Translation Problem Week Two: Moira Egan

I followed Sarah Stutt’s lead with the two translation idea and tried that for myself with the Moira Egan piece. In the first one, I tried to follow the transliteration closer like we saw Stutt do with the first of her two Rilke translations. In the other one, I allowed myself a little more creative freedom in terms of form. The “misery of translation,” as we discussed Monday, was the parts with the words “lugubrious,” “enough,” and the middle section when the ivy started to be brought in. I was very off-put by the multiple uses of the word “ivy” so close together in each line. I looked jumbled to me and I wanted to spread the moment out and elevate the language without changing the structure too much. I kept most of the commas and the way the line breaks, but I found that the word lugubrious didn’t give me the connotation that I think the piece wanted. When I read the word “lugubrious,” I found myself thinking of a burden or something that held back the subject (in this case, the tree), so I wanted to change the word to connote a togetherness and wholeness, even a “paying homage” type feel. I looked up synonyms for the word lugubrious and found “elegiac,” which to me, connotes all the things that I felt the ivy was trying to do for the tree, since there was no harm done, but it just hung there, using the tree as a home. The other instance that proved especially tricky was the “in pose poetics.” I had, and still have, no idea what that is trying to say, but I imagined it to be something along the lines of: the ivy is posed in the tree as they walk by, much like poetry is posed for the reader, almost fake. So I took out the “in” and just changed it to “posed poetics” because I like the assonance and alliteration.

The one on the left is the first translation (the closer), the one on the right is the second (the free-er).

I see another plant in the garden’s dark  and I think it must be a weeping willow, but when I ask him about it, he says: No,  it is a laurel  bound in an immense maze  of hanging ivy which does not harm  the host, but hangs symbiotically and enough, in posed poetics. It disappears in  another lugubrious illusion,  I say, and he laughs.

I see another plant  in the garden, dark and  I think it must be a weeping willow, but when I ask him, he says: No, it is a laurel bound in an immense maze  of hanging ivy, not harmful to the host,  but symbiotic and necessary, posed like poetry. Here it disappears  in an elegiac illusion, I say, and he laughs.