Translation

So I burned my brains the last week. I was working on a Sanskrit translation for one of my graduate classes. I studied Sanskrit in India, and though I had the best grade in my class, it has been six years since I even read a letter of the alphabet (Devanagiri [meaning city/home of the gods]). Language skills seriously erode if you don't keep up with them. The poem I translated was "Meghadutam" The Cloud Messenger, by Kalidasa. It would be madness to translate the whole thing. Indian literature has a fascination with all things epic. The translation was only a few lines, but my God! that took so much time. We take for granted the amount of work translators do for us. We also take for granted the level of understanding most translators have of the language from which they work. After I did my own translation, I found seven English translations. The variety between them was ridiculous. I was hoping to check my work using the translations of others. Fat chance. Some of the translations added so many words and phrases that simply weren't in Kalidasa's verses, and none of them matched up. It's amazing the liberties people take. Now, of course this is a poem, and it can be difficult to achieve the same level of artistic excellence by pure metaphrase, but just think, people do this with holy books...

But I've been thinking about a translation project I started a year ago. I'm interested in translating modern English into modern English. This may sound crazy, but it's probably not as crazy as taking an Intro to Islam class at University of Iowa where you don't read the Koran (Yes, that happened. I had to get a copy from a Muslim friend of mine and have her talk to me about it.) I digress. Part of translating English into English is essentially revision. But also there is this element to it of textual destruction. I like finding water-logged books on the side of the road, and then picking phrases out of them. In this same way, I love poetry by Sappho (possibly the oldest poet from whom we have poems,) because her poetry comes to us in many fragments, pieces of texts, things half-eaten by time. There is something lovely, something so wonderful about those half-sentences, something so alluring in the suggestiveness of her remaining work.