I’ve been away from political keyboarding for a few days, at a translation conference in Bellevue, Washington. Two hundred or so translators of literature, some of us friends for over 20 years, meet yearly to talk about writing, and more particularly, writing between two languages. Almost everyone writes into English. The from ranges from 16th Century Russian to modern Korean, from all the centuries of Spanish, and the remnants of Spain’s empire. Francophones are here, and translators from the four languages of Scandanavia; Portugal and Brazil, Haiti, Poland, China in all its glorious variation, and on and on. Each year it seems we hear a language we have never heard before.

It’s not just the language itself of course; it’s how the language is used — in that culture’s literature: stories, poems, songs, novels, aphorisms, expressions of love, of scatalogical excess, of mourning, purchasing, dreaming. That is the real wonder of the conference: hearing the translations into English of this beyond-marvellous rainbow of human expression.

I went to two sessions on Thursday morning: “Translating the Erotic Mode in Persian Poetry,” and “Avoiding the Missionary Position — Chinese Erotic Poetry.” Of the Persian, (Iran, of course) I heard of Forough Farrokhzad and her ground breaking role for Iranian women writers, of the sweet erotic expression she wrested from the male tradition:

Love Song

My nights are painted bright with your dream, sweet love
and heavy with your fragrance is my breast.
you fill my eyes with your presence, sweet love.
giving me more happiness than grief.
like rain washing through the soil
you have washed my life clean.
you are the heartbeat of my burning body;
a fire blazing in the shade of my eyelashes.
you are more bountiful than the wheat fields,
more fruit-laden than the golden boughs.
more …

Of course there was more, in just that one session, than I can reproduce; the notes I took could occupy me for hours. The delight of all of us is to recount our struggles with recalcitrant words: how the Persian speaks of a delightful act in a word or two for which English needs a whole description, and how the translator tries to deal with that.

The Chinese session brought 5 translators together. I learned that, contrary to the Persian tradition, the Chinese had for centuries included women; that when clouds and rain appear in poems we should always suspect the release of erotic tension; that mooring a boat is often an image for sexual intercourse. We learned of the curious beliefs of erotic Daoism — that the male brain is composed of the same material as his semen [rippling, knowing, modern laughter was heard,] and to become a wiser man, semen should be restrained from ejaculation so it would return to the brain… The Golden Lotus was mentioned, and other works more ancient and more recent. David Lunde gave us this, from the Zi Ye Poems:

“She opens her window to the autumn moon,
drops her robe, snuffs the candle–
within her bed curtains a waiting smile,
she raises her body in orchid fragrance.”

Geoff Waters explained that, depending on how the ideographs are read, the two simple lines,

“Birds fly away inexhaustibly,
Mountain by mountain, autumn’s color renewed.”

might be something like,

“The cock comes and goes without rest,
Rising and falling upon her, her color deepens.”

Love of course is interrupted by war. In a panel on modern Russian fiction one writer passed out examples of her attempts to bring Russian soldier cursing (from the wars in Cechnya) into US soldier cursing; the Russians being much more inventive, and detailed, the Americans settling for a select and pungent few, endlessly repeated.

In a panel on translating the Religious I heard of the goddess Enheduanna, of Sumer, 2300 BC, just 400 years after Gilgamesh himself, and heard some of her temple hymns, in Sumerian, as best as we know how to pronounce it, and in English. Fabulous.

The great Langston Hughes, it turns out, was also a translator, translating some of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads , a few poems of Gabriela Mistral’s, and others. Unusually, and path-breakingly, the panel members instead of each talking about an author and “me-as-the-translator,” brought us Hughes and those writers he had translated, along with history, biography and translation criticism. Fine stuff.

One of the books I am most looking forward to is titled In The United States of Africa, a broad satirical novel from a Djiboutian, Abdourahman Waberi, which imagines Africa as the all powerful, world straddling, super power frantic to protect its borders from the clamoring, starving, drug addled caucasians, too lazy and no good to create wealth in their own homelands. David Ball, the translator, read a remarkable short bit of the story. Watch for it. It should be out in 2007.

In the little, impromptu bookstore, books by most of the translators were on display, and to be purchased. The not-to-be-praised-enough Copper Canyon press was there, with a good selection of its books and breath taking broadsides. I couldn’t tear my eye away from this:

Twigs
by Taha Muhammad Ali

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.

My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.

My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and all that we’ve longed for,
on all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrify
within us.

1989-91
Translated by
Peter Cole,
Yahya Hijazi,
Gabriel Levin

What is created in these four days, beyond simply information exchanged, is a perfect little heaven. ALTA (The American Literary Translators Association) although essentially an academic organization, like many others (MLA, AWP), has never been the competitive, cut throat, job searching queue that characterize some of the others. People are generous, interested in each other, and the work they are doing. Almost to a person they come away invigorated, feel connected again. The work of a translator, part detective, part writer, is done largely alone. Certainly there are “informants” and others to whom we talk, but a lot of it is a lonely struggle, and lonely at the end when the paycheck arrives in its tens of dollars, or books to give out to our friends. The conference puts us together with others like us, and who like us! In all the years I have gone, and for all the reasons I have heard why a person translates from Croatian, or Urdu, or Portuguese, I have never heard: so I can despise them better; so I can shame them.

Learning, knowing, sharing, stitching together the great cloak of language to keep us all warm. That’s what we do and we like being together to be amazed and excited even if only once a year.