S E R G E G A V R O N S K Y
____________________________________THE CRITIC AS TRAITOR
That Old Horse, that persistent nag, the Italians rime : << traduttore tradittore.>> This is applied to those who may go from lingua franca to lingua Americana, jump over lines, invent rimes, misplace meanings, ignore puns, in fact making of the mother tongue a rebellious offspring, justified (if known) by "Making it New." I do not automatically condemn such re-creations especially if they are taken from ancestral cultures.
But there is another "translator," and that is the critic who, as he or she "translates" the given material, in fact, betrays it, harms it, dismissively, making the critic more significant than the "original." An essay which may rival the planted text but in so doing confuses the reader as well as the translator, if he or she is still breathing and therefore reading.
At a party a young novelist approached Edmond Wilson. "Mr. Wilson your devastating review cost me my life as a writer." As of that comment, Wilson promised himself never to write a negative review; select only those works with which he agreed. A lesson to all critics but let me add, it is not only a question of "translating" a novel or a longish poem; it is a question of doing it justice (critical, of course!). When the "other," the critic, takes it upon himself (herself) to play at the game of "reading" and yet does not read but selects elements such as punctuation to make a point, then I shall baptize the critic a traitor.
Examples follow:
1. Louis Zukofsky was so familiar with French poets from the Middle ages to the XX century (see Bottom: On Shakespeare), that Ezra Pound humorously dubbed him "Monsieur Zeukofski," thereby Frenchifying Zuk into a Parisian figure, especially given the two trips to France which impressed him.
2. Zukofsky in France is a complex figure (rhetorically speaking), rivaling with Pound for those who took exception at the praise accorded to Ezra. Thus the principle of translation was equally an ideological stance. Was that an act of treason?
3. Example: Anne-Marie Albiach, a remarkable poet, translated the first half of "A"-9 which was included in Deguy/Roubaud's anthology of 40 American Poets. That same Roubaud equally declared, in "Action poétique" that Zukofsky or Zuk as Claude Royet-Journoud coined his review, was the outstanding American poet. Thus critical acclaim; critical appreciation; critical reading.
4. But Albiach's translation made of Monsieur Zuk a Frenchman by translating the rime schemes but ignoring the Marxist theory of labor, defining that first half. Zuk becomes a "Racinian" poet, incorporated into the French body poetics.
5. When Mallarmé was asked to contribute his sonnet, "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe" to a celebration of the American Poe (already translated by Baudelaire), he provided the American translator with a phony accompaniment. That unfaithful world for world indicated that ofMallarmé, a professor English, supposed the American translator able to decipher the phony. In fact, an impossible task given the complexity of the "original." When one is one's own critic, trouble looms!
6. Example: when the first translation of Louis Zukofsky's "A", co-translated by Serge Gavronsky and François Dominique appeared, there were three critical commentaries. The first and anonymous, was found at the bottom of an article and specified that one had to know Yiddish in order to proceed. In my Preface I had insisted that Zukofsky blanched his Jewishness by working around a crucial topic which he later fully developed in "A."
The second critical reading, by Roubaud, was slightly longer and affirmed that the translation was "informative." Und das is alles. Whatever that conclusion meant was left to the disappointed reader off to a negative start, expecting not a poem but a reader's help, something like the Loeb translations of Greek and Latin verse with English "helpfully" added.
What can I say? That critical judgment bypassed the work; ignoring its complexities, its reconfiguration of the American into a French poem. Yes, we insisted on "meaning" but as Mallarmé once said, language itself is of a poetic nature and consequently, if we informed the reader (a German poet thanked us for helping him "understand" "A"), the approach was strictly of a "poetic" nature, finding French clichés, children's rime schemes, allusions and even working from a Shakespearian sonnet to one worked out by Ronsard. We believed that, for a French reader, if we provided an equivalent linguistic register, puns as registers of the nature of the text, we did so keeping our readers in mind.
The third and so far the last reviewer may be the most noteworthy "traitor." His observations, found in CIPM (Centre International de Poésie Marseille), is the clearest indication of a reviewer's singular effort to ignore the totality of the work, that is, 120 pages of "translation" and insist upon minutiae such as the substitution of dashes in French while "his" edition of the original had a comma and all of that appreciation anchored in the beginning of the translation. He further found it significant to recall Roubaud's statement and thus clinched his negative appreciation, indicating his "treasonable" approach.
7. I do not hold to the theory that a translation is beyond criticism but I suggest that any critic must "read" the totality of the work before adventuring into negation. When the critic limits his or her reading to a "personal" take on the work, then I would indeed consider that a treasonable act. I do also believe that one could argue with the decision to Frenchify the text and in particular to limit the multiplication of linguistic approaches so ardently exhibited by Louis Zukofsky. In the early stages of our co-translation I would at time insist on that particularity just to inform (infirm!) French poetics and provide French poets of a more audatious tinge a rival mode of thinking and especially hearing a poem. Zukofsky as a pedagogical enterprise, radically shifting out of a limited, "sublime," poetics to a "contemporary" mode. Olivier Cadiot has worked in that vein.
8. Conclusion: if a translator can be reproached for "taking liberties" and thereby "ignoring" the original (always shifting!), then all the more can one condemn a critic for not providing lines of boarding the translated work.
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