On Translation: Heredia et Moi

View Heredia's, Google's, Anson's, and my version of the poem here.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Order George David Clark's new book, Newly Not Eternal here!

-Order John Wall Barger's new book, The Elephant of Silence here! 

-On the necessity of verse translation, feat. Bob and Paul 

-Metaphrase and Paraphrase

-The Blumov Method of translation

-Jacques Barzun's An Essay On French Verse

-Romanticism in Realism's clothing

-The tyranny of Hugo

-Parnassianism and other ideologies of contraction

-Buy John Anson's lovely translation of Les Trophees here! 

Transcript

Versecraft 5-10: On Translation: Heredia et Moi 

            Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the final episode of Versecraft. The final episode of the fifth season, that is, and I ain’t talkin N.K. Jemisin. Heretofore I have established the questionable tradition that when I conclude a season of Versecraft, I close it out with a poem that I have written. This time is going to be a little different— I am still going to talk about a poem I wrote, but not an original poem. Rather, I am going to use this unique opportunity to feature a beautiful poem outside of the English tradition and take you through the process of how I have translated that poem. I might as well state now a very firm disclaimer: I am not fluent in French, the language from which I am translating, and therefore my translation should not be taken as a scholarly or by any means authoritative one. Rather, I am merely following in the hallowed tradition of poets attempting to commune with fellow poets outside their own language, and bringing into one tongue some of the wisdom and character, if not the actual music, of another. Despite my linguistic ignorance, I have nevertheless tried to write a poem which does considerable justice to the original in terms of both form and content. How I have made this attempt I will reveal shortly. 

            Before I do, let me remind you that if you enjoy this episode, please consider taking a moment to donate to the show, buy a Versecraft shirt, or leave the show a rating on Apple or Spotify. If spending money on podcasts is not your passion, please at least take a moment to tell at least one friend about the show this week. Thank you so much! 

            Thanks are also due to poet, critic, former feature, and friend of the show James Matthew Wilson, who has recently begun assigning Versecraft to his graduate students! This is an immense honor, something I’ve always dreamed of using the show for, and I’m incredibly grateful. To all those listening who are professors of poetry, please do not hesitate to follow James’s lead— I will always be ecstatic to hear that Versecraft is reverberating throughout the halls of academe, and if my efforts can help with your lesson planning, so much the better!

            Finally, I’d like to mention two lovely new books that unjustly slipped past my radar last week, both published by one of the best academic publishers around, LSU Press, which has long been one of the rare academic strongholds for contemporary formal poetry, a legacy which can be traced back to the influence of the great Wintersian professor and former Southern Review editor Donald Stanford. The first of these is a new collection of poems by a man who is not only a fine poet in his own right but the editor-in-chief of one of the best literary magazines in the world, 32 Poems. That man is George David Clark, and his new book, entitled Newly Not Eternal, is coming out this month. I haven’t gotten the chance to read it yet, but from what I’ve seen of his work I know it will be scintillating and poignant, and you should really see for yourself by purchasing a copy at my link in the show notes. The second book is a fascinating title by John Wall Barger, entitled The Elephant of Silence: Essays On Poetics and Cinema, which explores not only the intersections of those two artforms but also how they relate to greater issues of epistemology, phenomenology, and cultural vocabulary. Again, I have not had the chance to read it yet, but it looks intriguing, and you can check it out for yourself at my link in the show notes. 

            One last thing I’ll mention is that next week’s episode is going to require a little more research than usual. I hope I’ll be able to finish it in one week, but I may need an extra week to get it done. Just giving y’all a heads up. 

            In a quote that has at this point become something of a cliché, Robert Frost once said that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” The quote is less interesting for what it says about translation than for what it says about poetry, but there is some truth to it. If one defines poetry as music made out of a particular language, which in a limited sense I do, then of course poetry is never exactly translatable, because the change from one language to another is a change of instruments, and a change in instruments inevitably results in a different music. This is to say nothing of the larger problem of translation in general— the change in the complex network of connotation from one language’s vocabulary to another’s, another difference which cannot possibly be erased. 

            However, to view translation as a quixotic quest for exact replication is both crude and unnecessary. To Frost’s pessimistic insight we can add this quote of Paul Valery’s which functions as a kind of Thomistic, common-sense retort: “translating is producing analogous effects by different means.” Taken together, Frost and Valery underscore the absolute necessity of translating verse in one language into verse in another: poetry is not poetry without linguistic music; thus, even if the music must change, and thereby lose something, to abandon the music entirely is to, in a very real sense, abandon the original poetic text and the kind of effect it produces. The music of English will never sound like the music of Greek, but if there is no music at all, there will be no analogous effect, which is what the translator aims for. To translate the Iliad into English prose is like taking a clarinet sonata and not only changing the instrument to a violin, but forcing the violin to play the sonata with no discernable rhythm. Even if this exercise produces something interesting and engaging, the spirit and subliminal effect of the original sonata will be almost completely lost. 

            This leads us to a further conclusion: except in the case of word-for-word cribs, which have their own utility, translators of poetry must be poets in their own right if there is to be any legitimate translation happening at all. They must possess the skills which are required to produce an analogous effect to the original, otherwise the translation will not be adequate. The ideal translator of poetry is both a beautiful poet in the language he is translating into, as well as a rigorous speaker and scholar of the language he is translating from—hence the excellence of Arthur Golding, John Dryden, Allen Mandelbaum, Richard Wilbur, Dick Davis, Alicia Stallings, Ryan Wilson, and Chris Childers. 

However, given the fact that great poets who are also great polyglot scholars are few and far between; given the fact that poetic translation requires poets; and given the fact that literal word-for-word cribs of the kind I mentioned earlier are now more numerous and accessible than ever before, I think that even if a poet does not speak a language, if they are passionate about the work of a poet in that language, they should not shy away from translating that poet. This sort of naïve translation has at least three benefits: it provides a fresh and imaginative rendering of a foreign poet into one’s own language, it conditions and enriches the poetic faculties of the translator, and it can encourage the poet to develop their knowledge base in new directions. 

For instance, when Dick Davis translated his first major Persian poem, Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, his Persian was not strong enough to do it on his own, and he relied on his Iranian wife, Afkham, to provide a literal translation for him to work from. The poem nevertheless turned out wonderfully, and propelled Dick on the path to becoming the magisterial translator that he is today. The most acclaimed English translations of Russian literature today are those done by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: the Russian wife creates the literal translation, otherwise known as the metaphrase, and the American husband creates the literary translation, the paraphrase. When Robert Pinsky wrote his celebrated translation of Dante’s Inferno, he too relied on a metaphrase, as he does not speak Italian. One could go on. Clearly, one need not speak a language in order to write a serviceable or even brilliant translation from that language, and the poetry translation industry desperately needs poets, especially poets who know their way around meter and rhyme. However, in the absence of a bilingual spouse or friend, how does the poor monoglot do it? That is the process I aim to cover for you today. 

When I translate from a foreign language, I usually require three things: the original text, a metaphrase, and at least one paraphrase. Access to the original text enables me to see the actual words of the poem I will be translating, which is not only essential for pursuing fidelity to the poem and making proper diction and grammar related choices, but also enables me to construct a metaphrase, which I usually do via online translation software, either Google translate or some other service. Of course, such services are far from perfect, and being so literal they often misinterpret or do not adequately convey the sense of what is being said. That is why I also require a paraphrase, a literary translation done by a poet who speaks the original language and who is able to account for its idiomatic qualities. The metaphrase and the paraphrase reinforce one another, and for me, the cross-examination of the two is essential: the paraphrase allows me to better grasp what the metaphrase is getting at, and the metaphrase notifies me when the paraphrase is deviating from the actual vocabulary of the text. With constant reference to both translations and the source text, and supplementary research along the way, I am able to build up my own translation with confidence in my ability to not only produce something reasonably faithful, but to know when I am deviating from the original and how I can improve upon existing translations. 

The easiest way to acquire this trifecta of resources is to find an existing translation of a poet you would like to translate that has the original text of the poetry en face: that is, where the left-hand page has original text, and the right-hand page has translation of that text. In such editions you have both your source text and your paraphrase delivered to you on a silver platter, and the metaphrase is simple enough to generate. Whenever I am looking for a book of poems by a foreign writer, I always check to see if there is a reputable translation with the original text en face, and if there is, that is always the one I get. Such editions are great not only for one’s own translations, but for learning the art of translation more generally and gaining a greater appreciation of the music of the original writer. 

In order to get a sense of how this sort of cross-referencing translation actually works though, we must have a case study. Several weeks ago, Dick recommended a fabulous book to me: Jacques Barzun’s An Essay On French Verse For Readers of English Poetry. To anyone with even the slightest interest in French poetry, I cannot recommend this book enough— it is both a breezy and insightful survey of French poetic literature as well as a thorough primer on how to appreciate the subtleties and mechanics of French prosody. Reading this book was eye-opening for me in many ways, but the most practical effect that it had was that it reminded me of and made me interested in seeking out the work of the Parnassian poets. 

I’m going to discuss the Parnassian poets in more depth next week, but for now I will give the briefest of overviews. It is well known that the first half of the 19th century in Europe was dominated by the ideology known as Romanticism, a nexus of diverse beliefs and movements united by a revolutionary imperative to reverse the values of the neoclassical status quo: emotion over reason, individuality over society, particularity over universality, multiplicity over unity, nature over civilization, and freedom over restraint were the orders of the day. In its original forms, despite its perennial fetishization of melancholy, Romanticism was bursting with fiery optimism and utopianism. However, in 1848, when a wave of political revolutions which swept across Europe failed one after the other, a profound disillusionment instantly darkened the soul of Europe, and Romanticism came to be viewed by many as impractical, dangerous, and out of touch. Moreover, increased industrialization and scientific advancement began to provide a faith in positivist materialism to replace the transcendental spiritualism of the Romantics. By the 1850’s and 60’s, Romanticism was out, Realism was in. At least in theory. 

The fascinating thing about this supposedly anti-romantic backlash is that it happened entirely within a Romantic paradigm. Like it or not, there was no escaping the throes of Romantic ideology—it was too strong, too pervasive. Looking back upon the 19th century, we can easily identify Realism itself as just a second phase of Romanticism, and note with amusement that the advent of Realism left some areas, like Victorian poetry and German music, completely unaffected, while even those areas it did profoundly affect, like prose fiction and the visual arts, still operated from Romantic suppositions about the world and human nature. 

I bring all this up because it was within this cultural climate of the mid 19th century, this internecine Romantic conflict, that the Parnassian movement, one of the most interesting forms of pseudo-anti-romanticism, arose in France. In France, Romanticism was synonymous with the name Victor Hugo. Alongside Byron and Goethe, Hugo was one of the largest personalities of the Romantic movement, and as a poet, playwright, novelist, lover, political pamphleteer, and spiritual prophet, he utterly dominated French hearts, minds, and letters for decades. Imagine an individual who filled the roles of Elvis Presley, J.K. Rowling, Maya Angelou, Noam Chomsky, Mary Oliver, and Deepak Chopra all at once, and then add a mountain of critical adulation on top of that, and you will have some idea of the sway that Victor Hugo held in France in his time. Nevertheless, by the mid 19th century, there were those who had grown sick and exasperated with Hugo’s blustering emotionalism, his political idealism, his melodramatic diction, his diffuse rhetoric and indulgent egocentrism, and all the slavish writers who strove to emulate him. All these attributes were cringe-inducing to this later, more pessimistic generation. On the contrary, such critics said, poetry should strive, like modern science, to be precise and objective; to describe the facts soberly but beautifully, and not let emotions distort or the noisy personal “I” intrude; to achieve, like the sculptor, a chiseled formal excellence; and to achieve, like the composer of music, art that exists for its own sake, not to advertise one’s personality or propagandize for some ill-conceived political cause. Such were the prerogatives of the Parnassians. 

This reactionary desire to refine, to compress, and purify the arts after a period of expansiveness and excess was of course nothing new. It was present in the Neo-classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries, which sought to correct Baroque excesses; it was present in the Renaissance, which sought to correct Gothic excesses; and it was present in the Hellenistic poets, who sought, in the wake of Plato’s criticisms, to correct the vatic, sensational excesses of previous epic and melic verse. Superficial similarities between these movements of contraction may tempt us to group them all under one shared philosophy—say, a Classicist philosophy. Such a generalized appellation however would belie the deep ideological differences between these movements. It is from just such a conflation that we get the absurdity that is sometimes propounded that, simply because Modernism sought to pare back the excesses of Victorianism, it thereby constituted a “Classicist” movement. But that is a discussion for another time. 

As an ideology of contraction, Parnassianism too possesses superficial resemblances to what we call the Classicist ethos. I contend however that Parnassianism is at heart, like Modernism, merely an alternate form of Romanticism, an argument I shall explore in the next episode. The combination of several virtues that I myself prize— concentration, objectivity, precision, formal polish, and restraint— with a dark, pessimistic form of Romanticism makes Parnassianism, for me, an intriguing combination, both in itself and in its role as an unlikely bridge between traditional Romanticism and Symbolism. So it was that I was drawn to purchase John Anson’s deeply impressive translation of Les Trophees, a book of mostly sonnets by the poet Jose Maria de Heredia which is often considered the greatest fruit of the Parnassian project. Les Trophees means “trophies,” and the book’s conceit is to use each sonnet to snapshot a particular moment in the history or mythology of civilization, and to thereby examine the beauty, glory, and variety of mankind’s attempts to achieve permanence, and the inevitable failure of these attempts in the face of time and decay. True to the Parnassian aesthetic, the sonnets are almost all told from the perspective of a detached and invisible observer, whose mission is to zero in on the most captivating details of a scene in order to bring out its implicit resonance. The contemporary injunction to “show, don’t tell” has an incredibly Parnassian ring to it. 

Despite its fatalistic view of mankind, the book remains deeply and movingly humanist at its core— running throughout is a sense of admiration at human achievement, and the belief that though all things must pass, we are still entitled to treasure our artifacts and historical memories as “trophies” of past accomplishments, and that these can spur us to new accomplishments. It is a quietly beautiful and poignant collection, and John Anson’s translation, which preserves the Italian sonnet form of the poems, is spectacular, and provides the French en face for comparison. Unfortunately, it’s currently out of print, but I will link to used copies in the show notes. 

Despite feeling a good deal of spiritual kinship with the Parnassians, one thing I feel that I struggle with as a poet, and which the Parnassians excelled in, is finding the exact right sensory details to enhance the vividness of a poetic situation. I am so naturally inclined to abstraction, and so uncomfortable with the possibility of allowing extraneous detail, that I am sometimes tempted to avoid detail entirely rather than seek to use it to my advantage. I figured that since I enjoyed what the Parnassians were doing, which is to focus almost entirely on detail, and that this is something I would like to incorporate more in my poetry, it would behoove me to attempt my own translation of a Parnassian poem. I was further inspired to do so by the fact that Anson had so handsomely translated sonnets in French into sonnets in English, and I wanted to see if I was up to the challenge. Hence our poem for today, my translation of the last sonnet in Les Trophees, “Sur Un Marbre Brise,” which functions as a kind of metaphorical summation of the themes laid out by the previous poems. 

Before we get into that, a brief note on the original poet, monsieur Heredia. Jose Maria de Heredia, who lived from 1842 to 1905, was born in Cuba to a Spanish father and French mother. At the age of 9, he was sent by his parents to Paris to receive a French education, where he became first exposed to his great passion, French poetry, and where remained until he was 17. After a short stint back in Cuba, where he had intended to become a lawyer but was foiled by certification technicalities, he moved with his now widowed mother back to Paris, where he studied law for a time but in truth became much more concerned with writing poetry and making connections with the Parisian poetry scene, eventually befriending his longtime idol, the founding father of Parnassianism, Charles Marie Rene Leconte de L’isle, to whom he apprenticed himself for many years and came to look upon as a kind of a substitute father figure. Supporting himself with his family’s small fortune and odd jobs translating from Spanish into French, Heredia slowly gained a reputation for his exquisitely crafted, lapidary sonnets, and in retrospect we can say that Heredia is, after Ronsard, and before Musset, the finest sonneteer in the French language. Ever the perfectionist, he published his first and only collection, the aforementioned Les Trophees, in 1893, at the age of fifty. On the strength of this one collection, he was elected to the Academie Francaise the following year. In his acceptance speech, he said: “True poetry dwells in nature and in humanity, which are eternal, and not in the heart of a creature of a day, however great.” A delicious poisoned dart against the Romantic status quo, which is as true now as it was then. 

In his last years, Heredia served as the librarian of the Bibliotheque d’Arsenal, before dying prematurely of gastrointestinal issues at the age of 62. A man of clear-eyed perception, unshakeable integrity, formal rigor, gracious serenity, and deep love and admiration for his friends, he is not only one of the best but one of the most likeable poets in French literature. 

Now for our poem, “Sur Un Marbre Brise,” which as I said is the last sonnet Heredia included in his only book, Les Trophees. I will recite the original French, then Anson’s translation, and then, finally, my own. I will then take you through why I made the choices in my translation that I did. With apologies for any butchered vowels, here is the original Heredia: 

Sur Un Marbre Brise

La mousse fut pieuse en fermant ses yeux mornes ;
 Car, dans ce bois inculte, il chercherait en vain
 La Vierge qui versait le lait pur et le vin
 Sur la terre au beau nom dont il marqua les bornes.

 Aujourd'hui le houblon, le lierre et les viornes
 Qui s'enroulent autour de ce débris divin,
 Ignorant s'il fut Pan, Faune, Hermès ou Silvain,
 A son front mutilé tordent leurs vertes cornes.

 Vois. L'oblique rayon, le caressant encor,
 Dans sa face camuse a mis deux orbes d'or ;
 La vigne folle y rit comme une lèvre rouge ;

 Et, prestige mobile, un murmure du vent,
 Les feuilles, l'ombre errante et le soleil qui bouge,
 De ce marbre en ruine ont fait un Dieu vivant.

The poem, an Italian sonnet, describes a marble statue of a protective deity which has long been abandoned and overtaken by nature. However, seen in a certain light, the interplay of human artifice and natural growth produces the illusion, and perhaps the reality, of a living god. John Anson renders the poem as follows:

Upon A Shattered Marble

The kind moss closed his eyes, for they would see

how he pursued in vain through tangled vine

the virgin who poured out pure milk and wine

on land for which he marked the boundary.

Today the ivy and the bryony

that wrap themselves around him, can’t divine

whether from Hermes, Pan, or Faunus twine

the horns of the smashed brow in the debris.

But look! Slant rays that once more round it fold,

within the noseless face set orbs of gold.

The vine laughs on it with a lip of red.

And moving miracle, a breeze’s sighs,

the leaves, the shadows and the light that spread,

from ruined marble make a god arise.

Anson has brought over the exact same pattern of rhymes of the French into English: ABBABBA, CCDEDE. No easy feat. Finally, here is my translation, which also follows the same scheme: 

Upon A Derelict Marble

As if in mercy, moss enclosed his eyes. 

His woods forsaken, he would seek in vain

a virgin to pour milk and wine again

upon these lands he used to supervise. 

The ivy, hops, viburnums which now rise

and with their tendrils this wrecked god enchain—

ignorant whether Hermes, Pan, Silvain—

on broken brow new, greener horns devise. 

And yet, behold: light holds him in embrace,

and sets gold orbs into his noseless face. 

A spry red vine provides a laughing grin. 

Moving illusion, see the wind that gives

voice to the leaves, the shade, sun pouring in,

now raise this ruin into a god that lives. 

Two translation of the same poem, with the same form, but two very different voices. I will leave you to decide which is the superior. 

In translating this piece, the first thing to consider of course is the title, “Sur Un Marbre Brise,”  which in the French literally translates to “Upon a Broken Marble.” Anson went for the more dramatic “Upon A Shattered Marble.” I like the sound of this, but it doesn’t strike me as entirely accurate. For one thing, “shattered” implies that the statue was broken through suffering some single, large blow, which is not the case. For another thing, “shattered” implies that the statue is so damaged that it has broken into hundreds of tiny pieces, which is also not the case. I wanted to go for an adjective that would communicate brokenness but would also give a sense of why the statue is broken. I considered several options: derelict, dilapidated, crumbling, and decrepit. I liked the present participle “crumbling” which communicates active damage, but that still didn’t provide enough information for my taste. To choose between the other three, I consulted their etymologies: “Dilapidated” seemed like the perfect word: it comes from the Latin “di-lapis” which literally means to break apart stone, and it also connotes age and neglect, which is what I was going for. “Decrepit” comes from the Latin “crepare,” which means “to creak,” so that didn’t seem exactly appropriate. Finally, “derelict” comes from the Latin “de relinquere” meaning to completely abandon or forsake. I immediately loved this, because it literally tells you that the noun it modifies is forsaken, and also implies that it is damaged due to being forsaken. I ended up choosing “derelict” over “dilapidated” because I liked this focus on abandonment, which I thought was faithful to the spirit of the poem. I also thought “dilapidated” simply did not sound as good. 

The first quatrain of the French literally translates to the following:

The moss was pious as it closed his mournful eyes. 

For, in this uncultivated wood, he would seek in vain

the virgin who poured pure milk and wine

on the land with the beautiful name whose boundaries he marked. 

In the first line, Anson translates “the moss was pious as it closed his eyes” more succinctly as, “the kind moss closed his eyes.” Because I am allergic to the pathetic fallacy, I decided to use this opportunity to be even more precise than my source material. Thus, I said, “the moss, as if in mercy, closed his eyes.” Such is the prerogative of a non-scholarly translation. I also thought “mercy” was more in the spirit of “pious” than the more lukewarm “kind.” 

In the second line Anson translates “uncultivated wood” as “tangled vine,” in order to achieve his rhyme scheme and to provide harmony with the word “vain.” In doing this however, he sacrifices the human abandonment behind the word “uncultivated.” I couldn’t afford to keep “uncultivated” either—it simply costs too many syllables in the pentameter— so I went with “forsaken” instead, which is of a piece with the word “derelict,” and which creates harmony with the word “seek.” 

In the third line, Anson’s previous use of “tangled vine” comes in clutch, as he is able to translate the French almost word for word here: “the virgin who poured out pure milk and wine.” I had gone with a different rhyme scheme, so I had to be inventive. I ditched the adjective “pure,” and made a tweak which I thought actually benefited the poem: instead of the statue pseudo-romantic searching for one specific virgin from hundreds of years ago to offer him libations, I changed it to “a virgin to pour milk and wine again,” which technically rhymes with “vain” and which emphasizes the god’s hopes for a renewal of faith which will not come. 

In the fourth line, “on the land with the beautiful name whose boundaries he marked” both Anson and I elected to nix the “beautiful name” bit as taking up too many precious syllables. Otherwise, Anson’s line is accurate. In order to keep my rhyme scheme, I had to change “mark the boundary” to “used to supervise,” which is less accurate, and which perhaps has a whiff of eau de Walmart, but is actually more specific about the reason for why the statue is being offered libations in the first place.

            The second quatrain of the French literally translates to:

Today the hops, the ivy and the viburnums
 Which wrap themselves around this divine debris,
 Ignorant whether he was Pan, Faun, Hermes or Silvanus,
 On his mutilated forehead twist their green horns.

Here, in the fifth line, I retain greater fidelity than Anson, who, of the three botanicals listed—hops, ivy, and viburnums, retains only one, and also bring in another from outside the poem, bryony, for good measure. My translation keeps all the original details intact. In the sixth line, which is literally: “which wrap themselves around this divine debris,” Anson does something interesting. He retains the word “divine,” but uses it in a different sense: he says that the plants “that wrap themselves around him can’t divine” the identity of the statue. This is fine, and follows the trajectory of the poem, but it not only eliminates the image of divine debris but also fancifully suggests that the plants are struggling to guess what they are enwrapping and simply can’t, whereas the French simply has the word ignorant: “ignorant.” I translated this line: “and with their tendrils this wrecked god enchain,” which is a tad more dramatic than the original, but which retains the imagery. 

In the seventh line I am able, unlike Anson, to retain the word “ignorant,” but like him, am forced to drop the list of possible gods from four to three—such are the sacrifices one must make when translating from alexandrines to pentameter. The upside of this, which works for me but not for Anson, is that it provides a parallelism with the three-part list in line 5. Additionally, in order to make the rhyme work, I must retain the French form of the name Silvanus, Silvain, but which I think is a nice gesture to the original.  

In the eighth line is where I feel Anson goes most astray. From the list of gods provided, we can infer that the statue in question probably once possessed horns. The crucial image here is that the plants have replaced the statue’s broken horns with their own green simulacra of horns, a substitution of an artificial representation of nature with actual nature which is itself viewed representationally. Instead of this interesting image, Anson says that the plants can’t divine:

whether from Hermes, Pan, or Faunus twine

the horns of the smashed brow in the debris.

            This is not only a totally different image, it is a much more confusing one. Anson seems to be saying that the plants can’t figure out from which god the carved horns made of stone came from, which now lie twined on the ground, in the debris of the shattered marble. For one thing, if the statue is indeed confirmed to have horns, it is certainly not a statue of Hermes, and these plants are dumb as hell. For another thing, it is odd to think of horns, even curvy ones, twining around anything—this verb, which Anson takes from the French tordent, meaning “twist,” makes sense when referring to plants, not so much when referring to a piece of broken stone. For the eighth line, I say that the plants “on broken brow new greener horns devise,” which indulges in a slight pathetic fallacy, but entirely communicates the meaning of the original. 

            In the literal metaphrase, the tercet which follows the second quatrain translates to: 

See. The oblique ray, caressing him again,
 In his snub-nosed face has placed two orbs of gold;
 The crazy vine laughs there like a red lip;

            Anson’s translation of these lines is fairly accurate— he changes “oblique” to “slant,” which is a perfectly fine synonym, and instead of “caress” says that the light “folds” around the statue, which is a somewhat odd thing to say, but which he needs in order to rhyme with gold. For camuse, meaning “snub-nosed,” Anson has noseless, which is understandable, and he omits the adjective folle, meaning crazy, from the description of the red vine. Otherwise, all is accurate. My own rendition is also fairly accurate. I am able to keep “caresses” but lose “oblique,” and follow Anson in changing “snub-nosed” to noseless. However, I did take it upon myself to make the image of the vine as the laughing lip clearer than in the original. Instead of saying that the “crazy vine laughs,” which is rather nonsensical, I make clear that the vine itself is red and that it is moving, which I indicate with the word “spry,” and that this movement provides the look of laughter. I unfortunately had to substitute the word “grin” for the word “lips” for the sake of the rhyme, but the redness of the vine should make the image clear. 

            Finally, the literal metaphrase gives the concluding tercet as follows:

And, mobile prestige, a murmur of the wind,
 The leaves, the wandering shadow and the moving sun,
 From this ruined marble have made a living God.

By far the trickiest word here is “prestige,” which is a false cognate from French to English that Google translate did not catch, and which Anson misleadingly substitutes with the word “miracle.” The fact of the matter is that while in English “prestige” means honor or high-status, in French it retains the older meaning of “illusion” or “magic trick,” coming from the Latin praestigiae, which, by an etymological coincidence, is actually not the root of the word prestidigitation, meaning “sleight of hand.” In any case, what Heredia is saying here is that an illusion is taking place whereby the statue appears to be alive. Anson, however, gives us a much more credulous, borderline mystical interpretation with the completely unrelated word “miracle.” To Anson’s credit, he also cleverly translates mobile as “moving,” allowing for an entirely appropriate pun linking physical movement to emotional affectiveness. He goes on to translate “murmur of the wind” as “breeze’s sighs,” turning a relatively innocuous pathetic fallacy into a hackneyed Romantic one. In the penultimate line, he omits the word “wandering,” and changes “moving sun” to “light that spread.” In the final line, he omits the “living” from “living god,” and instead says that the god “arises.”

In my translation of these lines, I steal Anson’s substitution of “mobile” for “moving,” but follow it with the much more appropriate “illusion.” Then, instead of exacerbating the pathetic fallacy of “murmur of the wind,” I lessen it with the phrase “wind that gives voice to the leaves.” I too omit the descriptor “wandering,” change “shadow” to “shade,” and “moving sun” to “sun pouring in. In the final line, I omit the word “marble,” substitute “raise” for “make,” but retain “living god” in the phrase “god that lives.”

And thus, with a tweak here, a tweak there, a give and a take, Anson and I have produced translations which are both fairly accurate but entirely different from one another. We both could have produced even more verbally accurate translations if we were not bound by the strict demands of the Italian sonnet rhyme scheme, but for both of us, the retention of the sonnet form was crucial to approximating the overall effect of the poem. In case it hasn’t been clear, I deeply respect Anson’s translation, and the fact that he has converted the entirety body of Heredia’s sonnets into beautiful sonnets in English is a major accomplishment, and a gift to the Anglophone world. 

To cap things off, here is the metaphrase once more: 

On A Broken Marble 

The moss was pious as it closed his eyes;

for, in this uncultivated wood, he would seek in vain

the virgin who poured pure milk and wine

on the land with the beautiful name whose boundaries he marked.

Today the hops, the ivy, and the viburnums

which wrap themselves around this divine debris,

unaware whether he was Pan, Faun, Hermes, or Silvanus,

on his mutilated forehead twist their green horns. 

See. The oblique ray, caressing him again,

in his snub-nosed face has placed two orbs of gold;

the crazy vine laughs there like a red lip;

and, mobile prestige, a murmur of the wind,

the leaves, the wandering shadow and the moving sun,

from this ruined marble have made a living God. 

Here is Anson’s translation:

Upon A Shattered Marble 

The kind moss closed his eyes, for they would see

how he pursued in vain through tangled vine

the virgin who poured out pure milk and wine

on land for which he marked the boundary.

Today the ivy and the bryony

that wrap themselves around him, can’t divine

whether from Hermes, Pan, or Faunus twine

the horns of the smashed brow in the debris.

But look! Slant rays that once more round it fold,

within the noseless face set orbs of gold.

The vine laughs on it with a lip of red.

And moving miracle, a breeze’s sighs,

the leaves, the shadows and the light that spread,

from ruined marble make a god arise.

Finally, here is my own:

Upon A Derelict Marble (Blumov)

As if in mercy, moss enclosed his eyes. 

His woods forsaken, he would seek in vain

a virgin to pour milk and wine again

upon these lands he used to supervise. 

The ivy, hops, viburnums which now rise

and with their tendrils this wrecked god enchain—

ignorant whether Hermes, Pan, Silvain—

on broken brow new, greener horns devise. 

And yet, behold: light holds him in embrace,

and sets gold orbs into his noseless face. 

A spry red vine provides a laughing grin. 

Moving illusion, see the wind that gives

voice to the leaves, the shade, sun pouring in,

now raise this ruin into a god that lives.