Poets on Translation: Putting the Verse in the Fruit

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

"While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds." —Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (trans. by Harry Zohn)

I’ve been translating Romanian-French modernist Tristan Tzara’s poetry for more than 15 years. He’s known for his peripatetic layers of imagery, often fantastical and absurd. It’s not uncommon for me to search online (usually without success) for an unfamiliar folktale or idiom that might explain a curious phrase. And yet, inoculated as I am to poetic strangeness, I’ve long been struck by the bizarre image in the epigraph above, from Walter Benjamin’s controversial essay, “The Task of the Translator,” from the introduction to his translation, into German, of Baudelaire’s “Tableaux parisiens” (from Les fleurs du mal). Benjamin suggests the “content” of Baudelaire’s poetry is like fruit, wrapped effortlessly and naturally in the skin of the French language. By this logic, translation involves separating the poem from its skin, then clothing it in a new language, one which can’t quite fit and instead drapes excessively around it, “like a royal robe,” which, as Benjamin puts it in the next sentence, is “unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien.”

While there’s so much in “The Task of the Translator” to inspire Borgesian dreams, so much mystery, so many verdant questions raised about language, culture, and meaning, this fruit-and-robe metaphor isn’t what translation feels like to me at all! I don’t think it’s possible to separate the fruit from the skin, especially in poetry, because of all that’s embedded in the language itself: the shape of the letters or characters, the phonemes we use to pronounce the words, the words themselves, and the rhymes and rhythms that might be activated when the poem is read (either aloud or silently). Still, while impossibility may be an exciting starting place for thinking about translation, and though language and meaning are inextricably entangled with one another, I am certain poetry is eminently translatable, in manifold ways.

The words in a poem carry what Ralph Waldo Emerson called their “fossil poetry,” or etymologies, some of which, when translating from French to English, as I do, are shared—like the underground springs they both draw on. The English word fruit, for example, reaches back through the Old French to the shared Latin fructus, meaning “edible seeds and produce,” but also “reward,” as in “the fruits of labor.” A poem, put simply, is its words. And if each word has the vertical depth of its etymology and time-stamped usage, it has a horizontal breadth, too, in each author’s own lexicon, influenced by regional conventions, linguistic origins, and associations—both literary and quotidian—with each word, as well as the author’s favorite usages (think Homeric epithets, or Lucie Brock-Broido’s deployment of the word little). And of course, each translator has their own multifarious personal lexicon in both the original language and the “target” language.

Each of Tzara’s books has a circumscribed body of words, layered and repeated, and I often run a whole manuscript through a quantitative analysis, to generate a list of the words in order of frequency. In editing my translation, I’ll use this list to double-check the consistency of my translations and consider whether any departures may have a valid logic of their own. Often, the list itself feels like a kind of poem, a guide to the concerns, the landscape, and the flavor of the collection. For example, in Parler seul, or “Speaking Alone,” a collection of Tzara’s poetry I recently translated (and wrote about here), the most frequently used substantive nouns are water, laughter, eyes, and light—which point to the bright texture and tonal intimacy of this collection—followed by the surprising appearance of the word for hedgehog, which is repeated many times in several idiosyncratic, playful, short lyrics.

Tzara’s broader lexicon, spanning more than 40 years of his writing life, is indexed in a fascinating way by the editor of his six-volume complete works, Henri Béhar, who compiled a concordance of every occurrence of each word in situ, along with the phrase in which it appears, and the corresponding page number. Thus, I can find, in “Concordance—F,” that the singular form of the word fruit appears 61 times in Tzara’s collected works, including in the phrase “dada a mis le vers dans le fruit” or “dada put the verse in the fruit.” When I translate Tzara’s fruit, I aim to do the same.

In part “I” of the poem “The Laughter of Water,” from Speaking Alone, in a section culminating in the illumination of a “statue of fruit,” I find a more apt description for my own sense of what translation feels like:

stand up old body where the vanquished light
already cries land to the other side
to the other side of what
of laughter and the world’s branches
waiting for the statue of fruit to light up
and the delicate sugared mouthfuls
of flakes of light to fly

In translating Tzara, rather than skinning and re-clothing fruit, I am like the proverbial ferryboat captain (from translation’s own etymology, to “ferry across”), working in a watery space, who “cries land to the other side.” For me, in the case of this poem, it’s to the other side of 80 years, to the other side of the Atlantic, and from French to US-English. As the poet (through “la lumière vaincue,” “vanquished light”) cries out, I, the translator, pause before approaching “land.” I read and listen carefully: mapping sounds, digging beneath the soil of the words’ meaning, consulting Tzara’s œuvre for precursors and repetitions, reading biographies, histories, and poetry by Tzara’s contemporaries to understand the landscape that is the original’s context. Then I “stand up in [my] old body” and cry out (through “the vanquished light” of a different day), using new sounds to root a poem in a partially shared soil of linguistic meaning, and, with my voice, drawing shapes in the air to inscribe a pattern that parallels the poet’s original cry. Now, the poem exists “on the other side” of “the world’s branches.”

Put another way, rather than trying to fashion a new wrapper for the poem’s meaning, or craft a skin that will never quite fit the fruit, I study the molecular structure, the flavor, and the evolution of the poem, before grafting the cultivar on new rootstock in an attempt to produce something alive and bearing seeds. My hope is that a reader will discover this new, translated poem, and, in reading it, illuminate or activate the “statue of fruit,” so the “delicate sugared mouthfuls” of light can scatter and fly.