Seeing through the Words - اوال فيمينا

The Imagist poet H.D. said, of her translations of Euripides, ‘I know that we need scholars to decipher the Greek but that we also need poets and mystics… to see through the words.’¹ George Steiner agrees, arguing in the introduction to his book After Babel (1998) that it is ‘creative’ translations, by translators who do not necessarily speak the source language but are poets, novelists or dramatists in their own right, that can best preserve for posterity the ‘possible worlds and geographies’ that each language construes. Dryden defines this as ‘paraphrase’ but it is now generally described as ‘creative’ as opposed to ‘literal’ or ‘word-for-word’ translation. ‘Creative’ translation is increasingly encouraged, for example by the Stephen Spender Trust who offer ‘Creative Translation in the Classroom’ education programmes. It has also been validated for decades by translation theorists such as Lawrence Venuti who asserts that the source language poem is open to becoming just one of multiple equally acceptable variations. Yet ‘creative’ translation still has a substantial body of detractors. So why do so many poets risk opprobrium and strike out on their own to translate canonical texts without even the map and compass of knowing the language it is written in?

For Simon Armitage, the ‘preposterous’ conviction that he was put on earth to translate Gawain was prompted by co-incidence. In an article in the Guardian (16 December 2006) he explains how his wife’s dog-eared copy of the Tolkien and Gordon edition of the Green Knight fell open at a particular page and his eye was attracted to the word ‘wodwo’. Being a Hughes fan, he took this as a sign. He was then beset by doubts – wondering if he had the stamina, aptitude ‘or even the right’ to be ‘fiddling around with this ancient text.’ Among many reasons, including the fact that he himself is a Northerner, or North Midlander, as the original poet is thought to have been, he says the anonymity of the author seemed to ‘serve as an invitation, opening up a space within the poem for a new writer to occupy’. Using Marie Borroff’s translation alongside Tolkien’s, he decided to imitate the highly alliterative form because he felt that the sense of the poem is located in the ‘percussive patterning’ of its sound. Ezra Pound’s translations from Chinese, published in Cathay (1915) also came about by chance, in this case through meeting Ernest Fenollosa’s widow at a London literary salon in 1913 who persuaded him to edit her husband’s essay and notes ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’. Even though he couldn’t read or speak Chinese, the ideogrammatic nature of Chinese script chimed with his imagistic approach, inspiring a prolonged engagement with Chinese literature and leading T.S. Eliot to remark, in his introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems (1948), that Pound was ‘the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time’. When Seamus Heaney was commissioned to translate Beowulf for the Norton Anthology of English Literature he was tempted because, while he admitted to having ‘no great expertise’ in Old English, he wanted to get back to the ‘first stratum’ of language and ‘assay the hoard’. After a false start when the slow, labour-intensive work started to defeat him, the project was shelved, to be taken up again and completed later because, he says, he was ‘reluctant to abandon his own linguistic and literary origins.’²

In my own case, my longing to translate the world’s oldest known piece of written literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, began when I stumbled across it while researching my father’s active service in the First World War Mesopotamian Campaign for my book, Taking Mesopotamia (2014). Collated from cycles of stories dating back to 2,500 BC, Gilgamesh was supposedly first written down in the form we know it by the priest/ scribe/ exorcist Sin-leque-uninni in around 1200 BC. The ancient culture it derived from is still so relevant to 21st century concerns that Gilgamesh, with his friends and enemies, gods and goddesses, strode into my mind with the colossal power of Wordsworth’s mountain pursuing him across the moonlit lake. The tale of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, himself so superbly alive, so catastrophically flawed, and of Enkidu the wild man, ‘born from silence’, the ‘id’ to Gilgamesh’s ‘ego’, or a blank screen for the reader to project his or her own consciousness onto, became the bedrock for future epics (think Gilgamesh + Enkidu /Achilles + Patroclus, hero quests, interfering deities, journeys to the underworld) and had the same mesmerising effect on me as it had had on Rilke who, in a letter to Katherina Kippenberg, dated 11 December, 1916 said ‘Gilgamesh is tremendous!’ and that he counted it among the greatest texts that could be experienced. Gilgamesh, I found, flowed into me, filled me up and started leaking out everywhere. I wrote a play, After Gilgamesh, for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford (2012), a sequence of poems for Taking Mesopotamia and a festival theatre piece, Gilgamesh Rising; yet I still hadn’t got Gilgamesh out of my system. So in 2013, encouraged by my editor at Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, Robyn Marsack, and despite the fact that I could neither read Babylonian nor decipher cuneiform, I set out to write a new ‘creative’ translation of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh Retold, working mainly from Andrew George’s 2003 Penguin version with recourse to several other versions and related literature.

At the same time I was working with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh on translating extracts from his epic anti-war poem, Uruk’s Anthem. With Adnan, whose English is limited (although better than my almost non-existent Arabic), my methodology was different. We relied on bridge translations by nine different translators, one a gifted Palestinian-Lebanese student of mine, Ruba Abughaida, who worked on around one quarter of the text with us and was the only person we had a face-to-face session with. The others were mainly friends of Adnan who had helped in any way they could over the years. With these texts of markedly varying quality before us, we painstakingly worked our way through around 5,000 lines, ‘poeticising’ each word, image, colloquialism, surrealism, rhetorical figure and endnote. As the (seven) years went by I learned more about Arabic poetry and culture; and the more extracts we translated the better I began to understand the overarching patterns and symphonic qualities of the full text. Influenced by Adnan’s own musical reading style, I shaped my translation in response, using my intuition as a poet and songwriter to find cadences that gave the words (now my words) their own, different drive, humour or pathos, evaluating success by the reaction and feedback from audiences. ‘Now my words’, I say, and I am reminded of William Moran’s introduction to David Ferry’s version of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English (1993), where he says ‘Let it be stated at once: it is David Ferry’s poem. It is not Sin-leqe-uninni’s.’ Like climbing mountains, it seems, poets are drawn to ‘creative’ translation of epic texts ‘because they are there’ and they want to bring to them their own unique gifts and skills as poets and stamp them as their own.

For all his admiration of Pound’s Chinese translations, Eliot questioned the validity of foreign translations generally. While the Elizabethans ‘must have thought they got Homer through Chapman…’ he goes on to say in the same introduction, ‘we have not that illusion; we see that Chapman is more Chapman than Homer.’ He could have added that Pope is more Pope and Logue more Logue than Homer. All three of these celebrated translations were ‘creative’. When Chapman started on the Iliad he knew only a little Greek. Twelve years later he had acquired, through Latin-Greek lexicons and other cribs, a much deeper knowledge of the language. So much so that he claimed to have been visited by Homer’s ghost (on a hillside in Hitchin) who explained how he had ‘invisibly’ prompted Chapman ‘To those fair Greens, where thou dids’t English me’.³ The great strength Chapman brought to his Iliad was his skill as a dramatist. His knowledge of theatre and ear for the spoken word gave him the authority and freedom to create a swashbuckling playwright’s version, full of neologisms and tumbling enjambment where narrated speech was often transposed into fast-moving direct discourse.

Pope’s reasons for translating the Iliad were at least to some extent commercial. His publication of the work between 1715 and 1720 in six volumes by subscription, initially to an aristocratic readership, secured an income for him which allowed him to live on his own means as a professional author. He worked from bilingual editions, a 1699 French prose version by Madame Dacier and literal translations provided by Oxford classicists Elijah Fenton and William Broome. Pope’s distanced and painterly Iliad reflects his interest in classical architecture and the art of the landscape garden. He also brought to it a sense of decorum, funnelling its energies into heroic couplets and aestheticizing some of Homer’s cruder passages. Aestheticizing is a strategy I also used to describe the week long sex marathon between Shamhat the temple prostitute (or hierodule) and Enkidu in Gilgamesh Retold, finding it hard to imagine a scenario where a woman would willingly trek three days into the wilderness and lie naked by a waterhole as bait for a huge wild man (wodwo?) covered in a pelt of black hair – unless forced. My solution was to make the episode into a cultic rite or ‘offering’ in honour of the sex goddess, Inanna.

Christopher Logue was first cajoled into translating an extract from the Iliad by Donald Carne-Ross for a BBC programme in 1959. He had no knowledge of Greek and was openly hostile to scholar-translators who did. Key to his version were his experience as a political activist and ex-soldier and his career as a scriptwriter for theatre and film. ‘Picture the east Aegean sea by night’ his poem starts. The next stanza continues with an imperative, followed by a stream of active verbs ‘Now look…see/.../Run .../Then kneel ... burst into tears, and say “Mother, ...”’. The film directions continue throughout the poem. The relaxation of censorship in the 1960s and 70s, which led to Edward Bond’s Saved at the National in 1965, where a baby is stoned on stage, and the popularity of 1970’s films like Peckinpah’s misogynistic Straw Dogs and Burgess/Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, provided a comfortable climate for the relentless violence of Logue’s Iliad.

Despite historic legitimacy and Lawrence Venuti, there is still a body of feeling that only linguists who can speak the foreign language are entitled to translate it. Eric Griffiths in his review of Sean O’Brien’s Dante’s Inferno: A Verse Translation, (‘Down with the Damned’, the Guardian, Saturday 9 December, 2006) says that there is nothing worse than ‘remembering the felicity of Dante’s lines while toiling through O’Brien’s wretched stuff’. Yet some of the most lauded translations of the 21st century have been ‘creative’, with varying degrees of acknowledgement to the original author/s. For example, Don Paterson’s Orpheus, translations of Rilke’s 55 sonnets, is without attribution to Rilke on the front cover. The rest of us mostly legitimise our ‘wretched stuff’ by how we describe it. Of the Iliad we have ‘accounts’ (Logue), ‘excavations’ (Alice Oswald) and ‘hauntings’ (Michael Longley). Ferry calls his Gilgamesh a ‘rendering’. I describe my Gilgamesh as a ‘response’ to the original epic, and a ‘retelling’. Ted Hughes’s ‘retellings’, which form a crucial part of his oeuvre, relied on bridge translations which he preferred to be as literal and unpolished as possible. A monolinguist, he used them to activate his own poetic imagination, flagging up the issue of how the practice of ‘creative’ translation is increasingly becoming a way for poets to energise their own practice and experiment with adopting new voices.

A few writers prefer to invent, rather than adopt, a voice and challenge themselves to fit an existing text onto an avant garde template. Louis Zukofsky’s experiments with phonemic or homophonic poetry, for example, which extended to his translations of Catullus, and Philip Terry’s version of Gilgamesh, Dictator (2018) which is written using the constraints of Globish, a vocabulary of business language assembled by the poet Jean-Paul Nerrière. My own version of Gilgamesh has been called feminist and disruptive of male narratives by reviews in the New Yorker, the TLS and elsewhere. Indeed, had it not been I suggest it would have been a dereliction of purpose. To not have focused on rehabilitating the archetypes of the goddess, the prostitute and the hero; to not have provided a more woman-friendly interpretation of the predominantly macho Sin-leque-uninni text when I was writing from a literary aesthetic shaped by Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich, l’écriture feminine and the #MeToo movement would have been a pointless exercise. As to my right to subject an iconic text to such individualistic treatment, I echo the ‘partly naïve but helpful’ statement that Armitage kept telling himself to help him quell his doubts while translating Gawain: ‘this is a poem, and I am a poet. What other permission is needed?’

This article is taken from PN Review 263, Volume 48 Number 3, Jan – Feb 2022.

1. Quoted in Josephine Balmer, Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry (OUP,2013).

2. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, a New Translation (Faber, 1999).

3. Quoted in Colin Burrow, ‘Chapmaniac’, ‘Review of Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad’, London Review of Books, 27 June 2002.

Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter

who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She has had seven plays and poetry cycles performed with music and dance at major UK theatres including the Royal Festival Hall and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford for which she wrote Map of Stars (2002), Garden of the Senses (2005), After Gilgamesh (2012) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan Al-Sayegh, Journeys to Freedom: A Retelling of the 1001 Arabian Nights (2015). Jenny’s first poetry book was When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia 2002) which was dramatized, broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour and the BBC World Service and made into a prize-winning opera performed by the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company (2017) and by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for International Women’s Day 2023. Her later collections include Fathom (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2007), Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2014), Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018) which was a New Statesman Book of the Year, an LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet’s first ever audiobook; and From Base Materials (Carcanet, 2024). Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh which are part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘ Writing Mesopotamia’ project aimed at building bridges between English and Arabic-speaking communities. The project included collaborations with artists, musicians and film-makers; seminars and readings at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the British Museum and the Iraqi Embassy; and a song, ‘Anthem for Gilgamesh’ which has had over 100,000 hits on YouTube and Arab websites. Let me tell you what I saw, Jenny’s translation (with others) of extracts from Adnan’s work, was published by Seren in 2020. Jenny’s poems, reviews and articles have been published by leading journals, including Anacapa Review, Long Poem Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Oxford Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Wales, The Cork Literary Review, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The High Window, The Independent, The Poetry Review, The Rattle and World Literature Today. Her most recent work is a sequence of ecopoems for Seed Guardians, written and directed by Yasmin Sidhwa, for Mandala Theatre Company, first performed at The North Wall, Oxford then touring to the Midlands, the North of England and London, October-November 2024. It won a Joseph Rowntree Award in 2025.

Jenny’s writing for children includes a twenty-six-part children’s TV animation series, James the Cat, co-written, with its creator, Kate Canning and first shown in 1998. Her song-writing credits include ‘17 Pink Sugar Elephants’ with Vashti Bunyan (1964), later developed with new lyrics by Alasdair Clayre into the iconic ‘Train Song’ which has been used on TV commercials (Reebok and Samsung) as well as for the hit US shows True Detective and Patriot and been streamed over 20 million times.

In March 2021, Jenny completed a PhD on translating Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths, University of London. You can read the thesis here:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/30429/1/ENG_Thesis_LewisJ_2021.pdf

Travel Writing :

1. A Carcanet Poet Abroad – Jenny Lewis in Morrocco Part 1

2. A Carcanet Poet Abroad- The next chapter- Jenny Lewis in Morrocco Part 2

3. A Carcanet Poet Abroad: Homecoming – Jenny Lewis in Morrocco Part 3

4. MSt Tutor Jenny Lewis at the Al Kalima International Forum of Poetry, Morocco, March 2015.

5. An Egyptian Adventure: reading my poetry at the 50th Jubilee of the Cairo International Book Fair and Festival, 2019