Translation? More Questions than Answers by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

The following idea came to me the other day: Would one demand from two friends, that one happened to have, that they should not only keep close company, but that they should interchange roles, knowing all the while that these two have very little, if at all in common, meaning that they have very different characters and tastes in life? Certainly not.

And yet. If English and Greek were human beings they would be as different as day and night. I was asked by someone recently, how come I don't conceal anything in my poetry, how is it that I don't use "shutters", as the person in question put it.

I answered that I had never thought of it and that probably the flaw of poetry that was coming out of me was taking me where it did. But later I gave it some more thought and I wondered if it was the fact that I was writing in Greek, that my mother tongue was Greek, that made this openness so natural. To quote George Steiner: "certain cultures speak less than others; some modes of sensibility prize taciturnity and elision, others reward prolixity and semantic ornamentation". Elsewhere, I think, he says that English is a language that was made in order to conceal more than to reveal. And obviously Greek is the exact opposite. The fact that in English you can talk for some length about your love without having to disclose - grammatically speaking - the sex of the object of your adoration, is I think quite indicative. I am not a linguist, but I have a feeling that grammar is like the gestures of a person: they betray this person's weaknesses and strengths. An inflected language gesticulates much more than an non-inflected one. And finally; to add yet another metaphor -, often, when I translate, especially poetry, I have the feeling that I am a seamstress and that I have been given a piece of material. What I am going to make out of this material is up to me. I can make a suit, or an evening dress or a handkerchief. It depends upon my sensitivity, my good or bad taste and my sense of tone, not to make a Mackintosh out of a flowery print. All this to say that I see poetry as entirely language. Even the famous distinction between "image poetry" and "language poetry" - whereby image-poetry is easier to translate than language-poetry - convinces me less and less as the years go by. Could surrealism be born against a background, other than that of Latin-born languages? For example.

We know that poetry is that which is lost in translation, but if, for a moment, we leave aside this huge generalization, and start counting our losses, we would find, I think, that one of the first things to go is the tone. When I talked about sewing a three-piece suit out of some yards of muslin, I meant precisely this.

The quest for the correct corresponding tone, led me very early in my life and career, both as a poet and as a translator, to realise that I could never achieve the correct poetic tone if I were to write my own poetry in a language other than my own. I could never, that is, write poetry not my mother tongue. Because the tone is based on the most complex mechanism: that of the choice of words. The mechanism is so complex because in poetry, most of it rests in the dark, deep sea of the unconscious. And the unconscious cannot be translated, I think.

Are things easier when the object of my translating work is my own poetry? Hardly.

The fact is that I never take full responsibility - I don't sign, that is - when I translate into English. I always collaborate with a native speaker. Two collection of poems of mine have appeared in the States, one in 1976, one in 1986. For the first one - I collaborated with an American poet, Philip Ramp, the second with an English, woman, a linguist, not a poet, Jackie Willcox. In both cases the English speaking counter part had a rather limited knowledge of Greek and very few of the nuances of the original could be grasped without explanation. Now, what is interesting is, that I noticed, to my great surprise, that very quickly, I started distancing myself from the text, feeling less and less that I was the author of the original; in a way I was disowning my poems. So, I would analyse less and less this or that image and its implications for the whole poem. The truth is that I was slipping into the personality of the translation, a position that I found more comfortable. I was more anxious to find a translating "solution" to a given problem, then to render exactly in English what I had written in Greek. After all translating was interpreting. Why shouldn't my poems have more than one angle, or better still, why should I be the one who held the key to the right one?

I was a bit disappointed though. I thought my poems would put up a much bigger fight, that they would raise demands. Was I discovering that they were less good than I thought, or on the contrary, I was so conceited that I believed that they were so good that no bad translation would harm them? And, did I feel that what I was saying in these poems had to come across in the other language at all costs, or that what I wrote was so inseparable from the language in which it was written, (to the point that were it written in another language, it would be so completely different), that good or bad translation didn't really matter?? These trite, for all translations, questions, I can assure you that they sound quite different if they are printed on your own skin. Yes, being the author was really very dangerous. Another routine question, - for translation of literature - is: is this piece of literature, r e a l l y, worth translating? (Not all of us have the beautiful fate to translate Seferis, Cavafis, even Ritsos). Now, when you translate your own

M O N H M A T A

and you ask yourself the same question, it may be fatal. So, it is much easier to feel that you are "the translator" with or without quotes. And what if - one could argue - translating your own work, helps you to correct her or his mistakes? Ba....no such chance! Because what a poet instinctively does, is to blame the translator.

Athens 11/5/94

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Translation? More Questions than Answers by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke