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

Weinberger, page 6

And yet translations continue to be measured according to a Utopian dream of exact
equivalences, and are often dismissed on the basis of a single word, usually by
members of foreign language departments, known in the trade as the "translation
police." They are the ones who write- to take an actual example- that a certain
immensely prolific translator from the German "simply does not know German"
because somewhere in the vastness of Buddenbrooks, he had translated a
"chesterfield" as a "greatcoat." Such examples, as any translator can tell you, are
more the rule than the exception. One can only imagine if writers were reviewed in
the same way: "the use of the word 'incarnadine' on page 349 proves the utter
mediocrity of this book."

This is the old bugbear of "fidelity," which turns reviewers into television evangelists.
Now obviously a translation that is replete with semantical errors is probably a bad
translation, but fidelity may be the most overrated of a translation's qualities. I once
witnessed an interesting experiment: average 9-year-old students at a public school
in Rochester, New York, were given a text by Rimbaud and a bilingual dictionary, and
asked to translate the poem. Neither they nor their teacher knew a word of French.
What they produced were not masterpieces, but they were generally as accurate as,
and occasionally wittier than, any of the existing scholarly versions. In short, up to a
point, anyone can translate anything faithfully.

But the point at which they cannot translate is the point where real translations begin
to be made. The purpose of, say, a poetry translation is not, as it is usually said, to
give the foreign poet a voice in the translation-language. It is to allow the poem to be
heard in the translation-language, ideally in many of the same ways it is heard in the
original language. This means that a translation is a whole work; it is not a series of
matching en face lines and shouldn't be read as such. It means that the primary task
of a translator is not merely to get the dictionary meanings right- which is the
easiest part- but rather to invent a new music for the text in the translation-language, one that is mandated by the original. A music that is not technical replication of the original. (There is nothing worse than translations, for example, that attempt to recreate a foreign meter or rhyme scheme. They're sort of like the way hamburgers look and taste in Bolivia.) A music that is perfectly viable in English, but which- because it is a translation, because it will be read as a
translation- is able to evoke another music, and perhaps reproduce some of its
effects.

But to do so requires a thorough knowledge of the literature into which one is
translating. Before modernism, poems, no matter from where, were translated into the
prevailing styles and forms: the assumed perfection of the heroic couplet could
equally serve Homer, Kalidasa, or the Chinese folk songs of the Book of Odes. The
great lesson of modernism- first taught by Ezra Pound, but learned, even now, only by
a few- was that the unique form and style of the original must in some manner
determine the form and the style of the translation; the poem was not merely to be
poured into the familiar molds. Thus, in Pound's famous example, a fragment of
Sappho was turned into an English fragment, ellipses and all, and not "restored" or
transformed into rhyming pentameters.

This was based on a twofold, and somewhat contradictory, belief: First, that the dead
author and his literature were exotic, and therefore the translation should preserve
this exoticism and not domesticate it. Second, that the dead author was our
contemporary, and his poems- if they were worth reading- were as alive and fresh as
anything written yesterday. An unrestored Sappho was "one of us" precisely because
she was not one of us: a foreign (in the largest sense) poet pointing to a way that our
poems could be written today.

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