Photograph by Andrea Augé
COMMENTS & NOTES
COMMENTS & NOTES
“In
representing more adequately what translation does, and in raising awareness
even among translators of the implications of textual instability for their
task, this book may encourage us to translate differently––to expand our notion
of what translation can do, and to imagine modes of translating that break the
mold in which the reigning (if often disguised) discourse of originality and
derivation seems to have trapped us.”––Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation
and the Making of Originals (Bloomsbury, 2017), p.31.
Having explored the possibilities off and on for
several years of translating poems from ancient Greek in stages I thought of as
rough, rougher, and roughest, I made a firm commitment in the early spring of
2017 to the effort by formalizing it in two sets of translations following this
three-way paradigm entitled “Theocritus: Rough, Rougher, Roughest Trade and
Commentary” for a special issue of Golden Handcuffs Review: “Bless thee,
Bottom, bless thee! Thou Art Translated” (Vol. 11, #23, 2017). Put directly,
the idea behind doing what I have come to call the “rough stuff” involves
starting with a rendition that presents a version that is as faithful to the
content and form of the original as I can make, followed by two more versions
guided by the comparative and superlative degrees of “rough,” levels conceived and executed with the intention
of exploring new and unexpected contexts and textures for the poem rather than
by a wish to produce a more finished adaptation or do-over of the level of
“rough.” As the respective “roughest”
versions in the two latest additions to this project from Nossis and Cavafy (my
first attempt beyond ancient Greek) presented here beg, these final renditions
could hypothetically be read as independent poems if removed from their
original contexts. My urge to reiterate––to tell again and again but with a
difference––the poem in translation mirrors in its own way the very textual
condition of variance of the original that Karen Emmerich so brilliantly explores
in her rich and important new book Literary Translation and the Making of
Originals. Though arriving a year later, it comes in good time for me to
enjoy a sense of confirmation and newfound inspiration for this work in
progress.
In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that work on
the poem “Inside the Cello” was going on at the same time as work on
“Theocritus: Rough, Rougher, Roughest Trade and Commentary” with its focus on a
combination of experiments in poetic translation and relevant propositional remarks.
The poem, with its numerous references to the mythical, thematic and
topographical conventions that define the Greek poet’s book of Idylls and
its legacy, appropriates as a pivotal element the tragic death of the
foundational pastoral poet Daphnis as a point of origin for its pervasive and
unifying elegiac voicings, articulations that recapitulate the historical
reception in literary and artistic traditions of pastoral elegy. However, more
than a few of the poem’s other allusions and citations do not enter it as
straightforwardly as Daphins and depend upon compositional maneuvers such as
translation, paraphrase, juxtaposition, and syntactic modification, more akin,
perhaps, to some of the ways at work in “the rough stuff.”
*
TWO MORE ROUGH TRADES
NOSSIS (third century BC)
The
Greek Anthology 5, 170
(Rough)
“Nothing’s
sweeter than love. All life’s other gifts
come
in second. I’ve even spat out honey.”
Nossis
says so, but if there’s one Kypris has not kissed,
she’s
one who won’t know what roses her flowers are.
(Rougher)
Though
love’s life’s big winner, there’s no dearth of losers.
So
I, Nossis, decree that any she who’s missed
the
kiss of Kypris never breathes its rosy scent.
(Note:
Kypris is a name for Aphrodite, after the island of Cyprus, her birthplace.)
(Roughest)
Because
Aphrodite’s boy
set
down his bow and arrow
to
melt the wax
the deep red wax
for
her writing tablets
Nossis
knows who’s hot and not
who
shall and shan’t
share
and sing
la vie
en rose.
(Note:
The first five lines of this poem are based on the remark by the poet and
anthologist, Meleager, in the Proem to his Garland, which constitutes Book IV
of The Greek Anthology, that the wax
for Nossis’ writing tablets was melted by Love himself.)
________
C. P.
CAVAFY (1863-1933)
DAYS OF
1903
(Rough)
I never found them again––that were so quickly lost ….
the poetic eyes, the pallid
face …. in the street’s nightfall ….
I never found them again––what I came by wholly through
luck,
luck,
and so easily gave up,
then later longed for in anguish.
The poetic eyes, the pale face,
those lips I never found again.
(Rougher)
Found and lost––lost so fast…
those eyes, that face…
flashed in the darkened street…
Lost for good––gift of pure luck
so easily given up
then yearned for in grief.
Lost, lost for good at last.
(Roughest)
Lost and Found? ––
I’m looking for the voice
that moaned, “Oh, Dad!”
as I sipped my Jameson
at a sidewalk table
in downtown Athens, GA.
I barely got out an “Oh, Girl!”
before the boyfriend tugged
her back into the crowded street.
––So can you help?
No?
Yeah, I know.
________
INSIDE THE CELLO
1/
Stavros,
i’ vorrei che tu e Luis ed io
could
find ourselves enchanted
together
inside an enormous cello
immersed
in its numinous music
to
sustain us against the pinch of sorrow
to
come in Poussin’s shepherds’ quizzing
the
tomb that’s signed Et in Arcadia ego.
Read
right “Even in Arcady am I”
or
wrong “I lived in Arcady also”
it
sets a fine modulation from one key
of
grief to another from memento
to
remembrance in a final conflation
of
how brief it is and so long tomorrow.
2/
Ξέρεις τί άτιμο είναι το
κρίκ αυτό
a
treacherous creek my father called it
the
one named Hound for its driving flow
that
could have drowned and haled away
Daphnis
down the cascading undertow
of
Love into Hades in time uncontained
and
place omnipresent because long ago
has
nowhere to go but the here and now.
So
the Fates still snip the threads of a callow
boy
or girl as readily as of one the Muses love
and
Hound will drag them down into zero
again
and again from any and everywhere
we
leaf and then leave incommunicado.
3/
Now
the Seine’s flow sous le pont Mirabeau
floods
out of control dimly unveiling
a
sign for this time Maxime in Aleppo ego
read
in splayed infant bodies washed ashore
read
right reads wrong right down to its marrow.
An
idyll whatever that is this isn’t
but
a short sweet spot a fateful sparrow
flies
through from one dark night into another
only
one fleet spot of light just one though
cures
for this inborn incongruous term
have
been prescribed through divine placebo.
Better
this patchy light of Arcady
our
intermezzo inside the cello.
NOTES ON THE FIRST LINES
The first line of “Inside the Cello” borrows that of Dante’s Rime 52, “Guido, i’vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io,” in which he wishes that he and his poet friends, Guido Cavalcanti and Lapo Gianni, could be magically carried off with their respective ladies to speak of love forever. I have substituted the names of two friends of my own for whose presence with me I once wished at a performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Verizon Hall, whose design emulates the interior of a cello.
The first line (in Greek) of the second part, explained in the following line, is a recalled remark by my father after one of his fishing trips, literally, “You know what a treacherous creek that is,” referring to Hound Creek in Cascade Country, Montana, a new world addition to the waters of the underworld of antiquity and their guardian hound Cerberus.
And the first line of the third part, in which the order of the two halves of the first line of Guillaume Apollinaire’s “chanson triste,” Le pont Mirabeau, have been switched in order to maintain the controlling signature rhyme of lament.
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