Once a month I meet with a group of other poets at a local restaurant to talk about poetry and to workshop some poems. At a recent meeting we were looking over translations of Japanese poems by Sam Hamill, and we began discussing the subject of translations and the challenges they create for the translator and the reader.

To help answer a few of the questions, I decided to go to the source himself.

Hamill has published at least 14 volumes of his own poetry and about two dozen collections of translations from Chinese, Japanese, ancient Greek and Latin and more. He co-founded Copper Canyon Press and created Poets Against War.

How important is it that the translating poet be fluent in the language? Many people doing translations today work with someone who is fluent to get a literal translation, then the poet-translator steps in to take over.

There is no exact equation for great translation. Pound knew no Chinese and his source, Ernest Fenollosa, knew none, and Fenollosa’s sources, two Japanese art professors knew Li Po’s poetry only in Japanese, hence Pound “translating”  Rihaku—Li Po’s name in Japanese. Against all odds, we got 14 amazing poems, including one that is actually two poems combined. Pound’s “errors” have been noted time & again by his critics as well as by Chinese literary scholars. And yet the poems are among the most influential of the last century.

Stephen Mitchell’s “translation” of Tao Te Ching, on the other hand, is fabrication. His version was apparently “transmitted” by his Korean Zen master. In one chapter, 55, I think, there’s not a single word from the Chinese. This tome has misinformed a hundred thousand readers. Both Red Pine (Bill Porter) and I have translated Tao Te Ching in very literal ways, and comparative readings reveal a lot.

Robert Hass’s famous “translation” of a haiku by Issa bears only faint resemblance to the original, which I translate literally:

New Year greeting-time:

I feel about average

welcoming my spring.

Medetasa mo

chugurai  nari

ora ga haru

“Medatasa is a seasonal greeting, not New Year Day as Hass has it. Then Hass simply invents a line two: “Everything is in blossom!” which is not what line 2 says; “I feel about ‘chugurai’ middle or average,” which Hass turns into a punch line” “I feel about average.” Gets a nice audience response, but Issa didn’t write about blossoms in Feb in Japan. The poem asks for meditation, not a punch line.

My Chinese and Japanese is not good. But I enjoy immersing myself one word at a time, one line at a time, getting deep inside the poem and “finding” the poetry. I get help from scholar-friends and I wear out dictionaries. Bill Porter is a far better scholar, but less of a poet. I have learned a ton from him, as from translators like Burt Watson, J.P. Seaton, Rexroth, Edmund Keeley’s Seferis and Elytis, etc.

It’s always best to have a scholarly annotated translation along with one that focuses on the poetry— a “poet’s translation” —when dealing with complicated poets like Dante or Pindar.

Precise word choice in poetry can make or break a poem. In the writing group I moderate, we may spend 20 minutes discussing the use of one word. When reading translated poetry, I worry that the translator may not have the same word sense as the original author or that the English word may have connotations or associations not present in the original word (or phrase). How big of a problem do you believe that is?

Some words don’t translate. Some images don’t translate. Chinese syntax doesn’t follow English grammar. When the classical Chinese poet speaks of “clouds and rain,” it may be a reference to sex as well as to the weather: Clouds are masculine, rain feminine.

Translation is a provisional conclusion, that’s why the same classics need to be retranslated periodically. Translators develop their voices, just as emerging poets do, or prose writers for that matter. Scholarship can’t make up for a weak ear or failure of imagination. “Poetic licenses” come with major restrictions if one is respectful of the original

Is the translator’s responsibility to be true to the original author or to produce a good poem? I’m guessing it’s a little bit of both, but where’s the scale for you?

You can’t be “true” to a poet while turning his/her work into bad poetry. All one need do is look at what happens when formalists try to translate Chinese (which, by the way, employs both interior and end-rhyme). Chinese is a rhyme-rich language. American English is not.  Add the fact of needing to add particles, prepositions, conjunctions, decide gender when it’s indeterminate, etc. changes the poem in various ways. Chinese is also very good at plurisignation—one word may convey two or three distinct meanings all at once, and the translator must choose one.

You’ve translated poems from several languages, several different cultures and traditions sometimes separated from yourself by hundreds or thousands of years. How do you deal with the possibility of lost intention in the poem in those situations?

No one knows exact “intentions” in ancient poetry. We surmise. I have passed over a lot of poems just because they don’t make good poems in American English. For instance, Li Po wrote many occasional poems, many poems with bizarre flights of fancy that just don’t translate. We don’t know how much of Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu actually wrote, but we know that much of it existed in various forms, so he was more editor-translator than author.  Intentions?

I translated Catullus simply because the scholars were too timid to recreate his invective. Catullus invented a word, defutate, which one scholar translated “sexual exhaustion.” But a truer translation would be more raw: “fucked-out.” He was an uproarious defiant poet, and we know he, like Dante, bore grudges and used poetry to mock and/or condemn his enemies. He also translated Sappho, including her “mixo-Lydian Mode” into Latin, where it became the foundation of the “heavenly music” of the Catholic church.

How similar do you think is the experience of a contemporary reader reading, for example, Sappho or Saigyo, to the experience of a contemporary of those poets? Do you hope to recreate that experience or a new one?

Can’t possibly be done. We’d have to recreate a 7^th century Taoist-Confucian-Buddhist dynastic mind-set that is completely alien to a 21^st century sensibility to grasp Tu Fu or Li Po. We see our world through a lens of science and philosophy, history, and a richly embroidered historical imagination, and all of this colors the way we read various classics, from the Bible to the Lotus Sutra. Ancient Greek poets were usually accompanied by musicians, and anyone who’s heard ancient Greek music knows how mysterious it sounds to us, but to them, it was entirely “normal” music. Like Rexroth reading to jazz.

How could anyone try to actually live like Saigyo? I built a house in the woods and lived there without running water or electricity, studying Saigyo and Tu Fu et alia by kerosene lantern. But that’s not 13^th century Japan. I drove into Town to work at my press, I drove to the grocery stores. The poem itself is an authentic experience.

On the process of translating poetry vs. writing your own-how are the experiences and pleasures different?

Translation requires (unless one is Stephen Mitchell) putting aside the ego and devoting one’s attention and practice to a master.

Writing original poetry, one is informed and inspired by masters, but not sitting at their feet… more like standing on their shoulders. Although my friend Sandy Seaton points out that we all, as translators, stand on the shoulders of fellow translators.

Last Questions: Can you please tell me your top five favorite poems (by other people)? If you want to share what you like about those poems, that’d be great too.

I will regret this. In fifteens minutes, it could be an entirely different list, but here’s five translations:

An Old Man on the Riverbank by George Seferis, translated by Edmund Keeley & Phillip Sherrard  This poem was written while Seferis was in exile in Egypt during the German occupation of Greece. It’s a sustaining vision.

The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda, translated by Nathaniel Tarn —What could I possibly say about this?

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet translated by Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk— When the Commie Hikmet was captured by the Turkish regime and thrown into a ship’s bilge, he rose up and began singing poetry…

The Little Mariner by Odysseus Elytis, an epic poem translated by Olga Broumas— What an extraordinary poet and man: “Man is drawn to God / like a shark to blood.”

Sappho translated by Mary Barnard— So clear, so truly felt and truly spoken.

Mahmoud Darwish certainly belongs here, but which poem? Rilke’s Elegies, too, but not S. Mitchell’s translatio—maybe Galway Kinnell & Hannah Liebman

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