The Between-Space of Translation: Literary Sketches

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Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego Gdańsk 2020

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Reviewers Prof. em. Christoph Bode

Prof. dr. Tom Toremans Copy Editor

Piotr Styk

Cover and Title Pages Design Filip Sendal

Cover Photograph Izabela Szymańska Typesetting and Page Layout

Michał Janczewski Publication financed by

University of Gdańsk Faculty of Languages

University of Gdańsk Institute of English and American Studies University of Gdańsk Literary Studies in English Division

ISBN 978-83-8206-028-7 Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego ul. Armii Krajowej 119/121, 81-824 Sopot

tel./fax 58 523 11 37, tel. 725 991 206 e-mail: wydawnictwo@ug.edu.pl

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Printed and bound by

Zakład Poligrafii Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego ul. Armii Krajowej 119/121, 81-824 Sopot

tel. 58 523 14 49, fax 58 551 05 32

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For my friends, in honour of my adopted homeland

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface • 9

Chapter One: What is Translation? • 21

Chapter Two: Translation as Border Crossing • 45 Chapter Three: Translation as Hospitality • 75 Chapter Four: Translation as Exploration • 103 Chapter Five: Translation as Colonisation • 131 Chapter Six: Translation as Loss and Gain • 167 Chapter Seven: Translation as Friendship • 199 Chapter Eight: Translation as Encounter • 227

Conclusion: Looking Beyond the Between-Space • 249 Appendix • 261

Select Bibliography • 269 Index of Names • 285

Index of Biblical References • 291

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PREFACE

Translation is an art BETWEEN tongues, and the child born of the art lives forever BETWEEN home and alien city.

Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation

This book is a collection of reflections on literature from the borderland where “original” meets “translation” – terms which I place in inverted com- mas for reasons that I hope will become clear in the course of the book. It is intended for those whose interest is aroused by this kind of “between”

landscape. All such landscapes have something in common, but every border is particular and is experienced particularly. The book is written, then, for those who are in some way familiar with, or curious about, one specific border terrain, one particular literary, linguistic and cultural “between”: that of English and Polish. It arises not only out of scholarly literary reflection, but above all out of experience of literature – as reader, translator, teacher – in two languages, and of the discovery of the way that translation, as both activity and outcome,¹ deepens understanding and appreciation of literary texts and of the resources of the language they belong to, as well as of the language into which they are translated. I am an occasional translator, and an occasional commentator on translation – not in the sense that I do

1 I use the word translation, as Linda Hutcheon does the related word adapta- tion, “to refer to both a product and a process of creation and reception” (A Theory of Adaptation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), xiv).

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10 THE BETWEEN-SPACE OF TRANSLATION: LITERARY SKETCHES

these things from time to time, not very often, but in the sense that I do them as the occasion demands. In my teaching and writing on literature, the occasion does, continually, demand, and continually, too, the reflections that arise in connection with translation feed back into that teaching and writing. The choice of material for discussion in this book is shaped, and at the same time of course also limited, by these contexts. These “literary sketches” are an attempt “to see a world in a grain of sand”, to borrow a phrase from William Blake;² but I hope that this will make it possible also to see something beyond, or something that links, some of the richly distinctive and particular individual worlds to which I shall draw attention.

The idea of the “between” has interested me for as long as I can remember. I do not know how or when it began, but I find it reflected in my early and continuing fascination with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, an Amer- ican who became a British citizen, who abandoned his family’s Unitarian faith – a form of Protestantism at the extreme edge of anything that could unequivocally be defined as Christianity – in order to espouse a form of Anglicanism scarcely distinguishable from Roman Catholicism. From the time when I began to get to know the language and culture of Poland, another element was added to this astonishing “betweenness” of Eliot’s life and poetry: the question of how his work was read in Poland, of the inspiration he gave to Polish poets, and who the Eliot is who is not lost but “discovered”, found again in a new way, in Polish translation and in relation to Polish culture and history. Thinking along these lines has continued to shape much of my reflection on literature ever since, even when questions of translation are not obviously at the forefront.

Lawrence Venuti, in his now classic 1995 jeremiad on the weak posi- tion of translation and translators in the Anglo-American cultural milieu, lamented the effect that this continued to have, denying English speakers

2 William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” (line 1), in Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Library, 1975), 118.

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PREFACE

access to other ways of looking at the world, “producing cultures that are aggressively monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to flu- ent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with English-language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other”.³ It seems to me that only the specificity of attention paid to particular language pairs and particular texts can help evade the dangers of what in this book I have called, using a metaphor that is perhaps somewhat risky, “translation-as-colonising”. Like Suzanne Levine,⁴ and like Bella Brodzki, I believe that “the specificity of individual languages and their literary and cultural productions” deserves attention.⁵

Venuti begins the last chapter of his book, “Call to Action”, by referring to Maurice Blanchot’s 1971 essay “Translating”, which treats the foreign text as in itself “derivative, dependent on other, pre-existing materials”.⁶ In a similar way, my discussion of translation in a particular context, however much I would like it to be original, is inevitably derivative, dependent on other materials, even if I am not consciously aware of the source and even if it seems to me that I have reached my conclusions alone, by direct, unmediated association with the texts that are my focus and by my own experience as translator and reader. Translation is so deeply embedded in human civilisation that in general, whatever one might want to say about it is certain to have been said before – and this is as likely to be in the distant as in the recent past. But this is the eternal paradox of all kinds of writing:

its impossibility and yet its possibility. George Steiner, reaching back to the myth of Babel, reminds us of the ancient provenance of this paradox:

3 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 15.

4 Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991) (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009).

5 Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Mem- ory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 3.

6 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 307.

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communication is theoretically impossible, and yet “We do speak of the world and to one another. We do translate intra- and interlingually and have done so since the beginning of human history”.⁷ André Lefevere concludes his anthology of statements on translation in the German tradition with an extract from Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) arguing that while translation is theoretically impossible, it is a task that in practice everyone continually carries out, for “all speech is translation” since all speech is dialogue.⁸

The ubiquity of translation, its possibility and its impossibility: these are themes that resound through human culture through the ages. As a sample of the first, Willis Barnstone quotes, in this order, Harold Bloom: “All po- etry is translation” (Poetry and Repression); August Wilhelm Schlegel: “The human mind can do nothing but translate; all its activity consists of just that” (Translating Literature); and Octavio Paz, “Every reading is a trans- lation” (“Translation: Literature and Letters”)⁹ – this last an idea to which I shall return in this book. Here is Reuben A. Brower in 1959, beginning the introduction to an anthology “on translation” which includes contri- butions by Eugene A. Nida, Edwin and Willa Muir, Vladimir Nabokov, Renato Poggioli, Willard V. Quine and Roman Jakobson: “This is a book about a basic process in all writing and thinking and, one is tempted to add, in all experiencing.”¹⁰

In the essay from which Barnstone quotes, Octavio Paz refers translation to the beginnings of speech in every human life: translation is involved

7 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Ox- ford University Press, 1975), 250.

8 Franz Rosenzweig, “The Impossibility and Necessity of Translation”, in Trans- lating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig, ed. André Lefe- vere (Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), 110–111.

9 Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Ha- ven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 19.

10 Reuben A. Brower, introduction to On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 3.

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from the outset in learning to speak, as the child asks questions about the meaning of words.¹¹ If translation is a universal experience, can one hope to add anything to all that has already been said about it? In the last sentence of the same essay which sets the stage in this way, Paz concludes that two poets writing in two different languages, López Velarde and T. S. Eliot,

“neither even suspecting the existence of the other, almost simultaneously produced different but equally original versions of the poetry written some years earlier by a third poet [Jules Laforgue] in yet another language”.¹² Perhaps then, through the particulars of one’s own linguistic and literary experience, one may hope to do something that though not “original” in any absolute sense, is nevertheless distinctive and individual.

I have written the book in English, the language in which I am most deeply grounded, in the knowledge that there are many Polish readers for whom this will be no obstacle (Poland, after all, has a tradition of publishing bilingual editions of literary works in English and Polish, with two Kraków publishing houses, Wydawnictwo Literackie and Znak, leading the field in this enterprise), and in the hope of sharing some of the riches that I have discovered in Polish culture with those who might not otherwise have access to them, as well as of conveying some insights into literature in English which may deepen the Polish reader’s appreciation of it. The discussion inevitably involves detailed consideration of the linguistic material not only of English but also of Polish, and I am aware, of course, that this could pose difficulties for readers who know only the first of these languages. I have tried, however, to write the book in such a way as to make it comprehensible and interesting even to the monolingual English speaker – and perhaps in the process to

11 Octavio Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters”, trans. Irene del Corral, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Buguenet (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 152.

12 Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters”, 162.

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hint that no speaker of English – or Polish or any other language, for that matter – is truly, as the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones self-deprecatingly described himself, purely a monoglot.¹³

I refer in this book to many studies of translating and translation by Polish practitioners, not only because this is the context in which my own interest developed, but also because I believe these studies to be the outcome of profound and sensitive scholarship which deserves to be better known in English. I make no apology for the fact that very many of the works of translation criticism and theory referred to, whether these are Polish or not, date from before the twenty-first century – in some cases from long before. In thinking about translation and about literature, and about translating literature, we are constantly returning to the same questions, and the insights of the past – especially the recent past – are often overlooked or undervalued in the race to be ahead of the newest trends.

The book has been many years in the making. It is the fruit of a con- stant process of reassessment and critical revisiting of earlier experience and conclusions, in which those conclusions have been modified and ex- panded, or even sometimes abandoned. My reflections have been accom- panied from the beginning not only by the work of Stanisław Barańczak as poet, translator and literary scholar, but also by that of the less well-known Andrzej Szuba, whom one reviewer nevertheless names “the very first of Polish translators”.¹⁴ In recent years, I have also been particularly inspired by two collections of reflections on literary translation: Jerzy Jarniewicz’s Gościnność słowa. Szkice o przekładzie literackim [The Hospitality of Words.

Sketches on Literary Translation]¹⁵ and Małgorzata Łukasiewicz’s Pięć

13 David Jones, preface to The Anathemata (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 11.

14 Krzysztof Siwczyk, “Dwa żywioły” [Two Elements], review of Andrzej Szuba’s translations of poems by Ron Padgett, Polityka 26, 26 June 2018, 73.

15 Jerzy Jarniewicz, Gościnność słowa. Szkice o przekładzie literackim (Kraków:

Znak, 2012).

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razy o przekładzie [Five Essays on Translation].¹⁶ In both cases, even more important to me than the specific content of these collections is the ap- proach of their writers, in which theoretical reflections arise out of practice and experience.

This book is not purely a discussion of translation, nor is it a work of pure literary criticism. Rather it is something in between. Questions both of literature, broadly understood, and of translation, broadly understood, are always involved; sometimes one is more prominent than the other, but both are always present. Some parts of the text have appeared in earlier versions, though in most cases their incorporation into a new whole has involved extensive alteration and expansion. Chapters 1 and especially 2 draw in some degree on “Border Crossings: Some Reflections on Literature and Translation”, published in Tłumaczenia w XXI wieku [Translations in the Twenty-First Century] (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, 2018).¹⁷ Chapter 3 uses material from an unpublished paper entitled “Finding a ‘Home’ in Po- land for R. S. Thomas” and delivered at a conference in Łódź in 2017 (Współczesna literatura anglojęzyczna w Polsce [Contemporary Literature in English in Poland]).¹⁸ However, a few of the seeds for the discussion of Andrzej Szuba’s poetry in this chapter and in Chapter 1 were sown much longer ago, in a conference paper delivered jointly with David Malcolm in 2002 and published under the title “On Translating Andrzej Szuba’s

16 Małgorzata Łukasiewicz, Pięć razy o przekładzie (Kraków and Gdańsk: Karak- ter, 2017).

17 Jean Ward, “Border Crossings: Some Reflections on Literature and Transla- tion”, in Tłumaczenia w XXI wieku, ed. Anna Szczepan-Wojnarska, Agata Miko- łajko and Łukasz Kucharczyk (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, 2018), 17–36.

18 Jean Ward, “Finding a ‘Home’ in Poland for R. S. Thomas”, paper delivered during a conference entitled Współczesna literatura anglojęzyczna w Polsce, Łódź University, 12–13 May 2017.

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Poetry” in Przekładając nieprzekładalne II [Translating the Untranslat- able II] (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2004).¹⁹ Some of the reflections on Thomas’ work in Chapter 3 also began to take shape at around the same time, in a paper delivered in 2000 and later published as “‘Write what it is to be man’. Art and Life in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas”, in PASE Papers in Literature and Culture: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdań- skiego, 2003).²⁰

Chapter 4 develops from some considerations of around the same pe- riod, entitled “Translation and the Language of War” (Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Polish Association for the Study of English (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2002));²¹ but it also makes use of a much later text, “Translation: A Space of Yearning and Exploration”, published in a special issue of Ignaziana: rivista di ricerca teologica, the on- line journal of the Centre for Ignatian Spirituality of the Pontifical Grego- rian University (The Drama of the Spirit, Essays in Memory of Michael Paul Gallagher SJ, 2017).²² Some material from the Ignaziana text is also used in various other parts of the book. Chapter 5 is based on a text written

19 Jean Ward and David Malcolm, “On Translating Andrzej Szuba’s Poetry”, in Przekładając nieprzekładalne II, ed. Olga Kubińska and Wojciech Kubiński (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2004), 253–262.

20 Jean Ward, “‘Write what it is to be man’. Art and Life in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas”, in PASE Papers in Literature and Culture: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference, ed. Joanna Burzyńska and Danuta Stanulewicz (Gdańsk: Wy- dawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2003), 401–407.

21 Jean Ward, “Translation and the Language of War”, in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Polish Association for the Study of English, ed. Elżbieta Mańczak Wohlfeld (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2002), 169–177.

22 Jean Ward, “Translation: A Space of Yearning and Exploration”, Ignaziana:

rivista di ricerca teologica, Special Issue: The Drama of the Spirit: Essays in Memory of Michael Paul Gallagher SJ, ed. Francesca Bugliani-Knox, 2017: 40–51, https://

www.ignaziana.org/Gallagher.pdf

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originally in Polish, “Język, cierpienie, milczenie: Czesław Miłosz a poezja Geoffreya Hilla” [Language, Suffering, Silence: Czesław Miłosz and the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill], published in Przekładaniec 26 (2012).²³ Its rethinking and reworking for an English-speaking readership has consid- erably modified the content.

Chapter 6 returns to the very earliest stages of my reflection on translation and literature, fundamentally revising the judgment made of Stani- sław Barańczak as a translator of Seamus Heaney in “The Journey Back”

(Przekładaniec 3 (1997))²⁴ and placing this early discussion in an entirely new context. Chapter 7 revisits, revises and greatly expands the material originally included in the article “Prolegomena do rozważań nad przekła- dem wiersza Elizabeth Jennings ‘The Visitation’” [Prolegomena to Some Considerations of a Translation of Elizabeth Jennings’ ‘The Visitation’]

(Przekładaniec 13–14 (2004–2005)).²⁵ Chapter 8, which of all the chapters of the book is the least altered in relation to earlier texts, is a discussion of Czesław Miłosz’s correspondence with Thomas Merton published in Przekładaniec first in Polish and then in English, with slight changes to cater for a different reader – both versions my own: “‘Abowiem nie mamy tu miasta trwającego, ale przyszłego szukamy’. Przyjaciele złączeni wygnaniem: o korespondencji Czesława Miłosza z Thomasem Mertonem”

(Przekładaniec 25 (2011), Między Miłoszem a Miłoszem);²⁶ “‘For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come’. Friends United by Exile:

23 Jean Ward, “Język, cierpienie, milczenie: Czesław Miłosz a poezja Geoffreya Hilla”, Przekładaniec 26 (2012), Przekład mistrzów: 236–258.

24 Jean Ward, “The Journey Back”, Przekładaniec 3 (1997): 70–77.

25 Jean Ward, “Prolegomena do rozważań nad przekładem wiersza Elizabeth Jennings ‘The Visitation’”, Przekładaniec 13–14 (2004–2005): 49–62.

26 Jean Ward, “‘Abowiem nie mamy tu miasta trwającego, ale przyszłego szukamy’. Przyjaciele złączeni wygnaniem: o korespondencji Czesława Miłosza z Thomasem Mertonem”, Przekładaniec 25 (2011), Między Miłoszem a Miłoszem:

177–188.

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On the Correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton” (Prze- kładaniec 25 (2011), Between Miłosz and Milosz, published online 2 Au- gust 2013).²⁷

The poems by R. S. Thomas discussed and extensively quoted in Chap- ter 3 can all be found in Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix, 2000, originally published by Dent, 1993), © Elodie Thomas. Elizabeth Jennings’ poem “The Visitation” is reprinted from The Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012) in an appendix to this book by permission of David Higham Associates.

Over the years, more people than I can possibly remember have helped me in my thinking about translation and literature. Among these, two friends stand out especially for the encouragement and support they have given me: the poet and poet-translator Andrzej Szuba, who introduced me to the work of R. S. Thomas; and the founder and chief editor of the trans- lation journal Przekładaniec, Magda Heydel. I am indebted to them both also for permission to quote from their work. Magda Heydel has allowed me to print a revised version of her translation of Jennings’ poem “The Visi tation”, originally published in Przekładaniec 13–14 (2004–2005);²⁸ and Andrzej Szuba has permitted me to quote extensively from his own poems and from his translations of Thomas’ poetry. I have benefitted greatly from the help and advice given to me by Michael Edwards, Małgorzata Czermińska and Hilary Davies, and I thank them warmly for their interest in the book. I am also most grateful to Maria Fengler and Nicky Madden for generously taking the time to read parts of the manuscript.

27 Jean Ward, “‘For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come’.

Friends United by Exile: On the Correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton”, Przekładaniec 25 (2011), Between Miłosz and Milosz: 171–184, published online 2 August 2013. DOI:10.4467/16891864ePC.13.023.1212

28 Elizabeth Jennings, “Nawiedzenie” (“The Visitation”), trans. Magda Heydel, Przekładaniec 13–14 (2004–2005): 61.

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Finally, I thank Cardinal Wyszyński University Press, the Jagiellonian University Press, the Jesuit online journal Ignaziana and the editors of the translation journal Przekładaniec for permission to revise and re-use mate- rial from articles originally published with them.

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