Intervention
Tempting Translations

Commentary can help a reader appreciate what's left out when a poem is translated from one language to another.  It can also be daunting.  Unless you're truly convinced that the original version of the poem is absolutely first-rate, why would you ever want to spend time with aridly philological blah-de-blah?

Translations can serve different ends.  When translating a canonical or internationally famous writer, one can be fairly sure that readers will put up with some degree of explanatory apparatus.  What if the point, though, is to persuade readers that this or that unfamiliar poet is worth their time?  That the writer has achieved something so impressive that it is worth encountering even via a flawed copy?

I just came across a short poem by a contemporary American poet, Peter Gizzi, in a Russian literary magazine called TextOnly.  The translation is by Galina Ermoshina, a creative writer and literary critic who has published articles on such figures as Sasha Sokolov, Elena Guro, and Vladimir Kazakov.  Immediately I began to ponder the practical and theoretical problems involved in promoting interchange between twenty-first century poetry scenes that are largely ignorant of each other.

Here's the original lyric, titled "Song of a Lexicon," as it appeared in Gizzi's volume Periplum, published by Avec Books in 1992:

It is not simple to say
           zero
this my double
and I equals the letters
           of my name

Darling if I come to you
as a selfish word
as dry pages in a book
          break my temper
and drown these spooks

It is only this house
          we enter
a difficult tenure
when others loiter

behind the library
          a vacant sign (28)

Gizzi's poem is representative of the 1990s turn in American poetry toward an oblique yet expressively lyrical mode that makes frequent use of solecisms, surreal imagery, and other disruptive devices.  It seems to be a love poem ("Darling if I come to you"), more specifically a love poem that warns the lover that their relationship will be rocky, "a difficult tenure," and that she or he should be prepared to respond forcefully ("break," "drown") to set things right if and when the speaker behaves badly ("selfish," "dry").  At the same time, the poem appears to agonize over what happens as people and emotions are set down on the page.  "I," the speaker in all his or her human complexity, is reduced to "the letters / of my name"; he or she is even reduced to a number ("zero") as a "double," as if on a tax form or a statistical table.  Gizzi mentions "a book" and "the library," too, making one wonder whether "this house" that "we enter" might be the poem itself, a house of words.  The title, "Song of a Lexicon," could be read as employing a subjective or objective genitive--in other words, the "lexicon" could be doing the singing, or it could be the thing sung about--but either way the love-relationship in the poem threatens to collapse into a "vacant sign," an aggregate of words (a lexicon?) that amounts to nothing ("zero").  

The intertwining here of sexual and textual is recognizably postmodern, a statement that combines a declaration of powerful feelings with a countervailing recognition that to use words is to debase and falsely skew the true nature of those feelings, to recast them as "dry pages in a book."  Perhaps the only valid response to receiving a love-poem-that-betrays-what-it-hopes-to-say is to reject written language altogether, that is, to "drown these spooks," the language that haunts you.

Gizzi's recent collections--Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) and The Outernationale (2007)--are among the premier publications of the last decade.  His unusual combination of sincere passion, self-conscious artistry, and rich sound play (note, for instance, the end rhyme here "temper" / "enter" / "tenure" / "loiter") have won him an appreciative audience on both the East and West Coasts.  The publication of a selection of his verse in Russian is an index of his growing reputation.  Here is Ermoshina's version of "Song of a Lexicon," first in Cyrillic and then transliterated:

Песнь Словаря

Не просто сказать
          зеро
Это мой двойник
И я равен буквам
          моего имени

Любимая, если я прихожу к тебе
как эгоистичное слово
как сухие страницы в книге
          сломай мое самообладание
и потопи эти призраки

Это — только тот дом
          в который мы входим
трудное пребывание
когда другие отстают

за библиотекой
          знак «свободно»

* * * * * * * *

Pesn' Slovaria

Ne prosto skazat'
          zero
Eto moi dvoinik
I ia raven bukvam
          moiego imeni

Liubimaia, iesli ia prikhozhu k tebe
kak egoistichnoie slovo
kak sukhiie stranitsy v knige
          slomai moie samoobladaniie
i potopi eti prizraki

Eto -- tol'ko tot dom
         v kotoryi my vkhodim
trudnoie prebyvaniie
kogda drugiie otstaiut

za bibliotekoi
         znak "svobodno"

Ermoshina does not strive to reproduce Gizzi's sound play or rhythm.  Her version's very literal, virtually a word-for-word transposition from English to Russian.  There is a fair amount of slant rhyme ("bukvam" / "dom" / "vkhodim," "tebe" / "knige"), but it does not follow the patterns in the original lyric, and the word choice seems to have been guided primarily by the search for semantic equivalence and only secondarily by the desire for aural similarity.

There are a couple instances of the loss of what Christopher Warley has referred to this week in his blog as "density."  For example, Gizzi's word "temper" has been been rendered as "samoobladaniie," which means roughly "self-control" or "self-possession."  Gizzi's phrase "break my temper" is clearly a metaphor, but its import is not easily pinned down.  Ermoshina has apparently chosen to read "temper" as akin to temperament or temperance.  Alternatively, she has taken "temper" to refer to the toughening of metal or glass through controlled heating, which would make "breaking" that "temper" mean something like "overcoming the strength and resistance that earlier stress  had produced."  But "temper," of course, could be intended to invoke the phrase "to have a temper," that is, to become easily angered, or it could be short for temperature.  One talks about fevers breaking, for example.  Ermoshina's "samoobladaniie" replaces an excitingly polysemous word with a blandly straightforward one.

Similarly, "znak 'svobodno'" is a strange choice of words with which to end the poem.  Gizzi's "a vacant sign" is highly evocative.  Given the previous line--"behind the library"--one would normally expect "vacant" to preceed "lot."  Instead, we hear about a "sign."  That is peculiar.  Signs can be blank, and any English major worth her salt is familiar with the term empty signifier, but the word vacant usually means uninhabited or depopulated, that is, sans people, not simply empty.  Does Gizzi have in mind the "(no) vacancy" signs that appear in front of so many motels and hotels?  Alternatively, of course, "vacant" can describe a face or a look, legible "signs" that person might be physically present yet mentally absent.  Ermoshina was evidently stumped by the lack of an exact equivalent of vacant in Russian.  Her solution, "znak 'svobodno'," means "sign [that says] '[it is] free'."  A reader is presumably free to fill in this sign however she wishes, or this sign might be free from imposition or definition.  Regardless, "svobodno" has positive connotations that conclude the poem on an entirely different note than the more downbeat "vacant."

These are textbook instances of the inability of poetry to translate well.  Another common if less often discussed problem is syntactical.  Ermoshina's Russian smoothes out the grammatical oddities in Gizzi's lyric.  In the first stanza, "I equals" stands out as awkward.  The verb and the pronoun do not agree.  As in Rimbaud's famous statement "je est un autre," "I" here becomes impersonal, a way of referring to a part of speech or a generic type, "whoever speaks."  The Russian translation is "ia raven," a pronoun plus an adjective, meaning "I [am] equal."  Moreover, "raven" is the masculine singular form of the adjective.  This "I" is male.  There is no gender attributed either to speaker or to the person addressed in the original; Ermoshina nevertheless goes on to heterosexualize the lyric, translating "Darling" as "Liubimaia," the feminine form of the passive participle beloved.  What could be a romance between the (neuter) words on the page and a nonspecific but "[d]arling" reader is rescripted according to ye ole marriage plot.

A more subtle issue arises in the next-to-last stanza.  "It is only this house / we enter."  In English, the line break occurs at a moment of syntactical ambiguity.  The word "that" might or might not be omitted.  The two lines could be two simple declarative sentences or a single complex one with a subordinate clause.  True, either way it doesn't much affect the sense of the passage.  We know that a house is being pointed out, and we know that "we enter" it.  Nonetheless, the coexistence of two possible grammatical constructions causes a slight stumble when reading.  The grammar is hazy, almost as unclear as the landscape that serves as the setting.  Ermoshina eliminates this stumbling block.  "Eto--tol'ko tot dom / v kotoryi my vkhodim":  "This is only that house / into which we enter."  Her "v kotoryi," "into which," is like Robert Frost writing a poem called "The Road Most Traveled" about a path that never forks.

Why dwell on these problems?  I do not intend to criticize Ermoshina.  Translation is also interpretation, and a translator must improvise when the target language fails to provide exactly congruent words or expressions.  Her version of "Song of a Lexicon" suggests that she finds two aspects of Gizzi's poem especially stimulating.  First is its highly enjambed free verse.  Free verse began in Russian poetry with Aleksandr Blok and Mikhail Kuzmin back in the early twentieth century, but down to the present it remains rare and surprisingly marginal.  Rhyme and meter continue to predominate.  There are, it is true, a handful of writers such as Gennadii Aigi and Vsevolod Nekrasov whose prosody somewhat resembles Gizzi's, but there is simply no equivalent to the continuous sophisticated formal tradition in which Gizzi participates, which extends from William Carlos Williams to George Oppen to Robert Creeley to Rae Armantrout.  Ermoshina carefully preserves the placement of Gizzi's words on the page because she finds their layout integral to their impact, to their edginess and novelty.

Second, the Russian translation emphasizes the underlying dramatic scenario, the intimacy between "I" and "you."  One can conjecture that Gizzi's poem, as a love lyric, is estranging for a Russian reader.  It conveys passion, and its direct address is stirring.  (I can't be sure, but "Liubimaia," "Beloved," does not seem to capture the archness of the word "Darling" when tossed off by an American poet.  "Liubimaia" sets up readers differently, predisposing them to take the injunctions that follow more seriously.)  Moreover, the asseverations of eros coexist with hints of doom or nihilism ("zero," "a vacant sign").  In translation, Gizzi manages to be both intensely self-aware and self-reflexive (like, perhaps, the Moscow conceptualists) and lushly capital-R romantic (like, in a way, like their rivals the metarealists), a balance that could be quite appealing in a Russian literary culture determined to move beyond the impasses of the 1980s and 90s.

I do have to confess, though, that this translation elides precisely those aspects of Gizzi's poetry that draw me to it.  His use here of a Williams-esque free verse stanza is skilled, granted, but he has done nothing earth-shattering with it.  Lorine Niedecker, Amiri Baraka, Cole Swensen:  other figures stretch and reinvent the form in ways that repay close scrutiny.  True, Gizzi's tone is key to his success:  an unhip soulful sincerity.  What makes that pose seductive, however, are the stutters, not-quite-links, evasive images, failed comparisons, and other odd turns in his language.  His lyrics are beautiful yet broken.  In the U.S. since the 1960s, the transcendental pretensions of verse have been rigorously deconstructed, critiqued, and dissected in the anatomy theater of the academy, but he forges ahead anyway, making due with a wounded tattered discourse.  The Russian version of "Song of a Lexicon" pares away much of the mystery and much of the "vacancy" that make Gizzi's poetry simultaneously compelling and mournful.  I can only hope that, as more translations of Gizzi appear in Russia, readers there are tempted into a deeper more prolonged engagement with the English-language originals, whether via translations-with-glosses or via direct encounter.  

Could a facing bilingual translation accomplish that end?  Certainly, that's the preferred treatment these days for foreign poets deemed worthy of a Big Push in the U.S.  But how to justify the expense and the labor?  Are rave reviews by native speakers sufficient if those raves rest on small, nearly untranslatable details?

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