written by authors, scholars,translators, and readers of Renditions, who express indifferent ways their relationship with the journal andwhat they perceive to be its value and contribution. Theyand many others have been part of the success ofRenditions over the past thirty years. To understand thebackground of this journal, we have to go back to theearly 1970s.The Hong Kong of the 1970s witnessed an emergingcultural consciousness that demanded recognition forthe population’s Chinese roots. Hitherto, English was theonly official language in Hong Kong. It was not until1973 that the Chinese language was finally given an officialstatus comparable to English. It is therefore understandablethat many in Hong Kong felt the need tostrengthen the position of Chinese language and culture.At the same time, Chinese people outside of the People’sRepublic of China were concerned about the destructionof Chinese culture resulting from the Cultural Revolution(1966–1976). Many writers in Mainland China were persecutedfor what they wrote, accused of being “antirevolutionary”and sent away to live in harsh circumstancesin the countryside. Because hardly any literary writingwas published during this period and classical literaturewas part of the “four olds” that had to be swept away,one could say that there was a literary void.Hence, in bicultural and bilingual Hong Kong, ahaven from the frenzy of the Chinese mainland, a keensense of mission developed: on the one hand, to preserveChina’s cultural heritage, and on the other, to introduce itto the world. In this climate, Renditions was created.George Kao, who joined the newly establishedTranslation Centre of the Chinese University of HongKong in 1972, came up with the idea to publish a periodicaldevoted to English translations of Chinese literarywritings. Kao and Stephen Soong, the person behind thefounding of the Centre, commenced editorial work for30 Translation Review

the first issue in autumn 1972. A year later, the inauguralissue was launched.One of the first Chinese newspaper articles thatgreeted the new journal was headed: “Breaking theCultural Imbalance.” Until then, there had been manyChinese-language translations from the English, and thisnew magazine was hailed as a vehicle for “exportingChinese culture,” one that might do much to “redress theimbalance” in the existing East-West cultural interflow. 1A perhaps even more heartening reception was thereview in China Quarterly: “A most attractive feature isits catering both to those who are highly proficient in literaryChinese, and to those who are only slightly so orknow no Chinese at all … How pleasant to be remindedthat Chinese can be fun.” To reach beyond the limits ofacademia and to make knowledge “fun” is one ofRenditionsí guiding principles.As David Pollard, currently advisory editor ofRenditions and a subscriber since the first issue, recalls:… the magazine exceeded expectationswhen it arrived. George Kao and Stephen Soonghad gone to some trouble to line up a lot of bigguns in Chinese studies to give it a good sendoff.… Given first billing in No. 1, for example,was “Yen Fu on Translation,” and that was followedby Burton Watson’s “Two Imperial Ladiesof Han,” which cunningly anticipated the interestin what became known … as Gender Studies. 2According to George Kao, that first issue includedmuch in-house writing, with two pieces translated byhimself, an amusing Chinese-language radio script byY.R. Chao, and the short story “The Men Who SmeltGold” by Chu Hsi-Ning (Zhu Xining), a Taiwan writer.Coeditor Stephen Soong wrote an article titled “Notes onTranslating Poetry,” discussing that “translation, in thestrict sense of the term, is impossible.” Other interestingworks in that first issue include a story by Lu Xun, commonlyrecognized as the greatest Chinese writer of the20th century, and classical poetry translated by Jesuitscholar-poet Rev. John Turner. From its inception,Renditions has always published a wide variety of worksfrom the modern and classical traditions.Kao’s journalistic background and predilection forhumor show in the amusing anecdotes and quotes usedas fillers in the journal and the special section devoted toChinese humor in Renditions No. 9, in which Kao sharessome retold jokes from a Chinese Thesaurus of Laughs.An example of one of the fillers Kao chose forRenditions No. 1 is:There is an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, abouta woman at a cocktail party in Paris telling JamesThurber how much she had enjoyed his “delightfulsketches” in French translation. “Thank you,” saidThurber. “It is undoubtedly true that my writingloses a good deal in the original.”Thurber’s humor, here as elsewhere, obliquelypoints to a truth: this time to the truth that a translationmay be better literature than the work whichinspired it.John A. Kouwenhoven, “The Trouble with Translation”Soong’s personal interest is reflected in specialissues on classical poetry and articles on the famous 18 th -century novel The Story of the Stone. Together, Kao andSoong created special issues on fiction and drama andpublished in 1976 the beautifully illustrated issue on artthat was later reprinted in book form. An example ofRenditions’ “true and truly remarkable collaborativeeffort,” as Howard Goldblatt recalls, is the translation ofthe Cultural Revolution memoir by Yang Jiang, “SixChapters from My Life ‘Downunder’,” published inRenditions No. 16 (1981). This translation, whichGoldblatt was asked to undertake by Stephen Soong, aclose friend of Yang Jiang and her husband, QianZhongshu, involved not only the author, Soong, andGoldblatt but also Kao, who supplied the title. HowardGoldblatt recounts:My folder of correspondence is an inch and ahalf thick, and a source of pride, embarrassment,and, from time to time, bewilderment. The meticulousediting, for which the magazine has always beenknown, produced a finished translation that haspleased many and infuriated others, but which hasmade available, even a quarter of a century later, oneof the literary masterpieces of modern Chinesebelles-lettres. 3In 1976, George Kao returned to the United Statesbut kept an active role as Editor-at-Large until 1982.When Soong retired in 1984, Briton John Minford tookover as editor. Minford, who had read Chinese at OxfordUniversity and had been in China in the early 1980s, haddeveloped an interest in contemporary and emergingwriters who were then the cynosures of the rejuvenatedChinese literary scene. This led to the creation of a specialissue on “Chinese Literature Today” (RenditionsNos. 19 & 20, 1983), which is one of the earliest collectionsof Chinese writing from Taiwan, Hong Kong, andTranslation Review 31

the Chinese mainland. Writers featured include all majorpoets of the “Today” group, as well as Nobel LaureateGao Xingjian, then unknown outside China. The moodof that young generation emerging from the CulturalRevolution is reflected in a famous poem by Gu Cheng:One GenerationThe dark night has given me dark eyes,Yet I use them to search for light.(Tr. Seán Golden and Chu Chiyu)A new era began with Eva Hung, who took up theeditorship in December 1986. Hung’s bilingual educationin Chinese at home and English in school nurtured herinterests in both the classical and modern traditions. Sheenvisioned Renditions as a continuing literary anthologyoffering both depth and variety. This is one of the reasonswhy under her guidance, the largest number of specialissues covering the widest variety of themes hasbeen published. Furthermore, Hung’s active collaborationwith experts in other institutions worldwide also generatednew ideas and material for the special issues.Known as a promoter of women writers and HongKong literature, Hung came up with special issues onContemporary Women Writers (Renditions Nos. 27 &28) and on Hong Kong (Renditions Nos. 29 & 30) soonafter she took up the editorship. These won Renditionsmuch recognition for answering a crying need that hadexisted for some time. The issue on ContemporaryWomen Writers presents stories and poems by writersfrom Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. In abook review, Li Ruru writes:There is an old Chinese saying that “Threewomen together make for a performance.” Whatmore women might achieve is not measured inproverbs but this fine collection of women’s writingfrom Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kongdemonstrates that the assembled talents of twentyeightwomen can create a whole world. This fictitiousyet real world is full of figures of every huerepresenting the changing face of Chinese societyover the past several decades. … The women writershave not only observed the world with theirown eyes and through their insight, but have alsofelt other human beings with their own bodies,their own hearts and souls. Traditional approachesto writing are no longer enough and they are seekingnew forms of expression to convey what theyreally want to say. The language, the literary formand the technique in this special issue thereforerepresent some of the pioneer literature in Chinatoday, especially in the writing of Can Xue, LiuSuola, Wang Anyi, Shu Ting and Li Ang. 4The special issue on Hong Kong published in 1988was the first anthology of Hong Kong literature in anylanguage. This collection makes it clear that the idea ofHong Kong as a cultural desert is a fallacy and that culturallife in Hong Kong is alive and well. Calling it “Awide spectrum of works by a people torn betweenChinese totalitarianism and British colonialism,”Maurice L. Hoo writes about this special issue:Translated Hong Kong works will not only provideWestern readers with pleasurable reading, but willalso help dispel the myth that there is always ajunk boat or sampan in the middle of the harbortaking Suzie Wong to meet James Bond. Thebreadth and depth of the Hong Kong works collectedin this volume show that the barren rock hasbecome a gem, and that the “Hong Kong Genre”has achieved a distinct voice of its own: a voicethat, while using Chinese or English, is HongKong in essence. 5A good example of Hung’s active collaboration withexperts in other institutions is Renditions No. 50 (1998),Special Issue “There and Back Again: The Chinese‘Urban Youth’ Generation,” with guest editor RichardKing. In his essay in The Renditions Experience 1973-2003, King recalls the submission of his proposal in1996 for this special issue: “The response from EvaHung was swift and enthusiastic; with her help, I wasable to complete the selection of writings, locate translatorson four continents, complete the English versions,and see the zhiqing special issue in print before the endof 1998.” The result is a fine selection of fiction, poetry,memoirs and other writing dated from the early 1970s tothe mid-1990s, recording the experiences of a generationof educated youth sent to China’s poverty-stricken countrysideto be re-educated by peasants. Representing themood of this generation is a poem by Xing Qi:Where are these young people now?Scattered asunder like rain and stars,All have gone their separate ways.Gone is the past into the grave,This collection of poems stands as a monument,That marks the grave.(tr. Xong Xianling and Gary Sigley)32 Translation Review

During the period 1989–1997 when David Pollardwas coeditor, the journal had the strongest editorial lineupin its history. The two editors were backed up by twoexperienced colleagues — Janice Wickeri and Chu Chiyu— who brought with them impressive linguistic and culturalknowledge. Pollard, with a background in ChineseStudies, joining Hung in Translation Studies formed aunique editorial team. This combination of two perspectivesgenerated new ideas for special issues and interestingdebates on a variety of subjects ranging from thecontents of the journal to different editorial commentsabout translation approaches and styles. A showcase of aspecial issue by this unique editorial team is RenditionsNos. 53 & 54 (2000), “Chinese Impressions of theWest,” which presents the experience and observations ofthose who had journeyed to the West in the 19th century,as well as the impressions and opinions of those who hadnever been outside of China.In addition to the journal, Renditions also publishes ahard-cover and a paperback series. The hard-cover serieswas introduced in 1976 by Kao and Soong, primarily forthe library market, which shows that the discipline ofChinese Studies in the west was recognized as a corereadership for Renditions. In 1986, a paperback seriesaimed at making high-quality translations available to awider market was introduced. This series, with anemphasis on contemporary writers, is often used as classroommaterial by teachers of Chinese and Asian surveycourses in the West, but it also attracts a general readership.Titles in the hard-cover and paperback series haveaccumulated to seventeen and twenty-six, respectively. Aspecial new product introduced in 2002 is the RenditionsPDA series, sold directly on-line, featuring poetry selectionsand city stories, especially chosen for readers interestedin China or traveling to Asia. It offers them a tasteof Greater China through her literature.“Whatever we have achieved in the last few years andmay achieve in the future is a reflection of the inspirationwe draw from George Kao and Stephen Soong, thefounding editors. The torches they held high still lightthe way for us who follow in their footsteps,” wrote EvaHung in 1990. Building on the legacy, the different editorshave each brought in their share of innovation toRenditions while maintaining its cultural mission. In thepresent electronic days, Renditions publications have alsobeen made available on CD-Rom and in PDA format,new developments that would not have been part of theearly dream.ReferencesHung, Eva. “The Research Centre for Translation: AMirror of Translation Studies in Hong Kong.” InTranslation in Hong Kong: Past, Present andFuture. Chan Sin-wai, ed. Hong Kong: ChineseUniversity Press, 2001.———. “Periodicals as Anthologies: A Study of ThreeEnglish-Language Journals of Chinese Literature.”In International Anthologies of Literature inTranslation. Harald Kittel, ed. Berlin: ErichSchmidt, 1995.———. The Renditions Experience 1973–2003 Ed.Hong Kong: The Research Centre for Translation,The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003Kao, George. “Editing a Chinese-English TranslationMagazine.” In The Art and Profession ofTranslation. T.C. Lai, ed. Hong Kong: Hong KongTranslation Society, 1975.Renditions, Nos. 1–60, 1973–2003.Research Centre for Translation, Annual Reports1986–present.Footnotes1Book review by Si Qian in The China Times, Taipei, 20February 1975, referred to by Kao in his article “Editinga Chinese-English Translation Magazine.”2The Renditions Experience 1973–2003, ed. Eva Hung.(Hong Kong: The Research Centre for Translation, TheChinese University of Hong Kong, 2003), p. 533The Renditions Experience 1973–2003, p. 374China Quarterly, Vol. 118, June 1989, p. 378.5The San Francisco Review of Books, Feb/Mar 1994, pp.24–25.Translation Review 33

WHISPERED URGENCY: TRANSLATING SOUND AND MOMENTUMIN RAFFAELLO BALDINI’S “E’ MALÀN”By Adria BernardiWhen I first had the opportunity to hear RaffaelloBaldini read his poetry aloud, I heard something Ihad not heard in my own reading of them, a whisperedurgency, and because of this I had slowed the pace of hispoems too much. When I had a second opportunity tohear him read, including the poem “E’ malàn,” I againheard this whispered urgency. What I also heard washow phrases and images accumulated, one after theother, with no respite; there was seemingly no pause forbreath as he read, which gave the poem simultaneouslyboth nearly unbearable weight and incredible headlongmovement.“E’ malàn” (1) is made up of just such an accumulation,and what accumulates is noise. For the narrator,this accumulation of sounds is a barrage, an overwhelmingdin, which becomes transformed at the end of thepoem. It is Baldini’s layering, together with a poetic languagethat mimics spoken conversation, which give thispoem both weight and momentum. You arrive at the endhaving heard or spoken words with edges and gnarls andspikes; you arrive at the end of the poem out of breath.In the introduction to Baldini’s collection, Ad nòta(Nighttime), Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo begins: “Were itnot for the lazy prejudices still alive that relegate a poetwriting in dialect as ‘minor,’ even when he’s major,Raffaello Baldini would be considered. . . one of thethree or four most important poets in Italy.” (2)This salvo raises what tends to be the first questionin any discussion of the poet’s work, as it is in discussingthe works of those who write in a dialect: Why dialect?“But who’s going to understand your dialect?” he isasked in a collegeal interview by critic Franco Brevini.“What are the motivations for this choice?”(3) he isasked in another interview.“It’s probably an inevitable question,” Baldini concedes.“To which there can be more than one answer,including, ‘I don’t know,’ which seems like a nonresponse,but it isn’t.”(4)Like poetry written in other regional dialects,Baldini’s poetic language is fundamentally oral. In thesame interview, he says, “Well, for me the essence of thedialect, at least for me, is orality, . . . it’s an oral animal.”(5) It is, he reminds the interviwer, a language that didnot have an extensive written tradition until 1946, whenTonino Guerra’s groundbreaking, I scarabócc,(Scribblings) (6) was published. Along with Guerra(1920) and Nino Pedretti (1923), Baldini is one a “trio”of poets to write in romognala dialect and who share originsin Santarcangelo di Romagna, a town near Rimini.Born in 1924, Baldini was a journalist for many years forPanomama, where he wrote extensively about religion.All of his poetry and each of his three theatrical monologuesare written in romognola. (7)In reading the poem, “E’ malàn,” (Noise) one canbegin to see and hear some of the differences betweenthe sounds of Baldini’s romagnolo and standard Italian.In romognola, as in in other dialects, words end in a consonantwith great frequency. The effect of this dominanceof consonant-ending words is evident from thebeginning with the title. E’ malàn has a clipped, rushedsound. Il rumore is softer and slightly more elongated.E’ malàn is spoken with impatience, while il rumore, tomy ear, is a word that cannot be rushed in quite the sameway.From the beginning of the poem:E’ malànU i à da ès un pòstdvò ch’e’ va réss tótt e’ malàn de mònd,pr’aria, d’in èlt, chi sa, o alazò in fònd,mo dalòngh, ch’u n’i pò rivé niseun,una gònga, cmè un gòurgh, mo svérs, un mèr,che da ’d fura u n s vaid gnént, però avsinés,s’u s putéss,te préim u s sintirébb un sbruntlaméntcmè quant i bumbardéva vérs maréina,pu a fès piò sòtta, sl’òural,mè a dèggh ch’ l’à d’avnì fura un batibói,un diavuléri, che par no inzurléiséun u s chin mètt al dàidi tagli urècci, . . (p. 118,ll. 1-13)This is the Italian, which the poet himself translated:Ci dev’essere un posto / dove va a finire tutto ilrumore del mondo, / per aria, in alto, chi sa, o laggiú infondo, / ma lontano, che non ci può arrivare nessuno, /una conca, come una gora, ma immensa, un mare, / che34 Translation Review

da fuori non si vede niente, però ad avvicinarsi, / se sipotesse, / dapprincipio si sentirebbe un brontolamento /come quando bombardavano verso marina, / poi, a farsipiú sotto, sull’orlo, / io dico che deve venir fuori un fracasso,/ un diavolerio, che per non assordarsi / uno ècostretto a mettersi le dita nelle orecchie,There’s got to be a placewhere all the noises in the world end up,in the sky, way up, who knows, or down towardsthe bottom,but it’s got to be far, so far no one can get there,a basin, or a pond, but immense, a sea,which from far off you can’t see a thing, butgetting closer,if you could,the first thing you’d hear would be rumblinglike when they were bombing near the coast,then it shifting down lower, right at the shore,I’m saying, there’s got to be a crashing,a din, so that in order not to go deaf,you’ve got to stick your fingers, tight, into yourears,Many of the words in E’ malàn characterize or namekinds of noises: hubbub, ruckus, din, racket. In the originalthese words have a jagged sound, which even thepoet’s own Italian translation does not replicate. Aurally,some of these words have become smoothed out in theItalian and are somehow more generic. The words indialect are somehow noiser. In the Italian, they are lessnasal, less gutteral, and to be proncounced, they demandless of the body — the mouth, throat, windpipe and lips:batibói (crashing) becomes fracasso (pg. 118, l. 11);gluriòun (hubbub) becomes putiferio (p. 118, l.16); boba(ruckus) becomes baccano (p. 118, l. 20); buliròun(pandemonium) becomes pandimonio (page 119, l. 5);battasò (brouhaha) becomes baraonda (p. 118, l. 6 );santéssum (curses) becomes imprecazioni (p. 120, l.18).In translating I tried to capture some of thedialect’s jaggedness. So for gloriòun, I opted for“hubub,” which seemed to have a similar muttering qualitywhere the sound is swallowed at the end. For battasò,I opted for “brouhaha,” which seemed to retrieve someof the jaggedness of the original, as opposed to baraonda,which seemed more rolling.The accumulation of clipped sounds in Baldini’sdialect helps give this poem a quickness, as if words arenot being wasted. These lines from the end of the poemsuggest how the words compare to the standard Italian:“u t vén in amént, t si tè, cla vólta” (p. 122, l. 5) becomesin Italian: “ti viene in mente, sei tu, quella volta.”In the orignial, there is an abundance of “s” and “z”sounds, which reinforces the sense of the noisy andcacophonous. There is barely a line that does not containthe buzzing or whispering sounds of an “s” or “z’ at leastonce. This adds to the sense of an insistent dissonanceand a sense of agitation. Consider a line that has six ofthese sounds: “zchéurs in piaza, saràc, sbadài, biastéimi,(p. 120, l. 5) (all that discoursing in the piazza, the spitting,yawning, cursing.) Proper names in the poem have“s” and “z” sounds: Luisín, Tosi, Tisbe, Vizénz, Teresa,Gero dla Zopa. Wherever possible I tried to reinforcethese sounds.Even as the narrator finds this din unbearable, he canbear the silence less. He cannot keep his ears plugged upfor long; the absence of sound makes him jittery. He isdrawn to this noise and he begins to recognize familiarsounds:you’ve got to stay calm, keep following it,and then you realize it’s not just a ruckus,it’s like in sleep, when you’re feverishin the bed upstairs,you’re hearing those women downstairs chattingaway,you don’t understand a thing, but you recognizethe voices,it’s the same thing there,it’s pandemonium, it seems like they’re all mixedup in it,a brouhaha, a street-bazaar,but then instead you start to hear something,a door that’s slamming, an outburst of laughter,a flock of pigeons taking off,a woman in house-shoeswho’s running down a staircase,it seems like nothing at all,but being right there gives you goose bumps,and you start enjoying it, you close your eyes,you play with the fingerin each ear, it’s like an instrument, (pp. 118-119;ll. 19-21, ll. 1-15)With the next line begins a listing of noises, and itis here where we can see an astounding example ofBaldini’s images accumulating:you start hearing everything,keys being fumbled into the keyhole,Translation Review 35

Santina’s gatethat creaks whenever Luisín visits,someone who’s winding the clock sitting on a bed,Malvinawho’s fiddling with the rosary in her pocket,and Giulia who’s furiously knitting away,and then whatever’s going to happen, happens,a stone in a well, the water’s deep, splashing,the music of the carousel with its signaljust before it starts to turn,the bus at Borghiwheezing under the Arch like a human being,all that discoursing in the piazza, the spitting,yawning, cursing,the hogs from Caléccia when they’re beingslaughteredwho screech like a tool being sharpened on thegrinding stone,and underneath the bucket for blood,the filth that comes out of Minerva’s mouth,which afterwards she’s ashamed of,when she makes love to Doctor Tosi,a doorbell that rings and no one’s there,two who are running, one right after the other,they’re here, they’re past, they’re far away,the thud Tisbe heardthat night passing by the fishmarket,it was Vincenzo who had thrown himselfoff the town wall,the holy-hell Ruggero from Zoppa let loosewhen he lost his van playing cocincina,the guns at the time of the Front in the field for thefairand way up as far as Poggio, it was like a string ofrosary beadswhich when they were hitting us, we’d, out offrightstart laughing,someone chomping on a celery stalkwith his front teeth, Baghego’s finch whistlingthat sounds like an aria,a woman’s voice:“not there, the mark’ll show there,”the money Primo threw out the windowwhen he went bankrupt,and his wife in the hallway, sobbing,it was all just loose change, bouncing,altogether there was five thousand lire,the lightening crack that Sunday on the town hallwhich set the archives on fire,people arguing, the insults,the name-calling,and others talking in low voices, spying oneveryone else,a boy kicking a can,a ripe watermelon being cut, the crunch,the words she said that you couldn’t understand,Teresa, in the hospital before she died,her people all around her,with those hands and veins in her neck,her breathing slowing down,Critic Dante Isella, to whom “E’ malàn” is dedicated,describes this accumlation as “a metric equivalentin the accumulating of verses that speed up as they comeone after the other.”Brevini argues that in “E’ malàn,” as well as in thepoems, “La cucagna,” “La firma,” “L’amòur,” and “Lanàiva,” this listing characteristic, “(l’)elencazione caro aBaldini.” (this listing dear to Baldini) has acutally shifted,and the listing has become instead an expansion ofthe images into terrible dimensions. (8)This accumulation is found in other Baldini poemsas well. In “La chéursa” (La corsa, Running), a terrifiedboy flees other boys who are chasing him; as he runspanicked through town, he names all the places he passes,and these named landmarks, added layer by layer,give the poem its urgency. In “La nàiva,” (La neve,Snow) the narrator watches the town’s landmarks disappearone by one in a terrible, apocalyptic snowfall; thenaming and description of places accumulating, as thesnow does.In Baldini’s poetry and in his theatrical works thereis the overriding the sense of monologue. In his introductoryessay, Mengaldo refers to them as “monologuesyou lose your breath with.” (9) Isella argues thatBaldini’s various narrative and descriptivetechniques,“result in every way in achieving a spoknnessthat barely floats above the continuum of the prose, amonologal voice in which what is at stake is no longerthe ‘I’ of the writer but of each and every component ofhis own community.”(10)In this language that mimics spoken conversation,there is no pause or break, and it is often a series ofqualifications, of adjustments and asides. As in his theatricalmonologue Carta canta (Page Proof), or in otherpoems such as “E’ solitèri” (Solitaire), “E’ malàn” uses alanguage that mimics one particular kind of spoken conversation,that of an extended self-argument, whereby thespeaker sets up a hypothesis, projects it to someone else,36 Translation Review

only to then qualify, rebut, or expand upon it. This givesthe effect of overhearing someone argue with himself, orrather, argue with some absent other.In “E’ malàn,” it is as though the speaker is trying tocircle around the subject in an attempt to make it moreprecise. The hypothectical, “There must a place whereall the noises of the world end up,” is followed byexpressions of uncertainty at this proposition, (c)hi sa”,(who knows), and by qualifications,“mo dàlongh” (butit’s got to be far). In an attempt to be more precise, thenarrator continues to clarify: una gònga, cmè un gòurgh,mo svérs, un mèr, (a basin, or a pond, but immense, asea). (l. 5 ) There is a series of qualifications: “but gettingcloser, if you could,” and “I’m saying, there’s got tobe a crashing.” There is an assertion, followed by arejection of the assertion: “it (the hubbub) seems like itcould just carry it all away/ but nothing happens, it’s abig racket, without any substance.”In Baldini’s work, thoughts start up, stop, pick upwhere they left off several exchanges back. Subjectsappear, disappear, and reappear later. With dialect,Baldini has said, there is a certain kind of plasticity andmalleability that distinguishes it from standard Italian.One aspect of the dialect’s plasticitity is an insistenceupon the right to reiterate. Baldini explains: “whoeverspeaks in dialect doesn’t feel bothered by a word that isrepeated several times and then loops back again later.Italian, on the other hand, is hypersensitive about repetition;it will not tolerate it.” (11)In Baldini’s poems, the train of thought is broken;there are qualifications, repetitions, reiterations, digressions,exclamations and interrogatives. Certain poemsare a series of non sequiturs, of shifts in subject, of falsestarts and abrupt interruptions. This gives a strong senseof a conversation, but because the person to whom thethoughts are being addressed is not there or is elusive,the lingering sense is not one of having been addressedor having overheard a conversation, but rather one ofhaving been inside and heard the rumblings of an anxioussoul.At the end of this accumulation of noises, the narratorrecognizes what these sounds are: they are the voicesof people standing in line in front of him, each of whomis confessing sins. The noises have become transformedinto a listing of human frailties and failings.and this one is Emilia, there’s no mistaking her,confessing for Carlone too,poor guy, who’s not all there upstairs,and now listen to Don Gaetano behind the screengiving her penance,At the end of this poem, it is as if release comes byhaving endured the weight, the barrage and the accumulation,as if enduring it permits the cathartic transformationof the noises. In the final lines of the poem, the narratorliterally calls out, “listen”: sìnt che robi (listen tothis stuff). The release which at the end of the poemtakes the form of a series of questions, which are reallypleas:e pu un’èlta cunsiòun, mo chi sarà?pu dagli èlti ancòura, cs’èll, l’è sno cunsiòun?cmè ch’i avrà fat a ’rdéus-si tótt insén?i zcòrr, i zcòrr, i fa una baganèra,e l’è che què dabón u n va pérs gnént,l’è tótt i pchè de mònd,e i va ’vènti a cunsès, quant ch’i n n’à fat?sint che robi, mo un basta? u n gne n’è d’ilt?e i n’è bón da stè zétt, u n s nu n pò piò,qualcadéun ch’u i pardòuna, u n gn’è niséun?(p. 122, ll.15-23)and then another confession,who can it be?then some others,you get tired out waiting behind all of them,still others, what is it? are they just confessions?how could it have all come down to this?they talk, they talk, they’re making a din,and it’s that, right here, nothing gets lost,it’s all the sins of the world,and they step forward to make a confessionhow many do they have?listen to this stuff, that’s enough isn’t it?there are more of them?and they just can’t keep quiet, isn’t there someonewho can do it anymore,someone who can forgive them, isn’t there anyone?Notes1. “E’ malan,” in La nàiva in La nàiva, Furistír,Ciacri, Guilio Einaudi Editore, 2000. pp. 118-1222. Raffaello Baldini, Ad nòta: versi in dialetto romagnolo;presentazione di Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, ArnoldoMondadori Editor, 1995; p. ix “Se non restasse ancoraTranslation Review 37

vivo il preguidizio pigro per il quale un poeta in dialettoè un ’minore’, anche quando è maggiore, RaffaelloBaldini sarebbe considerato da tutti quello che è, uno deitre o quattro poeti più importanti d’Italia.”3. Manuela Ricci, “Prima le cose delle parole:Intervista a Raffaello Baldini,” IBC, July-September1996. pp.68-71. “Anche se può apparire scontato, credosia opportuno conoscere innanzitutto le motivazioni dellasua scelta: scrivere in dialetto.” p. 684. ibid. “È una domanda forse inevitabile. Alla qualeci può essere più di una risposta, compreso, ‘Non lo so,’che sembra una non risposta, mon non lo è.” p. 685. ibid. “Beh, l’essenza del dialetto, almeno per me, èl’oralità. Per me il dialetto, ho già avuto occasione didirlo, è un animale orale.” p. 696. ibid. p. 697. La nàiva (Einaudi, 1982); Furistír (Einaudi, 1988),Ad Nòta (Mondadori, 1995); La nàiva, Furastír, Ciacri(Einaudi, 2000). Baldini has written three theatricalmonologues: Carta canta, Zitti tutti! and In fondo adestra (Einaudi, 1998). His collection Furistír wasawarded the Viareggio Prize and Ad nòta was awardedthe Bagutta Prize. His first poetry collection, E’ solitèri,was originally published in 1976 by Galeati di Imola; itwas included in the 1982 Einaudi collection, La nàiva.8. Brevini, “L’apolcalisse rogangola di Baldini,”Nuova rivista europea, March-May 1982. p. 110-114.“In questi poemetti il tradizionale pocedimento dell’elencazionecaro a Baldini viene sostituito da un crescendodal minimo al massimo, da un movimento di dilatazioneche conduce la realtà ad assumere parvenze mostruose.”p. 113.9. Mengaldo. p. X, p. XV10. Isella. p. VI “. . . risulterà per ogni via manifestal’intenzione di realizzare un parlato appena al di sopradel continuum della prosa, una voce monologante in cuisi oggettiva non piú l”io”dello scrittore che ciascun componentedella sua stessa comunità.”11. Benati interview with Baldini in Page Proof. p. 4.Princeton PoetryNothing Is LostSelected PoemsEdvard KocbekTranslated by Michael Scammelland Veno TauferWith a foreword by Charles SimicThis is the first comprehensiveEnglish-language collection ofverse by the most celebratedSlovenian poet of modern timesand one of Europe’s most notablepostwar poets.“This is an extremely valuablebook. The translations are impeccable,lucid,and eloquent.”—Daniel WeissbortPaper $15.95 0-691-11840-XCloth $35.00 0-691-11839-6 Due MayThe CompleteElegies of SextusPropertiusTranslated, and with anintroduction and notes,by Vincent Katz“This work is a consummatelabor of love, which has managedto translate the agelesssophistication of the Roman poetPropertius into the distracted dissonanceof our ownperilous times.”—Robert CreeleyLockert Library of Poetry in TranslationPaper $18.95 0-691-11582-6Cloth $45.00 0-691-11581-8 Due JulyPRINCETON 800-777-4726 • READ EXCERPTS ONLINEUniversity Press•WWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU38 Translation Review

ON THE CATHAY TOUR WITH ELIOT WEINBERGER’S NEWDIRECTIONS ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRYBy Steve BradburyIn April 1915, when fourteen translations by EzraPound, for the most part from the Chinese of Li Po,appeared in a one-shilling chapbook in heavy tan paperwrappers with the title CATHAY, they set in motion avogue for Chinese poetry in free verse translation thatsoon swept away the rickety cottage industry of Victoriantranslators of this verse tradition like a “Schumpeteriangale.” 1 Pound’s inspired abandonment of rhyme andmeter in favor of free verse or, as he preferred to call it,vers libre, proved so appealing to readers and expedientfor subsequent translators, literary and academic alike,that the vogue eventually turned into a tradition that is,today, as firmly established as a four-lane highway. 2However one may feel about the “inventor of Chinesepoetry for our time,” as T.S. Eliot once famouslyremarked of the author of Cathay, it is difficult to denythat the modern turn to free verse led to some of the besttranslations of the last century and that they in turn havelured thousands of readers to tour one of the world’sgreat classical verse traditions.As with any tour, however, one is well advised to becautious before racing to the conclusion that the sites onesees are necessarily reflective of the cultural traditionthey represent. Of course, many translations on the“Cathay Highway” do provide a faithful representationof what their source poems say by way of assertion —and well they should, for only the prose poem affords thetranslator greater freedom as a medium of poetic expression.But even the best free verse translations give littlesense of the prosodic nature or auditory effects of theirsources — nor could they, for the forms of the classicalChinese verse tradition define themselves by the veryconventions that free verse defines itself against: fixedrhyme and meter. 3 Virtually all classical Chinese poetryrhymes, usually on the even lines, and although meter isa somewhat problematic term to use in the context of apredominantly monosyllabic tonal language like Chinese,as the late James J.Y. Liu perceptively observed,variation in tone involves not only modulation inpitch but contrast between long and short syllables.In the latter respect, Chinese verse resembles Latinquantitative verse, while the modulation in pitchplays a role in Chinese verse comparable to that ofvariation in stress in English verse. 4Despite its ideographic reputation, classical Chinesepoetry, like the poetry of virtually every verse traditionwhose roots extend into a preliterate era, “demands to berecited, heard, even memorized for its true appreciation.Shaping the words in one’s mouth is as much a part ofthe pleasure as hearing the sounds in the air.” 5 While noone knows exactly how the classical verse sounded whenit was written, the same can be said of Elizabethan verse.Changes in the Chinese language have not been so greatas to destroy the pleasure of reciting or hearing thepoems of Li Po, for example, any more than changes inthe English language have destroyed the auditory pleasuresof Shakespeare’s sonnets. Even in the relativelyremote dialect of Mandarin, most of the T’ang poemsstill rhyme, and their tonal cadences are so engaging thatChinese children memorize them with an enthusiasm thatWestern children tend to reserve for nursery rhymes andplayground songs. 6Sinologists have often pointed out that the sound andshape of the classic poems are half their meaning, butthey have never managed to drive this point home in theone place it really matters for the general reader: thepleasure of the reading moment. And since none of thegreat formalist poets or poet-scholars ever rose to theoccasion — What might a shilling chapbook of Li Popentasyllabic octaves rendered in ottava rima by W.B.Yeats or Daryl Hine, for example, have done to enlargeour appreciation of this verse tradition? — there is reallynothing in English translation that even suggests thatclassical Chinese poetry was written within and against aformalist tradition apart from the deservedly forgottenversions of the Victorian translators, none of whom werepoets, and a handful of more recent efforts that show solittle feeling for form or are so feeble or obnoxious inother regards as to leave one with the impression that, ifChinese poets didn’t actually write in free verse, well,American translators have probably been doing them afavor.Translation Review 39

I.Pluck, pluck, pluck, the thick plantain;Pluck, pick, pluck, then pluck again.Oh pick, pluck the thick plantain,Here be seeds for sturdy men.Pluck the leaf and fill the flap,Skirts were made to hide the lap.II.Don’t chop that pear tree,Don’t spoil that shade;Thaar’s where ole Marse Shao used to sit,Lord how I wish he was judgin’ yet.No, these are not the handwork of some nineteenthcentury rhymester working in the “dialect tradition” ofJoel Chandler Harris; they are the creations of the inventorof Chinese poetry for our time, Ezra Loomis Pound.Both are from The Classic Anthology Defined byConfucius (1954), the full-length version of the Shihchingor “Book of Poetry” the aging poet hammered outduring his long incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,where he served sentence for his disastrous career movefrom high modernist to political pundit on the “AmericanHour” of Radio Rome during World War Two. 7 HadPound been able to read classical Chinese with the fluencyand sensitivity for metrical form that he had oncebrought to the Anglo-Saxon of “The Seafarer” (one ofthe translations he included in Cathay) or the Provençalof Arnaut Daniel’s “Alba” (“When the nightingale to hismate/ Sings day-long and night late . . .”), he might wellhave re-invented Chinese poetry for our time.Unfortunately, he had no more than a smattering ofChinese, most of it gleaned from that relic of the ChinaInland Mission, Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary;and his poetic faculties had become so impaired by hisreactionary politics that his eleventh-hour venture intoformalism is both doting in its execution and laced withthe prejudices he had cultivated during his long romancewith the fascist regime of a dictator, Benito Mussolini,whom he had idealized as a modern Thomas Jefferson. 8If this seems a harsh judgment, take a moment to comparethe poet’s versions with his primary sources, theEnglish translations of the Victorian Sinologist JamesLegge, and observe the nature of the changes he made 9 :Fu YiWe gather and gather the plantains;Now we may gather them.We gather and gather the plantains;Now we have got them.We gather and gather the plantains;Now we pluck the ears.We gather and gather the plantains;Now we rub out the seeds.We gather and gather the plantains;Now we place the seeds in ourskirts.We gather and gather the plantains;Now we tuck our skirts under ourgirdles.Kan T’ang[This] umbrageous sweet pear-tree;Clip it not, hew it not down.Under it the chief of Zhou lodged.[This] umbrageous sweet pear-tree;Clip it not, break not a twig of it.Under it the chief of Zhou rested.[This] umbrageous sweet pear-tree;Clip it not, bend not a twig of it.Under it the chief of Zhou halted. 10As we can see from Legge’s translations, which havethe virtue of being faithful if little else to recommendthem, there is nothing in the first poem suggesting thatits author sought to impose rules of decorum uponwomen in the work place; nor anything in the secondimplying that its speaker longed, as Pound then did, forsome masterful authority of the remembered past whocould set the judgments of the world aright. It is not simplythat Pound misunderstood his sources: he has deliberatelyrewritten them in order to project his desires uponthat “imaginative geography” he called “ancient China”;this is not translation but Orientalism, and one that wouldno doubt have embarrassed many a Victorian. 11 For ifPound’s rewriting of the women’s harvest song reflectsan antebellum interest in “keeping ’em down on thefarm,” the voice, vocabulary, and spelling conventions of40 Translation Review

“Thaar’s where ole Marse Shao used to sit,/ Lord how Iwish he was judgin’ yet” are straight out of Uncle Remusand His Legends of the Old Plantation, whose mockblackdialect Pound, writing to T.S. Eliot in the late thirtiesfrom his cottage in Rapallo, Italy, would put on likesome epistolary version of black-face to amuse andembarrass the Southern poet: “Waaal Possum, my fineole Marse Supial . . ..” 12That Pound would seize upon Chinese poetry as anoccasion for an Orientalist rewriting is not entirely surprisingin light of his politics. What is surprising is thatan editor of Eliot Weinberger’s progressive viewswould reprint such work in an anthology he hopedwould find service “as a collection of poems worthreading, as an introductory survey of classical Chinesepoetry and a celebration of it by American poets”(xxvii). How either of these relics of Pound’s St.Elizabeths years serves any of these aims is a mysteryto me, but then I have similar reservations about thevolume in which they appear, The New DirectionsAnthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. This is a dreadfullydisappointing book, all the more so for the expectationselicited by its subtitle, the Chinese counterpartto Pound’s injunction to the modernists of his generation,“MAKE IT NEW” (“hsin jih jih hsin” ? ?? ?),and by its impressive list of contributors: Ezra Pound,William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, GarySnyder, and the much-laurelled translator David Hinton.Readers who purchase this anthology in the expectationof getting an introductory anthology of classicalChinese poetry are bound to be sorely disappointed. Inlimiting his selection to a handful of poets and translatorson the New Directions backlist, Weinberger leavesimmense expanses of the verse tradition entirely unrepresentedor dominated by the questionable work of a singletranslator. Pound is allowed to lord over the five centuriesof the Shih-ching, the very fountainhead ofChinese poetry, with a score of his dubious “ConfucianOdes” and one translation from Cathay. He also has thelion’s share of the mere eleven translations representingthe next thousand years of the verse tradition, and threeof these are not even translations but rather Imagistpoems, among them, this haiku-like chinoiserie the poet“extracted” from Herbert Giles’s late Victorian version ofa ten-line poem by the Han Dynasty concubine PanChieh-Yü:Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial LordO fan of white silk,Clear as frost on the grass-blade,You also are laid aside. (20)A nice example of Pound’s contribution to the Imagistmovement, but what can it possibly tell us about theChinese poem Weinberger allows it to represent exceptthat it, too, has been laid aside?Of the next seven centuries of Chinese verse, onlythe poetry of the T’ang Dynasty is sufficiently well representedto serve the needs of an introductory survey, butfrom then on the tradition once again falls under theimperious dominion of a single translator: KennethRexroth. All but three of the forty-nine translations representingthe three hundred years of the Sung are by thispoet, whose “Poems from the Chinese” even Weinbergerconcedes “are almost impossible to separate … from hisown poetry; they tend to speak as one” (xxiv). Whilemany of these translations are impressive individually, itis distressing to witness poet after poet — Confuciangentry, bureaucratic functionaries, generals, and widowsalike — transformed into the semblance of a middleagedMidwesterner “speaking in a plain, natural-breathing,neutral American idiom” (xxiv). Curiously, despitetheir generic similarities, some of Rexroth’s translationsare actually the product of a collaborative effort,although Weinberger is so stinting in his acknowledgmentsthat it is likely to escape most readers. I refer tothe seventeen Li Ch’ing-chao and Chu Shu-chen translations,most of which were either co-translated or extensivelyrevised by Ling Chung, a Taiwanese poet andscholar with whom Rexroth collaborated on two volumesof translation: The Orchid Boat: Woman Poets of Chinaand Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems. Rexroth alwaysshared the byline with Chung on the work they didtogether. Weinberger does not even mention her except ina passing reference to their collaboration in a sentencethat begins with a description of Marichiko, a Japanesefemale persona Rexroth invented for a series of eroticpoems he wrote in his sunset years, and ends with anassertion that shows an appalling indifference to the distinctionsbetween real people and Orientalist fictions:“Like Whitman, Rexroth was containing multitudes, butthey were all East Asian women” (xxiv).Weinberger’s anthology includes a number of shortessays and commentaries “On Chinese Poetry,” but theyadd little to his anthology’s value as an introductory survey.Surprisingly, only one of these has a Chinese source,Translation Review 41

Lu Chi’s “Rhymeprose on Literature,” a third-century arspoetica, so nicely translated by Achilles Fang that itshould have been included in the survey rather than itsappendix. The rest of Weinberger’s “collage of commentaries”are by the American contributors, not all of whomwere well versed in the classical verse tradition. Snyder’sthree brief essays on hills and mountains in Chinesepoetry are as beautifully composed and firmly groundedas the topics on which he writes, but Pound’s contribution,an excerpt from the Ernest Fenollosa essay he editedand published under the title “The Chinese WrittenCharacter as a Medium for Poetry,” is notoriously unreliable.Although it provided the basis for the “ideogrammicmethod” Pound began to bruit a few years afterCathay, its central thesis, that the Chinese characters areideographic, had been soundly discredited by sinologistsmore than half a century before Fenollosa took up thedesultory study of Chinese poetry under Japanesetutors. 13 William Carlos Williams’s contribution to thecollage, a review of Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems fromthe Chinese, has nothing to say about Chinese poetry andoffers few insights on the translations: “Mr. Rexroth is agenius in his own right, inventing a modern language, orfollowing a vocal tradition which he raises here to greatdistinction” (197). Rexroth’s contributions, a short essayon Tu Fu and a statement of “Chinese Poetry and theAmerican Imagination” from a published symposium, aremore informative, but the details tend to get lost in thewelter of his bewildering comparisons:. . . almost none of Tu Fu’s verse is lyric in thesense in which the songs of Shakespeare, ThomasCampion, Goethe, or Sappho are lyric. Rather, hisis a poetry of reverie, comparable to Leopardi’s“L’Infinito,” which might well be a translationfrom the Chinese, or the better sonnets ofWordsworth. (198)So Chinese poetry has come to influence the Westas a special form of Chinese verse — whichannoys some of the more pedantic Sinologists ofChinese ancestry. It is a special kind of free verseand its appearance happened to converge with themovement toward Objectivism, Imagism, and eventhe Cubist poetry of Gertrude Stein and PierreReverdy — “no ideas but in things,” as Williamssays rather naively. (209)Rexroth’s statements on the influence of Chinese verseon American poetry were often bent to the service ofpromoting free verse, but at least he had the probity tomention that “Chinese poetry, in fact, bears no resemblance”to the free verse translations of the Americanpoets (209). Weinberger never even points this out, muchless provide an actual description of the poetry his surveyrepresents. On the contrary, he begins his introductionwith the extraordinary thesis that “American poetryis inextricable from classical Chinese poetry and theChinese language itself” (xix). One is tempted to thinkthat he is speaking in jest, especially in light of his observation,a few pages later, that the wellspring of this“inextricable” relationship — “the new, plain-speaking,laconic, image-driven free verse” exemplified by theCathay translations — was “written by an American whoknew no Chinese, working from the notes of anAmerican who knew no Chinese, who was taking dictationfrom Japanese simultaneous interpreters who weretranslating the comments of Japanese professors”(xix–xx). It is soon clear, however, that Weinberger is inearnest, for he devotes much of his introduction to a ramblingaccount of the influence of the Chinese languageand classical verse tradition upon American poetry, oneso bereft of supporting evidence and riddled with contradictionsthat even he is forced to conclude:How classical Chinese entered into American poetryis a simple story, but its effect may never befully unraveled, for it is often impossible to determinewhether the Americans found in it a revelationor merely the confirmation of what they hadalready discovered. (xxv-xxvi).Literary influence is often difficult to determine, butthis much is certain: none of the free verse poets in theformative years of the American romance with Chinesepoetry — not Pound, Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, noreven Rexroth a generation later — could read the classicalpoems they translated. But all of them could read theEnglish translations in the sources they actually workedfrom. In Pound’s case, his sources, the notes of ErnestFenollosa, did not even include the Chinese, only aromanized transcription and a word-for-word gloss heappears to have largely ignored, judging from his versionof this excerpt (reprinted in Weinberger’s introduction) ofthe “first line of what was to become . . . ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ (‘While my hair was still cutstraight across my forehead’)”:Sho hatsu sho fuku gakuMistress hair first cover brow42 Translation Review

Chinese lady’s I or my beginningMy hair was at first covering my brows(Chinese method of wearing hair) (xix)Comparing the two versions, we can see that Poundextensively revised Fenollosa’s prose, but none of thechanges have any basis in Fenollosa’s glosses. Of hisprincipal changes, the introduction of trochaic meter andthe substitution of “covering my brow” with the moreconcrete “cut straight across my forehead,” the former isas old as the English verse tradition and the second wassomething he arrived at with the help of his English wife,Dorothy Shakespeare. Pound was certainly cognizant ofwhat the Chinese source poem says, thanks toFenollosa’s glosses, but it is clear that he was far lessinterested in representing its verse technique than inusing it as an occasion for a poetic rewriting to bolsterhis effort to “set up a critical standard” for free verse.This was something he had no doubt learned from hisFrench precursors, notably the prose poems of JudithGautier, whose “variations on Chinese themes,” collectedin her Le Livre de jade (1867), had invented Chinesepoetry for her era as Pound’s Cathay translations havefor ours. Gautier’s prose poems were not only formattedin a manner that anticipates vers libre; one of them is aversion of the same Li Po quatrain (chüeh-chü) Poundtranslated as “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance.” 14For his verse technique, however, Pound looked lessto French vers libre than to the free verse poems ofEdgar Lee Masters. Pound had been experimenting withfree verse since his 1913 “Pact” with Walt Whitman to“carve the new wood” the great bard had broken fromblank verse, but his few efforts in this direction had beenso self-consciously mannered in their revolt againstmeter, no doubt to mark his distance from Whitman, asto draw more attention to his meter than to his revolt. 15Masters’ free verse, which was modeled on English prosetranslations of the Greek Anthology, demonstrated that amore prosaic line could draw attention to the subjectwithin the poem in a way that left one with the impressionof being “confronted with life, with the objectivefact,” which are precisely the qualities of the dramaticmonologues in Cathay. 16 Pound never directly acknowledgedMasters’ influence, but it may, in fact, have providedthe impetus for him to do Cathay, for he had beensitting on the Fenollosa notebooks for nearly a yearbefore he set to work on the Chinese translations, andthis was shortly after he had gotten his first glimpse of“Spoon River.” 17 In any case, it is clear that Masters’ freeverse was very much on Pound’s mind during the monthshe worked on the Cathay translations, for in one reviewof the period, he compared Masters’ “straight writing,language unaffected” to lines from his version of the secondhalf of Li Po’s “South-Folk in Cold Country,” and inanother, reprinted several “Spoon River” poems that bearcomparison to “The River-Merchants’ Wife: A Letter.” 18Most are quite long, as is Pound’s version of the Li Popoem, but one not only is short enough to quote in fullbut also confronts us with a dramatis persona who, likethe river-merchant’s wife, recounts the painful ironies ofher marriage and speaks of dust, desire, and eternity:Amanda BarkerHenry got me with child,Knowing that I could not bring forth lifeWithout losing my own.In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.Traveler, it is believed in the village where I livedThat Henry loved me with a husband’s love,But I proclaim from the dustThat he slew me to gratify his hatred. 19Masters’ poem and Pound’s translation have differentplots and poetic genres, but they share the same versetechnique. Although none of the Cathay translationsdeploy the convention of a gravestone epigraph, he didmake a significant generic change to both “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” and the other great Li Po dramaticmonologue in Cathay, “Exile’s Letter.” The formeris actually a literary ballad (hsing) and the latter a “poemin the old style” (ku-shih), but having seen the “SpoonRiver” poems, Pound must have realized that adoptingthe prosaic convention of a “letter” would give his translationsmore of the “confronting” quality he had admiredin Masters’ work. The change has served them well, forthey are among the three or four most admired andanthologized Chinese translations in English.Neither Gautier’s prose poems nor Masters’ freeverse is quite as “laconic” or “image-driven” as theCathay translations, but even these aspects of Pound’sverse technique were something confirmed, rather thandiscovered, in the Fenollosa notebooks, for they weresimply an extension of the guiding principles of theImagist movement, whose birth he had presided over,when, in October 1912, in his role as foreign editor forPoetry Magazine, he had taken a blue pencil to HildaDoolittle’s “Hermes of the Ways” and christened herTranslation Review 43

“H.D. Imagiste”; he even used the word “laconic” in hiscover letter to Harriet Monroe. 20 In his genealogy of the“new, laconic, image-driven free verse” exemplified byPound’s Cathay translations, Weinberger makes a ratherfeeble effort to show that Chinese poetry had a formativeinfluence on the Imagist movement by pointing out thatmost of Pound’s early Imagist poems were “extracted”from the “weed-choked verbiage” of Herbert Giles’s versions(xviii). But this only shows that Chinese poetrywas not a source for the Imagist principles but merelymaterial upon which to exercise them. His real sourceswere the poems and fragments of the Greek Anthologythat he and other poets in the Imagist circle had beenreading and, as we saw earlier, English translations ofJapanese haiku, which provided the specific formalmodel for “Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord” and thisclassic expression of the Imagist aesthetic Pound claimedto have whittled down from a 30-line poem:In a Station of the MetroThe apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough. 21And so we move on to the other editorial hopes of TheNew Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry.Had Weinberger made a broader but more discriminatingselection of poems and translations influenced byPound’s “invention of China” and arranged them in theorder in which they were made, interlarded with briefintroductory comments, his anthology could have foundservice as both “a collection of poems worth reading”and “a celebration of Chinese poetry by American poets”(27). Unfortunately, many of the selections in his anthologyhave no more merit as poetry than as translations. Tohis credit, Weinberger has included a fair share of thebetter Cathay translations, but it is not easy to find themamong the thickets of Cathay outtakes and uncollectedwork like this version of a drinking poem attributed to LiPo that is so befuddled I am unable to identify its source,and there is no list of Chinese sources to make the searchany easier:WineDew, clear as gilt jewels, hangs under the gardengrass-blades.Swift is the year, swift is the coming cold season,Life swift as the dart of a bird:Wine, wine, wine for a hundred autumns,And then no wine, no wine, and no wine. 22Pound left such work uncollected precisely to avoid havingCathay turn into a “democratic beer-garden,” as heoft complained of Amy Lowell’s appropriation of theterm Imagist to refer to anything written in free verse butespecially her own “looser work.” 23 Now, with the entrepreneurialfervor of an Amy Lowell, Weinberger hasserved up some of the poet’s best vers libre with thepickings from his dustbin.Nor has William Carlos Williams been well servedby having fifteen of his unpublished Chinese translationsincluded in The New Directions Anthology of ClassicalChinese Poetry. Vide this bizarre version of a differentLi Po drinking poem Williams, then in his mid-seventies,made with the help of an obscure first-generationChinese-American named David Rafael Wang, whowrote, we are informed, “in the Greco-Sino-Samurai-African tradition” (xxiv-xxv):Drinking TogetherWe drink in the mountain while the flowers bloom,Apitcher, a pitcher, and one more pitcher.As my head spins you get up.So be back any time with your guitar. (88)Surely there’s a typo or two in the first line. Li Po wasn’tin the mountain but among the flowers growing on it;and, despite his reputation for being “rapt with wine,” heimbibed by a cup not much larger than a shot glass. 24 Notall of their translations are as unworthy of reading as thisone, but most amply justify the good doctor’s lack ofinterest in seeing them published. Of the few exceptions,only one seems equal to Williams’s reputation as a poet:an untitled version of Li Yü’s “To the Tune ‘At the Joyof Our Meeting,’” a tz’u, or poem set to one of the populartunes of the metropolitan pleasure quarters:Silently I ascend the western pavilion.The moon hangs like a hairpin.In the deep autumn gardenThe wu-t’ung stands alone.Involute,Entangled,The feeling of departureClings like a wet leaf to my heart. (142)44 Translation Review

It is not a bad translation, but their rendering of the lastline (in Chinese: ????????? “Outlandish as a flavoron the heart”) is extremely reminiscent of the closinglines in Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro” and thisImagist “extract” from one of Giles’s translations:Liu Ch’eThe rustling of the silk is discontinued,Dust drifts over the courtyard,There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leavesScurry into heaps and lie still,And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. (18)The textual similarities lead me to suspect the workwas a tribute to Pound, especially in light of the fact thatLi Yü, who was the last emperor of the Southern T’angDynasty and one of the founders of the tz’u, which cameto dominate the poetry of the conquering Sung Dynasty,spent his final years, like Pound, as a political prisonerwriting poems about the vanished glories of the past.Williams and his Chinese-American co-translator hadvisited Pound at St. Elizabeths, where they may havebeen struck by the similarities between these two imperiouspoets, and decided to turn their version into a tributeto the modernist whose Imagist principles had playedsuch a formative role in Williams’s own development asa poet. Unfortunately, we’ll never know, at least fromthis anthology, as Weinberger has nothing to say aboutthis particular work or, for that matter, many others thatwould well benefit from some editorial commentary.Even when he does bother to distinguish a paraphrasefrom a translation or place a text within a context thatmight enable us to illuminate its virtues and appreciateits liberties, he often skews or undermines the effort bysome bizarre liberty of his own. For example, in hisnotes to Pound’s Imagist chinoiserie, he repeatedly refersto them as “translations” even though the poet clearlyintended them to be read as poems. The New DirectionsAnthology of Classical Chinese Poetry was not designedto be a reference book, but better no notes than ones thatlead readers so far astray. Equally bizarre is his treatmentof this signature translation from Cathay:The Jewel Stairs’ GrievanceThe jewelled steps are already quite white withdew,It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,And I let down the crystal curtainAnd watch the moon through the clear autumn.By Rihaku (Li T’ai Po)Note: Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, thereforethere is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, thereforea court lady, not a servant who complains. Clearautumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather.Also she has come early, for the dew has not merelywhitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. Thepoem is especially prized because she utters no directreproach. 25Pound always presented his translation and prosenote together. This was not just to apprise his readers ofthe indirect reproach for which Li Po’s elegant take onthe stock formula of the neglected courtesan is deservedlyadmired. He is using the note to voice his own indirectreproach to the “potential Medicis” of his era for failingto provide the patronage that would release him (andother deserving poets) from the alienation and pedestrianrivalry of the marketplace, which he believed was all thatstood between him and the “American risorgimento,” or“new arising,” he had been calling for since 1910. 26 It isthe same grievance that finds more overt expression inseveral other translations in Cathay, such as Li Po’s“Exile’s Letter,” which Pound sent to the art patron JohnQuinn, whom he was then courting as the last, best hopefor an American renaissance, with the note “I rather likethe ‘Exile’s Letter’. Yrs. E.P.”; and that most curious ofCathay inclusions, “The Seafarer,” whose speaker is, likePound, an Anglo-Saxon poet who has crossed the sea andis wont to complain that “There come now no kings norCaesars/ Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.” 27Instead of Pound’s note, Weinberger gives us thisrather indifferent version of the same poem by DavidHinton:Jade-Staircase GrievanceNight long on the jade staircase, whiteDew appears, soaks through gauze stockings.She lets down crystalline blinds, gazes outThrough jewel lacework at the autumn moon. (77)Translation Review 45

Hinton has a huge presence in The New DirectionsAnthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. This is partlybecause Weinberger, believing him to be “a reliableSinologist,” has coupled many of his translations withthe Cathay poems so that “Readers may judge for themselvesPound’s reputation for ‘infidelity,’ that watchwordof translation’s morality police” (xx). Ironically, in thisinstance (and others as well), Hinton actually takes moreliberties with his Chinese source than the poet whosefaithfulness lies in question. Notwithstanding Pound’sreputation for playing fast and loose with his sources, hisversion of this Chinese poem is surprisingly faithful toboth the letter of the text and its rhetorical development.Like so much T’ang poetry, Li Po’s quatrain conveys itssense and sentiments through a poetics of oblique portrayal:first setting the scene (the evocative trompe l’oeilof the “jewelled stairs” glazed with dew) before commentingupon its significance (“It is late …”); thenamplifying the theme by abruptly altering our point ofview and/or advancing the “plot” (“And I let down thecrystal curtain”); and ending with a closing response thatagain enlarges our perspective on the situation (theevocative claire de lune of “And watch the moonthrough the clear autumn”). Hinton is less faithful to boththe letter of the text and its poetics. His transposition of“Night long” from the second line to the beginning of thefirst reverses Li Po’s rhetorical development by havingthe poem comment upon the scene before it has beenpresented. In the fourth line, his rendering of ling-lungtrades away the phrase’s primary interpretation (“clearand bright”) for an elaborate gloss (“jewel lacework”)that not only seems redundant after “crystalline blinds”but tends to deflect our attention from the courtesan’sgrievance to the splendor of her furnishings. His last linerolls nicely off the tongue, but the rest of his version isas prosaic as a telegram and his eccentric line breaks,which have no basis in his source text, give his Englishan awkwardness that could hardly have less in commonwith the elegant symmetry of his source.Rexroth made wonderful use of enjambment in manyof his “Poems from the Chinese,” as we can see fromthis version of a much-translated Tu Fu lü-shih, or regulatedoctave, that is among the better offerings inWeinberger’s anthology:Snow StormTumult, weeping, many new ghosts.Heartbroken, aging, alone, I singTo myself. Ragged mist settlesIn the spreading dusk. Snow skurriesIn the coiling wind. The wineglassIs spilled. The bottle is empty.The fire has gone out in the stove.Everywhere men speak in whispers.I brood on the uselessness of letters. (98)Rexroth took liberties with the Tu Fu poem, butthis is hardly surprising in light of the fact that it originatedas a paraphrase, one of several he published inthe closing years of World War Two to express hisdespair over the insolvency of his vocation as a poeton the Left. 28 These were hard times for any writer onthe Left, but Rexroth had not been able to find a venuefor his poetry or political views after America’s entryinto the war, and his strong pacifist convictions alienatedhim from the remnants of a once vigorous AmericanLeft for which he had, in the heyday of the PopularFront, harbored Whitmanic expectations of his role insociety: “I do not think there exists anything resemblinga political problem in adjusting the work of ournative ‘avant garde’ to the culture of the workingclassmovement.” 29 Moreover, his insolvency and isolationwere aggravated by the disintegration of his marriageand the discovery that former WPA “comrats” hadinformed against him during the FBI investigation ofhis application for draft exemption as a conscientiousobjector. 30 Read in this context, his Whitmanic “I sing/To myself” no longer seems an obtrusive anachronism,and we can see how the line break reinforces the ironyin the allusion by literalizing Rexroth’s break from theWhitmanic belief that he could sing the self and speakfor the nation. The next enjambment is no less meaningful,for it underscores his own powerlessness evenas it sweeps us up, like “the snow skurries [sic],” to thenext couplet, whose grammatical breaks and endstoppedlines compel us to reflect upon the spilt “wineglass”and other symbols of his diminished resourcesbefore carrying us to the final couplet, whose endstoppedlines fall upon our ears like an apocalypticjudgment: “Everywhere men speak in whispers./ Ibrood on the uselessness of letters.” It is not exactly TuFu, but it is wonderful poetry, and one of the bestpoems Rexroth ever wrote.Now look at Hinton’s version, which Weinbergerhas conveniently paired with Rexroth’s, much toHinton’s loss:46 Translation Review

Facing SnowEnough new ghosts to mourn any war.And a lone old grief-sung man. Clouds atTwilight’s ragged edge foundering, windBuffets a dance of headlong snow. A ladleLies beside this jar drained of emeraldWine. The stove’s flame-red mirage lingers.News comes from nowhere. I sit here,Spirit-wounded, tracing words onto air. (98)Hinton’s enjambment is no less aggressive thanRexroth’s but seems to have little rhyme or reason. Hisfirst break, after “Clouds at,” followed by the syntacticallyconvoluted “Twilight’s ragged edge foundering,” predisposesus to misread the enjambed word “wind” as averb rather than the noun it is. But once we have realizedour mistake and reread the line, the awkwardness andinconsistency of the comma leaves us pausing in wonderat his “style-sheet.” Why not a period as with all theother sentences? And why bump “A ladle” back to thefourth line instead of leaving it where it belongs? Thisviolates the structural symmetry of the couplets.Although it does give him a slanted end-rhyme with“emerald” in the next stanza, stacking four weak endrhymesin succession (“at,” “wind,” “ladle,” and “emerald”)draws far more attention to the effort than to theeuphony. Ironically, if it was, in fact, rhyme Hinton wasafter, he would have been better off had he foregoneenjambment altogether, for this alone would have yieldedhim a nice half rhyme (“man” and “wine”) to link thefirst and third couplets and a far more satisfying fullrhyme (“nowhere” and “air”) for his closing couplet thanthe half rhyme he gets from bumping “I sit here” up tothe end of the seventh line.But Hinton’s version does not stand up well againstRexroth’s even at the level of content, for his libertieswith the sense and syntax of his source text tend toobscure rather than illuminate the poem. Perhaps inanticipation of this complaint, Weinberger argues that“Hinton has attempted to recreate some of the density ofclassical Chinese, without resorting, as some others havedone, to a pidgin English”; this as a challenge to the“reigning style — forged by Rexroth, Snyder, and[Burton] Watson — which assumes that the Chinesedirect apprehension of the real world must be presentedin direct, conversational speech” (xxv). Although theChinese poems are not conversational, Hinton’s “density”bears little resemblance to that of his Chinese sourcesand, despite Weinberger’s reassurances to the contrary,some of the translator’s versions do verge at times on asort of elevated pidgin, as we can see from the closingcouplet of his translation of this Li Po poem:Wandering Ch’ing-ling Stream in Nan-yangI hoard the sky a setting sun leavesand love this cold stream’s clarity:western light follows water away,rippled current a wanderer’s heart.I sing, watch cloud and moon, emptysong soon long wind through pine. (88)To be sure, classical Chinese poetry has an enviableconcision, in part because the Chinese language has nocase, number, or gender, but also because the classicalpoets often dispensed with pronouns, prepositions, andother function words required in modern English.Nonetheless, most of the T’ang poems translated byHinton, even those by Tu Fu, who has a reputation fordensity, are surprisingly easy to understand because ofthe simplicity of the poetic lexicon and the structuralsymmetry of their forms. Their density is experiencednot as a semantic or syntactical complexity that resistsinterpretation but as a gradual thickening of significanceas relatively simple lines open up to complementaryreadings or enlarge the implications of what came before.But rather than take this on faith, let us look at theChinese source for the Tu Fu poem that Hinton andRexroth translated via a word-for-word translation. Ishould point out, however, that many Chinese words canserve equally well as nouns, verbs, or other parts ofspeech, depending on their relationship to other words inthe sentence, and, in the absence of inflection and manyfunction words essential in English, have a grammaticalmobility that is impossible to convey in English, whichtends to fix words into specific grammatical categories.Fortunately, the strict rules of the lü-shih form, whichrequire every line of the poem to be end-stopped, with acaesura or grammatical break after the second character,and each pair of lines in every couplet to be syntacticallyparallel and semantically antithetical, make the grammaticalrelationships fairly obvious even when the lines areinverted. Nonetheless, a few of the phrases, such as thefirst, are open to more than one reading, wherein liessome of the poem’s semantic complexity. In such cases, ITranslation Review 47

will represent the first reading in the literal translationand present the complementary reading in my discussion:Tui hsüeh ??chan k’u tuo hsin kuei ? ? ? ?ch’ou yin tu lau weng ? ? ? ? ?luan yün ti po mu ? ? ? ? ?chi hsüeh wu hui feng ? ? ? ? ?p’iao qi tsun wu lü ? ? ? ? ?lu ts’un huo ssu hung ? ? ? ? ?shu chou hsiao-hsi tuan ? ? ? ? ?ch’ou tso cheng shu k’ung ? ? ? ? ?Facing SnowBattle cries, many new ghosts;[In] sorrow chants [poetry], [a] lone old man.Chaotic clouds founder [in the] thinning twilight;Urgent snow dances [in the] swirling wind.[The] ladle [lies] discarded, [the] wine-jar withoutgreen;[The] brazier remains, [but the] fire [only] seemsred.[From] many provinces, news [is] cut off;[In his] sorrowful seat, just writing [in the] air.The poem opens as if in the middle of a battle, butby the end of the line, it is clear that the opening phraseforms the predicate of an inverted sentence, and thus thecries are not those of the combatants but their ghostshaunting the battlefields. Adjusting the translationaccording, we can see that the two lines of the coupletnot only are syntactically parallel but also form a nearlyperfect row of binary oppositions.[Over] battle-[fields] cry many new ghosts;[In] sorrow recites [poetry, a] lone old man.But here we can also see that we need not abandonour initial impression of the opening phrase, forboth the cries of the combatants and those of theghosts are alive in the memory or imagination of thesolitary man chanting poetry in the room that, onlynow, we realize is the real setting of “Facing Snow.”The next couplet follows a similar pattern, for it toobegins with a view of the world outside, followed bya line that abruptly constricts our visual perspectiveeven as it enlarges our understanding of what we haveseen. But here the “thickening of significance” issymbolic, for as Stephen Owen has pointed out, thecouplet’s opening phrases can be read in politicalterms: i.e., “clouds of rebellion” and “snow of war’salarums.” 31 The third couplet, which returns us to thetableau vivant of the “lone old man,” also enlargesour understanding of the situation by focusing ourattention, much as Rexroth’s version did, to the signsand symbols of the man’s insolvent state. The closingcouplet gives us our final view of the conditions outside,returning us to the constricted world of the “loneold man,” who is now “writing [in the] air.” Thisphrase requires a gloss, for it is a literary allusionmeaning “idly writing in air” but it also contains apun. The character “to write” (shu) was commonlyused in the T’ang dynasty as a word for “mail,” andthe character meaning “air” (k’ung) also means“empty,” which suggests that what the old man iswriting in the air are the letters he is unable to writebecause of the disruptions in communication mentionedin the previous line. This complementary reading(“now letters [are] empty”) brings the line intoconformity with both the rules of the lü-shih form andTu Fu scholarship, which has long assigned this poemto the late autumn or early winter of 756, when thepoet was trapped in the capital city of Ch’ang-an afterit had fallen in the An Lu-shan Rebellion and wasunderstandably anxious to hear word of the imperialcourt, which had fled into exile, and to write to hisfamily, which was then living in an adjoiningprovince. Something like “tracing empty letters in theair” would suggest this interpretive possibility.Returning to Hinton’s version of this poem, we cansee that, once again, Weinberger’s “reliable scholar” haschosen to disregard the rhetorical development of hissource by commenting on the significance of the scenebefore he has fully presented it. His rendering of the firstcouplet completely dismantles the battlefield setting andreduces the vivid cries of the “new ghosts” to a merepotential for mourning and the recitations of “the griefsungman” to a nominal modifier that leaves him with(literally) nothing to do even as it leaves us needlesslyconfused about what was “sung” and who was doing thesinging. His rendering of the next couplet scrambles thewords so that the metaphoric significance of the panoramais all but lost. While “A Ladle/ Lies besides this jardrained of emerald/ Wine” is nicely melodic, it has asumptuousness that seems far removed from the anxiousimpoverishment conveyed by his source. The referenceto “green” may be to an exotic wine, but it is far more48 Translation Review

likely a tea the speaker had been drinking in lieu of thewine he could not obtain or afford because of the privationsresulting from the conditions around him. But it isHinton’s rendering of the final couplet that take us farthestfrom Tu Fu’s Chinese, for “News comes fromnowhere” is open to the erroneous interpretation that thespeaker has actually received some news, albeit from anunidentifiable source, and the phrasing is so reminiscentof William Morris’s News from Nowhere as to suggestthe Hinton was making an incongruous allusion to thislate Victorian socialist fantasy. Ironically, his renderingof Tu Fu’s allusion (“tracing words onto air”) loses thepun on “letters” (shu) and, with it, the line’s complementaryreading. Moreover, the preposition “onto” not onlythrows off the rhythm of his line but is also illogical andunidiomatic, suggesting that China’s greatest poet wasnot quite in command of either his medium or faculties.In this regard, Rexroth is far more faithful than Hinton,for, despite his liberties with the form and content of TuFu’s poem, he does a superb job of conveying the relationshipbetween the two, wherein lies so much of themeaning of the poem: the poignant irony of being a poetwhose mastery of form can do nothing to master thechaos around him.We expect a Pound or Rexroth or even Snyder todepart from their sources. After all, they clearly belongto that tradition of writers who “seem to ask us,” asNietzsche observed of the French poets of the age ofCorneille and of the Revolution: “Should we not makenew for ourselves what is old and find ourselves in it?” 32Few of us expect a “reliable sinologist” to “MAKE ITNEW,” yet this is precisely what many of Hinton’s translationsdo (albeit with far less art and apparent purposethan the free verse poets who came before him) and preciselyhow he views his role as a translator, judging fromthis “author’s statement” he wrote at the invitation of theAcademy of American Poets after being awarded the1997 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award:Ancient Chinese poetry has been a major part ofmodern American poetry, providing an ancient traditionmuch more useful to the avant-garde thanthe traditions of the West, for they are rooted in acompletely discredited worldview. I approach theancients from this perspective, following Pound,Rexroth and Snyder. My intent is to translate themajor poets of ancient China, and thereby create anew tradition of contemporary American poetry, atradition with a coherent “voice” within which thedistinct voices of individual poets are clear andconsistent. 33There is a specter haunting the contradictions inthis statement and the tradition it invokes, and his nameis Walt Whitman. The author of “I Sing America” soughtto create a contemporary American poetry with a coherentvoice within which the distinct voices of “the mostpoetic of nations” would be clear and consistent andwound up with an imperious chorus of one, as, of course,did Rexroth. With seven volumes of classical Chineseverse already behind him, Hinton appears well on hisway to reducing the entire panoply of major poets to aWhitmanic chorus. Although he has made more effortthan Rexroth to suggest differences in voice and style,none of the many poets he has translated stand distinctlyapart from any of the others with the exception of hisHsieh Ling-yün. This may have less to do with the poetthan the prosaic nature of the selection, “Dwelling in theMountains,” a long fu, or “rhymeprose,” describing thescenery surrounding the poet’s immense estate in southernChina. In any case, Hinton has abandoned his customary“density” in favor of a more fluent and conversationalverse technique. Some passages have the powerand grace of a Rexroth or Snyder. Notable among theseis his rendering of the poem’s thesis, for here theenjambment not only makes all the sense in the worldbut also speaks volumes on the topic at hand:All these things —it’s their singularity that makes them nobletogether, each at ease in its own seasons. (46)True for Chinese poetry in translation as well asthe flora, fauna, and features of a Chinese landscape. Butit is one thing for a chorus of China’s greatest poets, eachat ease in his or her own “season,” to preserve a noblesingularity within their own poetic tradition and quiteanother for a single translator intent on making theirwork new for himself and finding himself in it. Havingpressed his imprint upon so much Chinese poetryalready, perhaps Hinton should venture some poetry ofhis own. Pound often recommended translation as a poeticexercise, but he also knew how readily it coulddevolve into an excuse to avoid the risks of originalcomposition. 34 Without these, however, how can anyoneexpect to “create a new tradition of contemporaryAmerican poetry,” much less one “useful to the avantgarde”?In one way or another, all of the free verse poetsrepresented in Weinberger’s anthology turned to ChineseTranslation Review 49

poetry in an attempt to refine or extend the Whitmanictradition in American poetry. Pound was the first to make“A Pact” with Whitman, but, having read his RemyDeGourmont, he knew that a poet “is valued by theabundance or the scarcity of his copy” and had the wisdom,at least when he still had his wits about him, tochoose the latter. 35 Thus, by default if not intention, thefourteen Cathay translations, for the most part from theChinese of Li Po, create the impression of a distinctpoetic voice even though they are part and parcel of anavant-garde effort to “set a critical standard” for freeverse. Williams, who had made his own pact withWhitman, avoided the dilemma of the Whitmanic translatorby simply avoiding publication. Snyder, who knewhis Pound, also had the wisdom to take the high road ofscarcity and confined his “conquest of the East,” by andlarge, to the “Cold Mountain Poems” of the early T’angpoet Han-Shan. 36 Thus, again, by default if not intention,his Chinese translations create the impression of a distinctand coherent poetic voice. Moreover, they have aclarity and lapidary cadence — the “rip-rap” of Snyder’sown early verse — that suggest the density of hisChinese sources without the awkwardness that mars somany of Hinton’s translations:In the mountains it’s cold.Always been cold, not just this year.Jagged scarps forever snowed inWoods in the dark ravines spitting mist.Grass is still sprouting at the end of June,Leaves begin to fall in early August.And here am I, high on mountains,Peering and peering, but I can’t even see the sky.(53)This is but one of fifteen fine “Cold MountainPoems” included in Weinberger’s anthology. These,together with Pound’s Cathay translations and Rexroth’s“Poems from the Chinese,” not only are worth reading aspoems but also have considerable merits as translations.But I would still not recommend The New DirectionsAnthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, for why spendtwenty-six dollars on this lamentable sampler of the NewDirections backlist when virtually everything in it worthreading is so readily and cheaply available online? Forthe same price, you can obtain second-hand copies, ingood to excellent condition, of Pound’s Selected Poems,Snyder’s Rip-Rap and Cold Mountain Poems, Rexroth’sOne Hundred Poems from the Chinese and Love and theTurning Year: More Poems from the Chinese, plus thetwo volumes of Chinese women’s poetry Rexroth translatedwith Ling Chung, and have most of the poems andtranslations in Weinberger’s anthology worth reading(and many more besides) without having to put up withpage after dreary page of Pound and Williams in theirdotage or Hinton’s belated efforts on behalf of the avantgardeor the prejudices of an editor who rather takes theluster off of New Directions’ reputation as the “primaryAmerican publisher of international modernism.” 37Footnotes1I borrow “Schumpeterian Gale” from David Harvey’smetaphor for Baron Haussmann’s massive reconstructionof the streets of Paris during the Second Empire modernization,discussed in The Condition of Postmodernity: AnEnquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1989) 16. Harvey coined the metaphorin honor of Joseph A. Schumpeter, who was one of thefirst economists to observe the role of entrepreneurialinitiative and technological innovation in sweeping awaythe past to clear space for new waves of investment andproduction.2Although translations from the Chinese in fixed rhymeand meter continued to appear after 1915, most wereeither reprints of older work or new work by older translators,such as L. Cranmer-Byng and W.J.B. Fletcher.3The classical verse poets did not even employ that fundamentaldefining convention of lineation, which was notwidely adopted until the modern era. Prior to the introductionof free verse, there was simply no need forChinese poets to make line breaks because the metricalregularity and rhyme schemes of the classical formsmade it so easy to parcel out the verse lines.4The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1962) 21-22.5The words in quotations are borrowed from Dana Gioia,whose remarks on the aural pleasures of Western traditionalverse seem equally applicable to those of classicalChinese poetry (“Notes on the New Formalism,” in CanPoetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture.St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992: 175-184) 176.6I am, of course, speaking of children in Taiwan andother corners of the Chinese-speaking world where theclassical canon continues to maintain a toehold in theelementary school curriculum. Ironically, in Taiwan, withthe decision to make English a mandatory subject in theelementary school curriculum, more and more childrenare being asked to memorize English nursery rhymes andplayground songs instead of the classical Chinese poems.7Pound was forcefully returned to the United States in50 Translation Review

1945 to face trial for treason for the 125 radio broadcastshe made in the closing years of Mussolini’s regime. At apreliminary competency hearing, however, he wasjudged to be “of unsound mind; unfit for trial” and committedto St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a Federal asylum,where he remained until 1958, when the case against himwas dismissed and he was released. For a concise discussionof the complexities of the poet’s “treason,” “trial,”and incarceration, see Conrad L. Rushing’s “‘MereWords’: The Trial of Ezra Pound,” and William M.Chace’s “Ezra Pound: ‘Insanity,’ ‘Treason,’ and Care,”both in Critical Inquiry 14 (August 1987): respectively,111-133 and 134-141.8Most notably, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L’IdeaStatale; Fascism as I Have Seen It (New York: Liveright,1970). Pound suffered a physical collapse during hisimprisonment in Pisa, which permanently impaired hisconcentration and the continuity of his conversation.9Legge’s 1898 bilingual version of the four majorConfucian classics held an especially honored place onPound’s shelf: “This little book has been my Bible foryears. It was the only thing I could hang onto duringthose hellish days at Pisa . . . Had it not been for thisbook, from which I drew my strength, I would have goneinsane . . . so you see I am really indebted to China”(quoted in Angela Chih-Ying Jung’s “Ezra Pound andChina,” Ph.D. diss. University of Washington, 1955) 8.10Legge’s translations are available online.11The phrase “imaginative geography” is borrowed fromEdward Said’s seminal study, Orientalism (New York:Viking Penguin, 1978) 71.12The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, edited by D.D.Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950)401. In “The Dialect in/of Modernism: Pound and Eliot’sRacial Masquerade,” Michael North shows that althoughPound’s propensity for “slumming” in the black dialectof Uncle Remus was tied to his modernist “defiance ofthe standard language,” racial anxieties were also aninfluential factor: “It was Pound who said [in 1919],‘The decline of human liberty in the States may quitepossibly date from the year of the emancipation proclamation’”(American Literary History 4.1 [Spring 1992]:56-76) 57-58. For a revealing discussion of Pound’s anti-Semitism and its relationship to his Orientalism, seeRobert Casillo’s “The Desert and the Swamp:Enlightenment, Orientalism, and the Jews in EzraPound,” Modern Language Quarterly 45.3 (Sept. 1984):263-286. For a discussion of his conservative views onwomen, see Ronald Bush’s introduction to the EzraPound entry in The Gender of Modernism: A CriticalAnthology, edited by Bonnie Kine Scott (Bloomington:Indiana UP) 353-359; and James Longenbach’s “PoundAmong the Women,” in Review, edited by James O.Hoge and James L.W. West III (Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 1990) 135-158.13John DeFrancis’s The Chinese Language: Fact andFantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984)provides a fascinating genealogy of the ideographic myth(133-148). The myth apparently originated with the erroneousreports of the early Jesuit missionaries to China.Ironically, the term “ideograph” was coined from theFrench of Jean-François Champollion, who succeeded indeciphering the Egyptian “hieroglyphics” on the RosettaStone precisely because he recognized that they were notideographic symbols but a primitive phonetic script(136).14Gautier’s volume was published in 1867 by AlphonseLemerre, publisher and bookseller for the poets of theParnassian movement. For a discussion of Le Livre dejade, see Joanna Richardson’s Judith Gautier: ABiography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987) 56-59, andin Muriel Détrie’s “Le Livre de Jade de Judith Gautier:un livre pionnier” (Revue de littérature comparée 63.3[1989]): 301-324. I borrow the term “variations sur desthèmes chinois” from the title under which Gautier’sprose poems appeared when samples were published inthe coterie journal L’Artiste (1er Juin 1865): 261.Rexroth cites Le Livre de jade among the French precursorsto Cathay in the excerpt from his statement on“Chinese Poetry and the American Imagination” reprintedin Weinberger’s anthology, but he erroneouslydescribes Gautier’s Chinese “informant” as “a Thai whodidn’t read Chinese” (209). Tin-Tun-ling (Ting Tun-ling??? ) was, in fact, a learned Chinese who had beenbrought to France by the French missionary and interpreterJoseph-Marie Callery to assist in the compilationof a French-Chinese dictionary. Callery, incidentally, wasone of the first to debunk the ideographic myth.15The classic example is “The Return,” which opens likean allegory on the diminished power of the metrical foot:“See, they return; ah, see the tentative/ Movements, andthe slow feet,/ The trouble in the pace and the uncertain/Wavering!” Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York:New Directions, 1957) 24.16The translations Masters read were most likely those inJ.W. Mackail’s Selected Epigrams from the Greek, whichhad appeared in 1906. For an informative discussion ofMasters’ “Spoon River” poems, see Willis Barnstone’s“Edgar Lee Masters: Fury of an American Poet on GreekTombstones,” in his The Poetics of Ecstasy: Varieties ofTranslation Review 51

Ekstasis from Sappho to Borges (New York: Holmes &Meier, 1983) 262-274. The remarks in quotations arePound’s, from “Affirmations: Edgar Lee Masters,”reprinted in volume two of the ten-volume Ezra Pound’sPoetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals [hereafterEPPP], prefaced and arranged by Lea Baechler, A.Walton Litz, and James Longenbach (New York: GarlandPublisher, 1991) 86-89: 88.17See his October 1914 letter to Harriet Moore, editor ofthe now legendary Poetry Magazine for which he hadlong served as foreign editor, reprinted in Letters of EzraPound 84.18Respectively, “Webster Ford” and the aforementioned“Affirmations: Edgar Lee Masters,” both in EPPP II: 1,86-89.19Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (New York:Macmillan, 1915) 9.20I am greatly indebted here to Hugh Kenner’s livelyaccount of the birth of Imagism, in The Pound Era(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) 174.21Selected Poems 35.22Weinberger 83. I have not been able to identify thesource of this translation and suspect it may be wronglyattributed.23The Letters of Ezra Pound 48.24I borrow the phrase “rapt with wine” from Liu’s discussionof this literary trope, in The Art of ChinesePoetry 59.25Selected Poems 55.26For a incisive discussion of Pound’s search for patronageamong the “potential Medicis” of his era, see FrankLentricchia’s perceptive Modernist Quartert (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1994).27Quinn was a New York lawyer and art patron whoorganized and financed the Armory Show of 1913. AsTimothy Materer points out in his informative introductionto The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to JohnQuinn, 1915-1924 (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), their correspondencebegan in March 1915, about a month beforeCathay went to print, when Quinn wrote to Pound aboutthe possibility of purchasing some of the Henri Gaudier-Brzeska works the poet had listed in an article on thesculptor, to which Pound replied: “If there were morelike you we should get on with our renaissance” (19-20).Quinn soon proved to be a literary patron of near-Renaissance proportions, for he oversaw the editing anddesign of the American edition of Lustra (1917), subsidizedMargaret Andersen’s Little Review, bought upmodernist manuscripts en masse, and provided numerouspersonal “loans” to Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, andother modernists who gravitated to the pages of TheLittle Review. The note to Quinn regarding the “Exile’sLetter” is quoted in Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide tothe Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (London: Faber &Faber, 1979) 140-141.28“Snow Storm” was originally published in the April1945 issue of The Briarcliff Quarterly under the title“The War is Permanent.” Rexroth’s source for this versionwas not Tu Fu’s Chinese but Florence Ayscough’sEnglish, in Tu Fu: The Autobiography of a Chinese Poet,A.D. 712-770 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929) 228-229.29The Coast 1 (Spring 1937): 36.30For a revealing discussion of this personal background,see Linda Hamalian’s A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (NewYork: Norton, 1991) 129-133.31The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang(New Haven: Yale UP, 1981) 202.32Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated byWalter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) 137.33http://arts.endow.gov/explore/Writers/hinton.html34See Pound’s remarks on the value and distractions oftranslation in his “Note” to a brief excerpt from a pieceby Jules Romains, reprinted in EPPP III: 84.35Pound’s “Pact” with Walt Whitman is announced in a1913 poem of this name, reprinted in Selected Poems 27.36Apart from his translation of the “Cold MountainPoems,” which are not complete, Snyder has about adozen translations and imitations from the Chinese, mostof which are reproduced in Weinberger’s anthology.37The words in quotation marks are Weinberger’s, fromhis introduction (xxvii).52 Translation Review

METHOD OR MAESTRI: TWO APPROACHES TO (TEACHING)TRANSLATIONBy Gregory ContiS. Hervey, I. Higgins, S. Cragie, P. Gambarotta, ThinkingItalian Translation: A Course in Translation Method:Italian to English. London, Routledge, 2000.R. Zacchi, M. Morini, eds, Manuale di traduzioni dall’inglese.Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 2002.These two books start by asking the same questionand then go on to answer it in ways that seem diametricallyopposed. “Can translation be taught?” ask themostly British authors of Thinking Italian Translation,and they have no doubt that the answer is yes: “anyonewho has taught the subject knows that a structuredcourse will help most students to become significantlybetter at translation …. This book offers just such acourse.” “With the demise of all prescriptive illusions,”respond the Italian editors of the other volume, “the editorsof manuals and didactic texts for translators candeclare themselves definitively free from the necessity ofadding a ‘scientific’ patina to their descriptions or frommaking their suggestions systematic… And this becausetranslation, as von Clausewitz said of war, cannot betaught but can only be shown by examples.”Were it not politically incorrect, a reader might considerthese two statements as solid evidence for the continuingvalidity of cultural stereotypes: the British, backsstraight in their pressed khaki uniforms, whistling in unison,rigorously building the bridge over the river Kwai;the Italians, draped in the multi-colored garb ofRaphael’s “The School of Athens,” each staring off in adifferent direction. But as is often the case with oppositionalapproaches, here too they have more in commonthan appears at first glance, and they end up arriving injust about the same place. What is truly interesting forthe outside observer is what happens along the way.As indicated by the ing participle in the title,Thinking Italian Translation aims both to indicate aprocess and to describe a product. The objective here isto train translators in a method that will guide them inmaking self-conscious, well-reasoned choices amongfully analyzed alternatives on the way to creating a unifiedand coherent final product. The presentation isorganized progressively and moves from consideration offour underlying issues — translation as process, translationas product, cultural transposition, and compensation— to examination of the formal properties of texts,semantics and pragmatics, varieties of language, andvarieties of genre. Finally, the authors complement thisprogressive elaboration of their method with four chapterson topics in “contrastive linguistics,” highlightingdifferences between English and Italian (nominalization,determiners, adverbials, condition, and future in thepast).At each stage in their presentation, the authorsarrange the material in an ascending spiral, moving progressivelyfrom the most specific to the most general orfrom the narrowest to the broadest view. The three chapterson the formal properties of texts, for example, beginwith phonic/graphic and prosodic issues, move intogrammatical and sentential questions, and end with discourseand intertextual analysis. Similarly, semanticquestions are examined first with regard to literal andthen connotative meaning, which is in turn broken downinto various subcategories: attitudinal, associative, allusive,reflected, collocative, and affective. Each chapterincludes one or more practical exercises, which are givenmore in-depth treatment and discussion in a companionvolume, the Tutor’s Handbook. The main volume’s treatmentof genre issues concludes with three chapters dedicatedto scientific and technical texts, legal and businessdocuments, and consumer-oriented texts. Literary translationis not given specific treatment, but literary textsare used throughout the book as examples and practicalexercises.Although detailed and extremely analytical in itspresentation, Thinking Italian Translation’s most valuablecontribution as a teaching/learning tool is its succinctstatement of the two fundamental bases of themethod it proposes: (1) that the translation process consistsin the simultaneous interpretation of the source text(ST) and the formulation of a target text (TT); and (2)that this simultaneous process is initiated and driven bythe systematic asking and answering of questions: Whatis the purpose of the text? What are its salient formal,semantic, cultural, and stylistic features? How do thosefeatures serve the purpose? The emphasis on simultaneityis crucial because the constant confrontation of theST and various potential TTs motivates and sharpens theTranslation Review 53

textual analysis that underlies the interpretive phase ofthe process. Indeed, as indicated by the chapter outlineabove, much of the “method” proposed here is composedof the textual analysis generally associated with traditionalcourses in monolingual or comparative literature.The application of those skills in a translation context,however, gives them a practical purpose in the formulationof a new text and thus lends direction and urgency tothe interpretive process; one good reason why Englishand Foreign Language departments would be welladvised to include translation in the curriculum.The translation context also adds a new element totraditional monolingual literary textual analysis: comparativelinguistic analysis of the source (SL) and target(TL) languages. At issue here are the structural differencesbetween the SL and the TL, in this case Italian andEnglish. How do they differ in their typical ways ofexpressing objective or subjective content?Thinking Italian Translation offers a chapter on eachof four such examples of contrasting structures or modesof expression between English and Italian. The first ofthese chapters, on nominalization, starts with a simpleobservation: “Italian often uses nominal expressionswhere English does not,” and then proceeds to examinethe implications of this difference for genre, register, andidiomaticity. The challenge for the Italian/English translatoris clear: an idiomatic Italian text will likely containa much higher incidence of nouns and noun phrases thanan idiomatic English text in the same genre. An EnglishST, on the other hand, will likely have a higher incidenceof verbs and verb phrases. This language-level comparisonoffers translators a rule of thumb for dealing withItalian nominal phrases; “in the many cases where nominalizationdoes turn out to require grammatical transposition,the translator is statistically more likely to transposefrom a noun in translating into English, and to a noun intranslating into Italian.”More importantly, however, the observation of thisstructural discrepancy identifies an issue about which thetranslator must ask the usual basic questions: what is thefunction of this structural feature in this particular ItalianST? If it is possible to duplicate the nominal structure inEnglish, would such a structure be the best way to servethe same function? Would a grammatical transposition ofthe nominal structure to a verb phrase better serve thepurposes of the ST or the TT? On the basis of theanswers to these and related questions, the translator willbe able to make conscious choices about how to handlenominal structures in specific cases. So while linguisticcomparison adds a new element to traditional textualanalysis, the heart of the method expounded in ThinkingItalian Translation is the systematic questioning, theinterrogation if you will, of both the SL and the developingTL texts. The answers to the questions will notalways be the same, and some, depending on the genreand the context, will be better than others, but it is thequestions that drive the process. “Chapter by chapter . . .the student is trained to ask, and to answer, a series ofquestions that apply to any text given for translation.”As this last statement indicates, Thinking ItalianTranslation takes what could be called a horizontalapproach, elaborating a methodology that cuts across thefield of translation regardless of genre. From this perspective,the approach of the Italian Manuale is not somuch opposite as complementary: where ThinkingItalian Translation is horizontal, the Manuale is vertical,offering a series of essays by professional translators,each of which treats a different genre. Moreover, thechoice of genres treated in the essays is indicative of anarrower though perhaps sharper focus compared to theBritish book: with the exception of a brief discussion ofmedical translation as part of a chapter on translationfrom English to Italian, the genres chosen here are eitherliterary or para-literary: the short story, poetry, theater,cinema, fairy tales and science fiction, profanity, comicstrips, journalism, and literary criticism.More than a question of focus, however, the choiceto organize the manual in this way is rooted in the convictionthat translation, inasmuch as it is a craft, cannotbe learned by studying and applying a method but mustbe learned in apprenticeship, by observing a maestro andimitating his technique, which, rather than followinggenerally applicable rules or processes, is the product ofindividual talent and experience. Each of the authors, theeditors point out, “thanks to his experience in the field,has matured his own convictions, honed his ownweapons, developed his own procedures: … only thepractice of translation can lead gradually to the fullawareness of the various issues involved and to a sort ofpersonal poetics of translation.”In practice, the consequences of these opposingpoints of departure turn out to be less dramatic than onemight expect. In fact, as one reads through the variousessays in the Manuale, one sees the authors applyingmany if not all of the same kinds of textual analysis andprocesses of interpretation and compensation as thoseoutlined in Thinking Italian Translation. With respect tomany aspects of textual analysis and interpretation, aswell as judgments regarding the prerequisites for or limitationson successful translation, one finds much more54 Translation Review

agreement than dissent. The authors of both books agree,for example, that translation is a form of interpretationthat starts with a solid knowledge of both languages andboth cultures; that there is no one right way to translate atext; that translation requires both creativity and method(research, self-awareness, and consistency); that methodand theory must be based in practice; that the elements tobe weighed in making choices include genre, purpose,intended audience, and structural and expressive featuresof the text; that translation always involves loss; and soon.The essential difference is not absolute but a questionof emphasis. Whereas Thinking Italian Translationstresses a methodology for translation choices ensuringthe conservation of as much as possible of the “salientfeatures” of the original text, which features are presumablyobjectively recognizable, the Manuale stresses theindividual talent of the translator in identifying these featuresand replicating or transforming them. This statementfrom Marco Fazzini’s essay on translating poetry isa typical example: “And yet, a clear and unifying strategyfor translation does not exist …. [T]ranslationoften means inventing one’s own strategies, extractingthem from the features of the text that one chooses totranslate, including its linguistic particularities (syntactical,lexical, etc.) which that text contains necessarily invarying degrees, and to which the translator would bewell-advised to pay more than a little attention.” (emphasisadded)But even if these two approaches to translation arenot quite so different as they first might seem, the booksdo have different strengths and weaknesses as instrumentsfor teaching and/or learning the art of translation.Thinking Italian Translation provides an extensive andstandard terminology that can be used to analyze textsfrom all genres. It follows from this that students andtranslators working in different fields can use the terminologyand the methodological techniques to shareinsights and experiences and learn from each other asthey identify the common aspects of texts across differentgenres. Students and translators can use this book tolearn and improve a variety of interpretive skills that canthen be applied to all kinds of texts. It can provide them,in other words, with basic skills that can be transferredfrom one specialized field to another. It is worth notinghere a subtle difference in phrasing between the twobooks: Thinking Italian Translation states that its methodapplies “to any text given for translation,” whereas theManuale tends to speak of texts “the translator chooses”to translate. The first formulation envisions a trained professionalwith a flexible set of skills able to serve a variedclientele, the second an artisan whose clientele isdetermined by his choice of material and projects towork on.In a certain sense, the strengths of one approach arehighlighted by the weaknesses of the other, and viceversa.The individual essays of the Manuale consistentlyfail to note and examine the common features betweengenres, even where the insights of the individual authorswould seem to call for it. The authors of the essays oncinema, theater, and comic strips, for example, all makethe interesting observation that their genre differs frommost text-to-text translation because the translator musttake account of the relationship between text and image.None of them, however, examine the similarities and differencesbetween stage and cinema, say, or between themoving image (cinema and TV) and a sequence of stillimages (comic strips) and the implications of those similaritiesand differences for translation. Another missedopportunity for comparative discussion involves thecomparison of translations of poetry and prose. Severalof the authors in the Manuale mention that in non-literaryprose translation (literary criticism, medical texts),the translator has more liberty with respect to form, morefreedom to, in Goethe’s formulation, “move the texttoward the reader.” With regard to poetry, on the otherhand, Massimilano Morini contrasts the translation ofcontent-based poetry, “The Temple of Nature” byErasmus Darwin, and form-based poetry, “The Huntingof the Snark” by Lewis Carroll, to conclude that thetranslator can take more formal liberties in translating thelatter. So the content/form distinction would seem tohave inverse consequences for translation, depending onwhether the original text is in poetry or prose, but thegenre-enclosed format of the Manuale does not allowthis question to be raised and addressed.But more than anything else, what undermines theManuale’s usefulness as a teaching tool is its choice ofthe apprenticeship model. Having rejected the feasibilityof developing and teaching a systematic and generallyapplicable methodology, the editors and readers of theManuale are left with the strengths and weaknesses ofthe performances of the individual maestri. Fortunately,many of the presentations included here are very welldone and instructive. Maurizio Ascari’s article on theshort story makes excellent use of comparisons of histranslations of Katherine Mansfield and WilliamFaulkner with previous translations to demonstrate theimportance of analyzing and interpreting the semantic,prosodic, and cultural aspects of the text in makingTranslation Review 55

choices of how to render those features in the TL. MarcoFazzini’s article on translating Scottish and SouthAfrican poetry provides a superb example of sensitiveanalysis of the visual as well as the phonic and rhythmicaspects of poetry and the careful preservation or reconstructionin the TT of dialectical diversions from standardSL. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Fazzini’s translationof Edwin Morgan’s “Opening the Cage” is also discussedin Thinking Italian Translation.) AlessandroSerpieri’s examination of the “peculiarities of dramatictexts” illuminates the complex relationship between spokenlanguage, visual images, and the language of mimeand gesture.But the strength of these and other individual performancesonly confirms the limitations of teaching orrather of “showing” how to translate exclusively byexamples. For what distinguishes the best articles in thecollection is their authors’ ability to articulate, illustrate,and apply a systematic, albeit avowedly personal,methodology. Ascari expresses this quite well by way ofthis ironic twist on the Italian adage “traduttore/traditore”:“it seems to me that the translator shows himselfto be a ‘traitor,’ as the old adage goes, only when thelack of correspondence between the source text and thetranslated text are the product of neglect and indifference,but there is no betrayal when the distance is theresult of careful choices, subject to precise formal rules.In other words, one must ‘betray with art.’” Ascari’sobservation implies, of course, that “art” necessarilydepends on method, and the fundamental weakness ofthe maestro approach to teaching translation is that itinhibits the systematic articulation and transfer ofmethod across genre divisions and beyond the individualmaestro’s range of operation.Finally, there is one issue that both books raise, eachin its own way, but in my opinion fail to answer satisfactorilywith regard to literary translation, and that is thequestion of what should be the translator’s objective.Thinking Italian Translation frames the issue in a usefulway by defining “translation loss” as the incompletereplication of the ST in the TT and pointing out that, inany translation, loss is inevitable. The goal for the translatorthen, in any genre, becomes not to maximize samenessor equivalence but to minimize difference: “thechallenge to the translator is not to eliminate [loss] but tocontrol it and channel it by deciding which features, in agiven ST, it is most important to respect, and which canmost legitimately be sacrificed in respecting them.” Inkeeping with their horizontal, cross-genre approach, theauthors then conclude that there is no universal criterionfor making these decisions and that “everything dependson the purpose of the translation and on what the role ofthe textual feature is in the text.” True enough, but ashelpful as it is to frame the question in terms of acceptingand minimizing loss, this formulation still leavestranslators without much guidance in deciding what lossesto accept in any specific situation. The literary translatoris still caught in the traditional bind between fidelityto the ST and fidelity to the TL and the TL reader.As mentioned earlier, most of the essays in theManuale concern literary genres, but each author eitherdefines his objective in individual terms or, in thosecases in which the author proposes a more generalanswer, tends to overstate the case for a single standard.In her article on translating for the cinema, for example,Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli quotes Gianni Galassi,one of the most famous Italian dubbing directors, andthen endorses his prescriptions as a model for all translation:“ ‘The accomplishment of a dialogue writer ismeasured by his ability to forget how the original linewas constructed, to distill the proposition, any subtexts,allusions, intentions and reformulate it in Italian as if hewere the writer of the script.’ It seems to us that this iswhat every good translator must do with whatever kindof text, with the only difference being that the reformulation,in the case of dubbing, must take into account therelationship between image and word.” This unquestioningendorsement of domesticating translation seems to bean overstatement even if restricted to cinema — there aremany genres of film, some of which would undoubtedlybe better served by a more foreignizing approach — butit is certainly unacceptable as an evaluative tool for literarytranslation.Another author in the Manuale, Sylvia Notini, proposesthat literary translators should be guided byMatthew Arnold’s appeal to what Eugene Nida has called“dynamic equivalence.” In literary translation, Notinistates, one must “put oneself in the mind of the authorand confront the text as if s/he were present. I agree withMatthew Arnold when he holds that the objective of thetranslator should be that of ‘producing on his readers aneffect as much as possible analogous to that which theoriginal presumably produces on the audience for whichit was intended.’” That is a very high-sounding goal, butas the authors of Thinking Italian Translation point out,it is impossible to know what effect the original producedon its readers, while it is certain that it did not producethe same effect on all of them. As a practical matterthen, Arnold’s advice is not all that helpful.At the same time, however, Arnold’s and Notini’s56 Translation Review

analogy between author and SL readers and translatorand TL readers is useful, I think, precisely because italludes by omission to a third reader who, if kept inmind, could help orient the literary translator in makingdecisions about which textual features to save and whichcan be less harmfully lost. The third reader is, of course,the translator or perhaps, to expand the category, thosereaders who are able to read and interpret both the STand the TT and who can thus appreciate what has beenlost and retained in the passage from one to the other. Inother words, in making the inevitable decisions aboutwhat to keep and what to lose, the translator as writermust keep in mind the translator as reader. This idea hasbeen expressed much more clearly and succinctly by thewriter Wendy Lesser in her recent article “The Mysteriesof Translation”: “This is not to say that a Margaret JullCosta translation of the Portuguese novelist JosèSaramago sounds like a Margaret Jull Costa translationof the Spanish novelist Javier Marías — not at all. If itdid, Costa would have failed in her primary aim, to let ushear the writer’s voice as she herself hears it in the originallanguage.” 1 Obviously, thinking of their objective inthis way will not provide literary translators with uniformanswers to the questions they must ask along theway, but it does provide a guidepost to orient the decision-makingprocess.1W. Lesser, “The Mysteries of Translation,” TheChronicle of Higher Education, 27 September, 2002,p.B8.Translation Review 57

TRANSLATING INDIA: ENABLING TAMIL AND SANSKRIT POEMS TOBE HEARD IN ENGLISHBy R. ParthasarathyTranslating IndiaHow does one translate India? One way of doing itwould be to translate from the language that is mostcompletely possessed by the spirit of India, and that languageis Sanskrit. Through Sanskrit the spirit of Indiahas been passed on to other Indian languages. ThroughSanskrit India continues to speak to the world.Translating from one Indian language to another isless of a problem than translating from an Indian languageinto a non-Indian language such as English.English has been in India for more than 200 years. LikeSanskrit and Hindi, it is an Indo-European language. Itscontinued use in India as the language of intellectual discoursehas empowered it to become familiar, if not intimate,with the spirit of India. It was in English that thefirst complete translation of a Sanskrit text appeared.This was Charles Wilkins’s (1749–1836) translation ofthe Bhagavad-gita, published in 1784 in Calcutta by theAsiatic Society of Bengal. This was followed in 1789and 1794 by William Jones’s translations of Kalidasa’sAbhijnana-sakuntalam (Sakuntala and the Ring ofRecollection, 5th c.) and the Manava-dharmasastra (TheLaws of Manu, 2nd c. BCE–2nd c. CE), respectively.Thus, Wilkins and Jones were the first to translate Indiafor the benefit of Europe. Raymond Schwab sums upbest the impact that these translations had on Europe:“As a complete world that can be placed alongside theGreco-Roman heritage, there is none other... For the firsttime the image of India regally entered the configurationof the universe.” 1We must not forget that politics was the movingforce behind these earliest translations of Sanskrit textsin the 18th century. Warren Hastings (1732–1818), thegovernor-general of Bengal, encouraged Wilkins andJones in their translations, since a firsthand knowledge ofIndian traditions would be invaluable in governing India.The relationship between England and India was a relationshipof power and domination. Translation was aninstrument of policy that helped in orientalizing India sothat it became a province of European thought. It istherefore not surprising that Indian literature in Englishtranslation has usually been read in terms of Westernpoetics, an inappropriate approach originating in thepolitical aims of pax Britannica. I consider theEurocentric view of Indian literature as essentially hegemonic.Today, we need to correct the imbalance by readingIndian literature in terms of Indian poetics and in thecontext of the Indian worldview.Over the next 200 years, all the major Sanskrit textsbecame available in English, and the enterprise continuesunabated to this day. Sanskrit has the distinction of beingthe Indian language most widely translated into English.It is upon this foundation that we must build by encouragingtranslations from the other Indian languages intoEnglish. Translated into English, a Tamil, Marathi, Hindi,Urdu, or Bengali text will have new readers, both athome and abroad. Only then we can say that India hastruly been translated.It is ironic that fifty years after Independence,English and not Hindi is the dominant language in India.Indian languages orbit around this behemoth not unlikethe invisible moons around Jupiter. This is true of allThird-World languages. There is thus an imbalance ofpower between English and the Indian languages, whichthe translator has to address. He must resist the temptationto anglicize the Tamil or Sanskrit text by respectingthe integrity of these languages. Nor must he suppress oriron out the linguistic idiosyncracies that are native to thelanguages. Both Tamil and Sanskrit are older thanEnglish by several hundred years and have a literary traditionthat is in no way inferior to that of English. In thisbusiness of translation, there is no room for shortchangingor counterfeiting. Only the genuine article will do.Unfortunately, a Gresham’s law of sorts has been inoperation for so long that bad translations continue toremain in circulation.Indian literature is generally a closed book to theWest. The scholarly translations from Sanskrit by the late18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century Indologists are farremoved from the spoken idiom of today. They afford littleor no pleasure. The masterpieces of Indian literatureneed to be retranslated in the idiom of our time. Scholarsshould consider collaborating with writers to producetranslations that are both accurate and a pleasure to read.In selecting works for translation, we might want to keepin mind three simple criteria:1. The significance of the work within the literarytradition. The translator has a moral responsibility to pro-58 Translation Review

vide the reader with the finest literatures in the best oftranslations.2. The excellence of the translation in English. Thetranslations ought to be authoritative, alive to the resonanceof the original, and expressed in an English idiomthat brings home that resonance to its readers.3. The work should interest educated Indian andWestern readers alike.These simple criteria ought to guide our evaluationof translations from Indian literature. In enabling deadIndian poets to be heard in English, I am guided by EzraPound’s (1885–1972) wise counsel: “...we test a translationby the feel, and particularly by the feel of being incontact with the force of a great original ...” 2Since Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad-gita in1784, European scholars have been engaged in translatingfrom Sanskrit to the exclusion of other Indian languages,with some notable exceptions. The mothertongues ought not to remain tongue-tied for ever in thepresence of an overbearing father tongue, Sanskrit. Thislinguistic oppression of one language by another muststop. Alone among the peoples of India, the Tamils haveresisted the intervention of Sanskrit and more recentlythe intervention of Hindi. The Tamil language bears witnessto this resistance by successfully retaining, forinstance, its phonology.In the last fifty years or so, there has been anincreasing attempt to translate from other languages,notably Tamil and Hindi, the two Indian languages mostwidely taught in the West after Sanskrit, thereby creatinga demand for translations for use in the classroom. Thisis true of Chinese and Japanese as well. Asian Studies isno longer the odd bird it once was, an exotica to besavored by only the most discriminating palates. It isnow a legitimate academic discipline in major universitiesthroughout the world. The presence of a sizablenumber of educated Asians in Europe and the UnitedStates has also contributed to the interest in translationsfrom the Asian languages. This interest is reflected insuch major series as the “Penguin Classics” of PenguinBooks, “World’s Classics” of Oxford University Press,“Harvard Oriental Series” of Harvard University Press,and “Translations from the Asian Classics” of ColumbiaUniversity Press. The success of the expanded seventhedition of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces(1995) 3 in two volumes bears this out. Out of a total of5970 pages, it devotes 517 pages (8.66%) to Indian literaturein eight languages: Sanskrit (231 pages), English(156 pages), Bengali (39 pages), Hindi (32 pages), Tamil(28 pages), Kannada (14 pages), Pali (9 pages), and Urdu(8 pages). The selections, with one exception, are impeccable,but the translations are not. Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntalamis included in its entirety and so is AnitaDesai’s (b. 1937) novel, Clear Light of Day (1980),which alone takes up 156 pages. Only excerpts areincluded from the other selections: the Ramayana, theMahabharata, the Bhagavad-gita, the Pancatantra,Bhartrhari, Amaru, the Kathasaritsagara, Vidyapati,Govindadasa, Candidasa, Tagore, Mahasweta Devi,Mirabai, the Ramcaritmanas, Premchand, theKuruntokai, the Purananuru, the Cilappatikaram,Basavanna, Mahadeviyakka, the Jataka, and Ghalib. TheNorton Anthology comes with a “Guide for Instructors” 4that provides background information, classroom strategies,comparative perspectives, and further reading andviewing. The “Guide” is a useful pedagogic tool. Out ofa total of 928 pages, it devotes 73 pages (7.87%) toIndian literature. There is nothing comparable to theNorton selections from Indian literature currently availablein India for use in the classroom. The only comprehensiveanthology of Indian literature in translation todate are the eleven volumes published by or forthcomingfrom the Sahitya Akademi (Indian National Academy ofLetters): Ancient Indian Literature (3 volumes),Medieval Indian Literature (4 volumes), Modern IndianLiterature (3 volumes), and an Index (1 volume). This isan extraordinary accomplishment. When completed, itcould be used as a resource for compiling a two-volumeanthology, “The Sahitya Akademi Anthology of IndianLiterature,” for use in the classroom like The NortonAnthology.These translations have created a new audience forthe Indian classics. As I see it, there are two types ofreaders for the translations:1. Indians within and outside India who are unableto read the works in their original languages but who canread them if they are in English.2. A small number of English-speaking peopleabroad with an interest in India.Because India is the third largest publisher ofbooks in English after the United States and Britain, thelargest readership for the translations is obviously withinIndia itself. With the exception of the Sahitya Akademi,no publisher in India is actively engaged in publishingtranslations either from one Indian language into anotheror from an Indian language into English. Since 1954, theSahitya Akademi has almost single-handedly sponsoredand published translations from every one of the twentytwoIndian languages, including English, that it recognizes.Considering the scope of its operations, itsTranslation Review 59

achievement is truly monumental. While universitypresses in the United States and Britain are playing aseminal role in the enterprise of translation, regrettably,Indian universities have allowed themselves to fallbehind those in the West in this important enterprise.Again, the Sahitya Akademi has established fourTranslation Centers in Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Delhi,and Shantiniketan to publish translations of Indian literaturein foreign languages. This initiative is to be welcomed,as it is a step in the right direction. BesidesEnglish, the classics of Indian literature ought to be madeavailable at least in French, German, Spanish, Russian,Arabic, and Chinese. Besides the Sahitya Akademi, theInstitut Français d’Indologie in Pondicherry has animpressive list of publications in French from Sanskritand Tamil.AWord or Two About TranslationLanguage is by nature arbitrary and imprecise. There isno one-to-one correspondence between the word (“thesignifier”) and the object (“the thing signified”). English,Tamil, Sanskrit, and Hindi use different words to denotethe same object, for example, “tree,” “maram,” “taru,”and “per.” No one of these words is more appropriatethan the other. Further, the word always falls short of theobject. It is out of such unstable material that a poem ismade. Whether a poem is in Tamil or is reborn inEnglish, the fact of the matter is that both poems areincomplete representations of experience. Poets havelong struggled with this problem. Paul Valéry(1871–1945) famously observed: “A work is never completebut abandoned.” 5 What are the implications fortranslation, then? Given the arbitrary nature of language,the concept of faithfulness to the original is no more thanan illusion. A successful translation recreates, not reproduces,as many aspects or elements of the original aspossible without doing violence to its sense of wholeness.No two languages are as foreign and distant fromone another as Tamil and English. How does the translatorcarry over into English the foreignness of a Tamilpoem that perhaps embodies what is most original anddistinctive about it? Translators often take the easy wayout and eliminate the foreignness altogether. In suchinstances, the translated poem fails to take root in the soilof English and simply withers away. We are all toofamiliar with the phenomenon. To prevent this from happening,the translator must prepare the soil of Englishcarefully to receive the seed of Tamil so that it will takeroot and grow. The coupling of languages is what translationis all about. The translated poem will then sharethe characteristics of both languages.What a translation carries across from one languageinto another is not merely information but the verybreath of the original, what animates it. The poet, perhapsmore than anyone else, is best suited to undertakethis delicate task because “words obey [his] call.” 6 Atranslated poem comes into being in much the same wayas an original poem. Poets know intuitively how to makea poem, and this makes all the difference. Ezra Pound’stranslations from the Chinese are poems in their ownright; they are unsurpassed to this day.All texts are translatable. One text may be moreresistant to translation than another. Since human beingsspeak with one voice, translation is what binds one languageto another. A translation cannot and thereforeshould not try to duplicate the original, which by definitionis unique, one of a kind without a second. It shouldcontinue the life of the original in another language. Atranslation may succeed in carrying across as many elementsof the original as possible. In the end, there willalways remain some elements that have resisted translation.The sound of a language is one such element. Itinvariably slips through the net of translation. Idioms areanother element that resist translation. They are a translator’snightmare. Poetry is especially rich in idioms thatcan only be translated by equivalent idioms in the secondlanguage. The translation functions then as one interpretationamong many. Again, a translation invariably endsup having more words than the original. In his attempt tomake clear the intention (vivaksa) of the poet, the translatoroften uses many more words, thereby diffusing thepoem’s “center of intensity.” The clarification that thetranslator had sought results only in muddying thewaters.Translation defamiliarizes a language of its apparentforeignness by stressing the commonality of all languagesrather than their singularity. Of all the elementscommon to languages, it is meaning (artha) that is at theheart of the matter. A translation may be measured by itssuccess in carrying across meaning from one languageinto another. Almost unchanged, inviolate, the meaningsteps out of one language and into another without anyloss of face. The meaning is not inherent in the language.It is offered by the poet to the language for safekeepingand may be equally offered to any other language forsafekeeping through the intervention of the translator.Thus, the translator shares with the poet the responsibilityof being the custodian of meaning.Because speech is the common denominator of all60 Translation Review

languages, every language is potentially capable of beingtranslated into every other language. What translationreveals is the essential unity of all languages. It allowsone language to so completely possess another languagethat both are changed in the process. Languages need oneanother for their survival. For all languages ultimatelyaspire to the one true language in which the distancebetween the word and the object is abolished, so that theword becomes the object. The Chilean poet VicenteHuidobro (1893–1948) put it well in “Ars Poetica”:Por qué cantáis la rosa, ¡oh Poetas!Hacedla florecer en el poema. 7Oh Poets, why sing of roses!Let them flower in your poems. 8This is the miracle that a translator no less than a poetdevoutly wishes for: the word as mantra (< Skt man, tothink + trai, to save; mananat trayate ity mantrah, bywhose thinking one is saved, that is mantra), divine revelationthat was not written down and read but only spokenand heard.Poetic language is by nature polysemic. Words resonatewith echoes and associations gathered in the courseof their travels in a language — echoes and associationsimprinted upon them by generations of poets. Suchwords simply resist translation, leaving the translatorwith some difficult choices:1. Using a word that lacks the resonance of theoriginal.2. Replacing it with an entirely new word thatbears no resemblance to the original.3. Omitting the word altogether.All three choices are unsatisfactory, but they are oftenmade. In translating a poem, a translator must aim attranslating nothing less than an entire tradition in whichthat poem lives and breathes with all the vitality andunexpectedness of the spoken language.“Translating India” is only one side of the coin. Theother side is of course “Untranslatable India.” In everyculture, gray areas exist that are untranslatable. Somerealities of everyday life in one culture simply have nocorrespondences in another culture. These realities fallthrough the cracks in translation. It is their intransigenceto translation that often makes the translator throw up hispen in despair. Allow me to offer an illustration fromTamil that speaks to this problem, the underside that ishidden from the sight of the language of translation andis therefore not carried across. It exists unobtrusively andinseparably in the original. There is an unresolved tensionbetween the language of translation (English) andthe cultural elements hidden in the Tamil poem, “Men inLove,” by Pereyin Muruvalar from the Kuruntokai (AnAnthology of Short Poems, 2nd c. BCE–3rd c. CE). Notall the elements in Tamil can be carried across successfullyinto English.mavena matalu murpa puvenukkuvimuki lerukkan kanniyun cutupamaruki narkkavum patupapiritu makupa kamankal koline. 9When love rises to fever pitchmen will trot on palmyra stems for horses,wear the unopened buds of the erukkamround their heads like a chaplet of flowers,endure the bad mouth of the street,even give up their lives.In the Tamil poem, culturally resonant motifs such as“matalurtal” and “erukkam” (Calotropis gigantea) resistbeing Englished. “Matalurtal” refers to the sociallyaccepted practice of a man riding on a horse made of thestems of palmyra leaves to declare his love for a woman.The erukkam (Skt. arka) or yercum belongs to a genus oftropical fiber-producing plants of the milkweed family. Itgrows in the wild, and its flowers give out a foul smell.In the Satarudriya sacrifice, the erukkam plant is rituallyoffered as food to Siva. Again, a dancing Siva wears agarland of erukkam flowers when he destroys the threeworlds. Erukkam is also associated with the cremationground. To the Tamils, it symbolizes illness and disgrace.I have translated “matalurtal” as “trot[ting] on palmyrastems for horses” and left “erukkam” untranslated.“Matalurtal” and “erukkam” refuse to speak in a voiceother than Tamil. Because they cannot be successfullyEnglished, they have to be annotated. Only then cansomething of the resonance of the original Tamil beexperienced.The tension between the two languages is a real challengeto a translator. It can spur him or her to be creative,to rewrite the poem from scratch in a second languagethat is for the most part a mirror image of the poem inthe first language. Translations are miracles of apopoesis.Instead of being caged in one language for eternity, thepoem when translated soars, a free bird, under anothersky. No one language can pin it down and appropriate itas its own. Translation is thus the ultimate test of apoem’s immortality. If it survives translation, it will liveTranslation Review 61

forever. Weak poems fall apart in translation. Strongpoems survive intact in translation. For a poem, originalor translation, lives in its language or not at all. The Songof Songs is as much an English poem as it is a Hebrewpoem. The resonance of the original survives miraculouslyin English in the King James Version. Translation thusabolishes the boundaries that separate languages. It confirmsthe truism that all languages are ultimately one language— the language of humanity.Translating From an Indian Language Into EnglishDrawing upon my translations from the Tamil andSanskrit, I would like to talk about my experience of“Translating India.” In the process, I will be talkingbriefly about these languages and about the problems Iencountered in enabling poets from these languages to beheard in English.Translation is the most intense form of reading. Tointerpret his text to his audience, the translator muststudy the culture that has produced the text and study itdiligently and for a long time, so that he knows what theSanskrit word moksa means (the word lacks an Englishequivalent), or what a bo tree (Ficus religiosa), underwhich the Buddha attained enlightenment, looks like.Translation samples that I will discuss are takenfrom the Tamil Kuruntokai (An Anthology of ShortPoems, 2nd c. BCE–3rd c. CE) and Purananuru (FourHundred Heroic Songs, 1st–3rd c. CE), and the SanskritAmarusataka (Amaru’s One Hundred Poems, 7th c. CE)and Subhasitaratnakosa (The Classic Anthology of FineVerses, ca. 1100). I will examine some problems ofidiom, syntax, imagery, meter, and tone encountered inthe course of making English poems from the Indian languages.I will also talk about the differences in the poeticsof the Indian languages on the one hand and ofEnglish on the other and examine the implications thosedifferences have for the translations.TamilTamil is the oldest of the four major Dravidian languages,and it is spoken primarily in Tamil Nadu insoutheastern India. The language was regularized around250 BCE. Tamil is an agglutinative language likeFinnish, Japanese, Magyar, and Turkish. Such languagesform their derivatives by a process of fusion. Suffixes,themselves meaningful elements, are added to a noun orverb to inflect its meaning.Turning to syntax, we find that the normal order ofwords in an English sentence is SVO (subject + verb +object). In Tamil and other Dravidian languages, theword order is SOV (subject + object + verb): nan puttakampatitten (“I a book read” instead of “I read abook”). Of course, such a construction is not unusual inEnglish; it occurs in poetry as an inversion: “For thysweet love rememb’red such wealth brings”(Shakespeare, “Sonnet 29”). 10 The inversion of the normalorder of words (anastrophe) is a rhetorical deviceused for dramatic effect. The verb in Tamil is usually inthe final position. What are the implications, then, fortranslation into a non-OV language such as English? Theinverted word order has to be normalized in English.Let us look at a poem, “A Trail of Foam,” byKalporu Cirunuraiyar from the Kurun-tokai (AnAnthology of Short Poems, 2nd c. BCE–3rd c. CE), comprising401 short poems of four to nine lines each andcompiled by one Purikko. Tamil poets are often known bytheir metaphors. We know this poet only by his pseudonym:“The Poet of the Trail of Foam on the Rocks.”kaman tankumati yenpor tamaktariyalar kollo vanaimatu kaiyarkolyamen katalark kane mayircerituni perukiya nencamotu perunirkkalporu cirunurai polamella mella villa kutume 11What do they know about love —the folks that tell me to endure its torments?Is it their strength makes them speak so?It would break my heartnot to be able to lay eyes upon my lover.Like floodwaters leaving behind a trail of foamas they spend themselves on the rocks,minute by minute I too waste away.A woman pines for her lover, who is away. When herfolks try to console her, she is furious. She alone knowswhat it is to be lovesick, and it breaks her heart. Unableto explain her condition fully, she lapses into a traditionalimage of floodwaters spending themselves on the rocks,leaving behind only a trail of foam. The image says it all.Her life too slows down to a trickle, though once it hadoverflowed with love. The alliteration of “m” and “l”sounds in the last line of the Tamil poem hints at elementalpassions beyond the reach of language. The imagetakes the poem to a new level of expressiveness unavailableearlier by concretizing the speaker’s feelings. Itfunctions as a parallel text. The image comes naturally tothe poet as the ancient Tamils tried to live in harmonywith their surroundings. An anonymous Japanese poem62 Translation Review

(10th c.) is remarkably similar to the Tamil.Like a wave that when the keen wind blowsDashes itself against the rocks —It is my own heart onlyThat I shatter in the torments of love. 12“Floodwaters” and “waves” spending themselves on therocks represent, on the one hand, the violent aspect ofwater that devours everything in its path and, on theother, uncontrolled powers. Tormented by love, thespeakers in both poems have lost control of themselves;their lives hang by a thread. Desolation is writ large onthe faces of both poems.Classical Tamil prosody developed independentlyof Sanskrit and is based on totally different principles,the most important of which is the acai (< acaital, “tomove, stir”), a metrical unit that comprises one or moresyllables (eluttu). It is unique to Tamil and is not knownto Sanskrit prosody. There are two types of acais: the nerand the nirai. The neracai is a simple metrical unit ofone syllable, long or short (CV[C] ¯ or CV[C]). The niraiacaiis a compound metrical unit of two short syllables,or of one short syllable followed by a long syllable(CVCV[C] or CVCV[C]). ¯ It therefore follows that theneracai may be long or short and that the first of the twosyllables of the niraiacai is always short. However, ashort syllable is considered long if it occurs alone, or if itis the final syllable in a foot. Also, if the first syllable ina foot is short, the one following it is considered short,even if it has a long vowel. A ner is represented here bythe symbol ( – ) and a nirai, by the symbol ( = ).A combination of two or more metrical units givesus the cir, “foot.” Usually, four feet make up a line (ati)of poetry. A foot, as a rule, comprises only one word orwords that are closely related. Thus, word boundary andprosodic boundary tend to coincide. It is the line of fourfeet that predominates in three of the four standardmeters: aciriyam, venpa, and kali. Thus, a line in theaciriyam meter has four feet or eight acais. A fourthmeter, the vanci, differs from the other three in that itsfoot comprises three acais instead of two. The normalvanci line has two feet, or six acais.Besides acai, the other important principle ofTamil prosody is totai, the stringing together of metricalunits into feet and lines. The devices commonly used forthe purpose are etukai, initial rhyme; iyaipu, final rhyme;and monai, alliteration. Rhyme in Tamil is at the beginningof the line: the second syllables in each of two ormore lines are identical. Final rhyme is the exception inˆˆˆˆclassical Tamil poetry. As regards alliteration, the letterthat begins each line should begin at least one other footin the same line. It is enough, however, if one of its classbegins one of the other feet. For vowels, the classes are(1) a, a, ai, au; (2) i, i, e, e; and (3) u, u, o, o. Totai isthus the art of knitting together lines to compose a song(pattutotuttal). Totuttal and yattal are other words used inthis connection. They are similar to the Greek wordrhapsoidein, “to rhapsodize,” that is, “to stitch songstogether.”While the number of acais in a foot is fixed at two,three, or four, the number of syllables in a foot varies.This is because the acai varies from one to two syllables.The rhythm (ocai) of Tamil poetry arises from the successionof acais, unlike that of English poetry, which isdetermined by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.There is, nevertheless, a strong impression ofstress despite the uneven number of syllables in a line.The ear recognizes four beats per line that usually fall inthe first acai of each foot.Each of the four Tamil meters has its own distinctiverhythm: akaval, “calling,” for aciriyam; ceppal,“saying,” for venpa; tunkal, “swinging,” for vanci; andtullal, “tripping,” for kali. These terms describe how theverses in the four meters sound to the ear when recited.Akaval, as the aciriyam meter was known earlier, is theoldest Tamil meter. It originated with the akavunans andakavanmakals, men and women of a specific clan whotold the future. Thus, akaval is a “prophetic utterance.”As in the case of the Greek hexameter, the connectionbetween meter and ritual existed in Tamil society as well.Aciriyam, with its strong impression of stress, was themeter of bardic poetry. It was recited to the accompanimentof a lute (yal), and this is clearly suggested by theterm akaval to indicate the rhythm that is characteristicof this meter.Talai, “linking,” indicates the mode by which the endof one foot is linked to the beginning of another to forma line. Lines are bound together to form a stanza orverse-form (pa) of which there are four types: aciriyappa,venpa, vancippa, and kalippa. Aciriyappa, the verseformin the aciriyam meter, is the staple of classicalTamil poetry. Each line comprises four feet of the typeknown as iyarcir, “natural foot,” which is of four kinds:ner ner ( – – ), nirai ner ( =– ), nirai nirai ( = = ), and nernirai ( –= ). Each of these feet has a mnemonic (vaypatu)named after a tree: tema, sweet mango ( – – ); pulima,sour mango ( =– ); karuvilam, wood apple ( = = ); andkuvilam, bael ( –= ). A scansion of the poem “A Trail ofFoam” would look like this.Translation Review 63

tema temankani tema tema- - - - = - - - -ner ner ner ner nirai ner ner ner ner1. kaman tankumati yenpor tamakkaruvilam tema karuvilam pulima= = - - = = = -nirai nirai ner ner nirai nirai nirai ner2. tariyalar kollo vanaimatu kaiyarkoltema kuvilam tema tema- - - = - - - -ner ner ner nirai ner ner ner ner3. yamen katalark kane mayirkaruvilam karuvilam karuvilam pulima= = = = = = = -nirai nirai nirai nirai nirai nirai nirai ner4. cerituni perukiya neñcamotu perunirkpulima karuvilam tema= - = = - -nirai ner nirai nirai ner ner5. kalporu cirunurai polatema tema tema pulima- - - - - - = -ner ner ner ner ner ner nirai ner6. mella mella villa kutumeNote the second-syllable rhymes (etukai) in lines 1(“man”) and 3 (“men”) and in lines 2 (“ri”) and 4 (“ri”).Tamil poetry favors second-syllable rhyme rather thanend rhyme. Note also the extensive use of alliteration(monai) throughout the poem: “ta” in line 1; “ko” in line2; “ka” in line 3; “pe” in line 4; and “me” in line 6. Therepetition of sounds, both horizontally and vertically,helps to create a seamless metrical grid that is impossibleto reproduce in English. I have instead used free versewith end-stopped lines to represent the tone of the Tamilpoem. The ancient Tamil poets composed for recitation.It is important to keep the auditory dimension of thepoem in mind while translating. And that is preciselywhat I have tried to do in my translation where the lastline, “minute by minute I too waste away,” mimics theauditory and emotional overtones of the last line of theoriginal, “mella mella villa kutume,” which really tugs atthe reader’s heartstrings. The Tamil poem of six linesexpands to eight lines in English. Such is the inflationarynature of poetic translation.Here is a poem, “The Tiger,” by Kavarpentu, oneof the few women poets represented in the Purananuru(Four Hundred Heroic Songs, 1st–3rd c. CE), comprising400 poems of five to twenty-five lines each on heroicthemes such as war and kingship.cirri narrun parri ninmakanyantula novena vinavuti yenmakanyantula nayinu mariye norumpulicerntu pokiya kallalai polainra vayiro vituvetonruvan mato porkkalat tane 13Where is your son? you ask,leaning against the fine pillar of my house.I don’t really know where he is.This womb that bore him is now a desolate cavea tiger once prowled about.Go, look for him on the battlefield.We overhear a woman talking with pride about her son.The poem is built on a series of binary oppositions.Elements from the inner and outer worlds are sharplycontrasted: son/tiger, womb/cave, house/battlefield. Thefirst pair is the most striking component of this montage.Her son is a tiger in his fierceness and courage. His naturalhabitat, like that of the predatory beast, is the openair. In fact, the battlefield is where he is most at home.He is a warrior. Her pride in this fact shines throughevery word she utters. There is also the poignancy of herseparation from him felt in the very core of her being —her womb. The pillars support her house. But her onlypillar of strength is her son, who is no longer with her.Her reticence belies her pain. But then social conventionsoblige her to restrain her feelings. Nevertheless, thepoem bursts at the seams with eloquence. Notice howunobtrusively the outside world enters her home andturns it upside down, erasing the difference, at least forher, between the two. Her only home is wherever her sonis. And, for the present, it happens to be the battlefield.The original poems do not have titles. I have providedthe titles for the translations.SanskritThe word “Sanskrit” means “perfected” or “refined.” Thelanguage was standardized from the spoken language byabout 500 BCE. It is an inflecting language like Greekand Latin, that is, a word is inflected by adding affixes orby different types of internal change. It has, for instance,64 Translation Review

eight distinct cases, whereas English has case only marginally.Inflection allows the word order to be variedendlessly. Unaccented function words in English, such as“a,” “the,” “of,” and “from,” are denoted in Sanskrit by achange in the inflectional syllable. Thus, for the threeEnglish words, “of the book,” Sanskrit has only one,“pustakasya,” in which the genitive singular marker“asya” represents “of the.” Thus, inflection allows anunusually concise structure.Sanskrit poetics emphasizes imagery and tone.Nothing is stated explicitly; it is always suggested.Indirect suggestion (dhvani) is a fundamental aestheticprinciple. The poems are impersonal. No names are mentioned,as any public acknowledgment would be sociallydisapproved and in bad taste. The form of the poem is anindependent stanza of two or four lines (muktaka),expressing a single mood (rasa). Often the stanza consistsof a single sentence.Sanskrit erotic poetry is best appreciated if thereader has some familiarity with the conventions of theerotic mood spelled out in such texts as Vatsyayana’sKamasutra (A Manual on the Art of Love, 3rd c.) orKalyanamalla’s Anangaranga (The Stage of the LoveGod, 16th c.). It has few equals, with the possible exceptionof the erotic poems in The Greek Anthology (10thc.) compiled by the Byzantine scholar KonstantinusKephalas. Sanskrit poetry was the product of a sophisticatedurban civilization.Let us look at an anonymous poem, “The Sheets,”from the Amarusataka (Amaru’s One Hundred Poems,7th c.), an influential anthology of erotic verse.kvacittambulaktah kvacidagarupankankamalinahkvaciccurnodgari kvaccidapi ca salakttakapadah |valibhangabhogairalakapatitaih sirnakusumaihstriya nanavastham prathayati ratam pracchadapatah||14Smudged here with betel juice, burnished therewith aloe paste, a splash of powder in one corner,and lacquer from footprints embroidered inanother,with flowers from her hair strewn all overits winding crumpled folds, the sheets celebratethe joy of making love to a woman in everyposition.The word “sheets” has long been part of the euphemismsfor lovemaking. Expressions include “shaking of thesheets,” “between the sheets,” and “possess a woman’ssheets.” Social conventions, however, prohibit the poetfrom describing the various positions. He gets around theprohibition by describing the traces left by the woman,who is probably a courtesan, on the bedsheets duringlovemaking. The telltale marks on the bedsheets —“betel juice,” “aloe paste,” “splash of powder,” “lacquerfrom footprints,” and “flowers/ from her hair” — bearwitness to a night of wild lovemaking by the couple. Byconcentrating almost entirely on the background, the poetforces the reader’s attention on the foreground — thecouple’s lovemaking in “every position.” In hisSrngaradipika (The Interpretation of Love, ca. 1400),one of four commentaries on the Amarusataka,Vemabhupala 15 identifies each of the telltale marks with aspecific position: the “betel juice” with the “position ofthe cat”; the “aloe paste” with the “position of the elephant”;the “splash of powder” with the “position of thecow”; and “lacquer from footprints” with the unorthodoxposition, muliere superior, the woman on top of the man.The Kamasutra (part 2, chapters 6 and 8) offers the classicdescription of these positions. The poem is a textbookexample of the Sanskrit poet’s use of indirect suggestion(dhvani). Each reader, however, completes the poem inhis or her own mind. Often in life what we cannot see isfar more powerful than what we can actually see.The poem is a feast of olfactory delights. It recognizesthe erotic possibilities of scents such as aromaticherbs and perfumes in lovemaking. Other cultures areequally explicit on this matter. Proverbs 7:17–18 says: “Ihave perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning; let ussolace ourselves with loves.” 16 The Anangaranga callsattention to the importance of a fine environment forlovemaking: “the sheets should be sprinkled with flowersand the coverlet scented by burning incense such as aloesand other fragrant woods. In such a place, let the manascending the throne of love, enjoy the woman at easeand comfort, gratifying his and her every wish andwhim.” 17The sense of total abandon with which the couplemake love all over the bed is brought home by the insistentrepetition of the adverb “here” (“kvacit”). The entirepoem is one sentence, in which the subject, “the sheets”(pracchadapatah), is deliberately withheld till the veryend to add to the suspense. The poem is an erotic masterpiece.Sanskrit prosody is quantitative like the prosodiesof Greek and Latin; it is based on a succession of shortand long syllables and not, as in English, on stress. Ashort syllable consists of a short vowel (a, i, u, r, . l) . fol-Translation Review 65

lowed by a consonant. A long syllable consists of a longvowel (a, i, u, r, e, ai, o, or au) or a short vowel followedby two or more consonants. A short vowel becomes longwhen it is followed by an anusvara (“after-sound”: avowel nasality indicated by a superscript dot), a visarga(“giving up”: voiceless aspiration indicated by two dots,one below the other, after the syllable), or a conjunctconsonant.The stanza form (padya) most common in classicalSanskrit poetry comprises four identical metrical lines or“quarters” (pada). The quarter is determined by the numberof syllables (aksaras) or by the number of syllabicinstants (matras). Each quarter has from eight to twentyoneor more syllables. A syllabic instant denotes the timetaken to utter a short vowel. A short vowel equals onematra; a long vowel or diphthong equals two matras.Each quarter is arranged in units of three syllables calledsyllabic feet (ganas). The order of short and long syllablesin each unit varies. There are eight syllabic feet,each represented by a letter of the Sanskrit alphabet:1. na: ∪ ∪ ∪ (tribrach)2. ya: ∪ - - (bacchiac)3. ra: - ∪ - (cretic)4. ta: - - ∪ (palimbacchiac)5. ma: - - - (molossus)6. bha: - ∪ ∪ (dactyl)7. ja: ∪ – ∪ (amphibrach)8. sa: ∪ ∪ - (anapest).There are two other syllabic feet: the first comprises asingle long syllable, represented by the letter ga (-), andthe second, a single short syllable, represented by the letterla (∪).Each of the four lines of the poem “The Sheets” hasseventeen syllables that have an identical metrical pattern,with a caesura (yati), represented by a vertical bar(|), after the sixth syllable:ya ma na sa bha la ga∪ - - - - -|∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ - - ∪ ∪ ∪ -kvacittambulaktah kvacidagarupankankamalinahya ma na sa bha la ga∪ - - - - -|∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ - - ∪ ∪ ∪ -kvaciccurnodgari kvaccidapi ca salakttakapadah |ya ma na sa bha la ga∪ - - - - -|∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ - - ∪ ∪ ∪ -valibhangabhogairalakapatitaih sirnakusumaihya ma na sa bha la ga∪ - - - - -| ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ - - ∪ ∪ ∪ -striya nanavastham prathayati ratam pracchadapatah ||where the macron (-) stands for a long syllable and thebreve (∪) for a short syllable.Sanskrit meters have fanciful names such as “TheTiger’s Sport” (sardulavikridita) and “Indra’sThunderbolt” (indravajra). Often the name of a metertells us something about its flow, for example, mandakranta(“slow moving”). The long syllables of thismeter suggest pathos. Kalidasa’s poem The CloudMessenger (Meghadutam) offers some fine examples. In“The Tiger’s Sport,” the meter mimics the leap of a tiger.A long leap is followed by a caesura after the twelfth syllable,and the quarter ends on a short leap. The meter ofour poem is “The Excellent Lady” (sikharini), comprisingseventeen syllables in each quarter. The second,third, fourth, fifth, sixth, twelfth, thirteenth, and seventeenthsyllables are long; the rest are short. There is acaesura after the sixth syllable. Each quarter consists ofthe following syllabic feet: ya, ma, na, sa, bha, la, andga (∪ - - - - - ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ ∪ - - ∪ ∪ ∪ -).In the translation, the four lines of Sanskrit haveexpanded to seven lines in English that vary in lengthfrom nine to fourteen syllables. The classical meter isreplaced by free verse. The rhythms are those of speech,not song. This is no doubt an impoverishment, but it isalmost impossible to reproduce the quantitative meters ofSanskrit in a stress-timed language such as English.Though my translation is no more than a faint echo ofthe original, I think it is an English poem in its ownright. Its rhythmic flow is unmistakable and so is itsuninhibited celebration of erotic love between a man anda woman in the true spirit of the Kamasutra. Englishdoes not have a tradition of erotic poetry comparable tothat of Sanskrit or Greek. Therefore tone becomes ofutmost importance in communicating the erotic mood ofthe Sanskrit poem. It has to be carefully modulated tosound right to an English ear without being offensive. Intranslating from Sanskrit into English, one translates notjust the text but an entire worldview which remains hiddenlike so many roots beneath the text.Here is another anonymous poem, “The Pledge,”from the Subhasitaratnakosa (The Classic Anthology ofFine Verses, ca. 1100):gate premabandhe hrdayabahumane vigalitenivrtte sadbhave jana iva jane gacchati purah |66 Translation Review

tadutpreksyotpreksya priyasakhi gataste ca divasana jane ko hetuh sphutati satadha yannahrdayam || 18He’s broken the pledge,banished me from his heart.No more in love,he now walks in front of melike any other man.I spend my days thinking of this.Why my heart doesn’t go to pieces, dear friend,I don’t know.The woman’s lover has not kept faith with her. He hasgone back on his word and abandoned her. She is heartbrokenby his betrayal. Passing her in the street, he failsto acknowledge her as if she were a stranger. He is onher mind night and day. Devastated, she does not knowwhat to do. In her loneliness, she confides to a friend andwonders why she is not dead from a broken heart. In lessthan thirty words in the original Sanskrit, the poem tellsus all that there is to know about unrequited love. It is aman’s world; he does what he pleases. The woman isusually helpless. The Sanskrit poem begins on an ominousnote, “gate premabandhe” (literally, “the bond oflove is broken”), that is heartrending. The word “gate”falls on the ear with the force of a sledgehammer. It is allover between them. There is nothing more to be said.The rest of the poem is just a gloss on this phrase.Given the nature of Indian patriarchy, it is notunusual for a woman writer to hide her name and gender.Anonymity offered her a “refuge” from the prying eyesof men. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was probably rightwhen she said: “Anon, who wrote so many poems withoutsigning them, was often a woman.” 19 It is not improbablethat a woman wrote “The Pledge.” The female personaspeaks in her own voice; she is not manipulated bya male author. Women, as a rule, were not taughtSanskrit. By writing in Sanskrit freely and openly abouther own situation, Anon interrogates patriarchy’s attitudestoward women, especially its politicization of awoman’s personal life leading to humiliation and abuse.Love is usually depicted in Sanskrit poetry in itstwo major aspects: love-in-enjoyment (sambhoga-srngara)and love-in-separation (vipralamba-srngara). “TheSheets” is a good example of the former and “ThePledge” of the latter.Translation as EmpowermentTranslation remains the most accessible marketplace forlinguistic exchanges to take place. A nation renews itselfthrough translation. If it is indifferent to it, it is in dangerof “falling off the globe.” The United NationsDevelopment Program’s Arab Human DevelopmentReport 2002, prepared by a group of Arab intellectuals,offers some telling data on translation and nation-building.The entire Arab world, comprising twenty-two stateswith a population of 280 million, translates “about 300books annually,” which is “one fifth the number thatGreece alone,” with a population of ten million, “translates.”Furthermore, “The cumulative total of translatedbooks since the Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma’mun’s (r. 813–33)time is about 100,000, which is almost the number thatSpain translates in one year.” 20 Translation is the oxygenthat keeps a language alive. Without it, the languagewould become stale, and its air, unbreathable.Translation has offered the poems in the two languages— Tamil and Sanskrit — an afterlife in anotherlanguage, English. It has enabled the Indian poets to beheard across the centuries in a contemporary global languagethat has made them known throughout the world.Such is the power of translation.Works CitedAll translations in the text are my own.Diacritical marks are omitted except on pages 63 and 66.1Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’sRediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans.Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York:Columbia UP, 1984) 7.2Ezra Pound, “Translators of Greek: Early Translators ofHomer,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot(London: Faber and Faber, 1954) 271.3Maynard Mack, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology ofWorld Masterpieces, expanded ed., 2 vols. (New York:W. W. Norton, 1995).4Paula Berggren, Teaching with The Norton Anthology ofWorld Masterpieces, expanded ed., “A Guide forInstructors” (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).5Paul Valéry, “Concerning Le Cimetière marin,” The Artof Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot, vol. 7 of The CollectedWorks of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews, BollingenSeries, 45 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985) 140–41.6William Butler Yeats, “Words,” The Collected Works ofW. B. Yeats, vol. 1: The Poems, rev. ed., ed. Richard J.Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989) 90.Translation Review 67

7Vicente Huidobro, “Arte Poetica,” The Selected Poetryof Vicente Huidobro, ed. David M. Guss (New York:New Directions, 1981) 2.8Huidobro, “Ars Poetica,” trans. David M. Guss, TheSelected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro, ed. Guss 3.9Pereyin Muruvalar, KT 17, Kuruntokai (KT), 4th printing,ed., with a commentary, U. Ve. Caminataiyar(Madras: Sri Tiyakaraca vilaca veliyitu, 1962) 42.10William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 29,” Shakespeare’sSonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale UP,1977) 28.11Kalporu Cirunuraiyar, KT 290, Caminataiyar 539–40.12Arthur Waley, trans. “Nineteen Japanese Poems,”Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation andAnthology of Arthur Waley, ed. Ivan Morris (Berkeley,CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1981) 238.13Kavarpentu, PN 86, Purananuru (PN), ed., with an oldcommentary, U. Ve. Caminataiyar, 6th printing (Madras:Sri Tiyakaraca vilaca veliyitu, 1963) 192.14Anon., AS 65, Amarusatakam (AS), with the commentarySrngaradipika of Vemabhupala, ed. and trans.Chintaman Ramachandra Devadhar (Delhi: MotilalBanarsidass, 1984) 79.15Devadhar 80.16Proverbs 7:17–18. The Bible: Authorized King JamesVersion, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, OxfordWorld’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997) 728.17Kalyanamalla, Anangaranga, trans. F. F. Arbuthnot andRichard F. Burton (New York: Medical P of New York,1964) 97.18Anon., SRK 697, Subhasitaratnakosa (SRK), comp.Vidyakara, and ed. D. D. Kosambi and V. V. Gokhale,Harvard Oriental Series, 42 (Cambridge, Harvard UP,1957) 128.19Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego,CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957 [1929]) 51.20Thomas L. Friedman, “Arabs at the Crossroads,” TheNew York Times (3 July 2002): A23, an op-ed on the“Arab Human Development Report 2002,” UnitedNations Development Program, Regional Bureau forArab States.68 Translation Review

THE MEXICAN POET HOMERO ARIDJISBy Rainer SchulteHomero Aridjis. Eyes To See Otherwise: Ojos de otromirar. Selected Poems 1960–2000. Edited by BettyFerber and George McWhirter. New York. NewDirections. 2001.Eyes To See Otherwise is the first comprehensivebilingual collection of Homero Aridjis’ poetic oeuvre.Represented are selections from the books of poemsAridjis has written over a period of forty years. Today,Aridjis is one of Mexico’s most important living poets.He has published more than twenty books of poetry andprose, and his works have been translated into a dozenlanguages.Included in the collection of Eyes To See Otherwiseare selections from Antes de reino (Before the Kingdom,1963), Los espacios azules (Blue Spaces, 1969), Ajedrez-Navigaciones (Chess-Navigations, 1969), El poeta niño(The Boy Poet, 1971), Quemar las naves (Exaltation ofLight, 1975), Vivir para ver (Living to See, 1977),Construir la morte (The Building of Death, 1982),Imágenes para el fin del milenio (Images for the End ofthe Millennium, 1990), Nueva expulsión del paraíso(Second Expulsion from Paradise, 1990), El poeta enpeligro de extinction (The Poet in Danger of Extinction,1992), Arzobispo haciendo fuego (Archbishop Building aFire, 1993), Tiempo de ángeles (A Time of Angels,1994), Ojos de otro mirar (Eyes to See Otherwise,1998), and El ojo de la ballena (The Eye of the Whale,2001).The list of distinguished translators who have renderedthe poems of Aridjis into English reads as follows:Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Martha Black Jordan, PhilipLamantia, W.S. Merwin, John Frederick Nims, KennethRexroth, Jerome Rothenberg, Brian Swann, BarbaraSzerlip, Nathaniel Tarn, Eliot Weinberger, and the twoeditors of this book.The majority of the earlier poems through the 1977collection Living to See (Vivir para ver) have been translatedby Eliot Weinberger. The later poems, fromConstruir la muerte, 1982 (The Building of Death) toThe Eye of the Whale, 2001 (El ojo de la ballena), weretranslated by George McWhirter. The translations byW.S. Merwin are particularly numerous in the sectiontitled Blue Spaces,1969, (Los espacios azules). Most ofthe other ten translators are represented mainly in theearlier works of Aridjis.The landscape of Aridjis’ poetic universe embracesthe splendor and misery of human existence. Above all,he is concerned about the present and future of the planetearth. In his words, “the task of poets and of holy men isto tell this planet’s stories and to articulate ecologicalcosmology that does not separate nature from humanity.”And his poems speak of a deep humanity that is linked tothe flowers, trees, and streams of his Mexican country.His inspiration comes from Nahuatl chants and Huicholinitiation songs to San Juan de la Cruz and the 16th-centurySpanish poet Luis de Gongora y Argote. The earthspeaks through his poems.“I remember … inexpressiblythe old tongue that speakswith beasts and trees.”The wonders of nature are juxtaposed to thedestruction of the environment by humans. The beauty ofanimals and nature clashes with the intrusion of chainsawsthat desecrate the forests. Aridjis’ constant concernwith the ecological future of the planet finds moments ofmeditative introspection in a series of self-portraits fromhis youth and a long poem about his mother’s death,“The Amazement of Time.” The vision of his poems coversa large territory: the Spanish Inquisition, Zapata andMontezuma, the Aztec ceremonies of sacrifice, and theerotic side of human existence. Aridjis seeks inspirationin Dante’s universe. For him, Dante is a moral poet whowas deeply involved in the turmoil of his own time andjudged his society with a strong critical eye.In the last two lines of his poem “Preguntas”(Questions) from his 1971 collection El poeta niño (TheBoy Poet), Aridjis articulates his poetic vision:“o seré siempre esto que soyun hombre de palabras?”(or will I always be that which I ama man of words?)Aridjis formulates this statement as a question. His oeuvreconfirms that he is a poet of words. And there arecertain words that glow through many of his poems.Above all, “light” dominates his poetic outlook: the daysings light; a man watches light shine on the fruit; bladesof light; the afternoon smells of light; only the light onthe leaves; and a white light meets with a red and greenlight in the same poem. Aridjis celebrates silence andTranslation Review 69

transparency, stones and clouds. His is a paradoxicalview of life, and we come to understand the worldthrough the ever-present tension of opposites. He writes:“with the sun on our faces/ we also/ move toward transparency”(p87); “this black stone/is a piece of the night”(p.137); and “I a shadow on the hot stones,/I a breath ina never ending silence” (p.105).On the one hand, Aridjis searches the light on thisearth; on the other, he has a keen eye for the violenceand misery of this world. The poem “We Inherit Pain andPass it On,” translated by Eliot Weinberger, shows thatside of his poetry.We Inherit Pain and Pass it OnOur parents left usblood and wordswe leave our childrenblood and wordswe sing to our bonesbeside the firewe sharpen our fistsinto daggersalmost deadwe kill ourselvesalmost nothingwe rip out our eyesour parents left usblood and wordswe leave our childrenblood and words(p. 99)Heredemos el Dolor y lo TransmittimosSangre y palabrasnos dejaron los viejossangre y palabrasdejamos a nuestros hijosjunto al fuegocantamos a nuestros huesosafilamos nuestros puñoslos hacemos puñalesya casi muertosnos asesinamosya casi nadanos sacamos los ojossangre y palabrasnos dejaron los viejossangre y palabrasdejamos a nuestros hijosAlmost like a Bach fugue, the poet hammers his messagethrough the repetition of “blood and words.” Bach actuallyappears several times in various of his poems.Even though thirteen translators are listed, themajority of the poems were translated by EliotWeinberger and George McWhirter. Weinberger translatedall the poems included in Exaltation of Light. Withvery few exceptions, McWhirter translated all the poemsfrom The Building of Death, Images for the End of theMillennium, Second Expulsion from Paradise, The Poetin Danger of Extinction, Archbishop Building a Fire, ATime of Angels, and Eyes to See Otherwise. Weinbergerand McWhirter translated most of the poems that werepublished after 1971. The other translators were primarilyinvolved in transplanting the poems written between1960 and 1971. Unfortunately, the translators are listedin the table of contents only with their respective initialsbut not with the actual translations of each poem. Thus,the reader experiences some difficulties in figuring outwho translated what poem. In a future edition of Eyes toSee Otherwise, this editorial policy should be corrected.The variety of translation perspectives brought tothe interpretation of Aridjis’ poems through the eyes ofthe translators makes this collection a fascinating reading.His poetic universe covers the pianissimo sounds ofhis lyrical vision and his fortissimo explosions lamentingthe destruction that humanity has inflicted on the planetearth. Ultimately, it is the light, la luz, with all its resonancesthat opens doors of hope toward the future. Inparticular, Aridjis celebrates the power of light in thepoems in his volume Exaltation of Light, which are alltranslated by Eliot Weinberger. Weinberger understandsthat Aridjis’ poetry is driven by the word, the poet as an“hombre de palabras.” The translators bring a great varietyof interpretive perspectives to their translations; theyall immersed themselves into the internal movements ofAridjis’ words and images, yet, at the same time, theyalways kept their ears close to the melodious voice ofeach poem. In its final analysis, Aridjis sees in all thedestruction that human beings have caused on the planetearth a ray of hope that springs from the creative energyof the individual.70 Translation Review

THE ART OF WARSUN-TZUEdited, Translated, and with anIntroduction by John MinfordPenguin Classics384 pp.0-14-043919-6 $14.00THE DESERT FATHERSSAYINGS OF THEEARLY CHRISTIAN MONKSTranslated, Edited, and with anIntroduction by Benedicta WardPenguin Classics304 pp.0-14-044731-8 $12.00THE BLACK TULIPALEXANDRE DUMASTranslated with an Introductionand Notes by Robin BussPenguin Classics288 pp.0-14-044892-6 $12.00THE INTERIOR CASTLEST. TERESA OF AVILANewly Translated with anIntroduction by Mirabai StarrThe first translation of the greatmystic saint’s most powerful andinfluential work by anyone outsidethe Catholic Church.Riverhead192 pp.1-57322-248-8 $22.95DEMOCRACY IN AMERICAAND TWO ESSAYS ON AMERICAALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLENewly Translated by Gerald BevanIntroduction by Isaac KramnickNotes by Jeff SelingerPenguin Classics896 pp.0-14-044760-1 $10.00FRAGMENTSTHE COLLECTEDWISDOM OF HERACLITUSTranslated by Brooks HaxtonForeword by James HillmanPenguin Classics128 pp.0-14-243765-4 $14.00HOMERIC HYMNSNew Translationby Jules CashfordIntroduction and Notesby Nicholas RichardsonPenguin Classics224 pp.0-14-043782-7 $12.00THE GREEK SOPHISTSTranslated by John Dillonand Tania GergelIntroduction by John DillonPenguin Classics256 pp.0-14-043689-8 $14.00SWANN’S WAYMARCEL PROUSTTranslated by Lydia DavisChristopher Prendergast,General EditorViking will publish volume II of In Searchof Lost Time, In The Shadows of Young Girlsin Flower, in February 2004.Viking496 pp.0-670-03245-X $27.95LAZARILLO DE TORMESand THE SWINDLERTWO SPANISHPICARESQUE NOVELSTranslated with an Introductionand Notes by Michael AlpertPenguin Classics240 pp.0-14-044900-0 $14.00The first major new translations of Freud in more thanthirty years—available only from Penguin Classicsf reudT H E N E W P E N G U I NADAM PHILLIPS, GENERAL EDITOR“A bold attempt to present Freud as an important Europeanwriter whose work inspired twentieth-century artists, filmmakers,and poets....Penguin should be congratulated on thisinnovative and timely project.” —The Observer (UK)“Each volume...comes with an introduction by a leading literarycritic, thinker, or historian....This has the effect not so muchof removing Freud from any therapeutic project as of placinghim at the very centre of the crowded intersection which iscontemporary thought.” —Lisa Appignanesi, co-author ofFreud’s WomenFor more information on the individual and forthcoming titles inThe New Penguin Freud Series go to www.penguin.com/pcfreud“THE WOLFMAN”AND OTHER CASESTranslated by Louise Adey HuishIntroduction by Gillian BeerPenguin Classics 384 pp. 0-14-243745-X $15.00THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGYOF EVERYDAY LIFETranslated by Anthea BellIntroduction by Paul KeeganPenguin Classics 320 pp. 0-14-243743-3 $14.00THE SCHREBER CASETranslated by Andrew WebberIntroduction by Colin MacCabePenguin Classics 96 pp. 0-14-243742-5 $12.00THE JOKE AND ITS RELATIONTO THE UNCONSCIOUSTranslated by Joyce CrickIntroduction by John CareyPenguin Classics 320 pp. 0-14-243744-1 $14.00THE UNCANNYTranslated by David McClintockIntroduction by Hugh HaughtonPenguin Classics 176 pp. 0-14-243747-6 $13.00PENGUIN GROUP (USA) Academic Marketing Department 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 www.penguin.com/academicTranslation Review 71

BOOK REVIEWTHE RETURN OF THE RIVER, by Roberto Sosa.Translated by Jo Anne Engelbert. Willimantic,Connecticut: Curbstone, 2002Steven F. White, ReviewerThe Return of the River, winner of the 2003 NationalTranslation Award, contains some of the most strikingcontemporary poems being written in the Spanish languageand has been translated here in resoundingly effectiveand innovative ways by Jo Anne Engelbert, who hasdedicated many years to the task of presenting the workof Honduran Roberto Sosa to readers in English. It ishard to believe that this remarkable poet will soon turn75, yet still is not very well known outside LatinAmerica. This volume of his selected poems, composedover some forty years, presented in a bilingual edition byCurbstone Press, and now recognized by the AmericanLiterary Translators Association, should be the perfectway to begin to rectify this situation.A close look at the trajectory of Sosa’s writingreveals that the poet experienced tremendous stylisticand thematic breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early1970s with the publication of the two volumes Lospobres (The Poor) and Un mundo para todos dividido (AWorld for All, Divided). For once, there was justice:respectively, the books received Spain’s prestigiousAdonais Prize and Cuba’s Casa de las Américas Prize. Infact, I would suggest that readers dive into The Return ofthe River and begin with these powerful poems that constitutepp. 61–155. This is the heart of Sosa’s mostaccomplished work, such as the tour de force “Mipadre”/ “My Father” (from Los pobres), which movesaudiences to tears and enthusiastic applause:Caminaba— doy mi testimonio —del brazo de fantasmasque lo llevaron a ninguna parte.Caíaabandono abajo, cada vez más abajo,más abajocon ayes sin sonidorepitiendo ruidos no aprendidos,buscando continuamenteel encuentro con los arrullos dentro de la apariencia.He was walking —I swear it —Arm in arm with ghostsleading him nowhere.He was fallinginto abandonment, deeper and deeper,deeper still,uttering silent moans,repeating unlearned soundstrying to find a lullabywithin appearances.“La hora baja” / “Qualms” (from Un mundo para todosdividido) contains chilling, engaged enigmas that enablethe poem simultaneously to live in the Honduras of thepoet’s lifetime and to inhabit other geographic and temporalboundaries:Dando vueltas y cambios crecimos duramente.De nosotrosse levantaronlos jueces de dos caras; los perseguidoresde cien ojos, veloces en la bruma y alegresconsumidores de distancias; los delatores fáciles;los verdugos sedientos de púrpura; los falsos testigoscreadores de la gráfica del humo; los pacienteshacedores de nocturnos cuchillos.Algunos dijeron: es el destinoque nos fue asignado y huyerondejando la noche enterrada. Otrosprefirieron encerrarse entre cuatro paredes sin principioni fin.Pero todos nosotros — a cierta hora — recorremosla callejuela de nuestro pasadode donde volvemoscon los cabellos tintos en sangre.72 Translation Review

Knocking about, kicked around and around, we grewup hard.From our ranks cametwo-faced judges; hundred-eyed pursuerswho eagerly devoured the road, swift in the mist;easy snitches; executioners thirsting for purple;false witnesses, inventors of smoke writing;and patient artisansof nocturnal knives.Some said: this is the fatethat was in our stars, and fled,burying the night. Othersshut themselves up within four walls that neitherbegin nor end.But all of us — at a certain hour — prowlthe alley of our pastand return,our hair stained with blood.The Peruvian poet César Vallejo breathes in the sentimentof these poems, and so does the Lorca who wrotePoet in New York, but Sosa’s empathies often have amore detached precision. Like knives, these poems cancut deeply, but sometimes they are hard to grasp becausethey’re all blade and no handle. For me, Sosa is not aSurrealist. He has discovered an astonishing poetic languagethat enables him to write the lucid dreams of hisbeing awake in the nightmare of history.Sosa’s is a world of brutality and the severest consequencesfor those who attempt to say what he says, especiallyin his more explicit subsequent publication Secretomilitar (Military Secret). In these thirteen poems, followingthe Latin American antecedent that Neruda establishesin Canto general, Sosa is not afraid to name names, touse the written word as a means of denouncing the specificpeople who have each played an infamous role inwriting the twentieth-century history of the Americas“inside a drop of blood”: Carías, Stroessner, Duvalier,Pinochet, Trujillo, and Hernández Martínez. There is alsoa place in this book for the military dictator Efraín RíosMontt, who appears as a giant boa constrictor (capable ofswallowing his country’s well-advertised ìeternalspring”) for his role in formulating the policies in the1980s that resulted in the deaths of so many indigenouspeople in Guatemala.As translator, Jo Anne Engelbert consistently demonstratesher ability to take the right kinds of risks.Although she is always respectful of the original text, shehas a nearly perfect understanding of when to vary syntaxand line breaks to create new equivalences inEnglish. There are also some serious and exciting examplesof what Rainer Schulte has called “associative, nonlinearthinking” in Engelbert’s translations of Sosa, suchas in the poem “Los Indios” / “The Indians”:Los he visto sin zapatos y casi desnudos,en gruposal cuidado de voces tendidas como l·tigos,o borrachos balanceándose con los charcos del ocasode regreso a sus cabañassituadas en el final de los olvidos.I have seen them in groups,barefoot and almost nude,controlled by voices that sting like whips,or drunk, weaving between sunset puddlesto reach their huts perched on the brinkof oblivion.In every poem, there is evidence of Engelbert’s expertiseas a translator, especially in terms of her thorough comprehensionof the nuances of meaning in the Spanish, hersensitivity to the musicality of the English she is shaping,and her recognition of the absolute importance of allowingSosa’s mysteries to remain intact in translation.Occasionally, Engelbert, for the sake of clarity andpoetic effect, augments in her translation, adding wordsand isolating new units of meaning with her line breaks:Temiblesabogadosperfeccionan el día y su azul dentellada.(“La casa de la justicia”)Fearsome attorneysperfect the dayand test the swiftness of their blue teeth.(“The House of Justice”)El origen les llama.Recorren con ojos dulces cuanto no tienen.En las noches recuerdan los hechos y palabras de losjustos.(“El otro océano”)The voice of origin is calling them.Translation Review 73

They gaze with gentle eyeson all they do not have.At nightfall they recallthe words and deeds of the just.(“The Other Ocean”)But Engelbert seems to be much more prone to elisionin her translations of Sosa’s poems, streamlining hislines or his rhetorical structures, distilling a core ofmeaning, highlighting a hitherto unobtrusive adjective oreliminating another:¿Qué humano no ha sentidoen el sitio del corazónesos dedos picoteadospor degradantes pájaros de cobre?(“La ciudad de los niños mendigos”)Whose heart has never felt those fingerspeckedby birds with copper beaks?(“The City of Beggar Children”)Todo ello ocurre con admirable naturalidad mientrasla gente aparece y desaparece sin percibirnossiquiera, porque, no hay duda, en medio de la transparenciaderrumbada se cree que somos perros.(“Los perros”)That’s how it is. People come and go, not giving us aglance. In the transparent space around us, they take usfor two dogs.(“Dogs”)If one examines Engelbert’s translations using asmaller unit of measurement, say, one or two words,there is also a great deal to admire about her imaginative,context-driven solutions to some perennial problems inSpanish. What follows is a kind of non-traditional minidictionary,which I hope is not inappropriate (even if itreflects how Engelbert sometimes changes parts ofspeech). If not in Translation Review, where?!abierto — yieldingabrirse — to yawn (in the spatial sense)acobardado — cringingacumulado — heaped-upaguardar — to set asidealrededor — rufflingamistad — companyamistad segura — friendship in my heartanudarse — to be ribbonedarrogante — overconfidentazulinante — habluecinatedbufonada — clown actcasi — supposed(nunca) concluido — undeadcreencias — cantcustodiar — to monitordecir — to confidedefinitivamente — it’s cleardelicadeza — charmdelincuente — gunmolldeshora — nightdeslealtades — selloutsdisponer — to ordainedificar — to concoctenvejecidas (por el odio ) — hate-wizenedescritura — scriptestrellado — star-shatteredextraído — spunfabricar placer — to brew a cup of pleasuregolpe — thudhablar — to expoundhablar oblicuo — to speak with forked tonguehuir — to fadehumillados — dispossessedidéntico — hasn’t changedinventado — ready-madelaberinto — multiple mazesllamar — to beckonmatices — inner workingsnegro — moonlessodio — to festerorillado — bereftpausado — deft(en dos) pedazos — cut in twopenumbra — waiting nightpertenecer — to have to one’s name(en) rebeldía — smolderingrecluido — ringedsacar — to siresensible — capable of feelingsobrevenir — to ravishTierra — whole earthunir — to fusevuelo — haloWhen I read Engelbert’s convincing translations ofSosa’s poems, I find poems in English that inspire confi-74 Translation Review

dence and bear close scrutiny whether I attempt to gaugeher work in terms of the smallest unit of measurement(word by word) or the largest (whole poems or even theentire book). In a few instances, however, I admit to havingambivalent feelings about her effort to take Sosa’sconventional politicized language and turn it into somethingmore unexpected or (to use Robert Bly’s term)“especially fragrant.” For example, Engelbert takes theadjective from the phrase “the cold war,” with its obviouspolitical connotations and attaches it to the metaphorthat follows. Thus, in “Los elegidos de la violencia”/“The Chosen Ones,” “La guerra fría/tiende su mano azuly mata” becomes “War extends its cold blue hand andkills.” Likewise, in “Esta luz que suscribo”/ “This Lightby which I Write,” Engelbert translates the perhaps overlystraightforward “mi gran compromiso” as “my enduringoath.” Nor does it seem wise, given the historicalbasis of inequality in Latin America, to translate “haciendas”as “fortunes” in that the wealth of the Generals inSosa’s poem “Las sales enigmáticas” / “The EnigmaticSalts” is specifically derived from their vast holdings ofland.My misgivings with The Return of the River havenothing to do with the translation but rather how thebook as a whole may not do enough to illuminate fullythe work of Sosa for the poet’s new readers. In his introduction,for example, Sam Hamill takes a pointedly antiacademicstance. He feels compelled to assail a criticalvocabulary often applied to poetry that “has been nailedinside the tidy academic coffins of fads and movements,entombed in “post-modernism” or “deconstructionism”or “neo-anythingism.” Agreed. As a reader, I can certainlyaccept this attitude, because I, too, would prefer not toread about Sosa in the impenetrable jargon that constitutesa great deal of contemporary literary criticism. ButHamill still needs to do his job. Despite his insightfulcomparisons of Sosa’s poetry with work by Chinesepoets from the T’ang dynasty and poetry from the GreekAnthology, Hamill makes no effort to describe, howeverbriefly, what is perhaps most obvious: as a poet writingin Spanish, Sosa is talking with Vallejo, Neruda, andLorca; he’s also engaged in a dialogue with the Biblicallanguage of the Psalms. Hamill makes a passing referenceto the “Contra war in Nicaragua,” but many potentialnew readers (university students, for example) wereborn in 1985 and need more to go on. In other words, agood introduction to Sosa’s poetry needs to take intoaccount a generation of readers who were children whenthe Berlin Wall fell and who truly do not grasp thegeopolitical realities that underlie the literal meaning ofthe title of Sosa’s best collection Un mundo para todosdividido (A World for All, Divided).But there is something even more disconcertingabout the introduction. Although Hamill is a skilledtranslator himself, he makes no mention at all ofEngelbert’s efforts in this regard. In fact, the poem“From Child to Adult” (“De niño a hombre”), which hecites as an example of Sosa’s rejection of “the objectificationof women so often associated with Hispanicromantic verse” (though how, I wonder, does Hamill read“Mist Woman”?), should have been an occasion to praisethe translator, because the conscious, insistent feminizationof Sosa’s masculine child is all Engelbert. Her translationexists on the page opposite the Spanish original asa brilliant counterpoint to Sosa’s entirely more traditionallanguage:Es fácil dejar a un niñoa merced de los pájaros.Mirarle sin asombrolos ojos de luces indefensas.Dejarlo dando vocesentre una multitud.No entender el idiomaclaro de su media lengua.O decirle a alguien:es suyo para siempre.Es fácil,facilísimo.Lo difíciles darle la dimensiónde un hombre verdadero.It’s easy to abandon a childto the mercy of birds.To look without wonderinto her eyes of helpless light.To let her cryon a crowded street.To ignore the clear languageof her baby talk.Translation Review 75

Or say to someone:You can have her,she’s yours forever.It’s easy,very easy.What is hardis to give herthe true dimension of a human life.If translation is a kind of interlingual conversation (facilitatedin this particular edition by the en face inclusion ofthe original Spanish) that seeks to define new equilibriums,editors, reviewers, and teachers, can all serve readersmore effectively by becoming engaged in this dialoguethemselves on some level. By pointing out the controversialnature of Engelbert’s translation strategy in thisinstance, there is an opportunity to discuss sexism in language,the role of the translator, and the way one text(the original) attempts to coexist with another (the translation).Whose responsibility is it to include in an anthologyof this kind essential items such as a basic bibliographyof the author’s works (including, in this case, thevolume of translations by Jim Lindsay that Princetonpublished some years ago) as well as a very selectivelisting of critical studies and any available interviewswith the author? Does this task correspond to the personwho writes the introduction, the translator, the author, thepublisher? Curbstone Press, in keeping with its statedmission to seek out and teach “the highest aestheticexpression of the dedication to human rights and interculturalunderstanding,” is generally very conscientiousregarding these issues (and even takes the next step bygetting their authors to connect with a diverse public ininnovative ways). Perhaps this explains my disappointmentwith the limitations of Hamill’s introduction interms of locating Sosa in a literary and sociohistoricalcontext. I wondered, too, why the publisher makes theerroneous statement on the back cover of Sosa’s bookthat “the poems in The Return of the River were writtenbetween 1990 and the present.” One of the advantages ofthis volume of selected poems is precisely the fact that itincludes a range of poetry produced over nearly fourdecades. As a teacher, I always appreciate it when thepublishers of works in translation choose to serve thebreadth of their readers in as full a way as possible, overcomingtheir fears of bringing out an “academic” editionthat they assume will be less marketable. Here, in theparochial United States, we usually need all the help wecan get when it comes to international authors.But, ultimately, none of this detracts from thequality of the poems in this anthology. In his prologue,Sosa describes his book as “perhaps the echo of the echoof the eternal return, repeating itself in concentric circlesaround the dream of a society free of the antihumannightmare and its fabricated image.” The Return of theRiver is a stunning collaboration between Roberto Sosa,a world-class poet who needs to be more widely known,and Jo Anne Engelbert, a translator who has created newbanks for the river of Sosa’s poetry in English.76 Translation Review

Street of Lost FootstepsBy Lyonel TrouillotTranslated and introduction by Linda CoverdaleLyonel Trouillot’s harrowing novel depicts a night of blazingviolence in modern-day Port-au-Prince, and recalls hundredsof years of violence stretching back even before the birth ofHaiti in the fires of revolution.Need for the BikeBy Paul FournelTranslated by Allan StoeklNeed for the Bike conducts readers into a personal world ofcommunication whose center is the bicycle, and where allpeople and things pass by way of the bike.An Empty HouseBy Carlos CerdaTranslated by Andrea G. LabingerA story of contemporary Chile by one of its mostprominent novelists, An Empty House depicts thedissolution of an upper-middle-class family against achilling background of exile, return, and discovery.Macadam DreamsBy Gisèle PineauTranslated by C. DicksonA cyclone inexorably sweeps Eliette into her past in thisnovel about the wayward violence of love and nature inGuadeloupe.publishers of Bison BooksUniversityof NebraskaPress800.755.1105www.nebraskapress.unl.eduTranslation Review 77

Dedicated to the promotion and advancementof the study and craft of translation,translators, and publishers of translated workssince 1978. Annual conferences, newsletters,and the journal Translation Review and itssupplement, Annotated Books Received,provide members of this professionalassociation with the latest information in thefield of translation.American Literary TranslatorsAssociationThe University of Texas at DallasMail Station MC35, Box 830688Richardson TX 75083-0688972-883-2093Fax: 972-883-6303www.literarytranslators.org78 Translation Review