Iain Galbraith The Slow Evolution of a Poem into Translation

Iain Galbraith

The Slow Evolution of a Poem in Translation

 

A short while ago I attended the setting of a friend’s gravestone at a Berlin cemetery. My contribution to the ceremony of music and memoirs was to read out Edwin Morgan’s ‘Clydegrad’, from his Sonnets from Scotland. It was a fine autumnal Friday afternoon, accents of vermilion, russet and sunny lemon barely flickering in the branches above the little group who had gathered in expectant remembrance around the year-old grave. The headstone was a slab of Caithness flag, a durable, fine-grained Middle Devonian siltstone, laid down some 370 million years ago. I had expected a rough dark grey, but on this stone saw instead a pattern of fawn silt nodules or algal stromatolites on a mud-green ground, with – where the heart might be – an ochre or ferrous stain.

Caithness flagstone paves Glasgow’s streets, and Morgan’s sonnet, also set in Glasgow, contains the line: ‘The long broad streets shone strongly after rain’. The stone is cut from a sedimentary formation, and palaeontologists, with a far-sighted view of our early ancestry, have been known to persuade the City Council to re-excavate flags that host the fossils of Devonian fish. With the deceased, a lovely man called Martin Chalmers, I share ‘Clydegrad’ as a place of birth, and while reading the poem I felt an urge to draw our little party more closely around the stone, to follow the words down to the shared ground of Morgan’s streets – as Martin himself, a literary translator and historian by training, might have done.

In finding the place where paving stones really do shine after rain, translators often need to be historians or archaeologists or palaeontologists. They must be aficionados of bric-à-brac and tiny animals, too, of mirrors, dyes and tadpoles, if only for a day. It is often said that a good translation will give you a particularly close reading, but if that is so, then the translation must go beyond the constraints of vocabulary equivalence, seeking to re-enact or re-textualize the sensations and associations that are part and pattern of the reading experience. The shape gradually inscribed by the emerging translation will be aware of itself as a reader’s construct, a topology of signalling nodes, sensory puzzlers like the stromatolites on the surface of a flagstone.

The translation brings about a moment of connectivity that has been long in the making, leading everything to conjunction in a space where ‘the very ground seems on fire with tongues of running time’ (Edwin Morgan, ‘The Welcome’). No word can afford to relax, except as enacted relaxation; each earns its place by association alone, and the whole becomes more than its sum of tiny decisions.  Moving again and again through the complex couplings activated by rhyme and stress and sound pattern, the translator writes his or her reading experience into the marrow of the rising text.

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