AW: I know 100 or so words in Spanish and a dozen each in French and Latin, so my understanding of translation is extremely limited. Do you still think in Russian and translate in your brain, or have you been here so long, you have to remember the Russian after you think in English, or is it possible to think in each language?

 

MY: I’m bilingual, or at least grew up bilingually, from the age of four, but thinking and language are only partially entwined, in my experience. I might have words in Russian and in English in my mind at the same time or dream in some combination. It’s hard to say what language I dream in, only that sometimes I wake up remembering a line in one or the other language — but that might just be my conscious mind putting words to notions. I think language is more like a cognitive action. I’m looking at this meadow and I’m thinking something, and only at some point do I begin to put words to the thoughts or name what I’m seeing. Of course, the go-to is more often English if I’ve been speaking English — which is usually the case, except when with family or visiting Russian friends, or in Russia, of course, but I haven’t been there since 2019 for reasons you can readily imagine.

 

AW: You have collaborated on a translation (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky. I watched a video of the two of you at Kelly Writers House. It’s hard to imagine two poets more different, which probably could have either been very difficult or very useful for collaboration. Did you “workshop” each other’s translations or was it, “Eugene, you do this verse and I’ll do the next”?

 

MY: Eugene and I rarely collaborate directly on a single text. For the Vvedensky book, we had both been translating this and that poem or prose text and then we put our work together. There was no overlap. We gave each other feedback, and he was the editor of that book so he may have queried me on my translation choices more than I queried him. I love what he does, both in his poems and in his translations, but he’s a very different translator (and poet, as you know). We don’t work the same way, though we respect each other’s ways. In the Vvedensky book, you could likely tell which were Eugene’s and which were my translations even if they weren’t marked with our initials. (You can read more about my approach to translating Vvedensky in a reflection I wrote for Poetry Daily.) For the last 15 years I’ve been working with John High on Osip Mandelstam’s late poetry, and in that case, it’s really a collaborative translation: for the most part we draft and edit and finalize each poem together, sitting across from each other at a kitchen table, or in John’s backyard, or — for the last few years — over Zoom or the phone, with our cursors moving through the same google doc. We read each poem aloud many times, talk about it, look up allusions and references and dig through dictionaries, talking our way toward a translation. One of us takes over the typing, then hands it off. We read our translations aloud many times alongside the original and get into the rhythm and the feeling as well as the meanings and intentions we’re interpreting. It’s a great process, even if it’s slow. I’ve done a handful of Mandelstam’s earlier poems on my own, but I’d never have taken on the task of Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks without this partnership. We keep each other going — alone, I might have given up because of the difficulty of late Mandelstam — and we keep coming back and honing things till we both feel it’s right.

 

AW: I have read the Quran in several English translations, and found it lacked the poetry of the King James Version of the Christian Bible. Speaking to some of my Muslim friends, they say if I could read it in Arabic, I would find a similar beauty. I am sure they are right, so my question is, how much of the beauty of the language of Russian poetry is lost, even when folks like you and Eugene translate it? And how do you compensate for that?

 

MY: Well, translation is firstly a cultural mediation. It’s not about finding linguistic equivalents — there are none — between languages. For what’s an equivalent sound if all the words are different, the grammar’s different, etc? Even between French and Italian, the one-syllable place has a different ring from piazza. And in English, it’s probably a public square, maybe a plaza, which sounds a tinge more exotic, but still doesn’t really match the sound of either. I think a lot about sound when I translate — but more along the lines of contrasts, effects, dissonance, assonance, and mainly I try to bear in mind the overall poetic intentions. I translated a famous Mayakovsky poem once — it’s usually known as “Cloud in Trousers,” but the Russian word shtany didn’t mean a presentable pair of slacks back in 1914; it was of a coarser register, and could even mean long johns or undergarments in some speech contexts. Furthermore, the English title “Cloud in Trousers” has two of the same vowel sounds (ou), whereas Mayakovsky — and this is a typical dissonance of his provocative poetic approach — has a significant contrast in the vowels. Here’s a phonetic transcription of the title in Russian: ˈobɫəkə v štanáx. Notice the o and the shwas in the word for cloud, and the much more open-mouthed a-sounds of the word for what the cloud is wearing. So I translated the title as “Cloud in Pants” (causing some consternation among certain editors) to keep the vowel contrast and to sound a bit vulgar, or at least brusque. (Of course the syllable count is different from the Russian, but you’re not going to get around that sort of thing.) Pants are commoner’s clothes — and Mayakovsky’s cloud is no suit. He’s letting it all hang out in the poem. Most translations smooth out his tone, and that begins with the title, which, they say, “sounds good” because of the smoothness, poetic because of the repetition — but that’s not Mayakovsky’s idea of poetic. So, for me, it’s about interpreting the poet’s intentions, getting behind the writer’s choices.

 

AW: Listening to you, and reading your poetry, I am reminded that we all write poetry for different reasons and in different ways. It has taken me nearly 60 years to sort out why I write poetry. I used to think I wrote for the reader, then I thought I wrote for me, but have finally (or at least for now) realized I write in service of the poem. So I would be interested in why you write? Why you translate? Why and for whom?

 

MY: Big question! I am compelled to translate in part by the desire to share lesser-known and under-translated (or mistranslated) literary works I’m excited by. (Which is also why I’ve been involved in editing and publishing translations of others for some 20 years, curating the Eastern European Poets Series for Ugly Duckling Presse, and soon re-starting that series at World Poetry Books.) Of course, one can say, vaguely, that translation is important, because it’s important to open ourselves up to other places, languages, traditions. But what’s happening in translation is really a mediation that — if it goes well — brings out some new possibilities that are latent in our own language and tradition. Pound’s translations — or productive mistranslations — of Li Po and other Chinese poets in Cathay, and what it did for jump-starting modern English-language poetry, is a great example. In fact, I would argue, Cathay was a paradigm shift that still governs what English-language poetry thinks it ought to be and do. In this sense, translation is like the Silk Road or other trade routes — like pasta is Italian, but it’s a borrowing from China, etc. — it’s the primary mover of literature. National literatures stagnate without the influx of foreign works. (What would Celan have become without Dickinson and Mandelstam, both of whom he translated, for example?)

 

Too often, however, translation (especially in English) attempts to inscribe the foreign into something we already know, something familiar. (In my research, I’m finding that the “deep image” and “plain style” translators of the Cold War period did a lot of that.) And the publishing industry has mostly upheld that sort of thing, tacitly relying on the notion that a translation should be “a good poem in English” — whatever that means. That’s the notion that proposes something like “Cloud in Trousers” sounds good in English, so why be more precise (read: academic), etc. It’s a problem with fiction in a different way — more on the level of familiar, or domesticated, content. (See Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Politics of Translation” or Emily Apter’s critiques of “World Literature”). But this is perhaps too big a topic and gets away from your question — I see I’m avoiding the “why.”

 

So why do I write? Perhaps, because I translate — and vice versa. That’s a coy answer, but there’s something to it, no? “In service of the poem,” is a good way to put it, but there’s also the issue that I have things to say about this and that, whether it be personal or political, or, even more importantly, aesthetic (which, for me, encompasses the latter). A long time ago I was struck by a formulation I read in Daniil Kharms’s diary, where he says that he likes writing poems to find things out. (I can’t find the passage just now, but it’s something like that.) Also, in a letter, which is also a work of fiction, Kharms writes that the poem “isn’t just words or thoughts printed on paper, it is a thing as real as a crystal inkwell standing in front of me on the table.” I want to make a real thing, not a reflection or a description of the world. Kharms goes on to say about the poem, when it is a poem, that “it seems that these verses have become a thing, and one can take them off the page and throw them at a window, and the window would break. That’s what words can do!” Perhaps that’s more magic than I can muster . . .

 

But then, to answer the question of “why” from a different angle, I find myself having a feeling, a kind of rage against the world — which is a kind of passion, so it is also love — or to use a phrase from a Mandelstam poem, a “quarrel with the world,” and I want to do something (or make something?) with it. This feeling is in part a consequence of doing this thing (poetry) that, as Mallarme said, “society does not want, in exchange for which it does not give me anything to live on.” And that, paradoxically, is what keeps me interested in writing poems.