“Apostrophes to the natural world: Inventive translations of ‘polyglot wordplay and glossolalia’” by Philip Ross Bullock (TLS; En)

I am convinced that Robert Chandler is a magician, because his work of translation is impeccably fascinating. Apologies for over-quoting (it’s paywalled, and not everyone knows how to go through, hence the lengthy excerpt), but it’s worth it.

Robert Chandler’s juxtaposition of the two poets in Birds, Beasts and a World Made New is an adroit one. Both were drawn to modern art. Both spoke to the apocalyptic upheavals of their age (one section of the anthology is entitled “War, Revolution, Civil War and Famine”). Both were famed for their experimental command of verse form, from the unpunctuated suppleness of Apollinaire’s Alcohols, or the playful visuality of his Calligrammes, to the polyglot wordplay and glossolalia of Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter” and transrational poetry.

Inventiveness abounds in these translations (and in the imaginative imitations and homages by other translators that Chandler generously includes). His version of Apollinaire’s “Exiled Grace” includes a deft macaronic half-rhyme between arc-en-ciel and “sad exile”, and wittily renders au vent de bise as “in the breeze”. The fluid seven lines of Khlebnikov’s “Cricket International” are compressed into a rhythmic quatrain of (mostly) dactylic bimeter:

Grasshopper-gracehoper,

Joy us with evensong.

Wing it, swing it,

Creak out your dickinsong.

As the last word suggests, Chand­ler’s ear is equally attuned to a pleiad of English-language poets. His commentaries cite John Clare, Walt Whitman and even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and W.B. Yeats provides a ready solution to an intractable couplet of abstract French. ©

What I find sad is that I can’t see the choirs singing carols anywhere in Cambridge anymore. It is conceivable, of course, that I just haven’t come across them, as they might perform in the centre (the Grand Arcade and such), but the thing is that before 2018/19 I had observed them (and enjoyed their performance, no matter how amateur) quite regularly...

Christmas Tree-2024: preparations (En)

I have to admit, the older I get the more I perceive decorating the Christmas Tree as one of the most important challenges of the year, which can be compared with any elaborate academic tasks. I *nearly* succeeded today, but the tree needs a bit more zhuzh, which I’ll certainly give it later tonight. All the usual pictures I, most likely, will take tomorrow, without huffing and puffing after completing the chores.

 

(Feat. Rudolf Bernhard Willmann (1868-1919), Christmas Tree Decorated with Lights)

So, husband generated* a new image of yours truly with the help of a new Apple AI, and let me tell you that this new “me” ultimately looks like an unloved child of the Teletubbies, pretty much all the evil characters from the original Toy Story and the main heroine from the recent sci fi horror M3GAN.

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* Many of you sadly have already been introduced to a variety of his artistic endeavours

You simply cannot envisage the best birthday without a cake (Sissi torte, dedicated to that one demure Empress of Austria, thanks to Kipferl yet again), the card and lovely greetings and messages from friends and family. And then, there were festivities at the restaurant with the nicest food (Basque cheesecake, I see you!) and the loveliest Cantabrigian ever: a proper way to celebrate 49, methinks.

 49.

I stop reposting from this particular outlet a while ago, but I still make one exception for Carol Rumens’s column, and this time she’s analysing—sublimely as usual—one of my favourite winter poems by Keats.

The title-lines, first: the lack of a hyphen between “drear” and “nighted” adds to the slow weight of the words opening stanzas one and two. Keats’s diction throughout is inventive: he makes bold use of gerunds, or “verbal nouns”, such as “thawings”, “bubblings”, “forgetting”, “fretting”. Each stanza encloses a triad of end-rhymes, consisting, in the first and third, of verb-and-object (“undo them”, “through them”, “glue them” and “feel it”, “heal it” “steel it”). The energy of the rhyme-scheme springs from folk song and folk-speech foundations. ©

Christmas Feast at Clare-2024

And the feast was marvellous, and the Tree was fabulous, and that one Fellow of Clare was merry.

Eldritch Elf-2024: in Cambridge! (En)

Heartfelt thanks to my Eldritch Elf this year, The Innsmouth Book Club! Rob and Tim, not only do you have one of the greatest podcasts out there, but also give the best presents! You made my 2024 much happier. Hooray!

“What Does a Translator Do?” by Max Norman (The New Yorker; En)

It depends on how we define sense in this case.

It’s not just that translation was called something different: it also meant something different. In Searls’s account, which draws heavily on the work of the twentieth-century French theorist Antoine Berman, translation was first a matter of content, and only later a matter of form. Cicero believed that sense should be translated for sense, not “counting out words for the reader,” but “weighing them out.” A few centuries later, St. Jerome, author of the great Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued that translations of the mysteries should be word for word, but everything else should be, like Cicero advocated, sense for sense. There was an easy confidence in antiquity, and all the way up to the Renaissance, that translation was indeed possible—though the more modern language may need to be stretched to accommodate the semantic richness, and classical authority, of the original. ©