A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

    PASTERNAK  was  once rebuked  by  a pedant   who came to his  door  bearing a long list of the poet's mistakes  in translating Hamlet.  The complaint was  greeted with laughter and a shrug:  "What  difference does it   make?  Shakespeare and  I  — we're both geniuses, aren't we?"  As if to justify his arrogance, Pastemak's  Hamlet is today considered  one of the glories of Russian literature. Andrei Voznesenski, who passed the anecdote on to me, was unable to recall the visiting critic's name. 

      The poet as translator lives with a paradox. His work must not read like a translation; conversely, it is not an exercise of the free imagination. One voice enjoins him:   "Respect the text!"  The other simultaneously pleads  with   him: "Make  it  new!"   He resembles the citizen in Kafka's aphorism who is fettered to two chains, one attached to earth, the other to heaven. If he heads for earth, his heavenly chain throttles him; if he heads for heaven, his earthly chain pulls him back. And yet,  as Kafka says, "all  the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in the original fettering." While   academicians insist that poetry is untranslatable, poets continue to  produce their translations — never in greater proliferation or diversity than now. 

      The easiest  poets to translate are the odd  and flashy ones, particularly those who revel in linguistic display. The translator of Akhmatova, like the translator of Pushkin, is presented with no idiosyncrasy of surface or of syntax to simplify his task. Her poems exist in the purity  and exactness of  their diction, the authority of their tone, the subtlety of their rhythmic modulations,