Imagery in Translation

translate: just you need to put word after word in the proper order,as you do when translating any piece of prose. Since the turn of the 20th century English poetry (in Britain and USA) has pre­dominantly developed in the direction of vers libre, which means no rhyme, irregular number of syllables, and purely phrasal stresses. The only restriction is the comparatively short line. For some time, you feel at ease with such a task. However, gradually this feeling gives way to hopeless embarrassment: some lines be­come much shorter than the corresponding lines in the original, while others turn out much, much longer, stretched by the de­mands of the target language and/or your want of skills. For ex­ample, choosing the course of literal rendering, we try to trans­late something as easy as a few lines of a poem by Ellen Chances:

The touch of skin to skin. Cheek upon cheek, breath into breath, gaze into gaze.

The result is quick and disastrous:

Прикосновение кожи к коже. Щека к щеке, дыханье в дыханье, взгляд во взгляд.

What sounds natural and melodic in English has become stumbling, faltering and clumsy in Russian as a result of such literal "faithfulness." More than that, it has become senseless, for the sense of the poem is in its clarity. Let us try another way, then:

Прикосновение тела к телу. Единение щек, единенье дыханья,

единение взглядов.

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In this version, the Russian lines have become longer, thesyntactical and semantic structures different. Altogether, in such a version the Russian text sounds more natural and creates an image similar to that of the original. Is it a great sin of a transla­tor? Vladimir Nabokov in his essay The Art of Translation men­tioned three such mortal sins:

1. "obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowl­ edge"

1. "leaving out tricky passages"

2. "transforming the original formula according to his own taste."

It is easy to guess that the first two sins "seem petty" in comparison with the third. Following Nabokov's advice, you may adopt a motto Do not try to improve the author being translated! Yet, you should not distort or forget anything either. This dichot­omy seems a deadlock until you find some narrow pass between the poles.

Thus even with vers libre one has to transform the original formula of the imaginary world, otherwise the poem would sound rotten in the target language, breaking the rules of good taste for the sake of primitive emotional perceptibility. The main matter of translating vers libre will be conveyed in syntax, though obey­ing the rules of euphony in the target language is also important (in our example, the [k-k] joints of the first variant simply kill any idea of a lyrical poem).

Much more complicated is the matter of translating a tradi­tionally structured poem. You must take into consideration not only the vast variety of metres, types of rhyme and forms of stan­za, not to mention the individuality of their combination in a par­ticular source poem, but also the highly probable difference in the way they function in the two languages. What a pure iambic pentameter can mean to English perception may not correspond to how and what it means to a Russian reader, and vice versa. Some translators lament the lack of rhyming resources in English

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Imagery in Translation

when it comes to translating the strong, pure rhymes of, say, Mdelstam. Presumably, this is what makes James Greene, the tra lator of Mandelstam's poetry into English, modestly admit have mostly had to eschew rhyme (but not half-rhyme, intei rhymes or assonance)... total "faithfulness", were it possible the "same" metre, rhyme-scheme, pattern of sounds, numbei syllables, line-length, etc., etc. — would be an absurdity." Jus — an absurdity. To found your translation on this cornersto you will find it natural to use trochee instead of iambus, two i instead of four, and to change the number of lines. Moreoi since rhyme is merely a nuisance, away with it! Then, as it h pens, Anna Akhmatova turns from a solemn rhythmical and r lodic voice into clumsy, incomprehensible prose (in the eve literal translation by the diligent Judith Henschemeiyer). You n call it "adaptation", "version", "imitation", etc.

The Russian tradition of poetry translation has develoj the opposite point of view on how to represent English verse Russian. Its basic principles are solid (yet, surprisingly, qi achievable): since the instructions of Valery Bryusov and Nike Gumilyov, an English poem in Russian translation should m the three requirements: equivalent metre, rhyme and line patte Comparing this with the quotation from James Greene above,) can see the difference that lies in one particular term: instead the "same" we use the word "equivalent," which may not nee sarily be "the same" in body, but the same in function. In other words, of value is not formal but functional equivalen Anyhow, you cannot expect a valuable translation substitute fc poem when the body has three arms instead of two, and, prol bly, only one eye. What Bryusov called "the method of trans tion" is the selection by the translator of the most important f tures in the source poem, those that determine its system of im; ery; it may be the metric pattern or rhyme, alliteration or syntac structure, a key word or a stylistic device. The proper choice the method of translation allows the translator to reconstruct • most important components of the source poem in the target 1;

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е.Certainly, one cannot expect that every formal detail of ource text is translatable but the task is to define which of may be neglected with the least negative effects.

To put into words the main difference between Russian and ish traditions of poetry translation, we may concede that Rus-translators often fall into the sin of "making the foreign poet d better in Russian," while their British/American counter-may feel a.t ease in making him (or her) not sound at all by il throwing off the original versification pattern, as too rigid, the sake of a new order." Which is probably no less a sin. results are dubious: in Russia, non-English speakers (read-read, know and love a whole host of British/American poets, >r as well as major, while to the average American reader the es of major 20^lh — century Russian poets are at best obscure actually known only to the university public.

Some poets are renowned in the English-speaking USA, :xample, not for their poetry as translated into English but ;r for their tragic fates — like Marina Tsvetaeva or Osip delshtam. Quoting Susan Miron from her review on Tsvetae-y Viktoria Schweitzer, "Outside the former Soviet Union, ina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is far better known today for her ide by hanging than for her poetry." This is due to translation certain extent. Tsvetaeva without her dashing rhymes, ner-j but well-arranged metre, and alliterative links between key ds, the unsurpassed play on sounds, which makes the very t of her poetry and gives a clue to the associative and imagi-¹ content, is a mere Jane Doe or some other decent poetic lan with no voice of her own. The purely semantic principle anslation is definitely inadequate in the case of Tsvetaeva.

There is a possible productive way for the theory of trans->n and translators of poetry, the comparative generative pros­it may serve as the basis for the theory of poetic translation will allow predicting the variety of actual prosodic parallels veen English and Russian systems of versification or recon-cting the basic model by its variants. There are some approach-