At Cornell way back in 1986, as a final paper for Caryl Emerson’s Russian literature (in Russian) class, I translated Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem poems and wrote an analysis of my translation process, the choices I made, and what I had learned from it. This morning I dug it out from a box of old papers and realized that parts of it seemed relevant to the current debate, so I decided to share some excerpts below. I didn’t include any of my translations of Akhmatova’s poems, but if there is actually any real interest I’ll consider doing so, though I’ll have to retype them first.
The problems of translation are many, but to attempt to translate poetry is to multiply these difficulties into a seemingly insurmountable task. Indeed, many people say it is impossible to translate poetry, much less translate it well….
My translation attempts began accidentally. While attempting to read Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem for an assignment, I began to read the translations provided by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. I was immediately confused. I grabbed my dictionary and began to look up the Russian words that I did not know, and found my problem— the English translation was inaccurate. To be more precise, in certain spots, the English had nothing to do with the original Russian at all. Certain isolated words or phrases were translated literally, but for the most part, great liberties were taken with Akhmatova’s language. Images were altered or eliminated, description was changed, and often her ideas were misrepresented or turned into something completely different, altering the symbolic structures, images, meaning, and power of her simple, devastating language. An even worse sin was committed— the English poetry was bad. The style was histrionic, pretentious, and melodramatic. I was particularly enraged with the feeble attempts at rhyme— they were contrived, forced, and laughable. Much of Akhmatova’s language and meaning was completely changed to fit a ridiculous, arbitrary, and inappropriate rhyme scheme.
As a poet, my artistic sensibilities were offended. As a student, I needed to understand the poems. My response to attempt my own literal translation in an attempt to gain greater meaning and appreciation for Akhmatova’s work. My translation was as technically and literally correct as my dictionary and my limited Russian knowledge would allow. The translation was crude and awkward— a strange mix of English words with Russian word orders and structures— yet I felt I was experiencing Akhmatova’s poems from the inside. I was fascinated by them, detecting the complex layers of meanings and symbols, overwhelmed by the power of her language. A simple statement of a few words was enough to trigger a series of emotions and associations. I felt I had “liberated” her poetry from the bad translation and given myself a way to really understand it.
Yet this was not enough. I also wanted to make my literal translation more poetic…, but I wanted to stay as close to Akhmatova’s intent and actual execution as possible. My naivete in taking on this task triggered many hours of thought into the problems of translation and the problems of poetry— and what happens when you throw them together. The result is this paper— the translations, why I did it, how I did it, and what I discovered….
I realized that one of the main problems any translator must face is determining a hierarchy of importance between the accuracy of the poet’s meaning, language, style, and structural characteristics. It is impossible for all of them to be maintained equally well, so all other translation decisions are based on this initial determination, though they are reevaluated constantly throughout the process. In Akhmatova’s poetry, I decided that these were the main elements I had to consider: rhyme scheme, metrical scheme, line breaks, stanza breaks, alliteration, the literal meaning of the words in direct translation, the meaning of the poem as a whole, and the author’s style (i.e. word choice length of line, punctuation, etc.). For my purposes, I thought that the most important thing was to preserve her meaning of the words and phrases and the meaning of the poem as a whole. I quickly abandoned any attempt at recreating in English a rhyme or metrical scheme or alliteration, for reasons I will more fully explain later…. I also wanted to preserve Akhmatova’s stanza breaks and (whenever possible) her line breaks and punctuation to enable my translations to be useful to someone trying to understand the poems line by line or phrase by phrase…. These were initial choices I made before beginning.
My first step was to do a very literal, line-by-line translation of the poems. I attempted to take into account all of the grammatical structures and various colloquial phrases, as always limited by my knowledge and my resources. What I ended up with was fairly accurate, though awkward. There were some concepts that did not carry over well into translation, or references hinted at with a couple of words that I could not explain or expand upon (i.e. Streltsky wives, years of Yezhov, etc.). My solution was to just translate them literally and leave it as a problem for the readers (or do additional research and add footnotes later if I felt it was necessary)….
The next step was to “clean up” the English. Here, word order, word choice, and the English rules of grammar took precedence. I attempted to turn the translations into better, clearer English. For the first time, I switched the order of lines for the sake of clarity… I also slightly altered the line breaks. Akhmatova’s line breaks are obviously important in the Russian because they are part of an intricate rhyme scheme and rhythm. In English, however, it is impossible to reproduce. If you attempt to “force” the rhyme to match her patterns, the result is often ridiculous and strained. as is evident from the Kunitz translation. I chose to not strictly hold to her line breaks, occasionally moving words into the lines above or again for the sake of grammar and clarity….
I also eliminated the capital letters at the beginning of every line. This is a convention in Russian poetry, but is only used in formal rhymed English poetry. I chose to use capital letters only at the beginning of sentences and where it was grammatically necessary.
From this point on, my task became even more difficult. I now had a fairly clear, literal translation of the poems, but was that in itself enough? Was that even poetry? I felt very strongly about not making the mistakes that I believed Kunitz and other translators of Akhmatova’s poetry made— I was not going to force an arbitrary rhyme scheme or metrical structure on the poems. I understood some of the reasons why other translators may have done so, attempting to give the reader a “feel” for the beautiful rhythms and rhymes of Akhmatova’s Russian language and structure in English. While I agreed with that rationale in theory, in practice it is nearly impossible without damaging the integrity and accuracy of Akhmatova’s own sentiments and language. I decided that Akhmatova’s poems were better suited to free verse combined with as literal a translation as was reasonable, allowing the simple power of her language and style to come through.
The last changes I made were small and stylistic. I repeatedly read and revised my translations of the poems, trying to smooth them out. While preserving the accuracy of my previous work, I re-translated certain words, phrases, or passages when their meaning was still unclear or did not fit into the poem as a whole. Here I caught some of the small mistakes I had made and once again considered word choice. I consulted a second Russian-English dictionary (this one a Russian publication, while my first was American) and tried to reconcile the differences. This was difficult and not always possible. Once I clarified obvious confusions as best I could, I stopped comparing the two dictionaries, realizing that I would be forced to create a whole new translation if I took everything into account. Thus I realized something else— a single person could produce countless possible translations of a single poem just by using different dictionaries or choosing different definitions of a word because no two languages have a 1-to-1 relationship. (I know this is a fairly obvious statement, but I had to learn it for myself the hard way to truly understand it.)
Lisa Gold: Research Maven 