The Translator Becoming The Poet

Ozick, Cynthia

The Translator B CYNTHIA OZICK Ihave found, in an old box in the attic, a great helter-skelter heap of papers. In sorting them out, I came upon 22 sheets relating to a single line of a single...

...by Dovid Einhom translated by Cynthia Ozick I was not wheedling the editor, but educating myself...
...But what of "The last to sing before the Ark is dead...
...suggested line, to the poem's "English equivalent" line, but then to that stage where the translator was ready to assume moral authority over the poem...
...I answered: As for "Jewish Spirit," isn't the Shekhina here a concrete figure, like Heine's occasional Virgin...
...I imagine I keep saying "calculate" because I took risks here and there to seize the tone...
...that I was not exhorting the editor, but beginning dimly to perceive the terrible complexities of the craft of translation...
...It comes out, if not poetry, a bit closer to poetry...
...Isn't this a case of "correct" translation resulting in falseness, in violation...
...I did not yet see that the poem had a blueprint of its own, a meticulous blueprint as singular as the whorl on a fingertip...
...for all I know, there may have been many more...
...It is, as "translation," wrong, but in English it is more right than any other alternative...
...The original text contained the word Shekhina, which presents no difficulty to the English reader...
...If 70 translators went into 70 separate rooms, would they all come out word-for-word with this very line...
...The line was the first line, and also the title, of a poem by Dovid Einhorn: Geshtorbn der Ulster Bd-Tfikli—"The Last Bal-Tfikh Is Dead...
...The last to sing before the Imw is dead...
...It's empty-sounding...
...It is a word both in the English dictionary and in the vocabulary of Western philosophy...
...I am just now too much devoted to the poem to lell whether it all works, but you will tell me thai...
...To someone not familiar with synagogue practice and personnel, "reader of the Law" is completely in context and holds the poem together...
...That was August...
...It lacks even the smallest redolence of the original...
...For bal-tfileh, the editor proposed "prayer leader...
...To one who knows nothing of synagogue practice, it illumines nothing...
...I pleaded, I implored, I whined and I wheedled...
...How about a direct and wholesale translation from the original...
...The chief trouble with "prayer leader" is that it isn't poetry...
...At least it sounds suitably ancient...
...Reader of the Law" would suggest that the original is bal-krieh rather than bal-tfileh...
...I was a believer...
...By the next month wc were skirting bal-tfileh, letting it lie fallow, and were now embrangled in the word "dolor...
...In sorting them out, I came upon 22 sheets relating to a single line of a single poem...
...he wanted "grief' instead pf "dolor...
...In that final stage the translated line became not a line of a translated poem, but the line of a poem...
...Or would they all come out with "prayer leader...
...for example, it was the poem's assumption that, quite apart from the translator's being in thrall to the editor, English ought to be in thrall to the poem...
...Nearly a year later—but I have no documents to show how this came about—I had abandoned the ordeal of the imprecise precision...
...what I had to do was not look for the ink to reproduce the print, but look for the inexorable lines of the print itself...
...Gradually, through a scries of feverish letters, the line evolved—from the editor's Adaptedfntn [lit book Metaphor & Memory by Cynthia OzitL Copyright ® 1989 by Cyittkia Ozick...
...One of my many errors at that time was to see the translator as a being in thrall to the editor...
...What I did not understand then was that The Last To Sing The tost to sing before the A rk is dead...
...But if you prefer another word, I can part with "dolor...
...Singer before the Ark" came next—at least it describes a synagogue— but the bal-tfileh is usually not much of a singer, and used in the line it has too many accented syllables anyhow...
...Singer in the pulpit [I wrote], though metrically nice (which is why it lured me), wears churchly robes, and is hardly bal-tfileh...
...And iter lips seem to shudder a last hushed plea, as if the Ark from its arras had spoken: Too late, too late, Oyon who are faithful lo Me...
...il seemed to me I was becoming Leivick...
...Very soon afterward, though, we were back at bal-tfileh...
...And as I wheedled the editor toward what I conceived to be the poem's needs, I discovered at last that the poem, ail on its own, could make unreasonable demands...
...But the perplexity lay in the term bal-tfileh...
...Well, if it has lo be "prayer leader," it has lo be "prayer leader...
...that the translator must dare to be equal master of the poem together with the poet...
...Or, in other words, thai a pretty good, workable English equivalent was all that was requisite, rather than an exactly nuanced representation...
...It wasn't the cunning of brains...
...If the editor offered a suggestion, I took it as an irreversible command...
...The windows are boarded, and shadows huddle in sharne in the pews...
...I toiled over il with a kind of calculating joy—I have about sixteen pages of crowded work-sheets, filled with calculated alternatives...
...I thought I had to jerry-build it myself, in makeshift ways...
...I had abandoned my trust in English as offering a solution or workable equivalence, and the opening stanza read as follows: The last to sing before the Ark is dead...
...You can hear in that last paragraph how "calculation" and "risk" suddenly fly away, replaced by becoming...
...Like "dolor," "sorrow" carried out all those open vowels of the rest of the line: "head," "bowed," "down," whereas "grief bites the line off rather loo quickly, almost as though the stanza were ready lo end too soon...
...Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc...
...Will that do for Geshtorbn der Ulster Bal-Tfileh...
...I guess ] did choose "dolor" for its archaic feel, so you mustn't object that it's archaic...
...I've tried it on the line and it looks grotesque: "The last prayer leader is dead...
...An extremely affecting poem, clear-eyed, sinuous, unsentimental...
...Padlocks hang in the house of thejews...
...Apparently I had just discarded the phrase "singer in the pulpit...
...But meanwhile, behind the scenes, I developed a kind of translator's cunning...
...The windows are boarded, and shadows huddle in shame in the pews...
...And soundless on tile steps of the Ark the abandoned Shekhina rests, her liead bowed down in sorrow, black as night iter dress...
...The Einhorn poem was among the earliest in the various groups of poems I had translated as a contributor to an anthology of Yiddish poetry, and I came to it as a novice...
...There is no one now to go up lo the A rk...
...Padlocks hang in the house of the Jews...
...The eternal flame, atone in its nook, struggles and sputters to dark...
...My trials with Geshtorbn der Ulster Bal- Tfdelt reveal the problem of translation at its most elementary and primitive stages—a tyro's tale...
...But it is too bland, I think, just because of its neutrality, so I have taken the risk and stayed with "reader of the Law...
...I did not have authority over the poem because I did not believe it was already there...
...How about "master of prayer...
...I meant to reinforce the ballad-quality...
...In September the editor answered as follows: "I agree that 'prayer leader' is no good...
...The last prayer leader is dead" sounds to me exactly as fake, as flat, and as silly as an equally data-ridden term would sound, e.g., "The last underpaid secondary cantor is dead...
...at least it doesn't sound Protestant...
...It trivializes an awesome idea...
...So in letter after letter I raised clamorous laments...
...to one who knows everything, it points to nothing—who will guess bal-tfileh from "prayer leader...
...You will say that the obvious thing to settle on, then, is "prayer leader," which is accurate and neutral enough to come out not entirely Quakerish or Christian Scientist...
...The editor wanted "Jewish Spirit," instead of "Shekhina...
...But for the moment I can offer only wails, no solutions...
...Apparently I managed to wheedle out "Shekhina," but not "dolor," because my next letter is still at work...
...Only this: my spirit drops at the thought of that thin phrase...
...Do lei your own preference rule, however...
...If he does think that (though a reader of a poem should stick with the poem and not try to translate back in his head), not an iota of violence is done to the poem anyhow...
...What would you think, though, of "sorrow" instead of "grief...
...That was written in April...
...These 22 pages are the ones that turned up...
...I have been trying all week with real despair to get at some oblique way of suggesting the role without naming it...
...In August, I find another letter still embroiled in Geshtorbn der Letster Bal-Tfileh...
...I dispatched the following moan: If it has to be "prayer leader," it has to be "prayer leader...
...But what I put under the head of dignity, authority, and majesty—not that the person of the bal-tfileh has all thai...
...So what had I accomplished...
...By the time 1 had acquired some experience—by then I was concentrating on the poet H. Leivick—I had learned to trust the doctrine of the Pre-Existent Poem...
...But I could outcry him...
...And this would also be true of one familiar with the synagogue, even though he might think bal-krieh...
...When I insisted to the editor that "not an iota of violence is done to the poem," I was clearly an advocate of doing violence...
...So he let me keep "sorrow...
...I did not sympathize with Einhom because I did not yet know that I was obliged to become Einhorn...
...Capitulate to literalncss, and remove the phrase from poetry and into data...
...Now I was writing hopelessly: So what's to be done...
...Through the ribs and throat...
...Ein-horn's shade rises before me and says: "Well, as a matter of fact, I was going to say bal-krieh, and it was only an accident I said bal-tfileh") At this juncture in the struggle, I believed not that the poem is a law over the translator— that would mean "prayer leader"—but that the poem is a law over English, that what is suitable in English will have to do, no matter how mistaken in substance...
...The poel will have his Astarte, no matter what...
...To keep faith with the ballad-feel of the poem, I've indulged in an old ball ad-word, dolor...
...Or so it seems to me now...
...Has the Pre-Existent Poem been uncovered...
...One last-ditch idea, which I throw down on ihe page in desperation: How about a still more reckless liter-alness...
...One very, very siill night, coming to the wordsyingl du mayner, Iikh bin dayn tateh der rotter [oh my child, my child, I am your red-haired father], I all at once felt Leiv-ick's father's ghost enter me...
...J was unsympathetic to the poet and was quite willing to call up the poet's ghost in order lo gel his approval for a workable English, even if it made him recast his poem...
...I had rendered a stanza this way: And soundless on the steps of the Ark the abandoned Shekhina rests, her head bowed down in dolor, black as night her dress...
...With a poem called Tateh-Ugende (Father Legend) I was surely Leivick, and one of my letters lo the editor records how lhal extraordinary realization opened itself out: Meanwhile, as you suggested, I've gone ahead with Tateh-Ugende...
...Pews" seems to me now very bad...
...It has rather a Buberian dignity, a bit of authority, a drop of majesty: 1 'The last master of prayer is dead...
...And if I fail at this moment to translate bal-tjikh, the reason for it will soon be clear...
...it's the liturgy I'm thinking of—what I put under that head, you may pronounce pretentious...
...I had wheedled him out of one mistake into a new mistake, this one of my own coinage...
...I couldn't outwit the editor, who was smarter than I was...
...It moves the poem out of majesty and into personnel...
...Bereavement without end creeps on tlx naked wails, and blazoned crown and priestly hands lit broken above the Scrolls...
...For a long time I did not comprehend that a translator, though continuing lo quail before the idea of translation, must nevertheless not be afraid of the poem that awaits...

Vol. 15 • February 1990 • No. 1


 
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