Translating Myself
Translating his own early poems, the poet negotiates between the self he was and the self he has become
An editor wrote to ask whether I would translate my own early poems into the language of exile.
I agreed, not knowing that I had accepted an appointment with the young man I used to be.
To translate oneself is to sit across a table from a stranger who wears your former face.
The young poet had written those lines in a tongue that trusted the world would never end.
Now I, older and displaced, was asked to carry his certainties across a border he never imagined.
, the first law of translation, proved a beautiful and wholly impossible to obey.
No word in the new language stood exactly where its old had once so easily stood.
To stay faithful to the sound, I had to betray the sense; to keep the sense, I sacrificed the music.
The young man protested from the page: "That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all."
I answered him quietly that meaning, like a country, changes its borders while you are away.
Between his intention and my rendering opened a gap that no dictionary had ever agreed to fill.
I was author and translator at once, the source text and the flawed, loving version of it.
My first person split cleanly in two: the I who had written and the I who now revised.
We negotiated, line by line, over what could be saved and what would have to be surrendered.
He wanted every image kept; I knew that some images do not survive the crossing intact.
A metaphor rooted in my childhood soil simply died when transplanted into this colder, foreign ground.
What is lost in translation, they say; but I was losing myself, phrase by careful phrase.
And yet, strangely, something new was being gained in the very act of that measured loss.
The translated poem was not a copy but a third thing, born between two languages and belonging to neither.
It carried the young man's fire and the old man's frost, married in a single, altered line.
I realised that I was not preserving the original self but composing a further version of him.
The word "" began to seem less like obedience and more like an ongoing, honest conversation.
To be faithful, perhaps, is not to repeat but to keep the argument between selves alive.
Each poem I rendered left me slightly rearranged, as if I had been quietly retranslated too.
The young poet and the exile signed, at last, an uneasy across the ruled and empty page.
Neither had won; both had been changed; and the poem stood as the record of their meeting.
I closed the understanding that no version is final and no self is ever wholly original.
And I began to suspect that I, too, was only a translation, endlessly revised and never quite complete.