Jeffrey Mehlman

Reminiscences of the Translation Seminar

The pleasure—and honor–of conducting the Translation Seminar in the spring of 1997 prompted me to invite as speakers a number of distinguished guests to the Seminar who had established credentials in the practice or theory of translation, but were in fact known for achievements—quite frequently in poetry and criticism—beyond translation per se. The program read as follows:

Arthur Goldhammer on “Sculpting with Words: How to Do Things with Style”; Christopher Ricks, “Beckett’s Allusions, English and French”; Norman Shapiro, “Traduttore seduttore: On the Art and Pleasure of Translation”; Gregory Rabassa, “If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents”; Harry Zohn, “Jest, Satire, Irony: Translating Kraus and Tucholsky”; Jeffrey Henderson, “Grace and Gall: Aristophanes and His Modern Audiences;” Richard Howard, “The Inside of the Outside: Stendhal, Proust, and Others”; Paul West, “ ‘Bless Thee Bottom! Thou art translated!’ Grace Notes of a Bottom Feeder”; Linda Asher: “Kundera: In French into English”; George Steiner, “After After Babel”; Lawrence Venuti, “Translation: Writing a Minor Literature”; and Richard Wilbur, “Voltaire, Villon, and Others.”

Twenty years after the fact, I shall restrict myself to recollections of what made the seminar memorable for me. First, perhaps, was the discovery of the sheer delight of examining differently rhymed versions of individual rhymed poems. The net effect was akin to that of a crossword puzzle with a variety of solutions to the same prompts. Valéry’s “Hélène” and Rilke’s “Panther” were ideal specimens for such an exercise, but looking through my notes, I am struck by the fact that the thrill that remained with me was a fragment on the tower of Babel \from the Roman street poet Giuseppe Belli as recast by Miller Williams and Anthony Burgess:

Williams:

But God has ears; he split his sides at this.

And all of a sudden their tongues stuck, they stammered.

Instead of making a tower they made a mess.

Nobody knew Italian anymore.

When one of the men said, ‘Hand me a hammer,’

The other one handed him a two-by-four.

And Burgess:

They’d just got level with the Pope’s top floor

When something in their mouth began to give:

They couldn’t talk Italian any more.

The project died in this linguistic slaughter.

Thus if a man said: ‘Pass us that there sieve,’

His mate would hand him up a pail of water.

The pleasures of effecting a confrontation of those two versions of Belli have remained with me—almost as a miniature of the thrill that a consideration of translation can afford.

But if Belli (via Burgess vs. Williams) provided a micro-instance of translation at its most tonic, the macro-instance, which I discovered in the course of the semester (and had not even known of before preparing a reading list for the seminar) was Tony Harrison (vs. Richard Wilbur vs. Robert Lowell) as translators of Racine’s Phèdre. The discovery of Harrison’s transposition to the British raj (i.e., nineteenth century India) of the Racine transposition of Euripides was—for members of the seminar—the revelation of the semester. This was particularly the case to the extent that for me it was Wilbur—via Racine but also Molière–who represented the gold standard in translation. And it was so much the case that I found it hard to resist asking Wilbur, when he came to the seminar, what he thought of Harrison, his memorable response, as I recall it, was: “Let’s put it this way: Harrison’s Phèdre was a lot better than one would have hoped.”

Wilbur’s wit—he was, after all talking about translating Voltaire–yielded another line that has remained with me (and others present). The question had to do with what it was like writing lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (Voltaire again!). He answered that the only way to rein in the composer from tampering with his lyrics was to threaten to cut the strings of his piano if he were ever to do it again…   It was only years later, while writing a memoir that I realized that Wilbur’s line may have stayed with me because poetry’s polemic with music, from the time of an undergraduate thesis on Mallarmé’s ambivalence toward Wagner had remained an enduring subtext of much of my writing over the years…

It was George Steiner, during his lecture of April 11, introduced by Geoffrey Hill, who quite memorably opened up the deeper affinities of translation with interpretation per se, a lesson not lost on the more ambitious members of the seminar. I should probably mention as well that Steiner, who had but recently reviewed my book on Benjamin, was quick to accept my invitation and did so without even inquiring into the fee that he might receive. (It has always been my impression that my subsequent selection to be a University Professor owed more than a little to the fact that it was bruited about around this time that I had lured the legendary Steiner for a relatively modest fee…)

Among the other legends to have come to the seminar that year mention should be made of Christopher Ricks on allusion (in two languages) in Beckett. He had recently finished his Beckett’s Dying Words and left many in the seminar haunted by what he drew from the writer’s insight that language might be “most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused.”  It left me wondering whether I might not have unwittingly or proleptically recast—translated?—Beckett’s thought in a line of my preface to a translation of the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Its thrust was that the way in which Freud was wrong was crucial to the way in which he may have been right (about whatever it was he was right about).

And then the metaphorical charge taken on by “death” in the titles of both Laplanche and Ricks had me thinking of Waiting for Godot. Its structure involves the relation between two distinct kinds of relation: first, Vladimir with Estragon and the paroxysms of “insignificance” to which they are reduced; and second, Pozzo with Lucky as modeled on a flawed (or foiled) version of the master-slave dialectic, what Sartre might have called a non-synthetic unification. Vladimir-Estragon, then, as the unconscious, and Lucky-Pozzo as the narcissistic ego. Leading utimately, as if to capitalize on Ricks’s delving into allusion in Beckett, to Pozzo’s question: “Ne serait-on pas au lieudit la Planche” (100).

There are other recollections of the seminar that year, but it is hard to view them in any other medium that the dispersion in which they occurred: a dinner with Rabassa and Saul Bellow, which saw them both engrossed in identifying the victim of a murder at Schrafft’s on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village during a period in the 1940s when both translator and novelist frequented it…

Harry Zohn, Benjamin’s translator, attempting to capture the Weimar era satirist Tucholsky’s singing style, and the panache with which the late Bob Rothstein rose to Zohn’s challenge to sing the American version, dubbed “Always” by Irving Berlin of a song associated with Tucholsky.

Larry Venuti, the “foreignizer,” arriving to infest the target language with the strangeness of its source. It was a circumstance that found me invoking what was at stake in foreignization with a sports analogy: Schleiermacher goes one-on-one with La Fontaine only to knock himself out in the third round and declare victory.

The most fluent of translators of La Fontaine, Norman Shapiro, relating the experience of the boy stymied in his attempts to figure out the meaning of “fornication,” only to be grabbed by the wrist by an impatient relative, confronted with an evening gown in his mother’s closet, and told: “That’s for an occasion!”

Gregory Rabassa relating the ordeal of Hymie, the immigrant child in New York, who, during a spelling test on his first day in school, is instructed to “spell avoid,” to which he responds: Vich void you vant?”s

Etc.

–Jeffrey Mehlman