Was There Ever an Original
原文などあったのか
After a hundred drafts, I reached for the original one final time, and my hand closed on smoke.
I had spent months in fidelity to a text that now seemed to recede as I approached.
Which of the poet's own drafts, I asked, was the true original the others merely approached?
The manuscript showed three revisions, each betraying the version that had come just before.
The poet, it seemed, had been translating himself, chasing a poem that existed nowhere on paper.
, that comforting chain of origins, dissolved the moment I examined a single link.
Every source turned out to be a translation of something earlier, itself already lost.
, I began to suspect, is a direction we point, not a place we can visit.
The original is always elsewhere, always the version that some other version is faithful to.
Even the poet's first was a of a feeling that language had already deformed.
Thought itself, before any word, is arguably the first and most violent translation of all.
If so, my English was not a copy of a copy but one more link in an endless chain.
There was no sacred first term against which all the others could be measured and judged.
, the philosophers say, means meaning is forever deferred, sliding from sign to sign.
No word rests in a final ; each points onward to the next, which points onward again.
The original I had worshipped was a produced by the very act of looking back.
Translation had not fallen away from an origin; it had, all along, been generating the origin.
My version would become, for some future reader, the original that a newer version betrayed.
The chain has no first link and no last, only the endless passing of the flame.
This should have devastated me, and for one vertiginous evening it very nearly did.
Yet a strange freedom rose out of the , cool and clarifying, like air after fever.
If there was no perfect original to betray, then my failures were not sins but continuations.
I was not defiling a sacred text; I was adding one more verse to a song without a beginning.
The poet and I were colleagues, separated by centuries, working on the same unfinished poem.
So I signed my translation, for the first time, without apology and without shame.
It was not the poem, and it was not not the poem; it was the poem continuing.
The untranslatable word, I finally understood, had never been a wall but a door.
And through that door the poem walked on, into languages neither of us would ever live to read.