Leah Smolin - Notes for Feb 18

 Leah Smolin - Reading Notes for Feb 18

The Eight Stages of Translation

Bly’s steps are very helpful to me as I work on my final project. I don’t know if poetry always has to sound “spoken”—but I think it does most of the time. 

“I had confused Rilke’s mood with certain violent moods I had at the time.” This is funny. I haven’t thought about how mood could infiltrate translation.

Translation as (Sub)Version

“Infante’s Inferno” is not a good title (sounds like an academic essay) and in no way captures the original “Havana for a Dead Infant.” 

Up until now, I have never thought someone should be thrown in jail for using alliterative puns.

“...a set from her settee, a repartee a la Satie: “Adulturers”--said Olga. “They’re fiendish fish.” This is awful. That Levine is so delighted with herself makes it worse. “Alliteration…frees the impulsive, rhythmic nature of language as music—which it is to the child and to the poet.” Well we agree it’s childish. I would say alliteration doesn’t free Levine, but rather chains her into a pattern of uninteresting, cutesy phrases. 

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Agree that plural “lichens” is ugly. 

Surely it’s not a Western conceit that empty = lonely. But I do prefer empty. 

Rexroth’s is nice. I like Octavio Paz’s too. 

The unhinged Boodberg version is like something I would write for class (my ‘antistrophic’ being ‘alkalize’)

2/18- Lauren M

  

It was such a pleasure to listen to Professor Maurer’s podcast on Lorca. I loved learning about Lorca's relationship with Dali. I was especially struck by the ending of the podcast in the reflections on Lorca’s characters not knowing entirely what they want, and idea of the dialectics of presence and absence. I thought about this dialectic a lot in Levine’s essay when she presents the bind of the feminist translator (e.g., “All who use the mother’s father-tongue, who echo the ideas and discourse of great men are, in a sense, betrayers: this is the contradiction and compromise of dissidence” (92)). It also felt relevant after Chloe Garcia Roberts’ talk on Friday, and the desire to be visible as a translator. I love the idea of translators leaving a trace of themselves in their work (and for the record, I’m very pro Deborah Smith). I had a lot of fun reading Robert Bly’s “The Eight Stages of Translation.” I personally love a step-by-step guide to doing something. Inspired by Val’s Nabokov assistant, I uploaded this essay into Terrier GPT (inputs are not used to train the models, don’t freak out) and asked it to prompt me with questions that Robert Bly might ask me as I approached my Proust translation. With Robot Bly’s assistance, I found myself able to zero in on specific verbs, tone, paradox, and diction in ways I probably would not have gotten to on my own. As always, I wish I had more time to spend on my translation! It always feels like something I could work on forever!

Feb 18 Post - Ellie

 I really enjoyed reading the Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei work. I thought it was very interesting to read so many different translations and comprehensions of Wang Wei's poem, that is rather short, and the message rather plain. But I think that the translation style says a lot about the individual translators, how they chose to represent Wang Wei's words in this poem. I enjoyed most of the versions, actually, save for a few that I thought were over the top and arrogant-sounding. I thought that the critic who wrote the work was rather judgmental, though. He often critiqued the translated versions and the translators themselves as being arrogant and self-aggrandizing, but I think that he was essentially doing the same thing himself, picking apart these poem translations and casting them aside one by one like they weren't good enough. Something that really struck me was how he talked about the word "reflection" which he acted very confused by when the translators used it, but it felt like he was being purposefully obtuse when saying that. Any normal person (me included) would be able to understand what the translator meant by "reflection," and yet this critic kicked up a fuss about it, because he wanted to grandstand over these translators. Though his commentary was interesting, I really did not like his tone throughout the work, nor the way he talked about the many various translations. On page 18, he talks about the translators having an issue of ego, but I really think that accusation could be thrown back at him as well. He has a big ego, and it shows in the way he turns his nose up at the perfectly acceptable and beautiful poems, without providing one of his own to back up his claims with. 

2/18 Readings - Kevin Hauger

 The Eight Stages of Translation

Stage 2 of Bly's proposed stages feels particularly apt to my situation this week. I am still stuck on Proust's image of souls wandering in an ancient ruin and rebuilding the edifice of memory, and what that means for "passé ancien"--only close interpretation of meaning, past the literal language, can decide how heavily to read that phrase. Wish me luck!

Separately, I'm not sure I agree that an interpreter needs to believe a poet's beliefs in order to accurately translate. I like that Bly shows the need for acknowledging biases and understanding how the poet's beliefs may differ from the translator's, but I don't think that deep, personal feeling is necessary to write a good line of poetry, nor to understand one. I'm also not sold on Bly's assertion in stage 5 that American English only has one lower/sensual tone left available for use. His view here is partial and omits the successful use of higher register by poets like Richard Wilbur or Elizabeth Bishop, as well as precludes its successful use by some modern poets like Patricia Smith or A.E. Stallings.

Translation as (Sub) Version: On Translating Infante's Inferno

I think that one of Levine's unwieldy assertions is something like: any text which attempts to exist on/create a ground for common understanding via clarity, forbearance, or the use of inherited terms like "mother tongue" is phallic in nature. I don't see why, in her extremely liberal application of pun and alliteration, she stopped short of rhyming Balzac with ballsack. 

I don't think I have enough experience with translation to speak on ideas that are so abstracted, except to say that they seem very self-involved and make me disinterested in reading the book.

Robert Frost on 'The Sound of Sense' and on 'Sentence Sound'

Frost is as bombastic here as in most of his letters and editorial work. I understand the truth behind what he's saying and he certainly had an excellent ear to prove he knows what he's writing about, but by emphatically foregrounding the sound of spoken language, he has also exposed the inability of that concept to fully describe poetry. Now that we have audio recordings of speech spanning over 150 years, it's easy to notice that spoken language evolves so drastically, and differs so much across cultures and subcultures, that Frost's belief in a common soundscape is a bit reductive. The dialogue in "Snow" which feels perfectly natural to him still reads a little unnaturally to modern audiences, more so to folks not from New England.

2/11 Reading Responses - Samantha Makishima

 On "Loaf or Hot Water Bottle":

The translator talked about using deliberate ignorance to approach their first translation of the text which I thought interesting. Often times when I am reading something, I want to at least read the synopsis written by the author to get a sense of what the story is about, however there have been moments where I felt that doing so has taken away some of the interest in reading the book/text in and of itself strangely enough. While I don't think this is completely analog to what the translator was referring, I believe that I understand the reasoning behind wanting to do a blind translation so to speak. It also helps with the question of what to do if there isn't much to research about the author for a particular text, at least partially I think. Similarly, the notion of not wanting other translations to color the translators interpretation of the text is interesting, as this is something I felt difficult to work around in our translation exercises that we are doing for class.

On "Translating Proust":

Something that I have been thinking about as I am reading these translator's notes, articles, etc. is also the idea of translating the style (eloquence, etc.) of the original versus attempting to stick as close to the meaning of the original as possible. It seems to me to be a somewhat difficult to balance tight rope in many cases. The conversation about Moncrieff's translation compared to subsequent revisions also reminds me of other books I have read where the first, "pioneering" translation was in some cases inaccurate or woefully heavy handed in the cutting of content but retained the feeling of the original---whereas the later translations, while far more close to the original in some ways, lost the ease and charm of the original translation in some regard. They brought up "version fatigue" as well at the end, I think that this reflects back to the "Loaf or Hot Water Bottle" reading where the translator deliberately chose not to read the previous translations before writing their first draft.

On "Brian Nelson's Translator's Note":

The translator brings up the idea of foreignization in their translator's note, and in this case he seems to imply how strictly using foreignization in terms of translating Proust's style could be inappropriate due to how the original French was already atypical. Hence, foreignization would in some sense be forcing the text to conform rather than a proper homage to the original. (At least that's what I took away from the text) Given that foreignization was a topic during our first guest lecture, it is interesting to see how the concept shows up here continues to add nuance to idea of translating style.

2/11 Readings - Kevin Hauger

 Brian Nelson's Translator's Note

My thoughts so far are very aligned with Nelson's attitude toward translation: "Successful translation of Proust is achieved...by making him sound like Proust." I'm not sure how much weight to give to the idea of "foreignization" because it feels foreignizing to assume that there is a correct or incorrect literary mode in each language that needs to be translated from one correct mode to another; it limits an author's voice to one concept of the language they write in.

Translating Proust

I appreciated Hazzard's insight into the ongoing and charged conversation around translations of Proust, which I hadn't been aware of. I've also felt the urge to translate differently than the translations we've read, and I wonder about how much the impulse to differ should be tempered depending on the context of the translation: will it be a new edition for a major publisher? Or is it envisioned as So-and-So's personal translation? Is there still a place for works like Pound's Cathay, or have the standards changed far beyond that in the past century?

Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle

I found Davis' coverage of her own methods awesome to read. I'm sure she's not the only translator we've read who works so rigorously, but I don't think other notes have been so extensive and detailed. Her blend of systematized rules and deep research seems like an effective way of distancing ego from the project, and I like that she used the Moncrieff as reference material, but not as its own source text to which one must adhere.

Reading Responses- 2/11/26- Claire Kapitan

            In Brian Nelson’s Translator’s note, I really enjoyed how he explored the art of translation as imitation: “It is a kind of performance art, combining close reading and creative (re) writing. A sequence of words in one language is replaced by a sequence of words in another language…This involves scrupulous attention to verbal detail—myriad decisions concerning tone, texture, rhythm, register, syntax, sound, connotations: all those things that make up style and reflect the marriage between style and meaning.” For Nelson in his translation of Proust’s The Swann Way, this wasn’t about just transferring Proust’s long, ‘coiling’ sentences, but trying to capture how he shifts between a full range of tones and registers. This harder, more subtle and shifting work is what he concerned himself with—revealing that the work of translating requires dozens of choices about every word or sound and its impact—choices that must always be informed. 

Lydia Davis had a different approach: when she began translating Proust, she didn’t engage with other translations until she had produced a first working draft, she didn’t read much about Proust and his life, and she didn’t read the entire work, but rather only a few pages ahead of what she was translating. She wanted her work to be uninfluenced, in a sense, to merely reproduce the closest words she could find in English. She described her first version in English as raw and naive, which was later shaped by more reading and research, when she interacted with other translations to compare them to hers. I think this process is very interesting—controlling how and when your translation is affected by outside influence. I also liked how she articulated how translation is often moving in a circle and ending up where you started, only more informed. 

I also loved this passage: “And, too, I found that, paradoxically, whenever

you go minutely, microscopically into a single word, you enter

some large place, some area of history or culture you had never

entered before (60).” 

Hazzard was very helpful in contextualizing translators of Proust and teasing out their weaknesses, strengths, tendencies, and the precedents they created. I also liked how Hazzard explored motivation for translation: when you want to translate a text, your goal should not be merely to “re-do,” but to “make better.” You have to identify a need—a hole that your translation and interpretation might fill. This, however, could also lead to version fatigue— a need to be different, break new ground, create a need even if there isn’t one. These are things I hadn’t considered before. 

Lastly, in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, I was struck by the idea that there is no existing original, so all the interactions that we see are interpretations of one kind or another. I also liked how in #4, Weinberger writes that individual translations are “relatives, not clones, of the original,” and that the relationship between an original and its translation is “parent-child,” where some can be overly attached and others, constantly rebelling (12). I thought this was a very effective metaphor for the shifting radius of creative freedom that is never clearly defined in translation.