Translation is complicated business which requires a lot of judgment calls. One of the things that I like best about poetic translation, in particular, is that the factors that need to be taken into account multiply. Big-time. In my last post, I demonstrated how that could lead to varying evaluations of translations of the same piece, depending upon which aspects of a piece one valued most. But not all translations are equal, as my first posting on this topic might have indicated. Hurly, de Giovanni, and I all got aspects of translating Borges right. No one of us came out head and shoulders in front of the others. Below, I have two translations of a poem by the Syrian poet Nizār Qabbānī, one of which, to me, seems decidedly better than the other.

While loitering over on #Poetry, I read the following (unattributed) translation:

Words

He lets me listen, when he moves me,
Words are not like other words
He takes me, from under my arms
He plants me, in a distant cloud
And the black rain in my eyes
Falls in torrents, torrents
He carries me with him, he carries me
To an evening of perfumed balconies

And I am like a child in his hands
Like a feather carried by the wind
He carries for me seven moons in his hands
and a bundle of songs
He gives me sun, he gives me summer
and flocks of swallows
He tells me that I am his treasure
And that I am equal to thousands of stars
And that I am treasure, and that I am
more beautiful than he has seen of paintings
He tells me things that make me dizzy
that make me forget the dance and the steps

Words… which overturn my history
which make me a woman… in seconds
He builds castles of fantasies
which I live in… for seconds…
And I return… I return to my table
Nothing with me…
Nothing with me… except words

Nizar Qabbani

To my eyes, this read like a fairly typical homoerotic Sufi devotional poem. The words ‘not like other words’ I presumed to be the Qur’ān. I became interested in Qabbānī, and started doing some research on-line. As it turns out, Qabbānī wasn’t much of a Sufi: He was just a poet who cared deeply about the plight of women in the Arab world. It seems probable that his poem was meant to be read quite literally. But while I was researching Qabbānī, I stumbled across the Arabic original of the poem:

نزار قباني

كلمات

يُسمعني.. حـينَ يراقصُني
كلماتٍ ليست كالكلمات

يأخذني من تحـتِ ذراعي
يزرعني في إحدى الغيمات

والمطـرُ الأسـودُ في عيني
يتساقـطُ زخاتٍ.. زخات

يحملـني معـهُ.. يحملـني
لمسـاءٍ ورديِ الشُـرفـات

وأنا.. كالطفلـةِ في يـدهِ
كالريشةِ تحملها النسمـات

يحمـلُ لي سبعـةَ أقمـارٍ
بيديـهِ وحُزمـةَ أغنيـات

يهديني شمسـاً.. يهـديني
صيفاً.. وقطيـعَ سنونوَّات

يخـبرني.. أني تحفتـهُ
وأساوي آلافَ النجمات

و بأنـي كنـزٌ… وبأني
أجملُ ما شاهدَ من لوحات

يروي أشيـاءَ تدوخـني
تنسيني المرقصَ والخطوات

كلماتٍ تقلـبُ تاريخي
تجعلني امرأةً في لحظـات

يبني لي قصـراً من وهـمٍ
لا أسكنُ فيهِ سوى لحظات

وأعودُ.. أعودُ لطـاولـتي
لا شيءَ معي.. إلا كلمات

You don’t have to read Arabic to notice that there’s something odd going on: Qabbānī’s couplets have been traded in for half-random stanzas. If you can read Arabic for pronunciation, you’ll then also notice that each of these couplets rhymes with the others. Qabbānī is known for the simplicity of his language, and so, as practice for my Arabic, I decided to give reading Kalimāt (as the poem is entitled in Arabic) a try. I produced, while reading, the following translation:

Words

He lets me listen when he dances with me
To his word, not like words

From beneath my forearms he lifts me
He sows me in one of the clouds

And the dark rain in my eyes
Falls in downpours… downpours

He carries me with him… carries me
To a roseate evening of balconies

And I… like a child in his hand
Like a feather carried on a breeze

He carries to me seven moons
With his hands and a bundle of songs

He brings me the Sun… he brings me
The Summer… and a flock of swallows

He tells me… Indeed, I am his jewel
And I am equivalent to thousands of stars

And indeed I am a treasure… and indeed I am
A greater beauty than he has seen in paintings

He tells me things that dizzy me
That make me forget the dance and the steps

In words that topple my history
That make me a woman in moments

He builds for me a castle from fancy
That I do not live in except for moments

And I return… I return to my table
Nothing with me… But words

Aside from my format (which more closely echoes Qabbānī’s), the translations are largely equivalent. But there’s one phrase which, I think, is fairly important: My ‘To his word, not like words’ as opposed to the other translation’s ‘Words are not like other words’. This is a pretty key difference: In mine, the unwordliness of the word in question is emphasised. In the other translation, attention is drawn, instead, to the difference between the words in question and other words. Further, by using the phrase ‘his word’, I indicate that we’re talking about a promise. The Arabic phrase ‘كلمات ليست كالكلمات’ refers to a broken promise — a word that means nothing. This key meaning is entirely lost in the other translation. The broken nature of the word in my translation is, unfortunately, implicit, unlike in the original. Nonetheless, I think it an improvement on the first translation, which obscures this meaning entirely.

In Le Ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter makes a very good case for maintaining formal elements of poetry in translation. In critique of one of his (many) translations of Clément Marot’s poem ‘A une Damoyselle malade’ (affectionately referred to as ‘Ma Mignonne’ throughout Hofstadter’s book), Hofstadter writes:

[T]his version… does not merit, for me, the label “translation”, for rhyme is the heart and soul of the original poem. To leave out rhyme in a supposed translation of “Ma Mignonne”, or of any rhyming poem, strikes me as not a whit nor a shred less daffy or bonkers than for a publisher to insist, for reasons of economy, on reproducing a color wheel in black and white in a text on painting, and then to claim that this does a perfectly adequate job of imparting a sense for hue, brightness, and saturation to students of art.

Later, critiquing Hiroaki Sato’s failure to translate Bashō’s famous frog haiku into 5-7-5, he writes that, ‘flinging 5-7-5 out the window, as does Sato, is to deeply disrespect Bashō!’ Also: ‘Art must be rendered as art, otherwise it is no longer art.‘

Hofstadter is obsessed with (or perhaps, more fairly, in love with) pattern, and he is a virulent proponent of rhymed verse. By his standards, my effort at Kalimāt is a travesty — it is a black-and-white colour wheel. And perhaps that’s fair. The rhyme really does drive the original Arabic, and it’s an integral part of the Arabic literary tradition. It is they rhyme in Qabbānī’s poem which allows it to be translated into song, which is an important medium by which Qabbānī has gained popularity in his native Syria and throughout the Arab world.

But…

I won’t go so far as to argue that a rhyming translation of Kalimāt could not be achieved (this is what Hofstadter fairly calls ‘argument by poverty of imagination’), but I do believe that through rhyme, the poem would lose its poetry. Qabbānī’s rhyme scheme is AB AB AB AB CB CB AB DB AB AB AB CB AB. Imagine this in English: it would drive me, at least, batty, and would seem incredibly dull. It would suck the élan out of the poem. Arabic has a vastly different literary tradition than does English — rhyme that seems monotonous in our tongue is a brilliant driving force in Arabic poetry and prose. The Qur’ān is peppered with assonance and rhyme (which is part of the reason for its legendary untranslatability).

While we can translate meaning, structure, and form from one language to another, we cannot translate aesthetic sensibilities. Thus, I’ve chosen to leave my translation of Qabbānī in unrhymed verse.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 27 April 2005 at 01:59 and is filed under Translation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.