Stealing Fire for His Own Furnaces: Clayton Eshleman on Translation

You’re widely regarded as the definitive translator of the poets Aimé Césaire and Cesar Vallejo—you’ve co-translated four volumes of Cesaire’s poetry and translated The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo. In both cases you’ve managed to capture the real voice and thrust of the writing, the holy grail of the translator. What first attracted you to these two poets in particular? In reading through your translations, I notice the development of their authors’ voices—really, my question has to do with intimacy, with your intimacy with these poets’ work. How do you get inside it? When did you know you would eventually translate their entire oeuvres?

I discovered Vallejo’s poetry in the 1947 New Directions Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry when I was a graduate student at Indiana University around 1958. One poem, “The Spider,” had an electrifying effect on me. Some of its resonance continued while I was living in Kyoto, Japan, 1962-1964. In the fall of 1962, I began to watch daily a large red, green and yellow garden spider in her web in a persimmon tree in the backyard of the Okumura house where my first wife and I had several rooms. One morning I found the web torn, the spider gone, and experienced a bizarre sort of grief that I knew no way to account for. I was still upset a few days later when, returning from a visit to Gary Snyder’s house, I began to hallucinate and decided to get off my motorcycle and circumambulate Nijo Castle. While doing so, I saw the spider, now all red and enormous, up in the sky over my head working her web. I had been crying for a vision to prove to myself that I was to be a poet and this vision was the confirmation.
Here is Vallejo’s “The Spider” (published in 1918):

                                      It is an enormous spider that now cannot move;
                                   a colorless spider, whose body,
                                   a head and an abdomen, bleeds. 

                                      Today I watched it up close. With what effort
                                   toward every side
                                   it extended its innumerable legs.
                                   And I have thought about its invisible eyes,
                                   the spider’s fatal pilots.

                                      It is a spider that tremored caught
                                   on the edge of a rock;
                                   abdomen on one side,
                                   head on the other. 

                                      With so many legs the poor thing, and still unable
                                   to free itself. And on seeing it
                                   confounded by its fix
                                   today, I have felt such sorrow for that traveler. 

                                      It is an enormous spider, impeded by
                                   its abdomen from following its head.
                                   And I have thought about its eyes
                                   and about its numerous legs…
                                   And I have felt such sorrow for that traveler!

At the same time I had been studying Vallejo’s Poemas humanos, a copy of which I had purchased in Mexico City a year before leaving for Japan. One afternoon my friend Will Petersen told me about a bonsai gardener who was doing some original work having finally finished his apprenticeship. How old is he, I inquired. In his late sixties, Will replied. That stunned me, as I had never thought about apprenticeship to an art before, and got me thinking about how I might apprentice myself to the art of poetry. I decided that I would translate all of the Poemas humanos as my apprenticeship without really knowing what I was getting myself in for. I have written about this apprenticeship in an essay, “A Translation Memoir,” to be found at the end of my translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007).

Césaire I discovered around 1960 via a translation by Emile Snyder of the extraordinary prose poem “Lynch 1” which Jack Hirschman published in Hip Pocket Poems #2. I read other translations of Césaire’s poetry and soon encountered his fifty-page Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), which at that time existed in two translations, one by Snyder, and another by John Berger and Anna Bostock. Reading the translations against the original French, I determined that Césaire was more complex and wilder than he was being represented in these two versions, so I teamed up with a French scholar at the California Institute of Technology (I was living in Los Angeles at the time), Annette Smith, and we did a version of our own, which led us to then do The Collected Poems of Aimé Césaire which University of California Press published in 1983.

Both Vallejo and Césaire struck me as not simply accomplished and moving poets, but as unique sensibilities. As I have written elsewhere concerning the key difference between a poet translating a poet and a scholar translating a poet:

While both engage the myth of Prometheus, seeking to steal some fire from one of the gods to bestow on readers, the poet is also involved in a sub-plot that may, as it were, chain him to a wall. That is, besides making an offering to the reader, the poet-translator is also making an offering to himself—he is stealing fire for his own furnaces at the risk of being overwhelmed—stalemated—by the power he has inducted into his own workings.

As for “the development of authors’ voices”: having stayed with both of these masters for over fifty years, I think I have become a more demanding and inventive translator as I have matured as a poet. Around 2003, when I retired from teaching at Eastern Michigan University, here in Ypsilanti, I decided that I should translate Vallejo’s early poetry—the rhymed verse of Los heraldos negros—and add it to the other three collections to make a “complete poetry.” I had previously stayed away from the early work as translating rhymed verse is a trap for any translator. If you rhyme it in English you destroy the meaning. If you translate sheerly for meaning, you generally lose the elegance and reoccurring harmonies of the original. So I did the best I could with The Black Heralds, revised once again my other Vallejo translations, and brought that saga to a close.

While I have cotranslated much of Césaire’s poetry I have not done everything. There are thirty to forty poems written after the 1982 moi, laminaire (which I cotranslated with Annette Smith in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-1982 (University Press of Virginia, 1990) that I do not plan to work on. My last Césaire project will undoubtedly be the translation, with A. James Arnold, of the unexpurgated 1948 Soleil cou coupé recently published by Wesleyan University Press as Solar Throat Slashed.

Tell me a little about your process of translation. Where do you begin? How do you know when you’re done?

Simple: one sketches out a first draft, and follows up with as many drafts are needed to get the translation as accurate as possible as well as up to the performance level of the original. A cohesive tonality is also very important so the translation does not read as if it were done by a machine. Tonality is hard to describe: it is like infusing a translation with a sense of personality, of making it vivid in the second language—while at the same time not distorting meaning. A difficult dance.

I sometimes work with cotranslators who are scholars who know much more about the original language than I do (while I took a few French classes in late 1960s and mid-1970s I am mainly a self-taught reader in both French and Spanish, neither of which do I speak or write fluently). Since my cotranslator knows more about the language than I do, she or he does the first draft, which I then go over, and query.

I guess we think we are done with a translation when we can’t figure out any more questions to prod it with. We really don’t complete it; we abandon it. And of course, with both of the poets discussed here, I have returned to completed translations decades later and redone them—several times in Vallejo’s case.

You knew Aimé Césaire, right? What was your relationship like?

I spent some time with Aimé Césaire on three occasions, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first two times I arranged through his Paris publisher to meet him in a café so that I could ask him questions Annette Smith and I had not been able to solve with her erudite French and our battalion of dictionaries. I found him to be a very sweet and genuine person, utterly without pomposity. In certain cases I was asking him questions about poems he no longer remembered writing! The third occasion we met in one of his son’s apartments in Paris where he stayed while he was on duty in the National Assembly (one of Césaire’s uniqueness being that he was not only the mayor of the capital city of Martinique but a congressman as well; imagine Walt Whitman as the mayor of Washington D.C. and a congressman). This time Annette and Jim Arnold joined us. We brought with us our final list of about two dozen unsolved translation problems. Aimé would ponder our question and then often scurry over to a bookcase to consult some French-African dictionary. At the end of our work, we asked him to read us a poem, and he chose “Corps perdu” (“Lost Body”) from the little collection with that title.

How does your work as translator affect your work as poet, essayist, and writer? How do you balance your writerly activity?

I am primarily a poet who translates and writes some literary and archeological prose. I probably have spent as much time translating as working on my own poems. On one level, translating is a godsend, as one cannot always (with rare exceptions) be working on poems. In fact, I believe it is a good idea to work very hard, say, for six months on poems, and then walk away for another six months and let one’s subconscious recover its arsenal. While translating, I find I spend much more time with my Webster’s International Dictionary (I adore the Second Edition) than I do with Spanish or French dictionaries. So I am studying my language while I am translating.

Both Vallejo and Césaire (and Antonin Artaud who I have spent a lot of time with as a translator) have given me the courage to try anything in poetry in my quest for an alternative world in poetry. As I wrote in my “Translation Memoir”:

Influence through translation is different than influence through reading masters in one’s own tongue. I am creating an American version out of a Spanish text, and if Vallejo is to enter my own poetry, he must do so through what I have already, as a translator, turned him into. This is, in the long run, very close to being influenced by myself, or by self I have created to mine. In this way, I do not feel that my poetry reflects Vallejo’s (or Césaire’s or Artaud’s).

I’m interested in your translations of Bei Dao’s work, someone who strikes me as aesthetically quite different than the other two poets we’ve discussed—not to mention the fact that he writes in Chinese! How did you get started translating Bei Dao? Is your process any different when translating from Chinese?

If you are interested in my Bei Dao co-translations, you should read Endure (Black Widow Press, 2011). In our Double Introduction and our Appendix on the translating of one Bei Dao poem at the end of that collection, I think we answer your question here. I know not a word of Chinese. Having known Bei Dao and his work for nearly two decades, I decided that he could possibly be translated better than his main translator, David Hinton, had done. Of course I had no entrance into the original Chinese, but I knew Bei Dao pretty well and intuitively I decided that he was more literary and complex than rendered by Hinton. So I teamed up with the young and very sharp Chinese translator/scholar Lucas Klein and through the mail (online) we did thirty-one poems mainly from the 1990s. We did not redo any of Eliot Weinberger’s co-translations because they seemed perfectly fine to us. Lucas would send me a first draft with commentary. I would make a second draft quizzing him about words in the poem as well as his commentary. And we would go back and forth, exchanging, I would guess, on the average, a dozen letters for each poem. Lucas of course always had the last word. I would constantly try things out on him, attempting to get more substantial placements and solid lines into a poem, and he would accept or reject my suggestions relative to whether they were backed up or not by the original Chinese. I think we did a fine job. Of course, it will be up to Bei Dao’s readers in English to decide if we have created a more compelling Bei Dao than has previously been done. So that your readers will have some sense as to what I am talking about here, I juxtapose a Hinton version with one of our versions, from Bei Dao’s collection The Landscape Above Zero Degrees (the Hinton version having appeared in his 1996 New Directions collection, Landscape Over Zero):

Bei Dao recently said that he finds contemporary literature uninspired, because “many writers are forced to lower their writing standards to cater to vulgarity.” Do you agree?

By “contemporary literature” I think Bei Dao means contemporary Chinese poetry. His English is not good enough to evaluate English language poetries. His own poetry, I think, has been considerably influenced by foreign poetries in Chinese translation, and of course I have no idea as to how accurately someone like Tomas Transtromer (one of his favorite foreign poets) has been translated. I suspect that Bei Dao uses his pretty basic English to read someone like Transtromer in English translation, a rather complicated situation in my opinion. So I am not really qualified to give you much of a response to this question. As you may know, Bei Dao has been living in exile for decades (he now lives in Hong Kong) and the world of the exile plays a profound role in his sensibility—in fact, I would guess that it has considerably shaped his sensibility and offered a defining contour to who he is and what he utters. I think your comments on his criticism of contemporary Chinese poetry is from a recent trip where he was given permission to participate in a gathering of poets in mainland China.

That’s very interesting. I recently had an email exchange with your co-translator Lucas Klein, who further contextualized Bei Dao’s comments. Lucas, what do you make of his suggestion that contemporary literature is uninspired?

LK The assertion that Bei Dao finds contemporary literature uninspired comes from the China Dailyarticle reporting on his attendance of the Qinghai Lake International Poetry Festival, his first time in mainland China in seven years and his first time ever attending a government-sponsored Chinese poetry event. But since the China Daily is the government’s official news organ in English, it probably has a vested interest in how it represents Bei Dao, so rather than make any mention of why he has not lived in China since 1989, for instance, it portrays him as disparaging contemporary Chinese poetry. But “many writers are forced to lower their writing standards to cater to vulgarity” was written by the journalist and is not a direct quote from Bei Dao. Where he’s directly quoted, he talks about the challenges poetry faces from a cheapened, commodified cultural field rather than about the quality of poetry as written: “It’s true not only in China but also across the world, and it’s related to many factors, like materialism oriented by consumption, the nationwide trend of seeking entertainment, information dissemination brought by new technologies. All these things are making bubbles in language and literature.” This is also the main point of his statement, which I translated, for this November’s Hong Kong International Poetry Nights:

At present, we are experiencing a retreat to human civilization’s last line of defense—ours is an era void of spiritual direction, an era of lost
cultural value and ideals, an era ridden with linguistic garbage … in the internet age of so-called globalization, vulgar and elegant meld to form
a common pact, simplifying humanity’s linguistic expressivity.
           What, then, can poetry do? This ancient term takes on a particular significance today.

I haven’t spoken with Bei Dao about this specifically, but to me this is very different from saying that poetry is “uninspired,” which again would be different from saying that poetry isn’t very good. My sense is that Bei Dao thinks poetry needs to be all the more inspired so that it can overcome the obstacles the world’s political and economic realities have put in front of it.

Funny, despite my knowledge of Bei Dao’s political situation and person—I was fortunate to meet him in Oklahoma in 2008—I didn’t realize that the China Daily was an official news source, with an official position.

Thanks, Clayton, for your time. And thanks, Lucas, for your insightful analysis of Bei Dao’s comments. I’m very grateful to you both for your renderings of Bei Dao’s beautiful poetry, and I’m excited to hear you read at Beyond Baroque.