After Great Pains: What's Lost in Translation

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—                    Szenvedés után, formális érzés jön—

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—                    Idegek sorban, mint Sirkövek, ülnek—

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,                Merev a Sziv és kérdi, Ö volt aki birta,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?                               Tegnap, vagy Századonként?

The Feet, mechanical go round—                                    Lábak lépnek, körbe, körbe—

Of Ground, or Air or Ought—                                         Föld, vagy Lég, vagy Semmi körül—

A Wooden way                                                                 A Fauton

Regardless grown                                                             Mely elhanyagolva

A Quartz contentment, like a stone—                              Egy Kvarx megelégedés, mint egy kö—

This is the Hour of Lead—                                               Ez az Olom Óra—

Remembered, if outlived,                                                 Visszaemlékezve, ha tulélve,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—                      Mint a Fagyoskodok, visszaemlékeznek Hóra-

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—            Elöször—Hideg—akor Kábulás—elernyedés-

  

Translating this Emily Dickinson poem into Hungarian, I realized that the poem, itself, can be read as a poem about the process of translation.  What makes Dickinson’s poem a unified, breathing entity in English is distorted, if not lost, in my Hungarian version.  Using Dickinson’s cemeterial metaphor, and other instances of her iconic imagery, I mourn here those aspects of her work that the translation lays to rest in order to come into its own

1)     Word Choice

2)     The Split Lark of Music

3)     The Swelling Ground of Rhythm

4)     The Alabaster Chamber of Syntax

5)     The Sm(all) of Morphemes

6)     A Buzz of Rhyme

7)     The Carriage of Ambiguity

8)     The Vesuvius of Metaphor

9)     The Quartz Containment of Compression

10) The Pier of New England

Word Choice

Rest in peace the word “Tombs.”  In English, the one-word “tomb” will do for grave and stone alike.  In Hungarian, the word must be made as explicit as is the English “tombstone.” Sir (pron. sheer) means to weep—sir, by metaphor, a place to weep.  The plural of sir, sirók, sounds too close to sirók, which, meaning those who weep, would identify the stone with those who cry at it. Kö means “stone.”  Sirkö means “tombstone.”  Sirkövek is the plural. By making the stone explicit, the Hungarian separates the tombstone from what it marks—the grave and its inhabitant.

Dickinson’s metonymical compression makes the dead (in the rigor mortis of the “Nerves”), the tomb that holds them and the tombstones that mark them, one.

            Let us mourn the loss of her meaning, place a harebell at the tomb of word choice as knell to soften the grief.

The Split Lark of Music

            Here lies the mystery and horror of the sound of the long oo in “Tombs,” a sound that generates deep caverns of below the throat—sonorous, mournful, blocked by the lips that close and round to form it.  As Nims shows us in Western Wind, the long oo is the lowest frequency vowel—tending toward that flat line on an EKG. 

Sir wheezes out its excited ee, a sound that opens the mouth, reveals the vibrating tongue, forms the lips into a false smile.  For Nims, the ee is the highest frequency vowel, looking much more like fur.

Here lies the shrill percussion of “Pain,” replaced by the soft line and repetitions of the syllables and vowels in the Hungarian szenvedés. Dickinson’s dirge comes in monosyllables.  Agglutinative Hungarian replaces them with the arias of megelégedés, visszaemlékezve, elerneydés.  “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go” lets go on a monosyllabic low frequency vowel oh.  Elöször—Hideg—akor Kábulás—majd as elernyedés puts up a struggle, especially in the last four-syllable word ending in the bright high-frequency sound of a long ae.

 Let us place Lilies of the Valley at this tomb, for their silenced bells.

The Swelling Ground of Rhythm

            The stark stasis of Dickinson’s monosyllables—“Nerves sit”—turns into the Hungarian St. Vitus dance of idegek ülnek—three syllables, not two. The hard thud of “Tombs” becomes the busyness of sirkövek. “Ceremonious” becomes a five-syllabled pomp in a line of monosyllables—1, 1, 1, 5, 1, 1. Like tombstones, the words sit separate from each other. The Hungarian Az idegek ülnek udvariasan, mint sirkövek is a polysyllabic carnival—the words are 1, 3, 2, 5, 1, 3, respectively. The Hungarian version does not offer the image of the separate tombstones that Dickinson’s does.  If the Hungarian word udvariasan were replaced with sorban (“in a row”), we would approximate the dirge-like monotony of words with similar syllables, but we would lose the last gasp of life that the word “Ceremonious” renders in the English before it drops back to monosyllables.

            Of Dickinson’s 72-word poem 74% are monosyllabic, 16% have two syllables; only 1% in five syllables.  The 56-word Hungarian translation is 41% monosyllabic, almost a half of the English; 35% two, more than twice the English. With 4% five-syllable words (four times the English, 13% of the words are more than three syllables long.

            So, this has further effects.  “Regardless grown” is said and done. Mely elhanyagolva keeps us handing on in its agglutinations (addings on) of syllables.  The staccato of “recollect”—becomes the flourish of visszgondolnak. Dickinson’s “Feet mechanical go round—” march, march each lone step of her pain. Hungarian words contradance, and stick to each other.  “The Feet, mechanical go round,” except for the felicity of my being able to craft two four-syllable words in the middle, couldn’t be A Lábak, gépiesen, körbe, körbe.

The Alabaster Chamber of Syntax

            Farewell “He—“—sinuously capitalized by Dickinson—“He—” instead of a softened, hushing “She.”  Hungarian pronouns are not differentiated by gender, so the ungendered ö can’t have that resonance.

           

            Prepositions, separate bits of predominantly monosyllabic glue in English, are assimilated in Hungarian agglutinated inflections. “Centuries before” became the Hungarian Századonként—“centuries across.”  “Of Ground, or Air or Ought—” was especially challenging to bring along.  Were the feet made “of” ground, air, or ought? Were the feet moving on and through?  Dickinson didn’t have to choose. Voilà! Poetic compression. In the translation, I had to choose.  Choose the mundane feet go around—körül—around the ground, the air, or ought.  Lose the sense Dickinson wrings from the word “Feet”—as in “poetic feet” that could be made of the ground earth of the pencil, or the air which is the air of a song, or the nothing which is the ephemera of meaning.  In the Hungarian, the feet become just what occurs between the ground and the person walking on it.  And we lost the ambiguities of the English “of.”

           

            Let us lay the peace of an olive branch at this tomb—syntax and order could not come along.

The Sm(all) of Morphemes

            Deconstruction taught us that texts self-implode with contradictions.  One of the ways to explore this is to find words embedded in words. It’s not even that “He” is he but that “He” is the “He” in “Heart,” and that this poem is also about itself—the violence of poetry, of “he” art.  And the “eat” in “great” is what pain does—gnaw at the soul.  The words “formal,” “feeling,” “stiff,” “Feet,” “Freezing,” and “First” link through the alliteration of f, even as life fizzles to its letting go.  The energy of Dickinson’s going “round” is embedded in “Ground”—Einstein would come to know this relation between energy (movement) and mass. The “Freezing” person” knows the “no” and “now” that comes with being buried in “s-no-w.”  “Ore” in “bore,” is a lode to be mined from bearing pain. 

            Place a heliotrope here in memory of Judge Lord.

A Buzz of Rhyme

            All the rhymed woe, the deep wobbling low-frequency wavelengths of “Tombs,” “bore,” “round,” “grown, “stone,” “Snow,” “go,” and the plummet in “before” in Dickinson’s poem—are gone in translation.  Each of Dickinson’s stanzas ends with the sure crisp closure of a Shakespearean couplet.  This pained security and finality is dashed.

            Place a spiked speedwell.

The Carriage of Ambiguity

            “The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore.”  Of the English version we can ask: a)

Was it He who endured it?  b) Was it He—that boar, that boor?  c) Was it He, that boring

one? Birta, the denotative translation of “bore” does not offer us such ambiguities.  “Hour of Lead” in English resonates with such meanings and echoes as a) Hour made of lead; b) Hour of being lead; c) Hour of the Dead; d) Our lead.  Olom is only metal.

      Laburnum blossoms—for the forsaken.

  

A Vesuvius of Metaphor

“A Wooden way”—on a wooden leg, into the words, with wooden teeth, behind the wood pile, a wooden look—wouldn’t it be loverly if “wood” meant for the shepherds of Hungary what it does for the forested and New Englandly?  “Wooden way” translated into A Fauton, translated back into English means “a road made of wood.”  Something missing in that translation, something about plodding, a missing leg, a hollow one for liquor never brewed, toy soldiers, the Civil War, stiffening.  There are significant dissonances in cultural meanings attached to the images for an English speaker as opposed to that of a Hungarian.

     

      Place and iris here, for messages lost.

The Pier of New England

            Puritan thrift and decorum, individualism, crisp closure of winter, the long Atlantic coastline, Calvin’s God precipitate into compression of thought, hymn rhythms and rhyme, words ceremonious, separate, uninflected to each other, stop when they stop.  All that is Hungarian—the Magyars, renegades, nomads blocked forever from the ocean tribal, nationalistic, soldier saints, shepherds and winemakers, boundaries blurred in pronouns as they are in a country where borders are constantly shifting—precipitates a language which hoards syllables; is profligate with inflections, unrelenting agglutinations, shirkings of the formal, words musical and passionate and warring for the sake of connection, tombs identified more with the living than the dead and long nights singing together around the fire.  My translation is more about the passionate responses of the Magyars to pain and death than the Puritan restraint of those who think New Englandy in households where each person lives as a monarch in her own realm—reclusive, touching only with words.

            “A formal feeling comes,” translating Dickinson’s poem—language to language—a kin to dying into immortality—promise of perfect transport unkept, the leaving behind the promise of E.D.en.  The translator’s nerves sit ceremonious, mechanical, go round.  Translator, on a wooden way, regardless grown—freezing person, recollecting Dickinson’s snow.  First—the chill impossible—then stupor—then, the translation lets go.

Works Cited:

Cover Art: https://www.marketingweek.com/marketing-translation/

Low Frequency:

https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/3d-particles-mesh-array-wave-sound-flowing-vector-24566998

High Frequency:

https://thisishuso.com/sound-frequency-heal-us/