Favorite Poems Redux--This Time in Translation

Cafe Society
1

In the current poetry is irrelevant/snobbish thread, a couple of posters mention that it is futile and silly and to attempt to translate poems. I disagree with this, but I don’t feel like arguing. I’d rather show by weight of example what can be done. So, show me one of your favoirte poems that didn’t start life in English. Ancient, modern, haiku, tanka, psalm, song, ode–it doesn’t matter–in fact, the more styles and languages that we can collect the better.

I’ll start with an excerpt from a Polish poem by Czeslaw Milosz, “A Book in the Ruins” (about picking up a damaged book from a library in Warsaw in 1943):

You pick a fragment
Of grenade which pierced the body of a song
On Daphnis and Chloe. And you long,
Ruefully, to have a talk with her,
As if it were what life prepared you for.
–How is it, Chloe, that your pretty skirt
Is torn so badly by the winds that hurt
Real people, you who, in eternity, sing
The hours, sun in your hair appearing
And disappearing? How is it that your breasts
Are pierced by shrapnel, and the oak groves burn,
While you, charmed, not caring at all, turn
To run through forests of machinery and concrete
And haunt us with the echoes of your feet?
If there is such an eternity, lush
Though short-lived, that’s enough. But how…hush!
We were predestined to live when the scene
Grows dim and the outline of a Greek ruin
Blackens the sky. It is noon, and wandering
Through a dark building, you see workers sitting
Down to a fire a narrow ray of sunlight
Kindles on the floor. They have dragged out
Heavy books and made a table of them
And begun to cut their bread. In good time
A tank will clatter past, a streetcar chime.
The rhymes make it for me–rhymes in English for a poem written in Polish. Masterful.

2

I agree - poetry is translatable, just very, very, very, very (etc.) difficult. Especially if you want to try to keep within the established form of the poem (meter, rhyme, etc.).

I can’t find the example I have in mind at the moment, but I’ve especially had an interest in finding good translations of classical Chinese poetry. (Li Bai especially had a gift for writing while drunk. :D)

3

That’s stunning. Who did the translation?

4

[QUOTE=Humble Servant]
In the current poetry is irrelevant/snobbish thread, a couple of posters mention that it is futile and silly and to attempt to translate poems. I disagree with this, but I don’t feel like arguing. I’d rather show by weight of example what can be done. So, show me one of your favoirte poems that didn’t start life in English. Ancient, modern, haiku, tanka, psalm, song, ode–it doesn’t matter–in fact, the more styles and languages that we can collect the better.
QUOTE]
(SNIP)

I’ve got two favourites:

The Parrots

My friend Michel is an army officer
in Somoto up near the Honduran border,
and he told me he had found some contraband parrots
waiting to be smuggled to the United States
to learn to speak English there.

There were 186 parrots
with 47 already dead in their cages.
He drove them back where they’d been taken from
and as the lorry approached a place known as The Plains
near the mountains which were these parrots’ home
(behind those plains the mountains stand up huge)
the parrots got excited, started beating their wings
and shoving against the cage-sides.

When the cages were let open
they all shot out like an arrow shower
straight for their mountains.

The Revolution did the same for us I think:
It freed us from the cages
where they trapped us to talk English,
it gave us back the country from which we were uprooted,
their green mountains restored to the parrots by parrot-green comrades.

But there were 47 that died.

Ernesto Cardenal (trans. Dinah Livingstone)

and:

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), (trans: Edmund Keeley)

5

When I worked in an ad agency in Hong Kong, one of my jobs was to translate a few lines of a classical Chinese poem. I drew up a big grid, then got one of my Chinese colleagues to give me all the meanings of each character, and any hidden meanings or puns within the character combinations. He then gave me his overall impression of the poem, and his impression of what each line was trying to convey. I combined all these meanings and tried to fit the scansion of the original. It was only about eight lines and it took an entire week. Gratifyingly, the (Japanese) client recognised the poem from my translation. Alas, I lost it along with my entire portfolio of work, and I can no longer remember the poet, but the lines I remember writing are something like:

Wild geese above the river
In the snow-sky before dawn.
I tighten my coat against the winter,
And the lonely peals of temple bells
File down to the river bank and join me
As passengers on my boat.

If anyone happens to recognise this, I’d love to see some other translations.

Some of my favourite French language poems are in the songs of Jacques Brel, but I’ve never seen a translation that does any of them justice.

6

Isn’t it? Robert Hass in collaberation with Milosz (who subsequently emigrated to the US and wrote some of his later things in English).

B. Canary–I liked both of those–had to google Cavafy to find out his original language is Greek. The Parrot one could be about the tyranny of English, so it is specially relevant.

Here’s a Li Bai drunk poem called “Amusing Myself:”

Facing my wine, I did not see the dusk,
Falling blossoms have filled the folds of my clothes.
Drunk, I rise and approach the moon in the stream,
Birds are far off, people too are few.
Polish, Spanish, Greek, Chinese

7

My favorite non-English poem is “El Lagarto Viejo” by Lorca. Translation here.

8

Who better to follow Lorca than Neruda?:

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence…

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

From “Nothing but Death,” as translated by Robert Bly.

9

And of course there’s Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (I think he was the guy who liked the razor so much he bought the company):

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

10

The closest match I can think off is this, but there’s a few details that don’t read right.

(Augh, I so need to brush up on my Chinese Classical poetry…)

11

Hey! That’s the one! Clearly I, or my memory, took some liberties.

Thanks very much.

12

Gacela of the Dark Death

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the business of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don’t want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I’d rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it’s dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

Federico García Lorca

And a little Jaques Brel (Lyrics I know, but some of the best ever)

“Why all these bugles crying,
For squads of young men drilled,
To kill and to be killed,
And waiting by this train.

Why the orders loud and hoarse,
Why the engine’s groaning cough,
As it strains to drag us off,
Into the holocaust.

Why crowds who sing and cry,
Who shout and fling us flowers,
And trade their right for ours,
To murder and to die.

The dove has torn her wing,
So no more songs of love.
We are not here to sing.
We’re here to kill the dove.”—from LA COLOMBE by Jacques Brel

13

I like Heine. An excerpt from his “On Teleology”

And a shorter one. “I Don’t Believe in Heaven” (Ich glaub nicht an den Himmel)

14

Ha! Never read that before!

Let’s do sacred now that we’ve done profane:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

(As one of my husband’s students once cited a Biblical passage: “James, K.–trans.”)

Love the Lorca too.

That’s Spanish, Polish, Greek, Farsi, German, French, Chinese and Hebrew.

15

There’s Housman’s inimitable translation of Ode 4.7 of Horace:

I cannot read this poem without chills. My wife and I incorporated some of the above and more tidbits from Horace into our marriage vows.

16

The River-Merchant’s Wife, a Letter, translated by Ezra Pound.

*While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.
*

17

Latin too–dust and dreams–there could be no doubt.

Lissla–I think that is the poem I have seen in the greatest number of English translations. Pound translated this from Chinese (from, as jjimm explains, literal translations of the Chinese characters–he didn’t actually read Chinese at the time) and many poets/translators have since been unable to resist the urge to try it for themselves. (Pound was big on translations generally.)

18

In honour of Robbie Burns’ Day I submit the following “translations”…

Extracts from The Best of Robert Burns, translated into the de’il’s tongue!

In particular I just love “To a Mouse”

19

The thing about translating poetry is you can translate the sense into another language really well, or you can concentrate on the form (rhyme, meter, alliteration, syllable count, what have you) and preserve the sense more loosely, but it’s hard to replicate the original. That said, here’s one of my favorites (I think it’s public domain but I’ll just post the first stanza. The translation is my own):

*Rhyfel * (Hedd Wyn)

Gwae fi fy myw mewn oes mor ddreng,
A Duw ar drai ar orwel pell;
O’i ôl mae dyn yn deyrn a gwreng,
Yn codi ei awdurdod hell.

War by Hedd Wyn

Woe is me that I live in such a bleak age,
With God on the ebb on the far horizon;
In his stead is man, sovereign and common,
Raising his ugly authority.

When he felt God going away
He raised a sword to kill his brother;
The sound of the fighting is in our ears
And its shadow on the cottages of the poor.

The old harps that once played
Are hanging on that willow there;
And the men cry out as the wind does,*
And their blood mixes with the rain.

  • This is that translation thing: literally, “and the [boys / young men] shout (fullness-of-the-wind)-ly.”
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“Translation is like looking at the back of a tapestry”
-Octavio Paz
Thank you all for the wonderful poems.
Means alot.