Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

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