D A V I D R O S E N B E R G
___________________________________________________________CHAPTER & VERSE: ON TRANSLATING FAITHFULLY
Entrance Hall
This essay was written in June 2005 to appear among the Appendices to Abraham: The First Historical Biography , in April, 2006. As an elucidation of the identity of a poet-scholar, it is only the latest of a series of pieces I've written in order to somehow justify my “giving up” poetry while remaining a poet. If that sounded incoherent, I was saved by contemporary interpretations of Walter Benjamin's theories, including those by Derrida and his European, Russian and Israeli colleagues. Personally, I preferred to read studies of Ugaritic and Sumerian poetics by wild-eyed Assyriologists, while learning to read Early Hebrew alphabets and cuneiform for myself. I've always felt more comfortable getting back to origins—what Freud called the coming-of-age of civilization. I've also felt a bit queasy around Pound and his bossy Renaissance or his unacknowledged appropriation of Arthur Waley. (It's more important anyway to recognize Waley in the education of bpNichol, the author of the deepest still-submerged North American poem of the late 20 th Century, The Martyrology ). On the other hand, the modern infatuation with the primitive, from Picasso to yesterday's Village Voice, wearies one's kishkas. Actually, the whole twentieth century is just a wash to my mind, like trying to rehabilitate a psychotic mass murderer. My hat is off rather to those going back in history as far as the mind can go—whilst knowing where syntactical writing begins and the face paint has turned into something like ink.There are exceptions, of course, and some of these are still in need of rescue from the sea with an outstretched hand. Thirty years ago, in the intro to the Harper edition of Blues of the Sky , I wrote about translation as the balance between entering the psalmist's consciousness and watching my hand move. Ensuing pieces quickly strove to be less poetic and more historical about the same self-awareness, so that it became the whole body bent over the clay tablet—unclear as to whether it is reading or incising—that needed to be backlighted and framed and captioned “The Translator.” The hand is better suited today, I would insist, to the ultimate humane act of rescue.
Be that as it may, the audience for which the following piece was written is more interested in the journey into history than the conscience of the guide. So in this umpteenth version of myself as a translator I've elucidated a journey through the text and out the sides, i.e. into historical time. Something is being saved other than the present author—and that means something in itself, in addition to its own meaning. Poet, translator, scholar, historian, philosopher or critic—what does it matter? Something is lost or drowning that many may never see or hear, so the writer must stretch his hand out.
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