Poetry is hard to understand, and purposefully so. Take this famous stanza from Emily Dickinson:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise;
Except for the unfamiliar use of the word “circuit”, the language in this verse is plain for the native English speaker. Strung together, however, it takes several readings to get the gist of what she is trying to say. The words are common enough to understand them all, but vague enough so that every reader might have a different guess at their meaning.
The Translation Tradeoff
In many poems there exists a triad of composition. Each decision a translator makes sacrifices a bit of one component to capture another:
• Expression
• Rhythm
• Rhyme
Expression
Taking the Dickinson example above, there are components here that an English speaker understands naturally, but would be difficult to communicate to a non-native speaker. “Telling something slant” may be another way of saying “telling a lie”, but the word “slant” connotes a certain way of bending the truth that can’t be conveyed with a literal description. In it’s most literal form one could express it in such a way: “tell the truth but don’t be so obvious about it”. Of course, what makes this so hard to translate is that “telling something slant” is an idiomatic part of speech that exists in English but not in other languages. A literal translation of the word “slant” here would baffle readers in a different language, and the whole meaning of that line would be lost.
This highlights the essential tradeoff translators face in translating poetry. The more faithful the translator is to the original wording, the less room the translator has to convey the idea. In focusing too intently on conveying the original idea, the translator loosens their hold on the wording that makes the poem unique. The tradeoff is between the literal and the conceptual.
Rhythm and Rhyme
The above stanza has a special cadence. The first and third lines have 8 syllables, while the second and fourth have 6 syllables. Read aloud, this cadence gives the stanza a sense of finality. When we read the first three lines, the reader instinctively gets a sense of the rhythm and expects the fourth line to resolve in similar way to the second. Lyrical poetry like this has a lot in common with music. If we are familiar with a scale, then we expect it to resolve a certain way. This stanza has that quality.
Of course, the words in other languages that are most similar in meaning may have a different number of syllables. The translator has therefore a more limited set of words to choose from if they are to retain the same rhythm. Often times it’s too difficult to do both, and the translator must focus on matching the meaning of the words at the expense of the poem’s rhythm.
The rhyme scheme too constrains the translator. The scheme is ABAB, and gives the stanza a melodic quality that would be missing with too literal a translation. The issue is that the number of words in the target language that 1) are similar to the original words in meaning 2) are the right number of syllables to match the 8-6-8-6 rhythm, and 3) rhyme with each other, are few and far between. The translator must make concessions and favor one component over the other to compose a translation with a likeness that’s honest to the original. Taking on all 3 components comes at the expense of capturing the poem’s overall meaning.
The Challenge
Translating poetry is like trying to play a piece of music composed for a particular instrument, but on an instrument in a different family. Imagine transcribing music written for a trumpet so that someone could play it on guitar. By nature it’s going to sound different. To play it honestly the musician has to lean into the differences between the two instruments, but within the constraints of the new instrument still try to convey the original melody and rhythm.
Similarly, a translator must get in the mind of the writer and of the reader. A good translator understands the poem well enough to understand what the poet is trying to say, but also knows the target language and the language of creation well enough to bridge the two. This incorporates all of the formal rigor of translation, but with some additional ingenuity, similar to that which resulted in the original creation.
A Polish to English Example
I talked in a previous post about writing two versions of a poem in translation: one to communicate the rhythm and rhyme, and one to communicate the literal expression of each word.
This is perhaps the best way to understand the original intention of a poem as written in its original language. However, at that point it’s more of an academic exercise. Reading poetry is supposed to be enjoyable, and the reader is supposed to come away with a few lines that stick out in memory because they are so carefully crafted. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” captures something universal but says it in such a way that it sticks in the memory, without the reader making a concerted effort to memorize it.
The translator’s job is to create something equally memorable, but using the different set of tools that the target language provides. This is what makes the effort such a challenge, but also what makes the reward so grand.
Here’s my attempt at translating Bolesław Leśmian from the original Polish. I chose him because he was deemed by many famous translators as being almost untranslatable. Here’s the original, and my attempt below. I’ll then analyze the choices I made, and what sacrifices I had to make to capture the original language while capturing the originality of work. For this exercise, I’ll include the original, then a literal translation and a rhymed one:
Gdybym spotkał ciebie znowu pierwszy raz,
Ale w innym sadzie, w innym lesie -
Może by inaczej zaszumiał nam las
Wydłużony mgłami na bezkresie….
Może innych kwiatów wśród zieleni bruzd
Jęłyby się dłonie dreszczem czynne -
Może by upadły z niedomyślnych ust
Jakieś inne słowa - jakieś inne…
Może by i słońce zniewoliło nas
Do spłynięcia duchem w róż kaskadzie,
Gdybym spotkał ciebie znowu pierwszy raz,
Ale w innym lesie, w innym sadzie…
__
If I met you again for the first time,
But in a different orchard, a different forest —
Perhaps the forest would have rustled differently,
Stretched by the fogs to infinity…
Perhaps different flowers among the green furrows
With our hands we’d pick, with a shiver —
Perhaps out of my dull-witted lips would fall
Some others words — some others…
Perhaps the sun would enslave us
To burn in a cascade of roses,
If I met you again for the first time,
But in a different forest, a different orchard…
__
If I met you again for the first time,
But in a different grove, a different wood—
Perhaps the singing forest would differently chime,
Stretched by the fogs as far as it could…
Perhaps with our hands we’d pick, with a shiver
Different flowers in the green furrow —
Perhaps my dull-witted lips would quiver
And out some other words would flow…
Perhaps the sun would forever us consign
To burn in a cascade of rose,
If I met you again for the first time
But in a different wood, a different grove…
A Deeper Look
You can see in the different versions how the rhyme scheme ABAB constrained my choice of words, and how these words differed from the literal translation. There is a unique difference between these language families that makes the choice of rhyming words difficult. In Polish and other Slavic languages, word order does not contribute to the meaning of a sentence. This is because these languages are highly inflected, meaning the words themselves change to signify their grammatical context. English, however, has a structure similar to many Germanic languages, in which the order denotes a word’s grammatical place in the sentence.
Take the line “Może by inaczej zaszumiał nam las”. The literal translation is “Maybe would rustle for us the forest”. The construction is Verb-Object-Subject. This reads so awkwardly in English because most English sentences take the form Subject-Verb-Object. Yoda actually uses this V-O-S word order in English: “Live for us, you will”. In the same poem, however, Leśmian uses the S-V-O word order (“Gdybym spotkał ciebie znowu pierwszy raz”) as well as V-O-S word order (“Może by upadły z niedomyślnych ust/Jakieś inne słow…”, or roughly “maybe would fall from my lips the words”). Since the word order is so flexible, Polish and other Slavic languages lend themselves well to poetry because it’s much easier to structure lines such that they end with a rhyme but still sound natural. In English this is more difficult, and results in awkward phrases like “Perhaps the sun would forever us consign”.
Another interesting part of this translation is the word “niedomyslnych”. This isn’t actually a “real” word in Polish (see “Leśmianisms”), but roughly means “not-smart”. In Polish, one can easily form words by adding a prefix like “nie-” or “bez-” (roughly meaning “without”) which in a way negates whatever it precedes. It’s easy to do this to any noun or verb, and it’s clear what the word would mean even if it’s not in common use. Leśmian likes to do this a lot in his poetry, but this word construction doesn’t exist in other languages in the same way. This in part caused many Polish translators to deem his work untranslatable.
My solution was to use a tool unique to the English language: the hyphenated word. This is a neat construct in English that allows a single noun or adjective to have a layered meaning by taking on the meaning of each of the hyphenated words. Think “ice-cold”, “half-hearted” or “long-winded”. I used the word “dull-witted” to capture the meaning of the Leśmian neologism, which I thought uses English’s word-forming strengths to good effect.
In a way, poets themselves are translators. They carefully translate their ideas into words designed to capture their original thought. One can say this about all writing, but in poetry this process is at the forefront because (usually) a poem uses fewer words to convey meaning. “Translating a translation” is a challenge, but the result is in itself a new and original work, and makes the process of translation less rote and more creative.