TRANSLATION AND THE UNKNOWN

Thinking this morning about experiences I’ve had with people who were antagonistic about my translations.

One was a woman who objected to my translating all these women poets when I - as a man - could not “know” how they had felt when they wrote the poem as I am not a woman. The other was a guy who told me that translating was a kind of “cheating.”

Thinking about these two because I am again and again struck by the the illusion that you can know - or as I often put it “master” - the poem to begin with.

So much of translation discussion is about establishing one’s mastery, one’s knowing because we are so uncomfortable with the unknowability of the poem. Every translator has to prove that they know everything about the foreign culture, the author’s life their language etc.

I have never “mastered” a poem I translated. If I had (I would be too bored to translate it). That unknowability of the poem I think unnerves a lot of people - so they invent easy paradigms to use to make sense of the poem - and translation really exacerbates this anxiety about the unknown. But the unknowability is crucial to art, to its mystery, to its movement and mutations. For me every translation has been about engaging with a text I don’t know, can’t know.

Thus I was accused of “cheating”. The translation is seen as a counterfeit. It has to be. It lacks the fundamental truth that can be known. This invokes for me a money-based way of thinking: There has to be a truth - a gold standard - to the poem because that truth can be mastered, owned, sold. Often this gold standard is based on personhood, individuality, experience. “Write what you know” said the MFA program era dictate (ie men can’t translate women).

Every translation points out that this is not how art work. Art contains an unknowability - it makes it unnerving to some, but also exciting, mysterious. Translation says: poetry is not about what you know but what you don’t, what you can’t know.