Toward a Theory of Translation

by Rodney Koeneke

Everyone knows that O’Hara is great, but who loses much sleep over Pasternak? In Russia, where the poem is still valued as a succession of more or less beautiful lines, creation is also regarded as the province of the Devil. Life and its regulation belong to dumb forces, which collect at a shining point the green translator would probably render as God, while spontaneity erupts (to borrow a favorite Russian image) like a fish breaking out from the ice, flopping from the water to thrash and heave in air.

Somewhere in this passage I’m certain it suffers a kind of epiphany, which is often celebrated in poems, but elsewhere finds itself less welcome, even despised. The motifs most common to Russian poetry are rich but few: a monk converses with his starets, or elder; features of the landscape such as ponds, clouds, and weather are addressed familiarly by the poet; a mule or duck suddenly speaks to its owner, describing in tears the heretofore unconsidered awkwardness of its servitude. Each exchange bears its measure of pathos, like women in the Caucasus with baskets balanced squarely on their heads, but it leaves little room for that boozy sprezzatura O’Hara and a dozen other poets achieved midcentury on a 40-block stretch of Manhattan.

All this is by way of saying that if love is a state for which no language is ever adequate, yet we keep falling in love and writing about it anyway, then each of us, in our private feelings, resembles a poem waiting for its translator, like a lover who waits for a lover on the steps of a bank or somewhere municipal, knowing how pale and approximate any discussion of feelings will finally be, despite the original’s undeniable power. The nonsensical, or phatic—defined by Jakobson as that which lifts the fish through the ice then gives it nothing to breathe—has perhaps been too little esteemed in translation, or anywhere else: for though I am no O’Hara, just being with you I manage to feel elevated, a trainful of Russians passing over Manhattan, happy to gesture or shout or merely gasp.

Rodney Koeneke, a marketing specialist, lives in San Francisco. His most recent book is Rouge State (Pavement Saw Press, Columbus, OH). E-mail: rodneyk@pacbell.net