THE WRITER AS TRANSLATOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELLEN WATSON

BY JAMES HOGGARD

Ellen Watson’s most recent book is We Live In Bodies (Alice James, 1997), a collection of her own poems that has been awarded the $6,000 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. She is also the translator of The Alphabet In The Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado, seven novels, a biography, and a children’s book from the Brazilian Portuguese. Translation Editor of the Massachusetts Review, she conducts writing workshops regularly.

JAMES HOGGARD:You and your writing have a reputation for a kind of vitality in which clarity of focus is sustained.You have also translated seven Brazilian novels from Portuguese and collections of poems as well.In addition to that, your own poetry has won awards.It's obvious, then, that at times you must be pulled seriously in several directions.That's not always true with translators and creative writers.Many, maybe most, don't sustain intensity in both idioms.You have, though, and I'd like to know how.

ELLEN WATSON:In some ways I might be the wrong person to ask, but the question for me is whether I can maintain intensity in both simultaneously, because in the past it has been either one or the other: writing or translating.I was a writer first and started playing with language and translating on the side in graduate school in Comp[arative] Lit[erature]. Then I went to Brazil and kept on writing, but I also started learning Portuguese and found poems I wanted to translate.When I came back here to the States, I was translating full-time, and I did that for a dozen years.And as I did, I was writing my own stuff less and less. It seemed as if I were living inside other people’s words, as if those words themselves were nourishing my thinking about writing.It’s hard, though, to go back and know whether that had to do with what I was translating, because at the beginning I was doing some intensely interesting experimental novels--some of the first to come out of the political repression in Brazil.Later on I had less choice and less passion about some of the books I was doing.That’s not true about all of them, of course, but there were also accumulating in me some inner voices that needed outing. I had to leave translation aside to get back to my own writing, to return to the art I had started with.

JH:Do you think a kind of intellectual curiosity was at the source of your drive to translate?

EW:Part of the drive came from the game of it--trying to figure out how to do this thing or that, how to act it out in English. It’s funny, acting was a natural metaphor for me, for translation, from the start. And when I discovered Adélia Prado’s poems, I was so excited by them, so richly fed by them that I couldn't imagine the idea that no one who didn't know Portuguese could read them.I think that kind of attitude drives a lot of translators to say, in effect, "Look at this thing!You have to see it.”It was as if Adélia’s poems were a gift to me that I had to make available to others.

JH:In a lot of ways it seems you're suggesting that it's the personal rather than the abstract that brings us to the work we care about, that maybe even carries us to the work we do best.

EW:That's certainly true for me.I'm sure there are folks who do things after having been led by theories or such, some plan that’s constructed or takes into account a larger overview than the personal.For me, though, it's the details, the images, the intensity of feelings that move me to work.Specifics, personal connections--they’re what lead me where I go.

JH:What prepared you for the journey you’ve taken into the world of translation?

EW:It's hard to pick a moment, but I always liked languages.I took French and Spanish in high school and continued with French in college. In graduate school, for an independent study in Comparative Literature, I did some translating. The major push, though, came later--when I discovered Adélia’s poems. I was enjoying the move from Spanish to Portuguese, reading books that I bought in a bookstore in the small city where I was living in Brazil--for the first time living in a language, bathing in it--but I wasn’t moved to translate in any sustained way until I found one of Adélia Prado’s books. I knew right away I had to bring it back home with me, to English.

JH: I’m wondering if, over time, your perceptions changed in regard to what you expected the work of a translator was going to be like when you started. Or did you even consider what it was going to be like?

EW:I thought I knew. I thought translating was something you did in your free time, something you did out of love: exploring a particular poet you cared about.Then it became my job. When I came back from Brazil, I connected with Tom Colchie, who became my agent. He told me, "Sure, I can arrange rights to Adélia Prado, but why don't you do fiction?At least that's a job"--which meant a way to earn a living. Not a whole lot of living, but I did do the work for about a dozen years. Very gradually, over a long period of self-recrimination, I realized that I can’t work eight to ten hours a day translating and be--let’s call it--a happy person. Some can but I can’t.

JH:Happy or not, you produced a large body of work, and had an agent. Many never manage that. How did it come about?

EW:While I was in Brazil, Adélia's publisher refused to give me the rights to translate her poems.He even refused to answer my letters. Finally, though, I went to see him--on the day I was leaving the country. I was determined to find out why he’d been so totally unresponsive. Again, there’s that personal approach. Well, I walked in and he just began venting his anger at the American publishing industry for charging so much to reprint work. I sympathized--and why not?--and finally he calmed down a bit, and it began to sink in that I wasn’t one of their representatives. He told me to talk to Tom Colchie. He said, “If he likes your translations, I’ll give you rights.” So that’s how I ended up working with Tom, who had been a translator himself and then turned to agenting. He represented both the Brazilian writers and their translators, and he’d send me books and negotiate the contracts for the translations.

JH:Theories of translation have been dealt with considerably in our time, and those efforts have often been impressive and helpful in focusing thoughts and refining points of debate. I'd like, however, to hear you deal with a different rhythm of the subject. You've not only been an interpreter of artists in your work as a translator, but you've been a serious artist yourself, one who creates what we’ll call, with some ironic turns of delight, the primary sources.In line with that, has translation intensified your own sense of creativity, or have its demands made you feel disloyal to your own art?

EW: Ha! You should ask me that a year from now!Since I began writing seriously again, I haven’t translated a word--for three years or so, not a word. Just recently, though, I started on a story. I’ve really just begun work on it. I’ve been away from the pursuit so long that the old sensations seem new. Still, I don’t think going back to translating will make me feel disloyal to my own writing.I think the two of them—the writing and the translating--are going to fight it out in terms of the amount of hours they get in a day.It’s that battle that’s the problem, and I can’t avoid it. There are people whose work I still love enough that I know I’ll be tempted back in, away from my own work now and then. I can't imagine not translating. But novels? That may be a different matter.

JH:Is there anything in particular that seems to bring about these shifts of rhythm?For instance, you left translating to concentrate on your own poetry, and now you talk about being brought back into the fold.What is it? Necessity maybe? Your sense of responsibility to bring us the good word from others we need to know about?

EW:Sometimes people tug at your sleeve, saying, “Please! I need you to translate me.” Sometimes I’m the one doing the tugging. The story I’m working on is by Milton Hatoum, whose novel is the last one I translated. I care a lot about him and his work, but I won’t take on his next novel, he knows that. I do, though, want to try to help him get better known here, find another translator, find a publisher, too. That’s why I’m doing the story. I’d feel like a cad if I’d said no.

JH:That’s what some call the Wesleyan tradition of responsibility.

EW:As in John Wesley? Yes, we do share the tradition, don’t we?

JH:I and some others we both know recognized early on in our association with ALTA that translators often seem healthy of sensibility, generous of spirit, open rather than guarded about their work. Do you think that’s because translators, by definition, are intensely interested in people and work outside themselves and their own?

EW:That does seem true, especially when I think about gatherings of writers as opposed to gatherings at ALTA, which are so collegial. When people at ALTA ask you what you’re doing, they seem really to want to know.  You become friends. You read each other’s work. People who work from Slavic languages, say, often read work that’s translated from Spanish, and vice versa. There’s so little territoriality and apparently not even much impulse toward provincialism. I think we’ve all learned a lot from the examples of other translators. It’s unhealthy to get too full of yourself. Translation, I think, helps teach us about the wonderful abundance of others. The publishers might do well to support us better, too; they have a great book-buying crowd in translators.

JH:How do you think your work in translation has affected your own poetry?Has Brazil or Portuguese made an imprint on your own work, maybe even been a catalyst to set some ghosts free?

EW:Surely there are echoes and pieces of Brazil in my life and in my poems. It’s my adopted country.But I think our range of involvement grows, broadens as we get older. Inevitably we’ll use what we’ve seen. I think, though, I was ready to return to writing in a way that I wasn’t perhaps a dozen years ago. For me the process of writing has been associated with direct experience. And for me that experience has included foreign literature and that foreign literature’s authors, and the country it was written in. It was important to me to have a point of reference outside the U.S. My involvement with the foreign helped me step outside myself.

JH:You’re reminding me that in Culture & Anarchy Matthew Arnold said something that seems both wise and provocative: and that is that curiosity is a major dimension of the educated and civilized (and, we ought to add, civilizing) mind.Does that, in your own frame of reference, seem germane to what translation is essentially about--curiosity?

EW:It really does. Think about meeting someone on the street who talks to you in a language you don't understand.Isn’t it a basic human instinct to stand around and use hand jive, to point at things, to try to draw pictures, even, until you can communicate? You don’t just say, “Oh,” and turn around and walk away. To me the normal, the healthy response is to want to find out about the other. To me the appeal of the other is quite large.

JH:When Aristotle was talking about man being a political animal, what he obviously meant was not that people divide up into parties to compete with each other, but that people live in communities, the term political coming from the Greek word polis, meaning community or city.Does that apply to what your vision of translation is about?The conversation with another rather than the appropriation of the other?

EW:I don't think translation is about appropriation at all.I think it can be misunderstood as being that, the way it was with the publisher in Brazil who talked about getting charged phenomenal amounts of money to publish, say, a Flannery O'Connor short story in a collection. I'm sure appropriation goes on, but that's not what the activity of translation is about.I think the people who are engaged in literary translation tend to forget about the money part of the process. But let me back up. When you talked about the derivation of the word political, I thought--wow!--imagine the kind of city a group of translators might make--the city of ALTA, with that incredible feeling of community. To tell you the truth, I hate that it meets just once a year. I know I’d definitely translate more if I were surrounded more often by these friends who do.

JH: The writers you’ve translated have been living authors. Has that had a notable effect on your work?

EW: I wouldn’t be able to, or have any interest in measuring them against one another, but for me the connection with the author has been important. They’ve given me great input--sometimes helpful, sometimes not. But I love the way authors will talk to you [the translator] in ways they won’t talk to critics. If a critic has a question, they’re likely to say, “Go figure it out for yourself.”But almost every author I’ve dealt with has been happy to provide a childhood anecdote to illuminate a particular phrase I’m having trouble with. The insights you get into their work and into them as people I find utterly fascinating.

JH:I’d like to turn the conversation to another kind of community. I know you grew up in the church. We both did. I’ve also noticed, for a long time now, that a lot of writers who did not grow up in that environment seem rather tone-deaf and undistinguished in their sense of poetic rhythm. Do you think your early and regularly continuing experience with hymns and liturgy affected your sense of language? There is, of course, a lot of sonic richness in good hymns, and an elegance of language in ritual speech.

EW:I think you must have grown up in a different Methodist church than I grew up in! But seriously, do you think it’s possible to assess, to assign where our rhythms came from? I heard music and sang in church, of course, but I also assimilated just as intensely the music I heard outside that environment. To be frank, I feel that I grew up kind of beige, though I discovered fairly early on that there were all sorts of bright colors available. I grew up Protestant, but in a town [on Long Island] that was mostly Italian Catholic or Jewish; and it was really a shock to me to realize later on that the group I came from was not the minority but the majority, in this country anyway.So, maybe in reaction to beige I’m attracted to high mass. I’m attracted to religions I know nothing about, languages I don’t understand, ritual, high churchly aspects. There was such a strong effort in the '60s particularly, when I was growing up, to bring church to the people. That was a really important impulse, but it meant that the sermons and the ritual speech were in everyday language. As a result, church seemed rather diluted to me, plain. What I was looking for was the exotic, the stuff that was italicized.

JH:I didn’t have in mind ideological orientation. Both of us grew up in a tradition that was more flexible than many others—one that seemed rather comfortable with thought and certainly disinclined to righteous spasming. What I was thinking about, though, in terms of one’s sense of rhythm and color of language, to pick up on your idea, was that week after week, in church, one gathered with others and sang and spoke communally.It would seem impossible, in that context, if one paid any attention at all, not to develop--if only through osmosis--a sense of rhythm and pitch. In the liturgy the responsive parts, so cleanly psalmic, often came from that eloquent oral tradition of Hebrew poetry.

EW:Maybe so. Maybe the fact I sang every week did make a difference. I was thinking, though, about singing in the high school choir. The music we sang was Baroque or Renaissance. That kind of music was more important to me than hymns.

JH:Fine. Let’s just say music: music as an early agent of influence in teaching one a sense of rhythm.

EW:Yes. The music did work its way into the imagination. Somewhere I read about a little girl who said that she loved the pictures in the radio so much more than the pictures on TV, because the ones on the radio were so much more beautiful.

JH: That’s wonderful. How could any writer do anything but smile with joy at hearing that? I remember one of the better teachers I ever had saying there were perhaps only two types of poems:the poem of drama and the poem of statement; and he wondered if the poem of statement were really a poem. Was it anything more than a statement of opinion or list of information? Dramas, though, give us textures of the world, and those textures intensify our involvement with those portions of the world we meet. I know, for example, that I've always experienced the world through stories, and judging by your poems, I think you have, too. You also have a sharp sense of rhythm in your poems. That’s one reason I was wondering about music in your background.

EW: Now that you’ve gotten me thinking about it, we really do learn so much unawares, by osmosis. Music becomes a shape that can hold feelings--both the composer’s and the singer’s or musician’s. That’s the impetus. Then comes the craft--the application of a kind of control. Just as it is in families, in politics, control’s a big issue in art. People look at art that appears out of control and wonder if it’s art, because they don’t know how to understand it. On the other hand, too much control makes the thing leave the realm of art and become didacticism. I think the amount and kind of control that needs to be exerted can vary greatly, as long as the goal of the controlling impulse ultimately is to allow the abandon, the spirit engendered in the work, to flourish. To flourish in a way that’s intelligible, or mysteriously evocative, not simply to the creator but also to the person receiving it. Inspired control, that’s it. That’s what I’m looking for when I’m working with raw material, my own or someone else’s that I’m translating. That’s what can make the revision, the refining process magical, makes the thing start to sing in your hands. I remember hearing once that what the musician wants is to become the music. I liked that. It stayed in my head. Does the translator want to become the writer? Does the writer want to become the poem? A poem I was writing once came to the conclusion that what may be leading everything, after all, is the music. When people experience art, many often want to make art, or bring someone’s art to someone else. They want to go look at more art. When we’re listening or creating, I think we become part of the music.

JH:Is that what translation is?

EW:It is to me: a way to become a part of another’s music.

[This conversation was held primarily in Wichita Falls, Texas, in early November 1997. My thanks to Kay Hannah of the Division of Humanities at Midwestern State University for transcribing the taped version of the interview. --JH]

James Hoggard was named The McMurtry Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, in December 1997.His most recently published books are Riding the Wind & Other Tales (Texas A&M UP, 1997) and Alone Against the Sea: Poems from Cuba by Raul Mesa (York Press, 1998).

Translation Review, Volume 54, 1998.