k enguin poets
Clive Wilmer
The last ten years or so have seen an extraordinary burgeoning in the art of verse translation. At first sight — given the congenital insularity of English culture — this would seem to bode nothing but good, but a Closer reading may tell a less hopeful tale.
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Popularity of translated poetry is largely symptomatic of our present literary malaise. At a time when it is hard to name as many as half-a-dozen English poets worthy of title, an influx of foreign poetry might seem the only conceivable source of new inspiration. But this-in itself is something of a forlorn hope, for the great mass of available translations pay no more than a cursory attention to such vital features of poetry as objective structure and the connotative density of the word. Insubstantiality of form and language is already the hallmark of much contemporary poetry. This Must be in part attributable to a diet of verse Iii which fable and image are all and the means a total irrelevance.
However, there is much to be grateful for. F,ew generations can have had any access at all to major contemporaries who write in mjnority languages, yet Gunnar EkelOf and 4bigniew Herbert, to name but two, are both cheaply available in the Penguin series of Modern European Poets. The aim of the series 'has always been to give us cheap and unintiMidating selections of such poets, a policy Which has meant minimal introductory matter, few notes and no parallel text. This is the real weakness of the series, for by no means all the translations are literal and, since there IS no annotation, we have no way of guessing at how faithful a version we are reading or at What kind of structure the original poem has. And since the books are short, the selections are often unrepresentative. This is especially true when two or three poets are crammed into one volume: witness the Four Greek Poets which includes _Cavafv and Seferis. The latest in the series, Joseph Brodsky, translated by George L. Kline, meets most of these objections. It is larger and well-annotated, but inevitably, at 85p, more expensive. With the figure of Solzhenitsyn towering over it, the whole centre of gravity of Soviet literature has shifted from verse to prose. Sack in 1962 it seemed proper to begin this series with Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Now, twelve Years later, all that idealistic rhetoric seems shallow, and even disingenuous. Brodsky, himself a victim of Soviet persecution, etnerges as a far more substantial poet. Curiously enough, his work is a-political; a kreligious poet, though by no means a quietist, 'e is concerned with the spiritual desolation Of modern life, be it under socialism or capitalism. By all accounts his technique is remarkable and there is no mistaking the grandeur of his themes: • • silence is the future of all days
that roll toward speech; yes, silence is the Presence
Of farewells in our greetings as we touch.
Indeed, the future of our words is silence —
those
words which have devoured the stuff of things With hungry vowels, for things abhor sharp
But alas, Mr Kline is no poet and, although he has painstakingly reproduced the original metres, the effect is often laborious and Mechanical. Marriage of form to content is the nub of the matter. A form or metre that is exactly right in one language may be wholly unsuitable in another. Anapaestic metre in English is so inescapably bound up with battle-pieces and limericks that it simply will not do for sombre metaphysical meditations.
Faced with this problem, the average translator evades it altogether and renders the poem in loose free verse, as Richard McKane does in his very readable selection of Anna Akhmatova. There are two mail objections to this volume. Far too much emphasis is laid on the early imagistic work at the expense of her later, heroic witness to the horrors of the Stalin era; and no attempt is made at rendering the forms of her verse. Akhmatova was not a sort of Russian Carlos Williams: her snatches of dialogue and fragments of sensuous detail are deliberately set in strictly rhymed classical metres. The briefest comparison with other versions of her poetry can only leave the common reader with an uncomfortable sense of being at the mercy of any translator's whim.
If this is true of Mr McKane, it is even more so of Margaret Crossland in her selection of Cesare Pavese (first published by Peter Owen in 1969). Pavese the novelist is now widely recognised as one of Italy's greatest modern writers, but his poetry, steering as it does so close to the borders of prose, is still sadly underrated. Since Miss Crossland sees no difference between verse and prose, her translations will do nothing to improve his reputation. That she omits the odd word or phrase that for no clear reason she feels to be superflo.us is bad enough. But it soon becomes apparent that she 'hardly knows Italian at all. The very first poem contains at least a dozen errors of language. Sometimes the errors are the most elementary faux-amis: parenti (relatives) is translated as 'parents.' Sometimes she simply guesses: ticchio (a whim or fancy) is rendered as a 'twitch.' Sometimes she misreads her dictionary: she confuses the noun recisa (a wound) with the adjective which means 'uncompromising.' That so prestigious a publisher as Penguin should reprint such a volume unrevised is nothing short of scandalous.
But it would be churlish not to acknowledge how much our awareness of other literatures has been extended by this series. There are many exceptional translations among them: Leishman's classic Rake, Auden and Sjoberg's Ekelof, Milosz's Herbert and Georgei Kay's honourably accurate Montale. Perhaps the finest recent selection is Michael Hamburger's Paul Celan. Celan, a Germanspeaking Jew whose cryptic, godless prayers are overshadowed by his memories of the death-camps, was one of those poets whose meaning is so entangled in what he calls his "language-mesh" that one would have thought him untranslatable. But it is hard to believe that a line as perfect as "we love each other like poppy and recollection" was ever written in anything other than English. Yet the translations are quite literal: clearly the product of deep immersion in the texts but with none of Mr Kline's unfortunate pedantry. Mr Hamburger is himself a poet but (unlike, say, Lowell, who uses 'imitations' to feed an already over-inflated ego) he sees translation as an attempt to mediate the original for a foreign reader; so that, while the poems are in distinguished and readable English — and often the exact rhythms of the German are reproduced — they never pretend to be other than translations.
Clive Wilmer; the poet, is currently teaching at Cambridge.
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