rich and strange, often very strange. I see no contradiction between the esteeming and the estranging.”* Celan’s style of translation was to break up, add, subtract, question, and argue with the original. Felstiner quoties Celan’s 1948 love poem to show what sort of love Celan had for the poetry he translated: “Only faithless am I true. / I am you, when I am I.” Felstiner added his own summation: “In love or translation, identifying with an other demands truth to oneself.”
Serge Gavronsky has identified two opposite approaches to translation, represented by two very different American translators of poetry. He told me, “One was Amy Lowell, and Amy Lowell did a number of very interesting translations from the Chinese. She is, for many reasons, the archrepresentation of the submissive translator, that is, one who renders honor to the master text. . . . it’s very clear that for her the translator disappears, no longer occupies an actual space, which is given over to the original. The other, and the absolute Other, is what I call cannibalism, which was Ezra Pound’s theory, that is, when you take those hieroglyphic love poems that he ‘translated’ or the poems he did from the Chinese, and you ask a sinologist to give you a quicky of at least the meaning of the poems, you realize that Ezra Pound’s aesthetics or poetics of translation is a very aggressive one. I exaggerate by calling it ‘cannibal.’”
Celan was a cannibal. However, Felstiner did not feel obliged to copy Celan’s approach to translation. Felstiner’s goal was not to place his artistic imprint on Celan’s poems, but rather to redeem all the loss Celan suffered and all the loss Celan has to suffer being transferred into another language. For Felstiner too, however, esteeming does not require copying. He is not at the other extreme, where the translator disappears, submissively crouching behind the author’s standing figure. Felstiner is there in front of the author, kneeling rather than crouching, interpreting and redeeming rather than either adapting or worshiping the original.
Translating Celan’s poetry, as he wrote of translating Pablo Neruda’s, is “an oddly subjective experience—one of possessing and being possessed.”* In reciting his translations of the Chilean poet’s work, he “discovered a strange side effect of translating at its most earnest: the experience of being possessed, the illusion that the lines you’ve translated are speaking through you and for you.” But
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