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WHCessay
- Carley on Translation
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Part One:
Lost in Translation
extracted from: Still
Waiting for the Splash - The pursuit of form in English language haiku
John E. Carley
UK
False Friends
and Exotic Strangers
Sometimes a word is not what it
appears to be. Is it ‘chips’ or ‘fries’? ‘Pants’ or ‘shorts’? An
Englishman in New York would do well to be certain before committing himself.
And France... visitors to La Cirque du Paris might be excused a moment of panic
upon learning that, as ‘host’, they are expected to ‘assist’ in the
latest death defying feat upon the flying trapeze! Those who survive the
defibrillator are generally relieved to learn that these are in fact terms
belonging to that class words known as ‘faux amis’ - false friends - and
that ‘hôte’ generally means ‘guest’, whilst ‘assister’ means ‘to
witness’. One suspects they do it on purpose…
For the vast majority of people
from the English speaking nations haiku, Japanese haiku, can only be experienced
in translation. Of course apart from modern loan words, and a very occasional
Sanskrit root, there is no historic crossover between the two languages. Little
or no chance of ‘faux amis’ there then. But there are problems of
false recognition, and serious ones too; at the very moment we bid goodbye to
our false friends we risk embracing those ‘exotic strangers’.
Try looking at, say, Issa,
rendered word for word. The absence of such things as articles and pronouns; the
different ways in which number, gender and tense are conveyed: these constitute
a radical departure from all things ‘English’. Factor-in a word order so
bizarre as to make German seem almost reasonable and Japanese begins to look
pretty extraordinary. And not so easy to translate.
But then, if the expectation is
that haiku are essentially brief, mysterious, and somehow other, what
better way to convey that ‘oriental feel’ than to employ a special English
which is itself brief, mysterious, and somehow other. An English which,
like the Japanese, does not use articles or pronouns; which refuses to
conjugated verbs, or dispenses with them altogether; which adopts a staccato,
gnomic, syntax, and inhabits a perpetual, revelatory, present. It’s like
nothing you’ve ever seen before. Of course not... it’s haiku!
The problem with such an
approach is that it says more about the attitude and skill of the translator
than the intention of the poet. Grammar, syntax and word choice: the language of
the Japanese haiku is, to the Japanese, neither wonderfully weird nor especially
religious. Revelation there may be, and compelling passion too, but the secret
does not lie in some arcane use of words.
Haiku are not puzzle poems, nor
are they foreign. Not unless we chose to make them so. And the exotic strangers,
when you get close up, look just like the Polish family from next door.
Rabbis, Trots
and Translators
Rabbis tend to tell jokes about
themselves so they can be excused this section. Trotskyites on the other hand
will argue about whether it should be "Trotskyitst" until the
cows come home, go to bed, get up, and go back out to work (an activity Trots
tend not to burden themselves with). Translators, though, are worse, being
unable to agree upon what they are arguing about.
Give three translators a text
by Shiki and they will come up with five translations. No two translations will
be the same; there will be different numbers of lines, words, tenses, subjects,
objects and anything else that can be squabbled over. Those with ‘attitude’
use purple biro.
But it gets worse: Give one
translator three texts by Shiki and he or she will still come up with
five translations. Lines, tenses, subjects, objects: we might expect to see some
degree of consistency now; a unified sense of style might be emerging. But what
chance of that haikuists’ Grail: the same number of syllables per poem? The
answer... "Not a lot!".
Why? Why should that be? If
Basho or Busson could write their hokku to rule, why so multifarious in
translation?
The obvious answer is that
Japanese is a language that favours these tight structures whilst English
clearly does not. Flip through X, or B, and there's the proof: great poetry,
fine translations... lots of variation. So let's just agree that a haiku in
English is less strict than one in Japanese.
Except that the obvious answer
is wrong. And the 'proof' is nothing of the sort.
The
"Snickers" Test
No matter how exalted, our
translators must begin their task as readers, and no two readers will take the
same thing from a text. Poems are not hi-fi manuals: there are few 'facts' and
many subtleties, above all in a genre that prizes inference. Indeed the very
brevity of the haiku makes translation so much harder: the length of the poem
does not permit a defining narrative or polemic to develop; there is no
self-referencing tapestry of imagery to build into a certain picture, and
juxtaposition, as a tool of prosody, is the antithesis of 'exposition'.
Even when the poet is both
author and translator the likelihood of a poem exhibiting fixed form in both the
language of composition and that of destination is slight. Some concepts are
culturally specific, and it takes an essay, not a word, to translate them. Many,
perhaps most, are universal, but have different size words to describe them. And
the proportions of these words vary, even for things like 'candy'
(confectionary). For example…
The European
"Snickers" bar lists ingredients in ten languages. A quick glance
confirms that the Italian requires more syllables than the English. But whereas
the first dozen English syllables take fifteen Italian syllables to say the same
thing, the second dozen require twenty, and the third: seventeen. Look hard
enough and somewhere we'll find ten English syllables that only require nine in
Italian.
By the same token the
probability that the 17 syllables of a Japanese haiku will always equate
to 13 or 129 syllables in English is considerably less than zero. But this does
not prove that Japanese is wonderfully adapted to fitting a given formula, or
that English is uniquely free spirited. It just means that the original is
written in Japanese, and the translation is written in English. Doh!
Changing Places
Of course, it's not as if the
poet only chooses a word for the 'hard information’ it encodes. There’s the
little matter euphony too. Speaking of nice sounds…
Adelaide
Crapsey was the original ‘Boy Named Sue’, and born a hundred years ahead
of her time. Whilst the Great Powers were tooling up to slaughter the flower of
each other’s manhood, Crapsey, an American, was living in a garret in Paris
studying the earliest translations of haiku and tanka. The result was the
"cinquain", a twenty two syllable fixed-form stanza of great
sophistication.
It's there
upon the shore . . .
an ancient lullabye
that beckons me, "come sleep and dream
once more."
naia. 2001
At its simplest the cinquain is
an unrhymed stanza that counts 2/4/6/8/2 syllables, written in iambs. In the
hands of a skilled poet, as with this fine example by the contemporary poet naia,
the meter may be inflected, and partial rhyme introduced. Less obviously, the
line-breaks are ‘strong’ in that they sustain a pause without destroying the
syntax, and the lines may be so structured that they contain a layered
contraction. Here the poet gives us:
"it’s there/shore/lullabye/dream/once
more",
… and generates a pure
synthesis from the first and last elements:
"it’s there/once
more".
Having marveled at the poet’s
subtlety, the reader is now invited to translate the poem into the language of
their choice, preserving every aspect of the cinquain structure and every nuance
of the content.
Take your time… … … …
… … ... dooby dooby… … … … … … … … … tra la, la la… …
… … … … … Would those persons who are still counting the syllables on
their Snickers wrappers please put them down now and attempt the translation.
Thank you.
"Viens
dors, viens rêve… encore."
It may be possible to get
pretty close in French. It is unlikely that it is possible to get remotely close
in a language that has a markedly different grammar from English. Swahili, for
example. Which raises the question:
Q:
Does this mean that English is a language that favours these tight structures
whilst Swahili clearly does not?
Sorry, that’s being
facetious. So let’s try some different questions:
Q:
Does this mean that the Cinquain can only be written in English?
Which in turn suggests the
corollary:
Q:
Does this mean that a Cinquain may only be translated as free verse.
And/or
Q:
Can the core aesthetics of the Cinquain be approximated in another language?
If so:
Q:
What are the core attributes of the Cinquain?
For example:
Q:
Is any Swahili poem comprising 22 syllables a Cinquain?
No, surely that’s too wide.
So:
Q:
How about if it has two syllables on the first line, four on the etc?
Erm…
Q:
And the first and last word summed up the poem?
Well… ok. But the really
nasty question is still lurking. And, refuses to go away:
Q:
If the lineation and word order of the Cinquain are natural to English, doesn’t
that mean they might be completely unnatural to Swahili?
He who pays the
piper
Only one thing is certain, as we browse the
latest offering of Inuit folk chants from the Oxbridge University Press, our
translator has already had to consider these questions and come up with a
working hypothesis.
In terms of content, of primary ‘meaning’,
all literate persons are familiar with the idea that a poem in translation is in
fact an ‘interpretation’ – that our experience of the poet’s intention
is more or less heavily mediated. But for a poet considering a literary form
indigenous to another language, the issue is far more important than anything as
trivial as ‘meaning’.
Register, syntax, image order, lineation,
meter, alliteration, onomatopoeia – all of these are, to a large degree,
elective. And the person who elects is not the poet, nor the reader, but the
translator.
So if one wishes to know what a famous Basho
hokku means, reading it in translation is a good idea. But, if one wishes
to know how haiku are written in Japanese – with a view to
understanding how they might be written in English for example - simply reading
translations can be very misleading indeed; one too easily learns more about the
translator than the poet. Never mind who's paying - it's the piper who decides
how to play the tune.
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