The Genius of Translation

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody’s translations of Benjamin Fondane, the Romanian francophone poet-philosopher increasingly recognized as a vital, enduring figure of Jewish and world literature, and of Paul Valéry, a writer as significant to French letters as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are to the anglophone world, but whose dense, compact, intricate verse is far more formally demanding than theirs (imagine John Donne or George Herbert in the age of Fernando Pessoa), have been justly praised. He is, as well, a talented poet.

It is a fact of modern letters that even translators working on such relatively familiar languages as French (which, time was, anyone who had done a little college would at least pretend to know) are rarely evaluated with any degree of seriousness. It’s not merely that people praise translations without comparing them against the original; this wouldn’t be so bad, if people asked themselves honestly whether they were enjoying what they were reading in English. Too often, however, people accept, or indeed expect, that translations read “like translations”: stiff, awkward, semi-foreign English as difficult to parse as the original language would be for a rather dull but earnest intermediate student. We are grateful that an attempt has been made at all; maybe we are even grateful that the attempt has not succeeded.

An ideal translation would force our admiration by being, first of all, compellingly excellent English (that is, American) literature, and only after that initial rush of pleasure and shame had deepened into a steadier and calmer contemplation would we begin to compare, if we could, the translation to its original, seeing the fine prowess of the translator’s art, his choices’ judicious surprises. In his translations of Fondane, particularly, Rudavsky-Brody approaches that ideal. One can, even without French, compare his contributions to the New York Review of Books Classics’ volume of Fondane’s poetry with those of the other contributors and see how much they shine out from their competition and above the NYRB’s typical level of merely acceptable translationese. His most signal accomplishment may be his version of Fondane’s book-length poem “Ulysses” (1933), which combines the author’s real-life sea voyage from France to Argentina at the end of the 1920s with a vision—compounded equally of the Odyssey, the Bible, and his mentor Lev Shestov’s existentialist philosophy—of the diasporic history of the Jews.

Fondane, inspired by the French surrealists, but also by the more classicizing verse of Valéry and Baudelaire, alternated in “Ulysses” between long, rather wild, nearly shapeless lines, and taught, structured passages that sometimes rhymed. Rudavsky-Brody gives to both a dignity and poise that Fondane—whose passionate intentions sometimes outran his craft—did not always manage in his own verse. Without ever intervening excessively, Rudavsky-Brody can shape moments that, in the French original, are not particularly memorable, into compact gems, such as “their carpets’ singing weave rewove/ the taut African light.” He is, however, fundamentally faithful to the energy of Fondane’s masterpiece, a strength which is less in the precision of any particular line (although Rudavsky-Brody supplies many excellent ones) than in a prophetic sweep through history, as in this poem, dedicated to his sister, Line:

—Where are you going, my brothers?
horse dealers, bone setters, wine merchants, country peddlers,
ragpickers, diamond cutters,
your blood lashes my blood, your eyelid lifts me up
you rode the night of time immemorial
you are my abiding thirst
I saw you leaving provincial backwaters
dragging a few limp vertebrae under your shirts
the Ukrainian pogroms drove you from the cities
your carried in your suitcase only your lives…
exodus of the aged fleeing with their Torah
their goose-down quilts and infants at the breast
how many times must the Red Sea part,
must we cry to you from the depths of our abyss:
so did the flight from Egypt only prefigure
this desperate flight the length of future history,
so was Jerusalem only the symbol and fable
of the port we search for, that cannot be found?

For Line’s sake, Fondane, who otherwise might have escaped the gas chambers thanks to the intervention of such well-connected friends as Emil Cioran, went to Auschwitz with her. As Rudavsky-Brody relates in his crucial introduction, Fondane was reported by survivors of the camp to have comforted his fellows by reciting “Ulysses” “as an elegy for the Jewish people and a symbol of his own fate.”

Rudavsky-Brody’s poetry is subtler and sparer, but deals, in its own less vatic or epic manner, with many of Fondane’s themes, and especially with the intertwining of biblical story and the personal, existential crisis of life in a post-traditional world. His recently published volume, A Dire Shortage of Usable Meaning, organized into two large poems, includes several short passages that wrestle, like Fondane’s verse, with problems of faith, memory, and spiritual inheritance.

For example, “After the Flood” recalls the story of Noah—without naming him—and positions readers in a collectivity, an “us,” who follows the patriarch, as he follows God, with wary hope:

Think of the dove
who flies three times into
an emptiness, and the third time
stays there, alone.

Think of the man who stands
with his hands empty, watching the sky.

And of us, behind him,
unable to follow his gaze,
who, seeing a sign in that vague expansion,
believe the rain is over.

The tone here is strikingly far from the reassurance of the biblical story. There is no mention of the olive branch that the dove brings back to the ark—indeed, no ark or flood! We wouldn’t know where the dove is coming from or going, or who the man might be, if we were not already people for whom this story is so familiar that even to mention a dove going somewhere three times supplies all the necessary background. But perhaps, the poem suggests, we should not presume to know with such confidence where we are and what sort of story this is.

We are left in our uncertain and possibly misguided faith, unsure whether the presence of such minimal figures as “the dove,” “the man,” and “the rain” are, indeed, enough to assure that we are, in fact, placed within the biblical narrative of Noah and its promises. It is just this anxiety that puts us, as readers, in something like the existential situation, if not of Noah himself, than of the less heroic others on the ark—those members of his family, wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, to whom God hadn’t spoken, who had to face first the mockery of their neighbors and then the annihilation of their world, who suffered the alternating terror and discomfort of life on the ark, and who looked some morning from the deck for they did not know what sign, all without the comfort of divine conversation.

By removing biblical references to God and Noah, flood and rainbow, Rudavsky-Brody returns us to the existential situation typically covered by our overfamiliar reception of the story. In this respect, he is a real inheritor, if not of Fondane’s poetic style or voice, then of the central concern of all Fondane’s writing, whether poetry or philosophy or criticism, which was to bring Jewish spirituality into dialogue with existentialism and to bring both to bear—not to salve, but to properly intensify—our collective and private crisis.

In contrast to the anxious expectation that characterizes the “us” called to participate in the drama of the dove and the man hoping for an end to the rain, the poem “Seventh-Century Christ” is firmly negative about another supposed savior and perhaps about salvation in general:

They didn’t get it right.
The straightness of his lines
is itself
a kind of nudity
and he is naked
but there is no pain in his eyes,
his muscles don’t turn
from the pain they deflower
in those who open to him
their miserable lives.
No one was saved
by his blank strength.
No one is saved.

The final line suggests that no one is going to be saved, by anyone, ever. The error, it seems, is not just in Christianity or in some less-than-competent sculptor of late antiquity, but rather in the idea of salvation.

Only for a moment in the middle of the poem is there an extremely indirect suggestion that things might be otherwise. What if there had been pain in Christ’s eyes? What if the sculpted muscles had turned, somehow, from the worshippers who, seeing and venerating this image of death, have been, as Rudavsky-Brody puts it, deflowered, ravished by the (erroneous?) idea conveyed that martyrdom and salvation are inseparable from each other? The poet appears to hint that the statue should have displayed Christ’s pain while turning itself aside from the pain that belief in the Christ myth inflicts on the worshippers, perhaps because there is something unseemly and unsaving in the spectacle of a deity propitiated by pained and “miserable” people. A saving God ought to suffer himself, and feel himself, perhaps in pity or guilt, shame or sympathy, unable to face our suffering straight-on.

While working on a second collection of his own poetry, Rudavsky-Brody is also completing two monumental projects: a translation of Lucien Rebatet’s novel The Two Standards (1952) and a new Baudelaire to rival Richard Howard’s magisterial version. These are each tests of the translator’s mettle, although for quite different reasons. Praised by George Steiner as one of the forgotten masterpieces of the 20th century (forgotten, that is, by people outside France), The Two Standards, a nearly 1,500-page door stopper, could be said to be one of the last of the great 19th-century novels, telling the story of an era through a love-rivalry between two archetypally opposed men who embody the contradictions of their historical moment. Something in the spirit of The Red and the Black, or the novels of Tolstoy, although not quite at that zenith of inspiration. While there are some bravura passages, the challenge for the translator (although hopefully not for his readers) is one of stamina—and of Rebatet’s reputation.

One of the most ardent French supporters of Hitler, Rebatet was in the company of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Robert Brasillach—or, today, of flagrant antisemite Marc-Édouard Nabe—as an eminently cancelable French literary talent. His prose, unlike his politics, was basically traditional, working within the canons of classic fiction rather than seeking, as Céline did, to do to syntax what the Nazis were doing to Europe. Rudavsky-Brody says of translating The Two Standards, which will appear in print next year, “The experience was one of wrestling with the devil. … For our society, I think it’s important to come to grips with such ‘unseemly’ voices and not sweep them under the rug.”

The difficulty of translating Baudelaire is quite different. Although there is much in Baudelaire that is “unseemly”—necrophilia, vampirism, murder—his celebrations of evil are often a kind of camp, in the manner of a Vincent Price movie or Hot Topic T-shirts. The deep seriousness of Baudelaire, the moral core that gives life to his poetry, consists not in taking the bats and skulls and opium smoke as true horrors, but in recognizing that their comic-grotesque haunted-house quality invites us first to laughter, revulsion, disgust, and dismissal, then catches us up short as the poet confronts us with ourselves. (Fondane, in his last years before deportation to the death camp, as he hid in occupied Paris, wrote a book, still untranslated into English, on Baudelaire’s investigations of evil and the urgency of his writings in the era of Nazism; that his work remains in obscurity while Theodor Adorno and Benjamin Fondane appear on innumerable humanities syllabuses is one of the outrages that remind us the race does indeed not go to the swift.)

Part of the challenge of bringing Baudelaire into English is capturing his serious playfulness, his ability to shift from one mood or register to another, without losing the intensity, pomposity, and moral seriousness that are also his. Baudelaire was a translator himself, notably of Edgar Allen Poe, who in Baudelaire’s free paraphrases emerges as a better author than he was in English. To translate Baudelaire in the manner of Baudelaire, thus, requires fidelity to his own creatively unfaithful approach.

Here Rudavsky-Brody is, perhaps, not yet free enough. Compare his translation of Baudelaire’s “Recueillement,” which appears in last year’s Farrar Straus Giroux Poetry Anthology, with Howard’s. Here’s the first stanza, in Rudavsky-Brody’s version:

Be good, O my Sorrow, try to be more calm.
You asked for Evening; Evening’s here; it falls:
A darkling atmosphere enfolds the city,
Carrying peace to some, to others pain.

Now Howard’s:

Behave, my Sorrow! let’s have no more scenes.
Evening’s what you wanted – Evening’s here:
a gradual darkness overtakes the town,
bringing peace to some, to others pain.

Howard’s is, like Howard’s own poetry, fundamentally dramatic and meant to be read. It risks a bit of silly theatrics (“oh, behave!”), then shifts into a register akin to that of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” These are, in fact, just the feeling tones of the French. Rudavsky-Brody’s translation, like his translations of Fondane and Valéry, is more uniform and stately—technically correct in its presentation of the meaning of the French, but missing Baudelaire’s playful movement among different ways of speaking.

Or compare another stanza. First, this time, Howard:

See how the dear departed dowdy years
crowd the balconies of heaven, leaning down,
while smiling out of the sea appears Regret;

While Rudavsky-Brody has:

See the dead years leaning
On heaven’s balconies in dated dresses;
And rising from the waters, smiling Regret;

The latter is a more accurate, but less true, translation. Baudelaire imagines the earth as a kind of stage, where dramas are observed by the years that have passed, still wearing their robes surannées, their “superannuated dresses.” In translation, or even reading mirthlessly the French, the reader might easily miss this image’s utter goofiness: 1800 and 1900 come to life wearing dusty costumes, watching our stupid mortal failures like Waldorf and Statler from the Muppets.

So while there is nothing, literally, in the text to justify Howard’s “dear departed dowdy” to characterize the years—as if they had been beloved great-aunts always with a piece of hard candy for a favorite great-nephew—in both their meaning and in humor of their alliterative sequence, these adjectives, inserted by the translator, help us see the bonkers comedy of Baudelaire’s imagery, which otherwise might be a parade of purple allegories as fatiguing as the second half of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. Likewise, the chain of D … D … D … weaving itself with the “ow” of dowdy … crowd … down and the hiss of the smiling … sea may seem to be merely frivolous displays of poetic skill (“Look what I can do!” Howard, but Baudelaire himself, so often seems to be saying), but, precisely, make the final word of the line, Regret, that much more surprising and forceful. The seriousness of the end can hit us effectively only if seriousness has previously been suspended; the turn back on our own “Regret”—our own wasted lives—calls us, the readers, out only if we’ve been effectively projected into the hilarious images in their bizarre details and into the loops and rhythms of repeated sounds, such that being forced back on ourselves feels like a real jump scare.

The jokes, inventions, falsities, and sonic fireworks are not, then, distractions, but rather techniques of letting what is really serious in the text shine through in its rightful power. It was by being so much himself—a joker and verbal one-upper—that Howard was so truly the voice of Baudelaire.

No one in contemporary letters could more reasonably attempt the unreasonably ambitious task of displacing Howard’s translation of Baudelaire with his own than Rudavsky-Brody. But to succeed, or even to fail in a way that fertilely marks the future of literature, Rudavsky-Brody will have to do to the French of Baudelaire what he allowed himself, in his poem “After the Flood,” to do to the Noah story: to return us to the existential drama of the original, if necessary by eliminating or altering features of the latter. Translation, like poetry, is the art of making the old story our own.