THE TRANSLATOR'S VOICE:An Interview with Willis Barnstone

By Thomas Hoeksema

The most striking feature of Willis Barnstone's production as a translator is the broad range of his interests and publications.His translation work reflects involvement with a wide variety of languages, cultural backgrounds, and literary periods.Volumes of his translations include the poetry of Mao Tse-tung, Sappho, St. John of the Cross, Pedro Salinas, Antonio Machado, Fray Luis de Leon, and a medieval Latin bestiary, Physiologus Theobaldi.

As an editor, he has produced significant and widely-disseminated anthologies of international writing--Greek Lyric Poetry, Modern European Poetry, Spanish Poetry from the Beginning through the Nineteenth Century, and the forthcoming A Book of Women Poets:From Antiquity to Now.As editor, he also has provided numerous publication opportunities for translators; the Modern European Poetry contains the first translation efforts of a number of individuals whose work has flourished since that anthology first appeared in 1966.

One of Mr. Barnstone's most recent contributions to the field of literary translation is in the areas of theory and critical essays.He has made provocative and creative statements on the art of literary translation, which, as a whole, comprise an evolving poetics of literary translation.His formulations reflect the extensive background in literature, linguistics, and critical theory which Willis Barnstone brings to the translation act.

The theoretical formulations, for example, of "The ABC's of Translation," and "Revelations: On the Art of Unveiling Poems" also reflect his sensitivity and experience as a poet.His career as a translator has been paralleled by the publication of eight volumes of poetry, two of which have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes.The correlations between his work as a poet and as a translator have produced an approach to creative expression that yields fresh insights and a rich perspective on the recreative act as well.Mr. Barnstone's observation that "the translated poem becomes the model for the translator's own poem" focused the first series of exchanges in the following interview.

In what sense have the poems you've translated become models for your own poetry?

The poems I have translated are the poems I have read most carefully, and insofar as I have been influenced by reading, those poems read through the act of translation have had the strongest impact.But there is another subtle sense in which translating affects one's writing.It is not the original text which ultimately affects one, though it is the first cause, but the intermediary text of the translated poem.It is not so much the original thought and sounds of the source text but the poem which the translator has been forced to create which is the immediate model.Thus, one is influenced by a text created by oneself.Guilts and inhibitions fade and one ventures into an area now one's own.

You place great emphasis on the translator being a poet at the moment of translation.Is it possible for a translator to be effective if he or she is not a poet outside the act of translation?

Without question.Those translators I admire most in our century have not been remarkable poets.I think that a translator may be a Pasternak or Lowell, a modest poet, or no poet at all outside of translation.If one has devoted one's poetic talents only to translation, this need not be a handicap.What is signal is the devotion.Just as a poet develops skills over a lifetime, so the translator quickens his skills.

What is the nature of poetry translation's influence on a writer?In a recent New Orleans Review interview James Wright noted a distinct influence on his own work as a result of working with a Spanish poet for several months.Has there been any such cross-over effect in your experiences?

Yes.My writing has been influenced by the Greek lyric poets, by Sappho in particular, by Antonio Machado, Pedro Salinas, Saint John of the Cross, Fray Luis de Leon, Mao Tse-tung, by Physiologus (Bishop Theobaldi, author of a medieval Latin bestiary) because I have done books of their work.At the same time I "misinterpret" these poets for my own design.The Uruguayan critic Monegal has observed that two lines are often enough for a poet to understand the whole scheme of another poet.Obviously, then, the intimate knowledge of a poet in another language will give one many clues.

Is it valid to say that translating a poem is more difficult than original composition of a poem?

No.A strange question.Perhaps writing a great poem is not "difficult," and only the less good ones offer the struggle.

In "the ABC's of Translation" you state that "to the translator poet, the `untranslatable' poem yields the best poem."Could you expand on that rather startling observation?

A neutral passage may be easily translated but the result may also be neutral.What is distinctive in the source language will probably provoke distinctive qualities in the target poem.What is "untranslatable" will force one to be inventive; as with any stricture, to circumvent bonds one must fly; the imagination must soar."Impossibility," "untranslatability," all strictures are the source of freedom.They incite freedom and invention.

In another essay you state that "the translator poet has a huge realm of literary freedom even when remaining very close to the source text."Since this is the reverse of the usual emphasis on a translator's restricted position, could you comment further on the nature and limits of the translator's realm of literary freedom?

If one translates close to the literal meaning, one is restricted.But since English--like every language--is marvelously flexible, this restriction forces the translator to find ingenious solutions.The pressure is off if one translates freely.

Could you provide a specific example of where an `untranslatable' poem provided you with the creative challenge that resulted in a successfully translated text?

I hesitate and should ponder.Where San Juan de la Cruz writes un no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo, I rendered this they keep babbling bits of mystery.Eric Segal gave a talk saying these words were untranslatable.Insofar as anything is untranslatable, yes.But surely the untranslatable is more translatable than other passages and more interesting.My example and success may be poor, but the principle is right.

Would you say there is such a thing as an untranslatable poem?

A poem is never translatable.A poem is always translatable.Choose.

You have observed that translation requires much craft--a craft most contemporary poets and translators do not possess.With what kind of translation would this craft be necessary?Why do you suppose so many poets and translators lack this formal training and ability?

Translating into rhyme and meter in a natural way of course requires craft.Usually, when translating poems from the European past, one has to contend with rhyme and meter.Since most poets do not use these devices today, they do not have the knowledge of applying them to translation.One can choose to translate formal poetry into a free form, into closed forms, or choose not to translate at all from closed forms.An awkward attempt at closed forms is painful.

One of your axioms from "Translating Poetry" emphasizes translation as an act of reading; specifically, "Because there is no one way of reading a poem, there is no one way of translating it."Could you explain in more detail what the creative and critical dimensions of this act of reading involve?

In translating one explicates, for one chooses a specific dominant meaning.Often in transferring meaning one has to give up ambiguities, but there are tricks even for finding equivalents of ambiguity.As for a single way of translating, no way.What keeps literature alive is that its readers develop, change from generation to generation, and thus, in completing the act of reading, change their own contribution.Likewise, a translator in each generation reads differently and hence pours an altered content in a form appropriate for each age.

You have recently published an essay on semiotics.Are there correspondences between your work in semiotics and the field of translation?

Insofar as semiotics applies to any transference of information, it applies to translation.Translation has so many variables it is a treasure house for semiologists.

How did you become involved in translation; what were some of your early experiences with translation?

As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, I translated a poem by Antonio Machado.I don't remember why.Then a year later, as a graduate student in Paris, my friend Robert Payne suggested that I translate García Lorca.Instead I translated Machado. Later, with my wife, I translated a lyrical novel from modern greek, The Other Alexander by Margarita Liberaki.These and some poems I did from Angelos Sikelianos for the BBC were my first experiences in translation.I found that adapting three plays from the Spanish--from Lope, Calderón and Neruda--led me to write my own verse play.From the beginning my involvement in translation has been happy.I have never tried to usurp the poem from the original author.I am happy to offer a conduit.To show one's love for a poet in another language, translation is the ideal gift.At the same time I have been pained somewhat by my reputation as a translator.I am grateful to be a translator; I am not grateful when it overshadows my work as a poet and critic.

Your work is marked by involvement with a wide variety of literatures and languages.What effect has the experience with a broad range of languages and literary periods had on your growth as a translator, or on your attitudes toward translation?

A fine question and I fear my answer will not be believed.Diverse experience in reading reinforces what is recognizably common.Above all a strange recognition of images in unrelated literatures.As for the instruction of earlier work, treating Sappho, whose images are pristine and strong, not a wasted word but never crabbed, helped me to deal with Chinese poems.Doing Louise Lab&e's sonnets helped me do Jorge Luis Borges' sonnets.

You endorse the use of an informant to facilitate the translation process.Under what conditions is an informant useful?

When one does not read the source language fluently.I can read Portuguese fairly well, but I have preferred to work with a Brazilian friend, Nelson Cerqueira, who makes the fine distinctions.As in any collaboration, one establishes a new voice.If the informant and poet are severely honest, test each other constantly, the collaboration should work.

How would you distinguish between the work with an informant and the direct collaboration between author and translator?To what extent have you collaborated with original authors in your projects?Have the results always been positive?Have there been conditions or circumstances where the collaboration was a hindrance to translation?

I have collaborated only three times with poets, with Matei Calinescu from Rumanian and with Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Satz from Spanish.In each case the collaboration was in every way positive.I never felt inhibited to take free trips, to go down some wild alleys.

In your introduction to the Pedro Salinas volume you state "The poetry of Pedro Salinas lends itself to modern translation."Could you explain that statement?

Pedro Salinas' poetry has a grammatical and semantic complication which comes through very well in English.I know no Russian, but though friends tell me that Pushkin is really extraordinary in Russian, in English, so far, he is weak.Perhaps Pushkin does not lend himself to translation.Perhaps his translator has not yet appeared.Surely closed forms are more difficult to reproduce.Donne's "Death be no Proud" was so difficult for Nicanor Parra to reproduce in Spanish, he had said, that he could do nothing after but write poetry himself.On the other hand, the poems of Neruda, with surprising language and clear imagery, do lend themselves to translation.

The Salinas translations were not published in bilingual form although many of your poetry translations are presented en face.Is it your general feeling that a bilingual format is always desirable in poetry volumes?

I would prefer an en face format for many reasons.I do not care for prose translations.Often they are hard to understand (as in Sinclair's Dante), for in seeking a literal transformation the sense is lost, and they are awkward as a crib.But interlinear (prose) translations are excellent, an ideal.The only perfect translation, which is a trick, is what we did for Mary Ellen Solt's anthology of concrete poetry, which I edited when it appeared in Hispanic Arts.Most of the poems were brief, so we provided a glossary so the reader could learn to read the poem in the original.To a certain extent en face formats, and especially interlinear ones, provide this possibility.

In a recent Translation Review interview, Teo Savory noted that the bilingual format too often causes the impact of both poems to be lost by distracting the reader's attention.Do you agree with this statement?

On the contrary.A bilingual format multiplies the reader's experience with the text, allowing him or her to go back and forth on changing levels of understanding.Of course the reader must use texts with cunning.Remember that for any text, original or translation, once the page leaves the printer the main creator is the reader.

The Modern European Poetry volume has proved to be an important anthology of modern poetry, which was recently issued in its sixth printing.How would you characterize the impact and influence of that book?

A friend has characterized it as prophetic, for many poets and poet translators then little known became so, including nine Nobel Prize winners.The book was done twenty years ago, seven years before its publication date.It took seven years to clear rights.I think it would be hard to redo such a book today because of permissions.A pity.Poets should be paid, but above all published.

Did the translation opportunities in this anthology have any effect on the careers of individual translators?

Poets like Robert Bly and James Wright increased their involvement with modern Spanish poets.My earlier volume, Eighty Poems of Antonio Machado, had already come to the attention of these poets and helped incite an interest and participation int he discovery of the poets of Spain and Latin America.

As general editor of the Modern European Poetry, did you impose or suggest any translation criteria for the book?

My translation criteria are translate as you wish, but do not make mistakes.Mistakes are not freedom.When a plumber's pipes don't connect properly, when the surgeon leaves the scissors inside, it is not creative.

When you are the editor of a volume of translations, what editorial criteria govern your choice or rejection of materials?As editor, do you place priority on the quality of the original?The translation?Do you try to cast the poet in the most favorable light by including or excluding certain poems?

A fine question.I would not include a poem in an anthology or any volume unless it was a good poem in English.Presumably it was in the original language, and fidelity to quality is foremost.Of course, good poets can improve on the original.This can become a vice.I prefer to "improve" on the original by choosing those poems which work well in translation.One should in any case always try to improve and perhaps one will at least come out even.

Your translation of the complete Mao Tse-tung poems received a great deal of media attention.What motivated you to translate Mao's poetry?

Robert Payne in Paris, back in the spring of 1949, told me that he had come two years earlier from the caves in northern China where he had visited and translated the works of its best poet, Mao.It was as a poet that he presented him.Payne was also the first to do translations of some of Mao's best-known poems into English. Having been a full-time student in Bengali at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), I was always close to Chinese poetry.I saw the clarity of Chinese images in Spanish and Greek, in Andalusian popular songs and in the American and English imagists.One day, remembering Robert Payne's enthusiasm for that Chinese poet, I altered my walk through a parking lot and went directly to the library.Mao's poetry, like Machado's war poems, are the best political poems--one could add Ho Chi Minh--because they never speak of external dogma but rather of personal history in a moment of historical crisis.Mao's poems are as personal as Kafka's Castle.They also have a Pindaric sweep and a typically Frostian conversational simplicity.As you see, experience in several literatures immediately leads one to find common (dare we say universal?) qualities.

Your translations of Sappho posed unique challenges.What special problems or distortions were created by moving from restorations or partial texts to translation?

Sappho poses troubling problems.Most of her poems are fragments embedded in contexts which, though not translated, give the translator further information.To be faithful to the words, one should make the texts make less sense in English.Perhaps were I to do them today I would be more faithful to the "non sense" of Greek.Yet since the contexts and the fragments themselves usually can be deciphered, my tendency would still be to help the sense along.The restorations of Edmonds are, however, a mistake, and the few instances where I heeded them I was wrong.

Because of the elaborate scholarly apparatus in the Sappho volume, you combine several roles--editor, scholar, historian, critic, translator--in rendering those poems.

A poet whose language is unknown to most English readers needs help.A good historical and literary introduction is desirable.Notes and a textual history, including concordances with other texts and translations, may be helpful.Everything one gives the reader is appreciated.As for me, the translator, all this helps me as well to read and translate the text better.

Is there ever a point where we can attribute definitive status to a translation?

By status I suppose you mean value.Some poets translate more readily, as I have said.One is George Seferis, who has also been poorly translated.I think Edmond Keeley's and Philip Sherrard's translation works so well in English that one can say Seferis exists in English. One summer I read the complete poems of Seferis through three times in Greek.Despite, or perhaps because of, the Greek echo in my mind, the English of Keeley's translation comes through beautifully.The translations of Cavafy, especially his Passions and Ancient Days done with George Savides, are remarkably fine and moving.But Cavafy poses more problems of tone and formal devices.Davafy is much farther from a definitive or near definitive translation.For reasons given earlier, for the variety of valid readings, there can obviously not be a truly definitive translation of anything, nor should there be.

Isn't it true that certain texts, such as the King James Version, have reached the level of a definitive and autonomous text, even though retranslation of the original is on-going?

Yes.Glory to the King James and also to the Revised.I regret that in our time scholars have not treated the Bible as they have the ancient Greek plays or Homer.Our great sacred texts have no modern translators.All translations I have seen are banal, stilted, or attempt theological corrections in the act of literary blindness.Exception is Richmond Lattimore's recent rendering of the four Gospels and the Apocalypse.I once asked a publisher to send me to Israel for two years so that I could improve my knowledge of Hebrew and work on a translation of the poetry.I was unable to convince them to give me a modest stipend.

In a recent article, Stefan Congrat-Butler proposes for formation of an official, professional translators' guild to cover all areas of the profession.Do you think such an organization is feasible or desirable?

Perhaps.Of course once we win the battle of publishing translations--as winning the struggle for the Fauves or modern architecture--we then have to win the struggle for the best work.In that we will fail, and perhaps should.There are not more major translators in the world than there are major poets.But publish we should.

Would you discuss in some detail the nature of your current and future translation projects?

With Edward Honig I am finishing an anthology of Spanish poetry from the Spanish jarchas by Arabs and Jews to contemporary Spanish and Latin American poets.In the fall I am bringing out The Dream Below the Sun:The Poems of Antonio Machado.This is a selection of 146 poems, an expansion of an earlier volume.Finally, having translated the poems of Fray Luis de Leon and Saint John of the Cross, I would like to make known in English the work of the other major Spanish Golden Age poets in separate volumes:Francisco de Quevedo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Garcilaso de la Vega.I love these poets and would like to share a knowledge of their work with English readers.

Questions for this discussion were prepared with the assistance of the Summer 1979 Translation Workshop, University of Texas at Dallas.

Translation Review, Volume 6, 1980.