Desire-Aware Translation: From Ethics to Erotics

Abstract

Desire-Aware Translation:From Ethics to Erotics David M. Smith (bio) I In Clayton Eshleman's "A Translation Memoir," an afterword to his translations of César Vallejo, we find an extraordinary account of the role desire played in one man's life as a translator. "For nearly 50 years," Eshleman wrote, Vallejo "has become the keelson in the ship of poetry I have attempted to construct." As a college student and aspiring poet in the early sixties, Eshleman came to translation because he thought translating poetry might facilitate the writing of his own poems. This aim would be radically disrupted when he discovered Vallejo, however, in whom he found "a whole wailing cathedral of desires, half-desires, mad-desires, anti-desires, all of which … seemed caught on the edge of no-desire." Eshleman decided he had to try and translate Vallejo's Poemas humanos, a project he approached with some trepidation, as it would involve "an awesome commitment of psyche as well as time." His anxiety would prove to be well-founded: Both in translating and in working on my own poems, I felt a terrific resistance, as if every attempt I made to advance was met by a force that pushed me back. It was as if through Vallejo I had made contact with a negative impaction in my being, a nebulous depth charge that I had been carrying around with me for many years. … I also began to have violent and morbid fantasies that seemed provoked by the combination of translating and writing. More and more I felt that I was struggling with a man as well as a text, and that this struggle was a matter of my becoming or failing to become a poet. For Eshleman, this translation brought about nothing less than the dissolution—the death—of his old identity. Out rose a new way of being: "I envisioned myself as a kind of angel-less Jacob wrestling with a figure who possessed a language the meaning of which I was attempting to wrest away." This did not only mean he was wrestling with Vallejo to wrench away the meaning of the poems; rather, Eshleman also came to realize: I had ceased to be what I was … that I now had a glimpse of another life, a life I was to create for myself, and that this other man I was struggling with was also the old Clayton who was resisting change. The old Clayton wanted to continue living in his white Presbyterian world of "light"—where man is associated with day/clarity/good and woman with night/opaqueness/bad. The darkness that was [End Page 157] beginning to spread through my sensibility could be viewed as the breaking up of the belief in male supremacy that had generated much of that "light." Eshleman's statement is radically different from most translators' prefaces and afterwords. Typically, these statements start with respectful deference to previous translations, before announcing why a new translation is needed or justified. The stability of the translator's identity, and their ability to transparently render the original author's meaning, is rarely questioned. Eshleman, however, shows us with wrenching honesty how the translator can be radically transformed by the experience, by opening the self to the translation as fully as possible. I am moved by Eshleman's honesty, and at times have been tempted to write, if not a full autobiography of my own coming-to-be as a translator, then a similar account of the desires, the resistances that have shaped my identity as a translator and my translational practice thus far. I take as a starting point my translation of the short story that complements this essay: "Den slappe farskapsdingsen," or in my rendering, "The Limp Fatherpizzle," by the Norwegian writer Kristian Klausen. I say "complements" since neither translation nor essay should be read either as prior or subordinate to the other. Rather, translation and essay become two sides of the same project of working through, in the psychoanalytic sense, of working through resistances in order to free up my translational desire. Through this analytical work, I hope to move away from certain distorting tendencies inherent to translation as...