The University of Iowa • International Writing Program – 91° Meridian

Weinberger, page 2

Lately, however, they are bothering, and there is something called the 300th Military
Intelligence Brigade. 1500 language experts, most of them Mormons trained for
missionary work in heathen lands, housed in six sites in the state of Utah, are rather
frantically trying to translate the mountain of documents that have been gathered by
the various intelligence agencies. Their commander, Col. Dee Snowball. . . [That's
her real name. Have you ever noticed that Republicans tend to have names from
Thomas Pynchon novels? Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott. But
Democrats have names from World War II platoon novels: Mario Cuomo, Teddy
Kennedy, Joe Lieberman, Tip O'Neill.] Anyway, their commander, Col. Dee Snowball
has recently rallied the troops with these words: "You will not garner the glory that
the combat soldier receives, but you will make a huge impact in the defense of your
country." It is the military version of what all translators experience and feel.

Some years ago, Bill Moyers did a PBS series on poetry that was filmed at the Dodge
Festival in New Jersey. Octavio Paz and I had given a bilingual reading there, and I
knew that we would be included in the first program. The morning of the broadcast, I
noticed in the index of that day's New York Times that there was a review of the show.
This being my national television debut, naturally I wondered if their tv critic had
discovered any latent star qualities in my performance, possibly leading to a career
change, and I quickly turned to the page. This is what he wrote: "Octavio Paz was
accompanied by his translator,"- no name given, of course- "always a problematic necessity."

[The strange thing is that on the plane coming out here yesterday, I happened to be
sitting in front of Bill Moyers, who surprisingly travels steerage just like the rest of
us. So as we were waiting to get off the plane, I introduced myself and told him the
story. He didn't think it was funny at all. I guess you lose your sense of humor when
you spend too much time talking to Robert Bly.]

"Problematic necessity," while not yet a cliche about translation, rather neatly
embodies the prevailing view of translation. I'd like to look at both terms, beginning
with the one that strikes me as accurate: necessity.

Needless to say, no single one of us can know all the languages of the world, not
even all the major languages, and if we believe- though not all cultures have believed
it- that the people who speak other languages have things to say or ways of saying
them that we don't know, then translation is an evident necessity. Many of the golden
ages of a national literature have been, not at all coincidentally, periods of active and
prolific translation. Sanskrit literature goes into Persian which goes into Arabic which
turns into the Medieval European courtly love tradition. Indian folk tales are
embedded in The Canterbury Tales. Shakespeare writes in an Italian form, the sonnet,
or in the blank verse invented by the Earl of Surrey for his version of the Aeneid; in
The Tempest, he lifts a whole passage verbatim from Arthur Golding's translation of
Ovid. German fiction begins with imitations of the Spanish picaresque and Robinson
Crusoe. Japanese poetry is first written in Chinese; Latin poetry is first an imitation
of the Greek; American poetry in the first half of this century is inextricable from all it
translated and learned from classical Chinese, Greek, and Latin; medieval Provençal
and modern French; in the second half of the century, it is inextricable from the
poetries of Latin America and Eastern Europe, classical Chinese again, and the oral
poetries of Native Americans and other indigenous groups. These examples could, of
course, be multiplied endlessly. Conversely, cultures that do not translate stagnate,
and end up repeating the same things to themselves: classical Chinese poetry, in its
last 800 or so years , being perhaps the best literary example. Or, in a wider cultural
sense of translation: the Aztec and Inkan empires, which could not translate the
sight of some ragged Europeans on horseback into anything human. >>

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