a homophonic translation of Leevi Lehto’s “Sanat Tulevat Yolla”
Bernstein explains before his reading of this poem at the Ear Inn, with Leslie Scalapino, April 2, 1994, that a homophonic translation involves him taking poems in another language that he does NOT know and taking the sounds of these words in another language to equate them with words that sound like them in English: (original in red, literal translation in blue, Bernstein’s hearing and version in black)
Sanat tulevat yöllä
Sane as Tugged Vat, Your Love
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Words Come at Night
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Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa.
O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.
I’ve brought this up many times already.
Talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo.
Talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.
There’s a light in every can of the house.
Sillat virtaavat itään.
Silly virtual item.
Bridges flow east.
Sanat tulevat yöllä koputtamatta.
Sane as tugged vat, your love, kaput.
Words come at night without knocking.
Tämä tapahtui kaukaisessa maassa tässä lähellä.
Tamed tapestry’s caressed master’s tasseled luaus.
This happened in a distant country near here.
Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa.
O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.
I’ve brought this up many times already.
Talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo.
Talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.
There’s a light in every can of the house.
Sillat virtaavat itään.
Silly virtual item.
Bridges flow east.
Maaseudulla puut eivät vielä olleet lähteneet juoksuun.
Medusa pouts as vat’s veil’s oldest lament jokes.
Tämä tapahtui kaukaisessa maassa tässä lähellä.
Tamed tapestry’s caressed master’s tasseled luaus.
Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa.
O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.
Talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo.
Talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.
Presidentti itse oli täysin lamaantunut.
President — he itsy, oily, tainted, laminated.
The President herself was completely paralyzed.
Maaseudulla puut eivät vielä olleet lähteneet juoksuun.
Medusa pouts as vat’s veil’s oldest lament jokes.
In the countryside the trees hadn’t broken into a run yet.
Tämä tapahtui kaukaisessa maassa tässä lähellä.
Tamed tapestry’s caressed master’s tasseled luaus.
This happened in a distant country near here.
Olen sanonut tästä jo monta kertaa:
O when sanity tasted of muffled curtsy.
I‘ve brought this up many times already:
talon jokaisessa veeseessä on valo,
talon — Jokasta’s vivisected valour.
there’s a light in every can of the house,
sillat virtaavat itään ja
silly virtual item, yah!
bridges flow east and
sanat tulevat yöllä koputtamatta.
sane as tugged vat, your love, kaput.
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words come at night without knocking
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If this is a translation of someone else’s poem, it may benefit us to look at what that poet says about both translation and poetry-
The poet of the original is Leevi Lehto who has stated the following:
on translation:
“in our present world, there is rather too much of ”communication”, of ”understanding each others”, and pretended communality – between persons as well as between classes and cultures. This is the reason for our contradictions; to attain harmony and concord, we need more misunderstandings and more power to bear up with them.”
on poetry:
“becoming a subordinated part of the media industry itself. To counter this, we only have the dissolution and fragmentation of all kinds of resistance… will there be any room left for an optimism of the will, especially after having limited its conditions of possibility in the extreme way I did above…I am convinced that there will be room – and that poetry can regain its “vision and urgency” precisely by tapping into its special relation with stupidity and barbarism that I spoke of in the beginning: in general, by emphasizing, ever more radically, its own insignificance, and ceaselessly renewing its relation with its own incomprehensibility.”
As the poet comically reminds us in another section of this same essay, English can sometimes be considered both stupid and barbaric (for a number of reasons like the fact that it is a perpetual bastardization of all the languages it comes across, and American culture’s irrational expectation for everyone else to speak English, thereby predisposing most English speakers to being monolingual) yet instead of ascribing to the hypocrisy where we act like we all understand one another “we need more misunderstanding” and “power” to “bear” them. Perhaps Bernstein is humorously attempting all of these ideas quoted above in one fell swoop: composing a poem that embraces the stupid and barbaric American ignorance of other languages and the incomprehensibility of one language’s speaker to another language’s audience in order to “rupture” the process of translation by conflating it with “unsuccessful” transcription of a foreign language as form of resistance through humor as we sit around watching critics trying to make sense of the resulting gibberish….NICE TRY SHERWOOD in asking us for a close reading of nonsense
For the record, I have 3 graduate credits in the Poetry of Nonsense, taught by Mssr. Bernstein in the late 1990s.
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Are you sure a close-reading of it is impossible, and if so, why?
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A partial bibliography:
Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature
Susan Stewart
Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature 0th Edition
by Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-century Poetry
By Marnie Parsons
An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense
By Wim Tigges
The fact you have 3 graduate credits in the poetry of nonsense does not surprise me- but I did chuckle!
It’s actually kind of fascinating. Would flarf be under “nonsensical poetry”?
To be human is to be capable of constructing meaning of almost any disparate facts, but the question unanswered pertains as to the foundation of that meaning (whether the meaning inheres in the facts themselves, or exists only in the mind of the observer, or is situated somewhere in between). This is part of the question behind Plato’s Theaetetus from the third century BCE. Nonsense poetry can be considered an exercise in meditating on this question, much like a Buddhist koan or unanswerable riddle used for disciples to meditate on for the purposes of revealing the arbitrary unanchored illusory nature of reason and knowledge. Constructing an interpretation out of these homophonic poems can be done, but are they literary criticism, literary writing, or psychoanalysis?