“Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.”
(Weinberger, 1987)
Poetry translation is an endeavour of passion, for it may bring cultural enrichment but seldom economic riches, the challenge once undertaken will likely be professionally rewarding but rarely satisfying as there forever seems to be a sense of incompletion… But never to translate the so-called “untranslatable,” is never to attempt to communicate the unique stories of others, their values, beliefs, philosophies, histories embedded in a text. So how much more would be “lost in translation” (Frost, 7) if “great poetry” were not translated at all, and instead, were left to slowly fade away.
But fade away it will not as part of a seminal poetry translation anthology entitled 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: a book comprising 19 different versions of a short 4-line poem written during the Tang Dynasty (608 – 917 AD) by painter, calligrapher and poet, Wang Wei. Weinberger’s petite 1987 book has shone a light on Wang Wei’s poem for almost four decades now and is in its second edition (2016). I first read the text in 2005 on a Master’s poetry translation option run by Prof. John T. Gilmore (featured in this collection) at the University of Warwick, and I have used it since in my own poetry translation teaching. Before 19 Ways, I’d seen translation through the eyes of an undergraduate being tested on vocabulary and grammar. Weinberger’s book opened my eyes to the irresistible number of possibilities in translation, and also to the challenges. Just one character in Chinese could be interpreted as three separate colours in the English language. So which would you choose and why?
Weinberger’s book and Gilmore set me on a pathway leading to my keen interest in translating the culturally-embedded poetry of Francophone African writers. These two elements combined gave me the first glimmer of inspiration for this book: could I create something inspired by Weinberger, but with an African poet and cultures, centred around French and English and the multitude of different forms they take globally, one that explores current debates: creativity in translation, a more fluid ‘original’, the impact of identity upon translation, the judgement of translations (and the criteria we judge them against) and the relevance of ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes) to more contemporary literary translation strategies. Indeed, Barthes emphasised the reader’s interpretation of a text as more significant to meaning than the author’s so-called “intention”, and as the translator is often the closest reader the text will ever have, should we see the source text as less of a straightjacket and more as inspiration for a new poem that allows what Weinberger calls the “spirit” of the source text to live on? In fact, this book could be seen as a translation of Weinberger’s in that much looser sense. Here is a new version of 19 Ways, this time 19 translations of “Le poème de Yambacongo” by Jean-Claude Awono.
I first met Awono in 2019 when working with the University of Bristol and Bakwa Books in Cameroon on a writing and translation workshop series. As Director of the publishing house, Editions Ifrikya, Awono had come to talk to participants about the literary and publishing ecosystem in Cameroon, and upon goodbye, he offered to send me some of his poetry. His work is predominantly free verse and highly embedded in Cameroonian cultures, history and languages. It is also very performative as he uses a plethora of sound devices (assonance, consonance, alliteration, rhyme, half-rhyme, strong rhythms, repetition, etc.) offering many a challenge to the translator. Awono is also a literary commentator, editor, teacher, and someone who has championed writing and poetry in Cameroon. Aside from being a remarkable read, his work also comes with a great deal of professional and experiential underpinning. Awono is also very open to translation, by that I mean he is interested in the process without expecting any particular outcome. Renowned—and widely translated—Ivorian writer, Véronique Tadjo holds a similar position on translation, stating that “a time always comes when I have to withdraw in order to let the text find its coherence and the translator his or her own empathy.” This is rather like an open door to a translator; it is always helpful to have contact with a writer, but poetry is formed when it isn’t constrained.
While reflecting upon Awono’s work, I continued collaborating with colleagues from the University of Bristol as part of a team contributing to the ERC-funded project, Literary Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa, led by Professor Madhu Krishnan, an expert in African, World and Comparative Literatures. The team also included a group of cultural professionals from Sub-Saharan Africa, including Bakwa’s Founding Editor, Dzekashu MacViban and Associate Editor and Senior Translator, Nfor E. Njinyoh. And it was on a joint trip to Senegal that I first mentioned the possibility of a Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono. Making Black writers and translators more visible and highlighting linguistic diversity in literature are subjects that arise frequently in Bakwa/Bristol group discussions, so this book is a good fit and adopts an activist stance through the promotion of marginalised voices and languages.
In fact, I liaised with Dzekashu, Madhu and Nfor on the poem selection for this volume, deciding upon “Le poème de Yambacongo”for its evident abundance of cultural, linguistic and stylistic challenges for the translator. For example, how do we communicate the layers of meaning in the term “Ossimbi”, the name of a district in a Cameroonian village (Guientsing I) close to Awono’s village (Guientsing II), but also a word that sounds very similar to “guissimbi” meaning “soldier” in Nugunu, the language spoken in both places. This is just one of myriad considerations for the translators in this volume. Even the title of the poem warrants a conversation; take a look at the diversity of those translations on the contents page!
This anthology may be inspired by Weinberger’s collection, but it is a very different book produced in a different climate for a different purpose. Obviously, the languages are not the same. French and English, the languages of this volume, are related Indo-European languages that use the same alphabet and have a number of true cognates, but the translation of Wang Wei’s Chinese characters into a range of European languages is inevitably more complex from that perspective. What we do see with both collections is that cultural understanding makes a difference, but this is arguably more challenging in Awono’s poem; it’s much longer, and there are many more culturally embedded words, phrases and concepts. Weinberger’s book also documents the passage of translation over time as the poems were previously published. Conversely, the translations in this collection were commissioned and have not appeared anywhere before.
Weinberger also carries out a (sometimes hard-hitting) critique of each translation, and we hear the voices of only a couple of translators (Octavio Paz and François Cheng, for example). As a translator myself, I found the latter process more insightful as it revealed the translator’s strategy and reasoning. As a curator, I have chosen to focus more on giving the translators a voice through their commentary (also easier as all my translators are still alive!). Unlike Weinberger, I refuse to say what I perceive to be “good” or “bad” about each poem, instead I want to question the criteria used to form such judgements. Is a translation necessarily better because it is more closely related to the source text, more literal, the same shape, with similar sounds, rhymes in the same place? I prefer something more unexpected, innovative, imaginative even. In poetry, I see precision as an uncomfortable restraint, while others enjoy the challenge of exactness. Our judgement criteria are often personal, and timebound; translation trends and our expectations shift as the decades pass: domestication, foreignization, literal, adaptive, and everything in between and beyond. Do we see a poem as a more fluid text, something related to oral traditions, thereby embracing innovation in translation rather than adhering to a more rigid notion of fidelity? Our stance is often related to the way we see our role as translators. Do we see ourselves more as scientific interpreters or artistic (re)writers?
The many possible voices of a writer in translation came to the fore after Amanda Gorman performed her poem at US President Biden’s inauguration. It was commissioned for translation into many different languages, but a debate ensued as to whether the translators should also be young Black women with marginalised voices. The extent to which readers agree or disagree with that argument will vary, but what is most important, I believe, is that this news story highlighted to the general public the global lack of diversity in literary translation as well as popularising the oft-discussed issue of the translator’s identity and the degree to which we need to share key demographics with the individual we are translating. Canan Marasligil elaborated on the subject to say that “A translator will make choices based on their life experience and their identity (so yes, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic background, disabilities… will matter)”. Hence, this book tests that theory; to what extent and how does the translator’s identity influence Awono’s work in translation (without saying who should or should not undertake the task)?
When commissioning translators for this collection, I wanted to embrace a diversity of individuals and hopefully, therefore, to receive poems that sit at different points along the science-art continuum. Translators were approached to fulfil a few different and very broad criteria in terms of identity: a variation in terms of age, gender, geographical location, ethnicity, skin colour, education, profession, birthplace etc. We have not listed everyone’s identifying traits, but some clues can be found in the translators’ commentaries and biographies or are transparent in the poems themselves. JK Anowe translates into Nigerian Pidgin, for example, and Elizabeth (Betty) Wilson into Jamaican Creole. I invite the reader to reflect on all the translations and the connections between poem, language and identity.
The choice of translators was very organic; some translators I had worked with before or had met through studying and teaching in universities; I had read the translations of some and seen others perform their poetry; I approached people for recommendations, including editors at Modern Poetry in Translation and judges of the Stephen Spender Prize; I searched online, including on Words Without Borders, and spoke to friends in different parts of the world to seek out translators I had never come across before. All but three of those approached appear in this final version of the book, with time being the main reason why individuals were unable to contribute. Of the nineteen other translators in this volume, I have met just four in person. I am, of course, aware of a number of issues: that by no means can we claim to cover every aspect of identity in this small selection; that my own relationships have had a great deal of impact on the choice of poets; and that anthologising, in itself, is an inherently subjective process, even down to the order in which the poems appear in this book. For instance, I like the fact that Nfor E. Njinyoh helps us visualise the fish trap from the start, and yet Maneo Mohale’s commentary is such a poetic and thought-provoking way to close the series of translations. I do not see this type of construction as a problem, so long as the reader reflecting upon the volume is aware that such a process has taken place.
Each translator was asked to provide a single translation of “Le poème de Yambacongo” in any version of English and using any translation strategy. As far as I’m aware, the poem hasn’t been translated into English before. Translators were also asked to provide a short commentary. I did not want to lead the translators in any direction, so I waited to see if they asked me questions, if they had queries for Awono, or if they wanted his contact details. This did have an impact on my own translation as I was privy to more background information than I would ordinarily have requested. However, I did create my translation before I read any others. In addition, we were all aware that there were going to be eighteen other versions of this poem, and that certainly gave me more freedom, thus straying further from the source text than I may ordinarily have done. According to Weinberger, I’m the rebellious child that kicks back at the parent-original, while others may be overly-attached!
I was keen to include translators who take more of a source-focused approach than me—Khadijah Sanusi Gumbi, for example—alongside those who are more target-focused or take a creative approach. To some extent, we see this in Herxheimer’s poem, which resituates many of the culturally embedded terms so that Yambacongo, for example, becomes Shtetlbetty. Nonetheless, we see both attachment and rebellion within most of the poems. Kareem James Abu-Zeid alters the register of the poem, beginning “What’d we do with it? / How’d we lose it?” and yet his use of a footnote reveals an intent to recommunicate as much source material as possible. Bonnie Chau translates the line-by-line structure of the source text, but not always the construction of individual phrases, for example, “Agad’Afouaga”—meaning “destroys-constructs” in Nugunu—becomes “Break-and-make-again”.
In terms of experience, some contributors are regular poetry or literary translators, such as Mary Noonan who is also an academic, as is Professor N. Kamala and Khadijah Sanusi Gumbi, amongst others, but we’ve also included the work of a talented PhD student, Alyssa Salzberg, who offers a fresh nuance by gendering Agad’Afouaga as feminine. And there are writers in this volume who ordinarily do not translate Francophone literature, such as Maneo Mohale, an award-winning and multilingual poet. Some use versions of English that you may never have read before, like Christine De Luca’s poem written in Shetlandic (a minority language and a variant of Scots that is related to Middle English) and then there is the poem by Sophie Herxheimer, who rather ingeniously translates into her German Jewish grandmother’s English accent. Try reading it aloud! Others use more standard forms of English, such as Jean Anderson or me. However, this so-called standard language still varies from poem to poem; we all have idiolects governing our individual linguistic preferences.
We also have one officially collaborative translation from Sarah Ardizzone and Rohan Ayinde (I say officially as most translators ask for the perspectives of others), which brings a new dynamic to the poem, revealed in their commentary discussion. We also wanted to make sure we had at least two very different translators from Cameroon for an interesting comparison: Nfor E. Njinyoh and Prudence Lucha. Both draw on their childhood to support their choices in translation, and yet their poems are so distinct. Note the translation of “serpentaires” as snakebird by Njinyoh and serpent-eagle by Lucha. The list could go on, but essentially, identity, culture and the way we interpret our role as a translator, all have an impact on our strategy and choices, making every single poem unique.
The hope, then, for this volume is to create talking points that are cultural, linguistic, poetic, translational, personal and critical in nature. Kadija Sesay’s thought-provoking Afterword begins that process. I am also keen for Awono’s “great poetry” to have a new “place to go” albeit in many different forms, to be studied and to enrich readers culturally. And in a translation ecosystem that is increasingly influenced by Artificial Intelligence, the hope is that other literary enthusiasts might take inspiration from this collection and indulge in arguably the most challenging—but not impossible—task in translation: poetry.
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono is available on Bakwa Books.
REFERENCES
Frost, Robert, and Elaine Barry. Robert Frost on Writing. Rutgers University Press, 1973.
Marasligil, Canan. “Uncaring: Reflections on the Politics of Literary Translation”. Read My Week, https://readmyworld.nl/en/an-editors-note/.
Tadjo, Véronique, and Kathryn Batchelor. “Translation: Spreading the Wings of Literature”. Intimate Enemies: Translation in Francophone Contexts. Liverpool University Press, 2013.
Weinberger, Eliot, and Octavio Paz. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: (With More Ways). New Directions Books, 2016.
Weinberger, Eliot, et al. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated. Moyer Bell, 1987