What Gets Lost in Translation

Paul Celan passport photo 1938

There are literary prizes awarded every year for original works written in English, which is a language that is now the native speech on three continents, and is a "second language" in isolated places on two others. The richness of English literature is much greater than that in any other language. But there are many texts in languages other than English that are required reading for anyone who wishes to call themselves well read. Fortunately, there are translations, some of them famous in themselves. The Robert Fagles translations of Homer and Vergil are among the finest available. No one who reads Russian literature can have avoided reading Constance Garnett's translations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. Every generation, it seems, there is a new translation of Dante. (I'm looking forward to reading Clive James's highly praised verse translation.) Richard Wilbur, who is a fine poet in his own right, has translated Moliere brilliantly. And the lately departed Richard Howard, also a poet, has left us a celebrated translation of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. 

But poetry is somewhat inimical to translation. Goethe grew so bored reading his Faust in German that he turned in his old age to Gérard de Nerval's French translation. But Faust is verse, not poetry. There are too many great poets in Italian, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and modern Greek to enumerate, but the prospect of reading them in translation doesn't inspire in me much enthusiasm or confidence. I can't escape the thought that one can only get a general idea of a poet's greatness from reading his or her poetry in translation. 

One can derive a strong impression from reading Paul Celan's magnificent poem "Totesfuge," in English as "Death Fugue," but even the translated title diminishes its impact. 

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends 

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts 

wir trinken und trinken 

In English translation the words function to suggest some of the powerful darkness that Celan was communicating: 

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings 

we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night 

we drink and we drink 

   (Pierre Joris) 

But the impact of the poem in German is lost. Celan's parents were German-speaking Jews from Czernowicz in what is now Romania. He spoke Romanian, Russian and lived in Paris after the war, but he chose to write poetry, much of which touches on the Holocaust, in the language of the people who murdered his parents. That fact alone gives his poetry in German an almost insurmountable strangeness - a language made so ugly in the hate-filled speeches of Hitler and Goebbels is used to memorialize the horror they inspired. 

But the very literary device of a poem, the most concentrated form of communication, the direct contact of one consciousness with another, using words for their music and meaning, resists the efforts of the translator. Philip Larkin explained how a poem works: 

It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.

   "The Pleasure Principle," 1957. 

The direct contact between the poet and the reader is interfered with by a translator. No matter how successfully he matches his words with the poet's, the translator interposes himself and his approximated reproduction of the original poem between the poet and the reader. One of the reasons is the shared language of the poet and the reader - a shared history of words. Virginia Woolf pointed out that even someone fluent in a foreign language cannot hope to match the native speaker's relationship with it: 

But to know a language one must have forgotten it, and that is a stage that one cannot reach without having absorbed words unconsciously as a child. In reading a language that is not one's own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces. Thus a foreigner with what is called a perfect command of English may write grammatical English and musical English, but never such unconscious English that we feel the past of the word in it, its associations, its attachments. 

   Virginia Woolf, "On Not Knowing French" 

W. H. Auden once complained to Joseph Brodsky: “I don’t see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet. The translations that I’ve seen don’t convince me at all.”* Brodsky commiserated with Auden, and wrote an essay about the mediocre translations of Mandelstam's poetry, that quite terribly misrepresent him. But Auden has a reason to complain. I wonder if some Russian readers are as dubious of Auden's greatness because of poor or inaccurate translations from English into Russian. 

I don't consider it far-fetched to compare the difficulties of poetry translation to the extreme dearth of effective literary adaptations to film. Very few successful movies have been adapted from good novels. When I think of an exception, like Carol Reed's An Outcast of the Islands, I have to remind myself that it was adapted from what was Joseph Conrad's second novel, and is far from one of his best efforts. In the process of transposing a written work to a movie, the characters and the story have to be reborn into a different medium - a medium of pictures and movement. The critic John Simon came up with a rule about adapting literary works to film: If it's worth doing it can't be done, and if it can be done, it wasn't worth doing. 

*Joseph Brodsky, “The Child of Civilization,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 142.