The Eight Stages of Translation by Robert Bly. Boston: Rowan Tree Press, 1983. 107 pages.

I’ve been translating some French poetry lately, starting in February, so I have been eager to read other poets’ accounts of process. This book is by far the best I’ve come across so far (although if readers have any additional suggestions, please leave them in the comments). Robert Bly is one of the best poets (American or otherwise) writing today. This book was straightforward, informative and filled with the practicalities of the intricate art of translating. Also, being more than 20 years old, the book is still just as relevant.

Bly’s aim is not to theorize about translation, but to relate what it’s like to translate and to “simplify the process into eight stages.” He cautions that “the stages will often collapse into each other, or a single line will go through all eight stages in a flash, while the other lines lie about looking even more resistant than before. What I will do is pretend that all goes in order.” So he chooses a poem–one of Rilke’s sonnets–and he walks us through his approach, stage by stage. Bly has been much lauded for his translation work so the lesson that unfolds is invaluable.

The first stage is to perform a literal translation. Not much needs to be said about this and, in fact, Bly does not say very much. in essence, this is the prep stage. The thing I liked about this is that a translator doesn’t necessarily need to be fluent in the original language of the poem. I mean, who is fluent in Old English, for example? For me, this takes a bit of the stigma away for working on an Italian or, say, a Russian poem. A good dictionary or a fluent friend is all you need for this stage, it is a literal word-for-word exchange.

Stage two is more important, however: this is where “we will need all we have learned in literature courses, or from our own writing.” And, also, because Bly chose a German poem, “all the German we can scrape up.” And this is where life experience (the cumulative learning and knowledge) comes in handy. You need to figure out what the poem is “about.” Bly says, “it’s important to follow every eccentric branch out to its farthest twig.” And he cautions: “In the store of feeling is beyond the translator, he or she should leave the poem be.” That is, if the poem is about something which the translator can’t empathize with or imagine fully, they should return to it later in life. In essence, stage three combines the first two stages: we compare our original word-for-word with what the poem might be trying to communicate with its metaphors, its imagery. We have to keep in mind that “each language evolves in a different way and we cannot cancel a thousand years of language evolution by our will.” This means that changing the word order is alright, even desirable, because in the case of the German language, the natural order of syntax is opposite to its English equivalent, and if we left it that way it would sound dull, archaic, or just plain stupid.

The fourth stage is the one I would call the “ear stage.” Bly suggests translating the English into “American,” by which he means simply into a natural idiom. “The idea that a great poem should be translated freshly every twenty years is rooted in an awareness of how fast the spoken language changes.” I suppose we could say “Canadian” instead of “American,” but it’s a moot point. The idea is to make it sound natural. And this is why I’ve been translating Emile Nelligan, and the reason why I think Zach Wells is also working on his own translations. The translations by P.F Widdows (1960) and Fred Cogswell (1983) mostly abandon Nelligan’s poems in stage one or two. They certainly don’t stand up in today’s speech and therefore don’t do justice to Nelligan’s genius. Bly puts it this way: “Asking the ear about each phrase, asking it, ‘Have you ever heard this prhase spoken?’ is the labour of this draft.” Bly compares it to Frost’s notion of a rhythm of common speech, a fragrance he called “sentence sound,” that “tells you a person now alive could have said the phrase.”

In the fifth stage, we need the ear again, “not the ear turned outward toward human speech, but the ear turned inward toward the complicated feelings the poem is carrying,” which for Bly means the mood of the piece. This stage, then, involves making small adjustments that correspond to the tone rather than the emphasis on the spoken element. Minute adjustments, yes, but necessary ones. Especially in English, where you can say something several different ways and each has its own tone. You can glean a lot by a description of how someone walks into a room, for example. A person can saunter, strut, lurch, etc. into a room. Each option carries with it associations. This stage is where you find the right one for the poem.

The sixth stage looks at the question of rhythm vs. metre. “The translator’s job is to feel the body language of the line, but that may or may not lead to the meter.” Bly wants to capture the idea of how it sounds in the original and emulate that in the target language. He gives the example of nineteenth-century translators who tried to squeeze their versions strictly into the metre of the orignal, thus losing what is more important for Bly, rhythm. I tend to agree with him here. Rhythm is such an integral component of poetry and to be perfectly reasonable, I don’t think all elements of prosody should be attempted to be translated. I just don’t think it’s possible. For Bly, rhythm is the most important element and therefore he places a premium on it.

Bly suggests that for the seventh stage the poet should get someone native to the language to go over the translation and point out infelicities of tone, image, slant of image, etc. Desirable I can see, but probably not always possible. And the seventh stage is the final draft. He suggests going through all previous drafts, “perhaps a half line was said better in one of them.” Bly also suggests making final adjustments before reading previous translations. I disagree slightly with this. Probably becasue I am guilty of doing it. But I’ve found that I like to get a sense of what has been done previously before I do my own. Perhaps, though, this is a limitation I’ve unconsiously placed on myself. Perhaps also because I am relatively new to translation, I haven’t trusted my own instincts enough. Bly adds an excellent point, though, by saying he doesn’t believe in keeping rhyme schemes just for their own sake. There is no dishonour, he says, in relinquishing such things: “I believe in working as much as possible with internal rhymes, but I think it’s best not to insist on reproducing end rhymes.” This is another area I think Widdows and, in particular, Cogswell fail Nelligan. Often by insisting on end rhymes, by inverting and distorting the natural order of English syntax for the rhyme, Cogswell kills the rhythm of the poems.

Although I think Bly’s advice is great and shows the nuts and bolts of a great translator’s process, I think ultimately a translator has to find his or her own way. These are superb guidlelines, though, and more than worth reading and absorbing.

In other news, I’m planning on some upcoming changes here at IanLeTourneau.ca. Once a month, look for a featured review, to be published here on the last day of each month. I’m working on a review of Eight Stages of Translation by Robert Bly right now. Nothing too fancy: just an overview and some thoughts. And I want people to come back everyday so one way to lure them is some original content. I’m going to post a picture of the day everyday: that’ll be pretty easy because every day I see something interesting in my back yard–lots of deer, all kinds of birds, and even a wolf one day. The only hitch is that I need a digital camera. We’re going to buy one soon, so I hope that feature comes on-line soon. Look for some changes (and original content) soon!

By the way, please leave a message to let me know your reading.