Mark Strand (1934 - 29 November 2014)[photo, nd © Mary Noble Ours] I was in the bathtub when J

Mark Strand (1934 - 29 November 2014)
[photo, nd © Mary Noble Ours]

I was in the bathtub when Jorge Luis Borges stumbled in the door. “Borges, be careful,” I yelled. “The floor is slippery and you are blind.” Then, soaping my chest, I said, “Borges, have you ever considered what is implicit in a phrase like "I translate Apollinaire into English”? or “I translate de la Mare into French”? that we take the highly idiosyncratic work of an individual and render it into a language that belongs to everyone and to no one, a system of meanings sufficiently general to permit not only misunderstandings but to throw into doubt the possibility of permitting anything else?“

"Yes,” he said, with an air of resignation.

“Then don’t you think,” I said, “that the translation of poetry is best left to poets who are in possession of an English they have each made their own, and that language teachers, who feel responsibility to a language not in its modifications but in its monolithic entirety, make the worst translators?

Wouldn’t it be best to think of translation as a transaction between individual idioms, between, say, the Italian of D'Annunzio and the English of Auden? If we did, we could end irrelevant discussions of who has and who hasn’t done a correct translation.”

“Yes,” he said, seeming to get excited.

“Say,” I said. “If translation is a kind of reading, the assumption or transformation of one personal idiom into another, then shouldn’t it be possible to translate work done in one’s own language? Shouldn’t it be possible to translate Wordsworth or Shelley into Strand?”

“You will discover,” said Borges, “that Wordsworth refuses to be translated. It is you who must be translated, who must become, for however long, the author of The Prelude. That is what happened to Pierre Menard when he translated Cervantes. He did not want to compose another Don Quixote – which would be easy – but the Don Quixote. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes. The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to re-embrace the Catholic faith, to fight against the Moors and Turks, to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary, and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it was almost impossible.”

“Not almost impossible,” I said, “but absolutely impossible, for in order to translate one must cease to be.” I closed my eyes for a second and realized that if I ceased to be, I would never know.

“Borges…” I was about to tell him that the strength of a style must be measured by its resistance to translation.

“Borges…” But when I opened my eyes, he, and the text into which he was drawn, had come to an end.

– Mark Strand, Translation, from The Continuous Life (Knopf, 1990)