Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

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