Would you agree, Afshan, that all poetry is an act of “translation” – that Latinate variant of the Greek “metaphor” meaning a transferring or carrying across – such as all poets experience as they struggle with language to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name?
I ask this question following your invitation to look out some hitherto unpublished poems in English took me to browsing among verses of mine that had first – and perhaps only – been published in languages other than English. This was not because I am a polyglot – sadly, I am not – but because friends elsewhere with whom I had shared a poem or two sometimes translated them into and published in other languages, perhaps – who knows – to their advantage?
As it is, I have been side-tracked from the task you set me into musing instead about “translation”. One poem of mine I have looked out, “The Secret Gardens”, was first published in Arabic after being translated by a Palestinian poet friend, Riad Nourallah, who also translated several other poems of mine for an anthology of British poetry published in Beirut:
Salaam ‘aleikum,
I said in the Al-Azhar mosque
And a man showed us round
that age-old centre of learning and worship,
its open courtyard and cool arcades,
Then cornered us in a closed-in room
And, together with two others,
Demanded money. And more money.
Salaam ‘aleikum,
I said in a one-bit barber’s shop
on the Blackstock Road
At a time when the Establishment
was targeting Muslim culture
And when I went to pay
the price of a pensioner’s haircut,
The barber, together with two others,
Waved it away. It is paid already, he said.
They are never where you expect them,
The secret gardens of Islam.
Whether this contrast between the behaviour of Muslims in, respectively, a famous and an obscure place would read differently in Arabic in the Middle East and in English in a British-Pakistani journal is a moot question, especially given the meretricious images the people of Egypt acquired during the time of colonial occupation?
A less problematic translation materialized after a visit I made to a Punjabi shop on the other side of the Blackstock Road. A young man who didn’t have pomegranate seeds in his shop when I inquired for them called out to his mother in the back who brought some out from her kitchen to give me. I remembered having once translated a well-known dohra of Baba Farid’s evocative of the Doab:
The roads are impassable now it has rained,
The house of your love’s far away.
Set out into this and your clothes will be ruined,
Your love be not love if you stay.
Seeing the young man in the shop caused me to further “translate” Farid to this bit of north London:
The food store, Farid, needs someone on hand,
To go out tonight is not on.
Mind you, your soul-mate will not understand,
If you stop in the shop, she’ll be gone.
Can poetry be translated? Is something inevitably lost in translation? Can there be a gain? Taufiq Rafat, translator of another Panjabi poet, Bulleh Shah, in an introduction that speaks wryly of his own experience of translating, points out that England’s best-known translator, Edward FitzGerald, was so free, if so immersed, in his translations of ‘Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát that he included at least one rubái in his collection entirely made up by himself.
Such a response makes it tempting to riff over FitzGerald’s own grave at Boulge:
A taxi drives us to and fro
Where once you walked in drifts of snow
And trees that leaf above our heads
Are blown by winds they do not know.
The gravestones play at pitch and toss
And no-one comes to mourn a loss:
Two broken chairs outside the gate
Sit awkwardly, acquiring moss.
A farmer and his dog invade
The churchyard where your bones are laid:
The dog can bark, the farmer shout,
But you remain a silent shade.
Though stones pretend to mine and thine,
It’s open house come rain or shine:
Oblivion whispers from the grass
And no grapes hang to give us wine.
If FitzGerald’s free approach to translation sounds as if he is taking a liberty too far, you may recall that old ‘Omar himself probably composed very few of the rubáiyát attributed to him and, if at all, probably only tossed off quatrains of this popular Persian form as a conclusion to his lectures on science. Poets in the courts of north India added several hundreds of them in his name, this too a sort of “translation”.
Those who argue for stricter literalness in translation might consider that the composition of poetry in any language demands the freedom to strike out each and every word at any point, so much so that, as all poets know, whole poems, having frustrated them to the point of fury, end up in the bin, actual or online.
The translator has the advantage of – at best – an accomplished text to work from but, by the same token, the disadvantage of not being able to depart radically from it.
It is not just a question of diverse languages and their rhythms that are problematic in translation but the context of a whole different cultures. In a mischievous moment while in Bangladesh several years ago, I took a lyrical verse of Rabindranath Tagore’s from Gitanjali and, remembering what difficulties his own translations of this work into English ran into, “updated” it:
Go to church on Sundays?
You must be joking.
Some musty, dusty old corner,
Muttering and stuttering.
Who do you think’s listening?
Wake up, you wally,
Your God’s just done a runner.
God’s gone with the workers.
He’s broken cover,
Turning a new Earth,
Laying a new Road,
All weathers.
Get with it. So what
You’re up to your neck in muck?
All men shall be free!
It’s not as easy as that.
Flower power and yoga?
Get real.
You’re not a tailor’s dummy.
Work with God,
Expect to sweat like Hell.
No Bengali I asked was able to identify the provenance of this English jeu d’esprit and, when disabused, shook their heads in disbelief and dismay. Bengali, no less than Panjabi, has quite other literary tropes and cultural contexts: no waterman on the Thames, for example, would ever be found singing my version – even if it were lyrical.
Can the cultural contexts overlap? Just as the Covid epidemic struck, I walked across the fields from Cambridge to Grantchester with a scholar from China, Sun Jicheng, who wished to visit a British Professor of Chinese. The Professor’s tenderness towards his flowers, together with his delightful absent-mindedness – he forgot to cut us a piece of the cake he had laid out for us – reminded me of similar stories about the 4th century Chinese poet, Táo Qián.
I recorded in verse our visit to the British Professor as if it were a visit to the Chinese Poet. This act of “translation” was then linguistically translated by the Chinese scholar so that it first appeared – as it happens in Canada – in Chinese. Here is the English version:
We walked across the fields to the edge of the South Village,
My friend, a poor scholar, escaping plague in his district.
We found the poet alone in his thatched cottage retreat,
A felled elm in the garden, chrysanthemums by the hedge.
Inside we sat by the fire talking of this and that.
Enough just to be there: quaffing from cups of wine,
His ancestors in shadow like mountains in the cloud,
A nut cake on the table meant to accompany wine.
A north wind was blowing as we retraced our steps,
Plague threatening our own land as it had my scholar friend’s.
The poet we’d left at his gate with his walking sticks and flowers,
Laughing that with our talk we had quite forgotten the cake.
I don’t know what value, if any, these jeux d’esprit with translation have as poetry but perhaps games of the spirit are no bad thing?
When not playing light-hearted games with it, it is the spirit, isn’t it, that is essentially to be translated? There is one poem of mine that did make its way into – and apparently across – the world not in Arabic or Chinese but in English and, were it translated into Bengali, I could almost imagine it being sung – unheard – by a wandering baul.
The poem? A stranger got in touch by e-mail with my wife Rani – a writer who has an online presence such as I don’t have – and asked if she knew a John Drew and, if so, was he still alive? Rani’s replies to those questions are unrecorded but it transpired her correspondent was a composer, Andrew Maxfield, who wanted permission to set to music a poem of mine he had come across in an anthology in a library in Provo, Utah, red heart of the Latterday Saints:
It could not have been
A nightingale, they said.
They said it was a blackbird
Or a thrush that I had seen
Singing above the streetlight
As Christmas Eve closed in.
Call it what they like
I heard that song all night
No other soul was near me.
If I could sing like that
I should not need a name
Nor anyone to hear me.
After a public reading of this poem in Budapest, one member of the audience rushed up not, as I vainly supposed, to felicitate me but to protest that the poem had it wrong, the bird I had heard must have been a robin.
I take comfort from the thought of the poem being transformed by being sung in Salt Lake City as a small and anonymous part of a much larger collective cycle, Snowdrifts. Meanwhile I’m translating – loosely of course – the dozen or so sentences that the – cock – robin that eats off my hand at our back door is said to share with his species:
The crumbs that fall. Quite enough, thank you. Little and often.
Funny sort of whistle. Out of tune. Easy to recognize.
Won’t sing for my supper. Supper first. Singing after.
Gets me eating out of his hand. His vanity. My breakfast.
It’s more for the company. Not that he talks much. Blokes don’t.
Birds do.
Five putative avian sentences down and several more to go but I leave the rest to your imagination, Afshan, your guess is as good as mine – or William Blake’s. How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight lost in translation?
Artwork by: Gustav Bauernfeind
