ALBANIAN DIRT

ALBANIAN DIRT:
THE PROBLEM OF
TRANSLATING POETRY

The difficulty of translating poetry is twofold: the words and meaning on the one hand, the flow and rhythm (or rhyme) on the other. Most translations of poetry are bad. This is mainly because the translator knows the foreign language too well and his or her language too poorly. In Albanian poetry, a good example of a classically-bad translator is Dr Robert Elsie, a Canadian albanologist of high distinction and erudition, but someone whose grasp of English is limited to the writing of academic papers and dissertations. His translations read as if they were written by a student - or an Albanian - and, in their awkward, unconvincing, almost robotic English, do a disservice to the originals.

In fact, after reading his (non-bilingual) anthology AN ELUSIVE EAGLE SOARS some years ago, I concluded that, unlike Macedonia, Albania had surprisingly poor poets - and started to write Albanian poems myself! Then I realised that however good an original might be, it can be completely swamped or undermined by poor translation.

Dr Elsie is not a poet - but that is irrelevant: some famous poets are extremely bad translators, the most obvious case being Robert "Iron John" Bly whose translations of Rilke are embarrassing. "Famous Séamus" Heaney and his fellow-Ulsterman Paul Muldoon are not much better.

Good translators do not even need to speak either language natively: an excellent example is Ewald Osers, a Czech who has made good translations of (Slavonic) Contemporary Macedonian Poetry (Forest Books) , and of his fellow-countryman Miroslav Holub , into English. Admittedly, though, Holub (like Popa) translates gratefully.

Another outstanding modern translator is Herbert Lomas (Bloodaxe Books) who has translated Contemporary Finnish Poetry. Neither of these books is in a bilingual edition - so it is impossible for me to say if the original is much better. But one which is - THE ERROR OF BEING by the outstanding Romanian poet Ion Caraion - can be seen to be poorly translated by Marguerite Dorian & Elliott B. Urdang without any knowledge of Romanian other than through other Romance languages and Latin. (See my own translation from this collection.)

The most famously good translator is Edward FitzGerald, whose universally-known rendering of The Ruba'iyát of Omar Khayyám reads as if it were originally composed in English. In fact he re-wrote and re-ordered a selection of Khayyám's verses, and sacrificed the original (rather obscure) meaning to fluency, thus creating not just a new poem in its own right, but an uniquely visionary poem of genius.

Even more extreme a translation is Yeats' early poem When you are old and grey and full of sleep... "translated" (or rather very freely paraphrased) from the incomparable Pierre de Ronsard 's sonnet Quand vous serez vien vieille... of which only one line is actually translated from Ronsard's original. ( Click to see Ronsard's original, my own translation, and Yeats' paraphrase all together.)

The contemporary and egregious Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku is unusually well-served by a posse of translators and her American editor Henry Israeli. But there are some awkwardnesses - and I think I have made a slightly better job of translating her splendid poem Provim .

Many Albanian poems sent to me by my co-translator Zana Banci simply will not go into English. What sounds fresh in Albanian sounds banal in English, and there is no way to be faithful to the spirit of the original without traducing it at the same time: traduttore, traditore, as the famous Italian dictum has it.

Albanian, like Serbian, is not a laconic language. English now is. When one is encounters zappy, laconic poetry in Albanian or Serbian, it is very difficult to render it in English - especially if there is word-play.

An example is a marvellous poem by Mitrush Kuteli, whose real name was Dhimitër Pasko, born in Pogradec, south-eastern Albania, in 1907, translated Gogol's Dead Souls into Albanian - and so was himself no stranger to the problems of translation. He was (like everyone of talent) sent to a labour-camp by Enver Hoxha, but escaped execution, because good translators were needed by the régime.

Here is our translation of his fine, zappy poem:

ALBANIAN DIRT

Dhimitër Pasko (Mitrush Kuteli)

I love you, Albanian dirt.
I love you
ferociously,
desperately
relating to you
as wolf to forest,
wave to wave
and dirt to dirt.

Up to my knees
I'm into you,
born out of you
as was my father
and grandfather
and great-grandfather.

I love you, Albanian dirt,
up to my waist
and higher yet.

T he word which I have translated as 'dirt' is BALTË in Albanian.
I use the word i n the American double-sense of soil/earth and filth.
British English does not carry the meaning of soil - what plants grow out of.

BALTË has, however, many meanings in Albanian:

1. Mud, soil, earth, dirt.
2. Clay, silt, sediment, sludge.
3. Muck, muddy place, mire.
4. Ground, earth.
5. A substance from which something is made.
6. Dregs, sediment, lees, grounds, refuse, alluvium, filth, dross.
7. A cheap, dirty, worthless or disgraceful thing.
8. Mess, trouble, stew, muddle, bad situation, imbroglio, cock-up.
9. Native land.

So here is a poem whose pivotal word cannot properly be translated into English. It can mean 'mud' or 'muddle' or 'mire' or 'motherland'. Yet it is such a light, witty and deep poem that it would be a shame not to unearth it for English readers.

This is not the only problem with this poem. In the very first line is another ambiguous word, DUA which means not just 'love' and 'like', but also 'need' and 'want'.
So to accommodate this, I have had to insert quite gratuitously the very modern English phrase 'relating to' (which also has a double meaning), so that the succeeding lines flow with the clean speed of the Albanian.

Here is the Albanian text.
Anyone can see that it is a very neat, rhyming poem - and that our translation is neither so neat nor so resonant - hence this apology.

BALTËS SHQIPTARE

Të dua, baltë shqiptare!
të dua
egërisht,
dëshpërimisht -
si ujku pyllin,
si vala valën,
si balta baltën!

Se gjer mbi gju
jam brenda teje;
se lerë kam këtu
si ati,
gjyshi,
stërgjyshi.

Të dua, baltë shqiptare
se gjer mbi bel
dhe përmbi bel.

About his difficulty as a writer - the difficulty of any writer under a totalitarian régime (and any dissident writer beyond the Pale in a 'liberal democracy') - Pasko wrote:

O such a surprise
to want not to be human,
to envy the stones
that suffer not
when the storm descends on Tirana!

O, sa cudi,
Të duash të mos jesh njeri
Dhe gurëve t'u kesh zili
Se gurët s'vuajn' kur bie shi
Përmbi Tiranë.

The 'storm' is the disfavour of Hoxha and the Party - what Dalan Luzaj called 'the hurricane'.

A poem he wrote to his wife from the horror of the prison camp:

Kaq afër jemi, por kaq larg,
Të lutem mos më prit
Na ndajnë terre rreth e qark
Dhe yll për mua s'ndrit.

Përse ta lidhësh fatin tënd
Me një pafat si unë,
Kur di se emri im u shëmb
Me dhunë e përdhune?

Pra hidhe hapin guximtar
Ndaj jetës së gëzuar
Dhe më harro këtu, në varr,
Të vdekur pa mbuluar.

utterly defeats decent translation into English...