Yves Bonnefoy Translating Poetry Translated by John Alexander and Clive Wilmer - Классики о переводе - Каталог статей

Yves Bonnefoy Translating Poetry Translated by John Alexander and Clive Wilmer You can translate by simply declaring one poem the translation of another. For example, Wladimir Weidlé' once jokingly said to me that Baudelaire's poem, "Je n'ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville ..." renders the sound of Pushkin: it has his clarity, it is the "best" translation of him. But is it possible to reduce a poem to its clarity? The answer to the question, "Can one translate a poem?" is of course no. The translator meets too many contradictions that he cannot eliminate; he must make too many sacrifices. For example (drawing on my own experience), Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium": straightaway, the title presents a problem. "L'Em-barquement pour Byzance"? Inconceivable. Watteau would get in the way. What's more, "sailing" has the energy of a verb. Baudelaire's "A Honfleur! Le plus tot possible avant de tomber plus bas" comes to mind, but "A Byzance" would be ridiculous: the myth rules out such brevities. . . . Finally, "to sail" makes one think not only of departure but also of the sea to be crossed—difficult, troubled like passion—and the distant port: commerce, labor, works, the conquest of nature, spirit. None of the things appareiller might convey, and faire voile isn't strong enough over these distances. I resigned myself to "Byzance—l'autre rive." A certain tension is perhaps salvaged but not the energy, the (at least unconscious) wrenching away that the verb expresses. As so often when we pass from the language of Shakespeare to French, still subject as it is to the harsh restrictions Malherbe imposed on it, lived experience is transformed into the timeless and the irrational into the intelligible. Another solution might be to gloss the title with Baudelaire's phrase. Then it would be necessary to experiment with open-ended translation (traductims developpées): one would allow into play all the associations of ideas called up by the work, laid out on the page like Mallarme's "Coup de dés." But Yeats is speaking of the moment—unique, urgent—and one must be faithful to that too. In the same poem, another sacrifice that can't be avoided: "fish, flesh, and fowl." Yeats crams the variousness of life into three words—its energy, its seeming finality—and does so above all by means of alliteration. Already quite a problem!—but worse is to come. The expression is ready-made, which is why we can dream— and taking it up into the poem suggests this—that everyday language preserves a little of the primordial language, fundamental and transparent, whose return or advent so many poets have longed for. "Sailing to Byzantium" is therefore concerned with the folk wisdom of the race and the here and now, at the very moment when it is a matter of tearing away from these things toward pure spirit. This is a paradox, which in Yeats is profound and ever present, but one that is necessarily lost in French where a comparable concision is not possible: the "felicities" of languages do not coincide. I translated it "tout ce qui nage, vole, s'elance," which retains that vitality in the sense but not in the substance of the words. What is more, the verb form in this instance is weaker than the nouns—"fish,flesh, and fowl"—which seem to repeat the first divine bestowal of names. Where a text has its felicities (accidental or not), its cruxes, its density—its unconscious—the translation must stick to the surface, even if its own cruxes crop up elsewhere. You can't translate a poem. But that's all to the good, since a poem is less than poetry, and to the extent that one is denied something of the former the effect can be stimulating to the latter. A poem, a certain number of words in a certain order on the page, is a form, where all relation to what is other and finite—to what is true—has been suspended. And the author may take pleasure in this: it's satisfying; one likes to bring things into being, things that endure, but one readily regrets having set oneself at odds with the place and time of true reciprocity. The poem is a means, a spiritual statement, which is not, however, an end. Publication puts it to the test: it is a time for reflection which one allows oneself, but this is not to settle for it, to make ii hard and fast. And, of course, the best reader is similarly the one who cares for the poem: not as one cares for a being but in response to the irreducible content it addresses, to the meaning it bears. Let's neither make an idol of the written page, nor, still less, regard it with that iconoclastic distaste that is inverted idolatry. At its most intense, reading is empathy, shared existence. And, in a sense, how disturbing that is! All that textual richness—ambiguities, wordplay, layers of meaning, etc.—denied the privilege of obliging us to solve their crossword puzzles. In their place, darkness and dull care. I will be reproached for impoverishing the text. What we gain, however, by way of compensation, is the very thing we cannot grasp or hold: that is to say, the poetry of other languages. We should in fact come to see what motivates the poem; to relive the act which both gave rise to it and remains enmeshed in it; and released from that fixed form, which is merely its trace, the first intention and intuition (let us say a yearning, an obsession, something universal) can be tried out anew in the other language. The exercise will now be the more genuine because the same difficulty manifests itself: that is to say, as in the original, the language (langue) of translation paralyzes the actual, tentative utterance (parole). For the difficulty of poetry is that language (langue) is a system, while the specific utterance (parole) is presence. But to understand this is to find oneself back with the author one is translating; it is to see more clearly the duress that bears on him, the maneuvers of thought he deploys against it; and the fidelities that bind him. For words will try to entice us into behaving as they do. Once a good translation has been set in motion, they will rapidly begin to justify the bad poem it turns into, and they will impoverish the experience for the sake of constructing a text. The translator needs to be on his guard and to test the ontological necessity of his new images even more than their term-for-term (and therefore external) resemblance to those of the original poem. This is uphill work, but the translator is rewarded by his author, if it's Yeats, if it's Donne, if it's Shakespeare. And instead of being, as before, up against the body of a text, he finds himself at the source, a beginning rich with possibility, and on this second journey he has the right to be himself. A creative act, in short! Playing tricks with the lacunae of his language, tinkering (bricoler), to use the fashionable word, he now finds himself reexperiencing the restrictions first encountered by his author, insofar as he attends to what the author learned from them: which is to say that you must live before you write. You must realize that the poem is nothing and that translation is possible— which is not to say that it's easy; it is merely poetry re-begun. Isn't this all out of proportion though, laying claim to a power of invention comparable to Yeats's in order to get back in this way to the source of his poem? But to put yourself forward is not to imply that you feel assured of success. The writing of poetry is invariably ambitious, and, even for the real poet, this ambition must proceed in uncertainty. There is no poetry but that which is impossible. And to fail, let us say, over certain specific details at least leaves one room to attend to unity, or transparency—and destiny. Indeed, practically, if the translation is not a crib, or mere technique, but an enquiry and an experiment, it can only inscribe itself—write itself—in the course of a life; it will draw upon that life in all its aspects, all its actions. This does not mean that the translator need be in other respects a "poet." But it definitely implies that if he is himself a writer he will be unable to keep his translating separate from his own work. Some examples of this interdependence—personal ones, since they are nothing to pride oneself on (or to be alarmed at: discrete fragments, with no value except as tokens). Horatio, talking to Hamlet about his companions of the watch after the ghost has appeared. They were "distilled," he says, "almost to jelly with the act of fear. . . ." The meaning is clear. But "the act of fear" introduces an intensity that is tragic, in which context "jelly" (literally gelatine—so English—in French, bouillie) seemed to me problematic. Why? The obscenities at the beginning of Romeo are translatable. But an obscenity is a pointed linguistic device, clear-cut and self-contained, while here "jelly" is everyday speech used without special care and not charged with meaning. Now I think my tendency here is very French: given such contexts, which are after all tragic and exemplary, I want a heightened consciousness and, accordingly, an economy of meaning, and so too a vocabulary if not restrained at least tried and tested. Of course, vulgarity must have its place, but simply as vulgarity—think of Rabelais and Rimbaud—and here I am at one again with Racine or Nerval and what is called elevated, or literary, language, but which is no more than language at its tautest, most highly serious. The English (look at Mercutio) expect less from language. They want direct observa tion and uncomplicated psychology (in short, "jelly" where a sol dier would say it) rather than heroic reconstruction. And I admit they're right. But while I am thus undecided, should I meet the challenge without more ado and speak of la bouil-lie, or even of l'eau de boudin? It would cost me almost nothing to be literal. But if it's true that, even in accepting this, I remain however slightly the disciple of Racine, it's also true that what looks like accuracy will lead to quaintness. This is the vice of Romantic translation—badly hewn from an earlier rhetoric—which always seems to me to evade the problem without resolving it. Even Ducjs1 would be better than that! Better still, listen to Shakespeare until I can anticipate him in all my own writing and not merely mirror him. And meanwhile, with full knowledge of the case (I will add a note), translate "jelly" with my own word, derived from another set of associations: cendre ("ash"). . . . Locally, the translation fails. But the act of translating has begun and will be concluded later elsewhere—that is, still here. And now back to Yeats again, to "The Sorrow of Love," where he says of the girl with "red mournful lips" that she is "doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships." "Labouring": the word conjures up long, difficult sea crossings and the rolling of the ship, but also emotional distress and grief—not to mention "to be in labor," that is, the process of giving birth. Not to mention, either, that the archaic sense of laborer—that is virtually ensemencer ("to sow")—is still current. All these senses have weight here, so what is to be done? But this time I wasn't even able to ask myself the question; irresistibly I translated "labouring" with qui boitent I au loin, thereby immediately rejecting some of the senses in my translation. And I would be equally able to justify or criticize these words: Odysseus did not flee, the children of Priam did—in quest of another Troy—and the death of Priam occurs in the next line. But that's not the point here. For these words did not come to me by the short circuiting that people think of as running from text to translation by way of the translator. They came by a more roundabout route that took in my own past. I've often thought about the limping of a ship. . . . Once even, coming back from Greece in 1961, with my heart full of the memory of the Sphinx of Naxos, whose smile expresses ataraxy, that music, I imagined that the boat—laboring in just this way, by night, off the coast of Italy— was itself fleeing and searching. With Verlaine at the back of my mind, I sketched out a kind of poem, in which the ever-rolling sea also played its part, "comme du fer, dans une caisse close" ("like iron in a closed chest"): a poem I've never since completed—and which, twelve years later, on an impulse, I tore up to give life to my translation. The relationship between what was there feeling its way and my concern with the poetry of Yeats became the most important, the true development. It was the English-speaking poet who explained me to myself, and my own personal experience that imposed the translation upon me. It is in the sympathy of destiny for destiny, in short, and not of an English phrase for a French one, that translations unfold, with lasting consequences one cannot foresee (the boat and its limping appeared in my last book). Following the logic of these remarks, I ought now to ask myself how my translations have fed back into my own poetry; and how the poetry of other languages has contributed to the development of ours. For want of time, I will do no more than raise another preliminary question. Under what circumstances is this type of translation, the translation of poetry, not completely mad? "Translate poets who are close to you," I once suggested. But what poet can be close enough? The irony of Donne, the luminous melancholy of Eliot—or Baudelairean spleen, or Rimbaud's mauvaiseté (and always, too, his hope)—are they not impenetrable worlds? And as for Yeats—the aspiration toward the Idea, toward Byzantium, on the one hand, but on the other "blood and mire," both mud and ecstasy, even the fury of passion, and Adonis as well as Christ—can that be shared? But in poetry, necessity is the mother of invention. What one has not tried is sometimes repressed, and translation, when a great poet speaks to us, can bypass censorship—this is part of the ?fo ,i back which, as I was saying, the translated work may generate An energy is released. So let us follow where it leads. But let us follow only this. If a work does not compel us, it is untranslatable
1 2 3 4 5 Категория: Классики о переводе \| Добавил: Voats (20.09.2011)
Просмотров: 9600 \| Рейтинг: 0.0/0