In this series, we listen in as Drunken Boat’s renowned translators talk with one another about art, craft, and the role of translation in the world. This fourth installment features Mary Jane White and Tony Brinkley.
Mary Jane White, MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop, NEA Fellowships (in poetry and translation). Tsvetaeva translations: Starry Sky to Starry Sky (1988) New Year’s, an elegy for Rilke; Poem of the Hill (The New England Review); Poem of the End (The Hudson Review), reprinted in Poets Translate Poets, (Syracuse 2013).
Tony Brinkley teaches English at the University of Maine, where he is also Senior Faculty Associate at the University’s Franco-American Centre and President of Maine’s Bridge Year Educational Services. His poetry and translations have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Four Centuries, The Hungarian Review, The New Review of Literature, Otoliths, Shofar, Metamorphosis, and World Literature. He is co-editor with Keith Hanley of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press).
MARY JANE WHITE: How did you find yourself doing this — translating?
TONY BRINKLEY: Somewhere around 2001, I started to try to write poetry (I had stopped trying to write poetry in my 20s because no one I asked thought the poems I was writing were poems), I discovered in my 50s perhaps that I could. At the time I was working with Holocaust materials — especially under the influence of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah — and I found that I could not write poetry about the Shoah, that I could only listen and report. Then, after a conversation with a friend, I started looking at Soviet materials, particularly Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s Hope Against Hope — and for whatever reason I found in her memoir the possibility for a kind of documentary poetry that I could write. I read a great deal, beginning with translations of Osip Mandelshtam’s Voronezh Notebooks, and I wrote a long documentary poem called Stalin’s Eyes. But I couldn’t read Mandelshtam in Russian. It was like hearing about music that I couldn’t hear. So with another friend, Raina Kostova, I began to translate Mandelshtam. We began with his “Ode to Stalin” because Joseph Brodsky said it was one of the great poems of the last century, and after the Ode, we translated Mandelshtam’s “Lines on the Unknown Soldier.” They were published. The translations seemed to have a way of working. So I didn’t stop. But I started to wonder, could I translate other poets? I tried translating three other Russian poets, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Tsvetsaeva. Then I tried translating Rilke from German, Rimbaud and Valéry from French. And each time I think I found a different poetry in English. Each time I think I found something new — at least for me — in English poetry. And that was very exciting.
MARY JANE WHITE: Tony, when you discovered you could translate, did you find that your study of what we call “close reading,” particularly with Harold Bloom, a teacher of yours at Yale, was of any service to you as you stumbled into translating so many years later?
TONY BRINKLEY: I studied at Yale in the 1960s and I began to translate at the beginning of this century — how odd to think of it that way — but yes, I think so, certainly. Bloom had — Bloom has — an incredible passion for poetry — I was quite depressed at the time I was his student — and his weekly seminar on modern poetry (we studied Yeats, Lawrence, Stevens, and Crane) was life-saving for me I think in many ways. This was before The Anxiety of Influence and its dark night of the soul, although I believe Bloom was at work on The Anxiety then. But at the time no Covering Cherub had yet descended to guard the way to the Tree of Life. Poets still seemed generous in Bloom’s classes, and his urgency — because his way of reading had an intense urgency — offered what he would call, what I learned from him to call, a blessing, an opening to more life and a time without limits. And of course in the 1960s, “close reading” — you might say, “literary reasoning” — was simply what everyone did, but in Bloom’s case the texts were grounded in the Romantic tradition and close-reading was very close to Torah reading, a mode of dialogic interpretation that Geoffrey Hartman fostered as well. And as Jewish — or as a half-Jewish kid who had been raised on C. S. Lewis and knew nothing about Judaism — this too was liberating. Years later when I began translating poetry, I think I found that translating was not only another way of reading closely — even of Torah reading — but that it spared me of any need to analyze the poems I was reading or conclude with any definitive interpretation. It was all dialogue, even intimate conversation. I could simply, deeply engage — more and more deeply — the experience of reading (really of listening) but without any imperative for later reasoning. Henri Bergson says that from an experience you can derive an analysis but from the analysis you cannot derive the experience. Translating for me is an experience that does not require an analysis either as a precondition or as a belated, critical assertion of will. Power is felt but no will to power is required. And translation offers as one of its exceptional gift, the closest of possible readings.
WHITE: I like that. So that for you a critical reading is not required?
BRINKLEY: Not to engage in too critical an analysis has almost become its own categorical imperative — a little like the prohibition against excessive representation — idol worship — in the Torah? Wisława Szymbroska says that poetry should fully engage what you cannot know; only in that way is it open to everything. I’m not sure that it is necessary to know what the poems you translate mean. Each time you try to determine what a poem means, don’t you preclude other possibilities, and isn’t a poem — as Wordsworth say of imagination — always, insistently “evermore about to be”? The confusion that literary criticism often fosters I think is to mistake the analysis of a poem with an underlying truth. Translation has let me work with the experience of a poem without excessive analysis, and I find that very liberating. There are things you need to know in order to translate Mandelshtam or Baudelaire, but there are also things that you don’t need to know — at least in the way that practical criticism seems to encourage. Walter Benjamin, whose practice as an historian was also a practice of translation, says in the Arcades Project, that he doesn’t need to say, only show. And translation leads to that possibility as well, I think. I don’t need to say what a poem means, only show what I found in English that in turn will show what might be found in the original. The relation of the poem in English to the poem in French or in Russian is deictic, a way of pointing out. When I do critical arguing (and I’ve done a fair amount — given my profession), for me there’s always an anxiety that goes with it, some struggle with an underlying need to control an argument, a dialectical cul-de-sac or assertion and negation. But when I translate, there’s no anxiety, just this incredible pleasure of discovering what might be happening in a poem and participating in that. It tends toward what Kant called the mathmatical sublime. For every n, there is always n+1, there is always more. Of course the translation is never the original, but that is more a matter of excess than of negation for me, not a question of not x for any x, but of more life. Ideally a translation is always accompanied by the original. They face each other and the gap between marks a limit which translation always faces — that a translation in one language cannot be the same, cannot be fully adequate as a representation of what is said in another language. An impossibility. I don’t think of this as an obstruction so much as a defining characteristic of translation as a genre, of what Benjamin calls “translatability.” Impossibility is fundamental to the genre, something to work with.
“… particularly since what I write could be called free-verse or freed verse, even though I’m translating poems which are very formal, since I am looking for an idiom in English — or better an American idiom — I trust music to help me find a rhythm or impulse in an American idiom. At first when I started with Mandelshtam, I also started with Russian music.”
WHITE: Could you talk about the role of music in your translation practice?
BRINKLEY: Well, I think one of the things that happens when I’m trying to translate a poem is that I’m looking for unexpected rhythms. And particularly in English, and particularly since what I write could be called free-verse or freed verse, even though I’m translating poems which are very formal, since I am looking for an idiom in English — or better an American idiom — I trust music to help me find a rhythm or impulse in an American idiom. At first when I started with Mandelshtam, I also started with Russian music. Shostakovich — particularly his string quartets. Or for Pasternak, Sciabin for obvious reasons. But for an American idiom — particularly in a freed verse — I wanted American rhythms and for that, for me, the most generous place to find American rhythms is in American jazz. For example, for Valéry, Thelonius Monk. For Rimbaud, late Coltrane. For Mandelshtam, Bud Powell, particularly “Un Poco Loco.” As an interesting coincidence if it is a coincidence: there is a repeated three-beat (three violin strokes) in Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet which can sound like a fist beating on a door at night and replays a passage from Beethoven’s 14th String Quartet. And a three-beat (on the piano) occurs in “Un Poco Loco.” For me it translates the Shoskakovich into an American rhythm and I can hear it as a kind of coda between lyrics throughout the Voronezh Notebooks. So I have found myself translating the Notebooks with that coda repeatedly in mind. An underlying terror — like the pacing of boots on the other side of the wall in the first Voronezh poem. I don’t know very much about music but I like to listen. I think translation is a way of listening and that translating into English involves very careful listening to the English that the poet you are translating now seems to be “writing” in. Of course that is a fiction — the poet you are translating is not writing in English — but I like to try to suspend that disbelief.
“Tsvetaeva says that poems are always translations, so I wanted to see how she translated a poem I had already translated for Drunken Boat. I wanted to learn from her practice in order to understand her better. Also your practice and mine. This is still work-in-progress, but I think there is something quite wonderful to discover.”
MARY JANE WHITE: Tony, I know that after I sent you an article about Tsvetaeva as translator, you started translating her Russian translation of Baudelaire’s poem “Le Voyage.” From 1939 to 1941, after she returned to the Soviet Union up until shortly before her suicide, she supported herself as a translator and probably valued more than any of the other translation work she did, her translation of “Le Voyage.” Could we talk about that?
TONY BRINKLEY: Well I think translating Tsvetaeva’s translation has been a way for me to respond to your beautiful translations of Tsvetaeva and to our conversations about Tsvetaeva. Perhaps as a dedication to you? Your understanding of this is much deeper than mine, but Tsvetaeva says that poems are always translations, so I wanted to see how she translated a poem I had already translated for Drunken Boat. I wanted to learn from her practice in order to understand her better. Also your practice and mine. This is still work-in-progress, but I think there is something quite wonderful to discover. Like many translations of Baudelaire in my experience (and this certainly includes my own translations), Tsvetaeva’s, while not what Lowell would call an imitation, still takes many liberties. Baudelaire seems to require translators to take lines of flight, make discoveries of analagous ways of saying what his poems say. So I was interested to see how Tsvetaeva would do this. And her Russian translations of “Le Voyage” are much more elliptical than the original. The number of words and images are significantly pared down. It is as if there is a fundamendal force or energy at work in the way Tsvetaeva translates — Mandelshtam would call this an impulse (порывь) — which does not have time for everything Baudelaire’s poem has to say. Her translations of Baudelaire are less reliant than the original on images and more reliant on — more naked to — порывь. She is translating the impulse. Perhaps she can teach us how to do that?
MARY JANE WHITE: I know when I read your translation of Baudelaire and then your translation of Tsvetaeva’s translation of Baudelaire, it was very apparent to me that her personal voice, her signature use of terms — of the ways she uses them — what Pound would call the logopoeia that organizes the logic of her poetry — now seemed to have invaded Baudelaire’s poem, penetrated somehow in the passage through Tsvetaeva’s Russian. The same parallelisms and logical constructions, which are very much her way of thinking, seemd to have survived the further translation you made from Russian to English. It is very interesting how texts give birth to each other.
“To be able to speak out through a mask of translation is an intriguing strategy. To speak out but from a position of safety.”
TONY BRINKLEY: Benjamin says that translations are an Überleben or survival of the original, and if Baudelaire’s poem survives in English, perhaps Tsvetaeva’s Baudelaire survives as well? As part of what Benjamin also calls a Fortleben, a continuing life? Luce Irigaray says of love that passages between us lose themselves in each other, and perhaps we can think of Baudelaire and Tsvetaeva and their translator in that way?
Here are the opening stanzas of “Le Voyage” in Baudelaire’s French:
Pour l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes,
L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!
Un matin nous partons, le cerveau plein de flamme,
Le coeur gros de rancune et de désirs amers,
Et nous allons, suivant le rythme de la lame,
Berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers:
And now in Tsvetaeva’s Russian:
Для отрока, в ночи глядящего эстампы,
За каждым валом — даль, за каждой далью — вал.
Как этот мир велик в лучах рабочей лампы!
Ах, в памяти очах — как бесконечно мал!
В один ненастный день, в тоске нечеловечьей,
Не вынеся тягот, под скрежет якорей,
Мы всходим на корабль, и происходит встреча
Безмерности мечты с предельностью морей.
I translated Baudelaire’s French into this English:
For a child in love with lithographs and
maps, his hunger and the universe are
equals. How vast his world appears at night
beneath a lamp — how small a memory!
We depart one morning — brains enflamed,
hearts coarse with spite and bitter wishes.
And we’re off, following wave-rhythms
cradling infinities, rocked by the sea’s finitude:
And I translated Tsvetaeva’s Russian like this:
For a boy at night who stares at prints —
past every wave, a prospect — and past every
prospect, waves — the mir — how vast in lamp-
light! — but how infinitely small in memory’s eye!
One foul day — inhuman melancholy
now unwilling to be anchored longer —
we board a ship to meet immensity —
dream without horizons — sea-bound —
However adequate or inadequate my translations, what is immediately obvious, of course, is that Tsvetaeva’s parallelism of wave-prospect and prospect-wave is in her poem but not in Baudelaire’s. At the same time mir has a wealth of associations in Russian that le monde does not offer in French and world would not offer in English. Tsvetaeva’s boy (отрока, really an adolescent) is not Baudelaire’s l’enfant. Where Baudelaire has maps as well as prints, Tsvetaeva has prints but no maps. And yet, it seems to me, that Tsvetaeva has beautifully found the impulse in the Baudelaire’s French and let that impulse shape her Russian. Everything Tsvetaeva does in her translation follows from Baudelaire’s. The substitutions and elisions are hers but I don’t think she is departing from Baudelaire. Or perhaps they are departing together? A dialogue perhaps? In engaging his voice in her Russian, she is also responding to his voice with her voice, losing each other in each other. I suppose that I am trying to respond to them both, to overhear what they are saying and then, perhaps, to join in their intimacy? I try to imagine what Tsvetaeva in 1940 Moscow found in the poem Baudelaire wrote in 1860. Certainly she was able to do in a translation what the Soviet authorities would not have allowed published in her own verse. During the 1930s Benjamin was using Baudelaire and 19th Century, capitalist Paris, as a way of engaging 20th Century, fascist Europe. Benjamin’s studies of Baudelaire were never simply an attempt to represent a past moment “as it really was,” but “to grasp a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger . . . when even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” an “enemy [who] has not ceased to be victorious.” Benjamin’s histories were not in that sense “faithful” translation. He was “fanning the spark of hope in the past,” searching a broken world in order to find something that was waiting to be found but that might only be legible at the moment. Baudelaire gains a new legibility, not in what he wrote but in what he writes now, in das Jetztzeit. And for Tsvetaeva in Moscow in 1940, in Mocow’s Fascist-Stalinist present? “Le Voyage” is structured by a child’s disappointments because what seems to be new — and what recalls from childhood those moments that were always renewed — turns out to only another novelty. And Tsvetaeva’s “Плаванье”? Her translation of Baudelaire title — the Russian word means sailing or swimming — suggests to me an immersion in which drowning is always a possibility, even an inevitability. That possibility is present in Baudelaire’s poem throughout but perhaps with less emphasis. Tsvetaeva’s title reminds me of Mandelshtam’s fascination with sailing in his 1933 essay on Dante and of how tacking in sailing had for him the feel of negotiated dangers during a prison visit.
MARY JANE WHITE: To be able to speak out through a mask of translation is an intriguing strategy. To speak out but from a position of safety.
TONY BRINKLEY: Yes.
Mandelshtam did not sit at a table. He felt the impulse stir and for the most part — according to Nadzheda Mandelshtam — it was all done in his head as he murmured and paced. Poetry was too restless a process to sit still for.
MARY JANE WHITE: And Mandelshtam?
TONY BRINKLEY: Mandelshtam never used translation in that way as far as I know, but Pasternak did; he used translation as a way of writing poetry through other means. His translation of Hamlet is a case in point. He was preparing it for Meyerhold in the late 1930s, but Meyerhold was arrested, tortured, and killed. Meyerhold’s wife was brutally murdered, but Pasternak, who has every reason to be afraid, nevertheless completed the translation. When Stalin banned its performance, he read portions of the translation to an audience, a kind of one-man performance, that he recalls in his poem “Hamlet,” which he also performed for an audience, and which became the first of the Zhivago lyrics. The danger and terror were palpable. Beria included Pasternak’s name on a list of victims, but Stalin warned Beria, “don’t touch that cloud dweller.” I think Tsvetaeva may have translated with Pasternak’s courage though Pasternak’s courage was far more strategic? At the same time that she was translating Baudelaire, she was also translating Lorca, another victim of Fascism whom she, as a victim of Fascism, could still translate with relative safety. Unlike Mandelshtam — as far as I know — she never called Stalin a Fascist, at least not under interogation in the Lubyanka. But then it is hard for me to imagine Mandelshtam as a translator of other poets?
MARY JANE WHITE: Why?
TONY BRINKLEY: I don’t know what Tsvetaeva’s habits of writing were, but Mandelshtam in some ways was not a writer at all, at least when he was writing poetry. Pasternak describes Zhivago in the Urals with Lara, at a table writing, finding the impulse in the writing as he wrote, but Mandelshtam did not sit at a table. He felt the impulse stir and for the most part — according to Nadzheda Mandelshtam — it was all done in his head as he murmured and paced. Poetry was too restless a process to sit still for. He did not sit and read what he was writing or had written and then rework it. An unworded urgency would find words and then he paced back and forth with them. He took them for a walk. Or perhaps they took him for a walk. He didn’t try to stop them, though later he would go back over them — for the most part in his head — to see where some words were placeholders for words that he hadn’t found (or that hadn’t found him) yet. Writing down was more of an afterthought. I think translation — the need to return to another written text — might have interfered with his walk?
MARY JANE WHITE: Well, you know, although Tsvetaeva was a great hiker, particularly when she was living in Czechoslovakia, she wrote at a table, she writes very frequently with affection for the table.
TONY BRINKLEY: Whereas Mandelshtam has no affection for the table at all.
MARY JANE WHITE: Which reminds me of Yeats, you know. We know from the time that Ezra Pound was his personal secretary that Yeats would walk and begin to hear — as he described it to Pound, a “chune” — and then the words would begin to come. Like Mandelshtam? Tsvetaeva is different. She was always an early morning-worker, and she would sit at a table. In her elegy for Rilke, she wrote about Rilke’s head in his hand, “his cupped hand,” with “no table for his elbow” after death. And you just know, this was her own self-portrait — of her way of writing.
TONY BRINKLEY: And Mandelshtam was not like that. When I am trying to translate Mandelshtam (and I hope this carries over into other translations I do, but this is something I learned from Mandelshtam), I experience the work of translating as a sort of rush, not a moment by moment choice, but a rush of possibilities once they get moving. And then I have to go back and see if any of it works, is the rhythm I thought was there actually on the page; where are the placeholders, what words might they be holding a place for. But for me — it’s not as I think it may be for many translators, very good ones (and perhaps it would be better if I were) — it is not a studied activity. So I don’t walk but it is as if I were taking a walk. I take a walk on the page.
“One of the things I more than admire in your Tsvetaeva translations is the poetry, how beautiful the music in your translations is. And it seems to me in your Tsvetaeva meaning emerges from rhythm. It is not that you have meanings and then you put them to rhythm. It’s rather you start with the rhythms.”
MARY JANE WHITE: But I think you told me you always start with a dictionary?
TONY BRINKLEY: Yes always. I always operate as if I didn’t know what the words say. In part that is just being honest. Because I really don’t know the languages I am translating from. But perhaps I also don’t really know the English words I am translating into? I look up all the words, even those I already know, so that I can read them again, listen to them again. Mandelshtam said that the words need to wake up so that they can take you on the road, a road that has no destination. This reminds me of something Garcia Marquez says about things, that they have a life of their own, you just need to wake them up. Or perhaps you need to wake up to their life, what Wordsworth calls “the life of things.” So maybe the dictionary for me is a way of waking the words up, of the Russian or French waking up words in English, or of waking me up to the English words so that we can go on the road? I try not to rely on “predetermined codes of decision” (that’s Wordsworth’s phrase and he says it is a great enemy of pleasure).
I think one of the experiences of “close reading” that we talked about earlier is that with anything you read you have to learn how to read it and in the process you have to learn how to read again. Otherwise reading becomes a bad habit. And you don’t know how to read a poem until you read it — even if you are reading it again. So part of the dictionary-practice may be another way of relearning how to read. And by focusing on each word — each word, word by word — perhaps it also protects me from the habit of trying to know what the poem means. It remains a “work-in-progess,” a play of minute particulars that has not come to an end. There is an executive function that arises out of my academic training as a critic which close attention to words helps me to avoid in the working moment. The British actor Mark Rylance says of acting that the actor should never be more certain about a character than the character is about the character. If you are playing Hamlet, you should not have certainties about who Hamlet is that Hamlet himself lacks. I don’t think a reader should ever be more certain about a poem than the poem is? In other words what Keats may have meant by “negative capability,” and which Kean offered him in his performances of Richard III and King Lear.
MARY JANE WHITE: That sounds like my favorite definition of sentimentality, which is “caring for a thing more than God would.”
TONY BRINKLEY: Or in the context of Torah reading, of loving the Torah more than God or than God would or could?
MARY JANE WHITE: Let me ask you this: When you read in translation what, if anything, makes you uneasy as a reader? Do you ever read translations where you just think, “Oh, I’m a little uneasy with this?”
TONY BRINKLEY: Well, when I am reading translations of poetry, I would like there to be music, not the music of the original — how would that be possible — but a music that the original makes it possible to hear in English. Of course different translations will find different musics, but when there isn’t any that I can hear, then I can’t feel the impulse and where there is no impulse then — and I am thinking of something Mandelshtam said about poetry — where there is no impulse, there is only paraphrase, a sure sign, he adds, that “the sheets have not been rumpled and poetry has not spent the night.” I want translations to be faithful, but I also want poetry to spend the night. One of the things I more than admire in your Tsvetaeva translations is the poetry, how beautiful the music in your translations is. And it seems to me in your Tsvetaeva meaning emerges from rhythm. It is not that you have meanings and then you put them to rhythm. It’s rather you start with the rhythms. The rhythms are there, and they turn sense into sense. They become meaningful, but the music comes first. In Tsvetaeva and in your translations of Tsvetaeva. They begin as impulse. Or that is my impression.
“ … after I translated Rimbaud’s poem, it occurred to me more than once that it would be fun to send it to Drunken Boat since “Le bateau ivre” is the title poem for the journal.”
MARY JANE WHITE: Do you enjoy reading multiple translations?
TONY BRINKLEY: Yes, very much. Even when they make me uneasy. Despite what I just said, I am not very critical. I am just looking for something and in every good translation — even when I can’t find the poetry — there is always something to find. There is always a generosity, the kinds of attention which Benjamin thought were the finest forms of prayer. At the same time I would never imagine that any translation — my own included — could ever say what the original says. That is why if I am trying to write about any work in translation — and when I find something that interests me — I always look at the original even if I don’t know the language in which it is written. It is a possible — more than possible — to work with a language that you do not know?
MARY JANE WHITE: I find that very interesting. It makes me think of someone like Ezra Pound translating Chinese. He’s relying on translations into Japanese and he was vactually working from notes of an English scholar, Ernest Fenellosa, who wasworking with a Japanese scholar. So as a translator, Pound is at all of these removes of readership which contribute somehow to the translations into English of Chinese poems that have passed through a filter of Japanese scholarship. But tell me about the Rimbaud project you participated in for Drunken Boat? How did you feel about all the variations?
TONY BRINKLEY: I didn’t really know there was a project when I first translated Rimbaud’s poem. But after I translated Rimbaud’s poem, it occurred to me more than once that it would be fun to send it to Drunken Boat since “Le bateau ivre” is the title poem for the journal. And then I saw the annoucement of the project so I sent my translation to Anna Rosenwong. And from what Anna told me, she sort of adopted my translation as a point of departure for the other variations. She published all of it, and then variations by others on three stanzas that come near the end of Rimbaud’s poem, quite wonderful variations that as sequenced in Drunken Boat become more and more experimental. And so I found it interesting that — from the point of view of the exercise — in a way I got to play the role of Rimbaud. My translation wasn’t the experiment, it was what other variations seemed to be experimenting from. And I was very interested by the experiments, how each in its own way, played with the impossibility that translation presents and that we discussed earlier, how each of the experiments seems to point to something (perhaps more than one thing) that is vital in Rimbaud’s verse.
MARY JANE WHITE: As I read I wondered if the arrangement from the most literal to the most experimental wasn’t part of Anna Rosenwong’s editorial intention.
TONY BRINKLEY: I think it probably was.
MARY JANE WHITE: Because as a reader, as I read through the later translations, I thought, “These are spinning farther and farther away.” A little like a drunken boat. Bit by bit the stitches are getting looser — like loosening the tension of the thread running through a sewing machine — and, you know, greater liberties are being taken with the original text. I thought it was really quite wonderful to see the sort of unravelling of the original ends to the ever more fringe-like. To me it was very fascinating, a very fascinating project to have filled out a spectrum from the very tension of impossibility — trying to make both a literal and beautiful translation in English — to using translation as a point of departure. But differently, let’s say, than Ezra Pound, who’s doing something like the “Homage to Sextus Propertius” as a critical assessment of the original through translation rather than through scholarly writing. That’s not what the Drunken Boat exercise does. There are multiple take-offs from the same original — more or less farfetched. Or: I see them as a family, a very strange set of brothers and sisters.
“I always think of translation as “wrestling with an angel.” The angel never tells Jacob the angel’s name — the angel only gives Jacob a new name — but how well you wrestle is what counts.”
TONY BRINKLEY: The exercise reminded me of the way Dan Tepfer performs Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Tepfer has the gifts of a Keith Jarrett or a Fred Hersh, and what he does is, he first plays each variation literally, as Bach wrote it, and then he plays a jazz variation. To feel surprised can feel very powerful, and it is quite surprising — and very powerful — how Tepfer plays the Bach and then finds an opening in the music (a different opening every night) to improvise through (the “opening” is his metaphor). And also how each jazz improvisation continues to be Bach. He stays with the original — he is faithful — perhaps in the way that Tsvetaeva’s variations on Baudelaire also stay with Baudelaire (and as I hope in my translation from her Russian do as well):
Through underworld scars we
travel cheerfully — out of the darkness,
voices call out to us: ‘Bring us your
hunger — you who are famished —
here is the lotus, fruit for your longing —
gather the fruit, taste our last oozings —
here — every season, each day — lotus-
moisture — where lotus dreams suck for
desire . . .Seductive tongue! Underworld nectar! . . .
drawn with each stroke through the black water.
And we will sing to you — parched from the fire:
“Refresh your heart — swim to Electra!”
This is not what Baudelaire wrote, and it is not what Tsvetaeva wrote — and it is only one experiment, one out of many — but in a way I hope that it is what Baudelaire wrote and it is what Tsvetaeva wrote. In a way I would like to think that it is also their experiment.
MARY JANE WHITE: I always think of translation as “wrestling with an angel.” The angel never tells Jacob the angel’s name — the angel only gives Jacob a new name — but how well you wrestle is what counts.
TONY BRINKLEY: And the angel may not even be an angel. We never know? The Hebrew calls him “someone,” “some man.” Jacob thinks he has seen God face to face, but some readers think he has wrestling with the angel of death. This goes back to many of the texts we have been wrestling with as well since I think for Mandelshtam certainly, I suspect for Tsvetaeva, certainly for Baudelaire and Rimbaud, their poetry often wrestles with — wrestles or embraces death. Baudelaire ends with death in “Le Voyage,” not death as an angel but as a Captain, perhaps as Ulyssess (I think he was thinking of Tennyson). And so, of course, as Baudelaire’s translator Tsvetava ends her translation of “Swimming” or of “Sailing” with her death as well:
Death! My old Captain! It’s time! The wind
rises! Death, my Dear, this climate bores us!
Though water and sky are black as ink,
a thousand suns have dawned within us!
Deceived sailors reveal the deeps —
hunger for what the sun surveys —
dive where Eden and Hell are one —
the deep Unknown — to find the New!
TONY BRINKLEY (Cont’d): Doesn’t this speak for Tsvetaeva in 1940 Moscow?
MARY JANE WHITE: And Mandelshtam?
TONY BRINKLEY: How does he turn the threat of death in a moment of reprieve, a blessing rather than trauma which numbs you so that you can’t think about anything. How does he translate the threat?
MARY JANE WHITE: I certainly feel that struggle throughout the Voronezh Notebooks.
TONY BRINKLEY: But then the poems come and the moments of reprieve are real. The “Lines on the Unknown Soldier” end: “and centuries encircle me with fire.” He is a victim of course in that circle of fire which Robert Lowell translated as “barbwire.” But he is also a magus in a fiery circle, the “master” as Stalin once called him. He translates the threat both ways. Isn’t that wonderful? Mandelshtam can do this with a sound — ось, for example, which as a word can mean axis or wasp but is also a syllable that his given name Осип shares with Stalin’s given name Иосиф. Life and death? The poet and the Tsar? Now we will always be together? Ось is not easy to translate in any way that carries the phonetic image, but I like to find words when I translate Mandelshtam that share that image with Mandelshtam’s Russian: “gossip,” or “oscillate,” “cost,” but particularly “loss” (if I cancel the last letter, I get Blake name for the prophet of imagination, Los, the power that is never quite lost).
“ … one of the things I like most about working with the dictionary. It requires that I begin with a space in which the words can float up. And when all the words have begun to float, then you have the pleasure of seeing what they might wish to do.”
MARY JANE WHITE: So meaning arises directly out of sound? That is certainly true for Tsvetaeva. It’s true at the syllable level, in the roots of words. She frequently takes a word where a change in a vowel or consonant will evoke another word . . .
TONY BRINKLEY: Like “screen” and “scream”?
MARY JANE WHITE: Tsvetaeva exploits that kind of “near-sound” all the time. As a translator I try to find opportunities in English to make that signature move. When I have the opportunity to use sound in the way she does, I want to be attentive to it. I often think of the word that floats under the word. As a poet I often think of that. Sometime in revision you just let the word that’s beneath float up and replace the word that was its placeholder. As a translator, I don’t know that you can always — what do I want to say — track it in that way. But if, as you’re sitting at the desk, you know, with your head in your hands — that’s what I do — and some felicity occurs that is similar to the kind of felicity I see in the Russian, then I think, okay, that a gift and let it go ahead and float up.
TONY BRINKLEY: I think that is one of the things I like most about working with the dictionary. It requires that I begin with a space in which the words can float up. And when all the words have begun to float, then you have the pleasure of seeing what they might wish to do. Like characters in a novel that is only now being written, when they discover a will of their own. But it has required the patience of looking up each word individually, seeing all the things each word can translate as — even when that is not what they can possibly mean in this context — and then the words begin to have their own life. Then you are ready for the road?
BETWEEN US: MARY JANE WHITE AND TONY BRINKLEY was originally published in DrunkenBoat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.