Translating the Universal

a review by Nora Delaney

On a lonely mountain somewhere in Russia, there is a boarding school for children with tuberculosis. The school’s head doctor, Snetkov, finds in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain a strange alternate version of his own school on the mountain — the creams and cures, the illnesses and hope. Snetkov is particularly drawn to the image of a blood-red elixir that a woman in Mann’s novel drinks. The image haunts him even as he is disappointed when his attempt to recreate the drink fails. Cures fall short in Snetkov’s world, but he is desperate to capture something of Mann’s magic mountain. Snetkov himself, like the boys at his school, desires the imagination that is both cure and shelter. At one point the doctor urges a young sick boy to find a secret hiding place. When it is safe for the boy to come out again, the school caretaker will blow on his horn “some kind of beautiful signal.” The music of the horn is both strange and exquisite; it pulls at the imagination; it is a kind of Morse code or Braille — a delicious puzzle to be teased out, much like the puzzle of translation.

This “beautiful signal” is extracted (like the blood-red drink) from Andrey Dmitriev’s Turn in the River for the title of the 2010 TWO LINES anthology of world writing in translation. TWO LINES — which has been published annually since 1994, and is edited each year by a different pair of translators — is one of the few American anthologies dedicated to poetry and prose in translation, accompanied by at least some of the original text printed en face. Translations of poems, generally, are accompanied by the original versions in full, and translated stories by the first page of the original text. The TWO LINES anthology is valuable not only because it exposes an American audience to a wide range of world literature — languages and authors that don’t always make it to our bookstores — but also because it provides thoughtful and informative translator’s notes to accompany each piece.

Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is also a thoughtful and rather beautiful collection. Natasha Wimmer, the prize-winning translator of Roberto Bolaño, and Jeffrey Yang, translator, poet, and editor at New Directions Publishing, have selected the prose and poetry for the 2010 anthology. There is a coherence to the collection that holds, despite its length and the range of authors and languages represented. In her introduction, Wimmer considers the collection’s guiding image, the “beautiful signal,” and suggests that when “we read in translation, those signals may come from far away, but they are strong and insistent.”

The signal is universal, and Wimmer’s selection of stories share in this sense of universality — beautiful signals that we recognize no matter what culture or country we hale from or what language we speak. Any reader, for instance, recognizes the yearning for childhood innocence and imagination that both Snetkov and the young boy on the mountain feel. At the same time it is possible to understand — no matter where you are from — how a moment stuck in an elevator with strangers can be inexplicably and unexpectedly beautiful, as does the narrator of Mikhail Shishkin’s “Verily He is Risen” (also from the Russian). In Shishkin’s story, the narrator repeats the word “beautiful” like a mantra to his wife, as if trying to explain something that transcends language.

Just as the sense of Shishkin’s community and communion is universal, so is the desire, longing, and regret in Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Smell.” In this story, translated from Urdu, a young man called Randhir longs for the earthy scent of a low-caste girl he once slept with, even as his beautiful, cultured, and respectable wife lies beside him. Despite Randhir’s marital happiness and his success, the memories of that low-caste girl with her breasts “unblemished and imbued with a strange radiance” — a nameless girl who spent just one rain-soaked night with Randhir — haunt him.

Randhir thinks about the low-caste girl: “just beneath the skin there seemed to be a layer of faint light giving off a spectral glow like how a pond can radiate light from beneath its turgid surface.” The beauty is both familiar and strange. This strangeness returns in Argentinean Samanta Schweblin’s story, “Birds in the Mouth,” about a girl who eats birds alive, much to the consternation of her bemused father; and in the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s works “Whispering Grassfeet” and “Otherness Touched,” which present deliberately alienating and odd images (the “grassfeet” and “otherness” of the titles) that are difficult to fully comprehend. In their alien beauty, many of the stories and poems in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal adhere to the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky’s claim that good art makes things strange so that they can be felt all the more closely. By defamiliarizing the reader, good art makes the stone stony.

There is a careful balance of the alien and the universal in each piece of writing in this anthology, no matter its language or culture of origin. Some languages are over-represented; stories and poems in Russian and Spanish, for instance, as well as other European languages, are common, and readers will be familiar with the excerpt from Lydia Davis’ new translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

The Editors do make an effort to offer languages and cultures less familiar to American readers, though. Yang, with the help of scholar and Uyghur specialist Dolkun Kamberi, includes a selection of Uyghur poets. Despite these poems’ somewhat conspicuous placement at the back of the collection — as if they were an afterthought — Yang asserts that the Uyghur verse forms the “center of the poetry” in Some Kind of Beautiful Signal.

Situated in the middle of Asia and alternately annexed by Russia and China, what is now the Uyghur Autonomous Region in China is a cultural crossroads which a long and rich oral tradition. Yang reproduces a sense of this cultural heritage with his selection of medieval Uyghur quatrains and a facsimile of a page from a Buddhist manuscript, Maitrisimit, alongside politically conscious 20th century verse by Abduhalik Uyghur and Dilber Keyim Kizi. “Uyghurs, my people, wake up, you have slept enough,” Abduhalik Uyghur writes, and Kizi refers to herself as her “motherland’s crazed lover,” claiming “I would rather hang myself with my long braided black hair / than betray my people with empty promises.”

The selection of Uyghur poems, and Yang’s introduction, present both the history and living tradition of Uyghur poetry. The Uyghur verse appeal to the same universality that can be found in the anthology as a whole, and in this sense, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal is particularly wide-ranging. It brings the universal elements of literature into sharp relief. A 20th century American reader, for instance, can appreciate the appeal to knowledge in the 11th century verse of Yusuf Hajib Balasaghuni: “If a learned man puts a stone in his belt / the stone will turn to jade.” Beauty emanates from the humanity of emotions and from the exquisite and precise images used to convey them.

The translators’ notes, of course, add to the sense that these various pieces engage with the wider world and, in particular, with the difficulties of transferring sense and substance from one language to another. Translation is the successful transference of a signal, like an electric current that is “translated” into the light radiating from a lamp. In his translation of German poet Anja Utler’s “for daphne: lamented,” in particular, Kurt Beals deals with the issue of carrying across sense and substance from one language to another. Thematically, Utler’s poem is about translation of a sort: the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree. The meanings of words in the poem shift as well, or contain multiple meanings at once. The challenge for Beals was in taking a word with divergent German meanings — the homophone kiefer, for instance, which can be both pine tree and jaw — and recreating a similar effect in the English text.

“The challenge for the translator,” Beals notes, “is to bring about the metamorphosis of this complex text, with all its multiplicity of meanings, into an English poem with a similar range of connotations.” Beals succeeds, and even manages to capture the sound patterning of the original in his translation. The vowels of “immer,” “glitzern,” and “schwimmt” are re-used on the facing English page in the two lines “unseeing image will, must always, glitter with you, rippled, / dimmer, now skimming: your thanks now — it swims.” Very neatly, the English “dimmer” absorbs the whole of the German “immer” (“always”).

Even flawed translations, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño argues, are valuable. They still bring work to a wider audience. Wimmer, who translated Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, includes in her anthology a non-fiction piece on translation which Bolaño had published in the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias in 2003. In this piece, “Translation is a Testing Ground,” Bolaño presents a manifesto of sorts on art:

How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading it makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.

For Bolaño, the important thing is getting a piece of imaginative art out to as many people as possible, in as many languages as possible. It doesn’t matter if the translation is imperfect; what matters is that a work of literary value be “reread and reinterpreted an imitated in spheres outside” the native language of its composition. Translation is a means of sharing value — sharing ideas, imagination, symbol, myth — to create a worldwide literary dialogue.

This synthesizing and sharing cultural traditions and art is at the heart of Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, and is readily visible in the Chinese poet Xi Chuan’s “Birds,” which brings together a tradition that links birds to the divine: “Legend has it that Zeus transformed himself into a swan to ravish Leda, and that God transformed himself in a dove to procreate with Mary. The Book of Odes says: ‘Mandated by Heaven the dark bird / Alighted to bear Shang.’” Chuan points out how the image of the bird has been translated — carried across — cultures, as has the idea of translation itself: Zeus becomes swan; God becomes dove. The bird goes beyond language, and, as an image reappears throughout the anthology. Birds appear in a very different form in Samanta Shweblin’s “Birds in the Mouth,” and in Bolaño’s final image of the Nightingale. It is as if Wimmer and Yang, in pulling together their anthology, have deliberately drawn together images and stories that “translate” among each other. The bird is the sort of signal that can be read anywhere. The image of a mountain is the same: we start with Snetkov on the mountain, Mann’s magic mountain, and end with Bolaño’s universal mountain. The signal that is both alien and, by that strangeness, universal, is carried on.