Week 9
A “total translation” ultimately aims to carry over “words, sounds, voice, melody, gesture, event,” and more essential qualities of a poem. So what Rothenberg translates is not only the ‘words,’ of a poem, but also a sense of the “song and of the attitudes” it encapsulates.
To account for all vocal sounds in the poems he was translating, Rothenberg would translate the music of the poetry “onto the page” (one can liken this to concrete poetry)—for instance, he spread out the letters of “HEH EH HEH” on the page to convey the slow regularity, deliberateness, repetition, and other lyrical qualities of a song-poem. Such a technique also points to Rothenberg’s project of getting “as far away” as he can from “writing"—he would sing his own words over a tape and replace the original poet’s vocables with sounds relevant to himself.
Furthermore, his claim that "poets shape their worlds through their poems” says much about his project to translate in this “total” sense, translating not only the words of a poem but also the living situation and attitudes of the people who speak its language. For instance, he says that he can “hardly speak of the poetry without using words that would describe the people as well.”
From my understanding, it seems that Rothenberg is translating context and experience, particularly the experience of musically interpreting a poem, at once.
For this exercise, I decided to also translate a song, so that I could experiment with translating music through poetry. I chose to translate three stanzas from Jay Chou’s “Common Jasmine Orange” (七里香) so that I could focus on translating closely in a ‘total’ sense (as opposed to tackling the entire song).
Song: 1:23 -3:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbp9ZaJD_eA
雨下整夜
我的愛溢出就像雨水
院子落葉
跟我的思念厚厚一疊
幾句是非
也無法將我的熱情冷卻
妳出現在我詩的每一頁
雨下整夜
我的愛溢出就像雨水
窗台蝴蝶
像詩裡紛飛的美麗章節
我接著寫
把永遠愛妳寫進詩的結尾
妳是我唯一想要的了解
雨下整夜
我的愛溢出就像雨水
院子落葉
跟我的思念厚厚一疊
幾句是非
也無法將我的熱情冷卻
妳出現在我詩的每一頁
Rain falls all night
my love pours out just like each drop, leaves
fall outside
piling up with my every thought, words
left and right
cannot cool the fire in my heart
on every page of my poem
you are a part
Rain falls all night
my love pours out just like each drop, as
butterflies fly
on the windowsill like beautiful stanzas and
so I write
into the last lines of my poem
I will love you forever
you are the only one I want to know…
Rain falls all night
my love pours out just like each drop, leaves
fall outside
______________________________________________________________
In general, the line lengths and spacing I have adopted match the way Jay Chou sings the lyrics. The highlight of the song is the triumphant opening line of the chorus, “雨下整夜,” and I wanted to preserve that effect by also opening the song with four strong syllables (rain falls all night). The accented syllables (the 2nd and 4th) are the same ones stressed in the song.
I also tried to make sure that the lines rhymed in roughly the same places as they do in the song. Because the singer segues from line 2 to 3 pretty smoothly, I conclude line 2 with “leaves” so that it creates an enjambment effect (I adopted the same tactic for lines 4 and 5, etc.).
There is a musical interlude that separates the final two stanzas, which I signified with ellipses and additional line breaks. To translate the chorus that returns after the interlude, I included only the first three lines, since rewriting the whole stanza would give the poem a ‘heavier’ feeling. After listening the song to this section, all you need is the familiar first couple of lines to recognize it as a recapitulation.
Part of Rothenberg’s project regarding a “total translation” was to also convey a sense of the living attitudes of the people whose language he was translating, and that was something I tried to keep in the back of my mind when I was translating this song. I tried to internalize not necessarily the attitude of Taiwanese people ‘as a whole,’ but rather the kind of mindset a Jay Chou fan / contemporary music listener / teenager would have when listening to this song. Through this lens, I wrote lines like, “ I will love you forever / you are the only one I want to know,” which is typical of love song lyrics.
I wonder how I would have approached a ‘total’ translation had I not been translating a song, and also whether I could have made bolder choices for this translation. I considered adding concrete poetry elements to it, but that decision did not quite seem to line up with the kind of ‘world’ these lyrics inhabit.