Where Have You Been? (28 page)

A few hundred remain on grizzly lands below

hanging glaciers, among Engelmann spruce, fir,

lodgepole pine, foothills of aspen and balsam poplar

in the Siffleur, White Goat and Peace Wilderness

where they're shot for sport, caught for rodeo stock,

sold for dog food at four hundred a head. Sixteen

left to rot in the forest northwest of Jasper,

two foals dumped at a gas well site by the only

animal who kills from a distance, noise for a voice

and noise for a home, for whom all places are alike.

 

 

PART TWO

 

“SHARP BISCUIT”: SOME THOUGHTS ON TRANSLATING

NOTES FROM A GUILTY BUSINESS

A handful of lucky or gifted poets fill their lives with poetry. I'm thinking of the likes of Ashbery, Brodsky, Ted Hughes, Les Murray. They write/wrote poems, it seems to me, practically every day, the way prose writers write their novels. The date at the bottom of Mandelstam poems. Plath poems. It's a question of the force of the gift, the pounds per square inch of the Muse. Heaney, too, comes close. The rest of us strike compromises, do something else “as well,” mostly teach, in a handful of cases do other, unrelated work, have “a job” in the “real world.” The job is the enemy of the poetry, its successful, favored rival (the job is everything, the poem nothing; who wants the poem, and who doesn't want the job?), but may also be the dirt from which the poetry grows. Such, anyway, is my hope, translating.

*   *   *

Meetings with remarkable translators. To coin a phrase. The first was Ralph Manheim (translator of Grass and Handke, then as now the two most prominent living German authors, but also of Brecht and Céline and Danilo Ki
Å¡
and any number of others—
Mein Kampf
, anyone?), who invited me to drinks at his flat in Paris. A native of Chicago, if I remember, and one of the great generation of American translators that was produced by the war. 1980, 1982, something like that. Six o'clock. Yardarm time. I turn up, meet him and his charming wife, who has suffered a stroke and whom he is looking after. I feel a bond with him: the unusual, “thin” spellings of our names, only one
n
in his, only one
f
in mine in the same place, plus he is exactly fifty years older than me, born in 1907. We talk about the vexatious Handke, who is also living in Paris, and with whom he says, in a gallant adaptation of the German idiom (which exists in the negative form), “
ist gut Kirschen essen
,” you
can
share a bowl of cherries, i.e., a companionable and generous and uncomplicated sort. I demur, but he says it, and he may after all be right. (Years later, I am with friends in Paris. Very late, long after supper, there is a knock on the door. It is Peter Handke, who only ever walks everywhere, unannounced, with his hat full of mushrooms he has picked. They are straightaway cooked and eaten, and I am surprised by Handke, who is tanned and strong and kind, and has a firm handshake, and I think about the cherries, and the Manheims.) I drink a beer, they both have whiskey. Ralph has come from his office in another building. The sense, then, of it being a job, that he keeps regular hours, locks it up, and comes home. Doesn't allow it to sprawl greedily or disfiguringly over his life. I think, if I think at all, of my father who writes at home, giving dictation—furthermore—to my mother, in what passes for our living room. His writing is everywhere, fills the airwaves, fills our family space, governs our lives like national economy.

Then Joseph Brodsky, sometime later in the eighties, in the Tufnell Park flat of a friend of his. Espresso and Vecchio Romano in a somewhat redundant, spotless kitchen. (He wrote about Auden's “real library of a kitchen” in Kirchstetten, but I guess that for him and in his life, most of the action will have been in, so to speak, the real kitchen of this or that library. As he said, “freedom is a library”; it isn't a kitchen.) “Circumcised” cigarettes. The practiced fingers pull out the sponge, pull out the fluff, discard the fluff, return the sponge. Only then is it safe to smoke. He is translating Cavafy, whom he loves. The classicism, the history, the anonymity. Into Russian. He has brought with him from New York a Russian portable typewriter. Greek into Cyrillic. In bourgeois north London. A bizarre, Conradian phenomenon. The translator as bacillus.

Maybe one more. A rare (for me) gathering of translators in New York City, perhaps some awards ceremony, I don't remember. We fill the front rows of a theater somewhere, feeling unusually effervescent, like a gathering of missionaries, or spies on day release. Optimistic. Righteous. Both full of ourselves and among ourselves,
unter uns
. Ourselves alone—Sinn Féin. The charabanc effect. To make things better/worse, Paul Auster is brought on to address us. Then someone announces that Gregory Rabassa is of the company, somewhere right and in front of us. A slight, stooped figure rises, bows. From the stage, a beam tries to pick him out, to try to somehow give him some plasticity. I don't think I would recognize him on the street. The first translator I was aware of, I read his García Márquez when I was twenty and doorstepped his London publishers. (Remember García Márquez's praise for him as “the best Latin American writer in the English language”?) A little pencil mustache, maybe? An imperial? I doubt myself, and think probably I'm making it up, extrapolating, literarizing. We applaud frantically. Such are the heroes of a secret business, a guilty business, even.

*   *   *

I translate to try to amount to something. When I first held my first book of poems in my hands (the least extent acceptable to the British Library, forty-eight pages including prelims), I thought it would fly away. To repair a deficit of literature in my life. My ill-advised version of Cartesianism:
traduco, ergo sum
. Ill-advised because the translator has no being, should neither be seen nor heard, should be (yawn) faithful, should be (double yawn) a plate of glass. Well,
Kerrang!!!

*   *   *

Many, if not most, translators operate with an acquired language, or languages, and their own, which is the one, according to Christopher Logue, they have to be really good at. (I never trust people who translate both into and out of a language: isn't there something unsanitary about that, like drinking the bathwater?) That brings a certain dispassion to their proceedings, a lab coat, tweezers, a fume cupboard. But both my languages are “my own”: German, my so-called mother tongue, and English, which I have no memory of learning at the age of four and was the language I first read and wrote in. Both are lived languages, primal languages: the one of family and first namings and, now, of companionship and love; the other of decades of, I hope, undetectable and successful assimilation in England. Which should I be without?

I was happily bilingual till my midtwenties, when I began, by economic necessity, to translate. The matching of my two languages is an inner process, the setting of a broken bone, a graft, the healing of a wound. Perhaps it can even be claimed that in me German is in some way an open wound, which is soothed and brought to healing by the application of English. Translation as a psychostatic necessity. Look, there is no break in my life, no loss of Eden, no loss of childhood certainties, no discontinuity, no breach, no rupture, no expulsion. English, then, as a bandage, a splint, a salve.

*   *   *

Late in my translation of my father's novel of small town Germany in the thirties and forties,
The Film Explainer
, about his grandfather, my great-grandfather, you may read: “Anyone who now saw Grandfather on the street, under his artist's hat, with which ‘he shields his thick skull from others' ideas' (Grandmother) no longer said: Hello, Herr Hofmann! He said: Heil Hitler! Or: Another scorcher!”

Yes, this one is ontologically and humorously important to me, it's a family book, the hero's name is Hofmann, and I identify with everyone in it because they're all a part of me: the vainglorious oldster (like me, a wearer of hats), the acerbic grandmother, the anxious-to-please small boy—but even beyond that, the expressing of that history, its domestication in English, gives me immense satisfaction. Where is the rift, the breach, if it is a matter of chance whether you say the Terry-Thomas “Another scorcher!” or the truly villainous “Heil Hitler!”? It could just as well have happened to you, it implies, and: look, I am making a joke of it, and: how can you think I am different? I am putting together something in myself, and in my history.

Hence—though of course no one likes a bad review—the way I react unusually badly (it seems to me) to mistakes (I do make them) and to readers' or reviewers' rebukes. It interferes with my healing, my knitting together, my convalescence. It tears off a bandage and scrapes open my hurt, or my heart. Don't disturb my zigzags, I think.

*   *   *

Translation is the production of words, hundreds of thousands of words, by now many millions of words. I prefer short books, I am lazy, I am a poet, one page is usually plenty for me. But even so, the long books have snuck up on me, and passed through me.
The Radetzky March
perhaps 140,000 words. Two long Falladas, two hundred thousand apiece. Fallada short stories, another hundred thousand. Ernst Jünger 130,000, and with a bunch of other war books—how did I get into that?—comfortably four hundred thousand. Seventy books, millions and millions of words, like millions and millions of numbers, like
π
, an unreal number. If I notice myself starting to repeat (3 point 141592…), I promise myself, then I will stop.

*   *   *

This is all distraction on an industrial scale, the “still small voice” of poetry decibeled over, my puny resources vastly overstretched, the ninety-eight-pound weakling unhappily running amok with a chest expander. In the Nietzsche/Jünger way, it will either kill me or make me strong. Again, how did it happen? Out of fealty to my novelist father: prose. Out of my German nature:
Tüchtigkeit
, energetic production, industry, diligence. Out of dissatisfaction with my own slow, woolgathering, window-gazing methods: all-consuming tasks in unbroken sequence. Out of a desire to make more—and heavier—books: translation. Given his druthers, what does moony Narcissus take upon himself? Why, the labors of Hercules!

*   *   *

If you want someone to look after your sentences for you, who or what better than a poet? If you want someone to regulate—enterprisingly regulate—your diction, cadence your prose, hook a beginning to an ending, jam an ending up against a beginning, drive a green fuse through the gray limbs of clauses—a poet. If you're looking for prose with dignity, with surprise, with order, with attention to detail. That's why the first item in Tom Paulin's book of electric free translations,
The Road to Inver
, is his version of the opening of Camus's
The Plague
. Prose. Well, up to a point.

*   *   *

And the resources, the tools? Well, they can be anything at all. Sometimes, when I've liked certain expressions in German—most especially when they weren't things I knew and therefore gave me the sense that not everyone would know them in German—I let them stand. Uncommon in German, why not new in English? In
Every Man Dies Alone
, there's this: “The actor Max Harteisen had, as his friend and attorney Toll liked to remind him, plenty of butter on his head from pre-Nazi times.” There is a footnote to this, but it's none of my making: I'd have let it go without. Butter on the head—isn't it an adorable expression?! Or this, from the novel
Seven Years
by Peter Stamm, a scene in which two architects are exchanging career advice: “Berlin is an El Dorado, he said, if you're half-presentable, then you can earn yourself a golden nose.” Nothing easier than to have said “really fill your boots” or “earn silly money” or “a shedload of money,” but I didn't want to: the golden nose—what a perfect expression of the wealth gap: such a futile, practically syphilitic protuberance!—had wowed me too much.

So, things let stand from German—but also the opposite. Things fetched from every corner of English. Someone told me a phrase in my Wassermann translation is Australian (I spent hours looking but couldn't find the reference, though I do remember once trying to use “Esky,” from “Eskimo,” the Australian term for a cooler, and not being allowed to). Another expression—“a kick in the slats”—is from a Dublin-born civil servant I used to know. This is translation not quite as autobiography but maybe as “autography”: turning out my pockets, Schwitters-style, a bus ticket, a scrap of newspaper, a fag packet, a page torn out of a diary. The words are not just words; they are words that I've knocked around with; they reflect my continuing engagement with Lowell, with Brodsky, with Bishop, with Malcolm Lowry, words that have had some wear and tear, there is fade in them, and softness, and history, maybe not visibly so for every reader, but palpably, to some.

I use English and American more or less as they come to hand; it used to be I thought I knew the difference, and even imagined I could deliberately switch between them, but I'm no longer sure. Is it the hood or the bonnet? The boot or the trunk? Does something take the biscuit or the cake? Is it the shoe that drops or the penny? Am I pernickety or more persnickety? Inevitably, and increasingly—it's a function of my life and reading, as well as of having employers in London and New York—things in me will come out mixed, in a style you could call “universal-provincial.” A molten, mongrel English (which I happen to believe is the genius and proclivity of the language anyway). What I find most resistant (and least simpatico) is the authentic and the limited and the local (but what translation is going to sit happily with those qualities: they are each the antithesis of translation). Everything expressive is possible. I fight hard for British expressions in my US translations (“on the never-never” is one that comes to mind—surely the American economy would be in a different shape if that jolly warning of the dangers of excessive credit had been understood!), and I like introducing British readers to American expressions as well. Eight boyhood years in Edinburgh—I thought they had left no trace—find a belated upsurge in a welter of Scottish-isms: “postie,” “wee,” “agley,” “first-footing.” (The main beneficiary/sufferer was Durs Grünbein; if I thought anything by it [by no means sure], perhaps that I was mapping provincialisms, Saxon onto Scottish, eighteenth-century capital onto eighteenth-century capital, his Dresden childhood onto mine in the self-styled “Athens of the North.”) Words I've used in poems myself, “bimble” and others, get in on the act. It's not just that translation takes away all your words, it's more insidious than that, more neutron-bomb-like: it takes away all
my
words. Again, once I find myself repeating myself, or see a certain predictability and mannerism in the use—without much sanction from the original—of a slightly dandyish, comical, rueful register, say .888888 recurring, it'll be time for me to stop.