The 'translation' of eastern European poetry into English by a group of Irish poets raises some contentious issues about the nature and merits of interpretation and the ownership of artistic voice, writes Belinda McKeon.
At the heart of 'The Messenger does not Matter', a poem by the Bulgarian poet Kristin Dimitrova, comes the worry that presents itself over and over to the literary translator. "Is that my voice?" asks the person addressed in the poem, an unnamed presence who seems to fascinate and frustrate the poet in equal measure. In the question is a note of accusation. But the poet is ready. "Yes," the answer comes, short and sure, "your own voice."
But, as the Cork-born poet Gregory O'Donoghue discovered when he set about translating this poem, along with more than 50 others by the same author, this solid certainty about the source of the poetic voice is not easily won. A Visit to the Clockmaker, a collection of his translations of poems by Dimitrova - one of the defining voices of the Bulgarian poetry scene that emerged in the early 1990s - has just been published by the Munster Literature Centre in association with Cork 2005; it is the first of a series of 13 books that will appear at monthly intervals over the next year as part of the official Cork 2005 programme. "When you do translation, you're doing a duet," says O'Donoghue of the creative act behind his new book. Over the past two years, such a duet has been performed for this project by a total of 26 poets - 13 from Co Cork, and 13 from the countries known as the accession states, the places that comprise the "New Europe".
From Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Estonia, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Malta, as well as Cyprus and Turkey, lone poets have been chosen for translation into English. As part of the project, which will incorporate readings as well as publications over the course of 2005, some of these poets' work will appear in English for the first time; for others, to see their words shaped into English with Irish inflections, their images sketched with Irish connections, will be a first.
Like O'Donoghue, some of the Cork poets still live in the county of their birth: Patrick Galvin, Roz Cowman, Liz O'Donoghue, Patrick Cotter, Gerry Murphy, and Eugene O'Connell remain firmly within the catchment area of the Munster Literature Centre and its regular activity. Others - Bernard O'Donoghue, Maurice Riordan, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Theo Dorgan, Greg Delanty and Robert Welch - have flown the nest to live and write elsewhere. But the Translations series, the brainchild of poet and assistant director of Cork 2005 Tom McCarthy, is bringing them back together for posterity, and also, you sense, for poetry itself.
"There's a two-way benefit involved in this process," says Patrick Cotter, director of the Munster Literature Centre and administrator of the Translations series, who is also one of the poets participating in the project (he has translated poems by the Estonian writer Andres Ehin). "Most European poets are desperate to be published in English." "You mean American," O'Donoghue interjects, laughing. "And from the Irish perspective," continues Cotter, "the opportunity for a poet to do a translation is essential to the poet's own development. Times of great poetry have always been times of great translation. Christopher Marlowe translated Ovid, Ben Jonson translated Catullus and, in our day, Heaney has done Beowulf, Carson has done Dante. Many writers have learned their craft through a process of mimicry and imitation, and translation is one opportunity to try out that process."
But mimicry? Imitation? Surely translation is a deeper, more involved, more surprising process than these words imply? It is, insist most of the poets gathered to discuss the project: O'Donoghue and Cotter, together with Eugene O'Connell and Liz O'Donoghue. The contract given to each poet at the beginning of the project was to produce not a literal but a literary translation, to make a poem in English out of the poem presented in a foreign language.
"And the result had to have the force of an original creative work in the English language," says Cotter. "There's a theory that a poem has a core, an essence to it, which is separate from the language in which it is composed. And that that essence and core can be transferred from one language to another without slavish adherence to the language of the original version. And I think the problem with a lot of non-poet translators of poetry is that they just don't get that concept. They have a very thorough concept of the grammar and structure, the cultural references of the original text, but they have no basic understanding of how language works as a literary object."
All the same, if it were not for these non-poet translators, the Translations series might never have come about in the first place. In all but one case (that of Ní Chuilleanáin, who translated the Romanian poet Ileana Malancioiu), the Irish poets approached the work of their assigned poet not in its original language, but through an interpreter of one kind of another.
Where the eastern European poet possessed fluent English, this interpretation was provided in correspondence, over the telephone or in face-to-face meetings; where language barriers were an issue, the Irish poet worked with what is known as a gloss or a crib - a functional translation provided by a third party that stayed true to every line and set out plainly what the poet's words meant in the simplest sense.
But the crib is no poem. "It's what you put the baby in," says O'Donoghue. "You know: the poem, before it's fully formed." In fact, Cotter explains that his instructions to the intermediate interpreters, the people who wrote the cribs, were to keep them as prosaic as possible, and never to attempt to do poetry. That way, he says, the risk of the crib unduly influencing the emerging poem of the translator could be minimised.
"I think that to do a proper literary translation," he says, "you have to be most proficient in the target language rather than the source language." Some of the poets had their work cut out for them with the intermediaries assigned by Cotter. Liz O'Donoghue, for example, had no sooner begun to ask questions of her intermediary about certain words that challenged her in the work of the Lithuanian poet Sigitas Parulskis than she was met with a demand for mutual recognition on the finished work i.e. that she would share the full title of poet-as-translator with the writer of the cribs. But this, explains Cotter, would have been against the aesthetic of the entire project. "When you concentrate in that much detail, word for word, on the original poem, you're losing out on the essence of the original. It's like one of Rilke's translator's said - that with great poetry, the freest translation is sometimes the most faithful."
Caught as it is between translation, imitation and accreditation, the question of the poetic voice remains a mysterious one. The individual voice of the poet, insists O'Connell (who translated the work of the Latvian poet Guntars Godin), is the thing that attracts the reader to a book of poems, and which draws them into its pages. But for the translator, to sound the true voice of a poem is a challenge.
"I've been reading the poetry of Rumi for years," says O'Connell, "but I've eventually realised that the man who'd translated him was letting his own poem come through as well, and that it was his own poem that was coming through first. If you open the page on a poem and the translation's very flat, it's very cold and not saying anything to you, the original poet can't come through. You know, they have to come through your sieve, your filter."
Liz O'Donoghue takes up the point: "You pick up the book, you say, this is a Lithuanian poet, I want to know how that Lithuanian poet is, or sounds like . . . more so than your voice, the translator's voice."
It comes back to the question in Kristin Dimitrova's poem, and to whether that question can ever fully be answered. Especially when the poets involved lack fluency in one another's language, the issue of whose voice a translated poem contains comes down to matters of trust, the acceptance of responsibility and the struggle towards integrity on the part of the translating poet. O'Connell, who has yet to meet his poet, received written advice from Godin (himself an established translator from other European languages) on the art of translation.
"And he said basically, interpret, and do your own take, but keep the basic frame, keep the legs of it, the heart of it, and then just go away and do it." The resultant book, he says, is an act of "keeping faith" with Godin.
But into this bond of trust a dissenting voice comes: that of Gerry Murphy, newly arrived into the gathering, who has translated the work of the Polish poet Katarzyna Jagodzinska. "Look," he breaks in as Gregory O'Donoghue talks about the problem of some words refusing to carry the weight in English that they do in Czech, or Romanian, or Bulgarian - "you're using that word. Translation. But you're not translating!"
There is silence for a moment. This is a long-standing argument between Murphy and the other poets, pivoting around those contentious questions of glosses, of imitation, of true voice. "Maybe you're not," begins O'Donoghue, but Murphy breaks back in. "No, you're not. You don't have Bulgarian. And I'm not translating. I'm doing versions of translations."
At this, uproar threatens: O'Donoghue insists he's not completely illiterate in Bulgarian; the other O'Donoghue argues that familiarity with the shape and the sound of the original poem is crucial, not just for the creative process but in case of errors in the crib; and Cotter reminds Murphy that the rest of the poets disagree with him on this idea of all translations as versions.
O'Connell interjects, performing something of an act of translation as he attempts to reconcile their conflicting views. "I think we are acting as creative springboards," he says. "In my own book, I actually did anything that would bring the substance of the thing through. Some of the poems are very straight, very close to the crib. But as the book moved, I had to do versions and interpretations, anything that would bring the central core out. Because I felt that, if that book couldn't succeed as a book in its own right, that my poet wouldn't thank me for it. So you have to go by your instinct." Around the table runs a mumbled assent. It seems that the messenger matters after all.