Day 13: from 'Le Bleu et la poussière' by Jacques Izoard

Here is today's translation, from Le Bleu et la poussière ('The Bruise and the Dust') by Belgian poet Jacques Izoard (1936-2008). This is an extract from a longer poem. Not much time for commentary today, so feel free to provide your own, or just enjoy it as it is!

All will fall silent, all

will make of itself a misty quiet.

Chance, somewhere,

will don its dunce’s cap

for a final farewell.

For us who were the living

the flies will die.

After your proverbs and sayings,

your moons and your whims and your dreams,

your bare voice will emerge

like a rumbling sea

in the deepest of the deeps.

Life does not mean to say

that living is an absence.

But if life demands

armfuls of flowers –

also that flowers all die –

then leave you may.

What will be left to you

of your childhood tossed back and forth,

of your brawls, your negligible deaths,

of your self-forgetting,

is the bruise

we fashion poems from.

Day 12: A translated cut-up poem

My MA dissertation is (or will be) on the poetry of André Frénaud. Rather than translating any actual Frénaud here, though, I have tried a different tack. I took an extract from Bernard Pingaud's rather flowery introduction to Frénaud's collection Il n'y a pas de paradis, created a cut-up poem from it (I used all the words from the extract, rearranging them to make a poem), then translated that into English. Poetry is everywhere! Hooray!

"L’écriture, toutefois, n’est pas la cure. Alors que la parole analytique tend à s’abolir dans un silence final qui serait celui de la guérison, la parole poétique se fixe, au contraire, dans ces objets de forme et dimension diverses, ces petits monuments verbaux qui garantissent au poète que l’événement ne s’est pas produit en vain."

(Bernard Pingaud, Preface to André Frénaud, Il n’y a pas de paradis. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, p.10)

 
The cut-up technique produced this (with alterations made so that verbs are correctly conjugated and adjectives agree in gender and number. Punctuation has also been added.):

Au

dans l’écriture, toutefois,

qu'un silence final

qui serait parole

dans ces petites dimensions

poètes-monuments se fixent en vain

tendent ces objets divers

à l’événement

la poétique de celui-là est contraire

à s’abolir

la parole qui garantit, verbale et analytique

ne se produit pas

la cure n’est que forme, alors :

pas de guérison

The next stage was the translation:

To the

in writing, all the same,

nothing but a final silence

which would be speech

in these small dimensions

poet-monuments establish themselves in vain,

hold out these various objects

to the event

that one's poetics is opposed

to self-suppress

the word that guarantees, verbal and analytical

does not happen.

the cure is only form, then:

no healing

 

Day 11: 'Symphonie en gris' by Marie Krysinska

Today's translation is the first half of a poem by Marie Krysinska. Krysinska was a 19th-century French poet who wrote some of the first French poems in free verse. Although Rimbaud, Laforgue and Gustave Kahn all published their free-verse poems after Krysinska, her role in this poetic innovation is rarely acknowledged. She is no Rimbaud or Laforgue, but her poetry deserves to be remembered for its role in the development of French free verse. Here is some information about her along with two poems translated by Sandra Sokowski.

And here is 'Symphonie en gris', in the original and then in my translation:

Symphonie en gris

(À Rodolphe Salis)

Plus d’ardentes lueurs sur le ciel alourdi,
Qui semble tristement rêver.
Les arbres, sans mouvement,
Mettent dans le loin une dentelle grise. -
Sur le ciel qui semble tristement rêver,
Plus d’ardentes lueurs. -

Dans l’air gris flottent les apaisements,
Les résignations et les inquiétudes.
Du sol consterné monte une rumeur étrange, surhumaine.
Cabalistique langage entendu seulement
Des âmes attentives. -
Les apaisements, les résignations, et les inquiétudes
Flottent dans l’air gris. -

Les silhouettes vagues ont le geste de la folie.
Les maisons sont assises disgracieusement
Comme de vieilles femmes -
Les silhouettes vagues ont le geste de la folie. -
C’est l’heure cruelle et stupéfiante,
Où la chauve-souris déploie ses ailes grises,
Et s’en va rôdant comme un malfaiteur. -
Les silhouettes vagues ont le geste de la folie. -

Près de l’étang endormi
Le grillon fredonne d’exquises romances.
Et doucement ressuscitent dans l’air gris
Les choses enfuies.
Près de l’étang endormi
Le grillon fredonne d’exquises romances.
Sous le ciel qui semble tristement rêver.


I have translated only the first two stanzas, at least for now:

Symphony in grey

No more burning glow on the burdened sky,

Which seems in mournful dream.

The trees, unmoving,

Cast grey lace into the far-off.

On the sky which seems in mournful dream,

No more burning glow.

In the grey air float pacifications,

Resignations, disquiets.

From the stunned sun a strange sound rises, superhuman.

Cabalistic language heard only

By attentive souls.

Pacifications, resignations, disquiets

Float in the grey air.

Day 10: 'The Walk' by Thomas Hardy

Time for a change of direction: today I'm translating into French. This being as much of a first draft as any of my other NaPoTraMo efforts, and also being in my second language, I'm a bit nervous about posting it, but here we go...

The original:

The Walk

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way:
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.

And the translation:

La Balade

Dernièrement, tu

Ne venais plus

Te promener avec moi

Jusqu’à l’arbre du sommet

Par les petits sentiers

Comme autrefois ;

Faible, tu boitais,

Donc ne m’accompagnais jamais,

Et j’y allais tout seul, n’y réfléchissant guère ;

Je ne te croyais pas laissée en arrière.

Aujourd’hui je m’y suis promené

Comme j’ai si souvent fait ;

J’ai regardé la vue

Qui m’est si bien connue

Tout seul encore :

Quelle différence, alors ?

Rien que ce qu’on ressent, l’impression dérobée,

En retrouvant une pièce que l’on avait quittée.

The rhythm is inevitably different, and the French cannot always reproduce the concision that makes the original so poignant. ('Not thinking of you as left behind' was a line I found difficult to render elegantly in French!) I have had a go at the rhyme, though...

Comments welcome, as ever.

Day 9: ' Autorretrato a los veinte años' by Roberto Bolaño

Two days of the challenge missed, oh dear. My excuse is that I was in London, which, as everyone knows, doesn't have the internet. Better do some extra-good translating in the next couple of days to make up..

Buoyed by my success (judged solely by me) in translating from Italian, I am moving on to a language I have never learnt at all: Spanish. This poem by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was sent to me, with a literal translation, by my brother (who is in Chile - it pleases me to think of the poem as freshly sourced). One of the difficulties I find in working from a 'literal' is that sometimes it becomes difficult to move away from it. I read a line of it, think 'yeah, that sounds about right', and the challenge is then to imagine it differently. I try to do this by listening to the original, reading it before and after reading the gloss (I'm yet to attempt a poem where I can't even read the script the language is written in), and constantly going back to it to check the sound and rhythm of the words.

Here is the original:

Autorretrato a los veinte años

Me dejé ir, lo tomé en marcha y no supe nunca
hacia dónde hubiera podido llevarme. Iba lleno de miedo,
se me aflojó el estómago y me zumbaba la cabeza:
yo creo que era el aire frío de los muertos.
No sé. Me dejé ir, pensé que era una pena
acabar tan pronto, pero por otra parte
escuché aquella llamada misteriosa y convincente.
O la escuchas o no la escuchas, y yo la escuché
y casi me eché a llorar: un sonido terrible,
nacido en el aire y en el mar.
Un escudo y una espada. Entonces,
pese al miedo, me dejé ir, puse mi mejilla
junto a la mejilla de la muerte.
Y me fue imposible cerrar los ojos y no ver
aquel espectáculo extraño, lento y extraño,
aunque empotrado en una realidad velocísima:
miles de muchachos como yo, lampiños
o barbudos, pero latinoamericanos todos,
juntando sus mejillas con la muerte.
 
And my translation: 

Self-Portrait at 20

I let myself go, I set it going and I never knew

where it might take me to. Full of fear,

my gut loosened, my head was pounding:

I think it was the chill air of the dead.

I don’t know. I let myself go, it seemed a shame

to finish things so soon, but then again

I heard that mysterious convincing call.

You hear or do not hear. For me, I heard it

and it almost made me weep: a sound so dreadful

born in air and sea.

A shield and a sword. And then,

despite the weight of fear I let myself go, touched my cheek –

junto – to the cheek of death.

With eyes shut, I could not but see

that strange spectacle, slow and strange,

though racked in swift reality:

countless lads like me, smooth-skinned

or bearded, but latinamericans all

together, juntando, cheek to cheek with death.

I have made a few translation choices that I know are those of a non-Spanish speaker. This struck me as an interesting conundrum: is it acceptable to deliberately translate a word or phrase in a certain way when this comes from a lack of knowledge of the source language? With poetry, I think it can be: there is no perfect translation of any text, let alone of a poem, and sometimes the perspective of someone with an imperfect knowledge of the language can shed new light on the sound or origin of a word. As I have said before, I think translation should be playful - this was certainly a fun game.

The instances I'm talking about are:
1) the word junto, which is an extremely common word meaning 'joined', 'together', or 'next to'. Not speaking Spanish means that for me, the primary association this word brings is junta, the rulers of a military dictatorship. Bolaño was 20 years old in 1973, the year of the military coup that ousted the president, Salvador Allende; 'Autorretrato a los veinte años', where the presence of death is so strongly felt, is presumably a reference to this. The word 'junta', then, is not wholly out of context in my translation, even though junto is such an everyday word that in Spanish, I imagine these connotations would not be present.
2) "racked in swift reality" - empotrado means 'embedded', 'built-in', but these English words didn't seem very powerful or appropriate. The dictionary tells me that the root of this word, potro, also means 'rack', as in the instrument of torture. A rack where one stores things being not a million miles away from 'embedded' (well, OK, it's a stretch), I came up with this line and decided I liked it.
3) 'latinamericans' - latinoamericanos is Spanish for 'Latin Americans', so there was no real need to foreignise the word by joining the two English words together. However, doing so seemed to lend more weight to it, and also worked well with the two words that follow, todos ('all') and juntando ('joining').
What do you think? Is this an acceptable way to translate?

Day 6: 'Merdrigal' by Léon-Paul Fargue

I am translating poems by Léon-Paul Fargue for a Masters assignment. He wrote a lot of beautifully musical, atmospheric prose poems which - after several weeks spent deeply absorbed in them - I now want to scribble all over, put in my blender and then feed to the local rodents. (I'm sure this is only a passing phase.) Luckily, Fargue also wrote things like this:

Merdrigal
 
Dans mon coeur en ta présence

Fleurissent des harengs saurs.

Ma santé, c’est ton absence,

Et quand tu parais, je sors.

I have kept the title, since a) I think it can be understood by English readers, and b) I couldn't better it! I don't think the merdrigal has become an established form, but perhaps it should...

Merdrigal

Within my heart, when you are here,

Pickled herrings bloom.

My health is your absence; when you appear

I swiftly leave the room.

Day 5: 'Agonia' by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Can we translate from languages we don't speak? My attempt today is a poem by Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, sent to me by my Italian translator friend Elena. (She is also my Italian teacher, so the pressure is on...) My command of Italian being as yet mostly imaginary, she also sent me a fairly literal translation. So to what extent is this translation mine? With the help of a dictionary, I think I could have gathered all the information Elena included. But I have already been guided by her thoughts - I might have made different choices had I not read her version.
It is fairly common practice for poets and (especially) playwrights to produce 'translations' from languages they don't speak, aided either by some poor unacknowledged translator who gives them a 'literal', or by comparing multiple existing translations. This obviously considerably broadens the range of texts we have available to us as translators; but I am not wholly convinced it is really a good way to translate. If you have five different versions to compare, you will get a very good sense of what the original is doing, but can you really get sufficiently 'inside the mind' of the text to translate it if you can't read it yourself?
Of course, it's one thing for me translate from Italian, which is similar to French and which I read well enough to have some sense of what the poem is doing; it would be quite another for me to attempt a translation-from-literals of a Finnish poem, say - or Arabic, Chinese etc, where I couldn't even attempt to read the poem aloud.
Whether or not you think I should be inflicting my translations from Italian upon the world, I hope you enjoy this one!

Agony

To die like parched skylarks

on the mirage

Or like the partridge

 – the sea passed by –

perched in the first branches

because of flight

has no desire now to fly

But not to live on lament

like a songbird grown blind