Saturday 3/22, Hermitage, Beacon, NY
This past week, East Slope, a collection by 11th century poet Su Shi, arrived as part of my UDP subscription. East Slope consists of eight poems written during an eight month period in the early years of Su Shi's political exile. Jeffrey Yang's translations are really wonderful and are accompanied by the Chinese texts. I don't read Chinese, but I was intrigued by the internal line breaks that Yang employed. The generous spacing between words and phrases suggests brush strokes and gives the words in translation an object quality. Take for instance this line from poem #5:
Not one month since planting clods
covered with green green
The repetition and spacing of green interests me here because it emphasizes both the substantive and adjectival function of the word: green as a descriptive term, "the green clods," but also green as a metonymy for the anticipated harvest. In Poem #6, green reappears, also at the end of a line, this time like a hanging a leaf or fruit:
melts Imagine among
bamboo thickets green
yellow dangling by the eaves
In an afterword to his translation of nine poems from the Qian Jia Shi (Poems of a Thousand Masters), Yang briefly discusses his translation approach, particularly with regard to form:
The English translations emulate the overall rectangular fields (or seals) of the Chinese poems and retain the same number of lines. (Due to the difference in internet browsers, the lines in the translations
may be a little off and not form perfect rectangles.) White space, as in many poems, serve as punctuation, breath, pause, degrees of rest, "In silence . . . the pulse of God's blood in our veins" (Bunting). The
overarching hope was to convey some of the music and precision of the Chinese in English.
The white spaces in East Slope certainly encouraged pause and rest, but, as I said, it also enhanced for me the physicality of the language. I was thinking of this later at the reading, which was organized to engage the five senses. It began with a a taste of medicinal tea (to ward off colds), a moment of silence, and then artist Hu Ren Yi dipped his brush in dark ink and started painting across a sheet of paper while Yang read East Slope. Hu painted continuously without pause, and it was interesting for me to reflect on this when Yang paused between words, phrases and poems. He seemed to be giving Hu time and attention, but one could also understand Hu's brush strokes as a literal illustration of what fills the white space of Su Shi's poems. And what this is can be language or distortions of language, a movement or breath, a suggestion of landscape or a circle enclosing space.
Artists Jon Beacham and Christian Toscano opened Hermitage in December 2007 as an art space and bookstore focused on collaboration and community (Yang lives in Beacon). The bookstore stocks small press books and chapbooks of U.S. poetry from the 1950s and 1970s, an "important literary period in which poets and writers across the country published themselves and each other, and held a rich ongoing dialog through correspondence and activity amongst each other."
Sunday, 3/23, 92nd St. Y, New York, NY
I attended an interview with Israeli novelist David Grossman, part of the 92nd St. Y's "Israel at 60" festivities. The interviewer was Adam Rovner, who is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Hofstra University. Adam did a fantastic job asking a range of challenging questions on Grossman's work, focusing specifically on the literary and leaving the political to the Q&A.
Adam is also the Translation Editor for Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (and in this capacity has given me many opportunities to delve into some great translation projects). He's also married to translator Jessica Cohen, who has translated Grossman's most recent novels into English. So a question about translation was in order. Adam observed that, to a significant extent, translation has shaped Grossman's influences and noted, in particular, the role that Bruno Schulz plays in Grossman's 1986 novel See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh: ahava). Grossman had remarked earlier in the conversation that after the publication of his first novel, The Smile of the Lamb (Chiyukh ha-gedi, 1983), a number of readers and critics instantly tried to link his work to other writers. "I was a new literary baby and everyone wanted to claim a part of me...he has the eyes of... the ears of..." One reader remarked that Grossman's work shared a strong affinity to the writing of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), a Polish author Grossman had never read. He borrowed a Hebrew translation of Schulz's work and instantly was captivated. As he read more about Schulz, he was troubled in particular about the circumstances surrounding his murder and resolved to write a book that what redeem Schulz in some way. This book became See Under: Love, which contains long sections about Schulz and his death that are written in a style and language reminiscent of Schulz's stories.
Since Grossman read Schulz in Hebrew translation, it's a little odd for Grossman to talk about writing in "Schulz's language" (which was Polish, for the record), but this is exactly how he describes these sections of the novel. I think Adam wanted him to address this slippage between translation and writing but Grossman turned to the subject of translation and mentioned that though Jessica does a "brilliant" job translating his novels (she does!), he remains skeptical of the very possibility of translation. For Grossman, every word he writes is precise and resonant. His Hebrew is layered with traces of the language of the Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Haskalah (Enlightenment) and contemporary literature. Language, Grossman said, is like "a revolving door." The reader is inside this door experiencing the possibilities of language. But at some point, for translation to happen, one has to pick a point of exit. Where one chooses to step out of the door is necessary for translation to take place but it also reduces the possible meaning, references, and nuances of a word. As I listened to Grossman, I was struck once again by how often a deep skepticism about translation coincides with the deep influence of translation. Grossman may not be convinced that translation can convey adequately everything that he is trying to say in one word or phrase, but something came across in his reading of Schulz in Hebrew translation even if it was partial and incomplete. And it was this language of the translation that shaped those beautiful, resonant passages on Schulz in See Under: Love. Sure there are losses in translation, but when I think of See Under: Love and how translation inspired and, arguably, made possible the writing of this urgent, radiant novel, I'm convinced that the absence of translation risks the greater losses.
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