Is Russian Translatable?

WHEN I NOW say that perhaps he was right about translation, do I really mean it? He believed (naively, many thought) that the reason for there being so much free-verse translation of texts that were formal in the original was that translators, for the most part, were not up to the task, not dedicated or skilled enough. As Alan Myers, one of Joseph's earlier translators reminded me, Joseph once claimed, in an interview, that translating poetry was like doing a crossword puzzle. In other words, I suppose that it was a matter of verbal dexterity and patience (read dedication). There is surely more than a little truth in this, at least as regards the neophyte translator. Before he has exhaustively explored all possibilities, his obligations cannot be said to have been fully carried out. Joseph's standards may have been absolute - and translation is not an absolute or scientific business - but even if they seem unreasonable or simplistic, they are at least salutary.
    Well, was he right? And did his own translations into English constitute, as he evidently thought or hoped, a kind of proof of his rightness? For me, the question is now an open one. Possibly the problem lay as much in Joseph's combativeness, which was understandable, given his dependence on translation. Under normal circumstances (i.e. had he not been coerced into leaving his native land), translation surely would have played a less important part in his life and artistic development. He would not have been obliged to stake out territory for himself between languages, a kind of medial marginality.

I didn't know that a new collection of Brodsky's own poetry was due from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Joseph himself having read the proofs shortly before his death. I wonder whether the distinction between poems written in English and poems translated by the author into English will be clear. Increasingly it has not been clear to me, although he still uses the formula: "Translated by the Author". I suspect, though, that having for so long entrusted the translation of his poetry to others, even if under close supervision, he was engaged on a long-term (alas, short term, as it turned out) experiment - that may be putting it too circumspectly - in applying his own ideas about translation, bypassing the often recalcitrant translators. Thus, he was bringing his poems, in translation, syntactically and acoustically (metrically, rhythmically, above all), closer to his own Russian. I wonder if he was, at the same time, bringing his Russian closer to their potential English translation. After all, he had inhabited an English-speaking world for twenty-six of his fifty-five years. Russian was still the mother tongue, but English, given his reverence for its literary tradition and for some of its writers, was far more than just a second language.
    In a review-essay on a new translation of the celebrated elegies on the death of his daughter by the Renaissance Polish poet Jan Kochanowski (New York Review of Books, 15 February, 1996), Czeslaw Milosz, whom Joseph regarded as one of the preeminent poets of our time, re-iterated his belief that Russian poetry was "hardly translatable because of its particular features - strongly rhymed singsong verses among them". He added: "Modern Polish poetry does a little better because, in contrast to Russian, the Polish language benefits from abandoning both meter and rhyme, so that equivalents in English can more easily be found." He also believed, however, that the situation had improved somewhat, as a result of the increasing collaboration between poets in English and poets in the source language. The review in question is of a collaborative translation by Stanislaw Baranczak (Polish poet, essayist and Shakespeare translator, also the translator of Brodsky into Polish) and Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel Laureate.
    While I may have some doubts, in general, about "tandem translations", it would be foolish to argue with Milosz, when he speaks from experience, the experience of co-translating his own poetry with the American poets Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky. I wonder whether Joseph, who quite often collaborated with American poet friends, and who had hoped that Richard Wilbur, certainly a master of formal verse translation, would commit himself to translating more than one or two poems, was convinced of the efficacy of this method. When Wilbur turned out an impeccably crafted version of a Brodsky poem, however flattering this may be, was it Brodsky? No doubt partly due to his being so productive - he could not expect his illustrious poet friends to keep pace or to translate more than the occasional poem - he continued to work with lesser known, more malleable translators; under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that he increasingly resorted to translation of his own poetry, while continuing to consult his poet friends. After George Kline, Joseph never again had his personal translator. He may not have wanted one. The purpose of the operation was to get the poems into English with minimal loss, not to be loyal to translators. Since Joseph took over more and more, it became less important to work through a single translator in order to achieve consistency. Indeed, it was perhaps preferable for him to collaborate with Russianists, who produced, as Alan Myers put it to me, polufabrikaty or half-finished products, working drafts in English for Joseph to revise and complete. When a Walcott had a hand in things, however, it was presumably a matter of bringing an auto-translation into contact (or conflict?) with another's poetic sensibility. Granted, this is a form of collaboration, but I imagine that Milosz, in commending collaborations between poets from the source and target languages, had something different in mind.
         And what of the Polish poet's observation about the quasi-untranslatability of Russian? Milosz is quite matter-of-fact about it, but is he right? "Strong rhymed singsong verses." Joseph maintained that least of all could these be represented by free-verse. I wonder, therefore, how he reacted to Milosz's contention that "the Polish language benefits [my italics] from abandoning both rhyme and meter." As far as I know, he never commented on it. Given his interest both in Milosz and in Polish poetry, it is hard to believe that he never saw the review.
    Nabokov at once springs to mind. Of course, he goes much further. Recently, a Russian graduate student, a philologist by training, consulted me about her proposed thesis, which was an inquiry into the celebrated inadequacy of English translations of Pushkin's masterpiece "Eugene Onegin". I dug out my copy of Nabokov's Partisan Review essay, "Problems of Translation: 'Onegin' in English" - it had been one of the hand-outs I used in a translation-history class, as well as in the translation work- shop - which preceded the publication, in I964, of his four-volume magnum opus on Onegin, which of course includes his own polemically literalistic rendering. "The clumsiest literal translation", Nabokov fulminates, taking issue with the Ciceronian tradition of sense-for-sense as against word-for-word, "is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase ... The person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language, has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text. The term 'literal translation' is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody. " (18).  He seeks to show that this is particularly true of Russian, listing no fewer than six characteristics (to Milosz's one) of Russian language and prosody that cannot be rendered in English: (1) There are far more rhymes, both masculine and feminine, in Russian. "If in Russian and French", he remarks jocularly, "the feminine rhyme (e.g.) is a glamorous lady friend, her English counterpart is either an old maid or a drunken hussy from Limerick." Joseph vigorously rejected such notions. I put it to him once, and he reprimanded me mildly, though had I cited Nabokov - I cannot recall ever doing so - I suspect that he would have been less kind to the latter's shade than he was to me. Brodsky, as we have seen, held that the alleged paucity of full rhymes in English was simply an excuse, a cover-up for inferior skills or workmanship. Rhyming might require greater ingenuity in English, but that precisely was the challenge. He did not accept that the greater ingenuity required would tend to make the rhyme intrusive in English, and that it was  unreasonable to try to modify the impact by using slant-rhymes. But to  continue (2) Russian words, no matter how long have only one stress, whereas poly-syllabic English words often have secondary stresses or two stresses; (3) Russian is considerably more polysyllabic than English; (4) in Russian, all syllables are pronounced, without the elisions and slurs that occur in English verse; (5) inversion of trochaic words, common in English iambics, is rare in Russian verse; (6) as against that, Russian iambic tetrameters contain more modulated lines than regular ones, the reverse being true in English poetry. This, in the latter case, may lead to monotony, not unknown for instance with such a poet as Byron. Nabokov concludes that, "shorn of its primary verbal existence, the original text will not be able to soar and to sing; but it can be very nicely dissected and mounted, and scientifically studied in all its organic details." By which he meant that "the absolutely literal sense, with no emasculation and no padding" could be conveyed, with the help of exhaustive commentary. He does grant that, "in regard to mere meter", the characteristic English iambic is perfectly able to accommodate the Russian without loss of literal accuracy. Nabokov's recommendations are cogent. And after all, he is not some hack, but unquestionably a master (even if, actually, a minor poet) of the Russian language, as well as of the (or of his) English ...