Swedish poet Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s winning the Nobel Prize brought to light a rare bit of translation gossip: that there\u2019s bad blood between a few of his translators. And as there should be\u2014a lot of people suddenly want to buy Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s poetry; of the five plus out there, which book are you going to get? The Deleted World<\/i>, Scottish poet Robin Robertson\u2019s \u201cversions\u201d of Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s poems (Robertson doesn\u2019t like to call them \u201ctranslations\u201d), is the controversial one. Its first American publication at the end of last year, half a decade after it originally appeared from Enitharmon Press in Britain, drew new attention to the paper war abroad. In the introduction to the slim volume of fifteen poems from across Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s career, Robertson makes it clear, \u201cThe free versions in The Deleted World<\/i> were never intended as literal translations.\u201d Not free enough for some. As David Orr chronicled in March in the New York Times Book Review<\/i>, Robin Fulton, also a Scottish poet-translator of Transtr\u00f6mer, and who does speak Swedish, \u201caccused Robertson (who doesn\u2019t speak Swedish) of borrowing from his more faithful versions while inserting superfluous bits of Robertson\u2019s own creation \u2014 in essence, creating poems that are neither accurate translations nor interesting departures.\u201d Robertson has barbs of his own: in reference to other Transtr\u00f6mer collections, he dubs Samuel Charter\u2019s Baltics<\/i> a \u201cgood reading\u201d and Robert Bly\u2019s The Half-Finished Heaven<\/i> \u201ca strong American selection,\u201d while Fulton\u2019s Collected Poems<\/i> is a delightfully back-handed \u201cuseful.\u201d Good for a gloss, but get your poetry elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Whenever a translator feels compelled to present their work as something just a little bit different, as not quite a translation, but as an imitation, or a version, or whatever else they can come up with (\u201cEnglished\u201d for \u201ctranslated\u201d is a favorite), my instinct is to cry bullshit. There is rarely something original enough to justify setting oneself apart from other translators and, intended or not, it smacks of apologetics: a way of excusing any potential infidelities as part of the game. When you actually read the poems, it\u2019s clear why debating the merits of the different translations in terms of relative faithfulness is pointless. Compare these two versions of \u201cThe Couple,\u201d originally published in 1962. The first is by Robin Fulton, which we know to be the sober, literal rendition:<\/p>\n
\nThey switch off the light and its white shade
\nglimmers for a moment before dissolving
\nlike a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up.
\nThe hotel walls rise into the black sky.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\nThe movements of love have settled, and they sleep
\nbut their most secret thoughts meet as when
\ntwo colors meet and flow into each other
\non the wet paper of a schoolboy\u2019s painting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\nIt is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer
\ntonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached.
\nThey stand close up in a throng, waiting,
\na crowd whose faces have no expressions. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe second, from Robin Robertson, we expect to run roughshod over those lines:<\/p>\n
\nThey turn out the lamplight, and its white globe
\nglimmers for a moment: an aspirin rising and falling
\nthen dissolving in a glass of darkness. Around them,
\nthe hotel walls slide like a back-drop up into the night sky.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\nLove\u2019s drama has died down, and they\u2019re sleeping now,
\nbut their dreams will meet as colours meet
\nand bleed into each other
\nin the dampened pages of a child\u2019s painting-book.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\nAll around is dark, and silent. The city has drawn in,
\nextinguishing its windows. The houses have approached.
\nThey crowed in close, attentive:
\nthis audience of cancelled faces.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nRobertson adds \u201clike a back-drop\u201d in the fourth line, and there is certainly a good case for its not being there, but everything else can be unambiguously found in the Fulton. Robertson isn\u2019t offering anything more new than re-configurations and re-thinkings of what\u2019s already there \u2014 which is to say he\u2019s translating. \u201cThe town has pulled closer together,\u201d \u201cThe city has drawn in.\u201d Word-for-word, one of those might be more accurate to the Swedish, but they nonetheless say the same thing. The question is which says it better.<\/p>\n
I would make the case for Robertson here. His translation propels the reader through, where the Fulton in some parts seems to need a breath after every word (\u201cglimmers for a moment before dissolving \/ like a tablet in a glass of water\u201d). Where Robertson would seem to violate the syntax and exact words of the original, we find justification in the Fulton, such as the problems of \u201ca crowd whose faces have no expressions\u201d (is \u201cwhose\u201d the word to use here? does the crowd have faces or is it a crowd of faces? does each face have no expression or no expressions?) which \u201cthis audience of cancelled faces\u201d circumvents, though we do wonder what was wrong with \u201cexpressionless faces.\u201d Robertson is certainly not blameless, but past reviews have focused on his occasional admittedly superfluous additions (Orr cites his simile \u201clike the mess of a knife-fight\u201d as the most egregious example, since it is absolutely without basis in the Swedish), without giving equal weight to the majority of the time when his changes are perfectly permissible and frequently elegant, adding rhythm to the jerks and offering up Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s images in language that flows like water rather than dripping like ice. In a later poem, \u201cThe sun scorches. The plane flies low \/ throwing a shadow in the form of a large cross rushing forward on the ground\u201d becomes \u201cThe sun is scorching. The plane comes in low, \/ throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground.\u201d <\/p>\n
Others cite this as precisely what\u2019s wrong with Robertson\u2019s Transtr\u00f6mer, that the poems are too poetic, not strange enough. Such an effect may precisely be the hardest to produce: \u201cSick of those who come with words,\u201d writes Transtr\u00f6mer through Robertson, \u201cwords but no language.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Swedish poet Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s winning the Nobel Prize brought to light a rare bit of translation gossip: that there\u2019s bad blood between a few of his translators. And as there should be\u2014a lot of people suddenly want to buy Transtr\u00f6mer\u2019s poetry; of the five plus out there, which book are you going to get? The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[17726,1646,47756,47746,6436,47736,23996,42966],"class_list":["post-290966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-farrar-straus-and-giroux","tag-review","tag-robin-fulton","tag-robin-robertson","tag-swedish-literature","tag-the-deleted-world","tag-tim-nassau","tag-tomas-transtromer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319066,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290966\/revisions\/319066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}