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

Weinberger, page 3

But translation is much more than an offering of new trinkets in the literary bazaar.
Translation liberates the translation-language. Because a translation will always be
read as a translation, as something foreign, it is freed from many of the constraints of
the currently accepted norms and conventions in the national literature.

This was most strikingly apparent in China after the revolution in 1949. An important
group of modernist poets who had emerged in the 1930's and early 1940's were
forbidden to publish and were effectively kept from writing; all the new Chinese poetry
had to be in the promoted forms of socialist realism: folkloric ballads and paeans to
farm production and boiler-plate factories and heroes of the revolution. (The only
exceptions, ironically, or tragically, were the classical poems written by Mao
himself.) Yet they could translate foreign poets with the proper political credentials
(such as Eluard, Alberti, Lorca, Neruda, Aragon) even though their work was radically
different and not social realist at all. When a new generation of poets in the 1970's
came to reject socialist realism, their inspiration and models were not the erased and
forgotten Chinese modernists-whose poems they didn't know, and had no way of
knowing- but rather the foreign poets whom these same modernists had been
permitted to translate.

Translation liberates the translation-language, and it is often the case that
translation flourishes when the writers feel that their language or society needs
liberating. One of the great spurs to translation is a cultural inferiority complex or a
national self-loathing. The translation boom in Germany at the turn of the 19th
century was a response to the self-perceived paucity of German literature;
translation became a project of national culture-building: in the words of Herder, "to
walk through foreign gardens to pick flowers for my language." Furthermore, and
rather strangely, it was felt that the relative lack of literary associations in the
language- particularly in contrast to French- made German the ideal language for
translation, and even more, the place where the rest of the world could discover the
literature it couldn't otherwise read. Germany, they thought, would become the
Central Station of world literature precisely because it had no literature. This proved
both true and untrue. German did become the conduit, particularly for Sanskrit and
Persian, but it is also became much more. Its simultaneous, and not coincidental,
production of a great national literature ended up being the most influential poetry
and criticism in the West for the rest of the century. [And perhaps it should be
mentioned that, contrary to the reigning cliche of Orientalism- namely that
scholarship follows imperialism- Germany had no economic interests in either India
or Persia. England, which did, had no important scholars in those fields after the
pioneering Sir William Jones. Throughout the 19th century, for example, Sanskrit was
taught at Oxford exclusively by Germans.]

In the case of the Chinese poets, their coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution
meant that they had been unable to study foreign languages (or much of anything
else) and thus were themselves unable to translate. But to escape from their sense
of cultural deficiency, they turned to the translations of the previous generation, and
began to discover new ways of writing in Chinese, with the result that Chinese poetry
experienced its first truly radical and permanent change in some 1300 years.
Among American poets, there have been two great flowerings of translation. The first,
before and after the First World War, was largely the work of expatriates eager to
overcome their provinciality and to educate their national literature through the
discoveries made in their own self-educations: to make the U.S. as "cultured" as
Europe. The second, beginning in the 1950's and exploding in the 1960's, was the
result of a deep- and already half-forgotten- anti-Americanism among American
intellectuals: first in the more contained bohemian rebellion against the conformist
Eisenhower years and the Cold War, and then as part of the wider expression of
disgust and despair during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
Translation- the journey to the other- was more than a way out of America: the
embrace of the other was, in the 1960's, in its small way, an act of defiance against
the government that was murdering Asian others abroad and the social realities that
were oppressing minority others at home. Foreign poetry became as much a part of
the counterculture as American Indians, Eastern religions, hallucinatory states: a
new way of seeing, a new "us" forming out of everything that had not been "us." >>

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