Where Have You Been? (29 page)

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But that's the problem: Whose words are you going to use, if not your own? Reprising Buffon, Wallace Stevens said: “A man has no choice about his style.” Why shouldn't it be just as true of a translator as of John Doe, author? Is it imagined that you take a dictionary to an original, and make fifty or hundred thousand hermetically separate transactions, translating, in effect, blind, and into a language not yours and no one else's? Is that a book? Every word taken out of its association-proof shrink-wrapping? I don't see how a personal vocabulary and personal grammar and a personal rhythm—at least where they exist, in anyone evolved enough to have them—are to be excluded. Chocolates carry warnings that they may have been manufactured using equipment that has hosted peanuts; why not translations too? But then not just “has written the occasional modern poem” but also “likes punk” or “early familiarity with the works of Dickens” or even “reads the
Guardian
” or “follows the Dow” or “fan of P. G. Wodehouse.” (Yes, dear reader, these are all me.) But we are all contaminated. I have awe but not much respect for people who translate with a contemporary lexicon to hand, so that a translation of an old book is “guaranteed” to contain no words that weren't in existence—albeit in the other language—at the time of writing. It is ingenious, yes; disciplined, aha; plausible, sure; but it's entirely too mechanistic. Even if you use eighteenth-century vocabulary, chances are you won't manage a single sentence that would have passed muster in the eighteenth century. (There's a difference between a pianist and a piano tuner.) Meanwhile, your twenty-first-century reader reads you with what—his eighteenth-century parson's soul? On his Nook?

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I want a translation to provide an experience, and I want, as a translator, to make a difference. I concede that both aims may be felt to be somewhat unusual, even inadmissible. I can see that the idea of me as writer leans into, or even blurs, the idea of me as translator (after all, I don't need someone else's book to break my silence: I am, if you like, a ventriloquist's ventriloquist). Translating a book is for me an alternative to or an extension (a multiplier!) of writing an essay or poem. A publisher friend did me the kindness of dreaming of a world where books were thought of not by author but by translator (who is after all the one who comes up with the words on the page): so, a Pevear/Volokhonsky, not a Tolstoy; a Mitchell, not a Rilke; a Lydia Davis, not a Proust.

But where is the fidelity, you may say, where is the accuracy, the self-effacement, the service? For me the service comes in writing as well and as interestingly as possible. It comes from using the full range of Englishes, the different registers, the half-forgotten words, the tricks of voice, the unexpected tightenings and loosenings of grammar. (I serve my originals, as I see it, but I am also there to serve English, hence the importations, the “finds,” the dandyisms, and the collisions.) I am impatient with null or duff passages of writing, clichés, inexactitudes, even, actually, the ordinary inert. (I don't know that I would find anything more challenging than a book where the characters only ever “went” to places, and only ever “said” things: I'd find it stifling—and have done.) In his sweet-mannered but still thought-provoking
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
David Bellos characterizes translation as liable to produce a sort of
moyen
language, clipping the extremes of an original, tending toward the accepted and the established and the center, the unexceptional and the unexceptionable. I don't mind much where my extremes come from—whether they are mine, or my authors', but I want them to be there. Extra pixels. The high resolution of a fourth or fifth decimal place, I once put it. It's the expectation of poetry: brevity, pitch, drama. The right word, or phrase, or sentence—and thereby, too, something you mightn't have got from someone else. Yes, a translator is a passenger, riding in relative safety (and deserved penury) in a vehicle that has already been built, but I would still rather he were a passenger of the bobsled kind—a converted sprinter, someone who at least puts his own bones and balance and reactions into his work.

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And so one ungrateful reader sees fit to complain: “He uses words not commonly seen in books and occasionally his grammar is clumsy” (which only seems to get more hilarious the more I look at it: the wonderfully aggrieved, positively denunciatory tone; the gorgeous—imitatively clumsy—hitch, a kind of commaless splice; the absurd implication that more words may be used in speech [that written English operates a rather French system of vocabulary restraint]; the rather gray little sentence that flaunts its two mealy adverbs). A reviewer describes me as “the usually reliable” (which in some moods I would see as a slur), and goes on to grumble about my use of “inelegant nonwords” like “chuntering” (to talk in a low, inarticulate way) and “squinny” (from “squint,” obviously)—both of them seem to me not just perfect but perfectly good (and since when is there a universal edict on elegance, or on frequency of use?)—and intimates he would rather (sight unseen) read eighty-year-old versions by my predecessors, the wonderfully named Cedar and Eden Paul, who sound like the grandsire and grandam of the Tea Party: perhaps I should counter by denying him any of my other, “usually reliable,” translations? The novelist A. S. Byatt drew up a little list of words she thought ought not to have appeared in my translation of Joseph Roth's novel,
The Emperor's Tomb
(first published in 1938): “a ways,” “gussied up,” “sprog,” “sharp cookie,” “gobsmacked,” and (rather ruthlessly, I thought) “pinkie.” The action of the book straddles World War I; only the first of Byatt's terms comes from “before,” the others are all “after the deluge,” which I think matters. Four times I shrugged my shoulders. I inclined my head a little at “sharp cookie”—if English had offered “sharp biscuit” I might indeed have used that—but the only one that had me scrambling was “gobsmacked,” which is a vulgarism not in my repertoire in speech, never mind books, or so I thought. When I looked it up in Roth, I saw it was spoken by a character called von Stettenheim, a con man—
von man
—who is described as a “Prussian vulgarian.” Even that, then—reaching for a word I don't use—doesn't seem wrong to me.

What all these have in common, I think, is an angry impatience with the idea of there even
being
a translator. In their cars, as they conceive of them, there is but one steering wheel, and an author is at it (in fact there are dual controls). Such readers and critics will sometimes, rather in spite of themselves, read a translation, but with an edge of apprehension, almost already under protest or under notice. Their palette of expectation is all negative: impossible to imagine such people amused, struck, impressed, or surprised by a translation. (“Trans
la
tion?!” I seem to hear, almost like Lady Bracknell's “a
hand
bag?!”) Rather, woe if the translation should happen to show itself, to obtrude. There is only disfavor forthcoming. Their wrath will be terrible to behold. A translation is possible—bearable, one thinks—only so long as it remains meek, clothy, predictable, a little old-fashioned. It should wear its inadequacy on its sleeve. Whereas, to me, to sit over something purposely disappointing, necessarily doomed, and perennially half-empty would be a waste of my life (which—who knows?—perhaps I have wasted). Yes, it is impossible, but that is where we came in, it was the fall of the Tower of Babel that gave us our ground plan. Just because I am the translator of a book doesn't seem to me to rule out finesse, pleasure, initiative, even provocation. Hans Magnus Enzensberger—who dedicated one of his books to translators, to the “noble coolies” of poetry (and what a bizarre and wonderful collision of words that is)—still thinks we should have fun. Or does it always have to be like in Pope, “and ten low words oft creep in one dull line”?

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Something simple on method. It used to be I wrote out a draft by hand, usually at night. Then the next day I would look up words (irritatingly, they were almost always words I knew, but at that stage I felt I still needed the corroboration: the people who don't look things up are usually the ones who don't know them), and type up what I had. In the afternoon I would go swimming, and at night I would rough out—or rough up—the next few pages. When I'd got to the end of a manuscript, I would make a large photocopy, and scribble on it, working only—or almost only—with the English. Word processing has greatly simplified and run together these stages. What remains the case is that I get some sort of draft out as quickly as possible, put the German away, and revise, endlessly. Ten times, twenty times—more. If I can get someone to listen, I like to read a book aloud. I reread old translations of mine long after they've appeared, long after they've disappeared. I can see that it is possible for an original to get away from me, but think that on the whole that doesn't happen: all my instincts—even working at speed—are for accuracy and loyalty. I know that I've dwelt on difference and play and irresponsibility, but I am overwhelmingly a careful and dutiful worker. Further, there is a benefit to working with and from English, which is that a translation doesn't get involved in a sort of linguistic tug-of-war. There's not a struggle to be born, just a fairly quick and clean separation, and the English understands that it's on its own, as it has to be. (It's self-evident but needs saying: I translate for people without German, rather than those who have the doubtful good fortune of knowing it.) When I've translated poetry, which is in the last ten years or so, the presence or threat of a parallel text has protracted negotiations with the German; I'm not sure it's always been to the benefit of the translation, but clearly it's bound to happen that way. A poem translation can feel like the bundled-up corpse of an insect that's got caught in a spider's web, an overzealous parcel, attached by a thousand threads to the thing that will wait for it to die and then eat it: not a comfortable feeling, and not recommended.

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Over time, I've become more sure of myself, and more taken with myself. I'm not convinced either of these is a good thing, but again they're both likely to happen. Over their careers, a doctor or stockbroker or airline pilot will have gone the same way. Partly it's generalized experience, partly a long association with particular authors and epochs—the twenties and thirties; Stamm, Roth, Fallada, my father—but it has given rise to a sense of “this is how I do things” and even “this is how I want things to come out, and you should be satisfied with that.” There's nothing so exhausting as sticking up for yourself, but I can do it when put to it. I back my feel for words against just about anyone's, I know I have a degree of impatience—I don't like fussing—and then there's something impetuous and unpredictable in me as well. That's what you get. I wouldn't want it as a sort of generalized characterological dispensation, but I think in my own case it's probably okay.

 

GOTTFRIED BENN

Though Gottfried Benn can scarcely be said to exist in the English-speaking world, there are a surprising number of prominent mentions of him. T. S. Eliot, for instance, in his essay “The Three Voices of Poetry” goes so far as to associate one such voice—the first, “the voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody”—with Benn. John Berryman allows him the end of one Dream Song: “and Gottfried Benn / said:—we are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.” In his novel
Plexus
, Henry Miller is careful to leave the 1927 issue of Eugene Jolas's avant-garde magazine
transition
lying around, and quotes in extenso from Benn's essay in it. Frank O'Hara has a tilt at him in one of his invariably disastrous and perplexing diatribes, when he seems to have his ill-fitting Hector the Lecturer suit on: “Poetry is not instruments / that work at times / then walk out on you / laugh at you old / get drunk on you young / poetry's part of your self” (“To Gottfried Benn”).

With all these appearances, you would have thought Benn had to have some being somewhere. But it's more like that space radiation called “chatter”; there's something that leads our instruments to think there's something “out there”; we might even give it a name, but most of us remain doubtful, and few of us expect ever to see it. I don't think you could fill a room with a conversation about Benn—non-Germans and non-Germanists, that is. And yet we're talking of someone of the eminence, say, of Wallace Stevens, someone most Germans (and most German poets, too) would concede as the greatest German poet since Rilke.

Basically, Benn has appeared once in English, in E. B. Ashton's edited collection of Benn's selected writings,
Primal Vision
, published in 1960 and still in print with New Directions. The trouble with Ashton's book—and in this it perhaps betrays its origins in the postwar decade—is that it is not primarily interested in Benn the poet but the man of ideas, the German, and the “phenotype.” One has to wonder at the judgment and effectiveness (not to mention the long monopoly) of a book introducing a foreign poet to an English readership that is three parts prose, and where the translations of the poems (one-eighth of the whole) are starchy, cumbrous, and muted. They have neither the attack nor the ease of Benn in German—to me he is both the hardest and the softest poet who ever lived. Thus unsuccessfully transmitted, Benn has no English admirers; unlike Brecht, he's not even unpopular. It's only stray foreign readers like Joseph Brodsky or Adam Zagajewski who read him in a third or fourth language, or in the original, who have anything like a true or a full sense of Benn.

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