‘Most people ignore most poetry because
most poetry ignores most people’.
-
Adrian Mitchell
Poem
of the Week
Flowers
By
Wendy Videlock
for
my mother
They
are fleeting.
They
are fragile.
They
require
little
water.
They’ll
surprise you.
They’ll
remind you
that
they aren’t
and
they are you.
Theme
|
Poetry and Translation – II
Poetry is essentially communication, a large part of which
consists of feelings and emotions. Wordsworth, the leader of the English
Romantic movement, spoke of ‘spontaneous feelings’ and ‘emotions recollected
in tranquillity’. Its place of origin is, more often not, in the heart rather
than in the mind; the mind is associated with abstract thought, while the
heart - the physical rather than the mental – is the source of all emotions
and feelings. Eliot elucidates this distinction in a famous quote from his
essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’: “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they
think; but they do not feel (like Donne) their thought as immediately as the
odour of a rose…” In poetry, even a thought has to be as sensuous as the
odour of a rose. In other words, everything comes to a poet at the level of
feeling - living experience – even though it be a thought, an idea. And if
you look at the physiology of life all ideas come to you only when your heart
is pumping, your vision and auditory system is working. Even your dreams are
connected to your breathing.
And the important fact is that all
communication works by some process akin to translation. You vocalize sound
in your speech, but your thought has first to change into sound, then be
received by an auditory system, which finally transforms the sound into words
again in your brain, before the process of communication is complete from the
speaker to the listener. Translation, basically, is ‘transfer or carry over’,
as its etymology suggests. And because it’s a transfer – we have occasional
mistransfers resulting in possible ambiguities
and misconstructions. Transfer of one language-text into another language-text
involves a change on several levels –
lexical and syntactical (word and sentence-structure), and semantic (meaning)
and cultural on a higher level. In poetry this translation process becomes
all the more complex because here there is another higher symbolical level of
meaning closely connected with the cultural aspect of the source language.
But a poet with bilingual
translation capability tries to attain an acceptable equivalence of poetic
communication. He does a very delicate job like the spider spinning its fine
cobweb, and very often succeeds to a large extent. That is how we have the
concept of a ‘world literature’ where the riches of one literature can be
borrowed and enjoyed by the readers of another literature.
But the success of translation also depends to a large extent on
the text chosen and also on the high level of linguistic proficiency of the
bilingual translator. Had this not been so we would not have a ‘world’
literature for comparative consumption. And it’s this absolute imperative
necessity of translation for international communication that has brought in
machine or computer translation which is also a specialized field of study in
applied linguistics.
Let’s take an example –
one small twitter poem of mine in Hindi (140 keys) with its computerized translation placed
side-by-side:
Sun dipped सूरज डूबा Analysis: The number of key-touches and lines are the same. Orthography also presents it as a poem, even though Hindi doesn’t use line initial capitals. That is, the machine has seen it as poem, and not prose; except that the personal pronoun‘I’ is changed into lower case, which is unusual. It could not find cultural equivalents for - डूबा / उबरेगा / लिए-दिए / गहरे व्योम –
words which are crucial to the deeper meaning of the poem. The target language
(English) reader would not make out the real deeper meaning of the poem, and
the translated poem is likely to go waste. This wouldn’t have happened with a
qualified human translation in English, though the twitter limit would
certainly have broken. (For a check, you can translate my Hindi poem on your
smart mobile in an Indian language like Bangla, Marathi, etc (all derived
from Sanskrit) and discover that the cultural connotations are better
communicated in the latter case. A better option for enjoying poetry (in other
languages) through mobile, etc is for the original poet to summarize his
central idea of the poem in English (even machine-translated) and give it
along with the machine-translated version of their poem. This has a greater
chance of a much better trans-language communication. And it is with this
that we close our discussion of poetry and translation – a very significant
area of literary discourse. And as we end this discourse, let’s have
re-look at Wendy Videlock’s beautiful poem. It was first published in Poetry
magazine in 2012 – with all the aroma of traditional and modernist poetry
nicely blended into a contemporary flavour. It’s an extremely emotional,
touching poem rendered with classical control and no ambiguity; and yet it
has all the perfection of a sonnet. Ref: https://www.wendyvidelock.com/ Wendy
Videlock is the author of the full-length poetry collections Slingshots and Love Plums (2015), The Dark Gnu and Other Poems 7 (2013), and Nevertheless (2011), as well as the chapbook What’s That Supposed to Mean (2010). Known for poems that evoke myth, fairy tale,
and the natural world, Videlock has also received praise for her deft command
of meter. In an interview with the Colorado Poets Center, Videlock noted
that, for her “the iamb is really just another of the many natural pulsings
of the earth.” A regular contributor to Poetry, Videlock lives with her husband and children in
Palisade, Colorado.
©
Dr BSM Murty Photos:
Courtesy Poetry Foundation The
second part of this article was published in INDIAN LITERATURE[306, Jul-Aug,
2018]. Grateful acknowledgement is expressed. Please
visit my two other blogs: vibhutimurty.blogspot.com &
vagishwari.blogspot.com Contact
: bsmmurty@gmail.com Mob No 7752922938
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