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Happy hour: notes on the translation of two poems by Pia Tafdrup

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by Thomas A. Kennedy

Shortly after I emigrated to Denmark, curiosity about the country s poetry turned me into an amateur translator. My knowledge of Danish was insufficient to allow full enjoyment of the original; I had to try to approximate in English a feel for a poem. Sometimes I made mistakes. Once, I forwarded a flawed translation to one of Denmark's greatest poets, Thorkild Bjornvig. Characteristically kind and unflappable, he responded that my translation was fine except for one thing--the subject of the poem was not a "fox" (raev in Danish) but a "raven" (ravn).

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Since then, my Danish has improved, and I am more exacting about the translation process; I have learned the inevitability of what the excellent Dutch-English translator Stacey Knecht meant when she said, "To be a good translator you have to put yourself second." No mean task for one accustomed to originating texts.

No matter how hard you try, no matter how closely you liaise with the poet, perhaps something is always lost in the translation. But with luck, some small gain might also slip in to compensate, at least partially, for the loss, and with work, intuition and inspiration, the spirit, the experience, the power of a poem can be carried through.

Early on, I was taken by the poetry of Pia Tafdrup, by the power of her images--butchered hares bleeding onto newspapers; dreams in which books are mirrors; the song of birds that cut the pages of a day; a scene of chimpanzees contemplating a stream while a crowd of human spectators try to distract them; a mother's hand guiding that of her child as it holds a pencil; lines of sensual spirituality in which communication between man and woman comprises both a "dark language" and a "white fever" and a merging of souls. I have followed her work for some fifteen years, interviewed her, heard her read and speak, and cheered when she was selected in 2000 for the Nordic Literature Prize, the highest honor a poet of the five Nordic countries can receive. And during my years in Denmark, I have enjoyed the challenge of transporting a number of her poems into English.

Translating these two poems of respectively, 32 and 34 lines generated 70 pages of drafts and notes, more than a dozen e-mails to and from the poet and consulting with another poet when neither Pia nor I were content with a word, four e-mails to the publisher, three faxes, and three extended telephone conferences with Pia to discuss the final draft--not to mention the paperwork for the funding application. Then, the first telephone call I received on my new phone after changing residences at the end of the process, was from Pia on the eve of the translation deadline, for a final discussion of the graphic set-up. Even the graphics of a poem change in the movement from one language to another. The graphics can be intrinsic to the drawing of breath--and what else is poetry but the arrangement of breath?

Some lines of the originals called for direct discussion with the poet, while others crossed the borders of our respective mother tongues with little or no discussion. With the title of the poem "Notice" (Danish, Varsel), for example, I regret that the sound of the English lacks the auditory strength of the Danish word, but it does have an enhanced second layer of meaning which the perhaps more literal "warning" does not convey. An extended discussion with Pia about the Danish line "for at tankerne sammen kan omfatte det" smiled at the English draft of "so that our thoughts can unite to comprehend ..." "Comprehend" is close to "omfatte" but bears an intellectual sense which seems out of place in what is essentially a love poem. An alternative, "contain," carries an irrelevant sense of stopping or reducing rather than expanding or merging. So I consulted a third person, e-mailing the American poet Rick Mulkey for advice. A day later, he had come up with "embrace"--another one of the meanings of omfatte and clearly "le mot juste," enhancing the implications of the Danish word. An unusual aspect of Rick's having produced the right word is that he knows no Danish and could not likely have known that "embrace" is in fact one of the possible translations; he found the right word by contemplating my groping description of what we were after. With the exact word found, I wonder that I didn't come up with it myself--another aspect of translation, the little blindspots the translator must be alert to.

It took me three readings of the Danish original fully to recognize the extent to which it is a love poem, about an act of love in the fullest sense, the multi-levelled joining of two to where the walls of their souls merge. I presume that is because Pia did not want the poem to be "easy" in the manner that the phrase "love poem" seems to suggest. And that perhaps gives another level to its title--the "notice" cum "warning" cum "omen" of the original title, Varsel. The love of this "love poem" is hard-won, an effort to surrender territory, a disappearance of "oneness" in a "depth of light," not a "little death" so much as a more "embracing" act.

Happy hour: notes on the translation of two poems by Pia Tafdrup

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by Thomas A. Kennedy

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