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:
Low
Frequency:
High
Frequency:
