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

Weinberger, page 5

And one can never mention the word "translation" without some wit bringing up- as
though for the first time- that tedious Italian pun traduttore traditore, a wordplay that
has difficulty traveling beyond the language of Machiavelli. The characterizations of
translation as betrayal or treason is based on the impossibility of exact equivalence,
which is seen as a failing. It's true: a slice of German pumpernickel is not a Chinese
steam bun which is not a French baguette which is not Wonder Bread. But consider a
hypothetical line of German poetry- one I hope will never be written, but probably has
been: "Her body (or his body) was like a fresh loaf of pumpernickel." Pumpernickel in
the poem is pumpernickel, but it is also more than pumpernickel: it is the image of
warmth, nourishment, homeyness. When the cultures are close, it is possible to
translate more exactly: say, the German word pumpernickel into the American word
pumpernickel- which, despite appearances, are not the same: each carries its own
world of referents. But to translate the line into, say, Chinese, how much would really
be lost if it were a steam bun? (I leave aside sound for the moment.) "His body (her
body) was like a fresh steam bun" also has its charm- especially if you like your
lover doughy.

It's true that no translation is identical to the original. But no reading of a poem is
identical to any other, even when read by the same person. The first encounter with
our poetic pumpernickel might be delightful; at a second reading, even five minutes
later, it could easily seem ridiculous. Or imagine a 14-year-old German boy reading
the line in the springtime of young Alpine love; then at 50, while serving as the
chargé d'affaires in the German consulate in Kuala Lumpur, far from the bakeries of
his youth; then at 80, in a retirement village in the Black Forest, in the nostalgia for
dirndelled maidens. Every reading of every poem is a translation into one's own
experience and knowledge- whether it is a confirmation, a contradiction, or an
expansion. The poem does not exist without this act of translation. The poem must
move from reader to reader, reading to reading, in perpetual transformation. The
poem dies when it has no place to go.

Translation, above all, means change. In Elizabethan England, one of its meanings
was "death": to be translated from this world to the next. In the Middle Ages
translatio meant the theft or removal of holy relics from one monastery or church to
another. In the year 1087, for example, St. Nicolas appeared in visions to the monks
at Myra, near Antioch, where his remains were kept, and told them he wished to be
translated. When merchants arrived from the Italian city of Bari and broke open the
tomb to steal the remains, Myra and its surroundings were filled with a wonderful
fragrance, a sign of the saint's pleasure. In contrast, when the archdeacon of the
Bishop of Turin tried to steal the finger of John the Baptist from the obscure church of
Maurienne, the finger struck him dead. (Unlike dead authors, dead saints could
maintain control over their translations.) Translation is movement, the twin of
metaphor, which means "to move from one place to another." Metaphor makes the
familiar strange; translation makes the strange familiar. Translation is change. Even
the most concrete and limited form of translation- currency exchange- is in a state of
hourly flux.

The only recorded example of translation as replication, not as change, was, not
surprisingly, a miracle: Around 250 B.C., 72 translators were summoned to
Alexandria to prepare, in 72 days, 72 versions of the Hebrew Bible in Greek. Each
one was guided by the Original of all Original Authors and wrote identical
translations. 72 translators producing 72 identical texts is an author's- or a book
reviewer's- dream and a translator's nightmare.
A work of art is a singularity that remains itself while being subjected to restless
change- from translation to translation, from reader to reader. To proclaim the
intrinsic worthlessness of translations is to mistake that singularity with its
unendingly varying manifestations. A translation is a translation and not a work of
art- unless, over the centuries, it takes on its own singularity and becomes a work of
art. A work of art is its own subject; the subject of a translation is the original work of
art. There is a cliché in the U.S. that the purpose of a poetry translation is to create
an excellent new poem in English. This is empirically false: nearly all the great
translations in English would be ludicrous as poems written in English, even poems
written in the voice of a persona. I have always maintained- and for some reason this
is considered controversial- that the purpose of a poetry translation into English is
to create an excellent translation in English. That is, a text that will be read and
judged like a poem, but not as a poem. >>

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