notes on translation

wayfinding, Latin poetry, revolution, etc.

1. a translator [read: lover; radical] is the one in the passenger seat who unfolds the endless paper map and manages to trace a route between cities. you can’t just GPS these things: one city is a dream and the other a memory. it has to be done by hand.

2. it’s always the author’s car, of course. the Roman asshole & poet Catullus (84 - c. 54 BCE) was driving with his knees when he picked me up. even after five years on the road together, I still manage to get us lost. that is because translation—this wayfinding—is an act of creation, not discovery.

3. there is always something lost. that is another thing I know to be true. translation is the art of relinquishing. I’m thinking of Catullus’ most famous poem, #85.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requires.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excruior.

it should be something like

Hate(I) and love(I). Why this do(I), possibly ask(you).
Not know(I), but feel(I), and excruciate(I).

the action before the self, martyrial—but English never learned to do that.

4. it could be a word, made thin and humorless as it moves from one cultural-linguistic context into another; a rhyme unsalvageable; an innuendo; an idiom. you never realize how much must be left behind until you get out onto the road.

5. it is never easy. you pull over beside an empty field and stare at the map until the thin lines peel off the paper and dance in the air. scream, stamp your feet. throw the map at the driver, say, “why can’t you look at it for once?” but of course, that was never their task, and the car only exists because of you.

6. in the silence between CD tracks or half asleep, while rain falls on the windshield, you’ll find it. the same feeling—too wide for language—that first brought the author to their page. only there does your task become possible. only there will it release you. sometimes I think that translating Catullus is the only way I read him at all.

7. I hate and I love. Maybe you wonder why?
   I don't know. But I feel it, and I am tortured. 

8. [read: lover; radical]

9. when I say that wayfinding is an act of creation, not discovery, I’m talking about the work of radical imagination, of calling forth the world we dream of. translation is finding a path where none exists, and this is our task too. we must go deep into the silence, into the disjunction between what is and what will be. we must find our way into the feeling, the space beyond language. how do we translate a dream into reality?

10. do not forget that the path will not exist until we’re already halfway there. forward, always forward, with courage and joy.