Poetry and Translation: the Hum and the Un-Hum (and the Ho-Hum)

                                                  Osip Mandelstam Listens to the Hum

Poetry and Translation: the Hum and the Un-Hum (and the Ho-Hum)

In her memoir Hope Against Hope—chapter titled “Professional Sickness”—Nadezhda Mandelstam (NM) expresses her views about the origins of genuine poetry, and the different origins of a lesser, inferior mode of literature, translated poetry.

“I imagine that for a poet auditory hallucinations are something in the nature of an occupational disease. As many poets have said—Akhmatova (in ‘Poem Without a Hero’) and M [Osip Mandelstam] among them—a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing insistently in the ears; at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without words. I sometimes saw M trying to get rid of this kind of ‘hum,’ to brush it off and escape from it. He would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear while bathing. But it was always louder than any noise, radio or conversation in the same room.

“Akhmatova told me that when ‘Poem Without a Hero’ came to her, she was ready to try anything just to get rid of it, even rushing to do her laundry. But nothing helped. At some point words formed behind the musical phrase and then the lips began to move. The work of a poet has probably something in common with that of a composer, and the appearance of words is the crucial factor that distinguishes it from musical composition. The ‘hum’ sometimes came to M in his sleep, but he could never remember it upon waking. I have a feeling that verse exists before it is composed (M never spoke of ‘writing’ verse, only of ‘composing’ it and then copying it out). The whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is relayed from an unknown source and gradually forms itself into words. The last stage of the work consists in ridding the poem of all the words foreign to the harmonious whole that existed before the poem arose. Such words slip in by chance, being used to fill gaps during the emergence of the whole. They become lodged in the body of the poem, and removing them is hard work. The final stage is a painful process of listening in to oneself in a search for the objective and absolutely precise unity called a ‘poem.’ . . . . . .

“I noticed that in his work on a poem there were two points at which M would sigh with relief—when the first words in a line or stanza came to him, and when the last of the foreign bodies was driven out by the right word. Only then is there an end to the process of listening in to oneself—the same process that can prepare the way for a disturbance of the inner hearing and loss of sanity. The poem now seems to fall away from the author and no longer torments him with its resonance. He is released from the thing that obsesses him. . . . If the poem won’t ‘go away,’ M said, it means that there is something wrong with it, or something ‘still hidden in it’—a last fruitful bud from which a new shoot might sprout. In other words, the work is not finished.

. . . . .

“The process of doing a translation is the exact opposite of work on original verse. I am not speaking here, of course, of the miraculous meeting of poetic minds that one finds in Zhukovsky, whose translations brought a new element [the Western Romantic Movement] into Russian poetry, or of other translated verse that has become a valid part of Russian literature—such as A.K. Tolstoy’s rendering of Goethe’s ‘Bride of Corinth,’ which we liked so much. Only real poets can achieve this kind of thing—and then very rarely. But an ordinary translation is a cold and calculated act of versification in which certain aspects of the writing of poetry are imitated. Strange to say, in translation there is no pre-existing entity waiting to be expressed. The translator sets himself in motion like an engine and then grinds out the required melody by a laborious mechanical process. He is deficient in what Khodasevich so-aptly called ‘secret hearing.’ A real poet should beware of translation—it many only prevent the birth of original poetry.” [Hope Against Hope, 1999 paperback, translation by Max Hayward, p. 71-74]

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Questions and Semi-Rebuttals

I am far from convinced that the whole of a piece of verse “exists before it is composed,” and that the poet’s job is to coax it somehow out of the ether and onto paper. Then again, by far not all poets compose the way M did; example, Boris Pasternak, who, elsewhere in NM’s book is described as chained to his writing desk. For some perfectly fine poets the process involves writing down the thing at every stage of composition, not composing it all in your head while in perpetual motion, and not doing revisions in your head. And what about the process of rewriting drafts of a poem; do the ideas for making changes occur without the aid of the hum? We are not told if M went back to his written drafts and revised them from written copy, thereby bypassing, overriding the exquisite workings of the hum. I’m guessing that this is the way most writers work. Nikolai Gogol was a prose poet, and his magic number was eight. He usually needed about eight reworkings of successive written drafts, before arriving at a satisfactory final text.

This business of the hum recalls the old Romanic notion of the poet as amanuensis of the gods, who ostensibly guide his quill pen from on high. But since NM wrote her book modern neuroscience has made profound discoveries about how neurons work at the deepest level of the human brain. Certainly it is these neurons in the poet’s head that are producing the hum, or the competing hums, with one neuron fighting it out with another, to see whose hum (word) is the perfect choice.

The hum of the voices in the head also recalls what goes on inside the brain of a person with schizophrenia. Several years after coming to the U.S. my wife Natasha was afflicted with a mental illness. She heard inimical voices in her head, screaming obscenities in Russian. In the winter of 2007 she went on a pilgrimage back home, to the most venerable Russian Orthodox monastery, in Sergiev Posad. There she spent about a week, trying to cure herself through prayer and fasting, participating at one point in a mass exorcism ritual led by a certain renowned/notorious Father German.

Nothing helped; the voices went on raging. After that she took a train back to the south, where her parents and married sister lived, in Rostov-on-the Don. Her sister got her placed in a psychiatric ward, where she spent about four months. The treatment involved primarily shooting her full of Risperdal, an antipsychotic drug. When she was released from the hospital and returned to me in the U.S. she was walking stiffly, unable to swing her arms. The voices had gone quiet, but she was zombified.

The side effects to the antipsychotics were so severe that I encouraged her to stop taking the Risperdal. After she was off the drug for several weeks she began feeling stirrings in her brain. At first she described what she heard as a low hum. Then the humming got ever louder, until the point when the voices came back, and soon they were screaming obscenities again. This story has no happy ending.

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What about literary translation of poetry? Is it to be disparaged to the extent that NM disparages it above? Since I myself have indulged in attempts to get Russian poetry over into English poetry, I feel somewhat humbled and chagrined by NM’s low opinion of literary translation. I have to admit, however, that a great deal of what she says makes sense. The process of translation does not normally involve inspiration from the deepest wellsprings of the brain, what she describes as the origins of her husband’s poetry. But sometimes—not often, but sometimes—the translator stumbles upon exactly the right way to come up with a fine poetic translation in English.

Lately I have been re-posting on my blog what I consider the most successful of my efforts to translate Russian poems (“the bestest of the best”). How did these poems become what I consider good poems in English, the target language? There was no hum in my head, churning out the words; I even rely to some extent, mea culpa, on rhyming dictionaries. But some combination of deep inspiration plus pure luck was surely at work when I turned out my best stuff in what I call literary translation/adaptation. Why do I add the word “adaptation” to what I do? Because I sometimes bend and twist the original in my efforts to make a real piece of poetry in English; I am not an adherent of the literal school of translation.