The Poem That Resists
抵抗する詩
The poem I was translating had three lives, and I was permitted to preserve only one.
Its first life was its music, the interlocking chime of vowels that made the lines almost sing.
Its second life was its meaning, plain enough on the surface yet doubled beneath by sly .
Its third life was its shape, the way each rhyme fell like a coin into a waiting bowl.
To rescue the sound, I would have to let the double meaning quietly drown.
To rescue the double meaning, I would have to flatten the into honest, tuneless prose.
And to rescue the rhyme, I would have to bend the sense until it limped.
, the deep architecture of stress and pause, is the first casualty of any crossing.
English does not breathe on the same beat as the language I was carrying it from.
A line that gallops in one tongue may only trudge, footsore, in another.
, that soft rhyme of vowels within a line, rarely survives the customs of a new alphabet.
fares a little better, for consonants travel more lightly than the vowels they frame.
But , the sheer pleasantness of sound, is a native plant that seldom takes to foreign soil.
The poet had, in one word, folded two meanings so tightly that they could not be pried apart.
of that kind is a chord; unfold it into separate notes and the chord is gone.
I could footnote the second meaning, but a footnote is a chord explained, not a chord heard.
Every choice I weighed felt less like translation than like on a wounded body.
I found myself asking which organ the poem could lose and still remain recognisably itself.
Sound, I decided, was the breath; without it the lines would lie flat and blue.
So I chose the music, and let one shadow of meaning slip, unmourned, beneath the surface.
I rebuilt the vowels, coaxing English toward a chime it does not naturally possess.
I hunted synonyms not for sense alone but for the small percussions hidden in their syllables.
Where the original clicked shut like a lock, I sought a click my own tongue could make.
The lost meaning I buried in a note, honestly marked, a grave the curious could visit.
What I saved was not the poem but its pulse, the thing that made strangers lean closer.
A translated poem, I saw, is a photograph of a fire, warm to look at, cold to touch.
Yet a good photograph still testifies that the fire was real, and once, unbearably, bright.
That , imperfect and , was the most I could carry across the water.