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Making the Word Yet Again
Flesh
AT THE END of Horst Frenz's essay "The Art of Translation," standard
reading when I was a comparative literature undergraduate at Indiana
University, there is the wonderful exhoration from the correspondence
of Andr� Gide that "every creative writer owes it to his country to
translate at least one foreign work, to which his talent and his
temperament are particularly suited, and thus to enrich his own
literature." Indeed, this labor of love is a very vibrant part of what
has been going on in American literature for decades. From Ezra Pound
onward, American poets -- W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, and James
Wright to name just a few -- have found the need to branch out beyond
their own poetic craft and linguistic context, to find second wind,
second vision, a new way of looking at the world and at the poem.
Although the matter of bringing the work of other
literatures into English is of major importance in American poets'
ongoing interest in writing produced in other languages, it is hoped
that this new series by Artful Dodge will offer at
least a small window into another crucial aspect of the craft --
translations' function as an inextricable element of an individual
writer's creative activity. In a way, one might see translation as a
particularly engaged way of reading, a disciplined way of writing.
Here, the reading involves entering into the depths of a poem, into
what is between the lines, and the writing involves
working within the original framework of the relationship between text
and reading in the attempt to recast this energy in the adopted tongue.
This is a matter that undoubtedly goes beyond the facile literalist
notion of form and content. Decisions get made on the basis of a myriad
of concerns, sometimes with the aces that a bilingual and bicultural
background might give, sometimes with the help of native or bilingual
co-translators, sometimes with the collaboration of the author. Always
there is a balancing act present -- an awkwardness fragile, but
potentially as arresting as poetry itself.
We hope all our readers enjoy the series, and we
encourage other poets and translators to submit new work as well as
critical or personal responses to the theory and craft of translation.
In the end, we hope you encounter not only an interesting testimony to
these writers' attempts to expand America's vast but not infinite
cultural and aesthetic borders, but also an introduction to their
accomplishments as poets making flesh the ongoing miracle of poetry:
their poems and the poems of those not writing in English. --Daniel
Bourne
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