Interview with Daniel Weissbort

Daniel Weissbort, poet, translator and teacher, spoke with Leif Olsen and Madeline Sonik about his work in translation, the evolution of European poetry through translation, and the way translation might be used in the high school classroom.

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In the early 60s you and Ted Hughes started the journal Modern Poetry in Translation. Why?

Casting my mind back to that period, English poetry seemed to myself and Ted Hughes rather restricted and very inward-looking. At the same time, we were aware of poetry being written in Eastern Europe. After Stalin’s death, things began to ease up a bit and writers were able to travel a bit and there were these international festivals of poetry in Italy and other places. Some of the poets of the first postwar generation of East European poets had no translations of their work, but rather literal translations were being produced for distribution at these festivals. And these literal translations got around. We started the magazine in a way to provide a platform for this material.

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Could you comment a little more on how English poetry seemed restrictive?

If you take East European poetry, for instance, it seems far more inclusive than English poetry. It did not deliberately exclude politics, social issues, or philosophy. English poetry seemed to us to exclude all of those and we felt it could do with an infusion. Of course, a lot of people disliked this and we were attacked. Obviously, it was a somewhat aggressive stance, although we tried to do it diplomatically, but looking back I can see we weren’t all that diplomatic. English poets tried to defend themselves against us and quite rightly, in a way, extolled their own virtues—and there were virtues to this limited approach to poetry.

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What was the poetic climate in the late 50s and early 60s?

There was a deep suspicion in that period of the late 50s-60s in England of effusive romantic poetry; there was a retreat from it to something more concrete and specific. You should only write about what you know. What do you know about? You know about your house, your kitchen, your family life. You don’t know much more and you should only write what you know. There was a great reaction to Dylan Thomas. You know Dylan Thomas was effusive. And poets more or less tried to exclude images in a way and just write a very bare simple poetry that focused on what they knew.

Meanwhile, we were in a world where enormous things were happening…changes…, and they didn’t seem to be considering this at all. After Stalin’s death there was a thaw. People started writing about things they hadn’t been able to write about before. In the vanguard of this were the poets. Poetry in Russia and other Eastern Bloc countries sold in huge quantities, hundreds and thousands of copies.

And yet because they were able to do this after a very long time of suppression they wrote with a sort of freshness, a new reality somehow, so they brought us back to basic realities which we’d somehow lost.

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Can you comment on translation today?

There has been a great burgeoning of translation, translation theory, some of it highly erudite, some of it more practical. I think translators are becoming more conscious now of what they’re doing, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing—for instance, feminist theory or postcolonial theory. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that translators are aware of this because there are certain prejudices that are unconscious, and becoming aware of this you can achieve a more inclusive kind of a translation.

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How do you see translation bridging disciplines?

Translation does seem to bridge many disciplines—certainly between creative writing and translation. Creative writing programs tend to be nervous about translation as if it’s going to somehow contaminate them. Language departments tend not to like literary translation. They like translation, but only as an exercise in acquiring language or to demonstrate you know the language, so there’s a different aim. [Walter] Benjamin talks about translation being an extended life of another language, another culture, another time.

I’d recommend that students interested in translation read a lot in the language they want to translate from and find things they want to translate. There has to be that initial link. I would say if you’ve become aware of that link, the translation process has already begun. You have to love what you’re translating. You have to be drawn to it. The more you translate, the more you get involved with it and that’s the way of really learning about it and really appreciating it.

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Some suggest the ideal translation is a product of the speaker of the source language and a speaker of the target language working together in unison. How do you feel about this?

It can be very productive. It’s a very good way of pursuing a cultural exchange. Problems come up—translation’s not just translating words: it’s translating whole cultures into other cultures, and there may not be an equivalent. How do you deal with that? So these kind of issues, cultural differences, will be very apparent when you’re working with someone, but finally the one responsible is the one writing the translation.

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Could you speak a little bit about your own methods of translation?

I’m more interested in bringing something into English that will be quite distinct from English. I am drawn to “foreignizing” translation. I hope I don’t do it in a dogmatic way—for instance, the late Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet, worked with translators and wasn’t very happy with the translations, and finally he started translating himself, and to get over these problems of translating from Russian to English which are enormous, Brodsky created a sort of “into-language,” a language between Russian and English to translate the language “into” and this was completely misunderstood. Perhaps he wasn’t entirely aware of what he was doing, perhaps only someone without a vested interest in English, and Brodsky not being a native English speaker, didn’t have one, perhaps only such a person could do that. He created a curious kind of English which I find very interesting. I feel it’s a means…a halfway house. Through Brodsky’s translation of himself you can get some sense of what he’s like in Russian, where if he’s translated beautifully by [Richard] Wilbur, say, you’ve got something, but you haven’t got that gritty kind of connection. We want this kind of connection more now. It’s very exciting because it’s changing English. Language develops through translation.

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How could translation be implemented in high schools or primary schools?

I think it could be. There are courses in world literature and textbooks that try to present world literature to high school students and these books have little articles on translation—problems of translation. I think it can be introduced to high school students. I was involved in a program in England. It was a government-sponsored program and there was a translation component. I just did a day there. There was a lot of interest. The problem is finding teachers to do this. In this multicultural world in which we live, I would have thought that translation had a very definite role to play in the schools, but courses would have to be developed. They’d have to be more directed than translation workshops or translation classes at the graduate level.

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What would your ideal course look like?

I’d have a basic course in translating. Most schools have students from different countries who have a background in their home language. There is a problem in that foreign language education has declined. I think I would start translating within English—translating from say a story set in the 70s to a story set in the present—or language exercises within English that involve a sort of translation activity.


Then I think I would introduce into English literature courses a translation element so that students are made aware that English did not spring fully formed, but that it came out of many linguistic themes, many flowed into it, and that translations as such are part of the literature…great translations. You can point out that the bible wasn’t written in English, and ask students, “so how did it get to be written in English?” Or Homer’s The Odyssey; The Odyssey’s a great one because it’s an adventure story. That is so shocking to them; they often haven’t thought about it, and once you have them hooked, that’s it.