Synergy III: Challenges in Translation

In his 2015 study, Scott presents eco-translation as an eco- alternative to ecocriticism within the frame of literary criticism, whose starting point is the experience of individual reading:

Reading is where we should come to live with ourselves as individuals and to reinaugurate our personal relationships with our varied environments. Translation offers a perceptual posture towards a text that is very different from that of literary criticism, and eco-translation fosters an eco-alternative to ecocriticism… In other words, reading/translation not only makes manifest the ecology latent in the ST but also heightens ecological consciousness in the reader, and generates further ecologies out of the textual material itself… properly readerly interaction never comes to an end. What alternative then, should we propose? That reading itself is an ecological activity, is living in an environment, where environment is to be understood as the continuous texturing of the life-dynamic and thus something which fully incorporates ecologies of all kinds, and of all kinds of perceptual/conceptual contact the ecology of the read text incorporates, modulates with… (pp. 285–286)

In literary translation, as suggested earlier in this study, language is the most foregrounded landscape of the poem on several layers which give a poem its unique double pattern. The poetic language, especially, avails itself for the recreation of a variety of sensory and receptual experiences in translation, meaning that the rhythm, the musicality, other literary devices such as rhyme, assonance, alliteration are invitations of and attractions to different sensory experiences on the part of reader/translator. The linguistic landscape of the ST is static and unchangeable in itself when the whole text is produced in its natural environment; then, the process of translation, is not “a redisposition and re-sensitization” (Scott, 2015, p. 287) but it becomes a revolutionary act in the “practice and perception of language” (p. 287) enabling the translator “to align human discourse with the non-human world and to cultivate intuitional contacts with organic and inorganic matter” (p. 287). Actually, what Scott describes here is very similar to what Bradford describes as the “uniqueness of a poem: its double pattern”. Language of the text is the main constituent of the environment of the text which connects it to the consciousness of the reader/translator to enable him to create a translational environment for the TT.

On the other hand, language is the main challenge of the translator similar to the man/nature or human/non-human dichotomy. Metaphorically, language forces the translator to create new forms of perceptions and consciousnesses to be able to survive in the foreign environment and be able to recreate the double pattern of the original poem.

Poetry translation has been taken up in a theoretical and empirical study by James Holmes, the founder of Translation Studies in his seminal paper “Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse Form” in 1968 in a Conference paper and later in the prestigious academic journal Babel in 1969. Holmes describes the translated poem as a “metapoem” and explaining the term in the following manner:

For Holmes in this context, it is the metapoets’ “critical competence, craftsmanship as a poet, and skill in the analyzing and resolving of a confrontation of norms and conventions across linguistic barriers; in the making of appropriate decisions- that determine the degree to which the metapoet is capable of creating a new verbal object which, for all its differences from the original poem at every specific point, is nevertheless basically similar to it as an overall structure” (Holmes, 1988, p.12).

Holmes’ ideas about poetry translation are echoed in Scott’s ecologically oriented description of poetry translation. Both scholars believe in the possibility of poetry translation, in the first place. The emphasis Holmes puts on the metapoet’s decision – making process and skill and competence are very similar to Scott’s belief in the power of the reading act of the original poem to be able to produce the translation, and the allusion to the relation of the poem and the metapoem with that of the poem and the reality suggests Clive Scott’s and Michael Cronin’s postulations of the organic and the living medium of a poem interpreted as the poem’s ecological space in concrete terms.

I would like to start exploring these ideas on poetry and poetry translation within an ecological context and how they manifest themselves in poetry translation by means of studying Nazım Hikmet’s (1985) poem Salkımsöğüt and its English translation (1996) by Bernard Lewis. The reason for studying Hikmet within this context is largely based on the unique quality of the double pattern of his poetry which springs from the innovative formal and thematic aspects in his poems and also the manifestly strong linguistic and stylistic bondings of nature and environment residing in their organic space.

Nazım Hikmet is regarded as the forerunner of modern Turkish poetry which developed after the establishment of modern Turkey. He started by introducing innovations in terms of content and form.