Translating Poetry: Texts and Contexts of Nazim Hikmet

Translation teaches us that a poem is both something more and something less than what it says. Poems do more than communicate “messages”; they exploit language, the physical presence of words. At the same time, however, a poem does less than communicate a meaning, for what we bring to a text as readers, together with its total context of other literary and nonliterary meanings, makes up a great part of what the text communicates. This doubleness becomes crucial in translating the work of a political poet who is at the same time an innovator in his use of language. Nazim Hikmet is such a poet, and my examples in this discussion will be drawn from my experience of translating his work from Turkish. Although the translation of a single line or even a single word with its aura of connotations, history, usage, and echoes of other words is impossible, it is possible nevertheless to translate a poem. For a poem is experienced as an emotional whole, and this emotional whole can be translated, despite the loss of the original language, style, and even form. Unlike the critic, who can separate the work into a series of untranslatable components and can choose what to look at, the translator must hold the entire complex in suspension and focus not on the separate elements of the poem but on their interaction. And it is this complex of relations that can be translated, for if the target language has poetry—if it has an established poetic usage or poetic structuring of the elements of language—it will contain the same possibilities of word-use, and the same range or kind of relations may be reproduced. For while a literary text is of the flesh and blood of a language, a poem is not identical with the text; a poem is the experience of a text in its harmony and conflict with a variety of contexts. And translation may be defined as reproducing in a second language this complex of relationships that a poem is. In translating a poem, then, one must negotiate a number of contexts for the text. First, the translator has to provide not only equivalent words but a context of poetic usage or function for the words. Since the root of the problem of translating a poem is the untranslatability of all the nuances and auras of words, a prose translation of a poem is not necessarily more accurate than a verse translation. Indeed, a prose translation is essentially unfaithful, for a poet’s meaning in any one poem is inseparable from the fact that it is being said in poetry. In a poem, both the sound and meaning of a word become functional, and this momentary integration of sound and sense, which rests precariously on the essentially arbitrary nature of the connection between how a word sounds and what it means, is what distances poetry from institutional or “profane” language-use. In the translation of poetry, this simultaneously necessary and arbitrary connection between the sound and sense of words and lines poses a question to language itself. The apparent necessity of the poetic utterance only reveals its arbitrariness, for if the sound and sense of words in fact had a necessary. relationship in language, a given work would be absolutely reproducible in another language. Accordingly, if poetic usage were merely arbitrary, it would be indistinguishable from “profane” usage; in other words, it would again be translatable. That poetic usage is both arbitrary and necessary makes it both untranslatable and translatable. And a poetic text can have this texture of simultaneously concrete and symbolic word-use if it is translated as poetry—that is, if it approaches the “sacred” usage of the original text, in which words mean everything they can mean. Thus the very