Translating

I've said it before: Poetry is that which is worth translating. The poem dies when it has no place to go.

The object of a translation into English is not a poem in English.

A translation creates a specific kind of distance ("willing suspension"): the reader never forgets that what is being read is a translation.

A translation that sounds like a poem in English is usually a bad translation.

A translation that strives for the accuracy of a bilingual dictionary is usually a bad translation.

A translation must sound like a translation written in living English - and more, an English that takes advantage of certain possibilities that are not normally available to poems written in English.

The success of a translation is nearly always dependent on the smallest words: prepositions, articles. Anyone can translate nouns.

A foreign word with multiple meanings can - though few do it - be translated into several English words. One word can lead to a few, just as a few words can lead to one.

Pound intuitively corrected mistakes in the Fenollosa manuscript. For the rest of us, it is almost impossible to translate from a language one doesn't know. To translate through an 'informant' is to paint by numbers: it's their design, you merely add some colour.

Everything can be translated. That which is 'untranslatable' hasn't yet found its translator.

The original is never better than the translation. The translation is worse than another translation, written or not yet written, of the same original.

Translation is not duplication. Every reading is a new reading: why should we expect a translation to be identical?

To translate is to learn how poetry is written. Nothing else is so successful a teacher, for it carries no bagagage of self-expression.

Any poem should be translated as many times as possible, even by the same translator over the years. Only fundamentalists believe in a 'definitive' translation.

Nearly everywhere, the great ages of poetry have been, not coincidentally, periods of intense translation. With no news from abroad, a culture ends up repeating the same things to itself. It needs the foreign not to imitate, but to transform.

“Kanzi understood early on in his life about performance and ability,” Fields said, “and he often jealously guards an area of expertise, such as stone tool making, or flint knapping. We have seen many examples of this when Panbanisha (Kanzi’s half-sister) or Nyota (Panbanisha’s son) are making stone tools, and Kanzi can often be expected to express concern through displays of protest.”

However, when painting with the other bonobos, Kanzi is as congenial and cooperative as he his protective of his flint-knapping prowess.

“He appears to be interested in the paintings of other bonobos and enjoys painting while everyone else is painting,” Fields said. “While Panbanisha seems to be as good at painting as Kanzi is at stone-tool manufacturing, she often is not disposed to say as much about her paintings as Kanzi, as we suppose she feels her paintings speak for themselves.

“Kanzi, on the other hand, seems to feel he is able to express complicated ideas with the assistance of a painting, in which he is able to illuminate his message through the question-and-answer moment, using the painting as a point of reference or as an illustration. He seems to use the paintings to complete the dialogue informing those matters on his mind that are difficult to communicate merely through lexigrams.”

The process involved in the creation of Watermelon, a Kanzi original offered in this year’s Apes Helping Apes exhibit, seems to reinforce that, said Susannah Maisel, a bonobo caretaker and trusted friend of Kanzi’s.

The painting was created over two days, Nov. 5-6. Kanzi used his lexigram to ask Maisel if he could paint, and as she readied the supplies, he made another request: He wanted to eat watermelon during the activity. In her creative documentation, Maisel noted that the colors Kanzi selected – light red, dark red and white – were the same as the colors found in a slice of watermelon.

“He started with two shades of red, mixing white into the darker shade to make pink,” Maisel wrote. “He took his time with this painting, pausing between brush strokes to snack on watermelon.”

Kanzi left the painting unfinished on Nov. 5. The next morning, the bonobo pointed to lexigram symbols for “watermelon” and “paint,” indicating his desire to continue work on the painting. He added orange to some areas of the canvas that he had previously painted red, and then mixed white and green, which Maisel said could be interpreted to represent the color of watermelon rind. Last, he added more touches of pure red.

Maisel said it would be “easy to interpret this painting as a literal representation of watermelon, given the colors that Kanzi chose.”

However, researchers say that viewing Watermelon through the rich social situation in which the painting was completed – over slices of watermelon shared with his mother, Matata; siblings Elikya and Maisha; and nephew Nyota – the art may suggest something more.

CATHAY, De Nederlandse Vertaling

Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can't be true, let's find out what is true.

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language...

Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked that Aborigines were mathematically precise in thinking about their societies. This was his conclusion in his elegant formal analysis of the complex subsection systems they used for the calculating of correct marriages. For decades after he made this pronouncement, other anthropologists tried to find an all-encompassing formal system that might unite all categories through which Aboriginals thought about their social relationships. David McKnight's fundamental contribution to Aboriginal studies was to recognise that such a feat was impossible, for the Aborigines did not have, nor recognise, such an integrated model of society.

It was only if one examined a single dimension of their categorisation of relationships, as Lévi-Strauss did, that one could find, in the purely formal sense, an ordering that was precise and mathematical. Rather, as McKnight disclosed, for Aborigines, one set of rules, linked to one way of ordering social relationships, such as their sub-section systems, often enough contradicted the next. In real life Aborigines daily debated and argued over which set of obligations should prevail, for each classification carried its own individual perspective. Two people could be related through genealogy in one way, and through section terminology in another. Their social life could not be reduced to a formal principle of order, for it was not mathematical unity they privileged, but ambiguity, and complexity. Lévi-Strauss, in admiration, came to embrace McKnight's solution.

The Lardil people always played with perspective. They used three different languages, each of which allowed subtly different ways of understanding and arguing over their environment and world of kinspeople. Even when all three languages made the same distinction, they presented different information, for instance relevant to hunting, but perhaps not to gathering, or ritual. Their symbolism of decorative art provided a fourth "language" through which to view and judge the world.

...

He showed irrefutably that complex abstract ideas can be expressed in ways other than spoken language. He described dance for Lardil people as religious thought in action. Through dance and body decoration, Lardil could express in an instant, or in a series of movements, a number of contradictory statements, thereby overcoming the straitjacket of spoken language.

Lardil recognised David McKnight as a great hunter, and a dancer of the dreamtime. Eventually he became a prized elder and close kinsman. In appreciation of his great interest in their lives, they gave him the totemic name "Boora-rung-ee" - "the man who asks why" - and, sadly, in later years, he became recognised as the sole remaining "Keeper" ("speaker") of Demiin, their language of dreamtime ritual.