A quick mistranslation here from the astonishing Golden Age Spanish writer Luis de Góngora y Argote. This is not especially typical of his work, as I understand it, which ranged across many genres and was wildly influential in his day and arguably to the present day. I hope to return to add a bit more about my thoughts on de Góngora later when I have the time.
Meanwhile, I present here my mistranslation of one of his most popular lyric poems, an indisputably true piece of profundity and clarity that is probably best known in English via this spectacular version recorded by Dead Can Dance. You can listen to their version here, and then decide how badly my mistranslation compares.
When You Hope for Flutes, You Get Whistles
Fortune grants us things according to no rules. When you ask for whistles you get flutes. When you ask for flutes, you get whistles.
Honours and wealth walk habitually down many strange pathways. To some Fortune gives great presents, but to others she grants robes of shame. When you hope for whistles, you get flutes. When you hope for flutes, you get whistles.
Sometimes she steals the hut and plough from the finest goatherd, and for whichever one she fancies the lamest goat will bear two kids. When you foresee whistles, it’s flutes. When you foresee flutes, it’s whistles.
Because a young guy in a village who takes only one egg will swing in the sun for it while another walks past freely bearing a hundred thousand crimes. When it should be whistles, it’s flutes. When it should be flutes, it’s whistles.
Turgut Uyar was of the same generation of İkinci Yeni (Second New) poets as Sezai Karakoç, whom I previously mistranslated. Their movement’s voices functioned like a kind of mini-modernist revolution in Turkish poetry beginning in the 1950s or so, introducing imagism, more vernacular language and a kind of domestic intimacy to the tradition.
Uyar himself was from an Ankara military family and grew up in a suburb of Istanbul. He attended military school as his father had, and joined the army again in his father’s footsteps. His family suffered somewhat because his father had refused to join in the War of Independence in Ankara, choosing instead to stay with his family. Uyar claimed to see both sides of the argument.
As a public servant, he spent his early adult life moving around from post to post, serving both in the far east near Georgia and on the Black Sea coast, locations which inform and appear in his earliest work. He married young and had three daughters with his first wife Yezdan Şener, before divorcing her to remarry Tomris Uyar (nee Gedik), a prominent and influential writer and translator from Istanbul.
For Tomris it was also a second marriage, the first having ended soon after the tragic death of a child. She was admired by a number of other writers in their social circle, which caused quite a lot of insecurity and anxiety for Turgut at times. Yet they had a son and remained together until his death from cirrhosis in 1985.
In one of his better-known poems, this sense of anxiety in love comes to the fore. The self-knowledge that his attachment is ‘broken’ in no way lessens his attachment. If anything it reinforces his resolve – not to change how he feels or attempt to fix it – but to live within his flaws, perhaps out of habit, perhaps stubbornly, but mostly out of fear that fixing it would serve only to break it further.
Uyar accepts his brokenness, even revels in it, and at the same time accepts that perhaps he ought not to. Yet within this cracked exterior is a very pure emotion which he frantically wishes to preserve, that of the love he bears for his wife. She functions as the operating centre of his existence, wherein even time is silenced. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a relationship, but Tomris seems mostly to have tolerated it.
My Heart is a Broken Clock
Everyone thinks you are you without even knowing that you aren’t really yourself, aren’t really you. As I pass by, I would say, when they ask me the time; it is “her past her” o’clock. No one understands what I mean. They say, you never fixed that clock of yours. They never ask whether I want to have it fixed.
My heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.
I can stop time in my heart, because without you it passes, and the hour hand resents the minute hand. If this broken clock ever started working, it would be the death of me. You should know that if the hour hand passed the minute hand my heart would give out. So at least let’s leave it broken.
Because my heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.
Yes, it’s another, perhaps overdue, (mis)translation. There have been others which I didn’t feel did justice to their progenitors, so it’s taken this long to produce one I was prepared to release into the wild. I really wanted to keep Pasolini’s own word solitude, not least because my favourite football stadium is also curiously called by that name. But it’s clear from the subject matter that what he’s discussing isn’t some kind of autonomous security so much as its opposite, a loneliness even within a crowd, and even when that crowd has an overtly amatory intent.
Pasolini, it is no secret to reveal, was an ardent, one might say addicted, pursuer of impersonal sex, especially among the back streets of Rome where, in the 1970s, such activity from a famous gay man could easily provoke a dangerous response. Indeed, it is generally considered, except by some conspiracists, that this is the way by which he met his horrific and premature end.
The poem I think speaks for itself, even when muffled and garbled by my mistranslation. There is little requirement for exegesis here, except perhaps in relation to the very final phrase, fratelli dei cane, which taken literally means brothers of dogs.
Decades on from Pasolini’s demise, I think he might appreciate the new acerbic allusion this phrase has accrued with the ascent of the right-wing Fratelli D’Italia party to rule in Italy. Their political opponents have, on occasion, used this as a term of abuse. It may even be the case that they are overtly quoting Pasolini. Solitudine is not, after all, an obscurely known text in Italy.
And if not this poem, it may be that they reference instead Pasolini’s Lettera del traduttore, or ‘translator’s note’ as we might say in English that he wrote to explain and introduce a (mis?)translation of his own – that of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The whole letter is worth reading from the point of view of anyone interested in mistranslation or indeed translation. As this academic article indicates, it revolves around a central metaphor of a translator as a dog gnawing and worrying at a bone. Translators therefore are a kind of fratelli dei cane, he suggests.
Solitudine gives us another more personal meaning for that phrase, however, one embedded in the risky sexual practices he sought on those dangerous back streets of Rome in the years of lead, when political extremists like the Red Brigades and their right-wing equivalent, not to mention various mafias, brought continual terror to the country, a terror only compounded for a famous gay man in overt pursuit of anonymous sex in a devoutly Catholic nation in dark, windy, trash-filled alleys.
Pasolini captures the risk and the addiction, that such pursuit held for him, but also the inherent hollowness it left inside. I hope I have managed to convey a sense of his words, partly a confession but also a kind of mental dérivethrough his own sexuality.
Mostly I’ve preserved his somewhat unorthodox orthography. Finally, I am happy to accept the status he anointed both of us with, that of a brother to the dogs. I have gnawed at the bone of his poem as he chewed at the Oresteia. I hope that I have not disgraced him.
Loneliness (mistranslated from Solitudine, by Pier Paolo Pasolini)
You have to be really strong to love loneliness; you need good, strong legs and extraordinary resilience; you can’t risk colds and flus and sore throats; you shouldn’t fear theft or murder; if you must stroll throughout the afternoon, even throughout the night, you need to know how to do it without thinking; there’s nowhere to sit; it’s some kind of winter; with a wind that cuts through the wet grass, through the damp and muddy stones and rocks; nowhere can comfort be found, there’s no doubt about that, and besides, there’s a whole day and night ahead with no responsibilities, no limits at all.
Sex is just an excuse. No matter how many encounters there may be - even in winter, when the roads are abandoned to the wind, among the expanse of trash piling up against distant buildings, there are many – they’re still only moments of loneliness; warmer and more alive is the kind body which anoints you then departs, whereas the lover who deserts you is colder and more deadly; this is what fills you with joy, like a miracle wind, not the innocent grin or shady arrogance of those who then depart; carrying away their youth, so enormously young; and in this way it’s inhuman because it leaves nothing behind, or rather, it leaves only the same mark in every season.
A boy with his first lovers is nothing less than the fertility of the whole world.
And the world comes to him like this, appearing and disappearing, like a shapeshifter. Everything else remains the same, but you could wander through half the city and never find it again; the act is over, repeating it becomes a ritual. And so loneliness grows bigger even if a whole mob was waiting for their turn: the disappearances grow – leaving is fleeing – and the next one looms over this one like a duty, a sacrifice to the death wish.
But as time passes, fatigue makes itself felt, especially just after dinner time, yet for you nothing changes: you just about manage not to scream or cry; and it would be serious if it weren’t just fatigue, and maybe a little hunger. Huge, because that would mean that your desire for loneliness could not be more satisfied, so what’s waiting for you if something no one calls loneliness is the true loneliness, the kind you could never accept?
There’s nothing in the world you could eat or drink, no possible satisfaction that’s worth this endless walking through these poor streets, where you have to be both strong and disgraced, a brother to the dogs.
It’s been a while since my last (mis)translation. Not for the first time, I have traduced a Brazilian.
Leda Beatriz Abreu Spinardi (often known by the mononym Ledusha), is a poet, translator and journalist. This poem comes from her self-published second collection Risco no Disco (‘Scratches on the Record’), which first appeared in 1981 and was republished in 2016. Risco no Disco also later became the title of her poetry column in the Folha de Sao Paolo newspaper in the late 1990s.
This collection was the one that made her name, and characterised her, and perhaps a generation of young urban Brazilian women who were emerging from the Seventies towards the equal rights they would finally achieve with the Citizen’s Constitution of 1988.
Ledusha’s poetry, both feminist and feminine, reflected a women’s perspective within the movement of marginais poets and musicians who came of age and defined a generation in the Eighties.
Reticence
my love
away from you
I come upon disrespectful poems
away from you
my desire destroys doors
and quotations
away from you
I cover myself
with such mischief
you could only compare it
to how unfaithful
some metaphors can be.
This holiday period is an especially difficult one for many people, who will look up into the cold sky not in expectation of Santa Claus, but in despair. From wartorn Ukraine to the cost of living crisis in Europe, many people are suffering in ways that seemed unthinkable only a year ago.
This night, the seventh night of Hanukkah and the night before Christmas, pay a thought for those who are living insecurely and losing hope. There are many of them. All we have is each other, ultimately. Alas, some of us do not even have that. Here is the story of one such man, Maximilian Bern.
Maximilian Bern, (born Bernstein), was a Jewish German writer who died during the hyperinflation which brought the Weimar Republic to an end almost a century ago, in 1923.
He had been born in 1849 in Ukraine, in Kherson, where his father was a doctor. But then as now, people were leaving Ukraine, and Maximilian relocated with his mother to Vienna after his father died. Though the family fortune was lost, Maximilian’s first novel Auf Schwankem Grunde (“On Shaky Ground”), made his name, and he became a freelance poet, writer and novelist thereafter.
Bern is alas not much read today.
He lived for a couple of years in Paris, and for a time he was married to the renowned actress Olga Wohlbrück, who is now regarded as Germany’s first female movie director. She later left him for a playwright. However, until soon before his death in 1923, he lived an affluent life of artistic renown in Berlin.
In 1904, he published a collection of poems called Die zehnte Muse (“The Tenth Muse”), in which we may read two of his poems which now seem disturbingly prophetic. These are On a Dead Track, and Vagabond Song, which I have lovingly mistranslated below.
What do they appear to prophecy? His own death, which appears almost as a footnote or an aside in Frederick Taylor’s 2013 history The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class. Taylor had borrowed the anecdote about Bern’s death from a book by Otto Friedrich entitled Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the Twenties, wherein on page 126 we hear briefly about Bern’s fate.
Hyperinflation had destroyed Maximilian’s savings as it had so many others, and aged in his seventies, he was in no position to restore the family fortune a second time. He withdrew them all – over 100,000 marks – and spent the entirety of his wealth on a subway ticket, all he could now purchase. After riding one last time around the city, Bern withdrew to his apartment and starved to death.
It’s been a while since I last published a mistranslation, so here’s The Iceberg, mistranslated from the poem by the late great Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski. It’s not the first of his I’ve egregiously mishandled. Regular readers may recall this travesty from earlier this year.
Having now done damage to his work twice, I will release Leminski from the clutches of this project and seek other subjects elsewhere. You, however, are advised to go and read as much of his poetry as possible.
When I started doing this (mis)translations thing, I promised myself that certain poets were off limits. I drew up a list of them, poets who deserved better than to have their words manhandled out of shape and into poor English by me.
Lorca was, of course, one of them.
But I cracked in the vicious heat the other day while looking at the Puglian landscape just as he must have looked at the selfsame landscape in Spain, and suddenly realising, only one man has ever captured what I’ve seen here.
So, I am sorry, Federico Lorca.
Land without Song
Blue sky
and yellow field.
Blue mountain
and yellow field.
Across the roasted plain
an olive tree is walking.
An olive tree
alone.
And having broken the vow, one sin leads to another of course. So I decided to own the fault, and reached for a long-loved Constatine Cavafy poem which, like the Lorca one above, has already been perfectly well translated into English by poetry translators expert in the work of these authors themselves.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. In fact, it flies in the face of the original idea of the (mis)translations project. Perhaps what will happen sooner or later is these two texts will quietly vanish from the internet some late night and never appear in the resulting volume. In which case, “enjoy” them while you can, I guess. Their mere existence is precarious and ambivalent.
After all, I didn’t want trouble, and I didn’t want to do the big names like Lorca or Cavafy anyway because there are specialist poetry translators who spend all their lives on those guys. I wanted to do like the B or C division voices, people who don’t often get translated.
And why MIStranslate them? Because I’m not one of those specialist poetry translators. But I am an avid reader, and sporadic writer, of poetry. And additionally, I’m singularly untalented at languages. My children are multilingual, but I have journalist’s command of foreign languages – ie the basic thirty phrases one needs to survive, in about seven or eight tongues that I’ve had reason to use in the past.
Being fully truthful, I’m probably only really capable of assessing a translation of poetry that moves between French and English. And I’ve NEVER seen Shakespeare or Yeats properly translated into French. Likewise, there has never been a remotely satisfactory translation of Baudelaire into English.
Your mileage may vary. You may perhaps utterly adore some of these translations. And that’s okay, a mere matter of difference in taste. But can you honestly say that the original is FULLY communicated in even the best of translations? That NOTHING is missing? No nuance, no context, no wordplay, no rhyme scheme or echo?
You know, it sometimes almost makes me angry, even when it’s someone like Voltaire or François-Victor Hugo (son of the author of Les Miserables) who translates Shakespeare. Why? Because so much is missing. So much is simply impossible to translate.
Hence the (mis)translations project. The point is that I don’t know any of these languages. I don’t speak them. I don’t read them for the most part. I am reliant on a range of dictionaries, online and in print, as well as pre-existing translations and advice from native-speaking friends, in order to produce these works.
That was the point, to prove that is all poetry is ultimately untranslatable. It cannot be translated, only creatively (mis)translated. The term is therefore an apology to the poets themselves, and the entire project an act of deliberate and conscious (and conscientious) failure from the get-go.
Anyhow, digression aside, I departed from my original plan by (mis)translating Lorca, and compounded the sin by then (mis)translating Cavafy. Since I have shared one sin with you, I might as well make you complicit in the other too:
