Seduced by Foreign Sounds: Merwin as Translator

A few years ago, WS Merwin had the somewhat unusual honor of having a selected volume of his translations published. The translator was the “auteur” who held all these different foreign poets together: a strong case of the visibility of the translator.

Not surprisingly, many people were uncomfortable with this set-up. One such detractor was Adam Plunkett, who wrote a take-down review in New Republic.

Plunket seizes on Merwin’s introduction, where Merwin remembers being fascinated by foreign languages: “Merwin often puts his readers in the position he was in then—entranced by sounds, confused by words. In this mode, he is childlike but not childish…” This becomes the key for Plunkett’s take-down: Merwin is “childlike” because he is “entranced by sounds, confused by words.” That is to say, he’s seduced by sounds.

Seduction - a metaphor that emphasizes the bodily response to a poem - leads to a loss of mastery. Merwin loses himself in sounds. Plunkett further explains: “[Merwin] enjoys the foreignness of foreign languages, in which he can appreciate their sound without being distracted by sense.” There is something seductive about the sound – and particularly the “foreign” sound - that leads Merwin away from the meaning of the words.

Going back to my essay on translation and mimicry, I would say that Plunkett accuses Merwin of failing to capture the “spirit” of the text, instead becoming too physically affected by the text.

Plunkett invokes a common strain of thought about meaning: on one hand, there’s an abstract, semantic meaning, and on the other, there’s sound, which pulls us away from meaning, by insisting on the bodily, the sensual. This common model echoes an Augustinian Christian paradigm: the body is the site of seductions and distractions (aka sin), that corrupts meaning (aka the soul). Sounds seduce the body, leading it away from “the spirit” of the text. The most common imperative in translation discussions is that the translator should “capture the spirit” of the text. The body will, by implication, lead us astray.

The problem with “sound” in translation discussion is that it short-circuits the dominant idea of “equivalence.” How does one translate a sound? How does one find the “meaning” of a sound? This is why for example George Steiner warns that sound - and along with it puns, concrete poetry etc - “betrays” a translator, because it has no value. There is nothing “there” to translate if by “there” one means a “spirit” or an exchange rate.

But what is the problem with the bodily?

The pervasive denounciations of the body in translation discourse creates an ideal for poetry as disembodied and semantically controlled. And it creates an idea of the bodily as a threat to that control. This idea of the body as threat has much in common with Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of the body in the book Corpus:

Bodies aren't some kind of fullness or filled space (space is filled everywhere): they are open space, implying, in some sense, a space more properly spacious than spatial, what could also be called a place. Bodies are places of existence, and nothing exists without a place, a there, a "here," a "here is," for a this. The body-place isn't full or empty, since it doesn't have an outside or an inside, any more than it has parts, a totality, functions, or finality. It's acephalic and aphallic in every sense, as it were. Yet it is a skin, variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied, invaginated, exogastrulated, orificed, evasive, invaded, stretched, relaxed, excited, distressed, tied, untied. In these and thousands of other ways, the body makes room for existence (no "a priori forms of intuition" here, no "table of categories": the transcendental resides in an indefinite modification and spacious modulation of skin).

That is to say, bodies are not isolated, they are constantly touching and intersecting. They contain other bother, become other bodies. They do not contain essences; they have no inside/outside: “The body is a place that opens, displaces and spaces phallus and cephale: making room for them to create an event.” Writing the body is an “exscription”: bringing it out of itself, making it “strange” to itself.

So much of thinking about both translation and mimesis has tended to stress a kind of economics of the translation. There is a constant invocation of “fidelity” or “equivalence”: If we “capture the spirit” of the text, we can use this spirit like an exchange rate, to find the equivalent words in another language. That is by embracing a model of mastery and spirit, we can find the translation with the least amount of friction and noise, the least amount of transformation. The underlying assumption to this rhetoric is always: we need to control the volatility of translation.

On might expect the sonic seduction to cause Merwin to sound very different as a translator to how he sounds as a poet - he is after all too much under the influence of the foreign sounds. But rather, Plunkett objects to Merwin making all foreign poets sounding the same - not distinguishing boundaries in both a national/linguistic and a more metaphysical sense. Plunkett thinks Merwin both loses himself and loses the others. Everything becomes a foreign sound, an undomesticated sound, unproductive sound, unproductive expenditure (Bataille).

This becomes even more complex if we consider that Merwin was a poet who was profoundly influenced by foreign poets. It is important to remember that the style and sensibility of the translator will shape the translation. The translator’s sensibility will influence what texts she chooses and how she translates them. But how is a translator’s style created to begin with, if not by reading others. Merwin’s style – as a translator, as a poet – was fundamentally shaped by foreign poets, such as Follain, Celan, Garcia Lorca and Trakl, poets he translated and read in the 1960s. So the voice we may hear in his translations are not only that of the poet-translator Merwin, but a voice that is been fundamentally involved with translating and being influenced by foreign poetries .

The translator is a dynamic figure: both transforming and transformed by the act of translation, someone both under the influence of the foreign and influencing the foreign in translation (and here working with another translator, the Swedish poet Gunnar Harding, who was famously influenced by US poetry). Plunkett’s overdetermined position: Merwin both is too influential and too influenced suggests something fundamental about the translator: influence is volatile. It moves in every direction. It opens up the poems as deformation zones.