Thursday, August 27, 2020

Metaphors of Translation

"Treue in der Übersetzung des einzelnen Wortes kann fast nie den Sinn voll wiedergeben, den es im Original hat. Denn dieser erschöpft sich nach seiner dichterischen Bedeutung fürs Original nicht in dem Gemeinten, sondern gewinnt diese gerade dadurch, wie das Gemeinte an die Art des Meinens in dem bestimmten Worte gebunden ist. Man pflegt dies in der Formel auszudrücken, daß die Worte einen Gefühlston mit sich führen. Gar die Wörtlichkeit hinsichtlich der Syntax wirft jede Sinneswiedergabe vollends über den Haufen und droht geradenwegs ins Unverständliche zu führen." - Walter Benjamin

Did we break the jar when we touched it
Or merely disclose
What was already torn?

Was there something more
Than truth cleaved on the back of the truth
That came before, or something less?

The metaphor
Prompts a knowing,
A seeming to understand

Although it’s as hopeless
As structure
As the sand.

But it’s not what the cricket sings
As what we think is sung.
Ah! The possibility of reading

The hope of another
Disguised as the hope
Of meaning

Of which there is no end,
As slippery as the motives
And figures can be,

The sense is always clear enough
The truth will not escape
Such loose confederations of ropes,

For where will it go,
With its likenesses and tropes,
Lacking a home for exile?

There’s only this,
The irrevocable, forever past
The individual,

Always loosening its hold
On the one who watches itself
Disappear as the metaphor dissolves.

What relationship do we have
To allow such
Familiarity,

The kind we do not see
With families, fathers,
Long-lost friends?

What jar must be fit together
From afar? From what shared,
Ineffable source must it be drawn?

Is it bound to be defaced, even
A negation, exposed by its loss
In translation?

Do the figures inevitably revert
To abstraction, to the nonsense
Of their forms?

So much seems to be at stake
In not being able to convey
Enough across the gulf

(Which could be an abyss,
Or anything unrecoverable,
Depending on the language

And the whims of 
The mediator who strings 
The letters together

To make them mean
In another grammar
Of thinking)

To quell the fear
That without understanding
Nothing can be grasped.

But like a confidence man
Preying on this terror, words smooth
Over any dispute

With their well-worn store of truism,
Their agreeable tones,
As if all their circumlocutions

Lead to a center,
If one can only be patient
And wait for the elixir

Slipped in unnoticed
Without even touching,
The placebo of hope.

And so it is the rainbow
That words can’t catch
Eludes us

Like the dragonfly
That can’t be photographed, or
The moments absorbed into oblivion.

So spirit evades
Its effacement,
Its illusory definition

Where it would be lost
In the amber of a glyph,
A void waiting to be unearthed.