(picture reproduced from dalena)
Poems are like butter; you have to leave them out on the counter for a while before they’re soft enough to scoop. Or I guess you could microwave them?
So I attempted to translate a poem by Joseph Brodsky today. I love the joy and frustration that comes with moving communication from one language to another. It’s like taking a beautiful building and removing it stone by stone and trying to rebuild it somewhere very far away. You know you’re not going to make the same building; you just hope if the original architect came upon it he wouldn’t sue you for destruction of property.
I can’t really read Russian poems in English anymore. I try to; I just get discouraged. They’re so different in the translation, like looking at two totally different embassies (I live nearish to Embassy Row so this simile makes sense in my messy manbrain).
I’m not trying to discourage translations of poems. On the contrary, I wish more people translated more poems from all languages to all other languages. I just realize the enormity of the task, and sometimes I get weirdly existentially panicked when I think of the futility of communicating anything inside you. Like I’m a rock trying to speak to other rocks, but I can’t cuz I’m dumb and inanimate.
But then I feel better, because it’s not about perfection (take it up with Dali if you don’t like it). You’re just trying to get your point across. In the case of translation, you’re literally trying to get the point across a linguistic divide. And some things just won’t fucking translate. Get used to it. I mean, of course you should try to — I had to use five English words to describe the meaning encapsulated in one pretty snazzy Russian one — but at the end you’ll probably feel a little defeated. That’s okay.
In other news, I read some English translations of the Mongolian poet B. Burinbuhe’s work, and I figured I was losing about 90% of what was going on. But some of it got through, I think. The poet said, “If readers can smell from my crudely written poems the earth of the grassland, the scent of grass and milk, then I will be content.” I definitely smelled some form of dairy (which is probably my favorite food group), so I’ll say the translations were a success.