Autumn eats leaves from my hands: we are friends.
We stripped time from nuts and taught it how to walk:
So time goes back to the shell.
It's Sunday in the mirror,
Being hypnotized in a dream,
Tell the truth.
My eyes rested on my lover's genitals:
We looked at each other,
We exchange code words,
We love each other like poppies and memories,
We slept like wine in a shell,
Like the sea, under the blood of the moon
We hugged at the window and people in the street looked at us:
It is time. They know!
When the stone decides to blossom,
When you are worried,
It is time. It takes time.
It is time.
(Translated by Wang Jiaxin Hu Rui)
Kitajima translated this poem into Karona. The following is his translation:
Autumn eats leaves from my hands: we are friends.
We stripped time of its coat and taught it to walk:
Time has returned to the shell.
It's Sunday in the mirror,
There is a place to sleep in the dream,
We are telling the truth.
My eyes fell on my lover's gender:
We looked at each other,
We exchange code words,
We love each other like poppies and memories,
We slept like wine in a conch,
The sea in the bloody moonlight.
We hugged at the window, and people looked from the street:
It's time for them to know!
It's time for the stone to blossom,
Time is turbulent, with a beating heart.
It's time to turn the past into the present.
It is time.
The poem Corona mentioned by Kitajima (the original poem in German is the same as the English version) is a Latin word, because its first meaning means "corolla, garland, crown and petal". In Celan's poems, flowers, corollas, stamens, etc. It has been written repeatedly, and we translated it into Corona (in our translation, some poems are transliterated. Kitajima thinks this translation is too rash, because the word has the meaning of "crown, crown, deputy crown (flowery) and solar halo (total solar eclipse)", "Ceran uses the ambiguity and ambiguity of this word to express the complexity of the theme", and claims that "because of its ambiguity, I keep its transliteration" (namely "Carona").
Loyal to the "ambiguity" of the original poem (ambiguity? Sure, but be careful, just don't show off. Because in the final analysis, what we want to be faithful to is the original poem, not the knowledge we borrowed temporarily.
Then let's look at this ambiguity again: "It's time for them to know!" It's time for them to know! (If translated into German, it should also be translated in this way), Kitajima accused that "originally normal poems should be translated into Pidgin according to western language institutions, which not only hurts poems but also hurts Chinese", so it was translated into "It's time for them to know!" Isn't North Island very particular about "polysemy"? And his "it's time for them to know" is precisely the cancellation of ambiguity in Lan's poems, which not only misinterprets the original poem, simplifies its multiple meanings, but also changes its sense of language. Will Celan let the monotonous and straightforward sentence "It's time for them to know" appear in his poems? Impossible, just as it is impossible for Celan to let words and expressions like "You help you" (see Kosuke Kitajima's translation of Death fugue) appear in his poems. "It's time to let them know!" This is a typical Celan style grammar. In his poems, he always juxtaposes two words, two images or two short sentences with no logical relationship to create richer meanings. In fact, this is also the syntax of China's classical poetry, that is, Pound pointed out "juxtaposition of images" and "superposition of images", like Li Bai's "I should think of you in a floating cloud, so I think of me in the sunset", where floating clouds and wandering thoughts correspond, present at the same time and reach the scene in the poem. If it is interpreted (or translated) as "clouds in the sky are like wandering thoughts on the ground", it will be simplified or even destroyed. Didn't Kitajima talk about "China people" in his article? How could he forget this?
Similarly, the change of "we peel time from the nut and then teach it to walk" is also very telling. In order not to completely copy other people's translations, and to make Celan "normal" in Chinese, in short, North Island turned it into "we stripped time from nuts and taught it to walk". However, such changes did not make the translation "smooth" much, but destroyed the connection between things in the original poem. In the original poem, the image of "nut" is presented first, and the attention of the poem is also concentrated here (and on the "shell" below), while North Island blocks all this with a "we"!
"As long as you read it out loud, you will know what is wrong with Wang Rui's translation. It still lacks a sense of language and rhythm, which is even more fatal than mistranslation, "Kitajima said. Perhaps Wang Rui's translation lacks North Island's sense of language and rhythm, but it may not lack the translator's own sense of language and rhythm. Writing here, I would like to ask, is North Island's own sense of language a "standard sense of language" that everyone should follow? I don't know. What I know is that totalitarianism has permeated people's breath for many years. In other words, the ghost of totalitarianism has become an arbitrary aesthetic exclusiveness here.
Let's take a look at Kitajima's "sense of language": in the last five sentences of Carola, except the last one, "it's time", there should be no word "le" at the end of other sentences, but Kitajima actually added three words of "le" in one breath, so that four of the five poems he translated had a "le" at the end! I want to ask: is this still the language sense of Celan's poems? This is becoming a slogan. I think this is not only a problem of "over-interpretation", but also weakens the introverted power of the original poem. In doing so, it can be said that it has changed the nature of Celan's poems, which is "more fatal than mistranslation".
This reminds me of Kitajima's repetition of "Death is a master from Germany" in his article, which will naturally be very effective, but I think if Celan is still alive, it will be extremely embarrassing to hear someone repeat his poems over and over again. Because this is by no means a "grandstanding" poet, on the contrary, he has avoided and resisted this kind of thing all his life. Later, he even refused some critics to include his death fugue in various poems. He did not win people's sympathy by exaggerating suffering, nor did he regard the suffering of Jews as a moral advantage. Instead, I reached the core of the language, dug deep into my inner voice and started a more difficult journey. Can we see this more deeply?
For the poem "Carola", Kitajima gave it such comments as "great" and "excellent", and finally said, "I recommended it and incorporated it into the commemorative anthology of the 2000 Berlin International Literature Festival". Looks like Celan is blessed!
This reminds me of Kitajima's article about Rilke (see Harvest, No.3, 2004). He actually said that Rilke's poems were "mostly mediocre", and his masterpieces "Elegy for Duneo" and "Sonnet for orpheus" were "held too high", only his short poem "Autumn Day" made him hesitate again and again. People can't help but admire Kitajima's tone and frankness, and it's not that they can't "touch" Rilke's poems. However, the problem is: Kitajima himself doesn't know a word of German, so it's hard to say that he really entered the world of Rilke. Why did he say that?
Perhaps it is this attitude that causes self-righteousness and rashness in translation. Like "The Sea in the Bloody Moonlight" (see "Carona"), it can be said that it broke away from the original poem and began to shape its own image! Can Celan's highly original and accurate poems be treated like this? Does Celan need someone else to do such "polishing" for a person who has devoted all his efforts to writing and is extremely demanding on every word and would rather sacrifice "readability" than do anything to cater to him?
I think this is probably one of the main differences between us: for poets like Celan and Rilke, I always ask myself to read them, even if I don't understand or like all their poems, even if we see some limitations with the expansion of experience. As early as the winter of 199 1, I translated more than 20 short poems by Celan, and wrote in the postscript: "I deeply felt that my handwriting was not up to standard, but when I put my heart and soul into it and endured the darkness created by the poet, I gradually felt the light from the deceased." This is still my attitude today. When I face these immortal poetic souls and still feel a heartfelt excitement, I really want to say this:
Man, don't block the light handed by the dead with your enlarged shadow!