Unfaithful Beauties

Posted by Aviva Dautch, workshop leader

Recently I attended a poetry workshop focused on translation issues. The teacher, Clare Pollard, a young and very talented poet who has published three collections, is currently taking part in a British Council project to translate the work of Hungarian poets into English, an interesting challenge since she speaks no Hungarian. Clare has been matched with Anna Szabó (a Hungarian writer and translator into Hungarian of Yeats, Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath) and brought some of her renderings of Szabó’s poems to class.

The way they work is that Szabó writes a literal translation of the words in English. With the help of phone calls, e-mails and a big dictionary to clarify the meaning, Clare then creates an English poem which captures the style, rhythm and meaning of the original, often through imaginative poetic leaps that stray from the literal in order to reflect the poetic truth Szabó intended. These translations are ‘Les Belles Infidels’ or ‘Unfaithful Beauties’, perhaps the most interesting contemporary examples of which are Jo Shapcott’s versions of Rilke’s French rose poems, which interrogate and interpret Rilke’s descriptions – ‘translating’ them in the sense of translation’s original Latin meaning, trans-late: to carry across, to displace.

In the workshop I attended each of us were given the same poem to work on – in Szabó’s original Hungarian so we could see the form, sound and rhythm; together with her literal translation – and asked to do what Clare will do for real: turn it into an English poem. Each of our versions were simultaneously faithful and unfaithful and many were beautiful, but every one was different. Put 20 people in the same place, at the same time, give them the same challenge, and you get 20separate translations.

I was thinking about this experience when I last took a group around the exhibition. The strap-line of Sacred is ‘Discover What We Share’ and the curatorial intention is to look at the similarities, the shared histories and cultural influences, and the textual transmission. Each time I visit Sacred I am struck by the interchange between the religions and each other, between the religions and the cultures of the countries in which they grew. It is always fascinating to see the Hebrew calligraphy with a border scribed by a Christian illustrator, the Arabic writing of a Coptic Psalter and the other wonderful texts displayed in the final cabinet, which surprise us with their fluid identities. Yet what interests me more are the ‘standard’ texts that form the majority of the canon – the ones we take for granted.

Whenever I lead a tour, I always start at the central veiled box with its three books. We have been told to use the language ‘Jewish Bible, Christian Bible and Qur’an’ to describe them, but whenever I ask visitors (of all ages, from all countries) to name them, inevitably someone will call the first two ‘Old Testament and New Testament’.

Leaving aside the supercessionism that this implies (which is another issue in context of an exhibition which recognises Judaism as a valid and living religion not supplanted by Christianity), the Old Testament and the Jewish Bible are two different texts. The Jewish Bible is the Hebrew Bible, and orders the books into three sections: the Torah (5 Books of Moses / Pentateuch), the Neviim (the Prophets – from Samuel to Malachai) and the Ketuvim (the writings – the later texts, poetry, history and narratives of Job, Ruth, Esther etc. ending with Chronicles). The Old Testament orders and numbers the books differently, counting 39 to the Hebrew Bible’s 24, and is, of course, in a different language, translated first into Greek and later into Latin.

The earliest translation, the Septuagint (meaning 70 in Latin), is named for the legend that 72 Hellenised Jewish scholars translated the Pentateuch from Hebrew into Greek for one of the Ptolemaic kings, and all came up with an identical translation. My poetic experience leads me to doubt this as a possibility, and those who first marveled at the legend clearly shared my suspicions because they only way they believed it could happen was with divine inspiration.

Each version of the Jewish Bible displayed here is different – the Dead Sea Scrolls show a plain text, with no vowels or punctuation; however the post-10th Century Bibles contain the Masoretic text – with vowels and cantillation signs (providing the grammar) stabilising the Hebrew meaning. The Greek and Latin translations into the Old Testament are also varied, just like the numerous English versions we find in our bookshops today. Each word, each inflection changes the sense – as a translator, the tension between rendering Biblical poetry into a poetic text and sticking close to the literalness of its original, is far more freighted that when translating modern writing, or even Shakespeare. The theological implications of using a definite or indefinite article can send reverberations streaming through the text and religious life, let alone the impact of translating the bearer of prophecy in Isaiah into ‘young woman’ or ‘virgin’, or defining how all three religions have different understandings of ‘prophecy’ itself.

How can Jews, Christians and Muslims all be People of the Book, when their concepts of ‘the Book’ are founded on different interpretations and meanings? Who can lay claim to ‘the truth’? In a time when fundamentalism can have terrible and violent consequences, it seems so important to highlight the multiplicity of meaning, of possibility, the ways in which the readings and interpretations of these sacred texts was as much shaped by the historical place and moment as the calligraphy and illustration, the notion of ‘truths’ and not ‘truth’.

The one thing all these books share is their gift of tremendous power to the reader, the potential to be used (or misused) in heterogeneous ways. This means that, as the Exhibition’s educators, we have a difficult job and our methodology, the process of our education, is as important as the result.

I’m beginning to reach a place where I think the best thing I can do is raise the questions and not try to give the answers, and allow each visitor to take their own journey, for what they bring to these texts will influence what they take away and we each have our own ways of understanding what we see.

Meanwhile, the question for me to explore as I educate is the following: If all translations are unfaithful beauties, what impact does that have on people of faith?

Comments

[John Pounders]

Your comments are good overall. I noted that the brochure handed out with the Sacred exhibits contained inferences about the Old Testament and New Testament that are not true. I believe their integrity is widely substantiated. The brouchure implies that they are based on oral tradition which is simply not the case. Meticulous procedures were employed in coping Old Testament manuscripts. And, if I may, the small amount of oral tradition involved did not lead to variations which misrepresented or brought into question, for instance, the life and teachings of Jesus.

You could point that out to your guests.