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Much has been written of
the difficulty of translating poetry, the slipperiness of words, the
impossibility of conveying the writer's meaning in words not native to
their tongue or brain. Translation itself is a word with a multiplicity
of meanings, on the one hand signalling no-change, uniformity between
the words of one language and its fellow, alternatively the act of
changing in form or shape or appearance. Change, or similarity? The
translator's job is a tightrope between these twin poles, and many fall
by the wayside. Poetry, more than any other medium, reminds us of how
words transcend themselves, how they can be a seductive but misleading
web where one singular meaning cannot be unwound from the shimmering,
multi-faceted tangle in front of the reader. Thoughts may be shared,
but are rarely duplicated. For all the en-face translations, the twins
are fraternal only, never identical.
But I wonder whether this
is such a problem. Writers are rarely discrete in their observances -
in great poetry there is not one single meaning to be gleaned, but a
kaleidoscope of possibilities, a shifting that can take place even
during a single reading, let alone repeat viewings, different readers.
Whatever language a poem begins in, it is always a translation.
Collections dissociated from the writer's own language of choice remind
the reader of their own part in this process of decoding and
commonality: words are rarely transparent, singular, pure, but become
simply a medium, a conduit, for the thoughts that have inspired
them...What [translations] have in common is the recognition that we
are all distanced by, and from, language...
...Translating the world,
making sense of it can be a dark process as well as one lit with
evening sun in woodlands. Stephane Mallarme, a master of French
symbolism, was a writer who lived for this process of translation, of
subtle shifts, impressions cast. He once claimed that "to name an
object is to eliminate three-quarters of a poem's please...to suggest
it, this is the dream." By this argument poetry should strive for
intangibility: dislocation from names leaves us only with suggestion,
inference, shade and tone. Notes for Anatole's Tomb is not a
poem, we are told. Certainly it was not a poem in its author's eyes.
Mallarme, famed for his writing of tombeaux for figures such as Poe and
Baudelaire, found the death of his eight year old son an impossible
subject. Patrick McGuinness' translation of the fragments that make up
Mallarme's notes for his never-to-be completed elegy provides us with a
moving insight into the poet's mind. In these impassioned and
grief-stricken fragments Anatole becomes precisely what Mallarme is
unable to figure in his poetry. The poet here is not an alchemist, he
cannot transmute the death of his son into a kind of poetic afterlife,
despite Mallarme's lament that "with gift of words I could have made
you king" the words themselves fail him. But it is this failure,
perhaps that makes it poetry. Anatole's Tomb is not always easy
reading. Mallarme's notes are fragmentary, but this adds to the sombre
power of lines such as "I can feel him in me wanting - if not lost
life, at least the equivalent -" This is a collection to be experienced
rather than read, flashes of empathy for a grief that the poet himself
finds himself beyond articulation. He talks of his "fury against the
formless" but for all his anger and grief, this is a fury directed at
the inevitable partiality of language. If poetry is, after all, the
communication of something, even the inability to communicate then this
is certainly poetry, and of the highest order. What we can feel in
others, what we imagine we feel...
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