The Aeneid, Book 1, Line 203

…forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

 — Virgil (19 BCE)

 An hour will come, with pleasure to relate
Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate.

— Trans. John Dryden (1697) 

  It well may be
some happier hour will find this memory fair.

— Trans. Theodore C. Williams (1910)

Perhaps one day you will remember even
these our adversities with pleasure.

— Trans. Allen Mandelbaum (1971)

Some day, perhaps, remembering even this
Will be a pleasure.

— Trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1983) 

A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. 

— Trans. Robert Fagels (2006)

Maybe the day’ll come when even this will be joy to remember.

— Trans. Frederick Ahl (2007) 

…perhaps one day you’ll even delight in remembering this.

— Trans. A. S. Kline (2016) 

Many Shadows of Lǐ Bái Drinking by Moonlight

Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn): There was a Chinese poet who was drowned while trying to kiss the moon in the river. He was drunk.
George Kittredge (John Howard): I'd say as much.
Tracy Lord: But he wrote beautiful poetry.

-- The Philadelphia Story (1940), by Donald Ogden Stewart (directed by George Cukor)

The poet that Katherine Hepburn's character refers to is 李白 Lǐ Bái* (701 – 762), one of the major poets of the Chinese Tang dynasty. I don't know the origins of the legend about his death, which is apparently fairly widely known, but it does seem that both drinking and the moon are recurring images in his work. In particular, one of his most famous poems, 月下獨酌 (Yuè xià dú zhuó), is about both. It has been quite widely translated -- as this fabulous post amply demonstrates by presenting 43 (!) translations (from which I've taken most of the translations I'm including here). I thought I'd share some with you.

But first, here's the original Chinese (via A. Z. Foreman):

月下獨酌

花間一壺酒，
獨酌無相親；
舉杯邀明月，
對影成三人。
月既不解飲，
影徒隨我身；
暫伴月將影，
行樂須及春。
我歌月徘徊，
我舞影零亂；
醒時同交歡，
醉後各分散。
永結無情遊，
相期邈雲漢。

-- 李白

And, in somewhat nicer calligraphy, here's an image of the poem from Wikipedia:

The following pinyin reflects how it would be spoken in modern Mandarin -- which, of course, is way off: Lǐ Bái wrote earlier (or around the same time) as the Beowulf poet,** and of course the language's changed. But it's still interesting, I think. (Again, via A. Z. Foreman)

Yuè xià dú zhuó

Huā jiān yī hú jiǔ, 
dú zhuó wú xiāngqīn;
Jǔ bēi yāo míngyuè, 
duì yǐng chéng sān rén.
Yuè jì bù jiě yǐn, 
yǐng tú suí wǒ shēn;　
Zàn bàn yuè jiāng yǐng,　
xínglè xū jí chūn.
Wǒ gē yuè páihuái,　
Wó wǔ yǐng língluàn;
Xǐng shí tóng jiāo huān,
Zuì hòu gè fēnsàn.
Yǒng jié wúqíng yóu,
Xiāngqī miǎo yúnhàn.

-- Lǐ Bái

If you want to hear what that Mandarin sounds like, there are a number of readings of it on Librivox here.

Ok, let's look at the English. First, here's a character-by-character gloss (which I first found here):

moon, under, alone, pour wine

blossom, among, one, pot, wine
alone, pour wine, without, one another, intimate
to lift, cup, invite, bright, moon
couple, shadow, complete, three, people
moon, since, not understand, drink
shadow, disciple, follow, my body
temporary, companion, moon, shadow
to go, cheer, must, to reach, spring/joy
I, song, moon, irresolute, wander
I, to dance, shadow, remnant, in confusion
to be awake, accompanying, to make friends, joyous
intoxicate/finally, each, divided, scattered
forever, to bind, not, merciless, to travel/roaming
heavenly river/Milky Way, profound/remote, cloud, man

-- Glossed by Jordan Dickie

That's not a translation per se, but again, I find it interesting. But now let's look at some real translations.

First, here's a translation by Witter Bynner, an early Twentieth Century American poet who worked from glosses by Jiāng Kànghú (江亢虎) on an anthology of translations called The Jade Mountain.

Drinking Alone with the Moon

From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me—
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends.

To cheer me through the end of spring . . .
I sang. The moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
. . . Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.

-- Translated by Witter Bynner

If you want to read more of Bynner's translations of Lǐ Bái, there are a bunch of them online here.

Next, here's a translation by A. Z. Foreman, from whom I took the Chinese and pinyin versions above (and whose translation is, unlike most of those I reprinting here, not in the 43-translation roundup):

Pouring Myself Drinks Alone By Moonlight

Amid the flowers: a jug of wine.
I pour alone and friendlessly
Raise my cup to invite the moon down
Then face my shadow to make us three.
But the moon just doesn't know how to drink
And my shadow just follows me the whole time.
Still I must make friends with moon and shadow,
Enjoy, while I can, the year's brief prime.

I sing: the lit moon swings along.
I dance: my shadow jumps and sways.
While yet lucid, we share our pleasures;
Blacked out, we go our separate ways,
By feelingless wandering bound forever
To meet back up in the deep Sky River.

-- Translated by A. Z. Foreman

And a translation by Ezra Pound:

Amongst the flowers is a pot of wine

Amongst the flowers is a pot of wine
I pour alone but with no friend at hand
So I lift the cup to invite the shining moon,
Along with my shadow we become party of three

The moon although understands none of drinking, and
The shadow just follows my body vainly
Still I make the moon and the shadow my company
To enjoy the springtime before too late

The moon lingers while I am singing
The shadow scatters while I am dancing
We cheer in delight when being awake
We separate apart after getting drunk

Forever will we keep this unfettered friendship
Till we meet again far in the Milky Way.

-- Translated by Ezra Pound

And one by poet and novelist Vikram Seth:

Drinking Alone with the Moon

A pot of wine among the flowers.
I drink alone, no friend with me.
I raise my cup to invite the moon.
He and my shadow and I make three.

The moon does not know how to drink;
My shadow mimes my capering;
But I’ll make merry with them both–
And soon enough it will be Spring.

I sing–the moon moves to and fro.
I dance–my shadow leaps and sways.
Still sober, we exchange our joys.
Drunk–and we’ll go our separate ways.

Let’s pledge–beyond human ties–to be friends,
And meet where the Silver River ends.

-- Translated by Vikram Seth

And one by Elling O. Eide:

Drinking Alone in the Moonlight

Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine,
No friends at hand, so I poured alone;
I raised my cup to invite the moon,
Turned to my shadow, and we became three.
Now the moon had never learned about drinking,
And my shadow had merely followed my form,
But I quickly made friends with the moon and my shadow;
To find pleasure in life, make the most of the spring.

Whenever I sang, the moon swayed with me;
Whenever I danced, my shadow went wild.
Drinking, we shared our enjoyment together;
Drunk, then each went off on his own.
But forever agreed on dispassionate revels,
We promised to meet in the far Milky Way.

-- Translated by Elling O. Eide

And, finally, another one not in this great translation round-up, a translation by David Hinton (who calls the poet Li Po*):

Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon

Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine.
No one else here, I ladle it out myself.

Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,
and facing my shadow makes friends three,

though moon has never understood wine,
and shadow only trails along behind me.

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,
I've found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;
I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.

Sober, we're together and happy. Drunk,
we scatter away into our own directions:

intimates forever, we'll wander carefree
and meet again in Milky Way distances.

-- Translated by David Hinton

For a great many more translations, you should see this fabulous blog post I've already linked repeatedly. (I probably wouldn't have bothered with this post myself, save that some of the things I've included -- the pinyin, the literal gloss, the Foreman and Hinton translations, a few links -- aren't in that post.)

See you in the River of Stars.

Update, June 1: I stumbled across yet another poem not in the above-linked set of translations, so I thought I'd add it here. Frederick Turner, a poet who is the author of two science fictional epic poems, The New World and Genesis, has also done an entire book of translations of Tang poetry, freely available online (albeit in pretty awkward formatting, but hey, it's free). Here's his version of 月下獨酌:

Drinking Alone under the Moon

Among the flowers with one lone jug of wine
I drink without a friend to drink with me.
But I’ll lift up my cup, invite the moon,
So with my shadow we will make up three.

The moon’s immune, though, to debauchery,
And my poor shadow follows me in vain;
Still, Moon and Shadow are my company–
The joys of spring may never come again.

So as I sing, Moon wanders aimlessly,
And as I dance, poor tangled Shadow reels;
Sober, we were in perfect harmony,
Now, drunk, there’s no connection of our heels;
But, careless of this world, we’re bound, one day,
To meet together in the Milky Way.

-- Translated by Frederick Turner

___________________
* There seem to be two readings to the second character of 李白's name (I have no idea why), so that it can be transliterated in pinyin either as Lǐ Bái or as Lǐ Bó. This is in addition to the fact that you'll see other transliteration systems used, the Wade-Giles system for example, in which the poet's name is written either as Li Pai or as Li Po. All four are the same poet, and are represented by the same characters, 李白.

** Beowulf is dated to sometime between the eighth and eleventh centuries; Lǐ Bái wrote in the eighth. Still, it seems like a good point of chronological comparison for English readers.

"I am human: nothing human is alien to me"

Homo sum : humani nihil a me alienum puto.
Vel me monere hoc vel percontari puta:
Rectum'st, ego ut faciam ; non est, te ut deterream.

-- Publius Terentius Afer, Heauton Timorumenos

I am a man: and think myself interested in everything that concerns mankind. Imagine that I wish either to advise you, or to be informed myself: If what you do, is right, I would follow your example; if wrong, I would dissuade you from persisting in it.

-- Terence, "The Self Tormentor", Anonymous (?) translation, 1777

I am a man, and feel for all mankind.
Think, I advise, or ask for information:
If right, that I may do the same; if wrong,
To turn you from it.

-- Trans. George Coleman

I'm human, so any human interest is my concern. Call it solicitude or curiosity on my part, whichever you like. If you're right I'll copy you, and if you're wrong I'll try to make you mend your ways.

-- Trans. Betty Radice, 1965

Anyone know of any particular good translations of this passage? There are several nineteenth century ones online, but I like all of them less than either of these versions. Most of the more recent ones don't have a preview function. I suppose I'll have to go into an actual library, with books on dead trees -- how quaint.

Incidentally, if Wikiquotes is to be believed, this same play is also the source of the familiar phrases "time heals all wounds" (line 421, "Diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus") and "where there's life there's hope" (line 981, "Modo liceat vivere, est spes").

I came across these lines in Kwame Anthony Appiah's article in the NY Times six years ago, "The Case for Contamination"; something recently recalled them to me, so I dug them up. Here's the passage from that article where Appiah discusses this passage:

Our guide to what is going on here might as well be a former African slave named Publius Terentius Afer, whom we know as Terence. Terence, born in Carthage, was taken to Rome in the early second century B.C., and his plays - witty, elegant works that are, with Plautus's earlier, less-cultivated works, essentially all we have of Roman comedy - were widely admired among the city's literary elite. Terence's own mode of writing - which involved freely incorporating any number of earlier Greek plays into a single Latin one - was known to Roman littérateurs as "contamination."

It's an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. Terence had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures.

...A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his "I am human" line, but it is equally suggestive: "If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight."

I like the little fragments of translation that Appiah gives -- I don't know their source (all google results for that precise wording seem to be quotes of Appiah -- perhaps he's the translator?) -- better than any of the others above:

I am human: nothing human is alien to me.
[...]
If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight.

-- Translation by K. Anthony Appiah (?)

...except, of course, for that irritating missing middle line.

Anyone feel like translating "Vel me monere hoc vel percontari puta:" in the style of Appiah? Or, again, does, anyone know of a good translation of this passage? If you have any at hand, please leave the translations of these lines (77-79) in comments.

Later Update: I just recently had occasion to read Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers -- a terrific book, incidentally, highly recommended -- from which the above-quoted article was adapted. And in the book Appiah actually gives the entire quote, including the missing line. So here is the passage, in the full Appiah version:

I am human: nothing human is alien to me. Either I want to find out for myself or I want to advise you: think what you like. If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight.

-- Translation by K. Anthony Appiah

...and yes, judging by the notes Appiah himself is indeed the translator here (he doesn't have a note on this specific passage, but he says generally that uncited translations are his own).

So there: a translation of the entire three-line passage, in the style of Appiah -- as done by Appiah himself. Glad I found it.

Foolin' Around With Chinese: Translations of Children's Classics

So I've been fooling around with Chinese. The difference between this and studying Chinese is that I'm not expecting it to go anywhere, that I'm not claiming (even, or perhaps especially, to myself) to have learned anything, that I'm not being systematic about it, and that it's just for the pleasure of discovery rather than for anything that may result from it (since probably nothing will). It's less about Growth, Self-Improvement and Opportunity than it is about idle procrastination and lazy curiosity.

But it's fun, at least for me, and so I thought that I'd share a bit of the fun with my readers.

For this initial post, I thought I'd share three popular English-language children's books which have been posted online in Chinese.

In ascending order of age-appropriateness, the first is Eric Carle's classic The Very Hunger Caterpillar, a book designed for the tiniest of babies -- and, thus, appropriate for those who have only achieved the level of, say, a fairly impressive beginner in Chinese. (It has to be fairly impressive because, of course, we don't expect the babies to read it to themselves!)

Anyway, it's online here, in a translation pieced together by the bloggers from various existing commercial ones, picking what they liked of each. (They don't include the pictures or anything like that, but some of us -- say, parents of young children -- will have read it so many times that it doesn't matter.) It's just in Chinese, but if you mouse over any of the text the pinyin (for pronunciation) and the meaning of the word are given. It's a lot of fun, and good for learning things like the days of the week and the names of various fruits.

Second in our ascending order of age-appropriateness we have this version of Beatrix Potter's Tale of Peter Rabbit. It is really a quite superb web presentation. They have many of the original illustrations (I think they have the core set; nowadays you can buy editions which include ones left out of the early printings, and that's the one I read to my son (thus the one I'm familiar with), but the ones they include are more than sufficient to tell the story). Each page has the same bit of text -- one to four sentences -- in both English and Chinese; you click one of the buttons at the bottom of the page to switch back and forth. Another button will play that snippet in whichever language is displayed (the English taken from the librivox recording). Hovering the mouse over the Chinese text displays the pinyin (just the pinyin, and the whole sentence in one lump, so that one feature's not quite as useful as the The Very Hunger Caterpillar presentation). All-in-all, a splendid version -- you could just keep it in English and let a child play with it, learning to play the text and go forward and back at will; or you can use it yourself to, well, fool around with Chinese. (Not, please, to learn: that requires textbooks and flashcards and furrowed brows; it produces Results.)

Finally -- and this is a book on a level that I am far beyond getting anything out of (just as my (two-and-a-half-year-old) son couldn't enjoy it, unlike the other two), but I mention it because I found it so why not -- is a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Chinese. This is at the same site as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, although the presentation is much less fancy. (The same site also hosts one of the best free online English-Chinese dictionaries.) I don't know anything about the translation -- for instance, I know there's a classic translation of Alice into Chinese that's supposed to be very well done, but I don't know if this is it or not. At any rate it is, as I said, way over my head -- well, all three are way over my head, but the first two are over my head in a it's-still-fun-to-jump-and-see-how-close-I-can-get-to-touching-them sort of way; the Alice is -- well, c'est du chinois. 'nuff said.

So there it is. If anyone else wants to try to fool around with Chinese -- or if you know enough to just read 'em -- or (in the case of the Beatrix Potter) you just want a good presentation of a marvelous children's book -- enjoy! And I may have more foolin' around with Chinese posts in the future -- keep an 眼睛 on this blog if you're interested.

"And the whole world was of one language and of one speech"

A fun site I found last night (via) has the bible in multiple languages, formatted in parallel columns. This is not itself so rare, but this particular site has the bible in both Chinese and Pinyin (the standard romanization system for Chinese), which I don't recall seeing before. And you can line those up with English, or French, or a number of other languages. Fun for those of us who don't know Chinese, but who enjoy lusting after it from a great distance.

Now, the English is that of the King James Bible -- which is to say, it's pretty but also pretty inaccurate as far as translations go. And I have no idea, really, what the provenance of the other translations are -- whether, for instance, they were translated from the original languages, or from other translations, nor how accurate they are.

Still, y'know, fun.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
Toute la terre avait une seule langue et les mêmes mots.
那时，天下人的口音，言语，都是一样.
Nàshí , tiān xià rén de kǒuyīn , yányǔ , dōu shì yíyàng.

That's Chinese in simplified characters; they also have traditional. Furthermore, they also have an audio recording of the Chinese -- pretty cool, frankly.

The one thing they don't seem to have -- an odd omission -- is the Bible in the original, i.e. Hebrew for the Tanakh, Koine Greek for the new Testament. On the other hand, you can find that a lot of places (e.g.). The site above seems really to be designed for the Chinese.

Oh, and this quote, of course, is Genesis 11:1 -- the beginning of the creation myth that this most excellent of myth collections offers for the multitude of human languages.

Three Translations of Baudelaire's "L'Albatros" (Accidental Poetry Month, Part 19)

I've mentioned before that I like comparing translations -- indeed, I've done two such posts recently. In this case, however, it's different for me, because I can actually read the original.* At the same time, it's foreign enough for me that I really appreciate a good translation as well. So in a lot of ways this is, for me, a multiple treat -- the original reflecting on the translations, and then vice-versa, each increasing the pleasure in the other.

But before I present three translations that I really like, here's the original:

L'Albatros

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

-- Charles Baudelaire

I was trying to think of how to order the translations -- most to least favorite, or vice-versa? -- when I realized that I couldn't decide which I liked best, either. So I'm going to present them in rather random order here.

First up is a translation which I found in a book called Selected Poems From Les Fleurs du Mal: a Bilingual Edition, which has "English renderings" by Norman R. Shapiro, and well as engravings by David Schorr and a forward by Willis Barnstone (which may have been what drew my attention to the book in the first place).

The Albatross

Often will sailors, for their sport, ensnare
The albatross, flying with languid sweep--
Sea-bird companion, soaring on the air--
Behind their boats, plying the bitter deep.

Scare are they thrust on deck than those proud kings
Of azure climes, awkward and mortified,
Let droop, pathetically, their vast white wings,
Like two oars, trailing useless by their side.

How clumsy this winged voyager! How weak
Comic, and ugly! He, so fair of late!
Some, with their clay pipes, taunt him, jab his beak;
Some ape the esrtwhile flier's limping gait.

So too the Poet, like that prince of space,
Who haunts the storm and scorns the archer's bow:
Mocked, jeered, his giant's wings hobble his pace
When exiled from his heights to earth below.

-- Translated by Norman R. Shapiro

Next a translation by Richard Wilbur, one of the great translators of our time I (and not only I) think -- particularly from the French. (Although in this case I do think that Shapiro is just as good.) Here's Wilbur:

The Albatross

Often, for pastime, mariners will ensnare
The albatross, that vast sea-bird who sweeps
On high companionable pinion where
Their vessel glides upon the bitter deeps.

Torn from his native space, this captive king
Flounders upon the deck in stricken pride,
And pitiably lets his great white wing
Drag like a heavy paddle at his side.

This rider of winds, how awkward he is, and weak!
How droll he seems, who late was all grace!
A sailor pokes a pipestem into his beak;
Another, hobbling, mocks his trammeled pace.

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
Familiar of storms, of stars, and of all high things;
Exiled on earth amidst its hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, borne down by his giant wings.

-- Translated by Richard Wilbur

And finally a translation by A. Z. Foreman, who I've already posted translations by twice this month, and whose site was one of the things that lead me to go so crazy with poetry this particular March.

The Albatross

Often for sport the crewmen will ensnare
Some albatrosses: vast seabirds that sweep
In lax accompaniment through the air
Behind the ship that skims the bitter deep.

No sooner than they dump them on the floors
These skyborn kings, graceless and mortified,
Feel great white wings go down like useless oars
And drag pathetically at either side.

That sky-rider: how gawky now, how meek!
How droll and ugly he that shone on high!
The sailors poke a pipestem in his beak,
Then limp to mock this cripple born to fly.

The poet is so like this prince of clouds
Who haunted storms and sneered at earthly slings;
Now, banished to the ground, to cackling crowds,
He cannot walk beneath the weight of wings.

-- translated by A.Z. Foreman

If you click this link, you can hear Foreman read the original French.

There are a lot of other translations too -- this site has five more, for example -- but those three are definitely my favorites among the ones I've come across.

______________
* Yes, I can. My French is too poor to read any random text without much trouble; but when I've read the text enough times, then I get it.

Quote of the Day: the Value of Life

Où que vostre vie finisse, elle y est toute. L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace, elle est en l'usage: tel a vescu long temps, qui a peu vescu: attendez vous y pendant que vous y estes. Il gist en vostre volonté, non au nombre des ans, que vous ayez assez vescu. Pensiez vous jamais n'arriver là, où vous alliez sans cesse? encore n'y a il chemin qui n'aye son issue. Et si la compagnie vous peut soulager: le monde ne va-il pas mesme train que vous allez?

-- Michel de Montaigne, Essais, livre 1, Que Philosopher C'Est Apprendre à Mourir

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?

-- Ibid., as, "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die", trans. Charles Cotton

Wherever your life ends, there all of it ends. The usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived enough depends not on a count of years but on your will. Do you think you will never arrive whither you are ceaselessly heading? Yet every road has its end. And, if it is a relief to have company, is not the whole world proceeding at the same pace as you are?

-- Ibid., as "To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die", trans. M. A. Screech

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough. Did you think you would never arrive where you never ceased going? Yet there is no road but has its end. And if company can comfort you, does not the world keep pace with you?

-- Ibid., as "That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die", trans. Donald M. Frame

This marvelous passage is definitely from the chapter "Que Philosopher C'Est Apprendre à Mourir", which is definitely in Book 1 of Montainge's Essays; but, oddly, this chapter appears variously as chapter seventeen, nineteen and twenty, depending on which edition you look it. I don't have time right now to unravel this mystery, but would be interested in hearing the answer if anyone does. (I'm assuming it's really twenty... but what's left out if it's nineteen?)

Poem of the Day (and Poetry Site of the Month)

I recently stumbled upon a web site called Poems Found in Translation, run by a poet, linguist and polyglot* named A.Z. Foreman. It's a riveting site, not least because of the genuinely astonishing number of languages he's translated poems from -- nineteen (that's 19, one short of a score) at this count, including Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew and Russian. For those of us who struggle with any foreign tongues, it's rather breathtaking.

There are a lot of other nice features to the site too. He usually includes a recording of his own reading of the poem in the original -- with what sounds to an utterly ignorant and untrained ear (and at least in French & Chinese, the two I listened to) like a quite good accent. He has a small collection of book reviews of poetry translations, and a rather longer list of recommended books (mostly poetry in translation, but also some language learning materials). His translations also sometimes include helpful cultural hints that help you make sense of the poems. He always gives the original. And so forth.

In short: it's astonishing, and well worth checking out if your interests fall anywhere near that domain.

And -- again, to the untrained, American monoglot -- his translations seem pretty good, too.

Now, like any translator, he has his own theory of translation, and what you think of it will have a huge impact on how you judge his translations. He writes that his translations "are meant to be enjoyed as poems, not scrutinized for lexical fidelity", and that "I have no interest in literal translation, and if my translation differs from the literal dictionary meaning of a word or phrase, I had a reason for it". And while he does occasionally also give a literal gloss, he more often doesn't.

Personally I'm a lot more interested in literal translation than he seems to be, although I agree that both sorts have their use; I think my ideal poetry translation reading set-up is to have two translations -- one quite literal, and one more flowing and focused on being a good English poem. Although I think that the very best translators manage (at least at times) to do both at once -- which is I suppose the ideal of my ideal.

But at any rate, Foreman's good, and worth checking out.

Here's a poem he's translated. It's by the Chinese poet Li Bai (李白), who lived 701 - 762 C.E. First, just for kicks & giggles, here's the original (which I can't read -- I'm just cutting & pasting here):

靜夜思　　

牀前明月光，　
疑是地上霜。　
舉頭望山月，　
低頭思故鄉。

-- 李白

And here's the poem transliterated into modern pinyin (i.e. the official romanization system of the People's Republic of China). Note that although pinyin uses English-language letters, some of them are pronounced quite differently than in English (e.g. "x" is roughly what we would write as "sh"**); if you're interested, the basic rules are here. The poem:

Jìng yè sī　

Chuáng qián míng yuè guāng,　　
Yí shì dì shàng shuāng.　　
Jǔ tóu wàng shān yuè,　　
Dī tóu sī gù xiāng.

-- Lǐ bái

And now, following my ideal above, I'll give first a literal translation, and then Foreman's freer translation. The literal translation:

Quiet Night Thoughts

The moonlight glistens in front of my bed.
I thought it was the frost on the ground.
I lift my gaze to view the shimmering moon,
Then lower my head, and miss my homeland.

-- Translated by Adele

And Foreman's literal one:

Thoughts on a Quiet Night

The moonlight is luminous at my bedside.
I look and mistake it for ground-fallen frost.
Head raised, I gaze toward the mountain moon.
Head lowered, I'm cold for home and lost.

-- translated by A.Z. Foreman

(Note: the link on Foreman's name is his requested citation, which just goes to his blog's main page; to get to his page on this particular poem, click on the title, or just click here.)

I can't speak to how faithful Foreman's poem is to the spirit of the Chinese; but I like it very much as a piece of English poetry -- which is, I think, his test. So it works for me.

Go ahead and check out Foreman's site. To get you started, another great poem also by Li Bai is his version of Li Bai's Seeing a Friend Off (pair it with the more literal translation is here). For a totally different poem, I liked Foreman's version of Baudelaire's L'Albatros too. (That's a poem with several different English versions I like; I may try to have a comparative post on the topic soon. Until then, go. Surf his site. Or just keep reading the posts further down this page. Or you could even stop procrastinating and get some work done. Up to you.)

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* No, they're not the same. A linguist is someone who studies language; a polyglot is someone who knows lots of languages. A lot of polyglots aren't linguists, and you can do work in (at least some areas of) linguistics without knowing a lot of languages.

** At the same time, "sh" is also pronounced roughly as we would pronounce "sh"; yet "x" and "sh" are different phonemes, marking totally different words, so that you need to be able to hear (and say) the difference between, for instance, "xi" and "shi", even though they sound (to our ears) like "shi" and "shi". This is just one reason why Chinese is so damn hard.

An Ode to My Hometown... 's Namesake

On being (delightfully!) contacted by an old friend who was passing through Ithaca, I was informed that this blog gave no indication of my current residence. And, I guess, that's right. I mean, there are some clues -- on my about page, updated last fall, I mentioned that we're still living in Ithaca; last fall I blogged about an Ithaca-based book group that I was running; and I've mentioned teaching at HWS, which is in Geneva, NY, about an hour's drive north. But it's hardly blazoned. I should blog more about Ithaca! (Where, yes, I still live. If I ever leave, I promise I'll make it obvious here.)

So, of course, I thought of C. P. Cavafy.

Cavafy is an important, foundational (modern) Greek poet. I was first introduced to his work on my trip to Greece (over two decades ago) when I bought an English-language anthology of modern Greek poetry (this one); Cavafy was the first in the book. He wasn't one of the two Nobel-prize winners included, but he was clearly central to the cannon of modern Greek poetry.

Interestingly, however -- and I only learned this when googling around a big for this blog post -- he was actually born in, and lived most of his life in, Alexandra, Egypt. His parents were Greek, he spoke Greek and wrote in Greek, but he lived in Egypt -- part of the Greek diaspora there, I suppose. I think that's kinda cool, myself.

He also -- and as someone about to turn forty in less than a month, this really won him my heart -- is described by Wikipedia as someone who's "most important poetry was written after his fortieth birthday." God bless you, Cavafy! There's hope for us after all.

Anyway, his Cavafy's most famous poems -- in English, that is; I have no idea what works his Greek reputation rests on -- are "Waiting for the Barbarians" (whose title was borrowed for a novel by the Nobel-prize winning J. M. Coetzee) and "Ithaca", which is our topic here. It was first published, if Wikipedia can be trusted in this instance, exactly a century ago -- in 1911. (Update: In his anthology, Kimon Friar lists it as 1910. Darn.)

Anyone who can read modern Greek can read the original poem here. On the other hand, I suspect that anyone who can read the original doesn't need me to tell them about it. So let's move on to English-language translations.

Cavafy's official site presents five different translations of the poem -- and it's not a complete list. I first read the poem in a translation by Kimon Friar; there also seems to be a version by Rae Dalven, and (another?) by Edmund Keeley without Philip Sherrard's revisions, which have that word in the first line; but most of the reposting I can find online don't list translators at all (highly annoying), and I'm not sure of the translators for any but those at the official site.

Just to give you a sense of how they compare -- I like this sort of thing, after all -- here are the opening three lines in each of the various translations included on Cavafy's official site. (Some of the poems used the spelling "Ithaka" instead of "Ithaca", a spelling which is, I think, more accurate as far as strict transliteration goes, but not the typical English spelling.)

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.

-- trans. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

When you set out for distant Ithaca,
fervently wish your journey may be long, —
full of adventures and with much to learn.

-- trans. John Cavafy

As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with understanding.

-- trans. Daniel Mendelsohn

When you set out on your way to Ithaca
you should hope that your journey is a long one:
a journey full of adventure, full of knowing.

-- trans Stratis Haviaras

When you start on the way to Ithaca,
wish that the way be long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.

-- trans George Valassopoulo

Not knowing Greek, I can judge these only on the basis of their quality as English-language poetry. And reading through the entire poem (I'm not going to reprint the entirety of all five here; you can go look on Cavafy's site if you're curious), I think that I have a slight preference for the Haviaras -- although, truth be told, I don't have as strong feelings about this as I do about, say, Onegin.

But rather than simply reprint any of those five -- which, again, are already available online on the official Cavafy site -- here is the translation by Kimon Friar, from his 1982 anthology Modern Greek Poetry, which is my favorite -- quite possibly simply because I read it first. But here it is:

Ithaca

When you set out on the voyage to Ithaca,
pray that your journey may be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
Of the Laestrygones and the Cyclopes
and of furious Poseidon, do not be afraid,
for such on your journey you shall never meet
if your thought remain lofty, if a select
emotion imbue your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygones and the Cyclopes
and furious Poseidon you will never meet
unless you drag them with you in your soul,
unless your soul raises them up before you.

Pray that your journey may be long,
that many may those summer mornings be
when with what pleasure, what untold delight
you enter harbors you've not seen before;
that you stop at Phoenician market places
to procure the goodly merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and voluptuous perfumes of every kind,
as lavish an amount of voluptuous perfumes as you can;
that you venture on to many Egyptian cities
to learn and yet again to learn from the sages.

But you must always keep Ithaca in mind.
The arrival there is your predestination.
Yet do not by any means hasten your voyage.
Let it best endure for many years,
until grown old at length you anchor at your island
rich with all you have acquired on the way.
You never hoped that Ithaca would give you riches.

Ithaca has given you the lovely voyage.
Without her you would not have ventured on the way.
She has nothing more to give you now.

Poor though you may find her, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Now that you have become so wise, so full of experience,
you will have understood the meaning of an Ithaca.

-- C. P. Cavafy; translated by Kimon Friar

(I've kept the original capitalization, rather than changing it to the English standard custom of a capital letter for each new line.)

I find it sort of odd to read this poem as someone who lives in Ithaca -- even though I know that my Ithaca is not that Ithaca, and that for that matter that Ithaca isn't really Ithaca either, since Ithaca here is just a symbol. Nevertheless.

I like this poem -- and "Waiting for the Barbarians" too -- but I will admit that, at least to this English-language reader in 2011, they both seem rather didactic. They make Points, and make them heavily. They have a Moral. It's not subtle. Oh, they're both good points, but still: heavily made. I'm somewhat reluctant to label this as a criticism, for a variety of reasons: I'm reading them in translation, which undoubtedly weakens the effect; I'm reading them in 2011, and I'm not sure that they seemed quite as didactic a century ago. And maybe the points (the journey not the arrival matters, a foreign enemy gives a culture focus and meaning although not in a good way) didn't seem so cliched then. (If anyone reading this knows either Greek or the historical context (or both) better than I, I hope you'll enlighten us in the comments.) Perhaps this is a case like the apocryphal reader who thought Hamlet was just a bunch of quotations strung together.

Or maybe it's just a didactic poem by a didactic author. Who knows.

But I will maintain that it's quality survives both its didacticism and translation: and thus I present it to you, Noble Reader, as an ode to my hometown... 's namesake.

(Note: This post was substantively updated after its first posting (once I laid my hands on my dead-tree copy of Friar's Modern Greek Poems.))

11/02/2011; or, Two Translations of Two Paragraphs of Le Grand Palindrome de Georges Perec

What dates count as Palindromic dates depends on the dating system you use: in American usage, today is not a Palindrome, but in European usage (which puts the day first) it is: 11 February 2011, aka 11/02/2011.* (I think the European system makes more sense than the American, but not as much sense as the Chinese, which apparently puts the year first: 2011-02-11.)

But since today is a palindromic date in European countries (one of only 60 they get this millennium (we Americans get a more paltry 36 in the same period)), I thought I'd mark the occasion by briefly mentioning a work which has often been called the greatest Palindrome ever written, by the French novelist (and member of the literary group the Oulipo) Georges Perec, "Le Grand Palindrome".

Perec's "Grand Palindrome" is 5,566 letters, and about 1000 words, long. In it, Perec -- a man given to word games in his literary works, as fans of his novel La disparition will know -- attempted to write a Palindrome that was not simply a series of words that read the same in both directions, but one which was, in some sense, a literary work.

I will admit I haven't read it. My French is too weak to be called shaky, and this is hardly very clear. As Perec's (generally admiring) biographer noted:

...it is undeniably difficult to read. Knowledge of the constraint disarms critical faculties; when you know that it is a monster palindrome, you tend to see nothing but its palindromic design. At Manchester, in 1989, doctored photocopies and unsigned handwritten versions were given to students and teachers of French who were asked, respectively, to use it for the exercise of explication de texte and to mark it as an essay. Perec's palindrome barely made sense to the readers. Some teachers took it for the work of an incompetent student, while others suspected that they had been treated to a surrealist text produced by "automatic writing". Those with psychiatric interests identified the author as an adolescent in a dangerously paranoid state; those who had not forgotten the swinging sixties wondered whether it was LSD or marijuana that had generated the disconnected images of the text. Readers seem to project their won positive and negative fantasies onto Perec's palindrome, as they do onto other difficult, obscure and unattributed works.

-- David Bellos, Georges Perec: a Life in Words, p. 429

But the first and last sentences have been translated (not as palindromes, just for their plain sense (such as it is)) -- not once, but twice. So I thought I'd share them with you here.

Here is Perec's opening paragraph:

Trace l’inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule. Le brut repentir, cet écrit né Perec. L’arc lu pèse trop, lis à vice-versa.

Perte. Cerise d'...

Here's how Bellos translates it in his aforecited biography (p. 430):

Trace the uneven palindrome. Snow. A trifle, says Hercules. Unadorned repentance, this piece born [of] Perec. [If] the bow of reading is too heavy, read back-to-front.

Loss. Cherry...

And here's how the same words (save for the two at the end) are translated by Perec's friend and fellow Oulipian Harry Mathews (as given by Martin Gardner in his book Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers... and the Return of Dr. Matrix (p. 83)):

Trace the unequal palindrome. Snow. A trifle, Hercules would say. Rough penitence, this writing born as Perec. The read arch is too heavy: read vice-versa....

And, of course, reading backwards in the French (and respacing and repunctuating the words, to be sure) gives us:

.... Désire ce trépas rêvé : Ci va ! S’il porte, sépulcral, ce repentir, cet écrit ne perturbe le lucre : Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l’écart.

Which Bellows translates:

Desire this dreamt-of death: Here goes! If it bears, entombed, this repentance, this writing bears not on lucre. Strumpet, your trickery has no bite on range or space!

Whereas Mathews translates it:

Desire this dreamed-of decease: Here goes! If he carries, entombed, this penitence, this writing will disturb no lucre: Old witch, your treachery will bite into neither the shore nor the space between,

...comparing those translations, and imagining each of them as palindromes of their mates is, I suspect, as close as non-French readers can get to experiencing Perec's "Grand Palindrome". Probably not the biggest loss ever, I'll admit. But one that I will also admit saddens me just a little.

Happy 11/02/2011!

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* There are still other results if you use only the two-number abbreviation for the year, of course. See the above links for all the obsessive details you could wish.

On the Vanished Translations of Georges Perec's La disparition

A Vanishing: A Void, Vanish'd!

I recently re-read (for this) the published English translation Georges Perec's lipogrammatical novel La disparition, A Void (translated into English by Gilbert Adair). (A lipogram is a literary work that consciously omits a single letter of the alphabet; Perec's novel, and Adair's translation, omit the most common letter in both English and French, e.) This time through, I was very conscious of the quality of the translation.

Now, writing a lipogram is obviously difficult -- you must avoid many if not most common words -- thus translating a lipogram into a lipogram is doubly difficult. The original author has merely to guide his story to avoid topics that would require forbidden words; the translator has no such freedom, and must find a way to express certain concepts even if they contain e. Thus Perec's novel deals a lot with sleep and death -- whose French equivalents, "dormir" and "mort" are e-less; Adair had to find ways around this. That he was able to do so at all was remarkable, and his translation has got a lot of praise -- largely, I think, on "dancing bear" principles ("it's not how well it dances but that it dances at all"). And the first time through I was impressed very much for that reason.

But in the meantime I read an essay by Ian Monk -- like Georges Perec, a member of the French literary group the Oulipo -- called "On G. Adair's A Void" (it's at the link, but you'll have to scroll down or search for Adair; it's down a bit). Monk's review -- itself a lipogram in e -- basically pans Adair's translation for being unfaithful to its text. He cites four examples to make his point; here's the third:

Original: "Portons dix bons whiskys à l'avocat goujat qui fumait au zoo."

Adair (p. 39): "I ask all 10 of you, with a glass of whisky in your hand - and not just any whisky but a top-notch brand - to drink to that solicitor who is so boorish as to light up his cigar in a zoo."

This, similar to our "That quick brown fox is jumping onto a lazy diva", is a familiar typist's workout and should contain all symbols from A to Z (barring, naturally, what it cannot contain in this book) and is also an important, but vain indication to Anton Vowl's pals as to what is going on. Not only is this translation's volubility absurd, but it also lacks all of four symbols: m, q, v and x. How about: "Quick! pour six whisky drams for an unjovial solicitor bringing cigars to a zoo." If not, Anton Vowl's post scriptum is void of any point.

It seems, to me, a pretty damning critique. And this time around I found myself constantly wondering about the translation and checking (despite my oxidized-to-the-point-of-nonexistence French) the French original. There were certainly unfaithful passages (although there were also some pretty clever solutions, it seemed to me, and a few touches that were added but which struck me as very worthy additions). And there was the occasional omission -- for some reason, the prefatory poem is entirely absent from Adair's version. (I've posted an English version, see the link.) But what else can one do (besides learn French) -- I mean, it's not as if two people are going to produce lipogrammatic translations of Perec's fun but (let's face it) quirky and hardly-Harry-Potter-territory novel. Right?

Well, actually, I just found out that that's wrong. In fact there are two other English translations -- plus a few fragments by yet another translator. That's the good news. The bad news is that neither of the others have been published.

The translation situation is summed up by this note from David Bellos's article -- now 17 years old and quite outdated (note that he refers to the Adair translation as "pending" -- from the Review of Contemporary Fiction (vol. 13, no. 1), "Appendix: Georges Perec in English". Bellos writes:

La Disparition. Paris: Denoel, 1969. The first fragment of Perec's lipogram-novel to appear in English was in Harry Mathews's article "Vanishing Point," in American Book Review (November-December 1981). Further passages translated by Harry Mathews appeared in "That Ephemeral Thing," New York Review of Books, 6 June 1988. A translation of the whole novel by John Lee, entided Vanish'd!, and another translation by Ian Monk, remain unpublished. Extracts from John Lee's translation appeared in 1988 alongside his article "On translating La Disparition" (see below), and Lee's English versions of Perec's lipogrammatic translations of well-known French poems were published in PN Review (Manchester, UK) 15.6 (1989): 18-19. Gilbert Adair's translation, provisionally entitled A Void, is due to be published in London by Harvill in 1993.

So two translations -- done, it seems, prior to (or at any rate concurrently with) Adair's -- exist. But they aren't published, save for the excerpts from the apparently-uncompleted version by Oulipian Harry Mathews -- and save for the noted excerpts from Lee. For the Lee, the cite is to The Times Literary Supplement, 2 September 1988 (I haven't been able to track it down yet); a few brief excerpts of the translation were also published, subsequent to Bellos's bibliography, in the journal Palimpsests, no. 9.

What else can we learn about them?

Well, the main source of information seems to be a later issue of that same journal Palimpsests; issue 12 devotes several articles specifically to the comparison between the Adair and the Lee translations. Unfortunately, the journal is published in French -- which means that for pretty much anyone who can read it, the issue is moot save as a matter of literary theory and intellectual interest. Nevertheless, a few pages of one of the articles -- Sara R. Greaves's "Une traduction non plausible? La Disparition de Georges Perec traduit par John Lee" -- is available through Google Books, and a footnote to the first mention of John Lee's translation Vanish'd! gives some useful bibliographical information, useful even to those with heavily oxidized French:

On peut consulter cette traduction non publiée à L'association Georges Perec, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris. Il en était question dans un numéro précedent de Palimpsestes: "De La disparition de Georges Perec à Vanish'd! de John Lee: la traduction traduite". Paris: PSN, 1995: pp. 105-115, ainsi que dans mon memoire de maltrise, "La Traduction d'un Lipogramme", visible également à l'Association Georges Perec. L'autre traduction est d'Ian Monk, et n'a pas non plus été publiée.

So unless my French is betraying me, it seems that you can go to the Arsenal Library in Paris and read Lee's Vanish'd! there. (Why it hasn't been published isn't clarified.) But Ian Monk's translation -- which Greaves, like Bellos, gives no name for, although a number of web sites claim that it is called A Vanishing -- is n longer going to be published ("n'a pas non plus été publiée") and it's not clear why. A real pity, since I'd really like to read Monk's translation in particular.

If you scroll down in Greaves article, you can read a few snippets in Lee and Adair's translations, which she quotes as she compares them. One of the bits she quotes is the fourth sentence whose Adairian version Ian Monk critiques in his essay.

Another scholarly article, Alison James's "The Maltese and the Mustard Fields: Oulipian Translation", is not online, although you can read a summary here, and if you belong to an academic institution you might be able to access the entire thing. James quotes both the first and the third of Monk's four examples. Here's what she says about the third (i.e. the sentence which I previously quoted Ian Monk's discussion of):

...one important plot development is based on Perec's adaptation of a common pangram (a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet). The French sentence "Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume" ("Carry this old whisky to the blond judge who is smoking") becomes the e-less version "Portons dix bons whiskys à l'avocat goujat qui fumait au zoo" ("Carry ten good whiskies to the ill-mannered lawyer who was smoking at the zoo"; 55). This note in Voyl's journal leads Amaury Conson to track down the lawyer Hassan Ibn Abbou at the zoo. Adair's translation expands the sentence, retaining most words from the original while displacing some of them: "I ask all 10 of you, with a glass of whisky in your hand—and not just any whisky but a top-notch brand—to drink to that solicitor who is so boorish as to light up his cigar in a zoo" (A Void 39). Adair circumvents the constraint by using Arabic numerals for the number 10, while shifting its reference to the number of listeners (thus avoiding the problematic plural "whiskies"). This solution respects the novel's general constraint (the lipogram) although not the supplementary local one (the pangram). On the semantic level, it adapts the sentence's meaning, but retains the element required for the novel's plot (the lawyer who smokes at the zoo).

Lee also opts to keep the number 10, but by adopting Roman numerals is able to preserve the (pseudo-)pangram, with an X that functions both as number and letter: "Quick! X hot tots of brand whisky for an unjovial solicitor smoking at Paris zoo!" (36-37). Of course, this sentence is unlike Perec's in that it does not resemble a familiar English pangram. So Lee adds an ironic parenthesis: "(viz. a quick brown fox jumps at this lazy dog, as any typist will know, but such a translation would play havoc with our story, wouldn't it?)" (Vanish'd 36-37). Lee's double lipogrammatic pangram not only makes the wordplay more explicit than it is in Perec's French text, it also identifies itself as a translation and comments on the gap that separates it from the original text. It ironically hints that the translator, far from being a "lazy dog," is a faithful one who is forced to choose between different loyalties: to plot, to constraint, to meaning.

I will say that while I agree with Monk's critique of Adair's version, I'm not particularly enamored of Lee's either. It's really too bad that Ian Monk's seem to have vanished into a void.

...and that's all I've learned about the vanished translations for now. I must admit I find the life-imitating-art disparition of the two other versions more frustrating than amusing. I'd like to read them! Or, at the very least, read in them. Publishers -- why not bring them out?

In particular, if anyone knows why Ian Monk's translation is unavailable even to scholars (in contrast to Lee's which can at least be seen if you haul ass over to the Arsenal Library) -- or knows of any way to contact him to ask! -- I'd be grateful if you'd leave the information in comments.

Jacques Rouboud's "La Disparition" in English Translation

The French edition of Georges Perec's lipogramatic novel La Disparition begins with a poem ascribed (perhaps truthfully, perhaps fictitiously -- I have no idea) to his fellow Oulipian Jacques Roubaud, which is also titled "La Disparition". The French text of the poem is as follows:

La Disparition

Un corps noir tranchant un flamant au vol bas
un bruit fuit au sol (qu'avant son parcours lourd
dorait un son crissant au grain d'air) il court
portant son sang plus loin son charbon qui bat

Si nul n'allait brillant sur lui pas à pas
dur cil aujourd'hui plomb au fil du bras gourd
Si tombait nu grillon dans l'hors vu au sourd
mouvant baillon du gris hasard sans compas

l'alpha signal inconstant du vrai diffus
qui saurait (saisissant (un doux soir confus
ainsi on croit voir un pont à son galop)

un non qu'à ton stylo tu donnas brûlant)
qu'ici on dit (par un trait manquant plus clos)
I'art toujours su du chant-combat (noit pour blanc)

-- J. ROUBAUD

For some (to me) inexplicable reason, however, the sole published English translation of the work (A Void, translated by Gilbert Adair (1995)) does not include this poem at all, in any form.

There exists, however, an unpublished English translation by John Lee titled Vanish'd, and Lee, unlike Adair, translated the poem. So, courtesy of Google Book's edition of Palimpsestes #9, here is the translation:

Vanish'd

A black thing wings a flamingo, low flying,
Bound along ground (which, prior to flight, not light,
Brown'd a grinding sound in flood fo air), plying,
Carrying its blood afar, coal carrion in fright

If nobody was coming braggingly to pass,
Galling brow now, plumb on sagging arm a bind,
If, falling, stark cicala, out of sight, out of mind,
Moving, gagging, gray sick luck, out of compass

Alpha, inconstant sign of truth's diffusion,
Which might know (grasping (on a night of calm confusion
So you think to sight its bridging footfall)

This NO, flaming gift to your plumbago, writing)
That thus is said (by missing mark, most shut of all)
That long-known art of wordplay-swordplay (black for whiting)

-- Trans. John Lee

The Google Books link has a few other tantalizing snippets of Lee's translation from that issue of Palmipsets, although in usual GB fashion it cuts out lots of pages to make sure you can't just read it (copyright forfend!)

But here is this omitted poem, anyway, so for any readers of Adair's A Void, you can cut & paste this in front of your copy & have a complete version.

Poem of the Day: Autopsychography

Autopsychography

The poet is a faker
Who's so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in his writing
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they're missing.

And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.

-- Fernando Pessoa
Trans. Richard Zenith

The link goes to a site where seventeen different versions of Pessoa's "Autopsicografia" (as well as the Portuguese original) are housed, including two separate translations by one translator, as well as a notable version by that redoubtable translator "Google Translate". The Zenith was my favorite, at least on a first read-through; but check out the others -- your taste may vary, after all. (Faithful readers will know how much I like comparing various translations of particular poems.)

Oh, and just in case you've never heard of him, I should mention that, while it may be true that all poets are fakers, Pessoa was more of a faker than most, a strange man who seems to have been a refugee from an unwritten Borges story.

Quotes of the Day: Three Links in the Chain of Cultural Transmission

Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? Do evildoers prosper?
Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow, yea, they bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far from their reins.
But thou, O Lord, knowest me: thou hast seen me, and tried mine heart toward thee: pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter.
Jeremiah asks God to drag away his enemies like "sheep for the slaughter."
How long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein? the beasts are consumed, and the birds; because they said, He shall not see our last end....
Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.
They have made it desolate, and being desolate it mourneth unto me; the whole land is made desolate, because no man layeth it to heart.

-- Jeremiah 12:1-4, 10-11 (c. 6th Century B.C.E.)


Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1889)


Hey there mister can you tell me
What happened to the seeds I've sown
Can you give me a reason, sir, as to why they've never grown
They've just blown around from town to town
Back out on these fields
Where they fall from my hand
Back into the dirt of this hard land

Well me and my sister
From Germantown we did ride
We made our bed, sir
From the rock on the mountainside
We been blowin' around from town to town
Lookin' for a place to stand
Where the sun burst through the clouds and fall like a circle
A circle of fire down on this hard land

Now even the rain it don't come 'round
Don't come 'round here no more
And the only sound at night's the wind
Slammin' the back porch door
Yeah it stirs you up like it wants to blow you down
Twistin' and churnin' up the sand
Leavin' all them scarecrows lyin' facedown
In the dirt of this hard land

From a building up on the hill
I can hear a tape deck blastin' "Home on the Range"
I can hear them Bar-M choppers
Sweepin' low across the plains
It's me and you, Frank, we're lookin' for lost cattle
Our hooves twistin' and churnin' up the sand
We're ridin' in the whirlwind searchin' for lost treasure
Way down south of the Rio Grande
We're ridin' 'cross that river in the moonlight
Up onto the banks of this hard land

Hey, Frank, won't you pack your bags
And meet me tonight down at Liberty Hall
Just one kiss from you, my brother
And we'll ride until we fall
Well sleep in the fields
We'll sleep by the rivers
And in the morning we'll make a plan
Well if you can't make it stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive if you can
And meet me in a dream of this hard land

-- Bruce Springsteen (1995)
(video here; just the words don't do justice to this last,
since they were made to be sung...)

Eugene Onegin in English: Comparing Translations

One of my more neglected hobbies is comparing poetry translations. Because poetic translation is so over-constrained -- so that, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, a rhymed translation that also "translate[s] the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible" -- any attempt to put it into a new tongue is going to involve contentious aesthetic choices. For that matter, the same is hardly less true of translation of unrhymed poetry: since poetry, practically by definition, involves playing with the specifics of its original language ("poetry is what's lost in translation" opines Robert Frost from off under his apple tree). So it's fun to see the different ways that people do it. Watching others attempt the impossible is always entertaining, which is why people go to circuses.

For me, it's fun in particular with canonical heavyweights -- if only because lots of translations of them tend to exist. In times past, I've collected translations of, in particular, Goethe's Faust, but also (to a lesser extent) of the Odyssey, the Bible, and Dante's Divine Comedy.

And Eugene Onegin.

Onegin is particularly fun for a number of reasons. Above all, it's form is so ridiculously confining that -- even knowing, as I do, not a word of the original language -- it look like it ought to be impossible to translate. And, indeed, Vladimir Nabokov -- one of my personal favorite authors, a giant of both 20th-century English and 20th-century Russian literature -- specifically declared that doing a rhymed translation was impossible (indeed, mathematically so; op. cit.). And his furious attacks on the attempts of Walter Arndt to prove him wrong created the biggest literary spat of the 1960's, including the rupture of his famous friendship with critic Edmund Wilson, who rose to Arndt's defense. Despite Nabokov's mathematics, a number of translators have attempted Onegin while preserving its rhymes.*

A word about the Onegin stanza. It's a cousin to a sonnet, although with some key differences. First of all, it's in tetrameter, not pentameter (four beats per line not five). Secondly, as opposed to either the traditional Petrarchian (ABBAABBACDECDE) or Shakespearean (ABABCDCDEFEFGG) rhyme schemes, the Onegin stanza uses one of its own (ABABCCDDEFFEGG) -- one which deliberately goes through the three possible variations on a rhymed quatrain (ABAB, CCDD, EFFE) with an additional couplet to close it off (GG). Finally, Pushkin alternates masculine and feminine rhymes (the former are rhymes which rhyme only one syllable -- head, dead -- and the latter are ones which rhyme more than one -- platter, clatter).

Some English-language poetry has been written directly in Onegin stanzas, so you can get an idea of what it's like. First and foremost, Vikram Seth's absolutely delightful verse novel, The Golden Gate, is written entirely in Onegin stanzas, in a direct homage to Eugene Onegin (actually, to its 1977 translation by Charles Johnston); you can read some sample stanzas from it here, but they only give a taste -- you really ought to go read the whole thing. Then there's Nabokov's two-stanza poem "On Translating Eugene Onegin", also written directly in English in Onegin stanzas.

Anyway, the point here is that it's a tight, tough little form. Hard to do.

I had heard of Onegin before -- I'd taken a whole college class on Nabokov back in the day -- but what really turned me on to the existing English translations was reading Douglas Hofstadter's delightful (if often infuriating) book Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. He devotes two chapters two Onegin. One he devotes to praising and comparing four rhymed translations -- those of Oliver Elton (1937, later rev. by A. D. P. Briggs), Walter Arendt (1963, rev. 1978), Charles Johnston (1977), and above all that of James Falen (1990); the other he devotes to attacking the "vile non-verse" of Nabokov's deliberately ugly translation. And, much to my surprise as a self-identified Nabokov fan, Hofstadter won me over.** I began collecting Onegin translations when I saw them.

One of those eventually included that of Douglas Hofstadter himself (1999), who taught himself enough Russian to go at the task, so enamoured was he of the poem after his two-chapter gear-up in his earlier book. In the introduction he talks about all of the above-cited translations as well as his own, and also about the translation of Babette Deutsch (1936, rev. 1964) which he had read since the completion of his earlier book. In the first book, he gives four stanzas in each of the five translations (counting Nabokov) that he highlights; in the introduction to his own translation, he gives an additional stanza in seven (counting his own).

Hofstadter, by the way, is still at it. If you scroll way down in this online talk of his (or simply search for the word "Deutsch") you'll find eight versions of Chapter 2, Stanza 38 (the original Russian and seven translations of it), which he quotes and discusses.

But yesterday, while I was procrastinating on grading the papers I need to grade engaged in deep intellectual questing, I discovered that there are two new rhymed translations since Hofstadter's discussions were published: that of Tom Beck (2004) who, like Hofstadter, taught himself Russian for the task (sample stanzas here), and that of Stanley Mitchell (2008), which seems to be the most recent (chapter two is online in its entirety here).

Since I happened to have on hand the first stanza of all of Hofstadter's seven translations -- plus a literal one Arndt did for a book called Pushkin Threefold, plus the Russian (of which I did not understand a word), I dug up the first stanzas of the Beck and Mitchell two, and thus had a complete set of ten versions to compare.

Rather than hide the fruits of my obsession, I decided to post all ten here. (I put them on a separate web page to hide them from all this blather, and generally for easier reference.) As I say in the sidebar, I may add more when I have another set of papers to get through the time. (I don't know if I should post the stanzas that Hofstdater reprints -- which might be nice to have online, and with the Beck and Mitchell added -- or if I should try to add others, whether my favorites or simply ones that have gotten some attention from other people (e.g. the one Boyd compares in his Nabokov biography, or perhaps "the great/Fourth stanza of... Canto Eight"). Any thoughts?)

Anyway, once again, here's a link to Nine different versions of a Eugene Onegin stanza in English (with a bonus couplet from another stanza tucked in at the end). I hope that at least some of you may find them half as fascinating as I do. I think that reading them can tell you a lot about translation, poetry, rich dying relatives, and other noteworthy things.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I might have some papers to grade. Or something.

Update: At the suggestion of several readers, I've added the 1881 translation of Henry Spalding (that link goes to the complete text on Project Gutenberg) -- not one of my favorites, but for completion's sake it's now there.

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* Which doesn't by itself prove Nabokov wrong, since he only said it was impossible to translate Onegin faithfully with rhymes preserved.

** For a good argument on the Nabokov side of the debate, see Brian Boyd's comparison of the Deutsch, Arndt, Johnston and Nabokov translations in the Onegin chapter of his biography Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years.