Hiding Content: Notes on Translating Stevens Colors and Frost s A Time to Talk Jeroen van den Heuvel Wallace Stevens Journal, Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp. 113-116 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2017.0016 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/649784 No institutional affiliation (26 Dec 2018 13:07 GMT)
Hiding Content: Notes on Translating Stevens Colors and Frost s A Time to Talk JEROEN VAN DEN HEUVEL Colors I Pale orange, green and crimson, and white, and gold and brown. II Lapis-lazuli and orange, and opaque green, faun-color, black and gold. Kleuren I Lichtoranje, groen en karmijn, en wit, en goud en bruin. II Lapis-lazuli en oranje, en dekkend groen, faun-kleur, zwart en goud. WRITTEN IN 1909 and first published in 1957 in Opus Posthumous, Colors consists of two parts, each a list of colors. Most of the colors have easy counterparts in Dutch. Exceptions are crimson, lapis-lazuli, and faun-color. This last one is intriguing. We cannot know whether the written text has faun or fawn if the poem is read aloud. The use of this homophone draws attention to the auditory dimension, thus broadening the poem s message about perception to multiple modalities. But in Dutch the word for fawn (geelbruin) nowhere resembles the word faun. Unfortunately, then, this aspect is lost in translation. The name crimson refers to the way the dye was made using dried bodies of the kermes insect. For this reason, it is best translated into Dutch with the word karmijn. The name lapis-lazuli refers to the semiprecious stone with this distinct color. The name consists of the Latin word for stone, lapis, and a Latin genitive form indicating where the stone was mined. The name refers to its own origin, both by being in a language that had a major influence on English and by using the genitive form to indicate source. It could be translated in multiple ways, but I decided not to translate it. The colors describe a scene or object or even a person. Or possibly a painting thereof. This remains unclear. Most of the color names could be adjectives. They are, however, nouns as becomes apparent from faun-color. The color names are entities in themselves. Together they form a veil that hides the very thing they are describing. The main structure of each of the two parts of the poem is the list. Stevens plays with the grammatical conventions of writing down a list by THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 41.1 (SPRING 2017): 113 116. 2017 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. 113
using the Oxford comma not only toward the end of the list. This has multiple effects. One is that it gives the impression of the poet enumerating the colors he sees. He thinks he has reached the last one, uses the Oxford comma, but to his surprise needs to list yet another color. This introduces the notion of time, as well as a sense of process while the reader is reading the poem. Another effect is an emphasis on the lingual character of the poem. Even something as simple as listing colors becomes a struggle with commas and conjunctions. The list is a language construct. In Dutch, the rule of thumb is not to use a comma in front of a conjunction, not even in a list. I kept the commas and conjunctions in Dutch just as they appear in English, because they give the poem its overall rhythm. First published in Mountain Interval (1916), Frost s poem is metrically based on lines of four iambs, even though only three of the ten lines con- A Time to Talk When a friend calls to me from the road And slows his horse to a meaning walk, I don t stand still and look around On all the hills I haven t hoed, And shout from where I am, What is it? No, not as there is a time to talk. I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, Blade-end up and five feet tall, And plod: I go up to the stone wall For a friendly visit. Een tijd om te praten Als een vriend naar me roept van de straat En doelbewust zijn paard trager leidt, Houd ik niet stil en kijk niet op Naar alles wat me te doen staat, En schreeuw van waar ik ben Wat moet je? Nee, voor praten is er altijd tijd. Ik steek mijn schep met het blad ten top En vijf voet lang in het veen En sjok: ik ga naar de muur van steen Voor een leuk bezoekje. form to it. Time is important in this poem, as the title suggests, and so is distance. The latter is reflected in the rhyme scheme: abcadbceed. The poem ends abruptly. This effect is mainly achieved by the last line being the shortest (just six syllables), while the previous line is one of the longest (nine syllables, and the colon suggests a caesura, so ten time units). It is enhanced by the end rhyme is it/visit. These words are at the ending of both a line and a sentence, resulting in extra emphasis on the last syllable, which is metrically unstressed. Both syllables are based on a short /i/-vowel, giving them the same staccato quality. This creates the impression of two stressed syllables in a row, breaking the rhythm. The effect is blunt and rude, and not friendly at all. Which leads to the question how much of a friend the visitor really is. S/he is the catalyzer of the poem. The rhyme scheme reflects what happens: the distance between the I and the friend grows, despite their meeting at the stone wall, exactly where the end rhyme is the same for two subsequent lines (tall/wall), but in the last line the distance is bigger than ever. The stone wall is a fundamental barrier between them. It is easy to read this metapoetically. The friend is the reader and the I the writer. They meet each other at the surface of the poem, but they cannot enter each other s worlds. 114 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL
Difficulties in translating are posed by words like hoed (one syllable), which would be geschoffeld (three syllables) in Dutch. I replaced the hoe with the less specific schep (shovel), because I feel that the important part of the work of the I in the poem is cultivating nature. In metapoetical terms: a person imposing aesthetic restrictions on Nature. The how, why, and what of the hoeing is unclear. The decision for the I is either to keep it that way, and have the friend (reader) wonder at the mysterious character of the I (writer), or to expose the tools (hoe) of the writer, meet the reader, and be as clear and friendly as a poet possibly can be. It is always a puzzle to find matching rhyme words in a translation. I used turf in line 7 as an example of mellow ground, because the Dutch word for it (veen) rhymes with the word for stone (steen). The is it/visit rhyme is the only one that has weakened in Dutch: moet je/-zoekje is only a halfrhyme. I had some problems translating the tall/wall rhyme. It was hindered by the ingenuity of the penultimate line. So much is happening in that one line: plod suggesting the I isn t really eager to talk, opening up an ironical reading; the colon marking a pause and making the reader feel the hesitation; go contrasting with stand still to indicate that the speaker decides to take action instead of refraining from it; up resonating with the same word in the previous line, thus suggesting a connection between the awkward positioning of the hoe and the decision to talk; and then there is the stone wall. Discarding stone in the translation could solve the problem, but I don t like this. It is both a marker of time and place for the poem, and an indication of the solidity of the barrier between the I and the friend. I also decided to keep five feet tall in my translation, even though in The Netherlands we use metric units of measurement. It describes the hoe as a person, perhaps another friend, and the feet of course may suggest the metrical feet of the poem. Conclusion Perhaps the most prominent similarity is that at their core, both poems hide an important part of their contents. What the friend and the I talk about in Frost s poem is not mentioned. What the colors listed in Stevens poem are supposed to paint remains hidden. The way of hiding is different in each poem. Frost uses exclusion. He shows us the process of a choice, resulting in the I deciding to talk. The talk itself does not belong to the process, and is therefore outside of the poem. Stevens uses obscuring. He puts a veil of words between the object or scene depicted and the reader. Both poems draw attention to their lingual character. This is strongest in Stevens: he puts the words literally in the reader s way. Frost uses sig- NOTES ON TRANSLATING STEVENS COLORS AND FROST S A TIME TO TALK 115
nal words like talk, meaning, and feet. Both poems can be read metapoetically as being about reading and writing. Once again they differ within this similarity. Stevens poem concerns perception and representation. Frost s poem can be interpreted as the meeting of the writer and reader in the poem. One final comparison I would like to make regards the visual and auditory qualities of poetry. Stevens poem is pictorial in nature, contains many colors, and employs few auditory devices. This is the opposite in Frost: he mentions no colors, and is sonically oriented by the use of rhyme and meter. Eindhoven The Netherlands 116 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL