A
note on translation from Murat Nemet-Nejat:
Dear Ron,
I just read your thoughts on translation in your August blog:
"I simply don’t know if there is a tradition of homophonia in Oulipo or other
languages, or if the form is specifically American (one might argue that its
dynamics replicate the treasure collecting instincts of centuries of
exploration by Westciv hegemons, that a homophonic
translation isn’t necessarily that different from seeing an Egyptian tomb on
the edge of Central Park). From my perspective, a more telling question is
whether or not it’s possible, if there should not be a fortuitous
correspondence of tones between source & target languages, to assert
other values in the homophonic translation, to make it anything other than
a statement about this ghost dance of tongues."
Is really translation about transferring? Walter Benjamin says it is distance
that makes a work translatable: translation is a motion by two languages to a
third place. I am guessing that is what you are implying by 'this ghost dance
of tongues,' though I sense a negative twist in your assertion.
In a homophonic translation questions underlying the translation process do not
disappear. What is sound? What about the "sound" of the other tongue
is one translating? The physical texture of words? the cadences, the movement among words? the
change of pitch?
In your entry you speculate that you know of no Asian languages translated
homophonically because their sound structures are very different. Wouldn't a
simpler explanation be that there is no interest? After all Chris is
translating a surrealist icon. Catullus is a Western classic. These are
re-writings of assimilated entities.
There is at least one homophonic translation of the Basho
frog poem I remember. Of course, that haiku can be seen as a sound poem in the
original.
Once the association of translation with similarity is decoupled, all sorts of
possibilities open up. I do all my writing in English though my English is
affected by the rhythms, thought and syntactical patterns of Turkish, an
Asiatic "sound" which is very different from English.
This gives me a few choices, given, by your view, an unbreachable distance
between the two:
a) I can keep quiet and stop writing. By the way, that was the advice of Ciardi – no person can write poetry outside one's mother
tongue.*
b) I can pretend I am a full-blooded American and write the way I will be
taught at one college or another.
c) I can insist that the way I experience English will become part of this
language.
One's idea of translation is related to one's assumptions on other things,
particularly how one sees the other and lets oneself
be affected by it.
Of course, the whole of Wittgenstein's language systems makes any idea of
translation impossible. It supports closed systems.
In the last several months I did not get involved in any blog reading since I
have been finishing an anthology of Turkish poetry I was working on four years.
This labor day weekend it is finished. Your post on the Poetry List caught my
attention.
My best.
Murat Nemet-Nejat
*
Ciardi appears to have forgotten Joseph Conrad, Louis
Zukofsky, Jack Kerouac, William Carlos Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Anselm
Hollo, Pierre Joris,
