Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.34 (Fall - Winter / automne - hiver, 2000) 447-49
Haunting Hedonism of Sound
Mihai
Eminescu, Poezii alese/Selected Poems. Translations by Adrian George
Sahlean; preface by Dumitru Radu Popa. Bucharest: Univers, 2000; 150 pp.; ISBN:
973340747x (hbk.)
It
couldn’t help but be an exercise in fair complexity: the translation of Eminescu
into English is implicitly an exercise in alienation. However, investing heavily
into the figura of this late romantic (“National Poet,” all right?)
is a favorite pastime of Romanian culture. It also is its chief claim to that
superlative realism that aestheticizes nationalism unto the sacred. In the
hottest nationalistic cauldrons of that culture it is held that Eminescu is
“the most complete man of Romanian culture,” and even that “the 21st century
will either be Eminescian or it won’t be at all.” Charged with such a limpy
array of historical responsibilities
that the duty to beauty did and does impose on his her(m)itage, Eminescu is
supposed to be acidly defaced in translation. Thus, the task of his translator
proves to be as hard as matter: he’s to betray text and country. On the other
tongue, this “untranslatable” poet translates well, in the sense in which
the loss of sublimity can be tamed and retained beautifully. One prime example
is the glossy “Glossa” (1883), a text which has elicited championships of
“this-sounds-so-good-in-English-too” versions. Adrian George Sahlean joins
the club, en maître:
Time
goes by, time comes along. / All is old and all is new; / What is right and
what is wrong, / You must think and ask of you; / Have no hope and have no
fear, / Waves that rise can never hold; / If they urge or if they cheer, / You
remain aloof and cold.
Translation
is a hellish work, thus not devoid of the pleasure of choosing – ad
infinitum, as the monolingual St. Augustin would have it. Once the code of
trans-lation is found, once the music in-between takes over both choice and the
meanness of meaning, sense begins to flow as freely as language allows. I suggest that such poems are not translated
but “translating”: they become in the in-betweenness between source and target;
unlike both Zeno’s arrow and the corporate thought of the arriviste, they float
Mozart-like. This music’s accomplished task overcomes the translator; it also
overcomes the readers, no longer pressed to claim the authorship of their
reading: to poems in read, readers in love.
Sahlean
has chosen the primacy of music; while loyally and almost flawlessly rewriting
Eminescu’s prosody, he veils the challenges of translation under the effortlessness
of smooth. This is fraught with the dangers of “mere sounding” that [end
of page 447] Eminescu himself was warning against: the reader could easily
fall into the melopoea which renders meaning useless, thus offering the faint
purposelessness of a puppet-mirror. Yet, there is redemption in this danger:
wearing itself off in the repetitive patterns characteristic of Eminescu’s
prosody, the pleasure of sound comes to haunt the readers and force them on
the escape route from meaninglessness. This is the hope of meaning that Sahlean’s
virtuos(o), soft versions offer as meaning: one is to – as if in protest –
salute their emergence. Blushing and the sublime don’t translate; but the
subtle reaction to both – melancholy – does, as in Sahlean’s version of “Peste
vîrfuri” (Over treetops, 1883):
Over
treetops, white moon wanders / Forest boughs shake gentle leaf / Sounds a horn
with distant grief / Alders bow their heads asunder. // Far away and even
farther, / Softer still, its fading breath / Soothing with a dream of death /
My soul’s unrelenting ardor. // Why your music from me sever / When I turn to
you, forlorn – / Will you sound again sweet horn / For my soul’s enchantment,
ever?
Sahlean
is the latest in a line-up of notable translators from the “local universalism”
of Eminescu’s Romanian into today’s oecumene of AmerEnglish. Rehearsing
imperfections which call attention to their virtual elimination in song, he
mutes them after polishing repetitions, and chooses wisely to let music choose
for him. He takes the implacable defeat of translation – gracefully; grace,
thus, awaits the reader. This is how he renders, most memorably, the stanzas
telling of the Evening Star’s flight through space to find the Maker and ask to
be released from cold im-mortality:
A
canopy of stars, below; / Above, a starry dome: / An endless lightning seemed
to flow / And through the heavens roam. // And in the dark that streamed around,
/ As on the first day’s morn, / He glimpsed the chaos vales unbound / From
where the light is born. // He flies aswim through seas of light / With love
on wings of thought... / Until all perishes from sight, / Until all turns
to naught; // He goes where there’s no bound or bourn, / Nor is there eye
to know, / And time itself from voids uptorn / Struggles in vain to grow;
// For there is naught, yet it is there / A thirst that draws him on, / A
depth that lingers, like the snare / Of blind oblivion...
The
sorts of language draw high and near for any translator of “Luceafarul” (“The
Evening Star,” or “Lucifer,” 1883), the one hundred-stanza poem offered as
the standard and Romantic expression of the impossible love between the star
and a [end of page 448] maiden. Petre Grimm translated, à l’ancienne,
its first and fairy-tale-like stanza, as:
There
was, as in the fairy tales, / As ne’er in the time’s raid, /
There was, of famous royal blood / A most beautiful maid.
Corneliu
M. Popescu, Eminescu’s teenage translator, renders it with British breath:
Once
on a time, as poets sing / High tales with fancy laden, /
Born
of a very noble king / There lived a wondrous maiden.
Sahlean’s
“no-hiccup, non-nonsense” version runs:
...
Now, once upon enchanted time, / As time has never been, /
There
lived a princess most divine / Of royal blood and kin.
The
bilingual reader, particularly the diasporic intellectual to whose class the
now New England-based Sahlean belongs, can appreciate that these translations have the
energy to build a fictional country for their own dwelling. Heidegger thought
that language is the house of being (it might look so from the unmoved, Archimedean
standpoint of myth-ridden Black Forest), but for an expatriate like Cioran, la
patrie is a tent pitched in the desert. The tent is made of words, no less,
and this country on the move, this transatlantic movement of people and texts,
gives the reader the leisure to repose in between. In this floating country no
Wronglish could be spoken. Sahlean’s versions collapse the small infinite that
separates emigration from immigration with the large one that looms between
source and target. Translation here is a sign of the easy age where
metaphorical exile and actual commuting take over the dramatic exile of those
hard times that make up the human fabric of futures past. Translation here
becomes a faked exile: a self-effacing rendition of Eminescu’s “deportation in
being.” When dis/hardening of meaning, empty words bear lovely music.
Calin-Andrei Mihailescu
University
of Western Ontario