RUNOUDEN PUOLUSTUS

1985. Suomennoksessa oli perusteltua jättää osa lainauksista (erityisesti
runokatkelmat) alkukieliseen muotoon; raja kääännettyjen ja alkukielisten
lainausten välillä muodostui hieman häilyväksi; suomentaja
toivo, että tämä lisää esseeseen uuden – lukijasta riippuen – antiabsorptiivisen
tai absorptiivisen ulottuvuuden.
Normaalien ihmisten tunteita (”Emotions of Normal People”, DC)
Näkymä ei-mistään (”A View From Nowhere”, DC
Herpaantumatonta hilseilyä (”Besotted Desquamation”, WS). Vrt. suomentajan
”lausunto” Tukholmassa 16. syyskuuta 2006: ”I’m going to read a poem
by Charles Bernstein, ’Besotted Desquamation’, in Finnish. This poem
can be seen as consisting of 27 sections, with all the words in each
individual section sharing the same initial letter. When I sat down to
translate the poem into Finnish, I was disappointed, confused even, to
find that the words my dictionary suggested for replacement seemed to
begin with just about any letter. Nothing of the harmony and order of the
Bernstein original to be found there! I began to feel desperate, and to
have doubts as to the very fundaments of the profession of translation. I
mean, how can we imagine to translate anything, when we cannot even
get the first letters right? Eventually, I think I did find a problem to the
solution. What I did was to put the original away – for good, I never
looked at it again. And why should I have?After all, as with all poems
(and as we all only too well know), it was only a pale shadow of the
original intentions of the poet, whatever these may have been. I also
closed the English-Finnish dictionary I had been consulting, opening a
Finnish-Finnish one instead, as I think Charles had done with an English-
English one in his time. I then proceeded, not to translate, not even to
rewrite, but to write the poem, exactly the way Charles had done before
me – here perhaps echoing the project of the immemorable Pierre
Menard, in that story by Jorge Luis Borges, to write Cervantes’ Don
Quixote in the early Twentieth Century. I feel confident that the results of
my experiment not only prove the validity of my approach, but also go a
way to redeem the honour of the business of translation in general. Can
there be a better guarantee of the faithfulness of a translation than when
the translator has gone through exactly the same motions with the
originator? To this day, no one has been able to point out in my poem
any of those small changes in tone, or field of reference, of individual
words and phrases that are so frustrating in even the best translations of
poetry – not to speak about outright errors and misunderstandings, as
when someone once made Count Basie a nobleman (Furst Basie), or
another had a famous General, by name Assembly, speak in a big United
252