Exchange: Pain Not
Bread
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 13:03:21 -0500
From: Andy Patton
Dear J. Mark:
I was forwarded your review of PNB (I think you reversed our name: it's Nash
Stills and Crosby) by Brick Books and was dumbfounded to find that you'd
reviewed our book as a book of translations.
They're not imitations in Dryden's sense. No matter how free, even an
imitation must still have an original which, however loosely, it represents,
e.g. Ovid's Epistles: Dryden distinguishes them from his own work. If our
poems are imitations, you'd have to show that all or most of them are free
English versions of T'ang poems. But they're not.
We do say in the Afterword that "certain poems" (i.e. not all, and we
mention one by name) can thought of as being "in the spirit of Lowell's
'variations' on Montale. I'm assuming that since Lowell called his versions
"Imitations", following Dryden, that this is where you got the imitations
idea.
But the Afterword continues, saying that "Often, however, the poems are
sparked off by what might...best be called a random selection of words and
phrases, i.e. a set of elements scattered throughout the original with no
apparent connection, in the sense of the logic and needs of the original
piece." I don't think it makes sense to speak of translation in any sense,
no matter how wide, if the logic and needs of the original piece aren't
attended to. I think your review agrees, as when you write that "Disregard
for the 'logic and needs' of the original poems will certainly lose you the
name of translator."
There is one actual translation in our book, one attempt to represent
someone else's poem‹in this case, one of Wang Wei's. For that reason, it's
separated from all the other poems by the lengthy Afterword, and that's why
it appears with the original Chinese. We also introduced it explicitly as "a
translation of our own making." If the others were translations, why would
we mark this one off?
There are some poems are tied directly to Chinese poems in the sense of
being very very loose English variants, and hence imitations, so you're
right in some cases. There are two: both are listed in "A Note on Sources."
But that's just two!
For most of the book, neither Kim, nor Roo, nor I would be able to tell you
what the original poem we're supposedly translating is. The sources are a
wide and motley variety of writing: often many lie behind one poem. The
Afterword even states that some of the sources were "critical introductions
to translations of the original Chinese; the varying translations and prose
glosses themselves." Why would anyone translate into English an English
translation? Or a critical introduction to translations? That just doesn't
make sense.
Let me give you one example of what actually takes place in the book. There
are some places where there's a close contact between our writing and an
original poem in Chinese - but without our translating the poem, or even
making an imitation. "Mountains and Rivers", could be taken to be a loose
translation of Du Fu's great "Spring Scene", since ours begins similarly to
his. But if you look at Hawkes' translation, you'll see that Du Fu says that
while mountains and rivers survive, the state is crumbling. Our says the
opposite, that "mountains and rivers ruined by the state/survive, though
barely." Our "translation" is completely backwards! And it's dead wrong even
though we had Hawkes right in front of us.
I mean "yikes!".
-Andy Patton
*
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 13:25:32 -0400
From: J. Mark Smith
Dear Andy:
My profuse apologies for getting the Pain not Bread name inverted -- very
dumb of me. I think it's a great name, much better than CSN in fact, but it
must have hypnotized me. I will ask the folks at The Danforth Review to make
that correction when they return from summer break.
Also perhaps you would like to send this note, in one form or another, to
The DR's letters section? It's the kind of thing they like to print.
(In fact I'll cc your note to Michael Bryson, the editor there).
I hope you'll grant that though, yes, I devote a couple of paragraphs in the
review to wondering about just what sort of literary entities the poems in
your book are, my judgments of them are mainly premised on them being English-
language originals (and not translations). I think that is really the only way
to approach any poem out over on -- or well beyond -- the "imitation" side of
the translation spectrum.
J. Mark Smith
*
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 12:18:24 -0500
From: Andy Patton
Hi J. Mark:
> I think it's a great name, much better than CSN in fact, but it
> must have hypnotized me.
What I've always wanted to know was who I was in CSN, the alternative
universe to the PNB. (I hope it's not David Crosby, but the other options
aren't attractive either.) Like CS&N, we should have brought in someone for
for more power and stage presence, Michael Ondaatje?, to propel us into
superstardom. But MO was booked or something...or recording with Crazy
Horse.
George Elliott Clarke said that we were half Fenellosa, half
Frankenstein - which is a great one-liner, though I thought we were more like
half Fenellosa, half Frankenstein, half the Supremes, if you can accept a
Yogi Berra style arithmetic.
> Also perhaps you would like to send this note, in one form or another, to
> The DR's letters section? It's the kind of thing they like to print.
> (In fact I'll cc your note to Michael Bryson, the editor there).
Sure: that's fine.
> I hope you'll grant that though, yes, I devote a couple of paragraphs in the
> review to wondering about just what sort of literary entities the poems in
> your book are, my judgments of them are mainly premised on them being
English-
> language originals (and not translations). I think that is really the only
way
> to approach any poem out over on -- or well beyond -- the "imitation" side of
> the translation spectrum.
Sorry, I don't see that at all. Where's the wondering?
1. I can see wondering what they are, that's entirely legit, and all to the
good. But your review doesn't wonder. It says that they're translations,
specifically of the "imitations" sort.
e.g. "Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei is certainly a collection
of imitations in Dryden's sense of the word..."
"certainly" dissipates the possibility of wondering what the status of the
poems are, no? Plus you've said flat out what the book is, and no where do
you retract this idea. It's not the "I thought this was a book of
translations at first, and read it this way, then realized it was a book of
poems, and my reading went this way..."
2. If the idea of the poems being translation had been proposed, then
chucked, then this wouldn't appear later on:
"And the single most important Poundian insight seems to have been lost
sight of as well - that it is precisely out of a poet's struggle with the
content (and not just the the 'texture') of a foreign language poem that
significant formal invention happens."
There's the idea of translation again. PNB wasn't struggling (except in the
one Wang Wei actual translation) with the content of a foreign language
poem. You're backhandedly saying we were, by saying that PNB struggled with
the texture but not the content of a foreign language poem.
3. Here's another:
"The first principle of Pound's translation was to make a real English poem
out of the translation; that outcome, in fact, is the only justification for
"running division on the groundwork" (Dryden's phrase) of the original."
If the review has only wondered about whether these are translations, at
this point, it's sure not in any doubt at all. What relevance would
someone's principles about translations be unless you're discussing
translations? We weren't trying to make a real English poem out of the
translation: we were trying to make a real English poem, though, but not out
of a translation.
Sorry, but you've reviewed a book of bad (or charitably, "clumsy")
translations. But they're not translations. If you see them as bad poems,
fine, a reviewer is expected to give an adjudication of the writing. But
they're not translations, good, bad, indifferent...
I would still be writing you to complain even if you'd said that they were
the finest translations ever done in English of T'ang poems. (Though I'd be
complaining about 2 things then:1) that they're not translations, and 2)
that, for one, David Hawkes is much much much much much much etc superior.)
They're not translations!
-Andy
*
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 00:44:36 -0400
From: J. Mark Smith
hello again Andy --
The whole point of using a term like 'imitation' (or, I would have
thought, 'free variation') is to acknowledge that the sort of linguistic /
cultural practice we call translation operates along a spectrum.
I look in After Babel and see George Steiner puts it this way: "There is
between 'translation proper' and 'transmutation' [the interpretation of verbal
signs by non-verbal signs] a vast terrain of 'partial transformation'...
[whose means] include paraphrase, graphic illustration, pastiche, imitation,
thematic variation, parody, citation in a supporting or undermining context,
false attribution (accidental or deliberate), plagiarism, collage, and many
others." (415)
The Pain Not Bread poems are quite self-consciously situated on this terrain
of partial transformation. Why else would you write in your Afterword that all
of the poems "are derived (for the most part), in varying degrees, from other
texts" (121). Or that in most cases you ended up with something "finally very
different from the original" (121)? (I count "original" used at least three
times in this sense in the Afterword.) Or that you hoped the allusiveness of
the poems would stand as a sort of cultural "analogue" (122) to the
allusiveness of poems of the High Tang period?
What's more, the titles of the poems do introduce them in such a way as to
link each individual poem to the name of Wang Wei, Du Fu, or "the Late Tang."
So on this score, I think you protest a little too much.
Nevertheless, I never meant to accuse you (who are three) of infidelity to
the originals, or lack of scholarly rigour, or anything like that. I
understand that most of the poems in the book are not 'proper translations.'
My critical motive for wanting to hold on to the broad concept of
translation in talking about your book is as follows: translation always
implies a process that begins with reading (i.e. interpreting) some text
(which could well be an interpretation of another text), and proceeds to a re-
writing of that text. My premise, or prejudice, is that the perceptiveness or
strength of the interpretation -- regardless of how 'scholarly' it might be --
will determine the quality of the re-writing.
It's a fairly traditional premise, of course. I haven't -- so far -- been
much impressed by the poetics of intertextual drift (Oulipean 'constraints'
and that kind of thing), and in any case from what I can see the greater part
of Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei stays with a traditional
and/or modernist poetics too.
J. Mark Smith
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