Sunday, April 1, 2007

In a bid to actually intellectually discuss something I'm intellectually interested in...



...I decided to launch into one of my favourite topics of all time! ...you might not want to continue reading.

So I'm currently burning my brain trying to think of intelligent things to write about for various and sundry classes. I think I've gone beyond the state of caring, really; I'm so tired from school (not 'of', because I still like going to class and learning things, but it's the going and the learning that is exhausting me, and then it all goes to the 'ack' territory, I tell you, the many acks/man-yacks, indeed, and I have lost the ability to be coherent).

Anyways! If you've talked to me for any prolonged length of time, I've probably brought up Rilke; and specifically, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, because I fell in love with him, and them, around three years ago. I like to have mad, torrid love affairs with poetry; read the same poems over and over until they become a part of the way I think, fit themselves into how I frame my words and perceptions. This happens a lot of the time culturally speaking, anyways; like, how in a specific situation such as when a speech is made, references are drawn from poetry and/or literature that add special significance to the words being spoken. Say, for example, Tennyson's Ulysses, which has many oft-quoted lines: "To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." and "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." And then you have your ubiquitous limericks and rhymes, like "There was a man from Nantucket...", which also become embedded in culture and a part of culture, identifying those who are educated both academically - as Ulysses tends to indicate - as well as socially - as knowledge of commonly known anonymous works such as limericks tends to indicate.

The personal literary preferences of individuals is what makes conversation about literature so compelling, largely because diversity of preference shows the vitality of the works being discussed. I may madly love a poet that others despise, and vice versa; so too with prose works. The only detrimental emotion toward literature, I feel, is apathy. If people simply don't care, then what's the point? Poetry and prose exist to provoke, after all, to communicate, to produce emotional reverberations. There wouldn't be a point to poems or novels if they didn't make others feel, no matter what that feeling is.

Where this gets problematized, however, is in the area of translation. If what the reader-audience has access to is a specific translation and not the source text, then the integrity of the translation becomes debatable. Jane Hirschfield's Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry has an essay concerning the problem of translation, where she goes into the trouble inherent within translation, and delineates each of her own personal steps while translating Japanese poetry in conjunction with a Japanese woman. In this essay, Hirschfield states that historically speaking, the word for translator has also meant traitor, as to translate poetry or prose out of the language they are originally articulated in is to degrade their meaning. Obviously translation must occur on multiple levels; cultural as well as literal; and nuances are missed, or deemed untranslatable, or unimportant in relation to other aspects of the text to be translated. In effect, the translation of any given text is truly only a partial translation; it is impossible to retain fully what is originally meant.

Of course the counter-argument is that what arises from the translation is a hybrid of meaning, bridging the gap between cultures; and so it cannot just be the original poet or author who is acknowledged, but his or her translator as well; and subsequent translations must be treated as separate, though related entities. If you go with this argument, you're sort of moving into Bhabha's Third Space, I suppose, as new meanings are generated through the meeting of originator and translator - what is articulated is not wholly of either culture, but carves out its own space of signification.

There are other arguments, however, that are equally valid. One is that translation should not occur at all, that each individual should learn the language he or she wishes to read and not depend upon another's interpretation of a given work. I tend to hold with this view a bit more than with the former, simply because it doesn't seem as lazy, and because I like to get closer to the source of the idea rather than a particular interpretation of that idea - though of course the hybridized nature of translation is highly interesting, and a field I'm interested in investigating. The argument that translation should not be made at all is strong within some areas of Post-Colonial theory and literature, as translation is seen as detrimental to native culture, not to mention the reinterpretation of texts is also another form of appropriation and exploitation.

Moving past these arguments, to the actual object of this post, I want to touch on Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. All the lead up, and talk about translation, was mostly due to the fact that the Sonnets have been translated multiple times with a very definite chronology, as translators interact with the source text as well as with one another. This interaction is key - and it is fascinating, besides, seeing how each successive round of translation builds upon one another in varied ways, and how certain of the Sonnets remains largely the same despite the translator while others differ significantly to the point of being entirely different poems.

The Sonnets are in total fifty-two poems, with two cycles that in many respects mirror one another. Translating the Sonnets in their entirety is a large task, especially when taking into consideration that the translation must not occur only on an individual sonnet-to-sonnet basis, but also with respect to each sonnet comprising a piece of a larger poem - each sonnet being a stanza, if you will, or maybe even a line, of a larger poem. The translation I first read, done by Edward Snow, is the one I come back to most often - likely, because it was the first one I read, and not due to its own overt superiority over other translations (though my personal preferences do think it superior - with emphasis on personal). I believe the Snow translation is also one of the more current ones out there, which means that it fits within my own cultural context in terms of the language it uses, its syntax, being similar to what I normally use, and so I'm inherently more comfortable reading it.

The interaction between various translations is what fascinates me, not to mention the interaction between the original text and the translated text - looking at what has changed, and how, the way words and sentence structure morph across languages, and how this affects meaning - it's striking, how much of a difference each individual translation makes. What we get when we read a translated work isn't the work itself, but rather an interpretation of that work; and by positioning various interpretations alongside one another, a complex picture develops composed of various individual and interacting readings. The Sonnets, aside from being full of beautiful language, are well-suited for comparisons in their varied translations because of their structure of multiple smaller poems forming the over-arching narrative of the larger poem-cycle. This structure allows for both small and large comparisons in terms of individual sonnets as well as overall sonnet cycles.

I am, however, working on my German so that I can manage to make it through the original Sonnets unaided by translators/traitors; and I'd better stop typing now, or else I'll never really stop. This is what comes from being an English major. Pointlessly long blog-posts concerning topics no one actually cares about. Ah well. It's interesting to me, at any rate.

And just a heads-up: I'll probably go on pontificating about the Sonnets at a later date, because I really am weirdly in love with them. Like, to a horrific degree. It's kind of scary.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

ok, wow, michiko. I have no idea what I just read, but I said I'd comment on all your posts...so yeah. but...thanks...for the insights! Sorry! I'm such a science nerd! nothing makes sense to me unless it's in an equation of some sort! but I humbly acknowledge your smartness related to this...topic. indeed.

DJH said...

Rilke is a spider monkey.

Petra said...

jan: ...in my own defense, when you say things like 'tuberosity', i get scared. (by the way, you know how when we were at the northern inn over winter break and i showed you how i could bend my thumb back all the way to my wrist and you told me not to do that because it was, like, screwing over something in my hand? i can do that with both of my thumbs now! i'm incapable of taking advice! but i also have bendy thumbs! i believe the trade off is worth it).

dave: YOU'RE a spider monkey. so there.

Anonymous said...

screwing over something? oy! I give up.