This week, I loved the Robert Bly article in The Kenyon Review, and I was thoroughly confused how the Suzanne Jill Levine article got published anywhere, and it made me seriously question the quality of SubStance in the 1980s.
First, Levine: This made me never want to read Infante’s work. The article was so full of irrelevant name-dropping and puns and strange understandings of what feminism is that it read more like a chaotic commentary on why gibberish is allowed and even commendable than it said anything interesting to me about Infante’s work. IF it is an accurate reflection of Infante’s work, then it fits into Bly’s first round of cuts for me—this would be a work so full of puns that it would be impossible for me to enjoy it, to see it as actual humor or wit, and I would have to refuse translating it. If this is more a reflection of Levine’s own “faithfully unfaithful” or “exaggeration of the periodical elements” than I think is, honestly, embarrassing and even shameful. I think the word shame is warranted here—I do NOT think of translation as “another form of parody,” nor do I think of poetry as just language wanting to be music, or just feelings, or…. The list goes on. Mostly, parody is a very difficult and precarious art, and it’s probably further from “play” than more faithful translations. It risks harm and irony where they do not belong. And good God does the article make women look bad…. Some of the commentary on the role of women in Infante’s work could be interesting, if it wasn’t for the narrator shoving her own ego into the article: “Where does this leave a woman as translator of such a book?” Honestly: Who cares?!! When I draw on the great works of literature from the past, I don’t see my role as a “betrayor” and I don’t see history as Freudian or Nietzschian (see how annoying that name dropping can be?). I see myself as taking part in a serious, developing conversation about what it means to be human—flawed, but not some great deceptive irony. “Crafty craft” …. I digress.
Now I’m running out of space. Let me just say that, in contrast, Bly’s piece was articulate, clear, nuanced, intelligent, and I learned quite a bit from it. The stages were helpful, and I especially appreciated how he noted all along the way the things that might turn us away from continuing on the journey of translation. In great contrast to the quite masculine (!!!) energy of Levine’s barralling through a text one has serious disagreements with using subversion, irony, craft, and betrayal, Bly approaches translation with a certain humility: the time is never wasted, but all along the way we have to keep asking ourselves if we can accept the foreign idea, the foreign concept, the foreign feeling. “During this stage, then, we test how far we are willing to go . . . If we don’t [believe], we should let the poem alone and not translate it; we’ll only ruin it if we go ahead.” And again, in the context of drawing on a Western or Puritan understanding over the Greek (/German, though that is kind of complicated) understanding of discipline and joy: if we cannot see joy as the drive over repentance, we “should not translate this poem—something will go wrong.” And, one more example, “At the end of this stage, the translate should ask himself whether the feelings as well as the concepts are within his world. If they are not, he should stop.” Other things I loved in Bly’s essay was the emphasis on drawing on the genius of the English language and paying close attention to making something work in English rather than writing a “translatorese,” and I especially appreciate his note about the dangers of “a pious trust in ambiguity which amounts to a refusal to think the question through or risk an answer.”
This reminds me of our conversation last week. Sometimes, you have to add a word or rearrange the sentence for the sake of saving the image, and the feeling, and the meaning, and ultimately for the sake of clarity. But nothing should come (in my opinion) above clarity. That doesn’t mean that you eliminate all multiplicities of meanings in interpretations of the poem—a clear image or metaphor is exactly what opens up those meanings—but it does mean that when something reads as ambiguous, you don’t give it an automatic pass. You struggle with it, and ask yourself if it is because you are still in an early stage speaking “translatorese,” or because there is a deeper impasse in your ability to carry the meaning forward into English, because you really don’t believe in the poem. I think of my own revulsion with Catullus…. It was fun for an exercise, but I could never truly translate his work. There’s probably more to be said about that.
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