The poet Jane Hirshfield sketches two main motivational forces behind the desire to translate: the erotic longing for knowledge and the therapeutic desire either to cure oneself and one’s style of writing or to change established literary and linguistic practices. But no matter whether it is the translator-as-researcher, the translator-as-patient or the translator-as-physician, they all have to go through an experience of merging with the original as a work of writing — »the sense of active creative discovery is the same.« It is this potential of translation to open up »new realms of being«, to bring about a widened knowledge on »humanness« through poetic experience, which she introduces as the third of nine gates to enter the mind of poetry in her essay The World is Large and Full of Noises: Thoughts on Translation.
Translation occurs precisely in that moment of forgetfulness and dissolving, when everything already comprehended through great effort — grammar, vocabulary, meaning, background — falls away. In that surrendering instant, the translator turns from the known shore of the original to look into that emptiness where the outlines of the new poem begin to resolve, a changed landscape appearing through mist.
Jane Hirshfield
The emergence of a plurality of different, but equally accomplished translations from this encounter benefits those readers who wish to get closer to the flavour, sound and touch of the original poem but have to rely on translations. What they experience in repeated reading may be like the appearance of a shaded shadow between different light sources or the manifestation of a variating tune from sound:
If the reader is lucky, a work will exist in multiple translations — in their points of overlap and divergence, the hands of translators and author may be distinguished…
Jane Hirshfield
Hirshfield doesn’t tie her thoughts on translation to a preferred formal element or a sensual capacity. Instead, she moves with ease between references to or metaphors of sound, light, taste, texture, feelings and ideas: Whereas the title of her essay on translation refers to a large world »full of noises«, the epigraph mentions »to let in the light«, and the impossibility of matching words of different languages is encountered through their flavor. So she calls for an equally open approach to translation:
A translator’s first obligaton is to convey each poem’s particular strengths. If music and intricacy of form are the greatest pleasures in the original, this is what the translator should try to capture; if a startling directness of language is at the heart of a work, then straightforwardness should govern the new version as well. Imagery, sensibility, feeling, sound, ideas — any of these can become the through-line of a poem’s unfolding.
Jane Hirshfield
With the possibility of different translations of one and the same poem the translator’s obligation opens up to a much wider range of relating to the original text through translating it. It is the reading that unfolds the diversity of qualities or ‚through-lines‘ of a poem. And a translation may even answer back to the original from beyond, by creating a contrastive, disruptive, complementary or amplifying textual relation.
Further Reading:
❁ Jane Hirshfield, The World is Large and Full of Noises, in: Nine Gates. Entering the Mind of Poetry. Essays by Jane Hirshfield. New York: Harper Perennial 1998. (See p. 61, 64, 65)
❁ The Ink Dark Moon. Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan. Translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. New York: Vintage Classics 1990.
❁ More about Jane Hirshfield at the Poetry Foundation
❁ Listen to Jane Hirshfield reading her poems on The Poetry Archive