But it’s neither masturbation nor one-way giving; there’s at least as much taking as there is giving. It’s just that the author is not actively doing the giving the translator takes; he’s already done the giving, placed the gift under the tree.
The sort of intimacy involved in translation does not have to turn into published work, as Rosanna Warren told me: “My practice as a writer is to absorb and study poems that move me, that excite me, that pull me in. And some of them are in foreign languages, and part of the impulse of approaching and entering these works sometimes involves my doing a translation of them, to get truly inside them. . . . Sometimes these translations don’t come to anything that’s going to be presentable; it was just a practice of intimacy, but sometimes that turns into something that one can show an outside world.”
Sometimes the intimacy involves a third party: an earlier translator, or sometimes even multiple translators. This was the case with Jonathan Galassi when he translated the poetry of Eugenio Montale. He told me, “the person I’m in agon with is William Arrowsmith, because Arrowsmith has done all these translations. . . . He didn’t try to stick to Montale’s form; he produced a very strong English, almost a prose text that is a reading of the poems. Mine are trying to do it within the formal constraints of Montale’s verse, closer to an imitation of the form as well as the meaning. I have Montale on one side and Arrowsmith on the other. . . . I’ve borrowed things from him; it’s been a dialogue.”
It’s the intimacy, and all that comes out of it — learning, understanding, expanding one’s horizons — that makes the translator’s submission such a positive experience. “Is translation as self-transcendence still another version of the paradox: to know yourself, lose yourself in the other?” Edwin Honig wrote in the introduction to his collection of interviews with translators, The Poet’s Other Voice.* And the answer, of course, is, Yes. Every translator knows that there is no better way to find yourself than by losing yourself; the question is whether you’re finding what was there, hidden, or whether you’re adding something new, or at least providing new ammunition to articulate what was already there. Or as Herbert Mason, the translator of Gilgamesh and other epic works, told Honig in the same book, “translation is a process of
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