Love and Mistranslation

 


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Poems are gifts, Paul Celan repeats firmly. In these letters of about two months apart, Celan intoned this litany, the unity of gift and poem. Each time the word “poem” rings out, it echoes back as countless gifts. The poem is a gift, a gift . . . gift . . . The poem is a gift, a gift, gift . . .

In these letters, Celan’s principal rhetorical figure is the definition. Poems are gifts. His definition reveals no context, but posits as premise a question to which it provides an answer: What is a poem? To this interrogation of poetry, Celan replies not with some technical definition of the kind in dictionaries or even poetry criticism, but rather with a metaphor. And metaphor always draws us into other questions. You say the poem is a gift; if so, then how is it a gift? Beyond that: What is a gift

What is a poem. And what is a gift. Anyone could answer these questions. Each of us has her own meaning for “poem” and “gift.” Well, not quite. I don’t have one. So I guess I have to retract that claim. (Why didn’t I just delete that and write a new sentence instead, you ask? I wanted to use the word “retract.” It’s elegant, plaintive. It cancels the content of the utterance, yet preserves the memory of the speech act. So isn’t retraction the most courteous, refined way to acknowledge one’s mistakes? And, beyond that, it also redresses my incorrigible tendency to delete what I’ve just written . . . ) To those two questions, my answer is merely that: rather than offering a single high-density, perfectly ripened metaphor, both “poem” and “gift” are words that have not yet attained their final shape, one stage of a definition still in its production, transformation, and evolution, or else examples from personal experience. What is a poem, you ask? Words in motion. This is, for now, the provisional definition I’ve arrived at. If you want to manifest a word in motion with a metaphor still unknown, there are many carapaces yet to be shed; many joints that need to be broken, then reset; many wings, antennae, setae to attach. And what is a gift, then? To answer that, I’d have to marshal the names of all the gifts I’ve ever given or gotten (or couldn’t but wanted to) and array them in a list, extract and condense their shared essence, then clarify it into an answer—all of which I have an inkling would be impossible. Every gift is different. What was given to (or gotten from) whom and when and why or why not, and what were the reasons for the exchange in the first place? I can’t boil the occasions, people, objects down to just one thing. And that irreducible distinctiveness is part of my own impossible definition of what a gift is.

To Celan, a poem is a gift. But what does “gift” mean to him? How does the deed of gift giving occur, and who are the agents implicated therein? When a poet declares that the poem is a gift, we might vaguely presume the giver to be the poet and the recipient the reader. The poet presents us with the poem, and we split it among ourselves. But when we read Celan’s words with deeper attention, we realize that, contrary to conventional supposition, the recipient of the gift of the poem is the poet himself. In the blankness of mind prior to the intrusion of the poet’s vocational self-consciousness, free of desires and expectations, anyone of sufficiently deep attention may receive the poem-gift. This is the true marvel. A being of such deep attention becomes a poet not so much by writing poetry as by receiving it as an unavoidable gift, and thereby becomes—by fate—a poet. To Celan, the means by which a poem is produced is neither some epiphanic inspiration, nor the use of an intensive technique, such as invention. The poem comes to him, and he receives it. “I’ve never known how to invent—I’ve just received what I’ve written (and vice versa),” he wrote modestly, implying something about his process of composition. On this line of thought, the formal method for receiving a poem as a gift is that of dictation. Setting on paper the words I heard because they came to me. Translation—moving words into other words that resemble them—is a form of dictation. The recipient of the poem-gift becomes at once both a humble scribe, and also a translator. Celan is reminding us of the fact that he was not merely a poet himself, but also a superb translator of Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé, Osip Mandelstam, Sergei Yesenin, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, Gérard de Nerval, and numerous other poets.

To Celan, a poem was a gift enclosing a destiny. In German, the word for “fate,” Schicksal, derives from the verb “send,” schicken. And in the literature of the German-speaking world, the etymological convention of viewing the poet’s fate or destiny as a gift sent by some god unknown dates back well before Celan. Examples include Hölderlin’s “Schicksalslied” (included in his 1797–99 volume Hyperion) and Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 Lucinde. Celan wrote a letter; Hölderlin and Schlegel wrote epistolary novels. All three separately chose to convey the intractably overwhelming, giverless, doubted—but ultimately accepted—fate of the poetic gift in the shape of correspondence. And each of these three texts uses the form of the letter to reveal the postal essence inherent not just in gifts, but in poetic language itself. The poet, instead of monopolizing the poetic gift by making it private, uses the peculiar medium of writing that is the letter to send it away once more as a gift, to the nameless readers possessed of attention deep as the poet’s. The German adjective for “deeply attentive,” aufmerksam, comes from the verb “notice,” merken—the root of which, the noun Marke, means (like the word “mark” in English) not just a sign, symbol, or cipher, but also a stamp. Among poem, poet, and reader, postal metaphors proliferate.

The poem is a gift. But a gift is, above all, mail. Especially if you get the gift from some unknown being you’ve never met in person. If you’re giving the gift to anonymous people whom you can never make an appointment to see. Then the poem, too, is a piece of mail. Even with an inestimable period of time between being sent and received. Half a century passed between Celan’s declaration that poems are letters and those words brushing into someone, printed on a postcard in the gift shop of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” proves that this syllogism, derived from personal experience, was right:

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something. Toward what?

The metaphor of a message in a bottle clarifies the essentially postal nature of the poem enclosed within the gift metaphor. For Celan, the event of poesis goes beyond receiving a gift from some unnamed sender; it also comprises the work of sending it out once more, a transmission bottled in glass. We must do this with deep attention. But what sort of person qualifies as “deeply attentive”? One who rather than dismiss markings, traces, vestiges, symbols, stains, and stigmata as mistakes to be erased, recognizes them as poetic metaphors and accepts them as gifts. One who takes dictation, who translates. And one who sticks a new stamp to the gift they have dictated and translated, then mails it off anew. One who sends the metaphor received from an unknown hand off toward hearts equally unknown.

Metaphor of the gift, but especially metaphor as a gift, a piece of mail spreading from one word to another, ceaselessly renewing its stamp and envelope—this is the person moving metaphors, words already moved into other words, into still other words resembling those words for other people somewhere else. The person who on their own becomes the glass bottle encasing metaphor, swimming far away through time and space. A deeply attentive person, a poet, a translator. A person of hand and heart.
 


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Translation requires that a person commit their self, with joy, to the ascesis of continuously drawing closer to the languages of others while also never giving up their own. What do we mean by “translation”? Technical definitions are many. But I am sure that anyone whose life involves translation would agree that this fundamentally lonely task, which we go about like a student left in a classroom without a teacher—through repeated trial and error and wordless burnishing—at some point sheds theoretical definitions and instead is best tended to by metaphor. Such are the spooky workings of translation. However we might define it, at some point its practice surpasses technical limits and drags us into the terra incognita of metaphor. The moment comes when we can only explain what we are doing by metaphor. And lexically—perhaps tautologically—“translation” is “metaphor.” The task of putting words in other words. Taking a word somewhere past itself. Translations cannot not be metaphors. So just as a poet can only answer the question, “What is a poem?” by recourse to their own metaphors, any experienced translator can only answer the question, “What is a translation?” by proposing the unique metaphorical definition produced over the course of her own life and craft practice. Far more than any single concrete piece of translation work, it is the maturation of these metaphors that is the most rewarding, fulfilling achievement over the course of a translator’s life. I would like to collect all the metaphors each translator has for translation; I would like to make a landscape of them.
 
I never dedicated myself body and soul to translation, but because the languages of others have provided an indispensable foundation for my own writing, I’ve come away with several metaphors of my own. Despite the fact that, just as my definition of a poem as “words in motion” is an incomplete one, so too my metaphors for translation remain short of full ripeness.
 
To me, translation is, foremost, like interpreting and performing a musical score. I’ve never had any special talent on an instrument, and even as a music enthusiast, my sensitivity and expertise fall short. My experience is limited to the piano when I was young, then group violin lessons as an after-school extracurricular, and a bit of cello later on. I had passion, but a lack of innate talent meant that I never could really play so much as an exercise properly. Yet music—as much as air and water—is such a basic need in life that I wake to it each morning before I even leave bed, and only finally turn it off when I go to sleep. See you again tomorrow. I’ve spent many days without reading or writing so much as a single letter, but almost never a day without a measure of music. When I love music, I surrender myself to its plush, cozy sound; I depend on it, fixate on it—like an infant in swaddling, or a caterpillar in its cocoon. In music, I heal from the despairs and exhaustions I too often feel from words.

To read sheet music and grasp a piece, then rosin my bow, turning the pegs to just the right tension, and the moment my fingers snap to the right position on the fingerboard, pressing bow to strings and releasing clean, rich sound . . . I never could manage any of that due to my clumsy hands and poor ears. But the sense for music that I lack, I instead feel when I translate. Remarkably, the moment I translate, my physical memories of music class bubble up from within me: the text I translate is the score, previous versions are the recordings of fellow performers, and before I start working, I read the source text as one does sheet music, to hear as many different instantiations of translations on record as possible. I access a level of hearing I never managed when playing actual music—meticulous, exacting. By ear and imagination I sense my way through the murky noises emitted by the text, attuning the translation’s pitch as I go, and as if suddenly seizing on the single correct sound from a discontinuous array, out of an infinite number of mistranslations, I choose the expression that fits best, one phrase, the next phrase, repeating when wrong, yet never forgetting to be flexible, how to retain the shimmer of overtones, stubbornly training myself to bring just one étude to some merely satisfactory conclusion at last. Enough to avoid embarrassment when I play it for strangers.

It takes time, focus, devotion to duty. I have music on; my shoulders hunch as I sit. When I translate as part of a job, I hold onto this attitude, this mentality. It can be boring and hard, but I enjoy my pride in the sense of a beauty only I can envision, the beauty granted only to performers who have fostered it a long time, deep within the dark, resonant hollows of a slender, ebony instrument.
 
More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery. So how about we read the poem together? The problem is, you don’t know the same languages that I (at least somewhat) know; you only read poetry in your native tongue; yet I want to tell you about Ocean Vuong’s first book of poems, but—look here how Vuong rewrites Rilke; and you played me Blake, but will never, ever know how my heart races for Hölderlin and Novalis; and likewise, you know a language I don’t, and how you must pity me for not knowing the beautiful poetry written in it. So please, go and read me Sappho. And then read me Sei Shōnagon, and let us remember the weather of times gone by, and talk about it. Oh, and then read us all more Anne Carson. I’d enjoy hearing that. This is the impulse driving translation. Wanting to share poems with lovely people.

The reason I learn and translate languages is that I'd like to tell you about a language you don’t know. I now feel less like the instrumentalist I was calling myself a moment ago, and more like a maker of paper in Venice, toiling to keep tone color stable and accuracy optimal, yet, at the same time, ever attuned to the mood it creates unexpectedly, to the improvisatory effects of language.

Marbled paper is a specialty of Venice, brilliantly colored like literal marble with the stains resulting from oil paint washing over its surface, used chiefly as endpapers in board-bound books. Its manufacture involves filling a broad, shallow, square pan with water, then sprinkling different colors of oil-based pigments over the surface. Oils are less dense than water, and due to their weak surface tension, they cluster and bob on top of it, unfurling palely like lotus leaves. You slice through the arrayed layers of oil slicks with a comb on a stick, then swirl them together, forming vague patterns. Sometimes you might nudge the rim of the pan to ripple the water, the striped shear that anoints the surface quivering along with the waves. The force and resulting motion cause the molecules of water and oil to break and reunite from their respective strata, thereby continuously shifting their arrangement microscopically—the result of which every moment produces, to the naked eye, a gradient of minutely differentiated patterns on the surface where pigment and water touch. Wavelike, unwavelike. You seize the instant when the slowly drifting ebb and flow of the shapes is most beautiful, then cover it with paper to skim it off, and the dyes magically fix on the lifted page just as they were, leaving nothing but clear water once more.

Poem and translation are to each other as water to pigment, or tray to paper. If poems are words in motion, then in the best of cases, translations of poems cannot help but be words in motion, too. Just as I use the way the coat of oils follows water’s transformations to make a pattern, translation conveys, then resembles, the movements of poetic language. And as paper gracing the slick surface records just one scene in the ceaselessly metamorphosing interplay between the position of fluid molecules and the rippling surface they comprise, translation can relay only one potential shape among the endless interpretive possibilities latent in poetic language. Yet when the paper lifts, into water that has recovered its original transparency, you can plunge anew radiant blots of color, spread fresh patterns of stains, wrinkles, eddies, flows, vibrations, tremors, waves, and then when you again lay down blank paper, it captures the traces of an entirely different pattern, but from the exact same water—as you can unfurl yet-unheard interpretations from any poem, even one that has been translated before, because you can always translate it differently anew.

The marvel is in the emergence of colorfulness from colorlessness. In a single bowl, blossoms spring to life, heaped in layers. And you depart from the paper studio for the seashore.

Then, on a vaster scale, when you turn toward the ocean—how on its surface the light of the sun, the light of the moon fix, fragment, spread, then disperse along with its waves. Endlessly unfolding ripples, clusters of sparkles diffusing. Mesh lace of waves and foam, and over them latticework of light in clusters, pouring, falling, crashing, breaking. At the asymptotic convergence of two oscillations, two forever different yet similar shapes with two forever different yet similar layers of motion, which cycle on forever. Dizzyingly. Blindingly. Breathstoppingly. Beyond any single poem, a whole language, and its translation. Of one poetic being, and a second, the meeting—and the love. Of every silent rapture, the experience.
 
Poems: words in motion. If so, what is a “poetic entity”? A heart in motion. A soul leading toward a form.
 
Light moving over moving water, unlike performing music, admits factors not mitigable by will or practice. A heart may move, but how can one stop it? The moment one slackens toward mistranslation, the necessity arises of assessing the status and value of the unavoidable linguistic phenomenon we call by that name. To take it to one extreme, when a translator deliberately sets her heart on the poetic, entirely apart from the question of her linguistic talents, perhaps there is no mistranslation. Whatever the translation, there is merely a grasping of the soul in motion as it brushes the poem. Merely the soaking into paper of the heart’s colors as it follows the ripples of the poem in the moment you read it. Merely the spectrum of emotions imprinting on photosensitive paper the moment you collide with the poem. Merely everything, starting from the poem.

But if it seems obvious that there are things worth deeming mistranslations, perhaps they are due to the fact that oil, by nature, simply works in a way different from water—the creative capacity of some unknown language, long dormant in the translator, awakened by means of the poem. Surprisingly, and interestingly, it is in the zone of mistranslations, where unattested words creep in—words different from what one ought to translate—that the translator becomes a poet. What should we call this person, who says in poems what the poet does not say, if not “a poet”? And so, mistranslations increasingly disappear. Even mistranslations are a different language turning into a poem.

You must become a person of deep attention.
 


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A letter arrives from afar.

“Here’s a gift. A poem. I’m sorry it’s not the original.”
“Why be sorry? I’m grateful! And happy.”

I read a poem translated into a foreign language we both know. Ah, what a poem. What a gift. I end up wanting to translate it into the mother tongue we also both know, to gift the poem again. I look for the original version of the poem, which is in another foreign language we know. Read it. Read it again, with even deeper attention. Read that gift again. Read it. Try rereading it one more time. Give it my whole focus. Four letters not found in the original. Read. Did I misread? Read again. Cannot interpret it differently. I wait for my heartbeats to quiet, then translate that beautiful poemword I alone have received, translate that nonmetaphorical word with the same two-syllable word:
 
. . . liebend . . .
—Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1921)
 
. . . by whose side I for the first time learned that word I would never again forget, a word I could scarcely have known yet then at the age of three, yet which immediately made itself comprehensible when it surfaced before me: Liebe.
—Walter Benjamin, Berliner Chronik (1932)