Multiple im/person/aliz/ations: Four Attempts to 'get under the skin' of Poets

I have been actively translating for about twenty years. Looking back, I now realize that it made translation easier when I tried to ‘become’ the original writer: I was more successful when I asked myself, “what would they have written if they had had my knowledge of English?” and, for poetry, when faced with the clash between the demands of form and content, “which way would they bend?’ 
Rather than attempt any theorizing, I propose to relate my efforts to get under the skin of a number of poets, for example: one, surviving the siege of Leningrad; another, pioneering multiple poetic genres in early 19th-century Central Europe; a third who (successfully? I am not sure) aimed to capture the horror of a Nazi atrocity in Vienna; a fourth who became the most popular author of Slovene poetry for children by temporarily shedding his own adulthood. Also, I will add my recent attempts to capture, in Slovene, the style of children in war-torn Northern Uganda who are writing to the sponsors who are paying their school fees in a charming but not always clear fractured English (which they are just learning): is it possible, is it expedient to pretend to be such a child in order to transfer their thoughts into Slovene? 
It certainly helps to have been a teacher. Teachers are, I believe, better teachers if they can act the roles of others, and translators can perhaps be better translators if they can ‘become’ other people. Anyway, it makes for a more interesting life.


well. Given my greater experience now, and my better knowledge about Akhmatova, would I -if
translating this poem for the first time -allow myself the otsebyatina of both "Dunsinane" and the "too short of breath," both of which are not in the original? Maybe not. And yet I thought, when I translated, that I was producing a version that Akhmatova herself would have produced had she spoken good English -that I was "impersonating" her. Given my misunderstanding of her circumstances, this must have been a misapprehension.

Francè Prešeren
I began translating more in earnest a few years after my purported success with Akhmatova. After translating modern Slovene poetry for another decade, in the late 1990s I joined forces for the translation of a large selection of the poetry of Francè Prešeren (1800-1849) with a literature specialist at Indiana University, Henry Cooper, who had written a book on this poet. 5 Prešeren is as well-known in Slovenia as is Pushkin in Russia or Shakespeare in the Anglophone world. 6

Figure 4: Francè Prešeren 7
Before Prešeren there was little Slovene literature and almost no Slovene poetry; he took on the task of pioneering multiple poetic genres and proving that this language could stand beside any other as a vehicle for literature. He wrote sonnets (including a "wreath of sonnets," 1835 to show that Slovene could rival Italian); an epic poem of over 500 lines, "Krst pri Savici [The Baptism on the Savica]" (1840); elegies, folk tales, lyric poems, even poetry in unusual metres such as his "Ghazals" of 1846. I can assert with some assurance that as I strove to produce poetic forms of all kinds to clothe Henry Cooper's preliminary versions, I quickly appreciated the scope of Prešeren's achievements. The translations took most of a year, and by the half-way stage I definitely believed that I had begun to think like Prešeren -not, I add, as he did: as a frustrated lonely man yearning for the love of an unattainable woman (for I had not been like that since I was a teenager) but as a poet. His Wreath of Sonnets required the usual very intricate rhyme scheme, which had to be achieved using non-contemporary English; and when this was done, his epic poem Krst pri Savici [The Baptism on the Savica] seemed to go on interminably. A long time before I finished the 26 four-line verses of the Introduction and then the 53 eight-line verses of the main part of this poem, I was quite frankly bored with the task, and came to believe that Prešeren must have been exhausted and bored long before he reached the 528 th line, also. At a discussion of the translation at the P.E.N. club in Ljubljana, I dared to mention this idea, and although none of the eminent Slovene men of letters who were present explicitly said that they agreed with me, I came away with the impression that they did accept that Krst pri Savici is, at least, not fun to read. It was, very definitely, not fun to translate. To the extent that I was correct, I had, to this extent if no other, "become" the poet: I had shared his outlook on poetry. And after a year in his company, this was probably so.

Janko Messner
I now turn to contemporary Slovene poetry, and to Janko Messner (b. 1921), an outspoken, cantankerous, charming Austrian Carinthian Slovene (i.e., a member of the Slovene-speaking minority resident in the Austrian province of Kärnten (Slovene Koroška, English Carinthia)). Messner is known for his strong political views: he was for a long time and still is reviled as a 'Communist' by the right-wing German-speaking majority in Austria, and until Slovene independence was labelled a 'Capitalist lackey' by Yugoslav Communists. The first photograph is from the web-page http://www.kultur.at/see/messner.htm, used with permission of "Kultur.at"; the second, from a commemoration of Helene Weiss, a Roma killed in a concentration camp during World War Two, web-page http://www.freiheitskaempfer.at/site-old/kaernten/index.php by permission of the photographer, Vinzenz Jobst; the third is my own photograph of myself with the poet.  While translating this and others of his poems I was staying at the poet's house. Alas, he knows some, but only some, English, and his reactions to and suggestions for improvement of my translations often relied on his ancient dictionary, and this resulted in spirited disagreements. When I came to this poem, 12 I was quite pleased with my effort overall, and so was he.     TranscUlturAl, vol.1,4 (2011), 76-90. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/TC I borrowed CD's of both the musical version of the original, and of the German version, and took the advice of Klaus Detlef Olof: not to try to keep too closely to the original, but to (a) keep to the rhythm, so that it could be sung and recorded on a disk, and (b) make it entertaining. "Nothing else matters," is what he, in effect, told me, and I threw the translator's normal caution to the winds. One example: the last few lines last from the poem/song "Jedilni List/On the Menu" about the midday meal which Muri and Maca Publishing such a "loose" version in a journal devoted to translation is a brazen move, I confess; and I must aver that I have not departed and would most probably never depart to this extent from the original in any other translation.

DUNAJSKA BALADA A VIENNESE BALLAD
In this instance, I was very clearly not trying to "become" the poet, but (in my imagination) to listen to the lines as if I were a North American child -nothing more; to "impersonate" not the author, In the case of Anna Akhmatova, I naively assumed that I was "writing as she would have written if she had known English," and I much later realized that this assumption was a delusion. When it came to the poetry of France Prešeren, it was my lengthy and painstaking (and painsgiving, I should add) work with his poetry which led me to believe that I was perceiving it from his point of view -a belief that was in part confirmed, and which I still hold. As far as Janko Messner's political poetry is concerned, I was more or less successful in "impersonating" him, depending on my personal sympathy with his views: my general feelings about the value of political poetry are probably lukewarm when compared to his, whereas my own personal involvement with the circumstances of the "Guillotined Thirteen", my acquaintance with some of their relatives, and my visit to the room where the atrocity occurred, -all made my own sentiments about this event at least as deeply-felt, and probably even more so, as the poet's; therefore, when translating "A Viennese Ballad," I may even, so to speak, have over-"impersonated" him. And, finally, I appear to have "impersonated" Kajetan Kovič, to some extent, without even trying. With Akhmatova I had tried and failed; with Kovič, I did not try, but (partly) succeeded. A complete reversal! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License