Dear friends: in early November my friend Tobias hosted me at his flat in Berlin. As happens with wondrous friendship, our discussions have set off mutual fits of inspiration. Tobi invited me to write an essay for his college magazine, which you will find below. I hope you enjoy it. And I encourage you, dear reader, to print out the text, or at least close your other tabs. Thank you.

Every translation is an exercise in imperfection.

Rhythm shifts, the flow of sounds is rerouted. How can a verse, wrenched from its native habitat, be nearly as vital in a new one? Is there a more intimate connection than the one between a poem and its language? More essentially, in poetry, language is a vehicle for emotional movement. It is this inner feeling which makes for itself a home in a new tongue, rather than its former outward expression in language.

We cannot ask our translators to midwife equivalence, but rather rebirth. When a poem comes into a new tongue, it is the same soul finding expression in a new personality, all the more beautiful for not being identical.

A successful translation is a collaboration between languages and eras. The translator does great service to her generation and those thereafter, allowing novel thoughts to enter the discourse. As a pinch of ginger enhances a whole dish, a translated text enlivens a literature.

Such is the case a Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic who is the best-selling poet in America. He has come alive thanks to interpretive free verse renderings of Coleman Barks, (Daniel Ladinsky has done similar work with Hafiz, who came a generation later). Barks tells a story of how he was once asked “to free these poems,” shedding them of scholastic rigidity. I cannot be the first to have been effected by these verses:

“the way of love is not a subtle argument;
the door there is devastation.”

It is not in clever reasoning that one lives in a loving manner, but in deep feeling. That an eight-hundred-year-old Sufi speaks so strongly, and so broadly, to America, is cause for consideration.

That a text in a way so foreign is also so familiar suggests that times and settings are as similar as they are different. As long as man has had the opportunity to contemplate he has been subject to hope and doubt, as long as man has had relationships he has felt joy and sorrow. In reaching deep into the nonconceptual self the poet finds what is common to all, an insight into humanity transcending cultural bounds. Translation is essential because it allows the culturally transcendent to find a home in a new tongue.

An Indian folk tale tells of four old blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time. The elders span across the creature, each touching another part. Handling the tusk, the first observes that elephants are hard and sharp. The second, palming its knee, finds that elephants are rough and thick. The third, grappling with the trunk, declares that elephants are like snakes, but blow out much more air. The last, holding the tail, suggests that elephants are rat like and smell foul. Yet each touches the elephant.

Similarly, though our experiences with existence are of staggering difference, they are, none the less, of the same kind; they are encounters with living. It is in this way that distant texts are of such value: the circumstances that create the life of a Rumi or a Rilke are so different from one another, as well as our own, yet are so much the same. Their verses were written in diffent tongues, but their emotional referents are often parallel, if not the same. This is what literature, especially translated verse, gives to us: the poet undergoes trial or triumph, and expresses the process in verse. When the poem is good, it allows the reader to undergo a version of said events, in the way that a computer can simulate the flight of an airplane. And just as a flight simulation provides training for the pilot, a quality poem allows for a simulation of phenomena within the reader, whether it be redemption of a man or the smell of a rose. We gain wisdom through life experience, and poetry, as well as its cousins in fiction, is uniquely suited to providing a rendering of such experience. As readers, we benefit greatly by sampling the lives of those across places and times.

French philosopher Gaston Blachard describes the reading of the poem as a series of phenomena, a succession of images. The image reverberates in the reader: memories and other associations light up with a phrase. This is the personal nature of the poem. The space it inhabits and moves within is the emotional core, the soul. Rather than the lexical work of shifting a word from one tongue to another, the best translations preserve the emotional melody and rhythm of reverberations within the reader.

It can be said that all external language is translation. The often murky substance of feeling is something that cannot be properly called language, at least not one that can be shared, as while there may be syntax and vocabulary, there is not a clear expression. The antecedent feat of translation is to bring the unconscious into the conscious.

Our interior lives are complex and diffuse. It is reasonable to posit that we are constantly in communication with ourselves. There appears to be an intrapersonal forum inside, within which there are many voices. It could be said that one is blocked, emotionally or in some other way, if one denies the expression of said voices, be they that of the intuition, the emotions, or the intellect. Similar to the Millsian theory of the marketplace of ideas, that being an argument for an inclusive society in order to draw from the broadest range of thought, regardless of class, gender, or other distinction, there is an inner society of unconscious and conscious, and to refuse part of this society is to reduce one’s spectrum of experience, to not use all of the tools available to us in life.

This may be extrapolated to the nature of literature in translation: each person, and each culture, has a unique interpretation of the profoundly common experience of being human. The poet is gifted in the navigation and expression of his or her interior space, in which he or she contends with the pervasive trials of life. What we have then is more hands on the elephant. The poet reaches deep into himself to find what is common to all. The translator makes that insight available to another culture. And may our culture do the same for the next.