Poetry Blog 4
When we’re a short distance down the poet’s path, most of us try to write in the manner of poets we admire. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural part of our progression along the path. At one point I tried to write like James Dickey. By the time I entered the graduate creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I was trying to blend Keats-like imagery into Yeats-like form. I still think that the three greatest influences on my writing are Keats, Yeats and Frost. That’s what I believe, anyway. Someone else might be able to see my writing more clearly than I do. We’re all under someone’s influence, but that’s not really what this message is about. I want to propose a practice method that uses translations to help us become better poets.
Poetry doesn’t translate well from one language to another. I’ve often said that the first element that gets lost in translations of verse is the poetry itself. Poems are very dependent on the language they’re written in because the poetic diction (word choice) that one language offers is not perfectly equal to the poetic diction offered by any other language. Usually, the more poetic a translation is, the more liberties the translator has taken with the original wording. Conversely, the more literal the translation is, the less like poetry it reads. Let’s take a look at a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho.
Sappho lived around 600 B.C., on the Greek island of Lesbos. Romantically, she preferred women over men and made no bones about that in her poetry, and because of her, as a reference to her birthplace, we now have the word “lesbian.” I recently saw a translation of a poem by her that now exists only as a fragment known as “Fragment 31.” I regret not being able to cite the translator, but I have been unable to identify that person, and I suspect that this particular translation might have been computer-generated. I’ll quote it below. As you read the translation, consider how very unpoetic it is.
That man seems to me to be equal to the gods
who is sitting opposite you
and hears you nearby
speaking sweetly
and laughing delightfully, which indeed
makes my heart flutter in my breast;
for when I look at you even for a short time,
it is no longer possible for me to speak
but it is as if my tongue is broken
and immediately a subtle fire has run over my skin,
I cannot see anything with my eyes,
and my ears are buzzing.
A cold sweat comes over me, trembling
seizes me all over. I am paler
than grass, and I seem nearly
to have died,
but everything must be dared/endured, since (even a poor man?)
Let’s look at this fragment from the perspective of 21st-century English-speaking people who care about poetry. It’s certainly true that from culture to culture and language to language–and even from era to era within the same culture and language–the accepted traits of good poetry can vary. But in today’s English-speaking world, the first and most important trait of good poetry is economy. Economy in language means stating ideas as concisely as possible. The wordier a poem is, the less value it has. This translation is utterly wordy and sloppily worded at that. Let’s pick it apart.
Before I slash into the poem, though, let me assure you that I would never treat any living person’s poem this harshly. I’ve heard people tear into my work, especially when I was younger, and the experience was more painful than helpful. All we hear when such a thing happens is the negative. No one needs that. However, I really think a computer translated this, or else someone translated with the intent of preserving the original wording, which harkens back to my statement that the poetry frequently get lost in translation of verse. I’m about to tear into the translation, not into Sappho’s poem, which really exists in a Greek dialect, not in English.
Does “that man seems to me to be equal to the gods” seem wordy to you? If you ever use “seems to me to be” in a poem, you’d better have an unassailable, iron-clad, waterproof, air-tight, super-good reason to do so. Poetry needs to be stated very directly. The second line of the translation is an adjective clause referring grammatically to “gods” but intellectually to “man,” so in English, at least, it is a misplaced modifier–unacceptable in any good writing. (I apologize. I just analyzed the problem the way the Grammar Lady would do it. Someone else might read the first two lines of the translation and say that the second line just doesn’t seem to work. As long as we recognize that there’s a problem and then fix it, how we describe the problem doesn’t matter.)
The second stanza is also quite wordy. “Which indeed makes my heart flutter in my breast” is a good example. “Indeed” is unnecessary, and where, other than in one’s breast, can a heart flutter? All non-necessities must be stricken from poems. “When I look at you even for a short time” is awful poetry. In English, we have a word for “look at for a short time”–“glance.” Never use six words when one word will do. The final line of stanza 2 could be reduced to three words, maybe fewer.
I’ll leave it to you to consider wordiness in the rest of the translation, but I will point out some statements that would be considered troublesome in a modern poem in English. One is that in stanza 3 the speaker has “subtle fire” run over her skin, yet in stanza 5 is pale. Subtle fire over one’s skin would exhibit itself as a blush; we don’t blush and become pale at the same time. I can’t read a single word of Greek, so I don’t know exactly how Sappho expressed these thoughts, but the translation presents the kind of elementary mistake that a great poet wouldn’t make. Let’s blame the translation, not the poet. Similarly, “I am paler than grass” is actually funny because only dead or dormant grass is pale, and when we speak of grass, we always imagine it as green. That’s another statement that I wouldn’t hold Sappho herself accountable for. However, this poem comes to us only as a fragment, and we don’t know what might occur in the lost stanzas, but the stanzas that survive are set indoors and don’t involve grass except in that one statement, so I would recommend comparing the paleness to something consistent with the setting–a white tablecloth, perhaps. (Of course, we’ve already mentioned that one can’t blush and be pale at the same time, so the best thing to do with any mention of paleness is to delete it altogether.)
So–what about that practice method I mentioned in the first paragraph? It’s simple. Without adding rhyme or any other complication, just translate the translation into the most straightforward English (or whatever language you write in) poem you can. Here’s what I did:
That Greek god of a man
sitting opposite you
at the table surely hears
your sweet voice
and laugh, delightful as the joy
that brought it–and my heart’s jolt
at its sound. A glance at you
and I lose my tongue,
words and all, to your spell.
I feel my skin aflame;
you take my sight away,
my ears go dull
my palms grow damp, my fingers
quiver–and I fade away
as that Greek god of a man
leans toward you.
I deleted the last line of the translation and gave the poem an ending. Also, in regard to the form that I chose, I kept Sappho’s four-line stanzas. I can hardly imagine what the original poem sounds like in Greek, but I was once told that ancient Greek poets favored a three-beat line. For that reason, I wrote the first three lines of each stanza in three beats. A beat, remember, is simply an accented syllable. For example, “That GREEK GOD of a MAN.” Also, I know that Sappho liked to end her stanzas with a shorter line, so I made the final line of each stanza a two-beat line.
While I might have ruined the exercise for you as far as “Fragment 31” is concerned, there are thousands of translated poems on the internet for you to find and practice with. Of course, you’re free to put your personal interpretation on a translation, as I did. When you do that, you’ve actually written an imitation rather than a translation. When you translate a poem, under its title you put “translated from Sappho,” for example, but when you write an imitation, you put “after Sappho,” which I think is better because it implies that you actually did some writing beyond mere translation.
The reason that I think improving on translations of poems is a good exercise is that you can put all of your energy into the physical craft of poetry without having to divide that energy between crafting and developing content. The content is already there, most often in a less than perfect form. Give this exercise a try. It can’t hurt, and it just might move you a few steps down the poet’s path.
Thanks for reading this, and take care.