Notes on the difficulty of translating poetry
Michael Szpakowski
In the first part of the last century two American linguists, Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Lee Whorf, suggested that the language we are born into and grow up
speaking conditions our thinking.
They put the case for this quite strongly. Here's Sapir in 1929 1 :
'Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of
social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It
is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of
language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific
problems of communication or reflection'
and his student, Whorf, in 1940:
'We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and
types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they
stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a
kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this
means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.'
This notion has passed into legend, into urban myth it pops up all over the place.
Everyone's heard of the Inuit peoples' 20 or 30 or 50 words for different kinds of
snow the only problem being these don't exist 2 - and some years ago I heard the
claim that certain Native American languages were more "natural" languages in
which to talk about particle physics because of their unique verb forms.
(The delightful image springs to mind here of a physicist who has spent years
mastering the massively difficult and abstruse mathematics necessary for her trade
learning a new language in order to reduce the strain of discussing physics)
Popular distortions aside, a few minutes thought suggests that Sapir/Whorf at least in
its strong form, implying the impossibility of both effective translation and second
language learning is actually a load of old tosh, showing once again that there is often
no-one so stupid as the very clever.
It certainly is the case that different languages set different limits on items of
vocabulary the borderlines between colour terms vary in many languages.
Nevertheless this is nothing that a bit of compounding won't cure blue-green, a-very-reddish-orange; or snow-that-has-previously-melted-and-refrozen, for one of our
hypothetical snow terms, perhaps.
It's also blindingly obvious that although societies and cultures differ in detail, many
basic human activities and needs are universal, as indeed is the body, its parts and its
functions, and that this provides a pretty good basis for mutual
comprehensibility/translatability.
Having said all this I want to argue that there is an area of literature where
Sapir/Whorf is pretty much on the money and this is poetry.
In 1992 I started learning Hungarian from a self-instruction manual. In 2004 this is
still a work in progress I can read the ads on the Budapest metro and even spot the
puns, but I'm hard put to have more than a halting conversation with a cab driver.
Early on in my studies though, actually in my textbook itself, I came across a poem by
Attila József (József Attila in Hungarian, where the surname comes first) that took
my breath away.
Here it is:
Tedd a kezed
homlokomra,
mintha kezed
kezem volna.
Úgy őrizz, mint
ki gyilkolna,
mintha éltem
élted volna.
Úgy szeress, mint
ha jó volna,
mintha szívem
szíved volna.
A literal translation of this would be:
Put your hand on my brow
As if your hand were my hand
Guard me as if someone wanted to murder me
As if my life were your life.
Love me as if this were good
As if my heart were your heart
and this certainly captures all the conceptual content of the poem there is no
meaning beyond this that could be expressed in supplementary words or glosses
(unlike, say, much classical Japanese poetry where often the whole effect hinges on
complex puns which require detailed explication for a foreign reader) but had this
been an English poem it seems to me that it would be touching, but not great in any
way, perhaps merely just about rising above the high class greeting card.
What transforms the poem from the good to the great is not so much what he tells but
the way he tells it.
The way the poet makes Hungarian grammar, rhyme and scansion
work seamlessly and effortlessly together to neuter sentiment or banality and
ultimately, to move us deeply
Firstly the metre.
In Hungarian all syllables are sounded so that each line consists of
four syllables of equal length, with a major accent on the first syllable of each line and
a subsidiary on the third (there's also a pull towards the second syllable where a word
starts there, Hungarian stress naturally falling on the first syllable of a word, so the
subjunctives őrizz and szeress, 'guard!' and 'love!' respectively, and the conditional
gyilkolna ,'would kill', slightly and beautifully interrupt the flow).
This makes for a very steady incantation like quality to the poem, especially coupled
with the marked rhyme scheme.
Try reading the first verse (not too much to trip an
English speaker up here just pronounce every syllable, pronounce the "a"s as short
"o" as in English "hot" and the "gy"s as a single sound, a softish "d")
So far, so good. Even so the formal qualities of the verse could equally be those of
doggerel, likewise marked by its strict regularity of scansion and rhyme.
However there's something else, yet another layer, and a crucial one, and this is to do
with the way Hungarian indicates possession.
As with many Hungarian grammatical features it's done by adding a suffix to a word
so here kez is the root meaning hand but kezem means 'my hand' and kezed, 'your
(familiar) hand'.
Likewise with élet, 'life' yielding éltem and élted and szív 'heart'
well
take a look.
This minute difference between 'my' and 'your' supercharges the terseness of the
very regular rhyme scheme and scansion to create something which completely
inoculates a reader in Hungarian against any tendency to wallow in sentiment, whilst
at the same time somehow ennobling and deepening the sentiments of the poem
rather than simply a poetic conceit, this linguistic force makes us feel the content as
inevitable, necessary and almost overwhelming.
Here is the poem with an absolutely literal translation showing the grammatical
structure beneath each line:
Tedd a kezed
put the hand your
homlokomra,
forehead mine on
mintha kezed
as if hand your
kezem volna.
hand mine was
Úgy őrizz, mint
thus guard (me) as if
ki gyilkolna,
someone meant to kill (me)
mintha éltem
as if life my
élted volna.
life your was
Úgy szeress, mint
thus love (me) as
ha jó volna,
if good this were
mintha szívem
as if heart mine
szíved volna.
heart your was
Note how the poet avoids the mechanical by inverting the order of possessives in
verses 2 and 3 from that in verse 1 there is great technical skill here but it is always
at the service of content.
Attempting to read through the poem with its original Hungarian sounds and rhythms
whilst bearing in mind this grammatical structure gives some idea of the force of the
thing there's a terrific unity of form and content to the original, which is simply not
available directly to a reader in translation.
So here we have a very specific, local corroboration of Sapir/Whorf the full
"meaning" of the poem is absolutely tied to the phonetic and syntactic characteristics
of the language in which it is expressed.
This seems to me, though, a relatively weak claim for in no sense are we eternally
"shut out" of the poem there are a variety of things that a non native speaker can do
to appreciate the force of the piece, from reading this essay to acquiring a native level
command of Hungarian.
There seem to me to be two different substantial objections to the foregoing.
Firstly, could there be some layer of meaning that is locked into being a native
Hungarian speaker the experiences of the words that go together with growing up
and acquiring the language, in the culture, from birth?
Well
perhaps...but so many of the associations of words that one makes as a small
child are not so much social, as individual and psychological, to do with the particular
personal context in which a word is first encountered. Hence any problem in this respect could equally occur within one language
and although it's a position that deserves attention I'm not going to address it here. (Taking us, as it does, outside the strict question of translation to
more general reflections on communication in general between humans beings )
Furthermore, as I observed earlier, there is an enormous amount of human life which
is common to all societies, though of course specific practices surrounding these may
differ enormously, even in this globalised era.
Where there are strong socio/cultural/practical connotations to a word, where the
pattern of the individuals acquisition of particular words or structures transcends the
individual and is socially or culturally structured, say in the case of taboos, religious
formulae, phrases required for politeness, or honorifics, then this will be widely
enough noted to form part of any halfway decent language learning programme.
The second objection is that the argument could equally well apply to prose, and
again there is an element of truth here.
My response would be that prose is generally simply nowhere near as anchored in the
mechanics of the language in which it is expressed we sense this when we use the
expression "prose poem" or "heightened prose" to indicate, exceptionally, that this is
not the case.
Of course everything I have said of poetry would be true of this heightened mode too
( the rather problematic notion of "translating" Finnegans Wake springs to mind, although I believe that a Japanese translation does exist) so
perhaps we should talk of 'language that refers to its own structure', or 'texts with
meanings whose roots are entangled with those of the language in which they are
expressed'.
This phenomenon tends to be literary, but it also appears in the casual
creativity of ordinary speech 3.
So the borders of language are perhaps much more porous than Sapir/Whorf and their
epigones would allow, despite them being sort of right about poetry.
Indeed, although I've phrased matters here as being a confirmation, albeit weak and
limited, of Sapir/Whorf, the actual mechanism that is at work is completely different
from the one they propose.
Rather than our thought processes being "trapped" in a particular language, literary
and demotic creativity use particular language structures in a pretty wide awake way.
When they do this, they don't shut us out from the haiku to the colloquial pun it's
always possible to gloss these in order to make a none native speaker comprehend,
even if as in my footnote (3 again), it's a fairly laborious business.
A conjecture which might gladden the hearts of amateur and rather bumbling
language learners everywhere perhaps it's precisely the fact of being in the midst of
acquiring a second language that creates a heightened sensitivity to these kind of
structures.
I suspect this could be the case, in that a native command of a language
often renders structure invisible to the user 4 , hence the recent (and horrible) fad for
short exegetical texts by those "qualified" to interpret pieces of writing in the
"quality" Sunday papers.
I don't want to end with a pat series of conclusions the thrust of my argument here
is against superficially attractive but ultimately untenable generalization.
"Tedd a kezed.." and millions of other treasures come with translation problems
attached; these are not insuperable there are always ways of getting round them,
though they involve a little effort, and what rewards in/whilst/for so doing!
- my thanks to Rosemary Drescher, Kato Laszlo Roth 5 and Robert Roth for their help, comments and advice -
Place your hand
on my forehead
as if your hand
my hand would be
Guard me like
if murdered
my life
your life would be
Love me as
if it would be good
as if my heart
your heart would be