Adam J. Sorkin on Romanian Poetry PART ONE

JOEL:

Dear Dr. Sorkin,

My students are delighting in your translations from the Romanian in
the New European Poets anthology, and are bringing up some interesting
questions about them, particularly regarding the challenges you must
have faced when dealing with idioms. The conversation is ongoing on
our blog at

http://neweuropeanpoets.blogspot.com/2009/02/romanian-literature-not-as-intimidating.html

If you have any time or inclination to comment on the comments posted
there, we'd be tremendously grateful to hear from you.


DR. SORKIN:

Choices in diction are always choices. Some of the ones brought up were done
in conjunction with Romanian poets who did know English. I didn't go back to
the originals to check, but Radu Andiescu was playing with language and
establishing tone of voice, and I don't really think there is particular
reason that an idiom has to be up-to-date according to any time period's
narrow definition of with-it-ness, anyway (which would mean that five
minutes, months, or years from now, it will sound as old-fashioned as some
think this is). (I probably had running in my head a smile at Ronald
Reagan's use of "keister," which really would have sounded really out of
date; it surely added a private glee to the verbal energy the phrase should
have.) I recall that Radu used the usual Romanian idiom for a fist in the
muzzle/poke in the nose/punch in the face, but idioms get slithery, language
to language, and we wanted something vivid. So, a foot instead of a fist. I
sometimes feel it's freer when I can agree on things with the author.
Anyway, why not use what's at your disposal, that works in context and has a
corresponding effect? I notice that no one so far has so far remarked on the
use of "bloody" with "bad shit," which ("bloody") is clearly the British
locution. Saviana Stanescu's poem had typographical voice-echoes, but it
hardly matters given that she has the right to change her poem, anyway, to
what she feels (what we agree on) that she wanted in the English; if you
read her plays, done in English, or her poems written in English now, oh
yes, she does those things.

As to my own intent, at least, I always try to get something vernacular for
something vernacular, a corresponding register of diction. Recent Romanian
poetry is full of the demotic, the idiomatic, the slangy and the off-color,
and in the last decade, since poetry had been prohibited such diction and
references (communism was very prurient about language and about sexual
terms, a long story), the downright vulgar. Particularly from the 80s on,
with the influence of the American Beats (Ginsberg, some O'Hara) on the
so-called blue-jeans generation, the self-consciously postmodern generation
(e.g., Mircea Cartarescu, but very differently, Magda Carneci, a feminist
and more than a bit mystic, religious poet, developing the same freedoms
differently, or a third to note, not really influenced by these American
styles, the Serbian-born Ioan Flora, whose poems are, like most of these
writers, dyed-in-the-wool ironic and chock-full of detail and surrealism) --
you see the same kind of postmodernism-cum-religion in a number of the
writers in the Romanian/Moldovan sections, e.f., Galaicu-Paun, whose
references and energy can be quite wild, or similarly, Galatanu ---you can't
get a full sense of this from the various shorter poems, and an anthology
requires hard choices.

Anyway, postmodernism had rather a different, less esoteric/esthetic set of
connotations there under communism, since it meant working the way Western
writers worked, and had implications, then, about content. Irony was a way
of life, a state of the spirit, and continued to be after the Dec. 1989 fall
of communism. A native source for some of this kind of writing (I'm just
finishing a book of a selection of his poems for British publication) is
Mircea Ivanescu, who used no capital letters in his poems (yes, e.e.
cummings influence, but he isn't otherwise similar), whose broken syntax,
full of parentheses, asides, disconnects, makes for a kind of discursive
(well, a kind of "inward conversation," a phrase from one of the poems) and
less immediately poetic surface, anti-lyrical. Very unlike Mariana Marin,
poor woman, who gets mentioned in the comments, whose poems I sometimes
found editors in the U.S. rejecting for being -- as one commented -- too
neurotic. I took it as a compliment for the translation and kept on sending
her poems out and finally did place a book (the Ugly Duckling Presse book,
Paper Children).

This is all background to the poets in New European Poets, what they
develop, what they react to, what they sidestep as too immediately
influential. Post-communist poets are rarely political, tend to movements
such as "biographism" (until 1989, there was only one biography worth
writing, in official terms -- the dictator's -- but biography, remember,
opens up individualism and what were the forbidden "psy" disciplines,
contraband ways of thinking -- not that the younger poets really ever
accepted the official line) -- anyway, and what is often called
"miserabilism" (Sociu, more in slightly later poems, fits this well, though
he has now developed beyond that mode, as I think he'd agree -- which is not
to put down down-and-out sensibilities).

One thing a translator has to know is that there's always another way to do
it, another style, another perspective, another variation on the original,
foreign-language theme, another improvisation. I consciously try to keep
rather close to the originals, that is, not to make Sorkinesque poems out of
So-and-So's; in contradiction to this, if I have to err, I'd rather err on
the side of making poetry than of literal accuracy. The old conundrum,
often expressed as faithful dullness vs. faithless beauty. A poem that
doesn't come across as a poem in what is usually called the target language
(English, in this case) might as well be accused of targeting the source
poem with the gun-barrel of verbal violence. I do recognize, anyway, that
I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here.

I notice what I take to be some dismay that line lengths and breaks don't
quite follow American practice. That is quite true. One older-generation
poet I worked with, the late Mihai Ursachi, the rival of Nichita Stanescu
(at least that's what he himself said, and in ways, there is much more truth
to that than Sorescu, who is mentioned -- what Ursachi called, "ontological"
reasons, speaking with me) -- anyway, Ursachi said that Romanian critics
sometimes complained that he didn't have a good sense of line. I myself find
a sometimes anti-poetic use of line more and more in recent times, and
usually I keep it the way it was. If you concoct and all-American smoothie
out of everything, you blend away whatever makes this poetry different from
that poetry, and the differences from American poetry practice and
poetry-writing-class advice.

Formal poetry didn't get in the anthology, but it is still pursued, I'll
add. It was a matter of whom I judged most representative. And not just me
-- I asked many for advice. Anthologies have a canonic effect, but I think
they are more like snapshots. Limited. Ad-hoc. Continent.

By the way, those who liked Radu Andriescu's poetry might want to look (I'll
give it a plug, why not, though operators are not standing by at any
900-number) for a book just being published in Prague, from Twisted Spoon
Press: *Memory Glyphs* -- a book of three Romanian prose poets, Cristian
Popescu, Iustin Panta, and Radu Andriescu.

Enough, I'll close, but I'll sign off not in my own voice but with a poem
that always keeps me humble as a translator:

Translation by Marin Sorescu

I was taking a test
In a dead language.
I had to translate myself
From man into ape.

I started indirectly, at arm¹s length,
First tackling the translation of a text
From a forest.

The translation became
A lot trickier, however,
The closer I got to myself.
Still, with a little effort,
I found satisfactory equivalents
For toenails and leg-hair.

Around the knees
I began jabbering wild guesses.

Right before the heart, my hand jerked
And I put a blotch across the sun.

I tried to repair it
With the hair on my chest.
But I tripped up for good
At the soul.

translated by Adam J. Sorkin