THE TRANSLATOR'S VOICE: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON

Mr. Middleton, what were some of your initial experiences as a translator?

Well, I started translating as a schoolboy, but they were just schoolboy translations.I was entrusted with the task of translating a few odes of Horace.It was very difficult to do because my Latin wasn't that good, but at least I learned to appreciate the metrics of the Horatian ode.I can remember when I was in bed for a long time with a broken leg because somebody deliberately kicked me in a game of soccer, taking great pleasure in translating (16).The next thing I translated, about seven or eight years later, was also for fun--a poem by Walter von der Vogelweide.And then in Zürich when I was teaching and writing my PhD, I thought I'd translate a poem by Gottfried Keller that I liked very much, but it wasn't until someone p ut me on to Walser, and I became completely obsessed with Walser's prose, that I began to translate with publication as a goal.

Which work was that?

First of all I translated a long short story called "The Walk."When it came to putting this together with other things for a book, I translated three more short prose pieces by Walser.They eventually came out with John Calder.By that time I was also involved with translating German war poems, thanks to the insistence of a young German in London.They were First World War poems to be translated into English because the editor had a crazy idea of doing a tri-lingual anthology of the war or anti-war poetry.

Tri-lingual?

Yes, it was in English, French and German with parallel translations all the way through, and I ended up having to translate some of the French poems.However, with those there came a point at which I found out I had a consciousness of German, but my consciousness of French was simply not adequate.I didn't feel that my versions of the French poems properly echoed or responded to the linguistic qualities of the originals.Soon after that I met Michael Hamburger.He was very interested in expressionist poets and introduced me to the work of many of them.We began to translate Trakl, (Michael had already translated Trakl), and Heym and Stadler.

How were these Trakl translations published?Was that originally just a small edition?

Michael had produced a pamphlet ages before that with a private press.And he'd done seven or eight poems in this little pamphlet.We had the worst time in the world trying to find a publisher for those Trakl translations.It was several years later that Trakl appeared in the Cape Edition of Modern German Poetry 1910-1960, which, incidentally, was copied from the Suhrkamp Verlag editions.Trakl was rather popular among London publishers at that time.

What year did Cape bring out the Trakl?

1968.By that time, of course, the Modern German Poetry had been out for six years.When we were doing Modern German Poetry not a soul in London was interest in any of the stuff.Meanwhile Michael was writing away very manfully and trying to put contemporary German writing on the map.

How do you choose, in general, the material you translate?

I wouldn't say that I've ever translated something only because I was asked to do so.Having an academic job has privileged me.I haven't had to rely on translation to make a living, and I'm very grateful for that, because I don't like to translate things that don't interest me deeply in a human way.I don't like to translate things the language of which is neutral or even negative.I like to translate poems when I find that I don't understand them but detect in the original some mystery that I feel should be transferable into another idiom.What I try to do then is to push the English language around so that it is facing in the direction of the original, so I can introduce mutations into English, and so that the original and translation meet in the middle ground between the languages.

Other than the Trakl, which poets have you translated?

I did a lot of Gottfried Benn.After Grove Press published Modern German Poetry, New Directions decided to publish a selected Gottfried Benn entitled Primal Vision.Michael and I both received letters from James Laughlin inviting us to participate.

And so, both you and Michael had several translations in Primal Vision?

Yes, and incidentally, one of the traps in those days, and still today, was the price of translating.Grove Press was asked to pay a phenomenal fee for the use of our translations.And that caused difficulties because no one could afford the fees they were asking.Eventually, I think whoever was asking the fee was talked out of it or the fee was reduced.But there were prohibitive prices on these translations.Part of that was probably due to the fact that Limes Verlag was asking big translator's fees because they realized that Benn was a big commercial proposition; he was widely published and read throughout western Germany.

During the 1950's Grove Press with Evergreen Review and its other listings was probably the press in translation.

Yes, It's rather surprising how reluctant English publishers were in those days.It's ironic because some of the best translators have been English people.There is a certain aversion to anything that is foreign in the London literary ambience.Certain French things are admitted, but German things are "dull, heavy, Teutonic, pompous, and generally foolish" except for science and metaphysics or botany, perhaps.Generally there is an aversion to foreign literature, and anyone who tampers with it is reproved for being somehow affected.And this, of course, is a terrific challenge.I enjoyed it immensely, feeling that there must be something there is all these English people dislike it so much.It wasn't like a battle, but it was certainly a long, long haul before Günter Grass "arrived" in England and was welcomed by Secker & Warburg.I remember Grass lying on the lid of a great box in the basement of the Secker & Warburg apartments, smoking a Gauloise, and announcing as he lay on this box, "Now I can really smoke a coffin nail."It was absolutely delightful because this was the wonderfully ambiguous moment when the live author, captured by an interested, but still highly orthodox publisher, announces in the basement of the same publishing house, his own death.It was a great symbolic moment.Very poetical.

Do you think that egocentricity about literature comes over here as well?Do we inherit that attitude?

Yes.There is a certain American counterpart to this attitude.That's why people like Robert Bly and Clayton Eshleman have to get so frenetic.The English language is amazingly imperialistic in its presumptions.But I think the English are worse than the Americans.The American intelligentsia are largely receptive to foreign thought.But English literature has had some very powerful shots in the arm through the ages since Chaucer.Usually they've had to be administered by violence or subversion.And it's not the norm, that openness you speak of, at least not anything I find much evidence of.

Do you find English one of the better languages you translate into?

Yes.It has a mystical, extraordinarily flexible resources, and its sound resources are interesting to play with.You can't really get English to sound like Japanese or Chinese, but it has very interesting sonic infrastructures which enable you to build them into the verse as you're translating.I've recently been translating Arabic poems through two mediators.I can capture something of the strangeness--the guttural sounds, the long "r" sounds of Arabic--in the translation.You can't make it too obvious, but it's there.I think English is a lot more flexible and resourceful in this way than either German or French, the other two languages I'm familiar with.I'm not saying that translation isn't miming--aping--but it's a good thing if, in the translation, you can get the source language to resound, to have a resonance, in the sonic nerves of the English.

Let's say you have a new German poem that has something that attracts you to translate it.How do you go about the task?Do you make a rough draft first, or do you go one line at a time?

It's variable.Sometimes I go straight through and leave out what I can't cope with, and then go back over it day after day.Sometimes I'll have a conception of the poem in my head, which gets me stuck.I don't mind getting stuck on a particular line or a particular word, so that I won't translate the whole thing in one go.I like best to make some kind of sketch of the poem and then spend days, weeks, maybe months, filling in, taking out, eliminating, struggling for that right word which is very often the most obvious word which didn't reach you in the first place.

How would you characterize your relationship with the author after you get involved with the translation of a poem?

I think for the duration of translating his text, I have to be as close to him, as close to his perceiving, imagining, thinking, responding, his linguistic realities as I can possibly get, because if I were he, I would not like to be lied about.I would like my truth to be told by him.I would like my sounds, my emphases, my innuendoes, my subtleties, to be caught by this other person who things, very fondly maybe, that he is going to do what I did in the first place.So it's a very mysterious relationship.It's not between personalities, it's between spirits.This is what St. Jerome was always saying.The nub of the whole thing is that you have some kind of a spiritual rapport with the author, but in an extremely concrete and practical sense.There's nothing mystical or vibratory about it.You're trying to do justice to everything that this person has meant.You don't want to falsify him, and that's why I tend to be a bit doubtful about imitations and paraphrases.I wouldn't like to be the person who is being imitated or paraphrased.

Do you see the translator as an insider or an outsider looking in?

The translator has to imagine his way on the tentacles of language through to the bedrock sea bottom of the imagination of his author.It's a fascinating responsibility.Maybe it's all guesswork, fictions and imaginings, but all these fictions and imaginings are governed by something very practical:how can you model something in your own language which is a remodeling of something in a different language--a reconstruction.The personality of the author for me is made of language.All you know about him is the way he has delivered himself of these words.If you can get something which is faithful to that linguistic Gestalt, which is all you could perceive in the round of the personality of the author, then you may be doing a fair job.I've read bad translations, for instance, which are apings of an author which keep deviating from the gestalt.The falsification of the originals is bad faith; you're doing them in bad faith although you may not know that you're doing them in bad faith.

How do you feel about the modern German poetry done in bi-lingual form?Do you think the bi-lingual form is a good form?Lately a lot of people are saying that maybe one should get away from the bi-lingual.

Well, it depends what it's for.A publisher may conceive of a book as something which is going to be read by students, studied carefully by people who may have a fair knowledge of the original, but may be helped in their understanding of the original by translations, especially if those translations are good verse translations which have a life of their own.They have to be inspired by that vivacity to go back to the original and say, "Wow, something is really happening in the language here.This is reality."On the other hand, I have read some very interesting translations by New York poet Michael O'Brien.They are some of the most perfect translations of Ovid, Sappho, and Rimbaud I've ever seen.They are so good that they stand in their own right.He does not need the originals.Besides, his book of poems is not going to be mulled over and analyzed or "analized" in classrooms.He is a very good poet.It depends pretty much on how the book is conceived by the writer or by the publisher to determine what use it's going to be.I like bi-lingual books, myself.If the language is one of which I haven't got a clue--like Chinese or Japanese--I'm very happy to have the original, although I don't know a word of it, or I should say a calligram of it.I like having the original texts there.

For the visual impression?

Yes.

Do you feel an en face publication invites small-minded criticism by encouraging a reader to read one line of the original and then compare it to one line of the translation?

If people haven't got enough time to dwell on a book or carry it around with them and read it when they feel like it, then that's just too bad.The kind of readers who read across the pages line by line don't matter very much.The reader that I would think possible and admirable is the one who spends much more time on a text and who can value both the original and the translation by their own merits.He is someone who can learn something about his own language and something about the original language by this availability of the parallels.I suppose there are pedants and nit-pickers who are always reading across the pages and between the lines.

On the other hand, there are also poets who make mistakes and pretend that they didn't really make them.They "did it on purpose, for an effect."I don't like either the one or the other, but one mustn't only accuse academics of this sort of pedantry.

What would you say about translation being a guess?It seems any poem in the original is a "guess" anyway.

Except it is a "guess" which has all the authority of the deepest fibers of the language and its rhythms and sounds behind it.It is a "guess" which is such a good one that you forget while you're responding to it.That's the nature of the language.You suspend disbelief and tentative factors somehow fly out the window, and you're in the midst of that poem's reality as long as you're reading it or thinking about it afterwards.A translation is a disadvantage in the first place because everyone knows that it's a translation.The translations I like are miraculously as convincing as the originals, even if they may contain some features that pedants would call "mistakes," they have a vibrancy and vivacity about them.

What translations strike you as particularly artistic, sensitive accomplishments?

I read some translations of Baudelaire by Roy Campbell which are very good.They're incredibly muscular, weird, and alive in their linguisticity.Arthur Waley once said that no translator into the English language would like any translations other than his own, just as one doesn't like to wear other people's shoes.I'm not quite as picayune, but there is something to this view.You always find something you don't quite like.

The translations I have in mind without reservation tend to be ones from languages I don't know.I may not know the original, but they are so convincing in their own reality. I was amazed to find that I liked Michael O'Brien's Ovid and Rimbaud translations.I'm thinking of Keeley and Sherrard's translation of Seferis, some of Kimon Friar's translation of Kazantzakis' A Modern Odessey, some Chinese poems in translations by Graham in the Penguin Poems of the Late T'ang.They have a laconic simplicity and a stark, skeletal character about them I like very much.

What happens when a translation is so good that an author like Marquez makes the remark that he likes the English translation better than his original?

There you get the cross-linguistic problem.He probably doesn't know English well enough to say, but he has an impression of it.We can never know what that impression is.I think it is a statement of great nobility and modesty.

I think in Marquez' case you're probably right.But if that were true, would that be a fault of the translator?

I could be a bad translation.The original may have spoken to the translator with such force that he can perform at a level at which he could not perform if he had to originate something himself.I find this peculiar of Edmund Keeley's Greek things.Edmund Keeley writes novels.He probably writes poems too, but nobody knows about them.As a translator-poet he's very good, but who knows--as a poet in his own right he might be rather watery.There are poets with singular linguistic gifts who can be animated by an alien text.Their resources are then foregrounded, crystallized, by the sympathetic contact with this alien text.Translating poems or prose is a modulation of a capacity which is found in nature and found in human experience.The word for it is "transformation."We transform; we are transformants.This is one of our fundamental characteristics of translating, but one that's hidden from us by so many of the things that we have to do when we think that we are duplicating or going through the motions.We think we are following routines, obeying programs, reading or speaking acting out scripts.But I think that the transaction int he literary context is a very special variant of a fundamental human characteristic with parallels in the animal and plant world.When you find a good translation, you rejoice not just because a human mind has been able to do this amazing trick, but also because the performance of the trick is to prove that human beings are on this planet as brothers and sisters of plants and animals and all the other phenomena who also can transform.The fact that one does it in terms of language shouldn't blind us to the general phenomenon.

Does it ever happen that you prefer to read a text in a translation rather than the original, even though you know the original language?

Yes, I think so.I read the poem of Montale's in translation by Charles Wright, published by Field recently, and it was a poem that took me by surprise.I was blessed by that poem, while reading it and for twenty four hours afterwards.But I don't know if it's like that in Italian too.Probably if I had attempted to construe something out of the original with my absolutely miserable Italian I could never have had this glow and illumination.

What that translation does is to put you in touch with the original, even though you don't know the original.

There are some works of prose I prefer to read in the English even though I know the original very well.I love to read Heinrich Böll in English, for instance.I love to read Günter Grass in English, because I think that ralph Manheim is just a marvelous translator and a marvelous human being.He is doing more than justice to Grass.

How do you feel when you know that a line in the original is rather weak and you come up with a line in the translation that is better?

Why would a translator try to translate the poem if he felt that there was a weak line in it?--because there was so much else that was in it that was good, and he couldn't help himself.He "had" to fake the bad line into something good.That is the price the reader has to pay even though he doesn't know that he's having his pocket picked.It's all right, I suppose, just so long as the translator is attuned to the general quality of the original which he was wise enough, shrewd enough, or "crooked" enough to detect.I often have been flummoxed by this.

I remember talking to Erich Fried, who translated T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare and e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas, and I asked him how he translated all those puns and amazing multi-level ambiguities.He said if he couldn't do it in one line, then he'd do it where the author didn't with another line, hoping that the total gestalt would somehow balance.The author may find that sometimes he's been shortchanged, but if the total gestalt can really be accomplished in the language of translation, then justice has been done, although that's precisely the point at which the author of the original is going to come forth and say, "hey, you missed my point, and I don't like your variation on this other line," which is perfectly all right in itself, although it could have been done quite ably without all the folderol.He is not going to like it.But it may be that the language wants it that way.

It is very important to emphasize the fact that you get an overall transformation, an overall transplantation of the text, rather than thinking at all times of a particular line.More and more translators have to come to that recognition, that you're translating a work and not just a passage.

This is all right when you're translating a poem which is a big as a page, but it's terribly difficult when you're translating a novel or a play where the overall gestalt is really not perceptible except by omniscient, contemplative scholars 150 years after the event.With novels it must be extremely difficult.That's what I'm reluctant to undertake translating any longer texts.Longer translations that I've done have usually been ones that I've been commissioned to do where I have a nucleus of interest which I can sustain.I could not say that I was endowing any long translation with the unique, coherent integral spirit of the original.I would never vouch for that.

How do you feel when you encounter a translation as difficult as, say, Paul celan, whose syntax and diction creates its own language?What are the special problems involved?

Celan is very difficult and not just because of the metaphors and the sounds and the allusiveness of the hermetic character of the original, but also because his rather priestly tone which becomes pompous and idiotic when you try to put it into credible English.That's usually the point at which I have decided that I shouldn't really be translating Celan at all.I can't carry it out.

Which gets us to the problem of translatability.You mentioned working on translations of Pastior?

Unlike Celan, Pastior's tone translates wonderfully into English.He is funny and mocking.There is a certain absurdity to it which I like very much.On the other hand, the real problem is his etymological allusiveness and multi-linguistic punning, which, for instance, is very difficult to do in English.You can get certain weak equivalence, but he works through Rumanian, German, some remote English elements, and his own language, which is Crimean Gothic.In fact, he has written a whole book of Krim-gothische Gedichte which are splendid linguistic inventions.It's as if he is working the interfaces between several different languages and several other as yet uninvented imaginary languages.To translate this into intelligible English is quite difficult, but the tone carries well.His unmistakable personality is also in his work.I know him personally so I know his voice.It's in the authority of his voice that I as a translator can gamble on capturing the linguisticity of the authorial presence that is present in everything he writes.

Have you translated a major portion of his work?

No, I wouldn't dream of doing anything other than what he asked me to do.He gave me some things, and I translated three of them.The Chicago Review published two.They were some of the jollier and easier ones of the texts that I'd read.I went through his book in which there are about sixty or seventy prose texts, but I could only pick out about four which were even remotely translatable.I don't think one has to translate everything; in fact, I'm rather suspicious about translators of poems who annex entire opera and believe that they can do what Leashman tried to do with Rilke.Leashman, as far as I am concerned, had some major triumphs in the unrhymed poems, but since he had no ear, his work really has to be done over again.Eventually there will be a selected Rilke; the best translation will be by the people with the best ears and the best semantics.

There seem to be very few good translations of Rilke.

There are one or two good ones.A. Poulin, for instance, did some good translations of Rilke.Some of the elegies are fine, but most of his sonnet translations seem to be afterthoughts, and I don't like them at all.

But I don't read translations very much, and I don't like theorizing about them.I don't like translation seminars very much.Everyone talks about it, and people are spellbound by the notion.But I find translating a very private and secret activity.I've never written theoretical statements about it.

If there is a justification for the translation seminars, or translation workshops, it is that it gives people an opportunity to work with the text, translate it, and talk about the actual problems that arise while one is translating.If a workshop is dedicated only to speculation on what kind of theories there are, I don't see how it can be profitable.The workshops that we have done in the past were meant to give the student an opportunity to translate.

Sociologically, translation may be important now, because most of the activites that are scheduled for human beings are stultifying, paralyzing, castrating occupations that people have to perform.There are just one or two activities remaining which somehow could lead people back to their latent creativity which lies just under the surface.In some cases people have been deprived since childhood of any kind of emotion:compassion, affection, love, imagination.But you can scratch through that surface, however thick, and translation is one "scratcher" which can do this.You may find, in a class of forty people, one or two who, through experiencing translation, will quite suddenly detect in themselves the spring, the original being, and then with joy rediscover language and realize that we can invent life, and make life up as we go along.What worries me about the academic translator is that he uses the original in order to survive because he's not an inaugurator.He doesn't initiate anything, and it's a parasitic relationship.There must be people who, through translation, can discover their own inaugurative resources.

Prepared by

The Translation Review Editors

Translation Review, Volume 3, 1979.