When you wander through a labyrinth of magic mirrors at a fairground your face is distorted in fantastic
ways – one can acquire a huge
Mekon-like head or a thin and distended
one, like stretched chewing gum. I
feel that a similar process of distortion happens
with the translation of a poem. What
the translation shows us is not the poem,
but the poem warped by the vision of the
translator. A dozen different
Dantes stare back at us from the various
English translations of the Divine Comedy, from Mark Musa’s dark pared-down Dante,
bereft of rhyme to a Dante who appears in
tinkling triple rhyme in Sayer’s version. It
seems to me that Musa’s version is more
faithful to the original. In abandoning the
rhyme he achieves the feeling of natural
speech – the illusion of reality which is
crucial to Dante and so powerful that the
writer was pursued through Florence by
the cry ‘behold the man who has been in
hell’. Sayers’s version, on the other hand, by
adhering faithfully to the rhyme scheme of
Dante, loses the poet’s conversational tone.
Musa, by betraying the original rhyme,
stays faithful to the spirit of the poem.
These issues were powerfully present
to me as I translated Tychyna’s book Solar
Clarinets. ‘Whose book?’ you will probably
ask. Pavlo Tychyna ( 1891-
1967) is the major Ukrainian poet of the
twentieth century. His first collection, Solar
Clarinets (1918) focused on the themes of
nature, music and, in a certain sense, religion.
These poems evoke the landscape of
central Ukraine and the poet’s experience
of revolution and civil war, but combine
these elements into free standing musical
structures. The first poem, which can
be read as an epiphany experienced while
playing the clarinet, focuses on the musical
theme and acts as a manifesto for the rest
of the collection. The speaker of the poem
(the musician) experiences the intrinsic
structures of reality through music, and
conveys this experience through a series
of striking metaphors focused around the
clarinet. In the majority of the subsequent
lyrics the speaker of the poem will be audience,
rather than performer, to the math or
melody of reality:
Over the road stands the willow
Catching the resonant strings of rain
Bowing with its branches as if saying
Sorrow, sorrow
Such years, such without end
On the strings of eternity I play
A willow, solitary.
Unfortunately the relatively liberal conditions
of the 1920s during which Ukrainian
poetry blossomed like the sunflower on
the dust jacket of Tychyna’s first collection
were followed by the Stalinist inferno. Two
hundred and twenty-six Ukrainian writers
were executed or rendered inactive by
the Soviet Police. They died in the underground
basements of police stations, in
Arctic labour camps; they were shot and
tortured; they died of hypothermia, exhaustion,
malnutrition. During this period
millions of Ukrainian peasants died in the
artificial famine of 1932-1933, known as
the Holodomor – Ukraine was surrounded
and food was taken at gunpoint in order to
crush the nation’s ability to become a culturally
and politically independent entity.
Tychyna was one of the few surviving
members of this generation, which is
known as ‘the Executed Renaissance’. The
price he paid for his survival was writing
ream after ream of Stalinist doggerel.
The most notorious and typical example
of this poisonous material is “the Party
Leads” a celebration of mass murder which
was parroted by generations of crimson
neckerchief wearing Soviet Pioneers (the
Pioneers were communism’s answer to the
boy scouts :
We will we will we will beat
Bourgeise and bourgeoisie
And all the Lords into One Pit
Translating Tychyna’s work and conveying
it to the English reader presents two
major challenges. To begin with Ukraine,
territorially the largest country entirely in
Europe is weirdly invisible in terms of mainstream
European culture. A lack of skilled
Ukrainian translators, a naïve tendency to
trust the official Russian line on an Empire
which, like most empires, was welded together
by violence means that Ukraine is
for many people still a part of Russia: the
Ukraine – a mere area and not a country
with a language that is not a language but
a dialect. In historical terms this is similar
to saying that Dutch is simply a dialect of
German or Portugese a dialect of Spanish
– meaningless but potentially symbolic of
a wish to undermine a national culture.
In
presenting the poet you have also to present
his country and assume that the reader will
simply not have a mental vision of Ukraine
within which to place the work. It is easy to
imagine Rimbaud by the Seine or Dante in
the streets of Florence but behind Tychyna
looms an enormous void.
The biggest challenge is presented by the
infinitely complex grammar and endlessly
flexible word order of Ukrainian. The language
has seven cases, verbs may exist in
two forms, the word order is as flexible as
a bendy balloon. The agreement between
case endings which is echoed in the sound
of the words also creates endless possibilities
for internal rhyming fully embodied in
Tychyna’s work. The language itself really is
the Solar Clarinet of the title poem.
The problem is of course that the effortless
music of Tychyna’s verse, which grows
out of the syntactical structures of the
Ukrainian language, cannot be reproduced
in English.
However, there is at the heart of
his work a vision of nature and the world
which survives the transition into English.
The last poem in the book was written before Crow
by Ted Hughes and before T.S. Eliot’s The
Wasteland – but all of these poems seem to
echo one another or resonate in unison like
strings set to the same pitch.
These days translators of poetry are
moving away from a clunking attempt to
reproduce the verse structure of a foreign
poet and towards a more elusive quest for
that most vague of qualities – the essence
of a text. If there is a similarity between the
aforementioned poets it is not because
Tychyna was familiar with their work, but
because there is an elusive similarity between
the greatest writing; a congruence of
themes and emotions. Tychyna, like Hughes
and Eliot, was able to stare directly into
the furnace of the twentieth century and
into the blank enigma of the human heart.
Stephen Komarnyckyj is a PEN award winning literary translator and poet whose work is published by Kalyna Language Press and features on the PEN World Bookshelf. You can e mail him on stevekomoffice(at)zoho.eu
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