 Welcome. I bet you thought I was going to talk about the trail, but actually I'm talking about sex. So if you don't want to hear about sex, you can leave. That's a good one. I'm out of here. No, it's not a use of this. It's quite literal. It's a literal translation. Right. I'm going to just start out. I'll go first, and then Cain will go, and then Kate, and then Alexis. And I really don't want to go into the bios because you have it and it's boring. And so I just want to say that I am the series editor of the WordWorks International Imprint. And that last year at Alta, I saw Cain bet him and his book is coming out in a couple of months, two months, in time for AWP. So that's one thing. Otherwise, I was a former cheerleader, and I went through AU's MFA, American University's MFA program, which by the way, I believe was the first, this was in the 80s, that had a translation requirement. Cain is a beekeeper. He makes honey. He plays the ukulele. Something else, something else interesting that I'll think of. Kate lived in Moscow, and she didn't just study there. She is a, oh, classics department head. And Kate is language, Russian language. She lived in Moscow. She worked for a while with CNN, and then she ran a business helping people find their roots in Russia. Is that true? Well, you'll correct. And Alexis has written 9,000 books and has been everywhere in the world. And I found out that he had Sunstroke and Marrakesh. And that's about all, oh, SUNY, I guess I should mention SUNY. Okay, so this subject is about betrayal, but there are many different kinds of betrayal. There's political betrayal. There's relationship betrayal. And there's translation betrayal. And I'm talking in terms of translation, literal versus literary. How many of you know the origin of traditore, traditore? It was the Italians who called the French that when they were translating Dante. And they said that the French's translations were neither accurate nor beautiful. I just thought you'd want to know that. But now I'm going to talk about sex. So I'm sure you know the quote of the bride is beautiful. She is not faithful. If she is faithful, she is not beautiful. Somebody I know said a student is class said that. I don't think so. I think it was Victoria Goh. But even when I went online, I couldn't find the original person who said that. So simply what that means, if the bride is beautiful, preserves the musicality, the tone, the emotional underlay of the poem, most likely she will not be faithful. Here faithful meaning to the literary, I'm sorry, to the literal. And if it's like pretty close to a word-for-word translation, she surely won't be beautiful. In fact, may even dance with two left feet. But I'm not here to talk about the virtues of brides. Because I believe that translation is really a menage à trois. And you also always have to remember that because there's the author, the translator, and the reader. And the reader, you run into difficulties with the reader in case they're differing expectations as the one of the translator. Because the reader may be expecting a literary translation. We are, after all, literary translators. And the translator might be thinking of more of a literal translation. Or the other way around, the perfectly beautiful, non-literal translation. Now, best of conditions, everything being ideal. I think the only thing you're going to end up with is a kind of approximation or an equivalence. I don't like that so much. It smells of math. Or the word I really like best is a recomposition. Because it has that musical tone to it. And I wanted to read to you some of these fabulous quotes I found. Nabokov. You say it. Nabokov. You said this, and I don't know how many of you know this, but it's so fabulous. Because it touches on mimicry and the performance aspect of it. And I really do believe that people who grow up in a bilingual home have a real advantage here. Because they're already, their brain is already processing two languages. And it gives you a different way of thinking. So anyway, what he said was that the perfect translator is one who possesses genius and knowledge and the gift of mimicry. To be able to act, act as it were the real author's part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind with the utmost degree of versimilitude. Umberto Eco. He said, well, the job of translation is really trial and error. And it's like being in a bazaar where the carpet salesman asks for a hundred, and you offer ten, and you negotiate back and forth, and you end up with fifty. In any case, translation is a negotiation. And I did want to talk about the unintended consequences of a literal translation. And so I'm going to talk about English as she is spoke. Does anyone know that? English as she is spoke is a 19th century Portuguese book that was meant as a guide for tourists or travelers. And what they did was, what the author did, was translate word for word using a dictionary. And so you had this strictly literal translation, and then what the English is. And as I said, I have copies of this after that you can have, and it's worth it for these jokes. Unintended. So I guess I have time for maybe one or two. So I would like, you're doing the Portuguese. Is that all right? So here, this is the Portuguese. This one. Let's start and see how we're doing time wise. Tenho vontade de vomitar. I have mine to vomit. I feel sick. Alright, maybe one more. This is interesting. Quen cala consente. They'd be thrown in jail in America for that. That not say a word consent, which translates as silence gives consent. And just one because it's funny. Well, they're all funny to me. This one. Okay. Este lago parece bien piscozo. Vamos pescar para nos divertirmos. Pond, it seems. Me many multiplied fishies. Let us amuse rather to the fishing. This lake looks full of fish. Let's have some fun fishing. Okay, and now I want to talk a little about the Hebrew language. Every language has its peculiarities, but this one kind of, in my mind, is among the few that just is over the top in terms of peculiar. First of all, it was only a spoken language. It's only been a spoken, vibrant language of the street and the kitchen for 150 years. Now it was spoken before, but was really a language of diaspora Jews who knew Hebrew in terms of reading the Old Testament. But in other words, all the words, telephone, car, all those, they weren't in the Bible. And so this all had to be kind of invented about 150 years ago. So to get all the Hebrew words are based on root words, which are three letter words. So the one I use as an example here is book, which is Sefer, which is Samech Fe Reish, SFR. Okay, and from Sefer book we get Svarim Books, Sifria Library, B. Sefer School, Sofer Author. This is interesting to me. It's Lisbal, which means to count, but it's the same root. And I'm not quite sure how that happened except that maybe counting was maybe with an abacus or something. And so it involved, I don't know, but this is interesting. So from Lisbal, SPR, Pay-and-Fay are sort of the same. You get Mispar Number, Misbara Barbershop, and Sapa Barber. Today's Hebrew is a very rich, vital language, and it has a lot of slang, Arab words, and Americanized words. Yalla, everyone says Yalla, which is like bye, let's go. And weekend and okay, I guess that's pretty universal. Okay, and so I guess I should have handed this out before. This is what Hebrew looks like. And it goes from right to left, and it has little dots, which are called Nikud, which are vowels. So in kindergarten, first grade, the kids learn how to read with these vowels. Once they're in the fourth grade, no more vowels. And it's kind of like, I don't know how many of you got those matchbooks when you were younger, is that if you can read this, you can do speed writing. So it's just the consonants, and you fill in from context. So this is the Hebrew, please forgive. I work with a native speaker, which goes, do you not? It's called dunes. Do you not? This is the literal. Dunes, the sand, my skin, yearn for a blessed reigns of your hand touch. Don't spend your time on nothing. The time consuming won't spare even the single oases left for the rescue of the shelter of caravans. I haven't decided on the final translation. And there's some things that are in the original that just can't translate into English because they're clumsy. And so as I said, this is my basic judgment. If it's clumsy or if it's a poem in English, the author should sound as though they're writing in English. So the translation, which could change tomorrow, in fact, it changed a little on the plane. The sand dunes of my skin crave your touch. It's promise of rain. Hurry. Time won't spare the only oases left, the last to give refuge to this dusty caravan. I'll do it again. So I should say that the author is Moshe Dore. He was born in 1932 in Tel Aviv when, so he's a sovereign, everything was sand dunes. So sand dunes, I mean his house was built on a sand dunes, changed today. And the other thing is, is that they learned Arabic in school and they really learned Bible. Not as a religious thing, but as a literary and archeological thing. So you don't have this in front of you. So you can't really see that in the original it has blessed rains of your R-A-I-N-S, of your hand touch. So the first problem was blessed rains, which can sound, I don't know, it sounded a little sentimental to me. Although the word blessing is really important. So I did change that to the promise. And you know that occurred to me out of the blue and I thought, what a genius you are. I have no idea where it came from. But it's just, I was thinking your touch rain, how do I get that? And my first thought was to do the sand skins of my skin thirst for your touch. And I thought, oh, clever Barbara. But I got rid of it because it sounds too clever. I don't know how many of you agree with that. The sand dunes of my skin thirst for your touch. So, and then the other thing was, and this I'm still playing with. The soul oasis left, the only oasis left, the one oasis left. It's soul on the paper, but I think I'm going to go the only oasis left. And then I did change the ending again. The last refuge to this dusty caravan. You won't find dusty in the original. But I thought to convey kind of the age, the sense of age and you know the broken down body. I put in dusty caravan. And otherwise, they're just the obsessions about crave, yearn, long desire, which I'm sure we all do. So that's my presentation. So what was the betrayal, Dustin? The betrayal was putting in the promise, which sort of works meaning wise. And the dusty caravan took the place of rescue shelter caravan. I mean, it was a clumsy word in English. And I, of course, I went back and forth between rescue, refuge, shelter, all those words. And as I said, my decisions are based on sound. I want to make a comment on your translation and no one will agree with me. It's terrible. It's about the word skin. I encounter the word skin all the time as a Portuguese translator. And I usually end up with flesh. But this may be my own peculiarity. It's because the K in the word skin really bothers me. And it feels too prickly and it feels too superficial. And flesh, which rhymes almost with all these wonderful words like breath, fresh, freshness. Flesh to me is the skin deepened. And so you have a whole different feel. Here's my... Can I just say that the skin is the largest organ in your body. And that there is an active quality to the word skin. And flesh feels very passive to me. It does? It's more like the meat. Well, and that was not... And that's not where the poem is going. That's right. Because sand dunes are surface. Where's organ is an active thing? There's something active in the word. Well, I said everyone with disability. I forgive my word skin because that's where I found crave. Skin crave, which dismissed your desire long and all that. It's hard to think of sand dunes as flesh. All right. Well, but excuse me, it was the sand dunes of my flesh crave your touch. When you think about water coming to a region that is arid or semi-arid, the water of course doesn't just sit on the surface. It penetrates and gets down and then roots and things grow up. So the flesh is what is right beneath the skin. The flesh is already juicy when a skin can get dry. There you go. That's what I was thinking of. That's exactly... You're right. Flesh does already sound juicy. All right. Next. Next. I'm going to really try to keep it on time. Did I go over? Is Cain... Did I? Did I? No. No, because he came late. So as I said, Cain is head... Well, I didn't... He's head of the Classics Department at Davidson College in North Carolina. And he's my discovery. And Davidson has been very, very good to him in terms of giving him all sorts of honors and the whole year next year off with no teaching. Spatica. So go. Hello. I'd like to share my time with you today by... I guess, offering an unfair accusation and an insincere confession. We'll start with the unfair accusation. The accusation that will be along these lines that I basically want to accuse the Western tradition of its betrayal of Classics and Antiquity and a number of grounds. It's stemming in part from... I'm coming, obviously, from antiquity here. The rest of the dust off. This is coming in part because of a myth of influence that the Classics has somehow influenced the Western tradition and permeates it throughout. In fact, a better way to think about that is in terms of willful appropriation according to the needs period by period throughout European history. There's one appropriates. Of course, there's influence that occurs to some extent, but there's a lot of willful, careful appropriation of precisely those elements. Their culture for political reasons wants to use to its effects, be it, well, I won't give examples. They're positive ones perhaps and atrocious ones as well. But I'm more interested not in that relationship with the past, but in some of the effects that have occurred to Classics because of this. It has a discipline as a corpus of literature as well. One is that highly oral culture has been made into a highly literary one by posterity and appreciated on those terms by and large. So, for example, Oral Homer's epics, The Illy and the Odyssey, and even literature through the 5th century BC is really fundamentally oral. It begins to be written down as early as the end of the 8th century, but there are no spaces between words and the punctuation. It's not appreciated unless it's read aloud often by a slave, perhaps among friends, to one another playing back on this old tape recording, you know, big, large reels. And it's only accessible through the magic of reading it aloud, having it come out of your mouth, enter your ear again, where it takes on new meaning. It's really something, something far more static than anything we've received today. And yet we receive it on our own terms today. It has literature that's been translated into English, but it's also on the page with words separated, and we digest it silently. We can sit there and read. Ancient works without moving our lips. That was seen as miraculous when St. Augustine, I saw St. Ambrose reading with his lips. 5th century CE, right? We're talking a millennium later. We tend also, as a result of this, if we're appropriating classics to our own uses from age to age, we're putting classics inherently on a pedestal to justify the good things we do because we can draw from the classics in this way. Classics become something that's received cerebrally, more with the mind. It's something for study of students. And we alike will approach classics highly analytically, cerebrally, theoretically, and on those terms as well. Classics, I guess, part of that we make classics foundational or at least offer that claim, again, which gets back to the notion of influence. But we may found certain ideas upon classics. When we have ideas of our own, we may look back to the edifice, for example. It's a complex edifice and it's starting to offer one example there. And this may be why we like our white statues and our white temples. We think of, as some of us in this room know, some of us in this room truly don't, that the ancient temples weren't white at all, but painted in bright reds and greens, blues. It would be thought of as quite gaudy by modern American terms, I think. And I think people, when they learn about this, there's a certain maybe delight to find to see color in life existed antiquity. But also I've sensed in people who learn about a certain degree of resentment. Because it's almost as if these structures, this architecture and the statuary are held up as ideals. I don't know whether they're meant to be blank canvases, in which we can build our own concepts or not. But that seems to be part of what's gone on here. And I want to suggest to you that we might think of this as, I guess I should talk about translation and translationese as well. Coming perhaps, I can't say, obviously not originally, but for generations there's been a sort of a vocabulary and a syntax that's been developed over time and handed down that's useful for conveying the old age of the noble of the hallow. And that's a very dangerous thing. There are also, I heard at one panel here at this conference, people talking about the lobe trots. The lobes trot less closely now than they used to. But there's still a very real thing. And there's a kind of more academic, distilled approach to the classics. Sort of getting it right, letter, word by word. And both of those are problematic. I want to suggest in essence that our relationship with classics as a whole has been one of domestication. Not in the, and I'm kind of playing with the foreignization domestication concept to suggest using domestication in a sense not in making native necessarily, but in utterly taming it. Subjugating it to our own ends throughout the Western tradition. And so when I'm frustrated by this as a teacher of classics in ancient literature and so we can come to my confession, to my disingenuous confession that something I'm interested in doing is making classics more viscerally accessible to people. And with one example, and this is the example that Barbara's been referring to, is to try to make suffocally the work that was performed. Many of us don't realize that these Greek tragedies that are put on once only before 17,000 people that were meant to be received in performance, they did begin to have other texts preserved after a while. We have very few actually relatively few compared to how many went on. We're lucky to have those. But we again appreciate those as literature not as the singular performance that they were meant to be in honor of a god in a theater which is a temple today in Dionysus. So really religious mass cultive event that could have held depending on the time period and how badly the war was going between half or all of the citizenry of the United States. So to make to get this across viscerally and even spiritually to some extent I began looking for a parallel sort of American myth that might serve this purpose. It's not easy to find American myths in which someone can suspend their disbelief and I hit upon the Wild West as a concept. And I resist and I even prefer to call it Amethic Wild West. We don't localize it too much in the first spot. Exploring this with students first and then then on my own I began to discover certain useful aspects to this. One is the vernacular that one must employ and translating something for this sort of setting or this part of the imagination. The vernacular is at once it hits you in the gut on the one hand at the other hand vernacular can be highly elevated as well and achieve this sort of nobility when I think of westerns that they've seen or even setting something like that's like McCarthy's No Country for Old Men there's a western sensibility there it comes across in films well I'm probably part of that genre. And this is parallel in some ways to a reality it's got a sort of academic point I suppose is the reality of Greek poetry which has a parallel poetic language in the Greek language a parallel poetic language and a prosaic one. And they tell you which words you can see which author used a particular word and you find out this is from the vocabulary of poetry versus the vocabulary of prose and you can mix them from time to time it's a jarring thing there's actually a poetic language to English that I could work at to confer some nobility on the work in translation there's also the matter of I guess I could come with my confession there's some small areas that also sort of run through little bits, points of betrayal that I can describe that might be conceived of as betrayal one is my dealing with names in the translation of Greek names in translations of the Ancients but many of those names not all of them most of them seem to be obscured from the Near Eastern languages but most of them actually have meaning in Greek but we don't call Achilles the grief to Troy man which is what his name means and there were puns throughout Greek literature on this sense of his name and it would have been how it was received we don't call Helen the destroyer though Escalus puns on this meaning of her name but in this case we have Diana whose main character she ends up unwittingly killing her husband and her name in fact her name in fact means husband killer or husband destroyer so she goes in this translation as Diana Killman Diana capturing the sound Killman capturing that there's the island of Evia if you're from Greece Evia if you anglicize it Elboya in ancient Greek but it means good for oxen so bull better territory is what it becomes in sort of a western context crossing over also moving from the nautical island country to one that has territories from this particular instance another small betrayal there's also Inus wine man becomes Vettner instead of Inus for example and then there are a couple of other things that have to do with objects a translation of a bow and arrow into a gun and bullets this take their toll on me I'm a traditionalist classist so I feel the burn of all these decisions when I'm laying this out for you I'm pretty much laying out all the changes that I've made to the attacks which is otherwise really adhering closely to the ancient Greek throughout a boat to go from one island to the next becomes a wagon that brings the soon to be a corpse of the son of God into town and the son of God is the son of Zeus actually and it's the one all the other deities still exist but Zeus inevitably becomes God in this context which I have come to love because it creates it invites a reader in this game but at moments throughout the text it's punctuated with a kind of jarring realization that no if we were reading an ancient text that's coming out of antiquity so there's mention of Apollo, Artemis other deities who aren't translated that aren't major players in the play itself but more often a frequent reference to God which has more I'm not going to make point as well I hope you'll read from your translation you can do it by memory I'm going to do a piece from it at the Declamation tonight there's a God in Greek in Christian tradition is it means God it's not a proper name at all and in fact Zeus was called throughout antiquity as well he's more often referred to as than Zeus for example so there's an academic point that works operates there as well and so I just the concluding thought is while I think these sorts of elements traditionally might be argued as a domesticating act on my part of adapting or conforming the text for a setting in America and catering to American sensibilities but on the other hand I really believe that this act of domestication came the text in the way that the western tradition has but rather brings out a kind of wildness inherent in the text itself a foreignness fits there in fact that's all I have to say actually I just wanted to say that the play that Cain translated it was Sophocles Women of Trachas which I think he was a little put out at first but not now I hope is retitled I retitled it murder a jagged rock okay okay so like Barbara I am also a poet and I generally when I come to these gatherings I want to say very clearly that I come with my poet hat on although I also do have a translator hat and today I'm going to talk about translation from my specific language which is Russian to English I'm going to talk about translation of poetry in general into English and specifically American as opposed to British English and I'm also going to talk about portrayal in translation of poetry I seek to avoid committing it before I was a poet or translator I was a language major and as many of you know who started as a language as language majors that notion of what a translation was and how it worked was a very literal word to word and you wanted to stick very very closely to whatever score meaning something had and so consequently from that perspective almost everything about literary translation feels to me like some kind of betrayal and sort of one of my own burdens has been carrying that notion of such strong fidelity to a source text that has been a problem for me as a translator Russians as a language differs significantly from English it's an inflected language it uses cases to indicate grammatical function you know in English changes in meaning we can do that by adding words to a sentence or moving words around in a sentence but in Russian very often changes of meaning come they are reflected in the words themselves changes to the body of the word through inflections or by adding suffixes or prefixes so it's structurally a very different language and the fact that Russian is plastic in that way means obviously that syntax is much more flexible than English syntax and there are obvious implications for a translator in dealing with that because there are things that sound absolutely absurd to us in terms of phrases turned around or not spoken not in a commonplace type of speech that sound perfectly normal in Russian and Russian syntax the other thing about Russian poetry is even though in the last 25 years or so that there has been a strong push towards free verse in general it retains a strong formal bent even in contemporary poetry even in the spoken word scene and it relies heavily on the music of the language for its power and so let me just say in opposition to that American poetry on the other hand I personally am more of a formal poet than not but the overwhelming trend in American poetry in the last 50-60 years has been towards free verse which is a strong emphasis on how the words look on the page and where the lines break of course there is still some element of music to it but in general they are very strongly contrasting notions of what poetry and what music are and we have a problem of how to translate a largely formal and musical poetic tradition into a largely informal one without it sounding like something you would get on a greeting card and I think even more troublesome for me than questions of syntax or formalism are problems of poetic sensibility and tone because American poetry in the last 60 years has really been by turns hip, angry, ironic, post-modern and Donald Hull very famously talked about the main action in American poetry taking place along the periphery of vision so it's really a poetry of the outsider and also a poetry honestly that's not mainstream I write to say that but we're a marginal crew we poets and Russian poetry also has a strong outsider tradition but it's more in the case of in the scope of a shaman or witness poetry and much more integrated with the overall notion of society than say the American poet the lone cowboy so quite a metaphor and of course the even more important I think is the essential difference in the role of the poem in the two cultures that I alluded to earlier one obvious example even in the great 20th century Russian poems Akhmatova poets Akhmatova and Mandelstam Svitayam they all wrote odes or cycles of poems to the motherland to Russia as a concept this sort of great patriotic outpouring even as the country was literally being destroyed beneath them and they themselves their families were being persecuted but all we in America can think of we don't have any concept of the poetic ode to America or patriotic poetry anymore and I point you to inauguration day every four years when the poetic community puts our we put on our our collective hats and kind of shake our heads at the official inaugural poet because the inauguration poem is so odd it's not something that works generally in the American cultural context so these questions of cultural sensibility and tone are really the most difficult practical problem for me as a translator because you can't just slap on a bunch of footnotes when you're translating a poem so now that I have convinced you that it is absolute folly to try translating poetry from Russian into English I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I try to do it anyway and I want to say first of all with all due respect to Robert Frost something is certainly lost in translation but I don't personally think it's poetry and that begs the question what is poetry and in the current issue of poetry magazine James Langenbach by the way this is the translation issue of poetry magazine James Langenbach who is a critic and poet himself posits that there's an essay at the end of it he posits that language is an artistic medium that it functions like an artist's canvas and he says that any work of art and he's speaking specifically about poetry but it doesn't have to be poetry is quote a transaction between the mind and the world that is played out in the material reality of the medium so again looking at language as not an end but a medium like a blank canvas and this is similar to what some other poetic theorists have said including Robert Von Holberg who argues that poetry has really only two indispensable attributes first and foremost is its universality that is it's accessible to everything and the second is musicality so of all these ideas about what a poem is how it works the only one that's really based or grounded in language at all is this notion of music so that of course is something that we work on as translators and this is what Mr. Langenbach has to say about translation and poetry that's again coming from the perspective of a practicing poet and critic but not a translator himself we can't expect one language to replicate the effects to which another is particularly amenable but the act of translation does when the host language is engaged as a medium create a new poem a poem that asks us to attend to the sound of the words just as we attended to the words of the original so I think for the practicing poets among us this is a sort of accepted notion of what we're doing as translators as an art form but that may be a perspective that is not shared by everybody who's translating Edith Grossman has a really good metaphor in her little book on translation for what translators do and she talks about it being like akin to what happens when you go to the symphony when you go to the symphony you don't go to hear a mechanistic reproduction of the notes that Beethoven wrote down hundreds of years ago you don't go to hear the artistry of the interpretation of the conductor and the musicians in that space and time in that building and she's arguing that translation should be perceived that way not as some kind of mechanical reproduction but as a living art form and an interpretation interpretation speaking in a group of translators there's a different sense of what an interpretation should be but in this case we're talking about sort of artistic interpretation so what can you do as a translator aside from True Rhyme which I don't feel like I can use in an English context I know Alex is going to disagree we disagree about this over breakfast we disagree about this but there are of course plenty of musical devices that we can use in English just like we use them in Russian Asinets, alliteration, consonants Slant Rhyme so we can still use them also because English syntax is so inflexible we can't do so much with word order but what I tend to do is I will switch around words, phrases, clauses trying not to do too much harm to the original meaning but I feel free to play with that because English syntax just doesn't give me much other room to play compared to Russian syntax that I'm coming from The real trouble for me as a translator is in the real possibility of portrayal as I talked about earlier lies in tone and sensibility and finding equivalencies with English American teachers of poetry like to talk about two registers in English, the Latinate register of words that are high and formal and used for official types of descriptions of things or magical speech and then the Germanic register of words that tend to do things like bodily functions and earthy matters, animal husbandry or to use the Germanic word shit so we have those two very strange things for similar indicators to what the original author has given you in terms of syntax for example vocabulary or bird choice there are other criteria I won't worry you with them but I'm happy to talk to you about them as a translator as I said I came to translation as a language major I was very literal and what I was producing came out in ways that they weren't really alive to me in English writing and they actually looking at poem as a functioning living interpretive object as opposed to one of my correspondence with text was very freeing for me and I found I had originally gone to translation they were looking for some kind of checks and balance system to make sure am I doing this right? have I gone too far one direction or am I not? what I thought was I hadn't gone far enough in doing my translation work I really don't want to downplay how hard it was to translate I've got a Russian poetry who is a constant Russian Dadaist and I am not I have so far been completely unsuccessful in getting back into English but I do think we get way too caught up in the words themselves and I think by doing that speaking as a poet here it's a really fundamental betrayal of the spirit of the word of art if we cannot translate art if we cannot translate art I understand everything I'm about to say I really want to say that Christ or at least St. Paul had Christ say for us the word killer the spirit gave it life which is exactly what she just said so we should have asked ourselves what is it that we were betraying I hope what we betray is merely a dictionary not the spirit of the poem of Transylvania and now about formal verses I did want to talk about formal verses I have to admit that I agree with that Slant Rhyme is terribly useful in English English is very very deep and it's very rich in Slant Rhymes and I have an even greater ambition to make this is the one that is Stephen Kessler who I disagree with entirely on the issue of Rhyme but I don't want to back down a little bit Formally, theoretically, I always insist that if you're going to translate a Rhyme sonnet you better rhyme it that's what I insist on well, I handed in a bunch of Rhyme sonnets to Metamorphosis many years ago with an essay and in the essay I said well I believe in full Rhyme if the original had a full Rhyme the translation has to and I was just sending it off when I reread my poems and I discovered that by far the best translation of a sonnet that I was sending to Metamorphosis didn't have a single score what it had was an intricate weave of Slant Rhymes, eternal Slant Rhymes assonances, consonances it had everything except full Rhyme and it was so successful I had fooled myself and I thought that it was fully Rhyme so I had to rewrite my essay so there I have to admit Steven that I'm not I'd like to be completely right but I'm not, so I back down myself so I think the real question of the trail is what are you going to betray and certainly the denotator value of words is a much more sensible choice in poetry because in poetry what we're really after is feeling we're not after content we're after content we read a newspaper article we're after feeling and feeling is produced in many ways but it isn't produced by a dictionary word for word translation now one of the ways feeling is produced is by sound I mean I just was in a session a couple of hours ago where a woman I don't know read a poem in Persian I don't know a single word in Persian and I was just blown away read a poem in Persian how could I be blown away when I don't know a word of the language so it has to be the music and I said to the people in the room I was the only person in the room who didn't know Arabic or Persian I didn't know anything I said I'm the luckiest person in the room I'm at the concert I'm getting to hear the pure music of life of course of course in the end but music is really important to be in poetry and so I will do some betrayals of the dictionary meaning of what's going on in order to create music now I'll just give you a couple of examples none of us we're all practicing translators but we have given you very few hands-on examples of the kind of thing that comes up and I'm going to return to something we've already discussed skin and flesh and all that just like coincidences this is a poem about a mirror and the guide is a poem of Ryan Puppet whatever happens to the mirror it's cold it is the opposite of real life I think he's attacking narcissism during bear and so the poem ends talking about your relationship with what you see in the mirror is and it ends this way what you got in the in the mirror is a cold that is married or is coupled like animals coming together a cold that is that couples without seal seal is the word for heat as in rot or the cat in the back out in the heat seal a coupling a couple of a couple of a coupling without rot or without heat uma rima para silencio simply means a rhyme for silence because there is no other actually in the I mean it's a cold replica not another this is how I translate it it's quite that version so it is a betrayal of the word for word an icy coupling devoid of heat mating without meat which can offend some of you but it's completely a rhyme and it is exactly the idea you're talking about that there is no flesh there is no humanity you can look what you see in the mirror but it's completely dead so there's one example of a violation here's one that's what's the word syntactical you raise the issue of syntax here's a poem about slavery about the my poet I don't own him but I travel here and he's a great friend he is of course descended on half of his in half of his blood from slaves and so he was talking about the past in this poem and the poem ends with the image of the antilles as all of you know in most languages except for English actually in almost all languages there is a gender for everything and in Portuguese the antilles happen to be feminine so the poem ends this way I mean I mean I mean I want to talk about the Laceradas so antillas Laceradas has to mean in Portuguese licked or lacerated antilles there's some metaphor for because the blacks who came there were slight but by changing no English word word I got to have my cake and eat it too as he said listen to this to me with whom they sail to these ancestors to me with whom they sail their way to the sea and the antilles lacerated and now you see that it isn't just the antilles metaphorically lacerated it's the people who sail there as prisoners because in English after the comma the lacerated can easily refer to the dominating subject of the clause to me with whom they sail their way to the sea and the antilles lacerated they were lacerated so I've got in English with whom it's being lacerated and with people who went through which is real truth in a way it's even more important the poignant than the original just by changing word order because in English you'd normally say the lacerated antilles because we put the adjective before now about sound I have another example about sound okay here's a poem about looking at the viscuses it's a poem called Ecstasy I am now going to give an example of a change I should have made and I didn't I only made it after the book came out and we were giving readings all over America and we gave a reading at the new school and someone came up afterwards and said or actually I listened to my poet and I suddenly realized as he was reading it aloud that I had completely fucked up the ending I'll explain what happens it's a poem about the movement of the viscuses in the wind that's all that's, that's ecstasy ecstasy dance on the viscuses of photography dance on this movement absorbed in your work calligraphy dance on the viscuses of blood dance on the islands of the city dance on the climate dance on the river dance on the oil of photography dance on the day dance on the exotic ecstasiados noestático dancing dancing dance dance means they surrender as in sex or something you give yourself up and I translated the last slide they surrender that's how it is in the book but every book I've sold I cross it out I corrected my hands here's the poem they dance in the photograph they dance motionless absorbed in their crimson calligraphy the viscuses of blood they dance in the eyes of the city they dance these climbs they dance these rhymes they dance in the eye of the photograph they dance live lithograph of day they dance exotic they dance exact ecstasy statically they dance they give themselves to dance that's how I now have and originally it was a surrender and the sound the sound that they surrender ruined the whole phone because in Portuguese they dance and they surrender it's almost the same word and I haven't noticed it till listening to him as we were doing our tour and so then I didn't have to I corrected every copy of the book so there what I'm saying then is that the primacy of sound in this book is so evident if you don't get the dancing quality you lose what the poem is trying to convey the ecstasy of dance and so I made a slight change in the end which is simply they give themselves to dance and all the original said was they surrender do we have time for questions it says at 3.15 is that right? yeah it was just a couple of times I'm happy to start well you were all unhappy to stop I said I'm not I said I'm happy to stop that's what makes you unusual this is really fascinating what question I have is do people have experience in the course of trying to get something more equivalent or accurate with actually adding because I think one of the things we always feel you always have to leave things out in order to try to get a good translation but and even in the last example in a way you're not really adding anything you're bringing out something where you actually felt that you had to put additional stuff in there in the service of that seems to me a slightly different trail than knowing that it was an example informal poetry formal poetry like a sonic one of the problems is that languages don't take as long English being Anglo-Saxon, Germanic whatever you want to call it we're much more not a slap than the romance languages so that a Spanish or a Portuguese poem takes twice as long to say anything because of all the syllables and so you've got a lot of room to put in anything you like you have a lot of room in terms of I am with the talents and so I can give one example this is a closing of two lines and in the original it's about seeing a man who's a bum in the street really walking amongst the alleys and he flows around the alleys feito un bicho un vendido un can de rua a farejar na lana flor de lua okay, rua lua an urban stray in search of any gloom sniffing in mud the flower of the moon now I already part of me besides with Steven Kessler this in search of any gloom is my composition on the poem it's a bum who's looking for anything he can find but the original he's looking in the mud he's scavenging but the original doesn't talk about in search of any gloom it simply says this guy is floating around like an urbanized peaceful creature a street dog sniffing around in the mud at the flower of the moon probably perhaps it parks if the mud has a little bit of water it may be a reflection of the moon so I kept sniffing in mud the flower of the moon but I stuck in in search of any gloom and if that may be a little archaic it may be a little over the top I want to say that from the Hebrew there are so many biblical illusions that American audiences wouldn't know what it meant and so I added in there's a poem about Moses and I don't you may remember that Moses stuttered so that when God sat to him you're the guy who's going to lead them out and he says why me you know I am slow speech and think of tongue why not my brother Aaron and there's a story connected to why Moses stuttered and that is that a Pharaoh was told when he was taken and raised in the Pharaoh's house that a child the child would betray him and free the slaves or whatever and so the Pharaoh said well because he loved Moses he says well let's test him we'll put before him a bowl of coals burning coals and we'll see what he reaches for he reaches for the gold we get rid of him so here it comes and the baby he was very attracted to the gold the glitter and he reached out his hand for it but an angel came and smacked his hand away so that he touched the burning coals and he put his hand in his mouth hence the stutter now in reality that's a great story because in the Talmudic it's kind of counter but it's very important for the sake of the poem that people don't even really remember Moses stuttered much less that story and so I added in math as if filled with burning coals I just put that in no one's still going to know it but at least it conveys something of you know so I do that a lot with biblical and this is strange it's the King James translation of Jacob you know he was hauled, he was lame the angel made him lame and in the King James it says halting on his thigh very strange way of putting it right in the poem he goes I don't know that I have added anything but I have made significant changes for example I have taken poems that had a five foot line in Russian and played with that they might have a four foot line in my translation it's interesting because in general at any time when you try to measure Russian against English English has 30% more words but they tend to be of words that are not really significant to the process of the sense and I often find that that whatever meter the Russian original was in is not to convey the sense of what's in the original I need to adjust the meter in English to some degree the area in the Greek tragedy the area of translation that compelled me to feel ready to add something was in the choral lyrics the choral notes outside of the dialogue these really elaborate in some way perhaps the most important most poetic aspect of the tragedy that's where the playwright the playwright would compose all the choreography compose all the music as well as the words and teach the dancers and actors and musicians through call and response basically to train them really elaborate, really important and it became important I realized really a student might have said since I read a monologue in the class to sort of see what they thought she'd have said he'll never pull off the clothes and in that area so I began really closely the translation begins really closely but as the play progresses I start to integrate some rhyme for a sort of a kind of a valid effect there and the addition that I'm thinking of comes at the conclusion of one where I actually repeat the final line which you might expect to bring along a certain the grand conclusion of the Greek code there's the repetition of the line it's not repeated in the Greek but it still had that weight gives us in a modern song I found myself to know just to put it clear there's no rhyme this is too easy watch I wanted to answer that same question that once in a while you had something it caused such a part of your culture and it couldn't have been in the original and yet every reader in English will respond to it so I end up on here which is a phrase of hate the guy is against computers the virtual world is taking over and he's saying well I hope paper will survive in some way origami so his image of paper surviving is the origami tiger and he has this whole rhyme a couple of poems about it and he ends the poem saying in Portuguese because in an instant it can arm itself in paper can arm itself in a tiger an origami tiger and in English I want to come to end strongly and of course I'm looking for rhymes fire cannot scatter nothing water splatter to prevent it turning to a bright origami tiger in the night and so I have that plate back on me and in the original couldn't have that but I told him about it and he was delighted so there's something that's been imposed I don't know is it dangerous to be close to a paper claim? I mean this whole conversation has illustrated my response to this what I think is a false dichotomy between formal and so-called free verse because free verse is just as formal it's just formal in a different way and the whole idea that the only kind of rhyme that exists is the rhyme that lands at the end of the line is to me absurd I mean as a poet it's like all my poems, most of my poems are free verse but they rhyme all over the place I mean rhyme with Robert Duncan's sense of parallelism and patterns of sound it's a I think a more generous concept of rhyme that I think applies to most of it in fact that's perfect for much of the Bible at the Ecclesiastes and for much of what the parallelism is the rhyme not an actual one I want to come back to the issue of proper names it seems to me that proper names have a rather special status in every language and that part of that status is that their etymology becomes invisible to most people or native speakers of the language and I remember my great surprise when I started learning other languages to realize what the last names of my childhood friends meant so that in a way if you have a character in an American novel and it's named Schneider you don't necessarily want your translator into Russian to make it clear that means Taylor you see what I'm saying so in a way I'm sort of opposing your proposition are you looking at me? yeah yes I what do I do? I feel like I have to defend my choice I agree someone translated Russian to be sensitive to the fact that for Americans the last names are looked to for meaning unless they're intentionally I think 30 years before I deliver it back and it seems clear that they're playing on something dramatic in the work we'll be sensitive to that but the Greeks played with names and meanings of names all the time and people were bringing assumptions to the renovations to it the stunts and tragedies you know edifices as well when we receive edifices in translation we hear his name again and again but we don't realize that it's swollen until we're getting towards the whole play but the Greeks are hearing Mr. Swolf of the entire time leading up to that and maybe they're so surprised because his name could also be Mr. Nohfoot K. N. O. W. I refer to his knowledge of the riddle of who walks on how many feet at what time so there's that suspense in this piece that'd be tough for the cost so I think culturally the Greeks are just different that Americans I don't know enough other languages to know how common other languages people would readily attach names to names but it's certainly more so true in the Greeks than it is in the English that's what I would respond I would add to that too that Thomas Mann for example in his novels loves to create what he calls the German speaking names so there's this guy named Claude Hayat which doesn't really mean anything but it sounds like this guy is just all about his testicles it's not an approximate it sort of invites that invites that rerun and so how do you part of Dickens of course too so the the real stuff is full of that kind of stuff that you have to deal with because the intent of the original is to cause these sorts of echoes and so those posts really fascinating problems because it seems so heavy-handed to do in some ways but like Kilman kind of works but in Vintner I'm not sure you know are we thinking oh this is what the Greeks would have felt or not but I think in some you know modern prose it would be difficult to find that line between the sort of the gesture and the hammer you know the original name of your hero who doesn't really appear in the play but was Hermann yeah and I said I just don't like it because it sounds German what's a German doing in the west and even though there were Germans in the west yeah he was Hermann Leroy Kilman this was one name and it's her at least and that was something I added I called him Hermann and that was too much of me and it was good advice and I excised it out of it so that guilty pleasure that we have in finding something that is just beautiful and I called him Hermann because there's a point where she's worried about her husband falling in love with another woman a younger woman and she says I'll be known as his husband with Hermann and there's this play on that that works in the Greek and there's a play on the Greek but it's not apparently his name but I put it there in that name and it was good to give it a go now it goes by Hercules Hercules Hercules in the west I think in daily life Roger is completely right if you go to a foreign country I'm not totally to me whenever I discover all these names funny meanings I'm pointing them out I'm always making jokes and they just look at me blind red so he's completely right in daily life on the other hand not only do we have chickens but everybody Henry James John March he plods ahead never sees a thing never feels a thing and the woman refusing to actually love her though monopolizes her life is May Barton May possibility or springtime they never glossed because of him and so these things are done in literature but you're right in daily life we don't know this that our names mean that we used to put barrels together Cooper or Smith the most common name in America and nobody thinks of themselves as pounding or shoes but it's up put it this way in some books there's a clear intention with the naming of the characters fairy tales and in others you would probably be stretching to try and read something in them but it's done more in literature than in life that's true well thank you all