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Ted Hughes的翻译

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发表于 2007-8-4 13:58:38 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

<h1>Ted Hughes and translation</h1>Clive Wilmer Translation is an imperfect art – even an impossible one. That is the truism. But it would be a very eccentric devotee of literature who for lack of Greek or Russian refused to read Homer or Tolstoy. Lyric poetry is more challenging to the translator than narrative literature is, since little can be separated out from the choice of specific words, their sounds, rhythms and associations, to say nothing of poetic form and the elaborations of syntax. That is why there are lyric poets of the first rank – Goethe and Pushkin are prime examples – whose poems are not as well known in Britain as their fame might lead us to expect. Nevertheless, most good poets attempt translation in the course of a life’s work and serious readers of poetry will want to have some familiarity with, let us say, Catullus or Baudelaire. There are those who claim, moreover, that poetry is essentially metamorphic – a process that includes negotiations with other texts and the transformation of experience into language, rhythm and form. To such a conception of poetry, the act of verse translation is fundamental. Be that as it may, there are many different ways of making over a poem. Metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation, said Dryden. In practice, though, there are innumerable combinations and subdivisions of these three. The greatest translator of modern times, Ezra Pound, looked for the method appropriate to the case. In his masterpiece Cathay, conscious that previous attempts at Chinese had mostly resulted in mere chinoiserie, Pound abandoned formal structure and everything that would mark his originals as rooted in a tradition. He made modern free-verse poems out of Chinese classics, which are, we are told, compounded of elaborate forms and conventions, but we remember his versions for haunting images and poignantly unfamiliar rhythms – not, probably, for anything a Chinese reader would notice. This is the method for which Pound is mostly credited and it has exerted a colossal influence on translators ever since, even when they have felt obliged to modify it. It could be taken to explain almost everything in the Selected Translations of Ted Hughes. But it was not the only method Pound practised. When he translated a passage from Homer in the first of his Cantos, he turned the Greek hexameters – by way of a Latin translation in lineated prose – into something like the metre of Beowulf. In this case the metre was chosen as appropriate to his meaning: one that evoked an aspect of Homer which he shares with the author of Beowulf, a sort of barbaric fatalism. The classical hexameter, as innumerable attempts at it have shown, has no real equivalent in English. In this respect, Pound’s choice of alliterative verse might be compared to Pope’s of heroic couplets. In both cases the metre was adopted for what it signified to an English reader, not as an equivalent to the Greek. By contrast, when the original language employs structures for which clear equivalents exist in English, Pound imitates the original form, though he often adds some distinctive strangeness to mark the poem off as foreign and new to its English context. This is his method for the sonnets of Cavalcanti, and how his friend Laurence Binyon, with his approval, translated The Divine Comedy. In writing Cathay – at a time when, incidentally, he knew no Chinese – Pound discovered a mysterious process that Hughes seems also to have hit upon. Anyone who has successfully translated a poem knows something of it. In any poem of value there seems to be some poetic element, some inner intensity, which is separable from the language it is embodied in and which therefore appears to defy the truism we began with. Daniel Weissbort, who edited this selection, tells the story of Hughes taking another poet’s translation of a work by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhasz and, without any knowledge of the original language and no Hungarian speaker to advise him, turning that version into a thrilling poem that drives the existing versions off the map. It is as if there were, as the race has often dreamed, an ur-language, some fundamental human speech predating the Tower of Babel, to which true poets have visionary access. Hughes thought of the poet as a shaman and this experience of the translation process must have confirmed him in that view. But even poets of a coolly rationalistic outlook have spoken of such experiences. However we understand it, it seems to account for Hughes’s successes, the Juhasz being one. On the other hand, as we know, ecstatics with the gift of tongues sometimes talk gibberish. In 1969 Hughes collaborated with Peter Brook on a theatrical experiment that – on paper at any rate – seems to run that risk. Weissbort includes a passage from the drama in question, Orghast, which was performed at Persepolis by the tombs of the Persian kings. The play is a translation only in the figurative sense I mentioned at the outset. Indeed it is not even written in English, but in an invented language consisting (it would appear) of bird calls, grunts, shrieks, and fragments of languages Hughes had no knowledge of. Without the magic of Brook’s production and a ruin in the desert, it is hard to make much of it. One wants to protest that the origins of language might be traced through an examination of phonemic shifts or some fuller understanding of transformational grammar. The danger of this surrender to a hypothetical ur-language is that it allows the subjective predilections of a monocultural and largely monolingual poet to be projected as the expression of a common human nature. The principle of Orghast is disturbingly present throughout the present volume. An obvious contrast is provided, however, by a poem in a language very close to Hughes’s own. It would be hard to find a more inspired version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight than the fragmentary sections printed here. It is nothing short of tragic that Hughes never made an assault on the whole poem. Everything one enjoys in the original – its descriptive exuberance, the rush and delay of the narrative, the gallows humour, the rhythmic élan – is there, or seems to be, in Hughes’s version. The perfectly competent account of the poem by his fellow Yorkshireman, Simon Armitage, is simply tame by comparison. But Northernness must be part of the explanation. Hughes once declared that his West Yorkshire dialect connected him and his “most intimate self to Middle English poetry”. Long before Hughes attempted his translation, Seamus Heaney noticed that “with its beautiful alliterating and illuminated form, its interlacing and trellising of natural life and mythic life, [Sir Gawain] is probably closer in spirit to Hughes’s poetry than Hughes’s poetry is to that of his contemporaries”. One might also mention the laconic wit, the gritty sensuousness and the taste for the grim and violent: all things the two poets share. So in the case of Sir Gawain, Hughes was not so much translating as modernizing a work in his own language, though doing so with such concentration and sympathy, that the result is little less than a major modern poem. He makes no obvious attempt to follow the original structure, and yet his version seems to fit quite naturally into an accentual metre with alliteration, though no alliterative pattern. Apart from Sir Gawain, almost everything Hughes translates he renders in free verse. In some instances, as Pound discovered in Cathay, this method can break a logjam – as I am going to suggest it does with Racine’s Phèdre. In others it may seem to impose a misleading interpretation on the original. With poems from modern Europe the danger is particularly great. It is too easy to read our contemporaries as voices of a shared consciousness, to which cultural and linguistic differences are just irrelevant. The case in point, for me, is the great Hungarian poet, János Pilinszky, with his vividly disturbing images of the Holocaust and the horrors of the Second World War. In “Harbach 1944”, for example, he evokes a gang of forced labourers, apparently close to starvation, dragging an enormous cart: Already their bodies belong to silence. And they thrust their faces towards the height as if they strained for a scent of the faraway celestial troughs   because, prepared for their coming like an opened cattle-yard, its gates flung savagely back, death gapes to its hinges. I cannot and would not wish to deny that Hughes, in his quest for the ur-language, succeeds in putting his finger on the quality of Pilinszky’s vision. But what about his metre? Pilinszky is technically rather traditional. The stanza form here is somewhat like that of a ballad and evokes the impersonal grimness of folk poetry – as we find it in “The Ancient Mariner” or in Goethe’s “Erlkönig”. In Hungarian, moreover, “Harbach 1944” is inescapably a Christian poem, though you would never know it from Hughes’s version. Writing of Hughes’s work in the 1960s, Charles Tomlinson drew this caveat: When in Thrushes, Hughes equates the “bullet and automatic purpose” of thrushes with Mozart’s artistic instinct and then Mozart with sharks (“Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth . . .”), one begins to wonder if Hughes’s powerful evocation of primitive forces is not bought at the cost of knowing what civilization is. If you isolate Mozart’s musical savoir faire in this way, between the amoral automatism of the thrush and the shark’s lust for blood, you work a false rhetoric which prevents the reader asking in what ways human civilization and the centuries-long traditions of music were essential before Mozart could write a note. It was this limitation in Hughes’s art and outlook that enabled him to abridge Ovid’s Metamorphoses, eliding the principle of order that unifies the poem and its vision, and to reach for the animal terror at the heart of Racine’s Phèdre, in the process casting aside the formal discipline through which that terror becomes an object for contemplation. On the other hand, all translations are partial: no version can capture every aspect of a poem’s quality, so the best translators – Pope in his Homer or Pound in his Chinese poems – concentrate on the things they can achieve, which are very often the things that speak to their time. It must be admitted that, whatever the problems Hughes’s Phèdre poses, no one else has come as close to success as he has – with the possible exception of Tony Harrison, whose version is best seen as an adaptation. Nevertheless, I think we should resist the notion that Hughes has got to the root of Racine’s vision, as if the insight embodied in the famous line “C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée” were more fundamental to Racine than the poise of the alexandrine which gives his insight expression. Hughes’s work as a translator, however, is both consistent and compellingly readable. As is so often the case with poet-translators, it needs to be seen in the context of his own poetry, which has both drawn on these texts and contributed to the means of their translation. This Selected Translations, meticulously edited by Daniel Weissbort, represents one of the most important but least recognized aspects of Hughes’s legacy. It includes work from twenty-three writers and fourteen languages, each selection underpinned by a documentary appendix. There are things as unexpected as, on the one hand, The Tibetan Book of the Dead – one of the sources for Hughes’s Crow – and, on the other, sonnets by Lorenzo de’ Medici. On balance, the engagements with classical poets – from Aeschylus and Euripides to Ovid and Seneca – are more convincing than those with Hughes’s contemporaries, though the omissions are also striking: Seneca’s but not Sophocles’ Oedipus, Homer but not Virgil. Could this be because neither Sophocles nor Virgil would prove responsive to the view of human nature Hughes ascribes to the Roman dramatist?The figures in Seneca’s Oedipus are Greek only by convention; by nature they are more primitive than aboriginals. They are a spider people, scuttling among hot stones.
There is something in the serenity of Oedipus at Colonus that, like the formal perfection of Mozart or Racine, is outside Hughes’s range. His triumph as a translator, though, if we exclude the fragmentary Sir Gawain, is surely the very popular Tales from Ovid. It is easy to see why Hughes looked to Ovid as his model of the shaman poet in a civilized society, yet it is possible to understand the success of these versions without recourse to mystical ideas. No doubt like any inspired poem – and Tales from Ovid really is inspired – it arises from engagements in Hughes’s inner life that are beyond comprehension, much as the Juhasz does. Unlike the Juhasz and much else in this fascinating book, however, it takes off from evident sources in English literature – from the fabulous Elizabethan translation by Arthur Golding and from Golding’s most resplendent beneficiary, William Shakespeare. Hughes was obsessed throughout his life with Venus and Adonis, and the Ovid is aptly represented here by the two sections Shakespeare drew his plot from. Reading the book through consecutively, one is struck on arriving at the Ovid by the ghost of Jacobean blank verse pervading the rhythm, much as it does in The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. If I am right that the versions of Ovid and Sir Gawain are the star turns of the book, I am pointing to poems with deep roots in Hughes’s own language and culture, and hardly at all in whatever it was we lost at the Tower of Babel. __________________________________________________________ Clive Wilmer is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His most recent collection of poems is The Mystery of Things, 2005.