POETICA : 9                             

 

‘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 Or i drown                      या मैं डूबा In the dark                      अन्धकार में The sun will rise             सूरज तो उबरेगा In new light                     नए प्रकाश में The earth will sink          डूबेगी धरती Dancing on the pivot       नाचती निज धुरी पर For me                            मुझको लिए-दिए                   Seeks deep                     गहरे व्योम में ढूंढती To that sun.                   उस सूरज को |   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                                                        Poetry substance and

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