Some thoughts on poetry translation
by Vasiliki Katsarou
I find myself in an odd position as a poet whose mother tongue was briefly Greek. I can remember my mother boasting to me that at sixteen months old I was ‘teleia sta Ellinika’—could speak Greek fluently. My stay at home mother had recently arrived in the US (the year before) from Greece with charm, beauty, and textile skills, but no driver’s license or even rudimentary English. An arranged marriage to the decade-older son of the family across the street in their village of Pelasgia, Greece. The fairy tales I heard from her were Greek and so were the lullabies.
Somewhere along the thread of those early years, English language encroached and then displaced Greek. We moved from a small rural town in the Berkshires to Lowell, Massachusetts. We spent some summers with family in Greece, while my father stayed behind working as an engineer. My Greek would come back only to recede when I returned to school in September.
My Greek language had early roots, but lacked development, as I opted to learn French in high school and college, and later while living in France. So the Greek words that come to me now while writing poems in English are like artifacts from my past, charged with memories of childhood. That is why this statement by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer resonates with me.
Let me sketch two ways of looking at a poem. You can perceive a poem as an expression of the life of the language itself, something organically grown out of the very language in which it is written—in my case, Swedish. A poem written by the Swedish language through me. Impossible to carry over into another language. Another, and contrary, view is this: the poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation. A transfer into English or Malayalam is merely the invisible poem’s new attempt to come into being. The important thing is what happens between the text and the reader. Does a really committed reader ask if the written version he reads is the original or a translation?
Are all poems translations in the way he suggests? Or is each poem only possible in the specific language into which its language seed has been planted? Or is it both?
When the Greek poet Anastasia Paraskevoulakou and I agreed to translate each other's poems, I was delighted. I was also astonished by the fluency that the ‘average’ Greek poet or reader has in English. In fact, I was deeply intimidated by the depth of knowledge of the Greek poets' grasp of all the strata of their language–from ancient Greek to New Testament Greek, to katharevousa (official, modernized) to demotic, colloquial Greek. The multiple registers available to Greek poetry make a contemporary Greek poet like Kiki Dimoula very challenging to translate into English.
So I cautiously chose three very short poems by Anastasia Paraskevoulakou to try my hand. They are from her 2014 collection Esotera by Solucio Press, which I translate as Innermost.
Esotera / Innermost
by Anastasia Paraskevoulakou
Jasmine yellows in a photograph
my body a wall that crumbles year upon inexorable year
etching into thought
*
My house considers me a stranger,
it has never cared for my struggles;
I refuse to live on the streets
and so I pray to be spared my possessions
*
In prayers and dreams
they call me a woman of the hour
I live with nothing, alongside something
far from beloveds
chirping into evergreen being
Translated by Vasiliki Katsarou
When I first wrote to Anastasia about translation, I confessed: My Greek language skills are a little strange, but I have read and written a lot, and I do have very good literary French, and I think Greek poetry has been influenced by the French literary world, even more than the Anglo-Saxon one. But you can tell me what you think about how American &/or English poetry has affected the Greek literary idiom.
From the many translations I've read and thought about (especially French), I've observed that there are two impulses. One is translation as a shortcut to understanding, where there is fidelity to all the original words. The other impulse is for the translated poem to register as a poem in the destination language, and not just as a translation. Ideally, the resulting poem is as similar in spirit as possible to the original. The prominent 20th- century Franco-Swiss poet and translator Philippe Jaccottet stated in a 2018 interview that a literary translator ought to capture the tone of the original poem, above all else.
Of the three poems of mine that Anastasia translated, I was delighted by her translation "Dovecote." Here is what I wrote about her first draft:
It's the first time I've heard my poems in Greek, and it's moving to me. Especially "Dovecote"-- which is the one that I think has the most to offer in a Greek translation. That's why I'm excited to hear from you that this one demanded the most from you.”
Upon first reading of this draft, my eye stopped at the translation of the French word (that also exists in English, “soubrette.”
Rather than the word for 'housemaid' -- my intention is the theatrical meaning: a two-bit actress. A demi-mondaine... if you know that word in French. When I checked my Greek-French dictionary, I found the word 'tsoula'-- but that sounds too harsh.
The poem is operating a sort of projection/deconstruction... there is a girl looking (the speaker) and a girl trapped in a frame (la soubrette) and a dove that is free to fly.
The speaker's 'features' are unknown (they are the words on the page)... they operate the dismantling of the soubrette's gaze or features into the image of a dove. They free her.
It's awkward to 'explain' a poem one has written, but this and many of my poems put the question of subjectivity front and center. So for me, the phrase "her expression is a dove" -- is not so much about an utterance, but about a gaze. Is blemma the right word in this case, or opsis?
I was moved as I read this poem in Greek because I realized that there is something there of the Greek voyage and return in the image of the dove, something that represents my own family story of emigration. It is the first poem in my 2020 chapbook Three Sea Stones, published in a limited edition by Lucia Press.
I am most grateful to Anastasia and to Mandragoras Magazine for publishing these translations of my work.
Dovecote
by Vasiliki Katsarou
in a frame above the stairs
ink sketch of a Greek soubrette
in feathered hat and fur muffler
she looks away—
so far away
her features cannot be gathered back
her expression is a dove
flown so far ahead of us
its shadow has returned to perch
here
peristerióna
dovecote
you who flit and fly
alongside
such eyes
you never meet
but in this niche
rise
high above the white hills of the island
Περιστεριώνας
σε μια κορνίζα πάνω από τις σκάλες
το σκίτσο μιας Ελληνίδας σουμπρέτας
με γούνινο κασκόλ και καπέλο με φτερό
κοιτάζει μακριά_
τόσο μακριά
τα χαρακτηριστικά της χάνονται
η όψη της ένα περιστέρι
που πέταξε τόσο μακριά μας
η σκιά του έχει επιστρέψει για να κουρνιάσει
εδώ
στον περιστεριώνα
dovecote
εσύ που πας και έρχεσαι
και πετάς στο πλάι
τέτοια μάτια
ποτέ δεν συναντάς
παρά μονάχα σ’ αυτή την εσοχή
ανάτειλε
ψηλά πάνω απ’ τους λευκούς λόφους του νησιού
Translated by Anastasia Paraskevoulakou
ABOUT ANASTASIA PARASKEVOULAKOU
The translator and poet Anastasia Paraskevoulakou was born in Astros, Arcadia in the Peloponnese. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Montclair State University. She also studied Comparative Literature at SUNY Binghamton. She lives and works as an educator in Athens, Greece. Her published poetry collections include: Orpheu's Travels (1995), Steve Oliver, Recording Specialist (2005), Esotera (2014), White Canvas (2017) and Crossing the Hours, a bilingual edition (2020) by elikas editions.
ABOUT VASILIKI KATSAROU
A poet, independent curator, and filmmaker, Vasiliki Katsarou is a teaching artist at New Jersey's Hunterdon Art Museum. She read her poetry at the 2014 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and has served as a Geraldine R. Dodge Poet-in-the Schools. She holds an A.B. Phi Beta Kappa in comparative literature from Harvard University and an MFA in filmmaking from Boston University. Her award-winning 35mm short film, Fruitlands 1843, is about a Transcendentalist utopian community in Massachusetts. She is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunami, and a chapbook, Three Sea Stones (Lucia Press). She is also co-editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies: Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems and Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems. Her poems have been published widely and internationally, including in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem (Japan), Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series (U.K.), Regime Journal (Australia), Mediterranean Poetry (Denmark) as well as in Otoliths, Poetry Daily, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, Wild River Review, wicked alice, Literary Mama, La Vague Journal, and Contemporary American Voices. Her recent writing on film is published at the LENSES film blog and on DirectedbyWomen.com.