forkedtongues | Traduttore, tradittore; Translator, traitor

As difficult as I've found translation to be, I've never quite thought of it as harshly as the Italian saying in the subject line suggests: after learning of Daniel Ladinsky's "translations" of Hafez's poetry, I now begin to understand the sentiment.

So, my cousin is getting married this weekend, and she asked me to help her find an English translation along with the original Persian of a relevant poem about love or marriage. At the wedding, my father would read the Persian, and I'd read the English. I agreed, and told her to email me with her choices, and I'd do my best to match translation to original or vice versa. Today, she emailed me with what she thought was a translation of a poem by Hafez, and asked if I could source the original for my dad to read. Here's the poem she found:

"The Gift" by Daniel Ladinsky

Our union could be like this:
You feel cold
So I reach for a blanked to cover our shivering feet.
A hunger comes into your body
So I run to my garden and start digging potatoes.
You ask for a few words of comfort and guidance
I quickly kneel at your side offering you a whole book as a gift
You ache with loneliness one night so much
you weep, and I say
here is a rope, tie it around me
Hafiz will be your companion for life.

It's a nice little poem, but there's a problem: Hafez never wrote a poem like this. This supposed translation doesn't correspond to any of Hafez's original works, and the "translator" neither speaks nor reads Persian. I guessed that it was a at best loose translation with the use of the word "potatoes": potatoes did not reach Europe or Asia until the 16th century C.E., and Hafez died in the 13th century. I could think of no good reason for a translator to change one vegetable for another while translating, and so the rest of the poem became suspect. I spent a fruitless half hour searching for ghazals by Hafez with the word "union" or "marriage" in the first line, hoping one of them would correspond to this one. No luck. Instead, when I dug a little bit deeper, I found these two articles on the specious nature of Ladinsky's "translations" of Hafez: A.Z. Foreman's gloriously scathing review of The Gift, and Murat Nemet-Nejat's review of the same. I'll let Foreman sum it up nicely:

"Dan Ladinsky's The Gift: Poems from Hafiz the great Sufi Master is perhaps the most inexcusably excruciating book bearing the name "translation" I have ever had the displeasure read. For absurd reasons, it is still widely popular and seen as successful, despite a decade's worth of hindsight since its first printing in 1999. So let me do my part to call this book what it really is: an awfully-written, narcissistic, colossally unintelligent act of charlatanry which derives its success largely from exploiting (and grossly perpetuating) some of the most shameful traits of the American public: ignorance of Islam and Islamic languages, unbridled consumerism, poor literary sensibility, stereotypes of "The East" and reviewers' reticence to say anything negative."

Ladinsky, who says he "translated" Hafez via "an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz an an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to ‘my artists and seekers,’" and reading other translators' translations has essentially appended Hafez's name to his own derivative works, while passing them off as "translations." I find it appalling that an American publishing house has actually published these supposed translations, because anybody with a cursory familiarity with Hafez can tell you that Ladinsky's poems are not translations of Hafez.

Hafez is basically the Shakespeare of Persian-speaking countries: everyone with an education in Persian literature has read his poems, and almost always has memorized more than one. I can recite the first line of a random Hafez poem, and expect that one of my parents will finish it. And as Foreman notes, someone with knowledge of Persian literature or Hafez could expect to recognize at least some of the poems in any given anthology or work of translation. Instead, Ladinsky offers a collection of new-agey, pseudo-Sufi original poems with little to no relation to Hafez's actual work.

Now, imagine a translator attempting this in another language with a poet of the Western canon like Shakespeare or Byron or Chaucer, and being published and lauded for his moving translations. Yeah, not as easy, right? The majority of reviewers, likely being at least passingly familiar with the English language literature that so dominates the discourse and the market, would notice something wrong. And yet, with this execrable excuse for translation, we have little but about 14 negative reviews out of over 80 on Amazon to point out the inaccuracy and offensiveness of these "translations." Such works being published to wide acclaim and high sales are truly betrayals of the art of translation, not to mention gross examples of appropriation and Orientalism.

Are there any other examples you can think of where translation becomes betrayal? How can we promote non-appropriative, faithful translations, and how can we even be certain that the translations we read are faithful and respectful to the traditions they originally come from?

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Google tells me whenever the internet says anything new about me. And when people say interesting things, or pose interesting topics, I like to respond, as I am now:

Such works being published to wide acclaim and high sales are truly betrayals of the art of translation, not to mention gross examples of appropriation and Orientalism.

I hate to be finicky here, but I don't think you can call this orientalism, not even in the Saidian sense. (Mind you, I'm one of those folk who are proud to call themselves orientalists.)

Thanks to Edward Said's idiocy (and yes, it is idiocy,) anything seen to be an unjust treatment/use of the Islamic world is now labeled as "orientalism." But it isn't. Dan Ladinsky, for all his displays of talentlessness, isn't some schmuck who just took what he liked from Sufism and went home. Nor is he a scholar whose views were perverted by politicians and ideologues. His worldview, from what I've been able to glean from interviews (I never write a groin-crunching review like this without researching the subject thoroughly first) is a blend of New-Age American spiritism and a heavily, watered down ecumenical version of Sufism. While I personally find that concoction distasteful, it is wholly different from the scholarly rigor and generally valuable knowledge-production provided by the scholars whom Edward Said jealously slandered.

Are there any other examples you can think of where translation becomes betrayal?

Coleman Barks' versions of Rumi sometimes do this. But his work, at least, has the saving grace of at least trying to actually translated iscernible texts, instead of just making it up as he goes along à la Ladinsky.

Annemarie Schimmel said the following in an interview, alluding to Coleman Barks' Rumi versions. It is quite relevant to the topic at hand in general:

My great problem with the western interpretation of Sufism -and I say this because I love Sufism- is that they rely on very bad second hand translations. If you look at the translations made of Rumi's poetry in the West and now becoming best sellers in the colleges...I always say these translations resemble the original as much as a fly resembles an eagle. It just waters down these things. And the great attraction of Sufism for the west is that people think they can have instant illumination without working. And I always tell them "when you want to go the path, really and seriously, it's a very very hard path. You shouldn't think it's easy." Sometimes it's a kind of saloon Sufism which is practiced in the west. And I'm worried about that.

How can we promote non-appropriative, faithful translations

You can't. All translation, good or bad, is inherently appropriative. Moreover, this isn't really a bad thing, anymore than John Coltrane playing Mozart on a saxophone.

and how can we even be certain that the translations we read are faithful and respectful to the traditions they originally come from?

That's what I'm trying to accomplish with my blog. A table of contents for my translations can be found here: http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/p/table-of-contents.html

Welcome to our community!

While I agree with your assessment of Ladinsky, I do disagree with your dismissal of Said. Apart from that, I think that

yasaman's usage of the term 'orientalism' is quite appropriate; Said's example are not the exclusive defining ones, and shoddily appropriative and ignorant construction of the Orient are as much orientalist as academic scholarly ones. Orientalism was being practised in the dance halls and opera houses as much as in Oxford, and I think Ladinsky's work fits into the New Age appropriative attitude to Sufism quite clearly.

All translation, good or bad, is inherently appropriative.
I think you define 'appropriative' differently from many of us.

Thanks for the link to your blog - if you would like a dreamwidth account to be able to make posts to this community in addition to being able to comment in it, do let me know an email address to send an invite code to.

Regarding Said's foolishness, take a look at the relevant chapters in Robert Irwin's "Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents." Irwin is one of few people capable of fact-checking that book, and what he found ain't pretty.

Also, personally, I find it a little absurd when I hear things like "Only a true Oriental can accurately represent the orient" when it's coming from the mouth of the half-American son of an affluent, protestant, English-speaking family in whose household Arabic was never even spoken except to order servants around. But then, I wouldn't put it past him to give reasons why his early biography is all a Zionist fabrication.

Yes, you're right, Orientalism isn't quite the right word, though I agree with Kutti that there's Orientalism outside the scholarly. It was just the closest word I could think of for Ladinsky's particular combination of new age-y appropriation of Sufism and lack of knowledge of Persian literature. Like you said, Coleman Barks is another, less offensive example. I enjoyed his works before I could read and understand Rumi's originals, but they are quite watered down translations.

All translation, good or bad, is inherently appropriative. Moreover, this isn't really a bad thing, anymore than John Coltrane playing Mozart on a saxophone.

In the broader sense, yes, all translation is appropriative, as is the example you gave of Coltrane playing Mozart. But I was referring to the "bad" kind of cultural appropriation, where a member of the dominant group is using the art and culture of a less dominant group in an inaccurate or offensive way. Not sure I'm explaining it that well, but I'm talking about the kinds of cultural appropriation you can see written up in Racialicious.

And thanks for the link to your translations! I love seeing the process behind people's translations, especially with Persian to English.

I know the kind of appropriation you're talking about, and it doesn't hold much water with me. Take Japan, for example. Many more leftily minded folk will tell me not to decorate my night-table with Buddhist artwork. And yet when the Japanese decorate their bathrooms with statues of the virgin mary, it's really nothing to worth worrying about. (And westerners are not at all a dominant group in Japan, and are the victims of constant, systemic racism at every level of society- just ask any white person who's ever been detained by the Japanese police.)

One of the reasons why I have a problem with applying labels like this is that I get tired of individuals claiming to speak for an entire group of which they are a subset. For example, many of the ethnic Persians on the book's Amazon page gave it favorable reviews. Here's a representative sample:

Yes, Hafez is the greatest Persian-language poet outselling the Koran in Iran!

No, Hafez's poetry cannot be translated: it is both beautiful (in Persian) and meaningful. Translations can only hope to capture one of those traits.

Yes, Ladinsky's book is not a word-for-word (or poem-by-poem) translation.

However, he captures the essence of Hafez with beautiful verse. I read Hafez in Persian all the time, and enjoy Ladinsky almost as much!

Go Hafez! Thank you, Ladinsky.

People are different from one another, and belong to more than one group at a time. Groups aren't offended nearly as readily or as wholly as individuals.

Traduttore, tradittore; Translator, traitor

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