Asif Raza
T
ranslation of poetry involves not just transference of expressive but also aesthetic values. Robert Frost’s oft-quoted definition of poetry as that “which gets lost in translation” alludes to the special difficulties that it presents. Roman Jacobson’s rather blunt statement, made from his linguistic perspective, that “Poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible” also highlights the same problem.
Traditionally, the word “translation” has been taken to mean duplication of the original in the target language, both in content and form. This extreme view of translation as complete metaphrasic fidelity to the original (verbum pro verbo) is rejected today because, despite the semantic similarities between languages, due to the commonality of human experience, no two languages are interchangeable with each other. Absence of linguistic and cultural equivalence between languages and the inescapable necessity of accommodation and compromise at various levels make it inevitable for the translation to turn out to be more or less a different thing than exactly the same thing in a different language. Therefore neither the form nor the content of a poem is transferrable to another language with complete literalness (especially not the aesthetic value which is of the essence of poetry). In other words, translation does not mean an isotopic exercise undertaken with a view to retrieve the original but an act of transcreation or transposition which involves creative interpretation of a poetic text and its transference from the source language to the target language in such a way that it evokes in the target reader similar if not exactly the same aesthetic response.
The current practice of translation almost universally takes a middle ground between the extremes of the “liberal “and the “literal” strategies. At various points and various contexts, both can be, have been and should be used .By and large I have followed the same stance. Yet, my translations being not reenactments of somebody else’s creations but self-translations, I have taken more liberty with them by way of dropping or adding or emending a line or two, or even a whole paragraph, as well as by “depersonalizing” a couple of poems originally written in the first person confessional lyric form.
I have also set aside literalist considerations when the cost involved was ease of reading by English readers, which, call it my bias, has been my paramount concern in my translations. In that, I have opted for a reader-centered, idiomatic, or the so-called “domesticating” translation rather than text-centered (or author-centered), unidiomatic or “foreignizing” translation. Yet in a few instances, I have not avoided the latter because I could not, for example, when using certain symbols or images for which I could find no cultural equivalent in English. But in a few cases I did not because I would not, for example, in choosing not to suppress the surplus of emotions that still characterizes the oriental psyche but which a westerner may find embarrassing, or even deem it as bordering on the sentimental.
Although I do not agree with the view that a translation is meant to be exclusively read by readers in the target language, I do however maintain that poetic language being tonal in essence, readers who are well versed in the source language should possess or should cultivate the readiness to submit to a translation in English as an experience in English language, and as a poem with a life of its own, instead of hunting for deviations from and “betrayals” of the original without appreciating the fact that if so, they might have resulted from the inescapable necessity of expressive and aesthetic accommodation.
As for my idea of poetry, to me poetic speech is not just an aesthetic undertaking. It is rather aesthetic expression of the truth of one’s experience. However, not the expression of the quotidian truth but the truth that is revealed to one’s deeper self which, not stymied by the defenses of a socialized ego, or not propped up by the crutches of a consoling social myth or dogma, is in touch with the primordial reality and with the existential constants of the human condition. Seen thus, poetry is not merely communication of meaning, but an evocation of a state of being by the poet, that is, by the poet as a whole human being (rather than an abstracted fragment of himself).
Poetry in my view is not entirely a product of conscious or willful activity, not a “festival of the intellect” alone (as Paul Valery once called it) nor of the “collapse of the intellect” (as Andre Breton characterized it). It is, rather, a product of a tension between the two in which the irrational and the intellect both try to jostle each other each other for the control of the poetic process. There is a range of possible outcomes of this conflict: the irrational has the upper hand and the intellect is tamed or the opposite: the intellect has the upper hand, the Irrational is tamed. Or the two continue to balance and counterbalance each other in a jockeying mode.
In my creative process, I eschew putting poetic flesh on ideational bones. Writing a poem for me is a journey into the unknown. It is a voyage of self-discovery in which an image or a constellation of images, which are initially beyond the grasp of my understanding, beckon me and in guiding me on, suggest their corresponding ideas.
I strongly believe that both on the thematic and formal level, there is an element of compulsion at work in the creative process. As a critic of Kafka puts it, “One writes as one must, not as one should.” In other words it is impossible to write poetry by prescription. One does not proceed to write a poem from a theoretical position, whether articulated by the modernists or the postmodernists, (no matter what their stance, whether thematically and formally exclusive or inclusive). Rather, one writes from the vital center of one’s being, by following one’s deepest impulse. In my view, doing it any other way amounts to betrayal of one’s poetic self: it is tantamount to artistic suicide. Thus if a poet’s poetic speech is formulated in the dark recesses of his psyche that is attuned to its subterranean rumblings, then, by necessity, poetry for him means registering on the page the tremors of his soul , big or small irrespective of what literary fad or fashion or school or movement his poetry does or does not fit in. In the last analysis, it all depends upon one’s vision. And whether one has a tragic or a comic vision of existence is not a matter of one’s choosing. We are all; captives of our vision, including the comedian and the critic. As Talmud says “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
***
Seven Sisters
On a coral island, wide,
Seven sisters, somnambulist
Pursuing their nightly dream,
From their look-out, a reddish rock,
Scan the wide expanse of the sea;
But only the white foam of a returning wave
Dissolving itself on the shore.
Seven sisters, golden-haired, slender, tall,
Their virgin lips, cherry-red, aquiver
Their eyebrows arched, like daggers sharp,
Raging in their breasts an unrelenting storm,
Barred by the threshold of the sea,
They wait upon their dream.
A sail!
The glint of diamonds in their eyes!
But no, only a cloud upon the horizon.
The watery highway desolate as ever.
A picture of despair,
They let the pearls fall from their unclenched fists
Which the liquid abyss takes back without a question.
They pick up their seven-stringed lyre of gold,
And sing a golden masterpiece.
Their seven-octaved voices reach the farthest shores,
The rising wind suspends its surge upon the mountain-top.
The watery bell in its cavern delays its notice of distant journeys.
Their returning song! It bears the promise of a silver- draught
In a goblet of gold,
The tidings of an eternal moment of glory
(Hiding its face, the sea shell adds its offering…a priceless pearl).
The turbulence of waves is stilled at once,
Upon touching the coral-pink soles of their feet.
In response to a query by a passing under-current,
The rocky ledge shatters into fragments, in hanging low its head.
An indolent vortex, to say it bears no news,
Negates itself by unwinding its watery folds.
Self-wastingly, the morning squanders its gold
Upon the surface of a silent sea۔
Seven sisters, their azure eyes of unfathomable depths,
In which only the phantoms seek refuge,
Silver apples of golden boughs
Pressed tightly to their heaving breasts
Motionless, they peer beyond the gathering mists—
The terror that the shores strike into the sailors’ hearts!
No ship enters the bay.
A sailors’ fleet of cargo-laden ships,
Sails on silently toward its destination.
Dark shapes perched up high on the masts,
Hands shading eyes to stay the charted course,
Sharp-eyed, sharp-eared,
In whispers they mention the harbor ahead,
And its promise of a restful sleep
Before another busy day.
***
ARCH OF MEMORIES and other poems
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Author Note Seven Sisters is from a collection of my self-translated poems titled “Whispers From the Shadow Side”, originally penned in Urdu. It consists of selections from my three publications. Rendered bilingually they are: Bujhe Rangon ki Raunaq (Splendor of Faded Colors) Tanhai ke Tehwar (Festivals of Solitude) and Aaeene ke Zindani (Captives of the Mirror.)Asif Raza No less polymath writes poetry in Urdu and translates many of them into English. His poems have been published in several literary journals in India and Pakistan. Several of his original poems as well as his English translations of them were published in the now defunct bilingual journal, Annual of Urdu Studies, University of Wisconsin. He has authored three collections of poems: Bujhe Rangon ki Raunaq (Splendor of Faded colors), Tanhai ke Tehwar(Festivals of Solitude) and Aaeene Ke Zindani (Captives of the Mirror) published in two editions, the first one in Delhi, India (under the supervision of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who also wrote its foreword) and the other in Karachi, Pakistan.After a doctorate in Sociology, he taught at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb and a senior college in Texas. He lives in Tyler, Texas
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