Читать книгу Kreativität und Hermeneutik in der Translation - Группа авторов - Страница 35

The examples I have examined here from Celan’s original poem and my translation suggest that part of the way such poems have cognitive effects is in giving rise to creative, engaged reading. This is reading that is not afraid to analyse the original, or the translation, and to work out how words and structures achieve these effects. But it is also not afraid to attempt a reconstruction of a particular state of mind that gave rise to the poem and is reflected in its mind-style. Here that particular state of mind in the case of the original poem is traumatised, obsessive and filled with feelings of guilt.

A translator is by nature an interpreter, as is every reader. When we read anything we interpret it, giving it a meaning that we assume is a combination of what the writer meant and what it means to us. Translating poetry in particular involves, I have argued here, an understanding of translation as recreation that is accurate in that it allows access to the poetics that inform the poem. Reading for translation also involves a consideration of what it means when texts cross language-boundaries and it leads to a deeper understanding of the connection between languages, something that is particularly important to Holocaust poetry with its Central European origins and the multilingual background of so many of its writers. It involves imagining what the text will become in a new language and a new context, and how the new language and context will be affected.

The intellectual and emotional engagement the translator expends upon the original is thus by nature creative. It is no use, for example, to see equivalences at surface level with no thought for connotation, etymology, or the claims of semantics that link a particular word or phrase with other elements of language or the poet’s work or the work of others. But it is also no use being constrained by a superficial understanding of the original text. Creative engagement with the original text leads to analysis and research. If there seems, for example, a connotation of the crown of thorns in the poem, we cannot simply discard this because the poet was Jewish. No poet is influenced only by their own immediate cultural background. But, more than this, research will show the pre-Christian and extra-Christian origins of this image, which are always potentially available to any reader, whether or not they formed part of the cognitive context of the original poet.

Etymology, similarly, is not only a way to dig deeper into our own language, but a means to explore the common origins of languages and a way to uncover the uncertainty of meaning. It thus leads to an understanding of the multicultural origins of language.

It is to be hoped that, if the translation of poetry is in essence the translation of poetics, the translated poem will have its own poetics, its own system that informs the way the poem is put together. Then it can be hoped that some of the creative possibilities in reading the original which were available to the translator will also be available to the new readers of the translated poem.