Poetry
Poetry special: Brilliant disguise
Published 23 October 2006
Translation shows us how poetry works - and reminds us why it matters.
Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus is a strange work. Written in just over two weeks, the 55 poems appear to have been less composed than dictated to the German poet - as if they had been sitting around elsewhere, waiting for someone to channel them into speech. In an earlier time, we would have had no trouble in describing the Sonnets - in their oracularity and their visionary power - as a prophetic work.
Translating a complex, visionary poem leaves you with two choices. Either you translate something you don't understand in German into something you understand even less in English, or you make a single reading of it, knowing that this denies many others. In translating Rilke's Sonnets, I took the latter course, which is to say I made a travesty of sorts - as any single interpretation must be.
The one thing a poet must avoid, however, is pretending that both the meaning and the music of the original poem can be carried into the new language. Because a poem works on the heretical principle that sound and sense are the same thing, a poem is locked for ever in its original form. The poem's effect, which is all there is of it, can no more be "translated" than can a piece of music.
Yet we are compelled to seek some new incarnation for foreign poems in our own language. The two main strategies are the "translation" and the "version". In the translation, you work on accurately representing the words and their systems of relations; here, the integrity of the means (your skill and qualifications as a translator, say) justify the end. In the version, you work on representing the poem's idea and "spirit"; here, the integrity of the end (your inner conviction that this somehow "captures the vibe" of the original) justifies the means. A translation mirrors the original and stands alongside it; but a version tries to be a new, free-standing poem in its own right. In order to achieve that level of semantic and musical integration, it has, at some point, to forget the original and complete the course on its own.
Poetry is language put under a particular kind of heat and pressure: the heat of its emotional intensity, and the pressure of time - which is the desire to communicate our news with the utmost concision, urgency and intellectual clarity. The urge for an intense brevity leads poets to drive out all redundancy in their language, and the urge to create an explicit music - via the repetition and patterning of sounds - does much of the convincing, in lieu of the careful arguments poets have no time to present. In other words, meaning and music make poetry sound like poetry. It doesn't seem too outrageous to suggest that poetry which doesn't exhibit those features probably hasn't been put under emotional and intellectual pressure in the first place.
It's making a neutral observation to say that folk seemed to like poetry more when most of it sounded like poetry. The reclamation of poetry's readership must start with poets making a noise they want to hear. This noise, this articulate music, can perhaps only be summoned in the old way, at the intense convergence of thought and feeling. I wouldn't claim my version of the Sonnets does this, but with any luck, Rilke's big idea comes through: that singing is our sanest human act, and through it we remind ourselves that the earth is still our native element, and not the mad dream we have constructed for ourselves.
Don Paterson's translation of Rilke, "Orpheus", is published by Faber & Faber
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