Report from the reversible Workshop 2014
with the poets J. O. Morgan and Katharina Schultens
It's akin to a Venn diagram, where one circle is her/the other him? but wait: there are no Venn diagrams in German. Eventuell: Schnittmenge. Intersection, never a perfect overlap. But no matter. It's a lovely image, those floating circles.
Hysteresis has nothing to do with hysteria, though hysteria may take hold in the translation process. But perhaps that is the eucatastrophe Tolkien spoke of.
A PRISM is not a prism, but the misunderstanding enlightens the reader, and the translator all the more. The text is refracted twofold, threefold in conversation. The facets are infinite. The conversation revolves around nuclear physics and animal slaughter, astrology, mythology and the black magic of the financial markets.
The two poets' zone of intersection proves vast - both are precision mechanics of the most abstruse sciences. I get to watch as they take poems to pieces and assemble them anew. I get to hand them the nuts and bolts, the nuts and bolts for a poem. I get to dismantle each word of the German text for Jo, beginning with Un-be-teiligt-heit. Dis-interest-ed-ness. I am more than interested. I am beteiligt, participating in the reinvention of my profession by two poets who have barely translated before. They did an unconscionably good job of it. And we had an unconscionable amount of fun in the process.
(Isabel Cole, © gezett)
This is a poetry site, but this will be a translation blog, not a poetry blog. It is not my métier to write, critique or translate poetry. For my first entry, I planned to demonstratively not write about poetry. But as it happened, in June I did end up (co-)translating poetry - as a "language mediator" at VERSschmuggel / reversible.
(Aurélie Maurin, © gezett)
Curated by Aurélie Maurin, the translation workshop has been held in this format at the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin every years since 2001. It was inspired by a long-standing German translation debate: Should poetry be translated by people who are first and foremost translators, who have the right language skills and translatorly, but not necessarily poetic talent? Or rather by people who are first and foremost poets, compensating for lacking foreign language skills with an interlinear or gloss translation: the poet turns a "word for word" translation into a "real poem". The first (individualistic, West German) method has the advantage that everything is of a piece, in one person's hands; the disadvantage is that this person must encroach on a different area of expertise - a non-poet must create poetry. The advantage of the second (collectivist, East German) method is that experts are working in concert, each doing what they do best; the disadvantage is the indirectness (the potential accusation that the translating poet may have ultimately created a "real poem", but one that bears only a remote relation to the original poem, which they were unable to experience directly). VERSschmuggel / reversible is an attempt to address these issues using the workshop format. Two poets sit down together to translate each other, assisted by gloss translations and by a language mediator who interprets/facilitates during the poets' discussion. This arrangement preserves both the immediacy and the expertise.
What is fascinating about this method and the underlying debate is that it seems to crystallize out a certain notion of the poetic: poetry as an elusive but definable element, a substance that escapes during transport and needs to be replenished. And the division of labor used to cope with this problem suggests a modular conception of the translation process: as something that can be dismantled into its components - rationality, intuition, mediation, craft. The translator splits into three persons, three roles.
In practice, these are three human beings who interpret their roles as individuals and who interact with one another: this schematic set-up merely provides the framework for variation and creative friction. In addition, every year VERSschmuggel / reversible centers around a different language (in addition to German). This year German poets met with Scottish poets who write mainly in English. The German poets all had at least some knowledge of English; some had been translating from the English for years. The Scots, however, knew no German. Thus English became the main language of communication during the workshop. An especially easy language set-up, one might suppose, making the "language mediators" and even the gloss translations virtually superfluous. But as Aurélie Maurin explained, they were actually especially important here, relativizing the Germans' "linguistic advantage" and enabling the poets to meet on equal footing. It is always part of the language mediators' job to moderate the discussion and keep an eye on the group dynamics, if necessary mediating on a interpersonal as well as a linguistic level. Aurélie emphasized the key role of the language mediator as a unique aspect of the format: "It makes the dialogue into a trialogue? I like to speak of a translation workshop for six hands."
reversible provides a space for experimentation, she said: here most authors are willing to grant each other liberties, understanding this type of translation as a riff on their own poetic strategy. And sometimes even new subject matter is "smuggled" into the poems.
I assisted the Scottish poet J. O. ("Jo") Morgan and the German poet Katharina Schultens as a language mediator. The communication - both linguistic and interpersonal - went swimmingly. I interpreted occasionally when there were comprehension problems. Or, for instance, Jo insisted on going through the German poems with me word for word to understand the German syntax better, or even the structure of the individual words. Other than that, I simply participated in the cheerfully digressive discussion (it turned out that we were all fantasy fans) and brainstorming sessions - making an effort to provide stimuli rather than solutions of my own. It was liberating, the consciousness that I was not responsible for the poetry, and didn't need to be. And it was exciting to participate in the creation of poetry all the same. Above all, it was an excellent vantage point from which to reflect on the translation process, or rather the subprocesses, the different approaches and methods which Jo and Katharina tried out.
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And so I have asked Jo and Katharina, as well as Joseph Given, who did the English gloss translations, about their experience of the workshop and the approaches they used; for reasons of space, what follows are only excerpts from their comments.J. O. Morgan
...the [word] that ended up being "disinterestedness", was interesting in how I felt the construction of the long(ish) German word was necessary to choose an English equivalent; it worked because it was an abstract, but also worked metrically. It was only later that Katharina pointed out I'd got the pronouns that preceded it the wrong way round: "I suspected your disinterestedness", rather than "you suspected my disinterestedness". Of course, the word "disinterest" is a more common word, but it doesn't have the same feel, or impact; its stress is on the second syllable, whereas dis......ness has many more stresses, plus one on the end, which, for the closing word to a phrase/sentence, makes it stronger. Or something like that.
Also - the instance where the German was "das uns" and "dem wir"; which, as "the us" and "the we" I really liked; I liked its complexity and how it was achieving it through very simple means; but I felt (I knew) that that nuance would be lost if in English; the articles would be dull and the sound of it would throw the English-hearing ear; as well as "the we" coming at the end of the line, which would produce an odd effect, and possibly leave the listener considering how the speaker had escaped or kept their distance from "the piss" - which would be missing the point entirely. But the decision to change it to "the crowd" and "the group", though it retains the plurality of the original, as well as using the word "crowd" to suggest how people are said to "follow the crowd", which in turn seemed to fit with the "sheep" and "flock" of one of the other poems, as well as the "blindly-led stampede" mentioned earlier in the poem, it nonetheless loses some of the personal aspect of "us" and "we". In suggesting it I was expecting Katharina would think it wholly inappropriate to the tone/intent of her original, in which case I would have ditched the idea immediately; but she liked it, so in it went.
In order to concentrate on the work I almost had to convince, or maybe trick, my mind into thinking I was working on my own work, so that I would put as much effort into it as I would my own; except I was working from her German originals, so I treated those as a comprehensive (very comprehensive) set of notes. "Notes" may seem slightly derogatory, but I take my notes very seriously; if I have noted something down for my own work I know I will not have done so lightly; even if I can't quite recall why I noted it, I know that I must stick to it, and will have to work to root out its meaning. Whilst at the same time as all that I was also keeping it in mind that this was Katharina's voice, not my own. So I was treating the poems as though they were mine, as well as treating them as hers. It sounds confusing, but this layering of mental states is something I find very useful for all sorts of work.
Katharina Schultens
The excellent thing about VERSschmuggel was that I could speak with Jo directly - he doesn't speak German, but he grasped the structure of the language very quickly, we went through the German translations word for word and in a sense he retroactively granted me the liberties I had taken, or he approved of the ideas behind them. That made me feel more confident.
Despite the gloss translations, I tried to translate the poems "as is", directly and very quickly, to gain a feel for the text, its "flow". Then I compared the two as I worked.
While translating or rewriting the poems I automatically do what I do when a write a text myself. For me it has a lot to do with rhythm and flow, with meter, which is more internalized than consciously used. This process overlaps with the work on the sound. There is a lot of groping and searching and trial and error, and then one thing leads to another, and the text grows.
While my work was being translated, I was more concerned with answering Jo's questions and giving him a feel for how each poem works in German, where it becomes more intense, what the dramatic composition is, what the possible tones are - so that Jo could develop ways of creating a similar atmosphere, similar associations, a similar setting or a set of images in English. Creating urgency. He focused very strongly on the sound and the rhythm without my having to ask him to. Only once or twice I made a concrete suggestion after his translations were finished. Now certain passages of Jo's English texts say the exact opposite of what my German texts do. But that doesn't matter, because the texts work as a whole. I wanted to give up control of the results as far as possible, I simply wanted to see what would happen. In English the poems have grown much more complex, on a syntactic level as well, much of what is said feels less direct, less simple, because it can't be conveyed simply. But I like that. The best and most important thing for me was that I really liked reading the poems out loud in the English version, at the reading I would have loved to read them both in German and in English!
(Joseph Given, © gezett)
Joseph Given
I did not really think it possible for the interlinear translation itself to take the poetic content of Katharina Schultens's poetry into particular account. At the same time I was requested to understand it, but had to constantly switch my understanding off, understanding being subjective by nature. [?] Perhaps the challenge of it was to avoid creating a whole, to switch off my own creative processes and translate in a way as to force the poet/translator to make his/her own decisions.
My role or task was not to be a member of the group, as far as that was possible.
The intention of the gloss translations was to provide a framework enabling economical use of the time available at the workshop for the actual translation work in the group; at the same time, I wanted to hint at as many different possible directions as I could in order to inspire creative energies. At the same time, I did not want to prescribe concrete approaches.
It was interesting for me to delve into the grammatical content of poetic texts. I saw the way in which grammar and theme can be interwoven, as well as how they can stand in contradictory or almost critical juxtaposition.
On the one hand, this clinical way of dealing with poetic texts was fascinating; on the other hand, it seemed almost "morally reprehensible" to reduce poetry to a cold analysis on the semantic level.