I am too drunk to remember much. But Marla Muse, before flying off to Colombo, Sri Lanka to attend Scarriet’s 2023 Sex and Death Poetry March Madness tournament, made more enemies with remarks in Lesbos at the Hotel Seahorse last night.
“Translation is nothing but plagiarism which distorts, and even mocks, the original poetry.”
The Scarriet Sex and Death Poetry Games are marred, according to Marla Muse, by its many translations, even though she admits some are brilliant. Marla is fluent in every language and is the translation director for Scarriet.
“I’m not going to stand here and lie to you and say poetry translations can ever be successful,” she said last night. Or something close. Marla and I didn’t talk. I was drunk. I thought I was recording but my phone only seemed it was.
She’s crazy. There’s no way that occasionally a translation cannot be better in its own language than the original is, in its own language.
But then she would say it’s not the same poem—but at that point, who cares, if a worthy poem in another language has been added to the world?
Marla Muse expects us to learn the original language. Not everyone can do that. She accused Pound of plagiarism. She is probably correct, but Pound was at his best when he was plagiarizing—which might be true of everyone (“Great poets steal” -Eliot) but the caveat is, too precise a translation is a disaster, as is a translation which is too loose; the language one is working in demands one hit the “sweet spot” between the two extremes, and this is true of both translation and original poetry (which is a kind of translation, too, when you think about it).
I was able to write the above only because I am sobering up. Last night I was inarticulate and the only thing I could manage to say to Marla was, “can we make love?” Which drew laughter from the assembled.
Back in my room at the Hotel Seahorse I fell asleep, a sad drunk, but apparently not before I had scribbled something on a napkin which I found this morning:
“Take a simple phrase and play with it. See how quickly it becomes profound.
It is what it is.
It per it isn’t what it is.
And one can make it increasingly complex.
It per it was how it will not be.
One sees how merely altering can lead to philosophy and poetry.”
As I look this over now, I don’t recall if Marla said this or someone I met last night told me someone else said it.
Let’s look at a translation of “The Golden God” from the Upanishads, an expected entry in the Early Bracket:
Isn’t “The Golden God” an example of pure philosophy? How difficult, really, is this to translate?
THE GOLDEN GOD
The Golden God, the Self, the immortal Swan
leaves the small nest of the body, goes where He wants,
He moves through the realm of dreams; makes numberless forms;
delights in sex; eats, drinks, laughs with His friends;
frightens Himself with scenes of heart-chilling terror.
But He is not attached to anything that He sees;
and after He has wandered in the realms of dream and awakeness,
has tasted pleasures and experienced good and evil,
He returns to the blissful state from which He began.
As a fish swims forward to one riverbank then the other,
Self alternates between awareness and dreaming.
As an eagle, weary from long flight, folds its wings,
gliding down to its nest, Self hurries to the realm
of dreamless sleep, free of desires, fear, pain.
As a man in sexual union with his beloved
is unaware of anything outside or inside,
so a man in union with Self knows nothing, wants nothing,
has found his heart’s fulfillment and is free of sorrow.
Father disappears, mother disappears, God’s
and scriptures disappear, thief disappears, murderer,
rich man, beggar disappear, world disappears,
good and evil disappear; he has passed beyond sorrow.
How is that? Sounds pretty modern. It’s from 25 centuries ago. India. Ideas stick. Time doesn’t diminish them. Stephen Mitchell is the translator. Not a famous man. If a 25 century old poem sounds modern and poets are all essentially translators, should it surprise us we poets are about as famous as Mr. Mitchell? Are we poets/translators such a big deal? No, we are not.
Anyway, no one sopped up the sentiment of this poem quite as much as the Germans, of whom Marla Muse is much enamored. Think of Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Night Song,” “All the Fruit Is Ripe” by Hölderlin, Joseph von Eichendorff’s “On My Child’s Death,” Heine’s “Death Is the Tranquil Night,””The Hymns to the Night” by Novalis, and here is one for the ages and the Romantic bracket, possibly:
TWILIGHT OF THE OUTWARD LIFE
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929)
And children still grow up with longing eyes,
That know of nothing, still grow tall and perish,
And no new traveler treads a better way;
And fruits grow ripe and delicate to cherish
And still shall fall like dead birds from the skies,
And where they fell grow rotten in a day.
And still we feel cool winds on limbs still glowing,
That shudder westward; and we turn to say
Words, and we hear words; and cool winds are blowing
Our wilted hands through autumns of unclutching.
What use is all our tampering and touching?
Why laughter, that must soon turn pale and cry?
Who quarantined our lives in separate homes?
Our souls are trapped in lofts without a skylight;
We argue with a padlock till we die
In games we never meant to play for keeps.
And yet how much we say in saying “twilight,”
A word from which man’s grief and wisdom seeps
Like heavy honey out of swollen combs.
The translator is Peter Viereck.
Excuse me, I have a plane to catch. The Sex and Death March Madness poetry tournament is almost ready to begin in Sri Lanka.