lenten journal: found in translation

One of my friends from the Durham restaurant, Leonora, told me about a poetry class she has been taking at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. The class itself doesn’t have much to do with making documentaries, which I suppose means more than anything that the folks at the CDS are mostly looking for new ways to see things, whether or not it ends up on film. In one of the exercises she described, the members of the class were given a copy of a poem in Polish. No one in the room spoke or read Polish and no translation was offered. Their assignment was to decide what the poem meant to them, making whatever associations they could. When they came back the next week, they each presented what they had written and then were given the actual translation to see what connections there might have been.

As I’ve tried to focus my heart and mind on Holy Week today, in the midst of cooking, it strikes me that Leonora’s assignment is not a pretty good metaphor for reading the Bible: we have to take the words and make our own meaning. Yes, I know there are centuries of interpreters who have preceded us and plenty of commentaries and ecclesiastical councils to tell us what we are reading, just as there was an actual translation to her poem. There are also the readings where a “new” phrase appears as something we have never seen before, no matter how many times we have read the story, or we come away with questions we’ve not asked previously because of how we came to the text. Then there are odd little moments in the story, little bits of Polish to unravel, if you will, like this one from Luke 22: 7-12:

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover."

"Where do you want us to prepare for it?" they asked.

He replied, "As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters, and say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large upper room, all furnished. Make preparations there."

Jesus’ instructions carry a bit of intrigue because of the little details. When they entered the city, presumably unannounced and unscheduled, they would see a man carrying a jar of water; follow him home and ask for the guest room, which he will show you; go in and get supper ready.

Was Jesus doing some sort of Jedi Mind Trick? In a city with no running water, would there really only be one man with a water jar? And what if they had stopped for a falafel and beer on the way in; would they have missed him? How did he know the man? How did he know about the room?

My translation of the Polish in the passage is I think Jesus had friends the gospels never mentioned. We get a healthy dose of life with the disciples, with Mary and Martha and Lazarus, with Mary Magdalene, as well as the occasional contact with folks like Zacchaeus, but what we are not told is there were more folks who mattered to Jesus. There are stories we don’t know. And in these verses we get a peek at one of those people, the way you get a passing glance at someone famous driving by leaving you to wonder if you really saw who you think you saw.

What makes my translation more than recognition of an oddity is what the understanding means to me. I need to tell another story to explain. The first year I taught Honors British Literature in Winchester, there was a guy who sat silently in the back of the class most everyday. He turned in adequate work, but I could not engage him for the life of me. One day after school, I walked out to the sports fields to watch him and others in the class play lacrosse. I recognized him by his physical appearance, but there were no other connections between the kid in the back of the room and the passionate athlete on the field. After the game I went up to him to congratulate him on the win, and then I said, “I have one question. How do I get the guy who was out there on the field to come to English class?” Who I saw for my forty-five minutes a day of his life was not all of who he was, or even a reasonable facsimile.

Admittedly, I have more information about Jesus than I did about the boy in my English class, yet I think the parallel holds up. We have four fairly brief and often repetitive accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry on earth. We’ve got a pretty good telling of his birth, nothing much about childhood or adolescence, and a whirlwind tour of his three years out on the road. John says, at the end of his gospel, that we couldn’t build a library to hold all of the stories if they were told. But they weren’t. What we have is a representative slice of the life of Jesus, and some of it in theological Polish to boot.

Which means, to me, I need to live expecting Jesus to surprise me. As many times as I have headed into Holy Week filled with intention and focus, I must be ready to caught off guard by the guy with the water pot, whom I always assumed to simply be an extra brought in to fill out the scene. The more I think about him, I begin to imagine the disciples following him home only to be invited in for tea. As they talked about Jesus wanting to use the Upper Room, the man began telling stories of who Jesus was to him: how he had spent the night in that room many times, how he had healed one of his children, how hard he laughed at the dinner table, how much he talked about his disciples.

“I’m glad to finally get to meet you,” he would say. “Jesus has told me so many stories.”

I know about the Triumphal Entry and the Last Supper and the Trial and the Cross, but even in Holy Week there were lower case events, incidental encounters that were more than filler, and that remain unexplained and untranslated: Jesus’ Polish poems.

How did you translate them?

Peace,
Milton

a poet's bible

As I was reading this morning, I reached for David Rosenberg’s A Poet’s Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text and his translation of parts of Job and Ecclesiastes took me on a wonderful little journey.

A Poet's Bible

I found it used, on the shelf
in the basement of the Harvard
Bookstore, one blurb proclaiming,

“The best translation of this century,”
yet relegated to life among the
remnants and returned, years ago.

And this morning, after coffee and
my own reflection on my daily
work, I found it again and pulled

it from my own shelf and a place
it had sat unread far too many
days for a best translation.

I opened to Ecclesiastes
(turn, turn, turn)
to see how the poet heard what

I know by heart because he knew
the words behind the words,
all unrecognizable consonants

to me, running right to left,
as if we were playing the record
backwards to see what was being

secretly said; but there’s no secret
when I can sit and listen to
my life, to his words:

the grace to be still
in the flow of all creation
for a moment

I read it repeatedly in silence
and the chill of this rainy morning
glistening with the grace that has

traversed millennia, transcended
language, and is aged with the
understanding of fallen leaves and

broken branches, life and death,
failure and hope: used books,
used lives found in translation.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: the imagination of language

I was catching up on my Writer’s Almanac tonight and found yesterday was the shared birthday of Billy Collins and Edith Grossman. Billy Collins was the US Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and holds the distinction of being a poet who actually sells books. Edith Grossman is a book translator, known best for her translations of Gabriel Garcia Marques’ books and what is for many the definitive translation of Don Quixote. Born five years apart, they share this day, as well as the ability to make language come alive for us, the readers.

Grossman describes her vocation in this way:

Thinking up characters and plot is not a problem translators have to face, but the imagination of language and how one says what one needs to say in the best way possible—the most effective way possible—that’s a problem that translators have to deal with constantly.

Collins demonstrates the imagination of language brilliantly also, in his own way. Here is his poem, “Litany,” which he said came about because he "stole," as he said, the opening two lines from another poem that needed to be improved. (He also said it with a rather wry smile on his face.)

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine . . .
Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

One of my favorite books on preaching is Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Just the title kills me: poetry as a daring use of words. Perhaps he could write a sequel called Finally Comes the Translator, since both are working to find the mot juste, the right word to say it best.

Spending most of my day in a bilingual kitchen where most of us know only a few words of the others’ language, I have a growing appreciation for what it would feel like to hear Abel or Tony speak and then actually to be able to know the right English words to choose to articulate what they said in Spanish. In real life, I’m the culinary equivalent of a hunt-and-peck typist, hitting a word here or there, but having no sense of how I might actually put a sentence together, much less a coherent thought.

In that same kitchen, to make the shift from the prosaic actions of prep work to the poetry of putting a plate together to send out to a diner (at least I hope that’s what’s happening) makes the metaphor even more alive for me. Should we choose to live imaginatively, we are both translators and poets of this life of ours, seeking how we might say what needs to be said in the best way possible. To borrow words from King Lear:

the weight of these sad times we must obey
speak what we feel and not what we ought to say

Those words still translate.



Peace
Milton

Person Don Quixote

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