[Tim Murphy]

Dorianne, Bly is worshipped and recently made a cool million with his Iron John nonsense. But his "verse" is nonsense and his translations are worse. Look at Mandolin's much-appreciated posting of the original: hey, folks, it's rhymed, formal poetry! I have to agree with Professor Mezey that Free Verse Mastery is a non sequitur, and that most free verse isn't worth the powder to blow it to hell. 99% of the great free verse in our language is in the King James Bible.

[dorianne laux]

Yes, the first section is translated by Bly as well, just chose to print the second part. But yes, wow, that first line is a VERY different line, and as you say, Bly just got it wrong. I wonder if it was a typo? If he meant to say Sorrow, it is true that I know you, and the word NOT got in somehow and no one caught it. Though the line, And it's not true, Sorrow, I know you, could be misinterpreted depending on voice inflection, if the emphasis is on the word NOT vs. the word TRUE or KNOW.-- And it's NOT true, Sorrow, I know you vs. And it's not true, Sorrow, I KNOW you. Or, if you drop the word Sorrow and the commas-- And it's not true I know you. Well, now I'm even getting confused. I'm not a grammar queen which is why I'd never make a good translator. I was just talking with my husband about this and he mentioned that Philip Levine had asked Hardie St. Martin if he could translate Machado-- Levine was in Barcelona at the time-- and Martin said he had already asked Bly to do it. (More info on this can be found in an interview in The Bread of Time). It would be interesting to see a Levine translation. Thanks for doing this translation and for posting. I'll keep looking and comparing to see what else I think.

[Michael Juster]

The problem of translation cuts across free and formal verse, and when you really work hard at translating a poet and then look at other translations (I do it that way so I'm not subtly copying or resisting other approaches), it's truly horrifying how bad most translations are. There's a recent and generally gaseous book on translating Rilke by William Gass, but it has a brilliant twenty-five page section somewhere in the middle that compares and contrasts versions of one of our most-translated poets. Bly's stuff is BAD, almost as loose as the Lowell "translations", but Pope wasn't any better, so he has some good company.
Translating free verse, while difficult, is exponentially easier than translating formal verse--I think very few people are doing it well. I have a chapbook of Petrarch translations coming out next year, and it is remarkable how different the five or so other standard versions of this century are from each other and from mine. I think many poets have difficulty subjugating their own voice in order to capture the voice of their victim--it takes arrogance to attempt translation but then that arrogance gets in the way of the work.

[dorianne laux]

Originally posted by Tim Murphy:
Dorianne, Bly is worshipped and recently made a cool million with his Iron John nonsense. But his "verse" is nonsense and his translations are worse. Look at Mandolin's much-appreciated posting of the original: hey, folks, it's rhymed, formal poetry! I have to agree with Professor Mezey that Free Verse Mastery is a non sequitur, and that most free verse isn't worth the powder to blow it to hell. 99% of the great free verse in our language is in the King James Bible.

I'm not forwarding Bly here, only the Machado poem and my first exposure to it and love for it. I'm happy to have the chance to read other translations and learn more about the poem.

[mandolin]

Dorianne, Machado is wonderful, and I was glad to see his work posted here in any translation. But Bly's a kind of multi-culti-vampire who drains the life from traditional verse in other languages to further his own agenda, and his name alone pushes a lot of formalist buttons.

I'll find some other Machado translations and post them tomorrow, but just to give some insight into Tim's and my reaction to Bly, here's a sonnet by Baudelaire, translated first by Bly (from News of the Universe, then by Richard Wilbur (from Mayflies:


Intimate Associations

The natural world is a spiritual house, where the pillars, that are alive,
let slip at times some strangely garbled words;
Man walks there through forests of physical things that are also spiritual things,
that watch him with affectionate looks.

As the echoes of great bells coming from a long way off
become entangled in a deep and profound association,
a merging as huge as night or as huge as clear light,
odors and colors and sounds all mean--each other.

Perfumes exist that are as cool as the flesh of infants,
fragile as oboes, green as open fields,
and others exist also, corrupt, dense, and triumphant,

having the suggestions of infinite things,
such as musk and amber, myrrh and incense,
that describe the voyages of the body and soul.


Correspondences

Nature's a temple whose living colonnades
Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs;
Man wanders among symbols in those glades,
Where all things watch him with familiar eyes.

Like dwindling echoes gathered far away
Into a deep and thronging unison
Huge as the night or as the light of day,
All scents and sounds and colors meet as one.

Perfumes there are as sweet as the oboe's sound,
Green as the prairies, fresh as a child's caress,
--And there are others, rich, corrupt, profound

And of an infinite pervasiveness,
Like myrrh, or musk, or amber, that excite
The ecstasies of sense, the soul's delight.

---

Wilbur's piece, besides being an immensely better poem in its own right, is truer both to the sense and to the structure of Baudelaire's -- I was, at first, a little bothered by the way the stanza division in Wilbur's sestet goes against the rhyme pattern. But that is exactly what Baudelaire does in his sestet.

[Bryan Smith]

"98%" this and "99%" that! What are we, a bunch of half-baked statisticians? Professor Mezey and Mr. Murphy seem not to think much of free verse in general, which is their right, but I don't quite know what study produced their numbers.

But to the subject at hand: I think part of the problem people are having with Bly's Machado translation is that Spanish is almost comprehensible to most English readers, and so we know when the translator is taking liberties, as Bly certainly does. For a slightly different take on translation, how about Ezra Pound's "River Merchant's Wife: a Letter"? From what I hear, no one would give Pound high marks for accuracy, and yet his translation is a wonderful free-verse poem. Fortunately for Pound, not enough of us know Chinese to allow us to become incensed at his errors.

Robert Bly has become something much larger and different than the man who began the Fifties magazine which, with its successors the Sixties and so on, introduced American poets in those decades to Lorca, Jimenez, Neruda, the German poet Trakl and several others that most lovers of poetry now admire. So he should at least be thanked for making our discussion possible (as Dorianne notes), whether or not we decisively conclude here in this forum that Bly is a decent translator.

I personally think he is uneven: I like his Neruda and Jimenez translations, don't like his Rilke or Transtromer, and so on. I happen to like his version of the Machado poem quoted by Dorianne ... to me it seems haunting,
especially the "mad and lunar guitarist" phrase. Note that this phrase is pretty far from the original "guitarrista lunatico", so my criteria must not be strict word-for-word accuracy of translation.

And in fact, this brings up my main point: mandolin's assertion that he has given us a translation but not necessarily a poem seems exactly wrong. What is a translation of a poem but a poem? If I wanted a word-for-word substitution from one language to another, I too know how to use a dictionary and could produce something similar to what mandolin has given us. If I then gave the result to someone who didn't know Spanish, would that person be likely to fall in love with Machado on the basis of what they read? Would he or she even recognize the result as a poem? Probably not.

So there must be something more. The stress of translation, it seems to me, is between representing the poet's intention in terms of sense and music on one hand, and producing a good poem in the new environment, which for us is 2001 American poetic English, if there is such a thing, on the other. As one poster noted, Machado's poem is formal, with numerous end rhymes; my own efforts at translating from Italian have convinced me that you just can't generally produce a good result by rhyming in English with the same frequency as in Italian, and probably Spanish is the same way ... for one thing, Italian and Spanish give the poet many more opportunities to rhyme without having the rhyme-scheme become intrusive.

Which brings up another subject of interest to me: if one decides to translate a poem (especially a formal poem) into free verse, what is at stake? Since the result won't have the same formal music, the translation has to succeed by other means. What means? Well, it can still have music, and perhaps this can somehow simulate the original. For instance, Stephen Mitchell's translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies seem very good to me in terms of recreating the elegaic sounds and mood of the original. But is that close approximation necessary for a good translation? It also seems to me that doing a translation is a great opportunity to ask the question "What is it about the original that matters to me as a reader? Is it simply the sound? Are there things about the sense of the poem that are essential and that should be retained in the translation at all cost? Even things I don't understand consciously yet?

So my argument (which I don't quite believe) is that free verse, used as a tool for translation, frees the translator to play with the sounds of the poem (either to recreate the original sounds or to experiment with something different), while at the same time making it more important for the translator to pay attention to the meanings swimming out of the poem in all their subtlety, because that's what has to be caught and preserved by the translator. But I don't just mean literal meaning, since as mandolin has shown us, that's not enough.

Come on! I believe that Bly's translation of this Machado poem is a poem, in spite of Mezey's and Murphy's dire remarks about the state of free verse and Bly. Maybe we could move along and talk about something useful, like for instance, why all those free-verse failures are failures and what can be done to increase the success rate.

[mandolin]

A small point, Bryan --

I said that what I had given was not a poem -- I think Bly's is a poem, (and clearly, for many people, a moving poem) though not, I think, a good translation. His translation of the Baudelaire sonnet, on the other hand, just stinks.

You, Dorianne, Michael J, and the others raise many interesting points about translation. I wonder if anyone else has read Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot -- his translation of Eugene Onegin is dreadful, but this book is quite good, I think.

And I wonder if we're not overstaying our welcome, talking about translation on Dorianne's free verse mastery board. Is there a more appropriate place to continue?

[Michael Juster]

Dorianne will let us know when we have wandered too far afield here, but for now I think we're OK as long as we are exchanging ideas and not just disintegrating into turf wars.
Having said that, I do want to say that I have the same objections to Pound that I do to Bly, and in fact feel even more strongly about Pound because his influence has been so much greater. Classic Chinese lyric poetry generally had regular syllablic counts in each line and rhyme, and there is no good reason to render it like a tortured fortune cookie aphorism. Pound still haunts Chinese translation, and it is an awful thing. I know it is spitting in the wind, but my new long poem in The Formalist,"The Secret language Of Women" (see Accomplished Members below), is in part an attempt to retake land plundered by Pound.
Sorry for the tirade, but I had to say it...
I think there are times when verse with substantial formal elements can be translated effectively into contemporary free verse idioms. I am generally found of, for instance, the Arrowsmith translations of Eugenio Montale and (horrors, call out the National Guard to quell the riot) prefer them to Wilbur's (and Bly's--sorry for piling on). On the other hand, there are times when the formal elements of the verse are so integral to the experience of the poem that a free verse translation is inadequate almost by definition. I think Petrarch is an example--the sonnet is such an important part of the experience that, as much as it is painfully hard, you have to try to capture the formal structure of the original. You read the hamhanded literal translations of Durling, and you want to cry, and even Musa's more poetic blank verse renderings fall so short that it is frustrating.

[Bryan Smith]

First of all, I want to thank mandolin for providing the original Machado and his literal translation. My purpose wasn't to get on his case, but to point out that translations of poems ought to work as poems. I mostly agree with what Michael Juster says, so no turf wars from me.

But there are many different reasons to translate. I have the Durling translation of Petrarch, as well as his translation of Dante's Inferno, and they are useful books: I treat them as language aids in understanding the Italian originals, but they are no good as stand-alone poems. Probably if they were good stand-alone poems, they would not be as useful as references, since the originals would have had to be misrepresented to some extent to get good poems in English. And even if you disagree with that statement, translations are inevitably misrepresentations, even literal translations, unless there is some way to travel back to the culture in which the original was written and feel that culture as your own.

One of my favorite books of translations is Paul Auster's "Twentieth Century French Poetry". What's great about it is that there are many contributing translators, and you get to see what each one chooses to emphasize in the original. So, in the case of the Apollinaire section of this book, there are poems rendered by Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin, James Wright, Robert Bly, among others; some of these translations are amazing, I think. It's also interesting to see that Wilbur translates a formal poem into a formal poem, and that the translations by Merwin, Wright, and Bly sound kind of like what you would expect from Merwin, Wright, and Bly. To some extent, isn't it inevitable that a poet serving as a translator will sneak into his or her translations?

And even if Pound's Chinese translations are inaccurate, isn't there a place for them in the world? It seems like it would be a shame if they didn't exist at all, since they are moving to me and many others. Maybe such works should to thought of as "adaptations" rather than translations, but at some point I feel that, whatever you choose to call it, it has to work as a poem or what's the point.

[graywyvern]

this discussion has swerved a ways, but become more interesting i think. you can only learn to distrust translations enough through attempting to make some yourself. was i ever surprised to find out Rilke has a "chunky" sound, more like Hopkins than anyone else... i had never guessed this from the "easy-reader" free verse pablum that he's universally turned into!

but not everyone loses to this degree. a lot of poets in other languages are just as conversational as the norm here; & it does no great harm in representing them as contemporary Americans. unfortunately translation is an academic industry as well as a labor of love, & all too often fails to even take note of its casual Procrustean exactions on the way to becoming yet another entry in some hack's curriculum vitae. we lazy monoglots trust too much & worse, copy bad translations in our original creating!