On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation

Essay by Ellen Welcker

Books discussed in this essay:

• it. Inger Christensen. (Trans. Susanna Nied. New Directions. $17.95. 304 pp.
• Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, editors. Routledge. $47.95. 224 pp.
• The Poethical Wager. Joan Retallack. University of California Press. $24.95. 291 pp.
• Night is a Sharkskin Drum. Haunani-Kay Trask. University of Hawai’i Press. $27.00. 96 pp.
• Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre. Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Bamboo Ridge Press. $16.00. 148 pp.

How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of neat little phrases that come down so beautifully with all their feet on the ground! . . . I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, such as the shuffling of feet on the pavement.
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Indeed, translation has traditionally been married to the notion of what is lost, and this makes sense, if one looks at a poem like a Renaissance painting: the original being of highest quality and any replica a necessarily poor copy. But what if, like everything else in the world, it’s not so black and white? Poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu’s poem “English-Japanese Conversations” acutely addresses the subtle difficulties of translation in this excerpt:

hey!
oya! (hint of discovery)
ma! (said by female. hint of surprise, scorn, oh dear!)
ara! (said by female. hint of being contradicted.)
kora! (said by someone of a higher rank, older age, or more
status. hint of interrupting kids about to cause
mischief, stopping cheapskates from sneaking into
the movies.)
ya! (said by male. hello.)
oi! (said by male. hint of gruff masculinity. must be said
in a deep voice. hint of “hey now…”)
hei! (said by imitators of the cool American language.
often used in pop songs)

Read the rest of this essay at The Quarterly Conversation