The poet Charles Simic has died at 84. I confess his poetry was never my cup of tea, though I admired it (and quoted a short poem as part of a post making fun of the LRB), but I always liked his essays (see the related posts from 2003 and 2022), and to mark his passing I’ll quote a chunk of his 1980 NYRB review of Collected Poems in English by Joseph Brodsky, edited by Ann Kjellberg (on which see this 2015 post):
What we have under review then are translations Brodsky himself made, the ones he supervised and gave his approval, plus the poems he wrote in English. Brodsky’s output in Russian is large and of the highest quality. In it the breadth of formal invention and rhetorical complexity is staggering. He wrote just about every kind of poem, including long lyrical sequences, dramatic monologues, narratives, odes, elegies, sonnets, and sundry light verse. Modulating levels of diction, playful, witty, and endlessly inventive, he is a mouthful in the original Russian as anybody who has heard him read can testify. His poems, as with most Russian poetry, have meter and rhyme. Despite the difficulties, of which he was well aware, he insisted throughout his life that they both be faithfully preserved in translations of his work:
It should be remembered that verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced by each other, let alone by free verse. Differences in meters are differences in breath and in heart-beat. Differences in rhyming pattern are those of brain functions. The cavalier treatment of either is at best sacrilege, at worst a mutilation or a murder. In any case, it is a crime of the mind, for which its perpetrator—especially if he is not caught—pays with the pace of his intellectual degradation. As for the readers, they buy a lie.
These are very strong words. A demand for fidelity and near-complete identity between the original and the translation is an impossible task to achieve and a prescription for disaster as he himself admitted at times. He said in an interview:
It is easier to translate from English into Russian than the reverse. It’s just simpler. If only because grammatically Russian is much more flexible. In Russian you can always make up what’s been omitted, say just about anything you like. Its power is in subordinate clauses, in all those participial phrases and other grammatical turns of speech that the devil himself could break his leg on. All of this simply does not exist in English. In English translation, preserving this charm is, well, if not impossible, then at least incredibly difficult. So much is lost. Even a good, talented, brilliant poet who intuitively understands the task is incapable of restoring a Russian poem in English. The English language simply doesn’t have those moves. The translator is tied grammatically, structurally. This is why translation from Russian into English always involves straightening the text.
This is perfectly true. Brodsky is without a doubt a great Russian poet and so are Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Akhmatova, but often one would not know that for certain from the available translations of their work. This is an unusual situation in that we can get a fairly good idea of Apollinaire’s or Lorca’s greatness without knowing French or Spanish. Even ancient Chinese poets come across in English better than Russians do. As Brodsky said of Horace, whom he could not read in the original, one is “reduced to judging the stuff by the quality of imagination.” Could this mean that the quintessential quality of Russian poetry, what makes it different from all other poetries in the world, is its inextricable and untranslatable mixture of sound and meaning? Reading Tsvetaeva or Khlebnikov in the original I certainly have come to believe so. On the other hand, I can also think of a lot of poems of Stevens and Crane whose translation is unimaginable.
“We all work for a dictionary,” Brodsky said of the poets. He meant that the Muse is not some nebulous female presence, but a thick, dog-eared book lying on the table. He also said, “In order to write verses you have to stew in the idiomatics of the language constantly.” I agree. However, the thicker the stew, the harder it is for the translator to duplicate the recipe. Images and figures of speech can be translated and equivalents found for idioms, but the sound of a mother tongue, its music and what that music evokes in the native reader, cannot be brought over from one language to another.
Indeed it can’t, and it’s interesting that, as he says, “even ancient Chinese poets come across in English better than Russians do.”
It is easier to translate from English into Russian than the reverse. It’s just simpler. If only because grammatically Russian is much more flexible.
For those of us who are ignorant of Russian, can you elaborate? I think of English as grammatically flexible, in that there isn’t much of it. No gender to worry about, agreement between subjects and verbs is simple, verbs turn into nouns easily and vice versa… What aspects of Russian cause trouble for would-be translators into English?
It is indeed striking how pervasive the use of repeated sounds is in Russian poetry (and always has been: it’s just as pervasive in the Lay of Igor’s Host). Elsewhere this is much rarer (glomerati Grai, clusters great of Greeks in throngs, and not much more). Good old Germanic alliteration is similar, but much stricter and less flexible.
As far as I’ve noticed, Chinese poetry merely rhymes.
Word order is at least as flexible in Russian poetry and even prose literature as Caesar’s. On top of that, for the abovementioned participial constructions, Russian not only has a present active and a past passive participle, but also a present passive and a past active one, and they’re heavily used (even in scientific writing); translating them (“being done”, “having done”) will at the very least explode the meter.
Я вас любил: любовь ещё, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Romanization (Wikipedia)
Ya vas lyubíl: lyubóv’ eshchyó, byt’ mózhet,
V dushé moyéy ugásla ne sovsém;
No pust’ oná vas ból’she ne trevózhit;
Ya ne khochú pechálit’ vas nichém.
Word by word
I(pronoun, Nom) you(pronoun, formal, Acc) love (verb past impf. masc): love (noun, Nom, fem) still (adverb), maybe,
in soul (noun, Instr.) my (adjective Instr.) extinguish (verb past pf. fem) not completely [“Literal: with+ all (Instr)”]
but let (verb, subjunctive) she (pronoun, Nom) you(pronoun, formal, Acc) more (adverb) not worry (verb, present);
I(pronoun, Nom) not want (verb) sadden (verb, infinitive) you(pronoun, formal, Acc) “in any way” [Literal : no + what (Instr)]
Literalish translation (not mine):
I loved you once: perhaps that love has yet
To die down thoroughly within my soul;
But let it not dismay you any longer;
I have no wish to cause you any sorrow.
I am not sure what issues Brodsky would have about making good and faithful poetry out of these lines. I can suggest:
1. Some adverbs have transparent prep+obj breakdown, this is not poetic language like English “withal”
2. The clause from the middle of the 1st line to the end of the second line shows almost free reordering of normal word order to reflect speaker’s feelings.
3. Russians have an ongoing and deep relationship with their souls, such as I have only with my stomach. This is not connected with religion (neither in their case or mine).
4. The fourth line is also somewhat reordered (the ordering is oddly English-like) and brings a great emphasis to “sadden”.
I am not sure what issues Brodsky would have about making good and faithful poetry out of these lines.
Probably the same issue I do: the sentiment is banal, it’s only the magical use of the Russian language that makes it great poetry, and that’s by definition irreproducible. One could try to write a poem in English based on the same sentiment, and if one were a great poet it might turn out to be a great poem, but it wouldn’t be a translation. It is impossible for someone who knows only English to understand how that can be one of the most famous poems in Russian.
I remember a debate in graduate school where one of my seminar mates did in fact take that position that Pushkin is actually often extremely banal and that Russian is a dangerous language because it has the power through sound and rhythm to make banalities appear profound. I’m not convinced Russia has a special power in that regard – certainly Spanish and Arabic speakers are also very capable of sweeping themselves away on waves of their own rhetoric.
it’s interesting that, as he says, “even ancient Chinese poets come across in English better than Russians do.”
Isn’t that partly because we don’t really understand ancient Chinese poets very well, and have only a vague idea how the poetry was actually supposed to soun? That provides translators a lot more leeway to create great poetry where none may have actually existed.
Classical Latin poetry probably suffers just as much as Russian poetry, but so many generations of English speakers were able to read Latin in the original we give it the benefit of the doubt. Are there any translations of the Aeneid that reach the level of great poetry?
The most famous Latin example is of course Ennius:
(which the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium uses as an example of how not to do it).
Are there any extant human languages in which a sufficiently competent demagogue cannot make banalities (or worse …) appear profound?
A certain competence is also needed to make profundities appear banal. Cunningly popularized, even theoretical cosmology has lost its terrors. Anyone can join the conversation about holograms and quantum gravity.
It’s gotten to the point that I see no good reason to distinguish sharply between profound and banal. All that matters is that the punters bite.
Vanya, Russians are certainly capable of liking the sound of their own voices and being impressed by their own wit and wisdom. But Pushkin is not a good example of it (Brodsky, probably, is sometimes guilty). Most of his poems are not ponderous at all and one of the things that impresses (many) Russians is precisly the lightness of his style. And if you want something interesting and not quite often expressed, read the second stanza.
I’m surprised that Nabokov hasn’t come up in this discussion, because he was very interested in the possibilities of lossless translation, specifically between Russian and English. In Pale Fire (a book I liked much more than Lolita) he invented an example of word play that works just as well in Russian as it does in English:
That example by Nabokov shows that sometimes it’s possible to render Russian assonances in English, or vice versa, but even here both have different syllable counts. This would be a typical situation – Russian words tend to be longer, and while one could look for latinate words to render them in English, that gets you into problems of register and associations.
I’m surprised that Nabokov hasn’t come up in this discussion, because he was very interested in the possibilities of lossless translation
I don’t think he believed in the possibility of lossless translation; rather, he decided at some point (and very unfortunately) that the only loss that mattered was semantic, and that everything else could and should be discarded, leading to his rebarbative translation of Onegin (you can tell who was dishonest and/or had a tin ear by who reviewed it favorably). When he was younger he produced brilliant translations of a perfectly normal sort.
he invented an example of word play that works just as well in Russian as it does in English
That was a show-offy one-off, not a model for translation practice.
We’ve discussed Nabokov and translation a number of times, e.g. here and here.
“This is an unusual situation in that we can get a fairly good idea of Apollinaire’s or Lorca’s greatness without knowing French or Spanish. Even ancient Chinese poets come across in English better than Russians do. As Brodsky said of Horace, whom he could not read in the original, one is “reduced to judging the stuff by the quality of imagination.” Could this mean that the quintessential quality of Russian poetry, what makes it different from all other poetries in the world, is its inextricable and untranslatable mixture of sound and meaning?”
Isn’t this a kind of “sacred mystery of Russian” that was amusing applied to Japanese? “Different from all other poetries in the world”?
To a certain extent, sure. But it does seem to be hard to show the excellence of Russian poetry in English, though there have certainly been some successes (especially with Mandelstam).