Two Words: The Blog of the Center for the Art of Translation


Formal Feeling

Posted on August 31, 2009 by

(Keith Ekiss is Artistic Director of TWO LINES. His first collection of poems, Pima Road Notebook, will be published next year by New Issues Poetry and Prose.)
When translating closed form poetry, the formal elements (meter and rhyme) are often the first thing the translator abandons. It's common to read sonnets in translation, for example, that dispense with the rhyme and meter of the original. I'm no neo-formalist, but when a translator comes along who's able to convey not only the sense of the original, but an approximation (or recreation) of the rhythm and rhyme, I pay attention. George Szirtes, a prolific writer and translator born in Budapest, who has lived in Britain for most of his life, is that kind of poet.
This Day, Szirtes' translation of the Hungarian poet Anna Szabó's A mai nap, subtitled Wherever I lie is your bed, gives the new TWO LINES anthology it's title. It's a cinematic poem, jump cutting between scenes and years in the poet's life. We follow the writer as a seemingly casual search for a new apartment turns into uncertain panic and terror.
Fog everywhere: anxiety was a tight
cold sleepless night;
that's my life I thought and felt it glide
swiftly away but I wasn't part of the ride;
my life went on without me inside.
The form is important. The irregular, though pronounced, rhythm and the rhyme attempt to reign in, if only slightly, the poet's inner turmoil. To lose the form would decrease the tension. A quick glance to the left-hand side of the page, without knowing any Hungarian, confirms that Szirtes's translation preserves these patterns.
Szirtes's second translation, Dog (Kutya, in the Hungarian), is by the Budapest born Krisztina Tóth. In his introduction, Szirtes describes Tóth as writing love poems with a [ ] disillusioned bitter, haunted edge to them. The poem bears agonizing, protracted witness to a couple who come across a severely injured dog, one recently struck by a passing car, though not their own. The poem is unflinching in its description of the wounded animal's suffering, mouth wide open, it sat there, a half-dog / though I could tell from its eyes that it saw everything.
But it's the poem's second half where the tension increases, when it becomes clear that the man's hesitant refusal to save the dog stands in, from the poet's perspective, for the couple's broken relationship, with the constant fury / and resignation involved in even love-making, and the way / you asked me just what it was that I wanted you to do.
Szirtes is also an active blogger, whose posts are well worth reading.



Suzanne Jill Levine on Adolfo Bioy Casares

Posted on August 27, 2009 by

title=adolfo-bioy-casares(Adolfo Bioy Casares is certainly one of my favorite Latin American writers, and one that I feel is quite underappreciated in the U.S. So I was very pleased to see that Green Integer has just reissued Suzanne Jill Levine's translation of many of Bioy's stories. (Incidentally, Dalkey is also reissuing Levine's excellent book on translation, The Subversive Scribe.) I asked Levine to write a little about this collection and this is what she had to say.)
I gathered this selection of stories in collaboration with Bioy Casares himself, who first organized his short works in anthologies under two categories: Fantastic Tales and Love Stories. These stories are very Argentine in that Bioy, like his compatriots, was an inveterate traveler—always with that sensation of being far from the center, so faraway from Europe, especially Paris—hence several of them take place elsewhere, even if that elsewhere is across the delta, in Uruguay. From his famous Invention of Morel on, Bioy was a meticulous stylist. Less is more was the stoic tenor of his stories and novellas, though there is of course an ironic opacity in his understated approach. As translator, my task was to bring to life his quick humor, and to catch not the tiger by his tail but something just as elusive: the exact nuance or register of his language. He had a subtle ear for colloquial speech, and his narrators and characters tend to invite the reader's laughter unexpectedly, either because of wry depictions or because no matter how hard they seek dignity, their actions and utterances are buffoonish, in a Kafkaesque world where the individual hasn't a chance. A description of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's comic mode by Tom McCarthy (NYT, 12/21/2008) would serve well to depict Bioy's writing: Comic in . . . the sense in which . . . Bergson used the term . . . comedy entailed a tendency toward the mechanical. People, gestures and events become like automata. And yet, we sympathize and identify with these characters: they are us with all our pathos and absurdity.




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Posted on August 24, 2009 by

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Posted on August 24, 2009 by

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Posted on August 20, 2009 by

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Posted on August 18, 2009 by

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Posted on August 18, 2009 by

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Posted on August 17, 2009 by

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Posted on August 13, 2009 by

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Posted on August 11, 2009 by

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Posted on August 11, 2009 by

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Posted on August 10, 2009 by

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Posted on August 6, 2009 by

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Posted on August 4, 2009 by

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Posted on August 3, 2009 by

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