French & Polish, Polish & French

 Translations from Polish

One practical consequence of agreeing that any text is unstable is accepting that every translation is indefinite and no translation is ever done.  The idea of a finished translation—polished, packaged, and prepared for publication—, while an inescapable, a necessary convention of the industry, needn’t pigeonhole the evolution of a literary text.  A published translation is like a photo, a record indexed in time rather than an exhaustive description of where a text is or how, through translation, it evolves.  JTH’s willingness to share the process in addition to the product seems in concert with translation’s deeper structure.  The unpretentious humility with which she presented her work still under construction and credited a “network of actors” reminded me of the modest gratitude with which Michael Cooperson spoke of the numerous persons who helped him achieve the diversity of voices/registers in his Impostures.  Even if a translator has the appearance (or the airs) of working alone, that translator’s work nevertheless issues from an invisible network of precursors, constituted at minimum by the indirect collaboration of the authors that translator has read and the study that translator has done.

Speaking as a reader and a translator of prose, I suspect that one challenge of translating poetry is capturing the development, the maturation, and the tonal changes of a poet’s voice.  I’d venture that a poem is translated on at least two levels: as a coherent art object in and of itself, with its internal coherence and aesthetic uniqueness, and also as a synecdoche for a poet’s corpus.  Describing herself as a translator of Ginczanka interested in learning form Ginczanka, JTH posited translation as the fruit of the closest possible reading, impracticable without also investigating the multitudinous and often overlapping contexts which inform an artist’s production.  Ginczanka’s literary antecedents and the particulars of her historical moment are, along with the fact she emigrated to Poland and chose Polish as her literary language, indispensable for a close reading and, in turn, a fitting rendition of her poetry.  The literary, the historical, and the biographical—JTH presented all three in tandem, suggesting that downplaying or even silencing aspects of the latter in order to avoid a fetishized misrepresentation is to trade one skewed portrait for another.

Translations from French 

Opposed to the thesis of untranslatability, I must nevertheless admit that Emma Ramadan has valiantly translated two books that could have qualified as such.  The incessant verbal play of In Concrete, so dependent upon mechanisms particular to French, often lacks an English equivalent, obliging the translator to find a comparable effect or to create a homologous voice.  The situation needn’t be considered a loss.  As ER describes in her endnote, by permitting herself the puns, the phonetic misspellings, and the verbal splendor unique to English, more than compensating for a lost meaning, she discovered a new one.

In this novel, language is invariably cognizant of itself, every use of words complicating an ongoing inquiry into the production and etiology of meaning.  If this young narrator of purposefully ambiguous gender grew up pouring cement and running electrical wire, surely those experiences would shape the range of that speaker’s vocabulary and the rhythm of that person’s speech.  The novel’s farfetched case, testing the boundaries of verisimilitude, isn’t exclusively for diversion: Anne Garreta’s hyperbole, like a distorted mirror, surprises the reader with vestiges of her/his own reflection.

The earliest example of the metanovel, of nested layers of fictionality, is perhaps Don Quixote, a collection of tales allegedly written in Arabic and translated into Spanish before Cervantes collated them in a novel in two parts.  Both the Arabic source text and the pending translations are Cervantes’ inventions, part of his multilayered fictive universe.  In Revenge of the Translator, BM pushes the format to the nth degree.  And ER’s translation of this novel already located at the interchange of French and English adds yet another layer of complexity.  The best I can surmise (given my command of French is functionally zero) is that the last turn of the screw, when ER herself appears, implicated on the level of the narrative, is a device present in the original and reworked for the English translation: the fictional translator Mike Kirkfield ceding to the fictionalized translator Emma Ramadan.  I’d like to know how ER and BM arrived at this captivating last note.

 

-Josh

4/20 reflections

 Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poems are definitely of a different kind than what I am used to reading. Her poems are heavy, rhythmic, and serve historical documentary purposes, like mentioned in the Irena Grudzinska-Gross article, “[h]er poem was realistic enough to serve after the war as documentary evidence at a trial of a couple of her tormentors – quite an unusual role for a piece of literature.”

I am used to reading poems that are not as dense in the historical information it carries–the Hyakunin Isshu, my bread an butter anthology, has a word limit and is traditionally only made to express the astonishment one feels towards a certain natural scenery or their burning longing for someone. I tried my hands at translating some of these poems and the main difficulty that I had encountered was balancing the preciseness and conciseness–do I want it to be as accurate as possible or as terse and sweet as possible? 

In the discussion of translating Ginczanka’s poemsi in Eve Bigaj’s article, she mentioned that some translations of her poems “don’t necessarily have to be bad” to “not sound well in [her] ear”. It isn’t just the rhyme that is intricate woven in a Slavic language a challenge that translators have to face, but also the emphatic beat that is hard to carry over. I do not read polish but from the poems translated by Joanna Huss, I was able to enjoy the beats of the poem that adds a lot of power to the poetry covering topics such as life and death, victory and defeat, and heart and passion. I can’t very well what type of beat it is that is employed in these English translations, but the sentences roll off the tongue and are very rhythmic to read. 

With that, I will end with a question for Professor Elliot. In the poem “physiology”, there is a line that goes like: “I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point)” Why does there need to be a “(exclamation point)” when there is one “!” already? 

 

Jiayi 

Thoughts on Ginczanka and Polish Poetry

 I first encountered Zuzanna Ginczanka's poetry in Alissa Valles's class last semester, when we read her translation of "Non omnis moriar." I remember how impressed I was by the poem, and how powerfully Ginczanka managed to harness the beauty of these images in order to condemn her neighbor's denouncement. Now that I have read a few more of her poems, I see that this blend of gravity and beauty is a trademark of hers. I was especially struck by the line in "Physiology:" "yet I am impaled on the stake of my own spine," juxtaposed with "I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point)." Ginczanka's poetry is so mature, and she is able to acknowledge both the beauty of life and the inevitability of her own mortality in a way that is wise beyond her years (and what a tragedy it is that war and genocide make people come to this realization so young). 

I was particularly excited about Huss's comment on Ginczanka's "archaisms disguised as neologisms." Huss pays close attention to the linguistic sources that Ginczanka draws from, and her meticulousness and research is a concrete way for her to acknowledge and honor not only Ginczanka's role in modernist poetry as well as put her into conversation with the traditional Polish poets of whom she so hoped to join the ranks. 

Regarding the question of multiple translations, I really don't understand why it would be an issue for two publications to publish the same poem in different translations at once. We can only benefit from having many translations, and I wish journals and magazines weren't so focused on literature as a commodity for them to have ownership owner. Though I realize I'm an idealist... Finally, regarding Cavanagh's essay, I thought it was a wonderful rallying cry to continue to translate poetry! Yes, it may be impossible, but this is exactly why we must keep trying to capture its beauty and expressivity. And this is especially where I believe multiple translations can come into play, each bringing a different aspect of the original to light. 

-Maggie

Ronkainen, Jonika -- 4/20 Comments

    With the  "Competing Poems by Nobelist" piece, it’s really hard not to want to reconcile the two translations, and I wish I could see how they might have been reconciled in the original piece. For instance, the difference between “redemptive handrail” and “saving banister” feels massive to me, but they provide so much clarity to each other: I love the extra meaning Trzeciak creates (or maybe preserves?) with “saving banister”  where it evokes the sense of there being a staircase, as though the poet, or even the reader of poetry, has to try and clamber up some grueling staircase with a failing support in order to get at the “sort of thing” that poetry is, but I’m not sure I would’ve understood this kind of fail-safe quality of the insufficient answers to the question “what is poetry” without Baranczak and Cavanagh’s “redemptive handrail,” nor do I feel I would’ve gotten the same meaning solely out of Trzeciak “clutch” as I do looking at it in conjunction with Baranczak and Cavanagh’s “cling.” I also love the way Baranczak and Cavanagh’s description of “tumbling” fits precisely with Trzeciak’s staircase and the idea of climbing/falling, even though that idea does not seem elsewhere present in their translation. I would almost be persuaded that the best-poem might have been a secondary franken-poem of the two translations, where “saving banister” was simply the better choice for a closing line, where what you lose from the word "redemptive" is regained in the substitution of “saving banister” by the pervasive idea of climbing, falling, and reclimbing, but there are other points where the measure of difference between the choices seemed itself to display best the essence of the poem. Basically, I think a very good argument is made for competing translations, whether that takes the form of a franken-poem, or reading between the lines of multiple translations.

I think I'm too bad a reader of poetry to appreciate Ginczanka's on my own -- I need someone else to talk about it before I can figure out how I feel about it (eg. I was neutral on Julia Nemirovskaya's poems until I Dralyuk talked about them, and perhaps this is simply a merit of Dralyuk, but now I think he and Nemirovskaya are absolutely the greatest). However, this sequence in Physiology: 

I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point) I follow the orders of my breath, 

that allege: I am seventeen, 

that allege: I am happy,

 yet I am impaled on the stake of my own spine

was striking even to me. The last line in particular conjures such a poignant idea, and I wondered if the phrasing was more, or less, idiomatic (less creative? and I don't mean that to be derogatory) in the original Polish -- from what I could tell from google translate, "the stake of" was an addition from Trzeciak (the literal translation perhaps being "yet I am impaled, on my own backbone"), so I was curious whether that was because there was an idea of/word for impalement in polish that in itself capture this idea of there being a stake (instead of any other impaling object, i guess) that Trzeciak was trying to redeem.

4/20 Reflections

    Non Omnis Moriar, a poem that my fellow students in the MFA should know well, and now that I think about it, a large reason for why I decided that I would never willingly translate poetry in a language that I can understand. Knowing explicitly that in order to mimic the rhyming structure and meter of the original, things must be changed or added, or to maintain the semantic meaning and word order structure and meter had to be thrown aside, in a way almost completely dampens the joy I would have had reading it, the same way I enjoyed reading Boris's poems earlier this month. A thought that is only amplified by reading The Art of Losing, and the admittance that the translation of poetry is impossible. The ignorant reader who has no idea about the source material or the context it was written in is divorced from the struggles of the translator who is forced to make difficult decisions time and time again, repeated over each word of a poem. Then there is also the issue of necessary information; how wildly important context is in the case of Non Omnis Moriar, and even haikus, for that matter. How does the translator convey in a translation everything that is needed to be conveyed, while juggling decisions about what must be left behind? 

    Likewise in the Times article where two different translations were published in the same time frame, did the reactions to first time readers of Zuzanna truly differ that much? There are of course other ramifications of this double publishing, but without the context of the original poem, details about the structure and the context, I find it doubtful that any reader can make a precise judgement on either translation greater in detail then just stating that these nouns in this line elicit a certain emotional response, or relate to these lines here. It speaks to the reversed relationships between the informed translator who must bridge all these gaps between the reader and the writer, the language and the meaning, and the reader, who oftentimes does not even know there is a gap in their knowledge to begin with, happy to keep on walking forward through the translation blissfully unaware. A translator is lucky when they do not need to think about traversing the long and thorny path of translating a poem and all the problems it entails, and a reader is lucky when they know enough to enjoy a translation, but not enough that they would empathize with the problems the translator faced.

Steven 

Reflections 4/20 (Ginczanka, Joanna Huss)

    I found the article “Competing Versions of Poem by Nobelist” a little funny this week. Last week in Professor Vincent’s class, we read the first 100 pages of Kate Brigg’s (incredible) book This Little Art, and in the text, she suggests that actually, we probably aren’t getting any better at translation—we’re just making new ones, different ones. I love this idea because it allows for any number of different translations of a given to text to exist. One translation does not have to be written off as “bad” or “wrong” in order for someone to make another. One translator can translate the same text as another translator in a different way, a new way—one doesn’t necessarily have to be better or worse. The versions need not “compete.” And the two publications, The New Yorker and the New Republic, can certainly publish two different translations of the same poem. They should do so, in fact. The space for translations should not be finite.

     I liked Joanna Huss’ translations of Ginczanka’s poetry. I was particularly struck by the poem “Physiology” and the lines:

I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point) I follow the orders of my breath,

that allege: I am seventeen,

that allege: I am happy,

yet I am impaled on the stake of my own spine

(inevitable death is in me, like a needle circulating in the veins)

this is not subject to negotiation,

this is not subject to supplication:

The use of punctuation is striking, especially the exclamation point followed by the words “exclamation point.” The end rhyme with “negotiation” and “supplication” reads beautifully too. 

    I first encountered Ginczanka’s poetry last semester in Professor Valles’ class when she very kindly shared with us a few beautiful translations she was working on. We read a few different renditions of “I Shall Not Wholly Die.” I like the version shared in the article “Something or Other” translated by Irena Grudzinska-Gross and her students, as well as the one in the article “An Angel Against Her Will,” but there are other translations I preferred. Although usually I prefer keeping non-English words from the source text in their original language, I like when translators of this poem in particular render the very first line, the Latin “Non omnis moriar,” as “I shall not wholly die” in English. They are so immensely powerful in English. The translation of the material objects is particularly important here too. For example, while the translation that appears in “An Angel Against Her Will” writes of “jugs” and “candles,” Grudzinska-Gross’ translation uses the words “goblets” and “candlesticks,” establishing a haunting opulence that feels essential to this poem.

-sharon

4/20 Reflections

 I found the abstract imagery in Zuzanna Ginczanka's poetry to be vivid, poignant, and complete, especially in the translation by Joanna Huss. The fact that this quality of imagery is delivered in a distinct and neat rhyming form in Polish makes it a timeless poetry, indeed. I look forward to reading more poems by this author, and in different translations to catch all the reflections of their beauty. 

In the article "In Translation", quite a few parallels and metaphors were drawn. I would like to pose a question: "What would be the most useful and helpful metaphor for translation these days and why?" One of the parallels was drawn between translation, losing, and fleeing in the historical context of persecution. I believe more meaning lies not in this parallel but in the fact that parallels such as this can be made. Everything is interconnected to one degree or the other or, perhaps, to an equal degree altogether. Inventing or discovering such connections does little at this point, in my opinion - to me, a deeper question lies in what the existence of webs of connections mean in the grander scheme of things. It seems like at the moment these webs are used to define translation for themselves. There is always the question: "What is translation?" and there is restlessness in the search for answer. I believe the larger question is: "What makes us need to know what translation is? What makes us uncomfortable with ambiguity?" 

Articles about Zuzanna Ginczanka's poems sometimes mentioned possibility and impossibility to translate something. Possibility/impossibility can be seen as a duality similar to perfection/imperfection. Perfection is something that is accepted and desired. Imperfection is something that is rejected and deemed as undesirable. Possibility is something that is commonly believed to exist. Impossibility is something that is commonly believed to not exist. The reason for creation and maintenance of these artificial distinction is, in my opinion, human discomfort with what is vague. There is a need for labeling, definition through characteristics rather than function, and assortment into categories. An example of the latter would be: "Is this a precise or an imprecise translation?". Such question first and foremost exposes discomfort with not designating something as either precise or not precise. 

Thus, a path to progress for translation may be in becoming comfortable with what is seen as imperfection and imprecision, seeing beyond them and then abandoning such categories altogether. Similarly, when it comes to translation as a practice, going beyond the need to define and characterize it and instead exploring its potential as a tool and broadening the horizons of what this tool can be used for. 

-Ksenia