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Reading my Poetry in Arabic translation
WHILE A PROSE ARABIC TRANSLATION MAY RECREATE THE original quite faithfully, the intricate nature of poetry makes a language change hazardous and the outcome often uneven. As Arabic translator for the University of Iowa Press's Modern Arabic Poetry (1980) I would upon occasion receive remonstrating letters from Israeli poets. Some of these were truly humbling, as they pointed out my own limitations-I had not spoken Arabic for some thirty years. A note from the widow of a famous poet chided me for confusing nasog (to retreat) with nagos (to bite). Tricky, those three letter roots of the Arabic verbs: Ashamti, bagadeti, and I of course apologized.
A different complaint came from another source: "I don't understand why you used casement-window is such a beautiful English word," wrote the poet Manfred Winkler. I had to explain that while there was nothing wrong with window per se, the sound of the word simply would not blend into the fabric of the whole, was, as it were, inorganic. Just recently, when that same Mr. Winkler, as well as his fellow poet Shmu'el Shatal, translated some of my own poems into Arabic, came the revenge of the words: It was now my turn to send off frantic letters pleading for corrections and changes.
It may seem picayune to quibble about the alphabet, yet accidents happen during the transition into Arabic that would not occur elsewhere. An example is the similarity of the dalet and the resh, which led to one of my poems, "Elegy for My Father's Generation" [dor] to end up as "Elegy for My Father's Uncle" [dod]. Of course the publisher has to take the blame for that one, but the mistake is understandable; a similar danger exists with the nearly interchangeable samech and final mem.
Difficulties are generated by the differing grammars of English and Arabic. The Arabic translator has to decide whether to fuse noun and possessive pronoun. In "When I Slipped" Manfred Winkler offered for "the image/ of your dead" "temunat/ hamet shelkha," whereas he could have opted for "temunat/ metkha." Perhaps he wanted to approximate the "mother lan guage"--yet it comes at a price--a certain tautness is lost. Another such decision is required for verbs and their pronouns: Ve'azavti otkha ("and I left you") vs. ve'azavtikha.
In the same poem a more fundamental issue arose. I had written the piece to a father who had just lost his 21-year-old son to suicide. Winkler, a septuagenarian with the mind-set of a heterosexual lover, initially addressed it to a female, turning it into a love poem. Yet he could hardly be faulted: English first and second person pronouns (as well as third person plural) are gender non-specific. The gender of neither the speaker nor the addressee is spelled out in the original.
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