How can you avoid self-delusion in translation? It seems like translators fool themselves a lot, that they are not necessarily good readers of their own translations. Their justifications tend to be self-serving. My method is to give myself a grade for each translation, and then work over each poem that is at a "C" level or lower until it is at least a "B," then go on to make sure each is at least an "A-." Even then, I might be fooling myself.

There should be no justifications. If you have to give an explanation, it means something is amiss.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to look at the floor, the other, the ceiling.

On the floor level, you want to make sure there are no flaws caused by misunderstanding the original text. No line that sounds awful in English. If one of the poet's main tools is repetition, don't eliminate the repetitions. First, do no harm; that's the Hippocratic oath of translation.

By getting everything on the floor level, you are basically saying: nothing falls below this point. The translation might still be a C or C+, but all you're really doing is protecting yourself against the translation police, ensuring that nobody will find a howler.

To look at the ceiling provides a different perspective. Is the poem convincing, not as a translation of a putatively great original, but simply on its own terms. At this point it is not enough for a line to be not awful, or a reasonably good way of translating the original. If the floor is more or less fixed, the ceiling is infinite. There is no ceiling, only a sky.

A lot of the ways we think about translation don't make too much sense to me. Do we need a balance between floor and ceiling? No. Once the floor is achieved, we don't have to worry about it any more. Once a translation agrees 95% with what any competent translation would be, the semantic material of the original really doesn't need much more attention.

WARNING; NYT CROSSWORD PUZZLE SPOILER AHEAD



The NYT crossword for Friday, when it wants you to give the opposite of "loco," assumes that you will put "sano." (I know because I just completed the puzzle on line. For some reason it was easier than today's, Thursday's, which I haven't finished yet) The only problem, of course, is that "sano" means healthy, not "sane." The opposite of "loco" should be "cuerdo." It's rare to find a genuine mistake in these puzzles. They are very well edited. I first put "sane" in the box, in the English, then realized I needed an "o" there.

In his lecture on Góngora, Lorca says the poet should be a professor of the five bodily senses, in the following order

"vista, tacto, oído, olfato y gusto"

It's curious. My ordering would be

oído [ear], vista [vision], olfato [smell], with gusto [taste] and tacto [touch] bringing up the rear, roughly tied.

Smell is the sense of memory. Most of taste is really smell anyway. Texture, touch, is important too, but I wouldn't put it second as Lorca did. Lorca who was an excellent musician. I'm definitely in the "De la musique avant toute chose..." camp.

From Garrison Keillor's column

"Should I accept financial advice from someone who uses Me as a subject?" she asked me.

No.

And now I am wondering if the upheaval in finance may not be the result of the raging epidemic of poor spelling we see all around us. .

The field of language seems particularly prone to a kind of "magical thinking." If we only knew how to SPELL then society would be on a proper footing. Yes. I'm sure all the wall street geniuses who gave us the sub-prime mortgage crisis did so because of misspellings. If people didn't say "aint" they woudln't spit on the floor either. Of course, Keillor is a humorist so I'm sure he doesn't mean this idiocy to be taken literally. It's a very literal-minded approach, though.

Pound was especially prone to this kind of magical thinking. He thought certain breakthroughs in usage of language could lead to a better society. We all saw where that led. Orwell too. Why if we just didn't use so much litotis, euphemism, and the passive voice, our political thinking would be cleared up.

Magical thinking, basically, is the idea that we can influence reality through the strict control of largely irrelevant minute particulars. A mistake in the performance of the ritual will make the gods angry. If nobody uses "disinterested" to mean "uniniterested" we will all think clearly ever after. If Bush had paid attention in philosophy class, we wouldn't be in Iraq. For some reason liberal, educated folk are more, not less prone to this kind of magical thinking, especially about language. I hear this kind of crap all the time from people who should know better.

For example, the idea that poets are anti-war because of their unique sensitivity to language and its political manipulation. Then why are the crappy poets anti-war too?

I'm even prone to it myself. I caught myself thinking: if Garrison Keillor had only read Creeley and Silliman instead of Bly and Collins, he wouldn't make that mistake!

I had to overcome it in my work on translation. I was thinking that if translation of Lorca had been better, we wouldn't have had all those cultural misunderstandings, as though a good enough translation would simply abolish the difference between cultures. I don't believe that any more.

The immature writer, afraid of sounding dumb, will sometimes choose a style that masks rather than reveals. Clarity and simplicity can leave the writer feeling too exposed. If the point really is a simple one, state it simply. If it too obvious, then leave it out or frame its necessity.

I read on the AP wires that...

"Obama and President Bush are 10th cousins, once removed, linked by Samuel Hinkley of Cape Cod, who died in 1662."

I guess that makes me cousins with both of them, since I am descended from Samuel Hinkley too, via my paternal grandmother Vera Hinkley Mayhew.

(2)

Like everyone else, I suppose, I'm reading Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, number 2 on my 99 books about music thread. Shostakovich's Stalinist ordeal is harrowing, all the more so because he was, essentially, a Stalinist. Prokofiev comes off as a naive stooge as well.

Books on music end up being books about other things. In this case, the relation of music to politics and larger historical forces.

I'm not reading this as a book about jazz so it doesn't bother me that it is shunted off to one side. There are plenty of books about jazz already. He includes some to complete the picture, but it's not his main focus. If this were your main source for jazz history, you'd be in trouble.

I'm going to have to re-evaluate my position on Sibelius now.

Apparently there were no women composing music in the 20th century. That's the conclusion I've drawn, so far at least. I wish I were in a position to disagree, but my ignorance is astounding. Maybe in the last chapter some women will show up, but that's extraordinarily late when you think that women modernists in literature made a subtantial impact--H.D., Stein, Woolf, etc...

I went to see a reading by John Balaban yesterday, attended by about 12 WashU students plus myself. Some of his observations about translation from the Vietnamese were interesting. Of his own poetry, not much stuck with me. I haven't been feeeling too well--the inevitable let down after turning in the Lorca book to the publisher, so I dozed a little. What I did hear was basically prose poetry of an undistinguished variety, the kind where the story told in the poem might as well have been told using a set of different words. I didn't see what it looked like on the page. It could have been lineated, but what difference would that make? He seemed a sincere, genial guy.

If you invite a poet to the English department to read and not a single faculty member shows up, what does that mean? You should either show up or invite a better class of poets to come. An academic poetry of no interest to academics.

Ten Goals, Some More Realistic than Others

1) Publish the book of poetry.

2) Do the same for book of poetry written in Spanish.

3) Become a truly excellent teacher.

4) Become a really good drummer.

5) Become a truly mediocre clarinet player.

6) Find a way of supplementing income (hint: it won't come from 1-5).

7) Learn to fix a flat tire on the bicycle.

8) Job at better university?

9) Saxophone?

10) Publish another scholarly book with U of C P.

I'm sending the book to the publisher tomorrow. It took about 8 months of writing about two hours a day, and skipping only 3 DAYS during that entire time. Now I will be a full time poet until classes start in August. Of course, there is copy-editing, proofs, permissions, etc...

Separated at birth? (JFK & Juan Ramón's wife Zenobia Camprubí)

Separated at birth? (Celan and Collins)

Some more personal neurology:

Physical Left handedness. But if you asked me to punt a football I would use right foot for example. (By why would you ask me to do that?) Good balance. I learned easily to ride a unicycle, for example. A good typist, with the location of qwerty keyboard "wired" into my fingers. Bad handwriting, fine motor skills are not highly developed. Poor eye-hand coordination for sports, but good indepedence of 4 limbs playing drumset. In short, an interesting mix of clumsiness and coordination.

Sense of Time Relatively elastic. Good estimation of time (guessing what time it is). But some puzzlement about pace of years and months. I couldn't tell you whether something happened 2 or 4 years ago.

Sense of Direction. Good outside. I don't know where North or South is inside a building, unless it's my own house and I think for a minute.

Toleration of pain. I don't really know. I haven't really been in that much physical pain in my life. I tolerate mild discomfort with no problem. For example, I can work in a cold room if I'm concentrating.

Gustatory. Dislike for blandness. I need hot pepper in my food. I like certain combinations: black pepper with garlic. Cilantro and lime.

I drink coffee with nothing in it, even expresso at times with no sugar. I can't take overly sweet things, I loved smoky and pickled flavors.

I can't stand the texture of confectioner's coconut.

Olfactory Nothing too unusual here. I don't like "chemical" smelling smells as a rule. I don't see myself as oriented toward smells per se, though I'm not indifferent to them.

Sleep. I perceive sleep as a kind of "sweetness." I feel half-conscious and times and can take pleasure in being asleep. Dreams are intense but cannot be recalled usually.

What other categories have I forgotten? If I've left something out, at this point, that probably means it's not as significant to me, or that somehow I don't think of it as part of my neurology: brain + nervous system.

I find my time is better for having played drums. I feel the pulse pretty strongly when playing clarinet, even though my drumming pulse itself is not that strong (I thought.) The difference is that in drumming you are playing the beat, whereas playing clarinet with no other instruments you are playing in reference to a pulse that nobody is playing.