Burton Raffel’s Second Try at Translation: A Half-Century and Counting

It’s time to announce a new series of guest essays at Beatrice, one that I’ve been looking forward to launching for some time now: “In Translation” will give readers an opportunity to hear from the men and women who help bring a wider selection of international literature to English-language readers. Sometimes they’ll talk about their experiences working on a particular text, and sometimes—as in this essay by Burton Raffel, who has created a new version of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for the Modern Library—they’ll share broader reflections on the art of translation. Raffel, for instance, lets us in on the origins of his impulse to translate the great works of other languages, from early classics like Beowulf and Don Quixote to comparatively recent fare like The Red and the Black… and why he abandoned that goal the first time around. (And, luckily for us, what got him back in the game.)

I don’t think many translators think they were born to that trade. Most of the translators I know, or know anything about, have started in different directions and, at some indefinable point, have slid sideways and, much to their surprise, begun translating.

That’s both true of me and also false. I heard a lot of languages, in my parents’ house—Russian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Polish, Spanish. But these were their languages, not mine. I was, I felt, 100 percent American. After all, I had been born here, and they had not.

But when I started to study French, at age ten or eleven, I fell head over heels in love with it. I talked French to myself, silently, as I walked to and from school. This was my language: I even liked its grammar, though I hated ordinary grammar lessons, parsing dull English sentences with stupid, meaningless labels. Lying in bed, in the dark, I talked French to myself. If God spoke a human tongue, I used to say, it would have to be French.

I studied both French and Spanish, in high school, adding German when I got to college. My introduction to French literature, as a university freshman, was epochal. I liked English poetry; a few years earlier I had belonged to a teenage Chinese poetry-writing club. But the sheer sound of French verse seemed to me like the voices of angels. “Il pleure dans mon coeur, comme il pleut sur la ville” (Verlaine)—or a three-word phrase in Baudelaire’s “Hymne à la beauté,” five syllables, not one of which could be sounded in English. My twelfth-grade French teacher, back in 1943-44, had been a Parisienne, stranded in New York because of World War II. She spoke to us only in French; she drilled us in reshaping our mouths to handle those stunning French sounds. I was incredibly lucky, though I’m not sure I then knew it.

I was writing reams of adolescent poetry in English, I was reading modern American poets, so in my freshman year I tried to translate some of that gorgeous French into my native language. The wonderful professor who introduced me to the great French poets of the 19th and 20th centuries would smile, pleasantly, and shake her head. She was right, I had no idea what I was doing, except that I knew my translations were not much good. I gave it up.

When I was twenty-five, working on a PhD in English (which I never completed), I was bowled over by the hard sweetness of Old English (Anglo Saxon) poetry. I tried to translate a singularly beautiful elegy, “The Wanderer,” trying to match, phrase for phrase, O.E.’s jarring, melodic music. What a waste of time. My attempted translation sounded more like hail on a tin roof.

At twenty-seven, living in Indonesia and teaching English to Indonesian teachers of English, I went back to writing poetry. I didn’t like my stuff very much, but couldn’t find a way around my limitations. OK, I said to myself: if I can’t write good poetry, I can at least keep my poetic craft alive (that was how I talked, back then), and the best way I could think of was translation. Not French, because I wasn’t good enough to handle that, but maybe O.E., which had until then been translated only by scholars who wrote in academic dust. O.E. poetry was good; I knew the language; so why not? But the real secret was that I at last understood that a relatively straightforward but melodic English version—not even attempting to imitate a poetic method fifteen hundred years dead—was the right road.

It was. My little book, Poems From the Old English, was adored by university press editors, but stamped on by scholar reviewers, lost in their world of word-for-word translation. The book was thus rejected by forty-three publishers, over a period of five years. The last editor suddenly asked me if I would consider revision to meet scholarly complaints. I replied that if they showed the manuscript to a scholar who knew something about poetry, and he said I needed revision, I’d make an attempt. The scholar was found, he said the book was 98% fine as it was, and proposed a few quite acceptable changes. I sent his letter to the editor and got back an extremely plain telegram: “the presses run.” The book appeared in 1960. I did not know it, but my career as a translator had begun.

Not that I confine myself to translating. After Indonesia, I went to the Yale Law School, where I really learned what words were all about. They were bullets, and had to be treated with that kind of wary care. I have practiced law, and worked as a magazine editor, and (more than anything else) as a university English teacher. And I have written stories and novels and seven printed collections of poetry; I have written books about poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and edited and annotated the poetry of people like Milton and Shakespeare. And I have gone on translating, still engaged in hectic warfare with literary scholars, most of whom have learned nothing much about poetry, in the last fifty years, and know absolutely nothing about how poetry can be translated. I have written three books about translation; scholars don’t read them. So I go on repeating the mantra of translation as I know it: “A translation is not the original.” A translation is based upon, and drawn from the original, but it can never be the original. And therefore translations need to be re-done every fifty of a hundred years, because they become “dated,” while the original, if it is strong enough, is irreplaceably what it has been.

I have not said a word about Chaucer. But anyone who reads my new version of The Canterbury Tales will see that Chaucer and Chairil Anwar, and Chrétien de Troyes’ romances, and the unknown authors of Das Nibelungenlied and El Cantar de Mio Cid, and my new version of Dante’s Commedia (which may not appear until 2010) all end up about as different as are each of the originals. The worst thing anyone could say to me, about my translations, would be that this one sounds just like that one! There are thirty or forty books of them, by now, and no one has ever said it.

17 November 2008 | in translation |