Time to start scouting around for what to make of this summer's "deep dive" in reading for me. Every year I either reread a lot of some author's works or make a topical adventure out of something or other. I've been reading more poetry during this time of the coronavirus, and thinking now to make a summer of reading not only poetry in translation but some of the other writings of the translators (who often share bits of their approach to "what's lost in translation" in a lengthy foreword tailored to the particular author whose works they've spent months or years on).
Thought it would be fun to know more of what goes on behind the scenes with these multi-skilled writers, if I can find some of their memoirs, essays or even more collections where they've translated and annotated their concerns and decisions in footnotes. In reading translated works, it can sometimes be too easy to take labor for granted when the translations seem well done and the mechanics aren't showing. It's just that now and then --as when I bump into a negative criticism of some translated effort-- that I wonder how they ever managed to develop the nerve to translate even prose writers, never mind the works of poets.
Just now I've been reading some poems of the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. In a foreword to an Amichai poetry collection that Robert Alter edited (including poems brought to English by a number of translators), the noted Hebrew-English scriptural translator addresses some of the concerns any translator has, and I suppose that may have been the crystal around my growing interest in making poetry translation issues a summer "deep dive" for me. Here is one of Amichai's poems that Robert Alter himself translated to English; it was published in The New Yorker in July of 2008, eight years after the poet had passed away.
Summer Evening By the Window with Psalms
by Yehuda Amichai
(translated, from the Hebrew, by Robert Alter)
Close scrutiny of the past.
How my soul yearns within me like those souls
in the nineteenth century before the great wars,
like curtains that want to pull free
of the open window and fly.
We console ourselves with short breaths,
as, after running, we always recover.
We want to reach death hale and hearty,
like a murderer sentenced to death,
wounded when he was caught,
whose judges want him to heal before
he’s brought to the gallows.
I think, how many still waters
can yield a single night of stillness
and how many green pastures, wide as deserts,
can yield the quiet of a single hour
and how many valleys of the shadow of death do we need
to be a compassionate shade in the unrelenting sun.
I look out the window: a hundred and fifty
psalms pass through the twilight,
a hundred and fifty psalms, great and small.
What a grand and glorious and transient fleet!
I say: the window is God
And the door is his prophet.
