Team NEP: The below just in from translator, editor, and poet Alissa Valles. And here's an interview with her about her work as a translator. JBHello: I’m Alissa Valles – I edited the Polish, Spanish, Dutch and Flemish sections of the NEP anthology. Joel asked me a few things related to translation and cultural context that I’d like to respond to here. My own relationship to each of the above countries and cultures is very different, so first a word on that, because it may be relevant to some of the issues of cultural resonance Joel raised. I have ancestry and family history in Spain (my parents lived there before I was born, my brother was born there) but have never lived there. I was born in Amsterdam and raised there and in the US, multilingually; I’ve always felt more comfortable in English than in Dutch, and although I’ve translated into Dutch, all of my own writing is in English. I studied Polish in England (alongside Russian) and later lived, studied and worked in Poland for years, and now spend part of each year in Warsaw.
Here are Joel’s questions:
- Obviously, when we read a poem in translation, we apprehend a different object than the original in terms of language. But what about in terms of culture? Reading the poems in the anthology, my students have consistently expressed anxiety over the idea that even when they're enjoying a given poem, they may be enjoying it for the "wrong reasons," because they don't have an understanding of the cultural context in which the poem was born. How necessary would you say it is for American readers of these poems to acquaint themselves with the contemporary political/cultural/economic/ religious contexts of the countries represented? How much of the poetry is "lost" to us if we don't understand those contexts?
Obviously a great deal of the context for a poem is embedded in its linguistic choices and texture, but there is also context that can be learned – though the meaning it adds is still not even near what is available to a native speaker. One helpful analogy for reading poetry in translation may be reading poetry in English from a time or place remote from our own. To read Shakespeare, it obviously helps to learn something about his world. But in fact, readers of the NEP anthology may know (or intuit) more about the contemporary European world to which the anthology is related, than about Elizabethan England or colonial America. I’m not convinced a set of footnotes or a program of research is necessary to an enjoyment and immediate basic grasp of the poems in NEP (anymore than they are for Shakespeare). It’s a bit like meeting a bunch of new people at a party – you may not get all of their references, but you can have fun getting to know them. There is always room for a deepening of the response, if you decide you want to spend more time with these people, and history, politics, art, gender relations, religious tradition, anything you can learn about the culture will add interest and perhaps understanding. The untranslatable meanings embodied in language and social context of which a reader is acutely or vaguely aware should not preclude exploration and engagement with what is open. I feel poets in particular have a licence, and perhaps even a cultural duty, to guess and glean. Even misreadings, if we believe Harold Bloom, can be fertile. If the translator has done his or her job properly, the reader will be given a rich and suggestive poem that remains as faithful to the original in form and meaning as an English poem can. It is an impure, hybrid process – both for translator and reader - that should enrich poetry in English with new forms and meanings.
As for ‘wrong reasons’ for enjoying a poem in translation, what would be an example? There may be obstacles and misreadings, but perhaps there are no ‘wrong reasons’; just reasons, or readings, that are more or less profound. There may be a hierarchy of readings from shallow to deep, but I’m reluctant to be the arbiter of that hierarchy, or to dismiss a surface impression which may in fact lead to something important in the poem that isn’t so obvious. Being too much on top of a culture (as you often are if you’re immersed in a particular translation project) can also blind you (me) to potential meanings. So a widening of the readership only helps.
Generally speaking, I suspect that some knowledge of the culture is more important in reading the Polish section of the anthology than in reading the Dutch, Flemish or Spanish sections, and this is in itself interesting. For obvious political and historical reasons, Poland has undergone a radical transformation in the last thirty years, which is roughly the span of the anthology. In that period, Dutch and Spanish society have been relatively stable – despite their own at times explosive problems with immigration or separatism. (The Dutch section should really have some of the poetry written by the young poets writing in Dutch but intimately tied to the culture of Turkey or Morocco or Bosnia – all I can plead is lack of space, and a tentative sense that a great talent has yet to make its appearance among that group.) I think it’s fair to say – though I don’t know if the other regional editors would agree – there is not the same kind of generational revolution in poetry in Western Europe that you see in Poland. The younger Polish poets are often reacting against the politically engaged and often moralizing poetry of their predecessors who found themselves, in a variety of ways, opposing themselves to an authoritarian regime. In a more general way, the younger poets are trying to topple (or enrich, depending on your point of view) the canon of Polish poetry presented by Czeslaw Milosz. Sometimes polemically, sometimes by simply turning to relatively unexplored territory, particularly life in a new and very raw consumer society.
As I look at ‘my’ sections now, it seems to me that the Dutch and Spanish poets write with virtually no explicit references to their national culture, no geographical or linguistic markers. The Poles do it (perhaps only a bit) more. One should ask why this is. Have poets become more cosmopolitan, less connected to a particular culture and place? Certainly the NEP poets may be to an extent self-selecting, in that poems that translate well tend to be poems that forgo emphasis on local detail, slang, etc. In reading the whole anthology, I was struck by how many of the poets were themselves already tuned in to American (or English-language) poetry, spoke fluent Ashbery, had spent time in America or England, and so on. I made a conscious effort in working on my sections not to yield to that bias, and not to settle for any bland internationalism, but I did want to include poems that ‘worked’ in English. It’s very frustrating, and you see the phenomenon in the earlier generations of Polish poets as well: terrific poets whose language is rooted in slang, etymology, bent syntax, local references, are harder to transport – I’m thinking of Miron Bialoszewski, Krystyna Milobedzka, there are others. This is the real loss – or lack – which is a challenge to translators, but it remains in a sense invisible to a reader without knowledge of the particular foreign language and poetry. Some of the best wines don’t travel.
A side note: Another thing invisible to readers of translations is the involvement or non-involvement of the poet in the translation, and the arguments that may have gone on between translator and poet or translator and editor or editor and poet. Although the translation may be given as the work of a translator with the author, there are smaller but not insignificant interactions – a kind of back-stage life – which are another kind of context for the poem. Some poets don’t care if very place- or culture-specific references are preserved and would just as soon see some sort of English or American equivalent, others are terrified of losing them. Some translators avoid contact with the poet they are translating, some want to vet every detail.
One example of a poem for which some context may be essential is ‘Good Later’ by Marcin Sendecki. For a Polish reader, the poem takes place in the context of a certain polemic about and ‘incomprehensible poetry’. Sendecki inserts a particular Polish critic-poet’s text (published in a periodical) into the poem – everything in italics is an extended quote. In the background of the polemic is Czeslaw Milosz’s essay “On Incomprehensible Poetry” (cf. Milosz’s essays To Begin Where I Am, FSG 2001). Sendecki’s tactic for responding to the accusation (often leveled at him) is framing it in mundane, tacky, vital details of everyday life, as if tuning into it and out of it as if it were a radio broadcast, or a voice heard in passing. The title itself is a colloquial contraction of ‘good morning’ and ‘see you later’. I included the poem because it seems to me a kind of ars poetica poem (and because the Sendecki poem I wanted to include was too long for the section).
This is what I have time to write today, but I’d be happy to comment more on specific poets or sections, if questions come up in your reading.
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