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Gained in translation

While the Christian world was preparing to celebrate the birth of its savior as the past year drew to a close, Jews were wishing our neighbors a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. And between the glow of Christmas trees and the bright lights of the Chanukah menorah, all was a-glitter. Outside and in, in homes and hearts, at work or at play. Good will, the best of social lubricants, will have that welcome effect. But how express the theology of these respectful holidays in poetry? It's a challenge, if a happy one.

My little Prayer Book for Jewish Personnel in the Armed Forces of the United States did its limited best at the task by translating the Hebrew hymn, Adon Olam, or Lord of the World, into inadequate English:

Incomparable, unique is He,

No other can His oneness share.

Without beginning, without end,

Dominion's might is His to bear.

He is my living God who saves,

My Rock when grief or trials befall,

My Banner and my Refuge Strong,

My bounteous Portion when I call.

My soul I give unto his care,

Asleep, awake, for He is near,

And with my soul, my body, too,

God is with me I have no fear.

But this translation is almost Victorian in its elaborate clauses and phrases. Neither concise nor very meaningful, its gist is disguised by all those verbal curlicues. It's too long. It lacks the contrapuntal punch of the original Hebrew, a far more compact tongue than English with its vast vocabulary and a variety of ways to deploy it. Or waste it on tangential verbal wanderings. In that sense it's the ideal language for less than ideal politicians who love to hear their own voices reverberate.

It would take a poet of Helen Pinkerton's pointed grace to condense the hit-and-miss clutter of mundane English into a few concise words. Which is just what she does in her Metaphysical Song, which comes much closer to the precision of the Hebrew hymn:

First Principle

Being's pure act,

Infinite cause,

Of finite fact,

Essential being

Beyond our sight,

Without which, nothing,

Neither love nor light.

There is a pointillist precision about about those lines when you study them as they deserve to be studied: closely. They express a religious orthodoxy that stays down to earth yet rises to the heavens, as the best poetry does in our age or any other. Helen Pinkerton contrasts today's vogue for political correctness, its search for safe spaces, and its generally desiccated air to what she found so long ago at Stanford, where she taught many a class:

Where I once listened,

lonely as these young,

But with some hope beyond

what I could see

That meaning might be mastered

by my tongue,

Anonymous process now claims

them and me.

Perhaps the enterprise of mind

is vain;

Where hucksters sell opinions,

knowledge fails,

Wit pandering to the market,

for gross gain,

Corrupted words, false morals,

falser tales.

A stoicism that saved the Greeks for immortality now seems foreign to our minds, the permanent things rendered temporary and some contemporary, another passing fad. The poet Richard Taylor writes of the "foul and rotten Vanity Fair" of a flailing republic become a mass democracy.

Surely there are still tragic heroes waiting to emerge and redeem us all by their prophetic words. Cynicism is cold comfort in this or any other age while courage affords hope, just as poetry provides consolation. And instruction. Why abuse it by mistranslating it?

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote a whole taxonomy of translation that still demands attention, and applause. To quote him: "Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to know better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days."

Allow this admirer of Mr. Nabokov to second his motion and so let others move that it be adopted by acclamation that this meeting of the minds can be happily adjourned and poetry allowed to triumph, as the real thing will always do when challenged by inferior imitators. Accept no substitute for quality, especially when something as vital as poetry is concerned. On those occasions, all of us should enlist as concerned citizens.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 01/22/2017

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