Lars Nordström

Translating William Stafford: Some Observations

We all know what a prolific poet William Stafford was, and you may wonder how one goes about deciding which poems to translate.

Let me begin by saying that only four of William Stafford's poems have previously been translated into Swedish, so his work is practically unknown. Since my project involves gathering enough poems for a book, I have tried to be as representative as possible and include some of the most well-known poems from each of his major collections, resulting in a pool of maybe one hundred poems, all of which I like very much. My hope is that this approach will give the Swedish reader a sense of the range in Stafford's poetry.

Gathering the poems was the easy part of the process; the difficult part is trying to decide which of them might survive in translation. What determines if a Stafford poem can be translated into Swedish?

There are several things which one must take into consideration, but the first one is probably context. Some poems are so intertwined with things uniquely American that a foreign reader will be unable to grasp much of it without in-depth knowledge of that context. I'll read you a short poem from the collection An Oregon Message, which, even though it would be very easy to translate in terms of vocabulary and grammar, belongs to that category of unique contexts. It is called:

                        Final Exam: American Renaissance

                        Fill in blanks: Your name is

                        _________ _____ldo Emerson. Your friend

                        Thor______ lives at __________ Pond; he owes

                        you rent and an axe. Your

                        neighbor in a house with _________ gables

                        won't respond to another neighbor, Herman

                        _________, who broods about a whale colored _________

                        You think it is time for America to ____________.  

                        In a few choice words, tell why.

I like this poem, but I won't translate it since I think it won't survive the crossing into Swedish very well; I don't think Ralph Waldo Emerson ever made it onto the Swedish best-seller list. I realize that this is my personal judgement of context; I may be wrong, and the reader may actually know more than I assume. However, the reader may also know a lot less, and meaning and understanding is obviously tied up with what we know, of what we bring with us to the poems.

To illustrate my point I will read you an imitation of this poem to give you a sense of how a translation might come across to a Swedish reader:

                        Final Exam: The Swedish 1880s

                        Fill in blanks: Your name is

                        _________ Strindberg. Your wife

                        ________ has just left you; you think

                        your enemy ________ von Heidenstam is involved

                        in a conspiracy against you. You are

                        determined to go to _______ to make _______.

                        You brood about _________ Ibsen.

                        You think it is time for Swedish drama to ________.

                        In a few choice words, tell why.

Of course, not many Stafford poems are really like this; some seem to have a varying degree of the unfamiliar mixed into it. Up to a certain point these exotic elements act much like spices in cooking: in moderation they enhance and enrich, in excess they overwhelm and cover up.

But where does one draw the line between what one can translate and what one must leave behind? If there is only one word that is uniquely contextual, will that make the poem untranslatable? It depends, and this leads into the labyrinth of problems and challenges I simply think of as "vocabulary."

One of the things that attracted me to William Stafford's poetry when I first started reading him years ago, was his willingness to embrace the local and the immediate. What I did not realize, was that this aspect of his poetry also involves a challenge to the translator. Why? Because there are quite a few references to specific things that either lack Swedish words or references, and what do you do with American words that have no translation?

Let me give you an example of a poem where a single word makes the translation problematic. The poem is called:

                        B.C.

                        The seed that met water spoke a little name.

                        (Great sunflowers were lording the air that day;

                        this was before Jesus, before Rome; that other air

                        was readying our hundreds of years to say things

                        that rain has beat down on over broken stones

                        and heaped behind us in many slag lands.)

                        Quiet in the earth a drop of water came,

                        and the little seed spoke: "Sequoia is my name."

The expressions "lording the air" and "readying our hundreds of years" certainly require a bit of tinkering to get right, but the real problem lies in the word "Sequoia."

Sequoia trees do not grow in Sweden, but because of their size and age they are known and have a Swedish name. The problem is that the word is "mammutträd," which simply means mammoth tree, a good descriptive term. Redwoods are also known as "mammutträd," since they too are quite large and also grow in California, but it blurs the image somewhat. But to have the seed in the poem say "Mammoth tree is my name" just does not work as a way to end the poem; it becomes comical. To eliminate the word "Sequoia" also eliminates an important association: we know that the tree got its American name from the Cherokee scholar Sequoya, who figured out a way to transcribe the Cherokee language into a written form, and for us the poem might also resonate with echoes of meaning which have to do with language and creation.

            So if one can't end the poem with "Mammoth tree is my name," what can one do? Abandon the translation?

            After some research I found that one dictionary actually contained the Latin spelling of the tree, which is what English uses, followed by the suggested Swedish spelling of the word: "sekvoja." Even though it is a word that is not widely known, a reader could locate a definition of it if they had the right dictionary. Still, as a translator one wonders about the reader's experience encountering an almost certainly unfamiliar word, realizing that few will know that "Sequoia" is a tree as well as one of the largest living things on earth. (I should add here that I personally do not favor footnoted poetry, but would probably include a few words about a poem like this in an endnote.)

In the poem "B.C." the word "Sequoia" is especially problematic because of the way the poems uses it for the ending, but it is more often the case that the unknown term occurs elsewhere. For example, in the context of geography and landscapes, Swedish has a word for the Midwest and for the prairie, but not for the Great Plains. So what do you do with a poem called "The Farm on the Great Plains"? One can translate it generically, of course, and say "The farm on the big (or large) plains," but then the reader might think of it terms of any large plain, and that is not quite right. One could insert the word "American" into the generic "big plains," and say something like "The Farm on the Great American Plains" to direct the reader's associations; or, if one was brave enough, one could attempt some neologism for that region. Or one can use something that is familiar and almost the same thing, the word "prairie," even though the primary meaning of "prairie" is "grass land," a vegetation type and not a geographical area. Fortunately, Swedes don't generally know that there are areas in places such as Oregon which are also called prairies; to them there is only one prairie; the one called the Great Plains.

But there is more than geography, of course. There is also a group of words referring to landscape types, trees, fish, animals, and birds unique to North America which the translator broods about, such as mesas, cottonwoods, pin oaks, channel cats, muskrats, gophers, killdeers, flickers, and so on. Sometimes there are references to specific Native American things: I still don't know how to translate "the stick game" referred to in the poem called "At the Klamath Berry Festival." Sometimes the poems use regional expressions, such as the word "widow-maker" in the poem "The Tillamook Burn." It is such a simple, expressive term in English, but very difficult to translate because the connection between becoming a widow and a giant limb or dead tree top is not obvious. Translation is often like working on an American engine with a metric socket set: most of the metric sockets are interchangeable with fractions of inches, but occasionally one runs into that one nut that does not match.

Furthermore, I have certainly become aware of Stafford's unique pairing of words, combining the unexpected, giving the poems a very personal touch. One finds it in the first poem of his first book, "West of Your City," where he talks about entering the "fern sympathy". And there are innumerable examples of this, "the dazzle floor," "the flute-end of consequences," "the intricate sod," "my crowbar key," "the yesterday forest," "the crept hours," "pretzel purposes," and many, many more, all of which have their challenges. In translation, these combinations sometimes stand out, but they are also what makes Stafford's poetry his own.

I should also mention a common problem with semantics: the fact that all the meanings of an English word do not remain with the translated word. The translator is always forced to choose and to compromise: the primary meaning in English might be represented by a Swedish word endowed with a totally different set of secondary and tertiary meanings, and this is a sphere beyond the translator's control: it is the nature of language.

So was Robert Frost right when he claimed that: "Poetry is what gets lost in translation?"

I don't think so. That is good line of poetry, and as far as I know, it comes from a poet and not from a translator. Sometimes there are obviously things that change in the leap from one language to another, but I don't believe that it is necessarily the poetry that disappears. Swedish will never be English, and a Swedish reader will never be an American reader; but the poem will still be a poem, even in translation.

Finally, we should not forget that in most poems there are no problems with either context or vocabulary. In these poems, the words seem both transparent and available. Take this poem, for example:

                        Fall Wind

                        Pods of summer crowd around the door;

                        I take them in the autumn of my hands.

                        Last night I heard the first cold wind outside;

                        the wind blew soft, and yet I shiver twice:

                        Once for thin walls, once for the sound of time.

Since this kind of experience is universal, it could happen anywhere on earth where there are seasons, and the poem, like so much of William Stafford's poetry, changes into its new form very smoothly:

                        Höstvind

                        Sommarens fröskidor trängs runt dörren;

                        jag tar dem i mina händers höst.

                        I går kväll hörde jag de första kalla vindarna blåsa;

                        vinden var mjuk, ändå ryser jag två gånger:

                        En gång för tunna väggar, ännu en gång för tidens ljud.

The preceding article was originally written as a presentation given at the 1997 NW Regional NCTE Conference in Portland, Oregon. It was later published in the Oregon English Journal, Vol. XIX, No.1, Spring 1997, 13-15.