# European Elegies/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
BY VERSE TRANSLATION we commonly understand a metrical rendering of the words of a poet in one language into the exact equivalents of those words in another language. A scrupulous reproduction of the original metre is seldom considered; still less a recapture of its peculiar and precious quality of emotion. So wide-spread is this acceptance of mere fidelity to the letter of the original, this theory of “verbal inerrancy,” that a version which possesses power and beauty in itself is often termed “more than a translation,” as if these qualities were not indeed elements in the primitive poem quite as important as the ideas expressed.
It may not be a futile exercise, therefore, briefly to consider whether verse translation is possible in the higher sense of creative translation, of a full metempsychosis of the old emotional and imaginative power into a new body of the same type. Are there insuperable obstacles, inherent in differences of language, which make such a task utopian? Must one sacrifice the life of the original in order to present its ideas accurately? Will its spirit, on the other hand, transmigrate only into a body radically different? Or is it possible to achieve a compromise version which will satisfy both the philologist and the poet? This is the problem faced in the pages that follow, and this the denotation which the word translation is made to bear throughout the discussion.
To understand the ideal task of verse translation, we must first understand the nature of a poem—the psychological conditions under which it is created and the manner in which it subsists as a work of art. Only by a thorough comprehension of the complex character of poetry per se shall we be able to realize the concrete difficulties of transferring a living poem from one language into another.
​Art is primarily the expression of human experience through some such medium as painting, sculpture, music, or poetry. The distinctive character of that expression is that it shall be a concentrated activity of the whole man. In his particular art, the artist has found a medium through which he can express both the reasoning and the emotional elements of his nature. The conscious and the unconscious elements of his mind co-operate. He sublimates his experience, removing it from the realm of partial appeals—either to his reason (an imperfect satisfaction, involving only the conscious mind) or to his appetites (an imperfect satisfaction, involving only the emotional and motor levels of activity). In the true artistic sublimation, the man does something with the whole of himself and produces something which satisfies both his reason and his emotions. He loses himself so far as the immediate impulse is concerned, only to find himself in the higher synthesis of art. And this co-operative action of the conscious and the unconscious produces a sense of exaltation, or what we may call the thrill and fever of creation. Wordsworth's statement that poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquillity" means psychologically that before the poem is written the immediacy of emotional experience must have time to suffuse the poet's whole conscious conception of the universe, colouring it and being coloured by it so that the resulting poem expresses the whole man.
Some writers, especially of the analytical school of psychologists, have tried to ascribe art wholly to the subconscious mind. The result in such a case would be chaotic fantasy such as we find in dreams. Art involves a synthesis of the fantasy and emotion of the subconscious with the realities apprehended by the reason. It calls for an association of the subconscious non-reasonable elements of the mind with the highest elements ​of the disciplined intelligence. Ruskin adumbrated this idea in his thesis of the "pathetic fallacy." Fantasy and emotion must not usurp the place of the reason. All must blend harmoniously. Emotion stimulates and fantasy renders the experience vivid, but the experience should remain true to rational reality.
The important fact to remember is that what the artist reproduces is experience. A painter does not paint an objective landscape but his experience of it. A musician does not compose technically expounded motifs of notes but moods of musically expressed experience. A poet does not describe objective reality but his experience of it, rational and emotional. And in the creative process, both the conscious and the subconscious are alive and active, in a mutual relationship comparable to that of a masterful rider and his spirited steed. It is the subconscious that carries the work along on tense muscles of emotion and nerves of fantasy, but the conscious mind keeps the saddle and holds the rein in exultant but firm control.
The nature of the resulting work of art can be more adequately appreciate if we examine a specific art, that of poetry.
The two main elements in any poem are music and imagination—what we may call the means of incantation and the means of evocation. Strictly speaking, it is impossible to separate these completely from one another, for they are so interwoven and so mutually enhanced in effect that an examination of each apart does not give us all the elements in the case. Inadequate though it may thus be, however, a brief analysis of each of these factors in poetry is necessary.
The incantation, examined by itself, consists of rhythm (i.e. a certain regular proportion of durations of stress or quantity or the like), sometimes assisted by additional auditory devices such as rhyme, alliteration, onomatopœia, internal ​vowel schemes, and even such syntactic contrivances as the suppression or multiplication of verbs. The minimum requirement (peace to certain free versifiers and imagists) is some sort of rhythm. Rhythm is apparently innate in human speech under stress of emotion, and has also the power of stimulating emotion. Ages of technical experience have taken these potential rhythmical patterns and developed them into the complex instruments of a fine art, which can be acquired by the craftsman and used to heighten the effect of his poetry. As for the nature of this effect, it is slightly incorrect to say, as some theorists do, that this incantation or cadence lulls the conscious reasoning brain to rest and permits a direct appeal to the subconscious. The fact is rather that it causes the emotions of the subconscious so to suffuse the conscious mind that we get in the sensitive reader that harmonious interaction of the conscious and the subconscious in which the poet's own experience was projected into artistic form. Given that mood, the evocative symbols supplied by the poet's imagination become more truly potent for the reader. This is the true relation between incantation and imagination in the poem. The presence and effectiveness of both is very important. There is a false tendency to-day to belittle technique, and to trust to emotion, sensibility and fantastic imagery. Technique is essential and indispensable. For supreme poetry, greatness of imagination must be married to perfection of music.
Granting this, however, it is imagination that most truly distinguishes the poet. It is here that genius is definitely revealed. It is by this that the miracle of communicating experience is achieved.
Imagination, as etymology hints to us, is a matter of setting forth through metaphors and similes an intuitive perception of significant relationships between dissimilars. Language ​first developed as an instrument of practical affairs. Like the reason, it is well suited for dealing with the objective world but is tongue-tied in its treatment of the inner, subjective universe of experience, which is more than half emotion. This inner world is as wonderful and complex as the outer world of science, but its states and qualities are essentially incommunicable. When you have exhausted all the resources of psychological terminology in describing emotional experience, you have still failed. You have talked about the experience; but feeling can only be represented in terms of feeling, experience can only be known by the arousal of similar states of emotional experience. It is here that the poet produces his miracle. In the mind attuned by his incantation, imaginative language becomes powerfully evocative. His images stir not only the conscious but also the subconscious mind of the listener, creating an experience equivalent to that of things directly seen, heard, and felt. Imagination thus sets forth the intangible, the qualities of experience and emotion, in terms of the visible and sensuous. It thus becomes symbolic of otherwise indescribable and incommunicable states and qualities. Its power will depend on the extent to which the poet-genius, in his exploration of reality, realizes resemblances between the known and the unknown. If this realization does indeed mark an advance in experience, it will come to the listener with a thrill of discovery, the stimulus of a revelation. It is a creative act par excellence.
In the true poet, this creative work of imagination presumes four great factors: first, powerful intuition of the intangible essences of personality, the living qualities of human experience, and the infinite wonder and tragedy of the human spirit; second, vivid perception of the world of sense, so that he may make his intuitions articulate through realized comparisons ​with the sensuous impressions of the world; third, a strenuously developed and powerful intellect to give to all this coherence and intelligibility; and fourth, a dominating power of emotion, whose intensity fuses the whole into a moving unity of conception and projects life even into the symbols of a lifeless universe. This power of projection comes from the intensity of the poet's sympathy. Emerson said that in order to paint a tree as an artist, a man must first have been a tree.
I merely suggest in passing that this dynamic behind poetry is perhaps most often relatable to a concentrated massing of psychic force through the thwarting of sex in the life. Sex is probably the most violent single source of human emotion; and when dammed back on the physical level it throws its intense force into the process of sublimation. The whole phenomenon of the mind striving to express itself in works of art may possibly be conceived of as a striving for union, for the communication of self to another. Every one who lives above the vegetative level realizes his essential isolation in life; and this sense of loneliness, of separation from others by an impassible barrier, deepens steadily as a man grows in spiritual stature, a mountain-peak pushing up into cold bleak altitudes of individual development. Sex is one means whereby he seeks escape from frozen solitude. There is a profound suggestiveness in the Socratic idea that sex is a principle of division or separation striving to realize itself in union. And if that union is hindered or denied, the incalculable powers of sex take part in the artistic effort to grope towards communication on the plane of sublimation.
Art is essentially an individual experience, an irreplaceable achievement. A great work of art is the revelation of a great spirit, and so far as he is concerned that expression achieves the end of art.
​In itself, however, the work of art has a far wider value than that. Its function is not simply to give the reader an emotional thrill but to expand in both the conscious and the subconscious minds his comprehension of life. It may make fuller our consciousness of the power and subtlety of the primitive impulses of our bodies; it may heighten our awareness of subconscious stirrings that are on a higher plane than our noblest conscious endeavours; it may place all this against a vast and amazing background of integrated space and time. The great artist has experienced greatly, has pushed back farther the limiting horizons of the universe, and by communicating his experience to us he makes life for us wider, richer, and more profound.
Having passed in survey the psychological basis of art and the way in which, through incantation and evocative imagery, the poet communicates his experience to us, let us now approach the problem of translation and ask ourselves whether it is possible to take a work of art thus created and so re-express it in another language that neither the music, the meaning, the imagination, nor the emotional communication of experience is impaired in the process. Or to phrase it in another way, are there any inherent limitations to verse translation? And if so, what should be the theoretical basis on which a translation is made? In answering these questions, let us suppose the original poems to be in any of the languages of Europe, and the language of the translator English.
An immediate obstacle lies in the fact that languages differ profoundly in their adaptability to certain types of incantation. Thus English is ill-adapted to spondaic measures, and is seldom happy in the use of dactyls or trochees for sustained verse. The most grievous deficiency of the language, however, is its wretched poverty in rhymes. The decay of inflection ​has left English with no syllabic inflections except "-ing" and sometimes "-es" and "-ed." The Romance languages are all far richer, the Slavic tongues (with an average of a dozen endings to the noun and a very complex verb) have greater resources still, while the Finnish noun has some thirty case-endings, many of them disyllabic, and offers an almost unbelievable fulness of rhyming harmonies. With the exception of Magyar and the Celtic languages, English is the weakest and poorest language in Europe, considered simply from the point of view of technical possibilities. Thus to attempt to reproduce in English the incantation of certain European languages is like trying to play a violin score on a Jew's harp.
Another serious obstacle to maintaining the original cadence-frame is what I may call the syllabic laconicism of English. Jespersen and others have counted the syllables in the Gospel according to Matthew in certain languages and have obtained the following results: Greek, 39,000; French, 36,000; Swedish, 35,000; German, 33,000; and English, 29,000. Last year, I myself extended this survey to include all of the languages of Europe, and found that English still footed the list. Since English thus uses fewer syllables than any other European language in expressing any given idea, it is natural that a translator should find that a literal translation into English, line for line, leaves the English version short of syllables to fill out the metrical pattern of the original. He must therefore either pad out his version with circumlocutions and extraneous ideas or cut down the length of his lines. Perhaps related to this quality of laconicism is the fact that different languages seem suited to lines of different lengths. English, with its brevity of expression, favours the tetrameter and the pentameter; French finds normal expression in the Alexandrine; Latin and Greek seem most at home in the hexameter; while in Finnish, ​which is essentially polysyllabic, I have found poems in which an eighteen-syllabled line was handled without any sense of strain or awkwardness.
Even apart from these difficulties the translator has a more exhausting task, technically considered, than the original poet. Metrical systems, especially those of the lyric, are essentially artificial, providing problems of technical dexterity and subtlety that render the cross-word puzzle rudimentary by comparison. Now the original poet is, in a sense, free to alter and adapt his plastic materials, conditioned only by the necessity of fidelity to mood and experience. The translator, on the other hand, must accept an arbitrary pattern and into it force the fixed ideas of another.
And even were he apparently to succeed on the technical level, the result would still be different, for in two lines in the same metre, one in English, say, and one in Polish, the different lengths of words within the line and the different qualities of the vowels and consonants in the two instances would produce an incantation that was essentially different. This is clearly proven by the kymograph, a piece of modern laboratory apparatus which measures in one-hundredths of a second the actual time-values of the different letters and letter-groups. Even on the purely mechanical level it is impossible to produce in English the exact equivalent of a poem in any other language.
When we turn from incantation to evocation, however, the difficulties become far more profound, for the evocative value of a given foreign word may be far greater than that of its literal English equivalent. The English language, with its composite origin and confused history, has accumulated a vast vocabulary, but the result has been that its poetic diction has moved farther and farther from real life. French, German, Russian most of all, can use the simple diction of the common day and secure ​from it the most potent magic; but to render them literally into English may give lines that are banal and insipid.
Again, even if we succeed in this, our lines may lack the freshness of real poetry. There are grave disadvantages in being the poetic heir to a great literary tradition. In some of the newer languages, an expression may represent the height of technique and originality. Yet for an older literature its literal rendering may represent jejune thought and rudimentary craftsmanship. If we are to create in this older language a translation that shall move its readers as much as the original poem moved those native to that tongue, we must produce something that reinterprets it with the voice of an accumulated past of thought and expression. To speak a living word, to create a phrase that shall not be a dull echo of one of a million harmonies in a long, rich literary tradition, is a most difficult task. All previous English poets are in the field against you, condemning as feeble all that does not involve an advanced technique and an originality of phrase that grows more and more difficult with the passing of the crowded centuries.
It might seem, in view of all this, that a vital translation is inherently impossible. Yet while the supreme obstacle is still to be mentioned, it is an obstacle which contains in itself the only hint of hope for a translation of any value. As we said before, the ultimate purpose of any art is to communicate the artist's experience. Here lies the heart of the translator's problem. For unless he can succeed in communicating vital human experience, technique and diction will profit him nothing.
Now a literal translation may tell you what the experience was about, but it cannot transmit the actual feeling of that experience. Language is so delicately interwoven with the spirit of man that the translator cannot convey what was the experience of the original poem—the only thing that makes it ​of value—unless he too feels the power of that same experience. Only life can beget life. Synthetic protoplasm may be chemically exact, but it is no substitute for the living cell. Only emotion in the translator can produce a translation that is poetry.
It is in the corollary to this difficult condition that the translator's hope lies. For it follows that if he feels and responds to the original, he may produce a version lacking in literal accuracy but far truer to the original in spirit.
Now it is not always possible to realize accurately or adequately the experience of the original poet. That realization is easiest when our own experience has approximated to his; but as a matter of fact no two persons ever have exactly the same experience, for the effect of even apparently identical experiences will be conditioned by the sum-total of preceding thought and experience in each case. One might therefore suggest that if, by a slight change, the translator can flood the poem with his own emotional experience, giving it a transfusion of his own feeling, he will be more likely to produce verses that at once represent the original and at the same time have life as poetry.
The result of our hurried analysis of the possibilities of complete or ideal translation may now be recapitulated. In such translation, the translator must cope with a complex incantation of verbal cadences in another language; he must consider the meaning and the imaginative significance of the original; and above all he must seek to communicate the power of emotional experience. The deficiencies and idiosyncrasies of English render the adequate reproduction of the incantation almost impossible; a literal rendering of phrase and figure may result in dish-water insipidity; but if the translator is inspired with the emotion of the original, or better still reinforces ​it with analogous experience of his own, he can trust to the genuine sincerity of his emotion to produce work of value. The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive.