Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Translator as Poet -- Selena's Question
I'm especially drawn to the part of Rebecca Gayle Howell's interview where she says that translation work has made her a better poet. She writes, "As a person who only has full access to her native language, I essentially had to deconstruct my relationship to English and my pre-conceived notions of how poetry behaves, in order to go as deep into the Arabic and into the Arabic poems as I could." Without making the two ideas mutually exclusive, I'm wondering how her earlier advice, to "work the language like bread dough," can make one a better poet. How do you do this without making the work feel belabored?
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She does "work the language like bread dough" and comes up with new good poems. She participates in the act of creating the text in a different language rather than faithfully translating it. If the reader does not have access to the language of the original text and/or to see its physical layout on the page, the work would not feel belabored. It would only feel good poetry. However, when "work" is considered as translation of another text from another language produced in another cultural environment, it fails to be good translation! It would feel worse than belabored.
ReplyDeleteWorking language like bread dough . . . well I got literal. When I've made bread, the kneading process allows the dough to gain in elasticity and smoothness, working the ingredients until they're integrated. From there, the dough rises and expands as air moves into it. Usually it takes several risings and, in between, more kneading and smacking/punching down the dough. There's also a way we get a feel for it--kneading and the bread. I do think it's possible to over-knead dough, however. At some point, it has to be allowed to do its thing, to rise. Too much working it might even change its texture. And, so, I think Howell's metaphor involves a kind of get messy process, developing a feel for the language, and yet setting it aside to do what it needs to, to be what it needs to be. How might this make us better poets? Well, I think it would make me humble before the materials of my craft and would also give me the sense that I'm a participant, a creator, but there are elements of the process--if it's alchemical--that are out of my control.
ReplyDeleteI think this conversation is an interesting one, but what I still have questions about here is what Howell meant by "deconstruct[ing]" her relationship with English in order to get closer to the arabic. What does this process look like and how do you go about doing it? I'm especially interested since I'm also working with a language that I don't know very well.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that translation has made Howell a better poet. "Working the language like bread dough" is an apt simile for Howell's own work, for her book "Render" that came out after er al-Jabouri translation. "Render" imagines a kind of apocalyptic farmer's almanac, with titles like "How to Kill a Rooster" and "How to Kill a Pig," and Howell seems to have worked her native language like bread dough, in that the lines are distilled, as if they had gone through many revisions, many "kneadings". In addition, the lines are rooted in the physical world, in the concrete, even when they are metaphoric, and the physicality of kneading bread dough gets at that. I guess I am arguing that the hard work of translation, of really examining the effect, weight, sound of every single word, has paid off for Howell's poetry. With its short couplets, her book "Render" has some of the spareness and intensity of "Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation". Here are a few lines from "How to Kill a Rooster": "Because he's spurred you / grab him by his neck and his legs // Hold him in both your hands / Look him in the eye // Let him ask / if you are to kill him today // then tell him yes say yes / with your own eye // just before you take him to the clothes line // and tie him up / by his yellow feet // Take a blade / Cut his throat". To be honest, though, whereas al-Jabouri has lent Howell her fantastic sense of compression, of every line breaking a silence, and her ability to represent violence without eviscarating the reader, Howell has dropped the abstractions that al-Jabouri tends to employ. In other words, Howell's own work is far more concrete (specific nouns, avoidance of abstract nouns) than her translations of al-Jabouri. To my mind, no amount of "kneading the dough" of the original al-Jabouri text is going to make poems that are rooted in abstractions—for example, "the demise of manhood," "heights of pleasure," "indecent face of death," "in the name of freedom"—more concrete. I guess my overall point is that I consider "Render" to be a stronger book, and yet I doubt that Howell could have written it without translating al-Jabouri in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this post, Becky. I wondered if Howell just means deconstruction in the philosophy of literature way here--i.e. that she had to undo her idea of English as having one or set meanings and engaging the idea that a reading depends on the reader. It's tricky because the statement's not really elaborated upon and we're not quite sure whether to read it as a literal breaking apart/breaking down, or if it's related to deconstructionist theory. In any event, I do feel like we don't get a sense of what that process looked like for her. Maybe those lexical charts helped her?
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